The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Question: The principle of direct observation [in teaching] has been rediscovered in recent times. Now it turns out that when the child leaves school, they are helpless when it comes to thinking about life. They have been so taken by direct observation that they can only see the picture.

Rudolf Steiner: This is an extraordinarily important pedagogical question of the present day, the question of the concreteness or the exclusive concreteness of teaching. Now perhaps this question is not so specialized, but can only be treated exhaustively by looking at pedagogical thinking as a whole. I would like to mention first of all that teaching in the Waldorf school is based on our knowledge of human development. It is certainly not the case that the Waldorf school is a school of world view, but the educational skill, the educational methodology, the educational handling of things that can be achieved from an anthroposophical state of mind should be put into practice to benefit the Waldorf school. In this practical respect, the insight that children up to about the age of six or seven imitate everything plays a major role. Children continue to imitate up to this age. This means that at this age, at kindergarten age, one should not actually teach in the usual sense, but should rely on the child's ability to imitate. You see, when you have been dealing with such things for decades, as I had to, you gain all kinds of experience. People come to you and ask about all sorts of things. Once a father came to me, very unhappy, and said: What should we do, our boy, who has always been a good boy, has stolen. — I asked the father: How old is the boy? - Four to five years. – Then, I said, we must first examine whether he really stole. – The examination showed that he had not stolen at all, the little boy, even though he had taken money from a drawer. He had only seen every day that his mother gave money to the delivery people from her drawer. He thought: if that's how my mother does it, then it must be right – and he simply took money from the drawer too. He bought sweets, but did not eat them himself, but gave them away. The child was simply an imitator, according to his age. What he did was simply an act of imitation. The point is that you don't actually lead children of this age to believe anything that they are not allowed to imitate. Then begins the age of life that starts with the change of teeth and ends with sexual maturity, which is the actual elementary school age. This elementary school age simply demands – what is demanded today from some party lines must be set aside, the factual must be placed in the foreground – this age demands that the child learns to understand and act on the basis of authority. It is of the greatest importance for the whole of later life, especially for the education of the young for later difficult times and for everything that may happen in life, that the child at this age, from about seven to fourteen years, accepts something on the basis of authority. This relationship of a natural authority of the teacher and educator to the child is something that cannot be replaced by anything else for the human being in his or her whole later life. It would be easy to find proof of what cannot be replaced later in life if one has not had the good fortune to have a natural authority in one's life.

And so it is at this age that the question of object lessons arises. The object lessons that are demanded today have grown out of materialism in their extreme form. Everything is simply placed before the eye. They believe in nothing but what is before their eyes; so everything should be placed before the child. But not only the difficulties you have emphasized arise, but also others that arise on the part of the teachers. Take the auxiliary books written for teachers, in which instructions are given for visual instruction. The banalities and trivialities that are served up there are nothing short of monstrosities. There is an instinctive constant striving to push everything to the lowest possible level. This is the kind of visual instruction in which you teach the child nothing more than what he already knows. This is the worst possible teaching, which provides insight in this way. The best teaching is that which not only caters for childhood, but for the whole of a person's life. If life is not such that one still has something to gain from one's time sitting at school in one's forties or fifties, then the teaching was bad. One must be able to look back on one's school lessons in such a way that there are living forces in this reminiscing. We also grow, of course, as our limbs become larger and many other things within us are also transformed; everything about us grows. When we teach children concepts, ideas and views that do not grow, that remain, and on which we place great emphasis, we are violating the principle of growth. We must present things to the child in such a way that they are placed in the context of living growth. We cannot do this with trite, banal object lessons, but rather when we as educators face the child, imponderables come into play. I very often use an example like this: let us assume that we want to teach the child a concept - one that can be understood purely from the knowledge of the psychology of the child at a certain age -: the concept of immortality. One can make this tangible through natural processes, for example, through the transformation of a butterfly from a chrysalis. One can say: the immortal soul in man is contained in it, like the butterfly in the chrysalis, only that it develops in a spiritual world, just as the butterfly develops from the chrysalis. This is an image. One can teach this image to the child in two different ways. The first is this: one imagines, “I am the teacher, I am tremendously clever; the child is young and terribly stupid.” So I set up this symbol for the child to represent this concept. Of course I have long since outgrown this, but in this way the child is to grasp the immortality of the soul. Now I am explaining this in an intellectualistic way. This is not the way to teach a child; not because what I have said is wrong, but because I am not attuned to the child in the right way. When I immerse myself in anthroposophical spiritual science, it is not an image that makes me feel smarter than the child, but a truth. Nature itself has created the butterfly that emerges from the chrysalis at a lower level, and the passage through the gate of death at a higher level. If I bring what is so vividly alive in me to the child, then the child will benefit from it. You can't just say that something should be done in a certain way; instead, it depends on imponderables, on a certain state of mind that you yourself have as a teacher – that is what is important. Difficulties arise when one stops at the flat illustrative teaching, which is becoming more and more impersonal; at the age when the teacher should play the important role as a self-evident authority, he withdraws. There are, for example, certain things that should simply be handed down to the child on the authority of an adult. Not everything can be taught to the child on the basis of direct experience — for example, moral concepts: here one cannot start from direct experience, nor from mere commandments; these can only be conveyed to the child through the authority of an adult. And it is one of the most significant experiences one can have in later life, when one has absorbed something in the eighth, ninth, or twelfth year because a revered personality regards it as correct. This relationship to a revered personality is one of the imponderables of . You reach the age of thirty, and with a certain experience it comes up from the depths of human consciousness; now you understand something that you actually took in twenty or thirty years ago, at that time on authority. This means something tremendous in life. This is in fact a living growth of what one has taken in during childhood. That is why all this discussion about more or less intuition is not so important. These things must arise out of the object itself. Even the discussion about more or less thinking and so on is not very important. The important thing is that teachers are put in their rightful place, that the human element is brought together in the right way in a school organization. That is the main goal. You can't do anything with curricula or anything that can be formulated in paragraphs in real life – and teaching and educational life is real life. Because if three or six or twelve people sit down together, regardless of their antecedents, from which circle, from which education they come, they will be able to work out an ideally beautiful curriculum. If you somehow put something together in paragraphs out of reflection, it can become ideally beautiful, the most wonderful things can be in it. I am not mocking, it does not have to be bad, it can be extraordinarily beautiful and magnificent, but that is not the point. The point is that in the school, which has a number of teachers, real life takes place; each of these teachers has their own special abilities, that is the real thing, and that is what has to be worked with. What use is it if the teacher can see: this and this is the teaching goal? - That is just an abstraction. What he can be to the children as a personality, by the fact that he stands in a certain way in the world, that is what matters.

The question of schooling in our time is essentially a question of the teacher, and from this point of view all the more detailed questions, such as the question of practical instruction and the like, should be treated. Can children, for example, be taught in a very extreme way through visual instruction? I must say that I feel a slight horror when I see these tortures with the calculating machines in a class, where they even want to transform things that should be cultivated in a completely different way into visual instruction. If you just want to continue with pure visual instruction, you will, of course, end up with clumsy children. This is the result of unbiased observation. It has nothing to do with phenomenology, with phenomenalism: in order to develop proper phenomenalism, you first have to be able to think properly. At school, you are dealing with pedagogical methodology, not with scientific methodology. But one must know how closely proper thinking is connected not only with the brain and the mind of the person, but with the whole person. It depends on the way in which someone has learned to think, on the skill in the fingers. For in reality, man thinks with his whole body. It is only believed today that he thinks with the nervous system; in reality he thinks with the whole organism. And the reverse is also true: if one can teach a child quick thinking in the right way, and even presence of mind to a certain extent in a natural way, one is working for physical dexterity; and if one carries this quickness of thinking to the point of physicality, then the children's dexterity also comes to one's aid. What we have now established in the Waldorf school is much more important: instead of the usual visual instruction in manual skills, the children move on to self-forming, through which they get a sense of the artistic design of the surface. This then leads in turn to the mathematical conception of the surface in later years. This living into the subject matter, not through mere visual instruction for the senses, but through a living together with the whole environment, which is achieved for the whole human being, is what we must work towards.

I just wanted to point out that such questions should be placed in the context of pedagogical thinking as a whole, and that today we spend far too much time discussing specifics.

Rudolf Steiner (in response to other questions): What has been said and often emphasized must be noted: the Waldorf School does not want to be a world view school as such. The fact that it is based on anthroposophical soul-condition is only the case insofar as it is implemented in educational practice. Thus, what is at issue in the Waldorf School is the development of what can be achieved through the anthroposophical movement by purely pedagogical means. The Waldorf School does not want to be, and cannot be, a school of world view in any sense. That is why the Waldorf School has never claimed the right to provide religious instruction for the children in its care. What individual anthroposophists believe about worldviews is not the point. The important thing is that anthroposophy in schools and all that goes with it is intended to have an effect only in the pedagogical practice. For this reason, the religious education of the Catholic children was handed over to the Catholic priest and that of the Protestant children to the Protestant pastor. Now it turned out – this simply came about due to the current circumstances – that there were quite a lot of dissident children who would actually have grown up without religion. For these children, religious education is now provided, but it is not considered part of the school, rather it is presented as free religious education alongside Protestant and Catholic religious education. We have at least had the success that children who would otherwise not have been admitted to any religious education at all now grow up with a religious life as a result. This is a free religious education that is taught by someone who understands it and is called to do so, like the others who teach Catholic and Protestant religion. However, it must be strictly maintained that the intentions of the Waldorf School are not to promote any particular world view. The aim is not to indoctrinate children with anthroposophy but to apply anthroposophy in practice. So questions on this topic are irrelevant. At the beginning we had to find an appropriate approach to what follows from practice. We have our views about how a seven-, eight- or nine-year-old child should be taught, and these are appropriate. We believed that we had to decide these things on the basis of purely objective principles. Now, of course, the Waldorf school is not an institution for hermits or sects, but an institution that wants to fully engage with life, that wants to make capable people out of children for the sake of contemporary, very practical life. Therefore, it is important to organize the lessons in such a way that, on the one hand, the strict pedagogical requirements are met, and on the other hand, it is important that the Waldorf school is not just any institution for eccentrics. I then worked out the matter in such a way that from the time of entering school until the completion of the third class, you have an absolutely free hand in the individual years, but by the time they have completed the third class, the children are ready to transfer to any school. From the ninth to the twelfth year, you again have a free hand, and then the child must be ready to transfer to any other school, and the same applies when they have completed primary school. We are currently setting up one class each year; what happens next remains to be seen.

As you can see, it is not a matter of working from party-political views, worldviews or anything like that, but purely of putting anthroposophy into pedagogical practice. The ideal would be that the children initially — because Anthroposophy is only developed for adults, we have no children's teaching, and have not yet been in a position to want to have one — would not know that there is an Anthroposophy, but that they would be kept objective and thus placed in life. These things cannot be achieved in the ideal: no matter how hard the teacher tries to remain objective, one child will live in the circle of these parents, the other in the circle of those parents; there are also anthroposophical fanatics, and their children bring anthroposophical mischief into the school, as well as all kinds of other things. It must be made absolutely clear that it can never be a question of the Waldorf School in any way being a school of world view or anything of the sort. It is not that at all, but it wants to make children into capable people in the immediate present, that is, in the life in which we are placed within the state and everything else, so that they are capable within it. It is self-evident that the Waldorf school does not bring the ideas of threefolding into the school. This cannot happen through the efforts of Waldorf education. No party politics are brought into the Waldorf school from the anthroposophical side.

Question: Isn't the methodology that the pastor uses somewhat opposed to the rest of the teaching? Isn't there a conflict here?

Rudolf Steiner: You can't achieve anything completely in life. It would be very nice if we could find not only a Protestant pastor but also a Catholic one who would teach according to our methodology. As I said, our school only wants to put pedagogical practice into practice, not a worldview. The other can go hand in hand with this. Now it is self-evident that in free religious education — because after such, only by anthroposophists to be held, was asked —, also after our methodology is proceeded. It would be very dear to us if the Protestant and Catholic lessons were also given in this way, but we have not yet achieved that.

Question: What is the content of the material taught to anthroposophical children?

Rudolf Steiner: The material is determined in such a way that an attempt is made to take the child's age into account. This is what is always at the psychological basis. That is why it is important in all things that they are most effectively brought to the child when they are introduced at exactly the right age, when the child's inner being resonates most strongly with them. It is a fact that in the seventh or eighth year of life, little is achieved with objective gospel or Bible knowledge, and nothing at all with catechism knowledge. It is not absorbed by the child. This is an anthropological law. On the other hand, everything religious that can be directly formed from a certain shaping of natural processes is very well absorbed by the child at this age; all ethical and genuinely religious concepts that can be formed from natural processes. Above all, one can lead the child to religious feeling indirectly through images of nature. One can only lead the child to the actual Christian feeling from the age of eight, or even from the age of nine. It is only then that they begin to grasp what lies behind the figure of Christ Jesus, for example. These are the concepts that one must teach the child if they are to grasp the content of the Gospels. It is good if it has a foundation and is only introduced to the content of the Gospels around the age of nine, and then gradually led up to the deeper mysteries of Christianity. It must be emphasized that this free religious education is, in the most eminent sense, a thoroughly Christian one, in that the various denominations that take part in it are introduced to a real Christianity. It is the case that if you are a teacher at the Waldorf School, you have come to this [Christian] conviction yourself, from an anthroposophical point of view. You have entered into Christianity from this side. You might phrase it differently, but the children are introduced to a real Christianity. Just as we leave the Protestant and Catholic religious education to their own devices, we also leave the free religious education based on anthroposophy to its own devices. It has never been my intention to ensure that children come to this free religious education. They came in large numbers, but it is really not the aim to damage the external reputation of the school by making it happen in such a way that it could be said to be a school of world view. One does not want to be that at first. That is why we are careful about free religious education and only give it because it is requested.

I do not want to give a lecture in response to the remarks of the esteemed Mr. Strakosch, but please take what I am about to say only as a supplementary comment. Nor should it be taken as something conclusive in any sense.

When I was recently given the task of supervising the construction of the Dornach building, a saying kept ringing in my ears that I had heard when I was studying at the Technical University in Vienna and during that time the builder of the Votive Church in Vienna, the famous architect Ferstel, took up the post of rector at this university. He delivered his inaugural address on the history of architecture. Ferstel said something like this during his speech: architectural styles cannot be invented, they must emerge from the foundations of nationality. On the basis of this view, Ferstel explained the fact that the modern period could be less productive in terms of architectural styles because the folk soul, so to speak, did not bring anything like styles to the surface, and that it could only be more reproductive, which is why people resorted to ancient, to posophie talk, you can make anything out of these mystical foundations. You can do the craziest stuff. But anthroposophy is not allowed to do that. It is not allowed to do the craziest stuff. So that, as I said, you are in a position to have, on the one hand, the craziest stuff of modern mystics, and on the other hand, you have to perform an anthroposophical building that has to be justified before strict science, and you have the most modern material, concrete, with which you can do the craziest stuff, but you can't do that with a sense of style.

Now I want to make it clear: when you are working practically on the realization of a style, history is of no help at all. Historical observation is of no help at all. Everything that has to be done must come from a place of naivety, must truly come from a creative place. Otherwise, it cannot be done, and what must arise in a certain way, must practically arise in opposition to such a view as Ferstel expressed at the time: “Architectural styles cannot be invented, they must arise from the foundations of folklore.” One must simply come to the view with a certain stylistic conscience: the architectural style must be created out of a certain reality, out of a truth. It cannot be invented out of thin air, it must be created out of reality.

Now I would like to draw attention to a third point, which Mr. Strakosch also mentioned. He pointed out the Gothic style, which, with full justification, must be built out of concrete due to the circumstances, and the concrete substructure, which goes up to a certain height, had to be crowned by the actual structure, a wooden structure. You will also admit that the forms of the wooden structure are actually dictated by the material itself with a certain strictness. The wooden structure provides precisely what must arise from the interaction of need, purpose and sense of material. So in Dornach, there was a very specific style to be combined with something that Mr. Strakosch has said: you can do anything with it; you can build the craziest things out of concrete.

Now, if one is not predisposed to building the craziest things, then one actually has a different feeling towards concrete than towards wood. And here I must say, based on practical experience, the opposite of what has just been said. If you take all the antecedents of architectural styles, you can't really build anything out of concrete today. Not everything, but absolutely nothing. If you have a sense of style, you can't just take the “you can do anything” approach. You can only get started if you can use concrete as a material out of a certain stylistic conscience. In a certain respect, you are in a parallel situation with what sometimes occurs on anthroposophical ground at the moment. You see, from the misunderstood backgrounds of mystical contemplation and so on, which many people have in mind when they talk about mysticism, theosophy, anthroposophy today, you can make anything out of these mystical backgrounds. You can make the craziest stuff. But anthroposophy is not allowed to do that. It is not allowed to do the craziest stuff. So that, as I said, you are in a position to have, on the one hand, the craziest stuff of modern mystics, and on the other hand, you have to perform an anthroposophical building that has to be justified before strict science, and you have the most modern material, concrete, with which you can do the craziest stuff, but you can't do that with a sense of style.

Now I would like to make it clear: when you are working on the practical realization of a style, history is of no help at all. Historical reflection is of no help at all. Everything that has to be done must come from the realm of the naive, must really come from the realm of creativity. There is no other way to do it, which must in a certain way rebel, practically rebel against such a view as Ferstel expressed at the time: “Architectural styles cannot be invented, they must come from the foundations of folklore.” - One must simply come to the view with a certain stylistic conscience: The architectural style must be created out of a specific reality, out of a reality. It cannot be invented out of the blue, it must be created out of reality.

Now I would like to draw attention to a third point, which Mr. Strakosch also mentioned. He pointed out the Gothic style and showed, with full justification, how the Gothic style actually draws heavily from craftsmanship. And there is indeed a backward devotion to craftsmanship in the Gothic style. In one direction, the question of style was resolved by the combination of cross vaulting, pointed arches and flying buttresses that the Gothic style then developed. But if we consider the other aspect that has been emphasized, the matter takes on a different perspective. It was also said that the mere mechanical fitting together of the components would not result in the Gothic style, that certain forms and certain views live on in the Gothic style, which can be found in the Gothic style, and about which a certain secret has been kept, even in the “building huts”, which has been strictly guarded, and which now goes beyond the craftsmanship. We thus find an element that has been built into it, that can be found in the style, but which – it will be possible to admit this in the broadest sense – has actually been lost for the more recent period in terms of its actual essence, or at least in terms of its application. Today we no longer do what was done in those days out of the secrets of architecture, which arose out of quite different presuppositions, without the necessity of making strict calculations and the like. It is just these conditions that could, I am putting this hypothetically for the moment, be connected with other things. They could be connected with the fact that today the reproductive element rules: not really the productive creation of style rules, but the reproductive shaping of style rules. Perhaps it is precisely from those soul entities that have been very strictly preserved that those forces which underlie productivity and from which the productivity of style comes, flow. And perhaps this perplexity about style in recent times stems from the fact that we have lost a certain element in building. This element must be given special consideration in architecture because it has to conform to the strict laws by which a building must be constructed, must conform to the static and other conditions that Mr. Strakosch has discussed. In architecture, in the broadest sense, we are dealing with what scientifically based technology makes possible, and on the other hand we are obliged to incorporate a certain stylistic element into what we build.

The question now arises: Was not perhaps in older times what technology is much more closely tied to style than it is today? Was it not perhaps the case that the building rules that existed at the time were formulated in such a way that they included the technology, so that one could build safely, as it were, by simply following the results of these guarded rules? Were they not, despite being artistically stylish, perhaps also technically correct through and through?

You get such a feeling when you experience something like what could be experienced in Dornach. It occurred to me — as I said, the main things always arise out of naivety — to enclose the auditorium with a dome and to attach this dome to a smaller dome that was to crown the stage area. The question now was how to find the technique for the connection, and that was an important question in Dornach for quite some time. I felt the necessity to do it this way; on the other hand, it had to be technically feasible. Until we found the solution, I could only say that the right technical solution must be found for what arises out of the necessity of style, and that it must also show a certain perfection in terms of technique. These things must coincide. Of course, if something is conceived in an intellectualistic or inartistic way and one somehow wants to build a building without style, no technical problem will arise for it. But if something is really found in the foundations where the style must lie, then the appropriate technique must also be found for it.

Now, as I said, the historical is of no help if one - if I may put it this way - has to create something like a style from a naive point of view. But afterwards one can still orient oneself towards what the development may lead to. And here I would like to add something to what has just been said, which may initially seem somewhat paradoxical in the present, like so many things that have to be said from anthroposophical spiritual science, but which will probably prove to be thoroughly practical in the course of time, however fantastic it may seem to some people today.

I do not want to go back to Oriental or Egyptian architecture, which has been sufficiently considered just now, but I want to refer first to what is already on the foundations of what has emerged from Oriental-Egyptian architecture, I want to refer to Greek architecture, and there again - first disregarding everything else - to Greek temple construction. But I do not want to touch on the technical side of things now, but rather on the style.

I believe that anyone who studies Greek architecture more closely will find that the forms cannot really be grasped if one concentrates too much on the static element. Greek architecture definitely takes static elements into account – this is clear. They are there, but in an extraordinarily free way. They are everywhere in such a way that one sees: in a certain way, what we today call statics is handled quite freely. The bearing and the load are there. But they have not fallen into the trap of regarding what has been put there as decoration, nor, on the other hand, have they fallen into the trap of one-sidedness, of regarding it as merely static. There is an element hidden there that has perhaps been kept even more jealously than the secrets of the later masons' lodges, that has emerged from the original, instinctive views of humanity and that, in turn, can only be found through anthroposophical, spiritual scientific investigation. In a sense, these Greek temples are also functional buildings. A Greek temple, considered in itself as a mere structure, is never complete. If you take the statue of the god out of the Greek temple and look at it, you get the feeling that the most essential thing is missing. It was understood only as the dwelling of the god, and only if one assumes that the people actually only have something to do with the temple from the outside, that actually only the god should have his residence in it. But now it follows that the temple is the dwelling of the god, not much for those intuitions that flowed into the temple construction. One must go back to something else, especially with regard to the purpose of building a temple; if I may now call it that in a figurative sense: with regard to the question of need. In this regard, one can say that the purely external aspect of the temple's purpose is clear to anyone who wants to describe these things in a feature-like way; the fact that the temple is the dwelling place of the god. But this is not enough for those who want to go beyond the feature-like description and really understand the inner form of the temple. For this, it is necessary to add another element: that the Greek temple is to be seen as a transformation of the original burial vault, the burial building. The Greek temple cannot be understood otherwise than by seeing in it a metamorphosis of a burial building. But this leads back to times when the soul of the deceased was sought in the vicinity of the buried corpse. The building was actually erected in its forms for the soul, which should still be there, even when one passed from ancestor worship to the cult of the gods. The cult of the gods in the older religions was nothing other than a metamorphosed cult of ancestors; the old gods are basically ancestors, are thought of as ancestors, and the way in which the rule of the soul-spiritual was also a transformation of how the workings of the soul after death were viewed in the deceased person – in terms of the forms of perception, there was something that was strictly related to this. Now it was a matter of rebuilding a soul, and for that one had to come up with the right balance of power, the right statics, which was possible as an external statics, but at the same time served this purpose, to be a soul's reconstruction, so that the soul could dwell within; for the soul of the god had to dwell in just such a structure.

