The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The theosophical world view differs from all remaining world views, which we can meet in the present, because it also satisfies knowledge. We have so often heard in the present: we cannot recognise certain matters; our cognitive faculties have limits and cannot rise up above a certain height. If we let the philosophical investigations of the present approach us, then one often speaks of such limits of knowledge in particular those philosophical schools which go back to Kantianism. The view of the theosophist and the practical mystic differs from all such discussions because it never puts limits to the human cognitive faculties, but considers them in such a way that they can be extended. Is it not a big immodesty, if anybody considers his particular cognitive faculties, his point of cognition as something decisive and says that we cannot go with our cognitive faculties beyond a certain limit?

The theosophist says: I stand on a certain point of view of human cognition today. From this point of view I can recognise this or that, and I cannot recognise this or that. But it is possible to develop the human cognitive faculties to increase them. What one calls initiatory schools is intended basically to increase these human cognitive faculties to a higher level, so that it is indeed correct if one says from a lower level of knowledge that there are limits of cognition, that one cannot recognise this or that. But one can also rise up above such a level of knowledge, one can get to higher levels, and then one can recognise what one could not recognise on subordinate levels. This is the nature of initiation, and this deepening or rise of knowledge is the task of the initiatory schools. It is a matter of raising the human being to the levels of knowledge on which he cannot stand from nature which he has to attain only with long-standing patient exercises.

At all times, there have been such initiatory schools. With all peoples recognising men of higher kind came from such initiatory schools. The nature of such initiatory schools and of the great initiates who have outgrown the lower levels of the human cognitive faculties and got to the highest knowledge, which is accessible to us on earth, expresses itself in the fact that these initiates gave the different religions and world views to the different peoples.

We want to outline the nature of these great initiates today. As one must get to know the methods of every science, of every spiritual procedure with which one penetrates to knowledge, it is also in the initiatory schools. Also there it is the point that we are led to higher stages of cognition using certain methods of which we have just spoken. Now I shortly invoke the concerning stages. Certain levels of knowledge are to be attained only in the intimate initiatory schools, where teachers are who themselves have experienced that school, who have carried out those exercises, who can really consider any single stage, any single step. One has to confide in such teachers of these initiatory schools only.

Indeed, there is nothing of authority in these initiatory schools, nothing of the principle of dogmatism, but only the principle of advising holds sway. Who has gone through certain stages of study and has thereby acquired the experiences of the higher super-sensible life knows the intimate ways leading to this higher cognition. Only such a man/woman is competent to say what one has to do. What is necessary in this field between pupil and teacher is confidence only. Who does not have this confidence is not able to learn anything. Who has this confidence sees very soon that by any esoteric or mystic teacher nothing else is recommended than what this teacher himself has worked through. The point is that only the externally visible part of the whole entity of the human being is completed, as well as the human being faces us today. Everybody who strives for esoteric instructions has to get clear in his mind that the human being is not a completed being today, as he faces us, but that he is developing that he gets to much higher stages in future.

What has already attained the image of God today, what of the human being has come to the highest level is the human sensuous body what we see of him with eyes, what we can generally perceive with our senses. However, this is not the only what the human being has. The human being has even higher members of his nature. At first, he has a member which we call the etheric body. Someone who has developed the soul organs can see this etheric body. Because of this etheric body the human being is not only a creation in which chemical and physical forces work but a living creation that lives and is provided with growth, life and the capacity of reproduction. One can see this etheric body which is a kind of archetype of the human being, if one suggests the usual physical body away with the methods of clairvoyance that are still characterised afterwards. You know that one can achieve by the usual methods of hypnosis and suggestion that if you say to anybody that here is no lamp he really sees no lamp. Thus you are able to thoroughly suggest the room away although you look into the room. That is possible if you develop enough strong willpower in yourselves, that willpower which diverts the attention from the physical body. Then you see the room not empty, but filled with a kind of archetype. This archetype has approximately the same figure as the physical body. However, it is not through and through of the same kind, but is organised thoroughly. It is not only interspersed with fine little veins and currents, but it also has organs. This formation, this etheric body causes the real life of the human being. Its colour can be compared only with the colour of the young peach-blossom. It is no colour which is included in the solar spectrum; it is approximately between violet and red. This is the second body.

The third body is the aura which I have already described occasionally, that cloud-like formation of which I have spoken last time, when I described the origin of the human being, in which the human being is like in an ovoid cloud. Everything expresses itself in it that lives in the human being as desire, passion and feeling. Happy, devoted feelings express themselves in bright colour currents in this aura. Hatred, sensual emotions express themselves in darker hues. Keen, logical thoughts express themselves in well-defined figures. Illogical, confused thoughts find expression in figures with unclear contours. Thus we have an image of the human soul-life in this aura.

As well as I have now described the human being he was placed so to speak, by the hand of nature on earth at that time which lies nearly in the outset of the Atlantean age. I have described last time what one has to understand by the Atlantean age. At the time when the fertilisation with the eternal spirit had already taken place the human being faces us with three members: body, soul and mind. Today these three members of the human being are basically somewhat changed because the human being has worked on himself since that time, since nature has dismissed him, since he has become a self-conscious being.

This work on himself means improving his aura, irradiating light from the self-consciousness to this aura. The human being who stands on a very deep level who has not worked on himself, we say a savage, has an aura as nature has given him. All those, however, who are within our civilised world, have auras in which they themselves have co-operated. For as far as the human being is a self-conscious being, he works on himself, and this work finds expression in him at first that his aura changes. Everything that the human being has learnt from nature what he has taken up, since he can speak and think self-consciously, is a new impact in his aura, caused by himself.

If you transport yourselves back to the Lemurian age when the human being was warm-blooded since long time when his fertilisation by the spirit had taken place in the middle of this Lemurian age, the human being was not yet a being capable of clear thoughts. All that just started developing. The spirit had just taken possession of the corporeality. At that time, the aura was completely a result of the natural forces. There one could notice and one can notice it still today with people of very low level , a smaller aura of bluish colour originating at a certain place within the head. This smaller aura is the external auric expression of the self-consciousness. The more the human being has developed this self-consciousness by his thinking and working, the more this smaller aura spreads out about the other aura, so that both become often completely different in short time. The human being who lives in the external civilisation who is an educated civilised person works on his aura in such a way as civilisation just drives him. We take up our usual knowledge, as our school offers it, our experiences, which life brings us, and they perpetually change our aura. But this change must be continued if the human being wants to join the practical mysticism. There he has to work particularly on himself. There he has to incorporate into his aura not only what civilisation offers him, but there he has to exert an influence in certain, regular way on his aura. This happens by means of the so-called meditation. This meditation or the inner contemplation is the first stage which the student of an initiate has to go through.

What is the sense and purpose of this meditation? Attempt once to hold the thoughts before yourselves, which you hold in the mind from the morning up to the evening, and to ponder how these thoughts are influenced by the space and time in which you live. Attempt once whether you are able to prevent your thoughts and ask yourselves whether you had them if you did not live by chance in Berlin and in the beginning of the 20-th century. At the end of the 18-th and at the beginning of the 19-th century, the human beings have not thought in the same way as the human beings of today. If you imagine how the world has been changed in the course of the last century and which changes time has caused, then you see that what permeates your soul from morning to night depends on space and time. It is different if we dedicate ourselves to thoughts which have an eternal value. Actually, these are only certain abstract, academic thoughts, the highest thoughts of mathematics and geometry to which the human being dedicates himself and have eternal value. Twice two is four: this must hold good at all times and places. The same applies to the geometrical truths which we take up. But if we refrain from the certain foundation of such truths, we can say that the average person thinks very little that is independent of space and time. What is dependent on them connects us with the world and exerts a small influence only on that being which itself is something permanent.

Meditation is nothing else than dedicating oneself to thoughts of eternal value, to educate oneself consciously to that which is beyond space and time. The great religious writings contain such thoughts: the Vedanta, the Bhagavad Gita, the John's Gospel from the thirteenth chapter up to the end, also the Imitation of Christ (1441) by Thomas à Kempis (~1380-1471, canon regular). Who becomes engrossed with patience and perseverance in such a way that he lives in such writings, who becomes engrossed every day anew and maybe works on one single sentence for weeks, and thinks and feels it through, gets an infinite use. As well as one gets to know and love a child with all its peculiarities more and more every day, one lets such a sentence of eternity penetrate the soul every day which arises from the great initiates or inspired human beings. This fulfils us with new life. The sayings in Light on the Path (1885), written down by Mabel Collins (1851-1927) according to higher instructions, are also very important. Already the first four sentences are suitable if they are exercised patiently to intervene in the human aura in such a way that this aura is completely illuminated with a new light. One can see this light lighting up in the human aura. Bluish colour nuances replace the reddish or reddish-brownish ones, light reddish nuances replace the yellow ones et etcetera All the colours of the aura change under the influence of such thoughts of eternity. The student cannot yet perceive this in the beginning, but he starts gradually feeling the deep influence that goes out from this changed aura.

If the human being exercises certain virtues, certain performances of the soul most carefully beside these meditations, then his soul senses develop within this aura. We must have these if we want to behold into the soul-world, just as we must have physical senses to be able to look into the physical world. As the external senses are implanted by nature into the body, the human being has to implant higher soul senses lawfully into his aura. The meditation causes that the human being becomes mature to work on these senses which exist as rudiments.

But we have to turn our attention to particular soul performances if we want to develop these senses. Consider that the human being has a number of such senses as rudiments. We call these senses lotus-flowers, because the astral structure which the human being starts developing in his aura takes on the figure of lotus-flowers comparatively. Of course, this is only comparative, just as one speaks of lungs which resemble to wings. The two-petalled lotus-flower is in the middle of the head about the nasal root between the eyes. Then near the larynx is the 16-petalled lotus-flower, near the heart is the twelve-petalled one, near the pit of the stomach the 10-petalled one. More far below there are the 6-petalled and the 4-petalled lotus-flowers. I would like to speak only of the 16-petalled and the 12-petalled lotus-flowers today.

In Buddha's teaching the so-called eightfold path is given. Now ask yourselves once: why does Buddha give just this eightfold path as especially important for the attainment of the higher stages of the human being? This eightfold path is: right view, right aspiration, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. Such a great initiate like Buddha does not speak out of a vaguely felt ideal, he speaks out of the knowledge of the human nature, and he knows which influence the soul performances have on those bodies which must develop only in future. If we consider the 16-petalled lotus-flower of a modern average person, we see, actually, very little. It is about to light up again, so to speak. In times of very distant past this lotus-flower existed already once. It declined in its development. Today it appears again due to the cultural work of the human being. However, in future this 16-petalled lotus-flower comes again to full development. It begins to gleam in its sixteen spokes or petals brightly, any petal appears in another hue, and, finally, it moves from the left to the right, clockwise.

Someone develops in the initiatory school consciously what every human being experiences and possesses once in future, so that he can become a guide of humanity. Eight of the sixteen petals were already developed in the very distant past. Eight are still to be developed today if the esoteric student wants to get to the use of these senses.
These are formed,
-If the human being goes consciously and carefully the eightfold path
-If he exercises the eight soul activities given by Buddha
-If he arranges his whole soul-life in such a way that he exercises these eight virtues as intensely as possible,
So that he controls himself, supports his meditation work and not only matures the 16-petalled lotus-flower, but sets them also in motion to be able to really perceive.

Now I still want to speak of the 12-petalled lotus-flower near the heart. Six petals were already developed in the far-off past; six have to be developed in future with all human beings, with initiates and their pupils already today. In all theosophical manuals you can find certain virtues cited which someone who wants to ascend to the stage of a chela or student should acquire in the forecourt. These six virtues, which you find cited in every theosophical manual where of the development of the human being is spoken, are: control of thoughts, control of actions, tolerance, steadfastness, impartiality and balance or what Angelus Silesius calls calmness. These six virtues, which one has to practice consciously and carefully and to add to the meditation, develop the other six petals of the 12-petalled lotus-flower. This is not blindly or accidentally picked up in the theosophical textbooks or written down out of own internal feeling, but is spoken from the deepest knowledge of the great initiates. The initiates know that somebody who really wants to develop to higher super-sensible stages has to develop the 12-petalled lotus-flower. For this purpose he has to develop the six petals, which were not developed in the past, with these six virtues. Thus you see how from a deeper knowledge of the human being the great initiates gave their instructions for life. I could still extend this consideration to other organs of cognition and observation, but I want only to give you an outline of the initiatory process with these remarks which should be sufficient.

If the student has advanced so far that he starts developing these astral senses if he has advanced so far that he is thereby able to see not only the sensuous impressions in his surroundings but also what is mental, what the aura is in the human being, in the animal and in the plant, a quite new level of instruction begins. Nobody can see anything mental in his surroundings, before his lotus-flowers rotate, just as somebody who has no eyes can see no colours and no light. If now the wall is broken through if he has progressed on the preliminary stage of knowledge so far that he has an insight into this astral world, then only the real apprenticeship begins for him. This leads through four stages of knowledge. What happens now at this moment when the human being has become a chela, after he has gone through the preliminary stages? We have seen that everything that we have now described refers to the astral body. This is organised thoroughly by the human body. The human being who has experienced such a development has another aura. If he then examines his astral body with self-consciousness, if he himself has become the clear organisation of his astral body, we say that this student has examined his astral body with manas. Nothing else is manas than an astral body which is controlled from self-consciousness. Manas and astral body are one and the same, but on different developmental stages.

One has to realise this if one wants to practically use for the practical mysticism what is given in the theosophical manuals as seven principles. Everybody who knows the mystic way of development, everybody who knows something of initiation says that they have a theoretical value for the study, but for the practical mystic only if one knows the relationships which exist between the lower and upper principles. No practical mystic knows more than four members: the physical body, in which the chemical and physical laws are working, the etheric body, the astral body and, finally, the self-consciousness which we call kama-manas in the present development, the self-consciously thinking principle. Manas is nothing else than what the self-consciousness works into the body. The etheric body, as it is now, is taken away from any influence of the self-consciousness. We can influence growth and nourishment indirectly, but not in such a way as we let our wishes, our thoughts and ideas come from the self-consciousness. Thus we ourselves cannot influence our relationships of nourishment, digestion and growth. These are without any connection with the human self-consciousness. This etheric body has to come under the influence of the astral body, the so-called aura. The self-consciousness of the astral body must penetrate and treat the etheric body in the same way as the human being his aura, his astral body. If the human being has advanced so far by meditation, by contemplation and by the exercise of the soul activities that the astral body is organised of its own accord, then the work proceeds to the etheric body, then the etheric body receives the inner word, then the human being hears not only what lives in the environment, then the inner sense of the things sounds to him in his etheric body.

Many a time I have said here that the actually spiritual in the things is something sounding. I have drawn your attention to the fact that the practical mystic if he speaks of a sounding in the spiritual world that he speaks of a luminescence in the astral world, the world of desires. Not without reason Goethe says when he leads his Faust to the heaven:

In ancient rivalry with fellow spheres
the sun still sings its glorious song,
and it completes with threat of thunder
the journey it has been assigned.

And not without reason Ariel says, as Faust is led by the spirits to the spiritual world: “In these sounds we spirits hear the new day already born.”

This inner sounding which is, of course, no sounding perceptible to external sensuous ears, this inner word of the things by which they express their own nature is the experience which the human being has if he is able to influence his astral body from his etheric body. Then he has become the chela, the real disciple of a great initiate. Then he can continue this path. One calls such a human being who has ascended this level a homeless human being, because he has found the connection with a new world because the spiritual world sounds to him and because he has no longer his home, so to speak, in this sensuous world. One must not misunderstand this. The chela who has attained this level is a good citizen and father of a family, a good friend as he would be, if he had not become a chela. He needs to be torn out from nothing. What he experiences there is a course of soul development. There he attains a new home in a world which lies behind these sensuous one.

What has happened there? The spiritual world sounds in the human being, and while the spiritual world sounds into the human being, he overcomes an illusion, the illusion generally, in which basically all human beings are prejudiced before this level of development. This is the illusion of the personal self. The human being believes that he is a personality, separated from the rest of the world. Already a mere reflection could teach him that he himself is no independent being in the physical. Take into account if in this room the temperature were 200 degrees higher than now, we would not be able to exist here as we exist now. As soon as the circumstances change outside, the conditions are no longer appropriate to our physical existence. We are only the continuation of the outside world and absolutely inconceivable as a special being. This is even more the case in the psychic and in the spiritual worlds. We see that the human being, understood as a self, is only an illusion that he is a member of the general divine spirituality. Here the human being overcomes the personal self. It appears what Goethe pronounced it in the chorus mysticus (Faust) with the words: “All that is transitory is only a symbol.” What we see, is only an image of an eternal being. We ourselves are only an image of an eternal being. If we give up our special being, we have the external life and we live a separate life with the whelp of the etheric body , then we have overcome the external, separate life, we have become a part of the All-life.

In the human being something now appears that we have called buddhi. Buddhi is virtually now achieved as a developmental stage of the etheric body, of that etheric body which does no longer cause a special existence, but enters the All-life. The human being, who arrives at this, has arrived at the second level of chelahood. Then all scruples and doubts drop from his soul, and then he can no longer be a superstitious person, just as little as he can be a disbelieving person. Then he does no longer need to get truth comparing his ideas with the external environment, then he lives in the sound, in the word of the things, then it sounds and sounds out of the being what it is. Neither superstition nor doubt is there. One calls this the delivery of the key of knowledge to the chela. If he has attained this stage, a word of the spiritual world sounds into this. Then his word does no longer echo what the world is but what comes from another world which works into our external world which cannot be seen with our external senses. Messengers of the divinity are these words.

If this stage is stepped over, a new one comes. It happens that the human being wins influence on what his physical body is immediately doing. He had only influence on the etheric body before, now, however, on the physical body. His actions have to set the physical body in motion. What the human being does is integrated into what we call his karma. But the human being does not work consciously on it; he does not know that he pulls an effect behind himself because of his action. Only now the human being starts performing the actions consciously in the physical world in such a way that he consciously works on his karma. There he wins influence on the karma with the physical action. There it sounds not only from the things of the environment, but there he is so far that he is able to pronounce the names of all things. As the human being lives in our cultural stage, he is able only to pronounce one single name. And this is the name he gives himself: I. This is the only name the human being himself can give. Who becomes deeper engrossed in it, can come to profound knowledge nothing of which the academic psychology dreams.

It is only one thing to which only you yourselves can give the concerning name. No one else can say to you I, only you yourselves. To anyone you must say you and every other must say you to you. It is something in everybody that everybody can call I. Therefore, the Jewish secret doctrine also speaks of the inexpressible name of God. This is something that is immediately an announcement of the God in him. It was forbidden to pronounce this name unworthily and unholy. Hence, the holy shyness, the importance and fundamentality if the Jewish esoteric teacher pronounced this name. “I” is the only word which says something to you what can never come to you from the outside world. As the average person gives his self only the name, the chela of the third degree gives names which he has from intuition to all things of the world. That is he is merged up in the world-self. He speaks out of this world-self. He is allowed to say the deepest name of a thing to this thing, whereas the average present-day human being is only able to say “I” to himself. If the chela has attained this level, one calls him a swan. The chela who can rise to the names of all things is called swan because he is the herald of all things.

What is beyond the third degree cannot be expressed with everyday words. This requires the knowledge of a special script which is taught only in the esoteric schools. The following degree is the degree of the disguised. Beyond it are the degrees which the great initiates have, those initiates who gave our culture the big impulses at all times. They were chelas first. First they attained the key of knowledge. Then they were led to the regions where to them the universal and the names of the things were disclosed. Then they ascended to the stage of the All and could have the deep experiences by which they were enabled to found the great religions of the world.

Not only the great religions, but generally every big impulse, everything that is important in the world originated from the great initiates. Only two examples are cited which kind of influence on the world the great initiates have who experienced the training.

We transport ourselves back to that time where under the guidance of Hermes the students of the initiatory schools were instructed. These instructions were usual, so-called esoteric, scientific lessons.

Only with a few lines I am able to draw what such lessons contained. It was shown there how the world spirit descends to the body world, embodies itself, and how it revives in the matter, how it gets to its highest stage in the human being and celebrates its resurrection. Paracelsus expressed this pleasantly saying: what we meet outside, these single beings are the letters, and the word which is joined together from them is the human being. We have off-loaded all human virtues or weaknesses on the creatures outside. However, the human being is the confluence of all that. How in the human being a confluence of the remaining macrocosm revives as a microcosm, this was taught in details and with immense spiritual wealth as esoteric lessons in the Egyptian initiatory schools.

After these lessons the hermetic lessons followed. One can understand with the senses and with the reason what I have said. One can only understand what in the hermetic lessons was offered if one has achieved the first degree of chelahood. Then one gets to know that special script which is not an accidental and arbitrary one but echoes the great laws of the spiritual world. This script is not like ours an external image which is fixed arbitrarily in single letters and members, but it is born out of the spiritual law of nature because the human being who is expert of this script is in the possession of these laws of nature. Thus all his ideation is following a set pattern in the psychic and astral space. What he imagines he imagines in the sense of these big characters. He is able to do that if he gives up his self. He submits to the eternal laws. Now he is over his hermetic lessons. He is admitted to the first stage of a more profound initiation. He has to experience something in the astral world, in the real soul-world that has a significance extending over the world cycles. After he has attained the capacity that the astral senses fully work, so that they work down to the etheric body, he is introduced in a deep secret of the astral world for three days. He experiences in the astral world what I have described to you as the origin of the earth and the human being last time. He experiences this descent of the spirit, this separation of sun, moon and earth and the origin of the human being, he has this whole sequence of phenomena before himself. At the same time, he has them before himself in such a way that they become a picture. And then he comes out of the temple. After he has gone through this great experience in the initiatory school, he steps among the people and tells what he has experienced in this psychic and astral world. This story runs approximately in such a way:

Once a divine couple, Osiris and Isis, was combined with the earth. This divine couple was the regent of everything that happens on earth. But Osiris was persecuted and dismembered by Typhon, and Isis had to search for his corpse. She did not bring it home, but at different places of the earth Osiris's graves were laid out. There he descended completely and was buried in the earth. There a ray of the spiritual world radiated on Isis, fertilising her to the new Horus by an immaculate conception.

This image was nothing else than a big representation of what we have just got to know as the emergence of the sun and moon, as the separation of the sun and moon and as the origin of the human being. Isis is the symbol of the moon; Horus signifies the earthly humanity, the earth itself. When humanity was not yet provided with warm blood, when it was not yet covered with the physical body, it felt in big images what occurred in the soul-world. It was prepared to receive the big truths in such images from the great initiates in the beginning of the Lemurian, Atlantean and Aryan developments. Hence, these truths were not simply arranged, but were given in the picture of Osiris and Isis. All great religions which we find in antiquity were experienced by the great initiates in the psychic space. These great initiates came out and spoke to the people in the way how it could understand, namely in images of that which they themselves had experienced in the initiatory schools. This was in antiquity that way. Only because one was in such initiatory school one could ascend to the higher astral experience.

With the emergence of Christianity this changed. It represents a significant incision in the development. Since the appearance of Christ, it was possible that one could be initiated as a nature initiate as one also speaks of a nature poet. There are Christian mystics who had received the initiation by mercy. The first who was called to bring out Christianity all over the world under the effect of the saying “happy are they who find faith without beholding me” (John 20:29) was Paul. The appearance on the road to Damascus was an initiation outside of the mysteries. I cannot deal with further details.

To all great movements and cultural foundations the great initiates gave the impulses. A nice myth has survived to us from the Middle Ages which should show this in a time when one did not yet ask for materialistic reasons. The epic originated in Bavaria and, hence, has taken on the dress of Catholicism. We want to realise what happened at that time in the following way. At that time the so-called urban culture, the modern bourgeoisie originated in Europe. The mystic understood the further development of humanity, the advance of every soul to the next stage as the advance of the soul, of the female in the human being. The mystic sees something female in the soul that is fertilised by the lower sensory impressions of nature and by the eternal truths. In every historical process the mystic sees such a fertilisation process. The big impulses for the progress of humanity are given by the great initiates. Somebody can notice this who looks deeper into the evolution of humanity who beholds the spiritual forces behind the physical phenomena. Thus the medieval world view also attributed that rise of the soul to higher stages during the new cultural stage which was caused by the cities. This urban development was achieved because the soul took a leap forward in history. It was an initiate who caused this leap. One attributed all big impulses to the great lodge of the initiates who surrounded the Holy Grail. From there the great initiates came who are not visible to the external human being. And one called that person Lohengrin who provided the urban culture in those days with an impulse in mediaeval times. This is the emissary of the Holy Grail, the great lodge. And the urban soul, the female principle that should be fertilised by the great initiates is suggested by Elsa of Brabant. That who should mediate is the swan. Lohengrin is brought by the swan to this physical world. The initiate must not be asked for his name. He belongs to a higher world. The chela, the swan, provided this influence.

I could only suggest that the big impact was symbolised again for the people in a myth. The great initiates worked that way and put into their teachings what they had to announce. Also those worked this way who founded the elementary culture of humanity: Hermes in Egypt, Krishna in India, Zarathustra in Persia, and Moses in the Jewish people. Then again Orpheus, Pythagoras and, finally, Jesus worked who is the initiate of the initiates who carried Christ in himself.

With it only the great initiates are called. I have tried to characterise their connection with the world in these explanations. What has been described with it is still abstruse to many people. But those who themselves felt something of the higher worlds in their souls looked always up not only to the spiritual worlds but also to the leaders of humanity. Only with this point of view they were able to speak so enthusiastically like Goethe. But you also find something of a holy spark with others, which leads us to this point which spiritual science should give us again. You will find it with a German, with a young sensible German poet and thinker whose life looks like a blissful recollection of a former life of a great initiate. Who reads Novalis (pseudonym of Friedrich von Hardenberg, 1772-1801, German poet and philosopher) feels something of the breath which leads to this higher world. It is not so pronounced as usually, but it is something in him that also the magic words have. That is why he wrote the nice word of the relationship of our planet to humanity, which applies to the lower, undeveloped human being as well as to the initiate:

Humanity is the sense of our earth planet, humanity is the nerve that connects this earth planet with the upper worlds, and humanity is the eye with which this earth planet faces the heavenly kingdoms of the universe.

Answer-to-Question

Question: Why did Christ not leave writings behind?

This is just the basic difference between him and the former founders of a religion. Christ says: “I am the way, the truth and the life.” The other founders of a religion were way and truth. They announced what should be done and believed, as Moses did, for example. If we study the ancient religious confessions, we find no difference of the contents, no difference between Christianity as doctrine and the other great religions. Who knows the Egyptian religious system in its deepness finds everything that is included in Christianity also there. That applies to all religions. Christianity is still something absolutely new, not as a doctrine but as a fact. Hence, I have called my book: Christianity as Mystic Fact and the Mysteries of Antiquity (CW 8). The appearance of Christ signifies something that is termed “blessed” (selig), filled with the soul (Seele). Now everybody should become blessed who was connected in faith with the founder. Christ descends to the valley and becomes a human being among human beings. He teaches nothing new, but he lives in the immediate existence, in the innermost personality in that which the others taught. What the others taught was the Logos, the divine truth. If you study Buddha, if you penetrate the lofty teachings of Hermes or of the Vedas, you have external sayings of the divine creator's word. The Logos became doctrine there.

Before I close the lecture cycle of this winter with a picture of the human future and human ideals, I would like to talk of the present cultural life as it expresses itself in one of the most significant and most typical spiritual heroes of our time.

