The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Translated by Steiner Online Library

We are living at a time when one can see what anthroposophic Spiritual Science—as it is called—has really been striving after for years. To a certain extent the fiery signs of the times can be regarded as proving the necessity that led to the birth of this movement and has kept it before the world for some years now. And perhaps the best result of our anthroposophic strivings would be a conviction of this necessity in the hearts and souls of those taking part. Though this or that event in the external world may take on a stormy character, though that which is striving to develop from out of the depths of human evolution may have this or that appearance, the essential nature of what is happening to-day can only be grasped if we look at those events which escape the ordinary human powers of perception still usual among us. Such events are only really perceptible when we study the world from a spiritual point of view.

I should like to start by mentioning one such phenomenon which almost escapes notice among the manifold stormy events of to-day. It is regarded as something insignificant and unimportant, but it is an actual fact for one who, from spiritual sources, has acquired the ability to study life as it actually is.

It may sound an extraordinary statement, but it is nevertheless true, that for some seven, eight or ten years now a real student of human life can observe quite a different expression on the faces of new-born babies. Many people, it is true, do not notice this, for the most important things of life pass unheeded to-day. But one who has acquired an eye for such things knows that very many children born during the last seven to ten years wear a melancholy expression. It is as if they ‘held back’ from the world. One might say that even from the first days of life, from the first week onwards, something different can be seen in the physiognomy of these children. And if we investigate this remarkable fact that seems so strange to the man of to-day, we find that the souls entering the world through birth bear within them from before conception and birth that which gives their faces this melancholy expression. Hidden though it often be behind all their smiles, it is nevertheless there in the faces of these children, almost from birth. It was not there formerly. In these souls there lives—though it is quite unconscious, of course—a “reluctance” to enter life. Souls entering through birth to-day feel a kind of hindrance, a difficulty, in entering the physical world.

Now it is a fact that man undergoes an important experience in the spiritual world before entering the physical world through conception and birth, and the effects of this experience are active in his coming life. Here on the earth men die; they pass through the gate of death, laying aside their physical bodies and taking their souls into the spiritual world. These souls still bear within them the effects of all they have experienced in the physical world. After passing through the gates of death human souls appear, on the whole, as the after-effects of what they have immediately experienced in earthly life. Now such souls meet those who are about to descend into a physical body. (This is actually the case. I can only tell you of it, for these things can only be brought from the spiritual world through actual experience of them.) This meeting between those souls who have just passed through the gate of death and those who are just about to enter the physical world through the gate of birth is an important event. Its effect is decisive in many respects. In a certain sense, its function is to give the descending souls some idea of what they will encounter here. It is from this meeting that the “impulse” is derived that stamps the peculiar expression of melancholy on the faces of children entering the world to-day. They do not want to enter the world of which they have learnt through this meeting. For they know how, in a sense, their “spiritual plumage” will be ruffled by what mankind, immersed in materialistic thoughts and feelings, views and deeds, is experiencing on the earth to-day.

This fact (which, naturally, can only be established spiritually) and other things beside throw a strong light on our whole age. The present times can only be understood on such a basis, and we ought to strive for such an understanding.

I have started from something which can, of course, only be apprehended through spiritual perception. But other events of to-day are speaking to us loudly and clearly and can strike everyone who, though without spiritual vision, does not go through life half asleep. We have seen the great catastrophe of the World-War extend over the world during the last four or five years, causing great harm; we can turn our thoughts again and again to the outward and visible causes of this terrible catastrophe (as, I believe, everyone who is not asleep must do); we can study the course of this catastrophe and, finally, the events which have followed from it over large areas of the globe. One thing must be clear to every soul that is really awake. Consider the peculiar fact that this catastrophe of the world-war burst over Central Europe, for example, actually without anyone knowing how it all came about. This was indeed the case. People ask how it arose, pronounce this or that person guilty—and then, when they imagine they have laid the blame at somebody's door, repeat again and again: Yet it cannot be like that; there must have been some other factor at work.

People tell themselves that a great social movement has developed out of the catastrophe of the world war. Whether they belong to a party or not they try to understand what ought to be done in the present social catastrophe. Yet all the thoughts they form about it are only “thought-mummies” in the face of current events—thoughts that are powerless before the storm of events and quite inadequate to their true character. And if we look more closely at all this—especially now when all kinds of memoirs are being published by persons who, apparently, were directly concerned in the outbreak of the world-catastrophe—we have to ask ourselves: Were these people really “within” the events of four or five years ago? Did they really know what they were doing? Had they any conception of the far-reaching consequences of what their intellects had thought out? People ought more and more to admit to themselves to-day what the Russian Minister Suchomlinoff admitted at his trial. Speaking of the three or four hours in which he made his most important decisions, he said: I must have lost my reason then; I must, indeed, have been mad!

Such things are very significant. They point to the wide-spread mental confusion among those concerned. And one who is really in a position to see through the terrible nature of present world-events, discovers what people will come to see more and more, namely: that there was not so very much moral failure, but all the more intellectual blundering through sheer incapacity to grasp world-events.

It is just the same to-day. How helpless, in the main, is the great majority of people in the face of world-events that have come upon them. A most serious question is presented here. What really lies at the base of all this?

At the base of this lies something which is extraordinarily difficult for our materialistically-minded age to grasp, namely: that just since the historical moment in which the wave of materialism rose especially high, the strongest spiritual force that has ever willed to enter human life from the spiritual world is now seeking to enter. It is this that is characteristic of our age. Since the beginning of the last, third of the 19th century the spirit—the spiritual world—is willing to reveal itself to men in all strength; yet men have gradually reached a point in their development when they are only willing to use their physical bodies as instruments for receiving anything at all in the world. Their materialistic outlook has accustomed them to consider—even to maintain on theoretical grounds that the physical body is the instrument of thinking and, indeed, of feeling and willing too. Men have persuaded themselves that the physical body is the instrument of all spiritual life. They have not persuaded themselves of this without grounds; they have good reason for this, namely: That man in the course of his evolution had gradually come to be able to use only the physical body. It had really come about that only the physical body could be used as the instrument of spiritual activity.

So we stand to-day at the infinitely important juncture in human evolution where, on the one hand, the spiritual world is willing to reveal itself with great power, while, on the other, man must find the strength to free himself from his greatest entanglement in what is material and come to a new reception of spiritual revelations.

To-day man is confronted by the greatest trial of his strength—his power to work his way in freedom to the spirit which is approaching him of itself, if he does not shut himself off from it. The time is past when the spiritual could reveal itself to man in all sorts of subconscious and unconscious processes. The time has come when man must receive the light of the spirit through a free, inner deed. All the confusion and want of clarity in which men are living to-day come from the fact that men must receive something that they do not yet want to receive: an entirely new understanding of things.

The old ways of thought, the old ways of regarding world-events, came to full expression in the terrible catastrophe of the world-war. Its infinitely significant warning signs are nothing but a call to re-model our ways of thinking, to try a new way of regarding the world, for the old way can only lead again and again to chaos and confusion. It is time we realised this. It is time we realised that the leading statesmen in 1914 had come to a point at which nothing more could be achieved with the old methods of thought. Because of this they led humanity into misfortune. People must impress this fact strongly upon themselves, or they will not form a strong resolution really to meet the spirit and the life of the spirit in freedom and inwardness of soul.

The lamentable thing about the time in which we are living is that we see things being revealed everywhere which cannot be understood with previous points of view and previous conceptions of life; yet people cling firmly to these old points of view and conceptions of life and simply do not want to come to new modes of conception. The anthroposophic view of the world wanted to prepare mankind for such new modes. Fundamentally, the anthroposophic view of the world had no real opponents except inner comfort and laziness of soul. People cannot rouse themselves to bring the inner forces of their souls to meet the spiritual wave invading our life so powerfully to-day.

I have just said that people are no longer accustomed to use anything but their physical bodies for thinking. It is this that had led to the materialistic view of the world. Now there is one thing that simply must be understood to-day. Nature, as studied by natural science to-day—that science which has achieved so many triumphs—can be understood with the instrument of the physical brain or of the physical body in general. But one cannot understand human life with this instrument of the physical body. We can only understand human life if we can rise to a thinking that is not produced by the physical body alone. It is this thinking that should be cultivated through the anthroposophic view of the world. Of course people say they do not understand the anthroposophic outlook—what is given in our books or presented in lectures. And we can quite believe them. But what does this mean? It only means that they want to se their physical brains for understanding. They do not want to learn another kind of thinking than that which can lazily find support in the physical brain. The anthroposophic view of the world cannot, of course, be understood with such thinking. It is not that one would have to be clairvoyant in order to understand it. But one must train oneself to a thinking that is not bound to the physical brain. What is to be found in anthroposophic literature and can be acquired with the healthy human understanding—for the healthy human understanding is not bound to the brain—gradually develops a thinking, a feeling and a willing that are adequate to the needs of to-day. It is a fact that what the present requires of us cannot be understood by the instrument of the physical body; it must be apprehended, through the instrument of the etheric body, i.e., with the body of formative forces underlying the physical body.

The spiritual world which is striving to reveal itself to men, only finds expression in their deeply unconscious feelings. Men are dominated by an unconquerable fear of the spiritual world. When they say they do not understand spiritual science this is really only an excuse. The truth is, they are afraid of the revelations of the spiritual world. It is only because they will not admit this fear that they say they do not understand spiritual science, or that it is not logical—or they make other excuses. In truth, they are afraid and therefore seek all possible excuses in order to escape from the great problems. How glad people are when they can escape the great tasks and riddles of present day life! When one spoke, maybe from this or that angle, of important problems of our age, people grew uncomfortable. Then perhaps they went to see the plays of Ibsen in which some of the great problems of the age find partial expression. But they did not need to take these seriously; all that is “merely” dramatic art. People grew uncomfortable when one spoke to them directly of the penetration of the physical world by the spiritual. Now Björnson had treated of this in his dramas, but one had no need to believe it; it was “only” art. People felt an unconquerable fear of taking these things seriously.

Again, class differences became greater and greater, the gulf between the governing and proletarian classes became wider and wider. The social question produced riddles; one talked of these but felt uncomfortable about them. Yet people went to the theatre to see Hauptmann's “Weavers,” though they felt no need to take a serious attitude to the problems it presented. One let oneself be stirred a little by the abysmal depths in human life, but there was no need to take it seriously, for it was “just” art. People took refuge in something that they did not need to take seriously. This is a phenomenon that is characteristic of the psychology of the age. What lies behind this?

Behind this lies the fact that men, in accordance with the will on the part of the spiritual world to reveal itself to them, ought to have striven to take seriously certain things which cannot be grasped through the instrumentality of the physical body, but only through “imaginative” forces—just as art itself can only be grasped by “imaginative” forces. Man's physical body is built up like a natural product; it is a work of nature. Man's etheric body is built up like a work of art; it is a real work of plastic art—only, it is in constant motion. And what man receives (for his enjoyment) from understanding a work of art, must be intensified and clarified, must become perception which he takes seriously, i.e., “Imagination,” “Inspiration” and “Intuition.” Man then understands what is willing to reveal itself to him to-day. For behind present events waits concealed what can only be understood spiritually. One should feel deeply that the spiritual revelation trying to enter our present world can only be grasped through spiritual science itself i.e., through that thinking and feeling, through those inner impulses of will which can be trained by spiritual science and belong to the same region of soul as artistic perceptions—though these are not taken seriously and remain mere mirror-images.

At one time I tried to draw attention to something that is urgently needed by the present age. Naturally it was not understood because of the philistine character of our science—that terrible monster of official, academic science. My book “Philosophie der Freiheit,” which appeared in 1892, contains a chapter entitled “Die Moralische Phantasie” (Moral Imagination). In terms of Spiritual Science one could say “imaginative moral impulses.” I wanted to point out that the domain usually reached only in artistic fantasy must now be grasped by mankind in all earnestness, for it represents a stage that man must attain in order to receive the super-sensible which cannot be grasped by the brain.

At the beginning of the nineties I wanted to point out, at least in regard to man's moral perceptions, that the super-sensible must now be grasped in all earnestness. One should realise all this to-day; one should feel that the thoughts, the inner impulses of soul that were carried over into the catastrophe of the world-war and into the present period of social upheaval are no longer of any use. We need new “impulses” (or springs of action). If one comes to-day with a new “impulse,” it is the last thing that people understand. For if one brings a new “impulse,” whose source is entirely within the spiritual world, and presents it as a remedy for the evils of our age, complaints are heard on all sides, from the extreme right to the extreme left, that it is all incomprehensible. Of course one does not understand it if one wants to retain the old forms of thinking. But to-day it is necessary to overcome these old forms, re-modelling one's whole soul inwardly. All external revolutions, no matter how agreeable to this or that party or class, lead into the worst of blind alleys and will bring the greatest misery to mankind if not illuminated by the inner revolution of the soul. This means throwing off one's absorption in the purely materialistic view of the world and preparing actively to receive the spiritual wave that is willing to invade human evolution as a new revelation. The revolution from matter to spirit is the only salutary revolution; all others are only like diseases of childhood—scarlet-fever or measles—afflicting the early stages of what is trying to come to healthy expression in the emergence of the spirit at the present time.

A strong inner resolution is necessary to-day if we are to be equal to the demands made upon us by our present age. Let us consider in all earnestness that it is a spiritual world that is trying to invade our life. Spiritual forces are there and we should make our decisions, our deeds, our whole thinking dependent on them. This is demanded of us to-day! Much is changing in the present time. Let me point to something symptomatic which also sounds strange when spoken of, but appears of the greatest importance when viewed spiritually.

I have just spoken to you of the etheric body as a necessary instrument for a certain spiritual understanding of what in art need only remain a mirror-image. Now we know from Spiritual Science that in addition to the physical body and “etheric body” we possess an “astral body”—or whatever you like to call it. It is the psychic element proper and is essentially more spiritual than the “etheric body.” At the time of his physical development man was naturally more “remote” from this than from his “etheric body.” For the “etheric body,” underlying, as it does, the physical body, has a kind of “form” [Bildgestalt] even though it is a “form” in constant motion. The “astral body,” however, is really formless. When we speak of it, we are speaking of an “image” or “picture” which, we know, is only intended to “represent” the “astral body,” for this is really formless. The “astral body” has been changing during the last three to four centuries and is very different in modern man. The human beings of the past had “astral bodies” that were, comparatively speaking, permeated with all kinds of spiritual forces; the spiritual feelings and impulses at work in their lives were due to this spiritual element in their “astral bodies.” To-day our “astral bodies” have becomeempty. They are remarkably empty, and this is because, at the present time, when the power of the spiritual world is striving to reveal itself from without (to a certain extent), man is to receive this external spiritual world. Hence his “astral body” has gradually become empty. He ought to fill himself again with what is revealing itself from without. This has a quite definite effect on man. And now I am coming to a fact which, as I have already said, sounds so very strange when one speaks of it just as strange as when one speaks of the child's melancholy countenance. Nevertheless it is a fact.

The most important event in the series that led to the outbreak of the catastrophe of the world-war fell—so far as Berlin was concerned—on the 1st [of] August, at some time between a quarter past three in the afternoon and eleven or twelve o'clock at night. Various people were concerned—people belonging, of course, to our materialistic age. Now for the materialistically-minded man of to-day that is the most unfavourable time for making decisions. For we have come to a very, very important point in human evolution. The man of to-day cannot form sensible decisions at all if he does not wake up with them in the morning. This is true, however strange it may sound, and men will recognise it more and more from external acts. It is not necessary that we should be conscious of these decisions; in our sub-consciousness we live through in the night what we can experience on the following day. Man has not yet got so far as to be able to survey it prophetically, but that is not the point. If you harbour a thought at 3:30 or 6 o'clock, it may be a thought that you have already had in the night and now arises in you again. If, however, a thought arises that you have not already formed in the night but which is produced from out of the events of the day, it cannot be a reasonable thought in the case of the man of to-day. The man of to-day has to draw his most important impulses from the spiritual world. These do not come from the physical world at all. To-day we cannot but be “unreasonable” if we do not bring our decisions with us, if we do not appeal to this life in the spiritual world. When our “astral body” is free at night, i.e., outside the physical and “etheric” bodies and together with the spiritual world, that which is most essential takes place; it is prepared for the Reason of the day (and more so than in the case of our ancestors). The moment of waking should be sacred for the modern man. He should feel: I come from the spiritual world and enter the physical; all that is good, all that makes me capable of being a reasonable man, I have experienced between falling asleep and waking up, through intercourse with the spiritual world, through intercourse with the dead I have known in life and who have died before me—in short, through intercourse with those who are no longer in a physical body. I experience it when I am with them in the purely spiritual world. From this experience I ought to draw the fundamental mood of sacred regard for the moment of waking; this fundamental feeling will then make it possible for me throughout the day to say in one case “Here I am helped by a spiritual impulse” and in another case “Here I receive no help; this must not be decided before tomorrow.”

That is a way of conducting one's life spiritually, really reckoning with spiritual factors. Of course, in a materialistic age men do not reckon with spiritual factors for they are always so “clever.” They believe that nothing more than the instrument of the physical body is required in order to be clever. They do not appeal to what can be revealed to them when they are separated from their physical body and are together with the spiritual world in their “astral body.” Nothing but the will to conduct life spiritually, the will to allow spiritual decisions, spiritual impulses, to play a part in what we do in the physical world can make humanity healthy again.

This is what man should really consider thoroughly to-day. The anthroposophic view of the world cannot consist in a number of abstract concepts which we receive, studying them and resting content that we have a different view of the world from that of others. No; our whole thinking and our whole feeling must become different, so that we realise that we must let our life be penetrated by the light of the spirit. Humanity's present misfortunes have come from its refusal to entertain the spiritual—an attitude that has been cultivated to the utmost. The catastrophe of the world-war has, more than any previous event, arisen from external, purely material causes. It has therefore been the most terrible catastrophe of all. Man should learn from it that he was driven into it by his previous thinking, feeling and willing; he will not come out of it—though it will assume other forms—until he boldly determines to undertake the inner transformation of his soul.

The facts which I have put before you are indeed facts: the melancholy expression on the faces of children, the necessity of using our etheric body for gaining an understanding of the world, and the necessity of appealing to the moment of waking, to what remains of the previous sleep and glows on, as it were, in us.. It will be more and more necessary for man's future evolution that he should let the spirit play an active part.

One should understand that the anthroposophic view of the world is not intended as something sensational for “psychic idlers”—and many of our present day mystics are just that. One should see in it not a kind of dessert supplementing life's external, physical enjoyments, but something connected with the deepest impulses of our cultural life. The latter cannot become healthy unless fructified by the anthroposophic view of the world. We should engrave this fact deeply upon our souls when we have learnt to know this anthroposophic view.

With the above words I wanted to describe, from a certain point of view, the present decisive moment in human evolution. Of course it is quite easy, if we judge with the thoughts of the age, to condemn as mere foolishness the important things that are most in need of being said to-day. People believe themselves Christians but have not even understood the saying that what is wisdom with man is often foolishness unto God, and that all foolishness—perhaps folly and madness—before men can yet be wisdom unto God. Indeed, people to-day forget so easily the inner impulses and like to cling to the empty phrase. When one speaks to men to-day and utters the word “Christian” or “Christ” or “Jesus” after every fifth word, one is considered to be speaking in a Christian sense, even if what one is saying may be very unchristian. But if we hold we are making known what the Christ is revealing to our souls to-day, and if in doing so we take account of the commandment: “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain”—a saying that has been carried over into Christianity—people find it unchristian. They repeat, in parrot fashion, the Ten Commandments, but take the name of their God in vain every moment and believe themselves to be specially Christian in consequence. So, too, one is not regarded as a true German if one has not always the word “German” on one's lips; though to-day the important thing is to see that the deepest forces of the German people have been, as it were, trampled under foot during the last thirty years and must be raised again by a spiritual deepening. We look to the West and find a civilization that strives to become completely materialistic, though it has, at least, a certain inner surety of instinct and on this account cannot completely drown in materialism. We look to the East and find a cultural life that despises the West and us too, for the Eastern culture still clings to an ancient spirituality and is renewing it in a certain way. We stand between these and are called to find the right path between Western materialism, and Eastern spirituality (which is not suitable for us). We in Central Europe should become conscious of our great responsibility and conscious, too, how much our sense of responsibility for this position has been lost in the last decades. What has our spiritual life become? An appendage to the political life and to the economic life. The state as trustee of the spiritual [cultural] life, especially of education, has destroyed the spiritual life. The economic life on which we depend for our daily bread has further destroyed us. We require a free spiritual life, for only into such can we introduce that which the spiritual world would reveal to mankind. This stream of spiritual life must descend! But it will never reveal itself to the servant of the state, the state professor; and it will never reveal itself to one who, in the spiritual life, is the coolie of the economic life. It will only reveal itself to him who has daily to struggle with the spiritual life and stands within the free life of the spirit. Our age requires the life of the spirit to be set free from the shackles of the state and of economics.

These things which are being made known to-day in another form through our “Threefold State” proposals, are the Christianity of to-day; they are, spiritual revelations clothed in external forms. They are what men need; they alone offer men a real basis and a real possibility for learning anew to transform their thinking. It is this that is so necessary for mankind to-day. We have had to wage war with a country that possesses an instinctive political life of great perfection and has long possessed many colonies with which it has industrial ties. We have fought as a country with an industrialism that was only developing and which wanted to possess colonies. For these strivings we required “spirit” [Geist]—and no one had committed the sin against the Spirit more than those who took a leading part in the economic life of Germany during the last three decades. For their programme was: rejection of the spiritual life, surrender to mere chance, blind chance. It is as if the World Spirit had wished to give the German people the greatest lesson by imposing the greatest test. This nation was to be shown the Spirit cannot be ignored. But it appears as if this is being learnt with difficulty, for this nation is still inclined to condemn everything else rather than lack of consciousness of responsibility towards the spirit. The lamentable events occurring in this domain to-day show that men's souls are still asleep. There is a total lack of conscious realisation how ill-fitted for their task are the men who guide the destiny of the German people and have to represent it before the West. There is simply no realisation that the whole delegation_, to Versailles is senseless because of the men taking part. The will not to see events as they are is still a witness to the fact that men's souls are asleep; otherwise they would have said long ago: The delegates to Versailles whom we have sent are as unfitted as possible to understand the present moment of world history. One will only judge these things correctly when one becomes conscious of responsibility towards the spirit—when one recognises that we are living in a very important moment of the world's history and that it is our duty to take things very seriously. In certain fields there is much talk about this, that and the other, and it is more comfortable to say: those who hold the responsible positions will manage somehow. But nothing good can come if those who hold responsible positions to-day still harbour the old thoughts. Whether they be old-fashioned aristocrats, or decadent aristocrats, or Marxian Socialists who know nothing about the world but, at most, have absorbed something of Marx' “Kapital”—whoever they be nothing good can come if they do not develop the will to turn their souls from the old to new thoughts. The revolution of the 9th [of] November, 1918, was no revolution, for what has changed is only the external stucco. But what is trying to change can be seen most clearly in those who now wear the outward stucco instead of those who wore it previously. It is necessary to see what lies at the base of all this. But thoughts are necessary, and for these one must have the will; and this will can only come when trained through active intercourse with the spiritual world. On this account active intercourse with the spiritual world is the sole real balsam that humanity needs.

