The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The writings of John Scotus Erigena emanate from a mode of thinking which shines over from the first centuries of Christendom into the 9th century. The mental process, the whole life of thought and idea in those first centuries of Christendom was different from what it came to be later on. A great and fundamental change occurred in the 4th century of our era. From the middle of the 4th century onwards, the thinking of men consisted to a far greater extent in an exercising of the reasoning faculty. Until that time, all knowledge and all mental life sprang far more from a kind of inspiration than later on when, with increasing consciousness, men began to work out their own thoughts for themselves. Now the kind of consciousness that was natural before the 4th century still echoes on in sayings like that of John Scotus Erigena—that man forms judgments and draws conclusions as a human being but knows as an Angel. This idea—which springs up in John Scotus Erigena as a kind of reminiscence, as a heritage from an earlier form of knowledge—was a fact acknowledged by anyone who thought at all in the days before the 4th century of our era. It never occurred to men in those days to attribute thoughts to the human being as such. Thoughts were attributed to the Angel working within the human being. An Angel indwelt the body of a man; the Angel was the knower and the human being shared in the knowledge.

Consciousness of these things died away altogether after the 4th century and in men like John Scotus Erigena it flashed up once again, was drawn forth as it were with effort from the soul. This very fact indicates that man's whole way of looking at the world had changed in the course of that century. And that is why it is so difficult for us today to understand the mode of thinking of the first centuries of Christen' dom. Indeed, this understanding can only come from Spiritual Science. It is a question of forming true and really adequate conceptions of the thought and outlook of men in those early Christian times.

The Eucharistic controversy, as it is called, had already appeared on the scene in the days of John Scotus Erigena, and discussion was rife on such subjects as predestination. This is an unmistakable indication of the fact that what was previously more of the nature of inspiration, removed altogether from the domain of controversy, had now been drawn into the sphere of discussion and debate. But as the centuries took their course, many things were no longer understood at all, as, for example, the first verses of the Gospel of St John in the form in which they are commonly rendered. If we read the first verses of this Gospel carefully, we find a statement that has been overlooked altogether by adherents of the Christian Faith throughout subsequent centuries. Think of the first verses of the Gospel of St John: ‘In the beginning was the Word’. And then: ‘All things were made by him [i.e.: by the Logos]; and without him was not anything made that was made.’

If these words are taken literally, their purport is quite clear: namely, that all things visible were made by the Logos, that the Logos, therefore, is the creator of the things of the world. In the Christian mind after the 4th century, the Logos—rightly identified with the Christ in the sense of St John's Gospel—is not regarded as the creator of things visible, but the Father God is substituted for the Logos. The Logos is known as the Son, but the Father, not the Son, is conceived as the creator. This doctrine has persisted through the centuries and completely contradicts the words of the Gospel of St John. One cannot take this Gospel literally and maintain at the same time that the creator of things visible is the Father God and not the Christ.

And now we must try to understand the kind of thinking in which such a fundamental change came about in the 4th century. In the early Christian centuries, thought was based upon the knowledge of the spiritual world that had survived from ancient paganism. We must try to understand the attitude of men living in the first centuries of Christendom to teachings such as those now living on in the form of the Eucharist. The essence of the Eucharist is, as we realise, contained in the words: ‘This is My body’ (the bread); ‘this is My blood’ (the wine). There was a real understanding of this mystery in those early centuries, even among men who were by no means learned but whom the Eucharist drew together in simple devotion to Christ. What did such a mystery really signify to these men?

Teachings of religious wisdom permeated the whole of antiquity. The further we go back in time, the more deeply was this teaching founded upon the nature of the Father God. When we study the religious beliefs of very ancient times—beliefs which then survived in decadent form—we find everywhere that veneration was paid to the element flowing down from the primal ancestor of a tribal stock. In his Germania, Tacitus speaks of the peoples who, having found their way into the Roman Empire, became the founders of the new civilisation, and of how they still harked back in remembrance to these tribal deities, although to some extent they had already adopted a different form of worship, the worship of Gods of locality. The conception, therefore, was that generation after generation had passed by since the existence of an ancient ancestor who had founded the tribal stock, and that the soul and spirit of this father of the tribe still held sway, down to the very latest generation. Men thought: the bodies of all who constitute the tribal stock are under this ancestral sway. These bodies are all related, they have one common origin. One common blood flows through the veins of them all. The body and the blood are one. And in revering the soul and spirit of the father of the tribe, men felt the sway of the Divinity behind this tribal ancestor whose soul and spirit worked upon and through them as a people. They beheld the sway of this Divinity in the bodies, in the blood flowing through the generations and they felt the presence of a mystery in the forces of the body and of the blood.

In the days of ancient paganism men had a real perception of the forces of the Divinity ruling in the body and flowing through the blood. Whenever an adherent of that ancient view of the world saw blood flowing from animals or from human beings, he saw in the blood the body of the Godhead and in the bodies that were built up by this blood, the bodies of the members of the tribe, the form, the image of the Godhead. People of today have no longer any real conception of how the Divine-Spiritual in those times was worshipped in this material form.

And so, the power of the Godhead flowed through the blood of the successive generations. The Godhead shaped His image in the bodies of the generations. The soul and the spirit of the father of the tribe had been in the presence of the Godhead and as the primal ancestor he then worked with divine power upon and through his progeny. The father of the tribe was worshipped as the divine ancestor.

Now it must be remembered that the forces working in the body of man are of the nature of the forces of the Earth. This is not merely an ancient belief but an actual truth for, as you know, the origin of the human physical body lies in still more ancient times, and now, when the physical body has the mineral kingdom within it, the forces of the Earth are working in the body and in the blood of man.

In human blood there work not only the forces introduced with the foodstuffs but the forces that are active in the planetary body of the Earth as a whole. If a man lives in a region where the soil is red, or its geological constituents include certain metallic substances, his blood is influenced by the Earth. Again, the bodily form of the human being is itself affected by the Earth. In warmer zones the human body is not the same as in colder zones. The bodily nature and the forces working in the blood are fundamentally influenced by the forces of the Earth. This truth—which can only be revealed today by spiritual investigation—was a matter of course in the instinctive knowledge possessed by the men of old. They knew that the forces of the Earth pulsate in the blood. When we today connect the telegraphic apparatus in station A by means of a wire with the telegraphic apparatus in station B, this is only one part of the connection. The current of electricity must be led through the wire. But the current must be ‘circuited’, as we say. You know quite well how this is done—simply by sinking plates in the Earth. The Earth does the rest. This has been discovered today by modern science. We presuppose that the electric current works in the Earth. In olden times men knew nothing about electricity or electric currents, but on the other hand they knew something about their blood. Standing on the Earth they knew: there is something in the Earth which also lives in the blood. They did not speak of electricity but of an earthly force living in their blood. We no longer know that Earth-electricity is living in the blood. We are content to rely on mathematical formulae and the science of mechanics. But the men of old connected their picture of the Godhead with the very body of the Earth. They felt the sway of the Godhead in the blood, in the body, in the Earth. It was their picture of the Father God. This picture of the Father God was based upon the principle of the primal ancestor of the tribe, which the people conceived as the initial focus of the forces of the Godhead. But the Earth was the medium through which this Godhead manifested and the forces of the Earth in the blood, in the whole human body, were held to be workings of the Godhead.

Now another conception too was associated with this picture of the Father God in the days of antiquity. Men said to themselves: Every' thing would be well if the earthly forces only were working upon the being of man, but this is not the case. The Moon is working in the neighbourhood of the Earth. In short, the Earth is not working alone, but together with the Moon. And with this mingling of Earth and Moon forces there was associated the idea not only of one single Godhead of the Earth but of the many subordinate gods of paganism. All the forces working upon body and blood were woven into this ancient conception of the Godhead.

No wonder that all striving for knowledge in those times was directed to the forces of the Moon and of the Earth. A subtle and intricate body of knowledge grew up, a ‘science’ as it were of the Father God, and we have an echo of this in the first three sections of the great work of John Scotus Erigena, On the Division of Nature. He himself no longer possessed the knowledge in its real form, for he lived in the 9th century after Christ. None the less his books contain fragments that are a direct heritage from primeval wisdom, fragments in which we read that in all material existence there lives the Father God—creating but not created—and the other Divinities who both create and are themselves created. These other Divinities are the Beings of the Hierarchies.

I he visible world spread around the human being is created and does not create, and man is to look forward to a world wherein the Godhead rules as the Godhead at rest—neither creating nor created but receiving all things into himself. Such is the substance of the fourth section of the work of John Scotus Erigena.

This fourth section treats of soteriology and eschatology. It speaks of the history of the Christ Jesus, of the Resurrection, of the gifts of the Divine Grace, of the ending of the world and the return to the Godhead at rest. The first three sections, particularly, echo the conceptions of antiquity for, as a matter of fact, the thoughts become genuinely Christian only when we reach the fourth. The first three sections contain (Christian thoughts, but are derived, in essence, from ancient paganism. And so, it was among the Church Fathers of the first centuries of Christendom. Their conceptions were relics of the ancient era of paganism. Let me put it in these words: In Nature, in the created world around him, man gazed upon the region of the Father God. Behind Nature he saw an Ideal world. He beheld the workings of certain forces in nature; and in the succession of the generations, in the development of humanity itself in the different races and peoples he saw the ruling of the Father God.

Now in the first centuries of Christendom there was added to this conception another sphere of knowledge which has been entirely lost. The earliest Church Fathers spoke as follows, although such doctrines have been exterminated altogether by their later exponents. They said: The Father God has worked in the blood flowing through the generations and in all that has shaped itself into the bodies of men, but the Father God has been engaged in perpetual warfare with the powers who oppose him, namely the Nature Spirits. The minds of men during the first centuries of Christendom were imbued with the idea that the Father God had never succeeded in working alone but had been obliged to wage perpetual warfare against the Nature Spirits ruling in the things of the outer world. The teachings of the earliest Church Fathers were to the effect that in the pre-Christian era men believed in the Father God but could not distinguish him from the Nature Spirits. What these men of old really believed in was the whole world of the Father God combined with the kingdom of Nature. It was from this that they conceived the visible world to have proceeded. But, said the Church Fathers, this is an error. All these different Nature Gods are working in Nature but at a certain stage they insinuated themselves into the things of the Earth. The things of the Earth we perceive with our senses, the things that are outside us, that have become earthly, do not proceed from these Nature Spirits, nor from the Father God who worked creatively only in the metamorphoses of pre-earthly existence. The Earth we see proceeded not from the Father God and not from the Nature Spirits, but from the Son, from the Logos whom the Father God sent forth in order that He (the Logos) might create the Earth. And the Gospel of St John is there as a token and a memorial that the Earth is not, as the ancients believed, created by the Father God. The Father God sent forth the Son, and the Son is the creator of the Earth.

It was for the upholding of the teaching contained in the first verses of the Gospel of St John that the early Fathers of the Christian Church were fighting. So difficult was it for the growing faculty of human intellect to understand this teaching that Dionysius the Areopagite preferred to say: Whatsoever is created by the human intellect is Affirmative Theology, but Affirmative Theology does not penetrate into those regions where the real mysteries of the world are contained. These regions can only be attained by the negation of all predicates, by speaking of God not as essentia but as super-essentia, by speaking not of personality, but of super-personality. In other words, when everything is negated, then, through Negative Theology alone can the real mystery of existence be fathomed. But neither Dionysius the Areopagite nor a successor like John Scotus Erigena (who was already permeated by the forces of intellect) believed that human reason was in any way capable of explaining these mysteries of world existence.

And now try to think what is implied by the assertion that the Logos is the creator of the world. Think of what was present all through pre-Christian antiquity but had grown somewhat dim at the time of the approach of the Mystery of Golgotha. Men said to themselves: The Godhead works through the blood, through the body. And they associated with this the conception that when the blood runs in the veins of human beings or of animals, the Gods have been deprived of it. The blood, they said, is the lawful possession of the Gods. Therefore, we can draw near to the Gods if we give the blood back again to them. The Gods desire the blood for themselves. Men have taken possession of it and it must be given back again to the Gods. Hence the blood sacrifice in the days of antiquity.

But now came the Christ Who taught that the things of the Earth have not proceeded from the Gods who desire the blood for themselves. Christ directed the minds of men to all that works in their being before the forces of the Earth work upon them. Think of the bread—the substance wherewith man is nourished. He takes bread into his body. It is a means of nourishment and passing through the organism reaches a certain point before it is transformed into the forces of the blood. But it is not changed into blood until it has passed through the whole digestive tract. Only then do the forces of the Earth begin to work. As long as the foodstuff has not passed over into the blood, the earthly forces have not begun to work. Christ, therefore, taught men to see God not in the blood but in the bread before the bread becomes flesh, and to see God in the wine before the wine passes into the blood. There is the Divine, there is the incarnate Logos. Look not upon what flows in the blood, for what flows in the blood is a heritage of man from the Moon period, from pre- earthly time. Away, therefore, with the conceptions of the blood, of the body, of flesh. Turn your minds to what is not yet blood and not yet flesh, to what is prepared on the Earth around you without the influence of the Moon; turn your minds to what comes from the Sun! For we see things through the light of the Sun and when we eat the bread and drink the wine we receive in them the powers and forces of the Sun. Things visible exist not through the Father but through the Logos—the Son. Such was the message of Christ.

Here, you see, the mind of man is turned not to the kind of knowledge derived by the ancients from Nature, but in the direction of the Sun, to the forces poured down by the Sun to the Earth. Instead of deriving his conceptions of the Divine from physical, earthly things, man must behold the Divine in the Spiritual, in the Logos. The Logos superseded those ancient conceptions of the Father God. In other words, the mind of man was directed to the Spiritual. In pre-Christian times man had perceived the Divine with forces generated in his own organic being and these forces then arose within him in the form of vision. A vision of the Divine also proceeded from the blood. But now man must seek for the Divine in acts of purely spiritual contemplation. He must regard the things visible around him as having proceeded from the Logos, not from those beings who subsequently had insinuated themselves into the Earth as a result of the activity of a God who had created in pre-earthly existence.

Only in the light of this knowledge can we begin to understand the ideas and mental outlook of those who lived in the first centuries of Christendom. All that I have been describing was an indication to men that their conceptions of the Divine must be drawn from the forces of their consciousness alone, and from no other source. Men were directed to the Spiritual and the time had now come when it was possible to say to them: In the days of the old dispensation the Earth was so powerful that it was the source of your conception of the Divine. But those days have passed away. The Earth can no longer give you anything. Your own forces and your own forces alone must lead you to the Logos, the creative principle. Hitherto you have worshipped only the Godhead who created in pre-earthly existence; now you are to revere the principle that is creative in earthly existence. And this must be done through the power of your Ego, of your Spirit.

The early Christians, therefore, were wont to say: The end of the world is at hand. They meant the downfall of that Earth from which man drew his knowledge without conscious effort. To speak of this ‘world ending’ was to voice a profound truth, because hitherto the human being had been a son of the Earth, had relinquished himself to the forces of the Earth, relying upon his blood to give him knowledge. But this era had passed away. The kingdom of Heaven had drawn near, the kingdom of Earth had come to an end. Man was not, nor could he be henceforth, a son of the Earth. He must make himself a companion of I he Spiritual Being Who had come down to the Earth—of the Logos, of the Christ. And so, this downfall of the world was prophesied for the 4th century of Christendom. It signified the downfall of the Earth and the dawn of that kingdom in which man would feel himself dwelling as a Spirit among Spirits—it is our own time. The modern mind will find it exceedingly difficult to realise that in the first centuries of Christendom men did not look upon their existence as earthly, but as an existence within the kingdom of the Spirit after the Earth, as it had been when men drew their powers from its sources, had come to an end. Nobody who has ever really understood the thought-life of the earliest Christians will say that their belief concerning the end of the world was superstition because it did not come to pass. In the form in which the early Christians held this belief it did actually come to pass. The early Christians would have regarded the condition in which man lives as a Spirit among Spirits as the ‘new Jerusalem’. Only they would have said: We hold that man has entered already into the kingdom of Heaven, but he is so sinful that he knows it not; he imagines that Heaven flows with milk and honey, that there are no evil spirits in Heaven against which he must protect himself. The early Christians would have said: Hitherto these evil spirits were within the things of Nature; now they have been released and are whirling in their hosts invisibly around the human being who must guard against them.

In the sense of early Christian thought, then, there had been a world ending. But it was not realised that in place of the God indwelling the Earth, the God who proclaimed his being in the events of Earth, there had come the supersensible Logos Who must be known in the Supersensible and to Whom men must aspire with supersensible forces. If we recognise this we shall find that over the 9th, 10th and 11th centuries too, there hovered another mood, another feeling of a world ending. Once again men were expecting the downfall of the world. They did not yet understand the thoughts of the early Christians but out of this mood which spread over the whole of civilised Europe in the 9th, 10th and 11th centuries there came the urge to seek the path to Christ in a more material form than that in which it should properly have been sought. Men ought to have recognised that the Logos must be found in the Spirit and not in the phenomena of the natural world. This finding of the Logos in the Spirit was not understood by men who once again were imbued with the feeling of world ending, and they sought to find the Logos by a more material path.

Out of this feeling grew the mood which gave rise to the Crusades. Men set out to find the Christ in His grave in the East, and to hold fast to him in the throes of this misinterpreted feeling that the downfall of the world was at hand. But the Christ was not to be found away yonder in the East. Those who had sought to find Him visibly in the tomb were told: He Whom thou seekest is not here. Seek for Him in the Spirit.

And now, in the 20th century—and it will be so increasingly in the days to come—there is again the same mood of world downfall, albeit in their lethargy and indifference men no longer give heed to it. Nevertheless, the writer of The Decline of the West [Oswald Spengler] has made a deep and perceptible impression upon his time. This mood of world downfall will become more and more widespread.

Yet in truth one need not speak of the downfall of the world. World ending there has been, in the sense that the Spiritual can no longer be derived from the source of Nature. The question now is for man to realise that in very truth he is living in a spiritual world. An error is responsible for the loss of the direct knowledge that he is living and moving in a spiritual world. This is the error that has brought calamity upon us and that will make the bloodshed of wars more and more terrible. Human beings are as if possessed—possessed by the evil powers who cast their minds into confusion; and they no longer speak as if they were voicing what lives in the Ego. They are possessed as by a psychosis—a psychosis much talked about, but little understood.

The downfall of the world conceived by the first Christians has come about and the new era is upon us. But the new era must be recognised and understood. It must be realised that in very truth when the human being ‘knows’, he knows as an Angel; when he becomes conscious in his own true being, he is conscious as an Archangel. The spiritual world has come down to us and it is only a question of being conscious of it. That is the all-important thing. Many people imagine that they take the words of the Gospel literally and in all earnestness. Yet in spite of the unequivocal statement in the Gospel of St John that all created things are not to be explained on the basis of their sub-earthly forces but as having been created by the Logos, in spite of this, men have adhered to the Father God who is, indeed, to be recognised as one with the Christ but as that Person of the Trinity who was creative until the Earth took shape. The true Regent of the Earth is Christ—the Logos.

Understanding these things was hardly possible any longer in the days of John Scotus Erigena in the 9th century of our era. And that explains why his book On the Division of Nature is on the one hand so grand and significant but on the other so chaotic that Spiritual Science alone can help us to make anything of it.

As I have said, in the fourth section John the Scot speaks of the Being who is not created and does not create. If we really understand John Scotus Erigena when he speaks of the Godhead at rest, of the Godhead to whom all things return and in whom they are united, then we have the further stage. The world that is described in the first three sections of the work has come to an end. The world of the Godhead at rest—the Being who is not created and does not create—is upon us. The Earth is going towards its end—in so far, that is to say, as the Earth is Nature. I have reminded you many times that even our geologists today are saying that nothing more is really coming into being on the Earth. It is, of course, quite true that plant life continues; animals and human beings continue to come into existence through propagation. But the Earth, taken as one great whole, is not the same as it once was. It is breaking up, falling to pieces. In its mineral sphere the Earth is already disintegrating. The eminent geologist Suess makes this statement in his book Decline of the Earth. He says that we are moving about on the disintegrating ashes of the Earth. He speaks of a certain region where this is clearly evident and shows that it was not so in earlier epochs. Such was the view of the world and of life in the first centuries of Christendom—derived, of course, not from the natural but from the moral facts of human evolution.

We have been living since the beginning of the 15th century more within the ‘Godhead at rest’ than did John Scotus Erigena. The Godhead at rest is waiting until we are active enough to attain to Imagination and Inspiration wherewith we may see the world around us as a spiritual world, knowing that we are verily within that spiritual world from which the earthly world has been cast off, that we are living after the world ending has come to pass and that the new Jerusalem is with us.

Truly it is a strange destiny of men that living in the spiritual world they know it not, nor are willing to know it. All interpretations which present true Christianity as if it were bristling with inadequate ideas, such as that of a world ending which has not come to pass and is merely a figure of speech, all such interpretations are empty and futile. It is only a question of understanding the real meaning of the Christian writings. We must realise that the conceptions of men during the first centuries of Christendom related to a world that was altogether different after the 4th century.

The Church fathers of the early Christian centuries tried to bring the teachings of the old pagan wisdom into connection with the Mystery of Golgotha, but they did not believe that, to begin with, men would be capable of understanding them. Therefore, they preserved the mysteries of olden times in the form of dogmas which were to be matters of belief, but which men were not supposed to understand. These dogmas are not superstitions or untruths. They are, after all, quite true in themselves, only they must be understood in the right way, namely, by the application of those faculties and forces which have been developing in man since the time of the 15th century.

Since the middle of the 15th century the Consciousness Soul has been developing. When a man is evolving his thoughts and concepts today he is altogether lacking in any realisation that in his acts of knowledge he is an Angel. He will say: But I am simply thinking about the things I have experienced. And most certainly he will not say that in his ‘knowing’ he is a spiritual being, nor that in self-consciousness he is a yet higher spiritual being. Men seek for knowledge today with the shadow of that kind of intellect which lived among the Greeks, in Plato and in Aristotle, nay even among the Romans, and was still alive, to some extent, in a man like John Scotus Erigena in the 9th century.

The very fact that we need no longer allow ourselves to be led astray by the intellect can be a help to us. Today men are running after a shadow—after the shadow that is their intellect. They allow themselves to be misled by this intellect instead of striving to attain Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition which will lead them into the spiritual world. The fact that the intellect has faded into shadow is good in itself. But with shadowy intellect we have evolved our natural science and this sphere of knowledge must now be worked upon further. The Godhead has come to rest in order that we ourselves may labour. The fourth condition is upon us. It only remains for men to become conscious of it. And if they do not, then nothing new can come into being on the Earth, for what the Earth once received as a heritage has passed away. The new has to be created.

A man like Spengler saw the ruins which still remain of bygone civilisation. They lie before us clearly enough. The frame of mind in the 9th, 10th and 11th centuries was that of a world doomed. Then came the Crusades—achieving nothing because men were seeking in the material world for what ought to have been sought in the Spirit. And when the Crusades failed, the Renaissance came as a kind of makeshift. Greek culture was brought to light once again and is still being offered to human beings in the form of education. Greek culture is there, but it did not come to light in the Renaissance as a new thing. The only new thing that has come into being since the beginning of the 15th century consists of the mathematical and mechanical conceptions we apply to outer Nature. But the ruins of antiquity are forever with us. They are inculcated into the minds of the young in the form of their academic training and so constitute the basis of civilisation. Oswald Spengler gazed at these ruins of the Renaissance. Like great erratic blocks they float across the ocean of life that is travailing to give birth to something new. If we have eyes only for these floating blocks, then we see nothing but downfall. Nobody can galvanise our civilisation in the form in which it exists today. It is going to pieces, falling into ruin. A new civilisation must be brought into being from out of the Spiritual by a primal power of creation, for the fourth condition is upon us. This is the sense in which we must interpret the writings of John Scotus Erigena, whose wisdom—which he himself found difficult to under' stand—was drawn from the Mysteries still cultivated in Ireland.

What I have told you here is not only the result of Spiritual Science. Ancient documents tell us exactly the same, that is, if we really understand them and shake off Alexandrian influences in the form of science that goes by the name of philology. One cannot help saying that in their modern form these things show few traces either of real philology or real philosophy. In our methods of ‘cramming’ and in our examination schedules today there is exceedingly little room left for the ‘philo’. That must be brought from somewhere else, but we stand in dire need of it.

In this lecture I wanted first of all to speak of John Scotus Erigena and, secondly, to show you the paths along which we can come to an understanding of the now faded wisdom of antiquity. The Gospel of St John states quite clearly: The Logos, not the Father God, is the creative principle. But facts like this pass by unheeded in our time.

A lecture published in The Golden Blade, 1990. Also known as: The Influence of the Planets on Man, The Ego and the Sun, or Atomism. It is the thirteenth of seventeen lectures in the volume Perspectives on Humanity's Development.

The civilisation of the fourth Post-Atlantean epoch—the period of the development of the Mind Soul in humanity—was directed from the Greek Mysteries. In other words: the indications upon which the culture of the human mind was based issued from the Mystery-Sanctuaries which existed here and there in Asia Minor and Southern Europe. Now the secret of man's connection with the Sun was an essential part of these Mystery-teachings. From the book Theosophy we know that the Ego lights up within the Intellectual or Mind Soul and enters into possession of its full, inner force during the age of Consciousness, or Spiritual Soul.

Now because the Ego of man was destined from a certain point of view to be awakened during the age of the culture of the mind or intellect, it was quite natural that the Mysteries of that age should have been concerned with the secrets of the Sun and their connection with the human Ego. In the book Riddles of Philosophy it is said that the Greek's life of thought consisted in an actual perceiving of the outer world. The Greek's thought was at the same time a perception, just as we today have a perception of colours or sounds. The thoughts and conceptions of the Greek were not brought into being merely by inner activity of the soul, but they were born as it were from the objects themselves. In this respect Goethe's thinking undoubtedly possessed qualities in common with Greek thought. This is quite clear from his famous conversation with Schiller. Schiller stated that Goethe's conceptions were not perceptions, but ideas, and to this Goethe retorted that he actually saw his ideas before him, that he perceived them objectively.

The life of thought in Greece was associated with a very definite inner experience which arose when men looked at the world around them. They regarded the substance of the ideas which thus lit up before them as being the creation of the Sun. With the rising Sun they beheld the appearance in space of the life of ideas, and this life of ideas passed away again with the setting Sun. Men have now quite lost the faculty of perceiving and experiencing spirituality in the world around them. When the Sun rises they see only the phenomena of light and colour which there appear. And it is the same when the Sun sets in the red glow of evening. The Greeks felt that the world of ideas came to them at sunrise and passed away from them at sunset. They felt that in the darkness of the night they were bereft of the world of ideas. And when they looked at the sky, which seems to us to be blue, but for the colour of which the Greeks used a word which simply meant “darkness”, they felt that their world of ideas came to an end at the boundaries of visible space. Beyond this world of space the Greek divined the existence of other worlds—the worlds of the thoughts of the Gods, which he connected with light. These worlds seemed to him to be concentrated in the living Sun, and to withdraw during the night into the spaces of the dark firmament. Without some insight into this entirely different world of perception and experience, we cannot understand the further evolution of man's life of soul. This faculty of inwardly living perception functioned for a certain period of time, but then the most advanced representatives of the human race, those who still received their training in the Greek Mysteries, began to feel that their power to perceive the spiritual radiations from the living Sun in cosmic space was waning, and they saw salvation in the Mystery of Golgotha, inasmuch as the impulse coming from the Mystery of Golgotha made it possible for them to rekindle the light within their own being. And they tried now to experience the light by entering in spirit into the events connected with the Mystery of Golgotha.

Now the intellect alone can give us no real knowledge of what has really come to pass in the life of humanity through the ages. A great and far-reaching metamorphosis took place in man's life of soul and must never be forgotten when we are studying the course of evolution. We who have been living in the era of the development of the Consciousness Soul since the beginning of the fifteenth century have in our inner, intellectual activity, only a shadowy reflection of the spirituality which pervaded the life of the mind in the fourth Post-Atlantean period of civilisation. And the task before us is to awaken a faculty of the soul which will quicken in this shadowy intellect of ours a living understanding of the universe. The shadow-intellect that is characteristic of all modern culture has fettered man to the Earth. He has eyes only for earthly things, particularly when he allows himself to be influenced by the claims of modern science. In our age it never occurs to man that his being belongs, not to the Earth alone, but to the Cosmos beyond the Earth. Knowledge of our connection with the Cosmos beyond the Earth—that is what we need above all to make our own.

We take earthly life today as the basis of our ideas and concepts and build up a conception of the Universe in line with the conditions of this earthly life. But the picture of the Universe thus arising has been evolved by simply transferring earthly conditions to the world beyond the Earth. By means of spectro-analysis and other methods—admirable as they are in their way—a conception of the Sun has grown up which is really modelled wholly upon earthly conditions. Everyone is familiar with the appearance of luminous, incandescent gas, and this picture is then transferred to the Sun in the heavens. But we must learn to think of the Sun in the light of Spiritual Science. The Sun which the physicist believes to be a luminous body of gas out in cosmic space is spiritual through and through. The Sun receives the cosmic light and radiates it to the Earth, but the Sun is not physical at all. It is spiritual in its whole nature and being. The Greek was right when he felt that the Sun was connected with the development of his Ego, for the development of the Ego is associated with the intelligence and the faculty of forming ideas. The Greek conceived the rays of the Sun to be the power which kindled and quickened his Ego. His was still aware of the spirituality of the Cosmos, and to him the Sun was a living being, related to the human Ego in an absolutely concrete way. When a man says ‘ I ’ to himself, he experiences a force that is working within him, and the Greek, as he felt the working of this inner force, related it to the Sun. The Greek said to himself: Sun and Ego are the outer and inner aspects of one and the same being. The Sun out there in space is the Cosmic Ego. What lives within me is the human Ego.

