The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Since the form of “spiritual science” to which the author of these pages professes has attracted some attention among contemporaries, especially since the idea of building a place for the cultivation of this science, a “University for Spiritual Science” (in Dornach in the canton of Solothurn), was conceived, attacks from its opponents have been coming from all sides. They try to attribute the insights of spiritual research to the musings and fantasies of its representatives, to its spread across a whole range of civilized countries to the blind faith of its adherents and to many other things that they endeavor to present in unflattering terms. The adherents of various religious denominations find something in spiritual science that they feel they have to fight against. They paint all kinds of dangers that supposedly threaten religious sentiment.

Those who really want to penetrate to the true meaning of spiritual research will find it easy to see the unfounded nature of the opponents' attacks. In almost every case, the fabric of objectively incorrect assertions on which these attacks are based could easily be uncovered. And in those cases where such attacks do speak of the findings of spiritual research, they are mostly based on the most inadequate and misleading conception of these findings. Distorted images of these findings are given, which the opponents themselves first work out; and it is easy to find a “refutation” of these.

The writer of these remarks does not intend to deal with this or that individual attack in the same way; on the other hand, he would like to say something in general about the meaning and significance of spiritual science in the face of the prejudices that are held against it.

First of all, it may be noted that such “attacks” can be particularly surprising when they are made on spiritual research by representatives of religious denominations. One needs only a little insight into this research to recognize that it does not want to oppose any religious confession on its own initiative. For it does not consider itself as a new religious confession; it is as far away as possible from any kind of founding of a religion or formation of a sect. It wants to be the genuine, true continuation of the scientific way of thinking, as this has become incorporated into the spiritual life of humanity at the dawn of modern culture through Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Giordano Bruno and others. Out of the same attitude of mind with which Galileo, Bruno and others regarded the realm of nature, spiritual science seeks to regard the realm of the spirit. And just as little as Copernicus's doctrine that the earth moves did any harm to true religiousness, so little can the law, correctly understood in terms of spiritual science, that the human soul undergoes repeated earthly lives, endanger true religiousness. After Copernicus' appearance, it was believed that his teaching was detrimental to religion; but one can think differently about this belief than a learned priest who, elected rector of a large university, gave a speech about Galileo spoke such convincing words that the contemporaries of Copernicus turned against him out of a misplaced religiousness, whereas in our time the truly religious person should recognize how every new insight into the workings of the world must add a new piece to the revelation of divine world governance. World history has progressed beyond the attitude that wanted to reject Copernicus, and those who grasp spiritual science in its true sense must admit that the opposition that arises against this science in our time will be overcome much more quickly. For even where this antagonism arises from good faith, it is inspired by no different attitude than that which was directed against the Copernican world view. One is tempted to ask why the supporters of such an attitude do not make use of the teachings that can be drawn from the fact that so many have not grown tired of saying that Copernicus's theory contradicts the Bible? If they did so, they could no more accuse spiritual science of being an opponent of the Bible than they certainly no longer do so with the theory of the earth's movement.

Spiritual science is the true successor of natural science research in that it strives to recognize the realm of the spirit with the means that are suitable for this realm. As a continuation of natural science, it cannot itself be mere natural science. For the methods that have brought this science such tremendous triumphs were able to do so precisely because they were highly adapted to the study of nature and because this research was not compromised by others that were not suitable for the natural field. In order to accomplish something similar in the realm of the spirit as natural science has accomplished in the realm of nature, spiritual science must develop other cognitive abilities than those applicable in natural science. In doing so, it must, of course, assert a point of view that, understandably, can meet with many doubts in the present day. Just look impartially at what is said about these “other cognitive abilities”. They are abilities that lie entirely within the developmental line of the ordinary human soul powers. How must spiritual science understand its difference from natural science? The study of nature can only be cultivated with the powers of cognition that man acquires in the natural course of his life and that are supported for the purpose of this research by regulated observation and scientific experimental tools. In order to penetrate into the spiritual world, man must develop it further through spiritual and soul exercises beyond the point to which it develops by itself, so to speak, without such exercises. In this way, something similar happens to the human being at a different level to what happens to the child, which develops the abilities of its later years from those of its early years. Just as the child learns to use its soul abilities in such a way that the body becomes a good tool for experiencing the world of the senses, so the human being can develop his powers of cognition further so that he can perceive and experience in a state free of the body – purely as a soul. This happens when the soul intensifies to an unlimited degree certain activities which it already employs to a small extent in ordinary life, and thus brings about a state in which it draws out of the body, as it were, everything that is soul and spiritual in it. She can then experience her body as being outside of her, but for short, limited periods of time. She can know herself to be transported into a world in which she lives with spiritual beings and spiritual processes, just as she is surrounded by sensual processes and beings in the sensual world. The kind of spiritual-mental exercises by which this is achieved is described in my books: “How to Know Higher Worlds?” and “Occult Science”. What the soul experiences as a change in itself through such exercises is described in my book: “The Threshold of the Spiritual World”. Anyone who does not want to engage with the description of such actual processes as described in these books will be able to deny the possibility of a soul life free of the physical body, just as someone could say: I do not believe that hydrogen, as something quite different from water, can be developed out of water. He can say this if he does not want to concern himself with the fact that water is broken down into hydrogen and oxygen by means of chemistry. But man can — through a kind of spiritual chemistry — break himself down into physical corporeality and into soul-spirituality. The mode of thinking in spiritual science is the same as that in natural science; only this mode of thinking must be further developed in order to go beyond nature. But the following must always be emphasized: to investigate the beings and processes in the spiritual world, the development of the characterized soul powers is necessary; but to understand and grasp what the spiritual researcher finds through these soul powers, all that is needed is an unbiased, unprejudiced consideration of the results of spiritual research with the ordinary soul abilities. And it may be said that the reason why so many people reject these results is not because they do not prove convincing to the ordinary understanding, but solely because these people allow their understanding to be clouded by prejudice and bias. Indeed, it takes a certain impartiality to admit: Man, as he is in ordinary life, is not yet so perfect; he can still develop slumbering soul powers within him, indeed, these powers must even be developed if the spiritual world is to reveal itself. But spiritual science shows that only the sensual world, subject to death, is perceptible to the senses and the ordinary powers of the soul, and that another world, not subject to death, can only reveal itself to the soul forces that have first been opened up to it.

Anyone who gains insight into these things can only feel the deepest satisfaction that in our time, in almost all civilized countries, people are showing an interest in spiritual science. For this interest, this spread of spiritual science, is a testimony to a healthy sense of truth, to the will to grasp life impartially. Those who do not want to gain this insight will be able to claim of the adherents of spiritual science that they are following their representatives out of blind faith. The truth of the matter is that the true adherents of spiritual science are such precisely because they can rise above blind faith. The opponents of spiritual research are fond of suspecting blind faith in those who adhere to anything but the often quite “blind faith” of these opponents themselves.

A much-loved and yet misleading way of speaking disparagingly about spiritual science is to give a distorted picture of the “composition of the human being” in the sense of this science, and then criticize this distorted picture. Anyone who takes the trouble to recognize from my Theosophy the way in which spiritual science arrives at this “composition” can find that the striving to recognize the nature of man, as it was an ideal of all worldviews, is to be brought into a form that meets the demands of contemporary science. What is fundamentally new about this “composition” is only what is gained through the spiritual abilities characterized above. The rest can be found in the works of a great number of insightful students of the soul. If the number seven is found to be a revealing number for the human constitutional elements, then it should also be found to be revealing that the light in the seven colors of the rainbow, the sound in a seven-part scale (where the octave is again the fundamental) must be conceived as coming to manifestation. For in the same sense, only on a higher level, the human being reveals himself in seven members, of which three, bound to the body, perish, three - as spiritual - are immortal, and one in the middle forms the connecting link between the mortal and the immortal part of the human being. There will come a time when it will be no more of a “superstition” to recognize that man has these “seven” members than it is considered “superstition” today that the rainbow consists of “seven” colors. Those who simply say that the Theosophists are not satisfied with body, soul and spirit, they want to have found out that man is composed of “seven” members, are misleading, because by withholding the true reasons for this “seven-number” from their listeners and readers by withholding the true reasons for this “number seven”, he gives rise to the idea that the seven limbs have been arbitrarily assumed, whereas they arise as a result of careful spiritual research.

And how often is it claimed that the law of “repeated lives on earth” is based on “mere belief”. In truth, it is based on the most careful and profound spiritual-scientific investigations. Through these, one finds that in the life of man between birth and death, a “soul core” is revealed in development, which is just as much the basis of a new human life as the plant germ developing in the plant is the basis of a new plant life, which is thus already found in the predecessor plant. Since the plant germ is of a physical nature, it can be found by means of the senses; since the 'soul core' is of a spiritual-soul nature, it can only be observed by the soul, which places itself in a body-free state in the sense described above. And so, in man, the immortal soul-core is found in a strictly scientific way; it is not merely imagined to be analogous to plant life. It reveals itself to spiritual observation as that which already exists in the present life between birth and death, but which contains the forces to lead the soul beyond death into a purely spiritual life between death and a new birth, and after the course of this life to guide it back to a new life on earth. That something similar to this is found at a higher level for human beings – only with the difference that it is spiritual-soul – as at a lower level for plant life, testifies that spiritual science is the true successor of natural science. The plant germ, as a physical being, can perish without bringing forth a new plant-being; the soul-germ proves to be imperishable; there is nothing that can prevent its continuing the life of the soul. And just as the “repeated earth-lives” are the result of research and not “mere belief”, so it is also the case with the law of the connection of these earth-lives. A following earth-existence shows itself to spiritual research in relation to the abilities, the character and also the fate of man as an effect of the earth-lives spent earlier.

It is really not necessary to exert one's intellect particularly in order to find apparent refutations of the statements made by the spiritual researcher regarding special connections between the individual earthly lives of human beings. Indeed, it is not particularly difficult to ridicule many things in this field, since they belong to the “hidden depths of existence” and can easily appear strange to the field of ordinary thinking. If, for example, the spiritual researcher says that it may happen that a person was an idiot in one life on earth, but that it is precisely through his experiences as an idiot, which he looks back on after death, that he acquires the strength for a subsequent life on earth to become a philanthropic genius, then people of a certain disposition will naturally laugh and sneer at such a remark; but anyone who, through insight into true spiritual-scientific research and the mood of the researcher that is necessarily associated with it, gains an idea of the deep seriousness that must underlie such a statement, of the spiritual work through which such a statement is wrung from the soul, will no longer laugh and scoff. But he will also deepen his soul's contemplation of the depth, glory and inner dignity of all human and world existence.

Furthermore, how easy it is to say: yes, what becomes of human freedom if a person's actions are determined by his previous lives on earth? For if man acts according to a law of fate, then he does not act freely. The logic that is revealed in such an objection is somewhat flimsy. When I put my foot forward, I act according to the laws of life of my leg. Can anyone believe that freedom is endangered by this? Will someone say: yes, if I walk in accordance with the laws of life of the leg, then I am not free while walking? Nor should anyone be tempted to make the logical error of saying: if man acts in accordance with the law of fate, then one cannot speak of freedom. One can find that a truly thorough and serious logic is in harmony with the results of spiritual research everywhere; however, this cannot be said of a defective logic, which all too often considers itself infallible. One cannot demand or expect this of such a logic.

If there is at least an apparent reason for the adherents of various religions fearing a danger to religious life from the advances in the scientific way of thinking, then this should no longer apply to spiritual science itself after a little sober reflection.

What spiritual science has to say about the Christ-being is particularly offensive to many people. And yet this is also based only on a misunderstanding. If someone says, for example, that spiritual science claims that Jesus did not mature into the Christ from an early age under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, but that during the first thirty years of his life he only prepared the physical shell in which the Christ took up residence at his baptism by John, then he is distorting the results of spiritual science on this point. Spiritual research investigates what actually happened through John's baptism, which, according to the Bible, undoubtedly has to be regarded as an important event in Jesus' life. (There are translators of the Gospel who render the important passage in Luke as: “This is my beloved Son; today I have begotten him.”) And this research finds that the Christ-spirit, which had guided Jesus of Nazareth as if from without until his thirtieth year, then, in that year, entered into the innermost part of his being. Future biblical research will surely recognize that on this point, too, the Gospel is proved not by the opponents of spiritual science, but by this one. Why do Christians attack the Christ teaching of spiritual science at all? It contains nothing, absolutely nothing that denies what Christianity has said about Christ up to now. It only broadens and elevates the concept of Christ. One would think that anyone who honestly has Christ at the bottom of his heart would rejoice at this. When spiritual science scientifically recognizes the event of Golgotha in its worldwide significance, nothing is taken away from the recognition that any Christian can claim for it. Where does one end up when one finds it unacceptable that someone believes something else about the Christ than one is willing to believe oneself? One ends up saying: I not only demand of you that you believe what I believe; but I disapprove of you wanting to know something that I do not want to know and do not want to believe.

These remarks were intended to give only a few points of view that may serve to point out some of the incorrect judgments about spiritual science. If one wanted to discuss each individual thing that is said about it here or there, one would have to write more than a few pages. But one would certainly not silence the false judgments that have been circulated, for example, in the wake of the construction of the Dornach “School of Spiritual Science”. This building will serve the Anthroposophical Society, which is dedicated solely to the cultivation of the spiritual science characterized here. This society did indeed emerge from the so-called “Theosophical Society”, but now has nothing whatsoever to do with it. For a number of years, the members of this Anthroposophical Society have been organizing spiritual and artistic presentations in Munich every summer. Members from all Western European countries gathered for these events. The growing number of participating members became so large that the construction of a separate building had to be considered. Western Switzerland is certainly the best location for such a building; in this area, the building is at the center of the part of Europe where most members of the Anthroposophical Society reside. And this location of the building enables them to visit the magnificent natural beauty spots of Switzerland after the events. It is in the nature of this science and its significance for the spiritual life of the present time that in the future the events will extend over longer periods of the year and thus a “School of Spiritual Science” will naturally arise. Anyone who has even a slight acquaintance with the spirit and work of the Anthroposophical Society need have no fear — as was feared in the wake of the Dornach building project — that this Society will engage in disruptive propaganda in the vicinity of the building site or anywhere else. However, anyone who objects that books on spiritual science are being published, that lectures are being given, and asks: Is that not propaganda?, needs no reply. For he might also object: You do talk about spiritual science, so you are doing propaganda. But it must be said that the entire way in which the Anthroposophical Society works is not based on propaganda, but rather on the fact that truth-seeking souls, out of the fullest inner freedom and only on the basis of their own judgment, find a place where truth is sought about the spiritual worlds.

Postscript

The immediate cause for these remarks was the publication in the appendix to the “Tagblatt für das Birseck, Birsig- und Leimental” of a lecture: “What do the Theosophists want?”, Which Pastor E. Riggenbach gave at the family evening of the Reformed Church in Arlesheim on February 14, 1914. The editorial staff of the above-named newspaper was kind enough to print a detailed response of mine in its columns, at the end of which I said that “I fully appreciate Pastor Riggenbach's calm, objective, and heartfelt discussion and am grateful to him for it.” In response to my response, the paper printed the following lines from Pastor Riggenbach:

A final word on the question: “What do the Theosophists want?” Dr. Steiner has provided a detailed response to my presentation at the Reformed Church's family evening, and it does not seem right to me to simply ignore it. Therefore, it is not my intention to continue the theoretical discussion, because despite all the common ground, the starting points are too different for us to reach an understanding, let alone unite. The readers have now had the opportunity to see the teachings of the theosophists in both lights, and we will leave it to them to decide for themselves on one or the other evaluation. I have no intention of continuing the discussion for the time being, and I will keep to myself what I might have to say in objection to Dr. Steiner's corrections and refutations. But I do feel the need to thank Dr. Steiner sincerely for his appreciation of my efforts to do justice to his cause. He has understood me correctly when he has read from my whole presentation that I can reject a doctrine as false and misleading without wanting to discredit the representatives of that doctrine in any way. Rather, I hope that we will continue to live in good understanding with the members of the Society who have now become our guests.

Arlesheim, March 2, 1914
E. Riggenbach, Pastor

This loyal comment by Pastor Riggenbach causes me to deviate from my original intention of publishing my reply as a printed document, as it appeared in the “Tagblatt für das Birseck, Birsigund Leimental”. I have written the arguments of this reply quite separately from their relation to Pastor Riggenbach and the necessary statements, and have expanded them with some additional remarks. When dealing with an opponent who presents his point of view in such a distinguished manner as Pastor Riggenbach does, I am reluctant to print what I have said a second time with reference to him.

What is the purpose of spiritual science?

A reply to “What do Theosophists want?”

The supplement of the “Tagblatt für das Birseck, Birsig- und Leimental” contains the reprint of a lecture: “What do the Theosophists want?”, which was held by Pastor E. Riggenbach at the family evening of the Reformed Church in Arlesheim on February 14. Since this lecture also aims to deal with the “spiritual science” that I represent, the honorable editorial team will grant me the request to be allowed to say the following about the speaker's remarks. I will only take into consideration what is said in relation to this “spiritual science”. For even in the time when I was a member of the so-called “Theosophical Society”, I never advocated anything other than this spiritual science; and I believe that if we look more closely at the world view I have expressed, even Pastor Rig genbach would not insist on his misleading statement: “that the whole system of thought with which Dr. Steiner appears is essentially the same as that invented by Ladies Blavatsky and Besant”.

First of all, the efforts of Pastor Riggenbach to do justice to the cause of “spiritual science” from his point of view should be unreservedly acknowledged. The noble tone of the arguments, the warm-hearted search for truth and the noble loyalty to conviction of the Reverend are most sympathetic; and I would ask him to accept what I have to say quite objectively and without expecting the slightest personal barb from me.

Every “attack” made by a representative of a religious community against “spiritual science” amazes me, to a certain extent, because I hardly ever miss an opportunity to emphasize again and again that this spiritual science does not want to oppose any kind of religious confession, since it does not see itself as a new religious confession, but as the genuine successor of the scientific mode of thinking, as this has been incorporated into the spiritual life of humanity at the dawn of modern culture by Copernicus, Kepler, Galilei and Giordano Bruno. From the same attitude of mind with which Galileo and Bruno regarded the realm of nature, spiritual science wants to observe the realm of the spirit. And just as little as Copernicus's teaching that the earth moves around the sun has detracted from true religiosity, so too can the law of “repeated earthly lives”, understood correctly in terms of spiritual science, do no harm to genuine religiosity. After the appearance of Copernicus, people believed that his teaching was detrimental to religion, just as Pastor Riggenbach currently believes this about spiritual science. World history has progressed beyond this belief, which felt compelled to reject Copernicus; and those who understand spiritual science in its true sense must admit that the opposition that this science is currently facing will be overcome much more quickly than that which was directed against Copernicus. Again and again I am reminded of the beautiful words spoken by a priest who, as a professor of theology, took up the post of rector of a university a little over ten years ago: He said that our contemporaries have turned against Copernicus out of a misguided religiosity; at present, the truly religious person will recognize that every new insight into the workings of the world adds a new piece to the revelation of the glory of divine world governance. Why not make use of the experiences of those who have not grown tired of emphasizing that the teaching of Copernicus contradicts the Bible? If Pastor Riggenbach did this, he would express some of his words differently, for example, by stating that spiritual science contradicts the Gospel.

When spiritual science speaks of “higher cognitive abilities,” it does so, however, from a point of view that is still doubted from many sides in the present day. But just take what is said about these abilities without prejudice! They are abilities that lie entirely within the developmental line of ordinary human soul forces. When a person voluntarily develops their thinking, feeling and willing from the point to which these have developed without their intervention, something similar happens as in the case of a child, which transitions from the abilities of its first years into those of its later years. Just as the child learns to use the faculties of his soul in such a way that his body becomes a good tool for him to experience the world of the senses, so can the human being develop his powers of knowledge further, so that he finds himself in a state of soul free of the body. In this state he then experiences the processes of a spiritual world and knows that he is surrounded by spiritual beings, just as he knows that he is surrounded by beings of sense in the world of the senses. That this is possible can be seen by anyone who opens himself to what is set forth in my book, “How to Know Higher Worlds.” He who does not want to open himself to it can deny the possibility of a soul-life free from the body, just as someone could say, “I do not believe in the existence of hydrogen,” when he is not interested in the fact that water consists of hydrogen and oxygen. Just as the chemist demonstrates hydrogen apart from water, so the spiritual researcher demonstrates the insights of the soul freed from the body. The mode of presentation of spiritual science is the same as that of natural science; only this mode of presentation is applied to the spiritual realm.

No one who takes into account what has just been said and considers it in the context of how spiritual science is disseminated by me, for example, can have the slightest doubt that Pastor Riggenbach is making a misleading when he says: “In this, too, the way of the Theosophists directly contradicts that of Jesus, in that they form a narrow, closed circle of initiates and carefully withhold their best for them. Jesus never wanted anything to do with such secrecy.” Who can uphold this claim, considering that in my writing ‘How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds’ it is said for everyone who opens up access to the knowledge of spiritual science? Who can raise the accusation of secretiveness when one considers that I say everything that can be understood from the present-day spirit of the age in numerous public lectures that are accessible to everyone? When spiritual science is practiced by certain circles in a way that goes beyond this, the reason for the seclusion of such circles is that one can only arrive at certain parts of spiritual science if one has previously acquired others. But this is no different in this science than in any other; and anyone who accuses spiritual science of secrecy should also do so with regard to university science, which does exactly the same in this respect; namely, only to talk about certain things to those who have acquired an understanding of them. In no other sense is spiritual science secretive like any other science.

I know that no one who has properly studied the insights of spiritual science will discuss the comments I have made on the Lord's Prayer, on the passage in the Gospel of John “He who eats my bread he tramples me underfoot” or about the words of St. Paul: ‘The whole of nature groans in labor pains, awaiting adoption as children’ in the way that Pastor Riggenbach has done. Anyone who wants to understand what I have said in relation to these things cannot, as Pastor Riggenbach does, take them out of context. If you do that, then you can't just say that “I'm always lively when interpreting; if I'm not interpreting, I'm subverting”; you can't just say, “In my opinion, such an interpretation of the Savior's words borders on blasphemy”; you could say much more: you could claim that such an interpretation is complete nonsense. But anyone who takes into account the type of lecture, the way of presenting and thinking, within which these supposed “interpretations” occur, will no longer use these things for criticism in the way that Pastor Riggenbach does. If well-meaning criticism, as is decidedly the case with Pastor Riggenbach, proceeds in this way, then one can imagine that on the part of the friends of spiritual science, some precautions are taken so that lecture cycles, for example, which are intended only for those listeners who know other, preparatory ones, do not fall into the hands of such persons, who must find them quite fantastic because they do not have the prerequisites for understanding. From such completely matter-of-fact and not at all fundamentally significant measures, the unfounded accusation of secretiveness has developed.

Pastor Riggenbach also practices a much-loved yet misleading way of providing information about the “composition of the human being” in the sense of spiritual science. Anyone who takes the trouble to compare my Theosophy with the way in which spiritual science arrives at this “composition” can find that the striving to recognize the nature of man, as it was an ideal of all world views, is to be brought to a form that satisfies the demands of current science. The only thing really new in this classification is that which is gained through the spiritual faculties characterized above. The rest can already be found in a whole series of insightful students of the soul. If the number seven is found to be a captious number for the expressions of the soul, then it should also be found captious that light must be conceived as coming to revelation in seven rainbow colors, and sound in the seven-membered scale (the octave is again the keynote). I will not argue with Pastor Riggenbach when he says: “From the Bible we are accustomed to distinguishing three parts in man: body, soul and spirit.” There were ‘divine scholars’ who were so little accustomed to this from the Bible that they accused all those who asserted this tripartite of heresy of the true Christian teaching. There will come a time when people ‘from spiritual science’ will be ‘accustomed’ to distinguishing seven members of the human being, just as they now distinguish seven colors of light. Anyone who simply says, “The Theosophists are not satisfied with this — with body, soul and spirit; they have found out that man is composed of seven parts...” is misleading because he gives his listeners and readers the idea that the seven parts of man have been arbitrarily assumed; while they arise from careful spiritual research.

Pastor Riggenbach follows a process similar to the one he applies to the seven-limbed nature of man for the laws of “repeated earthly lives” and “karma”. He first adapts these laws to his own way of thinking and then criticizes not what I, for example, present about these laws, but what he has first made out of them.

The law of “repeated earthly lives” is not based, as Pastor Riggenbach seems to assume, on “belief”, but on a spiritual-scientific investigation. Through such a study, one finds that in the life of a human being between birth and death, a “soul core” is revealed in development, which is just as much the basis of a new human life as the plant germ is the basis of a new plant life, which is already found in the predecessor plant. Since the plant germ is of a physical nature, it can be found by the means of sense science; since the soul core is of a spiritual-soul nature, it can only be found by observing the soul when it has become free of the body. And so it is found, not by analogy (a comparison) with plant life. The fact that something similar is found at a higher level for the human being – only with the difference that it is spiritual-soul – as at a lower level for plant life, testifies that spiritual science is the true successor of natural science. The plant germ, as a physical being, can perish without founding a new plant being. The soul germ proves to be the eternal part in man that passes through repeated earthly lives. It imprints the experiences of successive earthly lives, which the plant germ cannot do, or only to a limited extent. Only so much can be said here about the many-sided law of “karma”. When Pastor Riggenbach, again taken out of context, mentions “more as a curiosity” what I once said about the karma connection of an idiot, he proves by the way he presents it how little he realizes what the spiritual researcher has gone through in his soul before daring to communicate to his listeners such a specific case as having been investigated by him. He shows how little he realizes the profound seriousness that underlies such a statement. Pastor Riggenbach believes that the true Christian draws the “truth from the Bible” and then sees it confirmed by his “religious and moral experience.” I would ask him: Can he really not imagine that knowledge as difficult as that of the karma of an idiot, wrung from the soul, is later confirmed by experience? In this case, the pastor allows the non-pastor to freely confess that I find his treatment of me, especially in this karma case, to be less than Christian.

And I would like to say almost the same thing when Pastor Riggenbach makes the comment: “For those who take karma seriously, love, which believes everything and hopes everything, and endures everything and bears everything, must appear as an illusion.” Where can Pastor Riggenbach get the reasons for such an assertion? Certainly not from seriously meant spiritual science. For the latter never tires of pointing out the karmic connections of unloving actions and attitudes. But the fact that Pastor Riggenbach can achieve many things with his logic that are completely foreign to spiritual science is proved to me by a truly astonishing sentence in his remarks. He says: “It does sound very contrived and sophisticated when he — Steiner — writes at one point: ‘It is not fate that acts, but we act in accordance with the laws of our fate.’ Yes,” — so Pastor Riggenbach continues, “if we act in accordance with the laws of our fate, that means nothing other than that we act under the compulsion of our fate and with that freedom is gone.” With all due respect: if I should ever say, “It is not the laws of my leg that cause me to move when I put my foot forward, but rather I put my foot forward in accordance with the laws of my leg,” you, Pastor Riggenbach, will then find this ” and sophistical” and perhaps even say, ”Yes, when we walk in accordance with the laws of the leg, it means nothing more than that we walk under the compulsion of our leg laws, and that freedom is lost.” You would hardly say that, and realize that one should not be so unchristian as to accuse someone of “sophistry” when it is so easy to get muddled in terms of logic.

The criticism of the Christ impulse, of which spiritual science speaks, is probably the most unfounded part of Pastor Riggenbach's arguments. It would be going much too far to refute the assertion that “this whole way” of understanding the Christ comes from so-called Gnosticism. No, it comes from spiritual scientific research independent of all antecedents. It is quite wrong to say: “According to this, Jesus did not mature into the Christ under the guidance of the Holy Spirit from an early age, as the Bible shows us, but rather, during the first thirty years of his life, he only prepared the physical shell into which the Christ descended at his baptism by John.” One cannot distort what spiritual science has to say about this point more than it is distorted by this assertion. This science examines what actually happened through John's baptism, which, according to the Bible, undoubtedly has to be regarded as an important event in Jesus' life. (Weizsäcker even translates the corresponding important passage in the Gospel of Luke: “This is my beloved Son; today I have begotten him.”) And spiritual research finds that the Christ-spirit, which guided Jesus of Nazareth as if from without until he was thirty, then entered into the innermost part of his being in his thirtieth year. Future biblical research will surely find that precisely on this point the Bible is also right about Mr. Pastor Riggenbach, but gives credence to spiritual science. I can be brief about everything else that Pastor Riggenbach brings forward against the Christ-teaching of spiritual science. Why does one attack this Christ-teaching at all, since it contains nothing that negates the views of any Christian confession about Christ? Nothing, absolutely nothing of what Pastor Riggenbach believes about Christ is negated by spiritual science. Spiritual science only brings about a significant broadening and elevation of the concept of Christ. One would think that even in the mind of Pastor Riggenbach, those who accept what he accepts and something more besides may still be called good Christians. If the cosmic significance of the event of Golgotha is also recognized, then nothing is taken away from the recognition that Pastor Riggenbach claims for himself. It is wrong to say: “The gospel is too simple, too plebeian for them - the theosophists.” It is an assertion that is again - forgive me the word - not very Christian towards people who put all their efforts into understanding the Christ event. Where does it get you when you find it unacceptable that someone believes something else about Christ than you yourself want to believe? One comes to say: I not only demand of you that you believe what I believe; but I disapprove of you because you want to know something that I do not want to know. And yet this is the ultimate consequence of the criticism that Pastor Riggenbach exercises on the Christ-concept of spiritual science. He would certainly reject this consequence, since he is a thoroughly well-meaning critic. But I must hear it in his remarks, and I find that these remarks sound to me as if someone were saying: You must not believe in Copernicus, because he does not speak about the processes of the world in the way it is written in the Bible. More will be said about this in my next lecture on “Spiritual Science and its Relationship to Contemporary Religious and Social Movements,” which I will give in Basel on March 13, 1914.

In conclusion, I would like to reiterate that I fully appreciate the calm, objective and heartfelt manner in which the pastor has addressed the issue and am grateful to him for it. Indeed, I wholeheartedly agree with him: “I do not regret this discussion on my part, because it is always interesting to engage with the ideas of others in honest debate. But I have no more reason to regret it because, from the humbler ground of spiritual science, 'the simple glory of the gospel stands out all the more brightly.

Dr. Rudolf Steiner

When my “Philosophy of Freedom” was printed in 1894, I personally handed the book over to Eduard von Hartmann. At the time, I was very keen to engage in a scientific discussion with this man about the fundamental views on which the structure of ideas in my book was based. My expectations in this regard seemed justified, since Eduard von Hartmann had been truly friendly in his approach to my literary work from the very beginning. Every time I sent him my writings published before the “Philosophy of Freedom,” he delighted me with often extensive written responses. In 1889 I had the opportunity of a long conversation with him, the subject-matter of which was the epistemological questions agitating the philosophical world at that time. And I expected much from a discussion of my book, particularly because, on the one hand, I was a warm admirer of the idealism of his philosophy, an attentive observer of his treatment of important vital questions, and, on the other hand, his decided opponent in all essentials of the epistemological foundation of a world view. In one important point, however, I was in complete agreement with him: the philosophical ethics of unselfish devotion of the human soul to the historical process of humanity as an ethical motive. Of course, I could not be taken in by the naive belief that I could convert the creator of the “Philosophy of the Unconscious” to my points of view in fundamental matters. But Eduard von Hartmann was always inclined to respond in a truly loving way to views that were contrary to his own; and his responsiveness led to those fruitful confrontations that are desirable in the field of world-view striving. Besides, even then it was far from my mind to make the estimation of a personality dependent on the extent to which I could be an opponent or a supporter of his ideas. The esteem in which I held Eduard von Hartmann led me to ask him in 1891 to accept the dedication of my small writing: “Truth and Science. Prelude to a Philosophy of Freedom”. He agreed. And so I was able to have the words printed on the second page of this writing in all sincerity: “Dr. Eduard von Hartmann in warm admiration dedicated by the author.” This happened despite the fact that Eduard von Hartmann had to completely reject the content of the writing from the point of view of his worldview.

I was not mistaken in my expectations regarding a discussion of the “Philosophy of Freedom.” For a few weeks after the presentation of the book, Eduard von Hartmann not only honored me with a friendly letter, but he also sent me the copy of the book that he had received, with his comments and objections, some of which went into great detail. He had entered them almost page by page into the book. At the end he had summarized his overall impression in a few sentences. He had been so sharp in his judgment that I could see in his words the fate that my world view would have to meet within contemporary thought. By concluding the present remarks with a discussion of this judgment, it will be possible for me to show how, from the beginning of my literary career, I strove to establish the epistemological foundation for what I later attempted to present in a series of writings as “spiritual science” or anthroposophy and on whose development I continue to work to this day.

In the 1880s, when I began my writing career, people were confronted with a world view that had basically blocked any access to a world of true reality for human cognition. It seemed necessary to me, above all, to strive for a scientifically sound epistemological basis in matters of world view. The opinions one encountered in this field at that time could be characterized from a myriad of contemporary writings. The one of the poet and philosopher Robert Hamerling shall be cited here. This again for the reason that I found myself in the most fundamental epistemological questions in complete opposition to this personality, whom I highly revered and esteemed. Robert Hamerling was writing his significant “Atomistik des Willens” (Atomism of the Will) at that time. Right at the beginning of this book, we encounter the following thought: “Certain stimuli produce a smell in our olfactory organ... Thus a rose has no scent unless there is a smeller to smell it. Certain vibrations of the air produce a sound in our ear. Thus a sound has no existence unless there is an ear to hear it. The shot of a gun would not resound if no one heard it... Anyone who grasps this will understand what a naive fallacy it is to believe that in addition to the view or idea we call “horse”, there is another, the real “horse”, of which our view is a kind of image. Outside of me there is only – let me repeat it – only the sum of those conditions which cause an idea to arise in my mind that I call a “horse.” Hamerling adds to these sentences: “If this does not make sense to you, dear reader, and if your ‘mind’ rears up before this fact like a shy horse, then do not read a single line further; leave this and all other books dealing with philosophical and scientific matters unread; for you lack the necessary ability to grasp a fact impartially and hold it in your thoughts.” The thoughts that Hamerling expresses were so much a part of the thinking habits of epistemologists in the second half of the nineteenth century that as early as 1879 Gustav Theodor Fechner wrote about them in his book “Die Tagesansicht gegenüber der Nachtansicht” (“The Day View Compared to the Night View”): “They are the thoughts of the whole thinking world around me. No matter how much and about what they may quarrel, philosophers and physicists, materialists and idealists, Darwinians and anti-Darwinians, orthodox and rationalists all join hands in it. It is not a building block, but a cornerstone of today's world view... What we think we see and hear in the world around us is all just our inner appearance, an illusion that one can praise oneself for, as I read recently; but it remains an illusion. Light and sound in the external world, ruled by mechanical laws and forces and not yet penetrated by consciousness, are only blind, mute waves that cross the ether and the air from more or less agitated material points, and only when they reach the protein coils of our brain, or rather only when they reach a certain point of it, do they become visible through the spiritualist magic of this medium. and air, and only when they encounter the protein coils of our brain, or rather only when they encounter a certain point of it, are they transformed by the spiritualist magic of this medium into luminous, sounding vibrations. The reason, essence, and details of this magic are debated; the fact is agreed upon; and of all the theories of thought and knowledge, in which philosophy now wants to exhaust and empty itself, as if it wanted to give birth to another philosophy, , none of them leads to doubting the correctness of this fact, unless it is to declare the doubt insoluble or to shatter the world into tiny specks of dust that illuminate only themselves but not the world."

For anyone who has kept his thinking far removed from such considerations, they may appear to be worthless fantasies. In the individual sciences and in activities more closely related to everyday life, they do not arise in such a way that one would have to take them into account. But anyone who wants to have a say in matters of world view must deal with them. In the second volume of my book “The Riddles of Philosophy” – in the section “The World as Illusion” – one finds a detailed presentation of the most essential forms in which these considerations have been expressed in recent times. Thirty years ago it would have been fruitless to place oneself in the current direction of thought with a Weltanschhauung without taking a stand on these considerations. For it was on this ground that judgments were formed as to whether a world-view had a legitimate starting-point or not. Gideon Spicker, who wrote a stimulating work on 'Lessing's World-View' and then published the two significant volumes 'From the Cloister to the Academic Chair' and 'At the Turning-point of the Christian World-Period', wrote to me wrote to me in 1886, after the publication of my “Epistemology of the Goethean World View”, that it would be necessary to finally stop constantly pondering the question of how and within what limits man can know. It would be better to start to really know something. But the observation of the time conditions in this field made it seem hopeless to come up with a worldview that did not advance its secure epistemological foundation.

The most diverse formulations of Schopenhauer's sentence: the world is my representation, presented itself at that time in all possible variations. Volkelt, the subtle dissector of Kant, the judicious author of the epistemological book “Erfahrung und Denken” (Experience and Thought), wrote at that time: “The first fundamental proposition that the philosopher must clearly realize is that our knowledge extends to nothing more than our ideas. Our perceptions are the only things we directly experience; and precisely because we experience them directly, not even the most radical doubt can rob us of the knowledge of them. By contrast, knowledge that goes beyond our perceptions – I am using this term here in the broadest sense, so that it includes all mental activity – is not protected from doubt. Therefore, at the beginning of philosophizing, all knowledge that goes beyond the representations must be explicitly presented as open to doubt.” Such assertions had become self-evident truths for philosophers in the last third of the nineteenth century; they still are for many today who are to be heard when it comes to judging whether a world view is based on legitimate ground or not.

One must familiarize oneself with the way of thinking that leads to such assertions if one wants to have a say in matters of world view in our time. It seemed to me that such familiarization showed that the fundamental questions about the process of knowledge must be posed quite differently from the way they are by many epistemologists, if the train of thought that is taken in such questions is not to lead to one standing at the end before a self-dissolution of that train of thought. To seek clarity in this area, clarity about the value and justification of the ideas under consideration, was the task I sought to solve through the research presented in my booklet “Truth and Science” and in my book “Philosophy of Freedom”. “Truth and Science” was intended as a ‘philosophizing consciousness coming to an understanding with itself’. This is also the title of the work as printed in the doctoral dissertation, which already contains its essential content.

At the time when I wrote these writings, I believed, and I still believe today, that the fundamental error of many epistemologies is to be found in the fact that the process of knowledge is viewed quite wrongly at its very root. One first thinks of the opposite: man and the world. One imagines that the world has an effect on man. The latter receives impressions from it. From these impressions, the world view in which he lives imaginatively is formed. From this thought, it is an almost natural progression to the opinion that everything that occurs within human consciousness is only a product of consciousness. Any thing or being of an external world lies beyond consciousness; for only when that which remains unknown, unconscious, of the external world is taken up by consciousness does it become a human world view. What things or beings are like outside of consciousness is a question that goes beyond the human capacity for knowledge. This mode of thought appears in various philosophies, tied up in tangles of concepts that are often thought of in such an unoriginal form, so far removed from their source, that some who have become accustomed to them cannot help but consider anyone who wants to reduce these concepts to their simple form to be a dilettante.

It cannot be denied that the train of thought described appears so firmly established from a certain point of view that an objection becomes almost impossible, and that Hamerling could say with some justification that anyone who does not accept this view lacks the ability to perceive a fact impartially and to retain it in thought. My aim was not to refute or criticize this way of thinking in the usual sense. I did not ask the question: to what extent is this line of thought incorrect? Rather, I tried to answer the other question exhaustively: to what extent is it correct? And it became clear to me that the epistemologists had made the mistake of not completing the answer. They had stopped halfway. A further progression leads from their starting point to different results than those asserted by them. Anyone with a sense for certain more subtle laws of human logic and psychology knows that one very often fails to recognize the truth value of a thought by allowing oneself to be captivated by refuting ideas that arise prematurely in the soul. In this way, fatal traps arise for an unbiased way of looking at things, which can prevent one from arriving at the right cognitive goals. In contrast, it is often better to immerse oneself in a train of thought and follow its course. If one does not lose sight of the scope and range of the individual thought processes, and does not allow oneself to be overwhelmed by the striving for one-sidedness that so many trains of thought entail, then even one-sided and imperfect thoughts can lead to the realm of truth.

