The Rudolf Steiner Archive

If we consider human existence on Earth, the most significant element in life must appear to be our capacity to think or make mental images—the capacity to think for ourselves about the world, our own actions and so forth. Any other view would be a self-deception. Certainly there are temptations to consider other aspects of life as more valuable. We can feel, just below the threshold of consciousness, that our feelings about our own tasks, about our relationships and about the world, are more valuable than our thinking. And if we consider our moral existence, and the voice of conscience, we can tell ourselves that this conscience speaks to us from depths that thinking can never reach.

We may feel all the more inclined to such a view when we see that even the most highly trained thinking, schooled in accordance with normal life, cannot arrive at the moral impulses of a simple, unschooled conscience. Still, we would be fooling ourselves if we imagined that thoughts are not the essence of human life on Earth.

Certainly the voice of conscience, the feeling of compassion, come from inexpressibly deeper sources than our thoughts. Yet these impulses that well up from the depths only find their right place in the human sphere when they are permeated by thought. The voice of conscience, too, only finds its true value by living within our thoughts, so that we clothe in thoughts what the voice of conscience says. Without overestimating thought, we still have to acknowledge, if we want to proceed in describing human consciousness without illusion, that it is thinking that makes us human. So Hegel is right, in a sense, when he says that thinking distinguishes man from beast.

Let us consider the total compass of the thoughts that fill us from the moment we wake to the point of going to sleep. If we are honest about it, we will have to say that the majority of our thoughts in life are dependent on what comes from outside, on sense impressions and experiences that have to do with the material processes of earthly life. Our thoughts pass by in intimate connection with the Earth, so that whatever is most significant for us between birth and death seems to be connected to the Earth. But if we consider the totality of human life on Earth, we notice that a third of it goes by without any thoughts at all. If, with the means available to ordinary consciousness, we look back over a period of life, we naturally link one day's experience to the next and leave out the experiences of sleep that remain in the unconscious. But this leaves a third of life out of consideration.

From my earlier lectures you know that our activity during sleep, though unconscious, is not uneventful. The I and the astral body go through experiences at night that simply do not light up within our awareness. And if we look more closely, we notice that the unconscious forces that operate during sleep continue while we are awake—though we might say they live a life of sleep, for they operate in our whole activity of will, which is no clearer to us than the state of sleep. And they operate in a large portion of our feeling life, which is a kind of dreaming.

When we try to look at what comes from our deepest essence, from our fundamental nature, we have to look at something unconscious. Through spiritual scientific observation, we find that what operates in us while we sleep continues to operate while we are awake. It is present as the I and the astral body, though they do not enter ordinary awareness except in their effects—the expressions of our will and our feeling life—which give a special aspect to what does enter into clear, waking awareness: our life of thought. This becomes more comprehensible when we take into consideration the existence we participate in between death and rebirth.

When we pass through the gates of death, we undergo states I have described to you before, and that you already know in some of their aspects. If we examine very precisely what element of the human being is necessary for our thinking, our conceptual life, we arrive at the insight that for the formation of thoughts on Earth we need the physical body. The physical body must be set in action for us, as earthly human beings, to have thoughts. Beyond this, we also need to set our life body in action. But these are the two elements of human nature that seem to lie unconscious in bed while we sleep. Only when our consciousness has developed somewhat, through a certain training of our soul, and when we can even see physical things from a spiritual viewpoint, do we realize that actually we are thinking all the time, even when we are asleep. If we consider the whole human being, we can say that during earthly life we are never not thinking.

When we return in the morning to our physical and life bodies, normal consciousness forces itself very quickly back into them, and it is only then that normal consciousness becomes aware of external things—of sense perceptions that we then process conceptually, of objects that we perceive around us. But when we begin to enter much more consciously into our physical and life bodies, then as we awaken we meet the thinking that has gone on while we were asleep. We think; that is, the physical and life bodies are caught up in continual thought activity while we are asleep, only we are not present to it; we are outside this activity in our I and astral body, so we are not aware that it is going on. But this is a great self-deception. And just as we can better recognize any aspect of ourselves when it is torn away from its harmonious relationship to the whole of life—that is, when it appears in an abnormal state—so too we can realize based on external experiences of the world that while we are asleep we not only continue to think, but we think far more cleverly while asleep and absent than when awake and present. We arrive at the depressing fact that our life body thinks less well when we are within it, with the normal consciousness of our I and astral body. We spoil the thoughts that course through our life body by being present to them with our normal consciousness.

Someone who can see into these things can therefore confirm reports like the following. There were once two university students. One was a philologist and knew nothing of numbers. The other was a mathematics student. Now, we know that at certain moments in the study of mathematics, you do sweat through certain problems, whereas in philology it tends to go more easily. And that's how it was with these two students, who shared a room. One night, at the end of their preparations for their exams, the philology student was very pleased with himself, while the mathematics student was not, since he couldn't solve a problem he needed to solve for a written assignment. So he lay down to sleep very dissatisfied, and a strange event followed. At a certain hour the philology student woke up and saw the mathematics student get out of bed and walk to the desk. There, he thought some more, wrote for a long time and then went back to bed and slept. The next day, when they both got up, the mathematics student said, “We didn't drink anything last night, but this morning I have a terrible headache.” The other replied, “No wonder, if you get up at three and do calculations for hours, of course your head will swim the next day.” And his roommate said, “I was not up in the night!” He knew nothing about having been up. Then he looked and saw that he had solved the problem, though he had no memory of it.

These things are not fairy tales. I chose this example, which belongs to the literature, because you can check it. I could tell you many other such things. It is not a question of the individual example, but of the reality of all this. When consciousness is not present—and I emphasize that the person in question had no memory of his nocturnal activity—then the physical and life bodies are worked on by outside influences, and the life body works in the physical body to solve the assignment.

Now, I know that many will wish this kind of thing could happen more often. But we today do not have it so easy. In such a case as this the life body proves to be much more clever when it is left alone to work on the physical body than when the I and the astral body are present. This was merely an illustration of how we go on thinking all through the night. For our thoughts are stimulated directly by the outer world through the mediation of the life body, and then the physical body helps as well, to raise up thoughts for the physical human being on Earth.

So our thought life is definitely bound up with our physical and life bodies. Not so our feeling life and our will life. It is merely a superstition of modern science to imagine that our feeling and will are as bound up with our physical and life bodies as our thoughts are. I will only review a few points on this topic.

In contemporary earthly life, it is not true to say we can survey what happens with our I and our astral body when they separate from the physical and life bodies, taking with them from normal life only the will and a portion of the life of feeling. For this experience between going to sleep and waking up takes place in a completely different world. It takes place in a spiritual world, a world in which the environment is not the kingdoms of nature, the mineral kingdom and the plant kingdom, but the higher hierarchies, spiritual beings, spiritual events. But as long as we are beings of the Earth, we are not adequately developed to survey what we are experiencing in our I and astral body between falling asleep and waking up. The experience stays unconscious, but it is not less lively than what becomes conscious. We do go through it. And once we have done so, it is something that belongs to our inner content. Each morning we awaken changed; the night has changed us. We don't awaken in the same state we arrived at before going to sleep. Instead, we awaken in the state that our sleep life has put us into.

Now, when we pass through the gates of death, we lay down our physical and life bodies. And so, in the first days after death (since it takes about three days to let go of the life body), we feel that our thought life is being sucked up by the universe. First, we have a brief glance over our previous earthly life. It is as if our past life were the world around us; we see it in pictures before us. The whole of the past life stands before us at one stroke once the soul is free of the physical and life bodies, that is, once our passage through the gate of death has been accomplished. But it still takes days afterward for the life body to be completely dissolved in the general life processes of the universe.

During this time, our impression is, first, of a living and sharply contoured overview of the life. Then it grows weaker and weaker, but at the same time more “cosmic,” until after a few days it finally melts away. But in these few days, the most valuable aspect of the earthly life that is past departs from the person who has died. Everything we thought about the things of the world, about our whole earthly environment, what filled our normal consciousness—all this melts away from us in just a few days. And to the exact extent that the content of earthly life melts away, there emerges the content of what we all go through unconsciously every night during sleep. This content now begins to become conscious for us. If we really experienced nothing during our sleep life, then three or four days after death our conscious life would be at an end. For everything we thought of as most valuable during our life has melted away, and out of this darkening, dimming awareness there emerges what we lived through every time we slept, but which formerly remained outside awareness.

Now, the peculiar characteristic of our sleeping experiences is this: that in sleep the world takes place in reverse. Whether our sleep is long or short, once we fall asleep it is all the same, since other states of consciousness also have completely different time-senses. So the characteristic I am talking about holds true whether you sleep all night or only for a few minutes. From the time we go to sleep until the time we wake up again, we leave backwards through everything we just experienced between our last waking and the current moment of falling asleep. But we live through it in a different form than we did at first. When we are awake, we live through the day from start to finish, every event and every circumstance, in terms of physical, intellectual nuances. While asleep, however, we experience it all backwards and in terms of its moral nuances. Moral and religious impulses appear; we pass through everything evaluating how it has made us more or less valuable as moral human beings. We indulge in no illusions, nor can we, but we evaluate everything we did the previous day in terms of our fundamental humanity.

Natural science is wrong when it claims that human life relies on causality, on necessary consequences, though in waking life we may only see this linking of cause and effect. Reality contains another current, though it remains unconscious for us during the day, and every night as we sleep we experience this moral ordering of the world. There, we evaluate things morally, that is, in connection with our own human value. We do this every night, or every time we sleep, with regard to the last-experienced period of being awake. And when we pass through the gates of death, then we go backwards through the last night, the next-to-last night, the night before that, and so on, up to the first night after we were born when we became conscious for the first time—for about a third of the time we were alive, since we slept through about a third of our earthly life.

The physical, cause-and-effect course of the world passes away from us, and what rises up before us is the course of the world as the gods and spirits think about it, feel about it and will it. Still, it appears to us bearing the coloration that earthly life gave it, since we have to pass through it in the form in which we lived it during our life on Earth. We need about a third of our lifetime to live it over again backwards in this way, just as I described it in my book Theosophy. There, I described the land of the soul and the world of the soul.

For before we enter a world that is completely spiritual, we have to live through everything that we experienced on Earth unconsciously in our sleeping state. In this way, we are training our awareness for the actual spiritual experiences between death and rebirth. At the same time, this backward experience of earthly life frees us from earthly life. Until we have done this, our consciousness is not adequately free to move among the spirits of the higher worlds. And once we have come to this point, we are only at the beginning of our life in the higher worlds.

Our life in the higher worlds, until we come to Earth again, can become a purely spiritual experience. Just as here we live among physical beings and events, there we live in a spiritual world among spiritual beings and spiritual events. We live among the spiritual beings and deeds that never descend to Earth, and among the spiritual beings who as human beings came to Earth and passed through the gates of death before us, or even after us. We meet again with all the people we knew during earthly life. And this community of ours is very widespread. For through our sleep life we include in this community everything that we only touched on briefly with human beings during our life on Earth. In sleep, we already live within the spiritual world, but we are still experiencing earthly events in reverse as earthly human beings; just this distinguishes our nightly experience from what we go through once we have passed through the gates of death.

First, we have to acknowledge that in the first few days, the content of our earthly consciousness melts away from us. The unconscious experiences of sleep, which we ignored during life, now emerge and we really do experience them. For in those earthly states of sleep, we experience backwards, and in pictures, only the events of waking life. As we step through the gates of death, we submerge ourselves in spiritual substance, just as here we submerge ourselves in material substance. Just as we have the physical and life bodies on Earth, after death we receive a higher kind of external sheath, a spiritual sheath. Through this process, we can actually go through, in a real way, what we only pass through in pictures, in images, during our periods of sleep on Earth. It is a real, true experience, just as real as our experience of earthly life in a physical body. This real experience, a repetition in reality of the pictorial experience of our sleep states, is the basis of the further experiences we go through in the later course of our life between death and rebirth.

What follows between death and rebirth, after we have put aside our whole earthly existence, is a preparation for the next life on Earth. In conjunction with the beings of the spiritual world, we form the spiritual seed of our next earthly life, and above all our next physical body. Then comes another period in which we grow oriented toward life on Earth. After dwelling for a long time among spiritual beings and spiritual facts, something happens that can be compared to a feeling of tiredness, of wanting to go to sleep. We feel how the awareness we have in the spirit becomes weaker, how we can no longer work together with the beings of the spiritual world in the way we have done, and our consciousness shifts over to an interest in a new life on Earth.

Just as every day we sink into the unconsciousness of sleep, our purely spiritual consciousness that fills most of our time between death and rebirth sinks down, not to unconsciousness but toward being filled with interest for life on Earth—as seen from the other side, from the point of view of the spiritual world. This interest in earthly life emerges many years, even many centuries, before we descend again to an actual life on Earth. The interest we took for so long in the purely spiritual world transforms itself into an interest in the succession of generations, and at the end of this succession, we ourselves are to be born. From out of the spiritual world, we take note of our ancestors through many long years before our own parents are born. So from out of the spiritual world we grow together with our ancestry.

At some point all this will become common knowledge, and only then will we see how limited today's science really is, despite its partial correctness, with regard to the concept of inheritance. Physical inheritance can only become comprehensible to us when we understand the role of those forces by which we participated in our ancestry from out of the spiritual world. When we point out here, with our limited scientific means, that we possess this or that characteristic of our great-grandfathers, we shouldn't forget that while this great grandfather was alive, we took an interest in him from out of the spiritual world; we grew together with what played itself out as the characteristics of the succeeding generations. We grew into it from out of the spiritual world.

When anthroposophy makes itself felt in the general civilization of humanity, these things will gain practical significance. We hardly realize how much in the way of cowardice and lack of energy derives today unconsciously from our notions of inheritance, for our science can only speak of inherited characteristics in a completely inadequate way. It has even permeated our arts, the whole of human thought.

When we finally penetrate to a realization of how we have been connected to the physical formation of our own ancestors, and also to the development of our own soul, which from out of the spiritual world has followed and co-created the whole evolution of our ancestors, then this awareness will become an inward reality for us. Then energy and courage will come from the spirit into our souls, where today we derive only cowardice and lack of energy from our contemporary style of thought. For it is not of the slightest value if we think this or that theoretically about the spiritual world. For the most part, we even clothe whatever we think about the spiritual world in physical thought forms. It is not a question of our making theoretical thoughts for ourselves about the spiritual world. ... What matters is not that we have mere thoughts about the spiritual world—we have to have them initially, so that the content of the spiritual world enters our souls at all—but that these thoughts become living and creative forces within us. Normal physical thoughts on Earth are completely abstract. Most scientific thoughts are abstract; they accomplish nothing within our human nature—no more than mirror images. Such thoughts are only pictures. If you are standing with another person, looking in a mirror, and the other person smacks you on the ear, you won't ascribe the blow to what happens in the mirror, but to the real person standing next to you. Thoughts are like these mirror images: they don't do anything, they don't act as impulses on reality. It is moral intuitions that can act as impulses. So, even if we have to start from thoughts, our thoughts about the spiritual world have to be active, active as reality itself and not like other thoughts.

We only enter into the real Anthroposophic view when we sense and experience thoughts as realities. A common objection arises at this point. It can be stated superficially that the whole anthroposophical world view is based on auto-hypnosis, a kind of self-suggestion. People say for instance that some of us are so suggestive that the very thought of drinking lemonade can fill us with the feeling of drinking a real lemonade. It is true that there are people so sensitive that they can taste lemonade in their mouths when they think about lemonade. This seems to be a good objection, but just let someone tell us about quenching thirst by the mere thought of lemonade! Mere thoughts do not become realities. As long as anthroposophy remains mere thought, it is like an imaginary lemonade. But it need not remain so, for it derives from spiritual reality. It does not simply operate like a thought, but it operates the way outer reality operates on material substances. It permeates, it resonates through our human life of feeling and of will. It becomes a reality in us. This is what matters.

So we don't have much if we have anthroposophy as theory. It has to become life. It is life if it fills our souls with energy, perseverance, courage. It is life if, faced with the cares of physical life on Earth—in our deepest sorrow, our deepest suffering—we become filled with inner joy, inner consolation, inner energy by looking up toward the spiritual world. Then anthroposophy becomes like a living being; it becomes something that seems to move amongst us as a living being. Only then has it become amongst us what it should be, permeating all our activity. And then it helps us to permeate this world in which we have come for the sake of the spirit, not for the sake of physical matter. Above all, anthroposophy arrives at real knowledge of what we are as human beings.

Today I would like to look at something from a completely different perspective that has occupied us a great deal here in recent times. I would like to look at the fact, from an historical perspective, that in the last third of the 19th century there was indeed a decisive turning point for human spiritual life. This decisive turning point was expressed in the most diverse facts. And these facts are essentially the underlying causes of all, I might say, the misery that befell humanity in the 20th century, for the underlying causes of all this misery nevertheless lie in the spiritual.

But now I would like to give a brief description of the actual nature of the spiritual crisis of the last third of the 19th century. It was indeed the case during this time that on the one hand there was materialism, the materialism of external life, and behind it the materialism of world view. And one would like to say how bashfully and gradually idealism as a world view completely abandoned its position. I have just tried to point out this contrast between materialism, which often did not want to be one and yet was one, and idealism in the penultimate issue of the “Goetheanum”. There I sketched out how idealistic spirits, certain spirits who continued the idealism of the first half of the 19th century, extended into this last third of the 19th century, but how these spirits, these thinkers, precisely because they only knew the spiritual life in the could not penetrate against everything that could assert itself on that basis, which natural science, so to speak, sovereignly explained, which natural science, against which nothing can be objected, led beyond its scope, as if all world affairs could be decided by pure natural science. This natural science had its great successes in the characterized time, successes in relation to knowledge, successes in relation to the outward practical-technical life. Those who wanted to reject everything that did not follow from the results of this natural science could point to these successes.

And so, I might say, the successful ones who confidently declared natural science and who, after all, represented nothing else and to this day represent nothing else but materialism, were confronted by those thinkers who wanted to be the guardians of idealism. But they knew the spiritual life only in ideas. They saw, so to speak, only ideas behind the material essence of the world, and behind the ideas nothing further, no active spirit. Ideas were the end, the last thing they could arrive at. But these ideas are abstract. They were cultivated as such by these thinkers in the first half of the nineteenth century, and remained abstract, even when they were further developed by idealists in the last third of the nineteenth century. And so these idealists could not, with the abstract ideas, which for them was the only spirit, keep up with the, I would say, tangible results of the natural scientific world view.

That is the external history. But the inner history that lies behind it is something else. That is that materialism, if it remains consistent and has spirit - even if it denies spirit, materialism can have a great deal of spirit - is actually not refutable. Materialism cannot be refuted. It is completely in vain to believe that materialism is a worldview that can be refuted. There are no reasons with which one can prove that materialism is incorrect. Hence the completely superfluous talk of those who always want to refute materialism with some theoretical reasons.

Why can't materialism be refuted? Well, you see, it can't be refuted for the following reason. Let us take that part of matter which provides the basis for spiritual activity in man himself, let us take the brain or, in a broader sense, the nervous system. This brain, in the broader sense the nervous system, is truly a reflection of the mind. Everything that occurs in the human spirit can also be demonstrated in some form or other, in some process of the brain or nervous system. So everything that can be cited spiritually as an expression of the human being can simply be found in its material counterpart in the brain, in the nervous system.

So how could someone who points to this nervous system not be able to say: Now you see, everything you say about the soul, everything you say about the spirit, is contained in the nervous system. If someone were to look at a portrait and say: This is the only thing about the person that is depicted, there is no original at all – and one could not find the person of whom the portrait is, one could perhaps not prove that there is an original. You cannot prove that the original exists from the portrait. Nor can you prove that there is a spirit from the material reproduction of the spiritual world. There is no refutation of materialism. There is only one way to point to the will, how to find the spirit as such. You have to find the spirit quite independently of the material, then you will indeed also find it creatively active in the material. But it is never possible to draw conclusions about the spirit through any descriptions of the material, through any conclusions drawn from the material, because everything that is in the spirit is in the material only as an image.

That is the secret of why, in a time like the last third of the 19th century, when people did not have direct access to the spirit, materialism stood there unrefuted, irrefutable, and why those idealistic thinkers could not arise in this time against the materialistic thinkers. The dispute could not take place in proof and counter-proof. It took place, so to speak, under the influence of the opposing greater or lesser power of the contending parties. And in the last third of the 19th century, those who were able to point to the easily understandable, because tangible, progress and successes of natural science and its technical results had the greater power.

Of course, those people who, as idealists, as idealistic thinkers, as I characterized them in the penultimate issue of the “Goetheanum”, preserved the traditions of the first half of the 19th They were the ones whose ideas could touch people much more than the materialists' ideas; but the materialists were the more powerful. And the dispute was not decided by evidence; at that time it was decided as a question of power. We must face this quite disillusioned. One must be clear about the fact that to reach the spirit presupposes the necessity of directly seeking a way to it, not to open it up, to want to prove it from material phenomena. Because everything that is in the spirit is also found in matter. So if someone has no direct path to the spiritual, then he finds everything he can observe in the world somewhere in matter.

Since even the noblest minds in the last third of the 19th century could not open up access to the spirit, they came, because the needs and longings for the spiritual still lived in them, almost into an insecurity of the whole human soul condition. And behind many a truly extraordinary personality of the last third of the 19th century stands, like a background, a sense of instability. People who, despite being extraordinarily intellectual, are often extraordinarily emotional, said to themselves: Yes, there is the material world, there are the ideas. The ideas are the only thing that can be found behind the phenomena of nature and humanity, behind nature and history. But then these people felt that ideas are something abstract, something dead. And so they came to feel insecure and unstable.

I would like to recommend an example to you, an actually quite significant personality, so that you can see in detail what this development of the human spirit, which finally led to our present time, actually was. Today I would like to draw your attention to the so-called Swabian Vischer, also called V-Vischer because he writes his name that way, in contrast to the other learned fishermen. Today I would like to point out the Swabian Vischer, the esthete.

You see, he had completely outgrown the idealism of the first half of the 19th century. He could not profess crude materialism. He saw ideas everywhere behind material entities and behind material processes, and basically also saw a sum of ideas in the moral world order. He was particularly concerned with finding the essence of beauty. In the Hegelian sense, he sought the essence of beauty in the emergence of the idea from sensual matter.

When an artist takes any material and shapes it in such a way that an idea appears through this form, that one is not just looking at a product of nature that does not reveal an idea, but when the artist arranges the material, be it the material of the ore, or the matter of musical tones, or the matter of words, so that one senses an ideal through his arrangement, then it is the appearance of the idea in a sensual form, in a sensual shape, and that is the beauty. It may be that the idea is so powerful that one perceives the sensual appearance as too weak to express the greatness of the idea. If, for example, the sculptor has something so powerful in his idea that no sensual material is sufficient to shape the idea, so that one can only sense the idea as something immeasurably great behind the material, then the beautiful becomes the sublime. If the idea is small, so that one can play with the material, and the idea is expressed in an amiable way throughout the playful treatment of the material, then the beautiful becomes the graceful.

Thus the charming and the sublime are different forms of beauty. Then, when man senses the harmony of the world in what is artistically created, he can turn either to the sublime or to the charming, depending on how the artist presents it. But then one can see, as happened so very often with Jean Paul, for example, how world events are presented in such a way that one never sees harmony, that one only sees contradictions everywhere in the world, that harmony is actually something unattainable that lies behind everything, but that world phenomena appear to one as the nearest thing. For example, you see how, let's say, there is a small schoolmaster who has an extremely idealistic mind, who has a great longing for knowledge, but has no money to buy books, and instead of books, only gets book catalogs from the antiquarian bookshops, and at least now has the book titles instead of the books. He can still buy white paper, and he now writes the books himself for all these titles that he has in the antiquarian bookshop catalog. Yes, but then he notices that there is still harmony in the material that the poet deals with. It is beautifully harmonious, how he balances out the disharmony that money introduces. And then again, the books he writes for himself are not as clever as those in the catalogs. The contradiction remains. You are tossed back and forth between what should be and what is and what should not be.

If you can come to terms with this contradiction in your mind, which cannot be resolved, wherever one contradiction replaces another, where you would not get beyond the contradiction at all, but would have to dissolve into dust yourself , if one nevertheless knows how to calm one's mind, then that is the mood of that beauty that one enjoys in humor.

Yes, it was precisely the case with the Swabian Vischer, the V-Vischer, that he virtually glorified humor as an esthete, that he, because he lived in the age when one was at a loss contradictions, the contradiction between mind and matter, because there was no actual penetration of the world harmonies for human understanding as something achievable, he wanted to help himself through humor over all of this. And so he glorified humor. But again, it is the case with humor that behind it, nevertheless, there must be a harmonization somewhere, otherwise humor does not come about, otherwise one sees in the end that one calms oneself through the mind with something, whereby one should not actually calm oneself if one does not want to become a wishy-washy person. And so, behind all this, there is the striving of the Swabian Vischer to enjoy the world – he is, after all, a leading figure for the second half of the 19th century – behind all this there is a striving, because one cannot enter into the spiritual world, but only into ideas, a striving that in turn has something terribly philistine about it. A laughing humor, but behind which is not really the balance of the mind, but something convulsive, a humor that easily, when it explores the contradictions in the world, instead of humorous balance, only finds the foolish juxtaposition.

All this is connected with the fact that the more noble minds in this second half of the 19th century could not find what was actually behind the world spiritually, that they therefore looked for means of information that ultimately led them into a certain lack of direction, into something convulsive. And yet, out of these convulsions of the last third of the 19th century, only the tragic and the unhealthy of the beginning, of the first half of the 20th century could emerge.

Now, when this Swabian Vischer, one might say, although he resisted it, wanted to present his own self – it is his own self, after all – to the world in this way, he wrote the novel “Auch Einer” (Another One). One can say that the “hero” of this novel, as one would say in philistine aesthetics, or as it is scientifically called, the hero of this novel - in reality his name is Albert Einhart, but V-Vischer abbreviates it: A. E., calls him “Auch Einer” (just “one of many”), and that is also the title of the novel - well, this “Auch Einer”, there is something in him. He would like to be a one as a human being, a real one. He would like to be a “one,” such an individuality, who is something in himself. But now, despite his magnificent, powerful talents, he becomes only “one of the ones,” not “one,” but “one of the ones,” perhaps not exactly twelve, but of which there are still a considerable number in a dozen! Yes, as I said, Vischer resisted the idea that “Auch Einer” is a portrait of his own character. He is not that either, but nevertheless Vischer has mysteriously incorporated into this “Auch Einer” that which lived in him as inner disharmony. At the same time, there are the discrepancies of the soul from the last third of the 19th century.

This novel “Auch Einer” actually consists of three parts. The first describes how V-Vischer becomes acquainted with Albert Einhart, with the “Auch Einer”. It is an interesting travel acquaintance, not exactly an everyday occurrence.

You see, V-Vischer, too, in the end, could see in the approach of the Mystery of Golgotha to earthly evolution nothing but the evolution of an idea. For him, the Christ was actually an abstract idea that has permeated the evolution of mankind. And at Golgotha, in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, an abstract idea — Christ — was actually crucified. It does not breathe much reality. It leads back to the time of David Friedrich Strauss and so on, where the actual content of religion was only understood as if religion only contained images for something that is actually meant ideally, abstractly. Thus Christ and the story of Christ could only be understood as images, the absorption of the highest ideas into earthly development, the crucifixion only as the appearance of the idea in a particularly outstanding sensual human form, and so on. All this has indeed been the subject of great intellectual efforts in the 19th century and has been the subject of bitter disappointments for the deeper minds in this 19th century, because behind all this idealism a real spirituality could not be found. And of course people thirst for the spiritual, as they always thirst for the spiritual, and most of all when they do not have it. And those thinkers thirst for it most who believe they can prove that there is no such thing as a spiritual reality, only matter or only ideas. One could say: at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, the more outstanding minds had actually already grown tired of this intellectualist quest for an answer to the question: how do ideas actually work in nature? How do abstractions actually work in history? Only at most such mercurial flatworms as Arthur Drews, have again brought forth that which had long been somewhat dismissed among those who could really think. Therefore, in the personality of this mercurial non-thinker, something of this still extends into the 20th century: an idea was crucified, not a real spiritual being.