As a matter of fact, this experience still comes to those who have a deeper feeling for Nature. The experience is not nearly as vivid as it was in the days of Greece, but for all that it is still possible to become aware of the spiritual forces indwelling the rays of the Sun in springtime. There are people here and there who feel that the Ego is imbued with a new vigour when the rays of the Sun begin to shine down upon the Earth with greater strength. But this is a last faint echo, an outward shell of an experience that is dying out altogether in the abstract, shadowy intellectualism prevalent in every branch of civilised life today. The task before us is to begin once again to realise and understand the connection of the being of man with super-earthly existence.

If we study and compare many things that are to be found in anthroposophical literature, we shall be able to understand the way in which the Sun is related to the Ego, and we shall also realise that the forces which stream down to the Earth from the Sun and from the Moon are entirely different in character and function. In a certain respect, Sun and Moon stand in polar antithesis. The forces streaming from the Sun enable the human being to become the bearer of an Ego. We owe to the rays of the Sun the power which moulds the human form into an image of the Ego. The forces which determine the human form from outside, even during the period of embryonic life, are the active forces of the Sun. While the embryo is developing in the mother's body, a great deal more is happening than modern science dreams of. Modern science is of the opinion that the forces all originate from the fertilised germ, but the truth is that the human embryo merely rests there in the body of the mother and is given form by the Sun forces. These Sun forces are, of course, associated with the Moon forces which are also working but in a different way. The Moon forces work above all in the inner, metabolic processes. We may therefore say: the Sun forces give form to the human being from outside. The Moon forces radiate outwards from within the metabolic process; they are centrifugal forces. This does not contradict the fact that these Moon forces are working, for instance, in the shaping and moulding of the human countenance. The Moon forces stream out from a centre in the metabolic system and work as it were by attraction upon the forming of the human face, differentiating the features, but there is an interplay between these Moon forces and the Sun forces. The organism that is connected with procreation is subject to the Sun forces. The whole being of man is involved in this way in the interplay between the forces of the Sun and the forces of the Moon.

A distinction must be made, however, between the Moon forces that work in the inner processes of metabolism in man, and the forces that originate in the metabolic processes itself. The Moon forces stream into the metabolic process, but this metabolic process has forces of its own as well. And these are earthly forces. The substances and forces in the vegetable and other foodstuffs work in the human being by virtue of their own inherent nature. They work here as Earth forces. Metabolism is primarily an outcome of the working of Earth forces. If the substances of the foodstuffs were merely to unfold their own forces within the human organism, there would be nothing but a chaotic play of forces in man. The fact that these forces work without intermission to renew and upbuild the being of man, is due not to the Earth at all, but to the Moon. The human being is shaped from within outwards by the Moon, and from without inwards by the Sun. Because the rays of the Sun are received through the eye into the head-organisation. The Sun forces work within the organism as well, but for all that they are still working from outside.

And so on the one hand the development and evolution of the Ego of man is dependent upon the forces of the Sun. Without the Sun, man could not be an Ego being living on the Earth; on the other hand there could be no such thing as propagation, there could be no human race without the Moon. It is the Sun which places man as an individual on the Earth, and it is the Moon that charms down the human race to Earth—the human race conceived here as one whole. The human race as the physical product of the generations is a product of the Moon forces which have worked in the generative process. As an individuality, however, man is the product of the Sun forces.

If, therefore, we want to understand the human being and the human race as a whole, we cannot do so by studying merely those conditions which obtain on the Earth alone. The efforts of geologists to understand the being of man by investigating the nature of the Earth are all in vain. Man is not primarily a creation of the Earth. He receives his shape and form from the Cosmos; he is an offspring of the world of the stars, above all of Sun and Moon. From the Earth are derived only those forces which are contained in the substances of the Earth. These forces work outside the human being and also within him when they are introduced into his organism either through eating or drinking. But within the organism they are received into the realm of forces of a super-earthly nature.

The processes that take place within the human being are by no means an affair of the Earth alone. They are through and through an affair of the world of stars. This is the kind of knowledge that we must struggle to reach once more.

Think of the human being as he stands there before us in his physical body. This physical body takes in the foodstuffs from the outer world and the forces of the foodstuffs continue to work within the body. But the physical body is permeated by the astral body and in the astral body the Moon forces are actively at work. The Sun forces too play into the astral body. The etheric body is there in the middle, between physical and astral body.

When we study the forces of foodstuffs, we find that, to begin with, they are active in the physical body and are then taken hold of by the astral body in which the influence of Sun and Moon are working. But between the physical body and astral body the etheric body is fulfilling its functions. The forces in the etheric body come, not from the Earth but from all directions of cosmic space. The products of the Earth, the substances which exist in the solid liquid or aeriform condition, are taken in by the human being and worked upon by the forces of Sun and Moon. But forces streaming in from all directions of cosmic space are also working in the human organism. The forces contained in the foodstuffs themselves come from the Earth, but from cosmic space the etheric forces stream in. These etheric forces also take hold of the foodstuffs and work upon them in such a way that they become inwardly responsive to light and also to warmth. We say, therefore: the human being is part of the Earth because he has a physical body. His etheric body relates him to the whole environment of the Earth. Through his astral body he is involved in the weaving forces of Sun and Moon.

Now these influences of the Sun and Moon in the astral body are modified and differentiated in a high degree as they work upon the ‘upper’ man. By ‘upper’ man I mean, in this case, the part of the organism that is encircled and permeated by the bloodstream which passed upwards from the heart in the direction of the head. The ‘lower’ man, then, comprises the other part of the organism—that part which lies below the heart.

Thus we have the upper part of man, including the head and everything that is organically connected with the head. The formation of this part of the organism is dependent, mainly, upon the Sun's influences. Its most important period of development is during embryonic life. The Sun's influences work upon the embryo in a very special way, but these influences continue to be active when the human being is born and is living in the physical world between birth and death. The astral influences working upon that part of the human organism which lies above the heart—speaking very roughly, for it would be necessary to go into more precise detail if we were describing the blood circulation—these astral influences are then modified by the influences of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars.

The planet Saturn circles round the Sun and sends forces to the Earth. These forces of Saturn work in the whole astral body of man, but above all in the part of the astral body which corresponds to the ‘upper’ man. They stream into the astral body, pervade it, and are the essential factor in bringing about a proper connection between the astral body and the physical body. When, for instance, a man cannot sleep properly, that is to say, when his astral body will not leave or come down again properly into his etheric and physical bodies or in some other way is not rightly connected with the physical body—this is due to an irregularity in the working of the Saturn forces. In other words, Saturn is the heavenly body which, by way of the human head, promotes and is responsible for setting up the proper relation of man's astral body to his etheric body and his physical body. And it is the Saturn forces too which mediate the connection of the astral body to the Ego, because of Saturn's relation to the Sun. Saturn's relation to the Sun is expressed in space and time inasmuch as Saturn accomplishes its orbit around the Sun in a period of thirty years.

In the human being, the relationship of Saturn to the Sun is expressed in the connection of the Ego with the astral body and in the way in which the astral body is membered into the whole human organism. The connection of Saturn with the upper part of the astral body was regarded as a factor of great importance in ancient times. In the Egypto-Chaldean period, three or four thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha, the Teachers and Sages of the Mysteries judged a human being according to his relation to Saturn—which was revealed by the date and time of his birth. For these Sages knew quite well that the position of Saturn in the heavens at the time of man's birth enabled his astral body either to function regularly or irregularly in his physical body. Knowledge of these influences played a very important part in olden days. But the onward progress of evolution is denoted precisely by the fact that in our age, which, as you know, began in the fifteenth century, we have to become free of these forces and influences.

Please do not misunderstand me This does not mean that Saturn is not working in us nowadays. Naturally the Saturn forces work in us, just as they worked in the Ancients, but we must now learn to make ourselves free and independent of them. And do you know how we can make ourselves free? Nothing is worse than to give oneself over to the shadowy intellectualism of our age. If we do that, the Saturn forces run riot within us and give rise to the so-called nervous troubles that are so very prevalent in our time. When a man suffers from ‘nerves’ as we say, it is because his astral body is not properly connected with his physical organisation. This lies at the basis of the morbid nervous symptoms which are so common nowadays. Our striving should be to unfold real vision, to attain Imagination. If man can achieve nothing better than the forming of abstract concepts and ideas, nervous symptoms are bound to increase in severity, because this intellectual activity tends to alienate him from the influences of Saturn, which are still at work within his being. His astral body will be torn away from his nerves, and he will be driven more and more into a state of nervous tension and excitability. The nervous complaints of our age must be recognised in their cosmic aspect, for they are caused by an irregular working of the Saturn forces.

Just as Saturn works chiefly in the upper part of the astral body and in the whole astral body inasmuch as the astral body is connected with the organism as a whole through the nervous system, so is Jupiter active in thinking.

When a man thinks, one part of his astral body is active. It is pre-eminently the Jupiter forces in the astral body which strengthen the thinking faculty, and Jupiter is responsible for permeating the human brain with astral forces.

Now the influences of Saturn continue throughout the whole of man's life. The beginning of a human life may really be said to consist of the first three periods of ten years. This is the period of growth, for as a matter of fact the activity of the growth forces does not wholly cease until after the thirtieth year. And our whole life and our health depend on how our astral body has developed during the thirty years. Saturn needs thirty years to complete its orbit around the Sun and this has its exact parallel in the life of man.

The development of the faculty of thinking takes place essentially during the first twelve years of life. Again we find the parallelism in the orbit of the planet Jupiter.

Just as Jupiter has to do with thinking, so has Mars to do with speech.

Mars works upon a still smaller part of the astral body than that with which Jupiter is concerned in connection with the thinking of man. And the development of the forces which finally express themselves in speech, is dependent upon the working of Mars within our being. Man learns to utter the first sounds of speech in a period which corresponds approximately to half the time required by Mars to complete its orbit around the Sun.

We see, then, that the development of faculties situated primarily in the region of the human head is connected with the Saturn forces, the Jupiter forces, and the Mars forces. The forces of the three outer planets, therefore, work on within the astral body through the life of man. The Sun is connected more directly with the Ego, Saturn, Jupiter and Mars are concerned respectively with the behaviour and functioning of the astral body in the human organism, with the faculty of thinking and with the faculty of speaking.

The Sun is connected with the Ego. And then we come to the inner planets, as they are sometimes called, the planets which are nearer the Earth and lie between the Earth and the Sun, whereas Saturn, Jupiter and Mars lie on the other side of the Sun. The forces of these inner planets are likewise connected with the being of man. We will take Mercury to begin with.

Like the Moon, the centre, from which the Mercury forces work, lies in the inner being of man, and it is only in connection with the forming of the human countenance that Mercury works from outside. The Mercury forces work in the part of the human organism that lies below the region of the heart. From there these Mercury forces stream into the human organism. The working of the astral body in the breathing and circulatory functions of the human organism is regulated by Mercury. Mercury acts as the intermediary between the astral body and the rhythmic processes in the being of man. The Mercury forces act as the intermediary between the astral body and the rhythmic functions in the human organism. Because this is so, the Mercury forces intervene, as do the Moon forces, in the metabolic processes as a whole, but only in so far as the metabolic process is subject to rhythm and reacts in turn upon the rhythmic functions.

We come next to Venus. Venus works pre-eminently in the etheric body of man. The cosmic forces chiefly active in the etheric body, therefore, are those of Venus.

Then we come again to the Moon. The Moon forces in the human organism work in polar antithesis to the Sun forces. From within outwards the Moon forces lead substance over into the realm of the living and are therefore connected with procreation. The Moon stimulates not only the inner, reproductive processes of the organism, but the procreative process as well. Thus we have:

You see now in what way processes in the human organism are dependent upon the Cosmos. On the one side man is bound up with the earthly forces through his physical body. And on the other side he is bound up with his whole cosmic environment through the etheric body. The cosmic forces, however, work in different ways in his being as we have heard. This differentiation originates in the astral body in which the forces of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury, Moon are contained. By way of the Ego, the Sun works in man. Suppose that as the result of his earlier incarnations a man has within his being forces which predestine him to be a thinker in the earthly life upon which he is entering. He prepares for his descent to the Earth and—since Jupiter takes a definite time to complete his orbit—he will choose a moment for his birth when the rays of Jupiter pour directly down upon him.

In this way the heavenly constellations provide conditions into which a human being may be born—conditions which are determined by his previous earthly lives.

In the age of the Consciousness Soul, of course, it is the task of man gradually to make himself free of these conditions. But he must free himself from them in the right way.

In speaking of the Saturn influences, I said that it is a question of trying to replace shadowy intellectualism by real Imagination. In the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds indications are given which, if they are followed, can make us independent of the cosmic forces, although none the less these cosmic forces continue to work in our being.

Man is born on Earth into conditions determined by a constellation in the heavens, but he must equip himself with forces which make him independent of this constellation. It is to this kind of knowledge—a knowledge of man's connection with the Cosmos beyond the Earth—that our civilisation must attain. Man must learn to realise that the forces of heredity described by modern science are not the only forces at work in his organism. To imagine such a thing, my dear friends, is the purest nonsense. It is pure nonsense to think that the maternal organism contains those forces which are then transmitted by heredity and so build up a heart, a liver and the other organs. There would be no heart in the human organism if the Sun did not build it into the organism of man, neither would there be a liver if Venus did not place it into the organism. And so it is with each single organ. Their presence in the human organism is due to the working of cosmic forces.

These are the things that humanity must once again learn to understand. Man must realise that the mysteries of his being cannot be explained by a science which deals merely with earthly phenomena. Around man live other creatures—and they too are not merely creatures of the Earth. It appears, to begin with, as if the minerals were entirely earthly in their nature. But in the minerals, too, changes have taken place which were due to the forces working in the cosmic environment of the Earth. The crystallised forms of the metals are all due to the play of forces from beyond the Earth. The metals were given shape and form at a time when the Earth's forces were not yet working in their full strength, but when cosmic forces were working in the Earth. The healing forces contained in the minerals, above all in the metals, are connected with the way in which these metals were formed within the Earth by the working of cosmic forces.

In the first epoch of Post-Atlantean times, when the ancient Indian civilisation was at its prime, man felt and knew himself to be a citizen of the whole wide universe. Although he had not yet developed the forces which modern humanity is so proud to possess, he was in the true sense of the word, MAN. By the time of the Chaldean epoch, however, man's attention had already begun to be diverted from the Sun. He had become a kind of amphibium—a creature who is thankful when the rays of the Sun pour down upon it, and when it need not always be confined to its dark burrows in the pound. But in our time one cannot say that man even resembles a creature like the mole, for he is really much more like an earthworm who has eyes at most for what has first been sent out into space from the Earth and comes back again as rain. This is really all that men see in the way of forces from beyond the Earth. But this the earthworms also see! In his materialism today man has become an earthworm. He must rise above this earth state, but he can only do so by realising and knowing his connection with the Cosmos beyond the Earth.

Our task therefore, is to raise ourselves above the earthworm state into which our civilisation has fallen, and bring a new spiritual life into being.

Also known as: A Picture of the Earth's Future Development Lecture 14 of 17 from the lecture series: Perspectives on Humanity's Development.

This is a time when a great deal of attention, ranging from serious science to science-fiction, is being devoted to “outer space.” There is speculation on various levels about visitants from other worlds. Behind it all there may be an instinctive feeling—true in itself though often distorted in expression—that the apparent isolation of man on earth is not final; that man is not alone in the universe. We are therefore reprinting here a lecture (first published in English in the quarterly, “Anthroposophy,” for Easter, 1933, and long out of print) in which Rudolf Steiner spoke, briefly and enigmatically, of the need to recognise and welcome certain beings, “not of the human order,” who since the seventies of the last century have been descending from cosmic spheres into the realm of earth-existence, bringing with them “the substance and content of Spiritual Science.”—The Editors.

This unmistakably indicates that it is high time for man to discover how he can receive new impulses into his life of soul, and we will turn our attention today to certain great cosmic events with which we are already familiar from other points of view.

Most of you will have read the book An Outline of Occult Science, and will have realised that one of the great events in earthly evolution was the separation of the moon from the earth. The moon as we see today, shining towards us from cosmic space, was once united with the earth. It then separated from the earth and now circles around it as its satellite. We know what incisive changes in the whole sweep of evolution are connected with this separation of the moon from the earth. We must go far back in time, before the Atlantean deluge, to find the epoch when the moon departed from the body of the earth.

Today we will confine our attention to what came to pass on earth in connection with the being of man, and with the kingdoms of Nature around him, as a consequence of the separation of the moon from the earth. From the lectures on colours we have learnt that minerals—that is to say, the coloured mineral substances—actually derive their different hues from this relationship of the moon to the earth. Recognition of this fact enables us to make these cosmic events part of an artistic conception of existence. But other matters of the greatest significance come into consideration here. Man's being is the product of preceding metamorphoses of earth-existence—namely, the Saturn, Sun and Moon periods of evolution, during which no mineral kingdom existed. The mineral kingdom as we know it today came into being for the first time during the Earth period. Mineral substance, therefore, became part of man's being only during this Earth period. During the stages of Saturn, old Sun and old Moon, man had nothing mineral within him at all. Nor was his constitution adapted for existence upon the earth. By his very nature he was a being of the cosmos. Before the separation of the moon, and before the mineral substances with their many colours came into being, man was not adapted for earthly existence.

Let me put it in this way. It was a very real question for the Spiritual Beings who guide earthly evolution as to what must happen to man. Should he be sent down to the earth or be left to pass his existence in a realm beyond the earth? It can be said with truth that the separation of the moon, with the consequent changes in the earth and in the being of man, was the outcome of a decision on the part of the Spiritual Beings who guide and direct the evolution of humanity. It was because this coarse moon-substance was sent out of the earth that man's organism developed in such a way as to make it possible for him to become an earthly being. Through this event—through the separation of the moon and the incorporation of the mineral kingdom into the earth—man has become an earthly being, existing in the sphere of earthly gravity. Without earthly gravity, he could never have become a being capable of freedom. Before the separation of the moon he was not, in the real sense a personality. He was able to become a personality because of the concentration of the forces that were to build his body. And this concentration of forces was the result of the separation of the moon and the incorporation of the mineral kingdom into earthly existence. Man became a personality, and freedom was henceforward placed within his reach.

The evolution of man upon the earth since the separation of the moon has proceeded through many different stages. And we may say that if nothing else had happened except this departure of the moon from the earth, it would still have been possible for man to draw out of his organism, out of his body and soul, pictures such as arose in ancient, clairvoyant vision. Nor was man deprived of this faculty by the separation of the moon. He still envisaged the world in pictures, and if nothing else had happened, he would be living in a world of pictures to this day. But evolution went on. Man did not remain fettered to the earth. He received an impulse for evolution in the other direction—an impulse which actually reached its climax in the nineteenth century.

Even when long ages ago the human being, as ‘metabolic man,’ became subject to the force of earthly gravity, he was adapted as ‘head man’ for a cosmic existence. In effect, the intellect began to evolve. The old clairvoyant pictures densified into the forms of intellectual consciousness, as it was until the epoch of the fourth century after Christ. It was then for the first time that the human intellect began to grow shadowy. This process has been increasingly rapid since the fifteenth century, and today, although the intellect is an altogether spiritual faculty in man, its existence is not rooted in reality. It has only a picture-existence. When the man of today thinks merely with his intellect and faculty of reason, his thoughts are not rooted in reality at all. More and more they move about in a shadowy existence which reached its climax during the nineteenth century. And today man is altogether devoid of the sense for reality. He lives within a spiritual element, but is at the same time a materialist. His thoughts—which are spiritual but yet merely shadow-thoughts—are directed entirely to material existence.

Thus the second great process or event was that man became more spiritual. But the spiritual substance once derived from matter no longer ensouls him. His nature has become more spiritual, but with his spiritual faculties he thinks only about material existence.

You know that the moon will one day reunite with the earth. By the astronomers and geologists, who live in a world of abstractions, this reunion of the moon with the earth is placed thousands and thousands of years ahead. But this is mere illusion. In reality it is by no means so very far distant. Humanity as such is becoming younger and younger. Human beings are coming to a point when their development of body and soul will proceed only up to a certain age in life. At the time of the death of Christ, of the Event of Golgotha, human beings in general were capable of development in body and in soul until the 33rd year of life. Today this development is possible until the 27th year. In the fourth millennium a time will come when men will be capable of development only until the 21st year. In the seventh millennium the bodily nature will be capable of development only until the 14th year of life. Women will then become barren. An entirely different form of earthly life will ensue. This is the epoch when the moon will again approach the earth and become part of it.

It is high time for man to turn his attention to such mighty events of the realm of existence beyond the earth. He must not go on dreaming, vaguely and in the abstract, of some form of Divinity, but he must begin to be alive to the great happenings that are connected with his evolution. He must know what it means to say that the moon once left the earth and will enter the earth again.

Just as the separation of the moon was a decisive event, so too will be its re-entry. It is true that as human beings we shall still be inhabiting the earth, although birth will no longer take place in the ordinary way. We shall be connected with the earth by other means than through birth. We shall, however, have evolved in a certain respect by that time. And we must learn to connect what is happening today—I mean the fact that the intellect is becoming more and more shadowy—with what will one day be a great event in earthly evolution—the re-entry of the moon into the substance of the earth.

If the intellect continues to become even more spectral than it is already, if men never resolve to receive into their being what can now flow to them from spiritual worlds, then they will inevitably be absorbed into the shadowy grey-ness of their intellectual life.

What is this shadowy intellect? It cannot understand the real nature and being of man. The mineral world is the only realm which the shadowy human intellect is to a certain degree capable of understanding. Even the life of the plant remains enigmatical; still more so the life of the animal; while human life is altogether beyond the grasp of the mind. And so man goes on his way, evolving pictures of existence which in reality are nothing but a great world-question. His intellect cannot begin to grasp the real nature of plant or animal, and least of all that of the human being. This state of things will continue if man fails to listen to what is being given to him in the form of new Imaginations, in which cosmic existence is pictured to him. The living wisdom that Spiritual Science is able to impart must be received into his shadowy, intellectual concepts and thoughts, for only so can the shadow-pictures of the intellect be quickened to life.

This quickening to life of the shadow-pictures of the intellect is not only a human but a cosmic event. You will remember the passage in the book Occult Science dealing with the time when the human souls ascended to the planets and afterwards descended once more to earth-existence. I spoke of how the Mars-men, the Jupiter-men and the others descended again to earth. Now an event of great significance came to pass at the end of the seventies of last century. It is an event that can be described only in the light of facts which are revealed to us in the spiritual world. Whereas in the days of old Atlantis human beings came down to the earth from Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and so on—that is to say, beings of soul were drawn into the realm of earth-existence—since the end of the seventies of last century, other Beings—not of the human order—have been descending to the earth for the purposes of their further development. From cosmic realms beyond the earth they come down to the earth and enter into a definite relationship with human beings. Since the eighties of the nineteenth century, super-earthly Beings have been seeking to enter the sphere of earth-existence. Just as the Vulcan-men were the last to come down to the earth so now Vulcan Beings are actually coming into the realm of earthly existence. Super-earthly Beings are already here, and the fact that we are able to have a connected body of Spiritual Science at all today is due to the circumstance that Beings from beyond the earth are bringing the messages from the spiritual world down into earth-existence.

But, speaking generally, what is the attitude adopted by the human race? The human race is behaving, if I may put it so very shabbily to these Beings who are appearing from the cosmos and coming down—slowly and by degrees, it is true—to the earth. The human race does not concern itself with them; it ignores their existence. And it is this which will plunge the earth into tragic conditions, for in the course of the next centuries more and more Spiritual Beings will be among us—Beings whose language we ought to understand. And this is possible only if we try to grasp what comes from them: namely, the substance and content of Spiritual Science. They want to give it to us and they want us to act in the sense of Spiritual Science. Their desire is that Spiritual Science shall be translated into social behaviour and action on the earth.

I repeat, then, that since the last third of the nineteenth century Spiritual Beings from the cosmos have been coming into our own sphere of existence. Their home is the sphere lying between the moon and Mercury, but they are already pressing forward into the realm of earth-existence and seeking to gain a foothold there. And they will be able to find it if human beings are imbued with the thought of their existence. This can also be expressed as I expressed it just now, by saying that our shadowy intellect must be quickened to life by the pictures of Spiritual Science. We are speaking of concrete fact when we say: Spiritual Beings are seeking to come down into earth-existence and ought to be willingly received. Catastrophe after catastrophe must ensue, and earthly life will fall at length into social chaos, if opposition is maintained in human existence to the advent of these Beings. They desire nothing else than to be the advance-guards of what will happen to earth-existence when the moon is once again united with the earth.

Today people may consider it comparatively harmless to elaborate only those automatic, lifeless thoughts which arise in connection with the mineral world and the mineral nature of plant, animal and man. Materialists revel in such thoughts which are—well—thoughts and nothing more. But try to imagine what will happen if men go on unfolding no other kinds of thoughts until the time is reached in the eighth millennium for the moon-existence to unite again with the earth. These Beings of whom I have spoken will gradually come down to the earth. Vulcan Beings, ‘Supermen’ of Vulcan, ‘Supermen’ of Venus, of Mercury, of the Sun, will unite with this earth-existence. But if human beings persist in nothing but opposition to them, earth-existence will pass over into chaos in the course of the next few thousand years.

It will be quite possible for the men of earth, if they so wish, to develop a more and more automatic form of intellect—but that can also happen amid conditions of barbarism. Full and complete manhood, however, cannot come to expression in such a form of intellect, and men will have no relationship to the Beings who would fain come towards them in earth-existence. And all those Beings of whom men have such an erroneous conception because the shadowy intellect can only grasp the mineral nature, the crudely material nature in the minerals, plants and animals, nay even in the human kingdom itself—all these thoughts which have no reality will in a trice become substantial realities when the moon unites again with the earth. And from the earth there will spring forth a terrible brood of beings, a brood of automata of an order of existence lying between the mineral and the plant kingdoms, and possessed of an overwhelming power of intellect.

This swarm will seize upon the earth, will spread over the earth like a network of ghastly, spider-like creatures, of an order lower than that of plant-existence, but possessed of overpowering wisdom. These spidery creatures will be all interlocked with one another, and in their outward movements they will imitate the thoughts that men have spun out of the shadowy intellect that has not allowed itself to be quickened by the new form of Imaginative Knowledge by Spiritual Science. All the thoughts that lack substance and reality will then be endowed with being.

The earth will be surrounded—as it is now with air and as it sometimes is with swarms of locusts—with a brood of terrible spider-like creatures, half-mineral, half-plant, interweaving with masterly intelligence, it is true, but with intensely evil intent. And in so far as man has not allowed his shadowy intellectual concepts to be quickened to life, his existence will be united not with the Beings who have been trying to descend since the last third of the nineteenth century, but with this ghastly brood of half-mineral, half-plantlike creatures. He will have to live together with these spider-like creatures and to continue his cosmic existence within the order of evolution into which this brood will then enter.

This is a destiny that is very emphatically part of human evolution upon the earth, and it is quite well known today by many of those who try to hold humanity back from the knowledge of Spiritual Science. For there are men who are actually conscious allies of this process of the entanglement of earth-existence. We must no longer allow ourselves to be shocked by descriptions of this kind. Such facts are the background of what is often said today by people who out of old traditions still have some consciousness of these things and who then see fit to surround them with a veil of mystery. But it is not right any longer for the process of the earthly evolution of humanity to be veiled in mystery. However great the resistance, these things must be said, for, as I constantly repeat, the acceptance or rejection of spiritual-scientific knowledge is a grave matter for all mankind.

I have been speaking today of a matter upon which we cannot form a lukewarm judgment, for it is part and parcel of the very texture of cosmic existence. The issue at stake is whether human beings will resolve in the present epoch to make themselves worthy to receive what the good Spirits who want to unite with men are bringing down from the cosmos, or whether men intend to seek their future cosmic existence within the tangled, spider-brood of their own shadowy thoughts. It is not enough today to speak in abstract terms of the need for Spiritual Science. The only thing to do is actually to show how thoughts become realities. Dreadfully abstract theories are hurled at men today, such, for example, as “Thoughts become things,” or similar phrases. Abstract statements of this kind altogether fail to convey the full and concrete reality. And the concrete reality is that the intellectual thoughts evolved inwardly by men today will in time to come creep over the earth like a spider's web wherein human beings will be enmeshed, if they will not reach out to a world lying beyond and above their shadowy thoughts and concepts.

We must learn to take in deepest earnestness such matters as were indicated at the conclusion of my lectures on the nature of colours, when I said that the science of colour must be lifted out of the realm of abstract physics into a region where the creative fantasy and feeling of the artist who understands the real nature of colour go hand-in-hand with a perception of the world illumined by Spiritual Science. We have seen how the nature of colour can be understood, how that which modern physics, with its unimaginative charts, casts down into the Ahrimanic world, can be lifted into the sphere of art, so that there can be established a theory of colours—remote, it is true, from the tenets of modern science, but able to provide a true foundation for artistic creation, if man will only receive it into his being.