This is what I wanted to put before you in a form in which it must appear to one to-day in face of contemporary events. I wanted, as the opportunity was given us to speak together again, to put this before your souls so that ever more and more and in ever wider and wider circles within our Anthroposophic Movement a striving might arise which can not only give the single individual an inner feeling of comfort but can bear fruits for the cultural life of the whole of humanity.

It is a deep satisfaction to me to see how many more friends of our Anthroposophic Movement are present to-day than a year ago. May the Spirit now quickening the development of the world and of humanity bring it about that in another year there may be as great, or even a much greater, increase in our numbers. For the more human souls there are who become convinced by this Spirit of the need for the new thinking, feeling and willing, and for a new sense of responsibility, the better it will be.

Let us continue our studies of yesterday. I then drew your attention to the fact that at the present period in human thought we compress the whole world within abstract lines of space, standing perpendicular to one another and forming the three dimensions of space, whereas in its life aspect this three-dimensional world proves to be much more complicated and much more concrete. In order to gain an adequate conception of all that this means, we must grasp it in even greater definition.

We must ask the question: If it is true that our Thinking is to be associated with the vertical plane which cuts through our axis of symmetry, our Willing with the vertical plane which stands perpendicularly to the thought-plane, while the plane of Feeling rests at right angles to both—how is it that we do not experience above and below, right and left, in front and behind, as three directions distinct in quality from each other and not interchangeable? How is it that we simply feel them as three space dimensions of equal value? We certainly speak of length, breadth and height, but if we form our three planes in this way, each one resting vertically upon the other, we might place the line which was horizontal in the first instance in a vertical position, and the other two would then become horizontal. In short, we could make three different arrangements. This only shows that the exactitude with which these three dimensions are built into the human body, when it is being used by man to describe and explain the whole Universe with the Sun and the stars, is made quite abstract.

The question is important: How do we manage to obtain abstract space dimensions from concrete ones? An animal could not do this! An animal would always feel its plane of symmetry as a concrete ‘symmetry’ plane, and it would not relate this symmetry plane to any abstract direction, but would at most, if it could think at all in the human sense, feel the turning (from one plane to another). The animal in fact does feel this turning as a deviation of its symmetry plane from the normal. Herein lie important and essential problems of Zoology, which will once again be illustrated as soon as man studies them from the standpoint of their impulses in reality.

The reason that animals can find direction, as is shown most clearly of all in the case of the migration of birds, is because they do not feel the three directions of space in a nebulous way, but feel themselves as part of a quite definite direction of space, and feel each departure from this direction as an angle, as a deviation.

Now, if we wish to understand how all this applies to man, we must call to our assistance what we have already learned about the organisation of the human body. We have heard that man is a threefold being, consisting firstly of the characteristic head organisation, which does not of course include the head alone but chiefly functions there, and extends all over the rest of the body. Then there is what I will designate as the ‘Circulation man’—all that belongs to lung and heart, and represents Rhythm in man. And lastly there is the ‘Limb’ man, which also continues inward and constitutes that part of man which is connected with metabolism or the transmutation of substance.

It now behoves us to study this three-membered man more closely. We will first think of him as Head man, Rhythmic man and Limb man. Of these three, only the third with its continuation inwards is strongly connected with the forces—not the substances, but the forces of our terrestrial planet.

This does not apply to the Head man, for what is he? (We are not now considering anything substantial but the forces, the formative forces which condition him.) The Head man is the metamorphosis of the Limb man of the previous incarnation. The forces that formed the Limb man in the last incarnation, have, during the period between the last death and the last birth—that birth which brought us into our present existence—been in a world which we have often described. There they were metamorphosed so that they could now form the head. Thus the Head man and the Limb man are complete polar opposites, and the central, Rhythmic man is the adjustment between the two, balancing or reconciling them by means of Rhythm.

This antithesis between the Head man and the Limb man must be still further examined. We shall, perhaps, be able more easily to approach the matters it is necessary to understand in this domain, if we examine the following example taken from another sphere.

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Consider the plant—not, for the moment, a perennial plant, but an annual which develops from seed to root and stem and during the year forms its fruit and seed. Such a plant grows from the seed that has been planted in the earth; out of the seed emerge the roots, then the leaves and the flowers, in which latter, during the fruit stage, is developed the new seed. This is the evolutionary cycle of the plant.

The plant proceeds from the seed-formation in the Earth, grows until it reaches the surface, when it receives the effects of the light—from the Sun—and the effects of warmth. Under these influences it grows still further and completes its cycle by returning again to the stage of seed-formation. But now, when it returns to the seeding period in autumn we have the plant not below in the soil but above the Earth; and here it has been during the whole summer, dependent upon extra-terrestrial influences. These influences helped to promote its growth to the point of new seed-formation; it has therefore grown to the point of a fresh seed-formation not under the influences of the Earth, but while drawn away from these by extra-terrestrial forces. It has become once more what it was before and yet something different. In what sense different? The completion of the new seed terminates the process of growth. Development ends here, and the cycle cannot be completed unless we take the seed from its own plane or region and return it once more to the Earth. That is to say, if we follow that seed up into the sphere in which it is beyond the earthly element, we must then bring it down again, under the Earth. Then once more it grows up towards Heaven, and then again we must bring it down again to Earth.

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That is to say, further growth depends upon bringing the seed down again to a deeper level—we must return to the Earth that which has been generated by the forces of Heaven. Therefore it is not sufficient to consider the cycle merely from seed to seed. We are concerned with the fact that the plant in a sense outgrows itself, and when it has outgrown itself to a certain stage, we must bring it back again to its original place, where it is once more received by the same forces and the cycle begins anew.

We can now draw the process in a diagram. If we have here the Earth level, then the cycle of evolution for the plant must be drawn thus. But the plant must again return to Earth, and so if we draw several annual processes, we must advance a little further each time. There you have the difference of level. We must again and again bring the plant back to another level.

I have given you this as an illustration, and before we pass on, something else must be considered in connection with it. Notice the way in which the bean plant arises out of the seed. and you will understand what I mean. You will realise it still better, if you observe a plant with a twining stem, one that is naturally inclined not to grow up in a straight line if certain forces are able to act freely. The bindweed is an instance of such a plant.

Now let us pass on to consider this picture in connection with man. If instead of thinking of the yearly cycle of the plant, we turn our attention to that cycle which leads man from one earthly life, through the spiritual world, to the next earthly life, we have there something quite remarkably similar. Think of your limb organism in the previous incarnation, and your head in this incarnation. The head is formed through a metamorphosis, and it is only the visible change that is interrupted by all that takes place between death and a new birth. The head is formed in the same way as the new seed in the plant is formed out of the old. But the whole of the intermediate life of the plant lies between. So that we may say: From the point of view of the organisation of his form, it is as if in man the root existed in the previous incarnation, and out of this root has grown the head of the present incarnation. The head, therefore, represents something analogous to the seed. But in man all this takes place, one may say, upon a higher level—in a higher region—and is, besides, more complicated.

And now in order to complete this conception, think of the whole metamorphosis of the plant. If you observe the bindweed, you will see from the spiral or screw-like form of the stem, that the forces acting from outside are not such as to cause it merely to grow in a straight line, they induce it to grow in a spiral form. The plant has a tendency to spiral formation. Only when the new seed is developed, does the seed resist this tendency; it is entirely concentrated in this small grain. The seed then withdraws from the influence of the Universe. In the case of man the Limb man is most under the influence of the Earth. (In the Rhythmic man the case is different and we will speak about this later.) But the head is something which withdraws itself from the Earth-forces and takes no part in them, just as the seed takes no part in the extra-mundane influences. Only because the head withdraws from the Earth-forces are we men able to think in abstract thoughts. Were it impossible for our head to separate itself entirely from Earth influences, we could not think in the abstract.

This fact is indeed expressed in the form of man. Think for a moment that your head actually represents the transformed Limb man. The latter however walks upon the Earth's surface, not so the head. The head may be compared with a man who is comfortably seated in a motor car or in a train; he does not move and yet goes forward. The head is in this position in respect to the rest of the organism; the latter advances forward, and the head rests as though in a vehicle, not taking part in any of the movements, but withdrawing itself in a very evident way from the Earth forces. The head is like the man who lets himself be carried forward by other people.

Such is the organisation of the head of man. It withdraws from the Earth's influences, and we can therefore say: The head of man shows itself—at least in this comparison—similar to the seed that withdraws from the heavenly influences of plant-formation. But with man it is not the same as with the plant. The latter grows from the Earth upwards—towards the Heavenly influences. Man grows downwards. When he arrives at conception or birth, he is in the first place a head structure; external embryology affords absolute proof of this. He brings with him his head as a transformed product of the last incarnation. During this earthly life—through the forces of it—the Limb man develops most especially. It grows on to the head. It is less evolved than the head and entirely under the influence of the Earth forces. The head on the other hand is entirely withdrawn from the Earth forces. We can therefore say: When we observe plants, we can trace, in the spiral or screw-like construction, whence come the forces that give the plant its spiral form; they come from extra-terrestrial bodies. But when we consider man, and see how he grows towards the Earth, we must ask ourselves: What has given man this potentiality to grow in opposition to the laws governing the growth of the plant which grows upwards? For man grows downwards and gradually succumbs to the earthly influence. How is all this explained? This is a most important, indeed an essential question, concerning not only Morphology, the study of the human form, but the whole being of Man. You see, if we were obliged to live our soul-life without a head, it would be entirely different; we should be incapable of any abstract conceptions! Above all, we could not conceive of three-dimensional space as abstract, but would strictly differentiate between front and back, right and left, above and below. All these directions would be for us quite distinct in character. This is, in fact, what our organism does. As soon as you have advanced, through the methods of Spiritual Science, to the imaginative conception of the Universe, this comfortable three-dimensionality ceases. Now you must discriminate, for you have performed something quite remarkable—you have eliminated the ordinary organism of the head and have gone back to the etheric organism of man.

Now the etheric organisation is essentially different from the physical organisation of the head. It is only through the completely organised head, brought over to this incarnation from the previous one, that abstractions have become possible. All abstract thinking, all thinking on the plane of pure thought, is bound to this head organism, which we attain only by leaving the spiritual world and coming into this physical world, in order to make independent of the Earth-organisation that which formerly was dependent on it.

This will show you that Man, like the plant, is embedded into the earthly influences, but with this difference, that man makes himself independent of them through his head organism. If the rest of our organism were to think without the instrumentality of the head—as indeed it can—man would at once feel himself one with the whole organism of the Universe.

If it were possible to invent a very comfortable sleeping car—it is at the present time perhaps unlikely—but a car from which you did not look out and from which all noise and rattle were eliminated, you might fall into the illusion that you were in a still and silent room, for you would perceive nothing of its movement. But upon looking out of the window, you would see that it is moving forward, although you are sitting quietly in the car. Similarly, as soon as you also release yourself from the illusion which your head organism produces in you during the process of making itself independent of the Earth-organisation, you observe that you are taking part in the motion of the Earth. That is to say, it is possible, through the transition from what, in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds I have called the present-day mode of forming ideas to what I have called Imagination—it is possible to feel the movements of the Earth, because you are then ‘looking out of the window’. You look into the spiritual world. In just the same way as you look through the window of a train and notice the landscape outside continually changing, so do you, when looking out of the physical sense-world into the spiritual, perceive in the alterations in the latter as you pass by, that you with the Earth are not at rest, but moving forward. Hence we cannot arrive at a true astronomical space-conception if we insist upon constructing it just with that part of our organism which has made itself independent!

Consider for a moment what we as civilised humanity have done since the beginning of this Fifth post-Atlantean epoch. We have thought about the Universe with our head. And it is the head—that part of us which has made itself quite independent of the Earth—that has contracted the world-movements into the abstraction of the three dimensions. We have the Copernican conception of the Universe, designed for us by the least appropriate instrument, the head, the essential characteristic of which is its emancipation from co-operation in the world movements. It would be somewhat as though you wished to obtain an idea, shall we say, of the movement of a railway train in which you are traveling, from a picture of it you draw with your hand, without reference to the movement of the train, but solely according to your own ideas. You draw something; you make yourself independent. But you cannot consider such a drawing as depicting the movement of the railway train; it has nothing whatever to do with it! And just as little to do with the world-process has a picture of it that we have designed according to external spatial astronomy, using for the purpose the instrument that is the most inadequate for its conception.

Now just observe to what conclusion a really truthful and commensurate conception of things leads us. We are compelled to admit that our spatial astronomical picture of the world has been built up with the most inadequate means. No wonder it contradicts the results that are obtained when the proper instrument is used! Of course, for certain purposes this conception is well adapted, because since the middle of the fifteenth century, when the Fifth post-Atlantean period began, we have had gradually to learn to form thoughts independently of the Universe. We shall hear in the next lecture how that came about. But we have thereby lost the capacity of really knowing anything of the movements in which we have trained ourselves to feel concretely the otherwise abstract dimensions of space. We shall come back to these things again and again; for we cannot arrive at a complete picture in any other way than by building up our ideas, as it were, in cycles.

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After yesterday's suggestions Dr. Stein has taken the trouble to construct a model showing the movements which result when we follow Man together with the Earth, or in other words the movement of the Earth taken in its absolute sense. If instead of following this time the motion of plant-forces in spirals, I follow the movements described by Man with the Earth, I again come upon a spiral, but one which is progressive. This spiral gives us an illustration of the real movement of the Earth, and at the same time a picture of that of the Sun. Suppose for a moment that the Earth is here and the Sun there. An observer sees the Sun in this direction. (diagram). The Earth progresses, but exactly in a line behind the Sun. When the Earth is here, the observer now sees the Sun in another direction. The Sun advances still further, the

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Earth following, and once again the observer sees the Sun in the other direction. That is to say, he sees the Sun at one time on the right, and another time on the left, owing to the way in which the Earth follows the Sun.

This has been interpreted as demonstrating that the Sun stands still and the Earth revolves round it. In reality, it is not so; the Earth moves along behind the Sun. The observer sees the Sun to the right when the latter has arrived at one point of the spiral path, while the Earth is here. Next he sees the Sun to the left, then again right, then left, and so on. All this gives the observer, who judges by outward appearances and loses sight of his own movement, the impression that the Earth revolves round the Sun.

From this you will realise how great a possibility of deception arises when one judges by exterior appearances; for here indeed a relativity of motion exists. We can really affirm that those who now calculate the apparent motion of the Sun do not perceive their own motion, and omit to take into consideration the relation between the Sun and the Earth.

I should like you to try to form a true idea of what I have said about course or motion in a screw-like line, because one must visualise, in a model such as this, the fact of the Earth following in the wake of the Sun; and then we shall be able to go on to what I should like us to attain tomorrow, namely a true understanding of the facts before us. Today I have intentionally given suggestions only, and purposely left many questions open, but they will be answered tomorrow or in one of the subsequent lectures. I wanted to show you in a quite simple way the experiences of one who looks out through the windows of the physical world, and observes the spiritual world outside as it rushes by. In this way he can form an idea of the real motion of the Earth and also of the Sun.

But I will show you first how to gain a conception of the true relation of the Earth to the Sun—that the Earth actually follows the Sun in its path—by searching for the one thing that will show us this relationship, namely certain processes in the human organism connected with the representative of the Sun in man—the human heart. For it is by taking our start from the knowledge of Man that we must seek to attain to a knowledge of the Universe.

In these studies I wanted to draw your attention to certain things which can lead us back to a more concrete study of the Universe than is contained in the cosmogony of Copernicus. We must not forget that the Copernican cosmogony arose during the epoch after the middle of the fifteenth century when there was an increasing tendency towards an abstract conception of the Universe. It came indeed at a moment of time when the tendency to make everything abstract was at its height. We must also remember that it is essential now that we should get free of this tendency and bring to our thought about the Universe concepts that contain something more than mere abstract ideas. It is not a matter simply of constructing a cosmogony similar in kind to that of Copernicus, on slightly different lines. This was brought home to me in the questions arising out of the last lecture. For the point in these questions turned on the possibility of being able at once to draw lines that would give us a picture of the world—once more a picture in quite external abstractions. That of course is not what is wanted. What we have to do is to grasp in its spiritual nature all that is not man, in order to build a bridge from the spiritual in Man to the spiritual outside him. You must understand that here, at this particular time at all events, it cannot be our task to discuss a mathematical astronomy. That would necessitate beginning over again from the very rudiments; for the fundamental concepts employed to-day have their source in the whole materialistic mode of thinking in use since the middle of the fifteenth century. If we wanted to develop and complete the cosmogony we have sketched, it would be necessary to begin with the most elementary principles and elaborate them anew. The fate that befell Copernicanism came about, as we shall see, because of the strong tendency to abstraction, which may so easily lead to intellectual excesses. True Copernicanism is not really the same as that which it has become in the hands of the followers of Copernicus. Certain theories have been selected from Copernicanism which were quite in keeping with the ways of thought of the last few centuries, and from them the cosmogony now taught in all the schools has arisen.

It is not my wish to do anything in the direction of a similar cosmogony, where, instead of the well-known ellipse in which the Sun is placed as one of the foci, and in which the Earth moves with an inclined axis, we simply put a screw-shaped line! What I want rather to do is to present the relation of Man to the Universe and it is in this direction that we will now pursue the matter further.

I have tried to show you how, the moment one begins to pass to a more intensive experience of the three directions of space in one's own form, one realises how these directions differ in nature and kind from one another; it is only the faculty of mental abstraction in the head which makes these three dimensions abstract and does not distinguish between above and below, left and right, before and behind, but simply takes them as three lines. And a similar error would immediately again be incurred if one set out to build any other construction into space in a purely abstract way. The point at issue can be made clearer if for a moment we turn to something else.

Let us consider colours. We will take colour once more as an example. Suppose we have a blue surface and, let us say, a yellow one. The conception of the world which, in its abstract thinking, gave rise to the Copernican cosmogony, has indeed succeeded in saying: “I see before me blue, I see before me yellow. That is due to the fact that some object has made an impression on me. This impression appears to me as yellow, as blue.” The point is that we should not begin to theorise in this way at all, saying: “Before me is yellow, before me is blue, and they make a certain impression upon me.” That is really just as if you were to treat the word PICTURE in the following way. Suppose you were to set about making deep researches into the word and think: “ ‘P’, something must be at the back of this; behind ‘P’ I must seek the vibrations which cause it. Then again, behind the ‘I’ there must be vibrations, and behind the ‘C’ more vibrations, and so on.” There is no sense in this. We find sense only when we unite the seven letters, connecting then one with another in their own plane, and read the whole word ‘Picture’; when we do not speculate as to what lies behind, but read the word—‘Picture’. So here too the point is that we should say: “This first surface makes me penetrate, as it were, behind it, makes me plunge into it. This other surface makes me turn away from it.” It is to these feelings into which the impression passes over that we must pay attention; then we come to something concrete. If we thus seek in the world outside what we experience inwardly, we come indeed to the feeling that we are not really within ourself at all, but that with our real Ego we are in the Universe, poured out into the Universe. Instead of searching behind the external Universe for ‘vibrations’, the atomists should seek for their own Ego behind the phenomena and then try to find out how their own Ego is placed into the outer Universe is, as it were, poured out into it. Just as with colour we should try to ascertain whether we feel we must plunge into it or whether we feel ourselves repelled by it, so, as regards the structure of our organism, we should feel how the three directions, above and below, forwards and backwards, right and left, differ concretely from one another; we should feel how differently we experience them inwardly, when we project ourselves into the Universe. When we are aware of ourselves as Man standing on the Earth, surrounded by the planets and fixed stars, we begin to feel ourselves as part of all these; it is not a matter merely of drawing three dimensions at right angles, but of thinking concretely about the Cosmos and penetrating into the concrete reality of the dimensions.

Now there is a series of constellations that is immediately evident to those who study the outer Universe at night-time, and has indeed always been seen when men have studied the stars. It is what we call the Zodiac. It is immaterial whether we believe in the Ptolemaic or the Copernican system; if we follow the apparent course of the Sun it always seems to pass through the Zodiac in its yearly round. Now if we imagine ourselves placed into the Universe in a living way, we find that the Zodiac is of very great significance. We cannot conceive of any other Plane in celestial space as being of like value with the Zodiac, any more than we could conceive the plane which divides us in two and creates our symmetry, as being placed at random just anywhere. We then perceive the Zodiac as something through which a plane may be described. (Drawing.) Let us suppose this plane to be the plane of the blackboard, so that we have here the plane of the Zodiac; the plane of the Zodiac is just the plane of the blackboard. We shall then have one plane before us in Cosmic space, precisely as we imagined the three planes sketched in Man. That is certainly a plane of which we can say that it is fixed there for us. We see the Sun run its course through the Zodiac; we relate all the phenomena of the heavens to this plane. And we have here an analogy of an extra-human kind for what we must perceive and experience as planes in Man himself. Now when we draw the Symmetry plane in Man, and have on one side of the Symmetry-axis the liver organised in one way, and on the other side the stomach organised in a different way, we cannot think of such a fact without feeling at the same time some inner concrete relation; we cannot imagine mere lines of space lying there, but what is in the space must manifest definite forces of activity; it will not be a matter of indifference whether something is on the right or on the left. In the same way we must imagine that in the organisation of the Universe it is a matter of consequence whether a thing is above or below the Zodiac. We shall begin to think of Cosmic space—as we see it there, sown with stars—we shall begin to think of it as having form.

Now just as we can think of this plane on the blackboard, so we can also think of another at right angles to it. Let us think of a plane extending from the constellation Leo to that of Aquarius on the other side. Then we can go further and imagine a third plane at right angles again to this one, running from Taurus to Scorpio. We have now three planes at right angles to one another in Cosmic space.

These three planes are analogous to the three we have imagined described in Man. If we think of the plane we have denoted as that of Will—the plane namely which separates us behind and before—we have the plane of the Zodiac itself.