But from what I say, you can see that ultimately, even for a thinker like Schwaben-Vischer, everything that was spiritual dissolved into ideas. In the end, it was the ideas, in their abstract form, that were the thing that worked through the world as a web. And everything that was told in the mythologies, in the religions up to and including the Christian religion, was, only clothed in material, something that was at most an image for the idea. And ultimately, from this striving to see only the idea in the sensual image, people had to realize that it does not really matter in which sensual image one expresses the weaving and spinning of the idea in matter.

And for a crank like Albert Einhart, who is “just one of those people,” matter asserts itself in a very strange way. It so happens that Albert Einhart wants to ascend to the sublime at every possible opportunity. When he wants to ascend to the highest heights of the spiritual, which for him is only the ideal, then he gets a cold, then he has to sneeze terribly, or he has to clear his throat terribly. That's when matter asserts itself, isn't it, that's matter. He doesn't usually feel matter so strongly as when he gets a cold or when he has a corn. After all, if you are a thinker from the second half of the 19th century, you don't know which end to grasp materialism, which just reflects ideas. It is best to grasp it where matter asserts itself the most, where it always appears in such a way that it even conquers the spirit. And in the end, like Albert Einhart, “one of them”, you even become a critic of what is already there.

For Albert Einhart does eventually come up with the idea that those who have approached the subject in a more neutral way have actually succumbed to an error. Schiller presented Tell completely wrongly, because it cannot be like that; the subject is grasped at a much too high level. You have to go deeper. You have to go into the catarrhal stage if you want to really grasp the subject. And so the correct composition of Tell should be that when he pushes off with the little boat, he doesn't just get across, but capsizes, falls out and is caught by Gesler's men, who give him a good thrashing, but he escapes again, falls into the water a second time and catches a cold. Now he gets a terrible cold, and just as he is about to draw the crossbow, he has to sneeze. And the bailiff cannot say: That is Tell's arrow – but: That is Tell's sneeze! That is how Tell should be, says Albert Einhart, the “Auch Einer” (the “Also Einer” is a play on words with “Auch einer” meaning “another one” and “einer” meaning “one”). No, you have to go deeper, more thoroughly into materialism, if you want to be consistent.

There have been all kinds of interpretations and explanations for Othello, psychological explanations; but one should see, says Einhart, that Othello is constantly trying to get a handkerchief, that he has a bad cold that drives him so crazy that he ends up strangling Desdemona. Nothing but a cold! One must go deeper into the matter, into the actual material. One must find it at the right point.

That is what Vischer seeks through his cozy, humorous approach. He cannot get beyond materialism. He cannot prove it away, and so he wants to at least rise above it in his mind. He cannot humorously ignore hydrogen and oxygen; well, one must humorously ignore catarrh. And that is precisely one point of view that one can take vis-à-vis materiality.

The matter has also led to Vischer being able to point out how he actually makes the acquaintance of this peculiar character. He is staying in a hotel, which – given the various circumstances, one can assume – must not be too far from here, albeit in the High Mountains, and because he already has a cold, he gets into an argument with the hotel servant, becomes somewhat violent, and so all the scruples of life come to his mind from this material affair. And it comes to such a pass that he even wants to end his own life. He throws himself down. But on this occasion the Swabian-Vischer sees him and prepares to save him, and in doing so tumbles down over the precipice. The other man sees this again, and forgets that he actually wanted to commit suicide himself, and comes to the aid of the Swabian-Vischer. That is how they make their acquaintance. It is not an everyday acquaintance. So they both roll down. And there you can still hear the curses of this “one too,” who is now expressing his worldview. You don't really hear it because there is a roar from all possible waters; it is not quiet, only individual parts can be heard like: World – a cold of the absolute – in solitude – spat out and the world was – the world coughed up by the eternal, coughed up – disgraceful jelly – breeding ground of the devil – and so on, you hear it all through. He will have said much more, of course!

Now they have made each other's acquaintance in this way, Vischer the Swabian and “Another One”. But they can't communicate right away because they both get a cold and have to sneeze terribly. And so it takes a little longer to communicate. The first part is about how you make a travel acquaintance in a not-quite-ordinary, everyday way. The second part is a work by “Auch Einer” that is inserted, a pile village story. It describes the life and activities in a pile village. One could talk at length about the age in which this pile village existed and so on, but there is also some information from which one can deduce that the pile village of “Auch Einer” is near the city of Turik. This city is nearby. And about the time – well, the pile-dwellers have to call in a bard boy from Turik. And this bard boy from Turik is called Guffrud Kullur. Yes, you can't really discuss the time in which this pile-dwelling existed.

The details of this pile-dwelling story are now developed in the narrative of “Auch Einer” (Another One), and we are introduced to the way in which, for example, the pile-dwellers take care of their religious needs. This is precisely what Swabian Vischer and his counterpart Albert Einhart describe in their study of religions: This has been the material-figurative expression of the rule of ideas everywhere. And so this religion of the pile dwellers is one that they adopted in a time when no one could catch a cold. It was a completely paradisiacal time when no one could catch a cold. But these paradise pile dwellers were not so comfortable. They felt somewhat irritated by this cold-free, catarrhal time, and so they fell for the temptation of the great god Grippo. This Grippo, who actually dwells in the cold west, but works and creates through fire, through heating. And so it came about that they, the people of the paradise on stilts, succumbed to the temptation of the god Grippo! And they caught cold, had to sneeze all the time, and so they surrendered to the weaver of worlds, who often appears to people as a white cow. They see: material-pictorial expression, elaboration of the spiritual. The World Spinner advises them to found their village on the lake, but the lake sends forth a constant cold, damp fog. The sniffles are properly expelled. The results of the god Grippo come out and are finally cured. This can only happen in pile villages.

Then a kind of heretic also comes to this pile village. But the pile villagers are led in an extraordinarily good way by a druid. A druid who is actually not much smarter than the other pile villagers, but who has learned to properly teach the catarrhal religion, completely dominates these pile villagers. And there is only one thing: The Druids must live celibate, so he does not have a wife, but a mistress, Urhixidur, who again rules him and from whom a lot emanates in this pile village. So now a heretic comes along who wants to teach the pile villagers a kind of enlightened religion, a religion without God. But the stake villagers have not only come to know the good gods, but also the Grippo and all sorts of other things. And the druid, egged on by the Urhixidur, sets up a heretic's court. The stake villagers become a little bit mad at the druid, because they dig up a deeper stake village, and now he can't explain that. And now they call Guffrud Kullur and another scholar, Feridan Kallar, from the neighboring city. But the strange thing is that when pile villages were excavated in a Swiss town other than Turik, one of the experts was Ferdinand Keller, who was not appointed by a town with a present-day name, but by Turik, just as, of course, the reference is not to Gottfried Keller, but to Guffrud Kullur. Well, the battles are taking place between the people with an original religion, with the religion of catarrhal conditions, and a heretic who now wants to teach a religion without God, a religion of the moral world order. They are interesting struggles. They come to a head in particular when the pile dwellers celebrate a festival that corresponds to Catholic confirmation and Protestant confirmation, namely the festival of investiture. This is when children are introduced to the community. But of course, in keeping with the events, they receive a handkerchief, not the things that usually happen at confirmation, but they have to get a proper handkerchief for the road through life.

All kinds of cultural struggles are still taking place there. It seems to “Auch Einer” that the cultural struggles were not only visible in the world during this time, but they also seem to have taken place in the pile villages.

Yes, I would say, the Swabian Vischer develops a humor to represent the inability to come to terms with materialism in this oddball. Whether one finally takes – this is probably what the Swabian Vischer meant in his heart – the concepts that start from the materialist art historians, who tie in with such neutral material, or others that show the material more clearly: perhaps it just depends on whether one takes the clearer concepts.

A man like Gottfried Semper, for example, asserts the working of stone and the workability of wood when explaining this or that architectural style. Yes, but why talk about the extent to which wood or stone can be worked? Why start from this side of the material? It is much more sensible to examine how people were affected by the different architectural styles, and then you have the connection between these architectural styles and the human being and human development. With the Greeks, it will have been the case that their style of building was open on all sides, so that if you spent a good deal of time in the buildings, you would catch a good, strong cold. These are the purely catarrhal architectural styles, the ancient architectural styles. And the Gothic architectural styles, there you were more protected, you only caught a cold now and then when you opened the windows: these are the mixed-catarrhal architectural styles. And the ideal is only in the distant future: these are the buildings in which you don't catch a cold at all. We can make a very nice distinction – and this is how it is done in scholarly writings – between architectural style A: purely catarrhal, architectural style B: mixed catarrhal, and architectural style C: where you no longer catch a cold. This is the classification of architectural styles by “Auch Einer”.

You see, V-Vischer didn't know how to approach materialism. He wanted to approach it humorously, and so he took this side of materialism where man feels matter in him in one way or another. That is, after all, what really underlies this novel, “Auch Einer”.

In a third part, there are also Albert Einhart's aphorisms. You get to know him better, so to speak. You get to know his struggle against nature, his struggle with the spirit, with the moral world order, with pure idealism; very witty remarks that are presented in aphorisms. Sometimes you get the feeling that the somewhat philistine Swabian Vischer has already anticipated the witty ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche. There is really something extraordinarily ingenious in this third part of Albert Einhart's aphorisms.

And Albert Einhart is also a very original personality. When you meet him in the novel, he is retired, of course, because he was something of a police director, but even then he was actually already an important personality. So the Swabian Vischer obviously wants to suggest that this in itself must be taken with humor: an important police director. But because he was important, he was also elected as a member of parliament, and there he gave an extraordinarily important speech. In this important speech, one sentence had a rousing effect, then a second sentence had a rousing effect again. But the second inspiring sentence had the same effect on the first as if the first had been poured over with horribly cold water. It is strange that the inspiring effect was as if the first flame of fire were to be extinguished: Now there are people again who belong to the old terrible, barbaric times and would like to introduce corporal punishment in the most diverse forms in the military and in schools. This is something that leads us in the most blatant form to the time when there was no idealism yet, when people did not yet live in pictorial religions, when they still had a purely moral view, religion without God. We must not expose ourselves to this in our time. In our time, there must be no beating, beating must be thoroughly eradicated. In our time, many other damages must be eradicated. We see how much barbarism still extends into our time. For example, we see how animals are tortured on the street by rough people, how these poor horses, who are not designed for it, are beaten with whips. Or we see how dogs, which have other organs on their feet than hooves and are not suited to pulling carts, have to pull carts. In short, we see how the animals are tortured, and I would like to make a motion here in the chamber that all animal abusers be publicly flogged!

These are the things, again, that one can only get over with a certain sense of humor when the second spark of fire pours out like a cold jet of water on the first. Yes, this Albert Einhart, this “Auch Einer,” is really a true creature of the last third of the 19th century! And much of what Vischer felt in terms of his own psychological discrepancies, he brought to light in this “Auch Einer”. But one must not identify Vischer with “Auch Einer”, nor with the person who had come to the village as a heretic and was tried as such, otherwise one would come to strange conclusions.

Not true, the Schwaben-Vischer has, though not in Turik, but in another city, for a time provided a kind of heretic protectorate, and it has done him badly. But it would be taking an overly humorous view of V-Vischer himself to interpret such things. For V-Vischer did not even want to accept the second part of Goethe's “Faust” and ridiculed the commentators and interpreters by calling himself in a third part of “Faust” that he wrote, with allusions to all those who find so many witty things in the second part of “Faust”, Deutobold Allegoriowitsch Mystifizinsky all those who find so much ingenious things in the second part of “Faust”, Deutobold Allegoriowitsch Mystifizinsky; Deutobold Symbolizetti Allegoriowitsch Mystifizinsky and so on he called himself. And as such he wrote the third part of Goethe's “Faust” to mock the commentaries that wanted to see a deeper wisdom in Goethe's “Faust”. One does not want to become an allegoriovitch like that, and since the Swabian Vischer's own fates are expressed or somehow hinted at in his “Auch Einer”.

One would like to say that it is remarkable how, in this last third of the 19th century, on the one hand there is Nietzsche, who is to be taken so deeply tragically, who perished because of the discrepancies that took place in his soul , and this Swabian Vischer, who could not help but express the groundlessness of the worldviews of his time in such a way as he did in the novel “Auch Einer” (Another One). One can only say that there is a certain unity even in this novel, as there is a certain unity in certain natural scientific materialistic views. After all, if you look at hydrogen, look at oxygen, look at zinc, look at gold, they are so different things, but together you find the one atomic unity everywhere. The atoms are everywhere, they are just a little differently collated, so that they look a little different. And here in this novel there is also a very strange unity.

For example, the “Auch Einer” finds the personality, the female personality, that really instilled a great respect in him in life, now as a widow again. It is a great moment for him. He is deeply indebted to the man who died. He finds the personality he deeply admires as a widow in a hotel. She enters into a conversation with him. And this conversation is interrupted because the “one too” is seized by a terrible sneezing fit. This conversation does not end. It is always matter that has a devastating effect, that rebels in this search for a worldview, for the spirit; it is always matter that intervenes and ultimately makes everything material. One can't do anything but ascribe everything to materialism when one wants to express the most sublime revelations of the human soul, and now, isn't it true, not even the word “ideal” comes about, but “ide-” and then comes a long sneeze! One sees how matter asserts itself everywhere and how the ideal simply disappears in the face of matter.

It is an extraordinarily significant cultural-historical phenomenon, this novel “Auch Einer” (i.e., “Just Another”) by Schwaben-Vischer, even though one must also say that there is a lot of philistinism in it. But that is precisely what makes it a particular expression of the time. And it expresses the fact that, as a spiritually minded person, one could no longer find one's way in what had become of spirit and matter, so that one could, like “Auch Einer”, come up with the most abstract ideas with the mind, which killed each other as much as the abolition of corporal punishment and the public flogging of those who tortured animals. So one idea kills the other. And if you turned to matter, you got matter where it was most perceptible to you: in the nasal mucus.

That was not exactly fine, one might say, but the Swabian Vischer also wrote a very interesting book about frivolity and cynicism. He never wanted to be frivolous, hated the ladies' narrow waists, but he found something extraordinarily right in cynicism, which one must apply everywhere if one wants to present this or that properly. And that is why he did not shrink back, one might say, not frivolously, but sometimes somewhat unsavory, from presenting world events in a materialistic sense, but humorously, as he thought.

You have to grasp what is alive in the times not only through abstract thoughts and not only through sentimentality, but you have to grasp it in moods. And I really think that something of the mood of the last third of the 19th century lay in those feelings that permeated this Swabian soul, the Vischersche, when he wrote the novel “Auch Einer” (Another One).

When we consider an appearance such as the one we were talking about yesterday, it becomes as clear as possible that not only did materialism arise in the last third of the 19th century in the spiritual development of humanity, but something that is fundamentally even worse than materialism: a certain insecurity and lack of stability has arisen, especially among those minds and thinkers who could not unconditionally go along with materialism. In this last third of the 19th century, we actually find the following situation. We find that the actual materialistically minded and attuned people at that time already had a certain inner security. One need only take a look at all those people who, out of their, one might say, power of knowledge, declared the scientific results to be sovereign and, from there, founded a world view. They appeared with a certain tremendous self-assurance. And it was not so much the content of what they gave as the certainty of their appearance that produced the numerous materialistic followers at that time. On the other hand, all those who, as I discussed yesterday, only held to the spirit with the abstract ideas, felt more or less as uncertain as the Swabian Vischer, of whom I spoke yesterday. They could only hold on to the spirit by saying: There are ideas at work behind the phenomena of the external sense world. But they could only present these ideas in the abstract. They could not bring a real spiritual life behind these ideas to the people's attention. They could not speak of a real spiritual life. Therefore, the abstract ideas did not have a guiding power for them. And so, by the 1890s, there was actually nothing left in public life of that idealism that had still been valid in the first half of the 19th century, which was then represented by isolated people, as I indicated in the penultimate issue of the “Goetheanum”, but which had just dried up by the turn of the century.

It is characteristic that the last third of the 19th century was introduced by a very effective book, the “History of Materialism” by Friedrich Albert Lange. This “History of Materialism” made an extraordinarily deep impression. It was first published in 1866, so it actually marks the beginning of the last third of the 19th century. This “History of Materialism” can be seen as a symptom of the state of mind that humanity was now approaching. For what exactly does this “History of Materialism” contain?

Friedrich Albert Lange presents the idea that man could not arrive at any other rational worldview than materialism, that he could not actually do otherwise if he did not want to indulge in illusions, than to declare atomistically arranged matter to be the starting point for a knowledge of the world. So one must take this world of material atoms filling space as the basis for reality.

Friedrich Albert Lange, of course, noticed that one had to form concepts about this world and that these concepts, ideas, were nevertheless something other than that which lives in atoms. But he said: Well, the concepts are just a fiction. - He actually coined the term “conceptual poetry”. And so man fashions his concepts for himself. Only the extraordinary fact arises that not every man fashions his own concepts; but, to understand each other a little, it comes about that people fashion common concepts. But the concepts are fictions. Real is only the atomic matter scattered in space.

You see, that would be crass materialism, which explains everything that goes beyond materialism as fiction. And one could say: at least it is a consistent point of view! But that is not the case in Friedrich Albert Lange's book. If he only went as far as I have told you so far, he would be a consistent materialist. Fine. I told you yesterday that consistent materialism cannot be refuted. And if someone has no access to the spiritual world – Friedrich Albert Lange certainly had none – then he can actually do nothing but posit materialism as the only valid world view.

But that is not what he does. Instead, Friedrich Albert Lange says something else that, I would say, runs like a red thread through all the arguments in his book. He says: It is true that one can only assume the material world of atoms to be real. But if one assumes that, if one now goes and says that the material world of atoms is at work in space, arranged in hydrogen and nitrogen in such and such a way, interacting in such and such a way, if ideas are boiled down in the brain, and so on – if one assumes all this, then in the end it is also just a construct of concepts. So materialism, which one is forced to profess, is itself actually only idealism, because one is again only inventing the world of atoms.

There is a much simpler image to express what Friedrich Albert Lange expressed in his world-famous book; with regard to logical form, there is a much simpler image. It is the famous Munchausen personality, which grasps its own hair and pulls itself up. The idealist takes the idealistic hair and pulls himself into materialism.

We see that one of the world's most famous works, written at the beginning of the last third of the 19th century, is actually nothing more than quite ordinary nonsense. It cannot be said otherwise. It is actually quite ordinary nonsense. If it were materialism, this “History of Materialism,” then at least it would be new. But that it is a materialistic materialism, a fabricated materialism, yes, that is pure nonsense. But what happened in this last third of the 19th century, which was so successful scientifically? This historical fact must be brought to mind. What happened? Friedrich Albert Lange's book became world-famous, because it was translated into almost all the cultural languages, and the most outstanding, enlightened minds regarded it as a redemptive act.

You are familiar with the matter that has now been performed so often in eurythmy: “Bim, Bam, Bum”, where the one tone, Bam, flies past the tone Bim; but Bim has surrendered to Bum:

“He is also a good Christian,
but that is just it”.

I have to remind you: All those who then drew their wisdom from Friedrich Albert Lange and who in turn formed the starting points for the fact that basically all our public thinking is permeated by this, were all enlightened minds – but that is just it: for the last third of the 19th century! And those who were merely the audience didn't notice any of this. And so, with regard to the most profound issues of human interest, a state of intense sleep has indeed descended.

You will say: these things are exaggerated. — They are not exaggerated! Only the depth of the sleep that has befallen humanity with regard to the greatest questions of spiritual life, the depth of this sleep is understated, not what I have said is exaggerated, but the general view of these things is understated. And if a healthy foundation is to be created for a future spiritual life, this whole serious fact, as I have just characterized it, must be brought to mind, brought to mind with all intensity. For it is just this that has excluded the interest of humanity in the spiritual world from the development of this humanity. And gradually it became the case that the less someone touched on spiritual problems at all, the more he was considered a great scientist. That was the situation at the turn of the century.

It was into this situation that Anthroposophy was to be introduced. And this is how, if I may put it, the task of Anthroposophy must be conceived. It must be conceived in such a way that it must actually work from the foundations, and must not tie in with this or that that already exists in one direction or another. There is simply nothing there, and one must understand the essence of anthroposophy from the foundations. Then, when one understands the essence of anthroposophy from the foundations, one will find that the facts that are currently available through the natural sciences are highly useful for anthroposophical research in all areas and that these facts of natural science can only be properly illuminated through anthroposophical research. This is how the situation must be understood. But for this to happen, it is necessary that a certain part of humanity really decides to lead intellectualism into the spiritual.

Of course, the people who join the anthroposophical movement are all deeply imbued with a certain urge and inclination towards the spiritual world. But very few people love to lead the world of ideas of the present into the spiritual. They would like to take in Anthroposophy as a kind of comfort for the soul, so to speak, by excluding the world of ideas. But that will not suffice to give Anthroposophy its impulsive power in spiritual life. You see, what is involved here must really be grasped in the individual, concrete fact, and today I want to present you with just such a single concrete example.

I have often told you that what you have put on as a head today is the transformed organism from your previous life. But you have to imagine the head as being separate from this organism from your previous life on earth. It really is like that. In the previous life on earth, you had to think away the head, it dissolved in the universe. But what was the rest of the organism, that now becomes the head of the next life on earth. And this organism in turn becomes the head of the next life on earth, and so on. That is how it is.

Now someone might say: But not only my head was buried in my previous life, but also the rest of my organism. It has not had the opportunity to transform into the head of my present life. — Yes, that is a very superficial view. You do not look at your head and the rest of your organism, but at the physical matter that fills your head today. Yes, that also changes about every seven years during your life on earth. What you carry within you today as matter, you did not have eight years ago. That which goes through the earth life is the invisible, supersensible form.

The matter that fills your head you have, of course, only taken up in this life. But the form, the supersensible forces that today round the eyes and turn up the nose, are the same forces that in the previous life formed arms and legs and the rest of the organism. That you can be seen by other people with physical senses is due to the fact that completely formless matter fills your form. It is not matter that gives you form. If you eat salt, the salt wants to be cubic, it does not want to be nose-shaped, nor eye-shaped, it wants to be cubic and so on. You do not owe the form in which you appear as a human being to the matter that is the basis of your physical visibility; but the form of your present head has really gone through metamorphoses, through the form of your organism, except for the head of the previous earth life. But that is why your head was really in an extraordinarily favorable situation. Because it has been so well treated in the universe, it is also the first to appear as a properly formed head in embryonic life. Just think, the head is very beautifully formed at first, while the other organs in the first embryonic life are really only attached to it as secondary organs. It must first be formed from the outside, and actually looks terrible in relation to the human form when you look at it, while the head is actually very beautifully formed from the very beginning. Of course, for someone who only recognizes the fully grown human being, the embryo's head will also have something unappealing about it, but actually it is already beautifully formed. This is because it brings its formative forces with it from the previous life.

This head has actually been worked on between death and the present birth, as I described in the lectures on cosmology, religion and philosophy, which I gave some time ago at the Goetheanum. This work between death and a new birth relates precisely to the development of the formative forces of the human head.

But that is why the human head is something extraordinarily perfect in relation to the cosmos. The human head actually contains the material image of the human spirit, soul and body. So when you look at the head, you have spirit, soul and body working together in a material way, in that they appear in shaped matter. One could say: for the human head, spirit, soul and body are still bodily. You see, that is the secret of the human head, that the spirit appears in a bodily way, that we can show materially in the miracle of the brain: this miracle is an image of the spirit. Just as sealing wax expresses what is on the seal, so through the head we have materially given spirit, soul and body.

In the case of the metabolism-limbs-human being, you can say: Actually, everything is more or less physically present. The legs, these two pillars, have not yet received anything of the miracle of the human head. They will undergo a metamorphosis. The lower jaw, with its wonderful function and mobility, will appear in the next life on earth, while the arms, after transformation, will be incorporated into the upper jaw in the next life, and so on. So that one can say: In the movement system - it is true that the arms are somewhat transformed after man has acquired his upright gait - the opposite is essentially the case, there spirit, soul and body are actually spiritual. There spirit, soul and body are thoroughly spiritual.

One would like to say that the way a person looks materially in terms of his legs and everything that is attached to them is not true. It will only show itself in its true material form in the next life on earth, when it has become a head. Now it is at the very beginning, and is actually quite insignificant in what it appears materially. The essential thing about it is what it first becomes through the will: the movement, the dynamics, the statics, everything that the human being transfers from his system of movement into the will. Thus, what is spiritually intangible, what is spiritually supersensible, is what this remaining human being is. So while the head of every material being is an image of the spirit and the spirit itself appears bodily, the bodily system of the body is hardly bodily. If one wants to find meaning in the whole bodily system at all, one must look everywhere: to what extent is the bodily suitable for the spiritual, for the spiritual revelation of the human being? So that one can say: This is the great mystery of the head, that spirit, soul and body are physical. That spirit, soul and body are spiritual, that is the great mystery of the lower human being.

You see, the Old Testament knew much more about these things from instinctive clairvoyance than today's man. Today's man actually overestimates the head. I have already discussed this from various points of view. In the Old Testament you will never find the illusion presented as if the brain concocted dreams! It says: “Yahweh tormented the man in his sleep in relation to his kidneys.” They knew that what is represented in dreams lies in the metabolic system. They did not attribute everything to the head. Why do we attribute everything to the head today? I'll tell you why: we don't believe in the spirit, so we don't look at the part of the human being where even the body is still spiritual. We don't really look at the lower human being, we are not proud of it. But we look at where even the spirit is physical and material, at the head: we are proud of that because that is where the spirit becomes material and bodily.

So, overrating the head, that is materialism. One wants only matter and also wants to have the spirit only as matter. That is why today in our physiological, in our scientific representations, the head is described as it is described, because one wants to have the spirit only materially. That is what it is, but in the head. Of course, no one knows that before this head could bring the spirit down to the physical, that is, material pictoriality, it had to go through the whole life between death and a new birth. That this material image of the human spirit could arise in the head at all had to be preceded by a long spiritual development. This material miracle of the development of the human brain is the conclusion of a wonderful spiritual development. But people only want to look at the material side and only want to accept the spirit in its material form.

Now, let us try to pay attention, my dear friends. Even if you are over fourteen years old, you can still pay attention. Isn't there a region in man that is entirely physical, and a region in man that is entirely spiritual? Yes, must there not be an intermediate point that is neither entirely physical nor entirely spiritual, that is both, and therefore neither of the two? There must therefore be a neutral point in the middle, where the spiritual passes into the physical and the physical into the spiritual, where neither of the two is present, where man is dependent neither on above nor below, where he is independent of both. That must exist somewhere in the middle.