And there is another thought, too, that must be taken very seriously. What do we find today all over the civilised world? Young students go into the hospitals or to universities to study science, and the constitution of the human being is explained to them. By studying the corpse they learn about the bones and the rest of the organism. By a series of abstract thoughts they are supposed to be able to acquaint themselves with the nature of man's being. But in this way it is only possible to learn something about the mineral part of the human organism. With this kind of science we can only learn about the part of man's being which has a significance from the time of the separation of the moon until its return, when the shadowy thoughts of modern times will become spidery creatures having a concrete existence.

A form of knowledge must develop which produces quite a different conception of the being of man, and it can be developed only by raising science to the level of artistic perception. We shall realise then that science as it is today is capable of grasping only the mineral nature, whether in the mineral kingdom itself or in the kingdoms of plant, animal and man. Even when applied to the plant kingdom, science must become a form of art, and still more so in the case of the animal kingdom. To think that the form and structure of an animal can be understood by the means employed by anatomists and physiologists is nonsense. And so long as we fail to realise that it is nonsense, the shadowy intellect cannot be transformed into a living, spiritual comprehension of the world. What is taught to young students today in so abstract a form in the universities must be transformed and must lead to a really artistic conception of the world. For the world of Nature itself creates as an artist. And until we realise that Nature is a world of creative art which can be understood only through artistic feeling, no healing will come into our picture of the world.

In the torture-chambers of mediaeval castles, people were shut into what was called the ‘iron virgin,’ where they were slowly spiked with iron teeth. This was a physical and more tangible procedure than that to which students in our day have to submit when they are taught anatomy and physiology and are told that in this way they are acquiring knowledge of the nature of man—but fundamentally it is the same kind of procedure. All that can be understood of the nature of man by such methods derives from an attitude of mind which is not unlike the attitude of those who were not averse from applying tortures in the Middle Ages. Students learn about the human being as he is when he has been dismembered—they are taught only about the mineral structure in man, about that part of his being which will one day be woven into the network of spider-like creatures extending over the earth.

It is a hard destiny that power should lie in the hands of men who regard the truest thoughts as absurdities and who scorn the impulses that are most inwardly and intimately bound up with the well-being of human evolution, with the whole mission of humanity in the world. It is a tragic state of things and we dare not shut our eyes to it. For it is only by realising the depth of such a tragedy that men will be brought to the point of resolving, each in his own place, to help the shadowy intellect to admit the spiritual world that is coming down from above in order that this intellect may be made fit for the conditions of future times. It is not right for the shadowy intellect to be driven down into an order of existence lower than that of the plants, into the brood of spidery creatures that will spread over the earth. Man's being needs to have reached a higher level of existence when, in the eighth millennium, women will become barren and the moon will unite once again with the earth. The earthly must then remain behind, with man directing and controlling it from outside like an object which he need not carry over with him into cosmic existence. Man must so prepare himself that he need not be involved in what must inevitably develop upon the surface of the earth in this way.

From pre-earthly existence man has descended to this earthly life. His birth from woman began with the departure of the moon, but this physical form of birth is only a passing episode in the great sweep of cosmic evolution and will be replaced by another. It is the phase which was destined to bring to man the feeling and consciousness of freedom, the self-completeness of individuality and personality. It is a phase by no means to be undervalued. It was necessary in the whole cosmic process, but it must not remain forever unchanged. Man must not give way to the easy course of assuming the existence of an abstract God, but bring himself to look concretely at things that are connected with his evolution. For his being of soul-and-spirit can only be inwardly stimulated when he really understands the nature of the concrete realities connected with the great epoch towards which his successive earthly lives are leading him.

That is what a true Spiritual Science tells us today. The human will is threatened with being deprived of spiritual impulses and with becoming involved in the spidery web that will creep over the earth. There are men in existence who imagine that they will gain their ends by promoting their own spiritual development and leaving the rest of their fellow-beings in a state of ignorance. But the vast majority live in complete unawareness of the terrible destiny that awaits them if they lend themselves to what an ancient form of spiritual knowledge called the “sixteen paths to corruption.” For just as there are many ways in which the shadowy intellect may be directed to the impulses and knowledge coming from the spiritual world, so naturally there are many ways in which varieties of the shadowy intellect will be able to unite with the spider-beings who will spin their web over the earth in times to come. Intellect will then be objectivised in the very limbs and tentacles of these spidery creatures, who in all their wonderful inter-weavings and caduceus-like convolutions will present an amazing network of intricate forms.

It is only by developing an inner understanding for what is truly artistic that man will be able to understand the realm that is higher than mineral existence—that realm of which we see an expression in the actual shaping and form of the surfaces of things in the world.

Goethe's theory of metamorphosis was a most significant discovery. The pedants of his day regarded it as dilettantism, and the same opinion prevails today. But in Goethe, clarity of insight and intelligence was combined with a faculty of vision which perceived Nature herself as an active expression of artistic creation. In connection with the animal world, Goethe only reached the point of applying this principle of metamorphosis to the forms of the vertebras and cranial bones. But the process whereby the forms of a previous existence are transformed, whereby the body of the earlier life is transformed into the head of the subsequent life—it is only by an inner understanding of this wonderfully artistic transformation of the radial bones into the spherical that we can truly perceive the difference between the head and the rest of the human structure. Without this insight we cannot perceive the inner, organic connection between the head and the rest of the human body.

But this is a form of art which is at the same time science. Whenever science fails to become art, it degenerates into sophistry a form of knowledge that hurls mankind into calamity so far as his cosmic existence is concerned. We see, therefore, how a true Spiritual Science points to the necessity for artistic insight and perception. This faculty was already alive in Goethe's soul and comes to expression in his hymn in prose, entitled Nature, written about the year 1780, and beginning: “Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by her ...” The ideas are woven together so wonderfully that the hymn is like the expression of a yearning to receive the Spirit from the cosmic All.

It can be said with truth that the development of the thoughts contained in Goethe's hymn to Nature would provide a dwelling-place for the Beings who would fain come down from the cosmos to the earth. But the barren conceptions of physiology and biology, the systematising of plant-life and the theories that were evolved during the nineteenth century—all the thoughts which, as I showed in the lectures on colour, have really nothing to do with the true nature of the plants—can awaken no real knowledge, nor can they get anywhere near the being of man. Hence the body of knowledge that is regarded today as science is essentially a product of Ahriman, leading man on towards earthly destruction and preventing him from entering the sphere which the Beings from beyond the earth have been trying to place within his reach since the last third of the nineteenth century.

To cultivate Spiritual Science is no abstract pursuit. To cultivate Spiritual Science means to open the doors to those influences from beyond the earth which have been seeking to come down to the earth since the last third of the nineteenth century. The cultivation of Spiritual Science is in very truth a cosmic event of which we ought to be fully conscious.

And so we survey the whole span of time from the separation until the return of the moon. The moon which, as we say, reflects the sunlight back to us, is in truth deeply connected with our existence. It separated itself from the earth in order that man might become a free being. But this period of time must be utilised by man in such a way that he does not prepare the material which, with the re-entry of the moon into the earth-sphere, would combine with the moon-substance to produce that new kingdom of which I have tried to give you a graphic picture.

Now and then there arises in human beings of our time a kind of foreboding of what will come about in the future. I do not know what meaning has been read into the chapter in Thus Spake Zarathustra, where Nietzsche writes of the ‘ugliest man’ in the ‘valley of death.’ It is a tragic and moving passage. Nietzsche, of course, had no concrete perception of the valley of death into which existence will be transformed when the spidery brood of which I have spoken spreads over the earth. Nevertheless, in the picture of this valley of death in Nietzsche's imagination there was a subconscious vision of the future, and within this valley of death he placed the figure of the ‘ugliest man.’ It was a kind of foreboding of what will happen if men continue to cultivate shadowy thoughts. For their destiny then will be that in hideous shape they will be caught up by the forces of the moon-existence as it comes down into the sphere of the earth and will become one with the brood of spidery creatures of which I have been speaking.

What purpose would be served by keeping these things secret today, as many people desire? To keep them secret would be to throw sand into the eyes of men. Much of what is spread over the world today under the name of spiritual teaching is nothing but a process of throwing sand into men's eyes so that no single event in history can be understood for what it really is. How many people realise today that events of fundamental and incisive importance are taking place? I have already spoken of these things. But how few are prepared really to enter into them! People prefer to shut their eyes to what is happening and to think that, after all, the events are not really of such great significance. Nevertheless, the signs of the times are unmistakable and must be understood.

This was what I wished to say in regard to the way in which the being of man upon the earth is connected with the cosmos.

• 1. Three lectures on Das Wesen der Farben, given at Dornach on May 6 – 8, 1921. Published in English as a book entitled “Colour” (new edition in preparation).

After the historical considerations we have undertaken, we shall explore today a few things about contemporary man. This will provide us with the possibility of observing more accurately the place of contemporary man in the whole course of time. We should be clear that in the way the human being stands before us as spiritual, soul, and bodily being, he is differently oriented in three directions. We see this already when we look at the human being purely outwardly. In his spirit, man goes through the world independently of outer phenomena, while in his soul he is not as independent of these outer phenomena. One need only consider certain relationships that are visible throughout life in order to discover how the real soul life has certain connections with the outer world. One can be depressed or uplifted in one's soul. Recall how you have often felt depressed in a dream, and how the root of this mood of depression had to be traced back to the irregularity of the breathing rhythm. One could say that this is merely an elementary example, and yet all soul life is never without a similar connection with the rhythmic life that we go through in the rhythm of our breathing, of our blood circulation, and the outer rhythmic life of the entire cosmos. Everything that takes place in the soul is connected with the world rhythm.

Whereas as spiritual beings we can feel highly independent of our environment, we cannot do the same regarding our soul life, for our soul life lies imbedded within the whole world rhythm.

Furthermore, we stand within universal world phenomena as bodily beings. Again, at first we may proceed from merely elementary examples. Man, as a bodily being, is heavy, that is to say, he has weight. Other merely mineral beings also have weight. Mineral beings, plant beings, animal beings, and the human being as a bodily being all partake in this universal weightiness, and we must actually lift ourselves above this universal weightiness when we wish to make the body a physical tool of the spiritual life. We have often mentioned that if it were only the physical weight of the brain that mattered, the weight would be so great (1300 to 1500 grams) that all the blood vessels lying underneath the brain would be crushed. The brain, however, is subject to the Archimedean principle, since it floats in the cerebrospinal fluid. It loses so much weight by floating in the cerebral fluid that it actually weighs only 20 grams and therefore presses on the vessels at the base of the brain with only these 20 grams. You can see from this that the brain actually strives much more upward than downward. It counteracts heaviness. It tears itself free of the universal gravity and thereby acts like any other body that is placed in water and loses as much of its weight as the weight of the displaced water.

You thus can see an interplay between our whole bodily being and the outer world. With our soul weavings we are not only integrated in a rhythm but are fully enmeshed in the outer physical life. If we stand on a given point of the earth, we press down upon that place; when we move to another point, we press down upon that new place. In our human body, we are as much physical beings as the physical beings of the other kingdoms of nature.

We therefore can say that with our spiritual being we are to some extent independent of the outer world; with our soul being we are part of the rhythm of the world; and with our bodily being we are part of the rest of the world as though we were not also soul and spirit. We must consider this distinction carefully, for we do not attain an understanding of the higher being of man if we do not look at this threefold relationship of the human being to his entire environment. Now, let us look for a moment at man's environment. In man's environment (I am now summarizing what we have considered over the course of many months from different viewpoints) we first have all that is ruled by natural laws. Picture the whole universe ruled by natural laws and, included in these natural laws, the totality of this visible, sense-perceptible world.

Simple consideration shows that we are dealing here only with the actual earthly world. Only foolhardy and unjustified hypotheses of physicists can maintain that the same natural laws we observe on the earth around us are also applicable in the extraterrestrial cosmos. I have often pointed out to you how surprised the physicists would be if they were able to ascend to the place where the sun is. Physicists regard the sun as something comparable to a large gas oven without walls, more or less like a burning gas. If one arrived at the place in the cosmos where the sun is, one would not find such a burning gas. Instead one would find something totally unlike what the physicists imagine. If this (sketching) encloses the space that normally we picture as taken up by the sun, not only are there none of the substances found on earth, but there is even an absence of what we call empty space. Imagine, to begin with, filled space. On earth you always have a filled space around you. If it is not filled by solid or liquid substances, it is permeated by air, or at least by warmth, light, and so on. In short, we are always dealing with filled space. You also know, however, that it is possible, at least approximately, to create an empty space by extracting the air from a container with an air pump.

Imagine we have a filled space that we will designate with the letter A, preceded by a plus sign: +A. Now, as we make this space emptier and emptier, A will become smaller and smaller, but as the space is still filled we continue to use the + sign. We can imagine—although this is not actually possible under earthly conditions, for we can render space only approximately empty—that it would be possible to produce a completely empty space. Then, in this part of space that we have made empty, there would only be space. I will designate this with 0. It has 0 content. Now, we can do with this space the same thing that you do with your wallet: if your wallet is filled with money, you can take more and more out until finally there is nothing in it. If you want to spend more money, you cannot take anything more out of your wallet, as it is already empty. You can, however, go into debt. You have -0 in your wallet if you incur debts. You can think of this space in the same way: it is not only empty but you could say that it exerts suction because there is less than 0 in it: -A. It can be said of this space exerting suction—which is not just empty but has a content, which is the opposite of being filled by matter—that it is occupied by that space which one must imagine as filled out by the sun. The sun therefore has an inward suction; it does not exert pressure like a gas. The sun space is filled with negative materiality.

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I only present this as an example in order for you to see that earthly lawfulness simply cannot be applied to the extraterrestrial cosmos. We must think of totally different relationships in the extraterrestrial cosmos from those we have learned to know in our environment on the earth. We must say that we are surrounded by lawfulness within earthly existence, and into this lawfulness is included the world of substances that is initially accessible to us. Now picture earthly existence. All you need to do is to picture the processes in the mineral world; place them before your soul, and you have that which, in so far as you see it, is completely encompassed by this lawfulness of earthly existence. Therefore we can say that the mineral world is encompassed by this lawfulness; yet something else is also encompassed by it. When we walk around, or even when we are carried around, in short when we act as objects in the physical world, we live in the same lawfulness as the mineral world. In relation to earthly lawfulness, it is immaterial whether we carry a stone around, whether it is moved, or whether a human being is carried around or moves himself; regarding this lawfulness, it is the same thing one way or the other. You need only consider that the only thing that comes into consideration regarding earthly lawfulness is a change in location of man's body, which he may, however, bring about himself. This is connected with other things. If you study only earthly lawfulness, what happens within the skin of man or what takes place in his soul can be quite irrelevant. Only the change in location within earthly space need be considered.

We thus can see that in addition to the mineral world there is the human being who has been moved (that is, outwardly moved). The only relationship of the outer world to man, in so far as that world is earthly and confronts our senses, is the relationship to the human being moved outwardly. If we seek any other relationship to man, we must at once refer to something else, and then we come to our extraterrestrial environment, for example, when we study the environment of the moon, that is, whatever emanates from the moon. It is a fact that many people are still aware of something of the effect of the moon on the earth. Many people believe in such effects of the moon on the earth, e.g., the connection of the phases of the moon with the quantity of rainfall. Learned people in our time consider this a superstition.

I have told you, some of you at least, of an amusing sequence of events that once took place in Leipzig. The unusual natural philosopher and aesthetician, Gustav Theodore Fechner, went so far as to write a book about the influence of the moon on weather conditions. He was a university colleague of the well-known botanist and natural scientist, Schleiden. Schleiden, as a modern materialist, was convinced, of course, that what his colleague Fechner was advancing about the influence of phases of the moon on the weather could only be based on superstition. In addition to the two scholars at the University of Leipzig there were also their wives, Frau Schleiden and Frau Fechner. At that time, the conditions were still so primitive that rain water needed to be collected for wash day. Frau Fechner said that she believed in what her husband had published concerning the influence of moon phases on the weather. She wanted to reach an agreement with Frau Professor Schleiden, who did not believe in what Fechner maintained, about when was the most efficient time to place out rain barrels in order to collect the most rain. Frau Fechner suggested that Frau Schleiden put out her barrels at different times, since according to Schleiden's opinion she should get just as much water as Frau Fechner. However, despite the fact that Frau Professor Schleiden considered the views of Professor Fechner to be exceedingly superstitious, she still chose to place her rain barrels out at the exact same times as Frau Fechner.

Now, the influence of the forces of other planetary bodies is less perceptible to our modern scientific consciousness. However, if one were to study more closely—as is to happen now in our scientific-physiological institute in Stuttgart—the line of growth followed on the stem by the leaves of plants, for example, one would find how each line is related to the movements of the planets, how these lines are, as it were, miniature pictures of the planetary movements. One thus would find that many things on the surface of the earth are comprehensible only when one knows the extraterrestrial and does not merely identify the extraterrestrial with the earthly, that is to say, when one presupposes that a lawfulness exists that is cosmic and not earthly.

We therefore can say that we have a second lawfulness within cosmic existence. Only when one begins to study these cosmic influences—and it is possible to do so quite empirically—will one have a true botany. Our plant world does not grow up out of the earth in the way conceived by a materialistic botany; rather it is pulled out by cosmic forces. What is pulled out in this way by cosmic forces in the process of growth is then permeated by the mineral forces that have saturated this cosmic plant structure so that it becomes visible to the senses. We thus can say firstly that the plant world is included in this cosmic lawfulness. Secondly, all that pertains to the inner movement of man—that is, a definitely physical movement, but within man—is included in this cosmic lawfulness (this is not as easy to establish as in the case of the plant world, because it achieves a certain independence from the rhythm of the outer processes; nevertheless, it imitates this rhythm inwardly). The outwardly moved human being, therefore, is included in the earthly lawfulness, but when you look upon your digestion, upon the movement of the nourishing substances in the digestive organs, when you look beyond merely the rhythm to the actual movement of the blood through the blood vessels—and there are many other things that move inwardly in man—you have a picture of what moves inside of the human being regardless of whether he is standing still or walking about. This cannot be integrated into the earthly lawfulness without further consideration but rather must be integrated into the cosmic lawfulness in the same way as are the forms and also the movements of the plants; in the human being, however, these forms and movements proceed much more slowly than they do in the plants. We therefore can say that the inner movements of man are also included in the cosmic lawfulness.

Now you could consider taking the cosmos into undefined distances; somehow in this way everything has an influence upon the life that develops on the earth's surface. Yet if these were the only two lawfulnesses that existed—that is, the earthly and cosmic lawfulnesses, in the way I have presented them to you—then nothing would exist on the earth but the mineral and plant kingdoms, for the human being, of course, would not be able to exist there. If the human being were present, he could move outwardly and the inner movements could take place, but this of course would not yet make up a human being. Neither would animals be able to be present on the earth under such conditions; in reality, only minerals and plants could exist. Cosmic lawfulness and cosmic content of being must be penetrated and permeated by something that is no longer a part of space, by something concerning which we cannot speak of space at all.

Naturally, everything that is included in the cosmic and earthly lawfulnesses must be thought of as existing in space; now, however, we must speak of something that cannot be thought of as existing in space, although it permeates the whole of cosmic lawfulness. Just imagine how in the human being the movements, that is his inner movements, are connected with his rhythm. To begin with, all that we call the movement of the nourishing substances within us merges into the movement of the blood. However, this movement doesn't take place in such a way that the blood simply flows through the veins as nutritive juice. Not only does the blood itself move rhythmically, but beyond that this rhythm has a definite relationship to the breathing rhythm through the consumption of oxygen by the blood. We have within us this dual rhythm. I pointed out once how the inner soul lawfulness is based upon the 4:1 ratio of the blood rhythm to the breathing rhythm in such a way that meter and verse measure are actually dependent upon it.

We thus see that what takes place as inner movement is related to rhythm, and rhythm, as we have said, is related to the soul life of the human being. In a similar way we must bring what we have in the movement of the stars into a relationship to the world soul. We therefore can speak of a third lawfulness within the world soul in which is encompassed: 1) the animal world, and 2) all the rhythmic processes related to the bodily human being. These rhythmic processes within man have a relationship to the whole world rhythm. We have already spoken about this, but I would like to bring it up again in relation to our further considerations here. You know that the human being takes approximately eighteen breaths per minute. Multiply that by sixty and you have the number of breaths per hour; multiply that total by twenty-four and you have the total for one day, approximately 25,920 breaths for the average human being in the course of a day. This number of breaths per day thus forms the day/night rhythm in the human being. We also know that the spring equinox moves through the constellations bit by bit each year, so that the point at which the sun rises in spring moves forward in the heavens. The length of time that it takes the sun to arrive again at its original point is 25,920 years. This is the rhythm of our universe, then, and our own breathing rhythm over twenty-four hours is a miniature picture of it. Hence, with our rhythm we are woven into the world rhythm, with our soul into the lawfulness of the world soul.

Now, there is a fourth lawfulness that lies at the basis of the entire universe as well as of the three previously mentioned lawfulnesses, namely, that within which we feel included when we become conscious of ourselves as spiritual human beings. In this process of becoming conscious of ourselves as spiritual human beings, we achieve clarity about these facts. At first we may not comprehend this or that about the world and, in fact, because of today's intellectualism, which has become a universal cultural force, very little indeed is comprehended. At a certain stage in our human evolution, we initially comprehend very little with our spirit. It is inherent, however, in the self-recognition of the spirit that it says to itself that as it evolves no boundaries can be imposed on its evolution. The spirit must be able to develop into the universe through knowing, feeling, and willing. By bearing the spirit within us, then, we must relate ourselves to a fourth lawfulness within the world spirit.

1.) Lawfulness within earthly existence
a) The mineral world b) The externally moved human being

2.) Lawfulness within cosmic existence
a) The plant world b) The inner movements of the human being

3.) Lawfulness within the world soul
a) The animal world b) The rhythmic processes

4.) Lawfulness within the world spirit
a) The human being b) The nerve-sense processes

Only now do we arrive at the real human being encompassed therein, for a human being could not really have existed merely within the other three lawfulnesses. Only now do we find the human being, but specifically that part of him that is his nerve-sense apparatus, all of what is, to begin with, the physical bearer of the spiritual life, the nerve-sense processes. When we look at the human being we consider first the entire human being in whom the head is the main bearer of the nerve-sense organs; then we consider the head itself. A human being is human, so to speak, by virtue of the fact that he has a head; the head is the most human part of man. In the human being as a whole and in the head, we already encounter the human being twice.

Now, when we consider what I have just described as a summary of what we have discussed in the last few weeks, it gives us to begin with a picture of the human being's connection with his environment; not merely the spatial environment, however, for the spatial world is related only to the first two lawfulnesses; we also have to do with the world that is non-spatial, which is related to the third and fourth lawfulnesses. It has become increasingly difficult for the contemporary human being to conceive that something could exist not within space or that sometimes it is not meaningful to speak in terms of space even when speaking of realities. Without such a conception, however, one can never rise to a spiritual science. If one wishes to remain within the confines of space, one cannot arrive at spiritual entities.

Last time I spoke here I told you about the world conception of the ancient Greeks in order to point out how in other eras the human being looked at the world differently from today. This picture of which I have just spoken to you can become evident to the human being in the present era; he arrives at it if, simply and without prejudice—that is undisturbed by the waste products sometimes offered by contemporary science—he observes the world.

I must add a few things to what I told you previously about the ancient Greek world conception so that we are able to see its connection with what I wished to present to you with this scheme. You see, if a human being is very clever he may say that the spatial world consists of some seventy-odd elements that have varying atomic weights and so on; those elements, he maintains, enter into syntheses; one can perform analyses on them, and so forth, and, based on chemical connections and chemical separations, one can explain what happens in the world regarding those seventy-odd elements. That they could be traced back to some earlier origin should not occupy us at the moment. In general, those seventy-odd elements are considered valid today in popular science.

A Greek—not in a contemporary incarnation, in which he would, of course, think like everyone else today if he were well educated—an ancient Greek, let us say, if he could appear in our present-day world, would be prompted to say, “Well, this is all very well and good, these seventy-odd elements, but one does not get very far with them; they actually tell us nothing about the world. We used to think quite differently about the world; we conceived of the world as consisting of fire, air, water, and earth.”

A contemporary person would reply, “That is a childish way to comprehend matters. We are far beyond that. We do, in fact, accept the aggregate states; in the gaseous aggregates we grant you the validity of the aeriform, in the fluid aggregates the watery, and in the solid aggregates the earthy. Warmth, however, does not mean at all the same thing to us as it does to you. We have moved beyond such childish notions. What constitutes the world for us we find in our seventy-odd elements.”

The ancient Greek would respond to this, “That is very nice, but fire—or warmth—air, water, earth are something entirely different from what you conceive. You do not understand in the least what we thought about it.”

At first our contemporary scholar would be curiously affected by such comments and would have the impression that he was encountering a human being from a more childlike stage of cultural development. The ancient Greek, because he would be immediately aware of what the modern scholar had in his head, would probably say, "What you call your seventy-two elements all belong to what we call earth; it is very nice that you differentiate it and analyze it further, but for us the properties that you recognize in your seventy-two elements belong to the earth. Of water, air, and fire you understand nothing; of those you have no conception.”

This Greek would continue—you can see that I do not choose an Oriental from an ancient cultural period but a knowledgeable Greek—“What ,you say about your seventy-two elements with their syntheses and analyses is all very nice, but to what do you believe it is related? It is all related merely to the physical human being once he has died and lies in the grave! There his substances, his entire physical body, undergo the processes that you learn to recognize in your physics and chemistry. What it is possible for you to learn within the structural relationships of your seventy-odd elements is not related at all to the living human being. You know nothing of the living human being because you know nothing of water, air, and fire. It is necessary first to know something about water, air, and fire in order then to know something about the living human being. With what is encompassed by your chemistry you know only what happens to man when he is dead and lying in the grave, the processes undergone by the corpse. That is all you come to know by means of your seventy-odd elements.”

If the ancient Greek went any further than this in this discussion he would not be a great success with our contemporary scholar, though he could go to the trouble of clarifying his views in the following way: “Your seventy-two elements are all what we consider earth. We may simply be regarding a general quality, but even if you analyze it further, you arrive merely at a more specific knowledge, and a more specific knowledge will not enable you to penetrate into the depths. If you acknowledged what we designate as water, however, you would have an element in which, as soon as it is weaving and living, earthly conditions are no longer active alone; water, in its entire activity, is subject to cosmic conditions.”

The ancient Greek's understanding of water was not limited merely to its physical characteristics but extended to everything that influences the earth as lawfulness from the cosmos, in which the movement of the water substance is encompassed. Within this movement of water substance lives the plant element. In distinguishing whatever is in the living and weaving water element from everything earthly, the ancient Greek saw in this living-weaving element the whole lawfulness of the life of vegetation, which is encompassed by this watery element. We thus can place this watery element schematically somewhere on the earth, but in such a way that it is determined from out of the cosmos. Then we can picture the mineral element, the actual earthly element, sprouting from below upward in a variety of ways, permeating the plants, infiltrating them, as it were, with earthly elements (see sketch).

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What the ancient Greek thought about the watery element, however, was something essentially new, and it was for him a quite definite perception. The Greek did not view this conceptually; rather, he saw it in pictures, in imaginations. Of course we must go back to Platonic times (for Aristotle corrupted this way of viewing), even to pre- Platonic times, in order to find how the truly knowing Greek saw in imaginations what lives in the watery element and actually bears the vegetation, how he related everything to the cosmos. Now, however, the ancient Greek would continue, “What lies in the grave after a human being has died, what is lawfully penetrated by the structural laws that work in your seventy-odd elements, is inserted between birth—or let us say conception—and death into the etheric life working from the cosmos. This etheric life permeates you as a living human being; you will not understand any of this if you do not speak of water as a separate element, if you do not regard the plant world as being tethered in the watery element, if you do not see these pictures, these imaginations.”

“We Greeks,” he would say, “certainly spoke about the etheric body of the human being, but we were not spinning the etheric body out of our fantasy. Rather we said: if one watches in spring the sprouting, greening plant world gradually and variously coloring itself, if one sees this plant world bearing fruit in summer and observes the leaves withering in autumn, if one follows this course of the year in the life of vegetation and has an inner understanding for it, what then appears before the eye of the soul connects with one just as strongly as one is connected with the mineral world by the bread and meat one eats. In a way analogous to eating one connects with what is outwardly visible in the plant world during the course of the year. Then if one penetrates oneself with the perception that everything happening in the course of twenty-four hours is like a miniature-image of this, repeating itself through one's entire life, then we have within us a miniature image of what constitutes the surrounding world out there from the watery, etheric element, from the cosmos. Whenever we regard this outer world with true understanding, we can say that what is out there also lives within us. We say that the spinach grows out there; I pick it, cook it, and eat it, and thereby have it in my stomach, that is, in my physical body; in the same way we can say, out there, in the course of the year, lives and weaves an etheric life, and that I have within myself.”

The Greek was not conceiving of the physical water; rather, what lay at the basis of his conception was what he grasped in his imagination and brought into living connection with the human being. Thus he would say further to our contemporary scholar, “You study the corpse that lies in the grave, because you study only the earth—your seventy-odd elements are only earth. We studied the living human being; in our time we studied the human being who is not yet dead, who grows and moves out of an inner activity. That is impossible without rising to the other elements.”