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If we think of the plane running from Taurus to Scorpio, we have the plane of Thinking; that is, our Thought Plane would be co-ordinated to this plane. And the third plane would be that of Feeling. Thus we have divided Cosmic space by means of three planes, just as we divided Man in our first lecture.

What is primarily of importance is not simply to unlearn as quickly as possible the Copernican Cosmic system, but to enter into this concrete picture, to imagine Cosmic space itself so organised that one can distinguish in it three planes at right angles to one another, just as can be done in the case of Man.

The next question to arise for us must be: Is really the whole of Man to be thought of as forming an integral part of what appears to us as an outer Cosmogony, in which Man is included? We emphasised in the last lecture that the Earth with the Sun and other planets progress in a spiral. Such a statement is, of course, merely diagrammatic, for the spiral line itself is curved. That however does not concern us here; what is important for us at the moment is that the Earth as we have seen, follows the Sun in such a spiral, and the question is whether Man too is so interwoven in this movement that he is absolutely compelled to take part in it in any case; for if that be so, if he absolutely must follow completely, then there is no place at all for free will or for moral activity on his part. Let us not forget that we began our study with this very question: how to build a bridge leading from pure natural necessity to morality, to what takes place under the impulse of free will.

Here we can go no further if we rely only on the Copernican system; for what have we there? We picture the Earth upon which we stand; whether the Earth or the Sun goes rushing along is of no moment ... If Man is connected with all this in an absolute natural causality, it is impossible for him to develop free will. We must therefore put the question: Does the entire being of Man lie within this natural causality, or does the being of Man move up out of it at some point? We must not however put the question out of the mood of thought of the materialists of the nineteenth century, who remarked that so many people have died on Earth that it would not be possible to find room for all their souls. They wanted to know about the space required for souls. But the point in question really is: What meaning is there in asking about a place for souls?

We must above all clearly understand that the full sense and meaning of the events in the Universe—and movement is also an event—only becomes clear to us when we grasp it in definite cases. We distinguish in some way what takes place in the four realms,—what is above and below the plane of the Zodiac (Will), and what is right and left of the plane of Feeling; or again, we can consider what lies on this or on the other side of the plane of Thinking. We feel that something is connected with this differentiation, something of Cosmic happening, namely, that which manifests in recapitulation, as we have it for instance in what we designate as the “course of the year”. And we must now ask in a concrete way: How can we find a connection between Man and the yearly course of the outer Universe? Well, first of all we find that when Man descends from the spiritual world into the physical, he passes through conception. He remains for about nine months in the embryonic condition—that is to say, three months less than the year's course. We might be inclined to call this a very irregular proceeding. In his evolution Man seems to show, even at the very genesis of his physical earthly existence, that he pays no attention to the course of Cosmic events outside. This is however not the case. If we have the faculty for observing the child during the first three months of his earthly existence, we find that these first three months—which make the year complete—manifest in a very true sense a continuation of his embryonic life; what takes place in the brain, as well as other things happening with the little child, can from a certain aspect be considered as still belonging to its embryonic life. Thus we can say that in a certain respect the first year of human development can after all be identified with the year's course.

Then comes another year—or about a year. If we observe the child after the first year, we see that the second year is approximately the time of the growth of the milk teeth. We observe the child during the second year after its conception, and we find that this year corresponds on an average with the growth of the first teeth. Now let us ask, does this continue? No, it does not. The first ‘teething’ seems to represent an inner year of Man. And so it does, just as the first year is at the same time an inner year of Man. In the formation of the milk teeth, the Universe obviously works in the child. But then something different happens.

In a space of time seven times as long—it is indeed far from completion even then, but at least it begins its activity during this period—in a period seven times as long from birth, the force which pushes out the second teeth is at work in the child. Here something occurs which we can not connect with the world's course but with something that is withdrawn out of it, and works from the inner being of the child.

Here, then, we have a concrete instance. We have, first of all, in respect to one series of facts, the world organism projected into Man in the formation of his milk teeth. And then again, when we look at the permanent teeth, which grow forth from Man, we find that these are Man's own production. An inner human Cosmic system has placed them into the other Cosmic system. Here we have the first herald of Man's becoming free, in the fact that he engages in something which clearly shows his independence of the Universe; because although this process retains within it in Man's being the time-course of the Universe, Man has slowed it down within him, he has given the same process a different velocity, seven times as slow, thus taking seven times as long. Here we have the contrast between the inner being of Man and the outer being of the Universe.

Another independence of the outer Universe is very clearly demonstrated in the alternation between sleeping and waking. Positions of the Earth alternate in respect to certain constellations, but they alternate always with day and night. How is it with Man?

What does this alternation between waking and sleeping signify to us human beings? It means, roughly speaking, that we go about at one time with our Ego and astral body united with our etheric and physical bodies, and at another time with the Ego and the astral body separated from the etheric and physical bodies.

Now a man in the present cycle of civilisation, especially one who calls himself a civilised man, is no longer entirely dependent in this respect on the cycle of Nature. The cycle of waking and sleeping, in its measure of time, seems to resemble the cycle of Nature; but there are persons at the present time—I have known such!—who turn night into day and day into night. In short, Man can wrest himself free from connection with the world's course. The sequence in him of the sleeping and waking states shows however that he still has within him a copy of this conformity to law. The same is true of many phenomena of the human being. When we observe how Man alternates between waking and sleeping, and Nature alternates between day and night, and how Man is still today bound to the alternation of waking and sleeping though not to that of day and night, we must say: Man was at one time, as regards his inner conditions, bound to the outer course of the Universe, but he has broken away from it. Civilised Man today has almost entirely broken away from the course of outer Nature. He is really returning to it when he perceives, when he discovers with his intellect, that it is better for him to sleep at night rather than by day. It is not the case however, that night takes possession of Man in such a way that he must under any circumstances sleep. No civilised man really feels: ‘Night makes me sleep, day wakes me up.’ At most, if night falls and a lecture is still going on here, the two facts taken together may perhaps affect some in such a way they experience an absolute demand of Nature that they should fall asleep. These however are incidents not necessarily involved in our cosmogony.

Thus the point to observe is that Man has wrested himself away from the course of Nature, but that nevertheless in his periodicity he still shows a reflection of it. Let us see how transitions from one to the other condition manifest themselves. We may say that in our waking and sleeping we still distinctly show the course of Nature in picture, but that we have wrested ourselves free from it. In the appearance of the second teeth, we no longer show in chronological sequence a picture of the course of Nature such as is still expressed in the growth of the first teeth. When we receive our second teeth, a new course of Nature arises in us; for this is not in our control like sleeping and waking. Our free choice does not enter here. Here something appears belonging to Nature and yet not following the larger course of Nature, something which Man has for his own. And yet it is not within his free choice, it is inserted as a second natural organisation within the first.

In all these things, I am speaking of quite simple everyday matters, but it is a question of noticing them in the right way. We must now say to ourselves: There is a certain natural ‘happening’, within which is interwoven the growth of the first teeth. Let us draw it in diagram. Within this natural event or process, as a part of the process, goes forward the formation of Man's first teeth. Then we have another natural happening, one of Man's own, not all within the general happening of the world—the growth of the second teeth (red). To draw it, we must present it as a different stream. Yet the difference is not yet clear in the drawing, they both look alike. The fact is, we must represent

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it in a quite different way if we want to depict the connection between the receiving of the first and second teeth; we must draw the first teeth seven times deeper in. If we draw them side by side, parallel, we have no picture of the relation of

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the first teeth to the second; we only get a picture of the force upon which the growth of the first teeth depends by drawing it encircled by another force, upon which the growth of the second teeth depends. Here, through the difference of velocity, the necessity arises for the movement to curve. Thus, when we say that there is a star somewhere in space with another circling round it ... then through the simple fact of the revolution, something qualitative arises—a creative activity.

I might also say: we look at the growth of the first teeth and of the second; that must have something to do in Cosmic space, with certain forces, one of which circles round the other. I put this example before you, because from it you will see what it means to speak of concrete movements in space, and how empty is the kind of talk which says: Jupiter—or, it may be Saturn—is so and so many miles distant from the Sun and encircles it in such and such a line. That tells one nothing at all, it is an empty phrase. We can only know anything about facts like these when we unite some content with them, such as: the orbit of Jupiter is like this, the orbit of Saturn like that, and the revolution of the one serves the revolution of the other.

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I have here merely pointed out the necessity for certain definite processes and happenings. Some of you may say that they are difficult to understand. Or perhaps you will not say so, but will consider that there is no need to discuss them! Not until people learn to study such things will they be able to progress to a definite and clear view of the Universe. And then they will give up what is presented so superficially in Copernicanism—the conception of the celestial movements solely in lines. Rather should an impulse enter humanity which says: It is necessary to be clear first about our own most elementary experiences before turning our attention to the outer mysteries of the Universe.

We only learn the significance of certain connections which we read from the stars, when we understand the corresponding processes in our organism; for what lies within our skin is no other than a reflection of the organism of the outer world. Thus if we draw a man in diagram, we have here the blood circulation (in diagram only) and we can trace its path. It is all in the inner being of Man. If we now go out into the Universe and look for the Sun, it is the Sun which corresponds to the heart within Man. What goes out from the heart through the body, or in point of fact out from the body to the heart, does in truth approximately resemble the movements connected with the course of the Sun. Instead of drawing abstract lines, we should look into the human being. Within his skin would be found what is outside in celestial space. Man too would be found to have his part in the Cosmic order. And, on the other hand, his independence of the Cosmic system would also be seen; and how he gains this independence little by little, as I have shown. We will speak further about this in the next lecture; for the present we must realise that we are dealing with it here merely in a diagrammatic way.

Look at the principal course of the blood-vessels in the human organism. Seen from above it is like a looped line. Instead of drawing it, we should follow the hieroglyphs inscribed in our own selves; for then we would learn to understand the nature of the qualities in the Universe outside. This we can only do when we are able to recognise and experience livingly the fact of which I have also spoken in public lectures, the fact namely, that the heart does not work like a pump driving the blood through the body, but that the heart is moved by the circulation, which is itself a living thing, and the circulation is in its turn conditioned by the organs. The heart, as can be followed in embryology, is really nothing more than a product of the blood circulation. If we can understand what the heart is in the human body, we shall learn to understand also that the Sun is not, as Newton calls it, the general cable-pulley which sends its ropes (called the force of gravitation) towards the planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars and so forth, drawing them by these unseen forces of attraction, or spraying out light to them, and the like; but that just as the movement of the heart is the product of the life-force of the circulation, so the Sun is no other than the product of the whole Planetary system. The Sun is the result, not the point of departure. The living co-operation of the solar system produces in the centre a hollow, which reflects as a mirror. That is the Sun! I have often said that the physicist would be greatly astonished if he could travel to the Sun and find there nothing of what he now imagines, but simply a hollow space; nay, even a hollow space of suction which annihilates everything within it. A space indeed that is less than hollow. A hollow space merely receives what is put into it; but the Sun is a hollow space of such a nature that anything brought to it is immediately absorbed and disappears. There in the Sun is not only nothing, but less than nothing. What shines to us in the light is the reflection of what first comes in from Cosmic space—just as the movement of the heart is, as it were, what is arrested there in the co-operation of the organs, in the blood-movement, through the activity of thirst and hunger and so forth.

If we understand the processes in the inner being of the organism, we can also understand from them the processes in outer Cosmic space. The abstract dimensions of space are only there to enable us to follow up these things in an easy indolent way. If we wish to follow them up in conformity with the truth, we must try to experience ourselves inwardly, and then turn outwards with inner understanding. They understand the Sun who understand the human heart; and so it is with the rest of Man's inner being.

Thus it is a matter of supreme moment to take the saying ‘Know Thyself’ seriously, and from that to pass on to the comprehension of the Universe. By a self-knowledge which embraces the whole Man, we shall understand the Universe outside Man.

You see we cannot get on so quickly with the construction of a cosmogony! In order to make a few of the features of this cosmogony clear, we can draw a spiral; but this does not yet show the actual state of things. For to describe a few more features, we must make the spiral itself move spirally; we must make the line itself curve. And even then we have not come far, for in order to describe certain facts such as the difference between the growth of the first year's teeth and the growth of the seven years' teeth we must describe a displacement of the line itself.

So you see that the construction of a Universe is not a thing that can be done very quickly. The wish to construct a cosmogony with a few lines must be relinquished, and man must learn to regard the present conception of the world as an absolute delusion.

This is intended as a preparatory study for what I mean to say in the next lecture. It had to be rather more difficult; but when we have overcome these initial difficulties, we shall have constructed the preliminary conditions for uniting the three important domains of life—Nature, Morality and Religion—by means of two corresponding bridges.

The fundamental nature and construction of the Universe cannot be conceived in its reality without continual reference to Man. Again and again we must try to find in the Universe outside, what exists in one way or another in Man. We will use these next three lectures for the purpose of obtaining, from just this point of view, a kind of plastically formed picture of the world, which can then lead on to the answer of the question: What is the relation between morality and natural law in Man?

When we study Man (I am here only repeating things that have already been spoken and written of from various standpoints) we find him first of all organised into what we may call higher Man and lower Man; and then we have what forms the connection between the two—the rhythmic Man, equalising or balancing the other two parts.

We have to observe first of all that a complete difference exists in the laws governing the upper and lower parts of man. We can realise this difference when we consider the fact that the ‘upper man’, who is regulated by the head, is in its origin the outcome of entirely different laws, belonging as it does to a different world from the world of the senses.

That part of us which in our last incarnation was a result of forces of the sense world, namely the limb man, has become what it now is, the head man, through a metamorphosis which takes place between death and a new birth—not in relation, of course, to the outer form, but in regard to the forces of formation. What is now the limb man becomes entirely transformed in its forces—transmuted in its super-sensible constitution between death and a new birth, and appears in our new Earth-life incorporated out of the Universe into our constitution. On to this is suspended, as it were, the rest of man—formed out of the world of sense. This fact we can find already proved clearly from Embryology, if we would only think rationally about embryonic facts. And thereby we have in our head organisation a system of laws not belonging to this world at all, save only at its origin—that is, in so far as it was present in a previous incarnation. But all that which has caused the transformation of limb man to head man is active in an entirely different world—the world wherein we live, in the interval between death and a new birth. Here, then, another world penetrates the world of the senses. Another world is manifested in the head organism of Man. In a certain sense the external world is brought into correspondence with this other world, in that the head projects the principal sense-organs outwards. The world that is extended in space and that runs its course in time, is perceived by man through his senses; it penetrates into man through his senses, and so it too belongs in a certain sense to the head organism. In relation to our limb man on the other hand, we are in a state of sleep. I have often spoken of this sleep-state of man in relation to his Will nature, in relation to all that exists in the limb man. We do not know how we move our limbs, how the will causes the movement; we only examine the movement afterwards as an outer phenomenon through our senses. We are asleep in our limb organisation, in the same sense as we are asleep in the Universe between going to sleep and awaking.

So here we have before us an entirely different world. We can say: we have a world which outwardly manifests all that speaks to our senses—all that we perceive through eyes, ears, etc. To this world we belong through that portion of ourselves which we have called the head man. Our connection with the world that lies behind this one is brought about by the limb man, but in it we are unconscious; we sleep into this world, whether we do so in the domain of our Will, or whether we sleep into the Universe between our going to sleep and our waking.

These two worlds are actually so constituted that the one is turned towards us, and the other away from us, as it were; it lies behind the world of sense although we have our origin in it. Man felt in olden times—and the East still feels it—that a reconciliation between the two is possible. As you know, we in the West search for the reconciliation in a different way; but the Easterns, even today, a line (sketch) still attempt to find it in a relatively conscious way, although their methods are already antiquated for the present humanity. The act of eating is symbolised by a line (sketch), for when we take food, the process following takes place in the sphere of sleep (unconsciously). We are not aware of what is really happening when we eat an egg or a cabbage; it takes place in the unconscious like the happenings of sleep. The cabbage and the egg manifest their exterior to our sense-perception. But the eating really belongs to the completely different world. The reconciliation however, is to be found in our breathing.

Although the latter is to a certain extent unconscious, it is not so in so great a degree as our eating. In spite of the fact that our breathing is not so conscious as our hearing and seeing, it is more conscious than the process of digestion for example; and while in the East today, the attempt to make the digestive process a conscious one has, as a rule, ceased (this used to be done in olden times), the breathing process is still in a certain sense brought up into consciousness. (The snake raises the process of digestion into consciousness, but the consciousness of the snake is of course not to be compared with human consciousness). There is a certain training of the breathing, where the inhaling and exhaling are regulated in such a way that the process is transformed into a sense-perception. Thus we find respiration inserted, as it were, between conscious sense-perception and the complete unconsciousness of assimilation and transmutation of physical matter. Man in fact dwells in three worlds; the one sensible to his consciousness, the other of which he remains entirely unconscious, and the third (breathing) acting as a connecting link or mediator between the two.

Now it is a fact that the process of breathing is also a kind of assimilation; at all events, it is a material process, though taking place in a more rarefied manner; it is an intermediate state between actual transmutation of matter assimilation and the process of sense-perception, the completely conscious experience of the external world.

In the state in which we find ourselves between falling asleep and awaking, we experience in the environment which then surrounds us, events which only enter into our every-day consciousness as dreams. Here man steps across into the world which is marked in our sketch, and the dreams reveal through their very nature how Man steps across. Consider for a moment how nearly related are dreams to the process of respiration—the rhythm of breathing—how often you can trace this rhythm in its after-workings when you dream. Man steps across the border, as it were, of the world of consciousness, when he dips ever so slightly into this other world in which he is when he sleeps or when he dreams. There lies also the world of ‘Imaginations’. In ‘Imaginations’ it is for us a fully conscious world, we have conscious perception in that world, which we merely sip, as it were, in our dreams.

We shall now have to consider a correspondence that is found to exist, an absolute correspondence, in respect of Number. I have already often drawn your attention to this correspondence between Man and the world in which he evolves. I have pointed to the fact that Man, in his rhythm of breathing—18 per minute—manifests something that is in remarkable accord with other processes of the Universe. We make 18 respirations per minute, which gives when calculated for the day, 25,920 respirations. And we arrive at the same number when we calculate how many days are contained in a normal life term of 72 years. That also gives about 25,920 days; so that something may be said to exhale our astral body and Ego, on falling asleep and inhale them again upon waking—always in conformity with the same number rhythm.

And again, when we consider how the Sun moves—whether apparently or really, does not matter—advancing a little each year in what we call the precession of the equinoxes, when we consider the number of years it takes the Sun to make this journey round the whole Zodiac, once more we get 25,920 years—the Platonic year.

The fact is, this human life of ours, within the boundaries set by birth and death, is indeed fashioned, down to its most infinitesimal processes—as we have seen in the breathing—in accordance with the laws of the Universe. But in the correspondence we have observed up to now between the Macrocosm and Man the Microcosm, we have made our observations in a realm where the correspondence is obvious and evident. There are however, other very important correspondences. For example, consider the following. I want to lead you through Number to something else I have to bring before you. Take the 18 respirations per minute, making 1,080 per hour and in 24 hours 25,920 respirations; that is, we must multiply: 18 X 60 X 24 in order to arrive at 25,920.

Taking this as the cycle of the precession of the equinoxes, and dividing it by 6o and again by 24, we would naturally get 18 years. And what do these 18 years really mean? Consider—these 25,920 respirations correspond to a human day of 24 hours; in other words, this 24 hour day is the day of the Microcosm. 18 respirations may serve as the unit of rhythm.

And now take the complete circle described by the precession of the equinoxes, and call it, not a Platonic year, but a great Day of the Heavens, a Macrocosmic day. How long would one respiration on this scale have to occupy to correspond with the human respiration? Its duration would have to be 18 years—a respiration made by the Being corresponding to the Macrocosm.

If we take the statements of modern astronomy—we need not interpret them here, we shall speak of their meaning later—we shall find that it is a matter of indifference whether we assume that the motion of the Sun is apparent, or the motion of the Earth; that does not concern us—but let us now take that which the Astronomer of today calls Nutation of the Earth's Axis.

You are aware that the Earth's axis lies obliquely upon the Ecliptic, and that the Astronomers speak of an oscillation of the Earth's axis around this point and they call this ‘Nutation’. The axis completes one revolution around this point in just about 18 years (it is really 18 years, 7 months, but we need not consider the fraction, although it is quite possible to calculate this too with exactitude.) But with these 18 years something else is intimately connected. For it is not merely on the fact of ‘Nutation’—this ‘trembling’, this rotation of the Earth's axis in a double cone around the Earth's centre, and the period of 18 years for its completion—it is not only on this fact that we have to fix our minds, but we find that simultaneously with it another process takes place. The Moon appears each year in a different position because, like the Sun, she ascends and descends from the ecliptic, proceeding in a kind of oscillating motion again and again towards the Equator ecliptic. And every 18 years she appears once more in the same position she occupied 18 years before. You see there is a connection between this Nutation and the path of the Moon. Nutation in truth indicates nothing else than the Moon's path. It is the projection of the motion of the Moon. So that we can in actual reality observe the “breathing” of the Macrocosm. We only need notice the path of the Moon in 18 years or, in other words, the Nutation of the Earth's axis. The Earth dances, and she dances in such a manner as to describe a cone, a double cone, in 18 years, and this dancing is a reflection of the macrocosmic breathing. This takes place just as many times in the macrocosmic year as the 18 human respirations during the microcosmic day of 24 hours.

So we really have one macrocosmic respiration per minute in this Nutation movement. In other words, we look into this breathing of the Macrocosm through this Nutation movement of the Moon, and we have before us what corresponds to respiration in man. And now, what is the purport of all this? The meaning of it is that as we pass from waking to sleep, or only from the wholly conscious to the dream state, we enter another world, and over against the ordinary laws of day, years, etc., and also the Platonic year, we find in this insertion of a Moon rhythm, something that has the same relationship in the Macrocosm, as breathing, the semiconscious process of respiration, has to our full consciousness. We have therefore not only to consider a world which is spread out before us, but another world which projects into, and permeates our own.

Just as we have before us a second part of the human organism, when observing the breathing process, namely the rhythmic man, as opposed to the perceptive or head man, so we have in what appears as the yearly Moon motion, or rather the 18-year motion of the Moon, the identity between one year and one human respiration; we have this second world interpenetrating our own.