Where did the power relations come from? That is the big question. They were not calculated at all in such a way, as we are rightly learning today in our age. This was not understood in those older times. The little literature that still exists clearly shows that such a structure was not built from strict statics and mathematics and mechanics. But those older times had something else, and here I come to what is of course regarded as fantastic today, and can be regarded as such, however practical it actually is: the question is to find out by what means, let us say for example, the position of the center of gravity was found, the center of gravity that simply had to be placed in such a way that by looking at the building, one knew where it was. But not with the intellect, but with the feeling, the sense of style in particular, it was necessary to find out how to distribute the forces, how to distribute the material in order to get the right feeling. There was a soul dwelling within. In those ancient times, one did not have the abstract ideas of the soul that one finds today, for example, among our psychologists, where the soul is something very vague – for some it is a point that is sought at some point in the physical organization, and what more such nonsense is –; these abstract views of the soul did not have the old days. They had very definite views of the soul. It would be interesting to explain these views, but there is no time for that. It would be all the more interesting because the views that these ancients had about the soul, to a certain extent, contained what the descriptions of the old soul conceptions, for example in Wundt's philosophy, do not contain, but did not contain everything that Wundt describes of the old soul conceptions. These things are such that they cannot be grasped by a materialistic way of thinking. But they lived in ancient times and they lived so concretely that one could also connect with them concrete ideas with regard to the forming of the material. But how was that done? You see, everything that was built, everything that was designed in terms of static relationships, arose for older times, however strange it may seem today, from the human organization and its statics. And what was still considered in Greek times for architecture arose from the statics of the human limb organism. I do not mean the human limb organism only as a combination of arms and legs, but also, for example, the lower jaw and much in the middle human, the chest human and so on. But everything that lies within the human being with limbs could be studied. For example, you could try out how a certain connection of forces works when you squat down, say, with bent knees. You could see how the center of gravity relates to a certain system of forces, and you could see how the center of gravity relates to a certain system of forces when you tried out the best way to hold your mouth open to find the ideal center of gravity of the head, which you do at the lower jaw. It is interesting to study the strange shaping that is present in Greek sculptures with this slightly open mouth; it arose from a very specific study of the position of the lower jaw, which one experienced internally in its static and dynamic aspects.

And in the same way, you experienced the static and dynamic relationships that arise when you squat down and rest your arms on your knees, for example. You studied this dynamic in humans, and in older times especially in the human limbs. They observed the dynamics as they express themselves in the human being when walking – because the unfolding of very special inner static-dynamic conditions is needed for this walking – and from this they formed ideas about very specific static conditions; and what could be studied in the human organism itself, we find again in the formation of the temple buildings. It was said that what the human being has as a head is indeed a beautiful external expression of the physical human being, but it is just an expression for the physical human being. After all, the human being is a rational being precisely in order to be efficient in the physical world. Similarly, the trunk and respiratory system of the human being were thought of in a certain way. It was said that this is something that underlies the connection between the human being and the earthly environment. Head and chest were, as it were, left out when, in ancient times, people thought of the human being as a spiritual container. They thought in particular of what could not be directly animated in the human form; they thought of the balance of power that arises in the use of the limb-based human being. This limb-based human being was the vehicle through which the human being carried his soul into the earth here. The systems of forces that the person revealed entered into the soul; they were studied; and people wanted to see the soul surrounded by them even after death. What one could experience by carrying one's soul through life, that one most secreted into what one wanted as the enclosure of the soul, but not in an abstract way, but with all the concreteness and practicality of the old view.

Such things can only be studied externally by observing certain qualities of feeling. It is also possible – spiritual science provides complete certainty in what I have just explained – to gain a certain insight into such things from external symptoms. Consider what the Greek sculptor particularly wanted to show when he depicted the human being as a physical figure: tall legs and an extraordinarily large head by later standards; in Greek sculpture, the length of the head is contained eight times in the total length of the human being. He particularly looked at the head in that the head has a certain length, thus it has a limb organism. The Greek sculptor particularly studied the limb system of the head and in turn studied the limb system of the whole human being. Everything contained in one system of the human being is also contained in the other. The whole human being is in turn contained in the head, the arm and leg construction in the jaws, only one must then look at the head the other way around. So that one can say: In the case of the Greeks, the main focus of attention in man was the organization of the limbs — right up to the head. The limb system is expressed least in the chest and trunk of the human being; it recedes completely in Greek sculpture. It is actually the shortest and weakest part in Greek sculpture. High lower limbs, a large head in relation to the rest – that is precisely the focus of attention on that from which an inner static in man follows. And this inner static was carefully studied and carefully guarded. Therefore, in those days, being an architect was to be in possession of the knowledge that had been studied on the noblest of what could be studied, on man.

Now, the Middle Ages are approaching. Mr. Strakosch has excellently described how something else flows into the vaulting, into the pointed arch, how something lives in it. You can study what lives in it by turning your attention to how man was viewed in the Middle Ages. If you look at the medieval representation of man, you will see that the head is not contained eight times in the whole human figure, but about ten times. The legs are short. People have small heads, which means that the limb organism of the head recedes and that little attention is paid to the other limbs. Hence the huge, long trunk; it is the main thing in medieval sculpture, all attention is paid to it. If you study this statics – I have to express myself paradigmatically because of the limited time – if you study what was contained in the rules of the masons' lodges, you can find the secrets of that part of the human body that we today call the rhythmic part of the human body, that which is expressed in rhythm, in the statics of the rhythms, in that element that was added to the purely craftsmanship of the Gothic period. In a sense – one must not become fanciful when mentioning this matter – this is what trust in God is – Mr. Strakosch has correctly traced it back to its real meaning – it comes from the heart, it comes from the middle human being, not from the head human being. Thus we find that in the same period in which, as a result of the study of external nature and the study of pure mathematics and mechanics, which are to be applied to nature, the attention to man is lost, and those elements that lead to a style are also lost. For one can only achieve a style if one can shape in the external present that which one can study in the microcosm.

And if one is faced with the task of finding a new architectural style, then it is naturally a matter of creating from similar foundations again. It is a matter of returning to what follows from the human essence itself. Now, in our time of scientific development, this cannot be found as I have outlined it for two epochs of humanity, but only by ascending from the limb-man to the head-man through the rhythmic man. But you can't start with that, because he has already developed his abilities to the highest degree. The head human being is, after all, the one in which the individuality of the human being is most expressed in form. You can't use it in the same way as, for example, in Greek statics, where you had in the spatial drawing precisely what you can't see in a person when he is simply standing in front of you. Likewise in later times: one had this in the spatial drawing, which cannot be seen, but which only results from a feeling through those arches that make up the rhythmic human being.

Now, in the present, the only thing that can be done is to find the spiritually seen basis that underlies the actual spirituality of man. Therefore, something had to be done in the Dornach building that is not just a meeting room, but also a room that invites the individual to feel in it in such a way that he comes to self-knowledge at the same time. The Greek building was the frame for the soul. The Gothic building is, through everything I have just mentioned, the place of assembly; it is not complete unless the community, the assembly, is present within it. 'Assembly' is something that corresponds to the 'Duma' and is etymologically related to 'cathedral'. The assembly belongs there. Now we need a building that is so responsive to human beings that they can see the forms not in their external human form but in their imagination. If one wanted to build in the same way as before, one would fall back into intellectualized building, which would be impossible because it would no longer be art. In art, one must remain in intuition, but one must also find the style for what is now brainwork, namely our present-day statics. While the statics of the Greeks was entirely intuition, our statics today is a product of work, a brainwork, and we must find that which was precisely withheld from the Greeks. They built up what they saw as statics. For us, this comes from the intellect. Intuition must add what can only be given in intuition. The Dornach building, which is not at all symbolic, is constructed in this way. It is a slander to say that, because that would mean that the building was constructed in an unartistic way. It is absolutely the case that everything about this building is only artistically conceived, but in such a way that the artistic is shaped directly out of direct perception. It is, again, the arrival at a style, but in such a way that this style has been found in an equally naive way as it was created earlier, out of the necessity of direct perception. Therefore, anyone who comes to Dornach will be able to feel at home in this building, because it is executed in such a way that one finds oneself in it as one has always found oneself in real architectural works. There is truly nothing fantastic in the Dornach building; everything has arisen out of the stylistic conscience just concretely characterized. Therefore what would otherwise have happened could not occur. — Is that not so? Anthroposophy was there, had been there for many years before it needed a building like the Dornach building. Then a number of people who at that time considered themselves convinced of the basic truths of anthroposophy had the idea — it was not my idea — of building a structure of this kind for the special kind of life that arises from anthroposophy in an artistic and practical way. I was only given the task of finding the forms, the style, for this building. I was, so to speak, commissioned by the Anthroposophists. The building did not arise as a fact from my idea.

Now, it is not the case that today such things happen in such a way that one says: There is some kind of association, a society with this or that goal. That is the order of the day: you found societies and associations everywhere, and then you set up the programs that are to be carried out for this or that association. These programs are usually very clever, because when people get together, they can come up with the cleverest things intellectually, but with all that, they would get no further than a theory; with all that, they would get no further than, say, Wilson's Fourteen Points in the direction of world history. That is also a program of that kind, clever, but in relation to the real affairs of the world, something impracticable, something quite abstractly foolish, one might almost say. And then, when such an association is there that needs its own house, then it chooses some style from the available ones, according to which it has its building constructed. Anthroposophy, if it is honest with itself, cannot proceed in this way. That is not possible with anthroposophy. By being thoroughly honest with itself, it knows that it is bringing something into modern civilization, into modern cultural development, that has not been there before. Anyone who has a sense of style and other artistic feelings knows that all forms of art, including architecture, grow out of the way of thinking of a particular time, and that they cannot be understood at all without living with the whole person in the way of thinking of that time. That is why the old architectural styles are only reminiscences for us. We can only understand them to the extent that we can put ourselves in those ancient times. Therefore, for most people who cannot do that, much is incomprehensible.

Anthroposophy is something completely new, not in the sense of a theory but in the sense of life. It is something that can become art at the same time because it does not blunt the feelings as mere intellectualism does. Artists are often afraid of anthroposophy because they think of it as a theory like any other theory. Theory deadens everything artistic, but not anthroposophy. There, the impulses of feeling and will are stimulated. The whole human being is stimulated. Anthroposophy makes people more skillful in their hands — this should be considered today, when most men are so clumsy that they can't even sew on a torn-off trouser button. Therefore, we must really recognize that everything that is anthroposophical is included in skill, in manual dexterity, in human mobility. These are not just thoughts, but at the same time they are world forces in which man lives. Therefore, they can be built, sculpted, and painted in the same way that one builds, sculpts, and paints that which has been brought out of man in the way described.

Because anthroposophy is something new in our culture, a setting had to be found for it that could only exist for anthroposophy. That is to say, a style had to be found that arose out of its spiritual impulses. The building at Dornach stands in such a way that what can be said from the rostrum, the word that is there to proclaim the content of the spiritual world, is one way of speaking; another is the way seen in the setting of the building. Every column and every capital speaks exactly like the words spoken from the rostrum. There is a harmony, just as there was a harmony in the Greek soul between the vision of God and the building of temples. One must create from the impulses of the origin of art. Then something comes out that cannot be discussed: the style – the style that must be grasped from the whole person, from where one experiences the thoughts, which are more than mere thoughts, as forces that sit within one and pulsate through one's blood, so that one can also shape them externally.

I only wanted to make a few remarks, my dear fellow students, honored guests. I just wanted to point out how one can indeed arrive at finding styles again. No matter how imperfectly this may have been achieved in Dornach — I myself am the strictest critic of this building, which is only the first step — an attempt has been made to find the characteristic style of the period, to find again what belongs to the style. And that is why something is being placed in the style here that is real spirituality, one can also conquer the material that proves to be so brittle, as Mr. Strakosch described it, the concrete, so that one then says to oneself: Certainly, one cannot make anything out of concrete if one does not want to make the craziest stuff, but the craziest stuff is precisely the most style-less. You can only do something with concrete if you have the other prerequisites – whether they are practical prerequisites for a functional building or spiritual prerequisites for a building such as the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach – if you have what is alive within, within you; then you can say, even if you have concrete in front of you: It is not the case that concrete allows you to make anything out of it, but rather you can only place one thing in a single place. Where a human being has an earlobe, there could not be a big toe, nature would not allow it; when a certain mass of forces of the organism is present, only one thing can be formed in one place – if one lives in contemplation. That is what is meant when one speaks of a sense of style, of a firmly established sense of style, and of the absolutely plastic concrete material.

So you may be able to experience in Dornach that, despite the truth of what Mr. Strakosch said about the concrete material from certain points of view, the concrete material in Dornach has been treated in such a way — even if not everything has been successful — that what is situated in any given place is sensed as necessary precisely there, and that one says to oneself out of direct perception: just as only an earlobe can be in a certain place on the head, so only a very definite form can be here. But before that, the merely symmetrical, the merely moderate-metrical must be transferred into the organic, the internally experienced moderate, the internally experienced symmetrical, as one experiences it when one passes from the merely mechanical to the organism. In order to arrive at a style again, the step had to be taken from the geometric-symmetrical, metrical style and so on to the organic style. No matter how imperfectly this may have been achieved, it is undoubtedly in this direction that we must seek what the further stylistic development of architecture must be. And I believe that we will only find the [style for a] utility building, as well as [for] a building like the Goetheanum in Dornach, if we follow such paths; otherwise we will only ever get as far as the reproductive. We will only get to the productive by following this path. Then there will be no need for pessimistic observations about the fact that architectural styles are not being invented, but then the urge for new stylization, new stylistics, will arise out of the full, artistic life.

Question: I would like to ask whether Dr. Steiner has found the relationship between today's man and the new stylistic form of the Dornach building on the path of higher knowledge, as was previously suggested for spiritual-scientific things, and if so, whether this path may be applied where intuitive and artistic

creation is involved.

Rudolf Steiner: This is a question that cannot be treated in such general terms. I have, I believe, described the process as far as it was possible in the sketchy presentation. The point is that the intuition is there, and this intuition comes with a certain inevitability. So you can't say that preparations could be made for something specific or something like that, so that these things will come. Rather, in the anthroposophical — whether one believes it today or not — there is something that, in contrast to the merely abstract, theoretical, is an element that is connected with organization, with growth and so on. It is the case that one can say: Even what I recognize as an idea, as some kind of essence in the spiritual world, is there, it is seen, but one does not now have the possibility of holding on to it in the same way as one holds on to a sensual experience that clings to the memory; one can only reconstruct the paths by which one has come to such a higher experience, that is, what lies before the experience, and then wait to see if the experience is there again. The experience is the direct perception; and just as I do not have this hall if I only have the memory of it, so I do not have the higher spiritual experience if I only have it in memory. It does not present itself at all in memory. That is the peculiar thing about higher spiritual experiences: they cannot be remembered in the usual way. I explained in my lecture that the higher spiritual experiences are due to a transformation of the power of memory, which is why they are not subject to memory, but must be experienced again and again in a new way. I have written four mystery dramas, and every single word was there, it was there. I cannot say that one can prepare oneself specifically, but through anthroposophy one enters into a living process. I could hint at what underlies it with something that might seem trivial to you. If you have learned something and have a corresponding memory, then you have it, you always have it present; but if you have eaten something, you cannot say: I do not need to eat today because I ate the day before yesterday. — What I learned yesterday is available to me today; that is an abstract process that underlies memory. What is a real process is not subject to memory, it is processed. This is how it is with the experience of what is experienced in supersensible worlds. It is a real experience. Therefore one can say: in general, the realization of what anthroposophy can give is already the path to such things, and will naturally be found in detail when the preconditions for it are there. But it is self-evident that one cannot say that one should now cultivate one thing or another through anthroposophy or that anthroposophy is the means to realize the ideal of Friedrich von Schlegel, the romantic, which consisted in nothing more than: one should resolve to become a genius. Anthroposophy is not the way to do that. But it is something living, that is what it is about. I have said that something like a new style emerges from the naive; historical considerations would be of no use in shaping a new style. It is not aimed at intellectualizing artistic production, but at what simply arises from the development of humanity, as I presented it yesterday, that the forces that used to be physically effective must now be sought spiritually. That is what matters. But I would like to warn against trying to regulate in any way the things that should actually lead to the fullest freedom, and thus also to artistic freedom, in the way indicated. I do not want to pass over these things without reminding you that artistic freedom must prevail in them, and that I very much fear that if you apply a rule to these things from the outset, even the golden section, that in the end it is not the free creation that lies there, but the feeling of being forced into those Spanish boots that a German poet once, let us say, “glorified” in a poem. The application of standards as to what may be achieved in free creation, and the judgment: “That is not beautiful” — if it does not meet a certain standard, that leads to the inartistic. And I fear that the Dornach building would become inartistic if one were to apply only the golden section [gap] —- the golden section is, of course, abstracted from what has been built so far; it is contained in countless works of art and is justified because it is contained in the human form; but if you apply it as a preconceived rule, you do not arrive at what is pleasing clothing, but at what was worn at the Spanish court and later at the Austrian court.

Question: How can it be explained that we can often solve problems in our half-asleep state that we cannot solve in broad daylight? ... [pause]

Rudolf Steiner: If we consider the current ideas of physiological science or even psychological science, which is almost the same thing nowadays, we cannot explain this fact, which is undoubtedly a fact. But if one has trained oneself without prejudice to observe human life in reality, then such facts become proof of this basic view. We must be clear about the following, and in the same way that one can be clear in a materialistic-physiological way about other things that can be achieved through such science. We must realize that man is actually only awake to a certain part of his being from waking to sleeping, namely only to his life of thinking. The life of thinking can be seen clearly when it is awake. On the other hand, there is no possibility of being in the same nuance of consciousness in the life of feeling as in the life of thinking. When analyzing the emotional life, it has the same nuance of consciousness as the dream life. Dreams are just images that string together. But the sequences of the dream life, especially in interesting dreams, do not correspond to the logic of the imagination, but actually to the logic of the emotions, the association of feelings. Feelings are basically only the waking parallel to what occurs in dreams in images, in instinctive imagination. Even when we are awake, we are completely asleep in terms of our will. No matter how we will, we only awaken in our imaginative life. How the will functions, what happens when we move just one arm, we do not have that [in consciousness]; we have the intention, we lift our arm in the imagination, but we only have the imaginative image of the act of the will. But now, for example, mathematical ideas do not come from that part of our consciousness that is exhausted in ordinary waking imagination. If we were only waking human beings, that is, only thinking beings — Dilthey describes this interestingly in a Berlin Academy treatise — we would not come to any mathematics, much less to mechanics. Mathematics and mechanics are grounded in the human being, and the human being comes to mathematics only through the movements of his own limbs. There is something similar at the basis of Greek statics, only we have it in reflection. We have mechanics, especially phoronomy, everything that we grasp with measure and number, only reflected in the imagination. Therefore, we are much closer to the mathematical, to what can be calculated, to what must be found by man. And if man would only experience it once – I have to express myself paradoxically – if he only really experienced how clever and ingenious he is in his sleep, he could become megalomaniac. It is actually very good that this fog of sleep spreads over this undeserved cleverness and that it only sometimes comes up in dreams. But it is absolutely right that when we wake up, we can just about catch what we are doing, if we are preparing some problem in our sleep. We solve many problems in our sleep. And if you want to proceed experimentally, you can do the following experiment. He should try to deal with a difficult task in the afternoon until the evening. He will see if he succeeds in formulating the question clearly towards the evening – the question is a difficult problem – and if he then has the composure to tackle it properly the next morning, he will see what he has worked on in the meantime. This can then seem like an inspiration. So you can even approach these things experimentally. Such things virtually confirm what anthroposophical spiritual science — in a methodical and thoroughly trained way, of course — wants to bring to light. I do not believe that we have yet reached the point where the “heaviness of the technician's trials” that Dr. Unger presented so brilliantly yesterday can be resolved by these means; we have not yet developed enough life pedagogy and didactics for that. But the problem can certainly be explained in the ways that I have just suggested.

Dear attendees! Anthroposophy, of which I can, of course, only sketch a meager and inadequate picture in the context of a short lecture this evening, does not want to talk about worldviews merely out of theoretical considerations or emotional impulses, but this anthroposophy wants to penetrate the most diverse branches of scientific and other life in a fruitful way. At present, anthroposophy is not only being discussed, but in Dornach, near Basel, we already have a School of Spiritual Science where a series of experts gave lectures and lecture courses on a wide range of scientific topics last fall and this spring. A therapeutic institute is being founded in Stuttgart to gradually introduce into medical practice the medical applications of anthroposophical spiritual science. And I could mention many more examples of this kind, which show that anthroposophy does not arise from some kind of sectarian sentiment or emotional impulse, but that it wants to place itself in life as a fact of life. Since it is based on such premises, it feels thoroughly permeated by the obligation to justify itself before the strictest demands that have gradually arisen in the scientific life of humanity. And it may well be said that anthroposophy seeks to take up precisely those points where the most diverse branches of science are currently showing that they demand a continuation from within their own structure. I would like to go straight to the point.

The great triumphs of modern science, which, as I have mentioned time and again, are fully recognized and appreciated by anthroposophy, these great triumphs of modern science are partly due to the fact that we have understood how to transform mere observation of the external sense world into scientific systematic experiment. And it is not only the results of the sciences of modern times that arise from experimentation, from the methodology of the experiment, from the experimental design, but at the same time, from the experimental design, from the way the experiment is conducted, arises what I would like to call the modern scientific attitude, which one must have if one wants to have any say in modern scientific life.

Anthroposophy now seeks to fully meet these requirements in a field other than that of recognized natural science.

What, then, is the actual basis of the certainty that we gain from experimentation in relation to the external world? It is based on the fact that we are able to compose the conditions of the experiment from our considerations, from our insights, in such a way that we are able to have a clear overview of what now emerges as a series of facts from these conditions that we ourselves have composed. What follows from this special characteristic of the experiment has now been worked out in the modern scientific world view, so that a knowledge of certain conditions, especially of the inorganic conditions of the external world, has indeed been achieved to a certain extent. The special esteem in which experiments were held has, however, led to what may be called scientific materialism. But this scientific materialism is justified in a certain sense. For, insofar as one aims to methodically get to know the laws of the course of material phenomena, it is really a matter of getting to know what we encounter in material existence as objectively material, as actual, and in its lawfulness. Great, tremendous progress has been made in this way.

But in more recent scientific life, we are confronted with another fact, a fact that does not stand alone, but which I would like to emphasize as a particularly symptomatic one: it was in the first half of the 19th century, in the age in which just that way of thinking emerged, of which I have just given a very brief description; it was in the age when one said goodbye to talking about a certain force that had always been assumed in the past and without which one did not think one could get along. What earlier natural philosophers or naturalists called the “life force” was abandoned. In the 19th century, this life force was already understood to be something very nebulous. The idea was that compounds of chemical elements and chemical processes in general should take place in the organism under the influence of this life force in a way that was only vaguely understood. And to the same extent that the newer experimental science emerged, to the same extent people no longer found satisfaction in speculating about such a life force. Because gradually all the talk about such a life force had become speculation. So around the middle of the nineteenth century, the scientific consideration of this talk about a special life force disappeared, and rightly so – at least if one is able to grasp things historically and scientifically.