Thus it was with the ancient Greeks, and were we to go still further into the past, the airy element and then the fire or warmth element would meet us in full clarity. We will also consider these later. And that is what is so characteristic of our cultural evolution since the first third of the fifteenth century, that the understanding for these connections has simply been lost; thereby the understanding for the living human being was also lost. We study only the corpse in science today. We have often heard that this phase in the history of humanity's evolution had to come, had to come for other reasons, namely, so that humanity could undergo the phase of the evolution of freedom. However, in the process a certain understanding of nature and the human being has been lost since the first third of the fifteenth century. The understanding of natural science up to now has limited itself to this one element, earth, and now we must find the way back. We must find our way back through Imagination to the element of water, through Inspiration to the element of air, through Intuition to the element of fire.

What we have seen and interpreted as an ascent in higher cognition—the ascent from ordinary object cognition through Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition—is fundamentally also an ascent to the elements. We will speak further about this in two days.

Two days ago we spoke of the time in which people still had a kind of inward knowledge. We gave as an example what an ancient Greek would have thought about the contemporary scientific world conception. Then I tried to show you how such a Greek, from the point of view of Imaginative cognition, would have described what we are accustomed to calling the human etheric body in relation to the element of water.

I said that Imaginative cognition would reveal a certain relationship of the entire activity of water, that surging and weaving of the water element, the striving toward the periphery, the sinking down toward the earth, a relationship of these forces of unfolding toward the periphery and toward the center with the shapes, with the pictures of the plant element in its individual forms. We thus arrive here at a concrete formulation of the content of the Imaginative world, at least one part of the Imaginative world. Such a knowledge can only be attained practically for human perception if a development is striven for, as it has been described in my book, How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, whose goal is Imaginative cognition.

Even with Imaginative cognition, however, one remains unacquainted with what, in an earlier world conception, was called the element of air. This airy element, such as it was conceived in more ancient times, can be penetrated only by so-called Inspired cognition. If you attempt to clarify the following to yourself, you will approach this Inspired cognition, this experience of the airy element. I have often mentioned to you that the human being today is studied quite superficially. Just call to mind how anatomical and physiological pictures of the human being are made today. Sharp outlines are drawn around the inner organs—heart, lungs, liver, and so on—and certainly these well-defined contours, these boundary lines of heart, lung, and liver, have a certain justification. In using such lines, however, we draw the human being as though he were through and through a solid body, which he really is not. Only the slightest portion of the human being consists of solid mineral substances. Even if we were to take a maximum, as it were, we could consider at most a mere 8 per cent as solid in the human being; 92 per cent of the human being is a column of fluid. Man is not solid at all; the solid is only deposited within the human being. There is very little consciousness of this fact at present among the pupils of physiology, anatomy, and so on. We do not learn to recognize the watery human being, the fluid human being, when we draw him with solid boundaries to his organs, for the fluid human being is something that is in a continual streaming. His organism is something that moves continually .within itself, and into this fluid organism the airy organism now inserts itself. The air streams in, uniting with the substances within and, if I may describe it in this way, stirring them up.

By means of the fact that the human being has this airy element within, he actually forms a complete unity with the outer world. The air that is now within me will presently be outside me again. We cannot really speak of the human being as enclosed within his skin if we observe him with reference to this third element, the airy element. And even less could we speak of him as living contained within his skin if we contemplated him with reference to the warmth element, the element of fire. One cannot say that man is a self-contained being.

Now, however, let us take the entire human being, that is, the human being who is organized not only in the solid element but also in the fluid, airy, and warmth elements, in a configured, moving warmth. Let us compare this entire human being with the human being as he is when he is asleep, with his soul and spirit outside the physical and etheric bodies. What permeates the human being as soul and spirit from awakening to falling asleep is simply not there in the time between falling asleep and awakening. In that time the human being is in another world that is penetrated by another lawfulness. We must ask ourselves, now, which lawfulness permeates the world in which man finds himself between falling asleep and awakening.

Yesterday we mentioned four kinds of lawfulnesses: first, the lawfulness within the earthly world; second the lawfulness within the cosmic world; third, the lawfulness within the world soul; and fourth, the lawfulness within the world spirit. Where, then, is the human being with his soul and spirit—or with his soul aspect and his I—between falling asleep and awakening? A consideration of what we have said up to now will show that the astral body and I at this time (between falling asleep and awakening) are in the realm of the world soul and the world spirit.

1. Lawfulness within the earthly world.
2. Lawfulness within the cosmic world.
3. Lawfulness within the world soul.	}	AstralBody,I
4. Lawfulness within the world spirit.

We must take very seriously something we mentioned two days ago, that with the first two worlds, the earthly and the cosmic, we have exhausted the whole realm of space. By entering the realm of world soul and world spirit, we have already gone beyond the realm of space. This is something we must dwell upon within our souls again and again: every time the human being sleeps, he is led not only outside his physical body but beyond ordinary space. He is led into a world that should not be confused at all with the world that can be perceived by the senses. All lawfulness that lies at the basis of the rhythmical human being—the human being whose fluid and also whose airy element is organized through rhythm—comes from this world. Rhythm manifests itself in space, but the source of rhythm, the lawfulness that produces rhythm, streams into every point in space from extra-spatial depths. It is regulated everywhere by a real world that lies beyond the sense world. If we are confronted with that wonderful reciprocal play that takes place within the human rhythms, through breathing and the pulse, we actually perceive something in this rhythm that is regulated from extra-spatial spiritual depths and brought into the world in which the human being also finds himself as physical man. It is impossible to understand the airy element if we do not reach such a concrete understanding of the rhythmical expression of man within this airy element.

If one grasps with Imagination what I described two days ago as the weaving and being of the plant world and, parallel with this, the weaving and being of the human etheric body, then one remains still within the world in which one normally resides. One must think of oneself as being transported from the earth, so to speak, and poured out into the entire cosmos. Then, however, in passing into the airy element, one must remove oneself from space. Then there must be the possibility of knowing oneself in a world that is no longer spatial but that exists only in time, a world in which only the time element holds a certain significance. In the times in which such things were still livingly perceived, it was seen that what belonged to such worlds could really be observed in the way that the spiritual played into human activity through rhythm. I pointed out to you how the ancient Greek formulated the hexameter: three pulse beats with the caesura, which gives a breath, and three more pulse beats with the caesura, or with the end of the verse, which gives the full hexameter. In two breaths one has the corresponding eight pulse beats. The harmonious resounding of the pulse beats with the breathing was shaped artistically in the recitation of the Greek hexameter. The way in which the spiritual, super-sensible world permeates the human being, how it permeates the blood circulation, the blood rhythm, synthesizes four pulse beats, four pulse rhythms, to one breathing rhythm—all this was reflected in every speech formation that is in the hexameter. All original strivings to build verse derive from this rhythmic organization of the human being.

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The world from which this rhythmic self-activity derives becomes real for the human being only when he becomes conscious during sleep. The activity in which the sleeping, but conscious human being then lives plays into this rhythm. Ordinary everyday consciousness remains unconscious of what lies at the foundation of this, and this is even more the case with the ordinary, present-day scientific consciousness. If this does become conscious, however, there begins to appear before the human being something more than what I described yesterday as the surging, weaving plant world. Something appears that is not a picture merely of the ordinary animal world, which must be spatial; there appears now a very clear consciousness, one which, however, can appear only outside the body and never within it, a consciousness whose content consists of the concrete pictures out of which the shapes of the animals in space are formed. Just as our human rhythmic activity streams in from the extra-spatial, so do the shapes that then organize themselves into the different animals stream in from the extra-spatial.

The first thing that is experienced if one undergoes consciously what otherwise is gone through only unconsciously between falling asleep and awakening, immersing oneself in the world that is the source of our rhythm, is that the animal world in all its forms becomes comprehensible. The animal world in all its forms cannot be explained by means of outer physical foundations or forces. If a zoologist or a morphologist believes that the form of the lion, the tiger, the butterfly, the beetle, is able to be explained by means of something found in physical space, he is very much fooling himself. In physical space one can never find an explanation for the different forms of the animals. One encounters the explanation in the way I have described it only if one enters the third lawfulness, the lawfulness of the world soul.

Now, I would like to return to the conversation I presented two days ago between the ancient Greek and the modern scholar who knows everything—that is to say, although occasionally he admits to not knowing everything, he still pretends that everything is able to be explained along lines similar to his own way of thinking. The ancient Greek would say, “Nothing at all can be explained by your method, though it has a kind of logic. You list all kinds of abstract conceptual forms, so-called categories—being, becoming, having, and so on. This logic is something that is supposed to represent the lawfulness of the concepts, the ideas.” (I am thinking now of a Greek of the pre-Socratic age, a Greek of the time from which the philosophies of Thales, Heraclitus, and Anaxagoras emanated, of which only a portion survives today.) “What you call logic,” this Greek would say, “was first constructed by a human being, a human being who really no longer knew much about the mysteries of the world. This logic was first made by Aristotle, after he had thoroughly applied his mundane intellect to Platonism. Truly Aristotle was a great man, but he was also a great Philistine who completely corrupted the actual logic, who made real logic into an ephemeral web that is related to reality in the same way as a thinly spun phantom is related to something densely real. The real logic,” our ancient Greek, being a scientist in his way, would have said, “the real logic encompasses all those forms that become outward and spatial in the animal world and that one discovers on becoming conscious in the time between falling asleep and awakening. That is logic, that is the real content of the logical consciousness.”

In the animal world there exists nothing but that which exists also in the human being, but in the human being it is spiritualized and thus he can think. He can think the logical formulas that swim in the outer world in space and become animals. When, between awakening and falling asleep, we manipulate our conceptual forms in ordinary consciousness, connecting one concept with another, it is so that we actually do the same thing in the realm of ideas that the outer world does in shaping the various forms of the animals. Just as it is possible to observe one's etheric when turning one's gaze to the plants and thinking of this plant world as embedded in the element of water, so, in the same way, one's soul world—or it can be called the astral world—can be comprehended if one permeates oneself with this living weaving that becomes conscious between falling asleep and awakening, understanding thereby the outer shapes of the animal world. One must then think of one's own shaping of the world of ideas as woven into the rhythm of the airy element.

You can make yourself a quite concrete mental image from the many things I have pointed out to you concerning the human being. Take the following process quite concretely: you breathe in, and the air follows the well-known pathway to the lungs. In breathing in, however, the inhaled air presses upon the space containing the spinal cord and spinal fluid. This fluid surrounding the spinal cord rhythmically courses through the subarachnoid space of the brain. The cerebral fluid comes into activity, and this activity is the activity of thought. In reality, thought rides on the breath, which is transmitted to the cerebro-spinal fluid, and this fluid in which the brain floats transmits the rhythmical beat of the breath directly onto the brain. In the brain live the impressions of the senses, the impressions of the eyes, the ears, through nerve-sense activity. The breathing rhythm comes into confrontation with what lives in the brain from the senses, and in this confrontation develops the interplay between sensation and thought activity, that formal thought activity which outwardly has its life in the animal forms. It is this thought activity, which is brought about by the breathing rhythm, transmitting itself to the cerebro-spinal fluid in the subarachnoid space, that commingles with what lives in the brain through the senses. 'Residing there is everything that becomes active in us in the form of ideas out of the rhythm.

What is essential, my dear friends, is that you attempt gradually to penetrate into the way in which the spiritual plays into the physical world. The great cultural defect of our time is that we have a science that arrives at the spirit in abstract forms, in purely intellectual forms, whereas the spiritual must be conceived in its creative element, for otherwise the material world remains like something hard, unconquered, outside the spiritual. We must penetrate into how this element of the third and fourth lawfulnesses plays concretely into what we ourselves carry out.

It is one of the most sublime things that can become clear to us if we recognize the actual inner basis that can prevail in every breathing rhythm—what is not fulfilled but what could be fulfilled each time an inhalation plays into the cerebro-spinal fluid. Now comes the recoil, the response: the cerebro-spinal fluid is again pressed down through the subarachnoid space of the spine, and there is an exhalation. This is a surrender once again to the world, a merging with the world. However, in this I-becoming/merging-with-the-world lies in essence what is expressed in the breathing rhythm.

This is the way one must speak if one wishes to speak of the reality that is meant when speaking of the element of air, whereas in speaking about the earth one simply encompasses everything that is included in our seventy-odd chemical elements. You see, what becomes a corpse is subject to the lawfulness of the seventy-two elements. What brings this dead body into movement, however, so that it can grow, can digest, is something that streams in from the cosmos. Then what penetrates this organism so that it not only grows and is able to digest but unfolds itself continually in a rhythmical activity, in the pulse, in the breathing rhythm, comes from an extra-spatial world. We study this extra-spatial world in the air element, for that is where it reveals itself, just as we study the cosmic—and not the earthly—world in the water element, for that is where the cosmic is revealed. What is revealed to the present-day chemist or physicist derives only from the earth element differentiated in itself.

We can also find the transition to the warmth element or element of fire. This is really possible only in the moment that is a practical result when a human being attains the ability not only to move out of his body consciously but to immerse himself with this consciousness into other beings. There is something else to consider here. One may already have had the ability for a long time to move out of one's body; if a little egotism is retained regarding the world, however, one is able to grasp everything of which I have spoken up to now, but one cannot really immerse oneself in this outer world. One cannot surrender oneself to this outer world. If, however, elements of true super-sensible love can be added during an immersion into that world in which one lives between falling asleep and awakening, then one learns to recognize by experience the element of warmth or fire. Only then does one recognize the true being of man, for what is looked at outwardly through the senses is only a semblance of man, is the human being from the other side, from the side of semblance.

If one ascends to the element of water, one has, to begin with, the experience of the etheric being of man dissolving. The etheric being of man becomes, you could say, a miniature picture of winter, summer, autumn, and so on. If one comes to the element of air, one becomes aware of a self-sustaining, rhythmical movement. The contained human being, the human being as he is eternal man, can be known only within the element of warmth. There everything comes into connection once again: the weaving movement of the water element and the rhythms of the air come together. They harmonize and deharmonize themselves in the warmth element, in the fire element, and there one can recognize the real being of man. There one is essentially in the fourth lawfulness, the lawfulness of the world spirit.

In hearing about an earlier science of the four elements—earth, water, air, and fire—one should not picture that we have progressed so wonderfully far with our modern science. One should rather picture that an altogether different consciousness existed concerning the roots of the human being in super-sensible depths. Something was known, therefore, of the various relationships of the earth element to this super-sensible. The earth element is, as it were, entirely outside the sphere of the super-sensible. The water element already begins to approach it; this water element is already much more closely connected with the world of spheres spread in cosmic space than with what the earth itself is. We leave space altogether, however, if we look for the source of what is within us as the air rhythm—and therefore our air organization—for regarding our air organization we are rhythmicizing, derhythmicizing, and so on. Finally we come to the universally extraspatial, to that which overcomes time, when we come into the fire element, into the warmth element. Only here do we come to recognize the entire, self-contained human being. One really finds this, though in a corrupted form, if one rediscovers—and it is already necessary today that one rediscover it—the literature that appeared before the fifteenth century.

There appeared a few years ago the work of a Swedish scientist concerning alchemy. This Swedish scientist read about a process described by an alchemist, and he commented, “If you investigate this process today, it turns out to be pure nonsense; you cannot picture anything of what they are saying.” It is easy to grasp that the chemist of today, even the Swede, who is somewhat less prejudiced than the Central European, takes the expressions in which are clothed what once existed in the corrupted literature of ancient times and then finds that nothing emerges from them. I looked up the process that the good Swedish scientist could not understand in the same literature that he had read: the process described there was actually an aspect of the embryonic process, of embryonic development in the human being! This became clear very soon. One must be able to read such matters, however. The modern scientist reads in such a way that he applies the expressions and vocabulary that he has learned from his chemistry text. He puts up his flasks and test tubes and imitates the process described: nonsense! What he has read is actually describing a portion of the process that takes place in the mother's body during embryonic development. You thus can see the abyss that has appeared between what the modern scientist is able to read and what was once meant.

All things that were described in the ancient literature, however, have also been described again today under the influence of the concepts of a new spiritual science. If these writings are not rediscovered, one cannot read them at all. They existed in an entirely different way from the way we discover them today. They existed in an instinctive, atavistic way, but they did exist, and humanity lifted itself, as it were, beyond an understanding of merely the earth element. We must find entrance again into the elements that do not explain to us merely the corpse of the human being but the whole human being, the living human being. For this it is necessary that one learn to take quite seriously within our civilization what is presented in the question of pre-existence.

When the concept of pre-existence was cast out of Western cultural evolution, selfless research was actually cast out as well. When preachers today preach about immortality, as I have indicated often before, they appeal basically to human egotism. It is known that man feels uncomfortable, feels afraid, of the cessation of life. Of course, life does not actually cease, but in speaking about immortality one appeals not to the forces of cognition but to man's fear of death, to man's will to continue living when the body is taken from him; in other words, man's egotism is appealed to. This is not possible when one speaks about preexistence. It is actually inconsequential to people today—from the point of view of their egotism—whether or not they lived before they were born or conceived. They are living now, and of that they are certain, and they are not very concerned, therefore, with pre-existence. Rather they are concerned about post-existence, for although they are now living, they do not know whether they will continue to live after death. This is connected with their egotism. Since they are already living, however, they say to themselves—perhaps only unconsciously or instinctively if they have not trained in cognition—“I am living now, and even if I didn't exist before my birth or conception, it makes no difference to me if I only began to live then, as long as I can continue to live from now on.”

This is the mood on the basis of which feelings today are called forth, through which human beings become enthusiastic about immortality. In the known languages, therefore, we have a word for immortality that directs us to the eternity at life's end, but we do not have a word, in the ordinary languages of our culture, for “unbornness.” This is something we must gradually acquire. Such a concept would speak more to cognition, would speak more to a lack of egotism, to a cognition of man that is free of egotism. This must be appealed to once again. Furthermore, cognition must become permeated by morality, by ethics. Unless our laboratory table becomes a kind of altar, and unless our synthesizing and analyzing become a kind of art of the spirit, and we become conscious that in doing this or that we participate in world evolution, our cultural evolution will not progress. We will come into a frightful descent if wider and wider circles do not perceive that one must achieve cognition free of egotism, a morally permeated cognition that must overcome today's analysis and synthesis, which do not take the higher worlds into any account. One must come to understand again something of the rhythm that plays into our lives, something of what plays into warmth. Into the warmth plays the moral element; and in the simple variations of warmth, varying intensities of warmth, there is in reality a world-permeating morality in which the human being develops himself. All this must gradually become conscious in humanity. This is not merely what I would like to call an idealistic whim demanding of us to interpret the signs of our times; rather, the signs of the times themselves speak of this deepening toward the super-sensible that must be attempted.

Two days ago we spoke of the time in which people still had a kind of inward knowledge. We gave as an example what an ancient Greek would have thought about the contemporary scientific world conception. Then I tried to show you how such a Greek, from the point of view of Imaginative cognition, would have described what we are accustomed to calling the human etheric body in relation to the element of water.

I said that Imaginative cognition would reveal a certain relationship of the entire activity of water, that surging and weaving of the water element, the striving toward the periphery, the sinking down toward the earth, a relationship of these forces of unfolding toward the periphery and toward the center with the shapes, with the pictures of the plant element in its individual forms. We thus arrive here at a concrete formulation of the content of the Imaginative world, at least one part of the Imaginative world. Such a knowledge can only be attained practically for human perception if a development is striven for, as it has been described in my book, How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, whose goal is Imaginative cognition.

Even with Imaginative cognition, however, one remains unacquainted with what, in an earlier world conception, was called the element of air. This airy element, such as it was conceived in more ancient times, can be penetrated only by so-called Inspired cognition. If you attempt to clarify the following to yourself, you will approach this Inspired cognition, this experience of the airy element. I have often mentioned to you that the human being today is studied quite superficially. Just call to mind how anatomical and physiological pictures of the human being are made today. Sharp outlines are drawn around the inner organs—heart, lungs, liver, and so on—and certainly these well-defined contours, these boundary lines of heart, lung, and liver, have a certain justification. In using such lines, however, we draw the human being as though he were through and through a solid body, which he really is not. Only the slightest portion of the human being consists of solid mineral substances. Even if we were to take a maximum, as it were, we could consider at most a mere 8 per cent as solid in the human being; 92 per cent of the human being is a column of fluid. Man is not solid at all; the solid is only deposited within the human being. There is very little consciousness of this fact at present among the pupils of physiology, anatomy, and so on. We do not learn to recognize the watery human being, the fluid human being, when we draw him with solid boundaries to his organs, for the fluid human being is something that is in a continual streaming. His organism is something that moves continually .within itself, and into this fluid organism the airy organism now inserts itself. The air streams in, uniting with the substances within and, if I may describe it in this way, stirring them up.

By means of the fact that the human being has this airy element within, he actually forms a complete unity with the outer world. The air that is now within me will presently be outside me again. We cannot really speak of the human being as enclosed within his skin if we observe him with reference to this third element, the airy element. And even less could we speak of him as living contained within his skin if we contemplated him with reference to the warmth element, the element of fire. One cannot say that man is a self-contained being.

Now, however, let us take the entire human being, that is, the human being who is organized not only in the solid element but also in the fluid, airy, and warmth elements, in a configured, moving warmth. Let us compare this entire human being with the human being as he is when he is asleep, with his soul and spirit outside the physical and etheric bodies. What permeates the human being as soul and spirit from awakening to falling asleep is simply not there in the time between falling asleep and awakening. In that time the human being is in another world that is penetrated by another lawfulness. We must ask ourselves, now, which lawfulness permeates the world in which man finds himself between falling asleep and awakening.

Yesterday we mentioned four kinds of lawfulnesses: first, the lawfulness within the earthly world; second the lawfulness within the cosmic world; third, the lawfulness within the world soul; and fourth, the lawfulness within the world spirit. Where, then, is the human being with his soul and spirit—or with his soul aspect and his I—between falling asleep and awakening? A consideration of what we have said up to now will show that the astral body and I at this time (between falling asleep and awakening) are in the realm of the world soul and the world spirit.

1. Lawfulness within the earthly world.
2. Lawfulness within the cosmic world.
3. Lawfulness within the world soul.	}	AstralBody,I
4. Lawfulness within the world spirit.

We must take very seriously something we mentioned two days ago, that with the first two worlds, the earthly and the cosmic, we have exhausted the whole realm of space. By entering the realm of world soul and world spirit, we have already gone beyond the realm of space. This is something we must dwell upon within our souls again and again: every time the human being sleeps, he is led not only outside his physical body but beyond ordinary space. He is led into a world that should not be confused at all with the world that can be perceived by the senses. All lawfulness that lies at the basis of the rhythmical human being—the human being whose fluid and also whose airy element is organized through rhythm—comes from this world. Rhythm manifests itself in space, but the source of rhythm, the lawfulness that produces rhythm, streams into every point in space from extra-spatial depths. It is regulated everywhere by a real world that lies beyond the sense world. If we are confronted with that wonderful reciprocal play that takes place within the human rhythms, through breathing and the pulse, we actually perceive something in this rhythm that is regulated from extra-spatial spiritual depths and brought into the world in which the human being also finds himself as physical man. It is impossible to understand the airy element if we do not reach such a concrete understanding of the rhythmical expression of man within this airy element.

If one grasps with Imagination what I described two days ago as the weaving and being of the plant world and, parallel with this, the weaving and being of the human etheric body, then one remains still within the world in which one normally resides. One must think of oneself as being transported from the earth, so to speak, and poured out into the entire cosmos. Then, however, in passing into the airy element, one must remove oneself from space. Then there must be the possibility of knowing oneself in a world that is no longer spatial but that exists only in time, a world in which only the time element holds a certain significance. In the times in which such things were still livingly perceived, it was seen that what belonged to such worlds could really be observed in the way that the spiritual played into human activity through rhythm. I pointed out to you how the ancient Greek formulated the hexameter: three pulse beats with the caesura, which gives a breath, and three more pulse beats with the caesura, or with the end of the verse, which gives the full hexameter. In two breaths one has the corresponding eight pulse beats. The harmonious resounding of the pulse beats with the breathing was shaped artistically in the recitation of the Greek hexameter. The way in which the spiritual, super-sensible world permeates the human being, how it permeates the blood circulation, the blood rhythm, synthesizes four pulse beats, four pulse rhythms, to one breathing rhythm—all this was reflected in every speech formation that is in the hexameter. All original strivings to build verse derive from this rhythmic organization of the human being.

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The world from which this rhythmic self-activity derives becomes real for the human being only when he becomes conscious during sleep. The activity in which the sleeping, but conscious human being then lives plays into this rhythm. Ordinary everyday consciousness remains unconscious of what lies at the foundation of this, and this is even more the case with the ordinary, present-day scientific consciousness. If this does become conscious, however, there begins to appear before the human being something more than what I described yesterday as the surging, weaving plant world. Something appears that is not a picture merely of the ordinary animal world, which must be spatial; there appears now a very clear consciousness, one which, however, can appear only outside the body and never within it, a consciousness whose content consists of the concrete pictures out of which the shapes of the animals in space are formed. Just as our human rhythmic activity streams in from the extra-spatial, so do the shapes that then organize themselves into the different animals stream in from the extra-spatial.

The first thing that is experienced if one undergoes consciously what otherwise is gone through only unconsciously between falling asleep and awakening, immersing oneself in the world that is the source of our rhythm, is that the animal world in all its forms becomes comprehensible. The animal world in all its forms cannot be explained by means of outer physical foundations or forces. If a zoologist or a morphologist believes that the form of the lion, the tiger, the butterfly, the beetle, is able to be explained by means of something found in physical space, he is very much fooling himself. In physical space one can never find an explanation for the different forms of the animals. One encounters the explanation in the way I have described it only if one enters the third lawfulness, the lawfulness of the world soul.

Now, I would like to return to the conversation I presented two days ago between the ancient Greek and the modern scholar who knows everything—that is to say, although occasionally he admits to not knowing everything, he still pretends that everything is able to be explained along lines similar to his own way of thinking. The ancient Greek would say, “Nothing at all can be explained by your method, though it has a kind of logic. You list all kinds of abstract conceptual forms, so-called categories—being, becoming, having, and so on. This logic is something that is supposed to represent the lawfulness of the concepts, the ideas.” (I am thinking now of a Greek of the pre-Socratic age, a Greek of the time from which the philosophies of Thales, Heraclitus, and Anaxagoras emanated, of which only a portion survives today.) “What you call logic,” this Greek would say, “was first constructed by a human being, a human being who really no longer knew much about the mysteries of the world. This logic was first made by Aristotle, after he had thoroughly applied his mundane intellect to Platonism. Truly Aristotle was a great man, but he was also a great Philistine who completely corrupted the actual logic, who made real logic into an ephemeral web that is related to reality in the same way as a thinly spun phantom is related to something densely real. The real logic,” our ancient Greek, being a scientist in his way, would have said, “the real logic encompasses all those forms that become outward and spatial in the animal world and that one discovers on becoming conscious in the time between falling asleep and awakening. That is logic, that is the real content of the logical consciousness.”

In the animal world there exists nothing but that which exists also in the human being, but in the human being it is spiritualized and thus he can think. He can think the logical formulas that swim in the outer world in space and become animals. When, between awakening and falling asleep, we manipulate our conceptual forms in ordinary consciousness, connecting one concept with another, it is so that we actually do the same thing in the realm of ideas that the outer world does in shaping the various forms of the animals. Just as it is possible to observe one's etheric when turning one's gaze to the plants and thinking of this plant world as embedded in the element of water, so, in the same way, one's soul world—or it can be called the astral world—can be comprehended if one permeates oneself with this living weaving that becomes conscious between falling asleep and awakening, understanding thereby the outer shapes of the animal world. One must then think of one's own shaping of the world of ideas as woven into the rhythm of the airy element.

You can make yourself a quite concrete mental image from the many things I have pointed out to you concerning the human being. Take the following process quite concretely: you breathe in, and the air follows the well-known pathway to the lungs. In breathing in, however, the inhaled air presses upon the space containing the spinal cord and spinal fluid. This fluid surrounding the spinal cord rhythmically courses through the subarachnoid space of the brain. The cerebral fluid comes into activity, and this activity is the activity of thought. In reality, thought rides on the breath, which is transmitted to the cerebro-spinal fluid, and this fluid in which the brain floats transmits the rhythmical beat of the breath directly onto the brain. In the brain live the impressions of the senses, the impressions of the eyes, the ears, through nerve-sense activity. The breathing rhythm comes into confrontation with what lives in the brain from the senses, and in this confrontation develops the interplay between sensation and thought activity, that formal thought activity which outwardly has its life in the animal forms. It is this thought activity, which is brought about by the breathing rhythm, transmitting itself to the cerebro-spinal fluid in the subarachnoid space, that commingles with what lives in the brain through the senses. 'Residing there is everything that becomes active in us in the form of ideas out of the rhythm.

What is essential, my dear friends, is that you attempt gradually to penetrate into the way in which the spiritual plays into the physical world. The great cultural defect of our time is that we have a science that arrives at the spirit in abstract forms, in purely intellectual forms, whereas the spiritual must be conceived in its creative element, for otherwise the material world remains like something hard, unconquered, outside the spiritual. We must penetrate into how this element of the third and fourth lawfulnesses plays concretely into what we ourselves carry out.