There can therefore be no question of having only one world in our environment. We have that world that we can follow as the world of the senses; but then we have a world, whose foundations are laid within the laws of another, and which stands in exactly the same relationship to the world of the senses, as our breathing does to our consciousness; and this other world is revealed to us as soon as we interpret in the right way this Moon movement, this Nutation of the Earth's axis.

These considerations should enable you to realise the impossibility of investigating in a one-sided way the laws manifesting in the world. The modern materialistic thinker is in quest of a single system of natural laws. In this he deludes himself; what he should say is rather as follows. “The world of the senses is certainly a world in which I find myself embedded and to which I belong; it is that world which is explained by natural science in terms of Cause and Effect. But another world interpenetrates this one, and is regulated by different laws. Each world is subject to its own system of laws.” As long as we are of the opinion that one kind of system of laws could suffice for our world, and that all hangs upon the thread of Cause and Effect, so long shall we remain victims of complete illusions.

Only when we can perceive from facts such as the Moon's motion and nutation of the Earth's axis that another world extends into this one—only then are we upon the right path.

And now, you see, these are the things in which the spiritual and material (so-called) touch each other, or let us say the psychical and material. He who can faithfully observe what is contained within his own self will find the following. These things must gradually be brought to the attention of humanity. There are many among you, who have already passed the 18 years and about 7 months period in age. That was an important period. Others will have passed twice that number of years—37 years and 2 months—again an important time. After that we have a third very momentous period 18 years and seven months later, at the age of 55 years and 9 months. Few can notice as yet, not having been trained to do so, the effects and important changes taking place within the individual soul at these times. The nights passed during these periods are the most important nights in the life of the individual. It is here where the Macrocosm completes its 18 respirations, completes one minute—and Man as it were, opens a window facing quite another world. But as I said, man cannot yet watch for these points in his life. Everyone, however, could try to let his mental eye look back over the years he has passed, and if he is over 55 years old to recognise three such important epochs; others two, and most of you at any rate one! In these epochs events take place, which rush up into this world of ours out of quite a different one. Our world opens at these moments to another world.

If we wish to describe this happening more clearly, we can say that our world is at these times penetrated anew by astral streams; they flow in and out. Of course this really happens every year, but we are here concerned with the 18 years, as they correspond to the 18 respirations per minute. In short, our attention is drawn through the cosmic clock to the breathing of the Macrocosm, in which we are embedded. This correspondence with another world, which is manifested through the motion of the Moon, is exceptionally important. Because, you see, the world which at these times projects into our own, is the very world into which we pass during our sleep, when the Ego and the astral body leave our physical and etheric bodies. It must not be thought that the world composing our every-day environment is merely permeated in an abstract way by the astral world; rather should we say, it breathes in the astral world, and we can observe the astral in this breathing process through the Moon's motion or nutation. You will realise that we have here come to something of great significance. If you remember what I said recently, we may put it in the following way. We have, on the one hand, our world as it is generally observed; and we have in addition, the materialistic superstition that, for instance, if we gaze upwards, we see the Sun, a ball of gas, as it is described in books. This is nonsense. The Sun is not a ball of gas; but in that place where the Sun is, there is something less than empty space—a sucking, absorbing body, in fact, while all around it is that which exerts pressure. Consequently in that which comes to us from the Sun we have not to do with anything constituting a product of combustion in the Sun; but all that has been transmitted to the Sun from the Universe is rayed back.

Where the Sun is, is emptier than empty space. This can be said of all parts of the Universe where we find Ether. For this reason it is so difficult for the physicist to speak of Ether, for he thinks that Ether is also matter, though more rarefied than ordinary matter. Materialism is still very busy with this perpetual ‘rarefying’, both the materialism of natural science as well as the materialism of Theosophy. It distinguishes first, dense matter; then etheric matter—more rarefied; then astral matter—still more rarefied; and then there is the ‘mental’ and I do not know what else—always more and more rarefied!

The only difference (in this theory of rarefying) between the two forms of materialism is that the one recognises more degrees of rarefaction than the other. But in the transition from ponderable matter to Ether we have nothing to do with rarefaction. Anyone who believes that in Ether we have to do merely with a ‘rarefying’ process is like a man who says: ‘I have here a purse full of money; I repeatedly take from it and the money becomes less and less. I take away still more till at last none remains.’ Nothing is left—but yet he can go on! The ‘nothing’ can become less still; for if he gets into debt, his money becomes less than nothing. In the same way not only does matter become empty space, but it becomes negative, less than nothing—emptier than emptiness; it assumes a ‘sucking’ nature. Ether is sucking, absorbing. Matter presses. Ether absorbs. The Sun is an absorbing, sucking ball, and wherever Ether is present we have this absorbent force.

Here we step over into the other side, the other aspect of three-dimensional space—we pass from pressure to suction. That which immediately surrounds us in this world, that of which we are constituted as physical man and ether man, is both pressing and sucking or absorbing. We are a combination of both; whereas the Sun possesses the power of suction only, being nothing but ether, nothing but suction. It is the undulating wave of pressure and suction, ponderable matter and ether, that forms in its alternation a living organisation. And the living organism continually breathes in the astral; the breathing expresses itself through the Moon's motion or nutation. And here we begin to divine a second member or principle of the world's construction; the one member—pressure and suction, physical and etheric; the other, the second—astral. The astral is neither physical nor etheric but is continually inhaled and exhaled; and the nutation demonstrates this process.

Now a certain astronomical fact was observed even in the most ancient times. Many thousands of years before the Christian era, the Egyptians knew that after a period of 72 years the fixed stars in their apparent course gain one day on the Sun. It seems to us, does it not, that the fixed stars revolve and the Sun too revolves, but that the latter revolves more slowly, so that after 72 years the stars are appreciably ahead. This is the reason of the movement of the Vernal Point (the Spring Equinoctial point); namely, that the stars go faster. The Spring Equinox moves further and further away, the fixed star has altered its place in relation to the Sun. Briefly, the facts are that if we notice the path of a fixed star and notice the point where the Sun stands over it, we find that at the end of 72 years the star occupies the same position on the 30th December, while the Sun only reaches that point again on the 31st December. The Sun has lost a day. After a lapse of 25,920 years this loss is so great, that the Sun has described a complete revolution and once again is back upon the place we noted. We see therefore that in 72 years the Sun is one day behind the fixed stars. Now these 72 years are approximately the normal life period of Man, and they are composed of 25,920 days.

Thus when we multiply 72 years by 360, and consider the human span of life as one day, we have the human life as one day of the Macrocosm. Man is breathed out, as it were, from the Macrocosm; his life is one day in the macrocosmic year.

So that this revolution, this circle described by the precession of the Equinoxes, indicating the macrocosmic year, as already known to the Egyptians thousands of years ago (for they looked upon this period of 72 years as very important), this apparent revolution of the Vernal point is connected with the life and death of Man in the Universe—with the life and death, that is, of the Macrocosm. And the laws of the life and death of Man are something that we are compelled to follow. We have already found how nutation points to another world; as our sense-perception world points to one world, so nutation points to another, the breathing world. And now through what present-day astronomy calls ‘precession’, we have something we may again call a transition, a transition this time to a state of deep sleep, a transition to still another, a third world. We have thus three worlds, interpenetrating one another, inter-related; but we must not attempt simply to combine these worlds from the point of view of causality. Three worlds, a three-fold world, as Man is a three-fold being; one, the world of sense surrounding us, the world we perceive; a second world whose presence is indicated by the motions of the Moon; and a third which makes itself known to us by the motion of the equinoctial point, or we might say, by the path of the Sun. This third world indeed remains about as unknown to us as the world of our own Will is unknown to our ordinary consciousness.

It is important therefore to search everywhere for correspondences between the human Microcosm and the Macrocosm. And when today the Oriental, if only in a decadent way, seeks to acquire breathing consciousness, as was done in the ancient Oriental wisdom, it is the manifestation of the desire to stray across into this other world which otherwise he could only recognise through what the Moon, so to speak, wills in our world. But in those times when there was still an ancient wisdom coming to man in a different way from that by which we have today to seek wisdom—in those times man also knew how to see this working of inner law in other connections and correspondences.

In the Old Testament the Initiates, who were familiar with these matters, used always a certain image or picture—the picture, namely, of the relation between Moon-light and Sun-light. This we can find also in a certain sense in the Gospels, as I have recently shown you.

We generally speak of the Moon-light being reflected Sunlight. I am speaking now in the sense of physics, and I shall have to show later on that these expressions are really very inaccurate. The Moon-light represented in the Old Testament the Jahve or Jehovah power. This power was conceived as a reflected power, and the Initiates—though not of course the orthodox Rabbis of the Old Testament—knew: The Messiah, the Christ will come, and He will be the direct Sun-light. Jahve is only His advance reflection. Jahve is the Sun-light, but not the direct Sun-light. Of course, here we are speaking not of physical sunlight, but of the spiritual reality.

Christ entered into human evolution, He who had been present previously only in reflection, in an indirect way in the form of Jehovah. And there arose the necessity to think of the Christ, who lived in Jesus, as the result of a different set of laws from those appertaining to ordinary natural science. But if we do not admit this other set of laws, if we believe that the world exists only as the result of cause and effect, then there is no place for That which is the Christ. His place must be prepared for Him by our recognition of three interpenetrating worlds. Then there is created the possibility of being able to say: It may be that in this world of sense everything is related through the law of cause and effect as maintained by natural science, but another world permeates this one, and to this other world belongs everything that has happened in the world that has connection with the Mystery of Golgotha.

In our times, when the desire for an understanding of these matters is becoming more and more manifest, it is important to realise that this understanding must be sought through the recognition of these three interpenetrating worlds, which exist simultaneously and are entirely different one from another. This means that we must seek not for one system of laws only, but for three; and we must seek for them within Man himself.

If you consider well what I have just said, you will see that it will not do to adopt the methods of the Copernican system, and simply draw ellipses intended to show the path of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Earth, Venus and Mercury and lastly of the Sun. That is not what is wanted at all. What is wanted is rather to look at the laws that are active in the worlds that are physically perceptible and see how these laws are cut across by an altogether different set of laws; and that especially the present Moon, in her motion, presents something that is in no way causally connected with the rest of the Stellar System, such as would be the case were the Moon a member of that System, like the other planets. The Moon however is to be referred to quite another world, which is, as it were, inserted into ours, and which indicates the breathing process of our Universe, as the Sun indicates the interpenetration of our Universe by the Ether.

Before one engages in Astronomy, one must educate oneself in a qualitative sense concerning that which moves in space, concerning the things that are interdependent in space. For one must be quite clear that Sun matter and any other matter—Earth matter for instance—can under no circumstances be brought into a simple relationship; because the matter of the Sun is, in comparison with the matter of the Earth, something absorbing and sucking, while the latter exerts pressure. The motions which express themselves in nutation are motions proceeding from the astral world, and not from anything that can be found in Newton's principles. It is just this Newtonism that has driven us so far into materialism, because it seizes on the uttermost abstractions. It speaks of a force of gravitation. The Sun, it says, attracts the Earth, or the Earth attracts the Moon; a force of attraction exists between these bodies, like some invisible cable. But if really nothing but this force of attraction existed, there would be no cause for the Moon to revolve round the Earth, or the Earth round the Sun; the Moon would simply fall on to the Earth. This would indeed have happened ages ago, if gravitation alone were acting; or the Earth would have fallen into the Sun. It is therefore quite impossible for us to look to gravitation alone for the means of explaining the imagined or actual motions of celestial bodies. So what do they do? Let us see! Here we have a Planet imbued with a constant desire to fall into the Sun—supposing we were to have the law of gravitation alone. But now we will suppose that this planet has at some time or other been given another force, a tangential force. This impetus acts with such and such a power, and the force of gravitation acts at the same time with such and such a power, so that eventually the planet does not fall into the Sun, but has to move along a line resulting from both forces.

You see that Newton's theory finds it necessary to assume some kind of original impetus, some kind of first push in the case of each planet, of each moving celestial body. There must always be some extra-mundane God somewhere, who gives this impetus, who imparts this tangential force. This is always presupposed; and remember, this assumption was made at a time when we had lost all idea of bringing the material and the spiritual into any kind of connection, when we were incapable of conceiving of anything but a perfectly external ‘push’.

Here we have an instance of the inability of materialism to understand matter. I have repeatedly drawn your attention to this of late. It follows, that therefore materialism is also unable to understand the motions of matter, and is compelled to give quite an anthropomorphic explanation of them, picturing God as a being with wholly human attributes, who simply gives the Moon a push and the Earth a push. The Earth and Moon then ‘attract’ each other—and behold, from these two forces, the push and the attraction, we have their movements in the heavens.

It is from ideas of this kind that the Solar system is constructed today. But to get a real understanding of the Universe it is absolutely necessary to look for the connection between that which lives in Man, and that which lives in the Macrocosm. For Man is an actual Microcosm in the Macrocosm. Of this we will speak further tomorrow.

Our studies of the last few days will have made it clear to you that it is altogether impossible to look upon the configuration of the spatial Universe and its movements in the way that is adopted by modern science. For not only is the Universe regarded as entirely separate from Man, but even the separate celestial bodies, which appear to our sight as disconnected from each other, are each treated as being isolated, and then in their isolation their effects upon each other are observed. It comes to the same thing as if, for example, we were to study the human organism by examining first an arm and then a leg, in order afterwards to understand the complete organism from the way in which the single members work together. But the fact is, it is not possible to comprehend the human organism by studying its individual members; but all investigation of the body of man must have its starting point in the whole, from which we can then proceed to the separate parts.

The same applies to the solar system, and also to the solar system in its relation to the whole visible stellar Universe. For the Sun, Moon, Earth and other planets are only parts of the whole system. Why should the Sun, for instance, be considered as an isolated body? There is absolutely no reason why we should imagine the Sun to be merely just where we see it, limited by the boundaries within which our eyes perceive it. In this connection the philosopher Schelling was quite correct when he declined to ask the question, ‘Where is the Sun?’ with any other meaning than ‘Where is his influence felt?’ If the Sun acts upon the Earth, the effects of such activity must belong of necessity to the sphere of the Sun; and it is very wrong to extract a part from a whole and study that part by itself. But this is the very thing the modern materialistic conception of the Universe has set out to do, and its influence has grown stronger and stronger ever since the middle of the fifteenth century. This it is against which Goethe always fought, when he was alive, in his labours in the realm of natural science, and against which all true followers of his science must also fight. Goethe found himself compelled to draw attention to the fact that we must not study Nature without Man, without keeping in mind the relation of Nature to Man. The study of natural phenomena outside Man must have its basis in the understanding of the nature of Man.

The following example will show you the value of some of the assertions made by modern Astronomy. Modern Astronomy endeavours, with the use of all manner of arguments, to speak of an elliptic path of the Earth around the Sun; asserting that this motion was in the first place initiated by that tangential propulsion of which I spoke yesterday in connection with the gravitational attraction of the Sun. But Astronomy cannot, and does not, deny the fact that when speaking of attraction, not only does the Sun attract the Earth, but the Earth must also attract the Sun. This, however, obliges us to conclude that we cannot speak of a revolution in an elliptical path of the Earth around the Sun, for if the attraction be mutual we cannot have a one-sided motion of the Earth around the Sun, but both of them must revolve round a neutral point. In other words, this revolution cannot take place in a manner that would allow us to look on the Sun's centre as the pivot, but the pivot must be a neutral point situated between the centre of the Sun and the centre of the Earth. In telling you this I am not raising objections to Astronomy, I am merely telling you what you can find for yourselves in astronomical books. Thus we are compelled to admit the existence—somehow or other—of a pivot between the two spheres.

Our Astronomy, by way of consoling itself, maintains that this pivot or point lies within the Sun itself. Both Earth and Sun, then, revolve around this point. And so, once again, we get no direct revolution of Earth round Sun, but the Sun also revolves, revolving however around a point lying within itself. Thus exoteric Astronomy has come so far as to assume as pivot a point that is not the centre of the Sun, but lies in the line connecting Sun and Earth, yet still within the Sun. But now we are confronted with another difficulty. The size of the Sun has first to be calculated. (The truth of the above assumption depends upon the calculated size of the Sun.) Upon the result of such calculation is built a conclusion which must of course possess a certain limited validity (the calculations being made from evidence of the senses), but which need not necessarily be the criterion by which we judge the real being of what lies behind nature's phenomena.

Thus it is necessary to keep a strict eye upon modern Astronomy, as well as on other sciences, in order to discern the places—and they are numerous—where science over-reaches itself, and gets into difficulties.

This difficulty cannot be settled by studying the outer aspect of the phenomena; we can only arrive at a true result by examining the Universe in its relation to Man. We must, in the first place, take note of the previously explained connections between the Universe and Man; and then we must add a good many other facts, before we can produce a perfectly true world-picture. We have said before that we must imagine, first of all, ordinary ponderable matter—matter that can be weighed. Light we cannot weigh; it does not belong to the realm of ponderable matter, neither does warmth (heat). First then, we must imagine the ponderable, then we must set over against this the ether. We said it is wrong to consider the Sun as consisting of ponderable matter like the matter of the Earth. The Sun is something which is actually less than space—so to speak, a ‘hollowing out’ of space; it is something that sucks in, in contradistinction to the pressure of ponderable matter.

And we have to do not only with an aggregation (in the Sun) of this absorbent ether in the outer Universe, but also with the fact that this ether is distributed far and wide, Everywhere we find, coexisting with the force of pressure, the absorbent force. We ourselves carry this force of suction in our own etheric bodies.

With this we completely exhaust all that we call Space. Pressure and Suction—these two, we find in Space. But not only do we possess our physical body, composed of ponderable matter which it assimilates and again expels, not only have we also an etheric body, composed of absorbent ether, but we have in addition an astral body—if we may use the term ‘body’ in this connection. What does the possession of this third body imply? It means that we have within us something that is no longer spatial, though it has a certain relation to space. This relationship can be proved when we realise that during waking hours the astral body interpenetrates the etheric and physical bodies. But the etheric body acts very differently when we are awake and when we are asleep. A different relation is established between the etheric and physical bodies when we wake, and this is caused by the astral body. It is active, and works upon the spatial, though it is not itself spatial. It brings order and organisation into the correlations of space. This organising activity of the astral body within us takes place also in the outer Universe, where it manifests in the following way.

Try for the moment to consider Space alone, and out of the whole visible Heavens, let us consider the regions that are indicated by the Zodiac. I do not intend here to deal in detail with the several Zodiacal signs, but let us consider the directions to which we look in the heavens when we turn, for instance, towards Aries (Ram), in the Zodiac; then Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius and Pisces. All we have to note, in the first place, is that the space that lies before us as our visible Universe is divided in this way. The signs merely indicate the division, in so far as each of them denotes the boundary of a certain section of Space.

Now we must not imagine that these directions of space can be treated in such a manner that one might say: ‘There is empty space, and I just draw a line somewhere into it’.

There simply does not exist such a thing as mathematics calls ‘Space’; but everywhere are lines of force, directions of force, and these are not equal, they vary, they are differentiated. We can distinguish between these twelve regions by realising that if we turn in the direction of the sign Aries, the force we experience is a different one than it would be had we faced the sign Libra or Cancer. In each direction the force differs. Man will not admit this, as long as he lives merely in the world of the senses; but as soon as he ascends to the Imaginative life of the soul, he no longer experiences the directions in space as the same when facing Aries or Cancer, but feels their influence upon him as greatly differentiated.

To give you a parallel, I might put before you the following. Imagine that you arrange round you a circle of twelve persons in such a manner that those most sympathetic to you occupy one part of the circle, then come the less sympathetic, until on the other side you have all those who are antipathetic to you. (We are not, imagining the degree of sympathy or antipathy to result from any personal emotion; it may be merely a matter of outward appearances.) Now if you turn round within the circle, twelve pictures pass before your vision and at the same time you experience a graduated series of differentiated sensations. Man becomes aware of such a series of sensations if, after attaining to Imaginative perception, he moves around within the Zodiac. A similar gradation of sensation, a similar gradation of vision is produced in him, and it takes place within him the moment he escapes from the indifference of ordinary sense-existence. So when we are dealing with these various sections of space there is no sameness, for we must realise that each of these directions exerts a different influence upon us.

You see, here comes to light a fact intimately connected with the whole evolution of Man. Had he remained at the stage of the old consciousness, the atavistic picture-consciousness, he would still experience strongly the actuality of this differentiation in the various sections of the heavens; he would have been conscious of a sensation of sympathy towards one direction of Space and antipathy towards another. Man has however been extricated from this play of forces by which at one time he was consciously surrounded, and he has been extricated from it just through the fact that his present organisation has placed him into the sense-world. But that Man is really organised in accordance with cosmic laws can even now be proved, and by quite external experiments, if attention is paid to certain phenomena. For it is by no means mere nonsense to say that certain sicknesses can be cured more quickly if the bed of the patient is placed in the direction of East to West. It is no superstition but a fact capable of definite proof. But this is not intended as a recommendation to each of you to place your bed in a certain position! I have had so many experiences in this direction, that I feel it necessary to interject here a word of warning! It once happened to me in Berlin, for instance, that at the end of an anthroposophical discourse. I laid a certain emphasis upon the fact of being able to put on my galoshes when it was raining, without sitting down, saying that this could be done by first standing upon one leg and then upon the other, and I added ‘And one ought to be able to stand upon one leg!’ This was taken by some anthroposophists in such a way that I found upon returning from London to Berlin, that members of the Anthroposophical Society there were being recommended, as esoteric training, to stand upon one leg for a short time at midnight! Many assertions made about us have just as good a foundation. Time and again things of this sort get said and then find their way into this or that newspaper article by the pen of some well- or ill-disposed person—generally the latter. So I repeat, I have no wish at all to recommend you each to place his bed in one particular position. Nevertheless, this fact and many others show that even today, in the inner or subconscious part of his being, Man still stands in a certain relation to these exterior spatial differentiations, into which he has been placed.

Now through what means does Man possess these relationships? He possesses them through his astral body, which establishes these relations. They are only possible to him because through his astral body Man is a denizen of an astral world, a world which though acting upon Space is not itself spatial. We only conceive the Zodiac in its full meaning when we treat it as the representative of the astral world beyond.

And now, without having regard to present-day astronomical theories, let us examine these phenomena which appear to our sense of vision. We know that either actually or apparently the Sun passes through the Zodiac in various ways; in its daily course, in its yearly course, and again in its course through the Platonic year, through the precession of the equinoxes. This points to the fact that the effects upon us of that absorbent ether ball called Sun vary greatly, as they come from the different directions of Space. At one time the Sun's workings impinge upon us from a part we call Aries, at another time from a different section and so on.