Starting from such premises, I tried to arrive at epistemological results. What I found seems to me to be completely certain even today. The way man is placed in the world, he must admit to himself that his world picture is given to him as the essence of his organization demands. In this fundamental idea one can know oneself to be in agreement with Kantians, neo-Kantians, physiologists and their followers. One can profess with them: what appears to human consciousness occurs in such a way as the conditions of the perceiving human being demand. If one now clings to this idea and develops it one-sidedly in thought, without connecting with the reality of the human being in the progression, then one blocks access to a true grasp of the capacity for knowledge. I have tried to explain this in detail in my two aforementioned writings. The first form in which man's world view is given can be followed by a spiritual process in man's inner being that transforms this world view in that it deprives it of its subjective character and allows cognition to submerge into the objective. One can, of course, be of the opinion that this process is only a continuation, a kind of mental or methodical revision of the given world view. If one holds this view, then one will be able to see nothing in all that can occur within consciousness other than a kind of effect of consciousness of the true reality that remains beyond knowledge. I have now endeavored to show that cognition, in its further progress, overcomes the form given to the world picture by the human organization at its first appearance. However, in order to be aware of this fact, cognition must reach an activity that I have called that in pure thinking. This activity is denied from the outset by many epistemologists. But one could, to paraphrase Hamerling, say: anyone who does not accept the idea that an activity is possible in the inner thought process that moves only in inner, living thought processes and that uses the ideas of the sensory world no longer as images but only as illustrative images, lacks the ability to grasp a fact impartially and to hold it in thought. My epistemological research led to the conclusion that man, through his organization, first cuts himself out of true reality into an incomplete one, so to speak, and that he reintroduces himself into this true reality in the further progress of his knowledge, in the elevation to pure thinking. The aim of the books I have mentioned is to show that human knowledge remains unrecognized if we try to view it as an image that is indifferent to the objective process of the world, and then have to admit that it cannot be one. Knowledge presented itself to me as a developmental process rooted in the human being, leading this being from one stage to another. In his cognitive interaction with the external world, the human being initially experiences his own nature incompletely, in that his organization presents him with an incomplete picture of reality. In the further inner experience, he transforms the first form of his world view, which is an incomplete image of the external world, so that he stands in the true reality with his inner experience. Seen in this light, the process of knowledge appears different at its very root than it does to many epistemologists. A comparison can clarify what is being considered here. It is, of course, meant with all the limitations that apply to all comparisons. One can examine the substantial nature of the cereal plant with regard to the extent to which cereals are suitable as human food due to the substances they contain. This investigation can be carried out in a very scientific way. And yet, from a certain point of view, it can be said that such an investigation says nothing about the nature of the plant, insofar as this is expressed in the processes that lead to growth, flowering and fruit bearing. However, the inner nature of the plant is revealed in these processes. And what the plant becomes as human food is, in a sense, a side effect of the plant's nature. The human cognitive process is, by its very nature, a link in human development. What happens through it has its significance within this development. The fact that at a certain stage of this development, a reflection of the external world also comes to light in the activity of thoughts and ideas is not peculiar to the cognitive process in a similar sense to the entry of grain into human nutrition. If one thinks one must pose the main question of epistemology in such a way that one only looks at it: to what extent is cognition a reflection of an external world, then one shifts the consideration just as one would shift the main botanical question if one wanted to seek the essence of the plant through food chemistry.

In the final section of the second volume of my “Riddles of Philosophy” one finds a “sketchy presentation of an anthroposophy” (written in 1914). In it I attempt to show that a completely organic progression must be conceived, from the basic epistemological views of my writing 'Truth and Knowledge' and my 'Philosophy of Freedom', to the content of 'spiritual science' or 'anthroposophy', as I have further developed them. But anyone who reads these earlier writings of mine with an open mind will be able to see that the results developed in them have been obtained through purely philosophical research, and that therefore agreement with what is asserted in them is not dependent on the position that someone takes on the “spiritual science” I represent. In those books I consciously used only the means of thought and methodology that one is accustomed to finding in philosophical works. Thus it seems to me that the kind of research I call “spiritual science” has a secure philosophical foundation in my epistemological presentations, but that the philosophical judgment of this foundation can be kept quite independent of the spiritual-scientific superstructure. But for me there is a clear path from my epistemology to “spiritual science”. Anyone who is able to see without bias what kind of research underlies the content of my later books or the brief presentations in the first and fourth books of this journal will find that the possible epistemological difficulties are cleared up by my earlier writings.

In my spiritual scientific writings, I present those cognitive processes that lead, through spiritual experience and observation, to ideas about the spiritual world in the same way that the senses and the mind bound to them lead to ideas about the sensory world and the human life in it, then, in my opinion, this could only be presented as scientifically justified if it could be proved that the process of pure thinking itself proves to be the first stage of those processes by which supersensible knowledge is attained. I believe I have provided this proof in my earlier writings. I have tried to show in the most diverse ways that man, by living in the pure process of thinking, does not merely perform a subjective activity that is turned away from and indifferent to world processes, but that pure thinking is an event that leads beyond subjective human activity, in which the essence of the objective world lives. It lives in it in such a way that man, in true knowledge, grows together with the objective essence of the world. Anyone who is willing to consider my earlier writings impartially, including the introductory essay I wrote in the 1880s about Goethe's scientific writings in Kürschner's German National Literature, will feel the weight of the sentence I wrote in 1897 in my book 'Goethe's World View'. “He who speaks of the coldness of the world of ideas can only think ideas, not experience them. He who lives the true life in the world of ideas feels within him the essence of the world at work in a warmth that cannot be compared with anything.” In my recently published book, ‘The Riddle of Man,’ I have described the ‘seeing consciousness’ — in reference to Goethe's idea of the ‘contemplative power of judgment.’ By this I understand the human being's ability to bring a spiritual world to immediate contemplation and observation. My earlier writings treat pure thinking in such a way that it is evident that I include it among the activities of the “contemplative consciousness”. In this pure thinking I see the first, still shadowy, revelation of the stages of spiritual knowledge. Everywhere in my later writings one can see that I regard only those as higher spiritual powers of knowledge that a person develops in the same way as pure thinking. I reject as belonging to the domain of the spiritual powers of cognition every human activity that leads to mere thinking, and I recognize only that which leads beyond pure thinking. No supposed form of knowledge that does not recognize pure thinking as a kind of model and that does not, in the same sphere, possess the same level of deliberation and inner clarity as thinking that is sharp in its ideas, can lead to a real spiritual world. My position regarding the spiritual powers of human cognition, which presupposes the lawfulness of pure thinking for all cognition, placed me in a special position with regard to the kind of thinking that is sometimes called mysticism. If we define mysticism as a form of knowledge through which a person experiences their own being as connected to the essence of the world, then I must apply this definition to my own understanding of true knowledge. I must say that genuine mysticism can only be attained if the epistemological foundations that I believe I have developed are recognized. On the other hand, when I look at what is often referred to as mysticism and what precisely avoids the composure and clarity that characterize the thought process, then I see myself compelled to characterize such mysticism as I did in my book “Goethe's Worldview”: “Mysticism aims to find the source of things, the Godhead, in the human soul. The mystic, like Goethe, is convinced that the essence of the world will reveal itself to him in inner experiences. Only, immersion in the world of ideas is not considered the inner experience that matters. He has roughly the same view of the clear ideas of reason as Kant. For him, they stand outside the creative whole of nature and belong only to the human mind. The mystic therefore seeks to attain the highest knowledge by awakening special powers. He seeks to develop unusual states, for example through ecstasy, to achieve a higher kind of insight... The mystic immerses himself in a world of unclear sensations and feelings; Goethe immerses himself in the clear world of ideas. The mystics despise the clarity of ideas. They consider this clarity to be superficial. They have no inkling of what people feel who have the gift of immersing themselves in the living world of ideas. It freezes the mystic when he surrenders himself to the world of ideas.” This mysticism, which I have to characterize in this way, I must place far outside the realm in which I seek the powers of knowledge that open up the spiritual world. This mysticism drives the life of the human soul into a realm in which it becomes more dependent on the human organization than it is in ordinary sensory perception and in intellectual activity. But the true spiritual faculties of knowledge lead the life of the soul into a realm in which it acquires greater independence from the organization than in sensory perception and imagination, and which is entered with pure thinking even in its simplest form. The cognitive activity by which I think I am building the “spiritual science” has nothing in common with the dreamy, half-conscious soul-life of false mysticism. Unfortunately, the opponents and also those who want to be followers of this spiritual science all too often confuse it with false mysticism, although this confusion is that of a thing with its opposite. Those who do not cling to words and fashion arbitrary creations out of them will see everywhere in my writings where I am aiming at the relatively justified part of the definition of mysticism and where I am rejecting the confusions of false mysticism.

If the process of cognition is recognized as an experience of human development, then one can no longer admit the possibility of pointing to a reality that lies beyond all consciousness by means of mere logical conclusions or hypotheses, through concepts and ideas derived from the perceptions of the senses. One can then speak of a world that lies beyond the senses only in the sense that such a world reveals itself to the “visionary consciousness” in the same way as the world of the senses reveals itself to sensory perception. By making this view my own, I found myself in complete opposition to those philosophies that reject any experience of the realms of reality that lie beyond the sensory world and at most want to admit that there is a logical necessity to hypothetically assume a reality that is alien to consciousness. Within these philosophies, Eduard von Hartmann's “transcendental realism” occupies a particularly characteristic position. From his point of view, the given world picture of man, including all experiences attainable in thinking, appears as the result of the subjective human organization. But Eduard von Hartmann emphasizes the necessity, following from the nature of this world picture itself, to hypothetically conclude from the subjective, conscious to an objective reality, which, however, must be decidedly thought of as remaining in the field of the unconscious. In my “Philosophy of Freedom” I try to show that this is a mistaken way of arriving at a metaphysics. I strove for a unified world view and attributed the apparent dualistic form of it to the fact that man, in mere sensory perception, separates an imperfect form of this image from its whole essence, only to overcome this imperfection in the further progress of cognition. Eduard von Hartmann asserts an epistemological dualism that cannot be overcome by human consciousness and that makes all ideas about the nature of the world those that are conceived in terms of dualism. From my point of view, the metaphysical is that which is not unconscious by nature, but is only not seen by the bearer of consciousness as long as the powers of perception are not laid bare, which allow that which lies beyond sense perception to be experienced just as physical reality is for the senses. It hardly needs to be emphasized that the one who speaks in this way of the supersensible does not claim that with the exercise of the “seeing consciousness” all the secrets of the spiritual world are suddenly revealed to man. It is only that knowledge is extended beyond the sense world into a realm that offers explanatory foundations for this sense world and for human life in this world. The essential thing is to enter into the mode of existence of the spiritual, even if one must be convinced that the part of the spiritual world that can be recognized first is only a small area in its wide expanse. Nor should it be overlooked that the investigation of the details of the spiritual world truly requires no less care and scientific conscientiousness than that of the physical world.

In elaborating my two works based on epistemology, it seemed to me that the rejection of any metaphysics that was merely imagined and filled with content that could not be spiritually experienced was to be linked to Eduard von Hartmann's transcendental realism because I warmly approved of the way in which, regardless of this epistemological point of view, this philosopher was able to demonstrate the spirit in the form of the idea in all phenomena of the world and of life. What compelled me to always recognize Hegel's philosophy in its full value, and yet to lead my own understanding beyond it, applied to me in another respect to Eduard von Hartmann as well. In Hegel I saw how he had grasped the content of thinking in its spiritual reality, but was only able to hold it in such a form that thinking could not become the living initial link in a spiritual process of knowledge that opens up the supersensible world. In Hegel's system, the idea is spiritual reality; but as such it is only a means of expressing the sense-perceptible world and the life in it. Therefore, Hegel's philosophy has nothing to say about a spiritual world; its content is only the world of nature and history.

My position in relation to Hartmann's philosophy was that I was able to agree with his idealistic illumination of the sensory world and human life in it in many things; but that I had to see in his fundamental epistemological views not only a only a theoretical contrast to what I consider to be truth, but also a way of thinking that practically deprives human thought of the possibility of discovering and applying the cognitive powers of the “visionary consciousness” that lie dormant in the soul. That is why, in the second volume of my exposition of Goethe's scientific writings (in Kürschner's German National Literature) in 1887, I was able to write the following sentences about Eduard von Hartmann's idealistic illumination of the sensory and historical world with the utmost sincerity: “With his objective idealism, Eduard von Hartmann stands squarely on the ground of the Goethean worldview... He does not want to be a mere idealist. But where he needs something positive in order to explain the world, he does call on the idea for help... But not much is achieved by distinguishing between the conscious and the unconscious... But one must tackle the idea in its objectivity, in its full content; one must not only see that the idea is unconsciously effective, but what this effectiveness is. If Hartmann had stopped at the idea that the idea is unconscious, and had explained the world from this unconscious, that is to say from a one-sided characteristic of the idea, he would have added a new monotonous system to the many systems which derive the world from some abstract formal principle. And his first major work cannot be said to be entirely free from this monotony. But Eduard von Hartmann's mind is too intense, too comprehensive and penetrating to have failed to recognize that the idea cannot be grasped merely as unconscious; rather, one must delve into what one has to address as unconscious, one must go beyond this quality to its concrete content and derive the world of individual phenomena from it.

Since I was in such a frame of mind and in such scientific opposition to Eduard von Hartmann, his overall judgment of my “Philosophy of Freedom” seemed significant to me in 1894. Given the position that Hartmann's philosophy occupies in the intellectual world, it cannot seem offensive that I share this judgment, which was intended only for me at the time, here and discuss it. This may be considered all the more justified since it is clear from the above that I have a high regard for the personality and philosophical significance of Hartmann. At the time, I already foresaw in this judgment the difficulties that my world view would have to face within contemporary thought. All the confusion with other ways of thinking, which I myself reject and which my striving for is also thought to meet with in the unintentional – and now also intentional – combating of it: they were all basically anticipated in Hartmann's judgment. But I had before me the judgment of a personality whom I esteemed and whose scientific seriousness I could acknowledge, despite her rejecting my way of thinking. Eduard von Hartmann wrote: “In this book, Hume's phenomenalism, absolute in itself, is not reconciled with Berkeley's phenomenalism, based on God; nor is this immanent or subjective phenomenalism reconciled at all with Hegel's transcendental panlogism, nor is Hegel's panlogism reconciled with Goethe's individualism. There is an unbridgeable gulf between any two of these components. Above all, however, it is overlooked that phenomenalism leads with inevitable consistency to solipsism, absolute illusionism and agnosticism, and nothing is done to prevent this slide into the abyss of unphilosophy, because the danger is not recognized at all.” - What is it in my ‘Philosophy of Freedom’ that Eduard von Hartmann seeks to attack with this judgment? Absolute phenomenalism, as it was realized in Hume's philosophy, appears to have been overcome by the attempt to characterize thinking in such a way that, through this, the phenomenal character of the sensory world view is lost and it is made into an appearance of an objective world; Berkeley's subjective phenomenalism loses its justification in the face of this view , in that it is shown that in thinking man grows together with the objective world and that therefore the assertion loses all meaning that world phenomena do not exist outside of being perceived; in contrast to Hegel's Panlogism, thinking is seen as the initial link for purely spiritual human cognitive abilities, not as the final link of ordinary consciousness, which only reflects the sensory world in shadowy ideas; Goethe's individualism is developed by showing how the understanding of human freedom is only possible through a world view that is based on the epistemological foundations of the “Philosophy of Freedom”. Only when the objective essence of the world of thought is recognized and the soul connection of man with ethical motives as a supersubjective experience comes to light, can the essence of freedom be grasped. It is this understanding that I also tried to make culminate in the presentation of my book. The accusation of solipsism against my world view is unfounded because it assigns thinking its place in the objective course of the world, thus directly pointing to the means of knowledge that makes the fall into solipsism impossible. Only someone who misjudges the reality value of the living thinking that I characterize can fall prey to the mention of the danger of absolute illusionism and agnosticism in relation to my “Philosophy of Freedom.” And this happens unconsciously, because they are foisting their view of thinking onto me. If one sees only what Eduard von Hartmann sees in thinking, then, upon rejecting transcendental realism, illusionism and agnosticism do indeed result, whereas my view of thinking leads precisely to making all illusionism and agnosticism impossible through the power and scope of thinking. And at the end of his judgment Eduard von Hartmann senses that my fundamental epistemological view leads out of the conceptual as a mere reflection of the sensible and historical world. For him, all philosophy and all possible striving for a worldview ends at this point; for me, it is the point where human cognitive powers enter the world of spiritual science. He calls this the “slide into the abyss of unphilosophy”; I characterize it, as I did in my book “Vom Menschenrätsel” (The Human Riddle), as the ascent from ordinary to “visionary” consciousness.

I shall explain later on that my arguments concerning the world view of Friedrich Nietzsche and Haeckel, as they appear in my writings from the 1890s, are a direct continuation of the path that leads from my “Philosophy of Freedom” to the “spiritual science” or “anthroposophy” that I advocate. Anyone who is bent on finding contradictions and then constructing a system of contradictions — perhaps a very spiteful system — will easily find contradictions in the structure of a world view if that world view itself is not based on words and word definitions in a formulaic way, but seeks to draw from the fullness of life with all its contradictions. Such a contradiction-fisherman could indeed reproach the world itself with its contradictions. However, some opponents of my world view are clearly prevented from properly assessing what they call contradictions by their obvious lack of knowledge of the development of philosophical science. Attacks on my world view, even from dubious quarters, cannot appear incomprehensible to me, since I was confronted a long time ago with the judgment in question from a serious and highly esteemed source, and I saw myself confronted with all the difficulties that this world view must face in many circles.

Anyone who knows the nature of the experiences that the human soul undergoes when it has opened the entrance gates to the spiritual world needs only to read a few pages of the “Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz Anno 1459” to recognize that the book's account refers to real spiritual experiences. Subjectively invented images reveal themselves as such to those who have insight into spiritual reality, because they cannot fully correspond to this reality either in their own form or in the way they are strung together. — This seems to provide the starting point from which the “Chymical Wedding” can be viewed. We can follow the experiences described from the soul's point of view, as it were, and explore what insight into spiritual realities has to say about them. Unconcerned about everything that has been written about this book, the point of view characterized by it is to be taken up here first. We will take from the book itself what it wants to say. Only then can we talk about questions that many observers ask before a sufficient basis for this is created.

The experiences of the wanderer in The Chemical Wedding are divided into seven mental days. The first day begins with the bearer of the experiences encountering imaginations before his soul that allow his decision to begin the journey to mature. The description is written in such a way that it reveals the particular care of the narrator in distinguishing between what the bearer of the experiences understands at the time he has a “vision” and what is still hidden from his insight. Likewise, a distinction is made between what comes to the seer from the spiritual world without his will being involved, and what is brought about by this will. The first experience is not one that is deliberately brought about and is not one that the seer fully understands. It brings him the opportunity to enter the spiritual world. However, he is not unprepared. Seven years ago, he was informed through a 'bodily face' that he would be called to participate in the 'Chymical Wedding'. The expression 'bodily face' cannot be misunderstood by anyone who grasps the entire spirit of the book. It is not a vision of the morbid or down-tuned soul life, but a perception that can be attained through spiritual vision, the content of which stands before the soul with the same character of reality as a perception of the bodily eye. That the bearer of the experiences could have such a “vision” presupposes a state of soul that is not that of ordinary human consciousness. The latter knows only the changing states of waking and sleeping and, between the two, the dream, the experiences of which are not related to anything real. The soul, which experiences itself through this ordinary consciousness, knows itself to be united with a reality through the senses; but when its connection with the senses ceases during sleep, it is not in a knowing relationship with any reality, not even with its own self and its inner experiences. And during the dream, she cannot see clearly what relationship she has to reality. At the time of the 'bodily vision' that he still remembers, the Wanderer in 'The Chemical Wedding' already had a consciousness that was different from the usual one. He has experienced that the soul can perceive even when it is in the same relationship to the senses as it is during sleep. The concept of the soul living separately from the body and knowing a reality in this life has become more valid for him. He knows that the soul can so strengthen its own being that in its separation from the body it can be united with a spiritual world as it is with nature through the bodily sense organs. That such a union can take place, that it lies before him, he has learned through the “bodily vision”. The experience itself of this union could not be given to him through this vision. He has waited for this. It presents itself in his conceptions as the participation in the “Chymical Wedding”. Thus he is prepared for a renewed experience in the spiritual world.

At a time of heightened spiritual mood, on the eve of Easter, this renewed experience occurs. The bearer of the experiences feels as if he is being buffeted by a storm. Thus it announces itself to him that he is experiencing a reality whose perception is not mediated through the physical body. He is lifted out of the state of equilibrium with respect to the forces of the world, into which the human being is placed by his physical body. His soul does not live the life of this physical body; it feels only connected with the (etheric) body of formative forces that permeates the physical one. This body of formative forces is not, however, part of the equilibrium of the cosmic forces, but of the mobility of the supersensible world, which is closest to the physical and which the human being perceives first when he has opened the gates of spiritual vision. Only in the physical world do the forces solidify into fixed forms that express themselves in states of equilibrium; in the spiritual world, perpetual mobility reigns. The person undergoing this mobility becomes aware of the raging storm as a result of this mobility. The revelation of a spiritual being emerges from the vagueness of this perception. This revelation takes place through a clearly shaped imagination. The spirit appears in a blue dress studded with stars. One must keep away from the description of this being everything that amateurish esotericists like to add to the “explanation” in the way of symbolic interpretations. One is dealing with a non-sensuous experience, which the person experiencing it expresses for himself and for others through an image. The blue dress studded with stars is no more a symbol of the blue night sky or anything similar than the idea of the rosebush is a symbol of the evening glow in ordinary consciousness. In supersensible perception there is a much more active, conscious activity of the soul than in the case of the senses. — In the case of the wanderer at the 'Chymical Wedding', this activity is exercised through the formative forces body, as in the case of physical seeing through the bodily senses by means of the eyes. This activity of the formative forces body can be compared to the arousal of radiating light. Such light falls on the spiritual being that is revealing itself. It is reflected back by it. Thus the beholder sees his own radiated light, and behind its boundary he becomes aware of the limiting being. The 'blue' comes about through this relationship of the spiritual being to the spiritual light of the body of formative forces; the stars are not reflected, but are absorbed by the being as parts of the spiritual light. The spiritual being has objective reality; the image through which it reveals itself is a modification, brought about by the being, in the radiance of the body of formative forces. This imagination must not be confused with a vision either. The subjective experience of the bearer of such an imagination is completely different from that of the visionary. The visionary lives in his vision through an inner compulsion; the bearer of the imagination adds it to the designated spiritual being or process with the same inner conscious freedom with which a word or a sentence is used as an expression for a sensual object. Someone who has no knowledge of the nature of the spiritual world may think that it is completely unnecessary to clothe this spiritual world, which reveals itself in imageless experiences, in imaginations that evoke the appearance of the visionary. In reply to this, it is true that imagination is not the essence that is perceived spiritually, but it is the means by which this essence must reveal itself in the soul. Just as one cannot perceive a sensual color without the definite activity of the eye, so too can one not experience something spiritual without encountering it from within with a definite imagination. This does not prevent the use of pure concepts, as they are common in natural science or philosophy, when presenting spiritual experiences that are made through imagination. The present remarks are based on such concepts in order to trace the content of the 'Chymical Wedding'. But in the seventeenth century, when J. V. Andreae wrote the book, it was not yet customary to make use of such concepts to such an extent; one directly presented the imaginations through which one had experienced the supersensible beings and processes.

In the spiritual form that reveals itself to him, the wanderer at the “Chemical Wedding” recognizes the being that can give him the right impulse for his journey. Through his encounter with this figure, he consciously feels that he is standing in the spiritual world. The way in which he stands in this world points to the particular direction of his path of knowledge. He does not walk in the direction of the mystic in the narrower sense, but in that of the alchemist. In order not to misunderstand the following exposition, one should keep away from the concept of “alchemy” everything that has been attached to it through superstition, fraud, adventurism and the like. Think of what the honest, unprejudiced seekers after truth who coined this term were striving for. They wanted to recognize the lawful connections between the things of nature that are not conditioned by the activity of nature itself, but by a spiritual essence that reveals itself through nature. They sought supersensible forces that are active in the sensual world but do not allow themselves to be recognized in a sensual way. The wanderer of the 'Chymical Wedding' sets out on the path of such researchers. In this sense, he is a representative of alchemical research. As such, he is convinced that the supersensible forces of nature hide themselves from ordinary consciousness. He has brought about experiences within himself which, through their effect, enable the soul to use the body of formative forces as an organ of perception. Through this organ of perception, he gains insight into the supersensible forces of nature. He first wants to recognize the extra-human, supersensible forces of nature in a spiritual form of existence, which is experienced outside the realm of sensory perception and ordinary mental activity. Equipped with the knowledge of these forces, he then wants to see through the true essence of the human body itself. He believes that through knowledge gained by the soul in conjunction with the body of formative forces, which is activated independently of the physical organism, one can see through the human body and thereby come close to the secret that the universe works through this being. For ordinary sensory perception, this secret is veiled; the human being lives in it; but he does not see through what he experiences. Starting from supersensible knowledge of nature, the wanderer in The Chymical Wedding finally aimed to arrive at beholding the supersensible essence of the human being. It is by this path of research that the alchemist, in contrast to the mystic in the narrower sense, strives. He too seeks to experience the human being differently from what is possible through ordinary consciousness. But he does not choose the path that leads to the use of the formative forces independent of the physical body. He starts from the vague feeling that a more intimate interpenetration of the physical body with the formative forces than is possible in ordinary waking life leads away from communion with the world of sense-perceptible beings and leads to communion with the spiritual world of human beings. The alchemist strives to withdraw himself with his conscious being from the ordinary context of the body and to enter into the world that lies behind the realm of sensory perception as the “spiritual nature” of the world. The mystic attempts to lead the conscious soul deeper into the context of the physical, in order to consciously immerse himself in that area of physicality that is hidden from self-awareness when it is filled with the perceptions of the senses. The mystic does not always seek to give a full account of this endeavor. He will only too often seek to characterize his path in a different way. But the mystic is in most cases a poor explainer of his own nature. This is connected with the fact that certain feelings become attached to the spiritual quest. Because the mystic's soul wants to overcome the kind of togetherness with the body that is experienced in ordinary consciousness, a kind of self-rapture takes hold of it, not only a certain contempt for this togetherness, but for the body itself. Therefore, she does not want to admit to herself that her mystical experience is based on an even more intimate connection with the body than that which produces ordinary consciousness. — Through this more intimate connection, the mystic perceives a change in his thinking, feeling and willing. He surrenders to this perception without developing any inclination to elucidate the reason for the change. This change reveals itself to him, despite having descended deeper into the physical, as a spiritualization of his inner life. And he has every right to see it as such. Sensuality is nothing other than the form of existence that the soul experiences when it is in the same connection with the body as that on which ordinary waking consciousness is based. When the soul unites more intimately with the body than is the case in this form of existence, then it experiences a relationship of the human being to the world that is more spiritual than that established through the senses. The perceptions that arise then are condensed into imaginations. These imaginations are revelations of the forces with which the formative body works on the physical body. They remain hidden from ordinary consciousness. The feeling is strengthened to such an extent that the etheric-spiritual forces, which radiate from the cosmos into the human being, are experienced as if through an inner touch. In the will, the soul knows itself to be dedicated to a spiritual work that integrates the human being into a supersensible world context, from which he separates himself through the subjective will of ordinary consciousness. True mysticism arises only when the human being carries his fully conscious soul being into the more intimate connection with the body that is characterized and is not driven by the constraints of the bodily organization to morbidly visionary or downcast consciousness. Genuine mysticism strives to experience the spiritual essence of man, which is too close to the human heart and which is covered by sense perception for ordinary consciousness. Genuine alchemy makes itself independent of sense perception in order to see the spiritual essence of the world that exists outside of man, which is covered by sense perception. Before entering into the inner life of man, the mystic must bring his soul into such a state that it does not expose its consciousness to fading or extinction in the face of the increased counter-pressure that it experiences through its closer union with the body. Before entering the spiritual world that lies beyond the sense realm, the alchemist needs to strengthen his soul so that it does not lose itself in the beings and processes of this world. The paths of research of the mystic and the alchemist lead in opposite directions. The mystic goes directly into the human being's own spiritual nature. His goal is what may be called the mystical marriage, the union of the conscious soul with one's own spiritual being. The alchemist wants to pass through the spiritual realm of nature in order to see the spiritual being of man with the powers of knowledge acquired in this realm after the successful journey. His goal is the “Chymical Wedding”, the union with the spiritual realm of nature. Only after this union does he want to experience the contemplation of the human being.

Both the mystic and the alchemist experience a mystery at the very beginning of their paths, which cannot be penetrated within the ordinary consciousness. It relates to the relationship between the human body and the human soul. As a spiritual being, the human being truly lives in the spiritual world; but at the present stage of development within the evolution of the world, he has no ability of his own to orient himself in the spiritual realm. Through the powers of his ordinary consciousness, he can only establish his relationship to himself and to the world outside of himself in the sense of truth if the body instructs him in the directions for soul activity. The body is so incorporated into the world that this incorporation corresponds to cosmic harmony. When the soul lives within the perception of the senses and the ordinary activity of the mind, it is given over to the body with just the strength by which the body can transmit its harmony with the universe to it. If the soul is lifted out of this experience according to the mystical or alchemical direction, it becomes necessary to take precautions so that it does not lose the harmony with the universe gained through the body. If he did not take such precautions, then on the mystical path he would be threatened with the loss of spiritual connection with the universe; on the alchemical path, the loss of the ability to distinguish between truth and error. Without this precaution, the mystic would, through the closer connection with the body, so intensify the power of self-consciousness that he would be overwhelmed by it and no longer be able to experience the life of the world in his own life. Thus he would enter with his consciousness into the region of a spiritual world other than that which corresponds to man. (In my spiritual scientific writings I have called this world the Luciferic.) The alchemist would, without the necessary precautions, come to a loss of discernment between truth and deception. In the great context of the universe, deception is a necessity. Man, however, cannot fall prey to it at his present stage of development because the realm of sense perception affords him protection. If deception were not in the background of human experience, man could not develop the various levels of consciousness. For deception is the driving force behind this development of consciousness. At the present stage of human consciousness, deception must indeed work towards the emergence of consciousness; but it must itself remain unconscious. For if it were to enter into consciousness, it would overwhelm the truth. As soon as the soul enters, by the alchemical path, into the spiritual realm that lies beyond sense perception, it enters into the vortices of deception. It can only preserve its nature in the right way within these vortices if it brings with it from its experience in the sense world a sufficiently developed power of distinguishing between truth and deception. If it failed to develop such a power of discrimination, the whirlpools of illusion would sweep it away into a world where it would have to lose itself. (In my spiritual writings I have called this world the Ahrimanic one.) — Before he begins his journey, the mystic needs to bring his soul into such a state that his own life cannot be overpowered; the alchemist must strengthen his sense of truth so that it will not be lost, even if he is not supported by sense perception and the mind that is bound to it.

The bearer of the experiences described in the “Chemical Wedding” is aware that, as an alchemist, he needs a strengthened ability to distinguish between truth and deception on his path. He seeks to gain his support from Christian truth according to the circumstances of life from which he begins his alchemical path. He knows that what connects him to Christ has already brought forth within his life in the sensual world a power in his soul that leads to the truth. This power does not need the basis of the senses and can therefore prove itself even when this basis of the senses is not there. With this attitude, his soul stands before the being in the blue dress, who points him to the path to the “Chemical Wedding”. At first this being could just as well belong to the world of deception and error as to that of truth. The wanderer on his way to the “Chemical Wedding” must distinguish. But his power of discrimination would be lost, error would have to overwhelm him, could he not recall in supersensible experience what binds him in the sense world to truth with an inner power. What has become in this soul through Christ arises out of it. And like its remaining light, the body of formative forces of this Christ-light radiates towards the revealing being. The right imagination is formed. The letter that points him to the path of the “Chemical Wedding” contains the sign of Christ and the words: in hoc signo vinces. The wanderer knows that he is connected to the appearing being through a power that points to the truth. If the power that had led him into the supersensible world had been one tending towards deception, he would have stood before an entity that would have paralyzed his memory for the Christ impulse living in him. He would then have followed only the seductive power that draws man to itself even when the supersensible world leads him forces that are pernicious to his nature and will.

The content of the letter, which is handed over to the wanderer after the “Chemical Wedding” by the being that appears to him, contains, in the language of the fifteenth century, a characterization of his relationship to the spiritual world, insofar as he has become aware of it at the beginning of the first day of his spiritual experiences. The symbol added to the words expresses how the mutual relationship between the physical body, the body of formative forces and the soul-spiritual has developed in him. It is significant for him to be able to say that this condition in his human existence is in harmony with the conditions in the universe. He has found, through “diligent recalculation and calculation” of his “annotated planets”, that this condition may occur in him at the point in time at which it is now taking place. Anyone who regards what is being considered here in the sense of the follies of some “astrologers” will misunderstand it, regardless of whether they are a believer in it or an “enlightened” person who smiles condescendingly at it. The author of The Chemical Wedding had good reason to add the date 1459 to the title of his book. He was aware that the soul-disposition of the one experiencing it must be in harmony with the state in which world-becoming has been attained at a certain point in time, if inner soul-disposition and outer world-content are not to result in disharmony. The outer supersensible world-content must meet the soul, which is independent of ordinary sense perception, in harmony, if the consonance of the two is to give rise to the state of consciousness that constitutes the “Chemical Wedding”. Anyone who believes that the constellation of the “annotated planets” contains a mysterious power that determines the state of experience of the person would be like someone who believed that the position of the hands on his watch had the power to cause him to undertake a journey that he had to take from his life circumstances at a certain hour.

The letter refers to three temples. What is meant by these is not yet understood by the bearer of the experiences at the time when he receives the hint. He who perceives in the spiritual world must know that he will occasionally receive imaginations, which he must first renounce in understanding. He must accept them as imaginations and allow them to mature in the soul as such. During this maturing, they bring forth in man's inner being the power that can effect understanding. If the observer were to explain them to himself at the moment they reveal themselves to him, he would do so with an unsuitable power of understanding and think inconsistently. In spiritual experience, much depends on having the patience to make observations, to accept them at face value at first, and to wait until the appropriate time to understand them. What the Wanderer experiences on the first day of his spiritual experiences at the “Chemical Wedding” is described by him as having been announced to him “seven years” before. During this time he was not allowed to form an intellectual opinion about his “vision” at the time, but had to wait until the “vision” had had such an effect on his soul that he was able to experience further things with understanding.

The appearance of the spirit being in the blue, star-studded dress and the presentation of the letter are experiences that the wanderer has at the “Chemical Wedding” without his soul's own free decision leading to it. He goes on to bring about experiences through such a free decision. He enters into a sleep-like state; one that brings him dream experiences whose content has a reality value. He can do this because, after the experiences he has had, he enters into a different relationship with the spiritual world than the ordinary one through the state of sleep. In the ordinary experience during the state of sleep, the human soul is not bound to the spiritual world by ties that can give its ideas a reality value. But the soul of the wanderer at the “Chemical Wedding” is transformed. It is so inwardly strengthened that it can take up in the dream experience what is connected with the spiritual world in which it finds itself. And through such an experience she first of all experiences her own newly won relationship to the sense body. She experiences this relationship through the imagination of the tower, in which the dreamer is locked up and from which he is freed. She consciously experiences what is unconsciously experienced in ordinary life when the soul, falling asleep, passes from the realm of sense experience into that of supersensible existence. The restrictions and hardships in the tower are an expression of the sensory experiences towards the soul's inner being when it frees itself from the realm of such experiences. What binds the soul to the body in such a way that the result of this bond is sensory experience, these are the life forces that promote growth. Consciousness could never arise under the sole influence of these forces. That which is merely alive remains unconscious. The forces that destroy life, in conjunction with illusion, lead to the emergence of consciousness. If man did not carry within him that which leads him towards physical death, he could live in the physical body but not develop consciousness in it. For ordinary consciousness, the connection between the death-bringing forces and this consciousness remains hidden. But for someone who, like the bearer of experiences in the “Chemical Wedding”, is to develop an awareness of the spiritual world, this connection must come before the “eye of the spirit”. He must experience that connected with his existence is the “hoary man”, the being who, by nature, carries within him the power of aging. Vision in the spiritual realm can only be granted to that soul which, while dwelling in this realm, beholds the power that in ordinary life lies behind aging. This power is capable of snatching the soul from the realm of sensory experience. The value of the dream experience lies in the fact that through it the wanderer to the “Chemical Wedding” is aware that he can now approach nature and the human world with a state of mind that allows him to see what is hidden in both of them from ordinary consciousness. This has matured him for the experiences of the next few days.

At the beginning of the description of the second day, it is immediately pointed out how nature appears to him in a new way. But he is not only to look into the background of nature; he is to look more deeply into the motives of human will and action than is possible in ordinary consciousness. The interpreter of The Chemical Wedding means to say that this ordinary consciousness only gets to know the outer side of the will and action, and that through this consciousness people are also only aware of their own will and action. The deeper spiritual impulses that pour out of the supersensible world into this volition and action, and that shape human social life, remain unknown to this consciousness. Man can live in the belief that a particular motive leads him to an action; in truth, this motive is only the conscious mask for one that remains unconscious. Insofar as human beings regulate their social life together according to ordinary consciousness, forces intervene in this life together that do not lie in the sense of evolution and are beneficial to humanity. These forces must be counteracted by others that are seen through supersensible consciousness and incorporated into social activity. The Wayfarer of the “Chymical Wedding” is to be led to the knowledge of such forces. To do this, he must see through people to the being that really lives in them, which is quite different from the one present in their belief or corresponds to the place they occupy in the social order determined by ordinary consciousness. The image of nature that reveals itself to ordinary consciousness is very different from that of a social human order. The supersensible natural forces, which spiritual consciousness gets to know, are related to the supersensible forces of this social order of man. The alchemist strives for a knowledge of nature that will become for him the basis of a true knowledge of human nature. It is the Way to such knowledge that the Wanderer to the “Chemical Wedding” must seek. But not one such Way, but several, are shown to him. The first leads into a region where the intellectual conceptions of ordinary consciousness, gained through sense perception, impinge upon the course of supersensible experience, so that insight into reality is killed through the interaction of the two experiential circles. The second holds out the prospect that the soul can lose its patience if it has to submit to long periods of waiting for spiritual revelations, in order to allow what must initially be accepted only as an incomprehensible revelation to mature fully. The third demands men who, through their already unconsciously attained maturity of development, are allowed to see in a short time what others must acquire in a long struggle. The fourth brings man to an encounter with all the forces from the supersensible world that cloud and frighten his consciousness when he wants to snatch himself from sensory experience. Which path is to be taken by the one or other human soul depends on the state into which the experiences of ordinary consciousness have brought it before it begins the spiritual journey. It cannot “choose” in the usual sense, because its choice would arise out of the sense consciousness, which is not entitled to decide in supersensible matters. The impossibility of such a choice is realized by the Wayfarer after the “Chemical Wedding.” But he also knows that his soul is sufficiently strong for behavior in a supersensible world to be led aright when such an inducement comes from the spiritual world itself. The Imagination of his deliverance “from the tower” gives him this knowledge. The imagination of the “black raven”, snatching the food given to the “white dove”, evokes a certain feeling in the soul of the wanderer; and this feeling, produced out of supersensible, imaginative perception, leads to the path whereon the choice of ordinary consciousness would not have dared to lead. On this path, the wanderer arrives where people and human relationships are to be revealed to his gaze in a light that is not accessible to experience in the sense body. He enters through a portal into a dwelling within which people behave in a way that corresponds to the super-sensible forces pouring into their souls. Through the experiences he has within this dwelling, he is to awaken to a new life, which he will be responsible for leading when a sufficiently large area of these experiences is covered by his super-sensible consciousness. Many critics have expressed the opinion that the “Chymical Wedding of Christiani Rosencreutz” is nothing more than a satirical novel about the doings of certain sectarians or adventurous alchemists or the like. But perhaps a truly correct view of the experiences that the author of the book has his wanderer undergo “before the gate” will show that the satirical mood that the work displays in its later parts can be traced back to soul experiences, the seriousness of which takes on a form that appears to be mere satire, which only wants to remain in the realm of sense experience. It would be well not to lose sight of this in considering the further experiences of the wanderer after the “Chemical Wedding”.