It is one of the most sublime things that can become clear to us if we recognize the actual inner basis that can prevail in every breathing rhythm—what is not fulfilled but what could be fulfilled each time an inhalation plays into the cerebro-spinal fluid. Now comes the recoil, the response: the cerebro-spinal fluid is again pressed down through the subarachnoid space of the spine, and there is an exhalation. This is a surrender once again to the world, a merging with the world. However, in this I-becoming/merging-with-the-world lies in essence what is expressed in the breathing rhythm.

This is the way one must speak if one wishes to speak of the reality that is meant when speaking of the element of air, whereas in speaking about the earth one simply encompasses everything that is included in our seventy-odd chemical elements. You see, what becomes a corpse is subject to the lawfulness of the seventy-two elements. What brings this dead body into movement, however, so that it can grow, can digest, is something that streams in from the cosmos. Then what penetrates this organism so that it not only grows and is able to digest but unfolds itself continually in a rhythmical activity, in the pulse, in the breathing rhythm, comes from an extra-spatial world. We study this extra-spatial world in the air element, for that is where it reveals itself, just as we study the cosmic—and not the earthly—world in the water element, for that is where the cosmic is revealed. What is revealed to the present-day chemist or physicist derives only from the earth element differentiated in itself.

We can also find the transition to the warmth element or element of fire. This is really possible only in the moment that is a practical result when a human being attains the ability not only to move out of his body consciously but to immerse himself with this consciousness into other beings. There is something else to consider here. One may already have had the ability for a long time to move out of one's body; if a little egotism is retained regarding the world, however, one is able to grasp everything of which I have spoken up to now, but one cannot really immerse oneself in this outer world. One cannot surrender oneself to this outer world. If, however, elements of true super-sensible love can be added during an immersion into that world in which one lives between falling asleep and awakening, then one learns to recognize by experience the element of warmth or fire. Only then does one recognize the true being of man, for what is looked at outwardly through the senses is only a semblance of man, is the human being from the other side, from the side of semblance.

If one ascends to the element of water, one has, to begin with, the experience of the etheric being of man dissolving. The etheric being of man becomes, you could say, a miniature picture of winter, summer, autumn, and so on. If one comes to the element of air, one becomes aware of a self-sustaining, rhythmical movement. The contained human being, the human being as he is eternal man, can be known only within the element of warmth. There everything comes into connection once again: the weaving movement of the water element and the rhythms of the air come together. They harmonize and deharmonize themselves in the warmth element, in the fire element, and there one can recognize the real being of man. There one is essentially in the fourth lawfulness, the lawfulness of the world spirit.

In hearing about an earlier science of the four elements—earth, water, air, and fire—one should not picture that we have progressed so wonderfully far with our modern science. One should rather picture that an altogether different consciousness existed concerning the roots of the human being in super-sensible depths. Something was known, therefore, of the various relationships of the earth element to this super-sensible. The earth element is, as it were, entirely outside the sphere of the super-sensible. The water element already begins to approach it; this water element is already much more closely connected with the world of spheres spread in cosmic space than with what the earth itself is. We leave space altogether, however, if we look for the source of what is within us as the air rhythm—and therefore our air organization—for regarding our air organization we are rhythmicizing, derhythmicizing, and so on. Finally we come to the universally extraspatial, to that which overcomes time, when we come into the fire element, into the warmth element. Only here do we come to recognize the entire, self-contained human being. One really finds this, though in a corrupted form, if one rediscovers—and it is already necessary today that one rediscover it—the literature that appeared before the fifteenth century.

There appeared a few years ago the work of a Swedish scientist concerning alchemy. This Swedish scientist read about a process described by an alchemist, and he commented, “If you investigate this process today, it turns out to be pure nonsense; you cannot picture anything of what they are saying.” It is easy to grasp that the chemist of today, even the Swede, who is somewhat less prejudiced than the Central European, takes the expressions in which are clothed what once existed in the corrupted literature of ancient times and then finds that nothing emerges from them. I looked up the process that the good Swedish scientist could not understand in the same literature that he had read: the process described there was actually an aspect of the embryonic process, of embryonic development in the human being! This became clear very soon. One must be able to read such matters, however. The modern scientist reads in such a way that he applies the expressions and vocabulary that he has learned from his chemistry text. He puts up his flasks and test tubes and imitates the process described: nonsense! What he has read is actually describing a portion of the process that takes place in the mother's body during embryonic development. You thus can see the abyss that has appeared between what the modern scientist is able to read and what was once meant.

All things that were described in the ancient literature, however, have also been described again today under the influence of the concepts of a new spiritual science. If these writings are not rediscovered, one cannot read them at all. They existed in an entirely different way from the way we discover them today. They existed in an instinctive, atavistic way, but they did exist, and humanity lifted itself, as it were, beyond an understanding of merely the earth element. We must find entrance again into the elements that do not explain to us merely the corpse of the human being but the whole human being, the living human being. For this it is necessary that one learn to take quite seriously within our civilization what is presented in the question of pre-existence.

When the concept of pre-existence was cast out of Western cultural evolution, selfless research was actually cast out as well. When preachers today preach about immortality, as I have indicated often before, they appeal basically to human egotism. It is known that man feels uncomfortable, feels afraid, of the cessation of life. Of course, life does not actually cease, but in speaking about immortality one appeals not to the forces of cognition but to man's fear of death, to man's will to continue living when the body is taken from him; in other words, man's egotism is appealed to. This is not possible when one speaks about preexistence. It is actually inconsequential to people today—from the point of view of their egotism—whether or not they lived before they were born or conceived. They are living now, and of that they are certain, and they are not very concerned, therefore, with pre-existence. Rather they are concerned about post-existence, for although they are now living, they do not know whether they will continue to live after death. This is connected with their egotism. Since they are already living, however, they say to themselves—perhaps only unconsciously or instinctively if they have not trained in cognition—“I am living now, and even if I didn't exist before my birth or conception, it makes no difference to me if I only began to live then, as long as I can continue to live from now on.”

This is the mood on the basis of which feelings today are called forth, through which human beings become enthusiastic about immortality. In the known languages, therefore, we have a word for immortality that directs us to the eternity at life's end, but we do not have a word, in the ordinary languages of our culture, for “unbornness.” This is something we must gradually acquire. Such a concept would speak more to cognition, would speak more to a lack of egotism, to a cognition of man that is free of egotism. This must be appealed to once again. Furthermore, cognition must become permeated by morality, by ethics. Unless our laboratory table becomes a kind of altar, and unless our synthesizing and analyzing become a kind of art of the spirit, and we become conscious that in doing this or that we participate in world evolution, our cultural evolution will not progress. We will come into a frightful descent if wider and wider circles do not perceive that one must achieve cognition free of egotism, a morally permeated cognition that must overcome today's analysis and synthesis, which do not take the higher worlds into any account. One must come to understand again something of the rhythm that plays into our lives, something of what plays into warmth. Into the warmth plays the moral element; and in the simple variations of warmth, varying intensities of warmth, there is in reality a world-permeating morality in which the human being develops himself. All this must gradually become conscious in humanity. This is not merely what I would like to call an idealistic whim demanding of us to interpret the signs of our times; rather, the signs of the times themselves speak of this deepening toward the super-sensible that must be attempted.

Today I have something further to add to what I began yesterday. I am reminding you of something that most of you have already heard from me. When the human being passes through death, the physical body remains behind within the earth-forces; the etheric body dissolves itself into the cosmic forces, and the human being finds his further life, his existence, throughout the realms that lie between death and a new birth. I said that within the human being himself we can follow the formative forces that reach from one life into the next. We know that man is essentially a threefold being, with three independent members; I am referring at first to the formative forces of the physical body, the physical organization. We have the nerve-sense organization, which extends over the whole body, of course, but is localized essentially in the head; we have the rhythmic organization, including the rhythm of the breath, of the circulation, and other rhythms; and we have the metabolic-limb organization, which we consider as one, because man's movements are intimately and organically connected with the metabolism.

You know that every human being has a differently formed head. If we now consider these forces that form the human head—of course you must not think here of the -physical substances but rather of the formative forces, of that which gives to the head its physiognomy, its whole character, its phrenological expression—if we consider these forces, we find them to be those of the metabolic-limb system from the previous incarnation that have now become form. We thus have in the head a metamorphic transformation of the metabolic-limb organization of the previous incarnation. If we consider again what we possess as our metabolic-limb system in this present incarnation, these formative forces are found to be undergoing a metamorphosis and shaping our head for the next incarnation. If we understand the human formation, therefore, we can look back directly, by means of an appropriate cultivation of the metamorphic thought, from the human head of today to the metabolic-limb system of the previous incarnation; and we can see from the present metabolic-limb system forward to the head organization of the next incarnation.

This conception—which in our spiritual science and throughout the spiritual science of all ages has played a particular role—of the truths concerning repeated earthly lives does not remain airy, without substantiation; rather, whoever understands the human organization can read these truths directly from the human organization. The present trend of natural science, however, is as far as possible from embarking upon the sort of investigation that would be necessary here. If one studies the human being through anatomy and physiology alone, it is naturally impossible not to arrive at the foolish conception that the liver can be investigated in the same way as the lungs. One places the liver next to the lungs on the dissecting table and regards them as organs of equal value, since both consist of cells, and so on. One can obtain no knowledge of these things in such a way, and two organ systems that are as different from one another as the lungs and liver cannot be studied merely outwardly by comparison of their cellular configuration, as will necessarily follow from present-day conceptions.

If we really wish to discover the pertinent relationships, methods must be employed by means of which a conception of these things may be gained. If the methods that I described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment are sufficiently developed, human cognition is greatly strengthened, reinforced. I am repeating here certain things that I already explained in lectures given last autumn in the Goetheanum. Our ordinary cognition is strengthened, that cognition through which we look out, by means of the senses, into our environment and through which we also look into our inner being, where we at first perceive our thinking, feeling, and willing. If we broaden this cognition, if we broaden it as is possible through the exercises that have often been described, our view in relation to the outer world changes, and in such a way that as a consequence one sees that it is absolute nonsense to speak of atoms as is done with the present world conception. What is behind sense beholding, behind sense qualities, behind yellow and red, behind C-sharp, G, and so forth, is not vibration but spiritual being-ness (Wesenhaftigheit). The world from without becomes ever more spiritual the further we press forward in cognition. One thereby really ceases to take seriously all those constructions derived from chemical or similar conceptions. All atomism is thoroughly driven from the mind when one broadens cognition from without. Behind the phenomena of the senses there is a spiritual world.

If, through such a broadened cognition, we look more deeply into the inner being, there arises—as I pointed out yesterday—not that confused mystical beholding, which does indeed form a transition that is quite justified, but there arises instead, when cognition of the inner being is developed, a psychic cognition of the organs. We learn really to recognize our inner being; while from without our cognition is more and more spiritualized, from within it is at first materialized. Working from this inner being, the real spiritual researcher—not the nebulous mystic—will become acquainted with each single organ. He learns to know the differentiated human organism. We reach into the spiritual world by no other path than by way of this observation of our inner materiality. Without learning to know lungs, liver, and so forth, one also does not learn to know, by way of this inner being, any kind of spiritual enthusiasm, which works away from the confusion of mysticism and works toward a concrete cognition of the inner organs of the human being.

At all events, one learns to know more precisely the configuration of the soul element. To begin with, one learns to give up the prejudice that our soul element is merely connected with the nerve-sense apparatus. Only the world of mental images is connected with the nerve-sense apparatus, while the world of feeling no longer is. The world of feeling is connected directly with the rhythmic organism, and the world of will is connected with the metabolic-limb organism. If I will something, something must take place in my metabolic-limb organism. The nervous system is there only in order that one can have mental images of what actually takes place in the will. There are no "nerves of will," as I have often stated; the division of nerves into sensory nerves and motor nerves is nonsense. The nerves are all of one kind, and the so-called nerves of will or motor nerves exist for no other purpose than to perceive inwardly the processes of will; they too are sensory nerves.

If we study this thoroughly, we come at last to consider the human organization in its entirety. Take the lung organization, the liver organization, and so forth. You reach a point, looking inward, at which you survey, as it were, the surface of the individual organs, of course by means of a spiritual gaze directed inward. What exactly is the surface of our organs? This surface is nothing other than a reflecting apparatus for the soul life. What we perceive and also what we work through in thought reflects itself upon the surface of all our inner organs, and this reflection signifies our recollections, our memory during life. Thus, after we have perceived and worked through something, it mirrors itself upon the outer surface of our heart, lungs, spleen, and so forth, and what is thus thrown back constitutes our recollections. With a not-very-intensive training you already notice how certain thoughts ray back over the whole organism in recollection. The most varied organs take part in this. If it is a question of remembering very abstract thoughts, let us say, then the lungs participate very strongly, the surface of the lungs. If it is a question of thoughts colored by feeling, of thoughts that have a nuance of feeling, then the surface of the liver is strongly involved. Thus we really can describe in detail very well how the individual organs of the human being take part in this raying back that appears as memory, as the power of recollection. When we focus on the soul element we must not say that in the nervous system alone lies the parallel organism for the soul life—rather, in the entire human organism lies the parallel organization for the human soul life.

In this connection much knowledge that once existed as instinct has simply been lost. It still exists in certain words, but people no longer sense how wisdom is preserved in these words. For example, if someone had a tendency to come to his recollections in a state of depression, it was called in ancient Greece hypochondria, meaning a process of cartilage-formation or ossification of the abdomen, where, as a result of this ossification, the reflection was brought about in such a way as to make memory a source of hypochondria. The entire organism is involved in these things. This is something that must be kept in mind.

When speaking of the power of recollection, I spoke of the surface of the organs. Everything we experienced strikes the surfaces, as it were, is reflected, and that leads to recollections. Something also enters the organism at the same time, however. In ordinary life this is transmuted, undergoes a metamorphosis, so that the organ produces a secretion. The organs having this function are mostly glandular organs. They have an inner secretion, and such forces as enter during life are transformed into secretions. Not everything is transformed in this way into organic metabolism and the like; rather certain organs instead absorb something that becomes latent within them and constitutes an inner force. For example, all thoughts that we absorb in this way are connected mainly with outer objects. The forces developed in these thoughts are stored, as it were, in the inner aspect of the lungs.

You know that the inner aspect of the lungs comes into activity through the metabolism, through the movement of the limbs, and these forces are transmuted in such a way that during life between birth and death our lungs are a reservoir, as it were, of forces that are continually influenced by the metabolic-limb organism. When we die, such forces have been stored up. The physical matter, of course, falls away, but these forces are not lost; they accompany us through death and through the entire life between death and a new birth. And when we enter a new incarnation, it is these forces that were in the lungs that form our head outwardly, that stamp upon our head outwardly the physiognomy. What the phrenologist wishes to study in the outer form of the head must be sought in an earlier form in the inner aspect of the lungs in the previous incarnation.

You see from life to life how concretely the transformation of forces may be traced. When this is done these things are no longer seen as merely abstract truths but will be beheld concretely, as one can also behold physical things concretely. Spiritual science becomes truly valuable only if one penetrates into individual concrete facts in this way. If one speaks about repeated earthly lives and so forth only in generalities, these are mere words. They acquire meaning only if one can enter into the individual concrete facts.

If what has been stored in the lungs is not controlled in the right way, it is pressed out, as I said yesterday, in the same way as water in a sponge is pressed out, and then, from what actually should only form the head in the next incarnation there arise abnormal phenomena that are usually designated as compulsive thoughts or illusions. It is an interesting chapter in a higher physiology to study in persons suffering from lung disease the strange notions that arise in the advanced stages of the disease. This is connected with what I have just explained to you, with the abnormal pressing-out of thoughts.

You see, the thoughts that thus are pressed out are compulsive thoughts, because they already contain the forming force. The thoughts that now we ought normally to have in consciousness must be only pictures; they must not have in themselves a forming force; they must not compel us. Through the long period between death and a new birth these thoughts do compel us; then they are causative, they work in a forming way. During earthly life they must not overwhelm us; they must use their force only during the transition from one life into another. This is the point to be considered.

If you now study the liver in the same way as I have just explained regarding the lungs, you will discover that within the liver are concentrated all the forces that in the next incarnation determine the inner disposition of the brain. Again by way of the metabolic organism of the present life, the inner forces of the liver pass over, this time not into the form of the head, as with the lungs, but into the inner disposition of the brain. Whether or not someone is to be an acute thinker in the next incarnation depends upon how he behaves in the present incarnation. Thus by way of the metabolism there may appear within the liver certain forces; if these forces are pressed out during the present incarnation, however, they lead to hallucinations or to powerful visions.

You therefore see concretely now what I pointed out yesterday in abstractions: that these things arise through being pressed out of the organs; then they push their way into consciousness, and, out of the general hallucinatory life that should extend from one incarnation into the next, they assert themselves within a single incarnation and make their abnormal appearance in this way.

If we study in the same way everything that is connected with the kidney-excretory organs, we will see that they concentrate within themselves the forces that in the next incarnation influence the head organization more from the emotional side. The kidney organs, the organs of excretion, bring forth in preparation for the next incarnation essentially that which has to do with the temperamental tendencies in the broadest sense, but by way of the head organization.

If these forces are pressed out during the present incarnation, they display all the nervous conditions, all the conditions connected with over-excitement of the human being, inner or soul over-excitement specifically, hypochondriacal conditions, depression, and so forth, in short all the conditions connected particularly with this side of the metabolism.

In fact, everything that is memorable more from the feeling or emotional side is also connected with what is reflected from the kidneys. If we consider lung or liver reflections, we find them to be more memory pictures, the actual memory pictures (Gedaechtnisvorstellungen). If we turn to the kidney system, we see there what we have as lasting habits in this incarnation, and within the kidney system are being prepared the temperamental tendencies in the broadest sense which, by way of the head organization, are intended for the next incarnation.

Let us study the heart in a similar way. For spiritual scientific research, the heart is also an extraordinarily interesting organ. You know that our trivial science is inclined to treat knowledge of the heart quite lightly. It looks upon the heart as a pump, a pump that pumps the blood through the body. Nothing more absurd than this can be believed, for the heart has nothing whatsoever to do with pumping the blood; rather the blood is set into activity by the entire mobility (Regsamkeit) of the astral body, of the I, and the heart is only a reflection of these movements. The movement of the blood is an autonomous movement, and the heart only brings to expression the movement of the blood caused by these forces. The heart is in fact only the organ that expresses the movement of the blood; the heart itself has no activity in relation to this movement of the blood. Contemporary natural scientists become very angry if you speak of this issue. Many years ago, I think in 1904 or 1905, on a journey to Stockholm, I explained this issue to a natural scientist, a medical man, and he was almost apoplectic about the idea that the heart should no longer be regarded as a pump but that the blood itself comes into movement through its own vitality, that the heart is simply inserted in the general movement of the blood, participating with its beat, and so on.

Something is reflected from the surface of the heart that is no longer merely a matter of habit or memory but is life that is already spiritualized when it reaches the outer surface of the heart. For what is thrown back from the heart are the pangs of conscience. This is to be considered, I would like to say, entirely from the physical aspect: the pangs of conscience that radiate into our consciousness are what is reflected by the heart from our experiences. Spiritual knowledge of the heart teaches us this.

If we look into the inner aspect of the heart, however, we see gathered there forces that also stem from the entire metabolic-limb organism, and because what is connected with the heart, with the heart forces, is spiritualized, within it is also spiritualized that which is connected with our outer life, with our deeds. However strange and paradoxical it may sound to a person who is clever in the modern sense, the fact remains that the forces thus prepared within the heart are the karmic tendencies, they are the tendencies of karma. It is revoltingly foolish to speak of the heart as a mere pumping mechanism, for the heart is the organ which, through mediation of the metabolic-limb system, carries what we understand as karma into the next incarnation.

You see, if one learns to know this organization, one learns to differentiate it, and it manifests then in its connection with the entire life, which extends beyond birth and death. One sees then into the entire structure of the human being. We have not been able to speak of the head, in speaking about transformations, for the head is simply cast off; its forces are fulfilled with this incarnation, having been transformed from the previous incarnation. What we have in these four main systems, however—in lung-, liver-, kidney-, and heart-systems—passes in a form-building way through the metabolic-limb system and forms our head with all its tendencies in the next incarnation. We must seek within the organs of the body for the forces that will carry over into the next incarnation what we are now experiencing.

The human metabolism is by no means the mere simmering and seething of chemicals in a test-tube that modern physiology describes. You need only take a single step, and a certain metabolism is produced. This metabolism that is produced is not merely a chemical process, which may be examined by means of physiology, of chemistry, but bears within it at the same time a moral coloring, a moral nuance. And this moral nuance is, in fact, stored in the heart and carried over as karmic force into the next incarnation. To study the entire human being means to find in him the forces that reach beyond earthly life. Our head itself is a sphere. Only because the rest of the organism is attached to it is this spherical shape modified. When we go through death we must, in the soul-spiritual organization that remains to us, adapt ourselves to the entire cosmos. The entire cosmos then receives us. Up to the middle point of the period between two incarnations—I have called this point, in one of my Mystery Dramas, the Midnight Hour of Existence—up to this moment, if I may express myself in this way, we continue to expand into the environment. We gradually become identical with the environment, and what thus proceeds from us into the environment gives the configuration for the astral and the etheric of the next incarnation.

This is determined essentially out of the cosmos within the mother. Through the father and fertilization comes that which is formed in the physical and what is in the ego. This ego, as it is then, after the Midnight Hour of Existence, actually passes over into an entirely different world. It passes over into that world through which it can then take this path through the paternal nature. This is an extremely significant process. The period up to the Midnight Hour of Existence and the period following it—both periods between death and a new birth—are actually very different from each other. In my lecture cycle in Vienna in 1914 (The Inner Nature of Man, Vienna, 1914, six lectures), I described these experiences from within. If we look at them more from the outside, we must say that the I is more cosmic in the first half, up to the Midnight Hour, and prepares in the cosmos that which then enters the next incarnation indirectly, by way of the mother. From the Midnight Hour of Existence until the next birth, the I passes over into what the ancient mysteries called the underworld. On the detour through this underworld it takes the path through fertilization. There the two poles of the human being basically meet, through the mother and the father: from the upper world and from the underworld.

At least as far as I know, what I am now saying was an essential content of the Egyptian mysteries, coming out of the instinctive ancient knowledge. The Egyptian mysteries led particularly to knowledge of what they called at that time the upper and lower gods, the upper world and underworld of the gods; and it may be said that in the act of fertilization a polar equilibrium of the upper world and underworld of the gods is brought about. The I between death and a new birth goes first through this upper world and then through the lower world. In ancient times there were not at all the strange connotations that many today connect with upper world and underworld. People of today nearly always look upon the upper world as the good and the underworld as the bad. These connotations were not originally connected with these worlds; they were simply the two polarities that had to participate in the general world formation. In directly experiencing the upper world, one perceived, beheld, it more,as the world of light, and the underworld more as the world of heaviness: heaviness and light as the two polarities, if one wishes to express it more outwardly. You thus see that things can be described concretely.

Regarding the other organs, I have told you that the out-flowing of organic forces can become hallucinatory life, especially what is pressed out of the liver system. If the heart presses out its contents, however, this is really a system of forces, pushed out and brought into consciousness, that call forth in the next incarnation that strange inclination to live out one's karma. If one observes how karma works itself out, it may be said from the human side that this living out of karma can only be described as a kind of hunger and its satisfaction.

This must be understood in the following way. Let us proceed first from the standpoint of ordinary life. Let us take a striking event: a woman meets a man and begins to love him. Now, as this is usually regarded, it is somewhat as if you were to cut a little piece from the Sistine Madonna—for example, a little finger from the Jesus boy—and were to gaze at it. You have, of course, a piece of the Sistine Madonna, but you do not see anything. Neither do you see anything if you merely consider the fact that a woman meets a man and begins to love him. The matter is not like that; one must trace it back. Before the woman met the man, she had been in other places in the world; before that she had been somewhere else, and still earlier somewhere else again. You can find all sorts of reasons that the woman went from one place to another. This conceals itself, of course, in the subconscious, but there is reason in it, there is an inner connection throughout, and by going back into childhood one can retrace the path.

The woman in question—and this is directed at no one in particular—follows the path from the beginning, which culminates in the event under discussion. The human being, when he is born, hungers to do what he does, and he does not give up until he satisfies this hunger. The pressing forward to a karmic event is a result of such a generalized spiritual feeling of hunger. One is driven to the event. It just so happens that the entire human being has such forces within him that lead to later events, in spite of the freedom that exists nevertheless but plays itself out in a different realm. The forces that manifest themselves as such a hunger, leading to karmic fulfillment, living themselves out in this way, are concentrated in the heart; and when they are pressed out and thereby come into consciousness in the present incarnation, they create pictures that form a stimulus, and then raving madness results. Raving madness is basically a premature living out in this incarnation of a force of karma intended for the following incarnation. Think how differently one must accustom oneself to look upon world events if these connections are understood. Of course, if a person suffered from raving madness in the present incarnation—or if one were that fellow who ruled Spain once—he would say that if God had permitted him to rule the world, he would have done it better! People thus ask questions such as, why did God create raving madness? Raving madness has plenty of good reasons for existing, but everything working in this world can appear at the wrong time, and the displaced manifestation, in this case brought about by Luciferic forces—everything that works prematurely in the world is brought about by the activity of Luciferic forces—the manifestation in this incarnation of karmic forces intended for the next incarnation creates raving madness.

You see, what is to be carried over and continued in another life can actually be studied in the abnormalities of a present life.

You can easily imagine what a strong distinction exists between what now rests in our heart through our entire incarnation and the condition in which this will be once it has gone through the long development between death and a new birth, then coming into appearance in the outer behavior of a human being in the new life.

However, if you look into the inner aspect of your hearts, you can perceive quite well—though of course only latently, not in a finished picture—what you will do in your next life. We need not confine ourselves to the general, abstract statement that what will work itself out karmically in the next life is prepared in this one, but we can point directly to the vessel in which resides the karma of the following incarnations. These are the things that must be penetrated concretely if one wishes to practice a real spiritual science.
You can imagine what enormous significance these things will gain when they are studied and made a part of the general education. What does modern medicine know of the possibility of a liver or heart disease when it does not know the most important fact of all, that is, the actual purpose of these organs? And this it does not know. It has not even discovered a correct connection between excitatory hallucinations and, let us say, the kidney system, nor does it understand that calm hallucinations, those that merely appear, are liver hallucinations, as it were. Hallucinations that appear as though crawling on a person so that the victim wants to brush them off come from the kidney system. These are excitatory hallucinations, which have to do with the emotional system, with the system of temperament. From such symptoms a much more sure diagnosis can be made than by the diagnostic means in ordinary use today. Diagnoses based upon purely outer evidence are very unsure in comparison with what they would be were these things studied.

Now all these things are connected with the outer world. The lungs, as inner organs or organ system, actually contain the compressed compulsive thoughts and everything that we take up in perceiving outer objects and concentrating these in the lungs. The liver relates to the outer world in an entirely different way. Precisely because the lungs preserve, as it were, the thought material, they are structured quite differently. They are more closely connected with the earthly element, with the earth element. The liver, which conceals hallucinations, particularly the calm hallucinations, the hallucinations that merely appear, is connected with the fluid system and therefore with water. The kidney system, paradoxical as it sounds, is connected with the air element. One naturally thinks that this ought to be the case with the lungs, but the lungs as organs are connected with the earth element, though not only with it. On the other hand, the kidney system—as an organ—is connected with the air element, and the heart system as an organ is connected with the warmth element; it is formed entirely out of the warmth element. This element, therefore, which is the most spiritual, is also the one that takes up the inclination for karma into these exceptionally fine warmth structures that we have in the warmth organism.

Since the entire human being stands in relationship to the outer world, you can say to yourself that the lungs have a particular relationship to the outer world in connection with the earthly element, and the liver in regard to the watery element. If you examine the earthly qualities of plants you will find in them the remedies for everything connected with diseases that have their origin in the lungs (this must be considered, of course, in its broadest implications). If you take what circulates in the plant, the circulation of the plant's juices, you will have therein the remedy for all disturbances connected with the liver organization. Thus a study of the reciprocal relationship of the organs to the environment offers, in fact, the foundation for a rational therapy.

Our present therapy is a jumble of empirical notes. One can come to a really rational therapy only by studying in this way the reciprocal relationships between the world of organs within the human being and the outer world. Of course the sensual longing for subjective mysticism must then be overcome. If the aim is to reach no further than the well-known "little divine flame" of Meister Eckhardt and so on, if the outpouring of a mere sensual delight in the inner world is the aim, having beautiful images without penetrating through this entire element to the concrete configuration of the inner organs, then one cannot really penetrate to significant therapeutic knowledge. For this knowledge yields itself upon the path of a true mysticism, which advances to the concrete reality of the inner element of the human being. Just as there we penetrate into the inner element of the human being and by way of this inner element learn to know the passage through the incarnations, just as we learn to know this inner life of the human being, so we reach, when we study the outer world, through the sense world, through the tapestry of the senses, into the spiritual. We ascend into the world of the spiritual hierarchies, which we did not find by way of inner mysticism. The hierarchies are found by way of a deeper view of the, outer world. Upon this path something yields itself that may first be expressed in analogies. They are not merely analogies, however, for there exist much deeper relationships.