Not from the literary, not from the aesthetic point of view, but from the world view I might speak of Ibsen's attitude; for really everything expresses itself just in Ibsen that the deepest and best spirits of the modern time feel and think.

One has often said that every poet is the expression of his time. Indeed, this sentence holds good, but only if one gives it the quite special contents, it can be understood. Just as Homer, Sophocles, and Goethe were expressions of their time, it is undoubtedly Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906, Norwegian playwright and poet) for the present, and nevertheless how differently our time does leave its stamp on him as once on those personalities.

In order to recognise how completely different the time was around the turn of the 18-th century, the time of Goethe, Schiller and Herder, and how differently our time expresses itself, one needs to put two things next to each other only. Goethe still rounds off the second part of his Faust, seals it and leaves it behind as a big will of his life. After his death he leaves a legacy behind to the human beings, shining into the future, full of forces in the confidence: “the traces of my days will survive into eternity” (Faust II, 11583-11584). A human being who is basically the representative of the whole humanity stands before us in Faust. We cling to him; he fulfils us with purpose in life, with life-force. Beyond his death Goethe points out that to us. Faust cannot become outdated; we find deeper and deeper truths in it. We feel it as something living on, something that we have not exhausted: this is an end of his life pointing to the future.

Henrik Ibsen consciously finished his life work long before his death with his drama When We Dead Awaken (1899). What has fulfilled human beings for half a century, what existed in revolutionary and other ideas penetrated Henrik Ibsen's soul. He described what the hearts moves what separates them, fighting the struggle for existence in a way never seen before. This drama appears as a big review and stands there like a symbol of the artist himself. He was a hermit in the human life, a hermit in his own life. For half a century he looked for human happiness and truth, did not save any forces to get to light and truth, to the solution of the big riddles of life. Now he himself awakes, feels what lies behind him as something dead, and he decides to write nothing more. It is a review that points only to the transitory; what he longed for appears to him as something mysterious, something unreal the ideals collapse behind him. Because he awoke, he is at his wits' end. This is the poet who is the representative of our time, the poetically greatest one. This life balance is a criticism of everything that we have a give-up and at the same time an awakening from and at the criticism of our time. An immense overview of the modern life expresses itself in this drama; if we realise it, we understand the tragic in the personality of the poet. For Henrik Ibsen is a tragic personality.

If one wants to understand him completely, one has to understand him as representative of our time. Hence, do not consider it as academic sophistry if I try at first to conceive the nerve of our time; for Henrik Ibsen is an expression of it. A word characterises our time and also the whole Ibsen, this is the word “personality.” Goethe also probably said: “personality is the highest happiness of the earth children only.” But, nevertheless, it happens with Ibsen quite differently. Ibsen is completely a child of our time, and from here we understand him best of all.

Remember how differently the personality stands there in ancient Greece. How does Oedipus stand there? What moves the destiny of Oedipus goes far beyond his whole house. We have to make connections with quite different regions: his destiny extends beyond his individual personality, it is lifted out above personality however, the personal is not yet lifted out from the moral connection with the whole world. This is different from today: we have now to search for the centre in the personality that destiny relocated in the personality. Bit by bit we can pursue this. With the emergence of Christianity it happens that the urge of individuality wants to satisfy itself. The personality wants to be free, free before the highest, before the divine. The connections are torn, the personality shifts for itself. During the Middle Ages, personality tries to understand itself.

How deeply the whole environment is yet connected with the personality in Greece! How the human being grows out of his surroundings! He is born out of the whole universe. The external configuration of the Greek life, however, is like a piece of art: Plato creates a state idea in which the single human being should adapt himself like a limb to the whole body. Christianity brings another ideal; but this new one is purchased by the price of the relationship with nature, one seeks above nature. The Christian searches what should release his personality in something that reaches beyond personality. Even the individual Roman felt as a member of the whole state: he is a citizen first, and then he is a human being. In mediaeval times, a tendency prevails that looks out over the environment, looks up to a yonder world which one clings to. This makes a big difference for the whole human thinking, feeling and willing. This continues that way up to modern times.

The Greek, the Roman citizen lived and died for what surrounded him what lived in his outside world. In mediaeval times, something of a divine world order still lived, indeed, not in the environment, but in the “Gospel of the Good News,” and expressed it like in a mirror. In the best as in the simplest souls, in the mystic as in the people this divine world order was alive. It is something that is given from without, indeed, but that lives as something emerging in the soul. What happens in the world of stars as God's will fulfils the soul substantially: one knows what is beyond birth and death.

Let us take the new time and look from the artistic point of view at Shakespeare. What finds expression in Shakespeare's dramas and lives in these dramas is the character first of all. Something like that does not exist in Greece and in mediaeval times. Shakespeare's dramas are character dramas; the main interest is directed to the human being, to that what happens in the depth of his soul, as he is put into the world.

The Middle Ages had no real drama; the human beings were occupied with other interests. Now the personality emerges but with it all the uncertain, all the incomprehensible of personality emerges at the same time. Take Hamlet: one can hear so many different interpretations about that from so many scholars. About no work so many books were probably written. This is due to the fact that this character itself has something uncertain. It is no longer a mirror image of the outside world, also no longer a mirror of the Good News.

The whole point of view of the modern times takes on this character. Have a look at the figure of Kant (1724-1804, German philosopher) how everything is put into the personality. What he says would be possible neither in mediaeval times, nor in antiquity. It is something quite uncertain that he represents: act in such a way that your action could become the guideline of the community. But this ideal remains something quite uncertain. He says: we cannot recognise, we have limits that we cannot overcome with our reason; it only feels something dark that urges and drives. Kant calls it the categorical imperative.

The Greek, the medieval human being had sharply outlined ideals. He knew not only that he should live like the other human beings in their sense: they lived in his blood. This had changed: a categorical imperative which has no right contents positioned itself before the reason; nothing fills this soul with particular ideals. Thus it was in the 18th century.

Something that asks for certain ideals awoke in our classical authors. It is interesting that Schiller who was a not less harsh critic of his time like Ibsen we take the Robbers: Karl Moor wants something certain, he wants to create human beings who change their time, do not practise only criticism , it is interesting that Schiller trusts in the ideal and says: whatever the world may be, I put human beings into it who set this world on fire.

Even more significantly this comes to the fore with Goethe in his Faust. Goethe appears here as a spirit who looks into the new aurora.

But now there came the 19th century with its demand for freedom, for personality. What is freedom? In which respect should the human being be free? One must want something certain. But it was freedom in itself, which one wanted. In addition to that, the 19-th century had become the most rationalistic one. The human beings see their surroundings; but no ideal pours out of them; the human beings are no longer borne by ideals. The human being stands on the peak of his personality, and the personality has become self purpose. Hence, humanity can no longer distinguish two concepts today: individuality and personality; it does no longer distinguish what must be separated.

What is individuality? Individuality is that what appears full of contents in the world. If I have a future thought, full of contents, and imagine what I insert into the world, my personality may be powerful or weak, but it is the support of these ideals, the cover of my individuality. The sum of all these ideals is the individuality which shines from the personality. The 19th century does not make this differentiation; it considers the mere powerful personality, which should be, actually, a vessel, a self purpose. That is why the personality becomes something nebulous, and with it also that becomes nebulous which was as clear as ether once. Mysticism was called mathesis once because it was clear like two times two. The human being lived in such spiritual contents, he took stock of himself and found something that was higher than personality: he recognised his individuality. The 19-th century cannot understand mysticism, one talks of it as something unclear, something incomprehensible. This was necessary: the personality had to be felt once like a hollow skin. One speaks mostly of personality, however, the real personality exists least of all. Where the personality is fulfilled with individuality, one speaks of it least of all because it is a matter of course. One talks mostly of that what is not there. If, hence, the 19th century talks of mysticism, it speaks of something unclear. We understand why this happened that way.

As a son of his time Henrik Ibsen deeply looked down into this personality and this time. Like an honest truth seeker he strives for the true contents of the personality, but as somebody who is completely born out of his time. “Oh my eye is dazzled by the light to which it turns.”

How would have an old Roman spoken of the right? It was a matter of course to him; as little as he denied the light, he would have denied the law. With Ibsen one reads: “Right? Where is it valid as right?” Everything is determined by power to a greater or lesser degree. Thus we see Henrik Ibsen as a thoroughly revolutionary spirit. He looked into the human breast, and he found nothing there, everything that the 19th century offered was nothing to him. He expresses it: oh how have these old ideals of the French revolution lost their strength; we need a revolution of the whole human spirit today! This is the mood expressing itself in Ibsen's dramas.

Once again let us consider the ancient times. The Greek felt well in his polis, the Roman in his state, the medieval human being felt as a child of God. How does the son of the modern time feel? He finds nothing around himself that can support him. The Greek and the medieval human being did not feel as lonesome human beings, with Ibsen the strongest man is the most lonesome one. This feeling of loneliness is something absolutely modern, and Ibsen's art arises from it. This concept, nevertheless, which speaks from Ibsen's dramas: we must appeal to the human personality, is nothing clear. These forces in the human being which must be uncovered are something uncertain, but we have to turn to them. Ibsen tries to understand the human beings around him in such a way. However, what else can one see in such a time than the struggle of the personality which is torn out from all social connections? Yes, there is the second possibility: if the human being is still connected with the state, with his surroundings, his personality bows to that, denies itself. However, what can these connections mean to the human being even today? They were true once, now the human being shifts only for himself and disharmonies originate between the personality and the surroundings.

Ibsen has a decided sense of the untruth of these connections between the human being and his surroundings. The seeker of truth becomes the rigorous critic of the lie. Hence, his heroes become uprooted personalities, and those who want to produce the connection with their surroundings must become enslaved by the lie, can do it only by deception of their self-consciousness. In the dramas of the middle time this attitude can be found. We see this if we let pass by Brand (1866), Peer Gynt (1867), and Emperor and Galilean (1873) before our eyes. We find a tip to three ages in the latter drama. The first is that which we have characterised before, that of the past when the external form held good so much. Emperor Julian looks into the second, that of the Galilean, which shows an internalisation of the soul. But a third age is said to come when the human being has ideals again and coins them from within to the outside. Destiny once came from without. What must be longed for is the internal ideals which the strong human being can impress to the world; he should be an emissary not reproduce, but shape, create. The third world age in which the ideal comes into its own is not yet attained. In the loneliness, the human being finds it in his soul, but not in such a way that it had force and power to fashion the world. This unification of Christianity with the antique ideal is the reverse way. But Ibsen put this ideal on a weak soul which collapses; Julian is still the human being of the past.

On the other hand, we have to do it with the human being who rests on the only formal, on the hollowed out personality. Nothing is more typical for Ibsen than the way he put the hard gnarled figure of his “Brand” into our time. He is not despotic and autocratic, but he is torn out of the connection with the environment. He stands there as a clergyman, surrounded by people to whom the connection with the divine had become a lie. Beside him a clergyman stands who only believes what he believes because he generally has no strong religious feeling.

An ideal which is a higher one must be able to work on all human beings. The theosophical ideal of brotherliness immerses the human acting in mildness and benevolence and regards every human being as a human brother. As long as this ideal is not yet born and the human being must rest on the fragments and leftovers of the old ideals which mix personality and individuality, he appears as hard and sturdy. Who puts up the personality ideal in such a way becomes hard and sturdy like Brand, and it must be that way. Individuality connects, personality separates. Nevertheless, this passage through the personality uncovered forces which had to be developed and would not have emerged, otherwise. We had to lose the old ideals, to regain them once on a higher level. A poet like Ibsen had to reach into this personality and to describe it as a hollow one as he does it brilliantly in the League of Youth (1869).

He explained what works on the personality, what it should only present in his later dramas in which he becomes the positive critic of the time like in the Pillars of Society (1877).

He shows us the personality in conflict with its surroundings in the Ghosts (1881). During the conflict with her surroundings Mrs. Alving must lie where she seeks for truth to bring her son in a clean atmosphere. Thus fate befalls her like the ancient Greeks. Ibsen lives in the sign of Darwin, and this Oswald stands not in a spiritual, ethical connection with the past, but in that of heredity. The personality, as far as it is soul, can only be torn out from its surroundings; the corporeality is connected with the physical heredity, and thus a fate befalls Oswald Alving pouring out only from the physical laws like a moral, spiritual-divine fate befalls the antique hero.

With it Ibsen is completely a son of his time. However, he also shows that way what of this personality is justified of the personality which should again become an individuality maybe later.

In an especially typical way this problem faces us in the woman. Nora lives as it were at A Doll's House (1879) and grows out of it, seeking for the way to individuality. All old world views have stated an individual, natural difference between man and woman, and this reproduced till our time. The passage had just to be found by the personality to remove this. Only as personalities man and woman are opposing each other on the same level; not until they find the same in the personality, they are able to develop the same individual, so that they go once as companions toward future. As long as one got the ideals from without, they were connected with the natural, and the natural was rooted in the difference between man and woman which can be compensated only in the soul. From nature this contrast was brought into religion still in mediaeval times, while it yet had an echo of the natural in the divine.

You find the male and female principles in the old religions side by side as something that flashes through the whole being, lives and works in nature. We find it in Osiris and Isis, in God Father and Mary. Only when one had cast off the nature basis, when one got to the soul and emancipated this soul, the personal in the human being finally managed to get to freedom by that which is not connected with the differentiation of man and woman. So only the contrast of male and female was overcome. And the poet of personality also had to find the typical word for it. Thus that differentiation grows up as a problem in him in such dramas like A Doll's House, Rosmersholm (1886) and The Lady from the Sea (1887).

We see how Ibsen is connected with everything that constitutes the greatness, even if the emptiness of our time. The more Ibsen looked into the future, the more he felt how the emptiness must happen if the personality is emancipated, is detached from its divine-spiritual connections. Thus Ibsen himself faces the problem of personality in The Master Builder (1892) with the big question to the future: we have freed the personality to what end? Something uncertain remains with this search for the essential. As a real truth seeker he represents this unknown like in an allegory in The Lady from the Sea. She gets free for the old duties. However, one has to continue asking: to what end? This is shown in the drama symbolically in a marvellous way.

When he tries to look even farther into the riddles of life in Little Eyolf (1894), in When We Dead Awaken, something deep disappears to him in the human heart in which he believed before. Desperation seizes the sculptor in When We Dead Awaken who tried to catch the ideal. He cannot yet form the free human being: animal grimaces rise before him. He tries to form something creatively that lifts him out of them, a resurrection however, always the grimaces push themselves to the fore, position themselves before the picture. When he realises that he cannot overcome them, he awakes and sees what is missing for our time, what it does not have. A tremendously tragic moment is put before us in When We Dead Awaken.

Thus Henrik Ibsen is an intrepid prophet of our time: he still feels in the deepest heart, assured of a good future, that there must be something that reaches beyond personality; but he is quiet, and this silence has that tremendously tragic in itself. Who familiarised himself with what stands out in the personality beyond birth and death who made himself familiar with the big law of karma finds new contents also in the personal. He establishes a new ideal; he overcomes personality and makes himself the confessor and lord of this big law of retribution.

The antique human being trusted in the reality around himself; he built up the supports of his soul on it. The Middle Ages experienced the ideal in the innermost soul. The modern human being has descended to isolation in the personality, to egotism. He still feels the categorical imperative but as something uncertain, dark. He strives for personal freedom, but the question imposes itself on him: to what end should the personality be freed?

The old ideals say nothing more to our time; something new must arise.

It is the purpose of the theosophical world view to bring freedom about which does no longer depend on personal arbitrariness, which combines again with divine ideals. It is the spiritual, theosophical life and world view to contribute to it, to build up this future.

Only if the best of our time point to this theosophical, spiritual-scientific world view being rooted in the cosmic reality, it gets the significance which it must have. If a great man is quiet in tragic modesty, one like Henrik Ibsen who has aroused the minds, this is such a suggestion.

In the days of the 19-th century drawing to an end he wrote his When We Dead Awaken. Now then, the time has come that to us dead human beings Goethe's saying comes true:

As long as you don't have
This dying and growing,
You are any dull guest
On the dark earth only. (From West-Eastern Divan)

The time has come that we live again, that we become personalities again but emancipated personalities: individualities.

In the talk on the great initiates fourteen days ago, I allowed to myself to point to the fact that the great initiates are basically the supporters of the future ideals of humanity and that their force, their mode of operation consists in the fact that they entail as their secret, have taken up as their mystery and put it into the ideals in an appropriate way what becomes obvious to the whole remaining humanity only in future. So that the idealism of humanity, the future ideals of our race are expressions of the masters' profound knowledge of the big spiritual world principles. I pronounced at that time that the theosophical ideals which come from the masters themselves differ from the ideals in life and that they come from a real knowledge of the principles of nature and not possibly from sensations such like: it should be that way, it is right that way et etcetera

At that time, I pointed to the fact that this is not prophecy in the bad sense of the word. It is a kind of indication of the future as we have it also in the natural sciences. As well as we exactly know from the knowledge of the material laws of hydrogen and oxygen that they combine under certain conditions and yield water, it is also with the spiritual laws, so that we can say which the ideals of the human future are. The developmental law leads the human being into the future. The initiate has to consciously get out of the knowledge of the big world principles what he wants for the future. This was one indication of the present talk given already fourteen days ago. The other indication I gave in the talk about Ibsen's attitude. I showed how Ibsen points brilliantly to the configuration of the personality in our time and how he characterises what has developed in our time and that he points to something higher that overcomes the personality what we call individuality in theosophy.

We stand actually at a turning point today. The great results of natural science have shown us how on one side the materialistic observation has brought the biggest fruits, how Darwinism and materialism extend into our time and we have to thank to them for a big cultural progress; but on the other side that also currents assert themselves preparing the future. New ideals arise just in the most excellent spirits. Indeed, these spirits who point to a distant future are not the so-called practical spirits, but the world history advances differently than the practical people fancy it. I have pointed to a pillar of idealism, to Tolstoy before. Today, however, I would still like to point to a western spirit, to Keely (John Ernst Worrell K., 1827–1898, inventor of a motor, based on “vibratory energy”), the great mechanic who furthers us although his mechanical idea is not yet a practical one. Some questions are connected with it which may appear fantastic to the materialist. But at the same time we want to get to know an idealism that is of another type than that of the everyday life. It is the same that lived in the mysteries once. What we spread today in popular talks lived up to the foundation of the Theosophical Society in 1875 in the so-called secret schools. I have pointed to the Rosicrucians repeatedly; also to the fact that one can scholarly find nothing about the real secrets of the Rosicrucians. Goethe was in close contact with the Rosicrucians; in his poem The Secrets he expressed this clearly. We have taken all that from the past talks.

We want to occupy ourselves with those big world laws which were announced in the mysteries as the world laws of the future, as those world laws which the human being has to conform to unless he wants to blunder into future in the darkness, but that he is aware to face these or those future events as well as the naturalist who goes to the laboratory knows that if he mixes certain substances and combines them, he receives certain results. This, explained popularly, can be heard only since 1875, since the foundation of the Theosophical Society. That is why it cannot surprise us that the academic literature contains nothing of these ideals of the future.

Now the question could arise, and this question has often been put: Are these the unworldly idealists generally who are apparently far away from any practise, who think out the thoughts of future, which support life, first in their heads? Can they be these? Has life not to be born from practise? Nevertheless, they spin out thoughts only, they are daydreamers, and want to bear the future? Only somebody who knows how one has to use the things of the everyday life is able to intervene, and it is to him to intervene in the practical life. Let me pick out examples of the pragmatist and the idealist as a small intermezzo and show that the pragmatists did not cause the great and real progress, but that these were the theorists who created from the plenty of ideas and also brought about the future in the everyday life.

Take the discoveries of the 19th century. Wherever we go we can find nothing that does not remind us of the steam power, of the telegraph, of the telephone, of the postal system, of the railway et etcetera But no practitioner has invented the railway. How have the pragmatists faced up to it? An example: when in Germany the first railways should be built, when the railway should be led from Berlin to Potsdam, this made a lot of brainwork to the Prussian Postmaster General von Nagler (1770–1846). He said: I send six to seven mail coaches to Potsdam a day which are not even completely used. Instead of building a railway there, they should rather pour money down the drain. The vote of the Bavarian medical board which was asked about the medical effect of the railway was approximate in such a way: one should build no railways, because people could thereby cause serious impairments to themselves. If one built them, however, one should raise wooden walls at both sides at least, so that those who pass do not become dizzy by the sight of the rapid trains. This was in 1830.

Another example is the postage stamp. Rowland Hill (1795–1879), a private citizen in England, had this idea first, not a practitioner of the postal system. When in the parliament in London this proposal should be negotiated, the chief post official argued that the post-office buildings would be too small because of the increasing mail dispatch, and one had to answer to the practitioner that the post-office buildings had to comply with the traffic and not vice versa the traffic with the post-office buildings. The telephone is also no invention of a practitioner. It was invented by the teacher Philipp Reis (1834–1874) in Frankfurt on the Main. Then it is developed further by Graham Bell (1847–1922), a teacher of deaf-mute. It was invented by real theorists. This was also the case of the electromagnetic telegraph. It was invented by two scholars, by Gauss (Carl Friedrich G., 1777–1855, mathematician) and Weber (Wilhelm Eduard W., 1804–1891, physicist) in Göttingen.

With some great examples I wanted to show that never the practitioners were those who brought the real progress of humanity. The practitioners cannot assess what belongs to the future. They are the real conservatives who counter all kinds of obstacles to any thought concerning the future. One can feel a certain accentuation of the exclusive skill and sense of authority so easily with the practitioners.

I said this in advance to show that the ideals do not arise from the practical, but are supported by those who are imbued with a higher spiritual reality. However, this was only an intermezzo.

You remember the lecture about the origin of the human being where we as theosophists ascribed a very early origin to humanity. We search for this origin much farther back than the scientific documents can lead us. May it seem fantastic that this origin was traced back up to the separation of the earth from sun and moon: somebody who becomes engrossed in the method which theosophy makes available finds that these are no fantastic ideas, but concrete realities like the tables and chairs in this room. Who becomes engrossed in the laws of the past that way and sharpens his look with the spiritual development at the same time can get to know the laws from the knowledge of the past which belong neither to the past, nor to the present, nor to the future, but to the all-time. If one has brought it so far that he has attained the initiation up to the degree which I have characterised in the talk on the great initiates, then the world laws appear before the spiritual look, world laws according to which the development takes place which need, however, the human being to be realised. Just as the chemist has to mix the substances first to let play the laws of nature, the human being has also to mix the substances to help the big world laws to the road of success. On the basis of such world laws, two matters should occupy us today: the distant future at which we look so that we do not keep to the few historic millennia and a short interval if we see into the future with the everyday look.

We want to see into in the more distant future as we have seen into in the distant past. We also want to understand our task in the future from the theosophical point of view. We have seen that another humanity preceded our present humanity. We went back to the older races which lived under other living conditions and with other abilities. The task of our race is to develop the inferring reason. While we have the logical thinking, counting and calculating, that which enables us to get to know the laws of the external physical nature and to use them in technology and industry, it was substantially different with the Atlantean race.

Memory was the basic force of this race. The present human being can hardly imagine which extent memory had with the Atlanteans. They could count only a little. Everything was based on the connection which they formed by memory. For example, they knew three times seven by memory, but they could not calculate that. They knew no multiplication tables. Another force which was developed with them but is to be understood even more difficultly was that they had a certain influence on the life-force itself. By a particular development of the willpower they could win an immediate influence over the living, for example, over the growth of a plant.

If we go back even farther, we come to a continent which we call Lemuria. The natural sciences admit this continent which was at the position of the present Indian Ocean, although they do not assume human beings but lower mammals as population on it.

We get to quite different stages of development now. Who has followed the lecture about the earth evolution some weeks ago knows that we get to a period when the human being was still a hermaphrodite, when the single being was male and female at the same time. In myths and legends, this original hermaphroditism was still preserved in the consciousness of the peoples. The Greeks originally regarded Zeus as hermaphrodite. One said that he was a beautiful man and a beautiful maiden at the same time. In the Greek mysteries the hermaphrodite human being still loomed large; he was put as a unity of the human being. The uni-sexual human being originated from the process I have described. We follow up the process as it represents itself to the seer in the worlds which give an insight into these matters by the means of practical mysticism to be explained another time.

If we follow up the human being in such a way, we see that he goes through that again now only consciously which he already completed unconsciously in former periods. We meet the human being at that time in such a way that his external material cover is thin. At that time, the earth was still in a high temperature state. The substances entered and went out of the human being; it was like a kind of inhaling and exhaling. He lived that way without perception moving through the senses; like pictures surging up and down as with the dreamer, the sensory impressions passed him by. If such a human being who was basically a soul human approached an object or being dreamily, clairvoyantly, he could not perceive this object or this being with the eyes, he could not smell the smell, but he approached the being, and it was by a force which I cannot further describe today that a vision rose in him. A world in his soul answered to the outside events. It was approximate in such a way, as if you have a clock before you, and you do not perceive the clock but the ticking of the clock.

Or you topple a chair in sleep and dream of a duel. This is chaotic today, so that it has no significance for us. However, this must be transformed again to clairvoyance, and then it has significance again. If you approached a human being in those days who had a bad emotion in himself, a picture rose in your soul that had dark colour nuances and was a reflection but not a perception of the external reality. The pleasant relation was reflected with bright nuances. Only by the fact that the human being received the gates of the senses the soul pictures changed into perception. He connected his ability to form colour pictures with the outer reality. The physicist says today that nothing else exists than the vibration of matter, and colour is the answer of the soul to vibrations. When the human eye was developed, the human being moved that on the outer objects which surged up and down as pictures in the soul. Everything that he perceived of his surroundings was basically nothing else than a spread of the soul pictures across the outer world.

In the further development the human being penetrates the higher worlds consciously and not in fugue states where he perceives the soul-world around him. Nothing else is initiation than developing up to this level. What the mystic can already develop today by certain methods in himself is developed in future with all human beings. This is the nature of the initiate that he already develops what is revealed to all human beings in future, and that he can at least indicate the direction of the future ideals of humanity. The ideals of the initiates thereby have a value that the unconscious ideals can never have. Then the human being moves between the soul things as he moves between tables and chairs today. Again and again I would like to emphasise that it is necessary for that who himself wants to advance to this level that he is absolutely firm concerning the developmental stage of humanity on which it stands now: He must be a person who is able to differentiate between speculative fiction and reality. Nobody can come to the higher world who indulges every fantasy but only somebody who stands firmly on the point of view of development which humanity has attained.

Another state is that in which the human being starts spiritually beholding or rather hearing what constitutes the deepness, the nature of the things. This is the so-called inner word where the things themselves say what they are. As well as only the human beings themselves can say to us what they are, there is an inner essentiality of all things. We cannot recognise this inner essentiality of the things with the reason, we have to creep into the things, become one with the things. We are able to do this only with the mind. We must combine with the things spiritually. The world thereby becomes that sounding world of which Goethe speaks and which I have often stated so that the human being rises to the higher regions, to the spiritual world or devachan; to that world in which the human being stays between death and a new birth. These are the worlds between death and a new birth.

Our earth is in its fourth cycle or in its fourth round. It has three rounds behind it. Three following rounds develop higher capabilities of the human being. What I have just described forms soon; and the principal race which follows ours has substantially different qualities. In the middle of that period it produces a human race which does not penetrate the physical world as deeply as ours and which casts off the uni-sexuality and becomes hermaphrodite. Then it will higher develop, until the development concludes. This will be in the astral. Then it will go through two cycles again. humanity has still to complete three such cycles. But we can only touch the next two ones.