The second mental day's work brings the spiritual seeker, whose experiences Johann Valentin Andreae describes, to experiences through which it is decided whether he can attain the ability of true spiritual vision, or whether a world of spiritual error shall embrace his soul. For his perception, these experiences take the form of imaginations of entering a castle, in which the world of spiritual experience is administered. Not only the genuine, but also the fake spiritual seeker can have such imaginations. The soul reaches them when it follows certain lines of thought and modes of perception, through which it is able to imagine surroundings that are not conveyed to it through sensual impressions. From the way Andreae describes the society of unreal spiritual seekers, within which the “Brother of the Red Rose Cross” still finds himself on the “second day”, one recognizes that he is well aware of the secret of the difference between the real and the unreal spiritual seeker. Whoever has the opportunity to correctly judge such inner testimonies of the spiritual insight of the author of The Chemical Wedding will be in no doubt as to the true character of this writing and of Andreaes's intention. It is obviously written to provide enlightenment for people who are seriously striving for an understanding of the relationship between the world of the senses and the spiritual world, and of the forces that can arise for the human soul from the knowledge of the spiritual world for social and moral life. Andreae's unsentimental, humorous and satirical style of presentation does not speak against, but for, the deeply serious intention. Not only can one feel the seriousness within the seemingly light-hearted scenes, but one also has the feeling that Andreae is describing like someone who does not want to cloud the mind of his reader with sentimentality about the secrets of the spiritual world, but who wants to create in the reader a spiritually free, self-aware and rational attitude towards this world.

If someone, through the exercise of thought and feeling, has brought himself to imagine a supersensible world, such ability is by no means a guarantee that these imaginations will lead him to a real relationship with the spiritual world. In the field of imaginative experience, the Brother of the Rose Cross sees himself surrounded by numerous souls who, although they live in ideas about the spiritual world, cannot come into real contact with this world because of their inner condition. The possibility of this real contact depends on how the spiritual seeker attunes his soul to the world of the senses before approaching the threshold of the spiritual world. This attunement produces a state of mind in the soul that is carried across the threshold and reveals itself within the spiritual world in such a way that it either accepts or rejects the seeker. The right frame of mind can only be attained if the seeker is willing to discard everything at the threshold that determines his relationship to the world within the reality of the senses. In order to dwell in the spiritual world, those impulses of the mind through which man feels the character and validity – the weight – of his personality from his external circumstances and fate must become ineffective. If this necessity, by which man feels transported into a kind of psychic childhood, is difficult to fulfill, then the other necessity, to suppress the kind of judgment by which one orients oneself within the sense world, is even more contrary to ordinary feeling. One must come to the realization that this way of judging is gained in the sense world, that it can only have validity within it, and that one must be prepared to learn the way one has to judge in the spiritual world from the spiritual world itself. When the Brother of the Rose Cross enters the castle, he develops a mood of soul that arises from a sense of these necessities. He does not allow himself to be led into a chamber to spend the first night in the castle, but remains in the hall to which he has come through his participation in the events of the second day. In this way he protects himself from carrying his soul into a region of the spiritual world with which the forces at work within him are not yet able to unite worthily. The soul mood that prevents him from penetrating further into the spiritual realm than the second day has brought him is effective in his soul throughout the night and equips him with the capacity for perception and will that he needs the following day. Those intruders who have come with him without the ability of such a state of mind must be expelled from the spiritual world the following day, because they cannot develop the fruit of this mood. Without this fruit it is impossible for them to connect the soul with the world through real inner powers, of which they are, so to speak, only externally embraced.

The events at the gates, the encounter with the lion, the reading of the inscriptions on the two pillars at the entrance, and other happenings of the second day are so vividly described by the Rose Cross Brother that one can see his soul weaving in the described mood. He experiences all this in such a way that that part of it remains unknown to him which speaks to the ordinary mind bound to the sense world, and that he only absorbs that which enters into a spiritual pictorial relationship with the deeper powers of the mind. The encounter with the “cruel lion” at the second gate is a step in the self-knowledge of the spiritual seeker. The Brother of the Rose Cross experiences it in such a way that it acts as an imagination on his deeper powers of mind, but that it remains unknown to him what it means for his position within the spiritual world. This unknown judgment is passed by the “guardian” who is with the lion, who calms the lion and, according to the content of a letter that is also unknown to the person entering, speaks the words to the person entering: “Now welcome to me, God, the man I have long wished to see.” The spiritual vision of the “cruel lion” is the result of the spiritual state of the Brother of the Rosicrucians. This soul condition is reflected in the formative part of the spiritual world and gives the imagination of the lion. In this reflection, an image of the observer's own self is given. In the field of spiritual reality, the observer is a different being than in the realm of sensory existence. The forces at work in the realm of the sensory world shape him into a sensory human image. In the spiritual realm, he is not yet human; he is a being that allows itself to be expressed imaginatively through the animal form. Within this existence, the drives, affects, feelings and impulses of the will that live in the human being's sensory existence are held in chains by the life of perception and imagination bound to the sense body, which are themselves a result of the sense world. If man wishes to step out of the sense world, he must become conscious of what in him is no longer fettered by the gifts of the sense world and must be brought onto the right path by new gifts from the spiritual world. Man must see himself before the sensuous incarnation. This insight comes to the Rose Cross Brother through the encounter with the lion, the image of his own being before the incarnation. It should be noted here, just to avoid any misunderstanding, that the form of existence in which the underlying essence of man beholds itself in a spiritual way before becoming man has nothing to do with animality, with which popular Darwinism thinks the human species is linked by descent. For the animal form of the spiritual vision is one that, by its very nature, can only belong to the world of formative forces. Within the sense world, it can only exist as a subconscious element of human nature. The fact that the part of his being that is held in bondage by the sense body is still in the process of becoming human is expressed in the frame of mind in which the Brother of the Rose Cross finds himself upon entering the castle. He faces what he has to expect with an open mind, and does not cloud it with judgments that still come from the mind bound to the world of sense. Such clouding he must later notice in those who have not come with a rightful soul mood. They too have passed by and seen the “cruel lion”, for this depends only on their having received the corresponding currents of thought and modes of perception into their souls. But the effect of this spiritual vision could not be strong enough in their case to persuade them to abandon the way of judging to which they were accustomed in the sense world. Their way of judging appears to the spiritual eye of the Brother of the Rose Cross within the spiritual world as vain boasting. They want to see Plato's ideas, count Democritus' atoms, pretend to see the invisible, while in truth they see nothing. These things show that they cannot connect the inner soul powers with the world that has embraced them. They lack consciousness of the true demands which the spiritual world makes upon man when he would see it. The Brother of the Rose Cross can in the following days connect his soul-forces with the spiritual world because on the second day he admits to himself in accordance with the truth that he cannot see and do what the other intruders claim before themselves or others to see and do. The feeling of his powerlessness later becomes the power of spiritual experience for him. He must allow himself to be bound at the end of the second day because he is to feel the bonds of mental powerlessness in the face of the spiritual world until this powerlessness as such has been exposed to the light of consciousness for as long as it takes to transform itself into power.

Andreae wants to show how the seven “sciences and liberal arts”, into which knowledge gained within the sensory world was divided in the Middle Ages, are to serve as preparation for spiritual knowledge. The seven liberal arts were usually considered to be: grammar, dialectics, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. From the description in the “Chymische Hochzeit” one recognizes that Andreae thinks both the brother of the Rose Cross and his rightful companions as well as the unlawful intruders as being equipped with the knowledge that can be gained from these liberal arts. However, the newcomers possess this knowledge to a varying extent. The rightful ones, especially the Brother of the Rose Cross, whose experiences are described, have acquired this knowledge in such a way that through its possession they have developed the strength in their souls to receive from the spiritual world the unknown, which must still remain hidden for these “free arts”. Their soul is so prepared by these arts that it not only knows what can be known through them, but this knowledge gives it the weight by which it can gain experience in the spiritual world. The weight of these arts has not become the weight of the souls of the unlawful arrivals. They do not have in their souls the true world content of these “seven free arts”. On the third day the Brother of the Rose Cross participates in the weighing of souls. This is described by means of the imagination of a scale by which the souls are weighed in order to find out whether they have acquired, in addition to their own human weight, a weight equal to seven others. These seven weights are the imaginative representatives of the “seven liberal arts”.

The Brother of the Rose Cross has in his soul not only the substance that can match the seven weights, but also a surplus. This benefits another personality, which is not considered sufficient for itself, but which is protected from expulsion from the spiritual world by the true spiritual seeker. By describing this process, Andreae shows how familiar he is with the secrets of the spiritual world. Of all the powers of the soul that develop in the world of sense, love is the only one that can remain unchanged during the transition of the soul into the spiritual world. Helping weaker people according to the strength one possesses, that can happen within the world of sense, and it can also be done in the same way with the possessions that a person receives in the spiritual realm.

From the way in which Andreae describes the expulsion of the unlawful intruders from the spiritual world, it is evident that he wants to use his writing to make his contemporaries aware of how far far removed from the spiritual world and thus from true reality a person can be who, although he has familiarized himself with all kinds of descriptions of the path to this world, is still unaware of a real inner transformation of the soul. An unbiased reading of the “Chymical Wedding” reveals as one of the aims of its author to tell his contemporaries how pernicious for the true development of humanity are those who intervene in life with impulses that relate to the spiritual world in an unlawful way. Andreae expects right social, moral and other human community goals from a rightful recognition of the spiritual foundations of existence, especially for his time. Therefore, in his description, he sheds a clear light on everything that is harmful to human progress because it draws such goals from an unlawful relationship to the spiritual world.

On the third day after witnessing the expulsion of the illegitimate newcomers, the brother of the Rose Cross senses that the possibility is beginning for him to use the ability to reason in a way that is suitable for the spiritual world. The possession of this ability presents itself to the soul as the imagination of the unicorn, which bows down before a lion. The lion then calls forth a dove with his roar, which brings him an olive branch. He swallows it. If one were to treat such a picture as a symbol and not as a real imagination, one could say that it visualizes the process in the soul of the spirit-seeker, through which he feels able to think spiritually. But this abstract idea would not express the soul process that is actually at stake in its full essence. For this process is experienced in such a way that the periphery of personal experience, which for the sense being extends to the boundary of the body, is extended beyond this boundary. In the spiritual realm the seer experiences beings and processes outside his own nature just as man experiences the processes within his own body through the ordinary waking consciousness. When such an expanded consciousness occurs, then mere abstract conception ceases, and imagination presents itself as the necessary form of expression of what is experienced. If one nevertheless wishes to express such an experience in abstract ideas, which is necessary in particular in the present day for communicating spiritual-scientific knowledge on a large scale, then one must first bring the imaginations into the form of ideas in an appropriate manner. Andreae omits this in The Chymical Wedding because he wishes to present, without alteration, the experiences of a spiritual seeker from the middle of the fifteenth century; in those days one did not translate the experienced imaginations into ideas and concepts.

When imaginative knowledge has matured to the point reached by the Brother of the Rose Cross on the third day, then the soul itself with its inner life can enter into the region of reality from which the imaginations have come. Only through this ability does man arrive at a new way of seeing the entities and processes of the sense world from a point of view situated in the spiritual world. He sees to what extent these flow out of their true sources in the supersensible realm. Andreae remarks that the Brother of the Rosycross acquires this ability to a greater extent than his companions. He is able to see the library of the castle and the burials of the kings from the point of view of the spiritual world. That he is able to do this depends on his being able to exercise his own will to a high degree in the imaginative world. His comrades can only see what comes to them through the power of others, without such strong exercise of their own will. The brother of the Rose Cross learns more at the “burials of the kings” than is written in all the books. The vision of these burials is brought into direct connection with that of the glorious “Phoenix”. In these visions the secret of death and birth is revealed. These two borderline processes of life only take place in the material world. In the spiritual realm, birth and death are not followed by creation and decay, but by the transformation of one form of life into another. One can only recognize the essence of birth and death by looking at them from a point of view outside the material world, from a realm in which they themselves do not exist.

The fact that the Brother of the Rose Cross penetrates to the “burials of the kings” and beholds in the image of the Phoenix the arising of a young royal power from the dead body of the old kings is recorded by Andreae because he wants to describe the particular spiritual path of a seeker of knowledge from the middle of the fifteenth century. This is a turning point in time with regard to the spiritual experience of humanity. The forms in which the human soul could approach the spiritual world through the centuries were changing at this point into others. In the sphere of external human life, this change was manifested by the emerging scientific way of thinking of the new time and the other upheavals in the life of the peoples of the earth in this epoch. In the realm of the world in which the spiritual seekers search for the secrets of existence, the passing away of a particular direction of the human soul forces and the appearance of another reveal themselves at such turning points. Despite all the other revolutionary events in the historical development of humanity, the character of spiritual insight had remained essentially the same since the times of Greco-Roman life until the fifteenth century. The spiritual seeker had to carry the instinctive mind rooted in the mind, which was the essential soul power of this age, into the field of spiritual reality and transform it there into the power of spiritual insight. From the middle of the fifteenth century onwards, this soul power was replaced by the mind, which was operating in the light of full self-awareness and liberating itself from instinctive forces. To raise this to the level of intuitive consciousness is the task of the spiritual seeker.

In Christian Rosenkreuz, as the leading brother of the Rosicrucians, Andreae portrays a personality who has entered the spiritual world in the way that came to an end in the fifteenth century. The experiences of the “Chymical Wedding” present this ending and the emergence of a new way to his mind's eye. He must therefore penetrate into secrets which the rulers of the castle, who would like to continue to administer the spiritual life in the old way, want to conceal from him. Andreae wants to characterize for his contemporaries the greatest spiritual researcher of the end of an expired epoch, but who sees through the death of this epoch and the rise of a new one in the spiritual field. He found that they were content with the traditions of the old epoch, that they wanted to open up the spiritual world in the sense of these traditions. He wanted to tell them: your way is a fruitless one; the greatest who has walked it in the end has seen through its fruitlessness. Recognize what he has seen through, and you will acquire a feeling for a new way. Andreae wanted to place Christian Rosenkreutz's spiritual path as the legacy of the spiritual research of the fifteenth century in his time, in order to show that the initiative must be taken for a new kind of spiritual research. In the continuation of efforts, as they began with Johann Valentin Andreae, the spiritual researcher still stands in them, who understands the signs of his time. He encounters the strongest resistance from those spiritual seekers who want to pave the way into the supersensible world by renewing or reviving old spiritual traditions.

Andreae speaks in delicate terms of the insights that must arise from humanity's contemplative consciousness in the epoch that began in the mid-fifteenth century. Christian Rosenkreutz advances to a great globe, through which the dependence of earthly events on extraterrestrial, cosmic impulses penetrates his soul. This marks the first glimpse of a “cosmology” that has its beginning with the Copernican view of the world, but which sees in it only a beginning that can only give what is valid for the sensory world. In the spirit of this beginning, the more recent scientific conception continues to research to this day. In its world picture, it sees the earth surrounded by “heavenly processes”, which it only wants to grasp with intellectual concepts. In the terrestrial area itself, it seeks the forces for the essential processes of the earth event. When it examines the conditions under which the germ for a new being arises in a mother being, it looks only at the forces that can be found in the hereditary current of the earthly ancestors. She is not aware that in the formation of the germ the “heavenly surroundings” of the earth are at work in the earthly process, that in the mother being is only the place where the extraterrestrial cosmos develops the germ. This way of thinking seeks the causes of historical events exclusively in the facts that preceded these events in earthly life. It does not look up to the extraterrestrial impulses that fertilize earthly facts, so that the events of one epoch give rise to those of the next. In this way of thinking, only the inanimate earthly processes are influenced by the extraterrestrial. For Christian Rosenkreutz, the prospect of an organic, spiritual “celestial science” opens up, which can no longer have anything in common with the kind of ancient astrology that rests on the same foundations for the supersensible as Copernicanism does for the sensual.

One can see how Andreae treats imaginative life quite appropriately in the “Chymical Wedding”. Everything that comes to him from Christian Rosenkreutz as revealed knowledge, without the intervention of his own will, is brought to him by forces that find their representation in images of the feminine. The path that the spirit-seeker's own will paves for itself is illustrated by images of guiding boys, by the masculine. Whether man is a woman or a man in the sense of the senses, the masculine and the feminine are at work in him as polar opposites. It is from this point of view that Andreae characterizes. The relationship between the conceptual and the volitional is brought into the right relationship when this relationship is presented in images that recall the relationship of the masculine and the feminine in the sensory world. Again, to avoid misunderstandings, it should be noted that the imagination of the male and female should not be confused with the relationships of man and woman in the sensual world itself; just as little as the imagination of the animal form, which arises in the seeing consciousness, has to do with the animal nature to which popular Darwinism relates humanity. At present, many a person believes that they can penetrate the hidden secrets of existence through sexual physiology. A superficial acquaintance with genuine spiritual science could convince him that this endeavor does not lead to the secrets of existence, but away from them. And in any case, it is nonsense to bring the opinions of such personalities as Andreae into any kind of relationship with ideas that have something to do with sexual physiology.

Andreae clearly points out important things that he wants to include in his “Chymical Wedding” in his characterization of the “virgin”, to whom he brings the spiritual seeker into a particularly close relationship. This “Virgin” is the imaginative representation of a supersensible knowledge that, in contrast to the “seven liberal arts” acquired in the sensible field, must be taken from the spiritual realm. This “Virgin” gives, in a somewhat mysterious way, her name, which is “alchemy”. Andreae is thus saying that true alchemy is a different kind of science from those that arise from ordinary consciousness. In his opinion, the alchemist performs his operations with sensible substances and forces not because he wants to know the effect of these substances and forces in the realm of the senses, but because he wants to let a supersensible reality reveal itself through the sensual process. He wants to look through the sensual process to a supersensible one. What he does is different from the investigation of the ordinary natural scientist in the way he looks at the process.

One of the experiences of the “third day” is the complete overcoming of the belief that the way of judging to which man is accustomed in the sense world can also be a guiding force in the supersensible world in its unaltered form. In the society in which Christian Rosenkreutz dwells, questions are put which lead to a reluctance to decide on an answer. This is to draw attention to the limitations of ordinary judgment. Reality is richer than the possibility of decision, which lies in the mind trained on the sense world. After describing these experiences, Andreae introduces a “duchess”; he thus relates Christian Rosenkreutz to the supersensible kind of knowledge characterized by her, to theology. The effect of this knowledge on the human mind is characterized. It is of particular importance that after all these experiences, the spiritual seeker is still haunted by the dream in the following night, which shows him a door that he wants to open and which resists him for a long time. This image is reflected in his soul by the idea that he should not regard all his previous experiences as valuable for their immediate content, but only as a producer of a force that must submit to further efforts.

The “fourth day” is crucial for the spiritual seeker's position in the supersensible world. The spiritual seeker encounters the lion again. The old inscription that the lion presents to him essentially contains the challenge to approach the source from which inspiration flows from the spiritual world. The soul that wishes to remain in merely imaginative experience could, so to speak, only allow itself to be addressed by the spiritual world and use the strength of its own will to bring the revelations to its understanding. If the full power of the human 'I' is to enter the supersensible world, then this 'I' must carry its own consciousness into this world. The soul must rediscover the 'I' with its sensory experiences in the spiritual world. In the supersensible, so to speak, the memory of the way the sensory world is experienced must arise. Andreae presents this by placing a 'comedy' among the experiences of the 'fourth day', that is, an image of events in the sensory world. In beholding this image of the world of sense, which is gained within the supersensible realm, the “I” of the spiritual seeker is strengthened, so that he feels the close connection between the soul element that experiences in the supersensible and that which is active in the sense world through the body.

From this insight into Andreae's appropriate mode of presentation, it can be concluded that he seriously wanted to talk to his contemporaries about a path to the spiritual world that is appropriate to the epoch of human development that began in the sixteenth century, at the beginning of which the author of the “Chymische Hochzeit” (The Chemical Wedding) feels he is. The fact that the realization of what Andreae presented to his contemporaries as ideal demands initially faced severe obstacles is rooted in the devastating impact of the turmoil of the Thirty Years War and all that it brought to recent times. But progress in the evolution of mankind is only possible if personalities like Johann Valentin Andreae counter the inhibiting forces of a certain world current with truly progressive ones.

Whether Andreae succeeded in describing to Christian Rosenkreutz a spiritual seeker who, from the path he has taken from the spiritual experiences of a bygone era, can effectively point to the new one that corresponds to the new era, can only be asserted if it is possible to show that the last “days” of the “Chymical Wedding” report experiences that open up the perspective into this new period; if Christian Rosenkreutz can carry his “I” over into this period.

The most significant experience for Christian Rosenkreutz on the “fourth day” is his presentation before the kings and their subsequent beheading. The author of The Chemical Wedding interprets the nature of this experience through the symbols that stand on a small altar. In these symbols, the human soul can see its relationship to the universe and its becoming. In such symbols, the spiritual seekers have always sought to make the soul understand how its own essence lives in the essence of the cosmos. The book points to the thought content of the human being, which, in accordance with the human organization, is an influx of objective world-creative thoughts into the soul. In the “Little Light” it is indicated how the world-creative thoughts are effective in the universe as light ether and how they become knowledge-producing and enlightening in man. Cupid's intervention by blowing out the little light refers to the view of the spiritual seeker, who sees two opposing forces in the essentiality that underlies all existence and becoming: light and love. But this view can only be correctly understood if we see in physical light and in the love active within the physical world the materially effective revelations of the primal spiritual forces. Within the spiritual power of light, the creative thought element of the world lives out itself, and within love, the creative will element. A “sphere” is among the symbols to suggest how human experience is part of the all-experience. The clock speaks of the soul's interweaving with the passage of time in the cosmos, just as the sphere speaks of its interweaving with the cosmos's spatial existence. The Brünnlein, from which blood-red water flows, and the skull with the snake, point to the way in which birth and death are conceived by the spirit-recognizer in the universe. Valentin Andreae uses these symbols in his description in a similar way to how they have been used since time immemorial in the meeting places that served such societies, through which the people admitted to them were to be initiated into the secrets of life. By using them in this way, he shows that, in his opinion, they are imaginations that are truly based on the development of the human soul and that can inspire the soul to feel the secrets of life.

The question arises: What does the “King's Hall” represent, where Christian Rosenkreuz is led, and what does he experience through the presence of the kings and their decapitation? The symbols point to the answer. The spiritual seeker should see how he is grounded in the essence of the universe with his own being. He must see what is in him in the world, and what is in the world in himself. He can only do this if he recognizes in the things and processes of the world the images of that which is active and alive in him. He comes to see what is going on in him not only through images drawn from the soul, but he sees the experiences of this soul through images that represent the evolution of the universe. The kings present themselves before Christian Rosenkreutz to show him: thus live the powers of your soul within yourself; and the experiences of the kings reflect what must happen in the soul under certain conditions. Christian Rosenkreutz stands before the events in the “King's Hall” in such a way that his soul beholds itself in them. The beheading of the Magi is an event within the development of his own soul. He has come to the “King's Hall” with the powers of knowledge, which still only have the nature that the entity was able to acquire before entering the spiritual world. However, by becoming familiar with this world, these powers of knowledge gain experiences that also relate to the material world. Not only does the spiritual world shine before the soul, but the material world also reveals itself in forms that cannot be fully grasped by those who stop at the material level of observation. One of the things these experiences reveal is the ambivalence of the human condition. The forces that underlie physical growth also show themselves to be effective in phenomena that are usually described as psychological. The power of memory and the impulses that give rise to imagination prove to be based on physical conditions that are similar to those of growth. Only the forces of growth work in such a way that they are in an ascending development in human childhood and adolescence, that they then decline and, through their decay, cause death in themselves, while the forces that form memory and imagination assume the possibility of decaying within themselves from a very early point in life. In each waking period, these forces undergo the descending development that extends to decay, which the whole organism undergoes from the second half of life until death. In each sleep period, this decay is compensated for, and memory and imagination experience a resurrection. The soul organism is superimposed on the human total organism like a parasite on a host. The soul organism can provide the conditions for memory and imagination because, in the course of the day, it undergoes the path to death that the total organism takes in the course of life on earth. In this way, for the spiritual seeker, the soul organism becomes a metamorphosis of the total organism. The soul organism appears as that part of the whole organism which brings forth the forces that reveal life from birth to death in a more intense way, so that they provide the basis for the life of imagination. Into the daily decay of the soul organism's forces, the creative thought-being of the world pours in and thus becomes a life of imagination in the human being. The essential thing is that the spiritual seeker recognizes the material basis of the soul processes as the transformed general material processes of the whole organism. The paradoxical fact is that on the path to the spirit one first sees the material conditions of soul life. This fact can be the starting point for an attempt. One can stop at the discovery that the soul processes reveal themselves in their material form. Then, in seeking the spirit, one can be driven into a materialistic world view. But if one really sees through what is at hand, then the opposite occurs. One recognizes in the material basis of the soul life the effective spiritual powers that reveal themselves through the material formations, and thus prepares the possibility of also recognizing the underlying spirit in the entire organism and its course of life.

Christian Rosenkreutz is thus confronted with the important experience that an alchemy taking place in the natural process reveals to him. The material processes of the whole organism are transformed before his spiritual eye. They become such that the soul processes shine through them like the light that reveals itself in the external process of combustion. But these soul processes also show him their limits. They are processes that correspond to what leads to death in the whole organism. Christian Rosenkreuz is led before the “kings” of his own soul being, before his powers of knowledge. They appear to him as that which the whole organism metamorphoses out of itself. But the life forces of growth are only transformed into powers of knowledge by absorbing death into themselves. And therefore they can only carry the knowledge of what is dead within them. Death is integrated into all processes of nature in that the inanimate lives in everything. The ordinary process of knowledge is directed only towards this inanimate. This process grasps the inorganic because it is dead; but it only grasps the plant and every living thing to the extent that they are tinged with the inanimate. Every plant contains inorganic processes in addition to what it is as a living being. These grasp the powers of knowledge in the ordinary view; they do not grasp the living. This only becomes visible insofar as it presents itself in the inanimate. Christian Rosenkreutz observes the death of his “soul kings”, his powers of knowledge, as they arise from the metamorphosis of the material forces of the whole organism, without the human being passing from natural alchemy to artificial alchemy. This must consist in man's giving his powers of knowledge a character within the soul that they do not have through mere organic developmental processes. What is essential in the ascending growth, what death has not yet gnawed at, must be awakened in the powers of knowledge. The natural alchemy must be continued.

This continuation of natural alchemy forms the fifth day's work of the “Chymical Wedding”. The spiritual seeker must penetrate with insight into the processes that nature brings about in bringing forth growing life. And he must introduce this natural creation into the powers of knowledge, without allowing death to prevail in the transition from the processes of growth to the processes of the soul. He receives the powers of knowledge from nature as dead entities; he must give them life by giving them what nature has taken from them when she has carried out the alchemical transformation into powers of knowledge with them. When he sets out on such a project, temptation draws near to him. He must descend into the sphere in which Nature works, conjuring up life out of that which, by its very nature, strives towards death, through the power of love. In doing so, he exposes himself to the danger of his vision being seized by the instincts that prevail in the lower realm of matter. He must come to know how an element akin to love lives in matter, which is imprinted with death, and which underlies every renewal of life. This process of the soul, exposed to temptation, is meaningfully described by Andreae in that he lets Cupid drive Christian Rosenkreutz before Venus. And it is clearly indicated how the characterized spiritual seeker is not held back from his further path by temptation, not only through his own soul power, but through the rule of other powers. If Christian Rosenkreutz had only to walk his own path of knowledge, he could also conclude with temptation. That this is not the case points to what Andreae wants to describe. Christian Rosenkreutz is to point the way from a past epoch to a dawning one with his spiritual path. It is the forces at work in the course of time that help him to permeate his “I” with the powers of knowledge that correspond to the new era. In this way he can begin the ascent to the “Tower” by taking part in the alchemical process by which the dead powers of knowledge experience their resurrection. Thus on this ascent he has the strength to hear the siren song of love without falling prey to its temptations. He must allow himself to be influenced by the spiritual elemental force of love; he must not allow himself to be misled by its manifestation in the sensual realm. In the Tower of Olympi, the dead forces of knowledge are brought into line with the impulses that in the human organism only come into play in growth processes. It is pointed out how Christian Rosenkreutz is allowed to participate in this process because his soul development is to take place in the sense of the changing temporal forces. He goes out into the garden while he should be sleeping, looks up at the starry sky and says to himself: “Because I had a good opportunity to reflect more deeply on astronomy, I found that on this particular night such a conjunction of the planets is taking place, the like of which cannot soon be observed elsewhere.”

In the experiences of the sixth day, the imaginations are described in detail, which bring to life in the soul of Christian Rosenkreutz how the dead powers of knowledge, which the organism develops in the ordinary course of its life, are transformed into the powers of supersensible insight. Each of these imaginations corresponds to an experience that the soul undergoes in relation to its own powers when it experiences how that which previously could only penetrate into itself with the dead becomes capable of awakening living knowledge within itself. Another spiritual seeker would describe the individual images in a different way from Andreae. But what matters is not the content of the individual images, but the fact that the transformation of the soul forces takes place in the human being by having the process of such images as a reflection of this transformation in a sequence of imaginations.

In The Chymical Wedding Christian Rosenkreutz is portrayed as the spiritual seeker who senses the approach of the age in which humanity will direct its gaze at natural processes differently than in the one ending with the fifteenth century, in which humanity no longer, when observing nature, , in this observation itself the spiritual content of natural things and natural processes, in which it can come to a denial of the spiritual world if it does not consider a path of knowledge possible by which one can see through the material basis of the soul life and yet still absorb the essence of the spirit into knowledge. To be able to do this, one must be able to spread the spiritual light over this material basis. One must be able to see how nature proceeds by shaping her forces of activity into a soul organism through which the dead is revealed, in order then to divine from the nature of nature itself the secret of how spirit can be juxtaposed to spirit when nature's creative activity is directed towards the awakening of the dead powers of knowledge to a higher life. In this way, knowledge is developed that is placed in reality as spiritual knowledge. For such knowledge is a further sprout on the living being of the world; through it, the evolution of reality continues, which prevails from the very beginning of existence up to the life of man. Only that which is present in nature in a germinal state and is retained in the working of nature itself at the point where, in the metamorphosis of existence, the powers of cognition are to develop for the dead, is developed as higher powers of cognition. That such a continuation of natural activity beyond what it itself achieves in human organization leads out of reality and into the formless is not an objection that will be raised by anyone who understands the development of nature itself. For this consists everywhere in hindering the progress of the growth forces at certain points, in order to bring about the revelations of the infinite possibilities of form at certain stages of existence. In the same way, a formative potential is also held within the human organization. But just as such a potential is held within the green leaf of the plant, and yet the formative forces of plant growth then go beyond this form in order to bring forth the green leaf in the colored petal at a higher level, so too can the human being progress from the form of his powers of knowledge, which are directed towards the dead, to a higher level of these powers. He experiences the reality of this progression by becoming aware within himself of how he thereby takes up the soul organ in order to grasp the spirit in its supersensible revelation, just as the transformation of the green leaf into the colored floral organ of the plant prepares the ability that is realized in the formation of the fruit.

After the completion of the art-alchemical process, Christian Rosenkreutz was appointed “Knight of the Golden Stone”. One would have to go into great detail in a purely historical account if one wanted to point out the name “güldener Stein” and its use from the relevant serious and the far more fraudulent literature. That is not the intention of this essay. However, it is possible to point out what can be gained from a study of this literature as a result of this use. Those serious personalities who have used the name wanted to use it to point to something in which dead stone nature can be viewed in such a way that its connection with living becoming is recognized. The serious alchemist believed that artificial natural processes could be brought about, in which dead, stony matter is used, but in which, if they are properly observed, something of what happens when nature itself weaves the dead into the living becoming can be recognized. By observing very specific processes in the dead, the aim was to grasp the traces of creative natural activity and thus the essence of the spirit that prevails in the phenomena. The symbol for the dead, recognized as a manifestation of the spirit, is the “golden stone”. Anyone who examines a corpse in its immediate present essence becomes aware of how the dead is incorporated into the general process of nature. But the formation of the corpse contradicts this general process of nature. This formation could only be a result of spiritual life. The general process of nature must destroy what has been formed by spiritual life. The Alchemist is of the opinion that ordinary human knowledge of nature as a whole involves something of which it only grasps as much as is present in a corpse. A higher knowledge should be found for natural phenomena, which relates to them as spiritual life does to a corpse. This striving is for the “güldenen Stein” (the golden stone). Andreae speaks of this symbol in such a way that one can see that he believes that only someone who has gone through the experiences of the six days he describes can grasp how to proceed with the “güldenen Stein”. He wishes to intimate that anyone who speaks of this symbol without knowing the nature of the transformation of the powers of knowledge can only have a mirage in mind. He wishes to portray Christian Rosenkreuz as a personality who can legitimately speak about something that many speak about without authorization. He wishes to defend the truth against the false talk about the search for the spiritual world.

Christian Rosenkreuz and his comrades, after they have become the true workers with the “golden stone,” receive a symbol with the two sayings: “Art is the handmaid of nature” and “Nature is the daughter of time.” In the spirit of these guiding principles they are to work out of their spiritual knowledge. The experiences of the six days can be summarized in these sentences. Nature reveals her secrets to him who, through his art, is able to continue her work. But this continuation cannot succeed for anyone who, for his art, has not first eavesdropped on her in the sense of her will, who has not recognized how her revelations come about through her infinite possibilities of development being born out of the womb of time in finite forms.

The relationship in which Christian Rosenkreutz is installed as king on the seventh day characterizes how the spiritual seeker now stands in relation to his transformed cognitive abilities. Attention is drawn to the fact that he himself gave birth to them as the “Father”. And his relationship to the “first gatekeeper” also appears as such to a part of his own self, namely to the one who, before the transformation of his powers of knowledge as the “Astrologus”, was indeed in search of the laws but who was not equal to the temptation that arises when the spiritual seeker comes to a point such as that at which Christian Rosenkreutz found himself at the beginning of the fifth day when he stood before Venus. He who succumbs to this temptation cannot enter the spiritual world. He knows too much to be completely removed from it, but he cannot enter either. He must stand guard before the gate until another comes who succumbs to the same temptation. Christian Rosenkreutz initially believes that he has succumbed to it and is therefore condemned to take over the office of the guard. But this guardian is, after all, a part of his own self; and by surveying this part with his transformed self, he has the opportunity to overcome it. He becomes the guardian of his own soul life; but this office of guardian does not prevent him from establishing his free relationship with the spiritual world.

Christian Rosenkreutz has become a knower of the spirit through the experiences of the seven days, and he is allowed to work in the world through the power that has come to his soul from these experiences. What he and his companions accomplish in their outer life will flow from the spirit from which the works of nature itself flow. Through their work, they will bring harmony into human life, which will be a reflection of the harmony at work in nature, overcoming the opposing disharmonies. The presence of such people in the social order should be a continually active cause for maintaining the health of life in the social order itself. Valentin Andreae points to Christian Rosenkreuz and his companions as an answer to those who ask: What are the best laws for the coexistence of people on earth? Andreae answers: Not what one expresses in thoughts, that it should happen in one way or another, can regulate this coexistence, but what people can say who strive to live in the spirit that wants to express itself through existence.

In five sentences, what guides souls that want to work in the sense of Christian Rosenkreutz in human life is summarized. It should be far from them to think in a different spirit than the one that is revealed in the work of nature, and they should find the human work by becoming the continuers of the works of nature. They should not place their work in the service of human desires, but should make these desires mediators of the works of the spirit. They should serve people lovingly so that the active spirit may be revealed in the relationship between people. They should not be deterred in their pursuit of the value that the spirit can give to all human work by anything that the world can give them in terms of value. They should not fall into the error of mistaking the physical for the spiritual, like bad alchemists. Such people believe that a physical means of prolonging life or something similar is a supreme good, and forget that the physical has value only as long as it proves itself through its existence as the rightful revealer of the spiritual that underlies it.

At the end of his description of the “Chymical Wedding”, Andreae hints at how Christian Rosenkreutz “came home”. In all the externals of the world he is the same as he was before his experiences. His new situation in life differs from the old one only in that from now on he will carry his “higher self” within him as the ruler of his consciousness, and that what he will accomplish can become what this “higher self” may work through him. The transition from the last experiences of the seventh day to the finding of oneself in the familiar surroundings is no longer described. “Here about two quart of leaves are missing.” One might imagine that there are people who would be particularly curious about what should have been on these missing pages. Well, it is that which can only be experienced by those who know the nature of the transformation of the soul as their own individual experience. Such a person knows that everything that leads to this experience has a general human significance that is shared as one shares the experiences of a journey. The reception of the experience by the ordinary person, on the other hand, is something very personal, is also different for each person and cannot be understood by anyone in the same way as by the person who has experienced it. The fact that Valentin Andreae omitted the description of this transition to the familiar situation can be taken as further proof that the “Chymische Hochzeit” expresses true connoisseurship of what is to be described.

The preceding remarks are an attempt to characterize what is expressed in the “Chemical Wedding”, merely from such a consideration of its content as it arises from the author of this presentation. The judgment should be substantiated that the writing published by Andreae should point in the direction that one should follow if one wanted to know something about the true character of a higher kind of knowledge. And as a fact, these remarks would like to show that the special kind of spirit knowledge that has been demanded since the fifteenth century is described in the “Chymical Wedding”. For anyone who understands the content of this writing in the same way as the author of this exposition, it is an historical account of a spiritual current in Europe that goes back to the fifteenth century and is directed towards gaining knowledge about a context of things that lies behind the external phenomena of the world.