Taking the case of an inhabitant of our own part of the globe, we can see that at any given time he has facing him one half of the Zodiacal signs, while the other half is obscured by the Earth. In other words, we are so placed in relation to this differentiation of Space, that we are turned directly towards the one part of the Zodiac while between the other and ourselves stands the Earth. Obviously this has nothing whatever to do with either an actual or an apparent motion; it is a simple fact that at any given moment we face one part of the Zodiac, while the other part is intercepted by the Earth. Now please try to imagine these sections of space with our Earth obscuring some of them. What does it signify for us? It is plain that the one half will influence us directly, the other not directly, but rather, shall I say, through its absence. At one time we have the direct working of these differentiated regions of space, at another time the working of their absence, the effect, as it were, of their non-presence. This fact is something which is active within us and enables us to some extent to bring into a kind of relationship that which is working directly upon us and that which is absent, from whose direct influence we are removed. For it opens up another possibility.

Let us say, from the direction of the Sign Cancer proceeds a certain kind of influence. This would be opposed by an influence from Capricorn, but the latter is taken away, is intercepted. Consequently I have in me the influence of Cancer and opposed to it the intercepted Capricornian influence; the influence of Cancer is thereby in a sense left in me, put into my hands, as it were. Of course, that which is absent cannot act upon me in the same way as that which is present; but I gain a certain influence as regards the Sign that acts upon me by reason of the opposition to its intercepted antithesis. Through the fact that I stand upon the Earth the celestial influences become quite different to what they would be, were I hovering freely in Space and directly exposed to them all.

I want you to note this point specially, and then you will realise that you cannot simply say: Above us we have the Signs Aries, Pisces, Aquarius, etc., and below Libra, Virgo, and so on, but you will have to conceive the whole as an organisation, with yourself harnessed into it. And as you progress, on account of the Earth's revolution, from sign to sign you are being carried through all these direct influences in turn. Here at one point, the Scorpio influence was taken away from you, and there at another point you have been carried into it. An analogy is the taking of food; you were hungry, the food was not there within you, but after the meal the food is present within you. The Scorpio influence was absent here, but at this other point became active. And so we form connections with the surrounding Cosmos as we come into different relations with it through the movement of the Earth. But is Man conscious of these varying influences, while yet on the physical plane? No, he is not; we have seen that the physical world takes him away from them. But the moment he withdraws with his astral body and Ego from his physical and etheric bodies, he finds himself within these forces; they act directly and strongly upon him. These extra-earthly, heavenly influences then make onset upon that part of Man which is no longer connected with the physical and etheric; they act upon it as powerfully as food upon the physical body. It is just this descent into the physical that is the cause of Man's withdrawal from these outer influences. We may therefore consider the astral body as being in a sense part of the celestial, and not of the terrestrial Universe, for when, together with the Ego, it is outside the physical body, we have to co-ordinate it to the non-terrestrial influences.

By considering the matter in this way, we are gradually brought to the conclusion that Man becomes receptive to these celestial forces in so far as he ceases to act through the organs of his physical body—that is to say, when he is, through this non-activity, more or less in a state of sleep. Man as a child is always more or less asleep, therefore the child is much more receptive to the celestial influences than the man. As he grows up he works his way further and further into earthly conditions. During childhood, all that is within the skin is still plastic and in a state of formation. The formative powers become less and less active with the years, until, at a considerably later point in life, they become very small indeed. This shows that the inner physical formation-process stands in a certain relation to the movements and configurations to the outer celestial Universe. But the part of our being which, as far as consciousness is concerned, remains in a continual state of sleep—such as our heart-activity, our digestive processes, etc.; in fact, all the inner physical processes—all this part of our being remains under the influences of the super-physical during the whole of our life. (These processes are induced in the same way as is the process that goes on when I take a step forward consciously, only they are all directed inward instead of outward.)

Let us take a characteristic example. By means of the inner movements of the intestines the chyme is propelled further on its path. These are internal movements within the boundary of the human skin, and therefore, as we have said, dependent upon what is beyond the Earth. Fundamentally, Man as Man is dependent only upon the terrestrial, upon ponderable-terrestrial matter, in all that affects him from outside his skin. But the moment any outer act or circumstance is translated into activity within the skin, then there begins in his organism an activity that is related to the super-sensible.

When you take a piece of sugar into the palm of your hand, you feel its weight physically, you raise it to your lips; the process is still physical. But as soon as you dissolve it on the tongue and it enters the sphere of taste, it no longer remains within the scope of Earthly processes but becomes subject to extra-Earthly forces.

In order to find the working of the extra-Earthly, we must penetrate into what is enclosed within the human skin. This will lead you to the realisation of the fact, that while you go about in the world, bearing round with you, as it were, your whole man, you are in the realm of the Earthly. But as soon as you come within, even only within the physical organisation, you are no longer in the realm of the Earthly, but have entered a sphere dependent upon extra-Earthly forces. You can easily prove for yourselves the fact that within you resides something that is not merged into earthly existence, if you carry your memory back to the oft-repeated fact, that the human brain floats in the meningeal fluid. If this were not the case, the pressure of the brain upon the organs placed on the floor of the skull would crush all the blood vessels. Any text book dealing with such matters will tell you the weight of the brain. If your choice is a ‘Bischoff’, you will notice he asserts that the female brain is much lighter than that of a male, which assertion was rendered absurd later on, to the delight of the ladies, when it was found upon examination, that the brain of Bischoff himself proved to be a good deal less in weight than the lightest of the female brains examined by him. This is only by the way, as an example of the general value of human judgements.

The human brain however, possessing as it does a considerable weight—at least 1,200 to 1,300 grammes—does not exert a pressure in anything like accord with its actual weight, but only, as we might say, a weight of comparatively few grammes, because of the upward pressure of the meningeal fluid. You remember the law of Archimedes, according to which the weight of an object is reduced by the weight of the water it displaces. Therefore the pressure of the brain is equal to only a few grammes because it floats in fluid. Had it a tendency to press downwards with its full weight, Man could not use his brain for thought. It overcomes its weight because it floats in fluid. We do not think with the matter of the brain, but with that which withdraws itself from the matter, with the upward striving forces, with that which grows beyond the Earth. And we must follow this out into all parts of Man's organisation. Just as we withdraw ourselves inwardly from the forces of terrestrial gravity in the case of the weight of the brain (exteriorly, of course, this is impossible, the brain upon the scales shows its full weight, even while within us), so do we similarly sever ourselves from earthly physical and chemical forces of other kinds.

What enables us to sever ourselves from these forces? It is the Ego and the astral body. As soon as these act upon the etheric and physical bodies in such a way as to withdraw the etheric from the physical, the absorbent force is then absent, and only ponderable matter remains. The ponderable matter is not part of the Earth, for the Earth does not retain it in its original form, but destroys it. The Earth-forces do not contain in them that which gives to Man his form. That is not difficult to comprehend, for we have seen that we sever ourselves inwardly from the Earth-forces. With all that is in him through his astral body and Ego, man is related to forces that are active beyond the Earth.

Our next question must be: What is the nature of this relation? To ascertain this, we must in a certain way study the whole quality and nature of Man. We find in the first place his complete form or figure. I do not mean by this the form which I would draw if I were to make a sketch of him, but the whole configuration, the whole formation of Man. It would include, e.g. the fact that the eyes are placed in the face, and the heels on the feet; for this is part of the inner configuration of Man in accordance with law.

Expressionistic painters may assert that Man could be drawn in such a way that his toe takes the place of his nose, or that one eye is placed here and the other in his hand. Yes, there really are such people, but they only show how little inner relationship they have with the world. We have indeed these days progressed so far in materialistic thought as to be able to depict single things separately, when they really belong together with the whole and ought not to be depicted each for itself.

We have therefore first Man's complete form; and this, as you know very well, is not produced as a figure is produced that is, for instance, carved in wood, but is formed from within. We cannot even re-carve any part that does not happen to meet with our approval. The human form is modeled by forces residing in the periphery and they are forces from beyond the Earth. Therefore when we contemplate a human form, we are looking at a product of the extra-earthly.

Secondly we can distinguish in Man, apart from his form, all that comes under the category of internal motion. Take, for instance, the blood and the other bodily juices; these possess internal motion. This also is produced from within; it is, so to speak, situated even deeper in Man than his form. The latter presses forward to the periphery, while internal motion takes place entirely within; and it is again a process that stands in relation with the world that is beyond the Earth.

Thirdly, the activity of the organs. Organs such as the lungs, liver, spleen, etc., are responsible for activities within Man, and it is these activities I will name as the third thing we find in Man. This need not cause you any surprise, rather should it lead you to seek the reason.

Consider for example, an important organ, namely, the heart, of which I have recently spoken repeatedly. We realise that in a certain sense, the heart has been welded together.

By following up Embryology, we find how the heart is gradually welded together or piled up, as it were, by the blood circulation, and is not a primary form. This is verified by Embryology. And it is the same with other organs. They are the results of these circulations, rather than the causes of them. Within the organs the circulation comes to a standstill, it undergoes a kind of metamorphosis, and proceeds further in a different way. To illustrate the idea, let us say we have a stream of water falling over a rock. It throws up a variety of formations and then flows on. These formations are caused by the forces of equilibrium and motion at this place. Now imagine that suddenly all this were to petrify; a skin would be formed like a wall, then the rest would flow on again, and we should have an organic structure formed. We should have the current going through the structure coming out again and flowing on further in an altered form. You can imagine something like this in the case of the flow of blood, as it circulates through the heart. I can only indicate these things here. They are well grounded, but here only an indication of them can be given.

Although the organs in the manner of their formation depend upon the flow of inner forces, yet they are something in the inner part of Man that again comes into relation with what is outside. We have here something which, as you can see from an example I will give, stands in closer relation with the Earthly; through these organs we are brought from the interior into contact with the exterior.

Take the case of the lungs. The lungs are organs, but they are at the same time the basis of respiration. As the instrument for the transmutation of inhaled oxygen into exhaled carbonic acid, the lungs form a relation with something that has significance for Man, but yet exists outside him in the realm of the Earthly. In this way we return, as it were, to the terrestrial environment by way of the organic activities. The moment we overstep, through organic activity, the boundary of our skin, we are outside, in the terrestrial sphere. You see, all these processes that take place entirely within us, the formation and regulation of fluidic movements, etc., stand in a relationship with the extra-earthly; whereas when we come to the organs we again approach the terrestrial. Here we have the union of Heaven and Earth in Man. The lungs are built up by the extra-Earthly, but what they do with the oxygen brings them into relation with the Earthly. And now, when Man takes up still more earthly substances and receives them into his organism, he comes into immediate contact, through the process of metabolism with the truly Earthly.

Thus we can study man from four different points of view: Complete Form, in so far as this is built up from within outwards; Internal Motion, Organic Activity and Metabolism. If we study the complete form, which is entirely constructed by inner forces, we find that it has the least connection of all with the Earthly. This point will be further explained tomorrow. We only begin to gain an understanding of the connection when we relate, as we shall do tomorrow, the complete form of Man to the Zodiac. The inner motion, the circulation of the blood, lymph, etc., can only be conceived in their reality, when related to our planetary system. And when we come to the activity of the organs, we are already approaching the terrestrial.

I gave you the example of the lungs, which, in respect to their internal construction, are formed by extra-terrestrial forces, but where they come into relation with oxygen, are in relation with the air. Other human organs come into relation with water, others again with heat, etc. Therefore, in studying the activity of the organs, we come into contact with the Elemental world—with fire, water, air. Only when our observations are centred upon actual assimilation, or metabolism, are we in the sphere of the Earth. The Elemental world is that which encompasses the Earth as the sphere of water and of air, and only when we encounter the process of metabolism, do we approach the relation of Man with the Earth itself.

In this way we can discover Man's relation to the Universe that surrounds him:

And now consider, if we understand the form of Man in all its nature and conditions, and find the possibility of tracing it back to the Zodiac—that is, to the world of fixed stars—then and then only are we able to form, from Man, an idea of all that is visible to us in surrounding space; for it cannot be investigated by mechanical or mathematical means, but only through a knowledge of the complete form of Man. Neither are planetary motions to be examined merely by means of a telescope. With a telescope one finds their positions—setting it first to one star and then to the other, finding the angle, and in this way discovering the positions. What is actually present in the processes of the Planet-World is something that is formed from within outwards. It is by a study of the activities in the saps and juices in Man that we shall learn to understand the planetary activities. Similarly, if we comprehend our own organic activities, we shall also understand what goes on in the Elemental world; and when we are able to understand what happens in Man in the moment when earthly substance is introduced into his metabolic system, we shall possess the key to the Earth activities, and be able to separate them spatially from all extra-earthly activities.

We have seen that we must search for a harmony between the processes taking place in and with Man, and the processes that take place in the outer Universe. Let us once again recall briefly the point whither our study of yesterday led us. We said that Man had to be regarded, to begin with, from four points of view. Firstly, from the standpoint of the forces which are responsible for his form; secondly from that which comprises all the forces expressing themselves in the circulation of the blood, lymph, etc., in short the forces of internal motion. (You already know that the formative forces are to a large extent in a state of rest in the fully grown man, whereas the inner motion is in a state of continual flow.) Thirdly, we have the organic forces, and fourthly, the actual metabolism.

To begin with we must consider all that has connection with the formative forces. These are the forces which work outward from within until they reach the outermost periphery, the limits of man's circumference. If we formed a silhouette of man, seen as it were from all sides, we should comprehend and enclose the outermost extremities of the activities resulting from these inner forces, which build from within outwards.

Now it should not be difficult to understand that these forces of formation must be connected with other forces, which, like them, belong to the periphery of man, and are to be discovered there. These latter are the forces having their activities in the senses. The senses of man lie, as you know, upon the periphery. They are of course distributed over it and differentiated, but in order to come into contact with the forces acting in the senses you must look for them at the periphery, and this justifies us in saying that the formative forces must have a connection with the activity of the senses.

We shall perhaps understand this point better if we remember the words that Goethe quotes as having been uttered by one of the old mystics.

“Were the eye not Sun-like in itself,
How could we see the Sun?”

Now it cannot be the light-activity surrounding us all the time that is meant when the eye is said to be sun-like or light-like, for this light-activity can be perceived by the eye only when the eye is completely formed. It cannot therefore be this that is meant, when we are speaking of the building up of the eye. We must imagine this light-activity as something intrinsically different. And it is a fact that we arrive at a certain conception of what underlies this saying, if we follow man during the time between death and a new birth. For during this period his experiences consist in part—but of course, only in part—in a perception of the gradual transformation of the forces within him from the preceding physical life to the new one; and he perceives how the limb-man is transformed in the time between death and a new birth into the head-form. These experiences are no less rich in content than are those experiences we live through in this life, when we watch the gradual quickening of the plants in Spring and their decay in Autumn, etc.

All this building up that goes on in man in the time between death and re-birth is a great wealth of events, a wealth of real happenings which are by no means so easy to grasp as the mere abstract idea of them. All that takes place during this time to effect the transformation of the forces of the limb-man into those of the head for the new incarnation, is extraordinarily manifold. Man himself partakes in the process. He experiences for instance, something akin to the building up of the eye. But he does not experience it in the same manner as he did during the long evolutionary period, when he passed through the various evolutionary stages preceding our Earth, namely, those of Moon, Sun and Saturn. The forces of the Stellar Universe then acted upon him in a different way. This Stellar Universe was also in a different form from what it is now.

It is of great importance to form clear ideas on these matters. If we consider our present perceptions of what is around us, what are they? They are really pictures. Behind these pictures, of course, lies the real world; but it is the world that lies behind these pictures, which actually built up man before he had evolved sufficiently to be able to perceive these pictures. Today we perceive with our eyes the pictures of the surrounding world. Behind these lies that which has built up our eyes. This brings us to the truth: Had not the forces residing behind the picture of the Sun constructed the eye, the eye could not perceive the picture of the Sun.

The saying, you see, has to be modified, for while the perception of light today gives pictures, yet what first built up the organs into the periphery of man were not pictures, but realities. So that when we look around us in this world, what we perceive are really the forces that have built us up—our own formative forces. They have now drawn into us; that which acted from without up to the Earth period, now works from within.

We will retain this thought for our succeeding studies and will now bring together the first and fourth of these forces.

1. Forces of Form.
2. Forces of Inner Movements.
3. Organic Forces.
4. Assimilative, or metabolic forces.

Let us, for the moment, consider the last named. The process of metabolism has already become in some degree irregular; but there are natural causes which still lead Man to hold to a certain regularity in this respect; and you all know that he is inconvenienced if, for some reason or other, he fails in the rhythmic process of assimilation. He can deviate from it within limits, but he always endeavours to return again to a certain rhythm; and you know that this rhythm is one of the first essentials of physical health. It is a rhythm that embraces day and night. Within 24 hours the rhythmic process of metabolism is completed. Twenty-four hours after breakfast you again have an appetite for breakfast. All that is connected with assimilation is connected also with the day's course. I would now ask you to compare the solidity, the firmness of the bodily periphery with the mobility of the forces of assimilation. One can say that no alterations take place in the former, while assimilation repeats itself every 24 hours. A great deal takes place inside your organism, but your periphery remains unchanged. Now try to discover, in the outer world, something corresponding with this inner mobility in relation to firmness, that you find in Man. Look at the Universe of Stars. Note how the constellations move as little as do the particles on the surface of the human periphery. You will find that the constellation of Aries is always at a fixed distance from the constellation of Taurus, just as your two eyes remain at the same distance from one another. But apparently this whole stellar heaven moves; apparently it revolves around the Earth. Well, in respect of this, men are today no longer ignorant, they know that the movement is merely apparent, and ascribe its appearance to a revolution of the Earth upon her own axis.

Many have been the attempts to find proof for this revolution of the Earth on her axis. It was really only during the fifties of the last century that man began to have the right to speak of such a revolution, for it was only then that the pendulum experiments of Foucault showed this turning of the Earth. I will not go into this further today. We have however, in this way, valid proof of this terrestrial process, which repeats itself every 24 hours. It represents, in relation to the fixed constellations, the analogy of the rhythmic course of metabolism in man as compared to the fixed nature of his peripheric form; and here you can find, if you examine thoroughly all the conditions and relationships, exact evidence for the movement of the Earth in the processes of metabolism in man.

In these times we come across various so-called theories of relativity which claim that we cannot really speak of absolute motion. If I look out of the window of a railway carriage and think that the objects outside are moving, in reality it is the train and myself that are moving. Neither however can it be strictly proved that the world outside is not also moving in an opposite direction! All this kind of talk is, as a matter of fact, not of much value. For if one man walks forward and another man stands still in the distance while he approaches him it is, relatively speaking, immaterial whether he says: “I approach him” or “he approaches me”. Looked at in this way there seems to be no difference. Such considerations as this form, as you know, the foundations of the Einstein theories of relativity.

It is all very well—but there is a way whereby one can strictly prove the motion, for the person who remains at rest will not experience fatigue, whereas the one who walks will do so. By means of inner processes the absolute reality of motion can thus be proved; indeed there are no other proofs but the inner processes. Applying this to the Earth, we can truly speak there too of absolute motion, for through Spiritual Science we learn to realise that this motion is the equivalent of the inner motion of metabolism as compared with the fixed form of man. We should not lay so much stress upon the fact that the Earth rotates round its axis and thereby brings about an apparent Solar motion in space, but should instead relate this terrestrial motion to the whole Starry Universe; we should not speak of Sun days, but rather of Star days—which are not synonymous, for the Stellar day is shorter than the Solar day. A correction is always necessary in formulae dealing with the Solar day. Hence we can truly speak of this movement of the Earth on her axis as of something derivable from Man's nature; for as already pointed out, with the revolution considered in its relation to the fixed starry heavens is connected the inner motion of metabolism in Man. To sum up, the relation of metabolism in Man to the forces responsible for the form of Man is the relation of the Earth to the Heaven of Fixed Stars, which latter is represented for us by the Zodiac.

When we look at the Zodiac, it forms for us the outer cosmic representative of our own outer form. When we consider the Earth, we have before us the representative of the assimilative forces within us; and the relation of movement in each case corresponds.

Now it will be a little more difficult to find the relationship between (2) and (3), between Inner Movements and Organic Forces. We can however make the matter comprehensible in the following way. If you consider the movements within the human organism, you will readily conclude that they are something in Man that is in no way so fixed as his outer periphery. They are in motion. But something further is connected with this movement. The movements include that of the blood as well as the nerve-fluid, lymph, etc. We need not give a detailed list of them here, but there are seven of these inner movements. Connected with these movements are the individual organs. The forces of motion have produced, within their courses, these organs; in the latter we must recognise the results of these motions. I have often drawn attention recently to the real truth concerning the human heart. The materialistic view of the world, as I have pointed out, is of opinion that the heart is a kind of pump, forcing the blood through the whole body. But this is not the case; on the contrary, the pulsation of the heart is not the cause but the effect of circulation. Into the living inner motions or movements is inserted the functioning of the organs.

If we try to discover a cosmic equivalent for this, we will find it by observing, on the one hand, the movements of the Planets, especially if we consider their motions in relation to the movements of the moon. You will know—having already had this explanation in previous lectures—the connection between the lunar motion and the phenomena of the tides; and much more besides is connected with this lunar motion. Were we to study the phenomena of Nature more deeply, we should find that not only does light appear as a result of the sunrise, but other—and indeed more material—effects in our Earth-environment are to be connected with the planetary motion. When once this is made the basis of real, genuine study, we shall realise the harmony existing between many phenomena on the Earth and the motions of the planets. We shall study the effects of the planetary influence upon air, water and earth, in the same way as we have to study—in the human body—the influences upon their respective organs of the forces of inner movement existing in the circulation of the blood and in other circulations. In this way we shall discover a certain reciprocal action between the organic activities and the forces of inner movement. Just as we have already observed a correspondence between Earth and the Fixed Stars, so now we shall in fact have before us a similar correspondence between earth, water, air, fire (heat) and the planets—among which we reckon, of course, the Sun.