Let us try to understand the significance of this point, which must therefore lie in the middle man, in the chest man. Imagine you have a scale here. Imagine a load here, and weights on the other side; now you create a balance. I must not give an excess weight here, otherwise it will go down; I must not give an excess weight there either, otherwise it will go down; I must not take anything away either, otherwise the whole thing will move. But look, here is a point, a neutral point. You could add as much as you wanted to this point, nothing would change in the balance of the scales. You could also take the scales there, and if you avoid creating an excess weight somewhere by any swing or something like that, you can move the scales all around, the balance remains the same. You can carry out the weighing correctly during the movement. This is a point that is not at all concerned with the whole system of the scales, an equilibrium point. You can do whatever you want with it, and nothing will change for the rest of the balance. For example, someone has a load on one side and weights on the other. Now he realizes: the balance beam is made of iron, I don't like that, I'll make it out of gold. Now all he has to do is enlarge the center point a little, because actually the point of rest is a mathematical point, but it will be possible to enlarge it a little. You can bring gold into this point of rest quite well: the balance will not be changed. If you put the gold somewhere else – outside the center – then the balance will change immediately. But if someone wants to create a hollow space there and put flesh in it, they can do that too, it won't change the balance. Another person puts butter in there: the butter melts in the sun, the balance of the scales does not change. In short, there is a point here, quite independent of the whole system of the scales, where you can do whatever you want.

In the same situation is the point that lies between the physical and the spiritual as a point of balance. It is not dependent on either the physical or the spiritual. Man can do whatever he wants with this point.

If you simply imagine that a person is a physical being and that everything is connected one-sidedly according to cause and effect, then you will not find this point. If you imagine that a person is only a spiritual being and that everything is determined from above by divine worlds, then again nothing can be done, because then a person must carry out what is determined by the gods. But if you know that there is a point of equilibrium, where man is determined by God upwards and by matter downwards, and with the one point, which can now be demonstrated in his middle-stage human existence, he can begin in the world whatever he wants to begin out of himself – if you have this threefold constitution of man, then you will find in the middle part, scientifically and strictly demonstrable, the fact of human freedom. You can say that, it is as scientific as any quadratic equation can be solved or a differential quotient can be sought or anything. It is something that can be treated according to the strict rules of science. So freedom is the result of a real knowledge of the human constitution, because there is a point in man that is as independent upwards and downwards as the fulcrum of the scales is independent of the load on the right and left. You can carry the scales around with you everywhere, you can replace this point, as I have told you, with whatever you want. In this way, you can also find a point in a person where natural causality, the connections between cause and effect, end, where the connections from above also end, the determination by the spiritual world, where the two maintain a balance. There, in this hypomochlion of human nature, human freedom is guaranteed. And it can be rigorously proven scientifically if one has a true physiology and a true psychology, not what one has today and which, as I have already shown you, adds up to amateurism squared in psychoanalysis.

These are the things that should make people who learn about them think, bearing the following in mind. You can take all of literature and philosophy, you can read about the problem of freedom everywhere – no one can cope with the problem of freedom. Why? Because they have no real view of the human being. Today, this does not exist except in anthroposophy. And the fact that one cannot cope with the problem of freedom points, in turn, to the other fact that I tried to shed light on yesterday, albeit with a humorous tone. But what I tried to characterize humorously yesterday, from an at least supposedly humorous creation, can also be presented in all seriousness.

And these things must be treated seriously if one is to profess Anthroposophy in earnest. Then it is really a matter of getting at the real realities and using them in the appropriate way. Not if one is not quite sure: should one profess spirit because one only knows spirit in abstract ideas, or should one profess materialism, yes, then one becomes a humorist like the Swabian Vischer, then, as a humorist, one devises a humoristic world system that, I might say, is not for a finer taste, the catarrhal world system. Of course, one can laugh about it, but one cannot say with absolute certainty that the world did not come into being through a “sneeze of the Absolute.” Once again, a material is not used in the right way. It is only a matter of always using the material in the right way. Whether you just want to recognize it or actually want to use it, you have to use this material in the right way. Yesterday I gave you an example of this, I presented the view of the Swabian fisherman, how he actually creates an entire world system out of catarrh as a compelling, overwhelming reality. Yes, in the field of anthroposophy we do not do that! There I also have a catarrh like I had yesterday, but I have only used it from time to time for illustration: now and then the catarrhal, the coughing came out; that was only used for illustration, not to somehow gain the basis for a worldview, but only to provide illustrative instruction.

Not true, if you stagger so aimlessly between the catarrhal matter and the merely ideal spirit, then you come to speak of the seduction and temptation by the god Grippo. That is no longer possible on the basis of anthroposophy. There you propagate a flu remedy precisely in order not to be exposed to the temptation of linking a whole myth of the Fall to the god Grippo! It is a matter of grasping the material at the right corner and putting it in its right place.

So things have to change significantly. If you were a person of the mindset of Vischer in the last third of the 19th century, you would get annoyed and spit and clear your throat and finally come up with the farce of the god Grippo. If you are an anthroposophist, you try to fight the flu with our very effective flu medicine! These are the things that point to the right difference in how one treats the material out of the spirit.

Just by looking at the way the human head is viewed epistemologically today, one can see that the entire contemporary worldview has a deep sympathy for materialism. And the fact that we are at a loss when faced with the problem of freedom is expressed by the fact that we simply do not know that two very different world impulses are at work in the upper human being and in the lower human being. And those who, in ancient times, only looked at the upper human being, found that man cannot be free because he is determined everywhere from the spiritual world. Those who look at the human being today simply ascribe a natural causality to everything that manifests itself in the human being. From both points of view, the human being cannot be free. But spiritual causality applies to the head, natural causality applies to the metabolism-limb-human being. In between lies the rhythmic organization, which is rhythmic precisely because things within it balance each other out rhythmically. In the rhythmic organization there is something that is neither determined in the spiritual nor in the material sense, that is neither determined nor causalized, that represents the point from which the impulse of freedom comes in the human being.

You see, at such specific points one can show how anthroposophy can shed light on the deepest problems of human existence. The moment the threefold human nature was presented in my book 'Von Seelenrätseln': the nerve-sense human being, the rhythmic human being, and the metabolic-limb human being, the same moment was reflected back to the 'Philosophy of Freedom', in which freedom was simply presented as a fact. It was illuminated by this fact of freedom, so that one could say: If you consider the human being in terms of his true essence as such a threefold organization, then you can arrive at a completely scientifically exact representation of freedom in the human being, just as one arrives at the representation of the hypomochlion in the case of the scales, or at some point in a system of forces, at the representation of a point of equilibrium, which is then there, independent of the rest of the interplay of the forces in question in the system. But you will also see from this how you can actually look everywhere today: Nowhere will you find the truth about these things. And from those inadequate concepts, which are very far removed from the true organization of the human being, people are educated today, forming moral systems, religious systems, and especially social systems. Yes, it is no wonder that these social systems reveal themselves in such aberrations of thought, as is so clearly evident from the example recently given by Leinhas in the “Goetheanum”, where one has to admit that the views that tie in with Marxism have been refuted by life itself, that life shows that they cannot apply. But that is not decisive; one must first wait until someone scientifically proves that they are invalid. One can actually, as it has been done by Leinhas, only quote such things in quotation marks with the authority's own words, because if one wants to repeat them, one thinks one's head will burst. Not only does a mill wheel turn in one's head, but one generally thinks one's head will burst if one is only to think about such things.

It is necessary not just to move within the anthroposophical movement and let everything go straight and crooked outside, but to take an interest first in how chaotic our knowledge and that which has been drawn from this knowledge in the world is gradually becoming.

Today's lecture is intended to be just one episode in the series of lectures I have given, an insertion, in fact, for the reason that it is necessary for anthroposophists to be alert people, that is, to form an opinion by looking at the world in a certain way. And so it is necessary from time to time to insert one or other of these into lectures that otherwise deal with anthroposophical material, in order to open up a view of the other events, of the other state of our civilization. And today I would like to expand on what I briefly mentioned in the last article in the “Goetheanum”, where I talked about a publication that has just been released: “Decay and Rebuilding of Culture” by Albert Schweitzer. It describes itself as the first part of a philosophy of culture and is essentially concerned with a kind of critique of contemporary culture. However, in order to support some of the characteristics that Albert Schweitzer gives of the present, I would like to start by presenting the existence of the culture that Albert Schweitzer wants to address through a single, but perhaps characteristic example. I could have chosen thousands. You can only pick and choose from the full cultural life of the present, but rather from the full cultural death of the present, and you will always find enough. That is precisely the point, as I also noted in the pedagogical lectures yesterday and today, that we are getting used to looking at such things with an honestly alert eye. And so, to establish a kind of foundation, I have selected something from the series that can always be considered a representation of contemporary intellectual culture. I have chosen a rector's speech that was delivered in Berlin on October 15, 1910. I chose this speech because it was given by a medical doctor, a person who is not one-sidedly immersed in some kind of philosophical cultural observation, but who, from a scientific point of view, wanted to give a kind of contemporary tableau.

Now I do not want to trouble you with the first part of this rectorate speech, which is mainly about the Berlin University, but I would like to familiarize you more with the general world view that the physician Rubner – because that is who it is – expressed on a solemn occasion at the time. It is perhaps a characteristic example because it dates back to 1910, when everyone in Europe and far beyond was optimistically convinced that there was a tremendous intellectual upturn and that great things had been achieved. The passage I want to select is a kind of apostrophe to the student body, but one that allows us to see into the heart of a representative figure of the present age and understand what is really going on there. First of all, the student body is addressed as follows: “We all have to learn. We bring nothing into the world but our instrument for intellectual work, a blank page, the brain, differently predisposed, differently capable of development; we receive everything from the outside world.”

Well, if you have gone through this materialistic culture of the present day, you can indeed have this view. There is no need to be narrow-minded. You have to be clear about the power that materialistic culture exerts on contemporary personalities, and then you can understand when someone says that you come into the world with a blank sheet, the brain, and that you receive everything from the outside world. But let us continue to listen to what this address to students has to say. It begins by explaining, apparently somewhat more clearly, how we are a blank slate, how the child of the most important mathematician must learn the multiplication table again, because, unfortunately, he has not inherited advanced mathematics from his father, how the child of the greatest linguist must learn his mother tongue again, and so on. No brain can grasp everything that its ancestors have experienced and learned. But now these brains are being advised what they, as completely blank slates, should do in the world in order to be written on. It goes on to say: “What billions of brains have considered and matured in the course of human history, what our spiritual heroes have helped create...” — not true, that is said for two pages in a row, it is inculcated into people: they are born with their brains as a blank slate and should just be careful to absorb what the spiritual heroes have created.

Yes, if these intellectual heroes were all blank slates, where did it all come from, what they created, and what the other blank slates are supposed to absorb? A strange train of thought, isn't it! - So: “What our spiritual heroes have helped to create is received” by this blank sheet of brain “in short sentences through education, and from this its uniqueness and individual life can now unfold.”

On the next page, these blank pages, these brains, are now presented with a strange sentence: “What has been learned provides the basic material for productive thinking.” So now, all at once, productive thinking appears on the blank pages, these brains. It would be natural, though, for someone who speaks of brains as blank pages not to speak of productive thinking.

Now a sentence that shows quite clearly how solidly materialistic the best of them gradually came to think. For Rubner is not one of the worst. He is a physician and has even read the philosopher Zeller, which is saying something. So he is not narrow-minded at all, you see. But how does he think? He wants to present the refreshing side of life, so he says: “But there is always something refreshing about working in a new, previously untilled field of the brain.” So when a student has studied something for a while and now moves on to a different subject, it means that he is now tilling a new field of the brain. As you can see, the thought patterns have gradually taken on a very characteristic materialistic note. “Because,” he continues, “some fields of the brain only yield results when they are repeatedly plowed, but eventually bear the same good fruit as others that open up more effortlessly.”

It is extremely difficult to follow this train of thought, because the brain is supposed to be a blank slate, and now it is supposed to learn everything from the written pages, which must also have been blank when they were born. Now this brain is supposed to be plowed. But now at least one farmer should be there. The more one would go into such completely incredible, impossible thinking, the more confused one would become. But Max Rubner is very concerned about his students, and so he advises them to work the brain properly. So they should work the brain. Now he cannot help but say that thinking works the brain. But now he wants to recommend thinking. His materialistic way of thinking strikes him in the neck again, and then he comes up with an extraordinarily pretty sentence: “Thinking strengthens the brain, the latter increases in performance through exercise just like any other organ, like our muscle strength through work and sport. Studying is brain sport.

Well, now the Berlin students in 1910 knew what to think: “Thinking is brain sport.” Yes, it does not occur to the representative personality of the present what is much more interesting in sport than what is happening externally. What is actually going on in the limbs of the human being during the various sporting movements, what inner processes are taking place, would be much more interesting to consider in sport. Then one would even come across something very interesting. If one were to consider this interesting aspect of sport, one would come to the conclusion that sport is one of those activities that belong to the human being with limbs, the human being with a metabolism. Thinking belongs to the nervous-sensory human being. There the relationship is reversed. What is turned inward in the human being, the processes within the human being, come to the outside in thinking. And what comes to the outside in sport comes to the inside. So one would have to consider the more interesting thing in thinking. But the representative personality has simply forgotten how to think, cannot bring any thought to an end at all.

Our entire modern culture has emerged from such thinking, which is actually incomplete in itself and always remains incomplete. You only catch a glimpse of the thinking that has produced our culture on such representative occasions. You catch it, as it were. But unfortunately, those who make such discoveries are not all that common. Because in a Berlin rectorate speech, a university speech on a festive occasion: “Our goals for the future” - if you are a real person of the present, you are taken seriously. That's what science says, that's what the invincible authority of science says, it knows everything. And if it is proven that thinking is brain sport, well, then you just have to accept it; then after millennia and millennia, people have become so clever that they have finally come to the conclusion that thinking is brain sport.

I could continue these reflections now into the most diverse areas, and we would see everywhere that I cannot say the same spirit, that the same evil spirit prevails, but that it is naturally admired. Well, some insightful people saw what had become of it even before the outwardly visible decline occurred. And one must say, for example: Albert Schweitzer, the excellent author of the book “History of Life-Jesus Research, from Reimarus to Wrede,” who, after all, was able to advance in life-Jesus research to the apocalyptic through careful, thorough, penetrating and sharp thinking, could be trusted to also get a clear view of the symptoms of decay in contemporary culture. Now he assured us that this writing of his, “Decay and Rebuilding of Culture,” was not written after the war, but that the first draft was conceived as early as 1900, and that it was then elaborated from 1914 to 1917. Now it has been published. And it must be said that here is someone who sees the decline of culture with open eyes. And it is interesting to visualize what such an observer of the decline of culture has to say about what has been wrought on this culture, as if with sharp critical knives. The phrases with which contemporary culture is characterized come across like cutting knives. Let us let a few of these phrases sink in. The first sentence of the book is: “We are in the throes of the decline of culture. The war did not create this situation. It is only one manifestation of it. What was given spiritually has been transformed into facts, which in turn now have a deteriorating effect on the spiritual in every respect.” - “We lost our culture because there was no reflection on culture among us.” — “So we crossed the threshold of the century with unshakable illusions about ourselves.” — “Now it is obvious to everyone that the self-destruction of culture is underway.”

Albert Schweitzer also sees it in his own way – I would say, somewhat forcefully – that this decline of culture began around the middle of the 19th century, around that middle of the 19th century that I have so often referred to here as an important point in time that must be considered if one wants to understand the present in some kind of awareness. Schweitzer says about this: “But around the middle of the 19th century, this confrontation between ethical ideals of reason and reality began to decline. In the course of the following decades, it came more and more to a standstill. The abdication of culture took place without a fight and without a sound. Its thoughts lagged behind the times, as if they were too exhausted to keep pace with it.” - And Schweitzer brings up something else that is actually surprising, but which we can understand well because it has been discussed here often in a much deeper sense than Schweitzer is able to present. He is clear about one thing: in earlier times there was a total worldview. All phenomena of life, from the stone below to the highest human ideals, were a totality of life. In this totality of life, the divine-spiritual being was at work. If one wanted to know how the laws of nature work in nature, one turned to the divine-spiritual being. If one wanted to know how the moral laws worked, how religious impulses worked, one turned to the divine-spiritual being. There was a total world view that had anchored morality in objectivity just as the laws of nature are anchored in objectivity. The last world view that emerged and still had some knowledge of such a total world view was the Enlightenment, which wanted to get everything out of the intellect, but which still brought the moral world into a certain inner connection with what the natural world is.

Consider how often I have said it here: If someone today honestly believes in the laws of nature as they are presented, they can only believe in a beginning of the world, similar to how the Kant-Laplacean theory presents it, and an end of the world, as it will one day be in the heat death. But then one must imagine that all moral ideals have been boiled out of the swirling particles of the cosmic fog, which have gradually coalesced into crystals and organisms and finally into humans, and out of humans the idealistic ethical view swirls. But these ethical ideals, being only illusions, born out of the swirling atoms of man, will have vanished when the earth has disappeared in heat death. That is to say, a world view has emerged that refers only to the natural and has not anchored moral ideals in it. And only because the man of the present is dishonest and does not admit it to himself, does not want to look at these facts, does he believe that the moral ideals are still somehow anchored. But anyone who believes in today's natural science and is honest must not believe in the eternity of moral ideals. He does it out of cowardly dishonesty if he does. We must look into the present with this seriousness.

And Albert Schweitzer also sees this in his own way, and he seeks to find out where the blame lies for this state of affairs. He says: “The decisive factor was the failure of philosophy.” Now one can have one's own particular thoughts about this matter. One can believe that philosophers are the hermits of the world, that other people have nothing to do with philosophers. But Albert Schweitzer says quite correctly at a later point in his writing: “Kant and Hegel ruled millions who never read a line of theirs and did not even know that they obeyed them.” The paths that the world's thoughts take are not at all as one usually imagines. I know very well, because I have often experienced it, that until the end of the 19th century the most important works of Hegel lay in the libraries and were not even cut open. They were not studied. But the few copies that were studied by a few have passed into the whole of educational life. And there is hardly a single one of you whose thinking does not involve Kant and Hegel, because the paths are, I would say, mysterious. And if people in the most remote mountain villages have come to read newspapers, it also applies to them, to these people in the mountain villages, that they are dominated by Kant and Hegel, not only to this illustrious and enlightened society sitting here in the hall.

So you can say, like Albert Schweitzer: “The decisive factor was the failure of philosophy.” In the 18th and early 19th centuries, philosophy was the leader of public opinion. She had dealt with the questions that arose for people and the time, and kept a reflection on them alive in the sense of culture. In philosophy at that time, there was an elementary philosophizing about man, society, people, humanity and culture, which naturally produced a lively popular philosophy that often dominated opinion and maintained cultural enthusiasm.

And now Albert Schweitzer comments on the further progress: “It was not clear to philosophy that the energy of the cultural ideas entrusted to it was beginning to be questioned. At the end of one of the most outstanding works on the history of philosophy published at the end of the 19th century, the same work that I once criticized in a public lecture, this work on the history of philosophy, “this is defined as the process in which,” and now he quotes the other historian of philosophy, ”with ever clearer and more certain consciousness, the reflection on cultural values has taken place, the universality of which is the subject of philosophy itself.” Schweitzer now says: “In doing so, the author forgot the essential point: that in the past, philosophy not only reflected on cultural values, but also allowed them to emerge as active ideas in public opinion, whereas from the second half of the 19th century onwards they increasingly became a guarded, unproductive capital for it.”

People have not realized what has actually happened to the thinking of humanity. Just read most of these century reflections that appeared at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. If one did it differently, as I did in my book, which was later called “The Riddles of Philosophy”, then of course it was considered unhistorical. And one of these noble philosophers reproached me because the book was then called “World and Life Views in the 19th Century” for saying nothing about Bismarck in it. Yes, a philosopher reproached this book for that. Many other similar accusations have been made against this book because it tried to extract from the past that which has an effect on the future. But what did these critics usually do? They reflected. They reflected on what culture is, on what already exists. These thinkers no longer had any idea that earlier centuries had created culture.

But now Albert Schweitzer comes along and I would like to say that he seems to have resigned himself to the future of philosophy. He says: It is actually not the fault of philosophy that it no longer plays an actual productive role in thinking. It was more the fate of philosophy. For the world in general has forgotten how to think, and philosophy has forgotten it along with the rest. In a certain respect, Schweitzer is even very indulgent, because one could also think: If the whole world has forgotten how to think, then at least the philosophers could have maintained it. But Schweitzer finds it quite natural that the philosophers have simply forgotten how to think along with all the other people. He says: “That thinking did not manage to create a world view of an optimistic-ethical character and to base the ideals that make up culture in such a world view was not the fault of philosophy, but a fact that arose in the development of thought.” - So that was the case with all people. —- “But philosophy was guilty of our world because it did not admit the fact and remained in the illusion that it really maintained a progress of culture.”

So, with the other people, the philosophers have, as Albert Schweitzer says with his razor-sharp criticism, forgotten how to think; but that is not really their fault, that is just a fact, they have just forgotten how to think with the other people. But their real fault is that they haven't even noticed that. They should have noticed it at least and should have talked about it. That is the only thing Schweitzer accuses the philosophers of. “According to its ultimate destiny, philosophy is the leader and guardian of general reason. It would have been its duty to admit to our world that the ethical ideals of reason no longer found support in a total world view, as they used to, but were left to their own devices for the time being and had to assert themselves in the world through their inner strength alone.” And then he concludes this first chapter by saying: “So little philosophy was made about culture that it did not even notice how it itself, and the times with it, became more and more cultureless. In the hour of danger, the guard who was supposed to keep us awake slept. So it happened that we did not struggle for our culture.”

Now, however, I ask you not to do this with these sentences of Albert Schweitzer, for example, by saying to yourself or a part of you: Well, that is just a criticism of German culture, and it does not apply to England, to America, and least of all to France, of course! Albert Schweitzer has written a great number of works. Among these are the following, written in English: “The Mystery of the Kingdom of God”; then another work: “The Question of the Historical Jesus”; then a third; and he has written some others in French. So the man is international and certainly does not just speak of German culture, but of the culture of the present day. Therefore it would not be very nice if this view were to be treated the way we experienced something in Berlin once. We had an anthroposophical meeting and there was a member who had a dog. I always had to explain that people have repeated lives on earth, reincarnation, but not animals, because it is the generic souls, the group souls, that are in the same stage, not the individual animal. But this personality loved her dog so much that she thought, even though she admitted that other animals, even other dogs, do not have repeated lives, her dog does have repeated lives, she knows that for sure. There was a little discussion about this matter – discussions are sometimes stimulating, as you know, and one could now think that this personality could never be convinced and that the others were convinced. This also became clear immediately when we were sitting in a coffee house. This other member said that it was actually terribly foolish of this personality to think that her dog had repeated earthly lives; she had realized this immediately, it was quite clear from anthroposophy that this was an impossibility. Yes, if it were my parrot! That's what it applies to! — I would not want that this thought form would be transferred by the different nationalities in such a way that they say: Yes, for the people for whom Albert Schweitzer speaks, it is true that culture is in decline, that philosophers have not realized it themselves, but — our parrot has repeated lives on earth!

In the second chapter, Albert Schweitzer talks about “circumstances that inhibit culture in our economic and intellectual life,” and here, too, he is extremely sharp. Of course, there are also trivialities, I would say, of what is quite obvious. But then Albert Schweitzer sees through a shortcoming of modern man, this cultureless modern man, by finding that modern man, because he has lost his culture, has become unfree, and is unsettled. Well, I have read sentences to you by Max Rubner – they do not, however, indicate a strong collection of thoughts. The representative modern man is unsettled.

Then Albert Schweitzer adds a cute epithet to this modern man. He is, in addition to being unfree and uncollected, also “incomplete”. Now imagine that these modern people all believe that they are walking around the world as complete specimens of humanity. But Albert Schweitzer believes that today, due to modern education, everyone is put into a very one-sided professional life, developing only one side of their abilities while allowing the others to wither away, and thus becoming an incomplete human being in reality. And in connection with this lack of freedom, incompleteness and lack of focus in modern man, Albert Schweitzer asserts that modern man is becoming somewhat inhumane: “In fact, thoughts of complete inhumanity have been moving among us with the ugly clarity of words and the authority of logical principles for two generations. A mentality has emerged in society that alienates individuals from humanity. The courtesy of natural feeling is fading.” - I recall the Annual General Meeting we had here, where courtesy was discussed! — ”In its place comes behavior of absolute indifference, with more or less formality. The aloofness and apathy emphasized in every way possible towards strangers is no longer felt as inner coarseness at all, but is considered to be a sign of sophistication. Our society has also ceased to recognize all people as having human value and dignity. Parts of humanity have become human material and human things for us. If for decades it has been possible to talk about war and conquest among us with increasing carelessness, as if it were a matter of operating on a chessboard, this was only possible because an overall attitude had been created in which the fate of the individual was no longer imagined, but only present as figures and objects. When war came, the inhumanity that was in us had free rein. And what fine and coarse rudeness has appeared in our colonial literature and in our parliaments over the past decades as a rational truth about people of color, and passed into public opinion! Twenty years ago, in one of the parliaments of continental Europe, it was even accepted that, with regard to deported blacks who had been left to die of hunger and disease, it was said from the rostrum that they had “died as if they were animals.

Now Albert Schweitzer also discusses the role of over-organization in our cultural decline. He believes that public conditions also have a culture-inhibiting effect due to the fact that over-organization is occurring everywhere. After all, organizing decrees, ordinances, laws are being created everywhere today. You are in an organization for everything. People experience this thoughtlessly. They also act thoughtlessly. They are always organized in something, so Albert Schweitzer finds that this “over-organization” has also had a culture-inhibiting effect.

“The terrible truth that with the progress of history and economic development, culture does not become easier, but more difficult, was not addressed.” — “The bankruptcy of the cultural state, which is becoming more apparent from decade to decade, is destroying modern man. The demoralization of the individual by the whole is in full swing.

A person who is unfree, uncollected, incomplete, and lost in a lack of humanity, who has surrendered his intellectual independence and moral judgment to organized society, and who experiences inhibitions of cultural awareness in every respect: this is how modern man trod his dark path in dark times. Philosophy had no understanding for the danger in which he found himself. So she made no attempt to help him. Not even to reflect on what was happening to him did she stop him."

In the third chapter, Albert Schweitzer then talks about how a real culture would have to have an ethical character. Earlier worldviews gave birth to ethical values; since the mid-19th century, people have continued to live with the old ethical values without somehow anchoring them in a total worldview, and they didn't even notice: “They in the situation created by the ethical cultural movement, without realizing that it had now become untenable, and without looking ahead to what was preparing between and within nations. So our time, thoughtless as it was, came to the conclusion that culture consists primarily of scientific, technical and artistic achievements and can do without ethics or with a minimum of ethics. This externalized conception of culture gained authority in public opinion in that it was universally held even by persons whose social position and scientific education seemed to indicate that they were competent in matters of intellectual life.” — ”Our sense of reality, then, consists in our allowing the next most obvious fact to arise from one fact through passions and short-sighted considerations of utility, and so on and on. Since we lack the purposeful intention of a whole to be realized, our activity falls under the concept of natural events.

And Albert Schweitzer also sees with full clarity that because people no longer had anything creative, they turned to nationalism.

"It was characteristic of the morbid nature of the realpolitik of nationalism that it sought in every way to adorn itself with the trappings of the ideal. The struggle for power became the struggle for law and culture. The selfish communities of interests that nations entered into with each other against others presented themselves as friendships and affinities. As such, they were backdated to the past, even when history knew more of hereditary enmity than of inner kinship.

Ultimately, it was not enough for nationalism to set aside any intention of realizing a cultural humanity in its politics. It even destroyed the very notion of culture by proclaiming national culture.

You see, Albert Schweitzer sees quite clearly in the most diverse areas of life, it must be said. And he finds words to express this negative aspect of our time. So, I would say, it is also quite clear to him what our time has become through the great influence of science. But since he also realizes that our time is incapable of thinking – I have shown you this with the example of Max Rubner – Albert Schweitzer also knows that science has become thoughtless and therefore cannot have the vocation to lead humanity in culture in our time.