We have to get the task of the present human cycle clear in our mind at first. We progress best of all if we put the question to ourselves: what task does the human being have on earth with his inferring reason? Clairvoyance and clairaudience are states that belong to former and later states of development. The human being now has the task to stand firmly in the physical life, so that humanity can get its goal. Theosophy should not lead us away from the physical basis; theosophy rises from the physical earth because it is also the expression of the astral and spiritual worlds. We do not want to lead to anything uncertain, unclear, we do not want to lead away from the physical reality, but we want to lead this physical reality to the right understanding, to the right comprehension. What stands behind the physical reality points to the task of the human being in the present cycle of development.

Consider what happens now. We call the present cycle the mineral one because the human being deals with the mineral world. The naturalist says: we cannot yet understand the plant world and considers the plant as a sum of mineral processes. He proceeds also with the animal that way. Even if this is a caricature of a world view, nevertheless, something forms the basis of the thing. He combines with his reason what is side by side in space and one after the other in time. Everywhere it is the reason which works on the dead, on the unliving and composes the parts. Begin with the machine and lead it up to a piece of art: the human being has this task in the present cycle of development, and he will complete it, so that he transforms the whole earth into his piece of art.

This is the task which the human being has for the future. As long as one atom is there which the human being has not worked through with his forces, the human task on earth is not yet completed. Who pursues the newest progress of electricity knows how the naturalist can have a look at the smallest parts of the mineral world because he controls the electric force still almost unknown fifty years ago. His task is to transform the unliving into a big piece of art. Hence, pieces of art existed long before the historical times, long before the Egyptians. Pursue this, and you understand that the present cycle signifies the spiritualisation of the whole mineral nature. Already the sensible naturalist says to us that it is not inconceivable according to our present knowledge that a time comes when the human beings are able to go even deeper into the nature of the material. This is a certain future perspective.

To those who have occupied themselves with physics a principle is memorable: future prospects are obtained because a big part of our technical work is performed applying heat, by conversion of heat to work. The theorist of heat shows us that always only a certain part of heat can be transformed into work or into that what is technically useful. If you heat a vapour machine, you cannot use all heat to create forces of locomotion. Imagine now that always heat is used for the work but a part of heat cannot be converted into work and remains behind. This is the state of heat which the heat engineer, the theorist of heat can show as a kind of death of our physical earth. There someone argues who occupies himself with the phenomena of life that then possibly the point in time may have come that life itself intervenes: that living machinery which masters the molecules and atoms quite differently with which we move our arm and set the brain in motion. This force could be able to work deeper on the material nature than the forces of transformation we know today.

This shows you an outlook that is not only a picture but something concrete and real for the clairvoyant who can pursue the spirit of development: He sees the whole earth transforming itself to a work of art. If this is achieved, then the human being has no longer anything to do in the mineral world, then he becomes free from all sides, then he can freely move, his soul does no longer stumble against the objects. This is the time when the earth enters the so-called astral state. As today already the engineer masters the outside world if he produces the machine which is filled with his mind, it is also with the human being. All that is there is the immediate product of his actions. We do not need to perceive what is our action what we ourselves formed. The senses have transformed themselves, and the astral state enters. This is the outlook: the mineral world stops with our earth cycle. Hence, we call the next cycle which the human being will finish, the cycle of plant existence. The whole earth will have cast off its mineral nature, and the human being will intervene like now with the mind in the mineral in the living with his soul-force. Then he will be the master of the plant world on a higher level, as he is now master of the mineral world. Then we get to that stage when the human being lives on a quite lively earth. However, we want to take this picture only as an approximate one; we want to be content to have obtained an outlook of the next cycle.

With it you have seen that the human being is on a course that leads him to another state absolutely different from ours that in him forces of such a kind are that can take on quite different forms in future. However, at the same time for somebody, who understands this, a feeling, a sensation combines with it which is basic for our whole life: what does the human being become if we consider him as a spring of such future forces? We face the human being quite differently about whom we know that the seed of this future human being slumbers in him. There our attitude toward him changes into the feeling that we have any human being as an unsolved riddle before ourselves. Deeper and deeper we would want to descend into the layers of the human nature because we know that they entail such deep things.

The theories are not important, even not that anybody imagines the plant cycle, but that we be in awe of any human individuality. Facing the human being as a god, who wants to leave his cover, we have understood something of the theosophical life, the theosophical life matters and not the theories. If we have certain ideas which show us what the human being can become and what he contains in himself, then our heart fills with that true love of the divine human being that the theosophical world view wants to accomplish. If we think it that way, we only understand the first principle of the Theosophical Society: forming the core of a brotherhood without differentiating sex, colour and denomination. What do these differences mean here?

You probably keep on asking: which significance have these images of humanity? How does this great ideal relate to our tasks? Is it not anything that belongs to a cloud-cuckoo-land, because it belongs to a future we do not experience? The human being has to utilise what he develops in himself. It is not without reason whether he lives on with the feelings, which I have just explained, or whether he lives into future only touching in the dark. Just as the plant bears the seed in itself of that which it is next year, the human being has to bear his future as a seed in himself. He can make this seed not full enough of content, not big enough. This applies also in the present. Since you have occupied yourselves with the social ideals and the plans for the near future of humanity, you know that almost anybody who reflects it has his own social ideal.

You ask yourselves if you look deeper into these matters: why do these ideals have so little power of persuasion? All the matters do not work and do not fit together. Both those who try to establish ideals of the future in a utopian way and those who want to do it with practical reason are not able to get to really great and radical points of view. All the social ideas, even the belief of big comprehensive world parties one can state this from profound points of view which are pronounced out of the consciousness of the sensuous world will never have any practical value. After fifty years, people will be surprised of these figments of imagination. The social ideal cannot be invented. Our thoughts or that which we obtain from our opinions, from our reason cannot form the basis of any social ideal. One has just to say: no social theory, whatsoever it may be, is fit to serve the welfare of humanity.

However, that is hard to verify. On the other side, consider the point in time in which we stand: The present has formed the personality. The personality is the characteristic, the significant of the human being. All the other differentiations, even that of man and woman, are overcome there. There is only the personality without any differentiation. We keep this in mind that humanity had to go through this point and that theosophy calls this personality lower manas: this is the power of thinking relating to the immediate world. The human being is a personality as far as he belongs to the sensuous world, and his combining reason belongs to the sensuous world, too. We have to raise everything to a higher stage that the human being can think with his reason and raises his personality if we want to understand it in its true being. That is why we also make a distinction between personality and individuality, between lower and higher manas. What is, actually, this lower manas?

Take the difference that exists between a modern human being and a simple barbarian who grinds the grains between two stones to prepare flour, and bakes bread then from it et etcetera With a very small expense of mental force the barbarian manages what fulfils his bodily needs. But civilisation advances, and what do we do basically in our time? We telegraph to America and let the same products come which the barbarian ground himself. All the technical understanding, what else is it than a detour to satisfy the animal needs? Still consider whether the reason accomplishes a lot of other things than to satisfy the everyday bodily needs. Does the reason become, therefore, anything higher, while it constructs ships, railways, telephones et etcetera if it produces nothing else than things to satisfy the everyday needs of the human being?

The reason is only a detour and does not lead out of the sensory world. Where, however, the spiritual world illumines this world: in the great works of art, in the original ideas which exceed the everyday needs, or where something of theosophy shines, then the human mind does not become only a manufacturer of that which is around it, but then it is a channel through which the spirit flows into the world. It brings something productive into this world. Every single human being is a channel through which a spiritual world pours forth. As long as the human being only seeks for the satisfaction of his needs, he is a personality. If he exceeds that, he is an individuality. We can find this spring only in the single individual; the human being is the mediator between the spiritual and sensory worlds, the human being mediates between both. This is the double way we can face the human being.

As personalities we all are on a par: the reason is developed somewhat less with the one somewhat more with the other. But that does not apply to the individuality. There the human being becomes a particular character; there everybody brings in something particular for his mission. If I want to know what he has to do as a personality in the world, what he can be on account of his genuineness as individuality, and then I have to wait, until through this channel something pours into this world from the spiritual world. If this influence is expected to take place, we have to regard every human being as an unsolved riddle. Through any single individuality the original spiritual force flows towards us.

As long as we consider the human being as a personality, we can control him: if we speak of general duties and rights, we speak of the personality. If we speak, however, of the individuality, we cannot squeeze the human being into a form; he must be the support of his genuineness. The human beings who live out their individualities know what humanity experiences in ten years. I am not allowed for my part to determine the child whom I educate, but I have to start from its mysterious inside that is quite unknown to me. If we want a social order, the single individualities must co-operate, and then everybody must be able to develop in his freedom. If we establish a social ideal, we bind this personality to this place, that personality to that place. The sum of that what exists is simply thrown together: however, nothing new comes into the world. Therefore, individualities have to go in; the great individualities must throw in their impact. There must be not laws, social programs from ideals of reason, but social brotherly attitude has to originate.

Only one social attitude can help us, the attitude that we face every being as individuality. We have always to realise that every human being has something to say to us. Every human being has something to say to us. We do need a social attitude, not social programs. This is absolutely real and practical. It is something that one can express in this talk, and it is that which theosophy establishes as a great future ideal. With it theosophy gains an immediate practical significance. If theosophy enters life, we give up squeezing everything into rules and regulations; we give up judging by norms, we accept the human being as a free and individual human being.

Then we realise that we fulfil our task if we put the right person to the right place. We do no longer ask: is he the best teacher who masters the teaching substance best, but we ask: which human being is he? One has to develop a fine feeling, maybe a clairvoyant talent whether the human being in question is with his being at his right place whether he is as a human being on his place. Somebody can understand his subjects of instruction completely; he can be a mine of information but unfit to teach, because he does not know what streams out of the human being what elicits the individuality of the other human being. Not until we refrain from rules and regulations and ask which human being is he, and put the best human being to the place where he is needed, we fulfil the ideals in ourselves which theosophy has brought. Somebody can also know a lot as a doctor but, nevertheless, it is crucial in the end facing the sick person which human being the doctor is. If theosophy intervenes directly in life, it must be that way.

Answer to Question

Question: What do you think of Dr. Eugen Heinrich Schmitt (1851–1916, philosopher)?

He faces theosophy friendly, has written something about theosophy, after he had published the writing about the secret of Hegel's dialectic. However, his way of thinking is an overly mathematical one, it is too constructive-mathematical, and is not enough based on observation. His way of thinking is also not enough tolerant toward other views.

Question: Where from do we know anything of the Atlanteans and Lemurians?

From the Akasha Chronicle. These are traces which any action leaves behind and which one can read long times backward. This Akasha Chronicle is absolutely a reality for that who can read it. However, it is difficult to read, and, besides, one is easily exposed to mistakes. To give an approximate idea of it the following may be said. If I speak here, the word fills the airspace. The oscillations correspond to the words. Who could not hear my words, but would be able to study the oscillations of the air, would be able to construct my words from the oscillations.

In the air these oscillations remain only a short time. In the astral substance, however, they survive longer. If the human being lives as a dreaming in such a way as the human being lives in the external reality, he can also see the psychic in the outer reality, he can also pursue the earth origin up to the astral origin of the earth. If the human being has attained the continuity of consciousness, and if he has this continuing consciousness during the night in the dream, he can see the concatenation of worlds, their origin and decay.

Question: What do you think of Karl Marx and his work?

What Karl Marx performed, applies to the time from the 16-th century till this day. It encloses the time of the emerging modern economic life and the developing industrialism. As far as production, consumption and what is connected with it is considered, theosophy can agree with Marx. However, the mistake which the Marxist makes is that he attributes everything to class struggle. It is a misunderstanding of the facts. The human being patterns, not the surroundings, not the relations of production. Can anybody state that the invention of the differential calculus depended on the relations of production? Certainly not. What has been performed, however, with the help of the differential calculus?

Question: Can a theosophist be a social democrat?

Yes, if he is also a theosophist with every step. Everybody has to decide for himself whether the social-democratic party is the desirable for the next time,

Question: Which task has art concerning the spiritual development of humanity?

The same as other activities. It helps to transform the whole world into a work of art, although also the single piece of art passes. However, we can ask whether these single pieces of art have no significance, and then we must say from the theosophical point of view that two things are to be considered with such a piece of art:

First the piece of art in space and secondly the force of the human being which had an effect. The force of the human being is the remaining. Art is something that has a still much higher significance.

Question: How does theosophy position itself to the Last Judgement and to the eternal punishments?

There are no eternal punishments in the theosophical view. There are only stages of development, karmic effects. However, the Last Judgement has a different significance. It signifies a certain point in time of that round I have spoken of in the talk. In this round the human being attains a certain level where he no longer gets any external impulse where he has overcome the sensuous completely where he has spiritualised the mineral-physical. What he has gained in the spiritual life appears as his tendency appears in the spirit. Hence, his tendency will be expressed in the external figure. The human being will carry that external figure which he himself has formed by his karma. The Last Judgement signifies nothing else than that this is impressed to everybody what he has in his soul. The human being can today hide what lives in his soul, then, however, this will no longer be the case.

Question: How does patriotism harmonise with the general brotherhood?

Patriotism is justified on a certain stage of development. What we put as the ideal of brotherliness is something bridging over. Both are compatible with each other. The activity of reason can have also individual moments, and because we mull over the individuality a certain moment happens there. Not any human being has his own logic, because the logic is something universal, nothing individual. However, these activities of reason take on an individual colouring. But the reason is not the individual.

Question: Why can a madman not control himself?

The madman is physically ill at first. The opposite of being mad is called being prudent that is to be able to harmonise his inner life with the surroundings. Who is not able to produce this harmony seems to be mad. If you wanted to behave on Mars as on earth, you would be a Martian madman.

Question: What do you think of the American books about hypnotism, magnetism?

What has a real significance is not to be found in these books. For the rest, these matters often are disadvantageous concerning health and in other ways as well. I can only advise against such matters the sharpest from the theosophical point of view.

Question: Has Christ really lived hundred years before the year one?

I stand here on the orthodox point of view. Others have made a mistake there to my way of thinking.

I have often emphasised here that the theosophical movement cannot disabuse us of the immediate reality, of the duties and tasks that the day imposes on us in this time. Now it must become apparent whether this theosophical movement finds the right words if it concerns to give us an understanding of the great spiritual heroes who are, in the end, the creators of our culture and education. During these days, everybody who counts himself among the German education directs his thoughts upon one of our greatest spiritual heroes, on our Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805).

Hundred years separate us from his earthly decease. The last big celebration of Schiller, which was committed not only within Germany, but also in England, in America, in Austria, in Russia, was in 1859, on his hundredth birthday. It was interlinked with jamborees, with devoted words to the highest idealism of Schiller. These were words that were spoken over whole regions of the earth. There will be again jamborees which are celebrated during these days to honour of our great spiritual hero. However, as intimate and sincere and honest as the sounds were, which were spoken in those days in 1859, so intimate and devoted and completely spoken from the heart the words will not be that are spoken about Schiller today. Education and the national view about Schiller has substantially changed during the last fifty years. In the first half of the 19th century, Schiller's great ideals, the great portrayals of his dramas settled down, slowly and gradually It was an echo of that which Schiller himself had planted, an echo of that which he had sunk in the hearts and souls which flowed in enthusiastic words from the lips of the best of the German nation in those days. The most excellent men of this time have exerted their best to say what they had to say. There the brothers Ernst and Georg Curtius, the aesthete Vischer, the linguist Jacob Grimm, Karl Gutzkow and many others united. They joined in the big choir of Schiller celebrations and everywhere it sounded in such a way, as if one heard anything from Schiller himself, anything of that which Schiller himself had planted.

We have to acknowledge to ourselves that this changed in the last decades. The immediate interest in Schiller has decreased because Schiller's great ideals do no longer speak so familiarly and intimately to our contemporaries. Hence, it may be a substitute that we bear in mind clearly and vividly what Schiller can still be for our present and future. It behoves the theosophist above all to take the big theosophical basic questions up and to ask himself whether Schiller has to do anything with these theosophical basic questions. I hope that the course of this evening shows that it is not pure invention if we bring together Schiller and the theosophical movement, if we theosophists feel called in certain way to care for the remembrance of Schiller.

What is our basic question, what do we long for, what do we want to investigate and fathom? It is the big question to find the way to that which surrounds us as sense-perceptible objects and to that which is beyond the sensuous, as the spiritual, the super-sensible that lives in us and above us. This was also an early question which moved our Schiller. I cannot get involved in details. But I would like to show one thing, nevertheless, that Schiller's life and work was penetrated by this basic question: how is the physical with the psycho-spiritual, the super-sensible connected? Schiller wanted to solve this problem from the beginning of his life up to the heights of his work, even through his whole work, which is the artistic and philosophical expression of this question. At that time, he wrote a treatise after he had completed his study of medicine. This treatise, a kind of thesis, which he wrote with the departure from the Karlsschule (elite military academy) addresses the question: which is the interrelation between the sensuous nature of the human being and his spiritual nature?

Schiller treats in this work emphatically and nicely how the spirit is connected with the physical nature of the human being. Our time has already outdistanced what Schiller answers to this question; but that does not matter with such a great genius like Schiller. It matters how he engrossed his mind and how he put up with such things. Schiller understood this in such a way that there no conflict may be permitted between the sensuous and the spiritual. Thus he tried to subtly show how the spirit, how the soul of the human being works on the physical, that the physical is only an expression of the spirit living in the human beings.

Any gesture, any form and any verbal utterance is an expression of it. He investigates at first how the soul enjoys life in the body; then he investigates how the physical condition works on the mind. Briefly, the harmony between body and soul is the sense of this treatise. The end of the treatise is brilliant. There Schiller speaks of death in such a way, as if this is no completion of life, but only an event like other events of life. Death is no completion. He says already there: life causes death once; but life is not finished with it; the soul goes, after it has experienced the event of death, into other spheres to look at life from the other side. However, has the human being already sucked out all experience from life really at this moment? Schiller thinks that it might very well be possible that the life of the soul within the body appears as if we read in a book which we peruse, put aside and take in hand again after some time to understand it better. Then we put it aside again, after some time we take it in hand et etcetera to understand it better and better. He says to us with it: the soul lives not only once in the body, but like the human being takes a book in hand again and again, the soul returns repeatedly to a body to make new experiences in this world. It is the great idea of reincarnation, which Lessing had touched shortly before in his Education of the Human Race like in his literary will, and which Schiller also expresses now where he writes about the interrelation of the sensuous nature with the spiritual nature of the human being. At the very beginning, Schiller starts considering life from the highest point of view.

Schiller's first dramas have an intense effect on somebody who has a feeling heart for what is great in them. If we ask ourselves why Schiller's great thoughts flow into our hearts, then we get the answer that Schiller touches matters in his dramas which belong to the highest of humanity. The human being does not always need to understand and realise in the abstract what takes place in the poet's soul if he lonely forms the figures of imagination. But what lives there in the breast of the poet when he forms his figures, which move there on the stage, we see this already as young people in the theatre, or if we read the dramas. There flows in us what lives in the poet's soul. What lived in Schiller's soul at that time when he out-poured his young soul in his Robbers, in Fiesco, in Intrigue and Love. We must take him from the spiritual currents of the 18th century if we want to completely understand him.

Two spiritual currents existed which influenced the spiritual horizon of Europe at that time. A term of the French materialism calls one current. If we want to understand it, we have to see deeper into the development of the nations. What seethed in Schiller's soul has taken its origin in the striving and thinking of centuries. Approximately around the turn of the 15-th to the 16-th century the time begins when the human beings looked up at the stars in a new way. Copernicus, Kepler, Galilei, they are those who bring up a new age, an age in which one looks at the world differently than before. Something new crept into the human souls relying on the external senses.

Who wants to compare the difference of the old world view of the12th, 13th centuries with that which arose around the turn of the 16th century with Copernicus and later with Kepler must compare what plays in Dante's Divine Comedy with the world view of the 17th, 18th centuries. One may argue against the medieval world view as much as one likes. It can no longer be ours. But it had what the 18th century did no longer have: it arranged the world as a big harmony, and the human being was arranged in this divine world order as its centre, he himself belonged to this big harmony. All things were the outflow of the divine, of the creativity which was revered in faith, in particular that of Christianity. The superior was an object of faith. It had to hold and bear. And this had an effect down to the plants and minerals. The whole world was enclosed in a big harmony, and the human being felt existing in this harmony. He felt that he can be released growing together and being interwoven with this divine harmony. He rested in that which he felt as the world permeated by God, and he felt contented.

This changed and had to change in the time when the new world view got entrance in the minds when the world was permeated with the modern spirit of research. There one had gained an overview about the material. By means of philosophical and physiological research one had received an insight into the sensory world. One could not harmonise what one thought of the sensuous world with faith this way. Other concepts and other views took place. However, the human beings could not harmonise their new achievements with that which they thought and felt about the spirit.

One could not harmonise it with that which one had to believe about the sources of life according to the ancient traditions. Thus something came up in the French Revolution that one can express with the sentence:”the human being is a machine.” One had understood the substances, but one had lost the connection with the spirit. One felt the spiritual in oneself. However, one did not feel how the world is connected with it; one did no longer have this. The materialists created a new world view in which actually nothing but substances existed. Goethe was repelled by such views like Holbach's Systeme de la nature, he found it empty and dull. But this world view of Holbach (1723–1789) was got out of the scientific view. It mirrors the external truth. How should the human being face up to it now who has lost the spirit? He has lost the connection, he has lost the harmony which the medieval human being felt, the harmony between the soul and the material. Thus the best spirits of that time had to strive to find the connection again or were forced to choose between the spiritual and the sensuous.

This was, as we have seen, Schiller's basic question in his youth, this interrelation between ideal and reality, nature and spirit. But the trend had torn up a deep abyss between the spiritual and the sensuous, it pressed like a nightmare on his soul. How can one reconcile ideal and reality, nature and spirit? This was the question.

This abyss had been still torn open by another trend, which issued from Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). Rousseau had rejected the culture modern at that time up to a certain degree. He had found that the human being alienated himself by this culture, that he has torn out himself from nature. He had alienated himself from nature not only by the world view; he also could no longer find the connection with the spring of life. Therefore, he had to long for the return to nature, and thus Rousseau establishes the principle that basically the culture diverts the human beings from the true harmonies of life, that it is a product of decline.

At that time, the question of the spiritual, of the ideal had faced up the greatest of the contemporaries in new form: why should it not be there if they looked at life? In the time in which one felt the ideal of life so much, one had to feel the conflict twice if one looked at the real life as it had developed, and then at that which there was in the human society. Schiller's teens were in this time. All that towered up; and Schiller had to feel that as disharmony. His youth dramas originated from this mood. Back to the ideal! Which is the right social existence which is decreed to us in a divine world order? These are the feelings which lived in Schiller's youth, which he expressed then in his dramas, in the Robbers, in particular, however, also in the court dramas; we feel them if we take in the great drama Don Carlos. We have seen how the young doctor Schiller put the basic question of the interrelation between the sensuous and the spirit, and that he put it as a poet before his contemporaries.

After the hard trials which he was exposed to on account of his youth dramas he was invited by the father of the freedom poet Körner (Christian Gottfried K., 1756–1831) who did everything to support the cultural life. Körner's fine philosophical education brought Schiller to philosophy, and now the question arose philosophically before Schiller's mind anew: how can the interrelation of the sensuous with the spirit be found again? What was spoken in those days in Dresden between Schiller and Körner (1785–1787) and which great ideas were exchanged is reflected in Schiller's philosophical letters. Indeed, these may be somewhat immature compared with Schiller's later works. What is immature, however, for Schiller, is still very ripe for many other people and is important for us because it can show us how Schiller has struggled up to the highest heights of thinking and imagination.

These philosophical letters, The Theosophy of Julius, represent the correspondence between Julius and Raphael; Schiller as Julius, Körner as Raphael. The world of the 18-th century faces us there. Nice sentences are in this philosophy, sentences like those which Paracelsus expressed as his world view. In the sense of Paracelsus that of the whole outside world is shown to us which the divine creativity accomplished in the most different realms of nature: minerals, plants, animals with capacities of the most varied kind are spread out over nature. The human being is like a big summary, like a world like an encyclopaedia repeats everything once again in itself that is otherwise scattered. A microcosm, a little world in a macrocosm, a big world! Like hieroglyphics, Schiller says, is that which is contained in the different realms of nature. The human being stands there as the summit of the whole nature, so that he combines in himself and expresses on a higher level what is poured out in the whole nature. Paracelsus expressed the same thought largely and nicely: all beings of nature are like the letters of a word, and, if we read them, nature represents her being, a word results which presents itself in the human being. Schiller expresses this lively and emotionally in his philosophical letters. It is so lively to him that the hieroglyphics speak vividly for themselves in nature. I see, Schiller says, the chrysalises outside in nature which change to the butterflies. The chrysalis does not perish, it shows a metamorphosis; this is a guarantee to me that also the human soul changes in similar way. Thus the butterfly is a guarantee of human immortality to me.

In the most marvellous way the thoughts of the mind associate themselves in nature with the thought which Schiller studies as that which lives in the human soul. Then he struggles up to the view that the force of love lives not only in the human being, but finds expression in certain stages all over the world, in the mineral, in the plant, in the animal, and in the human being. Love expresses itself in the forces of nature and most purely in the human being. Schiller phrases that in a way which reminds of the great mystics of the Middle Ages. He calls what he pronounced that way the Theosophy of Julius. At it he developed up to his later approaches to life. His whole lifestyle, his whole striving is nothing else than a big self-education, and in this sense Schiller is a practical theosophist. Theosophy is basically nothing else than self-education of the soul, perpetual work on the soul and its further development to the higher levels of existence. The theosophist is convinced that he can behold higher and higher things the higher he develops. Who accustoms himself only to sensuality can see the sensuous only; who is trained for the psycho-spiritual sees soul and spirit around himself. We have to become spirit and divine first, then we can recognise something divine. The Pythagoreans already said this in their secret schools that way, and Goethe also said it in accordance with an old mystic:

Unless the eyes were like the sun,
How could we see the light?
Unless God's own force lived in us,
How could delight us the divine?

But we must develop the forces and capacities which are in us. Thus Schiller tries to educate himself throughout his whole life.

A new stage of his self-development is his aesthetic letters, About the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters. They are a jewel in our German cultural life. Only somebody can feel what mysteriously pours out between and from the words also from Schiller's later dramas who knows these aesthetic letters; they are like a heart- balm. Who has concerned himself a little with the lofty spiritual, educational ideal, which lives in his aesthetic letters, has to say: we have to call these aesthetic letters a book for the people. Only when in our schools not only Plato, not only Cicero, but Schiller's aesthetic letters are equally studied by the young people, one will recognise that something distinct and ingenious lives in them. What lives in the aesthetic letters becomes productive first if the teachers of our secondary schools are permeated with this spiritual life, if they let pour in something of that which Schiller wanted to bring up giving us this marvellous work. In the modern philosophical works you do not find any reference to these aesthetic letters. However, they are more significant than a lot that has been performed by the pundits of philosophy, because they appeal to the core of the human being and want to raise this core a stage higher.