We breathe, of course, and I recently calculated for you the number of breaths we take in twenty-four hours. If we count eighteen breaths to the minute, we have in an hour 60 x 18, and in twenty-four hours 25,920 breaths, in a day and a night.

Let us take another rhythm in the human being, the rhythm of day and night itself. When you awake in the morning, you draw into your physical and etheric bodies the astral body and I. This is also a breathing. In the morning you inhale the astral body and I, and when you fall asleep at night you exhale them again; thus one complete breath in twenty-four hours, in one day. There are 365 such breaths in a year. Take the average age of a human being, 72 years, and you arrive at approximately the same figure, 25,920. If I had not started with 72 but a figure somewhat lower, I would have reached the same figure. That is to say, if you take the entire earthly life of the human being and you see each single day, each falling asleep and awakening, as one breath, you have then in an entire life as many inhalations and exhalations of the astral body and I as you have breaths in twenty-four hours. You take in the course of your life just as many breaths of the astral body and I as you take daily in breathing the air. These rhythms are in absolute correspondence, and we see how the human being is fitted into the world. The life of one day, sunrise to sunset, therefore a single circuit, corresponds to an inner sunrise and sunset that lasts from birth to death.

You see, the human being incorporates himself into the entire world, and I would like to close these considerations by pointing out to you an idea, asking you to think it through, to make it a subject of meditation. Science today pictures a world process, and within this world process the earth is thought to have arisen. Natural science believes that in the end, when entropy is fulfilled, the earth will end in a warmth death, and so on. If today one forms for oneself a view such as the Copernican view, or any modification of Copernicanism, one takes into consideration only the forces that formed the earth out of the primeval mist, and human life basically becomes a sort of fifth wheel on the wagon, for the geologist, the astronomer, does not take the human being into consideration. It does not occur to him to seek at all within the human being for the primal cause of a future shaping of the world. For modern science, the human being is everywhere present in this world process, but he is the fifth wheel on the wagon—the world process takes its course, but he has nothing to do with it. Picture it in this way: this whole world process comes to an end, ceases, dissolves itself in space. It ceases, and the primal causes of what then happens lie within the human skin, within the human being; there they continue. The origin of what is now the world lies far back within the human being in primeval ages. This is a reality. Just as the books of ancient wisdom relate such things to us in their own language, so the word of Christ Jesus also point to these things: “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.” All that constitutes the material world passes away, but that which comes from the spirit and the soul and is expressed in words survives the destruction of the earth and lives on into the future. The primal causes of the future do not lie outside our skin, and the geologists need not look for them in the ground. Rather we must seek them within, in the inner forces of our organization, which at first pass over into our next earthly life but then continue in other metamorphoses. Hence when you search for the future of the world you must look into the human being. Everything that is outer perishes utterly.

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The nineteenth century erected a barrier against this knowledge, and this barrier is called the law of the conservation of energy.

This law of the conservation of energy carries forward the forces residing in man's environment, but all these will dissolve and disappear. Only what arises within the human being builds the future. It is impossible to think of anything more false than the law of the conservation of energy. In reality its result is simply to make the human being a fifth wheel in the world process. It is not the statement of the law of the conservation of energy that is correct but rather that other saying: “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.” This is the correct statement. These two statements are diametrically opposed to one another, and it is simply a lack of thought when today certain adherents to this or that positive denomination wish to be believers in the Bible and at the same time adherents to the theories of modern physics. This is simply dishonesty, which appears today to be culturally creative. This dishonesty must be driven from the field of creative culture—which it actually opposes—if we are to emerge from these forces of decline into forces of ascent.

After the studies we have been conducting recently, a basic fact of human life and nature will be able to stand clearly before our soul. It is precisely when we consider a more exact relationship of the human being to his environment that the riddle always arises: how did it come to be that one cannot penetrate into the real nature of the outer world? This outer world lies before us in its phenomena, in its events, and even if we have only a feeble need for knowledge we must presume that behind these phenomena that lie before us as colored, as resounding, as warming world, and so on, the real nature of reality is concealed. There is, as it were, a veil there, and only behind this veil is the nature of reality to be found.

A similar riddle exists in relation to what is within the human being. In the last few days I have suggested that this inner element of the human being reveals the riddles of its organs only if one really arrives at this inner element. The fact is, however, that to begin with in ordinary consciousness one cannot see so deeply down into one's own inner being that one is able really to penetrate the nature of the lungs, liver, and so forth, in the way we described yesterday.

This fact of the existence of two riddles—the riddle regarding the unknowableness of the outer world and the riddle of the unknowableness of the inner world—can be understood out of the knowledge of the whole being of man, if one permits oneself to consider once the whole human nature, which shows only one side between birth and death, having its other side between death and a new birth.

Let us study the human being as he presents himself to us here between birth and death. We need only look at an aspect of the inner soul that is connected with our entire, normal daily life. We need only consider the inner fact of memory. I spoke yesterday of how this memory actually is based upon a reflecting-back on the outsides of the inner organs. We need this memory, however, for our soul life. I have often pointed out facts that show how the disturbance of this memory can undermine the entire normal life between birth and death. I told you of an example showing that the capacity for memory can extinguish itself in the human being. Such cases are well known. You can read in psychological literature of numerous such cases. It is a well-known fact that this can occur, and in a lesser degree this phenomenon is much more frequent than is generally realized. With such human beings, you need only picture that these processes—without the person knowing it in the ordinary sense of the word—are just as they are for you during sleep every night: consciousness is extinguished. Such an abnormal discontinuity of consciousness, however, has an extraordinarily significant influence upon the whole consciousness of the personality. A human being who has undergone such an experience is not quite able to get along with himself; there is something horrifying in his life afterward. From this you can see how important it is for the ordinary life between birth and death—except during the sleeping state—to have continuity of consciousness.

This continuity of consciousness is closely connected with our memory. We need this memory, therefore, in order to maintain our ordinary life normally. When one undergoes an occult development, another fact arises, the fact that it is necessary to develop soul forces that actually, during the moments of spiritual seeing, also extinguish ordinary memory. As long as one maintains this ordinary memory, one is basically unable to see into the spiritual world. Pupils of an occult development usually experience that when they begin to work on their development they have certain visions; then later they begin to complain that they no longer have these visions—the visions stay away. The reason for this is that for such visions—if they are genuine, true visions, and not hallucinations—there is really no memory. It is not possible to recall a vision, for the vision is something real. If you look at a piece of chalk and then look away, you have a memory picture. If, however, you wish to have the chalk before you, the real chalk, then you must return again to the perception; you must have the reality before you again. To experience this reality, memory is of no help at all. If you touch a hot iron, you burn yourself. Regardless of how much heat you retain in your memory, however, you cannot burn yourself. You must return to the real experience, because the vision brings you into connection with something real and not a mere picture. It is a matter, then, of returning to the vision and not merely recalling it, for a real seeing is a real occult experience and cannot become recollection; one can come to it again only in an indirect way. One can say to oneself that before the vision appeared we had gone through this or that in ordinary consciousness. This can be recalled, and one must call this stage back to the point when the vision appeared. One returns to this point. The vision cannot appear directly; rather one must retrace the path, as it were. This is not taken into account by many people, who believe that a vision can be recalled in the ordinary sense.

One must therefore undermine memory in a certain respect in occult development. This is absolutely necessary and cannot be prevented. It therefore must be said that one who strives for such an occult development must above all be certain that in ordinary life he is a reasonable person, that is, that he has no false mystical tendencies but has a healthy intellect and a sound memory. He who in ordinary life already has a tendency to wallow in unclarity and sentimentality is not fit to undergo an occult development. One absolutely must have the ability to recall the events of the day in full clarity before one can risk pressing forward to visions for which there is no such recollection.

The precautions that are recommended for an occult development are actually rooted in the nature of occult development itself. You thus can say that for the ordinary consciousness there is memory, and it is part of normal life between birth and death to have this memory.

Now I can sketch for you how human nature relates to the possession of this memory. Let me sketch it in this way (see drawing, pg. 84). What I am drawing now does not exist in this way but can be perceived in the etheric body. With this line I am indicating schematically that which is really extended over the whole body, and you would have to picture that from the head—and therefore from the sense perceptions, the sense organs—up to this line is what is outside the organs. This line represents the schematic borderline for the organs of the human being: this is the point of reflection, and beyond this line, therefore, lie heart, lungs, liver, and so on. Here (arrows) is where the reflection occurs. This line is symbolic of the human memory. You can actually picture that we have within us a kind of membrane that is really the membrane separating the etheric body from the astral body; in reality, however, it is not spatial—I have merely indicated it schematically. What is perceived is thrown back by the force of the organs that are behind it. It is thereby reflected, but reflected here, and we cannot see through it in ordinary consciousness; we cannot see through this memory membrane into the inner element of the human being; the memory conceals from us the inner element of man. It must conceal man's inner being, for otherwise the human being would not be normal in the ordinary life between birth and death. Memory is what closes off for us our ordinary consciousness from what is within. As soon as this memory is interrupted, as soon as it is torn, as happens through occult development, we see into our organs, as I described it yesterday.

Now, you see, we have the answer to the riddle of the not-being-able-to-look-within. This inner element must be concealed, for otherwise we would not be able to be normal in life between birth and death. We need this memory. The inner element of our self is thus hidden by our memory reflection. This understanding is what is necessary for a solution to this riddle.

From the other side, from the direction of the outer world, we see the veil of the senses spread out, as it were, and we do not see behind it. Let us look at the matter in this way, asking ourselves: how would it be if we were not to perceive the veil of the senses, behind which lies the essence of the world: let us say that the sense veil were perforated everywhere—if one could look through it everywhere, how would it be then? We would always flow with our perception, with our observation, into the objects. We would merge with'the objects. We would not be able to differentiate ourselves from the objects. What would be the result? We would never be able, if we were not able to differentiate ourselves from the objects, to develop feelings of love, for love is based upon the fact that one does not flow over into the other but rather remains an individuality, separated and yet “feeling across” (hinueberfuehlt). We are organized in such a way that we are capable of love between birth and death. In occult development this capacity for love must be replaced by Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition; we must, so to speak, break through the capacity for love. It would ruin our life totally and we would become brutal and cold if in our ordinary life we did not have love. Therefore it is necessary for one who attempts an occult development from this direction to develop above all, to the highest degree, the capacity for love. If he has developed it in such a way that he cannot lose it through occult development, that he maintains it in spite of this occult development, then he can dare to penetrate through the veil of the senses and look into the real objectivity. You thus see the second riddle placed before your soul. The human being must be organized in such a way that he is able to have memory and able to love. Because he must be capable of love, he is unable with his ordinary consciousness to see behind the veil of the senses, and because he must be able to remember, he is unable to look into his own inner being.

This is really the truth of the Kantian philosophy that is so erroneous. Kant wished to investigate human subjectivity, and he concocted a few abstract concepts that actually do not say anything. In reality it is so that we must understand the human being between birth and death as a being capable of both memory and love. In this life the human being learns to know what lives in sensation; he learns to know what lives in love, and this he must carry through the portal of death. We are here on earth, therefore, in order to bring to fruition in ourselves these two faculties.

Now, if the human being, through memory, must hold apart his perceiving and thinking being, which pushes against the veil of the senses here, then he develops, primarily through the head (though the human being is head in total), the life that we designate as the life of consciousness. This life of consciousness goes no further than the thought. The thought becomes memory picture, but we do not penetrate any further than to the memory picture. There the thought is stopped. Only through the fact that it is stopped there can it return again as memory. There the thought is stopped, and our normal life between birth and death actually consists of preventing the thought from descending into the organs. Its forces do descend, as I described yesterday, but the thought as such, as it lives in us as picture, we must not allow to descend into the organs. At the moment when we die, the thought becomes what it should not become in the ordinary consciousness; the thought then becomes Imagination. This Imagination, which in occult development is striven for with all one's effort, occurs when the human being passes through death. All his thoughts become pictures; the human being then lives entirely in pictures. One therefore can understand the dead only if one learns to know this picture-language. Immediately after death the thoughts transform themselves into pictures. The human being lives with these pictures for some time between death and a new birth. Then the pictures gradually become Inspiration. The soul thus in fact grows further. The pictures become Inspiration; then the human being begins to perceive the music of the spheres. The music of the spheres becomes something real for him: he lives in the world of world-tones. Finally he grows together with the objective-spiritual universe: his soul becomes entirely Intuition. He becomes, as it were, one with the universe.

When this Intuition has existed for some time, we are at the same point at which the world Midnight Hour occurs, of which I also spoke yesterday. Now the return path begins, and Intuition is suited to take up something of what the human being has left behind in having lived here on earth. When the human being goes through the portal of death, he lives by virtue of forces other than those that here on earth we call the will. He lives into more cosmic forces. The will becomes absorbed, let me say; the will gradually disappears. When the human being has arrived at the Midnight Hour of the world, however, that is after he has gone through the Imaginative stage, the stage of Inspiration, the Intuitive stage, and arrives, as it were, at the height of life between death and a new birth, then Intuition fills itself again with will. The thought again becomes permeated by will, and this will saturates the soul more and more; the soul wrestles through again to Inspiration and then to Imagination, undergoing Imagination for some time; then it is again ripe to be embodied here. Out of the pictures is formed, in the way I have described, what appears as the transformed metabolic-limb man of the previous incarnation. You see, therefore, that through those stages that are striven for in occult development, the human being ascends to the Midnight Hour of the world and then takes the reverse path down again to Imagination, arriving again at thought formation when he embodies himself (see drawing).

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During this entire time the human being absorbs the will, and now, coming again into physical existence, we see how what works in out of the cosmos, what he absorbed from the previous incarnation, is as in a picture, and the will is still within this picture. We thus have here will-saturated Imagination.

When the human being therefore arrives at a new physical life, still before his conception, he does indeed have an Imagination, but a will-saturated Imagination. Out of the Imagination, which is essentially what existed already as picture, arises the head and what belongs to it, as well as the will, which takes hold now of the new limbs and the metabolism. This thus distributes itself over the head and the rest of the human being. The head is essentially, let me say, crystallized, frozen thought; what lives in the rest of the human being is organized will. Actually the human being can truly awaken only in the head. After all, you know your thoughts—your mental images in ordinary consciousness—one can say this about all present-day human beings. What happens in the will, as I have often mentioned, is just as unknown to man as what happens in sleep. How does one know, when one lifts an arm in ordinary consciousness, what is taking place? One perceives that an arm is lifted—we have this mental image—but the act of will as such remains in sleep, similar to the period between falling asleep and awakening. One therefore can say that regarding the metabolic-limb system, man also sleeps during the day. He awakens actually only in relation to the head-man. This all works together again.

You see, official science today speaks of a certain logic. It speaks in the logic of the mental image, of making judgments, and of drawing conclusions. Picture such a conclusion. The well-known conclusion, which resides in all logic, is related to the famous logical personality: all human beings are mortal; Caesar is a human being; therefore Caesar is mortal. This is the conclusion, and every part of the conclusion is a judgment: “All human beings are mortal” is a judgment; “Caesar is a human being” is a judgment; “therefore Caesar is mortal” is a judgment. The whole is a conclusion. Man, Caesar, are mental images. If you question a person today who is one of the very clever people—we must always consider the very clever people, for they determine the prevailing tone—he says, “Everything actually takes place in the nervous system; the nervous system is the mediator of the mental image, judgment, conclusion, even of feeling and will.” Already with this kind of forming mental images, making judgments, drawing conclusions, things are not as present official thinking believes them to be. Only forming mental images as such is actually the concern of the head. When you make a judgment, then you must feel, through the mediation of the etheric body, how you stand on your legs. You do not really make judgments with your head at all; you make judgments with your legs, although with the legs of the etheric body. He who makes judgments even when he is lying down stretches his etheric legs. Making judgments is not based on the head; it is based on the legs! Of course nobody believes this today; nonetheless it is true. Drawing conclusions is based on the arms and hands, and generally upon that which lifts man out of what the animal also has. The animal stands on its legs; the animal is itself a judgment, but it does not draw conclusions. The human being draws conclusions; for that purpose his arms have been liberated; that is what his arms are there for, not for walking. The human being has his arms free so that he can be a being that can draw conclusions. What happens when one stretches one's etheric legs or when one moves one's astral arm is a judgment, is a conclusion, which merely reflects itself in the head as mental image and then actually becomes a mental image. One thus needs the entire human being, not merely the nerve-sense human being, in order to arrive at judgments and conclusions.

Now, if you take this into consideration, you will say to yourself: the human being really lifts judgments and conclusions out of his limb system. These are fundamentally already acts of will, and this comes out of a much more indefinite state than forming mental images. We basically experience the same thing when we finish drawing a conclusion as when we wake up in the morning: we have lifted it out of the depths of our being. That which has become old from the previous life to this life, which lives itself out in the head, leads us to be able to have mental images. In the head we are old in relation to the cosmos when we are born. Our will is able to renew itself because in relation to the cosmos we have become young. What we carry with us as our head is always reminiscent of the previous incarnation. It is the old element. The metabolic-limb system, however, has been conquered by the will in entering this incarnation. It is actually mediated by the mother's body. The rest of the body—this can be confirmed by an outer, empirical study of embryology—is actually constructed from out of the cosmos in the mother. The head is simply a copy of the cosmos, brought about by outer forces. Whoever wishes to deny this should also say that it is nonsense that the magnetic field of the earth positions the needle of the magnet. The physicist goes beyond the magnet's needle if he wishes to explain it; the physiologist, the embryologist, the biologist, remains in the mother's body when he wishes to explain the embryo. That is just as nonsensical as if one wished to explain the needle of the magnet only out of itself. One must proceed out to the whole cosmos.

In development we have, to begin with, the head, and the rest of the body is only attached to it; this part the will conquers for itself, having approached Imagination during the passage through life between death and a new birth from the Midnight Hour of Existence onward. Now, when we study this human being (see drawing, page 84) we find that everything pertaining to thinking and perception lies above the membrane of memory, while everything pertaining to willing lies below this membrane. The will works up from below, works up out of the unconscious, and one finds it only in the way that we explained yesterday. There the will works upward. In regard to the will, we are sleeping. We thus actually have the human being as a duality in the life between birth and death. It is true the human being is a monad, but he is this in regard to the whole world, and this monadic quality must be brought about in becoming; he must renew it again and again. In reality, however, the human being between birth and death is dualistic: the thought, to some extent, with the perception on one side, the will with the feeling (Gemüt) on the other side.

The human being is thereby actually the average, I would like to call it, of two worlds. Be honest and ask yourselves, in every moment of your lives what do you have in consciousness? Your memory pictures—what you experienced at age two, three, five, or six—are the content of your consciousness. What comes through from below, welling up out of the will, is love, the capacity for love. The human being is actually nothing other than what in the average of two worlds appears as memory pictures and love. Basically the human being is organized in such a way that above is a world that is cosmic thought, while below is a world that is cosmic will. The human being is continually a point of attack for Lucifer from the side of will and a point of attack for Ahriman from the side of thought (see drawing, page 84). Ahriman continually strives to make the human being all head. Lucifer continually strives to cut the head off so that the human being cannot think at all, so that everything streams out in warmth by way of the heart, overflows with world love, flowing into the world as world love, as an excessively sentimental cosmic being flows out.

In our age, in our highly praised civilization, it is chiefly Ahrimanic influences active in us. These Ahrimanic influences have always been sensed by sensitive human beings. When I was still a very young man, I spoke once with an Austrian poet who was quite well known at that time; he had a fine feeling for what is emerging in our civilization, and he expressed it in a half-pictorial way; this half-pictorial quality was for him, however, a reality. He said to me—and it seems to me as if it were happening today—“Considering how we human beings are today, and especially if things continue along the lines they are going now, humanity will actually be confronted by a terrible fate, for the human being will gradually lose the agility of his limbs; he will no longer be able to walk properly; he will always want to ride a bicycle and to travel mechanically. He will lose the agility of his hands, and everything will become technical. Just as a muscle atrophies if it is not used, so everything in the human body will atrophy and the human being will become merely a head. The head will become bigger and bigger until finally the human being will just roll along, with the rest of his organism totally crippled.”

This picture hovered like a nightmare before this Austrian poet—Hermann Rollett was his name—and he described it very visually, for it weighed upon him terribly, this picture that human beings will become rolling heads due to our civilization. There is something quite true underlying this picture, however. What underlies it is that, in fact, in our time the powers are extraordinarily strong that would like to develop our heads more and more. With the physical head they will not succeed so well, but with the etheric head they will be more successful. It is therefore so, in fact, that in our time the Ahrimanic powers would like to make us thoroughly head-men; they would like to transform us completely into mere thinkers.

For the human being in a healthy development, however, the other pole exists, the will pole, which always counteracts this so that when we die the will has grasped the thought. Thought must not yet be alone. You see, when we are born, we have gathered new will, but the thought separates itself and finds our head; the will takes hold of the rest of the body. While we live on the earth there is within us a continual interaction between will and thought. The will takes hold of the thought, and we must carry this fusing of will and thought through death. Ahriman would like to prevent this. He would like for the will to remain separate, for the thought alone to be particularly cultivated. We would lose our individuality if we were finally to arrive at the point toward which Ahriman strives. We would completely lose our individuality. We would arrive, in the moment of death, at an excessively, intensively cultivated thought. We human beings would be unable to hold this thought, and Ahriman could lay hold of it himself and integrate it into the rest of the world so that this thought would work further in the rest of the world. This is, in fact, the destiny that threatens humanity if we persist in the present-day materialism; then Ahrimanic powers would become so strong that Ahriman could steal thoughts from the human being and incorporate them into the earth in their effectiveness, so that the earth, which actually ought to come to an end, would become consolidated. Ahriman works toward consolidating the earth, toward the earth remaining as earth. Ahriman works against the saying, “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.” He wishes the words to be cast aside and heaven and earth to remain. This can be accomplished only if the thoughts of human beings are stolen, if human beings are deindividualized.

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If Ahriman could continue to work as he has been able to especially since the year 1845, human brains would become more and more rigid, and human beings would live as though subject to compulsive thoughts, to materialized thoughts, as I explained yesterday. This would show itself particularly in human beings being guided in their education in such a way that they would no longer have mobile thoughts; rather, when they reached a certain age, they would have completely fixed thoughts. Now ask yourselves whether that is not already true to a great extent in our time! Just think how fixed the thoughts of many human beings are today. Is it possible to teach much to human beings today? Their thoughts are so rigid, so solid, that it is almost impossible to teach them very much. This is already being used by Ahriman. Ahriman strives more and more to intensify the process of making thoughts into compulsive thoughts. An active product in the scientific realm of these compulsive thoughts is atomism. In atomism, the spirit behind the veil of the senses is not intimated but only atoms, everywhere vibrating, whirling atoms. Of course you cannot reach behind the veil of the senses in any other way than with thoughts. Ahriman, however, has confused people so much already that they have materialized their thoughts. They no longer believe that they themselves have actually merely constructed a world with thought-atoms; they consider this as reality. They therefore have externalized the thoughts. This is a thoroughly Ahrimanized world. Today we have an Ahrimanized science, Ahrimanized through and through.

That this is actually the case can sometimes be encountered in a frightening way. I received, for example—maybe thirty-five years ago—a manuscript. It was a very scholarly manuscript. It intended to give the human differential—I am telling you a true story! By the human differential was meant the differential that if one integrates it will result in the human being. If one therefore integrates from foot to head, one will get the human being. It was a very scholarly treatise, and the physician who brought it to me said, “You may meet the author personally,” for he was in his clinic. When I became acquainted with the man, he said, “Yes, this is so; I have experienced it myself. I consist altogether of differential atoms. Everywhere there are differentials, and I am only an integral.” He conceived himself as differentiated exclusively into atoms; that was an intellectual-Ahrimanic form of consciousness. In the last analysis, however, it is merely the system of atomism grown rigid. When this manuscript was brought to me, I was led to recall that there is a LaPlacian world formula: according to it, it should be possible, by integration from the processes of atoms, to calculate, by inserting a specific value, when, let us say, Caesar crossed the Rubicon, or something similar! Here one does not integrate from foot to head, but rather one merely needs to integrate from the world's beginning to its end. This can be done simply by bringing atoms into the world formula in the appropriate way. This whole way of thinking looks suspiciously similar to the treatise of the man who considered himself an integral locked in between the borders of foot and head. By viewing such matters correctly, one can receive clear insight into the progressively Ahrimanic nature of our culture.

This must, of course, be counteracted, which can happen only if our concepts are again led to have a pictorial quality, so that we do not merely work with abstract concepts but rather bring to our concepts a pictorial quality. Then, when passing through the portal of death, we will already be bringing pictures with us, and we will find the connection to what the world demands. Otherwise humanity approaches the danger of losing itself. What actually ought to be individualized by the flowing of the will into the thoughts will become mineralized, will be made into universal earth. The earth thus would become a world- being, but humanity would in terms of its soul flow into a great cemetery.

Such overviews of civilization must occasionally be made. In our time it is absolutely essential to make such overviews, for whoever is able to oversee more precisely the matters of evolution today knows how rapidly this ossification of our civilization is approaching us. On this occasion I would not like to forget to mention that until the year 869 A.D., until the Eighth Ecumenical Council in Constantinople, man's members were considered to be body, soul, and spirit. At this Eighth Ecumenical Council, the following formula, to which I have repeatedly drawn attention, was established for the West: it must not be believed that man consists of body, soul, and spirit, but only of body and soul, and the soul has a few spiritual properties. This decision then passed into the world. In the Middle Ages it was heresy to believe that man consisted of body, soul, and spirit. Today philosophy professors discover by means of "unprejudiced science" that man consists only of body and soul. This "unprejudiced science" is nothing but a decision by the Eighth Ecumenical Council. That, however, strives toward something else. One could say that through this Eighth Ecumenical Council humanity has lost the consciousness of the spirit, which must be regained. If we proceed further along the path I have just described to you, however, humanity will also lose consciousness of the soul.

Among the materialists of the nineteenth century, this consciousness of the soul had already disappeared to such an extent that it was said that the brain secretes thoughts just as the liver secretes bile. It seemed, therefore, as if only a consciousness of the bodily processes remained. In fact, already today, without people knowing it, there are all kinds of underground societies that work toward things that lead in a direction similar to the one decided upon in 869 at the Council of Constantinople. They work to explain that man does not consist of both body and soul but rather that man consists only of the body and that the soul is merely something that develops out of the body. It is therefore impossible, if you take this viewpoint, to educate man from the aspect of soul; one must find a substance, a material substance, that can be injected into a human being at a certain age; then he will develop his talents by injection. This tendency definitely exists. It is right in line with the Ahrimanic development: no longer establish schools in order to teach, but inject certain substances instead. This is possible. It is not as if it were not possible. It is indeed possible, but the human being is made thereby into an automaton. One would speed up immensely what would otherwise be achieved by means of developing ready-made thoughts, with an education that overpowers thinking. There are already such substances that can be developed, substances that if injected at seven years of age, for example, could make the public schools altogether expendable; the human being would then become a thought automaton. He would become exceptionally clever but would not have a consciousness of it. This cleverness would just run off like a machine. What do many people today care, however, whether the human being has an inner life or not, as long as outwardly he walks around and does this or that? Such human beings that submit themselves by preference to the Ahrimanic civilization—and they do exist today—strive for such ideals. After all, what could be more tempting than the attitude, such as today is spreading far and wide, which would prefer to find an injectible substance to struggling with the children for years and years? One must present these things as being drastic. If one does not present the situation as being drastic, humanity today would not notice toward what goals it is striving. By such an injectible substance, one would simply achieve a loosening of the etheric body in the physical body. As soon as the etheric body is loosened, the play between the etheric body and the universe would become exceedingly lively, and man would become an automaton. The physical body here on earth must be developed through spiritual will.

Out of the full consciousness that one faces when confronting the automization of the human being, the methods for the Waldorf School, the pedagogical methods for the Waldorf School, were discovered. In this regard they should be motors of civilization that will lead again to a spiritualization, for basically—one can already say this—today above all it is necessary for the spiritual life among human beings to be particularly nurtured. One therefore should look courageously upon all that appears as symptoms of the improvement of individual human beings. I have often mentioned before how humanity strives today to place routine in place of a real practice of life—routine, which is truly the mechanization of life.

I was overjoyed recently when I read that there are still people who, going beyond the ordinary routine of life, have already perceived the practical life as something important. Recently a news item spread through the world, describing how Edison tested the people he wished to prepare for some sort of practical work. It did not interest him at all whether or not a merchant was able to keep books. That, he said, can be learned in three weeks if one is a reasonable, intelligent person. None of these specialties interested him at all; these one can learn. When Edison wished to know whether people would be of any use in practical life, however, he tested them by asking them questions like, "How large is Siberia?" Thus when he wished to discover whether someone was a good bookkeeper, Edison did not ask whether he could conduct an audit properly, but he asked, “How large is Siberia?” or “If a room is five meters long, three meters wide, and four meters high, how many cubic meters of air are contained in this room?” and similar questions. He posed questions like, “What is standing at the place where Caesar crossed the Rubicon?” and so on, just general questions. And according to the extent to which a person could answer such questions, Edison hired him as a bookkeeper, or whatever. He knew that if a person could answer such a general question this was a proof that his schooling had not been in vain, that as a child he had developed mobile thoughts, and this is what Edison demanded.