"Today, thinking has nothing more to do with science because science has become independent and indifferent to it. The most advanced knowledge now goes hand in hand with the most thoughtless world view. It claims to deal only with individual findings, since only these preserve objective science. It is not its business to summarize knowledge and assert its consequences for world view. In the past, every scientific person was, as Albert Schweitzer says, at the same time a thinker who meant something in the general intellectual life of his generation. Our time has arrived at the ability to distinguish between science and thinking. That is why we still have freedom of science, but almost no thinking science anymore.

You see, Schweitzer sees the negative side extremely clearly, and he also knows how to say what is important: that it is important to bring the spirit back into culture. He knows that culture has become spiritless. But this morning in my lecture on education I explained how only the words remain of what people knew about the soul in earlier times. People talk about the soul in words, but they no longer associate anything real with those words. And so it is with the spirit. That is why there is no awareness of the spirit today. One has only the word. And then, when someone has so astutely characterized the negative of modern culture, then at most he can still come to it, according to certain traditional feelings that one has when one speaks of spirit today – but because no one knows anything about spirit – then at most one can come to say: the spirit is necessary.

But if you are supposed to say how the spirit is to enter into culture, then it becomes so - forgive me: when I was a very young boy, I lived near a village, and chickens were stolen from a person who was one of the village's most important residents. Now it came to a lawsuit. It came to a court hearing. The judge wanted to gauge how severe the punishment should be, and to do that it was necessary to get an idea of what kind of chickens they were. So he asked the village dignitary to describe the chickens. “Tell us something more about what kind of chickens they were. Describe them to us a little!” Yes, Mr. Judge, they were beautiful chickens. — You can't do anything with that if you can't tell us anything more precise! You had these chickens, describe these chickens to us a little. — Yes, Mr. Judge, they were just beautiful chickens! - And so this personality continued. Nothing more could be brought out of her than: They were beautiful chickens.

And you see, in the next chapter Albert Schweitzer also comes to the point of saying how he thinks a total world view should be: “But what kind of thinking world view must there be for cultural ideas and cultural attitudes to be grounded in it?” He says, “Optimistic and ethical.” They were just beautiful chickens! It must be optimistic and ethical. Yes, but how should it be? Just imagine that an architect is building a house for someone and wants to find out what the house should be like. The person in question simply replies: “The house should be solid, weatherproof, beautiful, and it should be pleasant to live in.” Now you can make the plan and know how he wants it! But that is exactly what happens when someone tells you that a worldview should be optimistic and ethical. If you want to build a house, you have to design the plan; it has to be a concretely designed plan. But the ever-so-shrewd Albert Schweitzer has nothing to say except: “There were just beautiful chickens.” Or: “The house should be beautiful, that is, it should be optimistic and ethical.

He even goes a little further, but it doesn't come out much differently than the beautiful chickens. He says, for example, that because thinking has gone so much out of fashion, because thinking is no longer possible at all and the philosophers themselves do not notice that it is no longer there, but still believe that they can think, so many people have come to mysticism who want to work free of thought, who want to arrive at a world view without thinking. Now he says: Yes, but why should one not enter mysticism with thinking? So the worldview that is to come must enter mysticism with thinking. Yes, but what will it be like then? The house should be solid, weatherproof, beautiful and so that one can live comfortably inside. The worldview should be such that it enters mysticism through thinking. That is exactly the same. A real content is not even hinted at anywhere. It does not exist.

So how does anthroposophy differ from such cultural criticism? It can certainly agree with the negative aspects, but it is not satisfied with describing the house in terms of what it should be: solid and weatherproof and beautiful and such that it is comfortable to live in. Instead, it draws up plans for the house, it really sketches out the image of a culture. Now, Albert Schweitzer does object to this to some extent, saying, “The great revision of the convictions and ideals in and for which we live cannot be achieved by talking other, better thoughts into the people of our time than those they already have. It can only be achieved by the many reflecting on the meaning of life...” So that's not possible, talking better thoughts into the people of our time than those they already have, that's not possible! Yes, what should one do then in the sense of Albert Schweitzer? He admonishes people to go within themselves, to get out of themselves what they have out of themselves, so that one does not need to talk into them thoughts that are somehow different from those they already have.

Yes, but by searching within themselves for what they already have, people have brought about the situation that we are now in: “We are in the throes of the decline of civilization.” “We lost our way culturally because there was no thinking about culture among us,” and so on. Yes, all this has come about - and this is what Schweitzer hits so hard and with such intense thinking - because people have neglected any real, concrete planning of culture. And now he says: It is not enough for people to absorb something; they have to go within themselves. You see, you can say that not only Max Rubner, who cannot cope with his thinking everywhere, but even a thinker as sharp as Albert Schweitzer is not able to make the transition from a negative critique of culture to an acknowledgment of what must enter this culture as a new spiritual life. Anthroposophy has been around for just as long as Albert Schweitzer, who admittedly wrote this book from 1900 onwards. But he failed to notice that Anthroposophy positively seeks to achieve what he merely criticizes in negative terms: to bring spirit into culture. In this regard, he even gets very facetious. Because towards the end of the last part of his writing he says:

“In itself, reflecting on the meaning of life has a significance. If such reflection arises again among us” – it is the conditional sentence, only worsened, because it should actually read: If such reflection arose again among us! - “then the ideals of vanity and passion, which now proliferate like evil weeds in the convictions of the masses, will wither away without hope. How much would be gained for today's conditions if we all just spent three minutes each evening looking up thoughtfully at the infinite worlds of the starry sky...” he comes to the conclusion that it would be good for people if they looked up at the starry sky for three minutes every evening! If you tell them so, they will certainly not do it; but read how these things should be done in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. One does not understand why the step from the negative to the positive cannot be taken here, one does not understand it! “and when attending a funeral, we would devote ourselves to the riddle of life and death, instead of walking thoughtlessly behind the coffin in conversation.”

You see, when you are so negative, you conclude such a reflection on culture in such a way that you say: “Previous thinking thought to understand the meaning of life from the meaning of the world. It may be that we have to resign ourselves to leaving the meaning of the world open to question and to give our lives a meaning from the will to live, as it is in us. Even if the paths by which we have to strive towards the goal still lie in darkness, the direction in which we have to go is clear.

As clear as it was that his chickens were beautiful chickens, and as clear as it is that someone says about the plan of his house: The house should be solid, weatherproof, and beautiful. Most people in the present see it as clear when they characterize something in this way, and do not even notice how unclear it is.

"We have to think about the meaning of life together, to struggle together to arrive at a world- and life-affirming worldview in which our drive, which we experience as necessary and valuable, finds justification, orientation, clarification, deepening, moralization and strengthening... ” - The house should be beautiful and solid and weatherproof and in such a way that one can live well in it. In regard to a house one says so, in regard to a Weltanschhauung one says: The Weltanschhauung should be such that it can work justification, orientation, clarification, deepening, moralization and strengthening! - “and thereupon become capable of setting up and realizing definite cultural ideals inspired by the spirit of true humanity.”

Now we have it. The sharpest, fully recognizable thinking about the negative, absolute powerlessness to see anything positive. Those people who deserve the most praise today – and Albert Schweitzer is one of them – are in such a position. Anthroposophists in particular should develop a keen awareness of this, so that they know what to expect when one of those who are “philosophers” in the sense of this astute Albert Schweitzer comes along, for example a neo-Kantian, as these people call themselves, and who now do not even realize that they have not only overslept thinking, but that they have not even noticed how they have overslept thinking. Of course, one cannot expect them to understand anthroposophy. But one should still keep a watchful eye on the way in which such people, who are rightly described by Schweitzer as the sleepy philosophers of the 19th and 20th centuries, now speak of anthroposophy. We should look into the present with an alert eye on all sides.

A newspaper article begins by saying how ineffective Bergson seems in comparison to Kant. But then it goes on to say: Steiner's wild speculations and great spiritual tirades stand even less up to an epistemological test based on Kant. Steiner also believes that he can go beyond Kant and the neo-Kantians to higher insights. In fact, he falls far short of them and, as can easily be proven from his writings, has misunderstood them completely at crucial points.

This is of course trumpeted out without any justification whatsoever in the world's newspapers. And then these people, who can think in this way, or who are far from being able to think the way Rubner can, say: You only have to ask contemporary science and you know very well what these supposed insights - these brain bubbles, as he calls them - actually mean.

We have to pay attention to these things, and we must not oversleep them. Because this - as Albert Schweitzer calls it - thoughtless science can assert itself, it can assert itself in the world, and for the time being it has power. Today many people say that one should not look at power but at the law; but unfortunately they then call the power they have the law. Well, I will spare you the rest of the gibberish he presents, because it now goes into spiritual phenomena, which must also be examined by science today, and so on.

But if the poor students do get hold of anthroposophy and absorb the “brain bubbles”, then Max Rubner gives them this advice: “But there is always something refreshing about working in a new, previously untilled field of the brain.” Some fields have been plowed over and over again! Now, when the poor students in anthroposophy get “brain bubbles” and then plow these brains, the bubbles in front of the plowshare will certainly disappear. So in this respect, the story is true again. To understand that which wants to enter our culture, which, according to the best minds, is admittedly disintegrating, indeed has already disintegrated, that is not really given to the best minds of the present either, insofar as they are involved in the present cultural industry. So it remains the case that when they are supposed to say what the house should be like, they do not take the pencil or the model substance to design the house – which is what anthroposophy does – but then they say: The house should be beautiful and strong and weatherproof and so that one can live comfortably in it. With the house one says so. With a worldview, one says that it should be optimistic, it should be ethical, one should be able to orient oneself in it, and now how all the things have been called, but which mean nothing other than what I have told you.

You can see that it is necessary – and you will recognize it from the matter itself that this is necessary – to sometimes go a little beyond what is happening in civilization. That is why I have presented today's episodic reflection. Next Friday we want to talk further about these things, not say any more that the house should be beautiful and firm and weatherproof and so that one can live comfortably in it, the world view should be optimistic and ethical and so that one can orient oneself in it, and so on, but we really want to point to the real anthroposophy, to the spiritual life that our culture needs.

Today I would like to reflect on the past century. In a rather superficial way, the fact that the action of a very important novel by the French writer George Sand, 'Le compagnon du tour de France', is set in 1823, a hundred years before our present time, could be the reason for such a reflection. It is therefore possible for some to gain inspiration from this novel in particular, because with a fantasy as expansive and vivid as George Sand's, more is actually achieved for the characterization of an era than through so-called scientific historical observation. It can be said that this writer has used her real vividness to make the time around 1823 – and especially for the French west of Europe – the background of a significant novel.

Now, I will not keep to the style that is used in this novel, but I will try to give the social background from the intellectual foundations for the time indicated. George Sand has drawn a number of characters who belong to the lower-middle-class artisan class, and then the experiences of aristocratic family life also play into the lives of these members of the lower-middle-class artisan class. But what is magnificently portrayed in this novel is precisely the social life of the artisan class. And one can say: with the difference, with the distinction that must exist according to popularity, George Sand has described the human being's being placed in the social conditions of this age, which we can count further back, count back by decades, I would like to say, just as far back for France as the social conditions from which Goethe created his “Wilhelm Meister” go back. So with that difference, which must be given by the popularity, we see how the social conditions are vividly described as the background of the novel, how man grows out of the social conditions, how he shows his own personality in a certain nuance by growing out of these social conditions.

You know, of course, that Goethe's Wilhelm Meister characters also grow out of these social conditions. As early as the first half of the 19th century, various personalities drew a kind of parallel between the social background of George Sand's novel and Goethe's “Wilhelm Meister”. Of course, as I said, the differences that arise from the popular nature must be taken into account. Goethe's novel is thoroughly cosmopolitan, has nothing of a national character, and also has nothing of a political character. Sand's novel is thoroughly national, thoroughly political. We must of course assume this when the otherwise justified comparison between the two novels is made.

Now, these circumstances, which serve as the social background, are truly extraordinarily characteristic of the whole way in which the modern human being has worked its way up from certain backgrounds to the surface of human existence in the course of the last decades of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th century. Today, it is not easy for people to imagine what things were like a century ago, because today the human personality actually stands isolated within the social order. Even those who have professional or family ties are gradually shaping their lives in such a way that they come out of these ties, out of social bonds, to become a certain individuality.

In this respect, an enormous change has taken place in the development of European humanity in the 19th century, and the inner state of mind with regard to social ties or lack of ties is quite different in the second half of the 19th century than in the first half. In the first half of the 19th century, people – and today we want to disregard the different circumstances, to focus primarily on the Western European circumstances – people in those days positively sought to place themselves in a social context. He sought to join those personalities who had common interests with him, common interests that were, so to speak, composed of the interests of the class on the one hand and the interests of the profession on the other.

For the rural population, who in those days were even more bound to the soil, the bond through the earth is taken into account. But for those who, through their craftsmanship, grew out of this rural state of mind and achieved a certain liberation from the soil, it is very important that they sought socialization in society in this period, one might say quite convulsively. And the remarkable thing about this first half of the nineteenth century, the only period for which we can make a century-long observation, is that despite class and caste contexts and professional contexts, which form the external cement for such socializations, there was everywhere a spiritual, a specifically spiritual background to these socializations.

In the French, however, everything converges with the national. If we were to consider the same conditions for the German character, we would have to point out from the outset that, for example, the German apprentice also migrated outside the country during his period of travel, that he took no account of political boundaries when it came to seeking out the kind of socialization I have indicated. The thoroughly national character of the Frenchman also caused the craftsman to travel only within the borders of France.

But there, within the borders of France, there arose just such connections between classes and occupations that were sought frantically and in which, in the background, the effect of spiritual impulses can be seen, which penetrated into the souls of men. These craftsmen, when they journeyed from town to town, felt that they were in a kind of spiritual home because in every town they found the community to which they belonged. They were accepted into a community in some town or other, and the community extended throughout the whole of France. As I said, that was still the case a century ago. When the apprentice craftsman travelled, he found the same association in the town where he wanted to continue his craft. He did not bring any written documents with him, but he did bring a sign of recognition, a certain handshake or other identifying mark. When he asserted this sign of recognition, it was known that he belonged to this association, which had branches in all cities.

Now such associations were everywhere - I must keep emphasizing this - connected with a spiritual background, and if one seriously and honestly wants to investigate these things, it can actually cause one some difficulties to find out what this spiritual background is like.

So there were in France around the time indicated essentially two such craft associations. One association was called “Loups Dévorants” or “Loups garous”. That was one. The other was called “Gavots”. And the two were constituted as I have described, and both had, in the times when they could devote themselves to such a matter, gatherings that took place in the same way in different cities. At these gatherings, there was, first of all, careful practice of the identifying signs; but then there were festivities during which people spoke in symbols and had decorated the festival hall with symbols. There were festivities during which legends were told that traced such associations far back in history. For example, the “Dévorants,” the “Loups garous” — if I wanted to use a German word, I would have to say “werewolves” — traced the entire history of this association back to King Solomon and told a legend that led back to King Solomon. In the case of the Gavots, the legend, which was told in many different ways, went back to the Phrygian master builder Hieram Abiff. These associations differed in many ways. And only by carefully examining the practices could one gradually arrive at the spiritual background of which the members were well aware.

Thus, one important difference between the two was related to the admission process or to the fact that, let's say, both associations were in some city. There were both Dévorants and Gavots in a wide variety of cities. Now, it was a strict rule that no one could be assigned to a trade – they were very careful about this – unless it was through one of these associations. So there were members who were éevorants with one association, and members who were gavots with the other. Each turned to his association when he came to a city, and the association then provided him with the relevant position in his profession, after he had identified himself in the prescribed manner, so that it was known that one was dealing with one of those who belonged.

Now it happened, of course, that sometimes, let's say, many more people traveled to a city than there were positions to be filled. Now the leaders of the two associations did not know how to help each other from the outset. Now the question was: should the Dévorants win this race for jobs, that is, should the Dévorants accommodate the majority of those who have arrived, or should the Gavots win, should more of them be accommodated?

Now it is characteristic that there was usually fierce antagonism between the associations as such, and just as today there are all sorts of much more trivial but more brutal, I would say, confrontations between the various leaders of the unions and so on, there were also measures that were supposed to decide whether one party or the other should win in such cases. The Dévorants usually did not suggest anything special, but they would gather in the public squares and beat the Gavots. The Gavots, on the other hand, suggested that a prize should be awarded, and then the judges from both parties should decide together whether the Dévorant or the Gavot had performed better. That is a very significant difference. The Dévorants were essentially inclined to bring about the decision through fighting and outward appearances, the Gavots through more spiritual things, and so it was that sometimes the custom of one, sometimes that of the other, carried the victory. This is the kind of difference that indicates the spiritual underpinnings.

Another difference that allows us to see inside is the way each of the two parties buried their dead. The Gavots buried their dead so that they walked silently behind the coffin. The coffin was silently lowered into the grave. To the left and right of the grave stood prominent members of the respective association, and they spoke over the grave, lisping certain mysterious words to one another. And then they formed a kind of circle and spoke again in mysterious words.

The Dövorants, on the other hand, accompanied their dead with an extremely powerful voice. Let me put it this way: if you were standing in the distance and heard a funeral procession walking, and especially when it reached the grave and the earth was thrown onto the coffin, it sounded like the howling of wolves from a distance. But it was the way the members of this association conducted the solemn funeral service. They were of the opinion, which they traced back to ancient traditions, that the human being must amplify his voice and nuance it in such a way that the sounds resound in a powerful, wild manner, as if from the world that the dead immediately enter, these sounds resound into the physical world.

This already gives you an indication of how traditions were present in these associations from ancient times, which originated from ancient knowledge. The funeral rites of the Dévorants were such that they took into account what ancient beliefs knew about, say, Purgatory, as it is also called, about Kamaloka and the like. But the expression “wolves, loups” itself points to what was actually meant. In many secret teachings, these words, or at least the idea that can be expressed by this word, was used to describe what is active in the human astral body when the intelligence is gone, when the regulator of the brain is missing. What asserts itself there in a passionate, emotional way from the depths of human nature, what asserts itself in particular in the desire to be with other people in such a way that, as the legend says, one even craves their blood, was described in many secret teachings with wolf. So that one can say, if one wants to look at things quite honestly and correctly, these Dévorants actually thought that they should behave as if they had left their physical body, that is to say, their brain, on such an occasion as at a funeral.

And so were the festivities. While the festivities of the Gavots were quiet and gentle, the festivities of the Dévorants were loud and stormy. It was like an unleashing of the astral world, which came to life during these festivities. The symbols, which played a major role in these festivities, the composition of the legends, all this showed that what was once different in ancient times was actually brought to bear in a wild way on these occasions.

On the other hand, it is significant that the other party is called “Gavots”. This comes from “gave”. These are the name of very small spirits who come down from the slopes of the Pyrenees covered with dense forest, who do not make themselves known, but who nevertheless come down from the heights of the Pyrenees, one might say, like very small elemental spirits, acting as representatives of the Grail knights who otherwise come down from the heights of the Spanish mountains. So the relatives of this other party, the “Gavots”, felt they were the little spirits who nevertheless belonged to the army of the Grail knights.

So while the one party, the Dévorants, wanted to emphasize more what lives in human astrality, the Gavots wanted to emphasize more what, according to the then prevailing view, lay in the ego. Thus, the antagonism between these two parties is really based on the antagonism between human astrality, the astral body and the human ego. And that is the striking, the tremendously interesting thing, that even in the first half of the 19th century we have associations that exert a tremendous influence and power within the class and profession, where it is customary to join them, and that are firmly rooted in such spiritual foundations.

It is absolutely the case that people want to shape their social relationships in the external world according to profession and class, because life makes it necessary. Therefore, such associations take this as their cement: profession and class. But such associations would still have found it inconceivable in the first half of the 19th century to be mere trade unions, professional associations. They were professional associations externally, just as a human being has a physical body externally. Internally, however, they were constituted in soul and spirit, placed an enormous value on their identifying marks, on their symbols, lived in these and saw to it that the pure character of the association was preserved through these symbols.

Note the enormous difference between that time and ours. You only have to consider what people in those days still learned in school. It was extraordinarily little, and the spiritual education that these people had did not come to them through the school system. Through the school system, they learned to read and write poorly and to do a little arithmetic. Everything else was only introduced later in the school system for the general population. Nevertheless, these broad masses of the population were not ignorant in those times. And that is the sad thing about our view of history, that actually history is only ever built on the basis of such documents that can be found in the state or city or other archives. But that is not the full living history at all. We can only find it if we are able to look at what lives in the soul, in the spirit of a human being of any time, in any profession, in any class.

Now, the people who were actually extremely influential for general professional life drew what the spiritual content of their soul was from these gatherings at their associations. Therefore, they did not have a scholastic, abstract education. For that is the peculiar thing: when education became scholastic, it took on an intellectualistic-abstract character. In all these associations, education did not have an intellectualistic-abstract character, but a pictorial-symbolizing character, something that wanted to grasp the world in images. Man spoke in pictures when he spoke about the world, and he got the pictures from these associations. And he watched over the pictures that he received in one or other association, because he knew that in knowing and using such pictures through closed societies, the will is brought in a certain direction, but above all to a certain strength. While abstract education leaves the will completely unaffected, these people, who received their education in this way, were gripped in their entirety. They were, so to speak, always representatives of what lived spiritually in these associations as a whole human being.

And so, in the world, one really had to deal with these associations. And we will only have a social history of the 19th century when we can correctly determine the following, when we can say: In such associations, the spiritual currents lived that were in all the artisans, that is, in everything that was in the middle between the peasantry and the nobility, that lived in all these souls. What lived in the souls of these people cannot be learned from today's history, because these things are not dealt with at all.

And when we then enter the mid-19th century, ideas suddenly emerge. All kinds of ideas arise in the political parties that form around the mid-19th century, and all kinds of ideas arise in the politically-minded poets. What are these ideas? Anyone who knows history, the real history, knows that these ideas live in such associations, where they are not written down. But then there are people who take advantage of the fact that everything is written down, that everything is printed. That breaks in, that breaks down right around the middle of the 19th century. The members of such associations would have been grateful if some journalistic way of thinking had asserted itself within their midst. They would very soon have resorted to asking the gentleman concerned to shut the door from the outside! Everything was bound up in the living human being.

Such people, who no longer had any feeling for this living humanity, carried this into poetry, journalism and all the other things that began to dominate the world around the middle of the 19th century. There it flows from bottom to top, but often it drives very cloudy bubbles at the top, and then these cloudy bubbles are told in the story. This history is not genuine, because this history does not know where the origins of such things are; this history fades everything and caricatures it, degrades it, trivializes it. In such connections, there were many things that had a character of tremendous depth, which were later completely trivialized. In fact, these connections gave the members a certain inclination of their souls towards the spiritual world in all its breadth.

Now you have to bear in mind that 1823 is a good year to illustrate this, because by then the levelling, the equalization of the French Revolution, had been behind us for so many years. But these things had been preserved in full vitality beyond the French Revolution. People talked about the ideas of the French Revolution; action with regard to the way one got a permanent position, how one came into contact with another person when one moved from one city to another, that happened according to the practices that were in these societies. People also felt rooted in social life by feeling that they were members of such a society.

Consider this: modern life, which, on the one hand, justifiably leads to individuality and freedom, begins, as I have often stated, in the 15th century. The old bonds and ties no longer hold people together. The further west you go, the less these old ties hold people together. Blood ties play an increasingly important role the further east you go, because there the old customs have been preserved. But the further west you go, the more people become isolated, the more the social fabric is individualized. But people feel that they cannot yet be fully self-sufficient, because it will take two millennia from the 15th century to become fully self-sufficient, and we are only in the first millennium now. There has certainly been a tremendous change, especially in the 19th century. But if you disregard the — what do you often call it? — of the upper crust, whether it be the upper crust of the outward-facing aristocracy or the spiritual aristocracy, if one disregards these and looks at the broad masses of humanity, then one must say: they are resisting being individualized. Now, those who are seized by the individualization also resist it. The nobility, the clergy, can hold together, they have bonds; the artisan class is torn out of its bonds. What these associations seek is precisely a frantic search for bonds that are no longer there historically, that have to be created.

And so we see from the 15th, 16th century onwards, in such associations that hold together through intellectual means, precisely among those who, as craftsmen, stand out from the rural occupation and do not make it either to the nobility or to the intellectual upper classes, the priesthood, the scribes and so on – how in all of them there is precisely this striving to be held together. And it is great and powerful to see how the cohesion is not yet sought in the same profession, but - nevertheless one closes oneself off in the profession, nevertheless the profession forms the framework - how it is sought in the spiritual, in the soul, how one only feel like a human being when, on the one hand, you have your work, but on the other hand, you have the freedom in your work to be able to integrate into a pictorial conception of life and the world, when you can thus incorporate this into your humanity. That is precisely the hallmark of the great change in the 19th century: that this inclination towards the spiritual is lost, that it is indeed preserved in the frippery of all kinds of secret societies, but that these secret societies no longer have any connection with the real world. They are the freemasonic and other secret societies that ape what has been cultivated in such outwardly professional societies, but inwardly held together by spiritual bonds. And if we add to this the fact that these two shades, Dévorants and Gavots, even lead to a greater cultivation of the astral in man, to a greater cultivation of what is appropriate to the ego in man, then we have a testimony to how something works in the history of mankind that can be recognized as the impulses in the structure of the human being.

If we look at the geography, we see that although there were actually devorants and gavots throughout France, the devorants were more prevalent in the cities of northern France and the gavots in those of southern France. This is connected with the fact that in fact that fine nuance between the warmer, more southern climate and the colder, more northern climate asserts itself there, that the colder climate develops more the astral, the warmer climate more the I-nature of the human being. Therefore, the further we come into hot zones, the more we see how

the difference in blood color between arteries and veins is less pronounced, while in the north people have sharply defined red and blue blood veins. The difference between red and blue blood vessels disappears more and more the further one gets into hot zones. The less differentiated the human being is between these two types, arterial blood and venous blood, the deeper their astral body and thus the present ego configuration is immersed in their ego; the more we find the ego the more we get into hotter climates. It is interesting that the outer geographical spread is also connected with what, simply out of geography, makes people more of an ego or more of an astral body.

And so we see that if we follow history, we can only recognize the external forces of history if we know that in one group of people the astral is more active, and in another group of people the I-being is more active. Only when one knows the astral being and the I-being can one actually follow the driving forces of history, while what is written in the history books today is as if an ignorant servant somewhere in a telegraph office writes a book about electric telegraphy based on his knowledge because he says to himself: I can do it better than those who have been trained in it because I have always been involved. That is more or less how historians living in the present day approach the facts. Only those who know the inner effective forces are involved in the facts of history. But these can only be drawn from the inner knowledge of the human being. And this is the only way to learn about geography. Geography shows us that people of different races are spread across the different areas of the earth. Yes, the races differ not only in hair color and nose configuration, but they differ in the way in which etheric, astral and I-being are integrated in the human being. All this comes from the spiritual.

And in the times of which I have spoken, in order to make a century-long observation, people also followed the spiritual impulses that were effective in the different regions when they formed associations arbitrarily. In northern France, people seek what works more out of the astral, in southern France, rather what works more out of the ego.

But for humanity to become one whole across the earth, these differences must in turn be blended. And so we see that the longer these associations exist, the more the community's contrasts are smoothed out and these members mingle with each other. At the end of the 18th century or before the French Revolution, we find that some people belong to their associations with tremendous enthusiasm and true rage and emotion, putting all their ambition into it, if they are “Gavot”, to win in a spiritual way, if they are “D&vorant”, to win with the cudgel in their hands. But the whole of humanity is used to stand in a dignified and right way in such a self-made union. These associations take into account what is spread over the earth in a spiritual way in the form of impulses.