There is, however, a fairly extensive literature on the effectiveness of Johann Valentin Andreae, in which the question is discussed whether the writings published by him can be considered real proof of the existence of such a spiritual current. In these writings, this current is presented as the Rosicrucianism. Some investigators are of the opinion that Andreae was only indulging in a literary joke with his Rosicrucian writings, intended to ridicule the dreamers who show themselves wherever higher knowledge is spoken of in a secretive way. Rosicrucianism would then be a fantasy of Andreae's, intended to mock the ravings of giddy or fraudulent mystics. The author of these remarks does not believe that he should approach his readers with much of what has been said in this direction against the seriousness of Andreae's intentions, because he believes that a proper consideration of the content of the “Chymical Wedding” makes it possible to form a sufficiently well-founded view of what is intended by it. Certificates taken from a field outside this content cannot change this view. Those who believe that inner reasons can be recognized in their full weight hold that external documents should be evaluated according to these reasons, and not the inner according to the outer. If, therefore, these remarks are made outside of the purely historical literature on Rosicrucianism, this is not intended as a negative judgment of historical research itself. It is only meant to indicate that the point of view adopted here makes a detailed discussion of Rosicrucian literature unnecessary. Only a few more remarks should be added. It is well known that the manuscript of the “Chymische Hochzeit” was completed as early as 1603. It was not published until 1616, after Andreae had published the other Rosicrucian writing “Fama Fraternitatis R. C.” in 1614. This writing, above all, has given rise to the belief that Andreae only spoke in jest of the existence of a Rosicrucian society. This belief is supported by the fact that Andreae himself subsequently referred to Rosicrucianism as something he would not want to advocate. Some of his later writings and notes in letters, which he made, cannot be interpreted in any other way than that he only wanted to tell a tale about such a school of thought in order to “fool” the curious and enthusiastic. However, in the exploitation of such testimonies, it is usually disregarded what misunderstandings writings like those published by Andreae are subject to. What he himself later said about them can only be correctly judged when one considers that he was compelled to speak after opponents had appeared who heretically denounced the designated school of thought in the worst possible way, that “followers” had appeared who were visionaries or alchemist swindlers, and who distorted everything that was meant by Rosicrucianism. But even if one takes all this into account, if one wanted to assume that Andreae, who later showed himself to be a more than pietistic writer, soon after the appearance of the Rosicrucian writings had a certain shyness about being considered the confessor of what was expressed in these writings, one cannot gain a sufficiently well-founded view of this personality's relationship to Rosicrucianism through such considerations. Yes, even if one wanted to go so far as to deny Andreae's authorship of the “Fama”, one would not want to do so with respect to the “Chemical Wedding” for historical reasons.

The matter must also be considered from another historical point of view. The “Fama Fraternitatis” was published in 1614. Let us leave open for the moment whether Andreae intended this writing to address serious readers, in order to speak to them of the school of thought known as Rosicrucianism. But two years after the publication of the “Fama”, the “Chymical Wedding” was published, which had already been completed thirteen years earlier. In 1603, Andreae was still a very young man (seventeen years old). Did he, as such, already have the maturity of mind to play a prank on the starry-eyed enthusiasts of his time by mocking them with a construct of his imagination in the form of Rosicrucianism? And even if he was willing to speak of a Rosicrucianism that he seriously believed in in the “Fama,” which, incidentally, had already been read in manuscript form in Tyrol in 1610, how did he, as a very young man, come to write the “Chymische Hochzeit,” the document that he then published two years after the “Fama” as a message about the true Rosicrucianism? The questions regarding Andreae seem to become so entangled that it becomes difficult to find a purely historical solution. One could hardly object to a mere historical researcher who tried to make credible that Andreae had found the manuscript of the “Chymische Hochzeit” and the “Fama” - perhaps in the possession of his family - and had published them in his youth for some reason, but later wanted nothing to do with the school of thought expressed in them. But if this were a fact, why did Andreae not simply make it known?

From a spiritual scientific point of view, one can come to a completely different conclusion. From Andreae's own judgment and maturity at the time he wrote the “Chymical Wedding”, one does not need to deduce its content. In terms of content, this writing proves to be one that was written out of intuition. Such a work can be written by people who are predisposed to do so, even if their own judgment and life experience do not speak into what is written down. And yet what is written down can still be a message from a reality. The content of the “Chymical Wedding” demands to be understood as a message about a real spiritual current in the sense indicated here. The assumption that Valentine Andreae wrote it intuitively throws light on the position he later took up to Rosicrucianism. As a young man he was predisposed to give a picture of this spiritual current without his own mode of cognition playing a part in it. But this mode of cognition developed in the later pietistic theologian Andreae. The intuitive side of his nature receded in his soul. He himself later philosophized about what he wrote in his youth. He does this as early as 1619 in his writing 'Turris Babel'. The connection between the later Andreae and the intuitive writer of his youth did not come clearly before his soul. If Andreae's attitude towards the subject-matter of the “Chymical Wedding” is considered in the light just indicated, one is compelled to consider the contents of this writing without reference to what its author himself expressed at any time about his relation to Rosicrucianism. Whatever of this spiritual current could reveal itself at Andreae's time, revealed itself through a personality suited for the purpose. Those who are convinced from the outset that it is impossible for the spiritual life active in world phenomena to be revealed in this way will indeed have to reject what is said here. But there could also be people who, without starting from superstitious prejudices, come to the conviction of such a form of revelation precisely through calm consideration of the “Andreae case”.

When I read Richard Wahle's 1885 essay 'Brain and Consciousness', I had the impression that a personality was speaking who knew how to describe in a sharp-sighted way what human consciousness can say about the content given to it when it philosophizes, putting itself in the perspective of currently accepted science. This essay contains the germ of what Wahle would later discuss impressively in his books 'The Whole of Philosophy and its End' and 'On the Mechanism of Spiritual Life', and for which he found such apt formulations in smaller essays, particularly in his 'Historical Overview of the Development of Philosophy up to its Last Phase'. In “fast sündhafter” Kürze is the extract of a thought-provoking work in the preceding short essay given; in extraordinarily commendable detail, the result of this work is in the mentioned works.

I described the impression that I gained from Brain and Consciousness in a short review of this work, which was printed in 1885 in the Deutsche Wochenschrift (No. 86, $. 9), which was then published in Vienna. I concluded this review with the words: “The main significance of this little work lies in the fact that it has shown, in sharp contours, what experience actually gives us and what is often only added to it. All that the individual sciences can find consists only in the observation of related events, whereby we must assume that the connection itself is based on some true fact. We consider the author's arguments to be thoroughly convincing, but we believe that he has not drawn the ultimate conclusion from his views. Otherwise, he would have found that the true facts of the matter are given to us as experiential events themselves – namely, the ideal ones – and that the negation of materialism consistently leads to scientific idealism. Thus, while we see the progression from the thoroughly solid foundation laid by Wahle to a higher level of knowledge as the right thing to do, we unreservedly admit that we see in this writing an outstanding achievement that will have a decisive effect on the branch of science to which it belongs and that will certainly take a place in the history of philosophy.

For me, before I read Wahle's writing, the content of which was given from the philosophical consciousness of the end of the nineteenth century; and I found this content presented in it in a way that seemed convincing to me. It was clear to me, however, that we must not stop at thinking this content through. Otherwise, we lack the 'final consequence'; and this cannot be a consequence of thinking, it must be a consequence of experience.

But must we not also recognize that dreaming encompasses a world of events, and waking another; and that the events of waking arise when dreaming suddenly changes into a different form of event? And must we not also recognize that the reality value of dreaming arises from the point of view of waking? If I have to answer these questions with “Yes,” I do not see myself in contradiction to what Wahle has said about dreaming in his “Mechanismus des geistigen Lebens.” I want to say, entirely in his spirit: There are series of events of waking and series of events of dreaming. One can think of the two types of series as being connected to each other, as Wahle does. In this way one is protected from the danger that Wahle so aptly characterizes (p. 459 of his “Mechanismus des geistigen Lebens”): “Dreaming makes a tremendous impression on people and when they talk about dreams they become quite dreamy and mystical.”

But it is different to consciously run through the stages in which waking and dreaming intertwine; it is different to experience waking and dreaming, and also the sudden transition from one experience to the other. It is precisely in the experience of waking, which occurs when one not only “wanted to get to know” Wahle's excellent “elucidations, refutations, demonstrations, analyses” and many “psychological and physiological insights”, but makes them the fully grasped constitution of “spiritual life” - I use this word entirely in Wahle's sense - is the impetus to move from the ranks of dreaming and waking to the others that I describe in imaginative, inspired, and intuitive knowledge. The transition of experience is as sudden as that from dreaming to waking; and the events of waking life receive from the standpoint of exact imagination, inspiration, and intuition a similar illumination of reality that they do not possess in themselves, just as dreaming receives one from the standpoint of waking life.

The objection that is raised, that nothing forces people to refer from the point of view of ordinary consciousness to that of imagination, inspiration and intuition, is naturally to be raised against the above statements. It will be raised by all those who do not go far enough in their cognitive life to notice the point in this life at which awakening from ordinary consciousness must occur.

It should not be raised by the man of choice alone. For he has ($. 174 f. of his “Mechanismus des geistigen Lebens”) written the fact-finding sentences: “We believe that once one realizes what is actually being said when one claims to perceive acts of the ego, one will be horrified by one's own presumptuousness. — Does one see, that is, perceive, not with the eyes, but does one clearly perceive the ego as a being, as a substance? Do you see the ego, which is supposed to appear as apperceiving, judging, willing, feeling in ever different acts, always as a constant thing, as the same being? When you see a person fencing, running, rowing, climbing, for example, you still always see the same person in the different activities. Do you always see the same ego here too? For heaven's sake, who can say that he has perceived this ego-being psychically?” And ($. 177 £.): ”But one must turn away from all this abstruse stuff, which of course was not gained by observation, but by the fear that one could only do justice to the complications by means of peculiar psychic brackets, and often was only gained by indirect spiritizing over literary enunciations. From metaphors and acts, unions, innate categories and symbols, one must turn to the simple representation of the multiplicity of sensual series.

Whoever says this indicates that ordinary consciousness dreams when it wants to claim something other than “series of images and bodily actions”. But then the next step cannot be to remain within ordinary consciousness, but to awaken from it. And with this awakening, the dreaming talk of a “will that shows itself to consciousness as power,” of an “act of loving,” of an “act of desiring, of judging, of imagining,” ceases. And an awakened speech about these “dreams” begins, similar to the way an awakened person speaks about his nocturnal dreams. For what is said in anthroposophy from exact imagination, inspiration, intuition about the phantasms of ordinary psychology, would like to relate to these as the judgments of the waking about the confused, confusing of his dream world.

The difference between awakening from the ordinary dream world to waking everyday life and awakening from this life to supersensible consciousness is only that the former is felt to be involuntary, the latter as brought about by one's own (but trained) will. (I also use the word will here with the same awareness as Wahle himself does in his writings, despite having seen through the fantasy of ordinary psychology with regard to the “will”).

Since Wahle is clear about the dreaming of ordinary consciousness, he cannot really close himself off from awakening either. But then it will also be possible to reach an understanding that by awakening to imagination, inspiration and intuition, one is on the way to the “primal factors” without sinning against one's justified “enlightenment, refutation, demonstration, analysis”. One has only to take a serious look at the corresponding occurrence of this awakening. Dreaming is often joined by nightmare. It is overcome by awakening. Such a “nightmare” is also present when one does not merely mentally imagine the “rows of flat, sensuous occurrences” and the “motoric activity in peculiar types,” but experiences them. This “nightmare experience” is what a person has when, in ordinary consciousness, he strives from the sensory into the supersensible. The dreaming of ordinary consciousness wants to merge into waking in the supersensible, just as the dream wants to merge into ordinary consciousness. Liberation from the “nightmare experience” is all striving for supersensible knowledge and for religious inwardness.

Spintizing about whether the results of imagination, inspiration and intuition now place us squarely in the realm of the “primal factors” ceases to have any significance when it is recognized that the point is not to speak of these “primal factors” in the way of dreaming, but to free ourselves from the nightmare of ordinary consciousness.

Wahle has analyzed and demonstrated the dream in a completely unique way (in his “Mechanismus des geistigen Lebens”). Anyone who moves in such trains of thought as he does, who can thus follow the dream sequences into the sequences of waking consciousness, should be able to understand that in the realm of occurrences not only the “frame principle” is assumed to be justified, but also the image principle. There is not only a framework, there is also a picture in the framework. And precisely those who can strictly experience the events in their immediacy, they arise in the field of the senses as images; in the field of bodily actions as experienced dreams. And through this, they are driven out of the image and the experienced dream into the supersensible reality, just as the (dreaming) dreamer is driven into the sensual.

The world of events is misinterpreted when one says: “Something that corresponds to the scurrying events of the world - still conceived without bodily senses - namely, how the world was and is, insofar as humans and senses are not, there must be it in living active power, and something that corresponds to the senses, there must also be it in truly living active power. Let us arbitrarily call the first substantial being X, the second substantial being in general Y. Then the following must hold: the free-floating, in themselves undeclared occurrences are the function of the interaction of XY. — That is the ultimate conclusion of “knowledge”: put XY, unknown how, the occurrences into the world.

But the occurrences say something else. They do not place all kinds of partial occurrences on the right side of the equals sign and X or Y on the left; nor do they add: Don't dissolve the calculation, but leave X and Y standing. They invite calculation; and calculation consists of imagination, inspiration, and intuition; and then, in the calculation, something comes out. We are not left with X and Y at the end of the path of knowledge, but at the beginning of the path of insight, with calculations to which we have applied the diligence of dissolution.

Actually, other objections to anthroposophy should be discussed here; but this “agreement” must also be of “almost sinful” brevity, and it already comprises more than double Wahle's remarks.

But from these allusions it should be clear that anthroposophy, without betraying itself, can do justice to Richard Wahle's excellent achievements. It will have no objection to the validity of the “destructive psychology” (the first part of “The Mechanism of Spiritual Life”); it will have to illuminate the astute “constructive psychology” (the second part of the aforementioned book) from the point of view of the awakened consciousness. For here Wahle relies on a physiology that, as numerous works in the anthroposophical literature show, is in great need of correction. But how can valid statements be possible for a mode of thinking that Wahle has so precisely analyzed and demonstrated? After all, even the dreamer can only judge his dream world after awakening.

And so I can still subscribe to the final sentences of my review of Wahle's “Brain and Consciousness” from 1885 today. Yes, I can extend them to include his later works.

There is only one thing I would like to say about the review at the time. It contains the sentence: “We consider what the author has presented to be thoroughly convincing, but we believe that he has not drawn the final conclusion from his views. Otherwise, he would have found that those true facts are given to us even as experiential occurrences – namely, the ideational ones – and that the negation of materialism consistently leads to scientific idealism.” What is underlined here often recurs in my writings from the eighties and nineties of the last century in various forms. Certain personalities, who are absorbed in outward appearances, certainly do not want to find in such sentences what leads to the later anthroposophical presentations in my consistent further development. If, when I wrote these sentences, I had not wanted to ward off being lumped together with those “spiritual cognizers” who materialize the spiritual in their imagination after all, if I had not wanted to make my view clearly recognizable as one of the “real spirit,” then perhaps I would not have had to run the risk of what I wanted to say clearly being later distorted by others into something unclear. For example, I could have formulated the above sentence as follows: “. . empirical occurrences, namely spiritual experience based on ideas, are given, and that the negation of materialism leads consistently to spiritual knowledge rooted in scientific idealism.” I do believe that anyone who wants to can see from my formulation decades ago the reference to what I currently call anthroposophy.

Considering all this, I would like to add my own to Wahl's final sentence: At the boundary of his steel-hard, narrow terrain of knowledge stands a turret with windows of frosted glass. If you leave them closed, the view into X and Y becomes cloudy, and you can only let “the hunch wander into a necessary but unsearchable realm”. But you can also open the windows, and then the inkling turns into an unsearchable realm – anthroposophy. But I have to return the sympathies, which are so gratifying to me, wholeheartedly, because one of the “little towers” that one needs to feel secure in the certainty of knowledge has been erected by Richard Wahle as a good master builder.

Criticism of Knowledge and Anthroposophy

by Richard Wahle

One happiness of the mind is to grasp truth, another is to dream. There is said to be truth and there is not said to be knowledge, because truth can consist in knowing that knowledge is impossible. But the mere certainty of knowledge, however sad the state of human knowledge may be, could not give rise to joy; rather, joy can come at most from getting rid of errors and vain hopes, and from having firm, albeit narrow, ground under one's feet instead of shaky ground.

I am free of all philosophical fallacies. Those who want to get to know the relevant explanations, refutations, demonstrations, analyses and many psychological and physiological insights would do best to read my works, especially my Mechanism of Mental Life. Here, in the utmost, almost sinful brevity, I shall mention what should lie behind us, in the night of false concepts and misleading words; I shall show the positive achievement that has been attained through my radical critique. And precisely that formula of the most certain and modest knowledge will then open the gate to the city of dreams.

First, let us recall the simplest analysis. There is no such thing as will essentially revealing itself as power to consciousness; there are only series of images and bodily actions. There is also no such thing as a psychic act of loving, no act of desiring, of judging, no act of imagining; but there are only series of two-dimensional sensory occurrences and motor functions - in peculiar types (which I have described in detail), for which those practical, abbreviated names are used, but behind which there are absolutely no recognized functions.

With the existence of the senses, there is certainly the occurrence of the world of expansion, of physicality; it is simply there, as a sensory occurrence, a reality. But there is no certainty, no chance for the assertion that this expansion is an effective, powerful potency, a factor of creation and energy.

It is quite certain that the extended reality exists on the one hand in the primary form of the real occurrence - as a crystal, a tree, a human body, an eye - and it is equally certain that on the other hand there is a secondary reality of occurrences in the form that is called memory - of crystal, of eye - or further emerging combinations of such occurrences, which are called fantasies. But it is not certain, it is even a deception that these events are found in the possession of an “I”. It is certain that all these primary and secondary occurrences are realities pure and simple, but it does not appear justified to assume that they exist as “known,” existing in the bosom of an “I.” There are free-floating, powerless, shadowy realities, without in any way betraying their origin, their rooting; we know nothing of their origin and their substance! That they are a treasure of an inner core-ego, that there is a consciousness of it, is a lie. It is easy to explain how the lie arises. It arises through the play - through opening and closing the eyes - of the senses, which, however, are themselves nothing but freely fluttering realities that show no power or way of acting and are not suited to tell us the true processes.

If we now summarize our critical certainty in the face of the abundance of unproven and premeditated events, we have to say: something that corresponds to the scurrying events of the world - still without bodily senses - corresponds to the world as it actually was and is, in so far as humans and senses are not present - must exist in living, active power; and something that corresponds to the senses must also exist in truly living, active power. Let us arbitrarily call the first substantial being X, and the second substantial being in general Y. Then the following must apply: the freely floating, in themselves undeclared occurrences are the function of the interaction of XY. That is the ultimate conclusion of “knowledge”: XY, unknown how, bring the occurrences into the world. And now one is pushed further to assumptions that allow a meager fixation, but cannot be thought out far. Thus, the realm of dreams opens up here, and four main streets emerge.

It is a fact in the area of occurrence that there is one circle of primary and secondary occurrences for sensory complex A and another for sensory complex B, and so on. The occurrences show themselves in spheres that are not open to each other, or at least cannot be declared open with certainty. So at first we may or perhaps must say that in the processes of effectiveness XY a principle of the departments exists. I called it the framework principle.

Then it can or must be thought that the X and Y, the elemental force of the extended world under the deduction of the senses, and the elemental force of sensuality are unified in the essence. For in order to interact, they must be equivalent. So perhaps only one elemental substance with an internal elemental differentiation is to be believed, with an internal cause to give itself in spheres, in the framework.

Furthermore, it is easily possible that this original substance in its functions also leaps its bounds, and so those spheres of occurrence could somehow flow together in the depths of the roots. And one can even dream that perhaps threads are spun from sphere to sphere in the realm of occurrences as well.

And finally. From the standpoint of man, we know joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain. But an almighty primary substance cannot suffer. And so every pain here must somehow be a part of a whole, in which it is not pain, but perhaps only a spice and an intensification of joy.

My absolutely radical analysis and critique of the existing, which only tolerates neutral realities floating around, unknown from where and how, makes it necessary to rave about true primal forces. At the edge of my steel-hard, narrow terrain of knowledge stands a turret from which the presentiment can roam into a necessary but unknowable realm. — And there is also the bridge over which my sympathies can cross over to the structures of anthroposophy and its thoughts.

PREFATORY NOTE

The following pages, entitled “Philosophy and Anthroposophy,” mainly reproduce a lecture which I gave in Stuttgart in 1908.

Under Anthroposophy I denote a scientific investigation of the spiritual world which, while cognizant of the limitations of mere physical science and ordinary mysticism, and before attempting to penetrate into the spiritual world, first develops in the soul faculties not yet evident in ordinary consciousness and science. The development of these faculties renders this advance possible.

A spiritual science of this nature is usually held by accepted philosophy to be an amateurish procedure. In a short description of the evolution of philosophy I attempt to show that this reproach is entirely unjustified. The reproach is only made because contemporary philosophy, having itself erred into false tracks, fails to perceive that the nature of its own origin demands the pursuance of the path which eventually leads to Anthroposophy.

—Rudolf Steiner

PHILOSOPHY AND ANTHROPOSOPHY

The human soul, under normal conditions of life and development, is liable to encounter two obstacles which must be overcome if the soul would avoid being swept like a rudderless ship on the waves of life. A drifting of this nature produces, in time and by degrees, an inner insecurity eventually culminating in some form of distress, or it may rob a man of the power of rightly disposing himself in the order of the world according to the true laws governing life, thus causing him to disturb and not promote this order.

Knowledge in respect of the human self—that is, self-knowledge—is one of the means of ensuring inner security and our true alignment in the order of life's development. The impulse to self-knowledge is found in every soul; it may be more or less unconscious, but it is always present. It may vent itself in quite indefinite feelings which, welling up from the depths of the soul, create an impression of dissatisfaction with life. Such feelings are often wrongly explained, and their alleviation sought in the outer circumstances of life. Though we are often unconscious of its nature, fear of these feelings obsesses us. If we could overcome this anxiety we should realize that no external measures, but only a thorough knowledge of the human being, can prove helpful. But this thorough knowledge requires that we should really feel the resistance of the two obstacles which human knowledge is liable to encounter when it would enter more deeply into the knowledge of the human being. They consist of two illusions, towering as two cliffs, between which we cannot advance in our pursuit of knowledge until we have experienced their true nature.

These two obstacles are: Natural Science and Mysticism. Both these forms of knowledge appear in a natural way upon the path of human life. But they must be inwardly experienced if they are to prove helpful. Whether or not we can acquire a knowledge of humanity depends upon our developing the strength to reach, indeed, both obstacles, but not to remain stationary before them. When confronted by them, we must still retain sufficient detachment to be able to say to ourselves: neither method can lead our soul whither we would go. But this insight can only result from a true inner experience of their cognitive value. We must not shrink from really experiencing their nature; in order to realize thereby that we endow them with their true value by first advancing beyond them. We must seek access to both methods of knowledge; once we have found them, the way of escape from them becomes apparent. The belief that true reality is grasped by Natural Science is revealed, to an unprejudiced insight, to be an illusion. A normal feeling of our own human reality produces quite a definite experience. The latter is intensified the more we tend to apply Natural Science to the comprehension of our own human self. Man as a natural product consists of a sum of natural operations. It may become an ideal of knowledge to comprehend man in the light of the operative forces observed in the realm of Nature. With genuine Natural Science this ideal is justifiable. It may also be admitted that an incalculably distant future will reveal the method of development according to natural law of the miraculous human organization. Efforts in this direction must be accepted as the rightful ideal of Natural Science. Yet it is essential that we should, in the face of this rightful ideal, press forward to an insight promoted by a sound feeling of reality. We must inwardly experience how the results offered us by Natural Science become increasingly foreign to all our inner experience of reality. The more perfect the results, the more foreign are they felt to be to our inner life, with its thirst for knowledge. True to its ideal, Natural Science is bound to offer us material substances; yet, if inwardly unbiased, we cannot avoid finally encountering the difficulty experienced by Du Bois-Reymond, when he asserted, in his famous lecture on the “Boundaries of Natural Science,” that human knowledge would never grapple with the phenomenon haunting space in the guise of matter. To devote all suitable faculties to the pursuit of Natural Science is a sound experience, but we should at the same time feel that the distance between ourselves and reality is not thereby lessened, but increased. The results of Natural Science should give us occasion to make this experience. We must observe that they do not result from comprehension or feeling, and we shall reach the point of admitting that we do not, in truth, devote ourselves to Natural Science in order to draw nearer to reality; we believe this to be the case in our conscious self, but the unconscious origin of our efforts must have an altogether different significance—a significance for human life, into which we must inquire. Knowledge of true reality does not coincide with knowledge of Nature. This insight can prove a turning point in the life of our soul. The knowledge is brought home to us through inner experience that we were bound to follow the course of Natural Science, but that we were disappointed in the expectations raised by our diligent pursuit. This recognition is the final result of genuine experience and insight into the natural processes. We then abandon the belief that Natural Science, however perfect its future development, can supply us with the knowledge of the human being. Not to have reached this standpoint and still to cherish the hope that ideal natural scientific knowledge can enlighten us concerning our own being, is a sign that we have not sufficiently advanced in the experiences that are possible within the scope of Natural Science itself.

This is the first obstacle against which we strike in our effort to attain knowledge of the human being. Many a thinker has felt the thrust on this side, and has faced about towards Mysticism and mystical immersion in the inner self. A certain progress can also be made in this direction, in the belief that actual reality, or something in the nature of unity with the primordial fount of all Being, can be inwardly experienced. If, however, we press on far enough to destroy the force of illusion, we become aware that however deep the immersion in the inner self, this experience leaves us helpless in the face of reality. With however powerful a grip we may be induced to feel that we have seized primal being, this inner experience finally proves to be some effect of an unknown being; we remain incapable of laying hold on true reality and retaining it. The mystic pursuing this path discovers that he has inwardly abandoned the true reality which he seeks and cannot draw near it again.

The natural scientist reaches an outer world which illudes his inner life. The mystic, while seeking to grasp an outer world reaches an inner life which sinks into the void.

Our experiences, on the one hand with Natural Science and on the other with Mysticism, proved to be no fulfillment of our efforts to find reality, but merely the starting-point of our path, for we are shown the chasm that yawns between material occurrence and the inner life of the soul; we are led to see this chasm and to gain the insight that, in respect of true and genuine knowledge, neither Natural Science nor mere Mysticism is capable of bridging it. The perception of this chasm leads us to seek an insight into reality by filling the gap with cognitional experiences which are not yet forthcoming in ordinary consciousness, but must be developed. With true experience of Natural Science and Mysticism, we must admit that another form of knowledge must be sought in addition to these—a knowledge that brings the material outer world nearer to our inner life, and at the same time immerses our inner life more deeply into the real world than this can be the case with Mysticism.

A cognitional method of this nature can be called anthroposophical, and the knowledge of reality thereby attained, Anthroposophy; for at the outset, true and genuine Man (anthropos) is held to be concealed behind the “man” revealed by Natural Science and the inner life of everyday consciousness. This true and genuine Man makes his presence felt in dim feelings, in the more unconscious life of the soul. Anthroposophical research raises him into consciousness. Anthroposophy does not lead away from reality to an unreal imaginary world; it embodies the search for a cognitional method in response to which the real world will reveal itself. With due experience of Natural Science and the Mysticism confined to ordinary consciousness, Anthroposophy presses forward to the perception that a new consciousness must be developed, issuing from ordinary consciousness as, for instance, waking from the dull dream consciousness. Thus the cognitional process becomes for Anthroposophy a real inner occurrence extending beyond ordinary consciousness, whereas Natural Science is nothing but logical judgment and inference within the confines of ordinary consciousness, on the basis of outwardly given material reality, and Mysticism only a deepened inner life which, however, remains within the pale of ordinary consciousness.

In calling attention, at the present day, to the fact that an inwardly real cognitional process and an anthroposophical knowledge exist, habits of thought are encountered whose origin is due, on the one hand, to Natural Science with its wonderful achievements and great expansion, and to certain mystical prejudices on the other. Thus Anthroposophy is repudiated upon the one side for supposedly not doing justice to Natural Science, while upon the other it appears superfluous to the mystically inclined, who believe they can themselves take their stand upon true reality. Others, who aim at keeping “genuine” knowledge free from everything that extends beyond ordinary consciousness, hold that Anthroposophy disowns the true scientific character which philosophy, for instance, and its knowledge of the world should retain, and therefore lapses into dilettantism.

The following exposition will prove how little this reproach of dilettantism (especially at the hands of philosophy) is justified. A short sketch of its development will show how often philosophy has estranged itself from true reality, through not perceiving the very two cognitional obstacles alluded to above, and how an unconscious impulse is at the root of all philosophical effort to steer between these obstacles and strive for Anthroposophy. (I have dealt at greater length with this tendency of all philosophy towards Anthroposophy in my book Die Rätsel der Philosophie.

Philosophy is generally regarded by those concerned therewith as something absolute, and not as something which was bound to come into existence, under particular conditions, in the course of the development of mankind, and be subject to transformation. Many an erroneous view of its true nature is current. It is however precisely when dealing with philosophy that we are in a position to name the period when it originated (and must have originated) in the course of human development—not merely through inner experience, but also on the basis of external historical documents. Most exponents of the history of philosophy, especially of the older school, have estimated this period fairly correctly. In all such presentations we find that a beginning is made with Thales, and the course of philosophy traced from him onwards in continuity down to our times. Some modern writers on the history of philosophy, aiming at unusual comprehensiveness and perspicacity, have placed the beginning of philosophy in still earlier times, drawing upon the various teachings of ancient wisdom. This, however, is only due to a particular form of dilettantism wholly ignorant of the fact that all the teachings of Indian, Egyptian, and Chaldean wisdom were entirely different, both in respect of method and origin, from purely philosophical thought with its leaning towards the speculative. The latter developed in the world of Greece, and there the first thinker to be considered in this sense is, in fact, Thales.

We need not describe at length the characteristics of the various Greek philosophers, beginning with Thales; we need not dwell on Anaxagoras, Heraclitus, Anaximenes, or yet on Socrates and Plato. We may begin at once with that personality who appears as the very first philosopher in the narrowest sense, the philosopher par excellence—Aristotle. All other philosophies were in reality but abstractions inspired by the wisdom of the Mysteries; in the case of Thales and Heraclitus, for instance, this could easily be shown.¹

Neither Plato nor Pythagoras is a philosopher in the real sense of the word, seership being the source from which both of them draw. The chief interest in a characterization of philosophy as such does not centre round the fact that someone or other expresses himself in ideas, but round the question where the sources from which he draws are to be found. Pythagoras drew from the wisdom of the Mysteries, which he translated into concepts and ideas. He was a seer, only he expressed his experiences as seer in philosophic form; and the same was the case with Plato.

But the essential characteristic of the philosopher, manifested for the first time in Aristotle, is the fact that he necessarily rejects all other sources (or has no access to them), and works exclusively with the technique of ideas. And since this may be said for the first time of Aristotle, it is not without good historical reason that it should be precisely this philosopher who founded logic and the science, of thought. All other efforts in this direction had been of a precursory nature only. The way and the manner in which concepts and judgments are formed and conclusions drawn this entire range of mental activity was discovered by Aristotle as a kind of natural history of subjective thought, and everything we meet within him is closely connected with this inauguration of the technique of thought. As we shall revert to certain points in connection with Aristotle which are of fundamental importance for all later aspects of the subject, this short historical indication will suffice to characterize in a few words the point from which we depart. Aristotle remains the representative philosopher for later times also. His achievements were not only embodied in the post-Aristotelian period of antiquity, up to the founding of Christianity, but he was regarded most especially in the first Christian period and onward into the Middle Ages as that philosopher in whom direction was to be sought in all efforts to formulate a conception of the universe. By this we do not mean that men had Aristotle's philosophy before them as a system, as a collection of dogmas—especially in the Middle Ages, when the original texts were not obtainable; but thinkers had become familiar with the process of applying the technique of pure thought and thereby ascending step by step to knowledge, up to the point where thought encompasses the fundamental problems of life. Aristotle became to an increasing extent the Master of Logic. The medieval thinkers would say to themselves: whatever be the source of the knowledge of positive facts, be it due to man's investigation of the outer world by means of his senses, or be it due to revelation by means of divine Grace, as through Christ Jesus, these things have simply to be accepted, on the one hand as the deposition of the senses, and on the other as revelation. But if any matter, however given, is to be substantiated by a purely conceptual process, this must be done with that technique of thinking which Aristotle discovered. And, in fact, the inauguration of the technique of thinking was achieved by Aristotle in so signal a fashion that Kant was but right in declaring that, since Aristotle, logic had not advanced by so much as a single sentence.² Indeed, this statement is in all essentials true of the present day; the fundamental teachings embodying a logical system of thought will be found today almost unaltered, if compared with what Aristotle set down. The additions made today are due to a somewhat mistaken attitude, prevalent even in philosophical circles, towards the conception of logic.

Now it was not merely the study, of Aristotle, but above all the assimilation of his technique of thinking, that became the standard of the central period of the Middle Ages, or the early Scholastic period, when Scholasticism was at its prime—a period which came to a close with St. Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. When mention is made of this early Scholasticism, it should be clearly understood that no philosophical judgment is possible at the present time in this connection, unless we are unhampered by all authority and dogmatic belief. It is indeed almost more difficult nowadays to speak of these things purely objectively, than disparagingly; for if we speak of Scholasticism with disparagement, we run no risk of being charged with heresy by the so-called freethinkers; but if we speak purely objectively, it is highly probable we shall be misunderstood, because a positive and most intolerant ecclesiastical movement of the present day often bases—its appeal upon totally misunderstood Thomism. There is no question of discussing here what is accepted by orthodox Catholic philosophy; neither should we be intimidated by the possible reproach of being concerned with what is professed and determined in dogmatic quarters. Let us rather be undisturbed by what may be asserted on the right and on the left, and simply seek to characterize what Scholasticism in its prime felt of science, the technique of thinking and supernatural revelation. Early Scholasticism does not bear the character attributed to it in a ready-made modern definition. Far from being dualistic in nature, as many imagine, it is pure Monism. It sees the world's primal source as an undoubted unity; only the Scholastic has a particular feeling with regard to the perception of this primal being. He says: there exists a certain fund of supersensible truth, a store of wisdom which was revealed to mankind; human thought with all its technique falls short of penetrating, of itself, into those regions which embody the content of the highest revealed wisdom. The early Scholastic appealed to a certain fund of wisdom which transcends the technique of thinking; that is, it is only in so far attainable as thought is capable of elucidating the wisdom which has been revealed. This portion of the Wisdom must be accepted by the thinkers as revelation, and the technique of thinking merely applied for its elucidation. What man can evolve from his inner self has its being only in certain subordinate regions of reality, and here the Scholastic applies active thought for the personal investigation of man. He presses forward up to a certain boundary where revealed wisdom meets him. Thus the content of personal research and revelation becomes united in an objective, unified, and monistic conception of the universe. That a kind of dualism, owing to human limitations, is associated with the matter is only of secondary importance; this is a dualism in cognition and not a dualism in the world whole.

The Scholastic, therefore, pronounces the technique of thinking to be suitable for the rational elaboration of the material gathered by empirical science in sense-observation; further, it may press forward a stage, even up to spiritual truth. Here the Scholastic, in all humility, presents a portion of wisdom as Revelation, which he cannot himself discover, but which he is called upon to accept.

Now this special technique of thinking, as applied by the Scholastics, sprang entirely from the soil of Aristotelian logic. There was, in fact, a twofold necessity for the early Scholastics (whose period drew to its close in the thirteenth century) to concern themselves with Aristotle. The first necessity was provided by historical evolution. Aristotelianism had become a permanency. The second arose from the fact that, as time went on, an enemy to Christianity sprang up in another quarter.

The teachings of Aristotle did not expand to Western countries only, but also to the East; and everything that had been brought by the Arabs into Europe by way of Spain was, in respect of thought technique, saturated with Aristotelianism. It was a certain form of philosophy, in particular of Natural Science, extending into Medicine, which had been brought over, and which was eminently saturated with Aristotelian technique of thinking. Now the belief had grown in that quarter that nothing but a kind of Pantheism could be the consistent outcome of Aristotelianism—a Pantheism which, particularly in philosophy, had evolved from a very vague Mysticism.

There was, therefore, in addition to the fact that Aristotle's influence was still paramount in the technique of thinking, yet another reason for men to concern themselves with his teachings, for in the interpretation placed upon him by the Arabs, Aristotle is made to appear as the opponent and foe of Christianity.

It had to be admitted that if the Arabian interpretation of Aristotelianism were true, the latter could provide a scientific basis adapted for the refutation of Christianity. Now let us imagine what the Scholastics felt in this extremity. Upon the one side they adhered firmly to the truth of Christianity, yet upon the other they were bound by all their traditions to acknowledge that the logic and the thought technique of Aristotle were alone right and true. Placed in this dilemma, the Scholastics were faced by the task of proving that Aristotle's logic could be applied and his philosophy professed, and that it was exactly he, Aristotle, who provided the very instrument by means of which Christianity would be really conceived and understood. It was a task imposed by the trend of historical development.

Aristotelianism had to be handled in such a way as to make it evident that the teaching brought by the Arabs was not Aristotle's, but only a mistaken conception thereof; that, in short, one had but to interpret Aristotle correctly in order to find in his teaching a basis for the conception of Christianity. This was the task Scholasticism set itself, to the achievement of which the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas were largely devoted.

Now, however, something else happened. When the day of Scholasticism had drawn to its close, there occurred in course of time a complete rupture along the whole line of logical and philosophical thought-evolution. No criticism is here intended of this fact; we do not wish even to suggest that it could have happened otherwise; the actual course taken was necessarily such as it was, and we merely put the case hypothetically when we say that the most natural thing would have been to have increasingly expanded the technique of thinking, so that ever higher and higher portions of the supersensible world should have been grasped by thought. But the next development was not of this nature. The fundamental conceptions, which, with St. Thomas Aquinas for instance, were applicable to the highest regions, and which could have received such development that the boundaries restricting human research would have receded ever farther and upwards into the supersensible regions—this body of thought was robbed of its power and possibility, and survived only in the conviction that the highest spiritual truths transcend altogether the activity of human thought and are beyond elaboration by concepts which man can evolve from himself. By such means a break in man's spiritual life occurred. Supersensible knowledge was pronounced to be entirely beyond the compass of human thought and to be unattainable by subjective cognitional nets; it must have its roots in faith. There had always been a tendency in this direction, but it ran to extremes towards the close of the Middle Ages.

Pains were taken to accentuate the breach between faith on the one hand, which must be attained by objective conviction, and, on the other hand, whatever logical activity can elaborate as the basis of a sound judgment.

Once this chasm was opened, it was only natural that knowledge and faith should be increasingly thrust asunder and that Aristotle and his technique of thinking should also become the victims of this breach occasioned by historical development. This was more especially the case at the beginning of the modern era. It was maintained on the scientific side (and we may consider many of the statements as well founded) that no progress could be made in the search for empirical truth by merely spinning out what Aristotle had placed on record. Furthermore, the trend of historical events was such that it became inadvisable to make common cause with the Aristotelians; and as the era of Kepler and Galileo drew near, mistaken Aristotelianism had become the very bane of knowledge.

It repeatedly happens that the adherents and followers of some particular philosophy of the universe corrupt an uncommon amount of the teaching which the founders themselves presented in the right way. Instead of looking to Nature herself, instead of exercising the faculty of observation, it was found easier at the end of the Middle Ages to have recourse to the old books of Aristotle and base all academic dissertations on his written word. It was characteristic of the epoch that when an orthodox Aristotelian was invited to convince himself by inspecting a dead body, that the nerves do not proceed from the heart, as he had mistakenly gathered from Aristotle, but that the nervous system has its centre in the brain the Aristotelian replied: “Observation certainly shows me that this is actually the case, but Aristotle states the reverse, and I have greater faith in him.” The followers of Aristotle had, in fact, become a grievance; empirical science was bound to make a clearance of this false Aristotelianism, basing its authority on pure experience, and we find a particularly strong impulse in the direction given by the great Galileo.