Thus we arrive at a certain relation between occurrences within the human organism and those taking place outside in the Macrocosm. For the present, however, we need concern ourselves only with the organic forces. How are they built up in the human body? They are built up in such a manner that as we follow the human life during the periods of this building-up process of the organs, we may recognise with a fair degree of accuracy that the process is related to the course of the year as metabolism is related to the course of the day. Observe how this building process takes place in the child, commencing at conception and proceeding until he first ‘sees the light of the world’ as it is beautifully expressed. After this, and especially during the first months after birth, the building-up process proceeds still further; so that, in very fact, we have here to do with a year's course. Then we have another period of about one year to the appearance of the first teeth. Thus, in the building process of the organs we have a yearly course. But this course stands in a similar relation to the forces of inner movement in Man as the varied conditions of the year's activity—Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter—do to the planets. Here again we discover something in Man that has correspondences in the Macrocosm. We cannot study these matters in any other way than by comparing details with each other. All I can do today is to draw your attention to certain facts that bear upon this subject, for were we to examine the connections in detail it would take us too long; but by studying certain relationships in Man during the actual building process of the organs, and seeing them in connection with the forces of inner movement, you can find everywhere analogies of that which takes place in the quarterly changes in the Seasons, as seen in their relationship to the forces of planetary motion. But we must avoid commencing our examination upon the basis of the heart being a pump; on the contrary, the heart must be viewed as a creation of the circulation of the blood. We must, so to speak, insert the heart into a living blood-circulation. The movement of the Sun too must be thought of as similarly inserted into the movements of the Planets. An unbiased examination of the intra-human conditions compels us to speak of a revolution of the Earth on her axis causing an apparent motion of the starry heavens—for this constitutes the equivalent of the movements connected with metabolism in their relations to the human outer form. But we cannot speak of a movement of the Earth around the Sun during the year. We cannot do this, if we understand the inner man which lives in close connection with the Macrocosm; for we must not conceive of that which moves towards the heart, in any other manner than we would the other flows of movement within man. We must therefore recognise that we are concerned not with an elliptical movement of the Earth in the course of the year but rather with a movement which corresponds to the Solar motion. That is, Earth and Sun move together in the course of the year; the one does not circle around the other. The latter opinion is the result of judging appearances; in actuality we have here the motion of both these bodies in space with a certain connection between the two. This is something in the Copernican theory that will have to be substantially corrected. But there is yet another way in which we must conceive the relation of man with macrocosmic nature.

What really is the nature of the process which we observe in the daily movement of metabolism? Only part of this process is carried on in such a way as to be accompanied by the phenomena of our consciousness, another part being accomplished while consciousness is shut off, while the Ego and astral body are separated from the physical and etheric. Now we must especially note the following. Man does not experience in the same way what takes place between awaking and going to sleep and what takes place between going to sleep and awaking. Just consider the relation between the two moments of time—going to sleep and awaking. If you do this with an unprejudiced mind, you will arrive at an unequivocal view of this matter. When you go to sleep, you are, as it were, at the zero of your being; the condition of sleep is not merely one of rest, it is the antithetical condition of the waking state. When you awake, you are, from the standpoint of your life, really in the same relation to yourself and your environment as you are at the moment of going to sleep. The one is the equivalent of the other, the only difference being that of direction. Awaking means passing from sleep to the waking state; falling asleep is the reverse. Apart from direction they are absolutely alike. Therefore if we could indicate the movements of metabolism by a line, then it cannot be a straight line or a circle, for they would not contain the points of awaking and of falling asleep. We must find a line which actually depicts the movements of metabolism, so as to contain these points, and the only one—search as long as you like—is the lemniscate. Here you have the point of awaking in one direction and the point of falling asleep in the other direction. The directions alone are opposite, the two movements being equal as regards life-condition. We can now distinguish in a real way the cycle of day and the cycle of night.

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Whither does all this lead? If we have grasped the fact that the motion of the daily metabolism corresponds to the motion of the Earth, we can no longer, with the Earth here (diagram) attribute to any one point a circular motion. On the contrary, we must form the conception that the Earth in actual fact proceeds along her path in such a way as to produce a line like that of the lemniscate. The motion is not a simple revolution, but a more complicated movement; each point of the terrestrial surface describes a lemniscate, which is also the line described by the metabolic process.

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We cannot therefore imagine the Earth's movement to consist merely of a turning round the axis, for in reality it is a complicated motion in which every point upon which you stand, describes—actually in order to form the foundation for the movement of your metabolic processes—a lemniscate. It is absolutely necessary to seek in the movements of the outer Universe the equivalent of movements taking place within Man. For only by a study of the changes within physical Man can we arrive at an understanding of the planetary motions exterior to Man. When a man sets his limbs in motion and becomes tired, we cannot go on arguing the point as to whether he is in relative or actual motion! It is out of the question to say: Perhaps the movement is only relative, perhaps the other man whom he is approaching is after all really approaching him! Theories of Relativity no longer hold water, when the inner motion proves that man moves. And it is impossible also to prove the movements in the interior of the Earth, except by means of the inner changes that go on in Man. The movements of metabolism, for example, are the true reflection of that which the Earth executes as motion in space. And again, that which we have termed the organ-building forces, active in the course of the year, are the equivalent of the annual motion of Earth and Sun together. We shall have occasion to speak more specifically of these things later; at the moment I should like to draw your attention once more to our model, where I have pointed out that the Earth moves behind the Sun in a screw-like line, the Earth moving along always with the Sun. And then if we view the line from above, we get a projection of the line and the projection shows a lemniscate.

Now all this will make it clear that we can certainly speak of a daily motion of the Earth around her axis, but by no means of a yearly motion of the Earth around the Sun. For the Earth follows the Sun, describing the same path.

Various other facts show that we have no right to speak of such a revolution. To give one instance, the fact that it was found necessary—I have spoken of this before—simply to suppress one statement of Copernicus. Were the Earth revolving round the Sun, we should of course expect her axis, which owing to its inertia remains parallel, to point in the direction of different fixed stars during this revolution. But it does not! If the Earth revolved round the Sun, the axis could not indicate the direction of the Pole-star, for the point indicated would itself have to revolve round the Polestar; it does not however do this, the axis continually indicates the Pole-star. That line which should be apparent to us and which would correspond to the progressive motion of the Earth in her relation to the Sun, is not to be found.

It is in a spiral, screw-like path that the Earth follows the Sun, boring her way, as it were, into cosmic space.

I have already indicated however that there is another movement which manifests in the phenomena of the precession of the equinoxes—the movement of the point of sunrise at the Spring-equinox through the Zodiac, once in 25,920 years. This also is the equivalent of a certain motion in Man. What can we find within Man corresponding to it? You may be able to come to a conclusion on this point from what I have said above. We have to find a motion equivalent to the relation of the Sun to the Fixed Stars, for the point of sunrise progresses through the complete Zodiac—or fixed stars—once in 25,920 years. The equivalent in Man is the relation between the forces of inner movement and the forces of form; this must therefore also be of long duration. The forces of inner movement in Man must change in some way, so as to alter their position in relation to the periphery of Man.

You will remember what I said about something that has been observable since the period of ancient Greece. I said that the Greeks used the same word for ‘yellow’ and ‘green’, that they really did not see blue in the same way as we do, but actually, as reported by Roman writers, realised and used four colours only in their art, namely yellow, red, black and white. They saw these four living colours. To them the sky was not blue as we see it; it appeared to them as a kind of darkness. Now this is an assertion that can be made in all certainty, and Spiritual Science confirms it. This change in Man has taken place since the time of ancient Greece. When you ponder over the fact that the constitution of the human eye has undergone such a degree of modification since the period of ancient Greece, you can then also conceive of other alterations in the human organism, taking place upon the periphery and occupying still longer periods of time for their accomplishment. Such alterations upon the periphery must of necessity bear a relation to the forces of inner movement, for, of course, they cannot be produced by the digestion or the organic functions. These peripheric modifications correspond, as a matter of fact, to the course of the vernal equinox in the Zodiac, to a period, that is, of 25,920 years. During this period the human race undergoes complete change. We must not make the mistake of thinking that previous to that time humanity appeared as we now see it. Consideration of the circumstances connected with physical existence makes it absurd to use the figures given us by modern geology for the purpose of following human evolution in time, for we can comprise this only in the period of 25,920 years, and part of that is still in the future. When the vernal equinox has come back again to the same place, the alterations that will have taken place in the whole human race are such that the human form will be quite dissimilar to what it is now. I have already told you something derived from other sources of cognition about the future of the human race and about its age. And here we see how the consideration of physical conditions compels a recognition of the same knowledge.

As a result of the above we arrive at the realisation that what we call the ‘movements of the heavenly bodies’ are not quite as simple as present day astronomy would have us believe, but that we enter here into extremely complicated conditions—conditions that can be studied from the standpoint of Man's connection with the Macrocosm. I have already been able to point out to you certain details of the motions of the heavenly bodies, and we shall in course of time learn more and more about them from other sources. You will be able already to see one thing—that man is not wholly dependent upon the Macrocosm. With what lies deep down in the subconscious, with the processes namely of assimilation, he is still in a certain way—but only in a certain way—bound to the Earth's daily revolution around her axis. Nevertheless, he can lift himself out of this connection. How is this? It is possible because man as he now is, built up in accordance with the forces of the periphery and of inner movement, with the forces too of the organs and of the metabolic system, is complete and finished in his dependence on the forces from without; and now he is able, with his complete and finished organisation to sever himself from this connection. In the same sense that we have in waking and sleeping a copy of day and night, having thus in ourselves the inner rhythm of day and night, but not needing to make this inner rhythm correspond with the outer rhythm of day and night (i.e. we need not sleep at night, nor wake during the day), so in a similar way does Man sever his connection with the Macrocosm in other departments of his existence. Upon this is founded the possibility of human free-will. It is not the present formation of Man that is dependent upon the Macrocosm, but his past formation. Man's present experiences are fundamentally a picture or copy of his past adaptation to the Macrocosm, and in this sense we live in the pictures of our past. Within these we are enabled to evolve our freedom, and from them we receive our moral laws, which are independent of the necessity ruling in our nature. It is when we understand clearly how Man and Macrocosm are related to each other that we recognise the possibility of free-will in Man.

Finally we must think over the following. It is clear that in Man the metabolic forces are still, in a certain respect, connected with the rhythm of his daily life. The forces of form have solidified. Now consider the animal instead of Man. Here we shall find a much more complete dependence upon the Macrocosm. Man has grown out of or beyond this dependence. The ancient wisdom therefore spoke of the Zodiac or Animal Circle, not of the Man Circle, as corresponding to the forces of formation. The forces of form manifest themselves in the animal kingdom in a great variety of forms, while in Man they manifest essentially in one form covering the whole human race; but they are the forces of the animal kingdom, and as we evolve beyond them and become Man, we must go out beyond the Zodiac. Beyond the Zodiac lies that upon which we, as human beings, are dependent in a higher sense than we are upon all that exists within the Zodiac, that is, within the circle of the fixed stars. Beyond the Zodiac is that which corresponds to our Ego.

With the astral body—which the animal also possesses—we are fettered to a dependence upon the Macrocosm, and the building up of the astral vehicle takes place in accordance with the will of the Stars. But with our "I" or Ego we transcend this Zodiac.

Here we have the principle upon which we have gained our freedom. Within the Zodiac we cannot sin, any more than can the animals; we begin to sin as soon as we carry our action beyond the Zodiac. This happens when we do that which makes us free from our connection with the Universal forces of formation, when we enter into relationship with regions exterior to the Zodiac or region of fixed stars. And this is the essential content of the human Ego.

You see, we may measure the Universe in so far as it appears to us a visible and temporal thing, we may measure its full extension through space to the outermost fixed stars, and all that takes place by way of movement in time in this starry heaven, and we may consider all this in its relation to Man; but in Man is being fulfilled something that goes on outside this space and outside this time, outside all that takes place in the astral. There beyond, is no ‘necessity of Nature’, but only that has place which is intimately connected with our moral nature and moral actions. Within the Zodiac we are unable to evolve our moral nature; but in so far as we evolve it, we record it into the Macrocosm beyond the Zodiac. All that we do remains and works in the world. The processes taking place within us from the forces of formation to the forces of metabolism, are the result of the past. But the past does not prejudge the whole of the future, it has no power over that future which eventuates from Man himself in his moral actions.

I can only lead you forward in this study step by step. Keep well in mind what I have said today and in my next lecture we will examine the matter from yet another point of view.

The last lectures here described a path which, if followed in the right way, leads to a perception of the Universe and its organisation. As you have seen, this path compels a continuous search for the harmony existing between the process taking place in Man and the processes observed in the Universe. Tomorrow and the day after I shall have to treat our subject in such a way that the friends who have come to attend the General Meeting may be able to receive something from the two lectures at which they are present. To-morrow I shall go over again some of what has been said in order then to connect with it something fresh.

In perusing my Occult Science—an Outline, you will have seen that in the description it gives of the evolution of the known Universe a point is made of keeping everywhere in view the relationship of that evolution to the evolution of Man himself. Beginning with the Saturn period which was followed by the Sun and Moon periods preceding the Earth period, you will remember that the Saturn period was characterised by the laying of the first foundations of the human senses. And along this line of thought the book proceeds. Everywhere universal conditions are considered in a way that at the same time also describes the evolution of Man. In short, Man is not considered as standing in the Universe as modern science sees him—the outer Universe on the one hand, and Man on the other—two entities that do not rightly belong to each other. Here, on the contrary, the two are regarded as merged into each other, and the evolution of both is followed together. This conception must, of necessity, be applied also to the present attributes, forces and motions of the Universe. We cannot consider first the Universe abstractly in its purely spatial aspect, as is done in the Galileo-Copernican system, and then Man as existing beside it; we must allow both to merge into one another in our study.

This is only possible, when we have acquired an understanding of Man himself. I have already shown you how little modern natural science is in a position really to explain Man. What does science do, for instance, in that sphere where it is greatest, judging by modern methods of thought? It states in a grand manner that Man has evolved physically from other lower forms. It then shows how, during the embryonic period, Man passes again rapidly through these forms in recapitulation. This means that Man is looked upon as the highest of the animals. Science contemplates the animal kingdom and then builds up Man from what is found there; in other words, it examines everything non-human, and then says: ‘Here we come to a standstill; here Man begins’. Natural science does not feel called upon to study Man as Man, and consequently any real understanding of his nature is out of the question.

It is in truth very necessary today for people who claim to be experts in this domain of nature, to examine Goethe's investigations in natural science, particularly his Theory of Colours. Here a very different method of investigation is used from that to which we today are accustomed. At the very commencement mention is made of subjective, and of physiological colours, and the phenomena of the living experience of the human eye in connection with its environment are then carefully investigated. It is shown, for example, how these experiences or impressions do not merely last as long as the eye is exposed to its surroundings, but that an after-effect remains. You all know a very simple phenomenon connected with this. You gaze at a red surface, and then quickly turning to a white surface you will see the red in the green after-colour. This shows that the eye is, in a certain sense, still under the influence of the original impression. There is here no need to examine into the reason why the second colour seen should be green, we will only keep to the more general fact that the eye retains the after-effect of its experience.

We have here to do with an experience on the periphery of the human body, for the eye is on the periphery. When we contemplate this experience, we find that for a certain limited time the eye retains the after-effect of the impression; after that the experience ceases, and the eye can then expose itself to new impressions without interference from the last one.

Let us now consider quite objectively a phenomenon connected not with any single localised organ of the human organism, but with the whole human being. Provided our observations are unprejudiced, we cannot fail to recognise that this experience made by the whole human being is related to the experience with the localised eye. We expose ourselves to an impression, to an experience, with our whole being. In so doing, we absorb this experience just as the eye absorbs the impression of the colour to which it is exposed; and we find that after the lapse of months, or even years, the after-effect comes forth in the form of a thought-picture. The whole phenomenon is somewhat different, but you will not fail to recognise the relation of this memory picture to that after-picture of an experience which the eye retains for a short limited time.

This is the kind of question that man must face, for he can only gain some knowledge of the world when he learns to ask questions in the correct way. Let us therefore ask ourselves: What is the connection between these two phenomena—between the after-picture of the eye and the memory picture that rises up within us in relation with a certain experience? As soon as we put our question in this form and require a definite answer, we realise that the whole method of the present-day natural-scientific thought completely fails to supply the answer; and it fails because of its ignorance of one great fact—the fact of the universal significance of metamorphosis. This metamorphosis is something that is not completed in Man within the limits of one life, but only plays itself out in consecutive lives on Earth.

You will remember that in order to gain a true insight into the nature of Man, we divided him into three parts: head, rhythmic man and limbs. We may, for the present purpose, consider the last two as one, and we then have the head-organisation on the one hand and all that makes up the remaining parts on the other. As we try to comprehend this head-organisation, we must be able to understand how it is related to the whole evolution of Man. The head is a later metamorphosis, a transformation, of the rest of Man, considered in terms of its forces. Were you to imagine yourself without your head—and of course also without whatever is present in the rest of the organism but really belongs to the head—you would, in the first place, think of the remaining portion of your organism as substantial. But here we are not concerned with substance; it is the inter-relation of the forces of this substance which undergoes a complete transformation in the period between death and a new birth and becomes in the next incarnation the head-organisation. In other words, that which you now include in the lower part (the rhythmic man and the limbs) is an earlier metamorphosis of what is going to be head-organisation. But if you wish to understand how this metamorphosis proceeds, you will have to consider the following.

Take any one organ—liver or kidney—of your lower man, and compare it with your head-organisation. You will at once become aware of a fundamental, essential difference; namely, that all the activities of the lower parts of the body as distinct from the upper or head, are directed inwards, as instanced by the kidneys, whose whole activity is exercised interiorly. The activity of the kidneys is an activity of secretion. In comparing this organ with a characteristic organ of the head—the eye, for instance—you find the construction of the latter to be the exact opposite. It is directed entirely outwards, and the results of the changing impressions are transmitted inwardly to the reason, to the head. In any particular organ of the head you have the polar opposite of an organ belonging to the other part of the body. We might depict this fact diagrammatically.

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Take the drawing on the left as the first metamorphosis, and the drawing on the right as the second; then you will have to imagine the first as the first life, and the second as the second life, and between the two is the life between death and a new birth. We have first an inner organ which is directed inward. Owing to the transformation taking place between two physical lives, the whole position and direction of this organ is entirely reversed—it now opens outwards. So that an organ which develops its activity inwardly in one incarnation, develops it outwardly in the succeeding life. You can now imagine that something has happened between the two incarnations that may be compared with putting on a glove, taking it off and turning it inside out; upon wearing the glove again, the surface which was previously turned inward comes outside, and vice versa. Thus it must be noted that this metamorphosis does not merely transform the organs, but turns them inside out; inner becomes outer. We can now say that the organs of the body (taking ‘body’ as the opposite to ‘head’) have been transformed. So that one or other of our abdominal organs, for instance, has now become our eyes in this incarnation. It has been reversed in its active forces, has become an eye, and has attained the ability to generate after-effects following upon impressions from without. Now this faculty must owe its origin to something.

Let us consider the eye and the mission of its life-activity, in an unbiased way. These after-effects only prove to us that the eye is a living thing. They prove that the eye, for a little while, retains impressions; and why? I will use as a simile something simpler. Suppose you touch silk; your organ of touch retains an after-effect of the smoothness of silk. If later on you again touch silk, you recognise it by what the first impression left behind with you. It is the same with the eye. The after-effect is somehow connected with recognition. The inner life which produces this after-effect, plays a part in the recognition. But the outer object, when recognised, remains outside. If I see any one of you now, and tomorrow meet you again and recognise you, you are physically present before me.

Now compare this with the inner organ of which the eye is a transformation in respect to its activity and forces. In this organ must reside something which in a certain sense corresponds to the eye's capacity for retaining pictures of impressions, something akin to the inner life of the eye; but it must be directed inward. And this must also have some connection with recognition. But to recognise an experience means to remember it. So when we look for the fundamental metamorphosis of the eye's activity in a former life, we must enquire into the activity of that organ which acts for the memory.

It is impossible to explain these things in simple language such as is often desired at the present day, but we can direct our thoughts along a certain line which, if followed up, will lead us to this conception—namely that all our sense-organs which are directed outward have their correspondences in the inner organs, and that these latter are also the organs of memory. With the eye we see that which recurs as an impression from the outer world, while with those organs within the human body which correspond to the previous metamorphosis of the eye, we remember the pictures transmitted through the eye. We hear sound with the ear, and with the inner organ corresponding to the ear we remember that sound. Thereby the whole man as he directs or opens his organs inward, becomes an organ of memory. We confront the outer world, taking it into ourselves in the form of impressions. Materialistic natural science claims that we receive an impression, for instance, with the aid of the eye. The impression is transmitted to the optic nerve. But here the activity apparently ceases; as regards the process of cognition, the whole remaining organism is like the fifth wheel of a wagon! But this is far from being the truth. All that we perceive passes over into the rest of the organism. The nerves have no direct relation with memory. On the contrary the entire human body, the whole man, becomes a memory instrument, only specialised according to the particular organ that directs its activity inwards. Materialism is experiencing a tragic paradox—it fails to comprehend matter, because it sticks fast to its abstractions! It becomes more and more abstract, the spiritual is more and more filtered away; therefore it cannot penetrate to the essence of material phenomena, for it does not recognise the spiritual within the material. For instance materialism does not realise that our internal organs have very much more to do with our memory than has the brain, which merely prepares the idea or images so that they can be absorbed by the other organs of the whole body. In this connection our science is a perpetuation of a one-sided asceticism, which consists in unwillingness to understand the spirituality of the material world and a desire to overcome it. Our science has learnt sufficient asceticism to deprive itself of the capacity for understanding the world, when it claims that the eyes and other sense-organs receive the various impressions, pass them on to the nervous system and then to something else, which remains undefined. But this undefined “something” is the entire remaining organism! Here it is that memories originate through the transmutation of the organs.

This was very well known in the days when no spurious asceticism oppressed human perception. Therefore we find that the ancients, when speaking of ‘hypochondria’ for example, did not speak of it in the same way as does modern man and even the psycho-analyst when he maintains that hypochondria is merely psychic, is something rooted in the soul. No, hypochondria means a hardening of the abdominal and lower parts. The ancients knew well enough that this hardening of the abdominal system has as its result what we call hypochondria, and the English language which gives evidence of a less advanced stage than other European tongues, still contains a remnant of memory of this correspondence between the material and the spiritual. I can, at the moment, only remind you of one instance of this. In English, depression is called “spleen”. The word is the same as the name of the physical organ that has very much to do with this depression. For this condition of soul cannot be explained out of the nervous system, the explanation for it is to be found in the spleen. We might find a good many such correspondences, for the genius of language has preserved much; and even if words have become somewhat transformed for the purpose of applying them to the soul, yet they point to an insight Man once possessed in ancient times and that stood him in good stead.