Again, it is the big question which faces Schiller in the beginning of the nineties of the 18th century. He puts the question now in such a way: the human being is subjected, on one side, to the sensuous hardships, the sensuous desires and passions. He is subjected to their necessities, he follows them, he is a slave of the impulses, desires and passions. The logical necessity stands on the other side: you have to think in a certain way. The moral necessity stands on the other side, too: you must submit to certain duties. The intellectual education is logically necessary. The moral necessity demands something else that exceeds the modern view. Logic gives us no freedom, we must submit to it; also the duty gives us no freedom, we must submit to it. The human being is put between logical necessity and the needs of nature. If he follows the one or the other, he is not free, a slave. But he should become free.

The question of freedom faces Schiller's soul, as deeply as it was never possibly put and treated in the whole German cultural life. Kant had also brought up this question shortly before. Schiller has never been a Kantian, at least he overcame Kantianism soon. During the wording of these letters he was no longer on Kant's point of view. Kant speaks of the duty so that the duty becomes a moral imperative. “Duty, you lofty and great name. You have nothing popular or mellifluous in yourself but you request submission, … you establish a law... in front of it all propensities fall silent if they counteract secretly against it...” Kant demands submission to the categorical imperative. However, Schiller renounced this Kantian view of duty. He says: “with pleasure I serve the friends, however, I do it, unfortunately, with propensity” and not with that which kills propensity which even kills love. Kant demands that we act from duty, from the categorical imperative.

Schiller wants harmony between both, a harmony between propensity and passion on the one hand and duty and logic on the other side. He finds it at first in the view of beauty. The working of beauty becomes a big universal music and he expressed this: ”Only through beauty's morning gate you enter the land of knowing.” If we have a piece of art, the spiritual shines through it. The piece of art does not appear to us as an iron necessity, but as a semblance that expresses the ideal, the spiritual to us. Spirit and sensuality are balanced in beauty. As to Schiller, spirit and sensuality must also be balanced in the human being. Where the human being is between these two conditions, where he depends neither on the natural necessity nor on the logic one, but where he lives in the condition which Schiller calls the aesthetic one, passion is overcome.

He got down the spirit to himself, he purified sensuality with beauty; and thus the human being has the impulse and the desire to do voluntarily what the categorical imperative has demanded. Then morality is something in the human being that has become flesh and blood in him, so that the impulses and desires themselves show the spiritual. Spirit and sensuality have penetrated the aesthetic human being that way, spirit and sensuality have interpenetrated in the human being because he likes what he has to do. What slumbers in the human being has to be awakened. This is Schiller's ideal. Also concerning the society, the human beings are forced by the natural needs or by the rational state to live together according to external laws. The aesthetic society is in between where love accomplishes what every human being longs for and what is imposed on him by his innermost propensity. In the aesthetic society, the human beings freely co-operate, there they do not need the external laws. They themselves are the expression of the laws according to which the human beings have to live together. Schiller describes this society where the human beings live together in love and in mutual propensity and do voluntarily what they should and have to do.

I could only outline the thoughts of Schiller's aesthetic letters in a few words. But they have an effect only if they are not read and studied, but if they accompany the human being like a meditation book through the whole life, so that he wants to become as Schiller wanted to become. At that time, the time had not yet come. It has come today where one can notice the large extent of a society which founds the interrelation of human beings on love as its first principle. At that time, Schiller tried to penetrate such a knowledge and such a living together. Schiller wanted to educate the human beings with his art at least, so that they become ripe once because his time was not ripe to create the free human beings in a free society. It is sad how little just these most intimate thoughts and feelings of Schiller have found entrance in the educational life which would have to be filled completely with them, which should be a summary of them.

In my talks on Schiller, which I have held in the “Free College,” I have explained how we have to understand Schiller concerning the present. I tried there to show the thoughts in coherent and comprehensive way. You can read up there in detail what I can only indicate today. In any Schiller's biography you can find basically only little of these intimacies of Schiller. But once a pedagogue, a sensitive, dear pedagogue concerned himself with the content of Schiller's aesthetic letters in nice letters. Deinhardt (Heinrich D., 1805-1867) was his name. I do not believe that you can still buy the book. All teachers, in particular of our secondary schools, had to purchase it. However, I believe, it was pulped. The man, who wrote it, could hardly achieve a poor tutor's place. He had the mishap to pick up a leg fracture; the consulted doctors said that the leg fracture could be cured, however, the man were too badly nourished. Thus he died as a result of this accident.

After Schiller had advanced to this point of his life that way, something very important occurred to him: an event took place that intervened deeply in his life and also in the life of our whole nation. It is an event which is very important generally for the whole modern spiritual life. This is the friendship between Schiller and Goethe. It was founded peculiarly. It was at a meeting of the “Society of Naturalists” in Jena. Schiller and Goethe visited a talk of a significant scientist, Batsch (Johann Karl B., 1761-1802, botanist). It happened that both went together out of the hall. Schiller said to Goethe: this is such a fragmented way to look at the natural beings; the spirit that lives in the whole nature is absent everywhere. Thus Schiller put his basic question again to Goethe. Goethe answered: there may probably be another way to look at nature.

Goethe had also pointed in his Faust to that where he says that somebody who searches in such a way expels the spirit, then he has the parts in his hands “however, unfortunately, the spirit band is absent.” Goethe had seen something in all plants that he calls the archetypal plant (Urpflanze), in the animals what he calls the archetypal animal. He saw what we call the etheric body and he drew this etheric body with a few characteristic lines before Schiller. He realised that something really living expresses itself in every plant. Schiller argued: “yes, however, this is no experience, this is an idea!” Goethe responded: “this can be very dear to me that I have ideas without knowing it, and even see them with my eyes.” Goethe was clear in his mind that it was nothing else than the being of the plant itself.

Schiller had now the task to attain the great and comprehensive view of Goethe. It is a fine letter, which I have mentioned already once; it contains the deepest psychology which generally exists and with which Schiller makes friends with Goethe. “For a long time and with always renewed admiration I have already observed the course of your mind although from considerable distance and the way, which you have marked for yourself. You search for the necessary of nature, but you search for it in the most difficult way, for any weaker strength will probably take good care not do that. You summarise the whole nature to get light about the single; you try to explain the individual in all its appearances. From the simple organisation you ascend step by step to the more intricate one to build, finally, the most intricate one of all, the human being, genetically from the materials of the whole nature. Because you recreate him in nature as it were, you try to penetrate his concealed techniques. A great and really heroic idea which shows well enough how much your mind holds together the whole wealth of its ideas in an admirable unity. You can never have hoped that your life will suffice to such a goal, but even to take such a way is more worth than to finish any other and you have chosen like Achilles in the Iliad between Phthia and immortality.

If you had been born as a Greek, or just as an Italian, and a choice nature and an idealising art had surrounded you already from the cradle, your way would be endlessly shortened, would maybe rendered quite superfluous. Then already in the first observation of the things you would have comprehended the form of the necessary, and with your first experiences the great style would have developed in you. Now, because you are born as a German, because your Greek mind was thrown into this northern creation, no other choice remained to you to become either a northern artist, or to give your imagination what reality refused to it to substitute with the help of mental capacity and to bear a Greece as it were from within on a rational way.” This is something that continued having an effect on Schiller as we will see immediately.

Schiller now returns again to poetry. What had a lasting effect faces us in his dramas. Greatly and comprehensively life faces us in Wallenstein. You do not need to believe that you find the thoughts which I develop now, if you read Schiller's dramas. But deeply inside they lie in his dramas, as well as the blood in our veins pulsates, without us seeing this blood in the veins. They pulsate in Schiller's dramas as blood of life. Something impersonal is mixed in the personal. Schiller said to himself: there must be something more comprehensive that goes beyond birth and death. He tried to understand which role the great transpersonal destiny plays in the personal. We have often mentioned this principle as the karma principle. In Wallenstein he describes the big destiny which crushes or raises the human being. Wallenstein tries to fathom it in the stars. Then, however, he realises again that he is drawn by the threads of destiny, that in our own breasts the stars of our destinies are shining. Schiller tries to poetically master the personal, the sensuous nature in connection with the divine in Wallenstein. It would be inartistic if we wanted to enjoy the drama with these thoughts. But the big impulse flows unconsciously into us which originates from this connection. We are raised and carried to that which pulsates through this drama. In each of the next dramas, Schiller tries to reach a higher level to educate himself and to raise the others with him.

In The Maid of Orleans transpersonal forces play a role in the personal. In The Bride of Messina he tries to embody something similar going back to the old Greek drama. He attempts to bring in a choir and a lyrical element there. Not in the usual colloquial language, but in sublime language he wanted to show destinies, which rise above the only personal. Why Schiller tied in with the Greek drama? We must visualise the origin of the Greek drama itself. If we look back to the Greek drama behind Sophocles and Aeschylus, we come to the Greek mystery drama, to the original drama whose later development stages are those of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. In his book The Birth of the Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872) Nietzsche (1844–1900) tries to explore the origin of the drama. In the Homeric time, something was annually brought forward to the Greeks in great dramatic paintings that was at the same time religion, art and science truth, devoutness and beauty. What did this original drama thereby become? This original drama was not a drama which shows human destinies. It should show the godhead himself as the representative of humanity Dionysus. The god, who has descended from higher spheres, who embodies himself in the material substances, who ascends through the realms of nature to the human being to celebrate his redemption and resurrection in the human being. This path of the divine in the world was shaped most beautifully in the descent, in the resurrection and the ascension of the divine.

This original drama took place in manifold figures before the eyes of the Greek spectators. The Greek saw what he wanted to know about the world, what he should know as truth about the world, the triumph of the spiritual over the natural. Science was to him what was shown in these dramas, and it was shown to him in such a way that this presentation was associated with devoutness and could be a model of the human lifestyle. Art, religion and wisdom was that which happened before the spectators. The single actors spoke not in usual language, but in sublime language about the descent, the suffering and overcoming, about the resurrection and ascension of the spiritual. The choir reflected what happened there. It rendered what took place as a divine drama in the simple music of the past. From this homogeneous spring flows out what we know as art, as science, which became physical, and as religion, which emerged from these mysteries. Thus we look back at something that links art with truth and religious devoutness.

The great re-thinker of the Greek original drama, the French author Edouard Schuré (1841–1929), attempted in our time to rebuild this drama. You can read up this really ingenious rebuilding in The Holy Drama of Eleusis (Le drame sacré d'Eleusis). Engrossing his mind in this drama he got to the idea that it is a task of our time to renew the theatre of the soul and the self. In The Children of Lucifer (Les Enfants de Lucifer) he tries to create a modern work that connects self-observation and beauty, dramatic strength and truth content with each other. If you want to know anything about the drama of the future, you can get an idea of it in these pictures of The Children of Lucifer. The whole Wagner circle strives for nothing else than to show something transpersonal in the dramas. In Richard Wagner's dramas, we have the course from the personal to the transpersonal, to the mythical. Hence, Nietzsche also found the way to Wagner when he sought the birth of the tragedy in the original drama. Schiller had already tried in his Bride of Messina what the 19th century aimed at. In this drama, the spiritual is represented in sublime language, and the choir echoes the divine actions before us. He says in his exceptionally witty preface of the writing About the Use of the Choir in the Tragedy from which depths he wanted to bear a Greece in those days. This writing is again a pearl of German literature and aesthetics.

Schiller attempted the same that the 19th century wanted to enter the land of knowing through beauty's morning gate and to be a missionary of truth. With the drama Demetrius which he could not finish because death tore him away, with this drama he tried to understand the problems of the human self, with a clearness and so greatly and intensely that none of those who tried it could finish Demetrius because the great wealth of Schiller's ideas is not to be found with them.

How deeply he understands the self that lives in the human being! Demetrius thinks of himself because of certain signs that he is the real Russian successor to the throne. He does everything to attain what is due to him. At the moment when he is near to arrive at his goal everything collapses that had filled his self. He has now to be what he has made of himself merely by the strength of his inside. This self which was given to him does no longer exist; a self which should be his own action should arise. Demetrius should act out of it. The problem of the human personality is grasped grandiloquently like by no other dramatist of the world. Schiller had such a great thing in mind when death tore him away. In this drama, something lies that with those who could not put it in clear words will now find more response. What was built in the human hearts and in the depths of human souls gushed out again in 1859.

1859 caused a change in the whole modern education. Four works appeared by chance round this time. They influenced the basic attitude of our education. One of them is Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life that brought a materialistic movement with it. The second work was also typical, in particular concerning Schiller if we remember his words which he called out to the astronomers: “do not chat to me so much about nebulas and suns! Is nature only great, because she gives you something to count? Admittedly, your object is the loftiest in space; but, friends, the elated does not live in space.” But it became possible to understand just this elated in space by a work about the spectral analysis which Kirchhoff (Robert K., 1824–1887, physicist) and Bunsen (Robert Wilhelm B., 1811–1899, physicist) published. The third work was again in a certain opposition to Schiller. Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–1887) wrote in idealistic spirit: The Preliminaries of Aesthetics (1876). An aesthetics should be created “from below.” Schiller had started it stupendously “from above.” Fechner took the simple sensation as his starting point. The fourth work carried materialism into the social life. What Schiller wanted to found as society was moved under the point of view of the crassest materialism in the work by Karl Marx (1818–1883) A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859). All that crept in. These are things which were far from the immediate-intimate which Schiller poured in the hearts, honestly and sincerely. And now those who are exposed to the modern literature can no longer look at Schiller in such an idealistic way. Recently, in the last decade of the 19-th century, a man wrote a biography on Schiller who had grown together thoroughly with the aesthetic culture. The first word in it was: “I hated Schiller in my youth!” And only by his scholarly activity he was able to acknowledge Schiller's greatness.

Who can listen only a little to what floods in our time sees that there a certain internal coercion prevails. Time has changed. Nevertheless, perhaps some great, enthusiastic words and some nice festivity will be also connected with Schiller. But somebody who has a good ear will not hear anything that still moved through the minds and souls before half a century when we revered Schiller. We must understand it; we do not reproach those who have no connection with Schiller today. But with the immense dimension of Schiller's oeuvre we have to concede to us: he has to become a component of our cultural education again. The immediate present has to follow Schiller again. Why should a society striving for spiritual deepening like the Theosophical Society not take Schiller up? He is still the first pre-school of self-education if we want to reach the heights of spirit. We get to knowledge differently, if we experience him. We come to the spiritual, if we experience his Aesthetic Letters. We understand the Theosophical Society as an association of human beings, without taking into consideration nation, gender, origin and the like, as an association merely on the basis of pure human love.

In the course of his life, Schiller strove for the heights of spiritual being, and his dramas are basically nothing else than what wants to penetrate artistically into the highest fields of this spiritual being. What he sought was nothing else than to develop something everlasting and imperishable in the human soul. If we remember Goethe quite briefly again: with the word “entelechy“ he termed what lives in the soul as the imperishable what the human being develops in himself, acquires experiencing reality, and what he sends up as his eternal. Schiller calls this the forming figure. As to Schiller, this is the everlasting that lives in the soul that the soul develops constantly in itself, increases in itself and leads to the imperishable realms.

It is a victory which the figure gains over the transient corporeality in which the figure only acts. Schiller calls it the everlasting in the soul-life, and we are allowed, like Goethe, after Schiller had deceased, to stamp the words: “he was ours.” If we understand Schiller with living mind, we are allowed to imbue ourselves with that which lived in him with which he lives in the other world, which took up his best friendly and affectionately. We are also allowed as theosophists to celebrate that mysterious connection with him which we can celebrate as a Schiller festival. As well as the mystic unites with the spiritual of the world the human being unites with the great spiritual heroes of humanity. Everybody who strives for a spiritual world view should celebrate such a festival, a “unio mystica,” for himself, still beside the big Schiller jamborees. Nothing should be argued against these big festivals. However, only somebody who celebrates this intimate festival in his heart connecting him with Schiller intimately finds Schiller's work. Aspiring to spirit we find the way best if we make it like Schiller who educated himself all his life. He expressed it, and it sounds like a motto of the theosophical world view:

Only the body belongs to those powers
Which braid the dark fate;
But freely from any force of time,
As playmate of blessed beings,
Strolls above in the light's acres,
Divinely among gods the figure.

Note: The transcript of the four “faculty” lectures are deficient. It shows not only noticeable gaps; the author of the transcript is also not familiar with the topic of the lectures. He often made summaries in haste as far as he understood the lecturer. That is why some connections shifted. Although notices of other participants were used, the deficiencies of the text could not be essentially corrected except for some big misunderstandings.

If the theosophical movement has to really intervene in the whole modern culture, it cannot limit itself unilaterally to spread any doctrine, to communicate knowledge concerning this or that, but it has to deal with the most different cultural factors and elements in the present. Theosophy should be no mere doctrine, it should live. It should flow into our acting, feeling and thinking. Now it is in the nature of things that such a movement addressing the heart of the modern culture immediately intervenes where we deal with the leadership in the spiritual life, if it should be capable of surviving. Where else should we look for the leadership of the spiritual life today than in our universities? There really all those should co-operate who work at least if you look at the matter idealistically as bearers of our culture, of our whole spiritual life, who work in the service of truth and progress and in the service of the spiritual movement generally. They should collaborate with young people who prepare for the highest tasks of life.

This would be the big and significant influence that the universities must have on the whole cultural life, the significant influence which comes from them as something authoritative because one cannot deny it, although one may also struggle against any authority in our time: our universities work authoritatively. And it is right in certain respect, because those who have to teach our young people about the highest cultural problems have to be determinative of all questions of the human existence. Thus it is really logical if the whole nation looks at that which the members of the faculties say in any question. That's how it is. Nevertheless, in all our faculties one regards what the university lecturer says about a matter as authoritative.

Thus it seems to me natural that we as theosophists ask ourselves once: how must we position ourselves to the different branches of our university life? No criticism should be offered to our university institutions; this should not be an object of this talk. What will be discussed in this and the following talks should simply give a perspective how the theosophical movement if it is really capable of surviving, if it can really intervene in the impulses of the spiritual movement , can possibly have a fruitful effect on our university life.

A university has four faculties: the divinity (in Germany theological) faculty, the faculty of law, the medical faculty and the arts (in Germany: philosophical) faculty. Indeed, as well as the high educational system is today, we have to include still other colleges in the sense of our present way of thinking and approach to life as a continuation of the university, as it were, namely the colleges of technology, the art colleges etcetera. That will be discussed later in the talk about philosophy. We have to deal with that faculty which in the first times, in the midst of the Middle Ages acquired a leading position in the modern education. In this time, theology at the universities was the “queen of sciences.” Everything that was otherwise done formed a group round the theological scholarship.

The university had arisen from that which the Church had developed in the Middle Ages: from the monastic schools. The old schools had a kind of supplement for that which one needed as worldly knowledge; however, the central issue was theology. These teachers, priests and monks who had experienced the clerical education were active until the end of the Middle Ages. Theology was called the “queen of sciences.” Is it now not quite natural, if you consider the matter in the abstract, ideally to call theology the queen of sciences, and had it not to be this queen if it fulfilled its task in the widest sense of the word? In the centre of the world that stands certainly which we call the primal ground of the world, the divine, in so far as the human being can grasp it. Theology is nothing else than the teachings of this divine. All other must trace back to divine primal forces of existence. If theology wants really to be the teachings of the divine, you cannot imagine it as that it is the central sun of any wisdom and knowledge, and that from it the strength and the energy is emitted to all remaining sciences. In the Middle Ages, it still was in such a way. What the great medieval theologians had to say about the world basically got its light, its most significant strength from the so-called holy science, from theology.

If we want to get an idea of this thinking and of this philosophy of life in the Middle Ages, we can do it with a few words. Any medieval theologian considered the world as a big unity. The divine creativity was on top, at the summit. Below, the single forces and realms of nature existed, dispersed in the manifoldness of the world. What one knew about the forces and realms of nature was the object of the single sciences. What led the human spirit to the clarification of the loftiest questions, what should lighten what the single sciences could not recognise came from theology. Hence, one studied philosophy first. It encompassed all worldly sciences. Then one advanced to the science of theology. The medical faculty and that of law stood somewhat differently in the university life. We can easily conceive an idea how these faculties interrelate if we look at the matter in such a way: philosophy encompassed all sciences, and the divinity faculty considered and dealt with the big question: what is the primal ground, and which are the single phenomena of existence?

This existence proceeds in time. There is a development to perfection, and as human beings we are not only put into the world order, but we ourselves co-operate in the world order. On the one side, the philosophical and the theological faculties consider that which is, which was, and which will be, on the other side, the medical faculty and that of law consider the world in its emergence, the world how it has to be led from the imperfect to the perfect. The medical faculty addresses more the natural life in its imperfection and asks how it should be made better. The law school turns to the moral world and asks how it must be made better. The whole life of the Middle Ages was one single body, and something similar must certainly come again. Again the whole unity, the universitas has to become a living body that has the single faculties as the members of the common life. The modern university is more an aggregate, and the single faculties do not deal a lot with each other. In the Middle Ages, everybody who studied at the university had to acquire a philosophical basic education, that which one calls a general education today, although one has to admit that just those who leave the university today are characterised by the absence of general education.

This was the basis of everything. Also in Goethe's Faust one finds said: the collegium logicum first, then metaphysics. Nevertheless, it is also correct that somebody who generally wants to be introduced into the secrets of the world existence, into the big questions of culture, must have a thorough education in the different branches of knowledge at first. It is no progress that this studium fundamentale has completely disappeared from our university education. In a large part is that which one can know lifeless nature: physics, chemistry, botany, zoology, mathematics etcetera. Not before the student had been introduced into the teachings of thinking, into the laws of logic, into the basic principles of the world or into metaphysics, he could ascend to the other, higher faculties. For the other faculties were called the higher ones with some right. Then he could advance to theology.

Someone who should be taught about the deepest questions of existence had to have learnt something about the simple questions of existence. But also the other faculties presuppose such an educational background. The situation of law and medicine would be much better if such a general previous training were maintained thoroughly, because someone who wants to intervene in the jurisprudence must know how the laws of the human life are generally. It must be understood lively what can lead a human being to the good or to the bad. You must be grasped not only in such a way as you are grasped from the dead letter of law, but you must be grasped like from life, like from something with which you are intimately related. These human beings must have the circumference first because the human being is really a microcosm in which all laws are living. Hence, one has to know the physical laws above all. Thus the university would have to be, correctly thought, an organism of the whole human knowledge. However, the divinity faculty would have to stimulate any other knowledge. Theology, the teachings of the divine world order, cannot exist at all unless it is inserted to the smallest and biggest of our existence, unless one deepens everything into the divine world order.

But, how should anybody be able to say anything about the divine world order who knows nothing about the minerals, nothing about the plants, animals and human beings, about the origin of the earth, about the nature of our planetary system? God's revelation is everywhere, and there is nothing that does not express the voice of the divinity. The human being has to link everything that the human being has and is and acts to these loftiest questions which the theological science should treat.

Now we must ask ourselves: does the divinity faculty position itself in this way in life today? Does it work in such a way that its strength and energy can flow from it to all remaining life? I would like to give no criticism, but an objective portrayal of the relations if possible. In the last time, even theology is brought somewhat into discredit, even within the religious movement. You have maybe heard something of the name Kalthoff (Albert K., 1850–1906, Protestant theologian) who has written Zarathustra sermons. He says that the religion must not suffer from the letters of theology; we do not want theology, but religion. These are people who are able to find the world of religious world view from their immediate conviction.

Now we ask ourselves whether this view can persist whether it can be true that religion without theology, sermon without theology is possible. In the first times of Christianity and also in the Middle Ages, this was not the case. Also in the first centuries of modern times, it was not in such a way. Only today, a kind of conflict has happened between the immediate religious effectiveness and theology, which has apparently turned away somewhat from life. In the first times of the Christianity, somebody was basically a theologian who could see up to the highest summits of existence because of his wisdom and science. Theology was something living, was something that lived in the first Church Fathers, that animated such spirits like Clement of Alexandria, like Origenes, like Scotus Erigena and St. Augustine; it was theology that animated them. It was that which lived like lifeblood in them. If the words came on their lips, they did not need to confide any dogma, then they knew how to speak intensively to the hearts. They found the words which were got out of any heart. The sermon was permeated with soul and religious currents. But it would not have been in such a way unless inside of these personalities the view of the loftiest beings in the highest form had lived in which the human being can attain this.

Such dogmatism is impossible which discusses every word in the abstract that is spoken in the everyday life. But somebody who wants to be a teacher of the people has to have experienced the highest form of knowledge with wisdom. He must have the resignation, the renunciation of that which is immediate to him; he must strive and experience what introduces him into the highest form of knowledge in loneliness, in the cell, far from the hustle and bustle of the world where he can be alone with his God, with his thinking and his heart. He must have the possibility to look up at the spiritual heights of existence. Without any fanaticism, without any desire, even without any religious desire, but in purely spiritual devotion that is free of everything that also appears, otherwise, in the longing of the religions. The conversation with God and the divine world order takes place in this lonesome height, at the summit of the human thinking.

One has to develop, one has to have attained resignation, renunciation to lead this lofty soliloquy and to have it living in oneself and to let work it as lifeblood in the words which are the contents of the popular doctrines. Then we have found the right stage of theology and sermon, of science and life.

Someone who sits below feels that this flows out of depths that it is got down from high scientific heights of wisdom. Then it needs no external authority, then the word itself is authority by the strength which lives in the soul of the teacher, because it settles in the heart by this strength to work with the echo of the heart. One achieved the harmony between religion and theology, and at the same time one tactfully distinguished theology and religious instruction. But anybody who has not climbed up to the theological heights who is not informed about the deepest questions of the spiritual existence will not slip that in his words which should live in the words of the preacher as a result of the dialogue with the divine world order itself.

This was really the opinion that one had in the Christian world view about the relation between theology and sermon for centuries. A good sermon would be that if a preacher steps only then in front of the people, after he has occupied himself with the high teachings of the Trinity of God, of the divinity and of the announcement of the Logos in the world, of the high metaphysical significance of Christ's personality. One must have accepted all these teachings that are understandable only for someone who has dealt with them for many, many years. These teachings may establish the contents of philosophy and other sciences at first; one has to make his thinking ripe for this truth. Only then one can penetrate these heights of truth. To someone who has achieved this, who knows something about the high ideas of the Trinity, of the Logos the Bible verses become something in his mouth that wins another liveliness than it has at first without this preceding theological schooling. Then he freely uses the Bible verses, then he creates that current from him to the community within the Bible verses which causes an influence of the divine creativity in the hearts of the crowd. Then he not only interprets the Bible but he handles it. Then he speaks in such a way, as if he himself had participated in the writing of the great truths which are written in this ancient religious book. He looked into the bases from which the great truths of the Bible originated. He knows what those have felt who were once much more influenced by the spiritual world than he is, and what is expressed in the Bible verses as the divine world government and human order of salvation. He has not only the word that he has to comment and to interpret, but behind him the great powerful writers stand whose pupil, disciple and successor he is. He speaks out of their spirit and he himself puts their spirit, which they have put into it, into the writing now.

This was the basis of developing authority in this or that epoch. As an ideal the human being had it in mind, it was often carried out. However, our time has also brought about a big reversal here. Let us consider the big reversal once again, which took place from the Middle Ages to the modern times. What happened at that time? What made it possible that Copernicus, Galilei, Giordano Bruno could announce a new world view? This new movement became possible because the human being approached nature immediately that he himself wanted to see that he did not rest on old documents as in the Middle Ages, but went straight to the natural existence. It was different in the medieval science. There the basic sciences were not derived from an unbiased consideration of nature, but from that which the Greek philosopher Aristoteles had schemed. Aristoteles was the authority during the whole Middle Ages.

One taught referring to him. The lecturer of metaphysics and logic had his books. He interpreted them. Aristoteles was an authority.