But in more recent times, we are once again confronted with a different fact. The certainty that has been gained in experimental science, and what has been acquired there in terms of knowledge of material connections – it is gradually becoming apparent that this is not enough. The material connections, insofar as they can be traced into the organic, even into the life of the soul, these connections cannot be grasped with what can be gained from the experimental science that has been customary up to now. And there is more: one gradually gets the feeling that it is impossible to approach what is already manifested in the living organism, let alone the ensouled organism, with the concepts and ideas, with the summaries of phenomena that are gained as natural laws. And so there has emerged what is called neo-vitalism, which in turn appeals to something similar to the old life force that has been abandoned.

Anyone who looks impartially at everything that is being attempted in this field of penetration, or, as it is also called, the overcoming of the science that grew up in the second half of the 19th century, will see it as a hybrid, a half-measure, because the same kind of thinking that has been developed for external experimental science is being used to penetrate more or less hypothetically into the living organism. And by observing without prejudice everything that presents itself in this respect as a kind of hybrid, one must actually come to the conclusion that the same thinking that one has developed in the usual experimental science is really not suitable for penetrating into the laws, into the essence of what lives in the organic, in the animated, and in the spiritualized. Can we get by with a renewal of the concept of the life force when we want to grasp the organic, the ensouled and the spiritualized with the same thoughts that we are accustomed to rightly apply to the external sensual nature?

Those who have correctly grasped the anthroposophical spiritual science meant here are fundamentally convinced that we cannot get by with this. They are convinced that it is perfectly justified to assume that the phenomena of life demand, precisely when they are observed with the strictest science of the 19th and 20th centuries, a going beyond this science; but at the same time they require a transformation of knowledge itself, a transformation of the whole soul disposition, a transformation of the whole position of the human observer to that which is to be observed. Therefore, the anthroposophical spiritual science referred to here does not start from the same knowledge that must rightly be assumed in external natural science, but seeks to grasp that which obviously lies beyond this natural scientific field through other powers of knowledge. And these other powers of cognition – this is for her a thoroughly empirical, an experiential fact – these other powers of cognition are not present in ordinary life, in ordinary scientific research; they lie, so to speak, dormant in the soul, they must first be brought out of this soul. And until one recognizes that every speculative reconstruction of something like the old life force is of no use, until one recognizes that only the transition to a special kind of knowledge, the development of a special kind of knowledge that lies dormant in the soul in ordinary life and in ordinary science. Otherwise, one will not advance from the comprehension of the inorganic to the comprehension of the organic, of the ensouled, of the spiritualized.

How should one imagine the development of such powers lying dormant in the soul? What I shall now have to characterize in a few words as a matter of principle – the path to supersensible knowledge – can be found described in detail in my book How to Know Higher Worlds and in the second part of my Occult Science, as well as in other books of mine. I shall only emphasize here what is of fundamental importance in the matter.

Two things should be aimed for first. To a certain extent, human soul life must be developed systematically and consciously in two poles if such higher knowledge is to emerge in man. One side is this, which is best understood by building on the human capacity for memory. We need this memory for ordinary life, and we need it to establish a scientific life. If a person's ability to remember, if their memory, is disturbed, they lose their normal mental health. You only need to familiarize yourself with what a pathologist tells you about people whose recollection of their life events is somehow interrupted, so that they can no longer see their past life. What makes us a whole person inwardly, in our soul, is actually the ability to remember. But this ability to remember is at the same time what must now be overcome in a certain respect for higher knowledge. One must tie in with what comes to light in memory. In memory, so to speak, our ideas become something permanent. Again and again, memories can arise arbitrarily or involuntarily from the stream of our experiences, and this is precisely how our soul life is constituted. What arises there, the making permanent of the ideas, can be recreated in a certain way by means of the method that I called the meditative method of knowledge in the books mentioned. I mean this in the technical sense, not in the nebulous, mystical sense in which it is often meant today. Then, with full and free will, one must imitate what arises in the memory, namely, the fact that certain images enter into consciousness. One must present such easily comprehensible ideas to oneself, which may not be reminiscences, which may not themselves be memory images, which one can therefore either have recommended by another, or which one must put together in such a way that they are thoroughly comprehensible, so that nothing from the subconscious can arise and mix in; and these ideas must then be given duration at will. To a certain extent, one must be able to rest with the whole life of the soul on such images. It does not depend on the actual content of such images, but on this act of the soul. It depends on bringing the whole life of the soul together in looking, inwardly looking at such images. In this way, one acts on this life of the soul in a similar way to how one acts, for example, on a muscle that performs work and thereby experiences a strengthening. What matters is this intensification of the soul life. Therefore, what I have now briefly described is, in practice, a very extensive exercise, something to which one must devote oneself for a long time and in a very orderly fashion. Then forces develop that otherwise would not be drawn out of the soul life. Under the influence of the modern scientific spirit, we are actually striving more and more not to evoke these kinds of images into the field of our consciousness and to rest on them, but rather we have come to life or through observation, so that this soul power, to which I have particularly referred, and which must be strengthened, has actually been little practised in the modern scientific and life attitude. But it is this soul power that is important.

Now, I would like to add something here, so to speak in parentheses: Those who hear that such soul forces are being developed that otherwise lie dormant in the soul will be inclined, out of certain foundations of today's thinking, to say with a light heart: Well, yes, a certain pathology of the soul is being developed; hallucinations or illusions or other unjustified soul content are being created. And those people who have not seriously studied what is actually meant here have presented their misunderstandings to the world in the most inaccurate way [for example, by claiming] that, to a certain extent, such exercises provoke pathological states of consciousness. If you are a true observer of the soul and understand how auto-suggestion, illusions and hallucinations come about – I would have to give many lectures to describe it in detail – if you know these pathological phenomena – for they are all pathological – if you know these pathological phenomena of the soul life and the forces that lead to them, then you also know that what is developed in the soul life through anthroposophy, through anthroposophical methodology, points in precisely the opposite direction. Everything that leads to illusion, to suggestion, points in the direction of illness. What is cultivated in the soul through the anthroposophical method points in the opposite direction. All the powers that heal and restore health in the life of the soul and, through it, in the organic life are called forth by the exercises I am referring to here.

What I have described here leads to a certain emergence of soul forces that grow stronger. This leads to the first stage of supersensible knowledge, which I call the imaginative stage. Not because one is dealing with “imagination” in the sense in which the word is often used, but because through such exercises one gradually comes to images without being forced to do so by external sensory perceptions. These images are purely mental images that cannot be compared to hallucinations, but only to memory images. One comes to such images gradually, but in the experience of the image one knows at the same time that this image, unlike a memory, does not refer to anything we have experienced in the life between birth and death, but that these images come from the depths of the soul when one gradually appropriates these images. These pictures do not arise from morbid sources, for in that case one would be subject to an inner compulsion, but in completely free creation, but they arise in such a way that one knows: they point to a spiritual reality. That is the essential thing, that one rises to the realization: just as our memories point to ordinary experiences that we have gone through in a healthy, level-headed way, so these imaginations, these images, point to a spiritual world. A spiritual world enters our consciousness by bringing this soul power up from its depths.

Now, the important thing is not to stop at such an exercise, but to proceed to call up such images at will, in the same way as one has formed them. I would like to say: just as one develops a kind of higher, a kind of artificial memory within oneself, so one must develop in a higher way the power that would otherwise lie in forgetting. It is even more difficult to bring this power of forgetting under the control of the will, but this must be practiced. In this one has only just begun, and just as one would otherwise relate an impression to an object through an external sense organ, one now learns to relate what one experiences in the imagination to a spiritual object. Only through this does one then attain the next higher level of supersensible knowledge, even if only partially at first. One reaches the level that I — please do not take offense at this term, it is often misused, I use it only in the sense in which I have often characterized it — which I call the inspired stage; inspired for the reason that one now comes to relate that which was previously only subjectively experienced, only subjective imagination, to an objective, spiritual external world.

Now, my dear audience, something arises that is a new inner experience. It arises that a judgment, an approval or a denial of any fact that one experiences in this way in the spiritual, takes on the form of an inner fact. One now knows: One no longer lives in such an abstract inner soul life as one was accustomed to and as it must be for the outer world, which merely has to be depicted, which cannot be experienced, but one now lives in an inner world of facts, which is, however, a purely soul-spiritual world of facts. One experiences agreement with a judgment in such a way that what otherwise appears in one's soul life as what is primitively called the power of sympathy clearly emerges. One experiences rejection as antipathy; only that these experiences are not something that occurs so subjectively in relation to the objects as in ordinary life, but as something that is incorporated into that spiritual world that one is now beginning to experience.

To these exercises, which I have described, must now be added others that can be described in principle – the details can be found in the books mentioned – as belonging to human inner self-discipline. We surrender to the outer life in our ordinary existence. We surrender to our educators as children, we surrender to the living out of inherited traits, and in later life we surrender more or less to this life itself. One should only be honest with oneself and say how much inner self-discipline there actually is for a person in ordinary life. This self-discipline is what the spiritual researcher must tackle in a systematic, methodical way. I can only emphasize a few individual points here; in my books I have presented many such exercises, all of which must be applied to a greater or lesser extent if one is to arrive at a certain degree of the knowledge I am referring to here.

It is a matter of, for example, clearly and calmly investigating what is a particular idiosyncrasy of one's own self, what is a habit that has developed, and so on. Now, out of a purely inner impulse, one sets about completely mastering this habit, that is, not leaving it in such a way that it leads one, so to speak, that one is under its compulsion, but in such a way that one can say: I follow this habit or I don't follow it. There are all kinds of exercises that can be done, which in turn are entirely up to the person recovering – also because they introduce the person to a certain sphere of freedom, to a way of moving freely in life and also in relation to themselves. One can carry out such exercises in such a way that, for example, if one is a slave to one's handwriting, one can decide to change one's handwriting thoroughly. This is also a change of habit. In this way, one really takes one's inner being into one's own hands, so to speak. When such exercises are carried out systematically – but not as in the previously described exercises, where the soul life is more reshaped on the intellectual side, but now more on the will side – then it happens that it becomes much more difficult for us inwardly, let us say, to come to a decision or to let go of something than it is otherwise in life. In everyday life, the impulses of the will lie in the depths of our nature; we follow them directly; we are led by them. The spiritual researcher must, for the times when he wants to devote himself to spiritual research - naturally only for these times - be able to withdraw from the constraints of his soul life.

And if I were to describe the whole path, I would finally come to say: the spiritual researcher comes to distinguish precisely between rest and the transition from rest to activity in relation to his life of will. This is what one now comes to know: this summoning of oneself to action, this fully conscious surrender of the will, which can then no longer be guided by the instincts, which is completely distinct from the organic life, which becomes independent, such an effort of the will, as is otherwise only present in external action, where the muscles must be strained, this strengthening of the inner life of the will by raising it out of the bodily: into the soul. And when we get to know this, then the possibility arises to fully develop the inspired knowledge of which I spoke earlier, that is, to now really gain the ability to relate the imaginations to spiritual facts, to spiritual entities, just as we otherwise relate our outer sense impressions to outer physical objects or physical facts. And then we learn to recognize the nature of the spiritual; we stand face to face with it when we acquire an inner culture in this way, also on the part of the will.

I have so far described to you, my dear audience, what emerges — more on the level of the soul — in human experience as a result of doing such exercises. But one need not stop at that. And however paradoxical it may still appear to some people today, it is simply a fact of the empirically developing soul life, which can be systematically trained to become supersensible research.

What we gain by transforming the intellectual more, as I have described it, is that we not only work our way into an actual experience of the soul, but that we also arrive at the transition - and not through external observation, but through inner experience - to what we have now grasped purely in spirit. For we have gone through imagination, inspiration and intuition and have grasped the spiritual. And we are now able to follow up what we really grasp imaginatively – if we add the other types of knowledge – in relation to the physical processes that take place in the human organism through this soul-spiritual life. In short, through actual research, through observation or, if I am not misunderstood, I can also express myself by saying: through inner experiment, we are now able to see in reality what psychologists and soul scientists are striving for through speculation. The question is always: Yes, how does the external world affect the human organism? Does it work indirectly through observation, through thinking? How, on the other hand, does the human being work through the will into the activity, into the mobility of the organism, and so on? —

These things — call it interaction or parallelism or whatever all the words are called, but they remain words — these things, which one seeks in a speculative way but for which one can never arrive at a result through speculation, one simply penetrates to them through inner vision when one has attained to imagination. Then one recognizes that this imagination is nothing other than a higher stage of development of what I called in my Philosophy of Freedom, which appeared in the early 1990s, “pure thinking,” that pure thinking that I used as the basis for the concept of human freedom. This pure thinking, in which pure will also actually lives, is the thinking from which the impulse of free action must proceed. In ordinary life it often goes unnoticed when it occurs, and it occurs when there is freedom in some part of our otherwise determined action. We cannot ask whether we are free or not; we are always only free in some part, but freedom lives in our actions. Developing this thinking upwards to a real reality, which is now of a spiritual nature, results in the possibility of finding, in inner vision, the relationship of thinking not only to the soul, as I have just described it, but also to the physical organism. As I said, as paradoxical as it may seem to modern man, it is nevertheless the case that the one who experiences thinking in this way knows that there is something in the development of thinking that is in the human organism – it is quite different in animals — in a consolidation of the material, it represents a process that is essentially a nervous process and which, in its connection with thinking, can be seen right into its physical aspect. It is a process that can be compared to a consolidation of matter, to what happens when some substance that is dissolved in another settles. This material consolidation, this becoming denser of the material, this separating out of the material from a medium, that is what is now actually experienced.

The other side, the development of the will, is experienced differently when the experience is extended into the physical-organic. One experiences now: every real act of the will, everything that corresponds to the will, has an effect in the organic that can be compared to a kind of dissolution, a kind of atomization of the material. One could also say that it is something that is realized in a kind of material process that begins with warming and leads into a process that starts with warming and then gradually leads into that which, in ordinary life, our will development also more or less consciously represents. While in ordinary life, full consciousness is linked to the fact that very fine consolidations of matter take place inwardly, dissolutions of the material take place when more or less unconscious acts of will take place in ordinary life; not so in the spiritual life, where they unfold transparently.

In anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, as it is meant here, it is not about those nebulous things that are talked about in ordinary mysticism, but here it is about an equally strict development of an inner soul condition, as it occurs, for example, in the development of mathematical methodology. There it is a matter of learning to dispense with beating about the bush, with mystifying, if I may use the expression, for the purpose of supersensible research; there it is a matter of proceeding with inner systematic strictness in relation to the development of the soul, as one has become accustomed to doing out of the scientific conscience and the scientific discipline of modern times. Therefore, in spiritual science, those who have first truly acquired a scientific conscience and scientific discipline in external research will be called upon to say something above all.

Lest I be misunderstood, I must say the following: What I am describing here are the states of the soul that the spiritual researcher attains, but these are not his ordinary states. No, the spiritual researcher must be grounded in ordinary life with all composure, with all reasonableness, with all inclination to ordinary scientific thinking and research. And that which I have described to you as higher cognitive power, so to speak, only occurs at the moment when the spiritual researcher devotes himself to these higher cognitions. It is not something that captivates him or makes him a mystical enthusiast who always lives outside of life, but it is something that he can handle, that he consciously goes to, just as one goes to an external scientific experiment and then goes away again into ordinary life, in which one is a reasonable person with all the sobriety that is necessary in this life. Precisely the one who in ordinary life tends towards some pathological states of mind, who in ordinary life cannot employ his full personality like any other person, cannot be a spiritual researcher in the true sense of the word.

But now, when you consider this strict inner methodology, what do you get from it? Unfortunately, due to the limited time, I can only hint at what the further continuation of this research is.

On the one hand, you get the opportunity, I said, to see the connection between the thought, which is initially grasped as a purely spiritual one, and material existence. One comes to see how the thought unfolds in the material inner life. This is the primitive fact from which one starts, the experiential axiom, which in its further pursuit now gives that which allows one to recognize — as imaginative and inspired recognition develops more and more — what our soul life is like before birth or before conception in a spiritual-soul world. What lives in us in a spiritual-soul world, what connects with what comes to us from our ancestors through the material of heredity, we now learn to recognize in its context as a further continuation of the primitive connection between thinking and the material processes within us. In a sense, one learns to experiment inwardly. One learns to penetrate into the living experimental process, albeit in a higher, metamorphosed art of experimentation. Just as we create the conditions in the experiment under which the results develop, so we get to know their consequences in the material-inner life through arbitrary thought processes. And by learning to develop this, one recognizes how the spiritual and soul life, the supersensible life of the human being, which continues from life to life, lived in a spiritual and soul world before birth, or rather before the conception of the present life. This cannot be achieved through any kind of speculation, nor from dark mysticism, but only through a systematic inner development of initially latent soul forces, as I have described it.

And the other side: one learns how the will works, how the will, as it were, leads to the dissociation of matter, how the will initiates a warming process that then passes into something else. From this one learns to recognize how the spiritual extricates itself from the material, how the spiritual as volitional extricates itself from the material. And that, in turn, can be compared to the process that confronts us when a person dies, when the volitional spiritual breaks free from the physical body. One comes to recognize this complete process of passing through death, of the immortal part of man passing over into a spiritual world.

They see that the point is to pursue a spiritual science in such a way that one does not want to go into the abstract, into the nebulous spiritual, and only talk about it, but that one follows the living activity and creation of this spiritual, the transition of the spiritual into the material life, the wresting of the spiritual from the material. Thus presents itself a spiritual science that does not prattle and ramble on about some abstract spiritual, but which seizes the living spirit, which finds its transition to material activity. That is why true spiritual science is not at all an enemy of materialism, because it recognizes matter as that which fits into the general spirituality. It allows materialism to remain in its own field, as I said before, and it learns to recognize its justification. This will also give you the opportunity to see, if I can only briefly hint at it, how the fact that one learns to see the soul-spiritual functions in their expression in the details of the whole human organism provides an opportunity to follow the effect of the material itself in this human organism. I would like to say: He who knows how thought and will work in the human organism also learns to recognize how a substance or remedy works in the whole human being, which consists of body, soul and spirit. One learns to see through, to see through the human organism inwardly. This, however, is the entrance to an anthroposophically oriented therapy, to a truly rational therapy, which starts from a knowledge of the human being that has been acquired by seeing through the whole human being.

In the same way, it could be shown for the other sciences, as it has indeed been indicated, at least, to those who have taken part in this course, by various experts from our circle for the individual sciences.

This, then, is what I want to give at least a hint about, albeit a meagre and insufficient hint: how anthroposophy can have a fertilizing effect on the individual specialized sciences. But notice what actually arises in the cognition that is formed in such a way. I will present only one property of this cognition.

First of all, when we have struggled up to imagination and see through something imaginatively, when we see through a realm of facts, a realm of entities in the spiritual world, as one sees through a genus, a species of plants, or animals or crystals, then we are confronted with a real perception of external spiritual reality, with which the human being is connected; when we understand something in the external sense world, we also know how the human being as a whole is integrated into this external world. But by living in this external spiritual reality, we come to see through the world's interconnections as such. And here I would just like to hint at something. It should only be highlighted as an example.

The science that I characterized at the beginning leads us to the so-called heat death, into which the events of the earth will one day end. Yes, my dear audience, we can certainly grant a certain justification to everything that external science can tell us about this heat death. But this external science lacks that which man himself introduces into the events that external science describes to us. And by learning to recognize how human will works within the warmth being — I have described how it intervenes in a warming process — we can sense, and this suspicion becomes a certainty through spiritual science, that in this process towards entropy can mix in that which emanates from human morality, from human ideality, from human volitional impulses; we can surmise that this then plays an essential role when considered in connection with its effect on the outer physical nature. And then one comes to say to oneself: Just as the individual human being rises as a soul out of his physical body and enters into a spiritual world, so the totality of human souls and human spirits will live beyond the heat death, indeed beyond the end of the earth, into other cosmic conditions; they will experience what is no longer earthly, but what belongs to a metamorphosis of the earth's development itself. All these things result in a certain change, a metamorphosis of our cognition itself. And there it is a striking fact that I must now touch upon.

When one has already come to see something in the external spiritual world, then one notices what it actually means: one has metamorphosed one's own ability to remember, one has transformed it into something else. For the peculiar thing is that At first, spiritual observations do not enter into the ordinary realm of memory. If one wants to recognize what one has once seen in the spiritual world, one cannot remember it in the ordinary sense. This shows precisely that it is an observation, not an ordinary concept or a fantasy. If one wants to go again to that which one has observed and of which one has only an image, one must also here again take the same spiritual path. One can only remember the way in which one brought about this spiritual observation, but it does not pass over into the immediate spiritual observation. That is surprising for beginners who devote themselves to spiritual science, who come to see and then forget what they have seen because it is an observation and not a mere concept. One must remember all the details through which one has brought about the vision, then, if one has the necessary strength and if the meditative exercise was sufficient, one can bring it about again. Thus, however, the spiritual researcher is obliged to make the ascent into the spiritual world again and again and again. What we see in the spiritual world does not become a memory; if I may express it this way, it can only be the cause to bring about the same processes again and again, through which one has risen to spiritual vision. I would also like to mention: One can even — and that is not the worst thing about this spiritual science, because it protects against illusions —, one can, when one has already achieved a great deal for oneself in this respect, come to skepticism and can be repeatedly compelled to overcome this skepticism. One must always work inwardly, in inner activity. And this inner activity also flows from what is communicated, what is written down by the spiritual researcher, and what the other person can accept based on his common sense. For spiritual science can be received by every layperson with common sense, without needing to be a spiritual researcher, just as astronomical truths can be received by the layperson who can see through them, even without being an astronomer. But through what is developed in spiritual science as a concept, as an idea, as a mental picture, an inner activity is transferred to the human being, which is transferred to the whole person. In other words, what is transferred to the human being is what could be called a spirit-filled contemplation of the world. This presence of mind, this apprehension of the concrete, this leaving behind of the merely abstract, is what one particularly cultivates in spiritual science. But through this one is prepared for life in a living realization.

It must be said again and again: in modern times it is difficult for people to come out of their inner individuality to a social life such as I have described in my Philosophy of Freedom, which I have already mentioned, because this beginning must be made by looking at spirituality, even if it is in a primitive way, but still by looking at spirituality itself. But when one finds one's way into it by studying spiritual science, by living into spiritual science, then one is led to the concrete. But this concrete must be grasped if one wants to understand this life, which we can call social life in the sense of modern times. We need only look back a few centuries to recognize the transformation that has taken place in the social life of human culture. In earlier times, social associations and social ties emerged from certain instinctive foundations that lived in human beings. And from these social ties, one might say, from what one human being experienced in another, , that particular degree of love also emerged, which is no longer appropriate in today's world, of course, but which in earlier centuries, even in those that we do not want to conjure up, did live from person to person. This degree of love must be understood from the instinctive relationships from person to person.