To repeat—you, as entire Man, observe the surrounding world, and this world reacts upon your organs, which adapt themselves to these experiences according to their nature. In a medical school, when anatomy is being studied, the liver is just called liver, be it the liver of a man of 50 or of 25, of a musician or of one who understands as much of music as a cow does of Sunday after regaling itself upon grass for a week! It is simply liver. The fact is that a great difference exists between the liver of a musician and that of a non-musician, for the liver is very closely connected with all that may be summed up as the musical conceptions that live and resound in Man. It is of no use to look at the liver with the eye of an ascetic and see it as an inferior organ; for that apparently humble organ is the seat of all that lives in and expresses itself through the beautiful sequence of melody; it is closely concerned e.g. with the act of listening to a symphony. We must clearly understand that the liver also possesses etheric organs; it is these latter which, in the first place, have to do with music. But the outer physical liver is, in a certain sense, an externalisation of the etheric liver, and its form is like the form of the latter. In this way you see, you prepare your organs; and if it depended entirely upon yourself, the instruments of your senses, would, in the next incarnation, be a replica of the experiences you had made in the world in the present incarnation. But this is true only in measure, for in the interval between death and a new birth Beings of the higher Hierarchies come to our aid, and they do not always decide that injuries produced upon our organs by lack of knowledge or of self-control should be carried by us as our fate. We receive help between death and re-birth, and are therefore, in respect of this portion of our constitution, not dependent upon ourselves alone.

From all this you will see that a relation really exists between the head organisation and the rest of the body with its organs. The body becomes head, and we lose the head at death in so far as its formative forces are concerned. Therefore it is so essentially bony in its structure and is preserved longer on Earth than the rest of the organism, which fact is only the outer sign that it is lost to us for our following re-incarnation, in respect to all that we have to experience between death and re-birth. The ancient atavistic wisdom perceived these things plainly, and especially when that great relation between Man and Macrocosm was investigated, which we find expressed in the ancient description of the movements of the heavenly bodies. The genius of language has also here preserved a great deal. As I pointed out yesterday, physical Man adheres internally to the day-cycle. He demands breakfast every day, and not only on Sunday. Breakfast, dinner and supper are required every day, and not only breakfast on Sunday, dinner on Wednesday and supper on Saturday. Man is bound to the 24 hour cycle in respect to his metabolism—or the transmutation of matter from the outer world. This day-cycle in the interior of Man corresponds to the daily motion of the Earth upon its axis. These things were closely perceived by the ancient wisdom. Man did not feel that he was a creature apart from the Earth, for he knew that he conformed to its motions; he knew also the nature of that to which he conformed. Those who have an understanding for ancient works of art—though the examples still preserved today offer but little opportunity for studying these things—will be aware of a living sense, on the part of the ancients, of the connection of Man the Microcosm with the Macrocosm. It is proved by the position certain figures take up in their pictures, and the positions that certain others are beginning to assume etc.; in these, cosmic movements are constantly imitated.

But we shall find something of even greater significance in another consideration.

In almost all the peoples inhabiting this Earth, you find a recognised distinction or comparison existing between the week and the day. You have, on the one hand, the cycle of the transmutation of substances—or metabolism, which expresses itself in the taking of meals at regular intervals.. Man has however never reckoned according to this cycle alone; he has added to the day-cycle a week-cycle. He first distinguished this rising and setting of the Sun—corresponding to a day; then he added Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, a cycle seven times that of the other, after which he came back once again to Sunday. (In a certain sense, after completing seven such cycles, we return also again to the starting-point.) We experience this in the contrast between day and week. But Man wished to express a great deal more by this contrast. He wished first to show the connection of the daily cycle with the motion of the Sun.

But there is a cycle seven times as great, which, whilst returning again to the Sun, includes all the planets—Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. This is the weekly cycle. This was intended to signify that, having one cycle corresponding to a day, and one seven times greater that included the planets, not only does the Earth revolve upon its axis (or the Sun go round), but the whole system has in itself also a movement. The movement can be seen in various other examples. If you take the course of the year's cycle, then you have in the year, as you know, 52 weeks, so that 7 weeks is about the seventh part—in point of number—of the year. This means, we imagine the week-cycle extended or stretched over the year, taking the beginning and end of the year as corresponding to the beginning and end of the week. And this necessitates the thought that all phenomena resulting from the weekly cycle must take place at a different speed from those events having their origin in the daily cycle.

And where are we to look for the origin of the feeling which impels us to reckon, now with the day-cycle, and now with the week-cycle? It arises from the sensation within us of the contrast between the human head-development, and that of the rest of the organism. We see the human head-organisation represented by a process to which I have already drawn your attention—the formation within about a year's cycle of the first teeth.

If you consider the first and second dentition you will see that the second takes place after a cycle that is seven times as long as the cycle of the first dentition. We may say that as the one year-cycle in respect to the first dentition stands to the cycle of human evolution that works up to the second dentition, so does the day stand to the week. The ancients felt this to be true, because they rightly understood another thing. They understood that the first dentition was primarily the result of heredity. You only need look at the embryo to realise that its development proceeds out of the head organisation; it annexes, as it were, the remainder of the organism later. You will then understand that the idea of the ancients was quite correct when they saw a connection of the formation of the first teeth with the head and of the second teeth with the whole human organism. And today we must arrive at the same result if we consider these phenomena objectively. The first teeth are connected with the forces of the human head, the second with the forces that work from out of the rest of the organism and penetrate into the head.

Through looking at the matter in this way, we have indicated an important difference between the head and the rest of the human body. The difference is one which can, in the first place, be considered as connected with time, for that which takes place in the human head has a seven times greater rapidity than that which takes place in the rest of the human organism. Let us translate this into rational language. Let us say, today you have eaten your usual number of meals in the proper sequence. Your organism demands a repetition of them tomorrow. Not so the head. This acts according to another measure of time; it must wait seven days before the food taken into the rest of the organism has proceeded far enough to enable the head to assimilate it. Supposing this to be Sunday, your head would have to wait until next Sunday before it would be in a position to benefit by the fruit of to-day's Sunday dinner. In the head organisation, a repetition takes place after a period of seven days, of what has been accomplished seven days before in the organism. All this the ancients knew intuitively and expressed by saying: a week is necessary to transmute what is physical and bodily into soul and spirit.

You will now see that metamorphosis also brings about a repetition in the succeeding incarnation in ‘single’ time of that which previously required a seven times longer period to accomplish. We are thus concerned with a metamorphosis which is spatial through the fact that our remaining organism—our body—is not merely transformed, but turned inside out, and is at the same time temporal, in that our head organisation has remained behind to the extent of a period seven times as long.

It will be clear to you now that this human organisation is not, after all, quite so simple as our modern, comfort-loving science would like to believe. We must make up our mind to regard Man's organisation as much more complicated; for if we do not understand Man rightly, we are also prevented from realising the cosmic movements in which he takes part. The descriptions of the Universe circulated since the beginning of modern times are mere abstractions, for they are described without a knowledge of Man.

This is the reform that is necessary, above all, in Astronomy—a reform demanding the re-inclusion of Man in the scheme of things, when cosmic movements are being studied. Such studies will then naturally be somewhat more difficult.

Goethe felt intuitively the metamorphosis of the skull from the vertebrae, when, in a Venetian Jewish burial ground, he found a sheep's skull which had fallen apart into its various small sections; these enabled him to study the transformation of the vertebrae, and he then pursued his discovery in detail. Modern science has also touched upon this line of research. You will find some interesting observations relating to the matter, and some hypotheses built up upon it, by the comparative anatomist Karl Gegenbaur; but in reality Gegenbaur created obstacles for the Goethean intuitional research, for he failed to find sufficient reason to declare himself in favour of the parallel between the vertebrae and the single sections of the skull. Why did he fail? Because so long as people think only of a transformation and disregard the reversal inside out, so long will they gain only an approximate idea of the similarity of the two kinds of bones. For in reality the bones of the skull result from those forces which act upon Man between death and rebirth, and they are therefore bound to be essentially different in appearance from merely transformed bone. They are turned inside out; it is this reversal which is the important point.

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Imagine we have here (diagram) the upper or head-man. All influences or impressions proceed inward from without. Here below would be the rest of the human body. Here everything works from within outwards, but so as to remain within the organism. Let me put it in another way. With his head man stands in relation to his outer environment, while with his lower organism he is related to the processes taking place within himself. The abstract mystic says: “Look within to find the reality of the outer world.” But this is merely abstract thought, it does not accord with the actual path. The reality of the outer world is not found through inner contemplation of all that acts upon us from outside; we must go deeper and consider ourselves as a duality, and allow the world to take form in quite a different part of our being. That is why abstract mysticism yields so little fruit, and why it is necessary to think here too of an inner process.

I do not expect any of you to allow your dinner to stand before you untouched, depending upon the attractive appearance of it to appease your hunger! Life could not be supported in this way. No! We must induce that process which runs its course in the 24-hour cycle, and which, if we consider the whole man, including the upper or head organisation, only finishes its course after seven days. But that which is assimilated spiritually—for it has really to be assimilated and not merely contemplated!—also requires for this process a period seven times as long. Therefore it becomes necessary first intellectually to assimilate all we absorb. But to see it reborn again within us, we must wait seven years. Only then has it developed into that which it was intended to be. That is why after the founding of the Anthroposophical Society in 1901 we had to wait patiently, seven, and even fourteen years for the result!

I would like to bring forward again, in a rather different form, a few remarks made in the course of our studies. You know that the fact of the intimate relation between man and the Universe was much better known to methods of perception used by the ancients than to ours of the present day. If we were to go back to the period of the Egypto-Chaldean culture, we should find that man did not look upon himself as a separate being who perambulates the Earth, but as a being belonging to the whole Universe. He knew of course to begin with that in a certain sense he was dependent upon the Earth. That can easily be observed; even our own materialistic age admits that Man, as far as his physical metabolism is concerned, depends upon the Earth's products, which he assimilates. But in those ancient times, by means of course of atavistic perception, Man knew himself to be dependent also in his soul on the one hand on the elements of fire, water and air, and on the other hand on the movements of the planets. These he related to his soul-nature in the same way as he related the products of the Earth to his physical metabolism. And the part of the Universe that is outside or beyond the planetary system, all that is in the starry heavens—this he connected with his spirit.

Thus in those past ages, when materialism was out of the question, man knew himself to be living in the bosom of the Universe. You may now ask: Yes, but how is it that the man of those times made such big mistakes in connection with the movements of the heavenly bodies, while today, in this materialistic age, he has made such magnificent progress in relation to the real truth of these movements? Well, we have spoken of these things for a considerable time and we have pointed out that the movements man believes in today are asserted by science merely on the basis of certain prejudices. Upon this subject I shall have more to say tomorrow, but for the moment we may remind ourselves that present-day man has entirely lost consciousness of the fact that that which belongs to the whole man can no more be discovered in the physical world than in the visible stellar world. For it is absolutely impossible to gain a true perception even of the visible starry heavens, unless man combines with the outer physical life the super-physical in his considerations—that super-physical part of his life through which he passes between death and re-birth. Yesterday we drew attention to the metamorphosis that takes place in man in this change from earthly to super-earthly life and showed how the organs which we consider as belonging to the lower man (and of which we said yesterday that they open inwards), transform themselves—as regards their forces, though obviously not in their substance—during the period between death and a new birth, and become what is considered to be the more noble head-organism. This latter is in reality nothing more than the metamorphosis—as regards the structure of its forces—of the so-called ‘lower’ man of the last Earth-life.

If we really think this matter over, we can see—in spirit—how between death and re-birth, man has a certain content within him of his experiences, as he has also here between birth and death. But the content is essentially different in each case. We may make this difference clear by saying: between birth and death, man has, as the circumference for his experiences, the circumference in Space, and also that which takes place in Time. He has these—Space and Time—as a circumference for his experiences.

You know in how small a degree man really experiences the processes of his inner organism. He is not conscious of them. All the organisation within the skin is known to man only indirectly and incompletely. The knowledge gained through anatomy and physiology is not real knowledge, for we do not by means of this investigation look into the actual interior of man; it is an illusion to believe that we do. Spiritual Science alone gradually reveals all that is within man. But how do we find conditions in this respect during the interval between death and a new birth? We have to put it in this way. In a certain sense we look then from the periphery upon the centre. And we know just as little of the periphery as we do here of our centre or interior. But on the other hand we have during this period a direct perception of the secrets and mysteries of Man himself. That which is hidden within us—within our skin—that we observe between death and a new birth as our experiences.

Now you will perhaps say that this world which we view during the time between death and re-birth must be a very small one indeed. But spatial dimensions do not count at all. It is the fullness or poverty of the content that matters, not the size. If we combine all we observe in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, and add thereto the starry heavens, it would not compare in richness with the mysteries within Man himself. The real process is approximately as follows. We lose the structural forces of the head when we pass over in death. They have completed their office. But then the spiritual world takes up the structural forces of the remaining (lower) organism, which from being inner experience belong now to the periphery, and transforms them in such a way that when the time is ripe, from out of the spiritual world the human head is determined in the womb of the mother.

We must be absolutely clear upon this point. The very first beginning of the corporeal man within the mother, is a result of the whole process we have been describing. Conception is merely the opportunity given for a certain cosmic activity to penetrate the human body, and that which is formed first in the process of man's formation is indeed an image of the whole Cosmos. He who wishes to study the human embryo from its first stage onwards, must consider it as an image of the Cosmos.

These matters are today almost entirely overlooked. For of what do we generally think when we speak of the origin of a human being in the physical sense? Of heredity! We observe how the child-organism is formed within the parent-organism, and we are ignorant of how the cosmic forces which surround us are active within the parent-organism; we are ignorant of the fact that the whole Macrocosm projects its force into the human being in order to make possible the genesis of a new human being.

Of course, the great fault of our present-day world-philosophy is that we never take the Macrocosm into consideration, and therefore never become conscious of where lie the forces whose effect we observe. I must once again remind you of the following. The modern physicist or chemist says that there are molecules which are composed of atoms, that the atoms possess forces by means of which they act upon each other. Now this is a conception which simply does not accord with reality. The truth is, that the minutest molecule is acted upon by the whole starry heavens. Suppose here is a planet, here another, here another, and so on. Then there are the fixed stars, which transmit their forces into the molecule. All these lines of force intersect each other in various ways. The Planets also transmit their forces in the same way, and we come to realise that the molecule is nothing but a focus of macrocosmic forces. It is the ardent desire of modern science to bring microscopy far enough to enable the atoms to be seen within the molecule. This way of looking at the subject must cease. Instead of wishing to examine the structure of the molecule microscopically, we must turn our gaze outwards to the starry heavens, we must look at the constellations and see copper in one, tin in another! Out there in the Macrocosm we have to behold the structure of the molecule that is only reflected in the molecule. Instead of passing into the infinitely little, we must turn our gaze outwards to the infinitely great, for it is there we have to look for the reality of what lives in the little.

In this way does the materialistic conception of things also affect other domains of thought. Someone who considers himself capable of giving an opinion on the progress of human knowledge may say: the nineteenth century materialism is now overcome! No! It is not overcome so long as men still think atomically, so long as they fail to search in the great for the form and configuration of the small. Neither is the materialism relative to humanity overcome, so long as we continue to ignore the connection of Man the Microcosm with the Macrocosm.

And at this point we are confronted with a new—I might say a monstrous—evidence of materialism, to which I have previously drawn attention. It is in so-called Theosophy that its traces are often to be found, where a tendency is present to look at things in the following way. Here we have matter; then ether, thinner than matter but otherwise similar to physical matter; then comes the astral—again thinner or finer than the etheric; and after that quite a number of other beautiful things, all thinner and thinner and thinner. Call it Kama-manas, or what you will, it is not spiritual, but remains materialistic! The truth is that in order to arrive at a real understanding of the world, we must conceive of heavy, ponderable matter as ceasing at the ether; for we must clearly understand that this ether is essentially a very different thing from that substance of which we speak as filling space. When speaking of this latter substance, we think of space as filled with matter. But this we cannot do when we speak of ether, for then we must conceive space as being empty of matter. When ordinary matter strikes some other object, the object is repelled or pushed away. When ether approaches an object, it attracts it and draws it within itself. The activity of ether is the exact opposite to that of matter. Ether acts as an absorbent. Were this otherwise, you would present the same appearance back and front, for even in this diversity of the physical appearance of man we have the result, on the one hand of the pressure of ponderable matter, and on the other of the absorbing action of ether. Your nose is forced outwards, as it were, from your organism through the pressure of matter, while the eye sockets are drawn inward through the action of ether. It is therefore simply a pressing and absorbing substance acting within you which differentiates the exterior appearance of your front and back. These are things which are not usually taken into consideration.

Further, when we come to speak of the astral, we must not think of three-dimensional physical matter extending in a three-fold way in space, nor must we think of the absorbent ether, but of a third factor, one that forms the adjustment or connection between the other two. And should we then go on and attempt to form some approximate idea of that part of our being termed the Ego—the ‘I am’—we would have to include a fourth factor, which acts as mediator between, on the one hand, the absorbent-repelling action of ether and physical matter, and on the other hand, the astral substance. These are the things that must be taken into consideration.

You cannot logically ask: If the ether has merely a sucking, absorbing action, how then is it possible for us to perceive it? The fact is, ether stands, figuratively speaking, in the same relation in respect to ponderable matter—I am speaking now in a picture—as the relation we find in another plane if we have a bottle of soda-water. We cannot see the water in the bottle, but the pearly bubbles we can see, although these are ‘thinner’ than the water. And so it is in the case of the ether, which is a ‘hollow’ in physical matter and therefore the essential antithesis of physical matter; it also can be perceived.

From the foregoing you will now see that it is necessary, when speaking of the life between death and re-birth, to realise that this life is actually lived beyond space—beyond the space of which we are cognisant on the Earth-plane; and we shall have to endeavour to gain a conception of this ‘beyond’ of space. You can best do so by trying first to imagine ‘filled’ space. Take for instance, a table; it fills or occupies space. Then you pass from ‘filled’ space to ‘empty’ space, and perhaps you would say that you cannot go beyond this. But as I have previously pointed out to you, this would be about as sensible as to say: ‘I have a full purse out of which I continue to take money till nothing is left; this “nothing” cannot be less than it is’. But it can be less if you get into debt, when you would have less than nothing in your purse! Similarly empty space can be less than empty by being filled with ether, when it becomes a negative entity.

And that which adjusts or connects the two, that which mediates also in you between pressure and suction, is the astral. No relation would exist between the front and back of a human body did not the astral activity within form the connection between the absorbent and the pressing elements. You will say: I do not observe this connecting element. But try to follow the digestive process, and you will find the connecting link very clearly manifested. The astral is active there, and its activity is based upon the contrast between the front and back nature of the human being, even as the connection between the higher (head) man and lower (limb) man by way of the astral is based upon the Ego. We must therefore consider man, as he stands before us, in a quite concrete manner and make clear to ourselves that while he has existence upon this plane between birth and death he imprints his astral part and his Ego in the absorbent and pressure-producing elements, but his being only manifests here on Earth as the mediator between the front and the back, and between the upper and the lower parts of the body.

Now, what is this mediator or connecting link? It is that which we experience within us when we feel our equilibrium. We do not jerk the head forward and backward; we stand and walk erect. We accommodate our posture to the demands of the laws of equilibrium. We cannot see this, but we experience it inwardly. When we pass through the gate of death we consciously adjust ourselves to this condition, of which here we take no heed. If we possessed eyes only, it would then be dark around us, and if we had ears only, stillness would envelop us. But we have also the sense of equilibrium, and the sense of motion, and so we become able after all to ‘experience’ there. We take part in that which on Earth is implied in the words ‘equilibrium’ and ‘movement’. We adapt ourselves to the movements of the external world, we find our way into them.

You see, here, in the life between birth and death, the only way we experience the activity of the Earth's revolution upon its axis is in our daily metabolic process. We must take our daily meals, and this together with the succeeding digestive processes takes place within the limits of 24 hours, uniform with one revolution of the Earth. These two things belong together, the one is proof of the other. When we die, the revolution of the Earth becomes something real, as real as are the visible objects here. Then we live with this terrestrial motion; we begin to experience this motion consciously.

There are also other motions connected with the starry heavens, all of which we experience after death. Correctly considered, the description of our experiences already includes this experience, for we do not expand into the Cosmos like a jelly-fish, but we take part in the life of the Cosmos—and as beings taking part in cosmic life we experience at the same time the inner being of man. Between birth and death we say: My heart is within my breast, and in it converge the streams or motions of the blood-circulation. At a certain stage of development between death and re-birth we say: In my inner being is the Sun—and by this expression we mean the actual Sun, which the physicist claims to be a ball of gas, but which is in reality something quite different. We experience the actual Sun in the same manner as we experience here the heart. Here the Sun is visible to the eye, whereas during the time between death and re-birth the evolution of the heart on its path to the pineal gland, as it undergoes on the way a wonderful metamorphosis, is the cause of sublime experiences. The complete system of our blood-circulation we experience consciously in its transformation; we have this system within existence between death and re-birth proceeds, these forces undergo transmutation, so that, when once again we arrive at the gates of a new Earth-life, they have become the forces of us—not, of course, the substance, but the forces. As our new nervous-system. Look at the plates and illustrations scattered through modern books on anatomy or physiology and examine the circulatory system of the blood in one incarnation. This in the next incarnation becomes the life of the nerves. (We must not depict in diagrammatic form the head, breast (rhythmic) and limb systems as existing side by side, for they interpenetrate each other.) Note the wonderful structure of the human eye; there we find blood-vessels, choroid and retina (omentum). The last two are transformations of each other. What today is retina, was in the last incarnation choroid, and what is choroid today will be retina in the next incarnation. Of course this must not be taken too literally, but such is the approximate course of events. So you will understand that we cannot gain an essential conception of man if we merely study him as he appears between birth and death or even along the lines by which he develops through the forces of physical heredity. For thereby we understand man at most as far as the circulatory system; that would be the last process we would understand. The nervous system of the present life is a result of a former life, and can never be understood if studied in connection with the present life alone.

Now my dear friends, I beg of you not to object to what I have explained, by saying that animals have also a nervous system although they have no earlier lives. Such an objection would indeed be very short-sighted; for though in man the forces of his nervous system are the transformation of the blood-circulation of the former life, that does not imply that the same is valid in the case of animals. It would be just as logical to go to a barber and ask him to sell you a razor for the dinner-table—a razor being a knife, and knives forming part of the dinner service! Razors however do not! Nothing carries within itself its immediate purpose, neither does a physical organ. The human organ is entirely different from the animal organ. It depends upon the use to be made of an organ. We should not compare the human nervous system with that of an animal, but rather observe the fact that human nerves have become similar—during the course of their evolution—to animal nerves, just as the razor has become similar to the table-knife. This again demonstrates that when man follows the ordinary materialistic line of investigation, he can arrive at no true conclusion. Yet that is just the path which is being followed today.