This changed with the reversal from the Middle Ages to the modern times. Copernicus himself wanted to scheme what is given by the immediate view. Galilei shone on the world of the immediate existence. Kepler found the big world law according to which the planets orbit the sun.

That's how it was in the past centuries. One wanted to see independently. One also told in anecdotes what occurred to Galilei: there was a scholar who knew his Aristoteles. One said something to him that Galilei had said. He answered that this must be different: I must have a look at Aristoteles, because he said it differently, and, nevertheless, Aristoteles is right. The authority was more important to him than the immediate view. But the time was ripe, one wanted now to know something independently. This does not require that everybody is immediately able to acquire this view fairly quickly, but it only requires that people are there who are able to approach nature that they are equipped with the instruments and tools and with the methods, which are necessary to observe nature. Progress thereby became possible. One can interpret what Aristoteles wrote; but one cannot progress thereby. Somebody can progress only if he himself progresses if he himself sees the things.

The past four centuries applied this principle of self-knowledge to all external knowledge, to everything that spreads out before our senses. First in physics, then in chemistry, then in the science of life, then in the historical sciences.

Everything was included in this self-observation, in the external looking of the sensory world. One withdrew from the principle of authority. What has not been included in this principle of own knowledge was the view of the spiritually effective in the world, the immediate knowledge of that which is there not for the senses, but only for the mind. Hence, something appears during the last centuries, concerning this science and wisdom of the mind that one could once not speak of. Now we could go back to the oldest times. We want to do it, however, only to the first times of Christianity. There we have a science of the divine, then a great doctrine of the world origin which reaches down to our immediate sensuous surroundings. If you look at the great sages of former centuries, you can see everywhere how this way is taken from the highest point down to the lowest existence, so that no gap is between that which is said by the divine world order in theology and what we say about the sensory world. One had a comprehensive view of the origin of the planets and our earth. But one does no longer need to inform this today. However, someone who observes the development in the course of time can also accept that one goes beyond our wisdom. Time goes beyond the form of our science as we have gone beyond the former forms.

What existed at that time was a uniform world edifice that stood before the soul, and the basis of the soul was the spirit. One saw the primal ground of existence in the spirit. That comes from the spirit which is not spirit. The world is the reflection of the infinite spirit of God. And then that comes from the spirit of God which we find as higher spiritual beings in the different religious systems and also that which is the most powerful on this world: the human being, then the animals, the plants and the minerals. One had a uniform world view of the origin of a solar system up to the formation of the mineral. The atom was chained together with God himself although one never dared to recognise God himself. One sought the divine in the world. The spiritual was its expression. Those who wanted to know something about the highest heights of existence strove for educating themselves in such a way that they could recognise the sensory world. They wanted to conceive ideas of that which is above the sensory world, of the spiritual world order. They could ascend from the simple sensory knowledge to the comprehensive knowledge of the spiritual that way. If we look at the ancient cosmologies, we find no interruption between the teachings of theology and what the single worldly sciences say about the things of our existence. Link is attached to link continuously. One had started from the core of spirit up to the circumference of our earthly existence.

One took another path in modern times. One simply directed the senses and what is regarded to be arms of the senses, as strengthening instruments of sense-perception, to the world. In brilliant, tremendous way one developed the world view that teaches us something about the external sensory world. Everything is not yet explained, but one can get an idea already today how this science of the sensuous things advances. However, something was thereby interrupted, namely the immediate connection between the world science and the divine science.

The picture of the world origin, of cosmology which is the most usual even today even if it is disputed, is found in the so-called Kant-Laplace world view. In order to orient ourselves, we want to say a few words about it to see then what signifies such a Kant-Laplace world view to us. It says: once there was a big world nebula, rather thin. If we could sit on chairs in space and watch, and if it were somewhat visible for finer eyes, this world nebula is organised perhaps because it cooled down. It establishes a centre in itself, rotates, pushes off rings which form to planets, and in this way you know this hypothesis such a solar system forms, which has the sun as a spring of life and heat. However, what is developed that way must find an end in such a way, as it develops. Kant and others admit that again new worlds form et etcetera.

What is now such a world view that the modern researcher tries to compose from the scientific experiences of physics, chemistry etcetera? This is something that would have to be sense-perceptible in all stages. Now try once to really imagine this world view. What is absent in it? The spirit is absent. It is a material process, a process which can happen in microcosm with an oil drop in water at which you can look with your eyes. The process of world origin is made sense-perceptible. The spirit was not involved in the origin of such a solar system. Hence, it is not surprising that the question is raised: how does life originate, and how does the spirit originate? Because one originally imagined the lifeless matter only which moves according to its own principles.

What one has not experienced one can get out impossibly of the concepts. One can only get out what has been put in. If one imagines a world system which is empty which is devoid of spirit, then it must remain inconceivable how spirit and life can exist in this world. The question can never be answered out of the Kant-Laplace theory how life and spirit can originate. The science of modern times is just a sensuous science. Hence, it has taken up that part of the world in its theory of world origin which is a section of the whole world. Your body represents you in your entirety as little as matter is the whole world.

Just as it is true that life, feelings, thoughts, impulses are in your body which one cannot see if one looks at your body with sensuous eyes, it is true that the spirit is also in the world. However, it is also true that the Kant-Laplace theory shows the body only. As little as the anatomist who shows the structure of the human body is able to say how a thought can arise from the blood and the nerves if he thinks only materially, just as little anybody who thinks the world system according to Kant-Laplace can get to the spirit one day. As little as somebody who is blind and cannot see the light can say anything about our sensory world, as little as anybody who does not have the immediate view of the spirit can explain that something spiritual exists besides the physical body. The modern science lacks in the view of the spiritual. The progress is based on its one-sidedness, just in this way the human being can reach the unilaterally highest height. Because science confines itself to the sensuous, it reaches its high development. However, it becomes an oppressive authority, because this science has founded ways of thinking. These are stronger than all theories, stronger than even all dogmas.

One gets used to searching science in the sensuous, and thereby the fact creeps into the ways of thinking of the modern human being since four centuries that the sensuous became the only real to him. Hence, one generally believes that the sensory world is the only real one. Something that is justified as a theory became way of thinking, and someone who looks deeper into this thinking knows which infinitely suggestive strength such an active way of thinking has on the human beings for centuries. It worked on all circles. Like a human being who is exposed to suggestion, the whole modern educated humanity is exposed to the suggestion that only that which one perceives with the senses, can grasp with the hands is the only real. Humanity has given up from regarding the spirit as something real. But this has nothing to do with a theory, but only with the accustomed forms of thinking. These sit much, much deeper than any understanding. One can prove this by epistemology and philosophy which are not sufficiently developed in us, unfortunately. The whole modern science is influenced by these modern ways of thinking. With somebody who speaks today about the origin of the animals and about the origin of the world this way of thinking sits in the background, and he can't help giving such a colouring to his words and concepts that they make the powerful impression by themselves that it is real.

It is different with that which one merely thinks. One has to advance so far today to recognise the deeper reality in that which one only thinks. One has to become capable to behold the spirit. This is not to be attained with books and talks, not with theories and new dogmas, but with intimate self-education, which intervenes in the customs of the soul of the modern human being. The human being has to recognise first that it is not absolutely necessary to regard the sensuous-real as the only real, but he has to realise that he exercises something that was stimulated for centuries. One thinks this way. It flows into the original feeling of the human beings. These are not aware that they have illusions because they got them from the beginning. This impression works too strong, even on an idealist, so that he emphasises and lets flow the things into the souls of his fellow men that only the sensuous-real is the real.

With this transformation of the ways of thinking the development of theology took place. What is theology? It is the science of the divine as it is handed down since millenniums. It scoops from the Bible as the science of the Middle Ages scooped from Aristoteles. But it is just the teaching of theology that no revelation continues forever, but that the world and the words of the old revelations change. In the doctrine of the Catholic Church, the immediate spiritual life does no longer flow; it depends there on whether there are persons from who the spiritual life can still flow. If we grasp it this way, we have to say that also theology is subject to the materialistic thinking.

Once one did not understand the Six-day Work in such a way, as if it had happened purely materially in six days. One did not have the odd idea that one has not to study Christ to understand Him, but one has only pointed to the fact that the Logos was incarnated once in the human being Jesus. Unless one advanced so far, one did not arrogate a judgement to recognise what lived there from 1 to 33 A.D. Today one sees in Jesus – he is also called the “simple man from Nazareth” only a man like anyone, only nobler and more idealised. Theology has also become materialistic. These are the essentials that the theological world view does no longer look up to the summits of spirit, but wants to understand purely rationally, materialistically what happened historically. Nobody can understand the life work of Christ who looks at it only as history who only wants to know how that looked and spoke who strolled in Palestine from 1 up to 33 A.D. And nobody can make a claim to say that in him anything else did not live than in other human beings. Or is anybody able to argue away what he says: to me all power is given in heaven and on earth? But one wants to understand the matters historically today.

What was spoken in a speech on the 31st May, 1904 with a pastoral conference in Alsace-Lorraine is very typical. There a professor Lobstein from Strassburg held a talk Truth and Poetry in our Religion; a speech which is deeply likeable and shows how the materialistic theologian wants to find the way with the external research. Someone who approaches the Gospels with materialistic ways of thinking tries to understand first of all, when they were written. There he can rely only on the external documents, on that which the external history delivers as material. However, what was handed down comes basically from a much later time than it is normally assumed. If one takes the external word, one gets around to saying: the Gospels are inconsistent with each another. One has put together the three Synoptics who can be reconciled; one has to consider the St. John's Gospel separately. Hence, it has become for many something like a poem. One has also examined the epistles of Paul and has found that only this or that part is authentic. These facts constituted the basis of the religious research.

Hence, the religious history or dogma history became the most important science. Not the experience of the dogmatic truth is important today, but the religious history, the external representation of the events at that time. One wants to investigate this. However, it should not depend on this at all. This may be important to a materialistic history. but it is not theology. Theology does not have to investigate, when the dogma of Trinity originated, when it was pronounced first or was written down, but what it means, what it announces to us, what it may offer as living, as fertile to the inner life.

Thus it has come that one talks as a professor of theology about truth and poetry in our religion. One has found that there are contradictions in the writings. One has shown that some matters do not agree with the natural sciences; these are the miracles. One does not try to understand them, but one simply says that they are not possible. Thus one got around to introducing the concept of poetry in the Holy Scripture. One says that it does not lose any value, but that the story is a kind of myth or poetry. One must not be under the illusion that everything is fact, but one must come to recognise that our Holy Scripture is composed of poetry and truth.

This is based on a lack of knowledge about the nature of poetry. Poetry is something else than what the human beings imagine as poetry today. Poetry arose from the spirit. Poetry itself has a religious origin. Before there was poetry, there were already events like the Greek dramas to which the Greeks pilgrimaged like to the Eleusinian mysteries. This is the original drama. If it was practised, it was science for the Greeks, but also spiritual reality at the same time. It was beauty and art at the same time, however, also religious edification. Poetry was nothing else than the external form which should express truth of the higher plane, not only symbolically, but really. This forms the basis of every true poetry. Therefore, Goethe says: poetry is not art, but an interpretation of the secret physical principles that would never have become obvious without it. That is why Goethe calls only someone “poet” who is anxious to recognise truth and to express it in beauty. Truth, beauty and goodness are the forms to express the divine.

Hence, we cannot speak about poetry and truth in religion. Our time does no longer have correct concepts of poetry. It does not know how poetry streams from the spring of truth. Hence, every word wins something from it. We have to get again to the correct concept of poetry. We have to understand what poetry was originally and apply it to that which theology has to investigate. We probably say: ye shall know them by their fruits. Where to has theology got ? In a book which made a great stir in the last time, and which the people have accepted because a modern theologian has written it I mean What is Christianity? (1901) by Harnack (Adolf H.,1851–1930, Protestant theologian) there is a place, and this place reads: “the Easter message tells of the miraculous event in the garden of Joseph of Arimathea that, nevertheless, no eye has seen, of the empty grave into which some women and disciples looked, of the phenomena of the transfigured Lord glorified so much that his followers could not recognise him immediately , then also of speeches and actions of the risen Christ; the reports became more and more complete and confident. However, the faith in Easter is the conviction of the victory of the crucified over death, of God's strength and justice and of the life of that who is the first-born among many brothers. As to St. Paul, the basis of his faith in Easter was the certainty that “the second Adam” had come from heaven, and the experience that God revealed his son as a living one to him on the way to Damascus.”

The theosophical world view tries to lead the human beings upwards to understand this great mystery. The theologian says: Today we do no longer know what happened, actually, in the Garden of Gethsemane. We also do not know the quality of the messages about the events that the disciples deliver to us. We also do not know how to estimate the value of the words about the risen Christ in the epistles of Paul. We cannot cope with it. But one thing is certain: the faith in the risen Saviour started from these events, and we want to keep to the faith and do not care about its basis. You find a concept in the modern dogmatism that is strange for someone who looks for reasons of truth. One says: one cannot explain it metaphysically. No contradiction is possible, but also no explanation. There remains only the third, the religious truth.

In Trier, they once put up the Holy Robe of Jesus in the belief that the robe can work miracles. This belief has disappeared, because every belief can be held only by the fact that it is confirmed by experience. However, there remains the fact that some have experienced this; there remains the subjective religious experience.

Those who say this are allegedly no materialists. In their theory, they are not, but in their ways of thinking, in the way as they want to investigate the spiritual. This is the basis of the spiritual life of our idealists and spiritists. They all have accepted the materialistic ways of thinking. Also those are materialists who want to sit together in a meeting room and want to look at materialised ghosts. Spiritism has become possible because of our materialistic ways of thinking. Today, one visits the spirit materialistically. All idealistic theories are of no avail, as long as the knowledge of the spirit remains a mere theory, as long as it does not become life.

This requires a renewal, a renaissance of theology. It is necessary that not only faith exists, but that the immediate intuition flows in it with those who have to announce the word of the divine world order. The theosophical world view also wants to lead from the belief in the documents, in books and stories to an observation of the spirit by self-education. The same way which our science has taken shall be taken in the spiritual life, in the spiritual wisdom. We have to arrive at the experience of the spiritual again. Science, even wisdom, decides nothing here. Not by logic, not by contemplation you can investigate anything. The logic of your soul invents a sensuous world system. However, spiritual experience fills our understanding with real contents. It is the higher spiritual experience that has to fill our concepts with spiritual contents. That is why a renaissance of theology takes place only if one understands the word of the apostle Paul: all wisdom of the human beings is not able to understand the divine wisdom. Science itself is not able to do it. Just as little the external life can grasp this spiritual world. Any reflection cannot lead to the spirit; as little as anybody who sits on a distant island finds great physical truths without instruments and without scientific methods one day.

To the human beings something must occur that goes beyond wisdom that leads to the immediate life. As well as our eyes and ears inform us about the sensuous reality, we must experience the spiritual reality directly. Then our wisdom can reach it. Paul did never say: wisdom is the precondition to reach the divine. Not before we have found the whole world wisdom, we are able again to bring together the whole. Not before we have a spiritual system of world evolution again as we have a materialistic one on the other side we must not have the old faith, but behold, here and there , then the sensuous and the spiritual unite in a chain, and one will be able to descend again from the spirit to the teachings of the sensuous science.

The theosophical world view wants to bring that. It does not want to be theology, not a bookish knowledge and also not the interpretation of any book, but it wants experience of the spiritual life, it wants to give communications of the experiences of this spiritual life. The same spiritual strength also speaks to us today that once spoke with the announcement of the religious systems. It has to be the task of that who wants to teach something of the divine world order that he looks for the rise where he can speak again lonely in the heart with the spiritual heart of the world. Then the reversal takes place in our faculty which took place from the Middle Ages to the modern times in the fields of the external natural sciences. Then it occurs that if anybody announces anything of the spirit, and someone faces him with the words: however, one reads that differently in the scriptures, he eventually convinces him or not. Perhaps, he also says to him: however, I believe more in the scriptures than in that which quite a few people may tell about the immediate experience. But the course of the spiritual life cannot be impeded. May there be many inhibitions, may those be ever so reluctant who work for theology in the sense of the mentioned medieval follower of Aristotle today, the reversal which must take place here cannot be impeded. As knowledge has risen from faith up to watching, we also ascend from faith to the watching in the spiritual realm, and behold in theosophy. Then there is no belief in letters, no theology, then there will be lively life. The spirit of life will let those participate who can hear it. The word will forge ahead and find the popular expression. The spirit speaks of the spirit. Life will be there, and theology will be the soul of this religious life.

Theosophy has this vocation concerning the divinity faculty. If theosophy represents a movement that wants to be capable of surviving, that can make life and lifeblood flow into the letters of the scholarship, then we have a certain mission. Who understands the matter in such a way does not regard us as adversaries of those who have to announce the word. If the theologians seriously dealt with the intentions of the theosophical movement, if they got involved in our intentions, they would see something in theosophy that could inspire and animate them. Not fragmentation, but the deepest peace could be between the theologically and theosophically striving human beings. One will recognise this in the course of time. One will overcome the prejudices against the theosophical movement and understand how true it is what Goethe said:

Who has science and art,
Has religion too;
Who doesn't have both,
Shall have religion.

Theosophy does not fight against any religion in any way. Somebody is a right theosophist who wishes that wisdom may flow into those who are appointed to speak to humanity, so that it should not be necessary that there are theosophists who tell something about the immediate religious view. Theosophy can welcome the day with pleasure when one speaks of wisdom in the sites from which religion should be announced. If the theologians announce the right religion that way, one does no longer need theosophy.

Note: The transcript of the four “faculty” lectures are deficient. It shows not only noticeable gaps; the author of the transcript is also not familiar with the topic of the lectures. He often made summaries in haste as far as he understood the lecturer. That is why some connections shifted. Although notices of other participants were used, the deficiencies of the text could not be essentially corrected except for some big misunderstandings.

If any issue seems to be far away from theosophy, then from the issue of this talk that tries to connect the study of law and the juridical life with the theosophical movement. Someone can only accept this as entitled who realises how deeply the theosophical movement is understood as a practical one by those who are involved in it who know its whole significance. The real theosophist takes no stock in theories and dogmas. However, the essentials of the theosophical movement are that it intervenes in the immediate life. If one speaks possibly of the theosophical movement that it has no connection with the practical life, then this may be due only to a complete misjudgement or misunderstanding of this movement.

Compared with the theosophical movement, a big number of the remaining movements appear eminently impractical because they are partial movements, without knowledge of the big connection and without knowledge of the great principles of life. Just in this respect, some question of life will occupy us. What could intervene in our life even deeper than jurisprudence? Of course, in the sense of the theosophical world view we deal less with the right or the laws. Rather we have to do it with the real relations as they face us, namely with those which face us in the figure of the human being itself, actually in our jurisprudence in the figure of our practical lawyers themselves. Hence, the topic does not have the heading The Faculty of Law and Theosophy for nothing.

Above all, it concerns the question: how does one instruct the human beings who are appointed to intervene in the violated right and compensate it? How does the university train the necessary elements, how does it instruct the lawyers? In the last talk on the divinity faculty and theosophy which could demonstrate the much more intimate relation of theosophy to our university, I had to tell you how the matters are correlated. Not so much the materialistic way of thinking as the rather deep, in the human souls deeply rooted ways of thinking of our time are those which put a certain main feature into our life. This will occupy us still more today.

You see, with one single fact I could illustrate the situation in which we are if we touch the topic: the faculty of law and the theosophical movement. Who has dealt with the faculty of law only in some degree knows the name Rudolf of Jhering (1818–1892) not only because of his writing: The Struggle for Law (1872). Everybody also knows, which significance his great work has: Laws as Means to an End (1877–1883).

In this work something is created that is basic for a whole sum of principal views in our conception of legality and in our jurisprudence. Jhering was certainly one of our most significant legal scholars. Who was lucky to be present once at a talk of Jhering knows how impressively this teacher of law has spoken. It was something frank in his nature. I still remember that Jhering said in a lesson: I have spoken for the last time about this or that question; I have considered the thing once again and have still to inform about essential changes. Among those who have done something similar in other fields the physicist Helmholtz (1821–1894) has to be mentioned who had such great results with his significant works, in spite of the modest way in which he worked. I instance Jhering because he worked originally and deeply.

He was an excellent lawyer who deeply intervened in jurisprudence of our days. In his work Laws as Means to an End you find an important sentence. I would like to read out it literally: “If I have ever regretted that my development took place in a period when philosophy got to discredit, it concerns the present work, too. What the young man missed at that time under the disfavour of the ruling mood, the mature man could not catch up.” Such a remark points to a deep lack concerning the education of the lawyers. What has lacked here, you find this not only expressed in the whole public life, as far as it is dependent on juridical relations, but also in the literature, not only the juridical one, but the whole literature, as far as this is influenced by juridical thinking. You find it also in all reform literature. You find it everywhere, also in the practical life because the most important is absent, namely a real knowledge of life and of the human soul.

Why is it absent? Because our impractical practitioners have no idea how the everyday life is connected with the deep principles of the single human soul. Look around with our economists, look around with those who write or speak in the service of a reform movement. Who has a mathematically trained thinking who is able to build up his chain of thoughts strictly logically sees that it is absent everywhere, and he remembers a significant speech that John Stuart Mill (1806–1873, English philosopher) held where he says that it is necessary above all that a real education of thinking, an education concerning the most elementary principles of the soul life penetrates our public relations.

It doesn't take much to train his thoughts in this way as it would be necessary to become a reformer really. Three weeks would be enough if one got involved in a real theory of principles of thinking. Indeed, then you have only the possibility to think correctly and educated, but who thinks correctly and educated, puts aside a lot of what is written today because he cannot endure what a jumble of impossible thinking is contained in it. Realise only once that this is a practical question in the most remarkable sense. If one wanted to build a tunnel and started drilling and digging with the knowledge of the usual bricklayer on one side of the mountain and believed that he came out without fail on the other side and has built a big tunnel, you would presumably consider him a fool. But today in all fields of life one does this in almost the same manner.

What is necessary to construct a tunnel, a railway, a bridge? The knowledge of the first principles of mathematics and mechanics and of that what enables us from the start to foresee something of the layers and formations of the mountain. Only a skilled engineer is able to initiate such a work really, and only that is the real practitioner who approaches the praxis on the basis of the complete theory. The world completely overlooks the most important questions of life, nay, one calls just those impractical people who believe that knowledge is necessary to solve the big questions of life. So we see the failed tunnels in all fields of human life because of insufficient basic knowledge. People do not realise that it is necessary, before one approaches a practical reform movement, to acquire the whole basic knowledge of the human soul and to get things straight concerning the possibilities and impossibilities in this and that field.

This comes to the fore in the explanations of the great lawyer concerning the basic education. For he missed such a basic philosophical education concerning his science and admitted that sincerely. Hence, you see that I am faraway to criticise a single person or an institution. I wanted only to give a characteristic of the relations that face us in life. Then our question will answer itself the easiest which practical significance the theosophical movement has for jurisprudence.

Jurisprudence developed most unfavourably in the course of the historical relations because it developed as it expresses itself in the most different legal systems and schools only in a time in which the materialistic thinking had already seized all circles. The other sciences go back to the older times, and those which rest on natural history have their support in the steady facts which does not allow to deviate so easily in all directions.

Of course, someone who builds a bridge wrong sees very soon the results of his dilettantish action. It is not so simple, however, with the facts that face us in the spiritual field. There one can fudge, and one can contend whether a thing is good or bad. There is apparently no objective criterion. However, there will also be objective criteria gradually in this respect. I said that Jhering missed a basic philosophical education with himself. I say that one can miss this where one intervenes in our life.

You may say that philosophy is not theosophy. But that matters. In certain respect, philosophy was the basic discipline of all remaining studies for some time in the 16th, 17th centuries, even in the 18th century until the 19th century. We have seen last time which disadvantage it has brought to theology that philosophy was no longer this basis of the studies. But in theology there is a substitute of the lacking philosophical study. There is no substitute on the field of law. When the old high schools had developed from the old schools, philosophy was caught a little bit between two stools. Once there were pre-studies at all universities where the students got an overview of the manifold disciplines by which they could also get an overview of the principles of life. Nobody advanced to the higher faculties without having acquired a real knowledge of the principles of life. Now one considers philosophising redundant because one believes that the high school gives the general education. But today also this has disappeared in the high schools. Only few old-fashioned people represent the point of view even today that one should do a little logic and psychology also in the high school.

Thus it happened that the study of law became a one-sided professional study. The other faculties have basically also no own pre-studies which provide a general, real knowledge of life and a deep sight into the riddles and the questions of life. Hence, the students early approach the special questions and must necessarily obsess about these special problems more and more. Thus it happened that the lawyer is already steered in a particular direction during his education. This does not refer to details; but someone who has been filled with particular forms of concepts for years can no longer get away from these concepts. The requirements are those that he must consider everybody as a fool who has kept a certain freedom of thinking with regard to such concepts that have become quite solid for him during his academic years.

Philosophy became something that has no connection with life in a certain respect just in that time in which our modern thinking developed. In the Middle Ages, there was no philosophy which was separated, I mean, which was separated practically from theology. Everything that philosophy treated went back to the big and comprehensive questions of existence. This has changed in modern times. Philosophy has emancipated itself; it has become a science because it has no longer any direct connection with the central issues of life. I will explain this in the talk on the arts faculty in detail. That is why it has happened that one could study philosophy for centuries without connecting anything really living with its terminology. In the 18-th century there still was something that made philosophy the world wisdom. When Schelling, Hegel and Fichte came, the immediate life was grasped. However, these spirits were not understood. A short heyday was there in the first time of the 19-th century. Then, however, one generally did not understand how to connect philosophy really with life and to found such a connection between life and the highest principles of thinking in all fields as it exists between mathematics, the differential calculus and the bridge building.

We want that those who work on life realise that it is necessary to have certain requirements as one must have studied mathematics before one constructs a bridge. Theosophy does not want to teach dogmas, but a way of thinking and an approach to life; the approach to life which should be the opposite of messing about everything, which should found a view of life on serious principles. You need to know nothing about the principles and, nevertheless, you can be a good theosophist if you simply want to go to the origin of the matters. Philosophy is to blame if it is discredited by those who prepare themselves for the big questions of life, because it should just be a kind of world wisdom. Those who developed our legal wisdom to the legal system could not go back to the philosophical attitude. The natural sciences still go back to mathematics, of course, go back to the rational, to mechanics et etcetera, and anybody cannot be a naturalist who does not know these first principles really.

The development of law shows the necessity to acquire an awareness of the fact that also the law must arise from a basic education which is as certain as the mathematical one. It is interesting that that nation which developed the right in the most eminent sense became great in the history of humanity by the development of law that the Roman people, magnificent just in this field, was small concerning that way of thinking which one must demand also for this field: the Romans did not achieve a single mathematical theorem! A totally unmathematical and inexact way of thinking formed the basis of the Roman thinking. Hence, the prejudice crept in the course of centuries that it would be impossible to have such a basis for the fields of jurisprudence and social science as one has it for the remaining technical fields.

I would like to quote a typical symptom of this fact. Fifteen years ago, an important lawyer acceded the presidency of the university of Vienna, Adolf Exner (1841–1894). He was a significant teacher of the Roman right. He spoke about the political education with his appointment. The whole sense of his talk was that it would be a mistake to appreciate the natural sciences so much, because the scientific thinking is not suited to intervene anyhow practically in the social and ethical questions of existence. Against it, he emphasised the necessity that would be founded upon the view of the juridical relations. Then he explained how the juridical conditions cannot be influenced by the scientific thinking. He says: in the natural sciences we look into the first principles. We see how in simple cases the matters are, but in the complex cases of life nobody can lead back the matters to such simple condition.