The more recent period, with its advances in natural science, with the justified applications of natural science in the field of technology, with what in turn technology has demanded in terms of world trade and world economy, in everything we can call the modern technology of life, and in everything that man sees himself in this modern life, - all this has emerged, at the same time as man has found himself in the modern spirit of science. But this modern scientific spirit tends first towards theory. Spiritual science, as it can appear today in anthroposophical orientation, moves away from theory, it moves towards observation, towards the concrete, towards the grasping of the momentarily given. But through this, this spiritual science will not only be able to serve the sciences, of which I was able to give a rough outline, but it will also be able to provide essential services to modern life. This modern life has indeed taken on forms that clearly show how forces of decline and destruction have entered the modern world. One need only study their destructive frenzy in the East. Far too little study is being done in the Center and West regarding the destructive forces that have entered humanity. How did these forces enter humanity? We shall see how not science itself – which has its full justification – but how what has asserted itself as a scientific way of thinking wanted to extend itself to thinking about social life. You see how people like the leaders of the radical socialist parties, the Leninists, the Trotskyists, say that what they now want to develop in social life, they have appropriated from the scientific spirit. — Theories applied to social life — that is what we see approaching today as something much more destructive than what has already been in effect: this will to apply theories to life, to want to theorize about life, to want to spin all kinds of utopias in life. But what is given to us in social human life is everywhere the living human beings. And it is only an illusion, a sociological illusion, not to see how today, out of a certain inclination towards the theoretical, man also tends towards the theoretical shaping of reality. Even if he wants to be a practical man, he shapes according to theoretical prejudices. Today, the worst practitioners do this, that is, those who consider themselves to be practitioners; their practice becomes routine. One can see how humanity is in danger of growing into a social machine, a mechanism. What is well suited to the external art of experimentation cannot be transferred to the way people live together. By asserting himself today, the human being wants to be an individual. This is what causes the bitter struggles of the present, which one only has to understand. One can understand them as a rebellion of the human being against what wants to envelop humanity like something objectively external, like a social madhouse. That is where the human being rebels. It is the human being that matters. But the human being that matters is the human being who acts through his or her impulses of will and who can only be understood if one starts from a love and a feeling that are inspired by spiritual knowledge. For it is the spirit that works through people in social life. What is at work in social life cannot be grasped by anthropology, but only by anthroposophy, because anthropology starts from the general, while anthroposophy starts from in his individual freedom; because anthroposophy knows how to look everywhere, right down to the individual human being, and see how this human being is the one who places himself in social life. In this sense, anthroposophical spiritual science also wants to serve the most practical aspects of life. This tendency has given rise to what was first attempted in my 'Philosophy of Freedom', for example, as a foundation of the subjective in man for a contemporary social life adapted to the present historical period of humanity , which was then in turn presented in my “Key Points of the Social Question” not as utopia but as the fullest expression of life, from empirical observation of life, but one that is borne by the spirit.

What flows into life that fully takes into account the human being, that has understanding for the individual, that shows how the individual human being cannot be pressed into the general human mold, how national stocks are just national stocks, how other small associations are small associations with their peculiarities — all this flows from the spirit. And only an education that springs from the ideas and concepts of true anthroposophy can look into social human life in such a way that a living, vital, enduring, and inwardly fruitful sociology can arise, which can then also shape social associations. In my “Key Points”, I have attempted to develop such a sociology by eliminating all utopia.

And on such foundations, this anthroposophical spiritual science may believe that it can work in the direction indicated in today's lecture; in the direction that it can be fruitful — not by talking about world view out of theoretical or sentimental considerations —, but that it can have a fertilizing effect on the one hand, for science, which after all underlies our life more and more, and that it has a fertilizing effect on the other hand, for life itself, in its social shaping in particular; that anthroposophical spiritual science can not only create knowledge, but an actual spiritual-soul reality that is fruitful for science and for life.

Dear attendees, dear fellow students! We have come to the end of this event, and I too would like to express a wish that has already been expressed by the honored organizers: that some satisfying things may have sunk into the souls of our very welcome audience during these days, and that some satisfying things may also remain in their after-feelings. It is natural that in the course of such a short event one can only give a few samples of what anthroposophical spiritual science wants to be and what it wants to be in our time of science and life.

The fact that a number of personalities, especially from scientific circles, have come together to pursue anthroposophy out of youthful enthusiasm is one of the most satisfying things for someone who would like to devote his life to everything that lies within this anthroposophical spiritual science. Therefore, you will believe me when I express it from the bottom of my heart when I express my sincere thanks to the esteemed fellow students who have devoted their strength and effort and their good will to this event.

I am convinced that all those who have been involved here and who are active in one place or another in our anthroposophical movement also thank the organizers of these college courses most warmly and in the same spirit. These thanks are directed primarily to the working groups of the Federation for Anthroposophical School of Spiritual Science Work in Darmstadt, Frankfurt, Gießen, Marburg, Heidelberg and Würzburg, who have put so much effort into making this event a worthy one. But these thanks are also directed to all participants in this anthroposophical experiment.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, dear fellow students, if you would like me to say a few closing words, please do not ask me to say what I have to say, what I would like to say to you now at the end , but let me say a few things that seem necessary to me in part and that are very close to my heart in part, precisely in view of what I have been privileged to experience here among you during these days.

The fact that the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach, where it had to be shown during the war how German spiritual life can be presented to the world, has been called the Goetheanum, has been strongly contested from many quarters. I myself have often used the name, but the will to call this educational institution the Goetheanum came from others. But perhaps it may be said that there is something in this name that is connected with my own growth into the Anthroposophical Movement in this life. And so I may begin by clothing what I want to say to you in the images of some reminiscences of my life.

When I myself came to the university in Vienna, it was still in those days when what has now gained such immense world significance was only just being established at technical universities: electrical engineering. In Waltenhofen, the Viennese “Technik” had the first representative of electrical engineering, but he had grown out of general physics. And since then, one has been able to follow everything that has come from this particular direction and which, as we have seen, has become so effective that the treatment of light and many other natural phenomena has now led to a world view of a scientific nature, one might say that it is based entirely on the observation of electrical phenomena. The mere elastic atoms, with which we still had to deal with our complicated differential equations, have been replaced by the present-day picture of electrons. And in these decades, something significant in the development of modern humanity has been included. But it also includes what I tried to hint at in yesterday's public lecture: the striving to move beyond the increasingly pervasive materialistic view of the world, which actually celebrates its triumphs in the electron theory, and to return to a spiritual understanding of the world. Within what we can gain from the electron theory, we simply do not find the human being. But we must find the human being again. And perhaps it has become clear to you from the aspirations that underlie our lectures that, first and foremost, we are striving for knowledge of the human being, but such knowledge of the human being that is connected with all other scientific knowledge and with all striving for the world, down to the individual social level, is what is to be brought to life in anthroposophy.

For me personally, when I was still allowed to feel as many of you feel today, something came to me in the midst of what surrounded me in my youth from a scientific and technical way of thinking, soon after I entered the Technical University of Vienna. In addition to the other subjects I devoted myself to, I also became a student of my old teacher and friend, the late Karl Julius Schröer. And it is one of the most profound experiences that I felt at the time when Karl Julius Schröer, in the first lecture on German literature, spoke a word that so clearly showed how the renewal of the spiritual life of modern humanity can be born out of German, Germanic being. Perhaps this word no longer seems as significant to you today as it sounded to me at the time. Karl Julius Schröer wanted to characterize how Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Lessing, the German Romantics, the German philosophers, placed themselves in the context of the entire spiritual life of humanity. To this end, he wanted to show that art, that aesthetic experience, had become a sacred matter for humanity in that time for the German, not just a luxurious addition to life. Something that is fundamentally human should flow into art. And that is what Karl Julius Schröer expressed in his own way in the sentence he uttered in the first hour of his lecture: “The German has an aesthetic conscience”. This was also the basis for his treatment of Goethe's Faust, where he tried to present Faust as the hero of invincible idealism, which at that time had to emerge from the depths of German intellectual life into the development of the world and humanity.

Then I took part in what Karl Julius Schröer called “Deutsche Gesellschaft” (German Society), by recreating something that Uhland and Grimm had developed in their teaching. Young people gave lectures; they could express themselves as they wished. The first lecture I had to give within this German Society was concerned with rejecting Kant and Kantianism, in my then awkward, youthfully immature way, that barrier that had been erected against the essence of the world by the special interpretation that phenomena have found in modern science.

And then I had the good fortune to speak about Johann Gottlieb Fichte to a circle of Viennese students at the University of Vienna's “Deutsche Lesehalle”. I tried to include in what I wanted to say about Fichte everything that seemed to me, in an immature way at the time, to be necessary for a fertilization of intellectual life from a very particular angle.

And one of the essays I wrote when I was briefly editing the “Deutsche Wochenschrift” in Vienna had the same title as the second lecture I gave here, albeit in a different form: “The Spiritual Signature of the Present”. But this essay endeavored to point to the true sources of German intellectual life that could lead to a spiritualization of modern culture.

I am not saying this to boast in any way, but I would like to present such images so that perhaps one or the other may get a truer picture of what I personally have contributed to the spiritual-scientific-anthroposophical movement than the image that is now being widely spread by untruthful sides.

Now, my dear attendees, dear fellow students, I had plenty of opportunities to get to know the forces of decline in modern scientific life at the time. And so it was a great satisfaction for me that during my time in Weimar working at the Goethe-Schiller Archive, I was able to devote myself to Goetheanism, if I may say so, for years through my study of Goethe. One felt very much at the center of German intellectual life. Weimar in the 1980s was still very different from what it is today. There was still a breath over the whole of Weimar that is no longer there today, and from this breath one sensed precisely what is specifically Goethean. At that time I tried to point the way to what was to come by giving a lecture in Weimar on “The Imagination as a Cultural Creator”.

What I attempted to give from a scientific-philosophical basis shows you, even in its very first attempts, that it is a matter of drawing the spiritual current from that which was the basis of Goethe's thinking and feeling in all areas of knowledge and life. I certainly did not start from Haeckel; anyone who follows the chapter I wrote in the first introduction to Goethe's natural science writings at the beginning of the 1880s can see that. But anyone who wants to be part of spiritual scientific life must take everything seriously, and actually carry out what they advocate in their ideas. Therefore, those currents of contemporary spiritual life that have entered this life with all their might and strength must also be lovingly experienced; and this immersion in Nietzscheanism and Haeckelism has been perceived as a following [on my part]. But if one wanted to, one could find the sources of anthroposophical spiritual science in my writings that preceded these discussions with Haeckel or Nietzsche. In my Philosophy of Freedom, I first tried to indicate in a practical way how spiritual elements must flow into moral and social action.

And when it is emphasized today that my work has been incorporated into that of the Theosophical Society, then, my dear audience, I must always emphasize again that I have never, anywhere, advocated anything other than what I have gained from my own inner path of research. That I was wanted to be heard within the circle of this or that society, that I was invited to work within that society in order to be heard, is something that I consider to be quite possible, indeed necessary. And I will never allow it to be taken from me in the future, to speak wherever I am wanted.

Therefore, I must emphasize that I did not seek out the Theosophical Society, but that it came to me. And I must always emphasize that when I had written my first book, “Mysticism in the Dawn of Modern Spiritual Life and its Relation to the Modern World Picture”, which was more derived from the natural sciences, I was told within the theosophical circles, to which I did not belong at the time, that this book contained everything that was actually sought in these theosophical circles. But this did not come from these circles; it was found by the path of research that I found compelled to take from the foundations of natural science up into the spiritual, to anthroposophy.

And so the transformation of the “Theosophical Society” into an “Anthroposophical Society” was also given by the facts. But what flowed through the work of these Societies was never different from what flows today. However, it is self-evident that this anthroposophical spiritual science, because it has been cultivated for decades in the most diverse fields, has slowly and gradually developed, and that what had to be said in a more abstract form at the beginning could be formulated in ever more concrete and specific terms. Therefore, when we speak today, we can draw much more from spiritual reality than we could in earlier decades. But spiritual science in the anthroposophical sense would not be alive if it were not so. And those who do not hold with the dead spiritual, but with the living spiritual, will understand this living development. They will understand that just as a mature person can no more be a child than can an anthroposophical spiritual science that has grown old speak in the same way as it spoke when it was still a child. Anyone who wants to look at these things properly will see that it must be exactly as it is, because the matter wants to be thoroughly alive.

Even the artistic and medical aspects, which were taken up relatively late, have been organically integrated because the need for them has basically come from the outer world of pure anthroposophy. I would say that we have given in to what had emerged from the necessities of the time, from the signs of the times, more in keeping with destiny. But understanding the signs of the times is what it is all about.

My esteemed audience, dear fellow students, I could use many other images to show how what has been incorporated into anthroposophy can be found in the original source of German intellectual life. I will not do so today for the sake of brevity. I have only given the individual examples for the reason that recently the fight against anthroposophical spiritual science has also been waged under the flag of hostility towards all things German. And in the face of what comes out of the most unobjective of motives and out of scientific inability, as for example with the Göttingen Professor Fuchs, and what is combined with all kinds of attacks by various other personalities who have never even sensed a whiff of what anthroposophical spiritual science and anthroposophical spiritual striving really are, and which are directed precisely at the German essence of anthroposophy, in the face of this it must be said: Whatever anyone wants to think or feel about Anthroposophy, we respect; Anthroposophy will face up to anyone who is an honest opponent. I have never opposed the harshest criticism when it has taken the form of judgment. But I will always oppose something else. The criticism of many circles that today approach anthroposophy with hostility is not based on judgment, for easily understandable reasons: because these circles lack this judgment, because they do not want to develop the diligence to really find their way into the anthroposophical and into the way in which this anthroposophical wants to flow into the outer social life; their criticism is based on something else. In the broadest circles today, the numerous attacks, which you have probably also heard about, are based on lies. The lies go as far as the forged letters. The lies go so far that at my April lecture, which was held in Stuttgart in self-defense, one of these attacks was made against me from the audience: it was claimed that I had said this or that in Cologne in the last few months. I had to reply that I had not been to Cologne for years. The person in question referred to a letter that had been written to him from Cologne, and he had the audacity to show me this letter. I had to reply: No matter what it says, it is a forgery, because it is a lie that I have been to Cologne in recent years. — This is typical of the attacks that come from certain quarters. They do not base their arguments on judgment and opinion, it is all a lie. Everyone is entitled to their own judgment and opinion according to their abilities and what they are capable of; I will only oppose these within the limits that they themselves have set. Because an honest opponent strives to get to the bottom of the matter; it would be a sin not to deal with these opponents in complete agreement. But anyone who resorts to dishonesty and even forges letters cannot be argued with in any other way than by calling attention to the fact that he is lying.

That is what I would like to express here with these few words, for the reason that I am speaking to dedicated younger people who, out of the depths of their enthusiasm, have made it possible for this lecture course and this lecture event to take place despite the fact that anthroposophy is presented to the world in such a distorted form today.

Now, my dear fellow students, those who have already shown how they can find their way into this anthroposophy despite the difficulties that the anthroposophical path presents, how they make sacrifices for it, wherever untruthfulness arises without a judgment about the true form of anthroposophical striving, they may perhaps be expected to unmask the untruthfulness with full force. After all, dishonesty plays a widespread role in the present world in other ways as well, and a good part of how we move forward from forces of decline to forces of ascent will be in developing enthusiasm for truthfulness. Truthfulness is the highest, never the individual party line. The whole system of anthroposophy must be built on truthfulness. For how can anyone who does not understand how to stand up for truthfulness in the outer life penetrate to those regions where one must be guided by truthfulness only through the inner direction, because one cannot always be corrected for being untrue, as one can in the outer life? What could be presented to the world from the regions of supersensible worlds if enthusiasm for truthfulness were not the basis? This enthusiasm for truthfulness – we see it particularly in the discussions about the war guilt – this enthusiasm for truthfulness is also missing today in so many cases, even in those who call themselves the bearers of civilization. This enthusiasm for truthfulness is something we need, and anyone who is as closely connected with Germanness as I am — I mention this in all modesty — will, will be convinced, must be convinced that Germanness will suffer in no way at all if truthfulness is insisted upon, even in the most difficult of matters. All attacks on anthroposophy that come from this quarter bear the stamp of a lack of truthfulness of mind. Therefore, my dear fellow students, do understand how much it must fill me with the deepest satisfaction that you have undertaken this event here despite all that is being directed against anthroposophy in a well-organized manner today. And those of you here today who already feel how sincere these thanks are, will also feel that in the ways that are unfortunately only partially open to us, attempts will be made to work together in the fullest harmony in the further pursuit of the anthroposophical path. I have often had to take refuge in Goetheanism, because of the urge for renewal in modern scientific and technical life. Today some of you, my dear fellow students, are seeking this path through anthroposophy, no doubt from the bottom of your hearts. And it may be said, from an unprejudiced observation of the development of the times: you are seeking this path from the true signs of the times. May we therefore succeed, through our collaboration with those who are already working in one place or another in the anthroposophical movement, in particularly in the most fruitful way developing the work of youthful minds. Then youthful minds will have no reason to turn to Spengler's pessimism. Spengler has, however, recently denied that what he strives for is pessimism. But in any case, anyone who is fully imbued with an inner content of the rising forces of our age in the anthroposophical sense has no reason to turn to Spenglerism. On the other hand, what has made a great impression on all young people, insofar as they have turned to science, if they have ever studied it, can be revived in a new, more spiritualized form: what Fichte once said in his 'Discourses on the Essence and Destiny of the Scholar' at the end of the 18th century. These thoughts can be expressed again, albeit in a transformed form, precisely in order to make fruitful the rising forces in the first third of the twentieth century. In particular, however, one may recall the words that Fichte spoke at the very beginning of his speeches, addressing all those who wanted nothing to do with scooping out of spirituality for real, practical life. To them he said: if they believed that all reality was exhausted in the world of sense, that ideals represented only utopias, then they should be convinced that he who speaks as he does, Fichte, also knows quite clearly, perhaps better than they, that ideals cannot be realized in real life as directly as that to which they always point. But Fichte also added that perhaps such minds cannot be convinced, and that therefore, because the governance of the world did not actually count on them, God may give them food, sun and rain at the right time, and, if it can be, also some good thoughts.

Thus spoke Fichte, the idealist, at the end of the 18th century, and thus may we speak again today, from the innermost impulse of anthroposophical spiritual science. I hope that you feel something of this attitude as we part, and that it was this attitude that led you to organize these lectures, this entire event.

I speak to you out of the gratitude that arises from all the attention and commitment you have shown to what we have been able to offer you. I speak to you in such a way that I truly believe that it will be of particularly essential importance for the emergence of a new spiritual movement when youthful humanity, touched in its inmost heart, turns to this movement. It will be up to you, dear fellow students, how conditions develop in the coming decades. It will be up to you whether the languishing German nation will be able to rise again. To do this, humanity needs strength, not just words – strength! But strength can only come to present-day humanity from the spirit. In many respects, the young generation has made a start by forming these student groups. They have continued by leading the honored student groups from Darmstadt, Frankfurt, Gießen, Marburg, Heidelberg and Würzburg to this event. May this event be the starting point for fruitful further work, work that will lead to a true dawning of humanity in the coming generations, and in particular in Central Europe. For basically everything that has been achieved here during these days was directed towards this goal, towards this ideal. So, my dear fellow students, let us work together in the spirit of true anthroposophy, so that what humanity needs may flow into it: above all, the strength of youth, the enthusiasm of youth – and that it may also be imbued with the seriousness that young people experience through their engagement with science. We want to stand firmly on the ground of strict scientific observation. But we want to get out of the abstract, out of the merely theoretical, out of the dead webs of concepts. We want to move on to the living grasp of the full reality, which lives itself out not only in the outer world of the senses, but also in the soul and spiritual world.

And if I am speaking here in particular to those who, as prospective technicians, are involved in this movement, I may say that this involvement in technical activity seems to me to be particularly significant for a spiritual movement. In the world, things develop in polar fashion. The technician experiences the highest level of scientific thinking in construction, in building, and in the laboratory. By pouring the laws of nature into the outer world, by developing technology, we bring our soul above all to what initially does not contain the spirit, but the human heart approaches everything. The human soul and the human spirit enter into this sphere. It is precisely through our feeling for technology that we must direct our feeling, our thought, to the other pole, to that which, as spirituality, permeates and interweaves the world. Technology is particularly suited to pointing to the other side, to the side of spirituality, because it most deeply intervenes in the outer world of the senses. I therefore believe that especially the prospective engineer can be a source of strength that can contribute the most to the development of humanity by bringing a spiritual attitude, a spiritual worldview.

It is in this spirit that I wanted to address these final words of the present event to you all. May they once again end in heartfelt thanks to all those who have contributed to this event, in heartfelt thanks to all those who

have turned their attention to this event.

Dear Participants! It is my duty to extend the warmest greetings to you, who have gathered here for the spiritual work to be done during the next eight days here at the Goetheanum. You will believe me when I assure you of my sincere and heartfelt conviction that what is to be achieved here in this Goetheanum should not arise from the subjective arbitrariness of a single person or group of people, but that it should be the fulfillment of the demands placed on present-day humanity by the spirit of the time itself, for everyone who is able to hear it. And so I not only greet all of you here, but together with all of you who have come together for honest work, I would also like to greet this spirit of our time, this spirit of the present, which speaks so clearly of the forces of decline that most diverse areas of life and human work and what must be replaced by new forces from the mind, from the heart, from the souls of human beings, by new forces that can only be found if certain spiritual sources of the human inner being are tapped into in this present time: This spirit of the time, one would like to greet it through everything that can be achieved here in this Goetheanum, which itself has its origin in its demands. But there are many things standing in the way of the fulfillment of this demand at the present time. There is an enormous amount that comes from a certain kind of inner human laziness; there is much that comes from a very particular kind of human fear. And finally, there are many obstacles rooted in old habits of thinking that are difficult to overcome. It is hardly possible for anyone to offer the spirit of the modern age a completely honest greeting if they cannot come to terms with all the obstacles that lie in this mental laziness, in this spiritual fear, in these inherited habits of thinking. People have become so accustomed to the great, significant, genuine fruits of human development that have been brought forth by the last few centuries that they now find it quite uncomfortable to seek a transition to anything new.

At the end of the Middle Ages, humanity found a transition from belief in external authorities in spiritual matters to a certain inner freedom. But in the last three to four centuries, it has become dependent on something else, on all kinds of authorities that it believes to carry in its own heart, but which, in essence, are again only [external] authorities. It is the indeterminate, barely comprehensible authority of what one has been accustomed to calling “scientific” and there are other external authorities that lie in the social institutions to which the man of the present wants to submit and from which he can only escape if he escapes them out of his very own initiative, out of complete human freedom, if he outgrows them in activity, which he [but] finds so difficult to outgrow because he would prefer to continue comfortably in the way that the precepts of science or of external social institutions may suggest; he sinks, as it were, into what customary education, what customary general scientific belief, general culture have brought. He seeks, as they say, his place in the social world and does not find the very own initiative of the soul life, the complete freedom of the inner being. For the latter is uncomfortable: one cannot think in the worn-out ways, one must get out of them. This can only be done through inner courage, through inner initiative, and out of a complete sense of freedom. It is comfortable to move in well-trodden paths that have been laid out through the centuries. It is uncomfortable to seek out the demands of the spiritual in our present time from spiritual heights with inner courage, inner freedom, and inner initiative.