Such things show us how quickly the human soul changes over time. People live so blindly, actually believing that their fathers lived as they do. This may still be true for the present times, although anyone who knows children today knows very well that their souls are not shaped as the fathers were when they were the same age and so on. But if we go back a century, just to the point where that tremendous change took place around the middle of the 19th century, we find that there has been an enormous difference in the configuration of human social bonds.

And this transformation of the social being, that is history, not what can be found in archives. And you can really learn an extraordinary amount of history from the simple booklet that a carpenter's apprentice, I think in 1821, wrote as a kind of catechism for his traveling journeymen, where only the outward appearance is mentioned how one should travel and the like. One can learn an extraordinary amount of history from this simple booklet if one is able to deduce the historical background from the external events.

You see, even in the details, things are presented in such a way that history in reality can only be brought to life through spiritual science. And that is why spiritual science is not an increase in knowledge, not something that would form a straight continuation of what one is accustomed to learning in schools today, but spiritual science can only be compared to a waking up to the world, to an awakening. The other science, and we can regard this as our secret, can be compared more to a donning of a nightcap that extends well down over the ears. But anthroposophy should be a real awakening. Therefore, it also awakens people to historical circumstances.

With this, I wanted to make a start today, in the year 1923, with a view of the century, with a view that wanted to go back in perspective to 1823, with reference to a few specific facts. George Sand's novel can only be an external reason, because she naturally had no idea of these spiritual backgrounds. But she has portrayed the year 1823, and that period in general, with a certain instinctive genius, in such a magnificent way that one feels inspired to continue the observations from 1823 to 1923.

Yesterday I tried to take a kind of century-long view by describing to you how, especially in the western European regions, people entered into social bonds that were connected with the class on the one hand and with professional life on the other, and we saw how these connections, these socializations, were based on the spiritual. Yes, we even had to penetrate to the astral and to the ego-being of man, so that we could study the two opposing professional associations, the “Dévorants” and the “Gavots”. And the peculiarity of these associations, which, as I said, belong more to the western regions of Europe and in which more recent civilization has developed mainly in the west, the essence of these associations is that man, with all his soul, feels at home in such a community and that the various identifying marks, the symbols of which I have spoken to you, the legends, have some connection with working life, even though they have a thoroughly spiritual background.

Just as I described this life for Western European countries a century ago, it would be impossible to describe the life of Central European regions, for example. Therefore, it must be understandable that when George Sand wanted to write a novel in which she addressed certain social problems, she chose this socialization as a backdrop. It can certainly be said that Goethe also strove for something similar with his “Wilhelm Meister”. He wanted to describe how the human being is connected with humanity and with the spiritual and professional life of humanity, how the individual human being develops out of humanity. Goethe attempted this in his “Wilhelm Meister”. There is no doubt that if it had been a reality for him, he would also have chosen such craftsmen's associations as George Sand. He did not do it because it was simply not possible in the circles to which Goethe belonged by virtue of his education.

That is the peculiar thing: in Central Europe, ever since the advent of what I have often referred to as intellectualism, that is, since the 15th century, human problems have been understood quite differently than in the West. Yesterday I had to describe to you how the individual craftsman makes his way through France, how he gets himself admitted to such a, one could almost say secret, society in some city, how he gets his identifying marks there, how he, when he now begins his journeyman's travels, finds a similar branch of his association in some other city: he makes himself known, he is admitted within this branch of his association. As already mentioned, this was still the case in 1823. And these associations then had a profound influence on the life of the corresponding class.

One could not describe this for Central Europe. For Central Europe, one would have to say that, since the beginning of this newer time, that is, since the 15th century, there has always been an aspiration in people to cultivate individuality, the human self. There was not such an intense connection between the individual human being and his occupation or social class as in the West. Therefore it was the case that people took their occupation, one might say, sine ira, in a more external way. They did not grow together with their occupation in this way, they did not connect their spiritual life with their occupation.

The terms and symbols were taken from the main occupations in the West. This was not the case in Central Europe. It was rather the case that the spiritual life was more separate from the occupation, and also more separate from the class. Of course, one was also part of a class of people, but when one turned to the spiritual life, this spiritual life was more set apart, both from the occupation and from the class of people. Therefore, if one wanted to devote oneself to spirituality, one lived more in such a way that one completely freed oneself in one's thoughts from one's occupational life. And therefore, in Central Europe, those branches of spirituality were particularly cultivated which had nothing to do with professional life, nothing with class life.

Man's relationship to the world was understood without regard to nation, without regard to any national context. Man as such stood in the foreground. And then, if the individual, let us say, the craftsman, wanted to devote himself to a spiritual life, he did so as an individual human being. He thought more about the tasks of life as an individual human being. At the beginning of the 19th century, he had little more of such a spiritual life from some social connections than I described yesterday. Therefore, the spiritual stimuli in Central Europe developed in a completely different way,

The individual craftsman who had a particular urge, who, to use the southern German expression, became a Sinnierer – the wonderful word Sinnierer is present – who therefore thought a lot, he became acquainted with the remnants of of the old alchemy remained in the way of knowledge, which therefore has nothing to do with any class, with any nationality or with any profession; he familiarized himself with what remained of the old astrology. And what he absorbed in this way, he carried with him like a treasure that was important and valuable to his fellow human beings. He wandered from place to place a lot. There were always only a few people, and they had no identifying marks, they had come just as a human being. At first they had strange names for such a person. These names arose in the time when it was all topsy-turvy with the views of ancient and newer times; and those who stood out from the people were not immediately accepted. Such thinkers were considered eccentrics. They were called “spur knights” when they appeared like that. And such a man first had to gain his reputation by having something to say to the people and by coming together with them. Since no permanent connections had been formed, he had to gain his reputation only when the opportunity arose, with the people with whom he came together and who wanted to know something from him. And by asserting what he had devised, he gained a certain influence. And long before one of them came, there was already talk in an unspecific way that one should come.

At first it seemed strange to people, but later, when he left the place, they thought long and hard about what such a thinker had said, such an especially clever one, who had so much knowledge in his head that you couldn't even begin to grasp that a human head could be so big that it could contain everything he had in his head.

So the whole way in which the spiritual life was handled in the human dimension was different. And that is why it had to come about that in western countries education remained much more popular, much more broad-based, because it was related to professional and class life. In Central Europe, on the other hand, there was a gradual emergence of this abyss between the educated and the masses, who could no longer keep up. Now, this is often connected with the deep tragedy of Central European life, this abyss between those who, under the demands of modern times, summarized what remained of ancient wisdom - be it alchemical or astrological - and from this point of view looked deeper into human life, and those who only stopped at the subordinate concepts of religious life.

These were the conditions Goethe faced. So that Goethe could not have described in his “Wilhelm Meister” as, for example, George Sand did in the novel “Le compagnon du tour de France”. Goethe described the individual human being, the individual human individuality, their relationship to the upper worlds, their relationship to the lower worlds. In France, we encountered, as it were, the effectiveness of the astral in the Dévorants, the effectiveness of the ego in the Gavots, which came through in the furnishings. Within Central Europe, there was a search for how man is connected to heaven on the one hand and to the earth on the other.

In a beautiful way, Goethe has – but, I would say, very much in the educational sublimation, carried into the strongly abstract – that which, basically, within Central Europe, in terms of human and human wisdom that has been lived in Central Europe since the 15th century, brought into the two figures that appear in his “Wilhelm Meister”: on the one hand, Makarie and, on the other, the metal-sensing woman.

Then this remarkable figure appears in Goethe's “Wilhelm Meister”, Makarie, a mature female personality who, due to her sickly, pathological nature, has little more in common with earthly life, who, so to speak, has completely detached herself from earthly life, who rarely moves within the earthly confines, and is revered by all those around her, by all family members in the narrower and broader sense, and who, by becoming independent of the earthly, develops a remarkable cosmic life. And this cosmic life, which Goethe describes as if Makarie lived with the peculiarities of the stars, not with the peculiarities of the earth, leads to the fact that, so to speak, all physical world observation disappears from the spirit, from the soul of Makarie, and she is completely devoted to the cosmic laws. But the more she surrenders to cosmic laws, the more the earthly laws of nature cease to have any meaning for her, and the more the laws of nature are transformed into cosmic moral laws. She becomes a moral authority for all who meet her. And she does not represent a morality based on commandments, not just any morality borrowed from this or that source, but a morality that appears to a person when he is free from the earthly, but still has it, as if it were revealed by the stars themselves in their course. And what Makarie proclaims for her surroundings in this way, through her star-gazing, is interpreted by her friend, the astronomer, who now becomes the seer's student in the cosmic realms.

Goethe only portrayed in a subtly sublimated way in a higher social class what you have to vividly imagine was still happening everywhere in the first third of the 19th century. For example, you have to imagine that during this time there were still families, albeit scattered, who had family members, female family members, who simply were no longer able to move around on earth after a certain age , who became bedridden, whose skin turned white and transparent, showing interesting blue veins running to the surface of their bodies through the white, transparent skin, who rarely spoke. But when they spoke, everyone in the vicinity listened carefully to what was said, because then these female personalities proved to be the kind of seers that Goethe only typified in his Makarie. And after all, in the first third of the 19th century, you can find circles of legends everywhere in Central Europe. They tell the story: such a seeress lies in such and such a place; she has spoken this or that from her prophetic gift. — And such things were carried far and wide. And they were carried with the poetry that was possible in the social order of humanity when there were no newspapers, for the newspapers have contributed enormously to the destruction of spiritual life.

So Goethe has such a figure appear in his Makarie. And now, at a certain point in the “Wanderjahre”, this Makarie is opposed by the metal-feeler. Her friend is Montanus. The metal-feeler also feels what is going on inside the earth, that is, I would say, the very spiritual of earthly nature. She can speak of the secrets of the metals of the earth, she can speak of how the individual metals affect people. And Montanus interprets what happens with the metal feeler in the same way that the astronomer interprets what is revealed through Makarie.

Thus Goethe juxtaposes the cosmic seer with this metal-sensing woman, who reveals the secrets of the earth through her special organization - again, a somewhat pathological organization. Goethe shows that he does not seek what makes man capable, what enables man to carry out his deeds on earth, either from those who live on one side of the cosmos or from those who live on the other side, inside the earth. He seeks that which makes man capable of earthly life, where man is unaware of either ability in his state of consciousness, where they unconsciously take effect, but where, as in the balance beam, there is a balance between the two.

Goethe does not know what is at the root of this. But he senses, from his own adherence to an old education, how these two extremes of life and of spirit interact and actually make a human being a true human being, not when one or the other is in effect, but when both disappear with their own character, but work together and bring about a balance in human nature.

Today, when we can speak from the point of view of anthroposophy, we can say: first of all, we have the upper human being, the nerve-sense human being; then we have the middle human being, the rhythmic human being; and finally we have the lower human being, the metabolic-limb human being. If the upper human being predominates in a person, and if this does not balance out with the lower human being, then, as a result of a morbid development, as in the case of Makarie, the entire metabolic-limb human being has fallen into a kind of torpor, a torpor that which does not yet take life, but which makes man incapable of moving in the earthly space, then the event in the head predominates in such a personality, then man becomes a cosmic seer. If, as in the case of the metal-sensitive person, the nerve-sense organization recedes and the metabolic-limb system develops particularly significantly, then the person lives primarily with the earthly, with the forces and effects of the metals of the earth, the minerals of the earth. And in the middle of the human being is the balance.

This is how Goethe actually wanted to imply at this point in his social novel “Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years” how the human was sought in Central Europe, how the human being was structured on the one hand according to the cosmos, on the other hand according to the earthly, and how the right humanity consists in the balance between the two.

Much thought was given to this balance between astrology at the top and alchemy at the bottom. And when individual figures such as Paracelsus or Faust emerged, wandering from place to place, surprising people with what they knew of these secrets through their contemplations, people pricked up their ears to hear what man could know about man. But when individual significant personalities emerged, they were not the only ones. There were little Paracelsuses, little Fausts everywhere, who just did not travel so far, who had a smaller territory. And what is being explored again today in the secrets of dowsing was something that was quite common in those days. It happened not only once that something like the following occurred.

There came such a thinker to some place and impressed the people there with what he had to say about the upper and lower worlds. And when he had impressed the people mightily, when they began to believe unconditionally in his authority, then they said at last: But Master, now you must still do something for us. You know, we need a well, and you have to tell us where the well should be built. So the man who had come as a contemplator to the villages went around with the people in the area, and in some places he stopped, went on again, stopped again, but then he finally stopped in a place where he said: “There it is! There we have it!” – That's where the well was built.

These things are not recorded in history, and they extend into the first third of the 19th century, when they became increasingly rare and scarce. But these things are real. And that is something that has been particularly cultivated in the lower classes of the people, which, so to speak, constituted the spiritual life here. The spiritual life was definitely in these things because one had the innermost urge to grasp the human as such, I would say, not only symbolically but even cosmically. One asked here less: How does man, through his class, through his occupation, relate to the outside world? That was asserted even in the times of the guild system, when people wanted to appear in public with their insignia, when they wanted to make processions and the like, but that didn't really have the same deep spiritual significance as in the West. By contrast, here, this life, stripped of the external, had its great spiritual significance.

I would like to say: In the West, the aim was to understand humanity in terms of the external forces of living together. In Central Europe, it was the human being within his skin who also wanted to experience what he experienced socially as a human being. That is what drove Central European intellectual life to a certain height, so that it could not become popular as it did in the West. And this is also what at the same time brought about the deep spiritual tragedy of Central Europe. And we are already living in a time when these things should become conscious in the broadest circles, when people in the broadest circles should wake up to these things. For it is only to be hoped that our civilization, which has become chaotic, can in turn receive new impulses, that new life forces can be supplied to it, if one can grasp the real connection with historical life in this way.

In Central Europe, people were already descending to the earth. This is particularly evident in Goethe, who wanted to strike a balance between the upper and lower human beings, juxtaposing the two extremes, the metal-sensing and the cosmic-seeing. On the one hand, people wanted to see man as a doer on the earth; but on the other hand, they wanted to look up into the region of the cosmic, and they wanted to look down into the region of the earthly, the telluric, in order to recognize man as an earthling. These are the differentiations that modern civilization has brought up from its foundations.

That is why something like Schiller's 'Aesthetic Letters', which I have mentioned several times, could only be written in Central Europe. In these letters, man is seen purely as a human being, detached from nationality, and is to be understood only as a human being. And basically it was self-evident that part of the problem - even if neither Goethe nor the period that followed provided the solutions for it - was how to get people to understand this universal humanity in the modern way.

That is why a large part of Goethe's “Wilhelm Meister” novel is the so-called pedagogical province. The education of the human being becomes a problem: a problem for which the time had not yet come at that time, for which the time has only come today, when one can search for anthroposophical knowledge of man.

In the West, I would say, people had already gone beyond the human skin. They groped their way: How do you connect with another person? How do you reveal yourself to another person? How do you take his hand? How do you speak so that he recognizes you? The signs, gestures and words that later appeared in a somewhat luxurious way in the Masonic societies were something that was practiced in the West as something vitally active until the end of the first third of the 19th century. In Central Europe, people did not have as much of an appreciation for such special symbolism, but they did have a great sense of wanting to get behind the mystery of the human being in general.

It is interesting to compare this with Eastern Europe. There, not only until the end of the first third of the 19th century, but until a much later time, people came from their inner being, I would say, not to their skin. In a certain sense, he remained in a state of soul that did not completely lift him out of the divine, did not advance him to the point of becoming human. Therefore, I would like to say: While in the West the attitude has arisen that the world is the world - at most one has to think about social utopias - the world is the world, one has to live in it, one has to have social institutions in order to live in it, or one has to regard those who are already there as if they were quite wonderful to live in – while it was the case in the West, it was the case in Central Europe that one actually demanded: Man must first become human, he must first work his way to humanity, then he will find the earth. – In the East, one was convinced: Both ideals are actually wrong. The moment man thinks of working his way up to becoming a human being, he is on the wrong track, because in so doing he actually leaves Paradise. And man should always be able to see the piece of earth on which he lives as a paradise, otherwise life becomes impossible. One must go back more to what is unconsciously within man, and not go out too strongly into life.

For this reason, although there has always been a certain tolerance in Eastern Europe towards the West and towards Central Europe, out of a certain good nature and also out of philanthropy, there are nevertheless regions where either the outer humanity of the West or the individual human individuality of Central Europe has been reckoned with, and these regions have been regarded, so to speak, as a departure from the divine human being. And when, for example, the tendency arose in the East to acquire Western views, we see that because man does not want to come out of himself, we see, as is the case with the best, a tolerance, a toleration, but no inner engagement with the rest of the world. The Russian, if he is a real Russian, does not go as far as his skin; he remains deeper within himself. It is already far too earthly to go as far as his skin; one must remain more within.

You see, that was a mood of the soul that still occurred to a great extent in Dostoyevsky. And so it is interesting, after all, to hear what Dostoyevsky, one of those who are above all representative of Eastern European life, says to people in the West.

In the latest issue of the journal “Wissen und Leben” (Knowledge and Life), which has now been published, where letters that Dostoyevsky wrote to Apollon Maikov in 1868 are printed, you can read it. But such letters could have been written if traveling had already become so common in the first third of the 19th century.

I may have to apologize to some of the people sitting here for my reading out some parts of Dostoyevsky's letter, but it is Dostoyevsky who says it, not me, and I am of course far from wanting to say anything other than letting Dostoyevsky speak. Dostoyevsky therefore feels stranded in Geneva; and the Westerners of Geneva and those who live nearby will have to excuse me if I read just a few passages from a letter from Dostoyevsky from 1868 as a way of characterizing them.

"In Geneva, we suffered most from material discomfort and cold. If only you knew how stupid, dull, insignificant and wild this people is! It is not enough to visit the country as a tourist. No, try living here for a change! But I cannot even give you a brief account of my impressions now; there are far too many of them. Bourgeois life in this republic has reached a dead end. In the government and throughout Switzerland, there is nothing but parties, incessant disputes, pauperism, and a frightening mediocrity in everything. The local worker is not worth the little finger of ours: it is laughable to look at and listen to him. The morals are wild; oh, if you only knew what is considered good and bad here. Low education: what drunkenness, what thievery, what petty swindling that has become the law in trade. There are, however, some good traits that place them immeasurably above the Germans.

Now I must apologize again on the other side!

“In Germany I was most amazed at the stupidity of the people; they are extremely stupid, they are incommensurably stupid. Even Nikolai Nikolaevich Strachov, a man of great intellect, does not want to see the truth in our country: he said, ‘The Germans are clever, they invented gunpowder.’ But that is how their lives turned out!”

So he doesn't count the fact that they invented gunpowder as something that would reduce their incommensurable stupidity. Now:

”... In Switzerland there are still enough forests, and there are incomparably more of them in the mountains than in the other countries of Europe, although they are decreasing terribly from year to year. Now imagine: for five months of the year there is terrible cold here, and on top of that the Bisen. And for three months here it is almost the same winter as with us. Everyone shivers from the cold, never taking off their flannel and cotton (and they don't have any steam baths, so you can imagine the dirt they are used to). They don't have winter clothes, they walk around in almost the same clothes as in summer (but flannel alone is not enough for such a winter), and they lack the sense to improve their homes even a little! What good is a fireplace that burns coal or wood, even if they keep it burning all day long? But keeping it burning all day costs 2 francs a day. So much forest is needlessly destroyed, but they get no warmth from it. What do you think? If only they had double windows, then you could live with the fireplaces! I'm not saying that they should install stoves. Then they could save the entire forest. In 25 years there will be no forest left. They really live like savages! They can take some of it. In my room, with the terrible heating, it is only +5 degrees R&aumur (5 degrees heat). I sat in my coat in this cold, waiting for money, moving things around and thinking about a plan for a novel - is that nice? They say that in Florence this year there were temperatures as low as -10 degrees. In Montpellier, there was a cold snap of 15 degrees Reaumur. Here in Geneva, the temperature didn't drop below -8 degrees, but it doesn't matter if the water in the rooms freezes. Recently I changed apartments and now I have nice rooms; one is always cold, but the other is warm, and in this warm room I always have +10 or +11 degrees of heat, so you can still live.” And so on and so on.

So you see: the Central and Western Europeans do not exactly come off very well in this description by one of the most outstanding Russians. And that must be attributed to the fact that a going out even to the skin of the human being is not present there. There is still the closedness in itself, and therefore the non-adaptation to the environment, but rather, I would say, the demand that everything be as one is oneself.

As I said, from a certain contemporary historical point of view, it is quite interesting to take a look at this recently published passage from the letters. That is why I have chosen this one and not, for example, one from the first third of the 19th century for this century-long consideration. Because in Russia things only emerged with such clarity later on; but they have always been there, woven into the fabric of life. And one also characterizes the time of a century ago when one considers these statements about a time that has already changed somewhat. Yes, even things that one can probably be quite astonished about in the West can be found there. If you take Western or Central European descriptions, then the following letter, which is from the same time - March 1, 1868, will be interesting to you. You will see from it that you can look at the things of the world from different points of view.

“I have formed the following opinion about our courts (based on everything I have read): the moral character of our judges” - namely the judges in Russia - “and, above all, of our jury is infinitely higher than in Europe; they regard criminals as Christians. Even the Russian traitors living abroad admit it. But one thing does not yet seem to be established: I believe that in this humane relationship to the criminals, there is still much that has been created by books, much that is liberal and not independent. This sometimes happens. Besides, I can be terribly wrong from a distance. But our basic nature is infinitely higher in this respect than that of Europe.” And so on.

So you see, the view of the courts here is also given from a different point of view than you often hear it given in Western Europe.

I would like two things to emerge from yesterday's and today's reflections: Firstly, that it is absurd to believe that today's standards can somehow be applied to living conditions even a century ago, but that one must actually look lovingly at past conditions if one wants to come to a valid judgment that takes reality into account. But even with those people who live at the same time, it is important to acquire a certain broad-mindedness of judgment. That is what we have to find today. We have to find a way to refrain from these national points of view in order to actually find a point of view of a citizen of the world.

But then it is the case that this can only come from a deeper knowledge of the human being. This deeper knowledge of the human being is something that the world could not penetrate as long as the world did not seek anthroposophy. And one might say: If you look at what was available in Europe a century ago, you can see that there was a yearning for knowledge of the human being. But with what was known about nature at the time, it was not yet possible to arrive at a knowledge of the human being in the modern sense. Then, in the second half of the nineteenth century, natural science flooded everything. And now we have to seek again what was longed for a hundred years ago, what the best in Europe longed for, and what was only temporarily submerged.

This alone will provide humanity with the strength that can somehow lead to an ascent of culture in the face of decline. It is dismal that so little history and so little geography in the sense mentioned yesterday is cultivated, that things have taken on such an external form. The point is to really seek the spirit in history, in history and across the earth in a geographical sense. History and geography in particular must undergo a spiritual metamorphosis. This is necessary.

This is something that the Goethean province of education did not yet have in “Wilhelm Meister”, but it is what the figures who appear there long for. And much of this yearning of that time must break into civilization today. Men must awaken to what was then the special yearning of their dreams, so that the dreams of that time may now, through the power of spiritual insight, become reality. For this reality is what men need for their civilization.

From the two lectures I gave yesterday and the day before yesterday, you will have seen how important it is from an anthroposophical point of view to build on what happened in Europe in the course of the 19th century in the right way. And we were indeed able to link the phenomena that we have placed before our minds to many of the things that have emerged as the actual characteristic of the modern era, which we consider to be the actual characteristic of the spiritual and other historical developments in Europe from the mid-15th century onwards.

Today, precisely because I regard yesterday and the day before as a kind of substructure, as a kind of starting point for a perspective, I would like to look a little further ahead, and also a little further back in time.

We must be clear about the fact that in the course of the 19th century, materialism emerged in European development on the one hand. And I count as materialism everything that can only turn to material phenomena if it wants to say something about the world that does not feel the need to turn to a spiritual thing when it is about that which sustains man in the world, which instructs man in the world about his path. On the other hand, added to this materialism was what may be called intellectualism, rationalism, the view of the intellect, which only, I might say, wants to live and weave in logical concepts.

Now do not take this as if I meant that this logical way of thinking should be opposed to another non-logical or even anti-logical one. Of course that does not occur to me at all. But the logical alone is to reality what the skeletal system is to the human being, and in all things the logical actually represents not the living but the dead. And so what man had naively arrived at, this mere intellectual logic that contains dead concepts, promoted materialism, which only tied in with dead substance.

Now, nothing less than a completely disillusioned looking into the true reasons that, on the one hand, brought forth materialism and, on the other, rationalism, can help us today to further develop human civilization. And here we must also reach a little further back in time, so that yesterday's and the day before yesterday's description has an even broader background.

I have often pointed out the deep rift that exists between everything that was once Greek culture – let us say, the culture that developed partly in the Greek language – and what then gradually developed to the west as Roman, as Latin culture. Attention has often been called to the view of Herman Grimm, who says: Today's man can still understand the Romans, because he basically still has the same concepts as the Romans; the Greeks appear to him like the inhabitants of a fairy-tale land. Well, I have indeed spoken about this fact in more detail in the essays that recently appeared in the “Goetheanum”.

But now we must be clear about the fact that the East of Europe, which I tried to describe yesterday, so to speak, only as an appendix and perhaps in a way that is contestable for some of those sitting here, experienced a wave of civilization that was strongly influenced by Greek in later times. In the East of Europe we find the late forms of Greek feeling, of Greek sensibility. In the west and also in central Europe, on the other hand, Latin culture is developing in a very intensive way. And the very differentiation across Europe that I have described to you over the last two days is fundamentally under the influence of what existed in the east as a continuation of Greek culture and in the west as a continuation of Latin Roman culture.

We must not forget the following. We must be clear about the fact that the West was in a very different position to digest the Latin-Roman essence inwardly, spiritually, than Central Europe. The West has absorbed the Latin within itself. Central Europe has become ill from the Latin. And only those who are able to properly consider this phenomenon, which is currently showing itself in its last stages in the most intense way imaginable, actually know how to find their way around within the current concepts of education.

Let us first look at the matter from a Central European point of view. I would like to draw attention once more to what Fritz Mauthner, who died recently, asserted from the point of view of language, from the criticism of language. Fritz Mauthner did not want to write a critique of reason, that is, actually, a critique of concepts, like Kant, but rather a critique of language. He had made the supposed discovery that when people talk about higher things, they are really only talking in words and do not realize that they are only talking in words. But if you look at how people use words, for example, God, spirit, soul, good and so on, you can see that when people use words, they believe that they are dealing with a thing, but they are just using words without pointing to a real thing.

Now, as I have already indicated, I believe that Mauthner's entire view does not apply when it comes to natural things, because then people can distinguish quite well between the word and the thing. At least I have never yet heard of anyone who, for example, had the intention of mounting not a real white horse when he wanted to ride, but merely the word “white horse”! So in relation to things of nature, people can distinguish the word and its content from reality.

But the situation changes – and this gives Fritz Mauthner a certain semblance of justification – the moment we enter the realm of the soul on the one hand and the ethical-moral realm on the other. In relation to the soul, words from ancient times have been preserved that people continue to use, but the views on the matter have not been preserved. So that people use words like soul and spirit, but do not have the view of the matter. And since Mauthner noticed this in the realm of the soul, he thought he could generalize. But in the realm of the soul, and also in the ethical-moral realm, it is the case that, for example, in the ethical-moral realm, moral impulses have gradually lost their factual content for man and actually figure today only as external commandments or even as external laws.

Thus, for a good part of the vocabulary, the view of the matter has been lost. That is why it takes so much effort today to work on the most important abilities of the human soul - thinking, feeling and willing. Because thinking, feeling and willing are things that everyone discusses today, but people do not really have a view of the corresponding things. And it is a matter of coming up with what is actually behind it.