It is typical that a great man of our time not even sees that it would be our task to create a thinking as clear and transparent in the field of life as we were able to create it in the fields of the external sensuous natural phenomena. This must be just our task to realise that we can be effective only practically in the external field of the big tunnel construction if we are able to lead back all matters of life also to sharp concepts as we are able to lead back the rough matters to mathematical concepts. Jhering says in his book Laws as Means to an End that it is a big lack of our law education as well as in our practical legal life that the human beings who have to introduce anyway in the law are not trained in such a way to work immediately educationally, immediately technically learning, teaching and working in life. Then he says that one can be a lawyer, as well as one is a mathematician who has solved his task if he has carried out his calculation.

Again Jhering does not realise that mathematics has real significance only, since the thinking of the natural sciences has gained significance. One has found the way from the head to the hand if anything becomes practical activity. Then everything is of practical significance that is connected with jurisprudence and the social ethics if it is as clear as it is with mathematics which is necessary if one builds a tunnel. Then one also realises that any partial attempt looks in such a way, as if anybody carved stones, heaped them and believed that a house would come into being. Nothing is conquered or built in the field of the feminist movement or any other social movement unless a plan forms the basis of the whole. Otherwise the carving of stones would be an eminently impractical work.

It does not matter that we stuff ourselves with theories and we could derive all details from the big principles if we absorbed the system. We have to work free of dilettantism and to implement the big principles in life, in the immediate life. We have to work like the engineer works with that what he has learnt even if he has a much lower task, namely to intervene in the lifeless existence. We have to work like somebody works, after he has investigated the whole principles and has recognised them correctly. It is important to recognise the real principles of existence and to be connected with them. Otherwise nothing can be accomplished in the field of law in particular.

It is quite certain that hardly a lawyer leaves our institutions who is not prejudiced by a system of concepts unless he has before got to know the science of life in the conceivably biggest circumference. It is hard to speak popularly just about this question today. One cannot go into particular examples of the legal life, because today, unfortunately, it is a fact that jurisprudence is the most unpopular science, not only because it is liked least of all, but also because it has the least effect.

The juridical thinking can hardly be proportioned with healthy thinking and harmonised even less with life. Many among you doubt that one can obtain firm principles in jurisprudence and in the social life as one can gain them for the natural sciences directed to the sensuous. One requirement would be that our time again would get involved to seek where the human being still had a higher exact thinking and where one tried once to bring some concepts to a clear shape similar to mathematics. Everybody has the possibility, to familiarise himself on the cheap. Take a Reclam booklet in hand: The Self-Sufficient Trading State by Johann Gottlieb Fichte. I am far away to defend the contents of this booklet or to attribute any significance to it for our modern life. I wanted only to show how one can also proceed in this fields as practically as mathematics proceeds with the bridge building. Nevertheless, life becomes something particular in a given case. Someone who puts up general principles cannot apply them in life. It is just the same case with the natural sciences. Real ellipses, real circles exist nowhere. You know that one of Kepler's laws is this that the planets orbit the sun. Do you believe that this is applicable in this simplicity? Realise once whether the earth really depicts an ellipse which we draw on the board. Nevertheless, it is most necessary that we approach reality with such things, although they do not exist really.

Mathematics also does not exist in the immediate life, and, nevertheless, we use it in the immediate life. Not before one will see that there is anything, also in relation to the legal life, that is positioned to life like mathematics to nature, one will also be able to have a healthy view of this legal life again. However, the knowledge exists that there is a kind of mathematics, a way of thinking for the whole life; this knowledge and nothing else is theosophy!

Mathematics is nothing else than an internal experience. You can nowhere learn externally what mathematics is. There is no mathematical theorem which would not have resulted from self-knowledge, the self-knowledge of the mind in time and space. We need such self-knowledge. There is such self-knowledge also for the higher fields of existence. There is a mathesis as the Gnostics say. It is not mathematics what we apply to life, but something similar. There is such a thing also concerning jurisprudence and medicine, also concerning all fields of life and, above all, also concerning the social cooperation of the human beings. Any talking of mysticism as of something unclear is based on the fact that one does not know what mysticism is. Therefore, the Gnostics, the great mystics of the first Christian centuries, called their teachings mathesis because they formed a self-knowledge from it. If one has recognised this, one also knows what theosophy wants, and that one should be afraid without theosophical attitude to lift even a finger concerning the practical questions of life, as one must also be afraid to drill the Simplon Tunnel without knowledge of geology and mathematics.

This is the big severity that forms the basis of the theosophical world view, and what we have to keep in sight also clearly if we talk about such questions like about jurisprudence. Only then we have a healthy juridical education again if our greatest lawyers do not have to complain of a lacking basis of our knowledge if one has developed an awareness again, how that would be as I have suggested. This is the mishap of jurisprudence how it has developed during the last centuries when one did no longer know that there is such a thing like mathesis. The great philosopher Leibniz was a magnificent lawyer, a great practitioner and a great mathematician; who knows philosophy, knows him only too well. This may be to you a guarantee that Leibniz had a right view of these matters. What does he say about a juridical education without a basic practical training? He says: you will be in the legal life like in a labyrinth from which you find no exit. So single reforms are sought just concerning the legal life. There is a legal alliance; it is led by a former theologian. He tries in certain way to substitute our juridical concepts by something healthier. But also here one sees how from the sciences which are less accustomed to an exact thinking than the mathematicians and the physical scientists also nothing beneficial results. You find everywhere that the real insight of the question of fault is absent. Not before one recognises what is concerned, one realises that one has to know life before one has the norms of life. Only then we will have a healthy study.

The lawyer should study knowledge of life at first. How is our lawyer confronted with the questions of the soul life today, and how would he have to face it? Not only in such a way that he depends on the experts. He is confronted with the matters like a dilettante. The deep look into the soul life only enables him to draft a bill. But only he is able to judge somebody who has deviated from the law. You can only project your thoughts into the law of human life if you have exercised psychology. I do not want to speak of the theosophical view about the development of the human soul. The world still is too far back to have a deeper understanding of the more intimate problems of life. However, actually, everybody would have to see what is said with the words: true study of the soul and of the social life.

This would have to be the basis, the first instructions which the lawyer receives at the university: extensive study of the human being. Not until he has studied the human being as such, also as soul, namely in such clean sphere as the physical scientist tries to study the scientific problems, not until he can delve into in the soul life like a mystic, he is ripe to treat real soul questions that have an effect, that are ordered according to a plan in the public life.

Is it not sad if today in the economics the most unbelievable bustles about, also with so-called experts? Imagine that simple concepts that the economist could realise are not yet decisively grasped. Take the difference between productive and unproductive labour. You cannot decide there if you do not realise how productive and unproductive labour have an effect in the public life. Any such work is completely useless without this clarity. It can still happen that two significant economists argue whether a branch of the public life like the business activity is a productive or unproductive activity.

It is a defamation of theosophy in certain respect if one attributes any nebulosity to it. Those who know the intentions of theosophy emphasise over and over again that it strives for extreme clarity, for the most mellow way of thinking in all fields of life according to the pattern of mathematics. If this is the case, the most favourable must be expected from a fertilisation of our legal life by our movement. Then it will be the result of such a fertilisation that the future lawyer learns how spiritual facts are working in the human life. He realises that whole fields remain unproductive because he cannot get involved in understanding suggestion or other soul phenomena that are due to inner or outer causes.

The suggestions work so tremendously in our public life that one can easily realise that in big assemblies of thousands of human beings not free conviction but suggestion by the speaker works on the listeners. And the listeners spread the suggestion, so that many actions come about under the influence of a suggestion. However, somebody who intervenes in the practical life must know and observe such imponderables. If one knows to observe this way well, one also gets around to realising which effects such suggestions have.

There you already have such a network which extends about our life. There one tells to us what should happen in this or that field of life. If we know life, we know that it gives us nothing but a sum of suggestions at first. The one gives those of the social question, the other of the national question, the third of a third question. If theosophy has become a common property of humanity, it is never possible that somebody who has to deal with the public life does not figure such a thing out. And if you realise how the suggestions work and determine our legal conditions, then you realise that these conditions can only be cured by the theosophical way of thinking. Then it will become also clear that an essential part of that what is done in our faculty of law, a big part of mere knowledge could be cancelled, because the lawyer can also acquire this in practice. Everybody knows what practical work is. One can overcome the practical in much shorter time if one has settled down in the big questions of existence that comprise the big questions of life by themselves, the questions which the lawyer cannot touch like the question of responsibility. How does one debate about that, as for example Lombroso (Cesare L., 1836–1909) in Italy? It is impossible to somebody who figures them out to put up such pros and cons as this normally happens. This is only possible because there people take part who are not practically trained.

Which right do we have to punish? This is also a question which is answered in the most different way. All these matters are not to be solved with the means of our modern practical jurisprudence. If, however, the lawyer cannot get involved deeper in it, he acts without understanding the last principles. Then he must act dependently. But the lawyer has to be a really free man. We have to demand this from nobody more than from the lawyers. Savigny (Friedrich Karl von S., 1779–1861), the significant legal teacher, said once: law is nothing for itself, but it is an expression of life; hence, it also had to be created out of life

Take once the most various views of law which one had in the course of the 19th century, and you realise how little these views were born out of the real practise. There are schools of natural law which believe to be able to derive the law from the human nature. Later one said: the one thinks the right this way, the other that way, the one nation this way, the other nation that way. Then there came the historical law. An interesting attempt was also lately made with the positivistic law. Various experiments were done which do not start from the indicated attitude. To have a historical view of law is as impossible as a historical view of mathematics. It is impossible to found the law historically. It is not possible to prove this important sentence now. To investigate something a little bit “positivistically” would mean that one does not construct purely spiritual networks with mathematics, but that one puts together three rods, measures the angles and forms then the mathematical theorem of the sum of the angles in the triangle. These would be a “positivistic” explanation.

I wanted to speak only about the basis of the attitude and about the relation to that which theosophy can be in life praxis. I wanted to show how in all fields and in particular also in this field the theosophical way of thinking and theosophical attitude could be fertile and useful. The prejudice is spread that theosophy is something that the human being invents to have personal satisfaction. But that is a bad theosophist who has this view. The true theosophist realises that theosophy is life, whereas in the so-called practical life so many attempts are tremendously impractical. It is painful to see seeds everywhere in the single attempts where everybody wants to mess about in the public life; if all impractical movements get together in the big circle that does not face life in an unfamiliar way, but wants to enclose life, then an improvement could probably result. Theosophy itself cannot solve the question. But life pours out from that which it gives. Next time we see how with the doctors another feature comes in our life if they become practical theosophists. It concerns this feature, this undertone of a renewed life. If we understand this, a breath of theosophical attitude has to pour out about all branches of the practical life reform. Then one understands the theosophical movement and also all remaining life.

This has been stressed again and again because certain problems cannot be improved, as long as one does not want to deal with the things really because the human beings judge, long before they have acquired the most exact knowledge of the things. Those who want to intervene with the theosophical movement practically could easily mess about also in other attempts. It would be easy to lend a hand in certain fields if we expected anything only in the least from it, as long as we do not develop the practical sense which many people regard as something impractical.

It would be easy if we did not know that the centre must be controlled, before one goes to the periphery. It would be easy if we did not know that this is true: if you want to create better conditions in the world, you must give people the possibility to become better. In no field this remark is as justified as in the field of jurisprudence. Although the theosophical movement tries to have a practical, a stimulating effect in this field, we shall realise that all disputes between Romanists and Germanists, between historians and the representatives of natural law et etcetera disappear. If we get to that which is real movement and life, if we attain the attitude which asserts itself also against the external sensuous work because life would reprimand us if we could not face it properly, then we have become theosophists and real practitioners.

Note: The transcript of the four “faculty” lectures are deficient. It shows not only noticeable gaps; the author of the transcript is also not familiar with the topic of the lectures. He often made summaries in haste as far as he understood the lecturer. That is why some connections shifted. Although notices of other participants were used, the deficiencies of the text could not be essentially corrected except for some big misunderstandings.

It is a preliminary work of theosophy to illumine all fields of the present spiritual life comprehensively and to show how theosophical thoughts and ideas can work in every field of this modern spiritual life if they are accepted. Then they can prepare a full understanding of that which theosophy has to say in every field of our spiritual life. The modern human beings live in images and suggestions of the public life which, of course, influence them strongly, images that directly counteract our views and would gradually undermine them unless the ideas of theosophy flowed into these views. Fichte says that ideals cannot be applied directly in life, but ideals should be the propelling forces of life. Theosophy aims at this.

The doctor who has set himself the task to heal is freer than the lawyer. He is not restricted by prejudices and authorities and, hence, some doctors are found who co-operate with us. However, we do not want to interfere in the quarrel of the parties, this would be a subjective behaviour; we want to explain quite objectively only what theosophy has to say concerning the medical science. And we want always to bear in mind that theosophy can be hard understood, very hard by those who have lived under the constraint of studies. Only someone who freely stands there does not find any conflict between true science and what theosophy wants. Theosophy completely acknowledges the tremendous progress which the natural sciences have done during the last centuries and particularly in the last decades.

There are in all fields of culture big cyclic laws which refer also to the negative and to the positive sides of culture. If also in the medical science so much is uncertain today, we have to realise that the basic cause of this uncertainty is deeply rooted in our ways of thinking. These ways of thinking are rooted deeper than all theories which one acquires in any science. And they cannot be simply altered, but only replaced bit by bit with others. Today the materialistic, mechanistic thinking of our time influences all these ways of thinking.

How does the modern doctor despise medical science of the Middle Ages and antiquity; and, nevertheless, the future doctor could learn a lot from the history of the medicine of those ancient times. He could learn some other views than they prevail in the present medicine. The fewest doctors today know the theories of Galen, two to three centuries AD, for example, and the medical scholasticism of the Middle Ages. One looks wrongly down at this ancient medical science. If the modern doctors wanted to get to know them, they would be able to get to know something valuable. The Hippocratic doctrine, which teaches that the human being is composed of four elements earth, water, air and fire, excites sneer. If is spoken there of black and white bile, phlegm, blood and their relations to the planets of our solar system, are this no such theories as one puts up theories today. However, these theories have made the medical intuition fertile which gave old doctors the possibility to carry on the medical profession in quite different way than the modern doctor can do it.

The shamans of savage tribes have a principle that is accepted only by few reasonable persons. It is the same principle that also forms the basis of the oriental medicine, namely that the doctor, who wants to heal, must have absorbed qualities in himself which enable him to understand life from quite another side.

It may be an example of that what I mean if we look at a people that does not belong to the present cultural nations, to the Hindus. The doctors of the Hindus apply a principle which forms the basis of immunisation, the vaccination, as we know it, with an antiserum. They combat a certain form of disease, applying the cause of the disease as a remedy. The Hindu doctors heal snakebites, while they work on the wound with their saliva. The saliva is prepared by training, the doctors have immunised themselves against snakebites, against snake venom, exposing themselves to snakebites. It is their view that the doctor can also cause something bodily by something that he develops in himself. All remedial effects of a person on a person are based on this principle. With the Hindus a certain initiation forms the basis of this principle. You know that the human being becomes a different person by a certain training. The forces which another human being does not have are developed with them completely just as a piece of iron develops its strength by touching with a magnet.

The young doctor would receive quite different feelings with respect to healing if he became engrossed in the real history of medicine. Nevertheless, the words whose sense he cannot find out nowadays contain a deep sense, even if he denies it with a sneer.

It is pitiful that our whole science is infiltrated with materialistic imponderables; thus it is hardly conceivable that anybody frees himself from them and learns to think independently. Our whole scientific foundation of anatomy, physiology, comes from this materialistic way of thinking. In the 16-th century, Vesalius (Andreas V., 1514–1564, Belgian anatomist) gave the first teachings of anatomy, Harvey (William H., 1578-1657, English anatomist) gave the teachings of the blood circulation in the materialistic sense; according to this system the 17th and 18th centuries taught. The human being had to think materialistically for some centuries to do all big discoveries and inventions which we owe to these times. This way of thinking taught us to produce certain substances in the laboratory we owe Liebig's (Justus von L., 1803–1873, German chemist) epoch-making discoveries to it-, but it also led to regard the human cover as the only one. It is difficult to reconcile what we call life with the concept which the materialistic doctor has of it. Only someone who knows by intuition what life is can really penetrate to the understanding of life. And somebody like this also knows that the effectiveness of chemical and physical laws in the human body is controlled by something the term of which is absent, which can be recognised only by intuition. Not before the doctor himself has become another person, he can realise this. With a certain training he has to acquire the concepts and then the insight of the mode of action of our etheric body. The usual reason, the usual human intellect, is incapable to understand the spiritual; as soon as it should advance to higher fields, it fails. Hence, without intuition everything in the medical field is only discussing; one does not touch reality. Higher, subtler forces are necessary that must be developed by the doctor, then only a thorough healing of certain damages is possible.

We theosophists know, for example, from occult investigations that vivisection works deeply damaging in certain respect. What happens in this field is deeply damaging. We theosophists cannot appreciate the ostensible merits of the vivisectors. Indeed, we would not be understood if we expounded the reasons why we refuse vivisection; without getting involved in theosophical concepts, one would not understand just these reasons. Vivisection originated from the materialistic way of thinking which is destitute of any intuition which cannot look in the works of life. This way of thinking must look at the body as a mechanical interaction of the single parts. Then it is quite natural that one takes the animal experiment where one believes that the same interaction takes place as with the human being to recognise and combat certain illness processes. Only who knows nothing about the real life can do vivisection.

A time comes when the human beings figure out the single life of a creature in connection with the life of the whole universe. The human beings get reverence for life. Then they learn to realise: any life that is taken away from a living being, any harm that is caused to a living being lessens the noblest forces of our own human nature because of a connection which exists between life and life. Just as a quantity of mechanical work can be transformed into heat, something changes by the homicide of a living being in the human being, so that he becomes unable to have an curative and beneficial effect on his fellow men. This is an unbreakable principle. Here everything nebulous, everything unclear is strictly impossible. Here rules mathematical clarity.

If the human beings got involved in that which forms the basis here, they would also see the influence that must be exercised to be able to heal, to be a healer as a doctor. If the person concerned wants to be a doctor and a healer, he must improve and purify his nature at first. He has to develop it to that stage where only certain sensations and feelings can appear to us. Here it depends on trying! There one has to learn to realise first that the usual reason can be extended, can be spirtualised. It is a triviality saying: here and there are the limits of our knowledge methods. There are still other knowledge methods than those are which our reason uses. But, unfortunately, few persons realise this. Here it depends on wanting to defer to the theosophical attitude. Not before the sense-perceptible facts of anatomy and physiology are not only taught, not before one approaches them with “the eyes of the spirit,” as Goethe says, another study of the human body takes place. And only then all discoveries of the last decades concerning the medical science receive the correct light to recognise, for example, certain relations of the thyroid gland with other functions.

Not before one approaches theosophical knowledge, one sees every matter in its right hue and receives quite different values. The knowledge of the spiritual that connects the facts in these fields is still missing in the search for knowledge. Certain concepts which one has obtained may be absolutely correct, but the methods of application may be wrong. Often two great authorities of a certain field say just the opposite about the same subject. Where from do such things result? From the fact that thinking itself has been urged in a certain one-sided direction with each of these authorities.

You may ask now: would it not be possible that the human being if he always lives a healthy life develops the things in himself that make him immune against illnesses, and could he not educate his organism to be able to endure illnesses? You have to bring the thinking into another direction, then truths appear in this field, and you get another direction of researching. The modern thinking has something absolute, final and is penetrated with the confidence in its infallibility; you can realise something papal in the way someone acquires such concepts. Research is determined by the way how one puts the questions to nature. If one asks it wrongly, it gives wrong answers. The experiments, the questions to nature bear a peculiar imprint in the 19-th, 20-th centuries: that of coincidence. You can often notice all possible attempts that are put next to each other grotesquely. This comes from the lack of intuition, especially in the medical science. However, it is really also possible to come to a free thinking within the medical science.

The modern doctor who has left the university and is unleashed on the suffering humanity is often in a unenviable state. The medical study has thrown him into a confusion of concepts where he cannot form an opinion. Then he finds a way of thinking with his patients, which does not want to get involved in thoroughness, they regard that as a Gospel which refers to any authority. The doctor often suffers hard from the prejudices of the patients. The doctor is only capable of something if he studies the subtle processes that happen in an ill body with the aid of life itself; but the patient must also assist.

Certain illnesses are connected with certain cyclic developments and conditions; certain illnesses are based on [gap in the shorthand] and occur according to certain physical laws. This appears to somebody who investigates certain illness forms with theosophical spirit. Big lines are developed in such thinking, which are the guidelines of life itself. And they give that certainty which is connected with a relentless striving and fulfils with confidence. Some regular world relations were revealed to someone thinking that way which fulfil the soul with deep, religious feelings at the same time. The Tübingen doctor Schlegel (Emil S., 1852–1935) is a typical and symptomatic example of all those who seek for a way out from the labyrinth of modern medicine. This doctor is at the beginning of a big career; he has some intuitions of a natural medicine, and he dares to connect religion and healing power with each other.

A human being whose thinking is spiritual can never take part in those attempts symptomatic for our present in the medical field. For he knows: all single attempts are only really effective if one gets down to the root of the evil, to the core of the thing. All polemic cannot cause any radical reversal; only a quite different thinking is capable of it.

A materialistically trained person cannot understand this. But we human beings must not misunderstand ourselves in this world. The theosophically thinking person understands that the materialistically minded person does not understand him because he is not able of it. Goethe expresses what is meant here saying: “a wrong doctrine cannot be disproved, because it is based on the conviction that the wrong is true.” The ways of thinking of our time must experience a radical reversal; then an improvement of the feelings and sensations results completely by itself up to intuition. Not before the medical science gains this, it will have something again that works in a salutary way, then only a religious feature inspires it again and then only the doctor is that which he should be: the noblest human friend who feels obliged to bring up his profession by his own perfection as high as possible.

Note: The transcript of the four “faculty” lectures are deficient. It shows not only noticeable gaps; the author of the transcript is also not familiar with the topic of the lectures. He often made summaries in haste as far as he understood the lecturer. That is why some connections shifted. Although notices of other participants were used, the deficiencies of the text could not be essentially corrected except for some big misunderstandings.

In the order of the talks on the relation of the universities to the theosophical movement it is the fourth about theosophy and its relation to the arts faculty (in Germany: faculty of philosophy). We have to consider the fact that this is possibly of more significance to our education and culture than the three other faculties, because the arts faculty encloses the scientific disciplines which extend about the whole field of research. That is why somebody who wants to become engrossed in wisdom and world view without certain trend simply for the sake of knowledge and education has to direct his looks at it. The arts faculty has experienced big changes; however, it has grown out of an educational institution to a sophisticating one. It was once the arts faculty a very typical name that had to prepare for the study of theology, philosophy, and medicine.

You know that the university originated in the 12th and 13th centuries, and we can still observe up to the 18th century how somebody who wanted to climb up to the heights by studying had to go through a philosophical preparatory study. This was arranged in such a way that one did not aim at any certain professional education, but at a formal education which should form the spiritual training of a human being in a formal way. Among other things, rhetoric, dialectic, astronomy and music were taught. The latter was understood as an understanding of the harmonies in the universe and in the smaller phenomena which surround us. One appreciated it to make only the mind ripe. The feature of our time is to set little store by the formal education.

Besides, I must touch something that looks very heretical in our time. Today a big tendency exists to underestimate everything formal compared with the material. One makes a point conceiving the matters rationally, bundling together as much knowledge as possible. Who looks at the matters in such a way as it is usual today, does not understand me. Who would not side immediately if anybody said the following: there are two methods to learn languages. A method, which is regarded as ridiculous, is that by which the human being is tormented with pointless exercises, as such as: today, my father has become fifty years old. Tomorrow, my aunt travels to Paris. One smiles at such things and it is still the question whether one has any cause of it.

One thinks today that one could better take sentences from any great classic. Thus it has come to avoid such banal sentences at school; one prefers sentences of the classics who are then shredded and analysed and become thereby unenjoyable for the pupil. On one side, we find the pointless, on the other side, the picking to pieces. There one hardly finds anybody today who sides the first way. Nevertheless, it is for the psychologist no question that the first way is the right one. He is clear in his mind that the human being must remain at the formal very long, that his reason is invoked very late, and that we learn best of all if the things leave us very uninterested as regards contents. During the years in which the mind is most receptive, one has to develop it rightly at first. We have to learn to talk fairly, before our thoughts are transformed with it; one lets the reason mature in the subsoil, lets it develop the ability of logic formally, then this precious good of humankind slowly matures. It is clear that nobody can apply his reason to a problem without further ado. So at first formal education, before that matures which can appear as the best fruit in the human being.

The faculty of philosophy was called arts faculty in the Middle Ages. It was an artistic mastery of the mental material, and it contained an overwhelming quantity of thoughts. Later on, the lower subjects of the arts faculty were assigned for the high school. The modern arts faculty is unworthy of its name; it is an aggregate.

This is not always the case. The philosopher Fichte (1762–1814) headed the Berlin university when it was founded (1810). At that time, any single scientific discipline was integrated into a big organism. Fichte was convinced that the world is a unity, and that any knowledge is a patchwork that is not steeped in it. Why does one study botany, mathematics, history, for example? We study these sciences because we want to obtain an insight into the construction of the universe. In other times, the penetration in the scientific disciplines would not have been so fateful. But the picture of the unity of the world has disappeared. The arts faculty should pursue science on its own sake. It did this once, but thereby it has collided with the cultural life. Already Friedrich Schiller spoke in a talk at the Jena university of the difference between the philosophical head and the bread-and-butter scholar. At that time, it was not yet so bad. Who is a philosophical head can study everything; the biggest points of view present themselves to him from every science. He sees the biggest world secrets in the plant as the psychologist realises them in the human soul. Specialisation had to take place. We know too much today to master everything. Great spirits like Leibniz, Leonardo da Vinci and others could control the knowledge of their times. This is rare today. We can only hope that the scientific disciplines get new life. However, to the bread-and-butter scholar science is nothing but a cow that gives him milk.

One would object nothing if professional schools were established for studies that provide well-paid jobs. However, this has no other value than learning any other trade. From the point of view of world knowledge it is quite irrelevant whether I become a shoemaker or a chemist. The consciousness should become general that the professional study is not more valuable than any other study in life. The chemist, botanist et etcetera is compared with the great philosopher in the same position as the businessman. Who realises, however, what it means to acquire philosophical education knows that there must be sites where one pursues science for its own sake. In this respect, it is not good that the university split up into scientific disciplines, in particular in a time in which materialism has seized everything. Nowadays, the arts faculty is nothing else than a preparatory site for the grammar school teacher. Actually nothing at all would objected if philosophy devoted itself to the task to train educated teachers. Training the human soul belongs to the highest tasks of life. However, only someone can solve them who is an artist of psychology and can undertake the task to guide the souls. The human being was called a microcosm by the great spirits of the world not without reason. There is no branch of knowledge that one could not use to train a human soul. Hence, the pedagogues do not want to cram the young human being with knowledge only, and he will get to the formal quite naturally. Science takes a particular position if one looks at it as a pedagogue. If anyone studies painting or music, he is not yet a painter or a musician. That also applies to the pedagogue. All knowledge is nothing to the pedagogue if it has not proceeded to art as with the painter or musician, so that his mind, like physical organs, has immediately absorbed what he knows, so that knowledge is, as it were, completely digested. The human soul should be an organism in which the soul food is transformed, is assimilated. Only then the human being is a philosophical spirit. It is right that the universities teach the scientific disciplines. However, another human being should arise from them, a human being who has become an artist.