And the second thing, esteemed attendees, is, I would almost say, a mysterious fear that is present in humanity today. There is no other anxiety to be found in this present time; but it is as if the sum of all anxieties that could accumulate in the human mind were summed up in a common inner fear, the fear of the new, the fear of the still unknown rising forces in all areas of the soul and of the outer life that we need. But this fear does not appear in its true form. People today would be ashamed if this fear were to appear in its true form and they had to show it. This fear appears in a mask. It appears in a mask that does not seem so ugly, in a mask that is even very seductive. It occurs in such a way that the one who is actually merely afraid of the new, the unknown, in the face of the older, seeks all possible logical and intellectual reasons by which he can substantiate it. We experience it every day that the fear of the new, the unknown, actually sits in the souls of people. They come and say: What is being brought to us, that contradicts, as can be proved, the certain scientific results. Often such alleged proof appears in a tightly closed form, so that one can hardly escape its web of thoughts. But these thought webs are nothing more than the pleasing mask in which the fear of the new and the unknown is clothed. And because it is basically so nice to be able to say: You can prove something logically, all the individual reasons against the new are correct – you also mask the fact that you are afraid of the new, a fear that you would be ashamed of if you showed it in its true form. Much of what appears today with seemingly scientific justification, with seemingly strict logic, is nothing more than the mask of inner fear of the new, the unknown. Anthroposophical spiritual science, as it is meant here, wants nothing more than to lead these inner soul dangers for the further progress of the present time before the soul's eye in full deliberation.

And the third thing is to persist in those habits of thinking that have been brought up since the last three, four, five centuries, truly not from worthless sources; they have come up from what has really developed in strict science since the time of Galileo, which reached a certain culmination in the 19th century. Strict inner disciplines, disciplines of outer observation and experimentation, have come upon humanity; they have poured the spirit of their work and labor into even the lowest schools. But with that, those habits of thought have also emerged, which - because they are basically so easy to achieve, even though the methods are strict - also take root most intensely in the human soul, those habits of thought that we find everywhere today, wherever we hear any conversation about science and about faith, about art, about the progress of humanity, about social life. And these habits of thinking are most intimately connected with the outer life. Man has learned in a magnificent way to deal technically with the outer life, precisely through these habits of thinking. Therefore, these habits of thinking have also connected most intensely with egoism, with all that has brought it, this human being, into modern social life. And so these thought habits, which are only the product of the last four to five centuries, appear to today's human being as something that leads to thinking in all absoluteness itself. And while a person, once he has acquired certain habits, clings to these habits to such an extent that, out of an unconscious belief, he thinks that if he were to abandon these habits he would lose part of his own being, it is even much worse with thought habits, especially with those thought habits that have formed within humanity in the most recent epoch. Man regards what is only a habit of thinking as the actual essence of thinking itself. And since he rightly believes that thinking is connected with the deepest nature of man, he clings to these habits of thinking because he believes that they are the only correct thinking and thinks that he would lose his self, his human essence, with these habits of thinking. He believes that he would lose all ground of a world view, of a conception of life, if he abandoned these habits of thinking. And often he has not even an inkling of how much he has fallen prey to these habits of thinking of the last four to five centuries, habits of thinking that must be overcome just as the habits of thinking of older epochs have been overcome.

Only when we are confronted with the full magnitude of the task that arises from overcoming our inner psychological comfort, spiritual fear and thought habits, will we find the right path to the place where the spirit of the present wants to speak in a comprehensible language about the demands that are necessary so that the forces of decline do not carry away the victory over the forces of the rising sun. They have led humanity down into chaos. And this spirit of the time, it speaks quite clearly of the fact that people must seek a knowledge, a view of the supersensible, of the immortal, of the eternal, in contrast to the sensual, the transitory, the temporal. Especially that which has become so ingrained in the habits of the soul and in the habits of thought of modern times, my dear audience, is always connected with a human tendency towards the transitory, the temporal, the sensual.

This is not a criticism of the temporal and the transitory. Nor is it a cheap criticism of the temporal and the transitory. On the contrary, when one stands on the ground of anthroposophical spiritual science, one fully recognizes that humanity once had to go through what lies in having a world view that thoroughly deals with the transitory and the temporal. It is recognized, for example, that the greatness of the 19th century is based on the fact that man learned to see through, with the strictest views, the essence of the transitory, the essence of the temporal. But it would be a sad state of affairs for humanity if, in turn, the eternal, the imperishable, were not seen above the transitory and the temporal. But this eternal, this imperishable, cannot be seen with those powers of the soul that have been of great, great service to research in the transitory and in the temporal. These powers of the soul, the intellectual powers, the powers of abstract thinking and experimental research, have been developed to their highest level in the last few centuries. These last centuries have indeed developed in man everything that could lead to the feeling of freedom, to the awakening of the inner human personality values. But that which one develops in one's own human soul when one only draws near to the external transience and the temporal being does not penetrate inwardly to the full human being, and so, in a certain way, in his latest ascent, man has lost precisely that which is connected with his own human being.

It is easy to object: So the anthroposophical spiritual science, the Goetheanism, leads away from the proven, outwardly practical world, into dizzying, bottomless cloud cuckoo lands, into that which wants to rise to fantastic heights away from the strict methodology of the last centuries. One wants to forget and oversleep here – one could object – in this Goetheanum everything that the Galilei era has brought, and one wants to dream oneself back into the eternal, for example in a Platonic way. They want to enthuse about the eternal and the immortal in Plato's world of ideas because they lack the patience to engage with the achievements of the last few centuries in relation to the real external world. But if one only really got to know it without prejudice, this anthroposophy, as it is cultivated here in this Goetheanum, one would find that one does not want to flee here with a careless skipping of Galileism into a dreamt-up Platonic world, but that one wants everything here that man can achieve in truly understanding this outer, transitory sense world, in terms of the practice of outer life, that one wants to take up Galileism fully in order to carry its rigor and discipline to the heights to which Plato was allowed to ascend without this modern culture. Plato lived in his world of ideas, which was a living one for him, and he could do so because of the limitations of his epoch, before the age of Galileism. We would have to descend into the abyss, into enthusiasm, into fantasy, if we were to enter the Platonic world of heights in a dreamy state without the preliminary stages of what the times of Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler and Giordano Bruno brought us. Therefore, if one only gets to know what the anthroposophy meant here intends, then one will not reproach it for wanting to turn away from life in a fanciful, enthusiastic way into a Platonic world of ideas. No, it wants to draw the forces full of reality from the spirit in order to penetrate into real practical life. And just as the anthroposophy in question does not want to dream and fantasize about the outside world, it also does not want to lead to the inner life of the human being in such a way that the human being as a mystic becomes a hermit of life, that he wants to steal away like a hermit from all that is his task in real, outer, practical life.

Anthroposophy knows very well that methods such as those cultivated in India, such as the yoga method, have had their time; it knows very well that anyone who, with a complete misunderstanding of the spirit of modern times, wants to return to old mystical systems, that such a person is striving for something that should be avoided here. He strives for a certain mysticism of which nothing else can be said than the following.

My dear audience, there is a superficiality towards the outer world that never wants to go into the real facts, that does not want to follow the finer gradations of the facts, that, I might say, wants to enjoy life arbitrarily on the outside in large meshes. There is such a superficiality on the outside; but there is also a superficiality of the heart. This is the superficiality that, without thoroughly experiencing the inner human secrets, only ever speaks of withdrawing from the perception of the outside world, of cultivating the innermost. Such mystical striving, as it is making its way into many circles today, does not correspond to the demands of the spirit of the time, but rather adds to the external superficiality the superficiality of the heart. And in many circles that today think of themselves as particularly mystically exalted, nothing lives but that mysticism which is inner soul superficiality. With this soul superficiality one does not penetrate into the eternal secrets of life. One can only penetrate them if one has the patience to truly awaken the forces slumbering in the soul or at least to engage intellectually with what the forces slumbering in the soul can find from stage to stage. Only by overcoming the superficiality of the heart, by overcoming this superficial mysticism, lies the possibility of finding those powers of the soul that lead upwards in the right way, from the temporal, from the transitory to the eternal, to the everlasting. But when grasped in this way, it is truly capable of having a fruitful effect on the most diverse areas of today's life. And we need this fertilization. We have a magnificent science that has taken hold of the external course of things out of intellectualism and external observation. We need to advance from this science of the senses to a spiritual science, which is carried out in the same way as the pursuit of sensory science. Just as if it always had to give account before the strict methods and disciplines of the outer sensory science, the anthroposophical spiritual science meant here would like to fertilize today's scientific life in general.

Other branches of life sometimes show an impossibility of being fertilized by ordinary science in its present form. The intellectualism and abstract concepts that have been brought forth in more recent times are avoided by the artist; the artist believes that the more elementary power and force of his artistic experience would be taken from him if the mildew of science were to be poured into his heart, if he were to try to deepen his artistic experience with the help of today's science. And so many people say: Yes, spiritual science also wants to fertilize artistic life, but we understand how destructively scientific life affects artistic life. — People only say this until they realize how closely related artistic experience is to what the soul of a true spiritual scientist must go through to enter the realms where spirit and soul truly live. On this path one must not reflect, one must create, one must connect with that which lives and abides in the essence of things, which constitutes the secret of things. And soul-forces are released from the innermost being with the same vividness, with the same directly effective presence as they have in the artistic experience. And when one first becomes acquainted with the extraordinarily living, creative and formative side of spiritual science, then one will realize that this spiritual science does not bring abstract concepts, but directly inner impulses of life, which again to those spiritual regions from which the artist must draw if he does not want to imitate mere external nature in a superfluous way and thereby fall prey to a superfluous naturalism. What the spiritual scientist has to go through is intimately related to what the artist has to go through. And what the artist forms in his imagination, the spiritual researcher forms in supersensible intuition. These are two different paths that can lead to a good understanding, as many people in the past have understood each other. Those, for example, who, out of a deep intuitive perception of the secrets of the world, have presented something before their soul, as it then lives through Raphael in the Sistine Madonna, as it lives in Leonardo's Last Supper. Again, we have to reach into regions of spiritual life, but in the sense of the newer time, the modern time, so that we also have something in the artistic field that is not just an imitation of nature. Because imitation of nature, that is not possible for anyone. Whatever one wants to imitate in nature, nature can always do better. Only then can one find the way to art, when one finds the way to the spirit.

And if we look at another area in which the newer life has led to a real inner tragedy for many individual human personalities, we see how, in the religious sphere, the depth needed for a real religious experience has been lost. Anthroposophy, as it is meant here, is not meant to be a new foundation of religion! To say that is to defame it. For what we need is not a new religion; what we need is a deepening of the religious impulses in the human heart, in the human soul, but this can be found by man again finding the paths to the spiritual essence of the world. Just as science and art can be fertilized by the anthroposophical spiritual science meant here, so religious life can be deepened through it. And I believe I need not speak of it at all for all those who, looking beyond the immediate everyday, see how we have come into a social existence in the civilized world that is truly threatening, with every year growing larger, that is already horrifying enough today. All sorts of speculations as to how this or that institution should be set up, what should be done from state to state, from nation to nation, have certainly not been lacking in the old ways of thinking. There has been much talk about such things, but nowhere is there any prospect that social chaos might be resolved in a better light.

Does this not indicate how necessary it is for individuals to find their way to the social life, those individuals who find their way to the innermost part of the human soul, from which understanding can be found for what is necessary between human and human, between nation and nation, between race and race! Only when social life is absorbed in spiritual clarity in each individual will the age of individualism also be able to become a social age. But one does not arrive at these social impulses, these social feelings, in the human individuality by, for example, talking in fine phrases about deepening the human soul, about all kinds of social impulses that people should educate in themselves. We only arrive at this when we learn to belong to the world of the senses with our sensory organism, as we have learned to do in the last three to four centuries; when we learn to belong to a spiritual world with our spiritual organism; when we learn to belong to a spiritual world with our spiritual organism, when we are able to carry down ideas about the great destiny of humanity into the individual everyday life.

Humanity has become so proud of the practice of life developed in recent times. What has this practice of life revealed itself to be? It has withdrawn more and more into small circles in certain gestures of life, and in the end it has led to a situation where people can no longer follow the overwhelming course of world events fleeing into chaos with their thoughts. What has emerged is not real life practice, but routine in individual areas, mere life routine. What the human body would be without soul and spirit is this life routine without the fertilization of ideas, which can only come from the acknowledgment, from the realization of the spiritual regions. The most mundane, the smallest things in life become routine if they cannot be directed in the right way towards that which can pulsate in a person out of their sense of connection with the all-encompassing spiritual world. We will not arrive at such a practice, which in turn can support our social life, if we do not introduce the spirit into everyday life, going beyond all routine. For only a life of everydayness that is truly spiritualized and ensouled is truly practical.

Therefore, what wants to be spiritually worked on here in this Goetheanum does not want to become something unworldly, something fanciful, something that leads people away from the practice of life like a hermit; on the contrary, it wants to place them completely within it. We need true and genuine practical life. Every day shows us this when we are told how every day more and more humanity is drawn into decline. Therefore, in these eight days, we will speak of that which in turn leads to the rising, what the spirit of the time demands of the person of the present, what it demands in the sense that only from the insight into the eternal, into the supersensible, into the immortal, can that strength be gained which is needed to transform the forces of decline into forces of ascent. We need only recognize in the right sense how the inner obstacles of mental laziness, spiritual fear, and thought habits lie before us, and we will feel that what we need — inner initiative, activity of the soul , the courage to do something new, the fearlessness in the face of the new and the unknown – that all this can be won if we are so seized by the spirit that it is the spirit itself that lives in all our impulses. For just as the world is created by the spirit, so human activity, human endeavor, human knowledge will be true when they are permeated by the spirit. May all that is to be worked out in experiments bear witness to such spirit-filled practice and knowledge, as has been the case in previous such events during these past eight days here in this Goetheanum. And inspired by this wish that we may work together here in accordance with the great demands of the spirit of our time, I wanted to bring you today the warmest greeting from the spirit that should prevail here in this Goetheanum dedicated to anthroposophy at the beginning of these working days, and I wanted to greet the spirit itself, which should and may prevail here more and more during these eight days and always.

Dear attendees, We will take the liberty of presenting a performance of eurythmic art to you, one that will be performed by children, in order to illustrate the pedagogical-didactic value of eurythmic art. Since today we are dealing primarily with the educational and teaching side of eurythmy, I will present what needs to be said about eurythmy as art in particular at our next performance on Wednesday and will limit myself today to saying only what relates to eurythmy as an educational tool and subject of instruction. I would like to say a few words in advance to the effect that eurythmy is a truly inaudible, visible language, a language that is performed by the moving human being, that is, by movements of the human limbs, the whole human body, or that is also expressed by groups of people in space. What emerges as the eurythmic art, what is achieved on the basis of a visible language, is not an ordinary play of gestures, nor is it something in the ordinary sense of mimicry and least of all a dance art. Rather, it is a truly careful study of what the human organism wants to do, tends to do, by revealing itself in speech or song. The movements that the larynx and the other speech and singing organs are predisposed to perform are transferred to the whole human being according to the principle of Goethean metamorphosis. And because we are dealing with human movements that are natural and elementary way from the essence of the human organization itself, as language is taken in a natural and elementary way from the laws of the human organism, that is why eurythmy is also a means of education and teaching.

At the Stuttgart Waldorf School, which Emil Molt founded and which I direct, we have introduced this eurythmy as a compulsory subject from the earliest elementary school lessons up to the fourteenth or fifteenth year, as far as we have come with the Waldorf School so far. And it has already become apparent during the [two-year] existence of the Waldorf school that the children take this subject on with a special inner satisfaction. If we disregard the artistic aspect for the moment, we could call eurythmy in this respect: soul-inspired and spiritualized gymnastics. And as a subject, it is added to ordinary gymnastics like soul-inspired and spiritualized gymnastics. This ordinary gymnastics is, after all, only a logical consequence of the physiological study of the human organism, of the study of physicality.

The movements that children perform in eurythmy do not arise from this one aspect of the human being, the physical body, but from the body, soul and spirit, that is, from the whole human being. That is why the child also feels what it is doing as a soul-inspired gymnast, as if it has been taken out of the full human being, and it lives into these movements with particular satisfaction.

If we want to understand how this is, we need only think of how, for someone who is able to intuitively place themselves within the laws of the human organism, every possible movement that the body is striving towards is already present in the resting human form. The one who can see in this way sees in the resting human being how this being is constantly seeking to merge with the organism in movements that are already expressed in their formation in the formative or in the calm form. One only sets the human form itself in motion by moving from the observation of the sculpture of the human organism to this moving sculpture of eurythmy, which is at the same time a visible language. Anyone who is able to study the movements of the human being, which arise from the element of will deeply rooted in the subconscious, these possibilities of movement that lie within the human being, will find everywhere that these movements are nothing other than what, in turn, wants to come to rest in the same way as the human organism, when it rests, stands quietly or sits quietly, shows its calm form. You only need to look at a hand and the adjoining arm: If you look at the shape of the fingers, the forearm or anything else, you cannot imagine that it is meant to be at rest. Its resting shape is such that every possible movement and mobility is already expressed in the resting shape.

And when a person's arms and hands are moving, we see how only movements that are natural and elementary are possible, and these in turn point to the calm form of the hands and arms themselves.

The child senses that everything in eurythmy is derived from the inner laws of the human organism. That is why, as we see at the Stuttgart Waldorf School, they perform these eurythmic movements with such great enthusiasm, as spiritualized gymnastics.

And if we look even more at the soul, we have to say that ordinary gymnastics can actually only get out of the human being that which lies in his physical organization. One day we will think about these things more objectively, without today's prejudices. Then it will be seen how one-sided ordinary gymnastics is. I certainly do not want to go as far as a famous physiologist, perhaps even the most famous in Central Europe, who once sat here, listened to such an introduction, and who later told me: So, you consider gymnastics in general to be a one-sidedness that is taken out of physiology? I, as a physiologist, said he, I regard gymnastics as it is practiced today not at all as a subject for instruction, but as a barbarism.

Now, out of courtesy to our culture — one must always be polite too — I will not say that gymnastics is barbaric, but I would like to say: it is one-sided, it is only taken from the physiology of the human organism, while this inspired gymnastics, which occurs in eurythmy, is taken from body, soul and spirit, from the full human being. That is why it is used as a teaching tool, as an educational tool that brings out in the child what the present and future generations in particular will need very, very much, namely the will initiative, the initiative of the soul life.

This has already been demonstrated in the Waldorf school through the teaching of eurythmy, how the development of the will, the will initiative, is released from the subconscious depths of human experience during childhood. This has been achieved because eurythmy does not neglect the physical side, only address the soul and spirit, but takes into account all three elements of human life, developing the spirit, developing the soul, developing the body. that the child experiences eurythmy as something so natural that when it is brought to the child, the child learns to love it out of an equal inner urge, as is the case with speech. Just as with speech, when it is presented to the child, the natural urge in the child to reveal the speech is there, so too with eurythmy, when it is presented in a natural way, there is such an urge in the child to engage in eurythmy as in speech. And so we can hope, ladies and gentlemen, that eurythmy will be increasingly recognized as an educational tool in the pedagogical and didactic fields. What our time lacks, what our time needs, is for the introduction of eurythmy into the curriculum to be seen as a matter of course.

Dear attendees! There was a famous esthete in Germany in the last half of the 19th century, and I believe I may say that he was justly famous. He wrote books that can justifiably be said to have been extraordinarily stimulating, books on aesthetic subjects, books on human cultural development, and he gave lectures at the University of Munich that aroused great interest in the broadest circles. Now fate would have it that a few years ago I was sitting in a studio with a famous Munich artist who was already an elderly gentleman at the time, and our conversation turned to this esthete, who had his heyday when the artist I was talking to was still an “art disciple,” was just striving for art and apparently lived in the company of other aspiring artists, who were always present in Munich. From certain backgrounds, I came to the question of how the artists themselves felt inspired by the aesthetic views, by the whole artistic view of life, of this esthete, at the time when the esthete was giving the lectures that interested him so much. And lo and behold, the now elderly artist well remembered some of the moods of his youth and then summarized the answer to my question in the words: “Yes, we artists also often heard this esthete; we just called him the ‘aesthetic grunter of bliss’!”

One could really hear a lot from this artist's view of a famous esthete, much of what one can also experience otherwise when artistic people are to give their judgment on the possible suggestions that they can get from scientific art observation. And one must say that one understands such rejections with truly artistic feeling – for they are mostly rejections; one understands how the artist, who has experienced aesthetics in the style of the usual, or rather, the usual science, cannot have much use for it. And actually, I must say, I understood the “aesthetic blissful grunt” extremely well. But many another artistic judgment about the scientific aesthetics of our time arose before my soul.

The artist feels, when confronted with what has been formed out of the scientific spirit of modern times in terms of aesthetics, he feels almost paralyzed in the fresh originality and in the elementary of his artistic experience. He has the feeling that he, as an artist, must live in an element that someone who views art from the standpoint of today's science cannot enter at all.

And for inner reasons, too, my dear attendees, this can seem understandable. Science, as it has developed in modern times, naturally and quite rightly tends, from its point of view, towards objectivity, towards the establishment of such results into which nothing is mixed from the inner human, from the — as it is said — subjective, from the human-personal. The more this science can ignore the human-personal, that which can be experienced inwardly in the phenomena of the external world, the more objective this science appears. But for this science, the human being is completely excluded from the world view, and in the position that the human being wants to achieve in relation to the world through this science, there is nothing left of what can be experienced within the soul itself, what can make the human being feel warm and inwardly illuminated. This science, to a certain extent, excludes direct experience of the external world from its activity. Man must exclude himself, and then he lives in the results of this science as in a world of ideas, which can only give a true picture of what is outside of man, which contains nothing of the human itself, and which is therefore far removed from the artistic experience, which must find a place in the world and in life with the whole full human personality, with a rich inner life, with an original, elementary inner life. By excluding the human element and extending the world of ideas only to that which is non-human, only a kind of dead idea appears in the consciousness of man as an idea. A sum of concepts, which are actually dead concepts and which are all the more perfect the more dead they are, deals with a dead mineral nature.

Anyone who looks very deeply into what is actually at issue here will therefore find it understandable that I say: It is quite understandable to me that in the artistic community, in view of modern aesthetics, the judgment has arisen that those people who understand least about art generally speak about art in this modern way in an aesthetic way. Yes, I must say that I understand every degree of rejection that artists express towards aesthetic science. It even seems entirely understandable to me when an artist says: if someone is completely unsuitable to understand art, then that is the best preparation for making a name for oneself as an esthete.

You see, ladies and gentlemen, it cannot be my intention to talk you into any popular aestheticism when I speak of the essence of anthroposophy and art. But it is certainly the case that the judgment that has been formed on the artistic side in recent times about the knowledge of art is, quite understandably, a negative one, and that this judgment is now extended to what has been decided within anthroposophy. Artistic natures, who first allow the anthroposophical to approach them externally, are just suspicious – because after all, anthroposophy is ultimately also a form of knowledge – that here too nothing can confront them but something that resembles the aestheticisms that have been gained from more recent science. And it is out of this prejudice, out of this superficial consideration of what actually lives in anthroposophy, that the now understandable rejection of anthroposophy by artists arises.

But here one should consider another thing. Here one should bear in mind that Anthroposophy, although it maintains the full scientific discipline of the human interior, is absolutely striving to elevate human knowledge from the mere observation of the external to the observation of the human, that Anthroposophy wants to penetrate into everything that is currently being suppressed by what is accepted in science today. It is precisely the human being in his essence that is to be given back to human knowledge, and anthroposophy aims to move from corpse-like concepts to living knowledge. The concepts of the world outside of the human being only form the foundation, so to speak. And what can only be gained through the development of certain powers of cognition and life that otherwise lie dormant in the human being, certain powers that are intimately connected through their own essence with the entire human essence itself, is built upon this objective knowledge, which is fully accepted as something justified. And when, within the context of anthroposophical knowledge, what is called imaginative knowledge arises in a healthy way in the human soul, then precisely that which external science is supposed to suppress and hold back rises up out of the depths of the soul into consciousness: The living human soul world itself rises into human consciousness. From the depths of the human organization, the living sum of forces of everything that the etheric human body brings into the physical human body as the greatest work of art in the world rises into human consciousness. And for those who advance to real imagination, what artistic experience is definitely encountered on their way. He advances into those regions from which the unconscious stimuli come to the artist.