Now we must be clear about the fact that education, which actually led to intellectual life, was carried by the Latin language for many, many centuries in the Middle Ages, and that the Latin language really became a dead language not only in the sense of an external designation, but in a very inner sense. The Latin language, which one had to acquire in the Middle Ages if one wanted to access higher education at all, became more and more a, if I may express it thus, mechanism in itself. And it became precisely the logical mechanism in itself.

This process can be easily followed if you look at history the way we did yesterday and the day before yesterday for the 19th century. If we look at the inner life in the continuation of human existence, we see that in the fourth century AD the Latin language gradually ceased to be experienced inwardly, that it no longer embodied the logos but only the shells of the logos. What then remained of the Latin language as a latecomer, the Italian language, the French language, they have indeed absorbed much of the Latin language. In this way they participated in the dying process of the Latin language. But they also took in what was transmitted by the various peoples who moved from east to west and inhabited the west. So that in Italian and French the completely different element lives on, not only in the words, but above all in the shaping of the language, in the drama of the language. In contrast, the real Latin has died out. And in this deadness, where gradually the views have fallen away, it has become the all-dominant scientific language. And one must inquire precisely about language if one wants to understand: Why did the medieval world view take the form that it did?

Just think that the human being was pushed into this Latin during his boyhood, so that the process was not such that he shaped the language from the living soul, but the language was poured into him as a finished logical instrument, and he learned logic, so to speak, from the way the words were grammatically connected. Logic became something that filled man from the outside.

And so the connection between the human soul and spiritual education became increasingly loose and loose, and one did not grow into education with enthusiasm from what one already had within oneself, one was absorbed by a foreign element of education, by the foreign element of education that had been perverted in Latin. It radiated out, so to speak, into the soul and drove what one originally had out of the person or deeper into the person, into such a region where one made no claim to logic.

Just think how it was for many centuries in the Middle Ages and how it was in our youth, in the youth of those who are now creatures as old as I am. It was the case that if someone had expressed something in their mother tongue and it did not appear clear in the society in which one was, one quickly translated it into Latin, because then it became clear. But it also became cold and sober. It became logical. You immediately understood when something was expressed in a Latin case; you immediately understood exactly and precisely how the matter was meant.

But that was always done through the centuries of the Middle Ages. People allowed themselves all kinds of sloppiness in the spoken language because they attributed exactness and precision to thinking in the Latin language. But that was something foreign to man. And because it was foreign and man can only come to the spirit through his soul, the Latin language became so fossilized that you could no longer use a word in any way if you did not have the thing out there in physical sensuality. With the horse, it would not have worked if you only had the word, because you could not ride on it. But with those things that are supersensible, the content gradually evaporated from the word, and people only had the word. And then later, when their mother tongue emerged, they also only said the word in the mother tongue, the simply lexicographically translated word. In doing so, they did not bring in the idea. By putting anima and soul together and anima having lost its reality as content, the content of the soul was also lost. And so it came about that the Latin language was only applicable to the external sensual.

From the language you have one of the reasons why, in the middle of the Middle Ages, theology said: One can only understand external sensual things through science, and at most their context, and one must leave supersensible things to faith. If these people had developed the full strength to express what is true, then they would have said: Man can only recognize as much of the world as can be expressed in Latin, and the rest he must leave to a not quite expressible, only felt faith.

You see, in a sense that is the truth, and the rest is just an illusion. The truth is that over the centuries the view has taken hold that only what can be expressed in Latin is scientifically true.

And only in the 18th century did the pretension of the vernacular actually come into play. But at that time, when the pretensions of the vernacular were emerging, the various regions of Europe had a very different relationship to the vernacular. Where Latin still had an effect, the vernacular was more easily combined with education. Hence we have these phenomena in Western Europe, which we described the day before yesterday, that actually the connections in social life, the social bonds, as I have called them, develop in a way that is popular, in which everyone participates, because in the West, when folklore emerged, to a certain extent this folklore snapped into a related form in Latin.

In Central Europe this was quite impossible, because there the vernacular had not adopted anything Latin. There the vernacular was something quite different from Latin. And on top of that was the layer of education, which learned Latin if it wanted to be educated. So here the difference was enormous. Yes, it is precisely from this difference that the tragedy for Central Europe, of which I spoke yesterday, stems, the tragedy that existed between the people of the broad masses, who did not learn Latin, who therefore had no science either - because science was what could be said in Latin - and those who acquired science, who simply switched over the moment they acquired it. In their everyday lives, when they ate and drank and when they were otherwise with their fellow countrymen, they were unlearned people, because they spoke the language, which did not have any learning in it at all. And when they were scholars, they were something quite different; then they donned an inner robe. So that basically a person who was educated was actually a divided person.

You see, this had a particularly profound effect on the intellectual life of Central Europe. For in the vernacular, through all kinds of circumstances, which we will also touch on one day, there was actually only what I hinted at yesterday, on the one hand as an astrological element, on the other as an alchemical element. This was already alive in the vernacular, and the vernacular actually had an inner spirituality, an inner spirituality. The vernacular had no materialism in Europe. Materialism was only imposed on the vernacular from the materialism of the Latin language, in that the Latin language, when it was no longer the language of scholars, still left the people with the airs and graces that had developed when it became the language of scholars. And so the Central European language could not find a way to balance or harmonize with what had become established in Latin as education.

This is an extremely serious matter. It can be seen in an intensive way to this day. I will give a concrete example in a moment of how intensely this can be seen. You see, so-called political economy is also taught at various universities today. This political economy has actually grown out of legal ideas, and these are entirely a child of the Latin world. To think legally is to think in Latin, even today. And the ideas of political economy – yes, in an unfortunate way for the Latins, one comes down to things. Just as you can't ride the mere word Schimmel, you can't eat the mere economic terms. You can't do business with the mere economic terms. But since science has only developed from Latin - it's just that people don't realize the context - the economic sciences of the present have no content at all. Political economy, as it is taught today, actually only understands something that no longer has anything to do with reality because it comes from Latin, but it has not found the connection to present reality at all, instead spinning everything out of concepts.

One could say that it is precisely in the field of economics that a contrast becomes apparent. Yesterday I spoke to you about the fact that in Central Europe there were people going around among the people who were called thinkers – they worked from the folk tradition, which is why they had the old astrology, the old alchemy – thinkers, that is, those who reflect. Those who then carried Latin in that sublimated form into political economy are not those who speculate, but those who spin yarns. Yes, really, I am not joking, but am quite serious, because a mere logical web, into which the Latin language has been transformed, is spun out to form what is developed as a single science.

Last fall, I taught a course in economics here. It was based on facts, not on a web of words. And because it was based on facts, because it was based on the realities of economic life, it became more and more apparent that Students of political economy cannot reconcile this with what is mere fiction! The one does not flow into the other. And now someone could suggest that a supplementary course should be held to concretize the conceptual framework of today's political economy with what has been drawn from reality. But that would be like explaining the fertility of an orange to someone looking at discarded orange peel, and that is simply not possible. When it comes to gaining knowledge from reality, you cannot draw parallels to what is mere fiction. You have to start from scratch and work from the original, elementary level if reality is to have an effect.

And because in the education of the people, which was not interspersed with Latin, even if the old celestial and terrestrial knowledge, astrology and alchemy, lived on in a form that was no longer contemporary, the feeling that knowledge is that which one can say in Latin was gradually joined by the other feeling: superstition is everything that cannot be said in Latin but must be said in the vernacular. Only people do not express it that way because they add all kinds of embellishments. But our entire education is permeated on the one hand by the sentence: everything that can be expressed in Latin sentences is scientific; and on the other hand: everything that cannot be expressed in Latin sentences but must be expressed in the vernacular is superstition.

This is something that has been experienced much less in the West, but which has been experienced in a terribly tragic way, especially in Central Europe. In the East, again, to a lesser extent. Firstly, the East had allowed Greek, which was still imbued with the juice of reality, to flow into its civilization in many ways, and secondly, it did not take to heart what became the terrible inner struggle of the soul between the lively, popular and the dead dead Latin, did not take it very much to heart, but sat down and said to himself: “Oh, come now, only people who have fallen out of paradise get into such struggles in life; but we in the East have actually remained in paradise.” It is only an outward appearance that we have fallen out of paradise; we are inward people - inward; inward people!

You see, these things must be thoroughly understood if we are to comprehend the terrible split that exists today between people who live in what has been built in the Latin way and people who, as homeless souls – I used the expression here recently – want to seek the path to the spiritual from the elementary nature of their own being. And then the tremendous authority of something that is a branch of Latin confronts them. The respect for Latin is contained in the belief in authority that is shown towards our present-day science.

Just think what it meant over the centuries when a farmer's boy went to a monastery grammar school and learned Latin there! Then he came home during the holidays and knew Latin! Nobody understood anything of what the farm boy had learned, but all the others knew, well, that one must not and cannot understand anything that leads to science, to knowledge. They knew that now. Because the peasant boy who had come to the monastery school spoke in a language in which one seeks knowledge, and the other peasant boys who were peeling potatoes – well, that was not the case in earlier times – who were, let's say, somehow working in the meadow or in the fields, they had tremendous respect.

For one does not have respect for what one knows, but for what one cannot know. And this settled as a tremendous respect for what one cannot know, where one refrains from it from the outset. Yes, that then continues, and such things take paths that one can only follow if one really has the goodwill to follow the spiritual paths of humanity. The peasant boy in the 13th, 12th century, who only held the plough outside and otherwise helped, perhaps at most helped to crush the bacon into greaves and so on, the peasant boy knew: we cannot know anything, we will never be able to know anything, because only those who learn Latin can know something. The country boy says that, and then it goes the secret ways, and then, in more recent centuries, a naturalist gives a speech before the enlightened naturalists' assembly, and it culminates in the same words that the monastery farmer's boy said in the 12th century: We will not know ignorabimus! If one had the sense today to go back over historical facts, then going back centuries, one would find the origin of the Du Bois-Reymond impulse in the farmer's boy who did not learn Latin, compared to the farmer's boy who did learn Latin.

Now, when a language becomes dead, a language that undergoes the same regression as Latin has, tends to incline towards the dead in its words as well. But the dead in the world is the material. And so the Latin language, even where it was particularly dominant, drove things towards the dead, namely towards the material. Originally, as I have already mentioned, people everywhere knew what the transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ meant because they still knew the facts from living experience. The people could have known it too, but popular alchemy was considered superstitious, it was not in Latin. But the Latin language could not capture the spiritual. And so the trivial belief arose that what was imagined under the matter of bread and wine should change, and all the discussions about the doctrine of the Lord's Supper actually arose in such a way that those who discussed it proved nothing other than that they had adopted this doctrine in Latin. But there the words had only a dead character, and one no longer understood the living, just as today's anatomists no longer understand the living person from the dead corpse.

Central Europe has gone through this in a deeply tragic way, in that its language had nothing of what the Latin language brought forth. Central Europe had a language that would have been dependent on growing into the living. But thinking was dead because, after all, this thinking was also a dependency of Latin. And so the concepts did not find the words and the words did not find the concepts.

For example, the word “soul” could have found the living just as the word “psyche” once found the living in Greek. But the previous education was in Latin, and there was no knowledge of this living, and the living that was in the folk words was also killed off. That is why it is so important today to look again at the deep rift that had occurred between Greek and Roman civilization. And this deep rift is particularly evident when we look into the mystery being.

If we go to Greece, I would like to say that the most popular mysteries are the Eleusinian Mysteries, the Mysteries of Eleusis. They were the mysteries that had, so to speak, made the path to the spiritual most popular. And those who were initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries were the Telests; they were initiated into Eleusis. Let us first look at what is meant by the term “Eleusis” and then at what is meant by the term “Telests”.

Eleusis is only a linguistic transformation of Elosis and actually means: the place where those who are to come are, those who want to carry the future within themselves. Eleusis means: the future. And the Telests are those who are to come, the Eleusinian initiates are those who are to come. This indicates that people were aware that they are more of an imperfect being as they stand, and that they must become a coming being, one who carries the future within themselves. Telos anticipates the future, that which will only gradually be realized in the future. So that in the Eleusinian Mysteries, in the place of the coming, the coming ones, the imperfect human beings were trained to become perfect. They were telestai.

The whole meaning of this initiation was disrupted when it came to Romanism. In Greece, everything in the initiation pointed to the future, to the end of the earth. One should shape oneself with a strong inner impulse so that one would find the way after the end of the earth in the right way. Then one was a telest, one who should develop in the right way after the end of the earth.

When this came to the Romans, the expression of the Telesten gradually became that of the initiates – Initium, beginning. The goal was, so to speak, moved from the end of the earth to the beginning of the earth. The Telesten became initiates. Those who were initiated into the secrets of the future became knower of the past. The Promethean striving became Epimethean, striving for knowledge of the past. But only abstract knowledge of the past can remain; if one wants to penetrate into the future, one needs a living knowledge borne by the will, for there the will must develop itself into. The past is past. One can gain a higher knowledge by going back to the initium, to the past; but it remains knowledge; it becomes more and more abstract.

And with that, the impulse towards abstraction, that is, towards the reification that occurred from the 4th century AD and then more and more, moved into the Latin language. People wanted to return to the past, when ideas were still connected to life, because they knew that now they were no longer connected to life, that now one enters into inanimate speech when one rises to the level of ideas. And to be initiated in Greece meant to receive a higher life in one's soul. To be initiated in Roman times meant to resign oneself to a higher activity for one's life on earth and only to think about it: At the beginning of the world, man once had a higher activity, but from that he has descended; one cannot be a doer, at most a knower in relation to the higher knowledge.

You see, these are the difficulties we face today. When we use the word “initiation”, for example, it is so terribly vivid, because “initiation” is part of the whole concept: to immerse a person under water, to take them away from the sharp contours of physical life, to bring them into the liquid element of the world, so that they can move with their soul in the living, breathing, fleeting, fluid spiritual realm. To initiate is to introduce someone into the mobile, fluctuating, fluid world of life. Now this has to be translated somehow. And it is translated into the opposite. For example, one must say: initiation for the initiation.

It is necessary to know that such contradictions and difficulties are inherent in our present civilization. We must be clear about these skewers, I would say, that hurt us so much in our present civilization. Only then can that which really advances humanity come to life.

It is, of course, very far from my intention to turn these lectures into a diatribe against learning Latin. On the contrary, I would like people to learn even more Latin so that they can also come to feel that only the dead can be designated with Latin, that Latin quite rightly belongs in the dissecting room, but that if one wants to get to know what is not dead but alive, one must resort to the living element of language. Today, we cannot enter the future with some abstract intention, but only with an understanding, free of illusions, of what can again beat the life of the spirit out of the dead. And we are indeed living at a moment when the matter has actually been pushed to a decision in the spiritual life. We are living at an extremely important moment.

I don't know how many of you took seriously what I said in the last few issues of the “Goetheanum”, that only twenty, fifteen, ten years ago one could quote a person like Herman Grimm as a contemporary. Today he is a man of the past and one can only speak of him as of a man of the past. I meant what I said in these four articles in connection with Herman Grimm with immense bitterness. As you know, I myself used to quote Herman Grimm in a completely different sense than I quote him now. I quoted him where he could be used in his expression as a spirit that leads into the future. Today he is a thing of the past, belongs to history, and at most one can quote in such things, where he refers to ancient Greece and Rome, that which was still present only recently; that is already past today.

But I admit that this strange survival of a time that is quickly becoming the past demands something quite different in our time – and much of it is gently overslept! Because gently oversleeping is something that people love so much today.

But anthroposophy is the kind of knowledge that one does not merely collect in ideas, but that one should awaken to. That is why there are so many arguments, and also the one I have just given, is meant to have an awakening effect.

In the present time, when many things are being decided and very big questions are being asked of humanity, it is necessary to also raise oneself to the spiritual when considering contemporary phenomena. The spiritual is, after all, not an abstraction, but something that rises above the physical and sends its effects into the physical. And the person who sees only the physical, or even the physical permeated by the spiritual, is after all observing only a part of the world in which man, with his thinking and doing, is involved. For centuries this had a certain justification. But this is no longer the case for the present and the near future. And so you will see that today we are beginning to point out events of our present time in their direct connection with events that are taking place in the spiritual world and with the physical that is happening on earth.

Before this is possible, however, we must recall some of what was present spiritually in the development of mankind and led to the present historical moment. For a long time, in fact, only one part of world evolution was decisive for Western civilization and for everything that grew out of it. And this was justifiable. It was perfectly right that in the times when the Bible, with its Old Testament, was a necessity, the starting-point was taken from that moment in the development of the world when the creation of man was brought to mind through the intervention of Yahweh or Jehovah.

In an earlier period of human thought and world view, this moment in the development of the world, in which Yahweh or Jehovah intervened in it, was just one of many moments, not the one that was looked back on as the one that was actually decisive. In the Olden Days, what may be called the creation of the world by Jahve or Jehovah, according to the Old Testament, was preceded by a different development, one whose content was conceived much more spiritually than anything that was then presented in connection with the Bible, as it was usually understood. The moment that was grasped in the Bible, the creation of man by Jahve or Jehovah, was in fact a later moment in older times, and it was preceded by a different development that presented Jahve or Jehovah as the being that intervened in world evolution only later than other beings.

In Greece, when reflecting on the first stages of world evolution, one still pointed back to an older entity, to grasp which required something much more spiritual in cognition than is present in the Old Testament; one pointed back to the being that was understood in Greece as the actual creator of the world, as the Demiurgos. The Demiurge was imagined as a being existing in spheres of the highest spirituality, in which there was no need to think of any material existence, which can be linked to the kind of humanity that, according to the Bible, Yahweh or Jehovah is seen as the creator of.

We are therefore dealing with a very exalted being in the Demiurge, with a being as creator of the world, whose creative power essentially consists in expelling spiritual beings, if I may express it in this way, from itself. Gradually, as it were, lower and lower – the expression is certainly not quite accurate, but we have no other – gradually lower and lower were the entities that the demiurge allowed to emerge from himself; but entities that were far from being subject to earthly birth or earthly death.

In Greece, it was pointed out that they were called eons, and I would say that one distinguished between eons of the first kind, eons of the second kind, and so on (see diagram). These eons were the beings that had emerged from the Demiurge. Then, in the series of these eons, there was a relatively subordinate eon being, that is, an eon of a subordinate kind, Yahweh or Jehovah. And Jahve or Jehova united with matter – and now comes that which, for example, was presented in the first Christian centuries by the so-called Gnostics, but where there was always a gap in their understanding of what had been presented as a kind of renewal of the biblical content, but, as I said, there was always a gap in their understanding – Jahve or Jehova united with matter. And from this connection, man emerged.

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So that the creation of Yahweh or Jehovah consisted - always in the sense of these thoughts, which extended into the first Christian centuries - in that He Himself, as a descendant of a lower species from the more exalted eons up to the Demiurge, united with matter and thereby brought man into being. All that now arises, so to speak, is understandable for the older humanity, but no longer for the later humanity. All this arises on the basis of that which surrounds us in earthly life, and is sensually perceived. All this was summarized under the expression Pleroma (see diagram). The pleroma is therefore a world populated by individualized beings that rises above the physical world. In a sense, man, called into existence by Jahve or Jehovah, appears on the lowest level of this pleroma world. On the lowest level of this pleroma, an entity arises that actually does not live in the individual human being, nor in a group of peoples, but in all of humanity. It is the entity Achamoth, with which the striving of humanity towards the spiritual was indicated in Greece. So that through Achamoth there is a return to the spiritual (red arrow).

Now this world of ideas was joined by the other, that the Demiurge met the striving of Achamoth and sent down a very early aeon, who united with the man Jesus so that the striving of Achamoth could be fulfilled. So that in the man Jesus there is a being from the evolution of the eons, which was conceived by a much higher spiritual being, of a higher spiritual nature than Yahweh or Jehovah (green arrow).

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And in the case of those who had this idea in the first centuries of Christianity – and many people who looked up to the Mystery of Golgotha with deep fervor and sincerity had it – the idea developed in connection with this idea that a great secret surrounds the man Jesus with his indwelling of an ancient and thus primeval aeon.

The investigation of this mystery was cultivated in the most diverse ways. Today it is no longer very important to reflect in depth on the individual forms in which, in the first Christian centuries, through Greece, but especially in Asia Minor and the neighboring regions, it was imagined how this aeon being dwelled in the man Jesus. For the conceptions by which they sought to approach such a mystery in those days have long since vanished from the realm of human thought. What surrounds man sensually, what is connected with man between birth and death, lies in the realm of what man thinks today, and at most man infers from what he has around him between birth and death to what could spiritually underlie this physical-natural world. That direct relationship, that intimate relationship between the human soul and the pleroma, which once existed and was expressed in the same way as the relationship between man and the spiritual world, as the relationship between man and tree and bush, between cloud and wave, everything that was present in human conceptions in order to form an overview, a picture of the connection between man and that spiritual world, which interested man much more at that time than the physical world, all that has disappeared. The direct relationship is no longer there. And we can say: the last centuries in which such ideas could still be found in the civilization on which European, Western civilization then became dependent are the first, second, third and still a large part of the fourth century AD. Then the possibility of rising to the pleroma world disappears from what is human knowledge, and a different time begins.

The time begins that had thinkers such as Augustine, who was one of the first among them, or Scotus Erigena; the time begins that then had the scholastics, the time in which European mysticism flourished, a time in which one spoke quite differently on the basis of knowledge than in those ancient times. On the basis of knowledge, one spoke in such a way that one simply turned to the sensual-physical world and tried to extract the concepts and ideas from this physical-sensual world through a supersensible one.

But what humanity had in earlier times, the direct sense of the spiritual world, of the pleroma, was no longer there. For man was to enter a completely different stage of his development. It is not at all a matter of somehow defining the older time or the time of medieval human development according to values, but rather of recognizing what tasks humanity, insofar as it was civilized humanity, had in the different ages. One can say that the older time had indeed developed the direct relationship to the Pleroma. They had the task of developing those spiritual powers of knowledge that reside in the depths of the human soul, those powers of knowledge that go to the spirit, again.

Then, from the depths of humanity, there had to come a time - we have often spoken of it - when the pleromatic world was obscured, when man began to exercise those abilities that he did not have before, when man began to develop his own ratio, his rationalism, his thinking. In those older times, when the direct relationship to the pleroma was, one did not develop one's own thinking. Everything had been attained by way of illumination, inspiration, the instinctive supersensible attitude; the thoughts that men held were revealed thoughts. That welling up and springing forth of thought, that forming of one's own thoughts and logical connections, that only came about in later times. Aristotle had a presentiment of it, but it was only developed from the second half of the fourth century A.D. Then, during the Middle Ages, every effort was made to develop thinking as such, so to speak, and to develop everything that is connected with thinking.

In this respect, the Middle Ages, and in particular medieval scholasticism, made an enormous contribution to the overall development of humanity. It developed the practice of thinking in the formation of ideas and in the context of ideas. It developed a pure technique of thinking, a technique that has now been lost again.

What was contained in scholasticism as a thinking technique should be appropriated by people again. But in the present, people do not like to do it because in the present, everything is geared towards passively receiving knowledge, not actively acquiring it, actively conquering it. The inner activity and the urge for inner activity are missing in the present; scholasticism had this in the most magnificent way. That is why anyone who understands scholasticism is still able to think much better, much more vividly, and much more cohesively than, say, in the natural sciences today. This thinking in the natural sciences is schematic, short of breath, this thinking is incoherent.

And actually, people of the present should learn from scholasticism in this technique and practice of thinking. But it would have to be a different learning from what is loved today; it would have to be a learning by doing, by being active, and not merely consist of acquiring what has already been formed or read from the experiment. And so the Middle Ages were the time in which man was to develop inwardly, in soul and thought. One might say that the gods postponed the Pleroma, postponed their own revelation, because if they had continued to influence European humanity, this European humanity would not have developed that magnificent inner activity of thinking practice that was brought forth during the Middle Ages. And again, from this thinking practice emerged what is newer mathematics and such things, which are of direct scholastic descent.

So that one should imagine the matter thus: Through long centuries, the spiritual world, as if through a grace from above, gave humanity the revelation of the pleroma. Humanity saw this world full of light, this world revealing itself in and through light in ideas. A curtain was drawn in front of this world. In Asia, the decadent remnants of what was behind the curtain remained in human knowledge. Europe had a curtain, so to speak, that rose vertically from the earth towards the sky, which had its basis, I would say, in the Urals and the Volga, across the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. Imagine that a huge wall of wallpaper had been erected for Europe through the course I have just indicated, a wall through which one cannot see where in Asia the last decadent remnants of the pleroma developed, but in Europe nothing of it was seen and therefore the inner thinking practice was developed without any prospect of the spiritual world. Then you have an idea of the development of medieval civilization, which developed so great things out of man, but which did not see all that was behind the wall that ran along the Urals, along the Volga, along the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, which could not see through this wall and for which the East was at most a yearning, but not a reality.

They not only hinted symbolically, but quite literally, at what the European world actually was, how, as it were under the influence of a Giordano Bruno, Copernicus, Galilei, people said to themselves that they now wanted to get to know the earth, they wanted to get to know the ground, the lower regions. And then they found a science of heaven that was modeled on the science of the earth, while the old science of the earth was modeled on the science of the heavens with its pleromatic content. And so, as it were, in the darkness - for the light was blocked by the wall of the world described - the newer knowledge and the newer life of humanity arose.

It is a fact of human development that in certain epochs, when something specific is to emerge from humanity, other parts of what connects man are veiled, hidden. And basically, on the ground of the earth, behind the 'wallpaper for the earthly, only decadent Eastern culture developed. In Europe, Western culture remained stuck in its initial beginnings.

And this is basically the state of the European world still today, except that it is trying to inform itself about what, with the exclusion of all insight into the pleroma, has been acquired in the world of dark existence like a science, like a knowledge that is not, through all kinds of external, historical means. One has the opportunity to see through these things in their significance for the present when one realizes how, to a certain extent, behind the wallpaper, the earlier insight into the pleroma has become more and more decadent and regressive in the East, that a high, but instinctive, spiritual culture acquired by humanity has taken on decadent forms in Asia; that in Europe, the weaving and living of the human soul in the spirit has been pushed down into the sphere of the physical-sensual, which, for the time being, was only accessible to people in the medieval centuries. And so, beyond the wall-papered wall in the East, a culture arose that is not really a culture at all, that seeks to magically reproduce in earthly-physical forms what was to be experienced pleromatically in the weaving of the spirit. The rule and weaving of the spiritual beings in the Pleroma was to be carried down to earth in stone and wood, and their interaction was to resemble the weaving and nature of spiritual beings in the Pleroma. What gods actually do among themselves was thought to be the actions of physical, sensual idols. Idolatry took the place of divine service. And what can now be called oriental, North Asian-oriental magic, which has a bad effect, is the world of facts of the Pleroma, to which the soul's gaze was once directed, but which has been unlawfully transferred into the sensual. The magical sorcery of the shamans and its resonance in Central and North Asia (South Asia was also infected but has remained relatively freer) is the decadent form of the ancient pleroma view. Physical-sensory magic took the place of the human soul's participation in the divine realms of the pleroma. What the soul should do and had done in the past was attempted with the help of sensual-physical magic. A completely Ahrimanized pleroma activity became, so to speak, that which was practiced on earth and especially by the nearest spiritual beings bordering on the earth, but from which human beings were infected.