If one really applies the theosophical way of thinking there, it does not depend on scientific exams. As well as anyone does not own the quality of an artist who has only scholarship, also anyone does also never become an artist who has passed the necessary exams only. The problem of examinations must also be seen in a new light. The examiner has not only to examine knowledge, but also which kind of human being the examinee is, whether he has the right philosophy of life, how much of it he has made his own, to which extent he has become a new human being. This has gone unregarded in our materialistic age. When the external appearance to the senses became decisive, the modern arts faculty originated. All the other sciences originated from philosophy. Once one had the consciousness of the connection of all knowledge; but if one does not brand the Middle Ages as heretical, one does rouse prejudices. However, in those days one felt on what it depended for the world and for the human beings.

In 1388, a person was appointed professor of theology and of mathematics in Vienna. Today, a professor would faint about that. However, we know that mathematical thinking can serve well for that where to theology leads us. Who learns to think in the way that he exercises some mathematics, learns to think quite differently, can also be a mystic without becoming a romanticist. Who has not acquired a comprehensive knowledge, can abandon himself only to a suggestion. With this he enters in a professional study. What can he know if he has experienced a purely philosophical higher education, what can he know about mathematics? Only mathematical concepts, having no inkling of the fact that mathematics introduces in the great principles of the universe.

It is not long ago when one still knew this. In the Middle Ages, this view was not dangerous, because it is not true that the iron theology of the Middle Ages put everybody in irons. The best proof is that at the Paris university one argued, for example, about such subject like: The Speeches of Theology Are Founded on Fables or The Christian Religion Prevents from Adding Something Superficial to Theology. It was possible at that time to argue about these subjects. One argues differently today. Once arguing was fertile because one had acquired formal education. Today one can prove errors in reasoning very easily. But any arguing that is based on errors in reasoning is infertile because one is not clear in his mind that someone who argues has only to understand the technique of arguing. In the Middle Ages, mathematics was regarded as the basis of any knowledge, even of art. There could be the great idealism of which our time cannot have any idea. A typical remark by Leonardo da Vinci (1459–1519), this representative of the great idealism, is that the mechanics is the paradise of the mathematical sciences. He was an artist and mathematician at the same time. The physical education of his time lived in his soul. The way of thinking and the knowledge of his time also speak to us from his paintings. He called the external world the paradise of mathematics! Where he built bridges, thoughts about the spirit of humankind flowed to him... [Gap].

The “sacrifice of the world” means theosophically: the less someone acts for himself, the more he is capable to put something of himself into the culture of his time. It is not so important what we develop from ourselves, as what we implant in the world. Not what we perfect in ourselves, but what we give to the world is the pledge and the pound which is imperishable. Leonardo da Vinci got thoughts about the spirit of humankind as thoughts of mathematics from bridge building. The gods want free beings, they do not want a thing in nature. What the human being creates consciously in the world is an execution of the divine world plan. Something common can become something sacred if it is for the benefit of humankind. If we take this point of view, we have taken up the great idealism in ourselves, and this idealism would have to flow through the whole arts faculty. Within the frame of our arts faculty all scientific disciplines can be probably placed. But it had to be the headquarters of the world view as a core in the centre instead of taking the second place behind the single scientific disciplines.

With the help of this central philosophical science we would come to the artistic view. Only that should receive the doctorate who has absorbed this central attitude of having life in himself. The last exam of the philosopher would have to be an examination of his life forms; the only honorary title of the philosophical doctor would have to be founded on the fact that in the human being the life contents of this life form is included. Otherwise, the philosophical doctor is an arabesque, a pretension, a social form. Not only knowledge belongs to the philosophical doctor, but a knowledge transformed into art of living. One already had such consciousness. Thus a philosophical doctor will have only the maturity as it is commensurate with the philosophical head. A large dissemination of theosophy would bring it about by itself, for it wants to develop the forces that slumber in the human being. The theosophist is aware that the human being is capable of development that like the child must develop also mind and soul are capable to develop to higher stages. The human being is not yet complete when he leaves the high school and the universities. Theosophy asserts more and more that the human being is only in the beginning of his development. The arts faculty should have the greatest say. It should develop from the mathematical attitude into a spiritual direction; everything should run up to this point. Theosophy is not so difficult. It would be bound to occur that if there were a theosophical faculty all sciences would become theosophical in the end.

Physiology is the science of the phenomena in plants, animals and human beings. If in physiology the equipment of the eye is considered et etcetera, these are pictures to take the knowledge that the human being sees. Physiology teaches us that basically all our sense impressions depend on our senses; it teaches the subjective. In the end, it says that we know nothing about that which is beyond our sense impressions. If we consider this, and do not remain unthinking, but keep on investigating spiritually, we get exactly to the same teachings which occultism gives us that everything sensory is illusion and that the theory of sense energy, theosophically treated, leads into big depths. One needs physiology; one must study it and then top it with philosophy. One has no other choice. The philosophy in the arts faculty is only a piece. It does no longer have any strength; it is a discipline like other disciplines. This should not be; it had to give the strength to the other disciplines. Instead of this, it has received for its part the colouring from single professional disciplines.

The fact that one thinks substantially materially results from the fact that philosophy and the great world view do not have the saying, but rather psychology, which came from other disciplines, has become an experimental science. If one believes that psychology is done precisely only if one experiments around with the human being like with an unliving crystal, one considers the human being as something that has neither life nor soul. Psychology can recognise nothing but the material expression. Theosophy would realise that the studies of physiology and psychology are one and the same in certain way and would integrate both into the big framework of knowledge. The modern universities cannot do that and, therefore, they cannot carry any idealistic world view into the world. The arts faculty is not able to be the standard bearer of a philosophical attitude. The faculty should not be an aggregate of the various disciplines, but allow them to grow together to a common soul. Then it is taught theosophically without transplanting theosophy to the universities. Otherwise, the arts faculty remains an aggregate without spiritual bond. Knowledge should become a living whole from whose single parts the spirit shines. It satisfies us as theosophists if the prerogative belongs only to this philosophical study and if it develops on this basis. Then it is well rescued in theosophy. We want only what everybody wants for the welfare of the single sciences. Should theosophy fulfil its task, it must not be a doctrine but life. We have to be theosophists with every step, we have to impregnate everything that we do in life with this living theosophical attitude. Then the theosophical movement is more; it is like one of the most powerful cultural factors of the present. However, it has to win influence on those who are selected to lead our culture. We have to confess and represent theosophy where we want to work in life. The world process is not anything dead, but something living. The beings and not the relations cause the development of the human mind. If theosophy is a world of the spirit, then theosophy is one of the most powerful cultural factors of the present. It does not depend on the reading of theosophical writings, but on the attitude so that the human being is seized in the everyday life.

Spiritual research cannot interfere in the immediate problems of the day. Besides, the confidence must also not arise that the spiritual knowledge should be anything that floats above all reality and would have to do nothing with the life praxis. We do not want to state the events, which turn up the world directly today, in which way one treats the current events, and we do not want to belong to those who want to be blind and deaf to that which moves the human hearts immediately what concerns us directly. Between these two cliffs, the spiritual researcher has always to find the way, so that he is never merged in the opinions and the views of the everyday life. On the other side, he is never allowed to be involved in mere empty abstractions or to be addicted to authorities. I said that repeatedly from this place: spiritual science has to make us directly practical, much more practical than normally the pragmatists think. However, it should make us practical leading us in the deeply succumbing forces of life and clarify us about the things that they direct our actions in harmony with the big universal laws. Only then, one can achieve anything in the world and intervene in the activities of the world if one does it in accordance with the big universal laws.

After this premise, let me point to a few facts at first that should solely show us the importance and actuality of our questions.

Perhaps, you remember the fact that 24 August 1898 the authorised representative of the czar (Nicholas II) sent a circular to the foreign representatives accredited in Petersburg. In this circular you find, among other things, the following words, “The maintenance of the general peace and a possible lowering of the excessive armaments which press on all nations constitute an ideal in the present situation of the whole world to which the efforts of all governments should be directed.

The human and highly noble-minded striving of His Majesty, the Emperor, my elated lord, is completely dedicated to this task. In the conviction that this elated final goal corresponds to the most essential interests and the entitled wishes of all governments the imperial government believes that the present moment is extremely favourable to search for the most effective means on the way of international consultation, in order to ensure the benefits of a true and durable peace and to set an objective, above all, to the progressive development of the present armaments.”

Moreover, you find the following words in this document: “Because the financial loads increase and impair the national well-being, work and capital are headed off in great part from their natural determination and are consumed unproductively. Hundreds of millions are used to acquire dreadful destruction machines which are considered today as the last word of science and are condemned already tomorrow to lose any value as a result of any new discovery in these fields ... Because the armaments of every power grow to such an extent, they correspond less and less to the purpose which the concerning government has proposed to itself.” The document closes with the proposal that a conference with God's help should be an auspicious sign of the next century.

Certainly this manifesto arises from an intention. The last events teach us how this intention could come true. This intention is not quite new, because we can go back even centuries, and there we find a prince, Henry IV of France, in the 16th, 17th centuries, who stimulated the idea of such a general peace conference. Seven of sixteen countries were won when Heinrich IV was murdered. Nobody continued his work. If we were interested in it, we could probably trace back the intentions still much farther.

This is one range of facts. The other is this: the Hague peace conference took place. You all know the name of the meritorious person who pursues her ideal with a rare devotion and with a rare skill, the name of Bertha von Suttner (1853-1914, Austrian novelist and pacifist). A year after the Hague peace conference, she tried to collect the acts for a book in which she registered the partly nice and marvellous speeches. She prefaced the book. I ask to take into consideration that one year had passed, after Bertha von Suttner could have seen in this work of the peace conference. She already anticipated the results, after one year had passed. In the meantime, in the diametrical contrast to it, we had the bloody Transvaal war (1899-1902) with rejected mediation, and today we have war again (Russo-Japanese War 1904-1905).

Looking around in the world today, we see the struggle of many noble human beings for the idea of peace, the love for a global peace already in the hearts of high-minded idealists, and, nevertheless, so much blood has hardly flowed in other times on our earth as now. It is this a serious, very serious affair for everybody who also deals with the big mental problems. On the one hand, we have the dedicated apostles of peace with their activity. We have the excellent achievements of Bertha von Suttner, who was able to portray the frightfulness of fight and war with rare grandeur. However, we do not forget that we also have the reverse. If we do not forget that also many are among our judicious fellow-men who assure us, on the other side, again and again that they consider the fight as necessary for the progress, as something that steels the forces. Only in the fight against the opposition, the forces would grow. The researcher who has attracted so many thinkers (Ernst Haeckel), how often has he pronounced that he wishes the powerful war and that only the powerful war can further the forces in nature. Maybe he has not pronounced it so radically, but many people think that way.

Even within our spiritual-scientific movement, voices were being raised that it would be a weakness, almost a sin against the spirit of national strength if one objects anything against the war that has led to national honour, to national power. Today, in any case, the views in this area are confronted still harshly, very harshly. However, the Hague peace conference has brought one thing. It has brought the votes of a range of people who lead the public problems. A big range of the representatives of the states gave their consent in those days,—that the Hague conference could take place. One should believe that a thing that has found such an approval from such places had to be promising in the most eminent sense.

In order to be able to comment this spiritual-scientifically, we have to look a little deeper into the matters. If we pursue the question of peace as an ideal question as it has developed in the course of time, and pursue the facts of fight and quarrel, nevertheless, we must probably say that how this ideal of a general peace is pursued challenges our attention and an investigation. Many of those who practised the art of war are those in whose hearts pain and maybe even aversion of the results and effects of the war exist. Such matters induce us to ask, do the wars generally come from anything that can be eliminated by principles and views? Who looks deeper into the human souls, knows that two separate, completely different ways cause the war. One is that which we call power of judgement and reason that we call idealism, the other is the human desire, the human inclinations, the human sympathies, and antipathies. Some things would be different in the world if it were possible to regulate the desires, wishes and passions according to the principles of heart and mind without further ado. This is not possible, but the reverse has always been there in humanity up to now. For that which the passion wants, which the desire requires, the reason, even the heart creates a mask with its idealism.

If you pursue the history of the human evolution, you can put the question repeatedly, if you see lighting up principles or idealism here and there: which desires and passions are lurking in the background? If we consider this, it might be very well possible that one is not yet able to make use of the nicest principles in this question, then it could be that something else is necessary because simply the human passions, impulses and desires are not yet advanced enough to follow the idealism of the singles. You see that the question lies deeper, and we must grasp it deeper. We must really have a look at the human soul and its basic forces if we want to assess the whole thing correctly. The human being does not always see enough of his development. He often sees a small span of time only, and that is why an extensive worldview must open the look for us which, on the one side, leads deeply and allows us, on the other side, to overview the bigger periods, so that we get a judgment about the forces which have to lead us into the future.

Let us have a look once at the human soul, where we may study it in a point deeply and thoroughly. Today we have something that we could touch eight days ago, from another side. There we have a scientific theory, the so-called Darwinism. Within this scientific view, a concept plays a big role. One calls this concept the struggle for existence. At the sign of the struggle for existence, our natural sciences stood completely for decades, our whole view. The naturalists said, those beings in the world that survive in the struggle for existence best of all will remain and the others pass. So that we do not need to be surprised if those beings we have round ourselves are the best fitted ones, because they have developed through millions of years. The most efficient ones have survived; the unfit ones have declined.

The struggle for existence became the slogan of the researchers. Where from did this struggle come? It did not come from nature. Darwin himself, although he looks at it in a bigger style than his successors, took it from a view of Malthus (Thomas Robert M., 1766-1834), spreading about the human history, that view that the earth produces food in such a progression that this increase is much lower than the increase of population. Those who have dealt with these matters know that one says, the increase of food rises arithmetically, the increase of population geometrically. This causes a struggle for existence, a war of all against all.

Starting from it, Darwin also assumed the struggle for existence in the organic nature. This view does not correspond to a mere idea, but to the modern ways of life. This struggle for existence has become an actual reality as the general economic competition in the conditions of the single persons. One has seen this struggle for existence in the next nearness; one has regarded it as something natural in the human realm and has then accepted it in the natural sciences.

Ernst Haeckel, who has almost regarded war as a cultural lever, starts from such views. Struggle makes strong, the weak ones should decline. Civilisation demands that the weak ones perish.

Then economics have applied this struggle to the human world again. Thus, we have great theories within our economics, within our social theories which regard the struggle for existence as completely justified and as something that cannot be separated from the human evolution. One has further gone back on these things—not without prejudice, but with these principles—to primeval times, and there one tried to study the life of barbaric savage tribes. One believed to be able to eavesdrop on the human cultural development and believed to find the fiercest principle of war there.

Huxley (Thomas Henry H., 1825-1895, biologist) said, if we look at the nature of the animals, the struggle for existence resembles a gladiator fight, and this is a physical principle. If we look from the higher animals at the lower ones and if we get ourselves into the previous way of the world evolution, the world of facts teaches us everywhere that we live in a general struggle for existence.

You understand that this could be expressed and could be represented as a universal principle. Somebody who is clear in his mind knows that words are not pronounced which are not founded deep in the human soul says to himself that the whole soul constitution of our best men starts even today always from the view that struggle in the human race, even in the whole nature is justified.

Now you may say: but the researchers may have been quite humane persons who longed for peace, for balance and wished it in their deepest idealism. However, their profession, their science convinced them that it is not in such a way, and perhaps they wrote down their theory with a bleeding heart.—This would be an objection unless anything else had entered first. We are allowed to say that among all of those who believed to think scientifically and economically, the quoted theory was quite usual in whole Western Europe and Central Europe.

The view was quite usual that war and struggle are a physical principle from which one cannot escape. One had got rid of the old view of Rousseau (Jean-Jaques R., 1712-1778, philosopher) thoroughly—one believed—that only the human perversion has brought struggle and war, opposition and disharmony to the general peace of nature. This view of Rousseau was still spread at the end of the 18th century that if one looks into the life and activity of nature, which is still unaffected from the super civilisation of the human being, one sees harmony and peace then everywhere. Only the human being with his despotism and civilisation has brought fight and quarrel into the world.

This view of Rousseau still existed and the researchers assured us in the last third of the 19th century: yes, it would be nice if it were in such a way, but it is not the case. The facts teach us in another manner. Nevertheless, we ask ourselves seriously, has the feeling spoken or have the facts spoken? We could little argue if the facts spoke this way.

There a strange man appeared in 1880, a man who held a talk in the naturalists' meeting of 1880 in St. Petersburg in Russia, a talk that is of great importance for those who are thoroughly interested in this question. This man is the zoologist Kessler (Karl Fedorovich K., 1815-1881). He died shortly after. His talk dealt with the principle of mutual help in nature. For all those who deal with such matters seriously a quite new feature emerges from the research and scientific maturity that is stimulated by it. Here for the first time in the modern times facts of the whole nature were put together, which prove that all former theories of the struggle for existence do not comply with reality.

In this talk, the phenomenon is discussed and proven by facts that the animal species do not develop struggling for existence, but that there is a struggle for existence between two species only in exceptional cases, but not within the species. On the contrary, the individuals of a species help each other and those species survive whose individuals have a certain bent of mutual help. Not struggle, but mutual help grants long existence. One got a new point of view with it. However, modern research brought about because of a strange concatenation of circumstances that a personality that stands for the present on the most unbelievable point of view, Prince Kropotkin (Pyotr Alexeyevich K., 1842-1921, Russian anarchist, philosopher), has continued the matter. He could show with animals and tribes with an enormous sum of proven facts which significance this principle of mutual help has in nature and in the human life. I can recommend to everybody to study the German translation of this book (Mutual Aid; A Factor of Evolution, 1902). This book brings in a sum of concepts and ideas to the human being that are like a school for a spiritual attitude. Now, however, we understand these facts only correctly if we light up them esoterically if we penetrate these facts with the bases of spiritual science. I could demonstrate examples speaking quite distinctly; however, you can read them in the cited book. The principle of mutual help in nature means: those advance most of all who have developed this principle best.—The facts speak distinctly and will speak more and more distinctly for us.

If we speak of a single animal species in spiritual science, we speak of it like of a single human individual. An animal species is to us the same in a lower field as in higher fields the single human individual is. I have said it already once here: you must make a fact clear to yourselves to understand which contrast is there between the human being and the whole animal realm. This contrast expresses itself in the sentence: the human being has a biography; the animal has no biography. With the animal, we are contented if we have described the type. With the human being, we say: father, grandfather, grandson, and son; with the lion, this does not differ in such a way that we should especially describe any single one. Indeed, I know that one can argue a lot; I know that somebody who loves a dog or a monkey believes to be able to write a biography of the dog or the monkey. However, a biography should not contain what the other can know about the being, but what the being itself has known. Self-consciousness belongs to a biography, and in this sense, only the human being has a biography. This corresponds to a description of the whole animal type or species. The external expression of this fact is that any animal group has a group-soul and that any individual human being has a soul in himself. I was also allowed to discuss here already that a hidden world is directly connected with our physical world, the astral world that does not consist of such objects and beings whom you can perceive with the senses but it is made out of the substance from which our passions and desires are made. If you check the human being, you can see: that he has led his soul down to the physical plane or to the physical world. In this physical world, there is no individual soul of the animal. However, you find an individual soul of the animal that is on the so-called astral plane, in the astral world hidden behind our physical world. The animal groups have individual souls in the astral world.

There we have the difference between the human being and the animal realm. If we ask ourselves now, what fights in reality if we pursue the struggle for existence in the animal realm?—Then we must say: in reality it is the astral struggle of the passions and desires behind this struggle that is fought out between the species in the animal realm. It is rooted in the species or group souls.—However, if there were a struggle for existence within an animal species, then it would be in such a way, as if the human soul fought against itself in its different parts. This is an important truth. It cannot be the rule that there is a struggle within an animal species, but the struggle for existence can only take place between the species. For the soul of the whole species is uniform, and because it is uniform, it must control the parts.

The mutual aid within the animal realm that we can study within the species is simply the expression of the uniform activity of the species or group soul. If you look at all the examples you find cited in the mentioned interesting book, then you get a good knowledge of how the group souls work. For example, if an individual of a certain cancer species is thrown on the back by chance, so that it cannot get up itself again, then a bigger number of cancers comes along and helps it up. This mutual support results from a common soul organ of the cancer species.

Study once the way how beetles support themselves to maintain or protect a common brood, to master a dead mouse etcetera, how they combine there, support themselves, carry out common work, then you see the group soul working. You can study this up to the highest animal species. It is true: somebody who has a sense of this activity of mutual aid with the animals gets an insight, a concept, a notion of the activity of the group souls, too. Just there he can appropriate the vision with the eyes of the spirit. There the eye becomes sun-like.

However, the human being has a group soul that has become individual. In every single human being such a group soul lives. Thus, the single human being is able to fight against any single other human being like an animal group soul fights against other group souls. Let us now have a look at the purpose of the fight, whether the fight is there for the sake of the fight in the world evolution. What has emerged from the struggle of the species? Those species have remained which mostly support themselves mutually, and those which are most warlike against themselves have perished. That is the natural principle. That is why we have to say that in the external nature the developmental progress consists in the fact that peace takes the place of struggle. Where nature has arrived at a certain point, at the big turning point, there is balance; there rules peace to which the whole struggle has developed.

After all, take into consideration that plants as species struggle for existence against each other. However, consider how nicely and splendidly the plant and the animal realms support themselves mutually in their common developmental process: the animal inhales oxygen, the plant exhales oxygen. Thus, a peaceful universe is possible. What nature produces this way by its strength is determined for the human being that he produces it consciously from his individual nature. Step by step, the human being has advanced and step by step that has formed with him, which we recognise as the self-consciousness of our individual soul. We must look at our international situation in such a way that we envisage its previous development and trace its future trend. Go back to former times, and then you see group souls still in the human realm ruling first. They exist in little tribes and families; there we deal also with group souls of the human beings. The farther you look back in the world evolution, the more compact, the more uniform the human beings appear who are united that way. It is like a spirit that penetrated the ancient rural community that then became the primitive state. You could study that it was a completely different matter when Alexander the Great waged war with his hosts, from waging war today with human masses of more developed individual intentions. One must light up this properly. For this is the way of the progressive culture that the human beings become more and more individual, more independent and more conscious, more self-conscious. From groups, from common characteristics the human race has developed. Even as we have group souls that guide and direct the single animal species, the great group souls guide and direct the. The human being grows out of the guidance of the group soul more and more and becomes more and more independent by his progressive education. This independence implied that he is really—while he faced his fellow men in the groups more or less inimically—in a struggle for existence penetrating the whole humanity. This is our international situation, this is the destiny of our race in particular, and this is our immediate present.

Spiritual science distinguishes five successive races, consisting of seven sub-races, in the present world evolution at first. The first sub-race developed in ancient times, in the distant India. This sub-race was penetrated with a priest culture. This priest culture gave our present race the first impulses. It had come over from the Atlantean culture that was on that ground which forms the ground of the Atlantic now. This sub-race set the tone; then other sub-races followed, and now we are in the fifth. This is no division that is borrowed from anthropology or any race theory but a view that is discussed closer in the sixth talk of this series. The fifth sub-race furthered the distinct nature, the individual consciousness of the human being most notably. Christianity prepared the human being really to attain such an individual consciousness: the human being had to gain this self-consciousness. If we look back at the time before Christ when in ancient Egypt the huge pyramids were built, there an army of slaves did the work the difficulties and efforts of which no one has a right idea today. It was just a matter of course for these workers to build peacefully for the most time. They built because at that time the teaching of reincarnation and karma was a self-evident fact. No book says this to you, but this becomes clear to you bit by bit if you penetrate into spiritual science. Any slave who worked his hands raw and was in misery knew: this is a life of many lives, and I have what I suffer now to bear as a result of that which I prepared in my previous lives. However, if this is not the case, I experience the effect of the present life in a future life; he who orders me today was on the same point of view as I am today, or he will still be on it.

However, with this attitude, the whole self-conscious life on earth would never have developed, and the higher powers who guide the destiny of the human race in the large scale knew what they did when they atrophied the consciousness of reincarnation and karma for a while, for millenniums. This was the great previous development of Christianity that it atrophied the vision of a compensating Otherworld, and has drawn attention to the immense importance of the life on earth.

It may have gone too far in its radical realisation, but this had to happen, because the matters of the world do not develop according to the logic, but according to other principles. One has deduced eternal punishments from this life on earth; the tendency of development led to it if it is also illogical. Thus, humanity has learnt to be conscious of this one earth existence. Thereby the earth, this physical plane, became infinitely important to the human being. That had to become that way. Everything that happens in material respect could develop only from an attitude that is based on an education for this earth, apart from the ideas of reincarnation and karma. We see the result of this education: the human being has entirely settled in the physical plane. For the individual soul could only develop there, there it is separated, enclosed in this body and can look out only as an isolated special existence through its senses. With it, we have more and more of human rivalry, more and more of the effect of the special existence brought into the human race. We are not allowed to wonder that the human race is not ripe by a long stretch even today to eliminate the results of this education again.

We have seen that the present species of the animals developed to their perfection because of their mutual aid and that struggle was there only from species to species. However, if the human individuality is the same as the group soul of the animals, the human soul is only able to get a self-consciousness going through the same struggle as the animals outside in nature. As long as the human being does not yet have developed complete independence, the struggle will still last. However, the human being is appointed to consciously achieve what is there outside on the physical plane. Hence, it will lead him on the stages of consciousness to mutual aid and support because the human race is one single species. Only after the whole humanity has attained the peaceableness, as it is to be found in the animal realm, an entire, all-embracing peace will be. The struggle did not further the single animal species but mutual assistance and support. What lives as a group soul in the animal species as a single soul lives peacefully with itself, this is the uniform soul. Only the human individual soul is a particular one in this physical special being.

This is the great achievement of our soul which we obtain from the spiritual development that we really recognise the common soul that penetrates the whole human race. We do not receive it as an unaware present, but we have to get it consciously. It is the task of spiritual science to develop this uniform soul in the whole human race really. This expresses itself in our first principle: to found a brotherhood on the whole earth, without taking into consideration race, gender, skin colour etcetera. This is the recognition of the soul that is common to the whole humanity. The purification has to take place down to the passions, so that everybody understands that the same soul lives in the fellow man. In the physical, we are separated, in the mental we are a unity as the ego of humanity. However, only in the real life we can grasp and adapt this. Hence, it can be only has to foster the spiritual life that penetrates us with the common breath of this uniform soul. Not the present human beings with their principles, but the future ones who develop the consciousness of this common soul more and more establish the basis of a new race that is completely merged in mutual assistance. Hence, our first principle means a completely different thing than one usually says. We do not fight; we also do not fight against war or against anything else because struggle does not lead at all to higher development. From the struggle, every animal species has developed as a special race. Leave all struggle round us to the vicious ones who are not yet ripe enough to seek for that which the common soul of the human race finds in the spiritual life.

A real society of peace strives for spiritual knowledge, and the real peace movement is the spiritual-scientific movement. It is that peace movement as a peace movement can be in practice, because it aims at that which lives in the human being and progresses to future.