On the other side we see an entirely different development. An aversion to the technique of thinking was felt by those who, so to speak, sought to save their faith from this invasion of independent thought. They were of the opinion that this technique of thinking was powerless when faced by the fund of wisdom acquired through revelation. When the worldly empirics invoked the book of Aristotle, their opponents confronted them with arguments gathered from a different but equally misunderstood book—namely, the Bible. This was more particularly the case at the beginning of the modern era, as we may gather from Luther's hard words; “Reason is deaf and purblind fool” that should have naught to do with spiritual truths, adding further that pure faith by conviction can never be kindled by reason in a thought founded upon Aristotle, whom he calls “hypocrite, sycophant, and stinking goat.” These are, indeed, hard words; but when considered from the standpoint of the new era, they may be better understood. A deep chasm had opened between reason and its technique of thinking on the one hand, and supersensible truth on the other. A final expression of this break is found in a philosopher through whose influence the nineteenth century has become entangled in a web from which it can only with difficulty extricate itself. This philosopher is Kant. He is, virtually, the last representative thinker whose methods can be traced to that division which occurred in the Middle Ages. He differentiates sharply between faith and that knowledge which man may claim to attain. Externally the Critique of Pure Reason is associated with the Critique of Practical Reason, and Practical Reason seeks to handle the problem of Knowledge from the standpoint of rational faith. On the other hand Kant asserts most emphatically of Theoretical Reason that it is incapable of comprehending the Actual, the “thing-in-itself.” Man receives impressions from the thing-in-itself, but he is circumscribed by his own ideas and conceptions. We could not describe Kant's fundamental error without going deeply into the nature of his philosophy and its history; but this would lead too far from the present subject, moreover the reader will find the question adequately treated in my Truth and Science.

What is of far greater interest to us at the present moment is this web in the meshes of which the philosophical thought of the nineteenth century has become entangled. Let us examine how this came about. Kant was especially alive to the necessity of demonstrating to what extent something absolute was given us in thought, something in which there could be no uncertainty, as against the uncertainty, according to him, of everything which proceeds from experience. Our judgment can only derive certainty from the fact that a portion of knowledge does not originate with external things, but with ourselves. In the Kantian sense, we see external things as through a coloured glass; we receive them into ourselves, grouping them according to lawful connections which we ourselves evolve. Our cognition has certain forms—the forms of space, time, the categories of cause and effect, and so on. These are immaterial for the thing-in-itself, at least we cannot know whether the thing-in-itself has any existence in space, time, or causality. The latter are forms created by the subjective mind of man and imposed upon the thing-in-itself the moment of its appearing; the thing-in-itself remains unknown. Thus when man finds the thing-in-itself before him, he endows it with the forms of space and time, and finds an apparent association of cause and effect, thus enveloping the thing-in-itself with a self-made network of concepts and forms. For this reason man may claim a certain security of knowledge, since, as long as he is as he is, time, space, and causality possess actual significance for him. And whatever man thrusts into the things he must also extract from them. Of the thing-in-itself, however, he can have no knowledge, for he remains ever a captive of the forms of his own mind. This view was finally expressed by Schopenhauer in his classical formula; “The world is my conception.”

Now this entire process of reasoning has been transmitted to almost the entire thought of the nineteenth century; not only to the theory of knowledge, but also, for instance, to the theoretical principles of Physiology. Here philosophical speculation was amplified by certain experiences. If we consider the doctrine of the specific energies of the senses, there would seem to be a corroboration of the Kantian theory. At all events that is how the matter was recorded during the nineteenth century. “The eye perceives the light”; yet, if the eye be affected by some other means, say by pressure or by electric current, a perception of light is also recorded. Hence it was said: the perception of the light is generated by the specific energy of the eye and transferred to the thing-in-itself. It was Helmholtz in particular who laid this down in the crudest manner as a physiological-philosophical axiom, declaring that not even a pictorial resemblance can be claimed between our perceptions and the objects exterior to ourselves. A picture resembles its prototype, but in so called sense-perception the resemblance to the original cannot be so close as even in a picture. The only designation, therefore, we can find for the experience within ourselves is “symbol” of the thing-in-itself, for a symbol need have no resemblance to the thing it expresses.

Thus the philosophical thought of the nineteenth century, until the present day, became thoroughly impregnated with elements which had long been in preparation, so that the relation of human cognition to reality could not be conceived except in the sense of the ideas given above. I often recall a conversation I had the privilege of having years ago with a highly esteemed philosophical thinker of the nineteenth century, with whose views, however, on the theory of knowledge I could by no means agree. To qualify human conceived thought as purely subjective was, I urged, a cognitional assertion which should not be assumed a priori. He replied that one need only bear in mind the definition of the word “conception,” which pronounces the latter to exist only in the soul; but since reality is only given us by means of conceptions, it follows that we have no reality in the act of cognition, but only a conception thereof. This truly ingenious thinker had allowed a preconceived opinion to condense to a definition (which, for him, was indisputable), to the effect that conceptual thought reaches only as far as the boundary of the thing-in-itself, and is, therefore, subjective. This habit of thought has become so predominant in the course of time that all writers on the theory of cognition who pride themselves on understanding Kant, consider every man a dullard who will not agree with their definition of conceptual thought and the subjective nature of apprehension. All this has resulted from the split which I have described as occurring in the spiritual development of mankind.

Now a real understanding of Aristotle enables us to find that an entirely different principle and theory of cognition might have resulted from a direct, that is, from an undistorted, development of his teaching. In the matter of the theory of knowledge, Aristotle already admitted ideas to which man today can but slowly and gradually ascend through the intellectualistic undergrowth which is the outcome of Kant's influence. We must, above all things, realize that Aristotle, by means of his technique of thinking, was able to elaborate true concepts capable of transcending those limits which were imposed upon knowledge in the way described above.

We need only concern ourselves with a few of Aristotle's fundamental conceptions in order to recognize this. It is entirely in conformity with him to say: Our initial knowledge of the things which we apprehend around us is provided by our sense-perception. Sense presents to us the individual thing. When we, however, begin to think, the things group themselves; we gather diverse things into a unit of thought. Here Aristotle finds the right connection between this unity of thought and an objective reality (which, leads to the thing-in-itself), in showing that if we think consistently we must conceive the world of experience around us as composed of “matter” and what he terms “form”—two concepts which he genuinely differentiates in the only true and possible sense. It would entail a lengthy exposition to treat exhaustively of these concepts and all they involve; some elementary notions, however, in this connection will help us to understand Aristotle's teaching of “matter” and “form” as differentiated by him. He clearly realizes that, in respect of our cognition, it is essential that we should grasp the “form” of all things which constitute our world of experience, since it is the form which is the vital principle of things, and not matter.

There are even in our day personalities endowed with a true comprehension of Aristotle. Vincent Knauer, who in the 'eighties was lecturer at the University of Vienna, was in the habit of explaining to his hearers the difference between form and matter by means of an illustration which may, perhaps, appear grotesque, but is none the less pertinent. “Think,” he said, “how a wolf, after eating nothing but lambs for a part of his life, consists, strictly speaking, of nothing but lamb—and yet this wolf never becomes a lamb!” This argument, if only rightly followed up, gives the difference between matter and form. Is the wolf a wolf by reason of matter? No! His being is given him by his form, and we find this “wolf-form” not only in this particular wolf, but in all wolves. Thus we find form by means of a concept expressing a universal, in contradistinction to the thing grasped by the senses, which is always particular and single. Our thought moves altogether along Aristotelian lines, if we, like the Scholastics, exert ourselves to conceive the nature of form by dividing the universal into three kinds. The universal, as essence of the form, is conceived by the Scholastics, firstly as pre-existent to all operation and life of the form in the single thing; secondly as permeating the single thing with life and activity; thirdly, they found that the human soul, by observing the things inwardly, endows the universal form with life in a manner consistent with its (the soul's) nature. The philosophers, accordingly, differentiated the universal that lives in the thing and comes to expression in human cognition, in the following way:

1. Universalia ante rem: the essence of the form before its incorporation in the single thing.

2. Universalia in re: the essential forms existent in the things.

3. Universalia post rem: these essential forms abstracted from the things and appearing in cognition as an inner experience of the soul, through the reciprocal relation of the soul to the things.

Until we approach this threefold difference, no genuine insight is possible, in this connection, into what is here of importance. For only consider for a moment what is involved. The insight is involved that man, in so far as he remains within the universalia post rem, is confined to a subjective element. Further (and this is especially important), that the concept in the soul is a “representation” of universally existent real forms (Entelechies). The latter (universalia in re) have incorporated themselves in the things, thanks to their having previously existed as universalia ante rem.

A purely spiritual form of existence must be attributed to the universal essences before their incorporation in the single things. The conception of such essential universalia ante rem will naturally appear as a fanciful abstraction in the eyes of those for whom only the world of sensible objects is real. But it is of essential importance that an inner experience should induce us to accept this conception. That experience is meant, thanks to which the general concept “wolf” is not merely regarded as a condensation, effected by the intellect, of all the various single wolves, but is perceived as a spiritual reality extending beyond the single thing. This spiritual reality enables us to recognize difference between animal and man in a genuinely spiritual sense. What is inherent in the species “wolf” does not find its realization in the single wolf, but in the totality of these single wolves. In man, an entity of soul and spirit is immediately revealed in the individual, whereas, in animals, only through the species, in the totality of the individuals. Or, in Aristotelian terminology with individual man the “form” finds its immediate expression in the physical human being; in the animal world the “form,” as such, remains in a supersensible region and extends itself along the line of development comprising all the individuals of the same “form.” It is permissible, in the sense of Aristotelianism, to speak of “group-souls” (the souls of kind or species) in the case of animals, and of individual souls in the case of man. If we succeed in acquiring an inner experience in the light of which the above distinction becomes equivalent to a perceived reality, we have advanced one step farther on the path of knowledge, along which Aristotelianism and Scholasticism had only progressed as far as the technique of concepts and ideas. Anthroposophical Spiritual Science seeks to prove that the above experience can be acquired. The “forms” are then not merely the outcome of conceptual differentiation, but the object of supersensible vision. The group-souls of the animals and the individual souls of men are perceived as beings of similar kind. This entire process is perceived as physical reality is perceived by the senses. The method by which Anthroposophical Spiritual Science seeks to acquire this experience will be indicated in the course of this treatise. At this point the writer's intention was to show how ideas within the range of Aristotelian doctrine can be found to corroborate Anthroposophy. There is, however, in addition to all that we have met with in Aristotle, something which finds less and less favour in modern times. We are required to exert ourselves to think in concise, finely chiseled concepts, in concepts which we have first carefully prepared. It is necessary that we should have the patience to advance from concept to concept, and above all things cultivate clarity and keenness of thought; that we should be aware of what we are speaking when we frame a conception. If, for instance, we speak, in the Scholastic sense, of the relation of a concept to that which it represents, we are required in the first place to work our way through lengthy definitions in the Scholastic writings. We must understand what is meant when we find it stated that the concept is grounded “formally” in the subject and “fundamentally” in the object; the particular form of the concept is derived from the subject and its content from the object. That is but a small, quite a small, example. The study of Scholastic works involves labouring through massive volumes of definitions most unpleasant task for the scientist of today; for this reason he looks upon the Scholastics as learned pedants and condemns them downright. He is totally unaware that true Scholasticism is naught but the detailed elaboration of the art of thinking, in order that thought may provide a foundation for the genuine comprehension of reality.

It is of course far easier to bring a few ready-made conceptions to bear upon everything that confronts us in the nature of higher reality—far easier than to construct a firm foundation in the sphere of thought. But what are the consequent results? Philosophic books of the present day leave one with a dubious impression: men no longer understand each other on higher questions; they are not clear in their own minds as to the nature and scope of their conceptions. This could not have happened in the days of the Scholastics, for thinkers of that period were necessarily acquainted with the aspect of every concept they used. A way of penetrating to the depths of a genuine thought-method was clearly in existence, and, had this path been duly pursued, no entanglement in the web of Kant's “thing-in-itself,” and the (supposedly subjective) conception thereof, would have been possible. On the contrary, two results would have been attained. In the first place, man would have achieved an inwardly sound theory of knowledge; secondly (and this is of great importance), the great philosophers who lived and worked after Kant would not have been so completely misunderstood in accepted philosophical circles. Kant was succeeded by Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel; what are they to the man of today? They are held to be philosophers who sought to fashion a world from purely abstract concepts. This was never their intention.³

But Kant's principles of thought were the dominating influence and prevented the greatest philosopher in the world being understood. People will only by degrees ripen an understanding of all that Hegel has given to the world; only when they have east off this hampering web of theories and cognitional phantoms. Yet this would be so simple! No more is necessary than the effort to think naturally and without constraint, rejecting the set habits of thought which have developed under the questionable influence of the Kantian school. The question must clearly be settled whether man (as proceeding from the subject) encompasses the object with a conception which he himself constructs within that subject. But does it necessarily follow that man is unable to penetrate into the “thing-in-itself?” Let me give a simple example. Imagine, for instance, that you have a seal bearing the name of Miller. Now press the seal on some sealing-wax and again remove it. There can be no doubt, I take it, that the seal being, let us say, of brass, no property of the brass will pass over into the wax. Were the sealing-wax to exercise the function of cognition in the Kantian sense, it would say: “I am entirely wax; no brass passes over into me, there is therefore no connection whereby I may learn the nature of that which has approached me.” And yet the point in question has in this case been entirely neglected—namely, the fact that the name “Miller” remains objectively imprinted upon the sealing-wax, without any portion of the brass having adhered to it. So long as people cling to the materialistic principle of thought that no connection is possible unless matter passes over from one to the other, they will in theory maintain: “I am sealing-wax and the other is brass-in-itself, and since none of the brass-in-itself can enter me, therefore the name of Miller can be no more than a sign. But the thing-in-itself which was in the seal and which has impressed itself upon me so that I can read it, this thing-in-itself remains forever unknown to me.” With this final formula the argument is clenched. Continuing the illustration, we might say: “Man is all wax (conception). The thing-in-itself is all seal (that which is exterior to the conception). Now since I, being wax (the subject conceiving), can but attain to the outer surface of the seal (the thing-in-itself), I remain within myself and nothing passes into me from the thing-in-itself.” So long as Materialism is allowed to encroach upon the theory of knowledge, no understanding is possible of what is here of importance.⁴

It is true that we are limited by our own conception, but the element that reaches us from outer reality is of purely spiritual nature, and is not dependent upon the transmission of material atoms. What passes over into the subject is not of material but of spiritual nature, as truly as the name Miller passes into the wax. This must be the starting-point of a sound theory and investigation of knowledge, and it will soon become apparent to what extent Materialism has gained a footing even in philosophical thought. An unbiased review of the state of affairs leaves us no alternative but to conclude that Kant could only conceive the “thing-in-itself” as matter, however grotesque this may seem at first sight. For the sake of a complete survey of the subject we must new touch upon another point. We have explained how Aristotle distinguished between “form” and “matter” in all things within our range of experience. Now if the process of cognition allows us to approach the “form” in the manner indicated above, the question arises to what extent is a similar approach possible in the direction of “matter.” It must be noted that, for Aristotle, matter was not synonymous with material substance, but comprised the spiritual element underlying the world, of physical reality. It is therefore possible not only to comprehend the spiritual element that reaches us from external things,* but also to seek immediate access to the things and identify ourselves with matter. This question is also of importance for the theory of knowledge, and can be answered only by one who has gone deeply into the nature of thought, that is, of pure thought. The concept of “pure thought” is one which we must be at pains to acquire. Following Aristotle, we may look upon pure thought as an actual process. It is pure form and, in its initial mode of existence, void of content as far as the single, individual things of the external physical world are concerned. Why? Let us make it clear how pure conception comes into being in contradistinction to perception through the senses. Let us imagine we wish to form the conception of a circle. We can, for this purpose, put out to sea until we see nothing but water around: this perception can provide the conception of a circle. There is another way, however, of arriving at the conception of a circle without appealing to the senses. I can construct, in thought, the sum of all places which are equidistant from one particular spot. No appeal to the senses is necessary for this exclusively internal thought-process; it is unquestionably pure thought in the Aristotelian sense; pure actuality.

And now a further significant fact presents itself. Pure thought thus conceived harmonizes with experience; it is indispensable for the comprehension of experience. Imagine Kepler evolving, by means of pure constructive thought, a system in which the elliptical courses of the planets are shown, with the sun in the focus, and then observation, by means of the telescope, subsequently confirming an effort of pure thought conceived in advance of experience. Pure thought is thus shown to possess significance for reality—for it harmonizes therewith. Kepler's method affords a practical illustration of the theories which Aristotelianism founded upon the science of knowledge. The universalia post rem are grasped, and, upon nearer approach, it is found that they became united with the things in a previous form, as universalia ante rem. Now if these universals are not perverted in the sense of a false theory of knowledge, if they are not made to appear as subjective notions, but are found to exist objectively in the things, it follows that they must first have become united with that “form” conceived by Aristotle as the underlying foundation of the world.

Thus the discovery is made that the apparently most subjective activity (when something is determined independently of all experience) provides the very means for attaining reality in the most objective manner possible.

Now what is the reason why human thought, in so far as it is subjective, cannot at first find free access to the world? The reason is that it finds its way obstructed by the “thing-in-itself.” When we construct a circle we live in the process itself, if only formally to begin with. Now the next question is: To what extent can subjective thought lead to the attainment of any permanent reality? As we have pointed out, subjective thought is, in the first place, expressly constructed by ourselves; it is of merely formal nature and, as far as the objective world is concerned, has the appearance of an extraneous addition. We are indeed justified in claiming that it is a matter of complete indifference to any existing circle or sphere whether our thought concerns itself therewith or not. My thought is brought externally to bear upon reality, and is of no concern to the world of experience around me. The latter exists in its own accord irrespective of my thought. It can therefore follow that our thought may possess objectivity for ourselves, yet be of no moment for the things. What is the solution of this apparent contradiction? Where is the other pole to which we must now have recourse? Can a way be found, within pure thought to create not only form, but together with form its material reality? As soon as the possibility is given of a simultaneous creation of form and matter a point of security is reached upon which the theory of knowledge may build.

When we, for instance, construct the circle, we may claim that whatever we assert concerning this circle is objectively true; but the question whether our assertions are applicable to the things will depend upon the things themselves eventually showing us to what extent they are subject to the laws which we construct and apply to them. When the totality of forms resolves itself in pure thought, some residue (Aristotle's “matter”) must remain, where it is not possible by the process of pure thought to reach reality.

Fichte may at this point supplement Aristotle. A formula along Aristotelian lines may be reached to the effect that everything about us, including all things belonging to the invisible worlds, necessarily call for a material reality to correspond with form-reality. To Aristotle the idea of God is a pure actuality, a pure act, that is, an act in which actuality (the formative element) possesses the power to produce its own reality; it does not stand apart from matter, but by reason of its own activity fully and immediately coincides with reality.

The image of this pure actuality is found in man himself, when by the process of pure thought he attains to the idea of the “I.” Upon this level (in the “I”) he is within the sphere of what Fichte calls “deed-act.” He has inwardly arrived at something which not only lives in actuality, but together with this actuality produces its own “matter.” When we grasp the “I” in pure thought we are in a centre where pure thought produces its own essential “matter.” When we apprehend the “I” in thought, a threefold “I” is at hand; a pure “I” belonging to the universalia ante rem; an “I” wherein we ourselves are, belonging to the universalia in re; and an “I” which we comprehend and which belongs to the universalia post rem. But here we must especially note that, in this case, when we rise to a true apprehension of the “I,” the threefold “I” becomes merged into one. The “I” lives within itself; it produces its own concept and lives therein as a reality. The activity of pure thought is not immaterial to the “I,” for pure thought is the creator of the “I.” Here the “creative” and the “material” coincide, and we must but acknowledge that, whereas in other processes of cognition we strike against a boundary, this is not the case with the “I” which we embrace in its inmost being when we enfold it in pure thought.

The following fundamental axiom may therefore be formulated in the sense of the theory of cognition: “In pure thought a particular point is attainable wherein the complete convergence of the 'real' and the 'subjective' is achieved, and man experiences reality.” If we now set to work at this point, if we cultivate our thought so that it shall bear fruit and issue from itself—we then grasp the things of the world from within. In the “I,” therefore, grasped in pure thought and thereby also created, something is given whereby we may break down the barrier which, in the case of all other things, must be placed between “form” and “matter.”

A well-founded and thoroughgoing theory of cognition may thus advance to the point of indicating a way into reality by means of pure thought. If this path be pursued, it will be found that it must eventually lead to Anthroposophy. Very few philosophers, however, have any understanding of this path. They are mostly entangled in their self-made web of notions; arid since they cannot but regard the concept as something merely abstract, they are incapable of grasping the one and only point where it is a creative archetype, and equally incapable of finding a bond of union with the “thing-in-itself.”

For a knowledge of the “I” as an instrument whereby the human soul's immersion in the fullest reality may be clearly perceived, we are required to distinguish most carefully between the real “I” and the “I” of ordinary consciousness. A confusion of these might lead us to assert, with the philosopher Descartes: “I think, therefore I am”; in this case, however, reality would refute us during every sleep, when we “are” though we do not “think.” Thought does not vouch for the reality of the “I.” On the other hand, it is equally true that an experience of the true “I” is not possible except by means of pure thought. As far as ordinary human consciousness is concerned, the true “I” extends into pure thought, and into pure thought alone. Mere thinking only leads us to a thought (conception) of the “I”; experience of all that may be experienced within pure thought provides our consciousness with a content of reality in which “form” and “matter” coincide. Apart from this “I,” ordinary consciousness can know of nothing which carries both “'form” and “matter” into thought. All other thoughts do not image full reality. Yet by acquiring experience of the true “I” in pure thought we become acquainted with full reality; moreover, we may advance from this experience to other regions of true reality.

Anthroposophy attempts this advance. It does not remain stationary on the level of the experiences of ordinary consciousness, but strives to achieve an investigation of reality through the agency of a transformed consciousness. With the exception of the “I” experienced in pure thought, ordinary consciousness is excluded for the purpose of this investigation.

A new consciousness takes its place, whose activity in its widest range is commensurate with the activity of ordinary consciousness at such moments when the latter can rise to the experience of the “I” in pure thought. To achieve this purpose, our soul most acquire the strength to withdraw from the apprehension of all external things and from all conceptions with which we are inwardly so familiar that we can recall them in our memory. Most seekers after the knowledge of reality deny the possibility of the above; they deny it without trial. Indeed, the only method of trial is the accomplishment of those inner processes which lead to the above-mentioned transformation of consciousness. (A detailed description of these processes will be found in my book, among others, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment.) An attitude of denial in this matter effectively hinders the attainment of true reality. Only the main points in connection with these processes can here be given; the subject is treated in detail in the author's above-mentioned and other books. The soul forces which in ordinary life and science are devoted to the perception of things and to the activity of such thought as can be recalled in memory—these forces can be applied to the perception and experience of a supersensible world. Our initial experience in this way is the perception of our supersensible being. The reason why we cannot attain this supersensible being if we remain within the limits of ordinary consciousness becomes conspicuous to us. (Though we attain it at that one point of the true “I,” as explained above, we are unable immediately to recognize it in its state of isolation.) Ordinary consciousness is produced when man's physical, bodily nature, as it were, engulfs his spiritual being and acts in its place. In the ordinary apprehension of the physical world we have an activity of the human organism which is maintained by the transformation of man's supersensible being into a sensible (physical) being. The activity of ordinary thought originates in the same way, with the difference that apprehension is ensured by the reciprocal relation of the human organism to the outer world, whereas thought evolves within the organism itself.

An insight into these facts is conditional to all true knowledge of reality. The seeker after knowledge must make the attainment of this insight the object of inner, spiritual exertion. The habits of thought prevalent in our day tend to a confusion of this spiritual exercise with all manner of nebulous, mystical amateurishness. Nothing can be more irrelevant. The effort is entirely in the direction of the fullest clarity of soul. Strictly logical thought is both the point of departure and the standard of exercise, to the exclusion of all experiences deficient in such inner clarity. But this purely logical thought is related to the inner exercise in question, as a shadow to the object which casts it. The exercise of the inner faculties strengthens the soul to such an extent that the struggle towards knowledge becomes fraught with more than the experience of mere abstract thought; the experience of spiritual realities is achieved. Knowledge is kindled in the soul, of which a non-transformed consciousness can have no conception. This development of consciousness has nothing to do with any form of visionary or other diseased condition of soul. These are inseparable from a debasement of the soul below the sphere in which clear, logical thought is active; anthroposophical research, however, transcends this sphere and leads into the spiritual. In the above-mentioned conditions of soul the physical body is always implicated; anthroposophical research strengthens the soul to such an extent that activity in the spiritual sphere is possible independently of the physical body. The attainment of this strengthened condition of soul requires, to begin with, exercise in “pictorial thought.” Consciousness is made to centre upon such clear and pregnant conceptions as are otherwise only formed under the influence of external apprehension. An inner activity is thus experienced of such intensity as only external tone or colour or another sense-perception can otherwise evoke. In this case, however, the activity is purely the result of strong inner effort. It is of the nature of thought; not such thought as accompanies sense-perception with abstract concepts, but thought which becomes intensified to the point of (inner) visibility such as ordinarily is only evident in the imagery of sense-perception. The importance does not lie in “what” we think but in the consciousness of an activity not undertaken in ordinary consciousness. We thus learn to experience ourselves in the supersensible being of our “I” which, in ordinary life, is concealed by the manifestations of the physical, bodily organization. A consciousness thus transformed becomes the instrument for the perception of supersensible reality. For this purpose, however, further exercise in respect of feeling and willing is necessary, in addition to the above-mentioned exercise, which is only concerned with the transformed faculties of perceiving and conceiving.

In ordinary life, feeling and willing are associated with beings or processes external to the soul. To bring supersensible reality within the range of cognition, the soul must give vent to the same activity which, in the case of feeling and willing, is outwardly directed; this activity, however, must now apprehend the inner life itself. For the purpose of and during supersensible investigation, feeling and will must be entirely diverted from the outer world; they must solely grasp what the transformed faculties of perceiving and conceiving create within the soul. We “feel,” and we permeate with “will” solely what we inwardly experience as consciousness transformed through thought intensified to the point of inner visibility. (A more detailed account of this transformation of feeling and willing will be found in the books mentioned above.) The life of the soul thus becomes completely transformed. It becomes the life of a spiritual being (our own) experienced in a real supersensible, spiritual world—as man, within ordinary consciousness, experiences his “self” in a sensible, physical world through his senses and the faculty of conceptual thought connected therewith. The knowledge of true reality is the goal of human effort, and the first step towards its realization consists of the insight that neither Natural Science nor ordinary mystical experience can provide this knowledge; for between them there yawns an abyss (as was shown at the outset) which must be bridged. This is effected through the transformation of consciousness as outlined in these pages. The knowledge of true reality can never be attained unless we first realize that the usual instruments of knowledge are inadequate for this purpose, and that the requisite instrument must first be developed. Man feels that something more is slumbering within him than his own consciousness can encompass in ordinary life and with ordinary science. He instinctively yearns for a knowledge which is unattainable for this consciousness. For the purpose of attaining this knowledge he must not shrink from transforming the faculties which in ordinary consciousness are directed towards the physical world, so that they shall apprehend a supersensible world. Before true reality can be apprehended, a condition of soul appropriate for the spiritual world must first be established! The range of ordinary consciousness is dependent upon the human organization, which is dissolved by death. Hence it is conceivable that the knowledge resulting from this consciousness falls short of being knowledge of the spiritual and eternal in man. Only the transformation of this consciousness ensures a perception of that world in which man lives as a supersensible being, that is, as a being which remains unaffected by the dissolution of the physical organism.

The acceptance of this transmutability of consciousness and, hence, of a possible investigation of reality, is alien to the habits of thought of the present day. More so, perhaps, than the physical system of Copernicus to the men of his time. But as this system, in spite of all obstacles, found its way to the human soul—so, too, anthroposophical Spiritual Science will find its way. An understanding of anthroposophy is also difficult for contemporary philosophy, for the latter derives its origin from a mode of thought which failed to fructify the germs of an unprejudiced technique of thought which were implanted in Aristotelianism. This shortcoming, as was shown above, was followed by the seclusion of thought and investigation, through an artificial web of concepts, from true reality, which became a “thing-in-itself.” Owing to this fundamental tendency, contemporary philosophy cannot but refuse to accept anthroposophy. In the light of the philosophical conception of scientific method, anthroposophy cannot but appear as dilettantism, and this reproach is easily conceivable if the essentials of the question are kept in view. The origin of this reproach has here been explained.

These pages will possibly have made clear what must necessarily occur before the philosophers can undertake to agree that anthroposophy is no dilettantism. It is necessary that philosophy, with its conceptual system, should work its way to an unprejudiced recognition of its own fundamental basis. It is not the case that anthroposophy is at variance with sound philosophy, but that a modern theory of knowledge, accepted by science, is itself at variance with the deeper foundation of true philosophy.

This theory of knowledge is wandering in false tracks and must relinquish these if it would develop an understanding of anthroposophical world-comprehension.

• 1. Under “Wisdom of the Mysteries” a wisdom is meant which flourished in ancient times, and differed essentially from later methods of knowledge. Its origin as an inner experience of the soul whereby the secrets of the Cosmos were revealed. During the sixth century B.C., this method of knowledge was succeeded by another which, rejecting the inner experience of the soul, sought to gain an understanding of the world by the rational observation of the physical and spiritual phenomena. The inner vision of the more ancient method was sustained by an instinctive logic. In the following period logical thought became to an increasing extent a conscious faculty. Intuitive vision disappeared and the wisdom of the Mysteries was succeeded by philosophical speculation. The philosophers of the earliest period, however, were acquainted with the wisdom of the Mysteries, either through inner vision (if they still retained this faculty) or through tradition, and applied to it the newly evolving faculty of rational thought. The reader will find a description of this historical transition in the author's Die Rätsel der Philosophie
• 2. Little or no weight can be laid on the objections raised against this statement of Kant in certain quarters.
• 3. The author is well acquainted with certain modern philosophic works in which reference is made to Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel with a view to obtaining direction from the utterances of these thinkers. But he finds such treatises deficient in a point of vital importance for the philosophers in question, namely as regards their attitude towards a spiritual reality which must be experienced in the soul. A mere reference to the abstract logical element in their philosophy falls short of attaining the vital principle therein.
• 4. It clearly follows that the term “Materialism” must be used far more comprehensively than is usually the case. A man is a “materialist” when his method of thought constrains him to believe that the real thing-in-itself remains external to his soul, because no portion of its “matter” is transmitted. He is a materialist even though he deem himself an idealist for admitting the soul, as such. And it is to a masked materialism that Kant's doctrine can be traced. Viewed in this light, the modern claim that “Science has superseded nineteenth-century materialism” appears in all its hollowness. On the contrary, Science, failing to recognize materialistic thought as such, has plunged still deeper into Materialism.

The following thoughts are intended as aphoristic sketches of a domain of knowledge that, in the form in which is it characterised here, is almost entirely rejected by the culture of our time. The aphoristic form has been chosen in order to give some idea of the fundamental character of this field of knowledge, and to show—at least in one direction—the prospects for life which it opens up. The narrow frame of an essay requires one to refer the reader to the literature of the subject for further information. The author is fully aware that precisely this form of presentation may easily be felt as presumptuous by many who, from the well-founded habits of thought of the culture of the day, must find what is here brought forward directly opposed to all that is scientific. It may be said in answer to this that the author, in spite of his ‘spiritual-scientific’ orientation, believes that he can agree with every scientist in his high estimation of the spirit and significance of scientific thinking. Only it seems clear to him that one can fully accept Natural Science without being thereby compelled to reject an independent Spiritual Science of the kind described here. A consequence of this relation to Natural Science will, at all events, be to guard true Spiritual Science from that amateurishness which is noticeable in many quarters to-day, and which usually indulges the more presumptuously in phrases about the ‘crude materialism of Natural Science’ the less the speakers are able to judge of the earnestness, rigour and scientific soundness of Natural Knowledge.

The writer wished to make these introductory remarks because the brevity of the discussions in this article may possibly obscure from the reader his attitude towards these matters.

He who speaks to-day of investigating the spiritual world encounters the sceptical objections of those whose habits of thought have been moulded by the outlook of Natural Science. His attention will be drawn to the blessings which this outlook has brought for a healthy development of human life, by destroying the illusions of a learning which professed to follow purely spiritual modes of cognition. Now these sceptical objections can be quite intelligible to the spiritual investigator. Indeed it ought to be perfectly clear to him that any kind of spiritual investigation which finds itself in conflict with established ideas of Natural Science cannot rest on a sure foundation. A spiritual investigator with a feeling for, and an understanding of the earnestness of scientific procedure, and insight into the achievements of Natural Knowledge for human life, will not wish to join the ranks of those who, from the standpoint of their ‘spiritual sight,’ criticise lightly the limitations of scientists, and imagine their own standpoint so much the higher the more every kind of Natural Knowledge is lost for them in unfathomable depths.

Natural Science and Spiritual Science could live in harmony if the former could rid itself of the erroneous belief that true spiritual investigation necessarily requires we [human beings] to reject attested knowledge of sensible reality and of the soul-life bound up with this. In this erroneous belief lies the source of innumerable misunderstandings which Spiritual Science has to encounter. Those who believe they stand, in their outlook on life, on the ‘firm ground of Natural Science’ hold that the spiritual investigator is compelled by his point of view to reject their knowledge. But this is not really the case. Genuine spiritual investigation is in full agreement with Natural Science. Thus spiritual investigation is not opposed on account of what it maintains, but for what people believe it could or must maintain.

With regard to human soul life the scientific thinker must maintain that the soul activities which reveal themselves as thinking, feeling and willing, ought, for the acquisition of scientific knowledge, to be observed without prejudice in the same way as the phenomena of light or heat in the outer world of Nature. He must reject all ideas about the entity of the soul which do not arise from such unprejudiced observation, and from which all kinds of conclusions are then drawn about the indestructibility of the soul, and its connection with the spiritual world. It is quite understandable that such a thinker begins his study of the facts of soul-life as Theodor Ziehen does in the first of his lectures on “Physiological Psychology.” He says: “The psychology which I shall put before you, is not that old psychology which attempted to investigate soul phenomena in a more or less speculative way. This psychology has long been abandoned by those accustomed to think scientifically.” True spiritual investigation need not conflict with the scientific attitude which may he in such an avowal. And yet, among those who take this attitude as a result of their scientific habits of thought, the opinion will be almost universally held to-day that the specific results of spiritual investigation are to be regarded as unscientific. Of course one will not encounter everywhere this rejection, on grounds of principle, of the investigation of spiritual facts; yet when specific results of such investigation are brought forward they will scarcely escape the objection that scientific thinking can do nothing with them. As a consequence of this,one can observe that there has recently grown up a science of the soul, forming its methods of investigation on the pattern of natural-scientific procedure, but unable to find the power to approach those highest questions which our inner need of knowledge must put when we turn our gaze to the fate of the soul. One investigates conscientiously the connection of soul phenomena with bodily processes, one tries to gain ideas on the way presentations associate and dissociate in the soul, how attention acts, how memory functions, what relation exists between thinking, feeling and willing; but for the higher questions of soul-life the words of Franz Brentano remain true. This acute psychologist, though rooted in the mode of thinking of Natural Science, wrote: “The laws of association of ideas, of the development of convictions and opinions and of the genesis of pleasure and love would be anything but a true compensation for the hopes of a Plato or an Aristotle of gaining certainty concerning the continued life of our better part after the dissolution of the body.” And if the recent scientific mode of thinking really means “excluding the question of immortality,” this exclusion would have great significance for psychology.¹

The fact is, that considerations which might tend in the direction of the ‘hopes of a Plato and an Aristotle’ are avoided in recent psychological writings which wish to satisfy the demands of scientific thought. Now the spiritual investigator will not come into conflict with the mode of procedure of recent scientific psychology if he has an understanding of its vital nerve. He will have to admit that this psychology proceeds, in the main, along right lines insofar as the study of the inner experiences of thinking, feeling and willing is concerned. Indeed his path of knowledge leads him to admit that thinking, feeling and willing reveal nothing that could fulfil the ‘hopes of a Plato and an Aristotle’ if these activities are only studied as they are experienced in ordinary human life. But his path of knowledge also shows that in thinking, feeling and willing something lies hidden which does not become conscious in the course of ordinary life, but which can be brought to consciousness through inner soul exercises. In this spiritual entity of the soul, hidden from ordinary consciousness, is revealed what in it is independent of the life of the body; and in this the relations of man to the spiritual world can be studied. To the spiritual investigator it appears just as impossible to fulfil the ‘hopes of a Plato or an Aristotle’ in regard to the existence of the soul independent of bodily life by observing ordinary thinking, feeling and willing, as it is impossible to investigate in water the properties of hydrogen. To learn these one must first extract the hydrogen from the water by an appropriate procedure. So it is also necessary to separate from the everyday life of the soul (which it leads in connection with the body) that entity which is rooted in the spiritual world, if this entity is to be studied.

The error which casts befogging misunderstandings in the way of Spiritual Science lies in the almost general belief that knowledge about the higher questions of soul-life must be gained from a study of such facts of the soul as are already to be found in ordinary life. But no other knowledge results from these facts than that to which research, conducted on what are at present called scientific lines, can lead. On this account Spiritual Science can be no mere heeding of what is immediately present in the life of the soul. It must first lay bare, by inner processes in the life of the soul, the world of facts to be studied. To this end spiritual investigation applies soul processes which are attained in inner experience. Its field of research lies entirely within the inner life of the soul. It cannot make its experiences outwardly visible. Nevertheless they are not on that account less independent of personal caprice than the true results of Natural Science. They have nothing in common with mathematical truths except that they, too, cannot be proved by outer facts, but are proved for anyone who grasps them in inner perception. Like mathematical truths they can at the most be outwardly symbolised but not represented in their full content, for it is this that proves them. The essential point, which can easily be misunderstood, is, that on the path pursued by spiritual investigation a certain direction is given, by inner initiative, to the experiences of the soul, thereby calling out forces which otherwise remain unconscious as in a kind of soul sleep. (The soul exercises which lead to this goal are described in detail in my books “Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment” and “Occult Science.” It is only intended to indicate here what transpires in the soul when it subjects itself to such exercises). If the soul proceeds in this way it inserts—as it were—its inner life into the domain of spiritual reality. It opens to the spiritual world its organs of perception so formed, as the senses open outwardly to physical reality.

One kind of such soul exercises consists in an intensive surrender to the process of thinking. One carries this surrender so far that one acquires the capacity of directing one's attention no longer to the thoughts present in thinking but solely to the activity of thinking itself. Every kind of thought content then disappears from consciousness and the soul experiences herself consciously in the activity of thinking. Thinking then becomes transformed into a subtle inner act of will which is completely illuminated by consciousness. In ordinary thinking, thoughts live; the process indicated extinguishes the thought in thinking. The experience thus induced is a weaving in an inner activity of will which bears its reality within itself. The point is that the soul, by continued inner experience in this direction, may make itself as familiar with the purely spiritual reality in which it weaves as sense observation is with physical reality. As in the outer world a reality can only be known as such by experiencing it, so, too, in this inner domain. He who objects that what is inwardly real cannot be proved only shows that he has not yet grasped that we become convinced of an outer reality in no other way than by experiencing its existence together with our own. A healthy life has direct experience of the difference between a genuine perception in the outer world and a vision or hallucination; in a similar way a healthily developed soul life can distinguish the spiritual reality it has approached from fantastic imagining; and dreamy reverie.