It is this kind of investigation that prevents us from arriving at a conception of man as a product of the spiritual world. Our religious creeds, as they have gradually developed, have pandered too much to human egoism. It may almost be said that their one and only aim is to convince their followers of a continuation of life after death, because the egoism of humanity demands it. Yet it is equally important to prove to men the continuation in this life of a pre-natal life, so that they may comprehend—‘Here upon this earth I have to be a continuation of what I was between death and my present birth. I have to continue a spiritual life here on this plane.’ This indeed is not likely to please egoism so much; but it is something that must of necessity again imbue our civilisation, so that humanity can be liberated from its anti-social instincts. Try to imagine what it will mean when we can look upon a human countenance and say: ‘That is not of this world. The spiritual world has been at work upon it between the last death and this birth.’ For a time will come when we shall see within the material the imprint of the spiritual work between death and re-birth. It will indeed be a very different kind of culture which will guide humanity then; and it will bring in its train very different convictions and tendencies of thought, which will not permit the contemplation of the Cosmos as a vast machine set in motion by the mutual attraction between the stars—apart from the fact that this abstraction has already reached its zenith. Abstraction is deeply rooted in our ordinary conception of the planetary system, and it produces today some very strange results. For example, a great deal of popular literature is permeated with glorification of an idea which originates from Einstein. This idea is said to have shaken the theory of gravitation. Imagine that, far away from all celestial bodies—so that an interference by a field of gravity may be obviated—there is a box. Inside it is a man who holds a stone in one hand, and some down in the other. He lets both out of the box and see—they begin to fall—and fall until they reach the ground. Yes, says Einstein, men will no doubt say that the stone and the down both fall to the ground. But it need not be so; for up above a rope may be fastened and by some means or other the box is drawn up. The stone and the down—owing to the absence of any celestial body—do not fall, but remain where they are. When the bottom of the box reaches them, it takes them up with it.

This kind of discussion concerning an extreme abstraction, can be found today in the modern theory of relativity which Albert Einstein has propounded. Just think how far humanity has deviated from actuality! We can talk of relativity—well and good, but just imagine what would happen were this picture taken in earnest! A box, some inconceivable distance away from any celestial body that might attract (by gravitation) the stone and the down; and inside this box a man (air is only found of course in the neighbourhood of heavenly bodies, but the man is quite happy and content; as for his stone and his down, they of course need no air!), and now the box is suspended from outside and is then lifted up!

All this is a further development of the theory of Newton who postulated that ‘push’ or impetus which is imparted to a globe in the direction of a tangent, so that it is able with centrifugal force to escape the centripetal force. Such things as these actually form the contents of scientific discussions today, and are considered great achievements, whereas they are nothing more than a testimony to the fact that we have arrived at the most extreme abstraction, and that materialism has produced a state of complete ignorance in humanity as to what matter really is, and caused man to live in a series of mental pictures far removed from all reality.

But, my dear friends, these things are not in the least observed today, and we find our newspapers proclaiming that a new discovery has been made: the theory of gravitation has been replaced by the theory of inertia. The stone and down are not attracted; they remain in their original place—perhaps only because we can manage to imagine such a thing—while the box is raised! One can in truth say that so much nonsense masquerades as genius today that it becomes difficult to distinguish the one from the other. Can we wonder that in these times when in many other departments of thought too as well as that just described, men's ideas have grown quite crooked—can we wonder that we have at last been brought to the conditions of the last five or six years! These are things of which we need again and again to be reminded.

I have had to recall them to you today, and tomorrow I will add something further concerning the structure of the Universe.

The task underlying our present studies is, in the widest sense, to try to understand the Universe through the relations existing between it and Man. I am far from wishing to convey the idea to those who have had certain glimpses into the Universe during the foregoing lectures that the truth of these matters can be found in any quick and easy way such as one hears of in ordinary Astronomy when it tells of the celestial motions. I would, however, like the friends who have come to the General Meeting not merely to hear something that comes right in the middle of a consecutive series, but in these few lectures held during the General Meeting, also to have a self-contained picture. I will therefore continue our studies of yesterday, giving indications of how the conception of the nature of Man leads to the conception of the Universe, its being and its movements. Of course, this subject is so vast that it is impossible to exhaust it for the friends who are now present. It will be continued later. For the benefit of those here for the first time to-night, I should like to put before them at any rate a few of the salient features of the subject embodied in previous lectures.

From other lectures you all know of the relation existing in human life between waking and sleeping. You know that in the abstract the relation is something like this: In the waking condition, the physical, etheric and astral bodies, together with the Ego-being, are in a certain inner connection; whereas during sleep, we have on the one side, the physical and etheric bodies united, and on the other—separated from them at any rate in comparison with the waking state—we have the astral body and the Ego. This, as you know, is merely an abstract assertion, for I have often emphasised that as regards all that belongs to the limb-nature—which is continued into the inner organisation, and is also the real bearer of metabolism—all this part of man, connected as it is at the same time with the human will, is really in a perpetual state of sleep. We must be absolutely clear that this state of sleep continues in regard to our inner organism, when we ourselves are awake. We can therefore say that the ‘Limb-man’ as carrier of the ‘Will-man’, is in a permanent state of sleep. The Circulation or ‘Rhythmic-man’, which may be described as in the middle between the Head-organisation and the Limb-man (the latter extending into the interior of man) persists in a continuous dream state. This is at the same time the outer instrument for our world of feeling. The world of feeling is rooted wholly within man's rhythmic organisation and while the metabolic man, together with its outward extension—the limbs—is the vehicle of the will, the rhythmic man is the vehicle of the life of feeling, and is related to our consciousness in the same way as our dream state to our waking life. Between waking and falling asleep, we are only really awake in our life of ideation and thought.

In this way we have set before us the fact that man, in his life between birth and death, is in an intermittent waking state in respect to his life of thought, in a dream state regarding his emotions and feelings, of which the rhythmic man is the vehicle; and he is in a state of continuous sleep as regards his limbs and metabolic system. We must realise at this point that really to comprehend human nature, it is necessary to fix our attention upon the fact of the extension of the limb-nature into the interior of man. All the processes that are ultimately connected with the abdominal region, everything connected with assimilation, digestion, as also with the secretion of milk in females, and so forth, all these processes are a continuation of the limb nature, directed inwards. So that in speaking of the will-nature or metabolic-nature, we do not mean only the outer limbs, but the continuation inwards too of this limb activity. In respect to all this, intimately connected as it is with the will-nature, man is continuously asleep.

This complicates the abstract idea we gain in the first place of the departure of the Ego and astral body; and it also necessitates a corresponding comprehension of another important fact.

When the materialistic physiologist of today speaks of the will, saying for instance, that it manifests in the movement of the limbs, he has in mind that some kind of telephonic signal is sent from the central organ, the brain, proceeds through the so-called motor-nerves, and thus moves the right leg, for instance. This however is quite unproven—in fact, a quite erroneous hypothesis! For spiritual observation shows the following: If a man's right leg is raised or moved by the will, a direct influence of the Ego-being of man takes place, acting upon that limb, so that it is really raised by the Ego-being itself; only, the process takes place in a state like that of sleep. Consciousness knows nothing of it. The nerve merely informs us that we have a limb, it tells us of the presence of such a limb. This nerve as such has no part in the activity of the Ego upon that limb. A direct correspondence exists between the limb and the will, which latter is associated in man with the Ego-being, and in the animal with the astral body. All that Physiology has to say in respect, for instance, of the speed of transmission of the so-called will, needs to be revised; it should be impressed upon us that here we have to do rather with the velocity of transmission in respect of the perception of that particular limb. Naturally anyone initiated into modern physiology can challenge this assertion in a dozen ways. I am well acquainted with these objections. But we have to try to rise a really logical thought process in this matter, and we shall find that what I say here corresponds with actual facts of observation, while what is said in physiological textbooks does not.

Sometimes indeed these things are so obvious as to be evident to all. Thus at a meeting of scientists in Italy—I think it was in the 80's of the last century—a most interesting discussion took place concerning the contradictions which came to light between the usual theory of the motor-nerves and the movement of a limb. As however the tendency to take notice of the spiritual aspect of things is absent in the physiology of today, even during a discussion such as this little was arrived at, except that contradictions existed in the hypothetical explanation of a certain fact. It would be extremely interesting if our learned friends, and there are such among us, were to investigate and test the physiological and biological literature of the last 40 years. They would make extremely interesting discoveries, were they to take up these subjects. They would find facts everywhere, which merely need handling in the proper way to confirm the findings of Spiritual Science. It would form one of the most interesting problems of the Institutes of Scientific Research which ought now to be erected, to proceed in the following way: International literature on the subject should first be carefully studied. We must take the international literature, for in English, and particularly in American literature, most interesting facts are substantiated, although these investigators do not know what to make of them. If you look into the discovered facts and substantiate them, there is but one step more needed in the sequence of investigation—given the right kind of vision in response to which the thing will, as it were, come out and show itself—and magnificent results would be arrived at today. Once we have advanced sufficiently to possess such an Institute, furnished with adequate apparatus and the necessary material, the facts will be found all around us, waiting as it were. Today people fail to notice the universal urge towards an Institute such as I have in mind, for the series of tests and experiments commenced are always discontinued just at the most critical moments, simply because people are ignorant of the ultimate direction of such experiments. Really important foundations would be laid by such an Institute, foundations for practical work. People do not dream at the present time of the technique that would result if these things were actually done, first as experiments and then building up from them further. It is only the possibility of putting it into practical effect that is lacking.

This is only by the way. To return to our subject, we have to do with a portion of man which sleeps even while he is awake. I now wish to bring to your notice a fact which has played an important part in all the older conceptions of the Universe. I refer to the assertion that the starting-point of the lower limbs is under the rulership of the Moon, while the region of the larynx, which we may consider as the meeting-point of the higher limbs, is associated with Mars. The man of today who is deeply involved in the modern conception of the Macrocosm, cannot of course make anything of such assertions; and the nonsense which hazy mystics and theosophists of today say or write about these things should not be awarded any special value, for these facts lie far deeper than, for instance, the repeated statements of materialistic theosophy that we have first coarse physical matter, and then other rather ‘finer’, then the astral still ‘finer’ and so forth. Those and similar things that pass for theosophy are in reality no spiritual teaching at all, but a spiritual untruth, for they are nothing more than a perpetuation of materialism.

Statements, however, that have come down to us as remnants of the ancient wisdom, have power to lead us to a state of real veneration and deep humility before that ancient knowledge of man, as soon as we begin to understand its meaning. These indications of an ancient wisdom persisted, not only till far into the Middle Ages, but even into the eighteenth century (where they may be found in the literature of the period), and perhaps into the nineteenth century, though here they have become merely copies, so to speak, and are no longer the direct result of an original primeval consciousness. And when these things are found introduced into quite modern literature, then they are still more certain to be copies. Up to the earlier part of the eighteenth century, however, we can still find traces of a certain consciousness of these things, and here again an association was thought of as between the nature of the Moon and this region of the human organism.

What I have just said—that man in relation to his will-metabolic nature is in a constant state of sleep—is most forcibly expressed in the lower limbs. In other words, through the metamorphosis which the arms and hands have undergone, man wrests from unconsciousness that which is really the sleep-nature of the limb-man. If to some degree we sharpen our sensitiveness for these things, we shall perceive what a really remarkable difference exists between the movement of a leg and the movement of an arm. The movements of the arms are free, and in a sense follow the feelings. The movement of the legs is not as free—I mean in respect to the laws by which we produce their movements. This, of course, is something which is not always noticed, nor sufficiently appreciated, as exemplified by the fact that the greater portion of the public attending our performances of Eurythmy are merely passive observers, and fail to notice that the leg movements are less articulated and the movements of the arms and hands more so. The reason for this is that, to understand the movements of the arms, a certain co-operation of the soul on the part of the observer is necessary. In our cinema age, people do not want to give this co-operation. While watching the movements of a dance where only the legs are in movement, and the arms at most are subject to arbitrary movements, there is little need either to think or feel in union with the dancer. This is by the way.

As we have seen, the most intensely unconscious process is in connection with the movements of the lower limbs. There, man is in a sense, fast asleep. How the will works into the legs or into the abdominal region, is entirely missed by man, owing to this state of sleep. In respect to this process, man's own nature sends back to him what is a reflection only of the process. Of course we follow the movement of our legs, but this observation does not make us conscious of the processes taking place in the nervous system as the will acts upon it; only the reflection of this becomes manifest to us. The nature of our lower man turns one side away, as it were, and only the other side is turned towards us. It is exactly the same with the Moon. She revolves round the Earth, and is altogether a most courteous lady, who never turns her back upon us, but shows us always the same side. She does not show us first one side, and then the other, while proceeding along her journey round the Earth. Nobody has ever seen her back. On account of this we never receive anything from the Moon which may be termed her own, but always a reflected light. In this fact we have an absolute inner parallel between the Moon-nature and the whole inner being of man. As we look up to the Moon, we understand her only as regards her outer formal side, but we should try to feel her inner relationship with the lower physical organisation of man. The deeper we go into these matters, the more we find this to hold good. It was the simple, instinctive observations of the Ancients which enabled them to realise these inner relations between human nature and the celestial bodies ...

Now let us take the other fact—that the arms, in their connection with the upper portion of the middle or rhythmic man, come awake in a sense in man; the movements of the arms can be taken as equivalent at least to the dream-state. We feel that the activity of the arms is related in a much nearer sense to human consciousness than is the activity of the lower limbs. Hence we find that a man who has elementary feelings, generally accompanies his speech, which is in close relation to the middle man, with a gesture of the arms, by way of emphasis or as a help in explaining his meaning. Speech is closely related to the upper part of the rhythmic-man. I do not suppose there are many speakers who use movements of the legs as a help for speech, or many audiences who would consider such movements attractive!

So if we feel in the right way this necessity or tendency in man's nature, we can also feel the real relationship between the hands and arms, which belong to the upper portion of the limb-man, and the middle-man or rhythmic-man, who has as his spiritual counterpart, the feeling nature. Quite naturally we try to support our speech, which is often in danger of becoming too abstract, by gestures of our arms and hands. We endeavour to project our emotional nature into our speech.

Today, in many circles—I will not name them—it is considered a sign of intellectual clarity to abstain as much as possible from using gesture in speech. We may however, look at the matter from another standpoint and say: If a person acquires the habit of putting his hands in his trouser pockets while speaking, it may not only mark him as a man of linguistic ability, but also perhaps as being somewhat blasé. That is another aspect of the matter. I am not speaking in favour of either of these points of view, but you will see how the nature of the arms clearly indicates their connection not only with the metabolic limb man, but also with the middle, the rhythmic or circulation man. This was understood and felt by the Ancients when they connected the combination of speech and arm-movement with the sphere of Mars. This planet is not so intimately connected with the Earth as is the Moon, nor is that which underlies the foundation of speech and the arm-organisation so intimately connected with the earthly man as is that which underlies the abdominal and leg-organisation. In a certain sense we can say: what in its activity corresponds to the lower limbs, works very strongly upon the unconscious man. What corresponds to the arms and hands, however, works very powerfully upon the semiconscious man. It is indeed a fact that no one with wholly unskilled hands, no one wholly unable to perform any dexterous movements with the fingers, can be a very subtle thinker. He would in a sense seek a coarse thought-mesh rather than fine links of thought. If he has coarse, clumsy hands, he is much more qualified for materialism than one whose hand movements are more adroit. This has nothing to do with having an abstract conception of the Universe, but with the true inclination to a spiritual view of the Universe, which always demands to be comprehended in finely-meshed thoughts.

All these matters are taken fully into consideration in a comprehensive educational science. You would probably be very pleased if you came to our Waldorf School and visited the classroom where, from ten o'clock, instruction is given in handicrafts. You would see the boys as well as the girls industriously absorbed in knitting or crochet. These things are the outcome of the whole spirit of the Waldorf School, for it is not a question of writing sundry abstract programmes, but of taking in earnest that for the whole training of human knowledge, one should as a teacher know the great difference it makes to the thinking whether I understand how to move my fingers dexterously, whether I am able in ordinary circumstances to cross the middle finger over the first, like a caduceus, or not. The movements of our fingers are to a great extent the teachers of the elasticity of our thinking. These things must be followed with understanding and discernment. It is comparatively easy to acquire facility in crossing the middle finger over the first with elasticity, making a serpent and the caduceus, but it is not so easy to do the same with the second and third toes. In this we see what great distinctions there are in the whole organisation of man. It is very important to bear this in mind, for the construction of the foot is intimately connected with our whole human earthly nature. By the organisation of our hands we raise ourselves above the earthly nature. We raise ourselves to the super-earthly. This was felt by the ancient wisdom, for it said that the lower man belonged to the Moon, but that the part of man which raised itself above the earthly nature belonged to Mars. Primeval Wisdom felt the organisation in the whole Universe in the same way as we feel the organisation there is in man. Materialism, however, has brought it about that we do not understand man any more. Again and again I must emphasise that the tragedy of materialism is that it turns its attention to matter, and all the time understands nothing at all of matter but simply loses connection with material existence. For this reason materialism can only cause social harm; for the socialistic materialists, the Marxists, are, as regards reality, just talkers. This they have learnt from the middle classes which have indulged in materialistic chatter for centuries; but they have not applied it to the social institution, and have remained satisfied with half-truths. A spiritual philosophy of life will once more reveal the nature of man, not in the abstract, but as possessing a concrete soul and spirit, which can work into each individual member of the human organisation.

One cannot advance in these things without constantly turning to the other side of life; for this development which our organisation manifests is two-fold, in so far as the upper man is a metamorphosis of the lower man from the last Earth-life. There is a point of time between death and rebirth when a complete reversal takes place, when the inner is turned to the outer, when what is presented as the connection between the organisation of the liver and that of the spleen is changed in the whole structure of its forces into, what becomes our hearing organisation when we are reborn. The whole of the lower man appears transformed. We have today in our lower man a certain relationship between the spleen and the liver. They slide into one another as it were. What is now the spleen slips right through the liver, and comes out, in a certain respect, on the other side, appearing again in the hearing organisation. So too with the other organs. People say that proofs should be found for repeated Earth-lives. Well, the methods by which such proofs can be found have first to be created. Anyone who is able to observe the human head in the right way, possessing a sense for such observation, comes to a way of understanding the transformation of the lower man into the human head; but he cannot understand it without filling in the intermediate stages of the experiences between death and rebirth.

In this connection very remarkable things are experienced. It may perhaps astonish some of you when I say that an artist who has become well acquainted with our conception of the Universe, said: “All that Anthroposophy says is very beautiful, but there is no proof. De Rochas, for instance, has given proofs, for he has shown how in certain conditions of hypnosis, reminiscences of former earth-lives may arise.” It seemed to he very remarkable that an artist of all people should have said such a thing. I might have assured him that it is as though I were to say to him: “My dear friend, your pictures tell me nothing; show me first the original of them, then I will believe that they are good”, or something of the kind. That of course, would be nonsense. As soon as he leaves his own domain, however, he has no power to understand how out of what he has before him, out of the true form of the human head, one can arrive at what is expressed in this human head. The picture must speak through itself, not through the mere likeness to the original. The human head speaks for itself. It corresponds to reality. It is the transformed lower man and points us back to the former Earth-life. One must however first provide what will make it possible to understand the reality aright.

The physical is thus seen to be a direct expression of the Spiritual. It is possible to understand the physical man as an expression of the Spiritual which is experienced between death and re-birth. The physical world explains itself and brings the spiritual world into this explanation. But we must first know this, saying to ourselves: The phenomena of nature are only a half, as long as we have them as mere sense-phenomena. We must first know this. Then we can find the bridge and understand the event that gave Earth its true meaning—the event of Golgotha: then we can understand how a purely spiritual event can at the same time enter right into physical life. If a man is not prepared to see the relation of the physical to the spiritual aright, he will never be able to grasp the fact that the Event of Golgotha is both a spiritual Event and an Event of the physical plane. When in the eighth General Ecumenical Council, in the year 869, the Spirit was eliminated, it was made impossible to understand the Event of Golgotha. The interesting point is that while the Western Churches started from Christianity, they took great care that the essence of Christianity should not be understood. For the nature and essence of Christianity must be grasped by the Spirit. The Western creeds set themselves against the Spirit, and one of the principal reasons why Anthroposophy is prohibited from the Roman Catholic side is that in Anthroposophy we have to relinquish the erroneous statement that ‘man consists of soul and body’ and return to the truth that ‘man consists of body, soul and Spirit’. The prohibition indicates the interest taken on that side to prevent man from coming to the knowledge of the Spirit, and so arriving at the true significance of the Event of Golgotha. Thus the whole knowledge which, as we see, throws so much light on the understanding of Man, has been entirely lost.

How then is an educational science to be constructed for the humanity of today, when the vision of the true nature of Man has been lost? To be an educationalist means to solve those sublime riddles which the child propounds to us, as it gradually brings forth that which has been laid into it between death and re-birth. The creeds however, reckon only with the post-mortem life—in order to humour human egotism; they have not reckoned that human life on Earth should be regarded as a continuation of the heavenly life. To demand of man that he should prove himself worthy of the claim made on him before he entered earthly life through birth, requires a certain selflessness of view, whereas the creeds have chiefly reckoned with egotism up to the present. Here, in Anthroposophy, whatever is of the nature of creed or faith gains, as it were, a moral colouring. Here purely theoretical knowledge is made to flow out into the higher ethical view and conception of the Universe. This should be understood by the friends of Anthroposophy. They should understand that in a sense, a moral inclination to spirituality is the preliminary condition for a knowledge of spiritual beings. In our present difficult time, it is specially necessary that attention should be paid to this moral side of the nature of the conception of the Universe. If we glance at what is taking place in the external world, we must say that empty talk, which is the sister of falsehood, is what has resulted from materialism, even for the ethical experience of humanity. This would become stronger and stronger if humanity were not helped by knowledge which leads to the Spirit, and which must be united with a raising of man's inner moral sense. We ought to acquire a realisation of how a spiritual-scientific conception of the world stands to the tasks and the whole dignity of Man and we should take this feeling as a starting point of our knowledge. This is only too necessary to mankind today, and one would like to find new phrases, new forms of expression in which to describe this aspect of the task of Spiritual Science!