The spiritual life always developed from the East. The East was the area where the spiritual life was fostered. Here in the West was the area where the external material civilisation developed. Hence, one sees to the East as an area where the human beings are dreaming and sleeping. However, who knows what takes action in the souls of those whom we call dreaming or sleeping if they ascend to worlds that the western people do not know?—We have to get out of our material civilisation considering everything that is in the physical world round us. We have to ascend to the spiritual with everything that we have conquered on the physical plane. It is significant and not only symbolical that Darwinism still found Huxley as a representative who had to say from his western view: nature shows us that the apes struggled against each other, and it was the strongest who prevailed, while the slogan went out from the East: support, mutual aid consolidates our future. We have a particular task here in Central Europe. Nothing would avail us to be unilaterally English or unilaterally Oriental. We must combine the dawn of the East and the physical science of the West to a great harmony. Then we understand how the idea of the future is combined with the idea of the struggle for the special existence.

It is more than by chance that in that basic book of theosophy from which somebody who wants to get involved deeper in the spiritual life can find light on the path the second chapter ends meaningfully with a sentence that harmonises with this idea. You can read it not like a phrase in Light on the Path (1885, by Mabel Collins, 1851-1927, theosophical author), but because the spiritual development leads the human being to the knowledge of the common soul that settles in the single soul. At the same time, the nice words agree with which both chapters of Light on the Path close. Somebody who delves completely in this marvellous little book which fulfils the soul not only with the contents which make us internally devout and give the human being real clairvoyance because of the strength of the words sees the balance in detail if he lives through what he reads in every chapter. Then the last words light up in the soul: peace is with you. This will be finally imparted to the whole humanity by the mental power, which we look for and foster. Then the human genius bends over the human race spiritually whose principal words will be: peace is with you.—This opens the right perspective for us. There we have to speak not only of peace, not only establish peace as an ideal, conclude contracts, long for decisions of an arbitration panel, there we have to foster the spiritual life, then we cause the strength in ourselves that pours out over the whole humanity as a strength of mutual aid.

We do not fight; we do something else: we foster love, and we know that with this care of love the fight must disappear. We do not confront fight with fight. We confront fight with love, while we nourish and cherish it. This is something positive. We work on ourselves pouring out love and found a society, which is built on love. This is our ideal. We carry out an ancient saying in a Christian way if we penetrate this emotionally and vividly. A new Christianity or rather the original Christianity will awake for the new humanity. Buddha gave his people a saying that envisages such a care. However, Christianity also has such a care of love in even nicer words, if one understands them properly: you do not overcome fight with fight, or hatred with hatred but you really overcome fight and hatred only with love.

It was not at all that long ago that one considered as something unscientific in certain circles to speak about the human soul as a particular entity. The least understanding is there today if one speaks even about the mind or spirit besides the soul. The subject, which we set ourselves today, is rather extensive. I am only able to show some outlines. Within the spiritual-scientific worldview we are led to that older division of the human being, which is a trichotomy compared with that which has still validity almost entirely in the consciousness of the present humanity, compared with the division in two parts of body and soul. The trichotomy to which the theosophical or spiritual-scientific worldview has to go back again is that of body, soul and mind or spirit. Let us come to an understanding first of all about what we understand, actually, by body, soul and mind or spirit. The body of the human being is something about which we do not require many ideas to understand it. However, on the other side, the idea of the physical, of the external physical is so much the only thing that occupies our present humanity that the understanding about the difference of soul and mind and already about the entity of the soul is rather difficult. Today we have to be mindful—in contrast to some other talks I have held here—of a rather intimate exactness of our concepts and ideas which we want to develop here and, hence, I ask to be allowed to engage your attention to finer distinctions in the human ideas.

If a human being stands before you, you will admit without further ado that in the space, which the concerning person fills, his body exists. Because your senses attest this human body to you. However, the human being can look at himself with his senses at least partially, and we can say without thinking, the human being is a bodily being for another sensory-gifted human being. However, in the space, which the human being fills, even more exists certainly, than what your senses can see. It is maybe for the human life—understood in its entirety—the least that the other human being can see with his eyes and touch with his hands. For if the human being speaks about his life, he speaks very seldom about his bodily appearance perceptible to the senses. Then he speaks about his destiny, about joy and sorrow, about pain and everything that lives inside and is not perceptible to the senses at first.

A human being may stand before you and another beside him. What your senses perceive of both human beings is not the essential at first, but it is to be added that perhaps in the one human being a sad soul lives and in the other human being a joyful, happy soul exists. In both cases, the internal being of the person fills the space somewhat different from the physical existence. If you put a blind person before another person, this blind person does not perceive the bodily existence of the other person at first. He may be tempted to state under circumstances—if he does not take notice with his sense of touch or in another way—that nobody is in the room because his eye is unable to see. One just needs senses to be convinced of an external sensory existence, senses that are able to perceive this external bodily existence.

Now we must ask ourselves, would this external bodily existence not be there if one did not perceive it? Would I not stand also in this place if on all sides nothing but blind and deaf people were who cannot see and hear me? As for me, I would be there, I would be in myself. Just as I am in myself according to my bodily existence, and this must be distinguished from the perception by the others. We have now to soar a view that the same difference exists for that which I have called the second way of existence, for the desire and pain, for the life, which fills the space, but this space fulfilling is not perceptible to the senses. If a person stands before a blind person and this blind person becomes suddenly sighted, the external existence becomes a discernible existence for him. Then the question arises: could not be joy and pain, rage and passion—not perceptible to the senses at first, but living also in the human being like his red blood, his nerves and bones—a discernible entity perceptible to the other human beings?

The human being knows what he can perceive. He is a developing being, a being that has developed from imperfect levels in a distant past to his present existence. All organs, which are at and in the human being, have developed gradually. The abilities of seeing and hearing developed bit by bit; the external physical world became a discernible world for the human being, a world that he knows, that he can observe. If the human being develops that way, could we not ask there, whether he is not also able to improve himself further? May it become discernible to him what is not discernible to him even today?—Just as the room in which a human being stands is dark for a blind person at first and he starts perceiving colours and the physical figure if he becomes sighted, nonetheless, it could also be that that which still lives in the room what flashes through the soul would also be made visible, discernible. The human being was led to his external, sensuous visibility by the external forces of the world. He has added nothing there. He was put on the physical plane by the order of nature, equipped with senses to perceive the sensuous world. However, the human being himself can take in hand his further development; he can make himself able to experience other things except the sensuous world round him.

This development of a higher life was always nourished and cherished in certain human communities from times immemorial. Just as the human beings have sensuous eyes and sensuous ears at first, the ability to perceive with the eyes and ears of the soul—if I may express myself this way—was developed by the own activity of single human beings. As true as it is that the eye if it opens perceives a coloured world round itself, where, otherwise, darkness was, it is also true that the mental eye is unlocked by a suitable training, so that that which lives in the affects, in desire and grief becomes discernible. The instruction that leads to such higher development of the human being is different from the usual lessons. Our ninth talk will discuss that in detail what one can generally discuss on this internal development publicly. Somebody who wants to know more about this internal development can find out more about that. Today I can refer only to the ninth talk. However, the most necessary should be suggested.

The present external civilisation knows very little about those instructions, which the human being must receive to get mental eyes and ears. Only marginal knowledge is there. However, just the spiritual-scientific worldview is appointed to rouse an understanding of the supersensible because it is a necessary requirement for the culture. Today all lessons intend to fill the mind and reason mostly. However, this means that a world of ideas is woken in us that is connected with the external sensuous world. Our external sensuous knowledge attracts more and more increasing attention. However, this is not such necessary; it does not deepen the human being, as splendid as the achievements of our civilisation may be. There was another instruction at all times, an instruction that does not aim at the external expansion of the sensory world, but at the deepening of the world being. I describe it to you only with a few words to give an idea of it.

Everything that you read in the scientific writings today has come about by external sensuous observation. Science considers it more or less as something that must not contain what has not come about by external observation. One presupposes that the human being should remain, as he is that he already has the ability to absorb what this science can offer him. However, it is completely different if it concerns the instruction, which should lead the human being to the ability of mental perception. In such schools, one taught something else. At first, no teaching material is handed over to the student that contains as many concepts as possible. Rather a student went to a master and the master accepted him if he considered his disposition as ripe for developing the internal senses. Then he had not to take up much new contents in himself, but he had to become another human being at first. He did not get a book, not special contents, but so-called eternal contents of thought at first, something eternal that was due to those human beings who were further in their development than the remaining civilised human beings were. We have to come to an agreement about what we understand by such eternal contents of thought.

Try once to look around in your soul and to ask yourselves: how much of the ideas and thoughts living in me, of the feelings and what is, otherwise, in my soul, belongs to the time and the place in which I live?—Try once to think about what moves your soul from the morning up to the evening, and what would be different, completely different, if you were in Moscow instead of in Berlin, and if you did not live at the beginning of the 20th century, but at the end of the 18th century. Subtract everything that you have taken this way from space and time in which you live, from your soul contents. Try to understand how much of that which you imagine would also apply to a person in another place and time. It is not much. However, there are things, which do not only apply to today and to Berlin, but also to other places and other times. If we ascend in this sense, we detect more and more that our sense is led, like by a great spiritual guide of humanity, to such eternal contents of thought.

The religious scriptures of all times are full of such things, which are independent of space and time. To mention the most trivial I can say that mathematics is something that is independent of space and time. What deals with time and space is itself temporal and transient. However, if the soul devotes itself to the imperishable, it becomes everlasting and imperishable and absorbs what is immortal. Hence, the master gives everlasting contents of thought to the soul at first. The contents that are only related to the core of the soul can be given to everybody, indifferently whether he lives in America, in Japan or in Africa.

Then the student had to cut himself off the sensuous outside world and to live with that which lives as strength in him. With immense patience, the deepening had to happen on the inside of the soul. The human inside is something living, and as from the mere cell mass the wonderful construction of the physical eye has originated, the spiritual eye originates in the soul from the everlasting spiritual contents if it becomes engrossed that way and lives in meditation. The physical eye was not always there. It has originated from the confluence of the external physical forces. The human being is able to wake the spiritual eye in the soul if he can be developed by the spiritual contents. Such pupils awaited and awaited in patience, they had to use a big part of the day to their exercises. There were times in which this was possible. Thus, they waited until the internal forces woken by the mental deepening gave them the perception of that which filled the space as desire and grief, as instincts, passions, and impulses.

A physical eye sees because the external source of light throws rays on an object. One cannot see without light. Eye and light belong together. In the sensuous outside world, eye and light are two separate things. In the soul, the spiritual eye is woken, and this is at the same time the source of a new mental light. We ourselves must emit this light which makes the mental visible that stands before us. If you have received the inner light this way, by sinking in your inside and the awakening of the internal life linked with it, your own astral body starts shining from the inside and lights up everything in truth and reality like the sun the objects. However, you do not light up the external world, but that which is mental which lives in the human being as an affect; this becomes visible by the rays, which you yourselves emit. Thus, the human being is able to make discernible for himself what is not discernible externally.

All great guides of humanity who have spoken to us about the soul—do not believe that they had empty phrases and words in mind only. One knows nothing of the depths that have moved and caused the human culture if one believes only in the sense world. One normally speaks from the immediate view. Envisage, for example, the relation of soul and body as I have just discussed it, then you must say to yourselves, this relation of soul and body is such that something mental penetrates the bodily that stands before. As true as it is that this body that you call your own is fed from the outside by foodstuffs and is thereby animated and supplemented from outside, as true it is that this body is animated, penetrated and lighted by the mental. If this body sleeps, the mental is not in it at first, then it is separated from it, it is outside it. Then we cannot speak of the fact that the mental streams into the body. A German theosophist, a deep spirit, characterised this relation of soul and body in a wonderfully attractive way, which one understands only properly if one makes such requirements as we have just done. This theosophist—we are allowed to call him a theosophist—speaks about the sleep, when the soul is not in the body, in a peculiar way. He says, “Sleep is the digestion of the soul; the body digests the soul. Being awake means the effective state of the soul—the body enjoys the soul.” It is a wonderful comparison. As one enjoys the food with the absorption of nutrients, the body enjoys—this theosophist thinks—the soul, which lives in it. As well as the body, after it has enjoyed the food, digests it, the body digests in the sleeping state what the soul has sunk into it. This saying of our German poet and theosophist Novalis (pseudonym of Friedrich von Hardenberg, 1772-1801, poet) is very beautiful. You can find a source of the most beautiful spiritual-scientific wisdom with him. Only the spiritual-scientific worldview can understand him. I could state countless things of the German culture that would show you how the great seers of humanity spoke of soul, body, and their relation to each other with expertise.

The third thing about which we have to speak is the mind or spirit. We summarise desire and grief, pain and joy, passion, instinct and avidity and what else under the name “soul.” If one asks what the soul is, then we say, what gets the living existence inside at first. Someone can attain the perception of this soul who has received an education as I have just described it. Mind or spirit exists not only inside of the human being, but also everywhere in the world. You can convince yourselves of that by a very banal thinking activity. All human beings in the world think, think in that which is round them. They get knowledge of the world round them with their thoughts. These thoughts are not only expression of that which lives in the outside world, but also of something that does not live in the outside world. If you oversee the universe, your sense sees an enormous sum of stars and processes, and then there comes your reflection and gets a concept of these stars. If your sense sees a drop of water, your reflection gets a concept of this drop of water. Briefly speaking, you are not contented to perceive the things; you also want to understand them. This is something different from mere sensuous perceiving. If you have a glass without water in it, you cannot pour out water from it. If no thought and no concept were in the space outside, one could also not get out them. It would be illusionary to think about the world if the world were not built up according to thoughts. The stone about which you think and which you understand must have originated from a thought, otherwise the thought could not be got out. If you do not want to get involved in absurd contradictions, you have to admit that the thoughts are as true in the world outside as the thoughts in your head inside. You think, and the thoughts that live in you are not different from those, which have built up the world.

Thus, we have three aspects:

1. The sensuous in the world, the material existence, perceived by the external senses;

2. The soul which we experience and which that soul, which is instructed in that way about which I have spoken, can also perceive, and

3. The mind or spirit that we assume all over the world as that which flows through it like a fluid and announces the being of the things to us at first.

The human being can perceive this spirit first of all where it appears as such. What he can perceive is its external physiognomy, its sensuous expression. You do not see the spirit in the world, but its sensuous expression.

The human being thinks in the spirit. Indeed, the thought lives in the world, but the human being cannot see it. He can only think it. As true as you yourselves think about the world and as true as a spiritual mirror of the world forms, as true it also forms in every other human being. This other human being is not only desire and passion, but this spiritual mirror of the world also lives in him. One can perceive this with the spiritual eyes and ears. It is true that that internal training about which I have spoken produces not only the ability to perceive the soul of the human being, but the human being can also develop the ability in himself to see the thoughts of his fellow-man, to understand and perceive the worldview, the whole environment. When the human being perceives not only the external portrayal of his thought, but the thought itself, when he is able to open his spiritual ears to the universe, then he will really perceive the thoughts, the spirit of the world. Then the star appears to him not only as a star, but the star says something to him. The stones, the rock crystal, for example, appear to him not only water-clear, but it also announces its being to him. Then the human being can face everything in a new way with such a deepening, as it has been suggested, so that the things speak sounding round him, say their innermost names to him, announce their being to us.

The old Pythagoreans meant this. They had such a training and initiated into such a hearing of the world speaking of the sphere music. It was not a mere comparison; it was the immediate percipience and the bringing to awareness of that which is hidden, otherwise, behind the things. The spiritual eyes disperse this veil of nature, and the harmony that is hidden behind this veil starts sounding. Goethe also means that with his words in the Prologue in Heaven (Faust I). You read no phrase there. It would be a phrase if Goethe spoke of the sounding sun. However, no, he speaks: “In ancient rivalry with fellow spheres the sun still sings its glorious song and it completes with thread of thunder the journey it has been assigned.” These words sound from the world music of the world spirit. Goethe continues this later once again, where he says, “Hearken! Hear the onrush of the Horae! In these sounds we spirits hear the new day already born.” If the human being develops this ability, he becomes aware of the spiritual. Then his soul perceives the thought as distinctly as the usual human being perceives his body.

Body, soul, and spirit are the three members of the human being. He is a bodily, physical being at first. In his inside, the mental existence lives and develops. In this the spirit of the whole world—as far as the human being can grasp it—is reflected and lives as the third member. From the outside into the inside and from the inside again to the outside, this is the way, which the human being walks from the body through the soul to the spirit. What gives us generally the possibility to have such a mental existence? We owe this possibility to the fact that we can live in the soul. We live in desire and grief, in pain and joy even if we do not perceive it externally. We also live in our body, but we perceive it also from the outside. It is a difference between these two fields of existence. In the spiritual-scientific worldview, one calls that which one has round himself as one has the external bodily round himself: existence of complete consciousness. Our consciousness combines with the bodily existence first. This consciousness lives only on the physical plane that way and we call that the physical plane, which spreads out round us to the senses. What lives in our soul is different. One calls it life, and one calls this life existence on the so-called astral plane. The physical plane and the astral plane are both realms in which the human being lives. On the physical plane, the human being is aware, on the astral plane, he lives only. There he forms the things that are outside him not yet consciously. However, he lives in the mental or astral.

The third kind of existence is the spiritual existence. In general, as present human beings we do not yet live in it or only partially at most. However, while we settle in the spirit, this spirit combines with our soul bit by bit. We could say that this soul spreads over the whole environment, it becomes bigger and bigger. If the human being seizes the outside world, grasps the sense and the spirit of the outside world, then he is no longer concluded in his inside. Then he walks daringly out of himself and combines with the things around him. Compare the animal with the human being in this respect. The animal lives, so to speak, completely in the soul. It does not create concepts of the environment. It does not spread its soul over the spiritual of the world. This is also the difference between the human being and the animal. The animal lives and weaves, so to speak, in his inside. However, the human being emerges again from his inside. We could also say, the human being exceeds his self (German nonce word: sich entselbsten). The human being has always soul, inner life. This inner life is there. However, the development of the human being consists of the fact that he spreads this inner life over his environment, over that what is around him, over the spirit; it streams out over the whole world. If this happens, the human soul combines with the everlasting of the human being. Then this marriage of the human soul with the everlasting, the world spirit, takes place. When this union of the human being with the everlasting world spirit takes place, this whole sum of joy and grief changes, this whole world of impulses, desires, and passions in our inside, the whole astral body of the human being becomes different. That desire, those instincts of the human being, which he got, when he arose from nature's hand, which he has in common with the animal, all this soul life disappears and passes and belongs as such to the transient. Try to visualise once what lives in such instincts, sufferings, and joys in the human being and how this life takes place in the human being. They are connected with the transient.

The human being starts stepping out of the circle of this transient. He refines his impulses and desires, his passions, he ceases to appreciate or displease what is bound to place and time. He rises to that which lies behind the things and is just hidden by the veil of the sensuous. This is something important if the human being starts enjoying not only what his eye gives him, but also what the impressions of his eyes bring from the spiritual world to his soul. This is a great moment in the human development when the human being is no longer following his sensuous instincts only, but is led by supersensible motives, by moral ideas and concepts that do not penetrate from the outside but from the spirit. Just as the body is interspersed with the soul, the soul is interspersed with the spirit. Consider the human being on certain former stages of development, there you find his physical being, which is interspersed with the soul. While the human being stands as a body before you, he realises his existence in his desires and passions. More and more comes from the supersensible into the soul. It is infiltrated with the spiritual. This process lifts the soul out of time and space. What is beyond time and space is imperishable, remains as the everlasting in the soul. Thus, you see that just as the soul is embedded in a body, the spirit is embedded in the soul. As the imbedding of the soul in the body points us to a distant past, in which they were connected bit by bit with each other, the union of the soul with the spirit points to the future of humanity. This development takes place gradually. It takes place at first in such a way that the spirit penetrates the soul more and more.

Consider how the beginning of the spiritual contents is in the soul at first. Imagine, you have an object before yourselves. You look at it as a sensuous object. You turn round: the sensuous object is no longer before you. However, a picture of this sensuous object is before you. We call this the idea of the object, the memory of it in a certain respect. This remains in the soul. This is the first element that the spirit gains ground in the soul as memory. We could not absorb anything from the spirit of our environment if we were not able to know anything about the objects when they do no longer stand before us. The first element of the spirit lives in the human being. It is to the objects of the environment, as it is also to our own soul. Get clear in your mind, which role memory plays in our soul life. The animal completely lives in the present. Of course, the levels or degrees, which I indicate, are more extremely expressed than they are in reality. The animals have also to go through a certain spiritual development, but I have to express it somewhat extremely to bring the matter to mind.

What the animal feels and experiences today is the central issue for it. The spiritualisation of his whole being means to the human being that he is able to live beyond the present. While we take the memory with us from our spiritual into our present, we spiritualise ourselves more and more; thereby we grasp the spirit in the first element. I have the spiritual before myself, if I remember the experience of yesterday. Memory is one of the most important moments for the spiritualisation of the soul life. Memory ties on the spiritual-mental existence that is connected with the external from birth up to the present. If we could not remember the past days, we would have little spiritual contents only. There are tribes even today that do not have such memory. There are still tribes which forget the experience in the cold, and that is why they must look for a protecting shelter for themselves every evening anew. Somebody who strives for a higher development takes up the memory and trains it more and more. Here begins the possibility to look beyond our transient existence, which is enclosed between birth and death.

Imagine that you have made a point of bringing in sense and reason to life by memory, and of living not only in the present, but learning more and more to have the whole life like a tableau before yourselves, with the consciousness that that can flow out only from your whole temporal being what you want to accomplish. If this is the case and if this is used again to wake up the internal forces as I have indicated this just now when I spoke that you have to live up the soul contents by contemplation, then you can try to extend the review farther and farther, make it more and more concrete and go back to birth. You can do this. However, infinite patience belongs to it; we shall still speak of these methods. Then you also see that of the soul which is not enclosed between birth and death. Then you learn to tie in with other things what takes action within this life between birth and death. There you learn to tie in your present with your past by the very own consideration in the memory and to reasonably connect the effect of today with the cause of yesterday; there you learn to pursue the inner thread of cause and effect in your soul. Then the same strength, which leads you back to your present life, leads you beyond birth. Because you have learnt to look at cause and effect in the soul independently, you experience what was before your birth, how you lived before your birth.

By the gradual development of this sense, the human being gets knowledge of his previous lives. The principle of re-embodiment or reincarnation becomes a fact to him. Sharpening the sight for the temporal in the inside world we attain the mental ability to make reincarnation or re-embodiment a fact for us. What do we do in this case? In this case, we penetrate the soul with that which connects us with the mental. There our sight extends inside. While we grasp the spirit of the outside world by understanding the outside world, pour out our soul over the outside world, and extend it, we spread the consciousness about the mental itself coming beyond our birth. Thus, our sight extends more and more, and thus we look from that which is bound to place and time to that which follows each other in the sequence of times. From there, we take possession of the essence of the human being that is imperishable and everlasting.

The human being spiritualises himself more and more. The first stage is if he comes out of joy and sorrow and develops feelings for the supersensible, a sort of joy and sorrow. The further he develops this, the more Plato's beautiful sentence comes true to him: the body is transient because it subsists on transient food; however, the spirit is imperishable because it subsists on everlasting food.—The relationship of body, soul, and spirit is this way. The body passes. What you can see of the human being is handed over to the earth at death. However, what lives as joy and sorrow in the human being, the soul, has not originated at birth, but is tied together with something that extends beyond birth. Thus, the soul existence extends beyond the borders of birth and death. However, what the human being absorbs in himself, while he goes out of his soul again and combines with the spirit, connects this soul with the everlasting springs of existence. This deifies the soul. The human soul becomes visible outside the body. As far as it is bound to the body and is one with it, it is something transient. If the soul combines with the spiritual, it thereby becomes more and more everlasting and imperishable. With it, we come to the point where we understand what human self-knowledge is, what true cognition of the human inside is.

At first, the human being experiences his soul in his inside undergoing joy and sorrow. However, then this soul realises images which disappear again. Something revives that is hidden to the mere senses. The human being has as the bare thought in himself what revives there in the soul. However, he connects this thought with his soul in the course of his life. He learns to feel and sympathise with the spiritual and, in the end, he likes the spiritual with pleasure as he only liked the sensuous with pleasure before. The desire applies, in the end, to everything spiritual. Selfishness becomes the unselfish love of the imperishable. In selfishness, the human love is grasped in the soul. But while we grasp it deeply inside as spirit, we realise that we find this self in the whole remaining world, that we are connected with the whole remaining world and that as we are born from the physical it is as true that we are born as a spirit any time from the spiritual universe, the spiritual-divine world. If we look for our higher self, which exists like a spark in us, we see the spiritual in the whole environment. This is the great knowledge of wisdom that the Vedanta philosophy sums up in the saying: tat tvam asi—Thou art that.—If the human being is aware of his spirit and his development begins to go out into the world, then his self extends to the spirit of the universe, to an existence of a spirit self, and we are with our very own being everywhere. Then that which was mere understanding becomes emotionally related content, and this is the real elevation of the soul to the spirit, the elevation to the real spiritual life.

There is a beginning of the spiritual life; however, it is dry and cold. There are people who only become warm if it concerns something mental, human beings who are glad and suffer, only if it concerns something mental, pain and desire. They say that the spiritual is something dull and cold. If they look up to the stars, they regard the thoughts about them as abstract; but they are dry and cold in their intellect. However, if the soul seizes the spirit, we feel, we think not only with the universe, because then the view changes by reason and mind into the mental conception of the whole universe. What was only desire once becomes now the desire of the spiritual, what was love in the mental becomes now love of the spiritual-divine in the world. Our feeling, which we have closed inside, spreads about the whole world. Our self flows out, and we become one with the all-embracing spirit. We lose our selves and we find ourselves in the all-embracing spirit. This is something higher than the mere thinking. In the mental, the human being has got the sensation. In the spiritual, he starts being able to operate the spirit. However, he will also come there where he reaches the spirit with the sensation. Then he is on the divine stage. He has to climb up this ladder with his own strength of connecting the soul with the spirit, so that they become one. This is true self-consideration. If we grasp the divine spirit flowing through the world not only with the reason but also with the heart—as we meet a friend and feel warmth in the heart—then we penetrate from the head and its wisdom to the heart and its love of wisdom of the whole world. Thus, we rise raising our soul, and we get not only to know our narrow-minded inside this way, but we extend our selves and find ourselves outside in the world. I have stressed it often and often: Look at your inside only, there you find the divine human being. No, you only find in yourself what you have in yourself. If you want to find more in yourself, you must develop this higher self first, and you develop it, spreading out the higher self about the whole world. Those who advised self-knowledge to a human being did not mean idle examining of his inside. This self-knowledge is considered as we have grasped it now, as an ascent of the soul to the spirit. Then the human being no longer feels any difference between himself and the animal, the plant and the stone. A general feeling of a universal brotherhood permeates his heart. And then, and only then if the human being has this in mind, he understands as the last destination of the development from the bodily-mental to the mental-spiritual the beautiful word of the poet and seer (The Novices at Sais by Novalis, 1802): “Somebody was successful to lift the veil of the goddess at Sais.—But what did he see? He saw—miracle of miracles—his self!” The spiritual scientist adds: he finds the divine in his self, and this is just theosophy, divine wisdom to raise the heart, the soul to the spirit, so that one succeeds in connecting wisdom with the divine and to have not only understanding, but the general feeling of the divine world.