This is how practical life really should be conducted, whereas in recent times we have steered precisely in the opposite direction, succumbing more and more to specialization, so that finally one could really despair of finding the people needed for practical life. It is impossible to get anyone to do something outside the pigeonhole into which he wants to fit. Already today it must be said that in this way too we must work toward the mobility of thoughts. If there is such a working toward the mobility of thoughts, then these thoughts will not harden, and Ahriman will be in a difficult position. You can see yourselves, if you look at life, how few Edisons there are who have such practical principles. It is necessary to work toward a pictorial quality of concepts; whoever works toward the pictorial quality of concepts will no longer be able to say that he does not understand spiritual science. It is precisely that tug which a person giyes himself in order to receive from abstractions the pictorial quality of concepts that presents on the one hand the possibility of grasping that the earth evolved out of ancient Moon, Sun, Saturn; on the other hand, for the inner life, the life of feeling intermingles with the pictorial conceptions, with the imagination. The fully human being thus will arise.

I felt the need to speak to you about an anthroposophical topic this evening, despite the fact that my stay in Stuttgart should be devoted to other things. Today I would like to share with you something about the relationship between the human being and the world around that person, insofar as this world environment plays a role in the nature of the human being. I would like to shape this theme in such a way that its content can be particularly relevant to many things that need to be considered in the face of the decline of civilization in our time.

If we take together what we have learned over the years from anthroposophical spiritual science about the human being, then much can be summarized for us in that threefold nature of the human being, which has indeed already often appeared before our souls, in the threefold nature of spirit, soul and body. If we look at our present education from the spiritual-scientific point of view, at that which is penetrating more and more into our education today, then we must say that the development of humanity has gradually come to subject only the physical part of the human being to observation. In relation to this consideration of the bodily, we certainly have comprehensive knowledge today and even more endeavor to get to know the bodily in its relationship to the other phenomena of the world. But we live at a time when more and more attention must be paid to the soul and the spirit. Precisely when one looks at the physical so carefully, as is the case with today's usual knowledge, one must actually be led by this consideration of the physical to the consideration of the soul and the spiritual.

I would like to start from phenomena that cannot really be understood today because only the physical is considered, and which nevertheless, I would like to say, are there as great questions before man. When we consider the human body, it fits into the whole order of nature, and knowledge has gradually endeavored to piece this order of nature together from necessarily interrelated causes and effects. The human body is also thought of as being integrated into this chain of causes and effects and is explained from it. This is the materialistic character of our present-day knowledge in the broader and actual sense, that one only looks at natural causes and effects and the way in which the human body is derived from these causes and effects with a kind of mechanical necessity.

But then certain phenomena immediately present themselves to man, which are indeed abnormal phenomena in a certain sense, but which stand there like great riddles, like question marks, if one merely stops at the purely natural explanation according to cause and effect. We see how human corporeality unfolds. The natural scientist comes and seeks the same laws in the human body that he seeks in the rest of nature. He may say that they are only more complicated in the human body, but they are the same laws that are also found in nature. And lo and behold, we see individual laws from which certain phenomena arise, albeit in an abnormal way, which cannot possibly be incorporated into the course of natural events. The materialistic thinker endeavors – he has not yet achieved it, but he regards it as an ideal – to explain ordinary human volition, ordinary human feeling, human thinking or imagining as effects of bodily processes, in the same way that we explain a flame through the combustion of fuel. And it can certainly be said, even if, of course, such explanations have not yet been achieved today, that in a certain way the natural scientist may say that the time will come when thinking, feeling and willing will also be explained from the human body, just as the flame is explained from the burning of fuel. But how should we relate to human imagination, for example, if this view were completely correct? We distinguish between ideas in life that we accept because we can describe them as correct and ideas that we reject because we describe them as incorrect, because we say they are an error. But in the natural order, everything can only follow from the causes and be the proper effect of the causes. Thus, in accordance with the natural order, we can say that error and deception arise from necessary causes in the same way as the correct and justified conception. But here we are confronted with a riddle: why do the phenomena of nature, which are supposed to be all necessary, give rise in man to the true in one instance and the false in another?

But we are even more mystified when we see what we call deceptive visions and false hallucinations arising in individual human beings, which we know to be something that vividly suggests reality without being rooted in it. How can we possibly claim that something is an unjustified hallucination when everything that takes place in a human being necessarily arises from the natural order that is also in him? We would have to ascribe just as much justification to hallucinations as to what we call true impressions and true perceptions. And yet, we are – and we can feel and sense this – justifiably convinced that hallucinations must be rejected as such. Why must they be rejected? Why may they not be recognized as legitimate content of human consciousness? And how can we recognize them as hallucinations at all?

We will only be able to shed light on these mysteries if we look at something else that may initially remind us of hallucinations, but which, according to our perception, cannot be recognized by us in the same sense as hallucinations, and that is the products of human imagination. These products of human imagination arise first from the unfathomable depths of the human soul; they express themselves in images that magically present themselves to the human soul, and they are the source of many things that beautify and uplift life. All art would be inconceivable without the products of the imagination. Nevertheless, we are aware that these products of the imagination are not rooted in a solid reality, that we have to look at them as something that deceives us if we ascribe reality to them in the usual sense of the word. But then we come to something else.

We know the first stage of supersensible knowledge from our spiritual science. There we speak of imagination, there we speak of imaginative knowledge, there we describe how the soul, through certain exercises, comes to have a pictorial content in its contemplation, but which, although it appears as a pictorial content, is not seen by the spiritual researcher as a dream, but is seen as something that refers to a reality, that depicts a reality.

We have, so to speak, three stages of the soul's life before us: the hallucination, which we recognize as a complete deception; the fantasy, which we know that we have somehow brought out of reality, but which nevertheless does not, as it arises in us as a figment of the imagination, have anything directly to do with reality. Thirdly, we have the imagination, which also arises in our soul life as an image or as a collection of images and which we relate to a reality. The spiritual researcher knows how to relate this imagination to a reality through life, just as he relates the secure perception of color or sound to a reality. And to those who say that imagination, real imagination, cannot be proved in its reality, that it could also be an illusion, one must reply: He who has immersed himself in the things of the soul says: You also cannot know whether a hot piece of steel is a real hot piece of steel or merely a thought, a mere mental image. You cannot prove it through thoughts, but you can through life. Everyone knows how to distinguish in life, through the way he comes into contact with external physical reality, the merely imagined hot iron that does not burn you from the real hot iron. And so, in life, the spiritual researcher knows how to distinguish between what is merely imagined in this spiritual world and what points to a reality of this spiritual world through imagination, precisely because of the contact he comes into with the spiritual world through imagination.

Now, one does not understand the relationship of this threefold system, hallucination, fantasy, imagination, if one is not able to penetrate the essence of man in relation to his entire world environment in a spiritual scientific way. The human being is, after all, a being that is divided into spirit, soul and body. If we first consider the human being as he presents himself to us between birth, or let's say conception, and death, then, in terms of our immediate experiences, we have him before us in his corporeality. This corporeality of the human being is only understood to a very small extent, even by today's science. This corporeality is a very, very complicated one. The more one is able to follow it down to its details, the more it becomes a wonderful structure. But the answer to the question: How do we understand this corporeality? - it must come from another side and it only comes to us from the side that spiritual science offers us when it points to the spirit.

But if you take many of the things that have been said in the various lectures of the past years together, you will actually be able to say to yourself: Just as we have the human being's corporeality before us between birth and death, so we have his spirituality, his spirit, before us in the life that the human being accomplishes between death and a new birth. And if we consider the life of a human being between death and a new birth, as I did in the lecture series I gave in Vienna in the spring of 1914, we observe the growth and development of the human spirit in the same way as we observe the growth and development of the human body when we follow the human being from birth to death. It is really so: when we look at the newly born child and then follow the development of the human being, how he develops out of childhood, how he becomes more and more mature, how then decay comes, how then death occurs: we follow the human body in its becoming with our outer senses and combine our outer sense impressions with the intellect. In the same way, we can follow the human spirit in its development if we observe the growth and maturing of the spirit, if we arrive at what I have called in Occult Science the midnight hour of existence between death and a new birth, when we then see its approach to physical life; we then contemplate the spirit, and we must then look at the relationship of this spirit, which actually appears to us in its original form between death and a new birth, to what appears to us here in the physical world as its body in its becoming.

Now, through spiritual research, we are confronted with the significant and important fact that what we experience here as the body, what reveals itself to us as the body, is in a certain respect an image, an external image, a true image of what we observe as spirit between death and a new birth, and what we see as spirit in the way just now indicated is the model for what we see here in the physical life as a body. This is how we must imagine the relationship between the spiritual and the physical. Someone who knows nothing of the life between death and a new birth knows basically nothing of the human spirit.

But when we stand before a human being, as he presents himself to us in the corporeality that reveals itself to us between birth and death, and we then equip ourselves with the awareness that this is an image of the prenatal spiritual, then we ask ourselves: What mediates between the model and the image? What makes the model, which of course precedes the image in time, what makes this model develop in the image? We could perhaps do without such mediation if the human being were to appear completely perfect, if he were to be born in such a way that his spiritual model would immediately transform into the perfect human being and he would no longer have to grow and develop, but would stand before us in perfection. Then we could say: In a spiritual world beyond lies the spirit of man, here in the physical world is the physical image. We relate the physical image to the spiritual model. But it is not like that, as we know, but through birth, the human being first enters into sensual existence as an imperfect being and only gradually, slowly does the human being become similar to his model. Since the spirit only has an effect up to the moment of conception or even a little further into the embryonic life, that is, up to birth, and since the spirit then, so to speak, releases the human being, there must be a mediator, something must be there that, for example, in the twentieth year, takes what had not yet fully corresponded to its spiritual model and shapes it so that it corresponds more and more to its spiritual model. And that which reproduces the spiritual model in the physical is the soul.

And so we find man placed in his entire world environment. We then follow his spiritual existence between death and a new birth, his physical existence between birth and death, and we look at his soul existence as that which the model gradually develops in the physical body, in the bodily image. Then, so to speak, the midpoint of a person's development on earth comes around the age of thirty-five. Then decline sets in. Then, so to speak, the person becomes more and more hardened in terms of his physicality. But that which develops in him is already preparing itself to be absorbed again in its spiritual, purely spiritual, form at death, so that the human being can then live out again in the spiritual form between death and the next birth. What is it, again, that prepares the physical more and more so that it can become spiritual again in death? It is again the soul. This soul-life thus prepares us to be an image of our spirit in the first half of our life. It prepares us to become spirit again in the second half of our life. And so we get the human trinity of spirit, soul and body. This gives us a concrete idea of the relationship between spirit, soul and body. But we also get an idea of the physical, which is clear in itself, which is without contradiction in the sense that it must be. Because if the physical is a true reflection of the spiritual, then all spiritual activities must also be reflected in the physical; then what is spiritual must be traceable in the body in material form. And we need not be surprised that materialism has emerged in the newer knowledge and said that the bodily is the origin of the spiritual. If one takes only that which develops in man between birth and death, namely as imagination, then one finds everything that lives in the life of imagination in the images of the human body. One can follow the human being in the body up to his thinking, and one can come to the delusion of the materialistic view, because one must indeed find those fine ramifications of the bodily organization that come to light in thinking, in imagining.

So one can become a materialist in this way. One can become a materialist because the physical is a true reflection of the spiritual. And when one knows nothing of the spiritual, then one can be satisfied with the bodily, limit oneself to the bodily, then one can believe that the whole human being is contained in the bodily. But this bodily comes into being with the life of the embryo, dissolves after death. This bodily is transient, and all that we also develop as the life of imagination, bound to this bodily, is transient. And yet, it is a true reflection of the spiritual. This corporeality is a particularly true reflection of the spiritual when we look at the activity of this corporeality. We carry out an activity in the fine organizations of our nervous and sensory systems, and this fine activity is absolutely a reflection of a spiritual activity that has taken place between death and a new birth.

And when we now look at this physical activity, when we realize how it is - as I have indicated - mediated by the soul, we have to say: This physicality is an image, a reflection, and we only find the spiritual in the associated spiritual world. Here in this physical world, man, insofar as he is in this physical world, is quite a material being, and in the organization of his materiality, the true image of the spiritual is expressed at the same time. The soul certainly lives in him, which imparts the spiritual, but what belongs to the whole human being is that which lives right up to the embryonic life, which then transforms into that into which the human being in turn transforms after death: the spiritual. The spiritual, the soul and the physical are thus connected.

But if we look at this correctly – just try to see clearly what I have put before you – you will say to yourself: what the human being develops as the power of thinking must, even if only in reverberation, mediate through the soul what has gone before, from the embryo life. In other words, when I have ideas now, a certain power lives in my imaginative life, but this power is not only developed from the body; in the body there is only its afterimage. This power resonates, so to speak, it is a resonance of the life that I spent between death and a new birth before my embryonic life. This life must play a part in my present life. When the ordinary man of today imagines, it is indeed the case that in his imagining lives the echo, the reverberation of his prenatal life.

And how does a person come to ascribe a being to himself? He comes to ascribe a being to himself through the fact that he unconsciously has a realization of it: By imagining, my prenatal being lives on in me, resonates in me, and my body is an afterimage of this prenatal being. If he now begins to develop such an activity himself, which should actually only be developed through the resonance of prenatal existence, what then? Then, in this physical existence, the body, because it is an afterimage, develops something out of itself that is similar to the imaginative activity, but is not justified to do so. And that can indeed occur. When we live and think and imagine in our normal lives, our prenatal life resonates within us. And because the human being is tripartite, the nerve-sense life can be eliminated and each of the other parts can begin to imitate the activity from the purely physical realm that should actually resonate from our prenatal existence. When the rhythmic person or the metabolic-limb person develops such an activity out of themselves without justification, which is similar to the justified imagination that resonates from prenatal life, then hallucination arises. And you can, with absolute precision, if you look at the matter spiritually, distinguish the justified perception, which at the same time, by recognizing it as a justified perception, is living proof of the pre-existent life. You can distinguish it from the hallucination, which, by virtue of the fact that it can be there, that it is the imitation is a living proof that the original it apes also exists, but that it is cooked up entirely by the body and therefore stands there as something unauthorized. For in physical life the body has no right to ape out of itself the way of thinking that should be born out of the spiritual life of prenatal man.

Such considerations must indeed be made if one wants to get beyond those foolish ideas that are now considered definitions of hallucinations and the like. One must look into the structure of the whole human being if one wants to distinguish the hallucinatory life from the real life of imagination. And when the real life of imagination is further developed, when it is consciously taken up and when this consciousness is added to it, so that one not only experiences the echo in the imagination of prenatal life, but when one now quite consciously makes this echo into an image and thereby looks back from the echo to reality, then one comes to imagination. Thus the true spiritual scientist differentiates between hallucination, which is a boiled-out of the physical body, and imagination, which points to the spiritual, which projects itself back into the spiritual, so that one can say: In the hallucinating person the body combines, in the imagining person, who transports himself back from the echo into the prenatal world, the spirit combines; he extends his life beyond the physical existence and lets the spirit combine. In him the spirit combines. Those people who out of prejudice or, as is already happening today, out of ill will, repeat over and over again that the imagination of spiritual science could also be hallucination, they deliberately overlook the fact that the spiritual researcher knows how to strictly differentiate between hallucination and imagination, that it is he who, in the strictest sense of the word, can firmly distinguish one from the other, whereas what is said today in conventional science about hallucinations is everywhere without foundation and ground, everywhere arbitrary definitions. And it is actually only proof that present-day science does not know what hallucinations are, that it cannot distinguish what it encounters as imagination from the hallucinatory life.

Given the character of the insinuations made in this field, one must today already speak of conscious slander. It is only due to the fact that our scientists are lazy about what spiritual-scientific research is that they even bring such things into the world. If they would not be too lazy to go into spiritual science, they would see how strict distinctions are made between hallucinatory and imaginative life in spiritual science.

But one must take this into one's consciousness if one honestly wants to profess our movement, that in our contemporaneity there is the malevolence that comes from laziness, and one must pursue the laziness, which then leads to mendacity, in our contemporary culture to its hiding places; there is no other way for spiritual science today. So that we can say: In the hallucinatory life the body combines, in the imaginative life the spirit combines, and the human being feels completely removed from the world between birth and death when they feel fully immersed in the imaginative life.

The soul stands between the two. The soul is the mediator, so to speak, the spiritual fluid that mediates from the spirit, the model, to the body, the afterimage. This must not be sharply contoured on either side, it must have fluid contours, blurred contours; in contrast to this, one cannot say in a definite way that it is rooted in reality or that it is not rooted in reality. In the case of hallucinations, because they are only cooked up by the body, which however cannot cook up anything real unless it is living in the echoes of prenatal life, in the case of the body and its hallucinations one can say that they are not rooted in reality. In the case of the imaginations and their abstract images, the thoughts, one can say that they are rooted in reality.

With the images that arise from the combination of the soul, with the fantasy images, we now have something blurry; they are real-unreal. They are taken from reality, the sharp contours of reality are toned down, made to fade, made to blur. We feel ourselves to be lifted out of reality, but at the same time we feel that it is something that means something for our inner life, for our whole life in the world. We feel the intermediate state between hallucination, between deceptive hallucination and real imagination in the mediating fantasy, and we may say: in hallucination the body combines, in fantasies in the case of imagination, of which abstract thoughts are the ordinary-life reflection, the soul combines, in the case of inspiration, the mind combines. Here we have the threefold nature of man in his activity and in his relation to his environment. We may say: When we are in the spirit, whether in the shadowy image of thoughts or in imagination, through which we then rise to the higher levels of knowledge, we combine reality;

When we are within the soul and its figments of the imagination, we combine something that floats back and forth between reality and unreality; when the body combines, the hallucinations suggest to us something that may actually correspond to an unreality.

If you take what I have developed now, then you will say to yourself: Yes, an unbiased consideration of the human being provides us with this trinity of spirit, soul and body. And even with regard to what is activated by the human being, we can distinguish in three ways: hallucination, fantasy and imagination, and we are referred to body, soul and spirit. You see, with Anthroposophy you have to penetrate deeper and deeper into its essence to see how it covers the details from its wholeness.

We see how one must first present the division of the human being into body, soul and spirit in a more abstract way, and then how it is filled more and more with concrete content. If you look for the relationships between something that you have presented in this way and the other, you get more and more evidence. But that is necessary in anthroposophical life, that you keep pushing forward and forward. But that is what today's man, who feels so terribly clever, does not love. Modern man does not like to say to himself: I have now read an anthroposophical essay, I have heard an anthroposophical lecture, yes, it is not yet clear to me, but I will wait, I will see what else comes. If he would wait, he would see that progress is constantly being made on other things, and that in the end everything is certain to be true, that one thing will become proof of the other. And to the one who says: If one thing proves the other, then the whole universe is without reason and ground, then one thing always holds the other – to the one who makes this objection, you just say that he cannot accept the description that astronomy gives him of the earth. He is also told that one part of the earth supports the whole and that the whole stands without ground or base. The one who wants other proofs than this support of the one by the other does not take into account that in the case where one comes to totalities, this is precisely the characteristic, that one part supports the other.

What is necessary in order to present anything like what we have developed today before our soul is that people not only talk about the spirit – of course, one can easily talk about the spirit and actually mean blue smoke), but that one speaks spiritually of the spirit, that one is actually grasped by the spirit and that one arranges the one in the world in such a way that the work of the spirit comes to the fore. Someone who only thinks materially cannot distinguish hallucination from imagination and from figments of the imagination when he juxtaposes them. But the one who sees the living spirit in the mediation of the three pulls the threads from one to the other, is filled with living soul content in his way of looking at things, and speaks in such a way that the spirit lives in his words. One should not only speak of the spirit in science, one should let the spirit speak in spiritual science. Please reflect on this sentence, which is indeed very important if the essence of spiritual science is to be understood: One should not only speak about the spirit or of the spirit, one should let the spirit speak in a spiritual way. In this way one becomes free, for the spirit receives one freely and one expresses the nature of the spirit through one's own spirit. One must speak about the spirit in a spiritual way, that is, with fluid thinking, not with hardened thoughts, which correspond to a materialistically thinking science.

But if we take this, then it is, I would say, the very point that leads to the innermost task of our time, and which alone can save us from the decay that is such a strong impulse in our entire present-day civilization. We can say: If we feel completely at ease today with genuine, real devotion to knowing in the world within, then we are led, as if by a world grace pouring over us, to think in such a way that we think spiritually about the world. This is the one that, as a property of world evolution, only came about at the end of the 19th century. Anyone who follows the development of humanity with an open mind will see that the evolution of the world was different before the last third of the 19th century, but that, one might say, the gates of the spiritual have opened and that today, after the materialistic view of nature has celebrated great triumphs, we are faced with the task of looking at the world spiritually again. For rhythmic movement is also the human becoming, through which the individual human being passes in the rhythm of repeated earthly lives. This life is rhythmic. In rhythmic recurrence, man goes through that which once lived out in such spiritual striving of mankind, as it had its peak, for example, in the middle of the 19th century, when man only directed his mind to the material and wanted to explain everything materially , and our present time, when we must return to spiritual contemplation, because if we allow the world to fill our souls without reservation, that soul will be filled with the urge for spiritual contemplation of the world.

That is the secret of our time, I would say. Those who live with the spirit today must realize that the gates between the supersensible and the sensory world are open for earthly existence. Just as the things of the material external world speak to us through colors and sounds, so today a spiritual world speaks clearly to people. But people are still accustomed to letting the old, merely representative material world speak to them, and so they have opened the battle in all forms against the influx of the spiritual way of looking at things. This conflict manifests itself in the materialistic scientific point of view; it manifests itself in the terrible materialistic struggles that convulsed the beginning of the twentieth century. But just as in an earlier period of human development people once aspired too strongly to the spiritual and therefore fell into illusions and enthusiasms that wanted to express the spiritual in their bodies , so he who fights against the spiritual, as basically the majority of civilized people still do, falls into the clutches of the power that today resists the descent of the spiritual into the physical world. And so we have seen looming that which must come to those souls who resist the influx of the spiritual: we come to that which is the appearance of falsehood, which we have seen streaming in so terribly during the time of the world war. It was, however, already prepared beforehand, and we live today in a time when not only does the world resist knowledge, but the world is developing an inclination to tell untruths in a truly dreadful way. And basically, most of what is being said today by opponents of anthroposophy and everything associated with it is untrue. What profound dishonesty is evident in those who today virtually present themselves as the bearers of truth, who call themselves the proclaimers of truth!

Let me give you an example – I always have to use examples that are close at hand, I'm sorry to say: A paper called Stuttgarter Evangelisches Sonntagsblatt (Stuttgart Protestant Sunday Paper) is published in Stuttgart. In issue 19, page 149, the Stuttgarter Evangelisches Sonntagsblatt published a few sentences that included the following, among other things. Someone, a retired pastor named Jehle, had presented something about the anti-church currents of the present day. Much valuable information had been said about monism and freethinking, and then the retired pastor Jehle explained the deeper reasons for the bitterly fought battle against the historicity of Jesus, as waged by A. Drews. He then shed light on Christian Science, which, in the sharpest contrast to the materialistic world view, declares everything material to be unreal, and further: “Steiner's Theosophy, which, in gratitude for his allegiance to the returned Bernhard of Clairvaux, declares Pastor Rittelmeyer to be so.”

Now, my dear friends, a friend of ours has tried to get this matter rectified. The matter was also brought to Pastor Rittelmeyer, and Pastor Rittelmeyer then wrote the following letter to those who had made such a claim:

Well, you see, the Stuttgarter Evangelische Sonntagsblatt did not print the last words at all, about the low mentality and so on, but only the first words, and added:

So it is not admitted that one has spread a lie, but regrets that readers have understood it as if one had counted on the vanity. And now it continues: “As much as we regret, for factual reasons, the promotion of Rudolf Steiner's cause by a representative of the church, the thought of personal disparagement was far from our minds. We also have no doubt that Pastor Rittelmeyer was unpleasantly surprised by the thought of such an appointment by Rudolf Steiner.

So they create the impression that Pastor Rittelmeyer was unpleasantly surprised when he heard that I had appointed him, whereas he explicitly states that he was unpleasantly surprised that such a lie was spread by the Evangelisches Sonntagsblatt.

“Besides, I think our regular readers know us too well to suspect us of intending to personally disparage or even defame them. They also know that we have plenty to do with better and more beautiful work.” – I leave it to the readers of the Evangelisches Sonntagsblatt to judge this.

You see, this is how those who call themselves representatives, the official representatives of the truth, and those whom numerous people consider obliged to represent the truth, work today. One only has to point this out to draw attention to where the tendency towards untruthfulness is today. But there is not yet enough widespread revulsion, not enough widespread disgust for such immorality, for such an anti-religion, which calls itself Christian Sunday worship.

One need only point to a single such symptom, of which hundreds could be demonstrated today, to show where today - and this will get much worse, because we are living in our time - the starting points are that then accumulate into those rabble-rousing performances like the ones that took place at our last eurythmy performances in Frankfurt and Baden-Baden. The same eurythmy performance that was seen here with full sympathy last Sunday was jeered at and whistled at in Frankfurt and Baden-Baden with all kinds of keys and similar instruments, not, of course, out of objective judgment, but out of the coincidence of two things. Firstly, the battle that is being waged on a large scale for reasons that you have probably heard me speak of on many occasions. This battle is being waged against the assertion of the influx of spiritual life into our physical world and is being waged out of the tendency towards untruthfulness. People do not have much time for it, but it must be pursued to its very last hiding place. And the other is the inability that is in league with laziness, with discomfort. When a well-known local newspaper, as I have already mentioned here, wants to pass judgment for its readers, it turns to one of the current authorities, for example Professor Traub in Tübingen; and in one of these articles, as I have already mentioned here, one found very strange words. This university professor, who still has the right today to prepare as many young souls, as they say, for their profession, writes: In Rudolf Steiner's world view, spiritual things and spiritual beings move in the spiritual world like tables and chairs in the physical world! Well, has anyone ever seen tables and chairs moving in the physical world with a sober mind? Professor Traub in Tübingen has the style of writing now that I talk about in my writings that in the spiritual world the entities move like tables and chairs in the physical world. Since he probably does not admit to being a spiritualist, Professor Traub, I at least will not be so rude as to impute to him the other state while he wrote this article, in which one usually sees the tables and chairs moved.

But these are the authorities to whom one turns when one demands a judgment about what presents itself as spiritual science today. These things are just not always stated with sufficient sharpness, and above all they are not thought about and felt with sufficient sharpness by many of our friends either. And again and again we experience it happening that when someone says something against us and we describe him in his whole character, one does not take it badly that he is a liar, but one takes it badly that we say he is a liar. We have experienced this in the last few weeks, one might say, from day to day, here and elsewhere.

One may well speak of an inability when such nonsense is written, as Professor Traub wrote in Tübingen, who also wrote in the same essay: Secret science cannot be a science, simply because the terms “secret” and “science” are mutually exclusive; what is secret is not a science. Now I ask you, if someone writes a scientific book and someone else has the quirk of keeping it secret for a hundred years, is it any less scientific because it was kept secret? It is certainly not scientific because it is kept secret or public, but because of its scientific character! One must really be abandoned by all the spirits of healthy thinking if one can just write such a sentence.

And another thing: here, among ourselves, it is permissible to say that there are some things I must say because, unfortunately, they are not being said enough from other quarters. For many years now, we have been striving to develop an art of recitation and declamation in eurythmy, which in turn goes back to the old good principles of art, again reminding us of what poetry actually is, the art of rhythm, beat, sound, imagery, while in our unartistic time poetry is actually only recited in a prosaic way. They recite the prosaic, the literal, they do not go back to the rhythmic, the metrical basis; and because in our eurythmy we seek what Goethe meant when he rehearsed his iambic dramas with his actors with a baton like a conductor, pointing to the truly artistic in poetry, because we go back from an return from the unartistic to the artistic, that is why the protectors or the people themselves, who today, while pretending to recite poetry, croak and bleat all sorts of prosaic things, they rise croaking and bleating out of their inability and insult those who devote themselves to reciting, who in turn want to bring out the real art of reciting.

I regret that I have to say this myself, but what use is it; if things are not formulated by others, then they must be formulated by me. And I can't help but see in this struggle another form of the struggle of inability, as can be seen, for example, in Traub's thoughtlessness, a struggle of inability of the bleaters against what attempts to be a real recitation. It is understandable that what works out of inability bleats itself or makes its protectors bleat, but we have the obligation to protect spiritual knowledge, and we must, even if it is resented, point out in strong words what is the fundamental damage of our time. Today I have spoken to you about a topic that corresponds to spiritual science, and I had to – well, it was already past our hour, so it was an encore – let my reflections end with something that, in terms of contemporary history, is very much connected to the purely spiritual-scientific main topic. I regret that I have to let my reflections run into such arguments, but we do not live in a cloud-cuckoo-land, we live in the world within, and if we have the necessary enthusiasm, if we feel the sacred obligation to stand up today for the cause of anthroposophical knowledge and its effects, then we must see clearly where the opposition lies, and then, by communicating with each other about these things, we must develop within ourselves the strong will to shine a light into this opposition. For only in this way will we join that which, in the face of decline, leads to a new dawn, which are the impulses that, in the face of the struggle against spirit and soul, want to bring about the assertion of spirit and soul in earthly life. In order to be able to feel together in the right sense in the strong assertion of the power that wants to bring spirit and soul into play, can bring them into play, we must come to an understanding about everything that is against spirit and soul.