Thinking that has been developed in the manner stated perceives that it has freed itself from the soul force which ordinarily leads to memory. What is experienced in thinking which has become an inwardly experienced ‘will-reality’ cannot be remembered in the direct form in which it presents itself. Thus it differs from what is experienced in ordinary thinking. What one has thought about an event is incorporated into memory. It can be brought up again in the further course of life. But the ‘will-reality’ here described must be attained anew, if it is to be again experienced in consciousness. I do not mean that this reality cannot be indirectly incorporated into ordinary memory. This must indeed take place if the path of spiritual investigation is to be a healthy one. But what remains in memory is only an idea (Vorstellung) of this reality, just as what one remembers to-day of an experience of yesterday is only an idea (Vorstellung). Concepts, ideas, can be retained in memory: a spiritual reality must be experienced ever anew. By grasping vividly this difference between the cherishing of mere thoughts and a spiritual reality reached by developing the activity of thinking, one comes to experience oneself with this reality outside the physical body. What ordinary thinking must mostly regard as an impossibility commences; one experiences oneself outside the existence that is connected with the body. Ordinary thinking, regarding this experience ‘outside the body’ only from its own point of view, must at first hold this to be an illusion. Assurance of this experience can, indeed, only be won through the experience itself. And it is precisely through this experience that one understands only too well that those whose habits of thought have been formed by Natural Science cannot, at first, but regard such experiences as fantastic imaginings or dreamy reverie, perhaps as a weaving in illusions or hallucinations. Only he can fully understand what is here brought forward who has come to know that the path of true spiritual investigation releases forces in the soul which lie in a direction precisely opposite to those which induce pathological soul experiences. What the soul develops on the path of spiritual investigation are forces competent to oppose pathological states or to dissipate these where they tend to occur. No scientific investigation can see through what is visionary—of an hallucinatory nature—when this tries to get in man's way, as directly as true spiritual science, which can only unfold in a direction opposed to the unhealthy experiences mentioned.

In that moment when this ‘experience outside the body’ becomes a reality for him the spiritual investigator learns to know how ordinary thinking is bound to the physical processes of the body. He comes to see how thoughts acquired in outer experience necessarily arise in such a way that they can be remembered. This rests on the fact that these thoughts do not merely lead a spiritual life in the soul but share their life with the body. Thus the spiritual investigator comes not to reject but to accept what scientific thought must maintain about the dependence of the life of thought on bodily processes.

At first the inner experiences described above present themselves as anxious oppression of the soul. They appear to lead out of the domain of ordinary existence but not into a new reality. One knows, indeed, that one is living in a reality; one feels this reality as one's own spiritual being. One has found one's way out of sense reality, but one has only grasped oneself in a purely spiritual form of existence. A feeling of loneliness resembling fear can overtake the soul—a loneliness to experience oneself in a world, not merely to possess oneself. Yet another feeling arises. One feels one must lose again the acquired spiritual self-experience, if one cannot confront a spiritual environment. The spiritual state into which one thus enters may be roughly compared to what would be experienced if one had to clutch with one's hands in all directions without being able to lay hold of anything.

When, however, the path of spiritual investigation is pursued in the right way, the above experiences are, indeed, undergone, but they form only one side of the soul's development. The necessary completion is found in other experiences. As certain impulses given to the soul's experiences lead one to grasp the ‘will-reality’ within thinking, so other directions imparted to the processes of the soul lead to an experience of hidden forces within the activity of the will. (Here also we can only state what takes place in the inner being of man through such soul experiences. The books mentioned give a detailed description of what the soul must undertake in order to reach the indicated goal). In ordinary life the activity of the will is not perceived in the same way as an outer event. Even what is usually called introspection by no means puts one into the position of regarding one's own willing as one regards an outer event of Nature.

To achieve this—to be able to confront one's own willing as an observer stands before an outer fact of Nature—intensive soul processes, induced voluntarily, are again necessary. If these are induced in the appropriate way there arises something quite different from this view of one's own willing as of an outer fact. In ordinary perception a presentation (Vorstellung) emerges in the life of the soul and is, in a certain sense, an inner image of the outer fact. But in observing one's own willing this accustomed power of forming presentations fades out. One ceases to form presentations of outer things. In place of this a faculty of forming real images—a real perception—is released from the depths of willing, and breaks through the surface of the will's activity, bringing living spiritual reality with it. At first one's own hidden spiritual entity appears within this spiritual reality. One perceives that one carries a hidden spiritual man within one. This is no thought-picture but a real being—real in a higher sense than the outer bodily man. Now this spiritual man does not present himself like an outer being perceptible to the senses. He does not reveal his characteristic qualities outwardly. He reveals himself through his inner nature by developing an inner activity similar to the processes of consciousness in one's own soul. But, unlike the soul dwelling in man's body, this higher being is not turned towards sensible objects but towards spiritual events—in the first place towards the events of one's own soul-life as unfolded up till now. One really discovers in oneself a second human being who, as a spiritual being, is a conscious observer of one's ordinary soul-life. However fantastic this description of a spiritual man within the bodily may appear, it is nevertheless a sober description of reality for a soul-life appropriately trained. It is as different from anything visionary or of the nature of an illusion as is day from night.

Just as a reality partaking of the nature of will is discovered in the transformed thinking, so a consciousness partaking of the nature of being—and weaving in the spiritual—is discovered in the will. And these two prove, for fuller experience, to belong together. In a certain sense they are discovered on paths running in opposite directions, but turn out to be a unity. The feeling of anxiety experienced in the weaving of the ‘will-reality’ ceases when this ‘will-reality,’ born from developed thinking, unites itself with the higher being above described. Through this union man confronts, for the first time, the complete spiritual world. He encounters, not only himself, but beings and events of the spiritual world lying outside himself.

In the world into which man has thus entered, perception is an essentially different process from perception in the world of sense. Real beings and events of the spiritual world arise from out of the higher being revealed through developing the will. Through the interplay of these beings and events with the ‘will-reality’ resulting from developed thinking, these beings and events are spiritually perceived. What we know as memory in the physical world ceases to have significance for the spiritual world. We see that this soul force uses the physical body as a tool. But another force takes the place of memory in observing the spiritual world. Through this force a past event is not remembered in the form of mental presentations but perceived directly in a fresh experience. It is not like reading a sentence and remembering it later, but like reading and re-reading. The concept of the past acquires a new significance in this domain; the past appears to spiritual perception as present, and we recognise that something belongs to a past time by perceiving, not the passage of time, but the relation of one spiritual being or event to another.

The path into the spiritual world is thus traversed by laying bare what is contained in thinking and willing. Now feeling cannot be developed in a similar way by inner initiative of soul. Unlike the case of thinking and willing, nothing to take the place of what is experienced within the physical world as feeling can be developed in the spiritual world through transforming an inner force. What corresponds to feeling in the spiritual world arises quite of itself as soon as spiritual perception has been acquired in the described way. This experience of feeling, however, bears a different character from that borne by feeling in the physical world. One does not feel in oneself, but in the beings and events which one perceives. One enters into them with one's feeling; one feels their inner being, as in physical life one feels one's own being. We might put it in this way: as in the physical world one is conscious of experiencing objects and events as material, so in the spiritual world one is conscious of experiencing beings and facts through revelations of feeling which come from without like colours or sounds in the physical world.

A soul which has attained to the spiritual experience described knows it is in a world from out of which it can observe its own experiences in the physical word—just as physical perception can observe a sensible object. It is united with that spiritual entity which unites itself—at birth (or at conception)—with the physical body derived from one's ancestors; and this spiritual entity persists when this body is laid aside at death. The ‘hopes of a Plato and an Aristotle’ for the science of the soul can only be fulfilled through a perception of this entity. Moreover the perception of repeated earth-lives (between which are lives spent in the purely spiritual world) now becomes a fact inasmuch as man's psychic-spiritual kernel, thus discovered, perceives itself and its own weaving and becoming in the spiritual world. It learns to know its own being as the result of earlier earthlives and spiritual forms of existence lying between them. Within its present earth-life it finds a spiritual germ which must unfold in a future earth-life after passing through states between death and a new birth. As the plant germ contains the future plant potentially, so there develops, concealed in man, a psychic-spiritual germ. This reveals itself to spiritual perception through its own essence as the foundation of a future earth-life. It would be incorrect so to interpret the spiritual perception of life between death and a new birth as if such perception meant participating beforehand in the experience of the spiritual world entered at physical death. Such perception does not give a complete, disembodied experience of the spiritual world as experienced after death; it is only the knowledge of the actual experience that is experienced.

While still in one's body one can receive all of the disembodied experience between death and a new birth that is offered by the experiences of the soul described above, that is to say, when the ‘will-reality’ is released from thinking with the help of the consciousness set free from the will. In the spiritual world the feeling element revealing itself from without can first be experienced through entrance into this world. Strange as it may sound, experience in the spiritual world leads one to say: the physical world is present to man in the first place as a complex of outer facts, and man acquires knowledge of it after it has confronted him in this form; the spiritual world, on the other hand, sends knowledge of itself in advance, and the knowledge it kindles in the soul beforehand is the torch which must illumine the spiritual world if this world is to reveal itself as a fact. It is clear to one who knows this through spiritual perception that this light develops during bodily life on earth in the unconscious depths of the soul, and then, after death, illumines the regions of the spiritual world making them experiences of the human soul.

During bodily life on earth one can awaken this knowledge of the state between death and a new birth. This knowledge has an entirely opposite character to that developed for life in the physical world. One perceives through it what the soul will accomplish between death and a new birth, because one has present in spiritual perception the germ of what impels towards this accomplishment. The perception of this germ reveals that a creative connection with the spiritual world commences for the soul after death. It unfolds an activity which is directed towards the future earth life as its goal, whereas in physical perception its activity is directed—although imitatively and not creatively—towards the outer world of sense. Man's growth (Werden) as a spiritual being connected with the spiritual world lies in the field of vision of the soul between death and a new birth, as the existence (Sein) of the sense world lies in the field of view of the bodily man. Active perception of spiritual Becoming (Werden) characterises the conditions between death and a new birth. (It is not the task of this article to give details of these states. Those interested will find them in my books Theosophy” and Occult Science.

In contrast to experience in the body, spiritual experience is something to which we are completely unaccustomed, inasmuch as the idea of Being as acquired in the physical world loses all meaning. The spiritual world has nothing of the nature of Being. Everything is Becoming. To enter a spiritual environment is to enter an everlasting Becoming. But in contrast to this restless Becoming in our spiritual environment we have the soul's perception of itself as stationary consciousness within the never-ceasing movement into which it is placed. The awakened spiritual consciousness must accommodate itself to this reversal of inner experience with regard to the consciousness that lives in the body. It can thereby acquire a real knowledge of experience apart from the body. And only such knowledge can embrace the states between death and a new birth.

“.... In a certain sense all human beings are ‘specialists’ to-day so far as their souls are concerned. We are struck by this specialised mode of perception when we study the development of Art in humanity. And for this very reason a comprehensive understanding of spiritual life in its totality must again come into existence. True form in Art will arise from this comprehensive understanding of spiritual life ....”

—RUDOLF STEINER

(From Ways to a New Style in Architecture)

• 1. Brentano, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt, 1874 page 20.

The object of my remarks today on Spiritual Science, or Anthroposophy, is no more intended to be what is ordinarily meant by the word “propaganda,” than it was the object of my lecture delivered in this same place in January of the present year. Then as now, it was my desire to answer certain questions which must arise in this particular locality where the Dornach building, devoted to the service of this Spiritual Science, stands directly before our eyes.

Outsiders whose attention is drawn to the anthroposophical movement might quite properly inquire whether there is any reason, in the spiritual life of the present day, why such a movement is necessary. And it is easy to understand why such outsiders come to a negative conclusion at the outset. They may believe that a few people, with little to do in their daily lives, gather together in order to occupy themselves with all sorts of things which are of no use in real life, and which are no concern of those who are obliged to spend their time in hard work for the service of mankind. Yet this opinion can only be held by whose who have failed to acquaint themselves thoroughly with the conditions of human progress in the course of the last three or four centuries, and especially during the nineteenth century right up to our present day. Just cast an eye over all the changes which have taken place in human life during this period in comparison with the requirements of earlier times. New discoveries have been made relating to the operation of natural forces, and these discoveries have brought about a fundamental change in human existence and in the conditions of daily life. How different is the environment in which we find ourselves placed today when compared to that of a not very distant past! If we envisage human life today, from infancy to old age, we obtain a very different picture from the one presented by that vanished era. Such a survey would show us the life environment in which the individual finds himself, and how the work, for which preparation has been made during childhood and youth, has to be carried out. It would show further the individual awaking to the need of knowing something about the meaning and essential significance of life. He cannot be content with what he sees through his senses or what he must acquire by his own handiwork. In the course of life, attention is drawn to the voice of the in-dwelling soul, and the individual is led to ask: what sense has this soul life within the outer physical world? A perfectly justifiable answer can be made, viz: that the world really satisfies all human queries which may arise. Besides outer experiences, in connection with daily tasks and daily life, it brings to the individual the element of religious life. In this way the eternal meaning is disclosed of what occurs in the human being's physical surroundings, and thus the door which seems to close upon physical life is transformed for him into the portal to the everlasting and immortal life of the soul.

This answer is perfectly correct, generally speaking. Accordingly it seems quite reasonable to ask why something further should be required which will, in the form of Spiritual Science or Anthroposophy, force its way between outer life in the physical world and religious revelation, religious annunciations concerning the eternal being of man.

Yet anyone who is satisfied with the general terms of this quite correct opinion concerning contemporary human life, fails to take into account that recent centuries, and more especially our modern era, have given a particular form to this life which compels us today to regard all questions affecting life in a way which must extend beyond the limits of generalities. Just consider the education and schooling of today, how after passing through them we adopt viewpoints and receive impressions which are quite different from those of earlier times, inasmuch as they are based upon the great advances made during the recent centuries and the immediate present. It is of the essence of the historical progress of mankind that conditions of life should change completely during definite periods of time, and that not until after such change has reached a certain stage does the human being attain the ability to adjust individual soul life to the change. Consequently it is not until the present time that the human soul is beset with questions which are the outcome of changes in the conditions of human life which have taken place during the past three or four centuries. Only today are those questions taking on tangible form. Prime evidence of this fact is to be found in the belief held by many individuals during the 19th century and which has been unveiled and shown to be erroneous only in our own age.

Spiritual Science certainly does not underestimate the great progress made by natural science; it tenders it complete and admiring recognition; but doubts its claims. Only a little while ago it was possible to hold the belief that natural science would be able to solve the great riddles of human existence by the means at its disposal. But anyone possessed of intensified powers of soul, and familiarizing himself with the more recent accomplishments in the way of scientific achievement, becomes increasingly aware that, so far as the ultimate problems of human existence are concerned, science is not bringing us answers but on the contrary a perpetual series of new questions. Human life is enriched by the possibility of asking such questions today; in the domain of natural science they remain just questions. People who lived during the 19th century, even the men of learning, took far too little account of this. They believed they were obtaining answers to certain riddles, whereas in reality it was necessary to put the questions in a new way. Such questions have now been instilled into us, so to speak. They are present in the soul as soon as the individual has to face the facts of life, and they demand an answer.

Now the individuals who unite to form the Anthroposophical Society are in a certain sense those who are conscious of the riddles presented by life in the natural course of events, riddles not arbitrarily presented but which are, of necessity, presented by the life in which the human being finds himself enmeshed at the present time. These questions become especially evident in connection with modern science, yet do not exclusively concern those who occupy themselves seriously with science, but they affect everyone who takes an all-round interest in modern life. If it were impossible to obtain answers to these questions, certain consequences must inevitably ensue in human existence which would permit a sad light to be cast on the future. Anyone today speaking about these consequences may appear to be a visionary. But he will only seem so to those who allow themselves to be dazzled by the greatness of human progress, and who do not comprehend that this progress must be followed by progress in another realm, if the preparation of certain events below the surface, is to be prevented.

We might of course imagine that we could make ourselves insensitive to the riddle-questions referred to, turn a deaf ear to them and avoid asking them. But if we did so we would paralyze certain of our spiritual energies which require the very conditions presented by modern times for their development. Human soul life would then reach a condition comparable to that of having hands and feet but without being able to use them because they are fettered. Powers which we possess but cannot utilize have a very paralyzing effect on us. And the continual spread of this feeling of partial paralysis of certain soul forces would gradually bring about a state of indifference, nay even apathy toward religious emotion. Nor would it stop there. A state of indifference toward the concerns of the soul is only tolerable as long as human interest is strongly attracted by the other factor which obscures the concerns of the soul. But this interest also ceases after a while. It might persist in the case of individuals who were being directly impressed by the astonishing achievements of science; but it would be extinguished eventually. And then, save in the case of those directly impressed, apathy regarding external life would follow upon indifference to the concerns of the soul and be its further consequence. Joy in life and joy in work would be clouded. Life would be felt a burden.

The precursors of indifference to religious life were plainly perceptible during the 19th century. I will not cite as an illustration anything taken from the contributions made by the numerous scholars who believed themselves capable of answering spiritual questions from the standpoint of science. I am going to speak about a simple son of the soil caught in the toils of this belief. The man I refer to was a peasant who lived a martyr's existence in the upper Austrian Alps during the 19th century. Konrad Deubler was his name. Deubler was enthralled by the successful achievements of science during the 19th century. During his youth he devoted himself for awhile to the spiritual ideas advanced by Zschokke. But acquaintance with Darwinism as well as with the writings of Haeckel, Buechner and others weaned him away. He allowed himself to be captivated by the materialism of Darwin, to be completely carried away by the teachings of Haeckel, and finally came to believe that it was pure folly to imagine that any other sources save scientific ones could be relied upon for information concerning any sort of spiritual world. He believed that the world was fashioned from purely material substance and energy. For Deubler as an individual we can well feel admiration. He became a veritable martyr to his convictions, for he spent much time in prison on account of them between 1850 and 1860, an era when such things were still possible. Deubler was certainly a man whose views were not the product of any superficial attitude, but one who in consequence of being completely led astray by the currents of his century came to reject all spiritual sources of knowledge. True, he enjoyed life up to the hour of his death; but this was due to his living during the age in which it was still possible to be dazzled by the splendor of purely scientific achievements. Only those who lived later, could manifest in their souls the results of such ideas as he conceived them. In Deubler we have a famous example of a certain type of soul, characteristic of our modern age. Many such examples might be cited. They would go to prove that many people of today believe that natural science could give a comprehensive explanation of the meaning of the world. It will not be possible to arrest the advance of scientific knowledge, nor do we wish to hold it back, for its life consists in the conquests needed by modern man, in all the useful things which he must introduce into his existence. But if the human mind is directed one-sidedly toward natural science, contact with spiritual life, and with the individual, in-dwelling soul, is lost. People like Deubler did not see through the whole process, did not see how science gives birth to new questions for the living soul, but not to new answers. His mental attitude would have to be adopted more generally, if in addition to natural science, a fully qualified Spiritual Science were to come into being.

There are those therefore who have become united within the Anthroposophical Society, inspired by the belief that in modern Spiritual Science, or Anthroposophy, a bond should be created between life, as it has advanced, in the light of natural science, and the life of religion. If the meaning of natural science is correctly fathomed it may be said that such science leads to a picture of the world in which the essential being of man finds no place. In making this statement I am not just voicing my personal opinion, but expressing something which unprejudiced observation of scientific research can discern very clearly, and concerning which, deception is only possible in an age which accords scientific achievements the admiration, which is their just due, is yet unable to recognize their limitations. Individual investigators have long been aware of the existence of certain limitations. So the address made by du Bois-Reymond at Leipsic about 1870 has become famous. It closed with “Ignorabimus”: — No matter how closely nature's secrets are explored by the scientific method, it is never possible to discover what it is that inhabits the human soul in the form of consciousness; nay more, we cannot even find a way of comprehending what underlies matter. Natural science is incapable of understanding matter and consciousness, the two poles so to speak of human life. It may be said that natural science has in a sense driven human beings, so far as they are spiritual entities, out of the cosmos upon which it is working. This becomes apparent on investigating the ideas concerning the evolution of the earth planet, which have grown up on scientific soil.

I am quite aware that these ideas have undergone considerable change up to the present day, and that many people might label the points to which I am referring as out of date. But that is not the subject under consideration. The things which are being said today in this connection are a result of the same spirit which produced the already antiquated concept of Kant-Laplace, about which I am going to speak. According to that concept the earth and the whole solar system were fashioned out of a sort of primeval nebula, which contained nothing but forces belonging to a misty form. The rotation of this nebula is supposed gradually to have fashioned the planetary system and within this system the earth, so that through the continuous evolution of the forces originally contained in this nebula, all the things upon the earth which we admire, came into being, man included. This view is considered highly illuminating, and it is taught to our school children. People delude themselves into finding it illuminating, for one has only to perform a simple experiment for the children in order to believe that the process has been entirely elucidated. And visual elucidation is much admired by many who desire to find an adequate concept of the world in natural science. It is only necessary to take a drop of some substance that floats on water, pass a tiny strip of cardboard through the equatorial plane of this substance and stick a pin in the cardboard perpendicular to the equatorial plane. This floating drop on the surface of some water is then revolved by means of a pin. And behold! tiny particles do actually sever themselves from the main body! A cosmic system in miniature comes into being. How is it possible not to be able to say that here you have the entire process of the world's creation in miniature? The children think they understand; the experiment seems so illuminating. Yet there is one factor which always escapes notice in the experiment. And while it is sometimes a good thing to forget oneself in the world, it is not a good thing to do so in conducting a scientific experiment.

For observe, the drop would not throw off particles from itself, were the class teacher not standing there, revolving the pin. But since everything necessary to accomplish the result must be taken into account, the one presenting this experiment to an audience should give them to understand that a great professor or teacher, a giant professor, ought to be located in the universe outside, who has passed a gigantic pin through the nebula and is now causing the whole mass to rotate. And furthermore: what has come into being out of the drop? Nothing whatever, save that which was already there in the undivided state. Empiricism often leads us astray in our search for knowledge.

It is true that people possessed of really healthy impressions about the universe, decline to accept such an appeal to the eye, all scientific authority notwithstanding. I will give you an example, the same one which is mentioned in my latest book “The Riddle of the Human Being.” Herman Grimm, the great authority on art, set forth his conviction that Goethe at no time in his life would have committed himself to such a purely superficial explanation of cosmic evolution. This is what Herman Grimm says: “The great fantasy of Laplace and Kant concerning the origin and eventual fate of the earth ball had established itself firmly even at the time when Goethe was a youth. As a product of the rotating cosmic nebula — even the school children are now being taught this — the central gaseous sphere is formed which eventually becomes the earth, and as a densifying globe it passes through all the stages of evolution, becoming the habitation of the human race during inconceivably long periods of time, only to fall back headlong into the sun at last, a burnt out heap of slag. It is a lengthy process, but one quite intelligible to the public, since it demands no further external intervention than efforts on the part of some outside force to maintain the sun's heat at a constant temperature. No more barren perspective of the future can be imagined than this, which we are being forcibly urged to accept as a scientific necessity. A carrion bone, avoided even by a hungry dog, would be an invigorating and appetizing morsel compared to this final excrement of creation, the final form in which our earth would eventually be returned to its home in the “sun.” The avidity with which our generation swallows such things, and pretends to believe them, is a symptom of diseased fancy, an historical phenomenon of our time to explain which the scholars of future eras will some day have to expend much acumen. Goethe never opened his door to hopeless speculations of this kind . . .”

The feeling thus expressed by Herman Grimm, in an age when it was not yet possible to speak of Spiritual Science, or Anthroposophy, as we can now, deserves our careful attention. For it points to the presence of a human feeling which urgently demands a solution of the great problems of the universe quite different from the one offered in good faith by natural science, as the result of its remarkable achievements and here I should like to repeat that Spiritual Science has no hostility toward natural science. The real course, however, of scientific evolution of recent date, shows that this evolution can raise profound questions into consciousness, but that the answer to these questions must come from a different quarter. And it is these answers which Spiritual Science or Anthroposophy desires to give. Yet of course it must appeal to faculties of cognition which are quite different from faculties which are recognized today. I spoke about the evolution of these super-sensible faculties of knowledge in the previous lecture which I was privileged to give here. That lecture has been printed in pamphlet form bearing the title “The Mission of Spiritual Science and its Building at Dornach.” I shall not repeat what I said in that lecture, but shall merely draw attention to the fact that in addition to the ordinary soul forces possessed by the human being, which he also employs in the conduct of his scientific studies, others can be developed, and that these other powers have the same relationship to the ordinary powers of cognition, by way of comparison, that the musical ear has to the perception which is focused merely upon the vibrating strings of musical instruments. In the external world the point of view which disregards the ear will describe a symphony in terms of string vibrations, etc. But the musical ear receives a very different message from these vibrations. A spiritual researcher is a man who has developed, as it were, perceptive ability concerning the world. This ability is related to the natural scientific concept in much the same way that the musical ear is related to the concept which only concerns itself with the vibrating processes of space. The spiritual researcher uses faculties through which the spiritual world is manifested just as the symphony manifests itself through the phenomenon of vibrations. And I must emphasize the fact that by no means everyone desiring to make Spiritual Science or Anthroposophy fruitful for his soul need become a spiritual researcher himself. The relationship between the Spiritual Science researcher and the human being who carries on no research himself, but depends on the results of spiritual research of others, is different from the relationship between the natural science researcher and the human being who accepts the results of natural science. The relationship is a different one and will be here figuratively presented. The spiritual researcher himself prepares, so to say, only the means which communicate the knowledge of the spiritual world. Because he has developed certain faculties, the spiritual researcher is in the position to form such means by which everyone who is sufficiently unprejudiced to employ this instrument properly, can penetrate into the spiritual world. The only requisite is a correct concept of the nature of this means. While on the one hand anyone who constructs the apparatus required for an external chemical or clinical experiment has to assemble external things by means of which some secrets of nature may be revealed, on the other hand the spiritual researcher constructs a purely psycho-spiritual apparatus. This apparatus consists of certain ideas and combinations of ideas which, when correctly employed, unlock the door to the spiritual world.

For this reason the literature of Spiritual Science has to be conceived differently from other literature. Scientific literature imparts certain results with which we acquaint ourselves. The literature of Spiritual Science is not of this type. It can become an instrument in the soul of each human being. After thoroughly steeping ourselves in the ideas which are indicated there we have more than a mere dead result about which information has been gained. What we have before us is something uniting human beings, by virtue of their inherent life, with the spiritual world for which we are seeking. Anyone who reads a book attentively, written through Spiritual Science, will observe — provided the book is read with the right sort of attention — that the living ideas contained in it can become a means in the individual soul life of bringing this same soul life into a kind of synchronous vibration with spiritual existence. Henceforth such a person will conceive things spiritually which up to that time had been conceived by means of the senses alone, and of the intellect bound fast to the senses. Though this fact is little recognized, and the literature of Spiritual Science is regarded just like other writings, the reason is simply and solely the fact, that we are only now witnessing the commencement of spiritual-scientific evolution. When this evolution has progressed, it will be increasingly recognized that we possess something in the content of a book written according to the true principles of Spiritual Science, not at all like the content of other books, but we possess something resembling an instrument which does not merely impart results of knowledge, but we can secure by means of it such results by an activity of our own. But it must be clearly understood that the instrument of Spiritual Science is composed of soul and spirit only, and that it consists of certain ideas and concepts which have a quite definite life of their own, distinguishable from all other ordinary concepts and ideas by not being pictures, as is the case with ordinary thought and conceptual life, but living realities. Emphasis too must be laid on the point that even at the stage Spiritual Science has reached today everyone who earnestly strives can become, up to a certain point, a spiritual researcher himself. Yet this is not essential in order, as set forth above, to make the knowledge derived from Spiritual Science fruitful for the soul.

And for the very reason that Spiritual Science or Anthroposophy is still only at the beginning of its development, it is intelligible, nay self-evident, that the results obtained by the developed faculties of the spiritual researcher should encounter doubt and mistrust, perhaps even laughter and derision. But this doubt and derision will tend to disappear by degrees in the course of time, as soon as the needs awaken to which attention has already been called, and which at present slumber in the majority of human beings. So general recognition will be accorded to Spiritual Science also, just as it has been accorded to various other things which have taken place in humanity during its evolution.

The first thing apparent to a spiritual researcher is that the human being, as he appears to the senses, and to the intellect guided by those senses, and also as far as he can be examined by natural science employing external methods, represents merely one part, one member of the entire human entity; and that within this entire human nature, in addition to the man of the senses, the physical external man, there exists a super-physical man, active and alive within the man of the senses and alone capable of preventing the sense man from becoming a decaying corpse at any moment. For the spiritual researcher discovers that even as we behold color by means of the physical eye we can perceive — to adopt an expression of Goethe's — by means of the “spiritual eye,” within this physical man, what is called the “Etheric Body.” (The term “Etheric Body” is in itself of no special importance, so I beg you not to take this expression amiss; I could have used another just as well.) Within the physical human body lies the super-sensible etheric body not perceptible to physical eyes but visible to the spiritual eye only. People may scoff at the idea of the addition, by a spiritual researcher, of an etheric man to the physical man. Nevertheless, just as the physical human being consists of the matter and energy, together with their activities, which are present in his physical earthly environment, so does he also consist of spiritual forces which he possesses in common with a surrounding spiritual world. We shall begin by considering the forces of the so-called etheric body. This body consists of certain forces that may be termed super-sensible. And it is possible to discover these forces in our environment just as distinctly as the physical forces within us can be discovered by natural science within our earthly surroundings. But of course the spiritual element of our environment must be perceived by the “spiritual eye.”

Let us begin by speaking of an event which establishes a certain connection which actually exists between the processes in the world surrounding us and the forces constituting the etheric body within us. Ordinary human observation can note, during the course of the year, how plants shoot up in the spring time, become increasingly clothed in green, later on developing colored blossoms and finally fruit. Then we see them wither and pass away We are aware of active growth during the summer succeeded by rest and repose during the winter Thus the succession of the seasons of the year appears to outer sense observation. But for this sensible observation, what is represented here, is related to the spirit, just as the vibrating strings are related to the expanding tone volumes. The “spiritual eye” adds a kind of spiritual hearing and spiritual sight to this alternation between activity and repose; and the spiritual researcher compares it with the effect of vibrating strings upon a musical ear. And during the time when we see the plants physically shoot up out of the earth and become perceptible to the physical eye, the spiritual researcher beholds an extra-terrestrial being — whose approach to the earth from without is proportionate to the amount of plant growth. However paradoxical it may sound to the modern ear, it is an actual fact that this “spiritual eye” really beholds a stream of rich life entering the earth from the outside with every spring, which does not flow in during the winter. And while with our physical sight we see only physical plants growing out of the soil, spiritual sight beholds spiritual beings, etheric beings, growing downward, so to speak, out of the entire cosmic environment of the earth. And in the same proportion that the physical plants attain fullness of growth, we see, so to speak, just as many living spiritual beings disappear out of the etheric environment of the earth, as descend into the plant life growing up out of the ground. And it is not until the fruit begins to develop, and the flowers to fade, and autumn to draw near, that we see what has united itself with the earth, and has disappeared within the plant world, in a certain sense, returning to the regions of space surrounding the earth. So the inflow and the outflow of a super-sensible element into the being of the earth is spiritually visible from spring until autumn. You might describe it as super-sensible living plants growing out of the etheric realm and disappearing within the physical plants.

Winter presents a different spiritual scene. Anyone who is only aware of winter because of seeing the snow and feeling the cold does not know that the earth, as earth, is quite different during the winter from what it is in summer. For the earth enjoys a much more intense and active spiritual life of its own during the winter than during summer. And if these relations become a living experience we begin to share this alternation of etheric life during winter and summer. We experience a spiritual phenomenon comparable in a certain sense with the alternations in human experience brought about during the period of going to sleep and waking. (These short explanations do not allow me to show that the experiences I have described are not contradicted by the motions, proper to the earth globe. Anyone who begins to study Spiritual Science seriously will soon recognize the lack of significance in objections such as this: yes, but the earth revolves, you know, etc.)

In this way we learn to recognize that certain beings are not connected with the earth during the winter, but are to be found only in the cosmic environment of the earth, and that these beings descend to earth during the spring time, unite themselves with plant life, and enjoy a kind of repose by uniting themselves with earth life. But the repose which these beings find within the earth, stimulates earth life itself by reason of spirit having united itself with the earth, and during the winter the earth itself, as a being, has something resembling a memory of this summer contact with beings from extra-terrestrial space. Things otherwise unimaginable are revealed to spiritual perception by our natural environment. It is like suddenly receiving the gift of hearing, with sounds pouring in volume from vibrating strings, sounds which we could not hear previously on account of our deafness.

We become acquainted with etheric life. This etheric life shows that certain beings belonging to the earth's environment, but linked to other heavenly bodies, link themselves with the earth during the summer and withdraw again during the winter. This life causes the earth as a being (not that celestial object which geology, or the other natural sciences, regard as a dead body), to go to sleep during the summer, but to awaken in the winter, to live again in the memories of the spiritual visitations of the previous summer. Just the contrary of what we should like to think, as it were, about earth life, is correct — using in the process all sorts of analogies. Such analogies would lead us to believe that the earth awakens in the spring and goes to sleep in the autumn, but Spiritual Science brings us the knowledge that the warm and sultry summer is the earth's sleeping season, and that cold weather which wraps the earth in snow is the season when the earth is awake. (Anyone who achieves a right comprehension of such an experience as this will be unaffected by the superficial objection, that the comparison made with musical hearing, shows Spiritual Science to be merely a subjective phenomenon like taste in art. For the results which occur in the earth's organism as a consequence of what was seen taking place during summer prove the process to be an objective one.)

I wish to state emphatically that Spiritual Science gives voice to none of the anthropomorphic ideas uttered by some 19th century philosophers (Fechner, for instance), but does give imaginative descriptions of real spiritual perceptions, which for the most part are very different from anthropomorphic ideas. That fact alone should enable certain opponents of Spiritual Science to see how indefensible it is to confuse it with philosophy of an anthropomorphic type. By permeating ourselves with the knowledge which flows from such observations we learn to understand how human life moulds itself. For of all the riddles confronting us in the outer world, human life itself is the greatest. I can, in the course of a brief lecture, give only a mere sketch of some small part of what Spiritual Science or Anthroposophy has to say concerning the enigma of human life. But I shall indicate how spiritual sight observes a continuous rhythm in human life. Spiritual sight beholds in the period of childhood the first member of this rhythm. (For the present, we omit the time between conception and birth, interesting to observe on its own account.) The period of childhood from birth to the coming of the second teeth, that is, to the sixth or seventh year, is a period of special interest for spiritual methods of research.

During this first period, the amount of development in the human being is incalculable, hence teachers gifted with insight have declared that human beings learn from mother or nurse during the first years of life more than they can learn from everyone else during the rest of their lives, even if they were to circumnavigate the globe. All else aside, within this period the faculties of erect posture, of speech, of thought and memory, and finally the work of those inner forces which reach a kind of termination in the production of the second teeth are developed. Now all these processes of development present themselves to the spiritual researcher in a way that indicates that they were brought about by earthly forces. Of course he is obliged to add what is beheld by the “spiritual eye” in the evolution of the earth to what sense perception beholds in earth life. But that which takes place in us up to the age of about seven is comprehensible as a product of a complex of forces to be found within the earth domain. (It is hardly necessary to state that in saying this it is not meant to imply that Spiritual Science has already discovered all the secrets connected with this particular period of human development, but rather that no bounds be set to the amount of research which matters such as this may require in earthly life.)

From the change of teeth onward begins a second section of human life lasting until about the fourteenth year, when we become physically mature. Concerning this section of human life Spiritual Science knows that the processes which reveal themselves in the physical body are no longer to be explained by what is active upon the earth itself, but by extra-terrestrial forces, similar in kind to those which have been described in connection with plant life during the course of the year. This particular spirit life (etheric life) which characterizes the plant world is active during the second human life period, but its activity is of such a nature that the process which occurs in plant development in a single year, in reciprocal relationship with the extra-terrestrial forces, is accomplished by the human being during his earth life in about seven years. (All of this is not being said with a sidelong mystical glance at the number seven, but merely as a result of a spiritual observation.)

It must be specially remarked that the forces active during the second period of human life are only similar in kind to those coming from outside the earth to activate plant growth. In the case of the plant the extra- terrestrial forces actually work on the plants from within. These same forces are active within the human organism yet without an actual spatial entrance being effected from outside the earth. Accordingly, the etheric energy which operates to unfold and wither the plant world in the course of a year, lives in the human organism in the form of an enclosed etheric body. The evolutionary processes during the second life period from the seventh to the fourteenth year of the general life rhythm, take place under the influence of these forces. By reason of the human being containing the forces needed for these evolutionary processes within himself, he appears no longer as a purely earthly being, but a copy of something extra- terrestrial, although this particular extra-terrestrial element is present in the world of sense. It is the special evolutionary task of the earth forces to develop what comes to expression in the human brain.

Strange as this may sound when compared with the ideas in vogue today, the brain is chiefly a product of the earth. This shows itself externally through the evolution of the brain, coming to an end, to a large degree, at about the seventh year, naturally, not in regard to the development consisting of reception of concepts and ideas, but in regard to the brain's inner formation and structure, in the solidifying of its parts, etc., etc.

Something must now be added to what took part in the development of the human body up to the seventh year, something not contained within the earthly realm, but originating in the extra-terrestrial regions, and which causes the impulses, among other things, which the human being develops from the seventh to the fourteenth years in the rest of the body, apart from the head and brain, to force their way up into the development of the head and face as well. When we are seven years old, we give birth, as it were, to a super-terrestrial etheric man within, who works inwardly, alive and free. Just as man's physical body comes into physical existence at birth, so now does an etheric, a super-terrestrial body come into existence. The result is, that what is expressed in the features becomes more clearly defined. The etheric body furthermore influences the breathing and circulatory systems in a more individual manner. However, as a result of the earthly forces no longer being the only ones at work, and because the etheric body takes hold of the physical organization and forges an extra-terrestrial element into union with the human nature, an inner life makes its first appearance which continues to accompany us throughout the remainder of our lives as the bodily expression of our temperament and emotions. Spiritual research perceives this etheric body which human nature possesses in common with the plants, but this by no means exhausts the possibility of further discovery. When spiritual research is directed toward the animal world it finds there another super-sensible element, one not found in the extra- terrestrial environment, as is the case with the super-sensible element of the plant world. A spiritual reality is to be encountered there which is to be found neither within the earthly region nor within that super-terrestrial region which still reveals itself through the senses. It is a super-sensible element present in the human being from birth, and indeed from conception, but its activity in the bodily organization only commences about the fourteenth year. This super-sensible element is not active, as is the case with the etheric element, in the space which surrounds human beings upon earth. Just now I pointed out how Spiritual Science enables us to have knowledge of the earth, so that we may be aware how, during the winter, it retains its summer experiences connected with super-terrestrial forces, in the form of memory. When this perception of a spiritual element in the earth is followed up further, it will become evident that the earth body, upon which we now live, is just as much the offspring of a preceding planetary being, as a child is the son of his father. While the son resembles the father, the earth body comes forth like the offspring of another planetary being to whom it bears but little resemblance. We learn to observe this planetary being by observing the earth during the winter when it awakens to a certain extent and develops a kind of memory. For the spiritual element which reveals itself within the earth at that time still retains a memory picture of the conditions passed through by the particular heavenly body which later became our earth.