Yes, my dear attendees, the imaginative cognizer advances into the regions where the impulses lie that the artist is not initially aware of, but which live and have power in his inner being, which guide his pictorial creation, which guide his hands, which make him a creator, an artist, so that he incorporates into the external material, into the external substance, that which he receives from these regions as inspiration. What the artist does not need to know at first, but what he incorporates out of his unconscious intuition into the material given to him from outside, that comes to the imaginative cognizer before the conscious soul life. Thus, the imaginative cognizer enters precisely those regions from which the life of the artistic creator actually springs. And when one is truly touched by what is found in these regions, then it is not artistic creativity, then it is not productive power that is paralyzed as it is by the science of the dead, but rather that which otherwise remains in the dark is first stimulated by a bright light. And one cannot say that when a person in a dark room has gained an impression of what is in the room through touch, this impression is extinguished by the room suddenly being lit. Those who grasp the meaning of this image will gradually learn to admit that artistic creativity is not killed by anthroposophical spiritual knowledge, but is stimulated in the most eminent sense. For how does this imaginative, and later inspired and intuitive knowledge work? It introduces the artist to that which he incorporates into the material, and he then stands before this aesthetic, which the scientific spirit of the last centuries has produced, in such a way that he recognizes exactly how this scientific spirit, with all its aesthetics, is basically only suitable for scientifically fathoming the outer material into which the artist works.

The external material used by the artist can be the object of conventional science. The spiritual life that he incorporates into the material consciously enters the human soul in imaginative knowledge. And this does not only need to be emphasized for the artistic experience in general, it can also be placed before the mind's eye for the individual concrete arts. There is an inner static of the human organization for imaginative recognition. That which is otherwise completely down in the subconscious, a certain inner static, an experience of inner line, an experience of inner equilibrium, is raised into consciousness. When imaginative knowledge advances to a certain level, then the human being experiences how upright he is, how a cosmic direction, which for our earthly existence coincides with the vertical, cannot only be seen, cannot only be verified with the plumb line, but how it can be experienced inwardly. One experiences how the human organism can experience other states of equilibrium, other powerful inner lines in their mutual relationships. One finds out how the inner static of the whole cosmos imaginatively comes to life again in the human interior. One can immerse oneself in the way, for example, in which the Oriental has experienced his particular bodily positions in instinctive imagination. There is a difference between experiencing the inner static and the inner dynamic of the human organism when one is standing upright on both feet and when one is in the position of a yogi meditating in the sense of Indian meditation. With every change in the posture of the human body, one experiences a different inner static.

Now, esteemed attendees, when the art of architecture was still productive, when the architectural styles, which today are only imitated, still arose from human productive power, then the imaginatively experienced inner statics which the human being carried out of his inner experience, so to speak translating it from the inwardly experienced – I have to express myself in this way – from a negative into a positive and making it the spirit of a temple or another building. A time that cannot experience inwardly cannot create architectural styles. He who wants to understand old architectural styles from what is being built today through our science of mechanics, statics and so on, does not come to the secrets of the older architectural styles, not even of the medieval Gothic architectural style. Only someone who knows how, let us say, certain oriental buildings are an imitation of what is imprinted in the mind through the imaginative experience of the Buddhist position, only such a person can understand this architecture. And again, only someone who can relive the inner experiences of the ancient Egyptians or Greeks with regard to the inner statics of the body can understand the Egyptian and Greek architecture in its style. It was said of medieval architecture that those who studied it kept certain secrets, certain mysteries, that could only be acquired by joining certain secret orders and rising through the degrees. This is no mere legend, it is a fact; for it was in these secret orders, which later became the masons' lodges and so forth, that the imaginative inner experiences of human knowledge were preserved, and from them one built even the Gothic cathedral.

It was only in the Renaissance that this principle of building, which was inspired by the spirit, was lost. It must be regained by penetrating from today's superficial, banal saying that man is a microcosm in relation to the macrocosm — which is nothing more than an abstractly postulated concept — by penetrating from this abstraction to a realization such as that we can, in imagination, piece by piece, present the structure of the universe itself, the wonderful architecture of the universe in the human inner static, in the human inner dynamic, in the dynamic to be experienced, and - as it were with the translation of the photographic negative into a positive - from this architecture in our inner experience, we can approach what today's technology, what today's science teaches, and in turn can appear as style-formers.

In all the phrases that are frequently used in our civilization today about renewal in one field or another, only the shallowest superficiality actually occurs, and progress towards new creative powers today requires a concrete inner view of the human being, requires a patient exploration of the innermost human experiences.

And just as one can experience the inner static and dynamic through imaginative contemplation, so too can one experience every surface of the human organism in its particular formation through this imaginative contemplation. One can therefore experience, by entering into that which works and creates in the human organism in the etheric body, how, with a certain progressive necessity, each individual surface that delimits the human organism outwards is created out of these inner forces. One can behold in imagination the shaping of the human being in creative movement.

But in this way, that in us is developed which guides us, not by imitating, not by adhering to the model, but by adhering to the creative forces in nature itself, to the spirit of nature itself, to conjure up the human form out of any material according to the same maxims by which nature itself conjures up this human form.

Spiritual insight into that which works and lives in the human form provides the true instruction for the sculptor, for the creator. Only a scientific, but unartistic age was obliged to adhere to the model. Anyone with even a modicum of feeling will understand that Greek sculpture, truly great Greek sculpture, does not adhere to the model, that there was a living inner experience of the form of the human arm, of the form of the human hand, and that naturalism arose when man was no longer able to rise from the comprehension of an elementary, human essence to the full plastic development of the human form, whether at rest or in motion. One cannot speak of true imagination in any other way than that, in following the path to imagination, one must at the same time encounter artistic experience unconditionally.

Only those who do not want to go the way to the spirit, but only the way to a refined matter, such as the spiritualists, have no idea of the innermost relationship of that which is present in the artistic experience with that which comes before the soul in the anthroposophical imagination.

Our soul, esteemed attendees, uses the bodily senses to, let us say, first see the world of color. At first, this soul is devoted to the world of color that appears in external objects. When the paths to the imagination are taken, an inner world of color arises in the soul, an inner experience of color, but with that, only then does the truly creative element arise in the soul. Only when we are able to grasp this intimate relationship between the inner life of the soul and color do we begin to understand why, by using the human eyes, we see the colored surfaces of external objects. By no longer looking at colors merely externally, we learn to live with colors. You learn to identify with color in your soul, to identify your soul with color. Through the harmony of colors, you learn to lose yourself in color and at the same time to find yourself in your true essence. In that the soul finds itself experiencing itself in color, it experiences itself at the same time in its inner relationship with outer nature, which it also experiences as colored, by making use of the outer physical organism.

And to become familiar with the inner world of color means to find the creative element in the color itself, it means to learn to create out of color, and it means to penetrate the secret of painting. It is always the case that what unconsciously guides the artist's hand is found to be the goal of imaginative, inspired, and intuitive knowledge.

And we can move up into the world of sounds. This world of sounds appears to us as something spiritual, because that which expresses itself as something truly artistic in sound cannot actually be an imitation of nature, because in the artistic experience of the world of sound, something is heard from the outset that is above nature. But when we become familiar with the world of sound, we become aware — and through imaginative insight we can become fully aware — that sound, as we experience it, even in all its beauty in our musical creations, in the earthly, sensual world, it lives only as a banished being, a being that has been pushed down from the higher regions, where it has its true existence, where it is rooted and lives, into the denser air within which we perceive it through the human organization. The world of sound appears to us as if in exile when we perceive it with an external physical organ. And it is in exile. For when we discover the sounding, the lawfully sounding through imagination, then we become immersed in the etheric world, in an ever more spiritual and spiritual world; we become immersed in a world in which the sounding is no longer in exile, in which the sounding is in its very own element.

Yes, my dear attendees, you can learn to recognize sound as twofold. You can learn to recognize it in its banishment in the air with its vibrations, and you can learn to recognize it through the world of imaginations in its own region. When we get to know it in its spiritual region itself, then we see at the same time how the human organism with its internal organs is built out of this element of sounding, out of this element of world harmonies and world melodies, and we get an idea of the innermost nature of the human organism. We learn to recognize how our organs, lungs and so on are formed out of the choruses of the world, how our whole organization is a result of the sounding of the world, and we now understand why the artistic creation of music touches us so deeply inwardly, why many people associate the artistic creation of music with the immediate human inner life, while they associate the other arts more with the outer contemplation. That which our innermost humanity has otherwise formed out of the cosmos, we disassemble in the resonance of musical art creation. What is expressed in the musical work of art is the human being himself, with the innermost secrets of his sustenance. And one then learns to understand how the sound, in its exile, has a peculiar relationship to the human being. Just consider, my dear audience: the air that is set in vibration by the exiled sound, we breathe it in, we breathe it out again. It is not through this inhaling and exhaling that the human being is created in his organization, nor are the human organs built out of the cosmos; they are only maintained more. In our breathing process, we have a tinting, an imitation of what is contained in the depths of the world's existence.

Take that which our organs can only receive from the air in order to sustain life, take that at its original source, which is precisely in the spiritual world, and you have that which not only can sustain these organs – like the breath – you have that which creates these organs. Just as our breath, in its sustaining power for our organs, relates to the supersensible world from which our organs are created, so the banished sound of the world of tones relates to the world into which we ascend through imagination and through the inspiration that leads us to an understanding of breathing and of what I have just hinted at, and what lies behind breathing. And in this realm, where the sounding world has its true essence, lies the musician's unconscious inspiration. Imagination and inspiration penetrate into those regions from which the forces that inspire the musician to create his works are effective. It is the world of the spiritual from which art is born. It is the world of the spiritual that we enter through anthroposophical world knowledge.

The situation is different and yet similar with the art of human language, with poetry. Unlike the musical element, poetry is not inwardly connected with what one sees; but in a certain way it is connected with what is possible progress for the human being, with his possible development. And just as the human being grasps the soul in the world of colors, he grasps the spiritual in the human being in the imagined and inspired world of sounds. And so he experiences in language how those spiritual forces work down from above, directing human progress, human evolution.

And when we learn to recognize how the spiritual tone, banished down into the earthly air, creates its tools through the breath, when we learn to recognize how the tone, trained in a lower region to become one-sided, the breath creates for itself the ear, the ear's organization as a companion organ, then one also learns to recognize the anatomical-physiological connection between the respiratory and auditory systems, which plays such a great role in biology.

But from there one can also ascend to the realization of how the active and passive human speech element creatively participates in the development of the human being itself, and one learns to understand how the poet, who is truly artistic, language, which is connected with the external, to rhythm, meter, to musical or pictorial composition, in order to lead the prosaic element of language back to that which lies deeper than the word calculated for earthly life. The poet wants to lead the word, calculated for earthly life, back to that which can correspond to the word “supernatural” through its rhythms, through its rhyming, through alliteration and assonance, through the thematic. I would like to say that the poet wrestles in the realm of the soul with the problem that nature has solved in man by making the respiratory organism the vehicle of what lives unconsciously in man as his organization, which is formed out of the creative tone of the world. The poet goes through this process, and I would say that it is only shorter, but he goes through it. He tries to lead back to the word in the spirit what is in exile in the word. This can only happen through rhythm, through speech treatment and so on.

And when one becomes acquainted with the human organization and its relationship to the world in the most diverse fields in this way, then one gradually forms an intuitive view of the human organization as a whole, and then one tries to penetrate down to that central power which underlies all human expression of life and also of the senses. And this penetration down to this central power, which is the

* will, is attempted through the art of eurythmy, through that art which seeks to bring the whole human being as a will-being to direct sensory perception.

What the human being experiences inwardly can be expressed in his outer movements down to the smallest detail. And if art must seek its ideal in contemplating a spiritual element in the observation of the sensual, and never to contemplate the spiritual in abstraction, but always to have it before it in sensual revelation, then this revelation is most intensively accommodated by the art of eurythmy. For that which stands before us, the spiritual-soul human being, everything that fills the spiritual-soul human being at the moment of his appearance as a eurythmist, everything that lives spiritually and soulfully in his soul, should pass over into outward, sensually perceptible movement. The spiritual and soul life, the non-pictorial, should become fully pictorial. But no pictorial or sensual aspect is present in such a person performing eurythmy that is not simultaneously imbued and permeated by soul and spiritual experience. All sensual activity is permeated by spirit; everything that wants to reveal itself spiritually does not remain in abstract form, but is expressed in sensual revelation. One must first acquire a feeling for the living, for the directly spiritual, which has anthroposophical knowledge as its subject, then one will learn to think differently about the relationship between artistic experience and anthroposophy than one rightly thinks about the relationship between artistic experience and an aesthetic science that only creates from dead ideas.

Precisely during the heyday of this science, while it was developing, art lost its inner sources and became more or less content with speaking of something unreal. And hardly anyone understands, I would say, tragic world sighs like Goethe's: When nature begins to reveal its apparent mystery to someone, that person has the deepest yearning for its most worthy interpreter, art. That art has a place in the world of truth, in the world of reality, but a reality that cannot be reached with ordinary science, that can only be reached with anthroposophically oriented science, is something that will hopefully be felt gradually. Then people will feel that art and artistic experience, which are so urgently needed today because they have been lost in a scientific approach limited to the external, can receive inspiration, living inspiration, from the inner life, from the formative life, from that which finds the experience of thought itself on its way and which is sought through anthroposophical spiritual science.

If the artistic world, in contrast to a science that today itself requires a deepening in accordance with the spirit, has felt and experienced that it cannot justify itself as a creation of the imagination before that which such a science recognizes as the truly real, then in the future, people will understand what a real artist like Goethe, who was also a real thinker, meant when he said that art is not just a fantasy, but that a true work of art is a truthful representation of the secrets of the world.

And if we understand the relationship between art and anthroposophy, we will also recognize how this relationship can help art to emerge from a certain tragic situation, from the situation in which science fundamentally denies art its right to exist in reality, and in which, when art engages with science, it can only speak in such a way that the artist must reject it. Art and science will enter into a different relationship when there will be a science that will prove, precisely through its own existence, that art is a genuine citizen in the full reality of the world, that art is not merely a product of unreal fantasy, but that art is the great interpreter of the deepest secrets of the world. I believe that the person who does not strive for knowledge through revelation, but through the conquest of the secrets of the world, will be touched by this new relationship between science and art from the bottom of his or her heart.

Dear attendees, Last Monday we were able to present eurythmy as an educational and teaching tool, and I took the liberty of talking about eurythmy as a form of gymnastics that is inspired and spiritualized. Today, eurythmy as a free art will be presented to you here. To explain that which seeks to reveal itself as art is actually an inartistic undertaking. For everything that is truly artistic must work through that which it presents directly in perception. And on the other hand, people demand of the truly artistic that they can grasp its whole essence, without first having to seek the way in some roundabout way through a conceptual or other explanation.

If I nevertheless take the liberty of saying a few words in advance, it is because the eurythmy we are trying out here at the Goetheanum and elsewhere is an art that draws from hitherto unfamiliar artistic sources and also makes use of an unfamiliar artistic formal language. And allow me to say a few words in advance about these artistic sources and this artistic formal language.

What reveals eurythmy as a free art are movements of the human being in his or her individual limbs, or also movements of groups of people in space. These movements are not mere mimicry or pantomime, nor are they merely gestural or even dance-like; rather, eurythmy is meant to be a truly visible language, and a visible language that is derived from the sensual-transcendental observations of the human organism itself, so that in eurythmy one can bring forth something from the human being that comes out of him just as organically - without being an instantaneous gesture or facial expression - as human language itself. And just as a sound, or a tone when singing, wells up in a lawful way out of the human soul, so too should that which emerges as eurythmy art come out of the human soul, out of the human organization.

As I said, it is important to carefully study, in a way that is both sensory and supersensory, which movement tendencies or tendencies to move begin in the human speech or singing organs when the person prepares to speak or sing. I say expressly: movement tendencies, because what I mean by this is not a real movement, but one can actually only observe what lies at its basis in the process of coming into being, so to speak in the status nascendi, because that which wants to form itself as movement in the organs of singing and speaking is stopped in its development by the singing or speaking person and converted into those movements that can then represent the tone or the sound, so that what arises in the individual organ systems, in the singing or speaking system in humans, must be transferred to the whole person. This is entirely in accordance with the principle of Goethe's theory of metamorphosis. Goethe regards the individual leaf as a simplified plant, and in turn the whole plant as a complicated leaf. What Goethe applies here only to morphological considerations can be elevated to the artistic. One can transfer what is assessed in a single organ system in terms of movement possibilities to the whole human being, just as nature transfers the form of the individual leaf to the whole plant in a more complicated form. Then the whole human being becomes a speech or singing organ. And even groups of people become a speech or singing organ. And one should seek just as little a connection between the individual movement and the individual soul process as one may seek a connection between the individual sound or tone and that which takes place in the soul. But just as speech as a whole is formed according to law, so too the formation of eurythmic movements as a whole is absolutely lawful. This can be achieved by allowing the human being to reveal himself through this eurythmy, to present in his very own element precisely that artistic element that underlies singing or speaking. For in speech, through the human organization, the conceptual and that which does not merely come out of the head like the conceptual, but rather comes out of the whole human being: the volitional, flows together. But the more the merely conceptual lives in any content, the less artistic that content is. The thought kills the artistic. And only as much as can pass through language from the element of will that comes from the whole, from the fully human, so much can be found in language that is truly artistic and poetic.

Therefore, the poet, who is truly an artist, must wage a constant war against the prosaic element of language. This is particularly the case with civilized languages, where language is increasingly becoming an expression of cognitive thought on the one hand or, on the other, of thought that is suitable for social convention. As languages grow into civilization, they become an increasingly unusable and unusable element for the expression of that spiritual reality which the artistic poet must truly seek. Therefore, the poet must go beyond the prose content and, through rhythm, rhyme, harmony, meter, the musical or imaginative-thematic, lead language back, as it were, to that element in which the human being, through sound or phonetics, makes himself the revealer of the spiritual and can thereby truly elevate the sound or phonetic into the spiritual-artistic.

Now, because of the particular way it expresses itself through movement, eurythmy works from the human will element in an elementary and natural way. It is precisely through this that the truly artistic, both musical and poetic, can be brought out in people. And what the poet, I would say, is already striving for in an invisible eurythmy, can be seen in the human movements that occur in eurythmy. One can create an accompaniment to any piece of music in eurythmy, and then, in a sense, a visible song is performed. One can also sing in eurythmy, just as one can sing audibly. And one can also present poetry in eurythmy, in which case what appears on stage as eurythmy must be accompanied by the recitation or declamation of the poem. In an unartistic age, there will be little understanding for what is necessary for recitation and declamation to accompany the eurythmic art. And today is such an unartistic age.

Today we understand little of what Goethe meant when he rehearsed his iambic dramas with a baton in his hand like a conductor with his actors. He did not look at the prose content, he looked at the artistic formation of the iamb. Or it is difficult to understand how Schiller, especially in his most significant poems, did not initially have the literal prose content in his mind, but rather a melodious theme into which he then incorporated the literal prose content, so to speak. In an unartistic age such as the present, when the importance of declaiming and reciting is seen in the fact that the prose content is emphasized and that what lies behind the prose content as rhythm, rhyme, harmony, musical and imaginative themes lie behind the prose content. In such an age, one will understand little about what forms recitation and declamation must take in order to be performed simultaneously with eurythmy.

But the unartistic person must understand how a secret eurhythmics is sought in real poetry and how this secret, invisible eurhythmics can reveal itself in the visible language in which it appears here. Before such performances I must always say that we ask the audience to be lenient because we know very well that this eurythmy is still in the early stages of development. But anyone who delves into its true essence can also know that it offers unlimited possibilities for development. For why? When Goethe says, “When nature begins to reveal her secret to him who beholds her, he feels the deepest longing for her most worthy interpreter, art,” it may be added, justifying eurythmy: “When human essence itself in its formation and in its movement begins to reveal its secret, feels the deepest longing to reveal to the eye that which lies within this human form in terms of possibilities of movement, of eurythmy.

If, as Goethe says elsewhere, when man stands at the pinnacle of nature, he sees himself as a whole of nature, taking order, harmony, measure and meaning together, in order to rise to the production of a work of art, then, with regard to eurythmy, one may say that this eurythmy does not use an external tool, but the human being itself, and in the human being all the secrets of the world are truly hidden. If we can draw them out of him, then the revelation of these secrets of humanity, of these microcosmic secrets, is a revelation of the macrocosmic secrets.

Eurythmy uses the human being as its tool, drawing from the human being's nature order, harmony, measure and meaning and presenting the human being as a work of art. By undertaking this, there must be unlimited possibilities for development within it, because if the human being is taken as a tool for artistic expression, this is in any case the most worthy artistic tool.

And so we may hope that artistic revelations will come out of eurythmy, which is still in its infancy today. These revelations may still be somewhat influenced by us, but will probably come first through others. These revelations can establish eurythmy as a fully-fledged younger art alongside its fully-fledged older sister arts.

Dear attendees! If you advance in the course of the development of today's science, you can make your way from this or that branch of knowledge to the other, to which you are led by certain external or internal necessities. But basically, all this comes from a deeper human essence. You have to say: this path is traversed with a certain inner indifference. Of course, there are exam nerves, and these can lead to inner psychological catastrophes. But these psychological catastrophes – especially those who have gone through them will be able to testify to this – are not really connected with the content of what one is approaching, let us say in mathematics, in medicine, in biology. A researcher can also experience inner joy when he has discovered something. But what is experienced inwardly by the soul is outwardly linked to the content of what has come before the soul in knowledge.

This is certainly a radical way of expressing a phenomenon that does not always occur so radically; but if we contrast it with the opposite that arises when studying, that is, at the same time as inwardly experiencing anthroposophical spiritual science, the validity of what has been said will emerge.

When studying and inwardly experiencing anthroposophical spiritual science, one really does experience inner fateful events. One experiences psychological catastrophes and peripeteia. On the one hand, these experiences are closely and intensely connected with the content of the person approached in knowledge. On the other hand, we experience something that takes hold of human nature in many ways, transforms it, brings it to other levels of soul development, and so on. This fact, which at first glance might appear to be an external one, is in fact intrinsically connected with the nature of anthroposophical spiritual science; it is connected with the fact that, while one rises objectively out of today's scientific spirit into a world picture in a justified way, one does not actually find the human being in this world picture. Of course, one can also construct him out of it; but the human being who can be constructed out of the present evolutionary doctrine, who can be constructed out of present-day biology or physiology, does not present himself in an image that evokes inner tremors and liberations in the soul; he presents himself in an image that leaves the soul cold.