If we go east from the Urals and the Volga to Asia, we find, especially in the astral world adjoining the human earthly world, in the centuries of the second Middle Ages, in the centuries of the modern age, we have, to this day, an Ahrimanized magic, which is practiced by certain spiritual entities who, in their etheric-astral education, are indeed above man, but in their soul and spiritual education have remained below man. Throughout Siberia and Central Asia, and across the Caucasus, terrible ahrimanic, etheric-astral beings roam everywhere in the world immediately adjacent to the earthly, practising ahrimanic sorcery that has been lowered into the astral and earthly realms. And this has a contagious effect on people, who, after all, cannot do everything themselves, who are clumsy in these matters, but who, as I said, are infected, influenced by it and thus stand under the influence of the world bordering on the earth, immediately adjoining the astral. When something like this is described, it must be clear that what was called a myth or the like in ancient times is always based on a magnificent spiritual view of nature. And when people in Greece spoke of the fauns and satyrs, who, through their activity, interwove themselves into earthly events, they did not, as fanciful scholars of today imagine, construct beings in their fantasy, but in his spiritual nature he knew of those real beings, which populated the astral territory immediately adjacent to the earthly world everywhere as fauns and satyrs. At about the turn of the third or fourth century after Christ, all those fauns and satyrs moved over to the regions east of the Urals and the Volga, to the Caucasus. That became their homeland. There they underwent their further development. Before the carpet, before this cosmic carpet, what has emerged is that which developed out of the human soul as thinking and so on, as a certain dialectic. When people held fast to the inwardly strict and pure forms of thinking, to that which one must really develop within oneself, when one wants to develop the pure forms of scholastic thinking, then they have indeed cultivated that which was to be cultivated according to the counsel of the spirituality guiding the earthly, then they have worked in preparation for that which must come in our present time and in the near future. But this purity was not everywhere to be found. While in the East, beyond the wallpaper, if I may put it that way, the urge arose to draw down from the Pleroma the deeds of the Pleroma, to transform the happenings of the Pleroma into earthly magic and Ahrimanic magic, west of the wallpaper wall, the striving for reason, for dialectics, for logic, for the ideal understanding of the world of the earthly, all that which human feelings of pleasure signify, what human feelings of well-being signify in sensual existence. Human, earthly, luciferic drives mixed in with the pure use of reason that had been developed.

But as a result, alongside what developed as the pursuit of reason and ideal practice, directly adjacent to the earthly world, another astral world developed: an astral world developed that was, so to speak, in the midst of those who, as purely as Giordano Bruno or Galileo or even those who came later, strove for the development of earthly thinking, for an earthly maxim and technique of thinking. In the meantime, so to speak, the entities of an astral world arose, which now absorb all this into themselves, namely also into religious life, what sensual feelings are, to which rationalistic striving should be made subservient. And so, gradually, pure thinking acquired a sensual-physical character.

And much of what developed as such a thinking technique in the second half of the 18th century, but especially in the 19th century, is permeated and interwoven with what is present in the astral world, which now permeates this rationalistic world. The earthly desires of people, which were to be cleverly interpreted, cleverly recognized by a degenerate technique of thinking, developed in people an element that was nourishment for certain astral entities, which were out to use the thinking that was so highly developed to merely penetrate the earthly world.

Theories such as Marxism arose that limited thinking, instead of elevating it into the spiritual, to the mere weaving of sensual-physical entities and sensual-physical impulses.

This was something that made it increasingly possible for certain Luciferic entities weaving in this astral realm to intervene in human thought. Human thought was completely permeated by what certain astral entities then thought, and the Western world became just as obsessed by them as the descendants of the shamans in the East.

And so finally arose beings who were possessed by such astral beings, who introduced human desires into astutely earthly thinking. And beings arose such as those who then, from the astral plane, possessed the Lenins and their comrades.

And so we have set two worlds against each other: one east of the Urals and Volga and Caucasus, the other west of them, which, I might say, form a self-contained astral area. We have the Ural area, the adjoining Volga area, the Black Sea, where the former wallpaper wall used to be. East and west of the Urals and Volga, we have an astral territory of the earth in which, in an intensive way, beings are striving together as if in a cosmic marriage. Those beings have the luciferic thinking of the West as their life air, while those beings, east of the Urals and Volga in the adjoining astral territory, have the earthy magic of the former pleroma acts as their life element. These beings of an Ahrimanic and Luciferic nature are gathering together. And we have a very special astral territory on earth, in which people now live with the task of seeing through this. And when they fulfill this task, they fulfill something that is imposed on them in the overall development of humanity in a magnificent way. But if they turn their eyes away from it, then they will be inwardly permeated and possessed by all this in their feelings — possessed by that ardent marriage that is to be concluded in the cosmic sense by the Asian Ahrimanized entities and the European Luciferized entities, which strive towards each other with all cosmic voluptuousness and create a terribly sultry astral atmosphere and in turn make people possessed by themselves. And so, gradually, an astral region has come into being to the east and west of the Urals and Volga, rising up directly from the earth's surface, which represents the earthly astral region for entities that are the metamorphosed fauns and metamorphosed satyrs.

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When we look towards this part of Eastern Europe today, we see not only people when we see the whole of reality, but we also see, so to speak, what has become a kind of paradise for fauns and satyrs in the course of the Middle Ages and modern times, who have undergone their metamorphosis, their development. And if we understand in the right way what the Greeks saw in fauns and satyrs, then we can also look at this development, at this metamorphosis that the fauns and satyrs have undergone. These beings, who, I might say, always go about among human beings and carry on their voluptuous work in the astral plane, driven by magic from Asia, which they have corrupted with Ahriman, and by European rationalism, which they have corrupted with Lucifer. But they infect human beings with it. These transformed, metamorphosed satyrs and fauns are seen in such a way that, towards the lower the lower physical form, the goat-like form has become particularly wild in them, so that they have a goat-like form that shines outwardly through the lust, while upwardly they have an extraordinarily intelligent head, a head that has a kind of radiance but that is the image of all possible Luciferian, rationalistic sophistication. Shapes between bears and rams, with a human physiognomy that is cunningly drawn into the voluptuous, but at the same time into the incredibly clever, these entities inhabit the paradise of satyrs and fauns. For this region in the astral has become a paradise for satyrs and fauns in the last centuries of the Middle Ages and the first centuries of the modern era – a paradise of transformed satyrs and fauns that inhabit it today.

I would say that, beneath all that is happening, humanity, which has been left behind, dances around with its dulled concepts and describes only the earthly, while those things that truly belong to reality no less than those that can be seen with the sensual eyes and comprehended with the sensual mind play into the earthly.

What is now developing between Asia and Europe can only be understood when it is understood in its astral-spiritual aspect, it can only be understood when one can see what has remained over there from a reality as decadent shaman ism in Central and North Asia has remained over there from a reality, what is voluptuously striving there as today's decadent magism, in order to connect, so to speak, in a cosmic marriage with what has been given the name Bolshevism for external reasons. There, east and west of the Ural and Volga region, a marriage is sought between magism and Bolshevism. What is taking place there appears so incomprehensible to humanity because it is taking place in a strange mythical form, because the Luciferic-spiritual of Bolshevism is combining with the completely decadent forms of shamanism that are approaching the Urals and Volga and crossing this area. From west to east, from east to west, events interact in this way, which are precisely the events of the paradise of satyrs and fauns. And what plays into it from the spiritual into the human world is the result of this lustful interaction of the satyrs and fauns who have migrated here from ancient times and of what the Western spirits, who only develop the intellectual, the things belonging to the head, have formed in themselves, and who then want to connect with the satyrs and fauns who have come over from Asia.

I would like to say that, outwardly, it looks as if those cloud-like spiritual forms are clumping together the further they penetrate eastward toward the Urals and the Volga, whereby the other body remains unclear remains unclear – as if these formations were clumping together into, one might say, voluptuous-looking, sophisticated-looking heads; as if they were constantly becoming heads and losing the rest of their physicality. Then, from the east, towards the Ural and Volga region, come the metamorphosed satyrs and fauns, whose nature as goats has almost become nature as bears, and the more they come from the west, the more they lose their heads. And in a kind of marriage, a cosmic marriage, such a being that loses its head meets a being coming from Europe that offers its head. And so these metamorphosed organizations, endowed with the superhuman head, come into being; so these metamorphosed satyrs and fauns arise in the astral realm. They are the inhabitants of the earth just like physical humanity. They move within the world within which physical people also move. They are the seducers and tempters of physical people because they can make people obsessed with themselves, because they not only need to convince them by talking but can make them obsessed with themselves. Then it happens that people believe that what they do is done by themselves, by their own nature, whereas in truth what people do in such a field is often only done because they are inwardly imbued with such a being, which from the East has attained the body of a goat transformed into something bear-like and the European human head metamorphosed in the West into something superhuman.

It is our task today to grasp these things with the same strength with which myths were once formed. Only by consciously entering the realm of the imagination can we understand today what we must understand if we are to and want to consciously place ourselves in the development of humanity.

Recently, many members of the Anthroposophical Society, especially those with a scientific background, have come to believe that a discussion should take place between what is given in Anthroposophy as world knowledge and what is given today as scientific world knowledge based on the assumptions of the second half of the 19th century. Yes, it is believed that if one, as it were, accommodates science in a certain way, responds to it as much as possible, this could result in something extraordinarily favorable for anthroposophy.

It is precisely because scientific activity has entered the Anthroposophical Society, which in other respects is to be welcomed as an extremely gratifying fact, that an extraordinary number of errors have arisen with regard to the point mentioned.

We must not forget that in the course of the 19th century, under the influence of what was gradually called and is still called science, general human knowledge has taken on a character in relation to which anthroposophical knowledge of the world is quite different. One must assume that anyone who has grown into present-day scientific life with their habitual way of thinking will find it impossible to switch to the anthroposophical view without further ado. Therefore, one must be aware that no kind of approval of the anthroposophical view of the world can come from this side in the near future.

Those people who either have not grown into today's scientific work with their habitual way of thinking or who, as young people, grow into it and then out of it again, will be the ones who will mainly recognize the validity of anthroposophical world knowledge.

To bring a little life into what I have just said, I would like to speak today about an initial perspective on the path of Anthroposophy through the world. I would like to structure these three lectures somewhat aphoristically so that friends who have come from far away can take as much with them as possible. I would like to tie in with all kinds of phenomena in the life of civilization today, but in the main I would like to seek the content for these lectures in purely anthroposophical discussions.

We know what the facts are that a person experiences when they pass through the gate of death. Today, in order to present the physical perspective of anthroposophy to our souls, so to speak, we will first consider only the very first period of life after passing through the gate of death. It has often been mentioned how, throughout their entire life on earth, human beings have such a close connection between their physical body and their etheric body or formative forces that this connection is maintained throughout their entire life on earth.

When a person interrupts the ordinary state of consciousness during their life on earth through the state of sleep and dreams, they carry the astral body and the ego out of the physical and formative forces. These, in turn, are so closely connected that they do not separate. Thus, in the course of a normal twenty-four-hour day, the separation that occurs in the course of a normal day is such that the physical body and the etheric or formative body on the one hand and the ego and the astral body on the other hand separate, while each side forms a closely knit whole.

When a person now passes through the gate of death, it is different. Then it happens that the physical body is discarded first and that for a very short time a connection is established between the I, the astral body and the etheric body, which was not present during life on earth. This connection gives the first experiences that a person goes through after death, which only last for days. What are these experiences?

They consist of the person, as if melting away from himself, seeing everything that he has taken in through his senses and also through the mind, which combines the perceptions of the senses, during his life on earth.

During our life on earth, we become accustomed to seeing colored things and processes that shine in colors in our view when we look out into the world. But we also retain the impressions of colors in our memory, albeit in a weakened form. We carry them with us through our memory. It is the same with the impressions of the other senses. And if we are honest in self-observation, then we say to ourselves: Actually, when we sit in the quiet chamber and let our memories, that is, our inner selves, play, what we experience from our inner selves is composed of the shadowy images of external impressions. In our ordinary consciousness, we live either in the immediate, vivid impressions of the external world or in the shadowy memories of it. We will talk tomorrow about what we have beyond that. Today we only want to call to mind very strongly that during our whole life on earth this consciousness is filled with colors and color processes that spread over things, with sounds, with sensations of warmth and cold, in short, with the impressions that we receive through the senses, and with their shadowy afterimages in the inner life of the soul, as one might also say, in memory. Let us consider this as a kind of starting point.

Everything we experience melts away when we pass through the portal of death. Within a few days, so to speak, everything that fills our soul from birth to death has dissolved into the greater cosmos. This can be called: The etheric body or formative forces of the human being separate from the I and the astral body, after first entering into a connection with them that did not previously exist in earthly life.

Now let us imagine more precisely what this experience is like. I will make a schematic drawing for this purpose. Let us assume that the physical body of the human being is characterized by this schematic drawing; the etheric or formative body is characterized by this schematic drawing (shaded in yellow). We only experience what I have characterized as this, this interrelated structure of physical and etheric bodies, when we are stuck inside after waking up. So we actually always experience it from the inside. And to help us recall this as accurately as possible, I would like to design the drawing in the following way. I will indicate green for the part of the etheric body that seems inward. The physical body is discarded at death anyway, so we need not consider it at this point. And I will indicate what is directed outwards from the etheric body with this red line.

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I just said that we only experience this structure of the etheric body from the inside after waking up; so, in a sense, we only experience what shines inward in the green. We do not experience what shines outward in the red.

When we have passed through the gate of death and enter into a certain connection with the etheric body with our ego and our astral body, this connection happens in the following way. You must now imagine that the whole etheric body turns like a glove when you turn all the finger linings inside out, as you would normally do with the skin, turning the inside out. So that I now have to draw what is colored red on the outside in the earthly state as the inner part, and what is colored green on the inside, I have to draw green on the outside. The entire etheric body turns in on itself. But this turning around is connected with an immeasurably rapid enlargement of the etheric body. It grows, it becomes gigantic, it expands immeasurably far into the universe, so that I would now have to make the drawing something like this (large green board 8 circles).

And whereas we used to be in there with our ego and our astral body, we are now (red circle) facing the etheric body that expands into the cosmic, but we look at it from its other side. That which we previously carried with us without meaning, the red on the outside, is now turned inwards. What was previously turned inwards and what alone has meaning for us during our life on earth is now turned outwards, no longer of any concern to us, and disperses into the universe. But in this green – of course presented schematically – is contained everything that we have had within us during our life on earth as a colored, sounding, and so on world.

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As green, so to speak, goes through the etheric body turning to the other side, we lose it completely and we get a very different world as an impression. We must not imagine that we can still have the same world that we had during our life on earth after death. This world goes away. To imagine, for example, that after death we could experience, for my sake, in a different edition, the content of earthly life, that is quite wrong, that does not correspond to the facts. What we experience through the turning of the etheric or formative body is indeed of a gigantic size compared to the content of earthly life, but it is something quite different. We experience the whole of our earthly education through the fact that the outside is now turned inwards, in powerful impressions that are different from the sensory impressions. We do not experience the blush of the rose, but we experience how we have formed the blush of the rose within us as an idea. That is where it begins to be not as calm as it is in physical life. There, in earthly life, the roses are so beautifully arranged in a rose garden, and each one gives peace, and one feels suspended in the peace. Now the rose garden becomes something completely different, now the rose garden becomes an event in time. And as we gradually let our gaze wander from one rose to the next, as we formed the image of the first rose, the second, the third rose and so on within us, this, as in a living becoming, in a lightning-fast rippling and weaving, one rose after the other arises, but not as roses, but as images that unfold, this now emerges as our inner life as if in a sea of events. And so we are confronted with something we have not seen during our life on earth: the becoming of this earthly life, the gradual development of this earthly life. We know how our soul has become from childhood on. That which we have left completely unnoticed during our earthly life is now playing out in us. It is as if we had stepped out of ourselves, had become a second person and were watching how we gradually formed the simple ideas of childhood, the more complicated ones of later years, and so on. We see the emergence of all this earthly life from its inner side. We see how this earthly life, this earthly existence, is formed from hour to hour. Yes, we gain the impression that this whole earthly life is actually formed from the cosmos. For everything we perceive grows into the immeasurable, into the cosmic, and by growing into it, we become clear about the fact that what has been formed in us in earthly life is also formed from the cosmos.

And now we are gradually getting a valid idea of what it is like to live this human life on earth. Let us take as our starting point what is more or less believed today with regard to this life on earth. Man eats, and in doing so he takes the substances that are outside into his own organism. This is an undeniable fact. He also changes these substances. He changes them in his mouth, and then all the more so in the rest of his organism. What is absorbed goes into the whole organism, really goes into the whole organism. Science will still come and say: But we are also constantly losing substances to the outside. We need only think of how you cut your nails and your hair if you are not yet bald. You can see from the dandruff and so on how the human being loses matter, loses substance. And it is common knowledge today that in this way, by constantly losing matter, the human being completely rebuilds itself over the course of about seven years.

So that, if I want to put it drastically, everything sitting here on the chairs, in terms of the material, was scattered all over the world eight or nine years ago. Let me put it this way: what is sitting here on these chairs could only have gathered over the last seven to eight years. If what was in all of you more than seven or eight years ago were still sitting here in muscle tissue and so on – you are already older, so you will have regenerated several times – you would not all be sitting here.

So, of what you carried as your muscle meat, blood and other things at home or elsewhere seven or eight years ago, nothing is sitting there; you have gradually cut it off, shed it and so on.

But if science is now materialistically oriented, then how does it answer? It says something like this: During these last seven years we have all been eating. That which we have eaten now is here, and that which we ate earlier is no longer here. For example, each of you sitting here has a heart, doesn't he? Now, the physical matter of this heart, so science tells you, has renewed itself in the last seven to eight years. So you definitely have a new heart compared to your condition nine years ago, let's say. Yes, you could say something like that, if you think in terms of the present.

But it is not so. This idea exists only because people do not know what I have just explained to you, do not include it at all in the realm of their scientific observation and thinking. They know nothing of that reversal of the ether or formative forces of the body, of what shows us, after we have passed through the gate of death, how the whole being has actually come into being bit by bit. Because if one knows this, then one is also able to look into the human organism quite differently. And only then does one learn to recognize the truth.

One can believe that the cabbage, potatoes, other vegetables, cherries, plums and so on that one has enjoyed over the past few years have gradually accumulated this heart matter. But it has not. Essentially – listen to me when I say this – the heart you carry within you has not much to do with the material you have taken in over the last seven to eight years. Rather, the heart you carry within you today has essentially arisen in a very mysterious way out of the ether of the cosmos, which you have drawn together into the density of the heart over the last seven to eight years. So it is not that your heart has been renewed out of physical matter of the last seven to eight years, but it has been renewed out of the cosmos. You have renewed your heart and your other organs out of the ether. You have actually made yourself into a new person over the past few years, not from the earth, but from the cosmos. This can be seen from the effects of the etheric body after death, how it has worked during the whole of life on earth, that we have always regenerated ourselves from the cosmos.

Now your materialistic conscience – after all, everyone has to have one of those – will say: But we did eat. We did absorb external matter, and internal processes took place as a result.

Yes, but these internal processes have less to do with your actual, deeper nature than you might think.

Now we can even state a fact that may seem somewhat grotesque to today's thinking: You are all sitting there now; what you have renewed in yourselves over the past seven to eight years did not live in the cabbage and on the potato fields, but lived out in the universe in the sun, moon and stars, coming down from there, and you formed yourselves anew out of the universe. In doing so, we have pointed out an error that simply has to arise from today's thinking. They seek only the relationships of human regeneration to physical earth matter, but not to ether. And the consequence of this is that once one has become accustomed to the ideas presented in current physiology, one cannot help but regard everything that is given from the anthroposophical point of view as a kind of fantasy. Therefore, we must be clear about how fruitless discussions are today, how only by mastering both fields, contemporary science and anthroposophy, can we shed light on them from both sides, but how we must not give ourselves over to the hope – because if we give ourselves over to this hope, it is actually to the detriment of anthroposophy! - that those who are accustomed to materialistic ideas can be drawn over to it so easily by a discussion. One must have very clear and precise ideas about this. Then one will realize that, first of all, the whole way in which one appropriates anthroposophy must be appropriated by people before they can even enter into this anthroposophical way of looking at and knowing things.

I said that essentially we actually regenerate our new human being from the cosmos. We do not find the substances in the cosmos that we then find in the heart, of course not, because there they are so thin that they cannot be detected by physical means on earth. There they are ethereal. But what appears as dense heart matter at a certain age has only just condensed from the cosmic ether. So what is there today was all still out in the heavens, in the stars, nine or ten years ago, and what has remained, what has pushed its way in from the matter that should actually have formed out of the ether, that is what causes illness. When we carry physical matter that is too old within us, then that is one cause of illness. And deep insights into the nature of disease are gained when one knows how matter, instead of being expelled, persists; for all matter that is taken up as physical earth matter is actually doomed to be expelled again. If it persists in the organism, then it becomes the cause of disease.

You can also see from this how this really real knowledge, which we can only gain by having an insight into what occurs in us as first experiences shortly after we have completely discarded the physical body, plays a practical role. So after death, everything that we have had in the way of sense impressions and the mind's processing of sense impressions melts away from us. We look at the world quite differently. Minerals, plants, and animals, as we previously looked at them, are not there at all. How people become, that is there.

We have passed through the gateway of death. We have thereby resigned from the scene of the earth. We have stepped onto the scene of the cosmos: Another world surrounds us. It is as if we had stepped out of a small chamber of earthly existence into the majestically vast chamber of the cosmos, and we feel spread out over the cosmos, would truly not fit into the small earthly chamber. So we have entered the scene of the cosmos. And on this scene of the cosmos we must now remain until we descend again to our earthly existence, only that we now enter into contact with completely new worlds, with worlds whose essence belongs to the higher hierarchies.

This consideration, which one gains so directly in connection with man, must, however, be extended to the whole of nature. And I would like to characterize to you what has to happen there in the following way.

Let us assume, for example, that we have gone back a very long time in evolution, in the evolution of the earth. We would encounter very different living creatures and very different events on earth. You know that there have been periods of time when giant animals of a lower kind lived that no longer exist today. The entire species has died out and is no longer present. The paleontologist and geologist search for individual remains in the formations of the earth. Let us assume that I would draw schematically this very old development, where, for example, ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, these strange beasts, would have lived here on earth. Yes, these creatures were not formed out of physical earthly matter, they were formed out of the cosmos, out of ether. And when the time approached when these creatures gradually died out, the entire etheric matter remained, if I may put it that way. (See drawing: yellow.) Now there were no more creatures. But all the etheric matter from which these creatures had formed remained behind, just as our etheric body remains behind. And this etheric matter was the cause that in later times, after this etheric formation had passed through the cosmos, other beings formed in earthly existence. Of these, in turn, the etheric remained behind. From these, other entities formed. And finally, the world of animals emerged as it exists today.

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So if you have three consecutive periods here, first period, second period, third period, you have, let's say, consecutive animal forms. But for the following one to always arise from the previous one, a passage through the cosmos with the help of the ether is necessary, just as a passage through the cosmos between two earth lives is necessary for man. And if we finally have entities here (see drawing: red), then that can in turn pass into the ether, and there, formed out of the ether in a certain period, the human being can appear. But the influence has always happened in a roundabout way through the cosmos.

Now comes the purely materialistic observer. He sees all this, and now he believes that one thing has arisen out of the other. Certainly, on earth it also follows; but an etheric activity, a cosmic activity lies in between.

In the 19th century, it became common practice to look only at what follows on the earth, but not at what cosmic activity is beyond the earthly. Therefore, the consideration remained: ultimately man, before that simpler forms, still simpler forms and so on. This is what we can obtain as the development of organisms through natural science, which does not involve the etheric. This natural science could obtain nothing other than what it did obtain. If one admits its presuppositions, that one should not get involved in the ethereal, one poses the question in such a way that one should only consider that which belongs to earthly existence; yes, then there is no other choice than to present the physical evolutionary current. Darwinists have done this, Haeckel has done this, and to demand more as earth science or even to want to polemicize against what has come about as earth science is nonsense. Because only when one adds the knowledge of the ethereal world can that arise which belongs to it. So you see, there is no point in direct polemic; but if someone wants to remain on the ground of natural science, he can. And to the other, who speaks of some other principles of formation in what is on earth, he can always say: Yes, that has no significance at all. That is not there, he will say, when he has become accustomed to the merely earthly way of looking at things.

If one wants to speak differently, then one must first acquire knowledge of the ethereal world. So for a valid, reasonable polemic against today's science, the only thing left to do is to say: In your field, o naturalist, you are quite right, nothing else can come of it, we do not deny that, we fully admit that. But if you want to talk to us about what we mean, well, then you must first familiarize yourself with the elementary processes in the cosmic ether, then we can talk to each other. Otherwise you are not grounded in reality if you do not start from these things.

You see, a member sitting here has written a little book on botany from a spiritual scientific point of view. A very disparaging review of it appeared recently in a local paper. Well, what can one say about that! I said: Imagine you were the botanist who wrote this review, you had never heard of anthroposophy and this second edition of your little book came to your notice. It is only natural that you would write just like him! The fact that you do not do so, but on the contrary have written the little book yourself, is the very reason why you have taken up anthroposophy in the first place. You only have to put yourself in the other person's shoes for once, and then you can write all these opposing things yourself. But you see, if you want a person who has once put himself in one direction with all his habits of thought to be different, if you want him to be an anthroposophist, it seems to me almost like someone who has had a blonde daughter suddenly wants a black one. It doesn't work like that. What man has become through today's science is not something that can be changed in the twinkling of an eye. You have to think realistically.

The period that followed the mid-19th century gave the whole state of mind a very specific character. I will give you an example of this from a completely different angle.

You know that there is something today called analytical psychology, psychoanalysis. I have often said here that psychoanalysis produces some beautiful things; but, first of all, it arises from an incomplete, amateurish knowledge of human physiology, so it is amateurishness. Then it arises from an amateurish knowledge of the human soul, of human psychology. That is also amateurism. And because one usually follows the other, the things multiply, and psychoanalysis is actually amateurism squared. - If you multiply d by d, you get d?. But it does have an effect, even if only in an amateurish way, if it is pursued further. And one can also understand that this thing could gradually emerge from inadequate physiology and psychology. But it does rub off on people's minds, this way of thinking does rub off!

Today we have an enormous literature about it. You could fill a large library with psychoanalytic literature. People argue terribly in it, so that if you go into the polemics, it is sometimes quite interesting. Well, this psychoanalysis has also been mentioned here from time to time. One can really fill a library with what has been written about it. But if so much is written in this field, then there must be a lot of study in it, at least on the surface. This colors the state of mind of people.

Now there is something very peculiar. You see, in 1841, there was already a psychoanalytic literature in Central Europe. But it consisted of only fourteen lines. They read: “In our modern overcrowded consciousness, we throw many things around that we cannot develop because we lack the time. They remain in us in the form of tasks that we could work on. They are, to quote Tieck, unborn souls that, yearning for existence, hover in the background of our own soul as if in a limbo."

You see, in these fourteen lines - if you make the lines longer, there is even less - the principle of the whole of psychoanalysis is contained. At that time, it was called “unborn souls” that live in the background of the soul in a limbo, struggling for existence. Now it is called “hidden provinces in the depths of the soul,” “soul provinces,” and so on. In those days, however, it was considered such an insignificant thing that it was noted in a few lines. Today our civilization has come to write entire libraries about it. But everything essential, everything fundamental, is contained in those fourteen lines. But in those days, when it was all contained in just fourteen lines, the libraries were filled with different books than they are filled with today, and people who wanted to learn took in different material.

If today, as a young student, you somehow study psychology and are supposed to write a dissertation, you can't avoid psychoanalysis. You have to study it. Yes, it rubs off on the soul. In 1841, the essential was expressed in these fourteen lines. It was not considered something so important that could have such a tremendous significance for human thought. And so it has been with many things.