Such things sound paradoxical today; many people find them absurd or even foolish. But then all the things, which science has eventually acclaimed as self evident, were considered ridiculous at the outset. In the heavenly body out of which the earth subsequently took form, that which is now the mineral kingdom was not to be found. The road is a long one over which spiritual research has to travel in order to gain the knowledge that the earth evolved from a planetary predecessor on which there was no mineral kingdom. That element which is active extra-terrestrially today as a etheric element, and which unites with the body of the earth only in summer, was not so widely separated from the planetary ancestor of the earth as it is at present from the body of the earth. This ancestor, previous to the development of the mineral kingdom, was a living being itself. It was a living being in its entirety. When the “spiritual eye” beholds how our present earth evolved from a living body which preceded it, it gains the faculty of perceiving the super-sensible element acting in both man and animal; this element which is discoverable neither in earthly space nor yet at the present time in super-terrestrial space, is active already in the animal, yet it is active in the human being in a higher way. The human organism is the bearer of this super-sensible element from the commencement of its life, and is formed to be its bearer. However, about the fourteenth year, and thence onward, this super-sensible element manifests a particular and independent activity in the bodily processes not present up to that time. Observation of this activity by means of the “spiritual eye” offers one of the ways (we shall here leave others out of consideration) of recognizing a third member of human nature, the astral or soul body. Please bear in mind that the name in itself is of no importance; any other could replace it. It will not at first be easy for those unaccustomed to deal with ideas of this kind to discriminate between the astral body as it exists before and after the fourteenth year of human life. This and similar difficulties can only be overcome by a fairly long familiarity with spiritual research.

From about the age of twenty-one a further super-sensible member lays hold upon the organism of the human body in a particular fashion. It is the member which is the actual bearer of the Ego, i.e. the human Self. This human member elevates him above the animal level. The question now arises, in relation to this especial member of our being, what does Spiritual Science mean by declaring that the ego does not display independent activity until the fourth stage of life, since it is evident that we must be indebted to this member for the characteristics which elevate us even in childhood above the animal, e.g. upright posture, ability to speak etc.? The solution of this apparent contradiction is found when a knowledge has been gained of the special super-sensible nature of the human ego. It happens that the human being is organized in such a way, on the one hand, that the independent governing activity of the ego within the bodily organization does not develop until the fourth life stage. But on the other hand, the ego carries on its evolution throughout a series of incarnations. If the ego possessed only such forces as it could develop during one earth life, it would have to wait until the fourth stage of bodily life made the unfolding of the ego forces possible. But it enters this earthly life after having spent several complex lives in other bodies. And the forces which make it capable of repeated incarnations on earth, empower it to act upon certain parts of the bodily organization in such a way that the abilities, of which I have spoken, develop earlier than the fourth life stage. The same circumstance accounts for the astral body being brought into activity in the physical body by the ego earlier than was destined by the being of the essential astral body itself. Just through the fact that the spiritual researcher focuses his attention upon the difference in the activity of the ego in the human organism, prior to the advent of the fourth life period, and after it, he knows that the earth man passes through repeated earth lives, between which lie long periods of time in a purely spiritual existence, between death and new birth.

I have now described to you some of the things contained in the cosmic conception of Anthroposophy. Of course this description has been a very sketchy one, for I should have to talk for many hours in order to make any kind of approximately adequate statement concerning the path of research leading to the utterance of such thoughts as have been here expressed. Yet it may be that what has been stated will suffice to convey the idea that such statements are based upon careful, conscientious research, which presumes the employment of especially developed modes of cognition, and which in no way represent the arbitrary dominance of any fantastic speculations or philosophy. This sort of research adds the element of spirit — which surrounds us just as definitely as the physical outer world surrounds our physical being — to the of knowledge which natural science has been able to collect concerning the bodily part of man.

In this world, which becomes manifest through spiritual research, we encounter, to begin with, beings that grow downward etherically toward the earth just as plants grow upward, physically out of the earth. We have in these ether plants the earliest forerunners, so to speak, of spiritual beings and spiritual forces into which we grow even as through our senses we grow into the world of sense. But in the act of learning to know the spiritual world, the world out of which human astral life and the human ego originate, we learn to know a spiritual world within our environment, containing real spiritual beings. To this world our souls belong, just as our bodies belong to the physical world, the world inhabited by mankind. Once again I wish to emphasize that it must not be believed that spiritual investigation is actuated by any arbitrary human purpose in seeking for a relationship with the dead. This subject was touched upon by me in my previous lecture. If we are to draw near to any dead individual, the impulse for it must originate in the dead personality itself. In such a case it will of course be possible for a manifestation to come within the field of our “spiritual eye,” prompted by the will of the dead individual, just as we can receive other kinds of knowledge from the spiritual world. Yet everything coming out of this domain belongs to a type of research upon which the spiritual researcher will only embark with awe and reverence. But that which we can learn from the spiritual world by means of the deliberate development of our own faculties is something that concerns ourselves, and contains answers desired by the individuals who feel, in the manner described in this lecture, the need of spiritual help, a need which is entirely natural for the epoch of human evolution in which we live today.

As this evolutionary epoch has led of necessity to the discoveries of modern science it will lead of necessity to Spiritual Science as well. More and more persons will discover that Spiritual Science, contrary to widespread contemporary scepticism on this point, does not impair in the faintest degree human religious feelings or religious life. On the contrary, it will form the bond of union between those of us who grow up during the scientific era, and the secrets that can be imparted to us by religious revelation. Genuine Spiritual Science does not contradict natural science in anyway, nor can it estrange anybody from the life of religion.

Natural science has led in the course of recent time to a recognition of the fact that science itself is a great problem, to which something must be added if it is really to become intelligible to human beings. I should prefer not to base what I am now saying about natural science, which already today points beyond its legitimate boundaries when it contemplates the riddle of human existence, upon my personal opinion of this science. Spiritual research leads one away from personal views as they are generally understood, inasmuch as it continually tends to avoid expressions based upon subjective considerations, and to allow facts as they develop to speak for themselves. Therefore I should like here to speak about a point which the historical growth of natural science itself brings out in its latest phase. I should like to point to something which will serve as an interesting elucidation of the latest development of natural science.

The great expectations based upon Darwinism, the hopes coming from the results of spectro-analysis, and also the progress made in chemistry and biology, were especially developed in the middle of the 19th century. And then at the close of the sixties of that century Eduard von Hartmann wrote his “Philosophy of the Unconscious.” It was not even a spiritual researcher who expressed himself in this book, but a man was calling attention — primarily by hypotheses and occasionally even by means of quite illogical hypotheses — to a fact which Spiritual Science alone will actually achieve for humanity. Eduard von Hartmann thus points to a spiritual reality behind the physical world, and he calls it — though the term is open to objection — the “Unconscious.” He anticipates philosophically a thing that Spiritual Science can actually demonstrate. Because he postulated spirit as a philosophic necessity, he was unable — despite the amazing proportions already assumed by materialistic Darwinism and natural science as a whole during the sixties — to agree with the view held by so many natural scientists, viz. that present knowledge concerning the physical forces of chemistry and the biological externally perceptible forces made a perception of spiritually active forces appear unscientific. So he endeavored to show how the knowledge acclaimed by Darwinism everywhere points to spiritual forces at work in the activities and development of living beings.

How did certain scientists receive the views presented by Eduard von Hartmann? In much the same fashion that certain people today receive the statements set forth by Spiritual Science, particularly people who have so accustomed themselves to the views held by natural science concerning the universe that they regard everything which does not accord with their own ideas as a grotesque caricature. With the appearance of Eduard von Hartmann on the scene, there were those who believed themselves to be in sole possession of a science, which was true and genuine, who expressed themselves approximately thus: — Eduard von Hartmann is nothing but an amateur; he knows nothing concerning the central facts of scientific achievement; there is no need to be disturbed by such a layman's utterance as the “Philosophy of the Unconscious.” Many were the rejoinders which appeared, and all of them represented Hartmann as being an amateur. They were all designed to show that he simply did not understand the things that natural science had to say.

Among the many rejoinders one was written by a man who at first did not give his name. It was a thoughtful article, written in a genuinely scientific spirit from the standpoint of those scientists who had decisively rejected Hartmann. This criticism of Hartmann's scientific folly seemed to be one that annihilated him. Eminent scientists thereupon delivered themselves approximately as follows: — What a pity that this unknown author has not told us his name, for he has the mind of a true scientist who knows the essential requisites of scientific research. Let him announce his name and we will welcome him into our ranks. This verdict of the scientists was largely influential in exhausting the first edition of the article very rapidly. A second edition was soon required, and this time the previously unknown author announced his name. This author was Eduard von Hartmann. That was a proper lesson given to all those who, like Hartmann's scientific opponents, criticize unfamiliar matters in such an unfriendly spirit. Just as Eduard von Hartmann at that time showed that he could write as scientifically as the scientists themselves, so could the spiritual investigator of today without much effort, present all the arguments very generally used by those who denounce him as a visionary and quite unfamiliar with scientific thought. I am relating this story here not for the sake of saying something which will hit any particular critics of mine, but to draw attention to the sort of controversial arguments championed by the world which holds itself to be truly scientific when it is examining facts which are strange to it.

But this does not exhaust the matter. One of the most distinguished of Haeckel's pupils — Haeckel being the man who represented the materialistic trend of Darwinism most radically — Oskar Hertwig, who has written a whole series of books about biology, presents in his most recent and highly important work: “The Genesis of Organisms, a Rebuttal of the Darwinian Theory of Chance,” an exposition of the utter scientific impotence of materialistically colored Darwinism, when confronted with the problems of life. Proof is adduced in this book from the standpoint of the scientist himself, that the hopes entertained by Haeckel and others, that Darwinism would solve the problems of life, were unfounded. (Here I should like to state emphatically that I cherish the same high respect today for Haeckel's magnificent scientific achievements within the cosmic scheme, proper to natural science, as I did years ago. I still believe and always have believed that a correct appreciation of Haeckel's achievements is the best means of transcending a certain one-sidedness in his views. It is entirely intelligible that he could not attain to this insight himself.) Oskar Hertwig often quotes Eduard von Hartmann in the book mentioned above, and even draws attention to judgments of Hartmann, which completely annihilate the former Darwinistic opponents of this philosopher.

Facts such as these serve to show the manner in which the scientific “Weltanschauung” concerning the cosmos has taken shape; its foremost representatives today announce quite distinctly how totally erroneous the recent views of science have been.

That is a fact that will be recognized with increasing frequency. And along with the recognition of this fact will come an insight not alone into past utterances of Eduard von Hartmann and other speculative philosophers which transcend the scope of natural science, but into the additions which Spiritual Science can make to what natural science has achieved. There is no limit to the amount of additional material which could be brought forward in support of the views going to show that genuine scientific thought is in complete accord with Spiritual Science. Even as there is no contradiction between natural science and Spiritual Science, so is there no justification for saying that Spiritual Science contradicts the life of religion. In this connection I brought out points of importance in the first lecture I gave here. It is my conviction that no one (who has seriously weighed the mental attitude expressed by me in that lecture) can raise any objections to Spiritual Science from a religious point of view. Today I shall enter into some details to show that no one rooted in the scientific life of a particular religious faith can raise any objections to Spiritual Science, as long as an attitude of good will is maintained by that person. I am going to show how someone who has embraced the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, a Christian philosopher absolutely recognized as such by the Catholic Church, can think about Spiritual Science as here defined. And the things I venture to say in this regard are also applicable to the relations between any Protestant line of thought and Spiritual Science.

Thomas Aquinas' philosophy distinguishes between two kinds of knowledge: - first, facts unconditionally deriving from divine revelation and accepted because this, revelation is man's warrant for their truth. Such truths, in the teaching of Thomas Aquinas, are the Trinity; the doctrine that the earth's existence had a beginning in time; the doctrine of the fall and the redemption; the doctrine of the incarnation of Christ in Jesus of Nazareth and the doctrine of the sacraments. Thomas Aquinas is of the opinion that no human being who comprehends the nature of human powers of perception would endeavor to discover the above named truths by means of knowledge developed within himself.

Besides these truths of pure faith, Thomas Aquinas admits others which can be attained by man's own powers of perception. Such truths he denominates “Praeambula Fidei.” These include all truths dependent upon the existence of a divine spiritual element in the world. The existence therefore of a divine spiritual element which is the creator, ruler, upholder and judge of the world is not merely a truth to be accepted on faith, but a fact of knowledge which human powers can acquire. To the realm of Praeambula Fidei belong furthermore all things relating to the spiritual nature of human existence, as well as those leading to a correct discrimination between good and evil, and finally the kinds of knowledge which form the basis for ethics, natural science, aesthetics and anthropology.

It is entirely possible for us to accept the point of view of Thomas Aquinas, and to admit that on the one hand, Spiritual Science does not affect the character of these truths of pure faith, and that on the other, all the statements presented by Spiritual Science come under the head of Praeambula Fidei, as soon as we understand this concept in the correct sense of the Thomistic philosophy. For Spiritual Science there are fields of knowledge, even in domains lying very close to the human being, which must be treated exactly as the truths of pure faith are treated in a higher domain. In ordinary life we have to accept facts which are communicated to us which, by the very nature of the communication, cannot fall within our experience, viz. information concerning what befell us between the earliest point of time which we remember and the time of our birth. If the researcher develops spiritual powers of cognition, he is able to look back upon the period prior to this point of time; but prior to the point where memory begins, the “spiritual eye” does not behold events in the forms of the sense world, but it does perceive what has occurred in the spiritual realm, while the corresponding events are occurring in the physical world. Events perceptible by the senses, can as such, when they cannot enter consciousness through personal experience, be accepted by spiritual research only through the ordinary channels of communication. For instance no healthy minded spiritual researcher will believe it possible to do without communications from fellow human beings, and to substitute spiritual vision for the things that can be learned by ordinary means. Thus there are for Spiritual Science already knowable facts in the realm of everyday life, which can only be acquired by being communicated. In a higher domain the truths of pure faith recognized by Thomas Aquinas are those relating to events inaccessible to the grasp of human knowledge when it is compelled to rely on its own powers alone, because they lie in a domain which is withdrawn from ordinary existence and which, like the events occurring in physical existence during the years directly after birth, does not fall within the field of spiritual vision. Even as those physical occurrences can be received only through human communication, so can the events corresponding to the truths of pure faith be received only through communication (revelation) from the spiritual domain. Although Spiritual Science uses such terms as trinity and incarnation in the domain of spiritual perception, this fact has nothing to do with the application of these terms in relation to the domain to which Thomas Aquinas refers. Moreover everyone acquainted with Augustine knows that such a mode of thinking cannot be called non-Christian.

Thomas Aquinas' views regarding the Praeambula Fidei are likewise compatible with Spiritual Science. For everything accessible to unassisted human powers of perception must be admitted to belong to the Praeambula Fidei. For instance, he includes the spiritual nature of the human soul in that domain. Now when Spiritual Science, by extending the boundaries of knowledge, increases the information concerning the soul beyond the limits within which mere intellect confines it, it expands only the compass of a form of knowledge coming under the head of Praeambula Fidei; it does not go outside that domain. It thus wins its way to truths which support the truths of faith more actively than do the truths obtainable by mere intellect. Thomas Aquinas is of the opinion that the Praeambula Fidei can never find a way into the domain of the truths of faith, but that the former can defend and support the latter. What Thomas Aquinas desired of the Praeambula Fidei will be done still more intensively through their extension by means of Spiritual Science than through the mere intellect.

These observations of mine concerning the Thomistic system are made with the sole object of demonstrating that even the strictest adherent of this particular branch of philosophical thought can find the conclusions of Spiritual Science compatible with it. Of course I have no intention of proving that everybody who accepts the conclusions of Spiritual Science must become a disciple of Thomas Aquinas. Spiritual Science does not disturb the religious confession of anyone. The fact that one individual leans to one type of religious faith and another to a different one has nothing to do with what they know, or think they know, about the spiritual world, but is due to other conditions of life. The better these facts are really comprehended the more will opposition to Spiritual Science cease.

But all of us who have already worked their way through to the recognition of spiritual research will feel some degree of consolation in face of the antagonism which confronts us because of our knowledge of what has occurred in other things to which we become more easily accustomed in the external world, because they are in harmony with the principle of utility. You are aware that the railroads were incorporated into external civilization during the 19th century. A board of directors, whose membership included several recognized authorities, had to decide whether or not a railroad should be built in a certain locality. The story has often been told. According to reports, their decision was to the effect that no railroads should be built, because the people who would travel on them would of necessity incur injury to their health. And if in spite of this there should be people willing to take such a risk, and railroads should be built for their convenience, high board fences should at least be built to the right and left of the roads, to prevent damage to the health of the people past whom the train would have to go. I am not relating things of this kind in order to make fun of people whose one-sidedness could lead them into such an error as this. For it is quite possible to be a distinguished individual and still make such a mistake. Anyone who finds that work done by him is arousing opposition should not instantly accuse his opponent of folly or malice. I am telling you about actual cases of opposition encountered in various instances, because in considering such cases the right kind of feeling and attitude is aroused in anyone confronted by opposition of this kind.

It would not be easy today, no matter how wide a range the enquiry covered, to find a person who is not delighted by a performance of the Seventh Symphony of Beethoven. When this art-work was given for the first time the following opinion was expressed not by an individual without importance, but by Weber, the famous composer of “Der Freischütz”: — “The extravagances of this man of genius have at last reached the non plus ultra; Beethoven is now fit for a lunatic asylum.” And Abbé Stadler, who heard this Seventh Symphony at that time, commented as follows: — “The E is repeated interminably; the poor chap is too lacking in talent to have any ideas.”

It is quite true that those who observe no decrease in the amount of human folly will find special satisfaction in calling attention to phenomena of this kind in the evolution of mankind. And it is obvious that such phenomena do not prove anything, when dealing with a particular case of opposition. But they are not adduced here for the purpose of proving anything. Their intent is rather to stimulate people to examine rather closely what appears strange to them, before condemning it. In such a connection it is allowable to refer to a greater event. And I should like to do so, though obviously without any absurd intention of comparing the work of Spiritual Science, even distantly, with the greatest event which has taken place in human evolution. Let us cast a glance upon the development of the Roman Empire at the beginning of our Christian Era, and observe the rise of Christianity from that time on. How far removed was this Christianity at that time in Rome from any of the subjects considered worthy of an educated person's attention. And let us turn our gaze aside from this Roman life and look at what was unfolding literally underground, in the catacombs; let us look at the Christian life beginning to burst into flower in those caverns. Then let us direct our eyes to what was visible at this place some centuries later. Christianity had ascended from the caverns, it was being clutched eagerly in circles where previously it had been despised and rejected. The sight of such phenomena may serve to strengthen the confidence of any individual who deems it a duty to enlist in the service of a truth which has to struggle and strive for victory in the teeth of opposition. — No one in whom anthroposophical truth has taken permanent root will be surprised to find that it awakens hostility. But it will also appear to be that individual's bounden duty never to desist, in the face of such hostility, from presenting what Anthroposophy strives to be in the spiritual life of the human being.

When we try to advance along the path of supersensible knowledge to a perception of man's real being, the opposing nature of the activities of thinking and willing becomes more and more apparent. This contrast cannot escape an adequate introspection of even ordinary consciousness, but what is merely indicated in such observation, becomes clearly evident to spiritual-scientific observation. The thinking that is active in ordinary life and is usually applied in scientific research, shows itself to be closely bound up with the processes of the bodily organisation; while all that is of the nature of will reveals ever more strikingly its independence of the body the further its essential nature is penetrated by supersensible cognition.

Since introspection never finds the activities of thinking and willing separated in the everyday course of the soul's life, it is impossible for ordinary consciousness to learn to know them in their real, essential nature. It is always confronted by a thinking in which the will also is active, and a willing, shot through with the activity of thought. Hence it can never decide the shares of thought and will in a state of soul. A consciousness that has been prepared for the supersensible can be so focussed that thinking and willing enter its field of view separately. Only then do we know how closely bound to the bodily organisation is the thinking that is active in the world of sense.

One cannot investigate this connection without directing one's attention to the changing characteristics of man's life in successive periods. When our observation has been sharpened by spiritual-scientific training we perceive the constitution of a child's soul from birth to the change of teeth to be quite different from that between the change of teeth and puberty. And the period from puberty to the early twenties shows again other characteristics. The subsequent course of life also resolves itself into clearly distinguishable periods. The fourth closes with the end of the twenties, the fifth at the middle of the thirties, the sixth at the beginning, and the seventh at the end, of the forties. At the beginning of the fifties that period of life commences in which a division into sections can no longer be carried out in a completely definite way.

The whole range of the soul's constitution in its transformation through the various life periods is revealed with special clearness to the observer of the supersensible, when he directs his attention to the close dependence of thinking on the bodily organisation. To perceive here correctly he must keep strictly to the activity of thought, and separate from it everything that arises through the influence of the will. He then finds that in the first four periods of life the activity of thought, in so far as it develops out of man's own being and is dependent on his bodily organisation, is completely incapable of apprehending the real being of man. In the first three decades of life man could attain to no consciousness of himself that he could grasp by thought if, in his soul life, he were solely dependent on those powers of thought which develop on the basis of the bodily organisation. At the end of the twenties, thinking takes on a totally different character. It becomes capable of placing those thoughts which have been developed in dependence on his bodily organisation in the service of human self-knowledge. This self-knowledge, however, can only have reference to inner experiences falling within this period of life, not to those of earlier periods. Not till the middle of the thirties does man develop an understanding for his inner life by means of the activity of thought which he unfolds on the basis of his bodily organisation. This takes place in a definitely regular way. In the middle of the fourth decade there appears a power of thought capable of grasping the fourth period; at the beginning of the forties one which can grasp the third; at the end of the forties one which can grasp the second, and not till the middle of the forties one that can penetrate the experience of childhood from birth till the change of teeth. This evolution of thought throughout the course of a man's life remains quite unknown to ordinary consciousness. It runs its course quite beneath the threshold of this consciousness, and only with those who have tuned their inner life to a finer self-knowledge does it emerge out of the so-called subconscious into the daily experiences of the soul. The supersensible mode of cognition however raises the subconscious into the field of consciousness. It thus perceives that the self-knowledge acquired by man before the second half of life is not mediated by the activity of thinking, which develops out of his own bodily organisation, but by spiritual forces which enter thinking by way of the will, and which are independent of the human physical organisation. Not before the second half of life can the human organism become the basis for a thought activity which comprehends its own being.

The transformation and maturing of thought here described remain hidden from the ordinary life of the soul. Nevertheless the innermost being of man undergoes such a development. In the second half of life there arises from the bodily organisation a consciousness of the inner experiences of the first half of life. These remain unconscious during the first three decades, unless a force for self-perception, independent of the body, is given to thinking by way of the will.

To one who has attained by supersensible knowledge the insight here described there is also revealed in the course of his investigation a perception of the processes which are independent of the body, and by means of which self-perception by way of the will is made possible in the first half of life. His spiritual gaze is directed to the experiences of the soul in a supersensible world before birth (or conception). These experiences result from a totally different co-operation of thought and will from that existing in the life of the senses. This co-operation develops on the basis of a totally different constitution of the activities of thinking and of willing from that existing in sense life. These thoughts are active in themselves and partake of the nature of will, and will is, by its own nature, permeated by thought. In life pertaining to the senses, thoughts are only as shadows of what they reveal themselves to be in the supersensible; and the will activity in the sense world is like a radiating force deprived of light, compared with its true nature as it can be known in the supersensible. The co-operation of thought endowed with will, and will laden with thought, cannot take place on the basis of the bodily organisation. Now what takes place in the soul through the co-operation of thought and will before her entrance into the sense life, does not cease to work on her entrance. It continues to work. Beside the stream of soul life which runs its course in dependence on the bodily organisation there flows another, which is a continuation of soul and spiritual experiences free from the body. This stream gives to man in the first half of sense life the power of self-perception. It dries up in middle life. In its stead there develops for self-perception a power of thought on the basis of the bodily organisation.

An essentially different view presents itself to the consciousness trained in supersensible knowledge when it is directed, not to thought activity, but to will activity in the course of sense life. For such perception everything dependent on will is seen more and more free of the bodily organisation. To supersensible consciousness it becomes clear that the true nature of will cannot become apparent in the sense world. That man, even when he has not consciously developed supersensible insight, experiences will, rests on the fact that in everything pertaining to will something supersensible is woven into ordinary consciousness. Into every human consciousness the will intrudes as an immediately perceptible element, even when this consciousness, by its own constitution of soul, darkens insight into the supersensible world. Man would never even form a word for will, if he had not in his soul-life a perceptible supersensible element. For the powers which develop in the sense world, and for the sense world, the will would be something completely unknown. One who speaks of the development of super-sensible cognition maintains in truth nothing else than that those soul capacities which are already active in the perception of will experiences, can be expanded, concentrated and heightened, so that they are capable of attaining to a perception of another world-content in the same way as they perceive will.

Every science of the soul that seeks to investigate only by the means of cognition of ordinary consciousness must confront perceptions which, it must confess if it understands itself—are impenetrable for ordinary consciousness. For the life of the soul may be compared to a knot which is entangled with various threads at the point where they meet. Its essential nature can only be understood when one is willing to follow the threads outside the knot to their origin and destination. The above exposition speaks of an experience within the soul communicated by the bodily organisation, and of one interwoven with it, which is only to be apprehended by supersensible means of cognition. If this latter experience is, on account of its essential nature, hidden from ordinary consciousness, the other remains still more unknowable, because, in order to become known, it must be disentangled from that part which can only be grasped supersensibly.

Viewed in their detachment, these two elements of the soul life show that this is no steady forward flow; rather it is a striving for equilibrium between two movements. An activity more of the nature of thought and bound to the body would force it into the one, while an activity more of the nature of will and purely supersensible would force it into the other. If one perceives how the soul stands in the struggle between these two streams, then, through this observation, one gains a deeper insight into something else working into the life of the soul.

This observation shows that in the middle of sense life a minimum of that force is present which does not develop on a bodily basis, but which is given to man out of the supersensible world by way of the will. In this period of life the soul develops a strong subconscious inclination towards identification with the physical organisation. This inclination, though subconscious, works instinctively into consciousness. The soul then strives through the forces of her own being to turn away, to a certain extent, from the spiritual world in which she lived before her entrance into sense existence. Now against this striving there works another force which is not originally related in its own being to the forces of man's soul, but which, during the course of the world, attains an influence over the soul. This force is not only active in the middle period of man's life but through his whole life. Only in middle life it makes itself especially noticeable by hindering the turning away from the spiritual world. In general this force comes to expression in the constitution of the soul in a certain tendency toward what may be described as unjustified pride. It is active when a man considers himself more highly endowed than corresponds to his stage of evolution. And it is also active when, for example, man is impelled to an action that is, in its moral aspect, contrary to his nature as man. It may seem strange that a force which prevents man from turning away from the spiritual world can at the same time be a source of deviation from the good. But supersensible knowledge shows, just as sense knowledge does, that there are forces in the world whose effect, in one direction necessary and beneficial, can in another direction turn into the contrary. According to the use of the word in earlier views of the world the force here described can be called the “Luciferic.” But one must not attach to this idea only those feelings of antipathy which have been rightly linked to it on account of one aspect of the Luciferic nature. In a certain sense the justification for the appearance in the course of the world of such a force, whose activity has also evil consequences, must be sought in its necessity for the evolution of man.

In contrast to this force there stands another, which though not originally inherent in man's nature, is likewise active in it in the course of the world. If the Luciferic element were fully active without such opposition, it would, on the entrance of the soul into sense life, overcome the attraction of man's being for this life, and man would not enter it at all. In that moment when this turning away of the human soul from sense life is possible, the Luciferic is overcome by another force which draws the soul towards sense life more strongly than its own being would. For the same reason that we give the opposing force the name “Luciferic” we can call this other the “Ahrimanic.” And, like the Luciferic, the Ahrimanic has also its dark side. In it lies the origin of the aberrations of thought, as in the Luciferic the erring of will. For the Ahrimanic, too, is active in man's soul not only in the beginning but through the whole course of life.

An idea of the relation in which man as a cognitive and active being stands to the world, can only be gained if it is sought for on the basis of insight into the above forces working within his life. Knowledge of the world of nature is mediated entirely by the bodily organisation. The processes of nature are extended through the activity of the senses and the contiguous nervous system, into the interior of the body. The behaviour of the body as a whole towards the natural processes running into it may be compared to a mirroring. The body produces images of the events and the soul confronts these images as one who stands before a mirror and observes the image he produces. A science of the soul which rejects supersensible knowledge must always encounter an epistemological difficulty when it tries to comprehend how bodily processes produced by nerve and sense stimulation are transposed into soul experiences. This difficulty cannot be overcome by philosophic considerations which only take account of the manifestations of ordinary consciousness. For it arises from this: between the bodily processes perceptible to ordinary consciousness and the soul-being of which this consciousness can gain a knowledge, there exists no connection. Neither can anything in the bodily processes reveal itself to ordinary consciousness which would render these processes capable of producing mirror-images which could be grasped spiritually; nor can it perceive how the soul cognises such images. To supersensible perception, however, it is revealed that these same Ahrimanic forces which draw the soul towards the bodily organisation, are also active spiritually in the world of nature outside man. They are active as spiritual forces in the bodily organisation in the mirroring process described above, which is therefore a spiritual process within the material of the body; and they, through their activity in the soul, make her capable of experiencing images. All knowledge of Nature is mediated by Ahrimanic activity.

In his actions man experiences free will. This is a fact of consciousness. It can only be repudiated by one who closes his eyes to a patent fact. It cannot be understood by one who desires to comprehend everything according to the pattern of scientific ideas, for free will does not belong to the realm of Nature. Thinkers who would only admit the laws of Nature in the world decide against the acceptance of free will, not because they do not perceive it, but because they do not comprehend it. The essence of free will—like all that partakes of the nature of will—can only be grasped by supersensible perception. In relation to the sense world the human soul can only receive free will and make it part of her own being by being held back in the spiritual sphere by the Luciferic forces, even while she sojourns in the sense world with a part of her being. The same force which in the middle period of man's life saves him from becoming identified with the bodily organisation, fashions his free will. Through this force his life is lifted out of the realms of purely natural connections in which his bodily organisation places him. Supersensible perceptions of what is Ahrimanic and Luciferic show us clearly that man, according to his supersensible being, belongs to a different realm of the spiritual world from these two forces. It is further apparent that each of these two forces is opposed to the direction man's being should take in the world order; that, however, the pursuit of this direction through the state of equilibrium possible between these two kinds of forces, is the condition of man's evolution to ever higher stages of existence. From the foregoing exposition it may be seen that assimilating natural knowledge and making it one's own, and the development of free will, are results of the passage through this state of equilibrium.

A spiritual-scientific survey of the historical life of man shows that this life is also influenced in two opposing directions by both these forces, and is a striving for equilibrium between them. But in successive epochs there is an alternating preponderance of the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic impulses. After a period in which humanity is exposed predominantly to the Luciferic force, and in which it strives out of its own soul life to withstand this force, there always follows an epoch in which the working of the Ahrimanic has to be striven against. Such an Ahrimanic epoch holds sway in recent times. We owe to it a considerable extension of natural knowledge, and a mode of life by which man attains an especial perfection in the control of natural forces. But through a one-sided leaning in that direction he has withdrawn himself from the forces which accord with his own true being. And if he made no opposition to his inclination towards the Ahrimanic, the Luciferic impulses would take the place of man's own essential forces and cause a deviation of the historical stream in their direction. In the earlier ages in the evolution of mankind, the balance between the two impulses was kept by a kind of spiritual instinct. In modern times the place of this instinct must be taken by a conscious seizing hold of the forces which work on the soul. Progress in the historical development of mankind can be perceived in just this: the older instinctive spiritual life becomes transformed into a constitution of soul ever more ruled by consciousness. This transformation of the unconscious—half conscious—into conscious soul-life proceeds according to laws inherent in historical evolution. To prevent the result of this transformation from being deviated in an Ahrimanic direction the supersensible world must be grasped by man in a free act of will. For while outside man's soul the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic are forces opposing one another, within the soul a too strong influence of the conscious life by the Ahrimanic, prepares the ground for the attacks of the Luciferic. And if man is permeated by the Luciferic he develops a special tendency to allow his conscious soul-life to be pervaded by the Ahrimanic also. At the commencement of the fully conscious soul life of modern times man was in an epoch in which the Ahrimanic impulses were powerful. In consequence of this, it is necessary by the cultivation of a proper attitude of soul to withdraw oneself from the Luciferic tendencies thus introduced. This can only take place when a striving for supersensible cognition prevents the soul forces, which can serve this striving, from being gripped by Luciferic forces.

It is insight into all these relations which causes one who fully grasps them to regard supersensible cognition in the present time as a necessity in the course of human evolution. But one with this insight also understands that misunderstanding and opposition can arise in face of this knowledge. These arise directly from the duality of the human personality which becomes very evident through this insight. The Ahrimanic impulse of modern times seizes the conscious soul-life. Then, through this, in the unconscious part of soul-life, certain impulses stir which resist the inclination to supersensible knowledge. An unconscious fear of the supersensible arises. It is none the less active because it is unconscious. But for the conscious soul life it disguises itself in all sorts of self-deceptions which it produces in man. In this soul-life thoughts appear purporting to be logical reasons against the possibility—even against the blessings—of supersensible knowledge, thoughts to which man only gives his consent on account of his unconscious fear of this knowledge. He sees reasons which are in truth no reasons, and knows nothing of the fear which in reality governs him. Moreover, through the Ahrimanic impulse which forces man to sense existence, a certain want of interest in the supersensible as well as fear, makes itself felt. This prevents man from following up the deeper spiritual connections in the realm of Nature which, through their own being, lead away from mere sense perception towards the supersensible. Man would limit himself to the purely material and external side of natural facts. He would order his life according to this outer side. He does not notice that it is only his want of interest that drives him away from the perception of spirit in nature. He surrenders himself to the belief, caused by this want of interest, that the supersensible is either to be denied altogether or must only be thought of as beyond the bounds of human cognition. To counteract this unconscious fear and lack of interest, he who applies himself to supersensible knowledge has to develop the forces of his soul, while his opponents believe that they are fighting on the side of logical reason and that man should remain modestly within the bounds of cognition.

In addition to this there is the misunderstanding which arises because, owing to the contradictory nature of the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic, wrong inferences are drawn concerning the behaviour of these impulses towards the nature of man. People think—many only pretend to think—that by consciously opposing by supersensible cognition the Ahrimanic character of a mere natural knowledge, man must be led into the Luciferic. Whoever maintains this, lacks the understanding that the super-sensible knowledge which man develops out of his own innermost being cannot only never lead into the Luciferic element, but directly prevents such a downfall, which would inevitably take place if a one-sided Ahrimanic impulse usurped the place of consciousness. For this would deliver over to the Luciferic the strivings after the supersensible which are not seized by man's own being. With these indications we have pointed out the obstacles which oppose man's turning towards supersensible cognition. These arise from a certain self-deception and intentional, or half-intentional, misunderstanding of human nature. If attention is directed to these obstacles by a calm and collected soul life, the possibility of such cognition will easily be found, for this knowledge reveals its truth through itself when its revelations are not opposed by the human soul in the way indicated.

An address delivered to the First Annual Congress of the Federation of European Sections of the Theosophical Society on21 June 1904, Amsterdam

It is well known that the inscription over the door of Plato's school was intended to exclude anybody who was unacquainted with the science of Mathematics, from participating in the teachings of the Master. Whatever we may think of the historical truth of this tradition, it is based upon the correct understanding of the place that Plato assigned to mathematics within the domain of human knowledge. Plato intended to awaken the perceptions of his disciples by training them to move in the realm of purely spiritual being according to his “Doctrine of Ideas.” His point of view was that Man can know nothing of the “True World” so long as his thought is permeated by what his senses transmit. He demanded that thought should be emancipated from sensation. Man moves in the World of Ideas when he thinks, only after he has purged his thought of all that sensuous perception can present. The paramount question for Plato was, “How does Man emancipate himself from all sense-perception?” He considered this to be an all-important question for the education of the spiritual life.

Of course, it is only with difficulty that Man can emancipate himself from material perceptions, as a simple experiment on one's own self will prove. Even when the man who lives in this every-day world does withdraw into himself and does not allow any material impressions of the senses to work upon him, the residues of sensuous perception still linger, in his mind. As to the man who is as yet undeveloped, when he rejects the impressions which he has received from the physical world of the senses, he simply faces nothingness—the absolute annihilation of consciousness. Hence certain philosophers affirm that there exists no thought free from sense-perception. They say, “Let a man withdraw himself ever so much within the realm of pure thought, he would only be dealing with the shadowy reflections of his sense-perceptions.” This statement holds good, however, only for the undeveloped man. When he acquires for himself the faculty of developing organs which can perceive spiritual truths (just as Nature has built for him organs of sense), then his thought ceases to remain empty when it rids itself of the contents of sense-perception. It was precisely such a mind emancipated from sense-perception and yet spiritually full, which Plato demanded from those who would understand his Doctrine of Ideas. In demanding this, however, he demanded no more than was always required of their disciples, by those who aspired to make them true initiates of the Higher Knowledge. Until Man experiences within himself to its full extent what Plato here implies, he cannot have any conception of what true Wisdom is.

Now Plato looked upon mathematical science as a means of training for life in the World of Ideas emancipated from sense-perception. The mathematical images hover over the border-line between the material and the purely spiritual World. Let us think about the “circle”; we do not think of any special material circle which perhaps has been drawn on paper, but we think of any and every circle which may be represented or met with in Nature. So it is in the case of all mathematical pictures. They relate to the sense-perceptible, but they are not exhaustively contained in it. They hover over innumerable, manifold sense-perceptible forms. When I think mathematically, I do indeed think about something my senses can perceive; but at the same time I do not think in terms of sense-perception. It is not the material circle which teaches me the laws of the circle; it is the ideal circle existing only in my mind and of which the concrete form is a mere representation. I could learn the identical truths from any other sensible image. The essential property of mathematical perception is this: that a single sense-perceptible form leads me beyond itself; it can only be for me a representation of a comprehensive spiritual fact. Here again, however, there is the possibility that in this sphere I may bring through to sense-perception what is spiritual. From the mathematical figure I can learn to know super-sensible facts by way of the sense-world. This was the all-important point for Plato. We must visualise the idea in a purely spiritual manner if we would really know it in its true aspect. We can train ourselves to this if we only avail ourselves of the first steps in mathematical knowledge for this purpose, and understand clearly what it is that we really gain from a mathematical figure. “Learn to emancipate thyself from the senses by mathematics, then mayest thou hope to rise to the comprehension of ideas independently of the senses”: this was what Plato strove to impress upon his disciples.

The Gnostics desired something similar. They said, “Gnosis is Mathesis.” They did not mean by this that the essence of the world can be based on mathematical ideas, but only that the first stages in the spiritual education of Man are constituted by what is super-sensible in mathematical thought. When a man reaches the stage of being able to think of other properties of the world independently of sense-perception in the same way as he is able to think mathematically of geometrical forms and arithmetical relations of numbers, then he is fairly on the path to spiritual knowledge. They did not strive for Mathesis as such, but rather for super-sensible knowledge after the pattern of Mathesis. They regarded Mathesis as a model or a prototype, because the geometrical proportions of the World are the most elementary and simple, and such as Man can most easily understand. He must learn through the elementary mathematical truths to become emancipated from sense in order that he may reach, later, the point where the higher problems are appropriately to be considered. This will certainly mean, for many, a giddy height of human perceptive faculties. Those, however, who may be considered as true Occultists have in every age demanded from their disciples the courage to make this giddy height their goal:—“Learn to think of the essence of Nature and of Spiritual Being as independently of sense-perception as the mathematician thinks of the circle and its laws, then mayest thou become a student of Occult Science”—this is what everyone who really seeks after Truth should keep before his mind as if written in letters of gold. “Thou wilt never find a Circle in the World, which will not confirm for thee in the realm of sense what thou hast learned about the Circle by super-sensible mathematical perception; no experience will ever contradict thy super-sensible perception. Thus dost thou gain for thyself an imperishable and eternal knowledge when thou learnest to perceive free of the senses.” In this way did Plato, the Gnostics and all Occultists conceive mathematical science as an educational means.