But, dear attendees, is not the essence of the human soul in everyday life that we go through inner turmoil, pain, suffering, joy and satisfaction? Do we not go through catastrophes and peripeteia through our external lives? Can we therefore hope that we can grasp this human being, who is internally changeable and so close to us in his changeability, through a science that, on the one hand, provides us with an image of the human being that must actually leave us indifferent, yes, that must see its perfection in a certain relationship precisely in the fact that it leaves us indifferent? Anyone who sees this fact in the right light will initially be emotionally drawn to the essence of anthroposophical knowledge of man. This essence of anthroposophical knowledge of man — I have tried to describe it in part according to its method in my writing “How to Know Higher Worlds?” I have tried to describe it by name in my book “Theosophy” and then in the ” Secret Science. I have tried to show how the striving for knowledge must ascend if it is to arrive at genuine anthroposophical knowledge of man, through three degrees of knowledge, through Imagination, through Inspiration, through Intuition understood in the deeper sense. And I believe I have made it clear in my description of what a person can experience in imaginative, inspired, intuitive life, that going through such a path of knowledge means that a series of inner experiences of destiny take place at the same time. , so that not only the content of knowledge approaches the human being in abstraction, but the image of the human being approaches direct human experience, that which sits within us as the experienced essence of our human dignity.

Imagination is the first step in penetrating the essence of the world as well as the essence of the human being. I have described how imagination can be cultivated through a kind of meditative life and a kind of concentration of the power of thought, in a completely healthy way that is the opposite of a pathological one. Now I would like to draw attention to what actually happens within a person when they strive for this imaginative level of knowledge. It is the case that through this meditative inner experience, through this methodically disciplined inner experience of concentrating thoughts and feelings, the soul forces are, as it were, gathered together, and they are permeated by consciousness more intensely than is otherwise the case. If we then observe what is actually growing when we meditate and concentrate in this way, we find that it is the same thing — only in its continuation — that has brought us to actual self-awareness in our ordinary experience, that has brought us to composure, to calm personality and which has brought us, if I may use the expression, to the actual egoity of the human being, to that in which the human being must find himself so that he can detach himself from the world in a level-headed way, so that he can come to self-awareness in the right way.

This is also the dangerous thing about this path, that first of all this egoity of the human being must be strengthened. That which has led people to egoity must be taken further. Therefore, what is striven for here can basically only be properly achieved if it is preceded by a corresponding preparation, the preparation that I have described truthfully in my writing “How to Know Higher Worlds”. There you will find a certain method for attaining true inner modesty, that inner modesty which may not always be openly displayed in outer life, owing to outer circumstances, but which must penetrate the life of the soul in depth. If this modesty is not thoroughly developed as an inner strength of the soul experience, then there is indeed the danger of human megalomania on the path to imagination, not pathological megalomania, but psychological, moral megalomania. Those who apply anthroposophical methods correctly cannot lapse into pathology because these methods run directly counter to what can lead people out of their natural state into pathological conditions. However, they may certainly face psychological dangers such as the megalomania referred to here. A certain inner stability, rooted in modesty and unpretentiousness, is necessary for the individual who aspires to that elevation and intensification of egoism which is necessary to achieve imaginative knowledge. In ordinary life and in ordinary cognition, our concepts are too pale, our highest ideas too abstract, to move from their own full saturation to the inner experience of that which actually pushes man towards egoity. That which otherwise lives in the power of forming concepts and shaping ideas must be elevated, must be intensified. Then, indeed, an experience occurs, and by the occurrence of this experience the one striving toward imagination can actually gauge the correctness of his striving. One has done exercises to increase one's egoism, one has done such exercises that one's pale concepts and ideas have been raised to the intensity one experiences when one has a sensory image before one's eyes or ears. One has thereby increased that power which, by its concentration, produces our composure, our sense of personality, our egoism. The experience one has is that from a certain point on, an increase in egoity no longer occurs, that from a certain point on, precisely because of the increase in egoity, in a sense because of the arrival of egoity at a point of culmination, this egoity actually dissolves. That is the significant thing, that our egoity, when it is increased, is increased correctly, does not increase into the excessive as egoity, but that it basically dissolves.

From this alone it can be seen that the experience we have as human beings in the outer physical world, and which, through its own nature, carries us to egoity, is necessary as a transition, that egoity in a healthy way the physical world and through sensory perceptions must be attained before one can turn to that increase that I mean here, which then leads to a dissolution, so to speak, of egoity, or rather, to an outflow of egoity.

Where does our egoity flow into first? In ordinary life, my dear audience, our egoity is actually banished into the moment. We can only say “I” to ourselves by feeling that we are a being experiencing the moment. That which we already experienced yesterday, which was intimately connected with our egoity yesterday, what we were immersed in yesterday, has become objective for us today in this moment. And to a certain extent, we see what we experienced yesterday, in contrast to our sense of self, as something external through memory, just as we see any external experience as external. One time, something objective rises from the depths of our own organization in memory; the other time, it approaches us by announcing itself to us through the external senses.

Of course, we distinguish the remembered experience from the external sensory experience; but at the same time there is something very similar between the two in the way they approach the ego, which can only be fully grasped in the moment. In the endeavor to advance to imagination, the I actually gradually flows out over our physical life on earth between birth and death, and we learn to be immersed in a past experience as we are immersed in the experience of the present moment. We learn to feel ourselves as I in the long-past experience as well as we otherwise do in the present moment. I draw your attention to the fact that you have certainly already experienced in a dream – which I certainly do not regard as some kind of valid source of knowledge, but only use here for clarification – that you have certainly already experienced in a dream that you felt like a person 20 years in the past , as a person 20 years younger, that you imagined your image from 20 years ago and behaved in the dream as if you were only 20 years old, that you did the same things as you did 20 years ago. I would like to remind you that in this dream image you actually objectify yourself in such a way that you feel yourself at the age you were at a distant point in time.

What appears in dreams in a semi-pathological way can be attained by the human being in full consciousness through imaginative knowledge, and can be developed in full consciousness. Then the human being experiences what he has ever experienced in this earthly life – he does not just experience it as an ordinary memory, which is contrasted with the experience of the present moment, he experiences it in such a way that his I, his egoity, fills the entire stream of his experience in this earthly life. He steps out of the moment and into the stream of his experience of time. The I does not flow out in a nebulous way; the I flows out into the stream of real experiences of this earthly life. But in this outpouring one grasps something different than in the ordinary consciousness of the moment, which, according to ordinary logic, must be filled with intellectual images in abstractions. In this outpouring of the life stream, one grasps images, images of the vitality of the life of the senses. That which otherwise stands before the soul as a memory of life becomes inwardly saturated and intense; one learns the nature of imaginative knowledge in oneself. At the same time, one penetrates into the essence of the human being by advancing in knowledge. But from this moment on, one knows that one has submerged with the ego not in a stream of abstract memories, but in a stream of real life forces, the same life forces that, from our birth, or let us say from our conception, are the forces that constitute our organism, that shape our organs, that work on us internally, in growth, in nourishment, in reproduction.

We now become immersed in the stream of those forces that otherwise only have to do with the mediation of our nourishment, that make us grow, and that make our reproduction possible. And now, instead of living in an abstraction, we are living with full consciousness in a concrete reality, and we are learning what the etheric body is. We are learning that our physical body, in which we normally live in our ordinary lives, is based on a body that is an inner formation of forces and that can only be seen in such imaginative knowledge. One becomes familiar with that which has been repeatedly sought by hypothesis by physical and biological science in recent decades, and which is even denied by others today in its existence. One becomes familiar with the real ether world in contrast to the ponderable physical world and learns to recognize how that which underlies our physical human form is really such an ether human being. But in grasping oneself as such an etheric human being, the ego of the earthly human being dissolves in an even higher sense. One cannot grasp this etheric human being without simultaneously seeing in all its individual parts and aspects what the cosmos, what the world, is. At the same time, one is led out of oneself by grasping oneself as an etheric human being, because that which works within us as an organizing etheric human being throws its rays in currents out into the cosmos, bringing us a connection between these or those inner organs, between this or that limb of our physical organism and the cosmos.

What is experienced does not appear in the form of abstract concepts, but in the saturated form of imagery, of imagination. But in that we have, in a sense, surrendered our egoity in the process of knowing, as I have described it, we grasp at the same time that which is now etherically outside of us in the world. We penetrate through our own etheric body into the etheric of the great world, from which we are, after all, born as human beings.

But then a new task arises. The world we now experience is quite different [from the physical one]; it does not have certain things that we rightly consider to be the defining characteristics of our physical world. It initially presents itself to us in a pictorial way, while we recognize our physical world in its true objectivity when we strip away the pictoriality. But when we now ascend from the grasp of our own etheric body to the ethericity of the world, we notice that precisely those senses that otherwise convey the external world to us in the most beautiful way lag behind in their effectiveness. We owe what we have of the physical external world to the eye, the ear and so on. These senses, as it were, recede at first, and the very senses that are ignored in ordinary physical life come to the fore in human experience as we become so attuned to the etheric world: the sense of balance, the sense of movement, the sense of life. These come to the fore. We are freed, as it were, from our own heaviness. We enter into an experience of the world's own equilibrium, into which we find our way. The movements observed through the eyes or those detected by instruments cease. But what can be inwardly experienced in the movement when the human being is in this movement is experienced in the imagination through the resting human being, in that the movement first increases. This is a living penetration into the etheric world. And here I would like to draw your attention, ladies and gentlemen, to the fact that it is really as I characterized it in my introductory words today, when I said that the path of anthroposophical knowledge means a series of inner soul experiences of destiny. For what occurs, so to speak, as a damping of the higher senses and as a spiritualization and strengthening at the same time of the senses usually regarded as low, is connected with such a fate. And, although I know what one is exposed to in such a description, I would like to mention what I want to say here with an example: I was once occupied with the internal mental processing of what a person actually experiences when they profess their soul to these or those worldviews, when they become a materialist, idealist, realist, spiritualist, positivist, skeptic, and so on. These things cannot be exhausted by what ordinary life and ordinary contemporary science produce about them, if one really strives to recognize them from within. Ordinary life and ordinary contemporary science are actually exhausted in the fact that the idealist rails against the realist, criticizes him, and that he refutes what the realist puts forward; the spiritualist becomes haughty, and nevertheless he is often a complete layman in that which can only be recognized in the material world, he indulges in the most disparaging criticisms of materialism, which nevertheless was a cosmic side effect of our modern, justly so praised scientificness. These things, why the human mind leans towards materialism on the one hand, and on the other, for example, towards spiritualism or idealism, these things lie deeper than one usually thinks.

When one seriously engages with these things, then one carries out an inner soul work that is connected with the thought process in a healthy, but also comprehensive sense. One experiences something at the same time as one thinks. If you think abstractly, you experience nothing. But if you experience what becomes an experience for the human being, whether you are a materialist or a spiritualist, a realist or an idealist, then you are led, as it were, into the direct existence of the human soul. In a completely different way, this human soul is grasped by a kind of thinking that I would call deeply introspective, than is the case with the ordinary sciences.

What one can experience in such thinking, which must be meditative and concentrated thinking, leads one further, releases certain powers of the imagination, and leads to the appearance of an inner image for individual concrete things, , but with the complete character of this thought-experience, an inner pictorial experience arises, which, however, is not a dreamt or fantasized pictorial experience, but which is connected with the cosmic, supersensible facts underlying external phenomena.

And so I lived at that time, after I had gone through this concentration, this meditation on what I have just described to you. I lived myself into the imaginative world in such a way that the whole person who emerged in the imagination suddenly became something that stood before the inner eye in a concrete world fact. It was formed out of what one had grasped as the essence of man, as an image of the cosmic, the zodiac, the zodiakus; but not as one has it in mind in its abstract form, but in such a way that the individual formations of the zodiac became truly essential, so that the spiritual essence of the zodiacal constellation emerged and revealed how it now came together with the individual elements of human nature: the world as an image, within a certain sphere as an image, the living out of inner thoughts, striving towards cosmic imagery.

The I not only flows out into this stream of one's own personal experiences for this earthly life, the I flows out into the cosmos. One learns to recognize what is really there in the undulating, surging ether of the cosmos. One does not enter into this undulating, surging life of the cosmos other than by increasing one's egoity to the point where it reaches its culmination, then dissolving oneself in the comprehension of the world and pouring out into the objective existence of the world.

What I am describing to you is basically the character of the etheric world. Experiencing yourself in this etheric world — you will now understand why I call it a destiny experience. Experiencing knowledge is at the same time a destiny experience. In this etheric world one can experience that which cannot be described in any other way than as I have described it in my “Occult Science”. It is the etheric experience of the world that has been presented in this “Occult Science”.

But at the same time, one's inner destiny takes such a turn that one feels the egotism into which one is placed in ordinary life between birth and death, I might say, continually expanding. The point then is that through the continuation of such exercises, as I have indicated in “How to Know Higher Worlds?” and in my “Occult Science” in its second part, that through the continuation of such exercises the I, which one has actually lost in a certain psychological sense, that this I is found again.

If you develop - everyone can develop this - you develop the power to carry your thoughts into the pictorial experience, and if you practice this carrying of your thought power into the etheric pictorial experience long enough - for the individual person it is so long, for the other person differently long - if you practice this long enough, one practices it so to speak until it has the necessary strength to fight against the persistent addiction to lose one's thoughts in images, one maintains the upper hand with one's composure, with the imbuing of one's etheric image experiences with the power of thought. Then the I-experience arises again. But it now appears in a completely transformed form, it now appears before the fully collected soul, before the soul that is as collected as one can only be in the solution of some mathematical problem. The experience of the I emerges from the world of ethereal images, but it emerges in such a way that we see it, so to speak, not as something that dwells in our physical corporeality, but as emerging from the cosmic etheric world, to the contemplation of which we have risen. One would like to say: While otherwise our ego, when it emerges, experiences and is viewed as if it came from the physical body, as if it came from a human center, we now experience it as if our ego radiates from the indeterminate periphery of the universe, as if it wants to converge in a center instead of diverging. And we notice: the world in which we are now placed with full inner reflection, with full inner power of knowledge, the world we actually only dream of in our ordinary life between birth and death when we apply a force that cannot initially be a force of knowledge, when we apply the power of feeling.

What we experience in our ordinary human life through feeling is not imbued with the power of thought to the same extent as our imaginative life. In reality, as I have often discussed, it is only imbued with the power of thought to the extent that our dreams are imbued with the power of thought. What we experience, so to speak, in the shadow of the world of personal feeling, we now experience in its true form: the I, as it descends from the periphery of the world, from the world of etheric substance, as it, instead of dissolving into the indefinite, pushes towards the center of its own being. And in this comprehension, which transforms the ordinary emotional experience into a real thought experience and thus into a real cognitive experience, in this experience we grasp what is called the astral body in anthroposophical knowledge of man. The astral body appears to us as given to us by the world when we look out from our center. We discover how, as it were, what is our astral body is exuded from the etheric force arrangements. It is as if we were suddenly not living in ourselves, but living in the air we breathe in — as if our body were standing there objectively and we were not in this body, but in the air we breathe in — and it is as if we felt that our external physicality was merely this body of air that penetrates into the human interior. It is as if we were looking into the human organs, as if we were approaching the human form in its externality.

Ascending from this breathing experience, Indian yoga philosophy aimed to achieve the experience that I have just described to you as the experience of the astral world. We in the West are not allowed to imitate this yoga experience in the East, due to the nature of our organization. But everything that we can experience in the immediate future, in which we actually experience ourselves outside our body in this way, presents itself in the same way as the world soul in the etheric body of the world. In fact, we never have a physical world body before us in a concrete realization, but in real realization we only reach an etheric world body in the way described, and in this etheric world body we experience the world soul in its configurations, one of which is our own soul, our own astral body, if I may put it this way.

In the same way as I have described in my “Occult Science” what one can see in the ether world, the surging and nature of this ether world in its concreteness, one can also describe the soul-like becoming and weaving of the cosmos. Perhaps it will be incumbent upon me, if it is to come to pass in this life, to show that what has been described in my “Occult Science” as the ether world can also be described as the astral world. It will be seen that then one must speak from quite a different spirit, that then something must be added to the descriptions of this “Occult Science”, which in its description, in its characterizations, must be quite different from the descriptions, the characterizations of this “Occult Science”. And I say to those who approach my writings in this way, that instead of having the will to penetrate into the matter, they quibble over words and look for contradictions. I predict that they will find will find between the book, which is created in this way through the description of the astral in relation to the etheric, that they will find an even greater portion of what they will state as contradictions in their way. These are the contradictions of life, and the one who wants to penetrate life objectively must familiarize himself with these contradictions in a living way, not in abstract logic.

But when what we come to know as our own astral, as our own soul, approaches us in this world, we actually feel like cosmic human beings, and we feel our own astral body, our own soul, only as a part of the cosmos. But we feel it as a member not of the etheric cosmos, but of the soul cosmos, and we now know: the cosmos has a soul. And by being able to present the astral body to our soul as something other than what appears to us only through our outer physical corporeality and through the etheric, a life that precedes our birth or our conception , a life accomplished in the spirit, in the soul world, is placed before this soul of ours, and a life that we enter as a spiritual-soul being when we pass through the gate of death. That which is called immortality, and also that which our civilization has lost and which should be called unbornness, becomes a fact, for one gets to know oneself from the whole world that outlasts the individual human life. One does not just grasp the part of the human being that is embodied in the body between birth and death, but one grasps the human essence that precedes birth and follows death; one grasps oneself as a link in the eternal spiritual world.

And still further can be continued that inner concentration, that inner meditation, whereby one must only see to it that the power one has attained to penetrate the world of images with thoughts is fully maintained with the power of reflection. One can penetrate even further in this penetration of the imagination with thought-content, and the penetration of inspiration with thought-content; one can always intensify that which is the level-headed thought-experience in imagination, in inspiration, and then one comes to the experience of the true form of the central human ego. Then one penetrates through the human astral body, which actually presents itself as developing from the periphery of the world towards our human center, and presents itself as a member of the entire astral cosmos. From there, one arrives at the true self, of which one has only a shadow in ordinary life, to which one says “I”; one arrives at that which one now objectively sees as one's self, in the same way that one otherwise objectively sees external things. For that which one undergoes on the path of knowledge has brought one out of one's own corporeality, and what now moves back into one's own corporeality is not the ego that one has in ordinary life, but a real ego.

This real self initially has nothing to do with much of what shapes us as a human organism from the cosmos, what works in us and lives from the world that we have gone through in the spiritual and soul realm before birth or before conception. This I presents itself as an objective reality, as that which, so to speak, represents the sum of all the I's we have lived through in our past earthly lives.

This is achieved at the level of the intuitive, the truly intuitive. There, that which can be described in anthroposophical knowledge of man as repeated earthly lives becomes wisdom. In fact, anthroposophical knowledge does not consist of formulating abstract insights based on existing facts, which are images of the facts, but rather consists of gradually and truly living one's way into the human essence. What one experiences of this human being, after one has first poured out one's I, one's egoity, into the stream of life between birth and death in the etheric realm, now stands as the subject opposite the I that has become objective on the path from our previous life to our present life. It is from such a path of knowledge that the one speaks who, from inner vision, not from theory, speaks about the existence of repeated human lives on earth. This view of repeated human lives on earth is not a theory, but something that arises as a realization at the same time as the view of the true self, which in our ordinary life we have before us in the same way as we have our soul life before us between falling asleep and waking up. Just as we are between falling asleep and waking up in a state that we do not see into, that is given to us only negatively as an empty part of our experience, so we must, as it were, leave out in our life stream what we have experienced while sleeping. When we look back and let our life appear before us, how for ordinary consciousness we actually only have those stretches of life that run from waking to falling asleep, how these are always interrupted by empty lengths of stream, stream members, so in ordinary life we look down into our ego, into our organization. We see, by experiencing the surging, weaving soul life, a kind of empty space that we oversleep as we oversleep our state of sleep, and to this empty space we say I, not to something really fulfilled. Anthroposophical knowledge of the human being, ladies and gentlemen, can indicate how it arrives at its content, can describe step by step how it advances inwardly to grasp that which it must present to the world as a teaching. And because true anthroposophical knowledge of man carries the thought everywhere - for you have seen that I had to place the main emphasis on this in the description of this anthroposophical method of knowing man, that in imagination, in inspiration, the thought experience has been carried into it with all its sharpness, that this thought experience also appears in the intuitive experience in the end; you have seen that I had to place the special emphasis on this must attach to this, and because the thought experience is everywhere within, because that which man has in the abstract thought experience, which he uses for ordinary science, is everywhere within in all that the spiritual researcher directs his soul and his spirit, his I, therefore everything that the spiritual researcher presents to the world can be relived and also verified by the mere thought experience. The human being must only have the opportunity to follow the spiritual researcher to the thought experience. He must not lose the thought experience immediately when he leaves the sphere of sensory experience. He must have the strength to develop the inner capacity for growth and reproduction that can still have the self-generating thought when the thought stimulated by the external sensory experience ceases to bear its actual character. This intense inner experience can be appropriated at first; then one will find: the spiritual researcher describes things that he has essentially experienced by carrying the thought into imagination, inspiration and intuition.

The thoughts that he incorporates into it can be followed and tested. For the thoughts that he forms in imaginative, inspired and intuitive life can be tested for accuracy by their very nature and essence when you hold them up to yourself. One must only not cling to the human prejudice, which in recent times has become all too strong, that a thought can only be verified if one can have an external sensual fact as proof. One must recognize that the thought itself, the same thought that is used in external science, has an inner life, that it can shape its inner organization. If one experiences only this inner self-fashioning of the power of thought, if one experiences it in a way that Hegel in his time could not yet experience — hence he only unravelled abstract thoughts in his philosophy — if one experiences this living movement of the thought, which I first tried to present in its form in my “Philosophy of Freedom”, then one can really examine every single thought that the spiritual researcher expresses. Those who do not undertake this examination will generally do so because they feel compelled to do so out of an inadequate will: 'I do not follow what you are thinking there, because what I know so far gives me no reason to do so.

Anyone who takes this view is simply not open to discussion about anthroposophy, and in particular about anthroposophical knowledge of the human being. It is not necessary to ascend to imagination, inspiration, and intuition oneself; it is only necessary to bring the thought life, which one already develops in ordinary science, vividly into the whole inner soul life, and from this living grasp of the thought, to follow what the spiritual researcher brings out of imagination, inspiration, and intuition. But, ladies and gentlemen, one must be determined to break away from dead thinking, which only arranges concepts in a linear fashion, just as the external sense world unfolds. This dead thinking proceeds in such a way that I form this concept from one piece of the external sense world, then I stick it to the concept that I gain from the other piece of the sense world, and so on. Only those who adhere to this method of gluing for a system of concepts will say that, from the point of view of ordinary thinking, they cannot verify what is given in anthroposophy. But anyone who grasps that the human being really carries within himself, within himself experiences thinking as a living organism — it is only overshadowed, it is only overshadowed by an illusion —, anyone who grasps this thinking that is alive in life, can verify from this thinking everything that the spiritual researcher presents about man and the world.

Thus you see from the whole meaning of what I have taken the liberty of presenting to you that when the spiritual researcher attempts to penetrate to knowledge of man, at the same time as he strives for this knowledge of man, knowledge of the world results. Knowledge of the true human being leads us beyond ourselves into the objective world. Real knowledge of the true objective world gives us, within its content, the human being, the truly outwardly and inwardly living human being, who can feel at home in the world, which he discovers in this way. And so it may be said: Just as it can already be sensed that world and human being must belong together in the most intimate way, as I have already emphasized in my Philosophy of Freedom, so spiritual science presents knowledge to the world that world knowledge must be attained through knowledge of the human being, because world existence can be experienced can be experienced in the innermost human being, that human nature can be recognized from knowledge of the world, because the human being with his innermost nature comes from the objective, true world; that knowledge of the world must be attained through knowledge of the human being [and knowledge of the human being through knowledge of the world].