It means something tremendous, whether we look at any field of facts or whether we do not look. In those days, in 1841, people slept through psychoanalysis. This thought, which I read to you in the fourteen lines, only emerged in a single person, in Karl Rosenkranz. He dreamt about it once. Dreams pass quickly and do not have much influence on life. But people filled their waking hours with other things. Today, on the other hand, much is missed because one has to be awake for psychoanalysis and similar things.

This matter really needs to be looked at carefully, then it will be possible to say where to start in order to bring anthroposophy to bear in the world. In any case, polemics are not the answer. Polemics are almost like someone lying in a room and snoring terribly, and cannot be woken up at all, and someone else is watching, and now the person watching is trying hard to make the snorer, who is sleeping through everything, understand

what the other is saying. He cannot understand him. Nor is it possible for two fields of spiritual life to communicate with each other if each sleeps for the other's field and only watches for his own.

Now there will still be many who sleep for anthroposophy. They will not wake up so quickly for anthroposophy. But one would like the anthroposophists to wake up for the others, so that they know why anthroposophy is the all-embracing one, not only out of their blind faith but out of a real insight into the quality of the other and also encompasses what the others consider to be the only one, and how anthroposophy broadens the horizon because it goes beyond those areas that the others consider to be merely within a narrow horizon.

In this way I have presented one of the perspectives, the perspective that arises when we ask about the details of what surrounds us as the earth world and what melts away after death. It is the physical perspective. In order to be understood, it leads us into that which is immediately adjacent to it, into the etheric.

Later, we will look at the soul perspective, how the human being awakens to the soul perspective, and then conclude with a consideration of the spiritual perspective of anthroposophy. These will be the three perspectives of anthroposophy.

If we look at the spiritual life in our age, we cannot but see – if we are sufficiently unprejudiced – that the whole and the great in this age have lost more and more of their soul, especially since the second half of the 19th century. Soul is missing from our contemporary civilization; and if the individual wants to awaken his soul to inner life, then it becomes necessary for him to do so not through experiencing the great traits of our civilization, but in solitude.

We have generally lost the ability to truly follow the basic impulses of our present life with an alert mind. There have been phenomena for external observation, which began in the 19th century, that should have called for a powerful attention to what is happening in spiritual life. But such phenomena have passed more or less without a trace. Indeed, it can be said that such phenomena have not even been formulated in modern times in such a way that their formulation could have made a sufficiently deep, awakening impression on modern humanity.

I would like to begin today's reflection with an observation that, on the basis of its externality, may be received by one person with a certain smile, by another historically registered as one of the many world-view aberrations with a neutral meaning, and by a third combated with some anger. Above all, however, I would like to try to simply formulate the facts as I see them.

In the last two decades of the 19th century, it often became an important question for me as to who was actually the cleverest person of the age. Of course, such things can only be understood in a relative sense. So please don't construe the things I will say in connection with this question too literally, of course; but with the necessary grain of salt with which one takes such things, I ask you to consider the matter as something that I may present as a characteristic of our age.

Our age is the age of intellectualism. Intellect has reached very special heights. And so one must ask oneself: What does the intellect of man actually depend on during earthly existence? Certainly, the powers of the intellect, the active part of the intellect, depends on the soul of the human being – and we will have to consider this soul later – depends on what the human being unconsciously carries within him for earthly consciousness in the form of an etheric organism, a body of formative forces, an astral body and the I organization.

But in the present period of the earth's development, the human being is simply not yet so far advanced that he can really bring the activity of the intellect, as it lives in these three links of human nature, to existence. If the human being did not have his physical body, the intellect would have to remain silent during his earthly existence. It would be like the way a person walking into a wall feels: when walking straight ahead and not even paying attention to his arms and hands, he sees nothing of himself, but if the wall he is walking into is a mirror, then he sees himself. Just as a person who does not see himself, so would the intellect of man be: he would not perceive himself if he did not have the physical body that reflects his activity, that throws back his activity. Thus man owes the greatness of his intellect in the present age to the reflection of his inner soul activity through the physical body. But while man will never mistake his mirror image for himself, this is precisely what happens with intellect. Man ultimately mistakes as intellect that which lives only in the physical web as the mirror image of the intellect. He surrenders himself to the mirror image. But then the mirror image will rule in him.

In a sense, man surrenders himself completely to his physical body with his intellect. If man succeeds in truly surrendering himself completely to the physical body with his intellect, then this intellect becomes highly perfected. When we allow our inner being to be active, then we still occasionally grope our way through all kinds of feelings and urges that we have, through prejudices, through sympathies and antipathies, then we grope our way into the intellect. There we make it imperfect. But if we become completely dry, sober, cold natures, if, to speak in the Hamerling sense, we combine the male soullessness of the billionaire with the female soullessness of the mermaid, as Hamerling has portrayed such a union in his “Homunculus,” and thereby acquire the ability to think as we must think in accordance with our physical bodies, then a relative perfection of our intellectuality is precisely possible in this age. Then we learn to think in such a way that, in a sense, the intellect moves itself within us, that the intellect becomes, in a certain sense, an automaton, playing at a relatively highest perfection.

I said this to myself back then in the last two decades of the 19th century and asked myself: Who is the cleverest person in contemporary civilization in this sense, that he has brought the intellect to a relatively highest perfection? Well, you may smile, but I really couldn't come up with anything other than that the cleverest person in contemporary civilization is Eduard von Hartmann, the philosopher of the unconscious. It is by no means some kind of daring paradox, but something that emerged for me from a perhaps not entirely soulless consideration of the last two decades of the 19th century.

You can imagine that one has great respect for the person whom one considered the most intelligent person of the age. That is why I also dedicated what I wanted to express in terms of epistemology in my booklet “Truth and Science” to Eduard von Hartmann. So I am not speaking out of disrespect, I speak out of deep respect. The preconditions for Eduard von Hartmann's philosophy are, after all, that Eduard von Hartmann was actually trained as an officer. He made it to the rank of first lieutenant, but then contracted a knee injury and subsequently transformed the intellectuality that was actually intended for modern militarism into philosophy. It is interesting that this is precisely how what I can only formulate as follows came about: Eduard von Hartmann was the cleverest man of the last third of the 19th century.

He therefore also saw clearly what one can clearly see with the understanding of the last third of the 19th century. He saw through human consciousness, as it is bound to the earth, but bound to the physical human body. Being clever, he did not deny the spirit. But he transferred it into the sphere of the unconscious, into that which can never carry a body, which can never come into intimate contact with the physical, and which, therefore, since it is always extra-physical, that is, spiritual, can only be unconscious.

Conscious – Eduard von Hartmann told himself – one can only be in the body. But if the body is not the only thing, if there is a spirit, then the spirit cannot be conscious, only unconscious. When a person passes through the gate of death, Hartmann says, we cannot expect him to penetrate into a different consciousness, because beyond this earthly consciousness there is only the unconscious. The person enters the sphere of the unconscious spirit. The unconscious spirit is everywhere except where the person's consciousness is.

Eduard von Hartmann's philosophy is therefore a philosophy of the spirit, but a philosophy of the unconscious spirit. So that there is no consciousness except in the human body, that there is spirit everywhere, but spirit that knows nothing of itself or the world and nothing of itself.

Is it not absolutely clear that this unconscious spirit can never penetrate into anything outside of itself except through the physical human body? That is clear from the outset. But something very significant is said with this. It is said that this intellect, which thus elevates itself to the status of the unconscious, lacks love.

I am not saying that Eduard von Hartmann lacked love, but his intellect, which was precisely its significance, lacked all love. It is not possible for the loveless intellect to build the bridge anywhere. Therefore, it remains only in itself, but as a result, it cannot gain consciousness. He remains in the sphere of unconsciousness. One could also say that he remains in the sphere of unkindness.

This already indicates that this is also the sphere of soullessness, because where love cannot occur, soulfulness gradually fades away altogether. And so, I would say, we have to feel the atmosphere of unkindness from the whole and great civilization of the second half of the 19th century, on whose shoulders our civilization stands.

It is now highly remarkable where Eduard von Hartmann has led this indulgence of the unconscious mind, combined with unkindness.

He looked at this world of earthly life that gives man consciousness. But if we could not live as earth people in our body, if we could not submerge ourselves in our body with every waking and connect ourselves completely with our body, what would we face?

When we awaken as earth humans, the I and the astral body, which were secreted during sleep, return to the physical body and the etheric body. There the I and the astral body connect very intimately with the etheric body and physical body, and this I and the astral body become one with the etheric body and the physical body.

And as long as we are awake as an earthly human being, we must speak of an intimate unity of the spiritual-soul and the physical-bodily. But if we separate the spiritual-soul from the physical-bodily, as Eduard von Hartmann does intellectually, then the following reality would correspond to it: a reality that would occur when we, on waking up, enter our physical and etheric bodies, but do not merge with them, but only dwell in them. According to Eduard von Hartmann, the unconscious mind dwells in the body and thereby becomes conscious in physical life on earth. So it thinks something that, if it were to occur in reality, would be as if, when we wake up, we would indeed enter our physical and etheric bodies, but would not merge with them – but would live inside them, looking around as we look around in a house, seeing everything inside – so we would be separate inside. But what would happen then?

Now, if we, with our spiritual and mental selves, were not merged with our physical body but lived separately from it, then that would mean an unspeakable, unbearable pain for our soul; because every pain arises from the organ not functioning properly, from the organ becoming diseased, from us being expelled from a part of our physical body. If we were to be expelled altogether, if we were to be, if I may express it this way, 'extra' to our physical body, we would have to experience an unutterable pain. Every morning when we wake up, this pain threatens us, so to speak. We overcome it by immersing ourselves in our physical and etheric bodies and connecting with them.

Now, Eduard von Hartmann was certainly no initiate; he was merely an intellectual, the best intellectual of the second half of the 19th century. He merely grasped in thought what I have now painted before you as a reality. He presented the world as if we did not connect with our I and our astral body with the physical and etheric bodies. He imagined the relationship of the human being to his body as I have just described it in reality.

This led him to the following conclusion: He came to the conclusion of a complete pessimism. Of course, pessimism would be experienced if we were separated from our physical body when we woke up. Eduard von Hartmann conceived it. And what does he propose as the result of his thinking? The world is the worst conceivable. The world contains the greatest amount of evil and pain, and the real cultural development of humanity can only consist in gradually extinguishing, destroying the world. And at the end of “The Philosophy of the Unconscious” an ideal does indeed emerge.

Eduard von Hartmann lived in the age of ever-increasing technological development, when more and more machines were being used to perform this or that task. Anyone who takes a look at what is possible with machines is fascinated by the possibilities that lie within them. If you expand the possibilities that can arise for the world as the perfection of the mechanical, it has a tremendous suggestive power.

Eduard von Hartmann has surrendered himself to this suggestion. And he thinks that humanity – which, precisely because it has come to intellect, must gradually become more and more intelligent – must also increasingly realize that the right thing for this world is to destroy it; that humanity will one day will come to a machine through which one can drill down to the center of the earth and then set the machine in motion to hurl this whole worst earth into the vastness of the cosmos with everything that lives on it.

One can only say that the foundations for such a way of thinking are actually present in all others, who may not be as clever as Eduard von Hartmann, but are also very clever, but they have not had the courage to think the final consequences in this sense. And one can say that if one is really able to grasp what the intellect can achieve, detached from the rest of the world, then, with this one-sided development of the intellect, this ideal, as presented by Eduard von Hartmann, even appears, in a certain sense, necessary.

I said that one did not really come to formulate certain phenomena of the time that were there after all. But one should really aspire to a formulation that is as concise as possible by the philosopher of the unconscious, who presented this perspective to humanity in 1869. And in this, Eduard von Hartmann was actually also really cleverer than the others, because he did, after all, accomplish that deed, which I have often related, after he presented this ideal to people. In the same book in which he presents this ideal, he speaks of the spirit, albeit the unconscious spirit, but he speaks of the spirit. It was a terrible sin, because science had come so far that one was not allowed to speak scientifically of the spirit, even in the harmless way of leaving it entirely unconscious.

And so the other clever people saw this “philosophy of the unconscious,” which made itself very noticeable in literature, as dilettantism. Then Eduard von Hartmann played a trick on them. A refutation of the “philosophy of the unconscious” by an unknown author appeared. And in it, this spirit philosophy was thoroughly refuted. The writing was called “The Unconscious from the Point of View of Physiology and the Theory of Descent”. In this anonymous writing, the ghost of Hartmann's other clever minds was so strong – yes, I must say now, the ghost, because I am not allowed to say spirit in this case – that the most important natural scientists of that time, Oskar Schmidt, Ernst Haeckel and a host of others, wrote the most laudatory reviews of this anonymous book and said: “There's someone who has thoroughly dealt with this dilettante Eduard von Hartmann! It's a shame that he's not known, this anonymous. He should tell us his name and we would consider him one of our own.

It is understandable that after such a blow to the trumpet, the anonymous's writing was soon discontinued and a second edition was needed. It appeared: “The Unconscious from the Point of View of Physiology and the Theory of Descent, second edition, by Eduard von Hartmann”.

So, as you can see, Eduard von Hartmann also proved that he was already the cleverest, because firstly he could be as clever as he was, and then also as clever as the others, his opponents.

If yesterday I had to say that psychoanalysis is amateurism squared, then one would actually have to say that because soul qualities always multiply: the cleverness of Eduard von Hartmann was cleverness squared, multiplied by itself.

We should not pass by such a phenomenon of the age in such a deep sleep, as we do. We should formulate it and bring it to mind, then we would really have the absurdities of the age before us. And why was Eduard von Hartmann so clever? He was so clever because he really looked at everything that one was allowed to take note of in his time with a penetrating gaze. He became, so to speak, the naturalist of philosophy. It is, of course, rather like saying: the flour of soup. But he became the naturalist of philosophy.

Now it is a matter of realizing quite empirically, precisely in the face of such an occurrence, where one must go if one does not want to fall into these abysses. If one wants to find one's way out of the confusion that this civilization brings, one must look at what the human being really carries within.

But if we now move from the physical body of the human being and gradually move more into the spiritual, we approach the soul, as we discussed again yesterday, the etheric body or formative forces.

Eduard von

Hartmann knew nothing of such an etheric or formative body, in accordance with what could be known in his time. He did not ascend from the consideration of what is externally natural-physical to the next thing that borders on the physical, to the etheric or formative body.

We know that when a person falls asleep, his I and his astral body separate from the physical body and from the etheric body. The etheric body remains in the physical body. If a person merely applies earthly consciousness, he can never really know what the nature of his etheric body is. For when he is awake, he enters with his astral body and his ego into the etheric body. Then he is inside. Then he experiences what he himself has brought into it with his ego and his astral body. A being of a much higher organization would have to plunge into this etheric body during human sleep, while the I and the astral body are outside. Such a being, which could really objectively see how it actually relates to this etheric body, would find what the human being actually leaves behind with the physical body when he falls asleep, his etheric body. If one were to determine what it is that the human being leaves behind, one would find that this etheric body or formative forces body is truly the epitome of all wisdom in an earthly and in a much higher sense.

It cannot be denied for true knowledge: When we have left our physical and etheric bodies at night, the two that we have left behind are much cleverer together than we are when we are inside. For we are, in our I and our astral body, children of the development of the earth and the moon. The ether body, however, goes back to the development of the sun, and the physical body goes back to the development of Saturn. These are at a much higher level of perfection. Today, we in our I and in our astral body cannot measure up to what has accumulated over time from the solar developmental epoch here in our ether body as wisdom. One could say: this ether body is concentrated wisdom. But when we humans bring our wisdom into this etheric body with our astral body and with our ego, then we need a counterforce, just as we need the counterforce of the mirror if we want to see our reflection. We need the physical body as a counterforce. Just as we could not stand if we did not have physical ground, so we could not live in our etheric body without the etheric body bordering on the physical body and bumping into the physical body everywhere, having an abutment on the physical body. The etheric body with its inner life would be like a human being floating freely in the air without a base. In our ordinary earthly existence, we have only a soul life, which lives in the etheric body but needs the physical body as a support.

With this soul condition, we can only get close to the mineral world. We can only see through the inanimate. If we want to get close to the plant world, we need the ability to use the etheric body without the physical body.

How can we do that? How can we use our etheric body without our physical body? We can do this if we increasingly transform ourselves, through inner exercises, from people who live primarily through their physical body in the element of heaviness to people who live through the light in the element of lightness, who through the light no longer feel their connection with the earth, but with the vastness of the cosmos; when looking at the stars, the sun and moon, the vastness of the universe, gradually becomes as familiar to us as looking at the plants that cover the meadows. When we are mere earthly children, we look down at the plants that cover the meadows. We take pleasure in them, but do not understand them, because we are earth-bound human beings. But if we can learn to stand in the expanse of the universe, in the meadow of heaven, studded with stars — not on the floor but on the ceiling — and feel can feel a kinship with it, as we otherwise do with the soil of the earth, then we begin, by transforming our earthly consciousness into a cosmic consciousness, to use our etheric body in the same way as we otherwise use our physical body. Only then will we be able to penetrate to the plant world with our understanding. For plants are not produced from the earth upwards, but are drawn out of the earth through the heavens.

You see, Goethe was filled with this longing when he developed his Metamorphosis of Plants. And there is much that he said that is as if he felt he was such a person, inclined towards the sun rather than the earth, who felt how the sun draws the power of plant growth out of the earth even at the root , how the sun, with its powers, gradually develops the leaf in connection with the effect of the air, and how the sun finally, in the flower and in the formation of fruit, gradually cooks that which it has sucked out of the earth.

Just read this wonderful little book by Goethe, published in 1790: “Attempt to explain the metamorphosis of plants”, and you will find the beginnings of such a representation everywhere. Goethe longed to penetrate the plant world. But he repeatedly stumbled over the difficulty of really developing the ethereal vision instead of the physical vision. This is what was already present as an impulse in Goethe, and what the person who really draws on Goethe must further develop. This person does not want to take the dead Goethe, but the Goethe who continues to live and work.

For by realizing that the human soul can do something like this, if only it really becomes aware of its etheric body, it is able to feel its heavenly origin, its independence from the earth, its being on earth. The human soul can say to itself: You are of cosmic origin; you are on earth through the physical human body, but you are of cosmic origin. And when you can take joy in the plant world here, then that which rejoices in you is a son of heaven, who delights in what the heavens in turn draw out of the earth in the plant world. Man seizes himself soulfully from the earth by thus truly grasping his etheric or formative body in reality.

When one does this, that is, when one comes so far - and what can bring one to it is real love for the plant world - to live in the etheric body as one otherwise lives in the physical body, then not only one's own ether body is raised into consciousness, but in the same way as the physical nature is raised through our senses into our consciousness through our physical body, so the etheric world is placed into our consciousness through the etheric body.

And what do we feel when we look out, as it were, through our etheric body into the etheric world, just as we look out with our physical body into the physical world? We see there what is spread out before our physical eye, the real past from which this physical world has emerged. There we see in spirit the images of what was, so that the present can be.

Therefore, from the earliest times of humanity, the first initiation given to man was the initiation of the cosmos. In the oldest schools of humanity, people worked towards this initiation of the cosmos. The teachers of the first mysteries were the initiators for reading in the ether of the cosmos, which can also be called reading in chaos, in the Akasha Chronicle, reading the Akasha, reading that which has passed and has conjured the present before our eyes. And it was basically the first level of initiation that humanity has achieved in its existence on Earth, this initiation through the cosmos.

A second one that can be achieved is this: when we awaken, we let the astral body and the ego sink down into the physical body and etheric body. We animate the etheric and physical body, we connect with them. But we can only grasp as much of the infinite wisdom of the etheric body as we carry into it. But it constantly stimulates us. If we have a good idea somehow, then it is the etheric body that, because it is intimately connected with the ether of the cosmos, stimulates us to have the idea. Everything that a person develops in the way of ideas and ingenuity when they are awake comes from the etheric body and thus indirectly from the cosmos. The genius speaks with the cosmos by stimulating the astral body through the etheric body.

But the person who does not see this through lives in it, and his soul consists in that he sinks the astral body and the I into the physical body and the etheric body in the waking state.

When we make the stars our home, just as we do the meadows, we have the opportunity to experience the etheric, in that we make the world's widths the upper ground of our being. The human being always experiences it, only in his knowledge he does not penetrate there without initiation; but in reality every human being experiences it. If we look for a counterfoil for our astral body, this counterfoil is always there. It is only that spiritual science draws attention to what is present in every human being.

Suppose you could not see the physical floor, but you could stand on it, you would stand on it. If someone, who had only discovered through science that the floor was there, were to tell you about it, you would still stand on the floor. So the one who has mastered spiritual science can tell you that you are rising to the upper ground, to the starry heavens; but you are really rising all the same. And so the human being stands in another world with his astral body, in the world of living spirit beings, which we have enumerated as the world of the higher hierarchies.

Just as we, when we place ourselves in the physical world, have this physical world as our real one, just as there are minerals, plants and animals in this physical world and the soil is what the human being ultimately outgrows in the evolution of humanity, so the human being is in the world of the beings of the higher hierarchies with his astral body. When he lives in this world, he has the corresponding counterfoil for his astral body. But he always carries within himself that which he can only get to know through spiritual science. And he carries it within himself as the faculty of feeling.

Everything we make our own in the world through our feelings, through this most intimate life of the soul, exists in the undulations and weavings of the spirits of the higher hierarchies in our own astral body. When we become conscious of our feeling, this consciousness of feeling is what the human being has at first, but in this feeling the weaving and working of the spirits of the higher hierarchies lives through the human being. We cannot truly grasp the soul if we do not feel this soul immersed in the spiritual worlds of the higher hierarchies. And just as the past is revealed to us for the sensory present through etheric vision, when what has been developed in the first earthly mysteries as the initiation of the cosmos is recreated in a modern way, so too can the soul be so deepened that it attains an awareness of what is actually taking place in the astral body.

To do this, we need to lovingly immerse ourselves in what has been lived as a connection with the spiritual worlds in the great mysteries. If we allow the cosmos to teach us, under the guidance of the wisdom of initiation, we will arrive at the reality of the first level of the soul. If we can penetrate into what actually took place in the mysteries, we can, so to speak, not only read in the Akasha Chronicle the past of the stars, the past of the animals, the past of the physical human being, we can read what has lived in the souls of the great mystery teachers, we can truly awaken in us something like what I have tried to present in the way can be presented to the modern human being in my book 'Christianity as Mystical Fact'. If we can bring to life what the mystery teachers developed through their contact with the spiritual beings themselves, then we come close to that initiation which in later times on earth was added to the cosmic initiation and which I would like to call the initiation of the wise.

Thus one can speak of two levels of initiation: initiation through the cosmos and initiation through the wise. What the wise had taught as cosmic knowledge formed the content of cosmic initiation. Looking into the souls of those who preceded man in the life of the soul leads to the second level of soul being. Man can begin with all this in his outer historicity. When we grasp with inner aliveness what still shines through from ancient times – let us say in the wonderful Vedanta wisdom and other wisdom of older times – then in turn our own inner aliveness is grasped, and we are brought close to the initiation of the cosmos. And when one delves into such things with heartfelt love, as I presented them in my book 'Christianity as Mystical Fact', where an attempt has been made to present the old mysteries in their content in connection with the mystery of Golgotha, then one comes close to initiation by the wise.

And then, for the present, it is necessary to look honestly into one's own inner being and to get to know this inner being, one's own spirit, which then illuminates the soul from within. But I will speak in more detail about this, as the third stage of the initiation necessary today, next time. It is the initiation of self-knowledge.

But when spiritual science speaks of the soul today, it must speak from the spirit of these three stages of initiation: initiation through the cosmos, initiation through the sages, initiation through self-knowledge. In this way one measures the various boundaries of the soul's life. It is not possible to take even the first steps on this path without love. And I had to tell you that precisely the intellect of the present day, when it emerges at the highest level, forgets love, loses love. But in this way something very special takes place.

To really lovingly engage with what can be described as the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the I,

can be done by hearing something of the voice of the genius that rules our time, if one has the good will to listen to the voice of the genius of our time. But can the man of the present day take what is said when one speaks of “the genius of our age” with the deep seriousness it deserves? When we speak of the genius of our age, does it not remain an abstract concept for most people? Think how far removed people are from grasping a truly spiritual force that is active, weaving and living in our time when we speak of the genius of our time.

But it may be said that even if people deny the spirit, they will not be rid of the spirit. The spirit is inextricably linked to humanity. Only when people renounce the genius of an age does the demon of that age approach them. And when the intellect had progressed so far at the beginning of the last third of the 19th century that it followed only the mechanism of the physical body, even became automatic, mechanical, and thus reached its highest level, so that it became as clever as it and as clever as the others are, when this intellect advanced to the point where the mechanical and material aspects of the intellect called into existence, the intellect behaved as a person behaves when they reject genius. 'Then the demon of the age takes hold of him. The intellect had separated itself from the soul. The intellect became mechanical, soulless, and in this state it founded a philosophy. It had no love, could not love wisdom. Its philosophy could only become the intellectual image of earthly demonology, that demonology that conceives the ideal of a machine that is drilled into the center of the earth and blows the earth out into the universe.

That is what the demon of the age has told the intellect of the age. The demon of the age will often make itself heard if one does not want to recognize the soul. Then it will appear to this intellect as man would really experience it if, waking up, he were to submerge into his physical and etheric bodies and did not unite with them, but remained inwardly separate from them. For this intellect is alien to the human being; it emancipates itself from the human being. The intellect that is connected to the human being struggles out of earthly consciousness and up to other states of consciousness. For the intellect that only binds itself to the earth, but then separates itself, and therefore has only the reflection of the intellect, all other states of consciousness become the infinite sea of the unconscious. The human soul ceases to become aware of its heavenly origin, to become aware of its independence from earthly life.

But the soul-life of man consists in this, that man in his nature vibrates between the bodily and the spiritual. It is in this vibration between the bodily and the spiritual that the soul-life exists. If man honestly believes only in the body, and because he cannot leave the spirit alone, it only becomes unconscious, then the denial of the soul-life occurs.

While Hartmann conceived the destruction of the earth in such a demonic way, as only a person could conceive it who would sleep in the physical body, but then would become clairvoyant in the physical body - while Hartmann came to an intellectual formulation of earthly suffering, a person who was a friend of his who had exchanged many letters with him, writhing in real pain on his sickbed, in whom it had come about that many organs of his spiritual soul had not let him into the physical, who was experiencing earthly suffering, not inventing it, could only treat the soullessness of his age in a satirical way. That is Robert Hamerling, who wrote his “Homunculus” in the 1880s, when the perspective of the soullessness of the age dawned on him: the human being who only strives outwardly, who only ever accumulates more and more outwardly, and who finally becomes a billionaire – this terrible perspective of the soulless age was before Hamerling's soul's eye. And the soulless billionaire, the homunculus, who is born not through the agency of the soul but only in a mechanical way, through mechanical procreation, Hamerling has married to the soulless elemental spirit, to the mermaid, to the Lorelei.

Thus Robert Hamerling saw the prospect of the soulless age before the eye of the soul in the striving of man, who works purely materially, for spiritless intellectuality, which is certainly present in nature spirits, but which, in man, evokes all the forces of destruction, up to the demonic destructive urge to blow up the whole earth into space. Robert Hamerling could only treat this problem of the soulless age in a satirical way.

But soul must be given to the newer civilization and culture again. This soul can only be given when the earthly experiences of man are illuminated by the light of a knowledge of the spirit.

And so that which has been presented in a truly terrible, one might say chilling, way to the cleverest man of our age and which, writhing in pain, has satirically presented itself as a perspective by the one who felt the cleverness of the age most tragically, must be transformed for people through spiritual knowledge into the perspective of the soul, towards which we must strive as a second perspective.

Yesterday we spoke about the physical perspective. Today we want to speak about the perspective of the soul, and tomorrow we want to speak about the spiritual perspective.