We should consider what eminent persons have said about the relation of mathematics to natural science. Kant and many others like him, for example, have said that there is as much of true science as there is mathematics in our knowledge of Nature. This implies nothing else than that by reducing to mathematical formulae all natural phenomena, a science is obtained transcending sense-perception—a science which, although expressed through sense-perception, is visualised in the spirit. I have visualised the working of a machine only after I have reduced it to mathematical formulae. To express by such formulae the processes presented to the senses is the ideal of mechanics and physics and is increasingly becoming the ideal of chemistry.

But it is only that which exists in space and time and has extension in this sense, which may be thus mathematically expressed. As soon as we rise to the higher worlds where it is not only in this sense that Extension must be understood, the science of Mathematics itself fails to afford any immediate expression. But the method of perception which underlies mathematical science must not be lost. We must attain the faculty to speak of the realms of Life and Soul, etc., quite as independently of the particular objective entity, as we are able to speak of the “circle” independently of the particular circle drawn upon paper.

As it is true that only so much of real knowledge exists in Natural Science as there is Mathematics in It, so it is true that on all the higher planes knowledge can be acquired only when it is fashioned after the pattern of mathematical science.

Now, within the last few years, mathematical science has made considerable progress. An important step has been taken within the realm of mathematics itself, towards the super-sensible. This has come about as the result of the Analysis of Infinity which we owe to Newton and Leibnitz. Thus another branch of mathematical science has been added to that which we call “Euclidian.” Euclid expresses by mathematical formulae only what can be described and constructed within the field of the “finite.” What I can state in terms of Euclid about a circle, a triangle or about the relations of numbers, is within the field of the finite, it is capable of construction in a sense-perceptible manner. This is no longer possible with the Differential Calculus with which Newton and Leibnitz taught us to reckon. The Differential still possesses all the properties that render it possible for us to calculate with it; but in itself as such, it eludes sense-perception. In the Differential, sense-perception is brought to a vanishing point and then we get a new basis—free from sense-perception—for our reckoning. We calculate what is perceptible by the senses through that which eludes sense-perception. Thus the Differential is an Infinitesimal as against the finitely sensible. The “finite” is mathematically referred back to something quite different from it, namely to the real “infinitesimally small.” In the Infinitesimal Calculus we stand on an important boundary line. We are mathematically led out beyond what is perceptible to the senses, and yet we remain so much within the real that we calculate the “Imperceptible.” And when we have calculated, the perceptible proves to be the result of our calculation from the imperceptible. Applying the Infinitesimal Calculus to natural processes in Mechanics and Physics, we accomplish nothing else, in fact, than the calculation of the sensible from the super-sensible. We comprehend the sensible by means of its super-sensible beginning of origin. For sense-perception, the Differential is but a point, a zero. For spiritual comprehension, however, the point becomes alive, the zero becomes an active Cause. Thus, for our spiritual perception, Space itself is called to life. Materially perceived, all its points, its infinitesimally small parts, are dead; if, however, we perceive these points as differential magnitudes, an inner life awakens in the dead side-by-side. Extension itself becomes the creation of the extensionless. Thus did life flow into Natural Science through Infinitesimal Calculus. The realm of the senses is led back to the point of the super-sensible.

It is not by the usual philosophical speculations upon the nature of differential magnitudes that we grasp the full range of what is mentioned here, but rather by realising in true “self-knowledge” the inner nature of our own spiritual activity when from the infinitely small we attain an understanding of the finite through Infinitesimal Calculus. Here we find ourselves continually at the moment of the genesis of something sense-perceptible from something no longer sense-perceptible. This spiritual activity in the midst of super-sensible proportions and magnitudes has become in recent years a powerful educational means for the mathematician. And for what has been accomplished in the realms lying beyond the limits of ordinary physical perception by intellects such as Gauss, Riemann and our contemporary German thinkers Oskar Simony, Kurt Geissler, as well as many others, we are indebted precisely to this. Whatever may be objected in particular against these attempts: the fact that such thinkers extend the conception of space beyond the three-dimensional compass; that they reckon in terms that are more universal and more comprehensive than the space of the senses; these are simply the results of mathematical thought emancipated by Infinitesimal Calculus from the shackles of sense-perception.

In this way important indications have been set for Occultism. Even when mathematical thought ventures beyond the limits of sense-perception, it yet retains the strictness and sureness of true thought-control. Even if errors do creep in this field, they will never act so misleadingly as do the undisciplined thoughts of the non-mathematical student when he penetrates into the realms of the super-sensible.

Plato and the Gnostics only recognised in mathematical science a good means of education, and no more than this is here implied about the mathematics of the infinitely small; nevertheless to the Occultist it does present itself as a good educational means. It teaches him to effect a strict mental self-education where sense-perceptions are no longer there to control his wrong associations of ideas. Mathematical science teaches the way to become independent of sense-perception, and at the same time it teaches the surest path; for though indeed its truths are acquired by super-sensible means, they can always be confirmed in the realm of the senses. Even when we make a mathematical statement about four-dimensional space, our statement must be such that when we leave the fourth dimension out and restrict the result to three dimensions, our truth will still hold good as the special case of a more general proposition.

No one can become an Occultist who is not able to accomplish within himself the transition from thought permeated with sense to thought emancipated from sense-perception. For this is the transition where we experience the birth of the “Higher Manas” from the “Kama Manas.” It was this experience which Plato demanded from those who wished to become his disciples. But the Occultist who has passed through this experience must go through one still higher. He must also find the transition from thought emancipated from sense-perception in form, to formless thought. The idea of a triangle, of a circle, etc., is still qualified by form, even though this form is not an immediately sensible one. Only when we pass over from what is limited by finite form to that which does not yet possess any form, but which contains within itself the possibility of form-creation, only then are we able to understand what is the realm of Arupa in contrast to the realm of Rupa. On the lowest and most elementary plane we have an Arupa reality before us in the Differential. When we reckon in Differentials we are always on the border-line where Arupa gives birth to Rupa. In Infinitesimal Calculus, therefore, we can train ourselves to grasp the idea of Arupa and the relation of this to the Rupa. We need but once integrate a differential equation with full consciousness; then we shall feel something of the abounding power that exists on the borderline between Arupa and Rupa.

Here, of course, it is at first only in an elementary manner that one has grasped what the advanced Occultist is able to perceive in higher realms of being. But one here has the means to see at least an idea of what the man who is limited to sense-perception cannot even divine. For the man who knows nothing beyond sense-perception, the words of the Occultist must at first seem devoid of all meaning.

A science which is gained in realms where the support of sense-perception is necessarily removed, can be understood in the most simple manner at the stage where man emancipates himself most easily from such perception. And such is the case in mathematics. The latter, therefore, constitutes the most easily mastered preliminary training for the Occultist who will raise himself to the higher worlds with definite enlightened consciousness and not in dim sensuous ecstasy or in a semi-conscious longing. The Occultist and the Mystic live in the super-sensible with the same enlightened clearness as the elementary geometrician enjoys in the realm of his laws of triangles and circles. True Mysticism lives in the light, not in the darkness.

When the Occultist, who starts from a point of view like that of Plato, calls for research in the mathematical spirit, he can easily be misunderstood. It might be objected that he overrates the mathematical spirit. This is not the case. Such an overrating rather exists on the part of those who admit exact knowledge only to the extent to which mathematical science reaches. There are students of natural science at the present time who reject as not being scientific in the full sense of the word any statement which cannot be expressed in numbers or figures. For them vague faith begins where mathematics end; and according to them, all right to claim objective knowledge ceases at this point. It is precisely those who oppose this overrating of mathematics itself who can most thoroughly value the true enlightened research which advances in the spirit of mathematics even where mathematical science itself ceases. For in its direct meaning mathematical science after all has to do only with what is quantitative; where the qualitative begins, there its domain ends.

The point is, however, that we should also be able to research (in the exact sense of the word) in the domain of the qualitative itself. In this sense Goethe set himself with particular emphasis against an overrating of mathematics. He did not want to have the qualitative bound and fettered by a purely mathematical method of treatment. Nevertheless, in all things he wanted to think in the spirit of the mathematician, according to the model and pattern of the mathematician. This is what he says:—“Even where we do not require any calculation, we should go to work in such a manner as if we had to present our accounts to the strictest geometrician. For it is the mathematical method which on account of its thoroughness and clearness reveals each and every defect in our assertions, and its proofs are really only circumstantial explanations to the effect that what is brought into connection has already been there in its simple, single parts and in its entire sequence; that it has been perceived in its entirety and established as incontestably correct under all conditions.” Goethe wishes to understand the qualitative in the forms of plants with the accuracy and clearness of mathematical thought. Just as one draws up mathematical equations in which one only has. to insert special values in order to include under one general formula a multiplicity of single cases, so does Goethe seek for the primordial plant which is qualitatively all-embracing in spiritual reality. Of this he writes to Herder in 1787: “I must further assure you that I am now very near to the secret of the generation and organization of the plant, and that it is the very simplest thing that can be imagined ... The prototype of the plant (Urpflanze) will be the most wonderful creation of the world, for which Nature herself shall envy me. With this model and the key thereto one can then discover plants without end, which will necessarily be consistent, that is to say, which—even if they do not exist—could yet exist.” That is to say, Goethe seeks the as yet formless protoplant, and he endeavours to derive therefrom the actual plant-forms just as the mathematician gets from an equation the special forms of lines and surfaces. In these realms Goethe's trend of thought was really tending towards true Occultism. This is known to those who learn to know him intimately.

The point is that by the self-training above-mentioned, Man should raise himself to a perception emancipated from the senses. It is only through this, that the gates of Mysticism and Occultism are thrown open to him. Through the schooling in the spirit of mathematics lies one of the paths to the purification from life in the senses. And just as the mathematician is consistent in life, just as he is able to construct bridges and bore tunnels by virtue of his training—that is to say, he is able to command the quantitative reality, in the same way, only he will be able to understand and rule the qualitative, who can make himself master in the ethereal heights of sense-free perception. This is the Occultist. Just as the mathematician builds the shapes of iron into machines according to mathematical laws, so does the Occultist shape life and soul in the world according to the laws of these realms which he has understood in the spirit of mathematical science. The mathematician is led back to real life through his mathematical laws; the Occultist no less so through his laws. And just as little as he who is ignorant of mathematics is able to understand how the mathematician builds up the machine, even so little can he who is not an Occultist understand the plans by which the Occultist works upon the qualitative forms of life and soul.

This address was given at the Second Annual Congress of the Federation of European Sections of the Theosophical Society.

It was then edited for printing by St. George Publications in 1982.¹

Anthroposophy will only be able to fulfill its great and universal mission in modern civilization when it is able to grasp the special problems which have arisen in every land by reason of the intellectual possessions of the people. In Germany, these special problems are in part determined by the inheritance bequeathed to her intellectual life by the men of genius living at the close of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries. Any one who approaches those great minds, Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, Novalis, Jean Paul and many others, from the point of view of Anthroposophical thought and its attitude toward life, will have two important experiences. The first being that, as a result of this profoundly spiritual attitude, a new light is thrown upon the working and works of these men of genius; the second, that through them Anthroposophy receives new life-blood, which must, in some way as yet not clear, produce a fructifying and strengthening effect in the future. It may be said without exaggeration that the German will understand Anthroposophy if only he brings his mind to bear upon the highest conceptions for which the leading spirits of his land have striven, and which they have embodied in their works.

It will be the task of future generations to reveal the Anthroposophical and spiritual-scientific basis of the great advancement in the intellectual life of Germany during the period in question. It will then be shown what an intimate knowledge and understanding of the influences at work during this period is obtainable by regarding things from an Anthroposophical point of view. It is only possible on this occasion to make a few references to one man of genius who was the leading light of this age of culture, namely, Goethe. It is possible that new life may be infused into the active principles of Anthroposophy through Goethe's thought and the creations of his mind, with the result that, in Germany, Anthroposophy may appear by degrees to be something akin to the spirit of the people. One thing will be made clear: that the source of the Anthroposophical conception is one and the same as the fount from which Germany's great poet and thinker has derived his creative power.

The most clear-sighted of those among whom Goethe lived acknowledged without any reservation that there was no branch of intellectual life which his attitude toward life and the world could not enrich. But one must not allow oneself to be deceived by the fact that the quintessence of Goethe's mind really lies concealed below the surface of his works. He who wishes to win his way to a perfect understanding of them must become intimate with their innermost spirit. This does not mean that one should become insensitive to the beauties of their style or their artistic form. Nor must one put an abstract interpretation upon his art by means of intellectual symbols and allegories. But, just as a noble countenance excites no less admiration for the beauty of its features because the beholder is able to perceive the greatness of the soul illuminating this beauty, so it is with Goethe's art; not only can it lose nothing, but rather will it gain infinitely, when the outward expression of his creative power is illuminated by that depth of conception of the universe which possesses his soul.

Goethe himself often has shown how justified we are in having such a profound conception of his creative power. On January 29, 1827, he said to his devoted secretary Eckermann concerning his Faust, “It is all scenic and, from the point of view of the theatre, it will please everyone. More than this I did not wish. If only the performance gives pleasure to the majority of the audience, the initiated will not miss the deeper meaning.” It is only necessary to bring an impartial insight to bear upon Goethe's creative power in order to recognize that it is only an esoteric conception which can lead us to a full understanding of his working. He felt within him an ardent desire to discover in all phenomena of the senses the hidden spiritual force. It was one of his principles of search that the inner secrets are expressed in outward facts and objects, and that those only can aspire to understand Nature who look upon the phenomena as mere letters which enable them to decipher the inner meaning of the workings of the spirit. The words: “All we see before us passing, Sign and symbol is alone,” in the Chorus Mysticus, at the end of Faust, are not merely to be regarded as a poetical idea, but as the outcome of his whole attitude toward the world. In Art, too, he saw only a revelation of the innermost secrets of the world; in his opinion, it was through Art that those things are to be made clear which, though having their origin in Nature and being active in her, yet with the means at her disposal, she cannot express. He sought the same spirit in the phenomena of Nature as in the works of a creative artist; only the means of expression were different in the two cases. He was constantly at work on his conception of a gradual process of evolution of all the phenomena and creatures in the world. He regarded man as a compilation of the other kingdoms. The spirit of man was to him the revelation of a universal spirit, and the other realms of Nature, with their manifestations, appeared to him as the path of evolution leading to man. All this was not merely a theory with him, but became a living element in his work, permeating all that he produced. Schiller has given us a fine description of this peculiarity of Goethe's mind, in the letter with which he inaugurates the intimate friendship which united them (August 23, 1794):

For a long time I have watched, although from some distance, the procedure of your mind, and ever with renewed wonder have observed the track that you have marked out for yourself. You seek for the necessary (the absolute) in Nature; but you seek it by the most difficult route, which every weaker spirit will take care to avoid. You grasp in your view entire Nature in order to obtain light on her parts: in the totality of her manifestations, you search for the key to lay open the individual. (Correspondence between Schiller and Goethe, from 1794 to 1805.)

In his book on Winckelmann, Goethe has expressed his opinion as to the position of man in the evolution of the realms of Nature:

When the sound, healthy nature of man works as a whole, when he feels himself at one with the world as a great, beautiful, worthy whole, when this harmonious feeling of well-being gives him a pure free delight, then might the Universe, could it consciously feel, deeming itself at the goal, cry out for very joy, and be lost in admiration of the climax of its own development and organization.

It was Goethe's life-work to strive to obtain an ever clearer insight into the evolution of the living world. When, after moving to Weimar (about 1780), he embodied the result of his investigation in the beautiful prose-hymn, Nature, we find over the whole a certain abstract tinge of pantheism. He must perforce use words to define the hidden forces of being, but before long these cease to satisfy his ever-deepening conception. But it is in these very words that we first meet with the ideas which we find later in such perfect form. He says there, for instance:

Nature! we are surrounded and embraced by her ... Unasked and without warning she draws us into the circle of her dance and carries us along with her until we are weary and slip from her arms. For ever is she creating new forms; what is, never was before; what has been, never will be again; everything is new, and yet ever old ... Each one of her works has its own individuality, each of her phenomena requires individual comprehension, and yet it all makes but one whole ... She has thought, and is for ever meditating; not as man, though, but as Nature. She has her own all-embracing meaning, which no one can learn from her by observation only ... She envelops man in a mist, and is ever spurring him on toward the light ... She creates wants because she loves action ... She has neither speech nor language, but she creates tongues and hearts through which she feels and speaks ... Her crown is love, through which alone she may be approached ... She has isolated everything in order to draw everything together ... Past and future knows she not. The present is her eternity.

When Goethe (1828), having reached the summit of his insight, looked back upon this stage, he expressed himself thus concerning it:

I would call that former stage of insight the Comparative, which is impelled to express its tendency toward an, as yet, unattained Superlative ... But what is wanting for its fulfillment is the conception of the two great driving-wheels of all Nature, the comprehension of polarity and self-perfecting evolution, the former belonging to matter, insofar as we call it material, the latter opposed to it, insofar as we call it spiritual; the former is everlastingly attracting and repelling, the latter is ever striving to ascend. But, as matter cannot exist and operate without spirit, nor spirit without matter, even so matter has the power to raise itself, nor can spirit be prevented from attracting and repelling.

It was with such a conception that Goethe approached the animal, mineral and vegetable kingdoms to grasp the hidden spiritual unity in the manifest multiplicity of sense-perceptible phenomena. It is in this sense that he speaks of primeval plant, primeval animal. And it was for him Intuition which stood behind these conceptions as the active spiritual force. In his contemplation of things, his whole being strove toward what in Anthroposophy is called tolerance. And ever more and more he sought to acquire this quality by means of the strictest inward self-education. To this he frequently refers; it will suffice to quote a very characteristic example from the Campaign in France (1792):

As I was for the most part almost entirely engrossed by the business and occurrences of the moment, with which kind of life I had reason to be satisfied, of late years particularly, I had the peculiarity of never forming conceptions beforehand of persons whom I expected to meet, or places that I intended to visit, but allowed them to produce their effect upon me without being previously prepared for them.

The advantage that arises from this is very great; one does not require to come back from a previously conceived idea, to blot out a picture arbitrarily painted by ourselves, and painfully to adopt the reality in its place.

Thus he endeavored to rise higher and higher and to reach the point which divided the real from the unreal.

Only here and there do we find references to his innermost convictions. One of these occurs, for instance, in the poem The Mysteries, which contains his confession as a Rosicrucian. It was written in the middle of the 80's in the 18th century, and was regarded by those who knew him intimately as revealing his character. In 1816, he was called upon by a “fraternity of students in one of the chief towns of North Germany” to explain the hidden meaning of the poem, and the explanation which he gave might well stand as a paraphrase of the three objectives of the programme of the Anthroposophical Society.

Only when one is capable of appreciating the full significance of such points in Goethe is one in a position to recognize the higher meaning, to use his own expression, which he has introduced into his Faust for the initiated. In the second part of this dramatic poem is in fact to be found what Goethe had to say concerning the relation of man to the three worlds: the physical, the astral and the spiritual. From this point of view, the poem represents his expression of the incarnation of man. A character which, to the mind that refuses a spiritual-scientific basis, presents insuperable difficulties, is that of Homunculus. Every passage, every word, however, becomes clear as soon as one starts from this basis. Homunculus is created by the help of Mephistopheles. The latter represents the repressive and destructive forces of the Universe which manifest in the realms of man as Evil. Goethe wishes to characterize the part which Evil takes in the formation of Homunculus; and yet from such beginnings is to be produced a man. For this reason, he is led through the lower realms of Nature to the scene of the classical Walpurgis Night. Before he sets forth on these wanderings, he possesses only a part of human nature. What he himself says concerning his connection with the earthly part of human nature is striking.

Homunculus:

Hither and thither, up, down, in and out;
From place to place still hovering about,
Impatient the free air of life to breathe.
Longing to break the glass that is my sheath—
My chrysalis; but everywhere I see
Such sights! I could not venture yet to be.
Now for a secret—I am on the track
Of two Philosophers. Their tongues, clack! clack!
Went evermore, and Nature—Nature was
The word. Keep me not from them. Of the laws
Of earthly being they must somewhat know:
Between them I may learn some little; so
Pass into life by their experience wiser.

Part ii, Act ii.

The Nature of Homunculus becomes quite clear in the light of the following lines which refer to him:

Thales:

He wants your counsel—has come a long distance:
His object is to get into existence.
He is, by what he told me of his birth,
Miraculously come but half to earth:
A lively spark—has every mental quality,
But, luckless fellow, ‘twas his strange fatality
An active, naked spirit, all alone—
Without a shred of body, blood, or bone,
Into the world to be at hazard thrown—
His glass is all he has to steady him:
He wants and wishes body, life, and limb.

Part ii, Act ii.

The following words are also added, “He is, methinks, Hermaphrodite.” Goethe here intends to represent the astral body of man before his incarnation in mortal (earthly) matter. This he also makes clear by endowing Homunculus with powers of clairvoyance. He sees, for instance, the dream of Faust in the laboratory where work is going on with the help of Mephistopheles. Then in the course of the classical Walpurgis Night the embodying of Homunculus, that is, the astral man, is described. He is sent through the realms of Nature to Proteus, the spirit of transformations.

Thales:

Away to Proteus! Question the magician
As to the spark's proposed change of condition.
You thus may learn what transformations he
Must pass through to be anything—to BE.

Part ii, Act ii.

Proteus then describes the road which astral man has to take through the realms of Nature in order to arrive at an earthly incarnation and receive a physical body.

Proteus:

... In the broad sea thy being must commence;
On a small scale one there begins,
Well pleased the smallest to devour;
Till, waxing step by step, one wins
A loftier achievement, ampler power.

Part ii, Act ii.

The passage of man through the mineral kingdom is then described. Goethe makes his entrance into the vegetable kingdom particularly contemplative. Homunculus says:

A tender air is wafted here;
Dear is the greenness, and the fragrance dear.

The philosopher Thales, who is present, adds in elucidation of what is taking place:

Thales:

Obey the noble inspiration,
And at its source begin creation.
Make ready for the great emprize!
By laws eternal still ascending,
Through myriad forms of being wending,
To be a man in time thou'll rise.

The moment, too, when the asexual being has implanted within him the double sex, and therewith sexual love, is also represented:

Sirens:

And all things are gleaming by fire girt around,
Prime source of creation, let Eros be crowned.

That the investing of the astral body with the physical body, composed of earthly elements, is really meant here is expressly stated in the closing lines of the second act:

All:

Hail each softly blowing gale!
Caverns rich in marvels, hail!
Highly honored evermore,
Be the elemental four!

Goethe here makes use of the evolution of beings in the course of the fashioning of the earth in connection with the incarnation of man as a special being. The latter repeats as such the transformations which mankind has undergone in reaching its present form. In these conceptions, he was in line with the theory of evolution held by spiritual science. His explanation of the origin of the lower forms of life was that the impulse which was aspiring to a higher grade had been stopped on a certain level. In his diary of the Journey through Switzerland, of 1797, he noted a conversation with the Tübingen professor Kielmeyer, which is interesting in this connection. In it, the following words occur, “Concerning the idea that the higher organic natures in their evolution take several steps which the others behind them are unable to take.” His studies of plants, animals, and of man are entirely pervaded by these ideas, and he seeks to invest them with an artistic form in the transformation of Homunculus into a man. When he becomes acquainted with Howard's theory of the formation of clouds, “he expresses his thoughts concerning the relation of spiritual archetypes to the ever-changing forms in the following words:

When the deity Kama-Rupa, high and sublime, wanders, wavering, on the breeze, light and heavy, gathers together the folds of his veil, shakes them out again, rejoicing at the variety of forms, remains now motionless, and now disappears as a dream, we are amazed and scarce believe our eyes.

In Faust, we also find represented the relation of the imperishable spiritual man to the mortal envelope. Faust has to go to the Mothers to seek for this imperishable essence, and the explanation of this important scene is developed quite naturally in the second part of the play. Goethe conceives the real being of man as a trinity (in accord with the Anthroposophical teaching of Spirit-self, Life-spirit, Spirit-man). And Faust's visit to the Mothers may be termed in Anthroposophical phraseology the forcible entry into Devachan. There he is to find what remains of Helena. She is to be reincarnated; that is, she is to return from the realm of the Mothers to the earth and, in the third act, we really do in fact see her reincarnated. In order to accomplish this it is necessary to reunite the three natures of man: the astral, the physical, and the spiritual. At the end of the second act, the astral (Homunculus) has put on the physical envelope and this combination is now able to receive within it the higher nature. Such a conception introduces an inner dramatic unity into the poem, whereas with a non-occult forcible entry the individual events remain a mere arbitrary collection of poetical incidents. Without taking into account the spiritual-scientific foundation of the poem, Professor Veit Valentin, of Frankfort, has already drawn attention to the inner connection of Homunculus and Helena in an interesting book, Die Einheit des Ganzen Faust, 1896. But the contents of this work can only remain an intelligent hypothesis if one does not penetrate into the spiritual-scientific substratum underlying it all. Goethe has conceived Mephistopheles as a being to whom Devachan is unknown. He is only at home on the astral plane. Hence he can be of service in the creation of Homunculus, but he cannot accompany Faust into the realm of the Mothers. Indeed, that plane is to him Nothingness. He says to Faust, in speaking to him of that world:

Mephistopheles:

Naught, in the everlasting void afar,
Wilt see, nor hear thy footfall's sound,
Nor for thy tread find solid ground!

Part ii, Act i.

But Faust, with his spiritual intuition, at once divines that in that world he will find the real essence of Man.

Faust:

We'll fathom it! Come on, nor look behind!
In this thy Naught, the All I hope to find.

In the description which Mephistopheles gives of the world which he dares not enter, one understands exactly what Goethe means to express.

Mephistopheles:

Sink then! Arise! This also I might say:—
‘Tis all the same. Escaping from the real,
Seek thou the boundless realm of the ideal.
Delight thyself in forms long past away!
The train-like cloud-procession, glides along:
...

A glowing tripod teaches thee thou hast
The deep attained, the lowest deep, at last;
There by its light the Mothers thou wilt see;
Some sit, while others, as the case may be,
Or stand, or walk: formation, transformation
Of mind etern, eternal recreation!
While forms of being around them hover.

Only by means of the archetype which Faust fetches from the devachanic world of the Mothers can Homunculus, the astral being who has assumed physical form, become a spiritually-endowed entity, Helena in fact, who actually appears in the third act. Goethe has taken care that those who seek to penetrate the depths shall be able to grasp his meaning for, in his conversations with Eckermann, he has lifted the veil as far as it seemed to him practical to do so. On December 16, 1829, he said concerning Homunculus:

For such spiritual beings as Homunculus, who have not yet had their powers obscured and confined by becoming completely human, were reckoned as among the demons.

And, on the same day, he points out further how Homunculus is still wanting in Mind: “Reasoning is not his concern, he wants to act.”

The whole of the further development of the dramatic action in Faust, according to this reading, follows easily on the foregoing. Faust has become acquainted with the secrets of the three worlds. Henceforth, he looks at the world from the point of view of the mystic. One could point out scene after scene which bears this out, but it will be sufficient to draw attention here to a few passages. When, towards the end, Care approaches Faust, he becomes outwardly blind but, in the course of his development, he has acquired the faculty of inward sight.

Faust:

Deeper and deeper night is round me sinking;
Only within me shines a radiant light.

Part ii, Act v.

Goethe once, in answer to the question, “What was Faust's end?” replied definitely, “He becomes a mystic in the end,” and the significant words of the Chorus Mysticus, with which the poem closes, can only be interpreted in this sense. In the West-East Divan he also expresses himself very clearly on the subject of the spiritual development of man. It is to him the union of the human soul with the higher self. The illusion that the real man exists in his outward body must die out; then higher man comes into existence. That is why he begins his poem Blessed Longing with the words: “Tell it to none but to the wise, for the multitude hasten to deride. I will praise the living who longs for death by fire.” And, in conclusion, he adds: “And as long as thou hast not mastered this; dying and coming into existence; thou art but a sad and gloomy guest on the dark earth.”

Quite in harmony with this is the Chorus Mysticus, for its inner meaning is but this: The transient forms of the outer world have their foundation in the imperishable spiritual ones to which we attain by regarding the transient only as a symbol of the hidden spiritual:

Chorus Mysticus:

All of mere transient date
As symbol showeth.

That to which reason, appointed as it is to deal with the world of the senses and its forms, cannot attain, is revealed as an actual vision to the spiritual sight; further, that which this reason cannot describe is a fact in the regions of the spiritual.

Chorus Mysticus:

Here the inadequate
To fullness groweth.

In harmony with all mystical symbolism, Goethe represents the higher nature of man as feminine, entering into union with the Divine Spirit. For in the last lines:

The eternal feminine
Draws us upward.

Goethe only means to characterize the union of the purified soul drawing near to the Divine. All interpretations which are not made in a mystic sense fail here.

Goethe considered that the time had not yet come when it was possible to speak of certain secrets of our being in any other manner than he has done in some of his poems. And, above all, he felt it to be his own mission to furnish such a form of expression. At the beginning of his friendship with Schiller, he raised the question, “How are we to represent to ourselves the relationship between the physical and the spiritual natures of man?” Schiller had tried to answer this question in a philosophical style in his letters Concerning the Aesthetic Education of Man. To him, it was a question of the ennobling and purifying of man; to him, a man under the sway of nature's impulses of sensual love and desires appeared impure; but then he considered just as far removed from purity the man who looked upon the sensual impulses and desires as enemies, and was obliged to place himself under the rule of moral or abstract intellectual compulsion. Man only attained inner freedom when he had so absorbed moral law into his inner being that he desired only to obey it. Such a man has so ennobled his lower nature that it becomes by itself an expression of the higher spiritual, and he has so drawn down into the earthly human nature the spiritual that the latter possesses a direct sentient existence. The explanations which Schiller gives in these Letters form excellent rules of education, for their object is to further the evolution of man so that he may, by absorbing the higher ideal man, come to contemplate the world from a free and exalted point of view. In his way Schiller refers to the higher self of man thus:

Every individual man, one may say, harbors within him, according to his character and type, a pure, ideal man, with whose unalterable unity through all changes it is the great task of his life to harmonize himself.

All that Schiller says in this connection is of the most far-reaching significance. For he who really carries out his injunctions accomplishes within himself an education which brings him directly to that inward condition which paves the way for the inner contemplation of the spiritual. Goethe was satisfied, in the deepest sense of the word, with these ideas. He writes to Schiller:

I read the manuscript you sent me at once with the greatest delight; I swallowed it at one gulp. Just as a delicious drink, in sympathy with our nature, slips down willingly and, while still on the tongue, shows its wholesome workings in a pleasant harmony of the nervous system, so were these letters highly pleasing and beneficial to me; and how could it be otherwise, when I found set forth therein so coherently and nobly what I had long recognized as right, what I partly carried out in my life, and partly wished to carry out?

Goethe now endeavored on his part to set forth the same idea from the depths of his conception of the world—but veiled in imagery—in the problem-tale of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. It is placed in the editions of Goethe at the end of the Conversations of German Emigrants. The Faust story has often been called Goethe's Gospel; this tale may, however, be called his Apocalypse, for in it he sets forth—as a fairy-tale—the path of man's inner development. Here again, we can only point out a few short passages, it would need a large book to show how Goethe's spiritual insight is concealed in this tale.

The three worlds are here represented as two regions separated from one another by a river. The river itself stands for the astral plane. On this side of it is the physical world, on the other side the spiritual (Devachan), where dwells the beautiful lily, the symbol of man's higher nature. In her kingdom, man must strive if he would unite his lower with his higher nature. In the abyss—that is, in the physical world—dwells the serpent which symbolizes the self of man. Here too is a temple of initiation, where reign four kings, one golden, one silver, one bronze, and a fourth of an irregular mixture of the three metals. Goethe, who was a freemason, has clothed in freemasonic terminology what he had to impart of his mystic experiences. The three kings represent the three higher forces of man: Wisdom (Gold), Beauty (Silver), and Strength (Bronze). As long as man lives in his lower nature, these three forces are in him disordered and chaotic. This period in the evolution of man is represented by the mixed king. But when man has so purified himself that the three forces work together in perfect harmony, and he can freely use them, then the way into the realm of the spiritual lies open before him. The still unpurified man is represented by a youth who, without having attained inner purity, would unite himself with the beautiful lily. Through this union he becomes paralyzed.

Goethe here wished to point out the danger to which a man exposes himself who would force an entrance into the super-sensible region before he has severed himself from his lower self. Only when love has permeated the whole man, only when the lower nature has been sacrificed, can the initiation into the higher truths and powers begin. This sacrifice is expressed by the serpent yielding of its own accord, and forming a bridge of its body across the river—that is to say, the astral plane—between the two kingdoms, of the senses and of the spirit. At first man must accept the higher truths in the form in which they have been given to him in the imagery of the various religions. This form is personified as the man with the lamp. This lamp has the peculiarity of only giving light where there is already light, meaning that the religious truths presuppose a receptive, believing disposition. Their light shines where the light of faith is present. This lamp, however, has yet another quality, “of turning all stones into gold, all wood into silver, dead animals into precious stones, and of destroying all metals,” meaning the power of faith which changes the inner nature of the individual. There are about twenty characters in this allegory, all symbolical of certain forces in man's nature and, during the course of the action, the purifying of man is described, as he rises to the heights where, in his union with his higher self, he can be initiated into the secrets of existence. This state is symbolized by the Temple, formerly hidden in the abyss, being brought to the surface, and rising above the river—the astral plane. Every passage, every sentence in the allegory is significant. The more deeply one studies the tale, the more comprehensible and clear the whole becomes, and he who set forth the esoteric quintessence of this tale at the same time has given us the substance of the Anthroposophical outlook on life.

Goethe has not left the source uncertain from whose depths he has drawn his inspiration. In another tale, The New Paris, he gives in a veiled manner the history of his own inner enlightenment. Many will remain incredulous if we say that, in this dream, Goethe represents himself just at the boundary between the third and fourth sub-race of our fifth root-race. For him, the myth of Paris and Helen is a symbolic representation of this boundary. And as he—in a dream—conjures up before his eyes in a new form the myth of Paris, he feels he is casting a searching glance into the development of humanity. What such an insight into the past means to the inner eye, he tells us in the Prophecies of Bakis, which are also full of occult references:

The past likewise will Bakis reveal to thee; for even the past oft lies, oh blind world, like a riddle before thee. Who knows the past knows also the future: both are joined in To-day in one complete whole.

Much, too, might be quoted to show the underlying elements of spiritual science in the fairy tale, The New Melusine, a Pandora-fragment, and many other writings. In his novel, Wilhelm Meister's Traveling Years, Goethe has given us quite a masterly picture of a Clairvoyante in Makarie. Makarie's power of intuition rises to the level of a complete penetration of the inner mysteries of the planetary system:

She stands with regard to our solar system in a relationship which one hardly dares to express. In the spirit, of the soul, of the imagination, she fosters it, not only gazes at it, but at the same time forms part of it; she sees herself drawn on into those heavenly circles, but in quite a peculiar way; she has wandered since her childhood round the sun, and, in fact, as has now been discovered, in a spiral, circling ever further and further from the center towards the outer regions. If one may assume that beings insofar as they are embodied strive towards the center, but insofar as they are spirits strive towards the periphery, then our friend belongs to the most spiritual; She seems to have been born only to detach herself from the earthly and to force her way into the nearest and furthest realms of existence. This quality, glorious as it is, was laid upon her from her earliest years as a difficult task. She remembers her inner self penetrated, as it were, through and through by shining beings, illuminated by a light which not even the brightest sunlight could rival. She often saw two suns, one, that is, within, and one without in the heavens, two moons, of which the outer retained its size through all its phases; the inner ever more and more decreased.

These words of Goethe's prove clearly how intimate he is with these matters, and whoever reads through the whole passage will recognize that Goethe so expresses himself, albeit with reserve, that he who looks beneath the surface may feel quite certain of the spiritual-scientific foundation in his being.

Goethe always looked upon his mission as a poet in relation to his striving toward the hidden laws of Life. He was often forced to notice how friends failed to understand this side of his nature. He describes thus, in the Campaign in France in 1792, how his contemplation of Nature was always misunderstood:

... the passionate earnestness with which I addicted myself to this (the study of natural philosophy) seemed inconceivable to all, nobody observing how it sprang from my innermost being itself; they considered this laudable pursuit as a whimsical mistake; in their opinion, I could do something better, and leave my abilities to work in their old direction. They felt the more entitled to do this as my way of thinking did not agree with theirs, expressing rather, in most points, exactly the contrary. No more isolated being can be imagined than I was then, and for a long time afterwards. The Hylozoism, or whatever it may be called, to which I was attached, and the deep foundation of which I left untouched in all its sacred dignity, made me unsusceptible, nay, intolerant, toward that way of thinking which set up as an article of belief the existence of matter as a dead thing, in whatever way it may be supposed to be stirred up and put in motion.

Goethe could only understand artistic work when based on a profound penetration of the truth. As an artist, he wished to give utterance to that which in Nature is suggested without being fully expressed. Nature appeared to him as a product of the same essence which also works through human art, only that in the case of Nature the power has remained on a lower level. For Goethe, Art is a continuation of Nature revealing that which in Nature alone is hidden:

For in that man is placed as the peak of Nature, he perceives himself in his turn as a complete nature, which, in its turn, has within himself to produce a peak. With this objective in view, he raises himself, striving to win his way by all perfections and virtues. Selection, order, harmony, and purpose he calls to his aid, until finally he rises to the production of a work of art. (Winckelmann.)

To understand the world is to Goethe to Hue in the spirit of worldly things. For this reason, he speaks of a perceptive power of judgment (intellectus archetypus), through which Man draws ever nearer to the secrets of our being:

If, then, in a moral sense, we are, through faith in God, to attain to youth and immortality in a higher region, and are to draw near to the Most High, it should surely be the same in an intellectual sense, that only by the contemplation of an ever-creating Nature, we shall become worthy of spiritual participation in her productions.

Thus did Goethe represent to himself Man as the organ of the world, through which its occult powers should be revealed. The following was one of his aphorisms:

For this has man been placed so high that what must otherwise have been unmanifest might manifest through him. Truly may we say: What are even the workings of Nature's elements in comparison with man, who, that he may in some degree assimilate, must first control and modify them?

PLEASE NOTE: Although Rudolf Steiner in giving this address, used the words theosophy, Theosophical Society and occult, we have replaced these with the words Anthroposophy, Anthroposophical Society and, except in two or three cases, Spiritual Science, since, when Rudolf Steiner gave this address, he already had written KNOWLEDGE OF THE HIGHER WORLDS and THEOSOPHY and used the words theosophy, etc., in the sense that they are used in these books and in his subsequent writings and lectures. This was done as an attempt at corrective updating and no polemic is intended.

• 1. Original Translator Unknown. In the case of the quotations in this paper, the translations of Goethe's works by Anna Swanwick and John Anster and R. Farrie have been used freely. G. Calvert's translation of Schiller's work has also been quoted.