In this, however, a contradiction or even a paradox can be found, for one might ask: Where should we begin? Should we start with knowledge of the world in order to gain knowledge of the human being from knowledge of the world , as the pantheist or some other philosophically or materialistically minded person would undertake, or should we, as the mystic often does, soar from knowledge of man to knowledge of the world?

But this is dead, this is not alive thought. Knowledge of man and knowledge of the world do not belong together like two dead limbs of an organism, so that one can start with one and move on to the other, but knowledge of man and knowledge of the world belong together like the living limbs of a being itself. And just as little as one can say that the head lives through the limbs or the limbs live through the head, so little can one say that one can start with knowledge of the world in order to arrive at the human being, or start with knowledge of the human being in order to arrive at knowledge of the world. Rather, one must say that both must arise in living unity, and both must mutually illuminate each other in living unity. And in this sense, in the sense of a living realization, a world knowledge gained from spiritual research through true knowledge of man, a true knowledge of man through true world knowledge, must arise for the great questions of our time.

I would like to say a few words about the building idea, with the supporting, direct view of the building. From the outset, the view could arise that if one must first speak about such a building, it indicates that it does not make the necessary impression as an artistic work; and in many cases, what is thought about the building of Dornach, about the Goetheanum in the world, is thought from a false point of view influenced by a sensory view. For example, the opinion has been spread that the building in Dornach is meant to symbolize all kinds of things, that it is a symbolizing building. In reality, you will not find a single symbol when looking at this building, as is popular in mystical and theosophical societies. The building should be able to be experienced entirely from artistic perception and has also been created from these artistic perceptions in its forms, in all its details. Therefore, it must work only through what it is itself. Explaining has become popular, and people then want explanations; but in mentioning this here before you, I also say that such explaining of an artistic work always seems to me to be not only half, but almost completely unartistic, and that I will now give you a kind of lecture in the presence of the building, a lecture that I fundamentally dislike, if only because I have to speak to you in abstract terms about the details that arose in my mind when designing the building, the models and so on, and what was created from life. I would rather speak to you about the building as little as possible.

It is already the case that a new stylistic form, a new artistic form of expression, is viewed with a certain mistrust in the present. I can still hear a word that I heard many decades ago when I was studying at the Technical University, where Ferstel gave his lectures. In one of them, he says: “Architectural styles are not invented, an architectural style grows out of the character of a nation.” Therefore, Ferstel is also opposed to the invention of any new architectural style or type of building. What is true about this idea is that the style that is to stylize the characteristics of a people must emerge not from an abstraction, but from a living world view, which is at the same time a world experience and, from this point of view, comprehensively encompasses the chaotic spiritual life of contemporary humanity. On the basis of this thoroughly correct idea, it becomes necessary to transform what was peculiar to previous architectural styles into organic building forms by incorporating the symmetrical, the geometrically static, and so on.

I am well aware of what can be said, and rightly said from a certain point of view, by someone who has become inwardly attuned to previous architectural styles, against what has been attempted here in Dornach as an architectural style: the transference of geometrical-symmetrical-static forms into organic forms. But it has been attempted. And so you can see in these forms of construction that this building here is an as yet imperfect first attempt to express the transition from these geometric forms of construction to the organic. It is certain that the development of humanity is moving towards these forms of construction, and when we again have the impulses of clairvoyant experience, I believe that these forms of construction will play the first, leading role. This building should be understood in the same way through its relationship with the organizing forces of nature as the previous buildings are understood through their relationship with the geometrical-static-symmetrical forces of nature. This building is to be viewed from this point of view, and from this point of view you will understand how every detail within the building idea for Dornach must be completely individualized here. Just think of the lobe of your ear: it is a very small part of the human organism, but you cannot well imagine that an organic form such as the lobe of the ear is suited to grow on the big toe. This organ is completely bound to its place within the organism. Just as you find that within the whole organism a supporting organ is always shaped in such a way that it can have a static-dynamic effect within the organism, so too the individual forms in our building in Dornach had to be such that they could serve the static-dynamic forces. Every single form had to be organized in such a way that it could and had to be in its place what it now appears to be. Look at each arch from this point of view, how it is formed, how it flattens out towards the exit, for example, how it curves inwards towards the building itself, where it not only has to support but also to express support in an organic way, thereby helping to develop what only appears to be completely unnecessary in organic formation. Ordinary architecture leaves out what goes beyond the static, which the organism develops. But one senses that the building idea has been transferred to the organic design of the forms, and that this is also necessary.

You will have to look at every column from this point of view; then you will also understand that the ordinary column, which is taken out of the geometric-static, has been replaced by one that does not imitate the organic – everything is so that it is not imitated naturalistically – but transferred into organically made structures. It is not an imitation of an organic structure. You will not understand it if you look for a model in nature. But you will understand it if you understand how human beings can live together with the forces that have an organizing effect in nature and how, apart from what nature itself creates, such organizing forms can arise. So you will see in these column supports how the expansion of the building, the support, the inward pointing, and, in the same way as, say, in the upper end of the human thigh, the support, the walking, the walking and so on, is embodied statically, but organically and statically. From this point of view, I also ask you to look at something like the structure with the three perpendicular formations at the top of the stairs here below. The feeling arises here of how a person feels when he climbs the stairs. He must have a feeling of security, of spiritual unity in all that goes on in this building, indeed in everything he sees in this building. Everything came to me entirely from my own intuitive perception. You may believe it or not, but this form came to me entirely from my own artistic intuition. As I said, you may believe it or not, but it was only afterwards that it occurred to me that this form is somewhat reminiscent of the shape of the three semicircular crescents in the human ear, which, when injured, cause fainting, so that they directly express what gives a person stability. This expression, that stability is to be given to the human being in this structure, comes about in the experience of the three perpendicular directions. This can be experienced in this structure without having to engage in abstract reflection. One can remain entirely in the artistic.

If you look at the wall-like structures while handling them, you will find that natural forces have been poured into the forms, but in such a way that these forms, which are radiator covers, are first worked out of the concrete material of the building, and then further up out of the material of the wood, and that they are thereby metamorphosed. You will find that in these structures the process of metamorphosis is elevated to the artistic. It is the idea of the building that should have a definite effect on such radiator covers, which are designed in such a way that you immediately feel the purpose and do not need to explore it intellectually first. This is how these elementary forms, half plant-like, half animal-like, came to be felt. Only after having shaped them out of the material does one realize that they must be so. And it also follows that it is necessary to metamorphose them, depending on whether they are in one place or another, depending on whether they are long and low or narrower and higher. All this does not result from calculating the form, but the forms shape themselves out of the feeling in their metamorphosis, as for example here, where we have come so far, where the building is a concrete structure in its basement and where one has to empathize with the design of what concrete is. You enter here at the west gate. This is the room where you can leave your coat. The staircase, which leads up here on the left and right, takes you up to the wooden structure containing the auditorium, the stage and adjoining rooms.

Please follow me up the stairs to the auditorium.

We are now entering a kind of foyer. You will notice the very different impression created by the wooden cladding compared to the concrete cladding on the lower floor.

I would like to note here: When you have to work with stone, concrete or other hard materials, you have to approach it differently than when you have to work with soft materials, such as wood. The material of wood requires you to focus all your senses on the fact that you have to scrape corners, concaves, and hollows out of the soft material, if I may use the expression. It is scraping, scraping out. You deepen the material, and only by doing so can you enter into this relationship with the material, which is a truly artistic relationship. While when working with wood you only succeed in coaxing out of the material that which gives the forms when you focus your attention on deepening, when working with hard material you do not have to do with deepening. You can only develop a relationship with the hard material by applying it, by working convexly, by applying raised surfaces to the base surfaces, for example when working with stone. Grasping this is an essential part of artistic creation, and it has been partially lost in more recent times.

You will see when we enter the auditorium how each individual surface, each capital, is treated individually. A capital in this organic structure can only be such that one feels: in what follows each other, a kind of repetition cannot be created, as is otherwise the case with symmetrical-geometric-static architectural styles. In this building, which is the product of an organic idea, you have only a single axis of symmetry, running from west to east. You will find a symmetrical arrangement only in relation to this, just as you can find only a single axis of symmetry for a higher organism, not out of arbitrariness but out of the inner organization of forces of the entity in question.

At this point, I would like to mention that the treatment of the walls also had to be completely different under the influence of the organic building idea than it was before. A wall was for earlier architects what demarcates a space. It had the effect of being inside the room. This feeling had to be abandoned in this building. The walls had to be designed in such a way that they were not felt as a boundary, but as something that carries you out into the vastness of the macrocosm; you have to feel as if you are absorbed, as if you are standing inside the vastness of the cosmos. The walls had to be made transparent, so to speak, whereas in the past every effort was made to give the wall such artificial forms that it was closed and opaque. You will see that the transparent is used artistically at all, and that was driven from elementary foundations into the physical in these windows, which you see here and which you will see under construction. If you see windows in the sense of the earlier architectural style, you will actually have to have the healthy sense that they break through the walls, they do not fit into the architectural forms, but they only fit in through the principle of utility. Here, artistic feeling will be needed down to the last detail. There was a need to present the wall in such a way that it is not something closed, but something that expands outwards, towards infinity. I could only achieve this by remembering that, using a single-colored windowpane, you can, as it were, scratch out designs using a kind of etching method, a glass etching method. And so monochromatic window panes were purchased, which were then worked on in such a way that the motifs one wanted could be scratched out with the diamond pencil. So for this purpose, a glass etching technique was conceived, and the windows emerged from that.

When you consider the motifs of the windows, you must not think that you are dealing with symbolic design alone. You can see it already on this larger windowpane: nothing is designed on these windowpanes other than what the imagination produces. There are mystics who develop a mysticism with superficial sentences and strange ideas and constantly explain that the physical-sensual outer world is a kind of maja, an illusion. People often approach you and say that so-and-so is a great mystic because he always declaims that the outer world is a maja. There is something about the human physical countenance that is maya, that is thoroughly false, that is something else in truth. What appears on this windowpane is not something that symbolizes; it is a being that is envisaged, only it does not look to the spiritual observer as it appears to the senses. The larynx is the organ of vision for the etheric; the larynx is already Maja as a physical larynx, and that which is a mere physical-sensual view is not reality. What is behind it spiritually? The spiritual fact that what is whispered into the ear, left and right, are world secrets. So that one can truly say: the bull speaks into the left ear, the lion into the right ear. If one wants to express this as a motif in a picture or in words, then one can only attach to the word that which is already in the picture itself. However, one must be clear about the fact that one can only understand such a picture if one lives in the world view from which it has emerged. A person who does not have a living Christian feeling will also not be able to behave sympathetically towards the pictorial representations that Christian art has produced.

The artist experiences a lot when he lives into a vision; but such an experience must not be translated into abstract thoughts, otherwise it will immediately begin to fade. An example of the artist's experience is this: When Leonardo da Vinci painted his Last Supper, which is now so dilapidated that it can no longer be appreciated artistically, people thought it was taking too long. He could not finish the Judas because this Judas was to emerge from the darkness. Leonardo worked on this painting for almost twenty years and was still not finished. Then a new prior came to Milan and looked at the work. He was not an artist; he said that Leonardo, this servant of the church, should finally finish his work. Leonardo replied that he could do it now; he had always only sketched the figure of Judas because he had not found the model for it; now that the prior was there, he had found the model for Judas in him, and the painting would now be quickly completed. - There you have such an external, concrete experience. Such external, concrete experiences play a much greater role in all the artist's work than can be expressed in such brief descriptions.

Dear attendees, you have entered the building through the room below the organ and the room for the musical instruments. If you look around after entering, you will see that the architectural idea is initially characterized by the floor plan depicting two not quite completed circles, whose segments interlock. It seems to me that the necessity for shaping the building in this way can already be seen when approaching the building from a certain distance and if one has an idea of what is actually supposed to take place in the building. I will now explain in more detail what the building idea is. First of all, I would like to point out that you can see seven columns arranged in symmetry solely against the west-east axis, closing off the auditorium on the left and right as you move forward. These seven columns are not formed in such a way that a capital shape, a pedestal shape or an architrave shape above it is repeated, but the capital, pedestal and architrave shapes are in a continuous development.

The two columns at the back of the organ area have the simplest capital and pedestal motifs: forms that, to a certain extent, strive from top to bottom, with others striving towards them from bottom to top. This most primitive form of interaction between above and below was then metamorphosed into the following forms of architraves, capitals and pedestals. This progressive metamorphosis came about through artistic perception, in that, when I was developing the model, I tried to recreate what occurs in nature. What takes place in nature, where an unnotched leaf with primitive forms is first formed at the bottom of the plant, and then this primitive form metamorphoses the further up it goes, into the indented, intricately designed leaf, even transformed into petal, stamen and pistil, which must be imitated - albeit not in a naturalistic way. One must place oneself inwardly and vitally into it and then create from within, as nature creates and transforms, as it produces and metamorphoses. Then, without reflection, but out of much deeper soul forces than those of reflection, one will achieve such transformations of the second out of the first, of the third out of the second, and so on.

It can be misunderstood that, for example, in the fifth column and in the architrave motifs above the fourth column, something like a kind of Mercury staff appears. One could now believe that the caduceus was placed in these two positions by the intellect. I believe that someone who had worked from the intellect would probably have placed the caduceus in the architrave motif and below it - the intellect has a symmetrizing effect - the column motif with the caduceus. The person who works as we have done here finds something else. Here, with the motif that you see as the fourth capital motif, only by sensing the metamorphosing transformation, without me even remotely thinking of forming a Mercury staff, this Mercury staff emerged as a petal emerges from the sepal. I did not think of a past style, but of the transformation of the fourth capital motif from the third. One can see how the forms that have gradually emerged in the development of humanity have developed quite naturally.

Then we come to the epoch when man intervenes in the evolution of his soul-life. When this is individualized and worked into the column, it follows later what is worked on this architrave surface earlier. That is why you see the caduceus on the capital later than on the architrave.

A plant that is thin and delicate develops different leaf shapes than a sturdy one. Compare just a shepherd's purse with a cactus, and you will see how the filling and shaping of space is expressed in the figurative design. At the same time, a cosmic secret emerges in it, as one feels evolution all around. There has been much talk of evolution in recent times, but little feeling for it. One only thinks it out with the mind. One speaks of the evolution of the perfect from the imperfect. Herbert Spencer and others have done much harm in this regard, and the idea has arisen that is completely justified in the mind, but which does not do justice to the observation of nature: In intellectual thinking, one starts from the assumption that in evolution, the simpler forms are at the beginning and that these then later become more and more differentiated. Spencer in particular has worked with such evolutionary ideas. But evolution does not show it that way. There is indeed a differentiation, a complication of the forms; but then one comes to a middle and then the forms simplify again. What follows is not more complicated, but what follows is simpler again. You can see this in nature itself. The human eye, which is the most perfect, has, so to speak, achieved greater simplicity than the eye forms of certain animals, which, for example, have the xiphoid process, the fan, which has disappeared again as the eye in evolution moved further up to become human.

Thus it is necessary that man connects with the power of nature, that he feels the power of nature, that he makes the power of nature his own power and creates out of this feeling. So it has been attempted to design this building in an entirely organic way, to design every detail in its place as it must be individualized from the whole. You can see, for example, that the organ is surrounded by sculpted motifs that make it appear as if the organ is not simply placed in the space, but that it works out of the entire organic design as if growing out of it. So everything in this building must be tried to be made in the same way.

You see here the lectern on which I stand. With it, the first consideration was to create something in this place that would, as it were, grow out of the other forms of construction, but in such a way that it would also express the idea that from here, through the word, one strives to express everything that is to be expressed in the building. At the moment when a person speaks here, the forms of the spoken word must continue in such a way that, like the nose on a face, its form reveals what the whole person is. Anyone who has made artistically inspired nose studies can turn a nose study into the “architectural style”, the physiognomy of the whole person. No one can ever have a nose other than the one they have, and there could never be a lectern here other than the one that is here. However, if one asserts this, it is meant in one's own view; one can only act in one's own view.

That an attempt has been made here to truly metamorphose the body can be seen from the fact that the motifs here in the glass windows are in part really such motifs that arise as images of the soul's life. For example, look at the pink window here. You will see on the left wing something coming out like the west portal of the building; on the right wing you see a kind of head. There you see a person sitting on a slope, looking towards the building, and another person looking towards the head. This has nothing to do with speculative mysticism; it is an immediate inner visual experience. This building could not have been created in any other way than by mysteriously sensing the shape of the human head in it, and the organic power on the one hand and the shape of the human head on the other hand result in the intuitive shape of the building. Therefore, the person sitting on the slope sees the metamorphosis of the building in his soul, sometimes as a human head, sometimes as the building revealing itself to the outside world. This provides a motif that leads, if I may say so, to an inner experience.

There you will find in the blue windowpane a person who is aiming – on the left – to shoot a bird in flight. In the right-hand pane you will see that the person has fired. The bird in the left-hand field is in a sphere of light. Around the man you will see all kinds of figures vividly alive in the astral body, one when he is about to shoot, the other when he has fired. This is a reality, but one from mundane life. I can imagine that those who always want to be dripping with inner exaltation may be offended if they experience such things as they are meant here, simply as a human being shooting. Yes, I was pleased when an Italian friend once used a somewhat crude expression about theosophists, who are such mystics. The friend who had already died said it, and I may say it in the very esteemed company here, because the person concerned was a princess, and what a princess says, that can also be said. She glossed over such people, who always want to live in a kind of inner elevation, by saying that they are people with a “face up to their stomachs”. I also repeat her not quite correct German. Now, ladies and gentlemen, the same idea was also implemented in painting. I can only talk about the actual painting, about spiritual painting, by referring to the small dome. Only in the small dome was it possible for me to carry out what I have indicated as the challenge of a newer painting: that behind the effort to create a window experience, drawing disappears altogether. I had one of my characters in the first mystery drama express this as follows: that the forms appear as the work of color. For when one feels with the feeling for painting, then one feels the drawing, which is carried into the pictorial, as a lie. When I draw the horizontal line, it is actually a reproduction of something that is not there at all. When I apply the blue sky as a surface and the green below, the form arises from the experience of the color itself. In this way, every pictorial element can be formed. Within the world of color itself lies a creative world, and the one who feels the colors paints what the colors say to each other in creation. He does not need to stick to a naturalistic model; he can create the figures from the colors themselves. It is the case that nature and also human life already have a certain right to shape the moral out of the colored with a necessity.

Yesterday, Mr. Uehli quite rightly pointed out how newer painters already have an intuitive sense of such effects resulting from light and dark, from the colors themselves, and how they come to paint a double bass next to a tin can. They are pursuing the right thing in itself, that it is only a matter of seeing how the light gradates in its becoming colored when it falls on a double bass and then continues to fall on a tin can. That is the right thing. But the wrong thing is that this is again based on naturalistic experience. If you really live in the colors, it arises from the colored something other than a can and a bass violin. The color is creative, and how it puts together, but it is a necessity of the mere colored out, you have to experience. Then you do not make a can next to a bass violin, because that is again outside the colored.

So here I have tried to paint entirely from the colors. If you see the reddish-orange spot here next to the blue spot and the black spot, this is initially a vivid impression from the colors. But then the colors come to life, then figures emerge from them, which can even be interpreted afterwards. But just as little as one can make plants with the human mind here, so one can just as little paint something on them that one has thought up with the human mind. One must first think when the colors are there, just as the plant must first grow before one can see it.

And so a Faust figure with Death and the Child emerged. The entire head emerged from the colors with all its figuration. Only in the human soul does a spiritual-real object form by itself.

For example, you can see above the organ motif how something is painted that a philistine, a person attached to the sensual world, will naturally perceive as madness. But you will no longer perceive it as madness when I tell you the following: If you close your eyes, you will, as it were, feel something inside the eye, like two eyes looking at each other. What takes place inwardly can certainly be developed further in a certain way. Then what, when viewed in a primitive way, looks like two eyes glowing out of the darkness towards you, and what is experienced inwardly, can be shaped in such a way that, when projected outwards, an entire beyond, an entire world-genesis can be seen in it. Here again an attempt has been made to create out of color what the eye experiences when, by narrowing the pupil, it sees itself in the darkness. One need not merely read the secrets of the mind, one can see them - suddenly they are there.

In a similar way, attempts have been made to bring other motifs into reality, again not from the naturalistic imitation of signs and forms, but entirely from color. The ancient Indians and their inspiration, the seven Rishis, who in turn were inspired by the stars to paint with an open head, is, if you do it that way now, abstract, actually nonsense; I say that quite openly. But when one experiences what was experienced in the ancient Indian culture in the relationship between the disciple and the guru, the teacher, one feels as if the ancient Indian did not have a skullcap, but as if it had evaporated, and as if he were not a human being who lives in his skin, but one feels as a sevenfold being, as if his soul power were composed of the seven soul rays of the holy Rishis of ancient Atlantis, enlightening him, and that he then communicated to his world that which he revealed, not from his own spirit but from the spirit of the holy Rishis. The more one works out what is said here, the more one comes closer to what has been painted here. The intuitive perception has first placed itself in ancient India, in ancient Atlantis. That which can be seen there has been painted on the wall here, and only afterwards can one speculate when it is there. This is how the message can relate to artistic creation. This is how everything in this building should actually come about.

You will find this building covered with Nordic slate. The building idea must be felt through to the point of radiating outwards. The slate, or the material used to cover it, must shine in a certain way in the sunlight. It seemed to happen by chance here – but of course there is always an inner necessity underlying it. When I saw the Nordic slate in Norway from the train, I knew that it was the right material to cover the building. We were then still able to have the slate shipped from Norway in the pre-war period. You will certainly feel the effect when you look at the building from a distance in good sunshine.

My main concern while the building was being constructed was the acoustics. During the construction, the building was of course also provided with scaffolding on the inside so that work could be carried out upstairs. This did not produce any acoustics, the acoustics were quite different, that is, they were a caricature of acoustics. Now it so happens that the acoustics of the building were also conceived from the same building idea. My idea was that I could expect the acoustic question to be solved for the lecturer by occult research. You know how difficult it is; you cannot calculate the acoustics. You will see how it has been achieved, but to a certain degree of perfection, to carry out the acoustics. You may now ask how these seven pillars, which contain the secret of the building, are connected with the acoustics. The two domes within our building are so lightly connected that they form a kind of soundboard, just as the soundboard of a violin plays a role in the richness of sound. Of course, since the whole, both the columns and the dome, are made of wood, the acoustics will only reach perfection over the years, just as the acoustics of a violin only develop over the years. We must first find a way to have a profound effect on the material, to be able to feel through the building idea what is now sensed as the acoustics of this building. You will understand that the acoustics must be sensed best from the organ podium. You will also see that when two people here in the middle talk to each other, an echo can be heard coming down from the ceiling. This seems to be an indication from the world being that one may only speak from the stage or the lectern within the building and that the building itself does not actually tolerate useless chatter from any point.

Now, dear attendees, I have tried to tell you what can be said in this regard while looking at the building. I will have to supplement what I have spoken today in my presentation of the building idea, which I will give at the final event next Saturday. Then I will say what can still be said. Now we have to clear the hall for the next lecture.