I did not want to complain or grumble about the opponents, but I wanted to speak to you to make clear what is necessary for our souls to resonate in the work for mind and soul. I will say more about this when we meet again.

Today's deliberations will take as their starting point something that was already partially hinted at when I last had the opportunity to address you from this position. Today, we must once again consider the question that arises as a kind of conundrum of the times, but which is at the same time a profound riddle of humanity: How are the phenomena of nature, to which we are subject as physical subject to as physical beings, and the phenomena of the moral, ethical, and spiritual world, to which we must in some way profess to belong, because otherwise we cannot recognize our own human dignity? No matter how materialistic someone's outlook on knowledge may be, if he has even a rudimentary sense of human dignity, he will accept the difference between good and evil, between moral and immoral. And he will look up to the moral world, perhaps , if he is a materialist, reluctantly, but still in some way at least questioning, at least doubting, to the spiritual world, a spiritual world order that permeates the natural world to which we belong through our physical-sensual body. But if we consider what can emerge from the formation of our time to enlighten us about the nature of the world, we see that today human thinking, feeling and impulse are in profound conflict. This conflict cannot be resolved overnight, and it is not easy for modern man to find his way out of it. On the one hand, there is what science reports to him, which today has such tremendous success, that science, which rises from the contemplation of the external sensual world to justified or unjustified hypothetical views even about the beginning and end of the world, and on the other hand, there is the demand of the moral world. But how can the conflict between the two be resolved when, from the perspective of natural science, we learn that once upon a time there was a kind of cosmic fog; out of this cosmic fog the cosmos formed, our earth formed, initially in such a way that it was only a kind of mineral surge. Then gradually the plant and animal world emerged. Finally, man appeared. And if we then extend the same way of thinking, the same kind of lawfulness that we have envisaged, further to the becoming of the earth, we come to the conclusion that this earth will one day return to a kind of mineral surge, that the scene will no longer be able to support living beings, how, in other words, this scene will be a large cemetery that holds everything buried that was once alive, that was once ensouled and spiritualized. So there we are, between the mineralized world and yet again the mineralized world in the middle of it, having emerged from this mineralized world with all our organs, which actually represent only structures in which the substances that constitute the external world are interwoven more intricately than they are in the external world.

From what has emerged as a human being within this scientifically hypothetical world, the demand now arises to be moral, to be good, ideas and ideals arise in man, and the question must arise: What will become of the demands of the moral world, what will become of ideals, of ideas, when one day everything we understand scientifically, including man, will have fallen to the great final cemetery?

Of course, one can say that this is the extension of the scientific way of thinking to the hypothetical, and one does not actually need to go that far. But then one would have to at least raise the question: So where should one turn? Where can one gain any insight into the place of man in the universe, insofar as he is a moral being, a being who carries ideas and ideals within himself? This question would have to be raised if one did not admit to science the right to form hypotheses about the end of the earth and the beginning of the earth. But from all that is currently presented to man by recognized human science, which, after all, has been formed entirely out of natural science, no information can be given about man's place in the universe. I would like to explain what is emerging as a conflict in all human feeling in the present day and which is fundamentally intimately connected with all the forces of decline that are making themselves so terribly felt in our time by placing a man of the present day who has absorbed everything that is accepted as enlightenment, education and scientific knowledge in our time, in other words, a man who feels very clever in the present day. I will place him on one side and on the other side I will place a person from the Greek cultural community, a person who lived in the pre-Socratic period, still in the time from which so little has survived, such as individual sayings of the great philosophers Heraclitus, Anaxagoras and so on. I would like to place such an educated Greek next to the very clever people of the present. And not just a Greek in his present reincarnation, because if he were in a human body, he would probably also be a very clever person of the present, but I want to place him here as he was as a Greek. So in his embodiment as a Greek, I want to confront him with a very clever person of the present.

A person from that time would say: Yes, you modern people, you know nothing about humanity, because you also know nothing real about the world.

– “Why?” the clever person of the present would ask.

He would say: We have come to know a number of seventy elements, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur and so on. We are, however, now at the point where it seems that all these elements can be traced back to one; but we are not yet at the point where we can trace them back to one. We recognize these seventy-two elements, which mix and unmix, combine and separate, and which actually make up everything that happens in the physical-sensual world. Everything you see is based on the connection and disconnection of these elements.

The ancient Greeks would say: It's all very well having seventy-something elements, but you certainly won't get to know the human being with all these elements. There can be no question of that, because the beginning of knowledge of man - the ancient Greek would say - must be made by not speaking of seventy-two or seventy-six elements, of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and so on, but the beginning of knowledge of man must be made by saying: Everything that surrounds us externally, sensually, consists of earth, water, air and fire.

Now the clever person of the present day would say: Yes, that was once, that was in childhood, when one did not yet know as much as we do today. Then one said: earth, water, air and fire, but we have outgrown these childish things. Then four elements were assumed; now we know that there are seventy-six elements. That was a very childish way of looking at things. We know that water is not an element. We know that air should not be spoken of as an element either. We know that heat, fire, is not a material at all. We are tremendously clever. You were just at a childish stage of world view.

Now perhaps the Greek might reply: I have already studied your seventy elements, and the way you look at them – and it is the way of looking at them that matters – is that, in our conceptualized world, these seventy elements belong to the earth, not to water, not to air, not to fire, but to the earth. It is nice of you that you can differentiate and specify this earth and also think of it in great variety, split into seventy-two or seventy-six elements, that is all nice; we were not yet ready to get to know these interesting details, but we have summarized all this under the expression “earth.” But what we understand by water, air and fire, you understand nothing about, and because you understand nothing about it, you cannot have any knowledge of human nature. For you see — as the Greek of this time would say — there are two kinds of people: firstly, the human being who walks around between birth and death, first as a child and then as an adult, and then the human being who lies there as a corpse for a few days and then is in the grave. We are only talking about the physical human being – the Greeks would say – and there is this twofold form: the human being who walks from birth to death, and then the human being whom one sees for a few days as a corpse and who then lies in the grave. And what you learn from your seventy-two or seventy-six elements that combine and release, that only refers to the human being who lies in the grave, to the human corpse. You can recognize with your chemistry and physics how things are in the human being as a human corpse, but you cannot recognize anything at all about the human being who walks around alive between birth and death. You have a science that only refers to the observation of a person after he has died. You understand nothing about the living human being. You have happily reduced your science to a science of the dead human being, not at all of the living human being. For if you want to have a science of the living human being, then you must first observe the comprehensive, universal weaving and living of that which we call “water”. We do not call the coarse liquid element that runs in the brook water, but we call water everything where cold and moisture interact in the world; we call that water — as the Greeks would say. And in that we want to form a living image of what is intermingled there of moisture and cold in all forms, then we are first of all led to imagine not with mere concepts, with mere ideas, with mere abstractions, but in images. And the Greek will now say: If you can perceive moisture with some sensation of cold, when that passes into other moist things, shaped by the moist element or revealing itself in another sensation of cold, then you get living, weaving images in moisture and cold. And one ascends to the comprehension of the plant world and begins to understand the interweaving of the watery and cold element in such a way that, now not in the gross material water, but in this weaving of cold and watery, the plant world arises in spring in images, how it tears itself from the ground, how it tears itself through the watery in itself from the cold, because the earth is dry and cold. And in the formation of the plant world through spring, summer and autumn, we see another weaving of the watery element, and we grow in the mighty imagination of this outer weaving and life of the watery element. But the whole plant world with its formations is in it.

And so the Greek says: It is not a sensual thing that matters to us, but what one has as a super-sensual thing; weaving cold and damp, that is what matters to us. And we perceive the weaving and life of the plant world in this liquid, watery element within it. If we get to know this, not through abstract concepts, but through these images, which themselves inspire us to be inwardly active, then we need only look back into ourselves and we perceive in what we can observe outside in spring, summer, autumn and winter, in the emerging plant world, in the overcoming of the cold by warmth, in all that takes place towards autumn and again towards winter, in all this we perceive something that we can then imagine as a miniature image. When a person falls asleep, something happens in him that is very similar to spring, and as he continues to sleep, something similar happens in him that is like the sprouting, sprouting summer life. And when the person wakes up again, it is like winter life. You see a miniature image of the outer life, insofar as this outer life produces the vegetative, in what the human etheric body is. The Greeks would have said: In your seventy-two or seventy-six elements you only get to know the human corpse. But this human corpse is permeated by something that can only be known in pictures, but in such pictures, which arise when one thinks of the vegetative, one thus interprets the watery element. There you learn to recognize what, from birth to death, as the etheric body, makes active what you learn through your quite a few seventy elements to be the element of death. And by not rising to the watery element, you also never get to know the human being as a living being.

But now something else begins. That is just earth, which represents the dead in man. The moment a person dies, his body is taken over by the earth, by the many seventy elements; the lawfulness of the earth, the lawfulness of the earth element, extends over him. Where is the lawfulness of the element that is the watery? This lawfulness is not on earth, this lawfulness is out there in the cosmos. And if you want to look for — as the Greek would say — who brings forth this surging of the cold and damp through spring, summer, autumn and winter, you have to look up into the cosmic element, first to the planets, then to the fixed stars, look up into the vastness of the cosmos. Your earthly element is only valid in relation to the human being when he lies in the grave; the human being who walks around here on earth is, in every single moment, insofar as he carries his etheric body within him, subject to the laws of the cosmos. These are the laws that come into effect from the weaving of the planets or from the forces of the fixed stars. And so essential for the Greeks in the time I have indicated was the watery element that they would have said: In what the watery element is that surrounds the earth, clouds it, or discharges itself in thunderstorms, insofar as this watery element is effective, the cosmos is effective in the earth with its forces. What takes place in the watery element has nothing to do with the earthly element or with earthly things in general. It is to be sought in the cosmos, and there man rises into the cosmic element, simply because he has within him an active etheric body, which the elements snatch from the fate, let us say, of chemistry, between birth and death.

But with that, one has actually not yet grasped the human being in truth. One has only grasped what permeates him as life forces, what makes him grow, what causes him to be able to digest, what accompanies him as life forces between birth and death. But a third one – and the ancient Greek philosophers I mentioned would also have pointed this out – asserts itself in the human being, which is certainly active the whole time between birth and death, but actually asserts itself in a very special, unique way, not like the usual life forces. These are the forces that lie in our rhythmic system, in our respiratory system, in our blood circulation system and so on, everything that is rhythm, rhythmic activity in us.

You will be able to sense a certain connection between your not merely physical life, but your being as a soul, and breathing, if you bring to mind the following, which every human being knows. You will have woken up at times with a particular fear. You emerge with the awareness of a sense of anxiety and you notice: there is something wrong with your breathing. Certainly, the connection between breathing and the life of the soul is a mysterious one; but it can at least be perceived when a person wakes up with nightmares and when he notices the irregularity of his breathing. There is a connection between the life of the soul, between all the surging feelings and emotions within us, the feelings of fear and anxiety, the feelings of joy and pleasure, and the rhythm of breathing and the rhythm of circulation. This rhythmic system is something other than the mere system of life. This rhythmic system has to do with our being as soul; it has a great deal to do with our life of soul and our soul nature. It is, after all, the air that we breathe that actually stimulates the entire rhythmic system, and in ancient times people still spoke of the element of air and its relationship to human beings, for example in the time when the mystery schools studied the rhythms that regulate human inner activity, but from which at the same time the meter of Homer, the hexameter, was derived. If you take the average normal breathing and circulation rhythm, you have the following: you take about eighteen breaths and four times as many heartbeats in one minute. The ratio of blood rhythm to breathing rhythm is four to one. Take the hexameter: long, short, short – long, short, short – long, short, short: three feet and the caesura is the fourth. The four beats that fall on the half of the breath; after the caesura: dactyl, dactyl, dactyl, again the caesura. The inner structure of the Homeric verse and, in general, the inner structure of the old verses is taken from the human rhythmic system. In the peculiar structure of the Homeric verse, we find the expression of the relationship between blood circulation and respiratory rhythm. By taking seriously the element of air that unites with man and then separates from man, one felt that one absorbs something into oneself that has to do with the regular experiences of the human soul. And by speaking of the air element, the Greek began to speak of the most beautiful and also the most ordinary aspects of the human soul, and he remembered that a human being takes 25,920 breaths in the course of a twenty-four-hour day, and that the sun goes around the entire vault of heaven once every 25,920 years with its vernal point. And he harmonized the rhythm of the world with the daily rhythm of the human being. He pointed out the connection between the soul of the world and the soul of man, and he said: With the life that flows between birth and death, which in its twenty-four-hour course presents us with a miniature picture of spring, summer, autumn and winter, of this aqueous lawfulness that spreads out for the cold and damp in space, and moisture in the universe, which is governed by the cosmic, in this relationship between the human etheric and the cosmic, which expresses itself in the seasons, which is expressed in the change of weather, which is regulated by the movements of the planets, in this relationship we have what expresses itself in the human etheric body. When we come to the rhythmic system, we have to turn to the air element. We have to turn to what, in ancient times, when it was better understood, gave rise to the formation of that soul element that came to light in verse construction, because people sensed the connection between the human soul and the soul of the world. One still comes into the spatial when one observes life. One must indeed ascend into the cosmic-spatial. But one comes out of space and perceives what is sent into it from time as rhythm into space, when we turn to the rhythmic system.

You see, in the rhythmic element, which is the air element, the Greeks still perceived something of what they said: the human soul is rooted in the world soul, and it is the world soul itself that lives in its rhythm and sends the miniature images of its rhythm into human life. Outside, the world soul causes the spring equinox to advance a little each year; in 25,920 years it moves around the entire solar orbit, and in 25,920 breaths a day, a person has a miniature image in his or her rhythm of an immensely long world rhythm. In twenty-four hours, the human being presents a rhythm within himself that is a reflection of a cosmic year lasting 25,920 years. Thus, the human being is rooted in the soul of the world, in that he is within the soul of the world with his soul, lives within it.

If we then ascend to the element of fire, we have not only the soul, but also the spiritual that permeates us with the ego; we also have that which finds its physical expression in the element of blood. Just as we perceive the relationship of the human soul to the soul of the world through the element of air, so we perceive the relationship of the human spirit, of the human ego, to the spirit of the world through the element of warmth or fire. In earlier times, man was led up into spiritual regions by hearing about those elements that today's quite clever man thinks have arisen from a childish way of thinking. On the contrary, we must find our way back to this way of thinking; only we must reach it fully consciously, not instinctively, as it was in those days. But if we first penetrate into the watery element, we experience the world itself as a great living thing, because we are immediately led into the cosmos with its sources of life. We experience the world as a living thing. When we enter the rhythmic element, we experience the world as ensouled, and when we then enter the element of warmth, we experience the world as spiritualized.

But you cannot get to know the watery element through our abstract concepts, through all the concepts that you can get today if you go through elementary school, through secondary school, through high school, through universities; with all these concepts, you do not gain anything with which you could grasp the watery element. This must be grasped with imagination; it reveals itself only in images. Then, in a certain respect, the ordinary abstract way of thinking must be transformed into a concrete way of thinking, into an artistic conception of the world. The modern philosopher will immediately object: it is impossible to grasp the world in pictures; it is impossible to grasp the world artistically. I am constructing a theory of knowledge; the laws of nature must be encompassed by logic. It must be possible to express everything one wants to understand about the world in abstract concepts and abstract laws. People can demand this and they can base such epistemologies, but when nature creates artistically, it cannot be captured by such epistemologies; then it must be grasped in images. We cannot dictate to nature how she should be understood; instead, we must listen to how she wants to be understood. And it can only be grasped in its watery element of the plant world through imagination, and it can only be grasped in its rhythmic life, out into the rhythms of the world, through inspiration, through the pursuit of rhythmic life, through living into the life of breathing.

If you have nightmares, then you are oppressed by the rhythm of the world, which comes over you so vehemently that you cannot bear it. But if, after going through certain exercises, you can now crawl into this air element yourself, can move with the rhythm yourself, then you enter into the world of inspiration, then you are outside your body, just as the air itself, which moves in, is outside your body. Then you move with the air into and out of the body. Then you move on to the concept of what man truly is, not what lies in the grave after his death and what today's science can grasp.

But at the same time, one must rise from abstract concepts, from mere logical images to imaginations, to inspirations and then to intuitions. Today, however, abstract life is being taken very far. It is spirited. One can think up the following so beautifully. I may have mentioned it here before, but it is important to point out such things again and again.

You travel past two places at a decent speed. A cannon is fired at one place, and a cannon is fired at a slightly later point in time at another place that you pass later. Then you hear the cannonade from the place where the shot is fired later, of course only after you have heard the bang from the first place. Now you can easily imagine the following: If you move faster and faster, you will finally move at the speed of sound. If you move as fast as sound travels, then when you pass the second location, you will be able to perceive the two bangs at the same time. And if you move even faster than sound, you will perceive the later bang first and the earlier one later, because you will have outrun it by moving faster than sound.

There is a lot of speculation like this today. You think to yourself: How do I hear two cannons being fired if I move faster than the sound? I fly away from the sound; then, right, I must also hear the one fired later earlier than the one fired earlier and which I have run away from! You see, you have the possibility of forming something quite logical, but it is not realistic. Because if you were to move as fast as sound, you would be sound yourself and you would make a sound yourself, you would merge into sound, you would merge with sound. It is impossible for someone who thinks realistically to engage in such speculations. But such speculations are being made today. They are called Einstein's theories. Einstein goes to America; the newspapers spread the word that he has had enormous success, but that he said in London that not a single person in America understood him. So then he had his success with all those who did not understand him. Perhaps. But in London it was a great folly to present these abstractions, which of course originated in a very abstract mind, as the greatest and most significant world event, and even the old Lord Haldane felt obliged to emphasize what actually happened there. Basically, nothing more has happened than that a human being has taken abstraction, the spirit of unreality, the study of concepts and ideas, to the extreme, concepts and ideas that are completely alien to reality and have even less in itself than the power of the kind of logic that relates to the dead man in the grave; because with Einstein's concepts, you can no longer even grasp the corpse, but only an extract of the corpse. But basically there is no corrective at all against what is spreading among humanity today. This corrective is only present in anthroposophical spiritual science, which in turn seeks to find the way to concepts that are in line with reality. And these concepts that are in line with reality lead us out into the worlds, for example, which still appear spatial as cosmic worlds. Here we have the world before us as one great living organism, more or less as Goethe spoke of this world in the powerful intuition of the prose hymn 'Nature'. But then, ascending from this world, we come to the soul of the world, to the rhythm of the world, to that which was once called the harmony of the spheres. One comes to the world rhythms when one cultivates it, when one transforms it into imaginations, into rhythms. This is where one has what I tried to present in my 'Occult Science in Outline', where the world rhythm is presented and from the world rhythm the formation of Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth time and the future Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan time. These things are the elaboration of world events from the world rhythm. But just look at the way these successive, unfolding world rhythms are spoken of! First, the human being belongs to these world rhythms. The human being does not arise out of some sort of swirling, out of a mineral or animal swirling, but the human being arises out of the spiritualized world as a whole, and as far as we find world, we also find the human being. But you find something else as well: when you approach the world where rhythms are mentioned, you cannot help but speak of divine spiritual beings when you speak of this world. Do you think it makes sense to speak of the world, as described in a modern physics or chemistry book, in terms of Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai? Of course it would be very out of place if one were to speak first of the special compounds of carbon, of the etheric compounds of carbon in chemistry, of alcohol and so on! If one were to list all these formulas with their carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and so on and then say: this is of angels, this is of archangels - that is of course not possible. But if one ascends to the region where one is compelled to allow the evolution of the earth to emerge from the evolution of Saturn, the sun and the moon, if one beholds this fabric that lives in the world, in the rhythms of the world, that plays into the human soul through the inner human rhythm, which one can follow into the verse, if one can at the same time point out how the verse is constructed in relation to the blood rhythm and the breathing rhythm; if one can ascend to these regions, where one describes Saturn, Sun, Moon and so on, then one is compelled to speak of beings of the spiritual hierarchies. One enters into a world in which real spiritual entities are, not merely into a world in which that hazy pantheism is to live, to which even today some who do not want to be materialists aspire and say: The world is spiritualized.

Well, the world is permeated by spirit, a spiritual element is spreading everywhere – it is roughly the same as when someone says: a lion; you claim that it has a larynx, with which it roars, and a gullet and trachea and lungs and stomach – that is not my concern, I will not talk about it, it is just completely “lionized”. — It is something like saying that someone is completely permeated, the philosophical posturing of the pantheists, who think that the nebulous spiritual is spread everywhere.

But if you really want to talk about the spiritual, you have to talk about individual spiritual beings. Then you have to know how, as soon as you ascend from the water element to the air element, you encounter the spiritual beings that are described in the hierarchies. As soon as one enters the element of fire, one comes to the highest hierarchy: thrones, cherubs, seraphs, and only then to the actual spiritual formation of the world, in which, however, the human being can no longer distinguish individual entities. But before one enters into what superficial pantheists might call the nebulous All-One, one passes through the world in which the individual concrete spiritual entities live. And in these concrete spiritual beings, one now recognizes what also lives in the nature that surrounds us. Because one comes to the fundamentals of the nature that surrounds us. Man cannot be in the nature that surrounds us and that we observe with our chemistry and physics. Man can only be in a nature in which there is also the watery, the airy, and the fiery element.

As soon as we enter the airy element, we have the beings that we describe as angels, archangels and so on. Here we enter into the concrete spiritual world being. We also enter a world that we can grasp both morally and physically. We just don't see it because today we cloud our view of the fact that real morality also emanates from the same world from which, for example, real meter emanates. The world in which the seventy-six elements are found is not, of course, the origin of morality; nor does it contain that which animates the human being. But the moment we enter the rhythmic element, we also enter the world of morality. And the task for the modern human being is to recognize the moral world as real again, to recognize that the same material or substance from which his astral body is formed is contained in moral ideas. The same substance from which our ego is formed is contained in religious ideas and in the religious idea.

We must again find the bridge between the observation of nature and the observation of the spiritual world, but not just the generally hazy spiritual world, but the spiritual world from which our moral intuitions come. I already wanted to point out this interplay between the world of perceptions and the world of intuitions in my Philosophy of Freedom, 1893. I wanted to show how the concrete moral intuitions are taken from a world that lies beyond the world of perceptions and are inserted into the world.

That, after all, is the great task of the present time: not to stop at the world that is actually applicable to man only when he is in the grave, but to ascend to the world that shows us man when he experiences the soul in the rhythm of the physical. But it is precisely in the rhythm of the physical that one learns to understand rhythm in its essence. Thus one learns to understand the cosmic rhythm, and one cannot understand the cosmic rhythm without understanding the sources, the origins of the moral world. Only then can such an understanding come to say: Yes, I have a natural science at present that can be applied to the human being as a corpse. — Of course, it must then come from the corpse of the world, taken from that in the world that perishes. It must relate to that part of the earth that will one day become the corpse of the earth. But in what we grasp in the rhythmic, what we pour out, for example, in verse, in pictures, in the spiritual in general, so that it comes to life as it lives in the rhythms, and what we intuitively grasp in our moral ideals, we create something that outlasts earthly death, just as the individual human soul outlasts human death. The earth will perish according to the laws of nature that we recognize today; according to these laws the earth will perish. And according to the laws that we recognize by approaching the spiritual world, and according to the laws that we recognize when we have moral intuitions, when we have truly religious intuitions, according to these laws the soul is formed, the human souls are formed, which will leave the earth when it decays into death and go to new future existences.

And so it is that today we have an officially recognized science: it teaches that which is dead, it teaches that after which the earth will one day perish in the great cosmic grave. And we need a spiritual science that seriously endeavors to fulfill the words of Christ Jesus: “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.” We need a spiritual science that seeks the real, the true content of these words of Christ, because these words are about rhythm, about morality, about the divine, about that which passes over to new levels of existence when the earth and the cosmos fall apart and become a corpse. And we must be aware that we must escape from a science that only speaks of death, and move on to a science that rises to the living and through the living to the soul and spirit.

Until the year 333, roughly until the first half of the fourth century A.D., there was actually still a mystery science; in fact, it was only in the sixth century that the last Greek sages were completely expelled. But what did this mystery science actually want? This mystery science wanted to help people overcome the great danger of physical life. And in those days it was still relatively easy to help people overcome the great danger of physical life because they still had something of a unifying power, of group souls. This group soul nature was still very strong until the 4th century AD. Only since the migration of peoples began and the group soul nature was broken by the special element that emanated from the Germanic peoples, has the situation changed. But these mysteries have only attracted individuals whom they have regarded as particularly select, and developed them in the mysteries to a particular spiritual level of education. But in so doing, they did not only do something for these individual initiates and initiates, but because group spirit prevailed, everything was done at the same time for the rest of the environment in which the teacher or otherwise initiate worked. Particularly when we go back to the older Egyptian times, there were a few initiates, but they were at the same time the intellectual leaders in all fields, the leaders of the entire Egyptian people, and because there was group soulfulness, their strength was transferred to the other people who were not initiated. So in those days one had only to initiate individuals.

What was actually intended by this initiation? It was intended that people should be made aware of the danger of becoming mortal in their souls. In Egypt, people had a different concept of immortality than they do today. Today, we actually think of immortality as something that is granted to us in any case, that we cannot lose. In the Samothracean mysteries, for example, it was taught: There are four Kabirs; three of them always kill the fourth. But actually, it was meant that man has a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body and an ego. The physical body is subject to death, and becomes a physical corpse. The etheric body is scattered in the cosmic, and the astral body also dissolves in a certain way, as I have described in my book Theosophy. If the I does not save its self-awareness by participating in the spiritual, then the three also kill the I and drag it down into mortality. In the mysteries, people sought to save human immortality. They did not imagine that they could acquire immortality through prayers; they did not imagine that they could only relate passively to immortality and the like, but they imagined that those who were initiated, through the special transformation of their soul, through their awakening, through the awakening of their ego, got over the danger of not grasping themselves in spirit and thereby having to go the way of their mortal body. And because individual initiates had this power to still be able to think beyond the mortal body, they were also able to communicate it to other people because there was a group soul spirit. Today there is no more group soul. Since the first third of the 15th century, this has been more and more prepared; today we are called upon to develop freedom as individual human beings. Today we are basically at the point where we face the opposite danger.

While people until the 4th century AD were faced with the danger of not being able to grasp themselves in the spiritual element, so to speak, so that they had to be awakened in this spiritual element, today, due to the special development of their physical body, due to the special development of matter, people are actually really thinkers, and they live terribly much in thoughts. Those people who believe that they live in reality are actually living more than ever in thoughts. Today people are terribly abstract, and they immediately fall for everything that is abstract because they have an inner affinity to the abstract. But these abstractions, these thoughts that are concocted, are not only wrongly interpreted when it is said that they depend on the brain; they really do depend on the brain, because the brain imitates the processes that take place in the spiritual world in a person before birth or before conception. The brain imitates what my soul did before it descended. Now, because this thinking, which is developed with particular perfection today, is mere brain thinking, materialism is right. It must be emphasized again and again: with regard to today's prevailing thinking, materialism is right, because it is a mere imitation of true, living thinking. And so man must come to grasp freedom in thinking and thereby save himself. That is, he must come not only to let his brain think but to take hold of his thinking in such a way that he becomes aware: he is a free being. That is why I placed great emphasis on pure thinking, on free thinking, which at the same time grasps itself as will, so that one thinks but actually wills, so that the volition and the thinking are a substantial grasping itself in pure freedom, as I presented it in my Philosophy of Freedom. It should show people: You are only free when you grasp that which is in you, your immortal self, through which you can save yourself, through which you can save yourself beyond the death of the four Kabirs.

However, one enters a ground that, I would like to say, consists of thin ice, which the modern man does not like to enter because he would prefer that some external worldly powers immortality guaranteed to him in some way, that he would not have to do anything to awaken in himself that which might otherwise fall asleep, that which might otherwise go through death by the human body going through death. And in modern humanity, as thinking becomes more and more similar to the physical processes of the brain, modern humanity is indeed not only facing the danger of no longer understanding anything about immortality, but modern humanity is facing the danger of losing immortality. That is the greatest ideal of Ahriman, to destroy the human being in his individuality, to no longer allow him to be individual, but to take the powers that he has, the power of thought, and to incorporate them into the earthly powers, so that once the earth becomes one great corpse, this corpse will be permeated by all the powers that man, through his logic, incorporates into the earth. So that there would be a great earth spider in which the seventy elements would live, completely pulverized, but interwoven like huge, tangled spiders, human thinking, according to the pattern of mere abstract thinking. That is the ideal that Ahriman would like to achieve: to destroy the individualities of man, to transform the earth from the power of human thought into a web of gigantic thought-spiders, but real spiders. That is the Ahrimanic goal, and it must be avoided by man now truly grasping the spiritual language: “Not I, but the Christ in me”, by the true I becoming alive in him, the immortal I that can understand the words: “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away”. That wisdom cannot perish which is reality and which encompasses that reality by which, when the earth is a corpse, the whole being of man is propagated into a new existence. The New Jerusalem in the Apocalypse is meant to speak of such existence. But these things must be understood again. The greatest obstacle to such understanding is, of course, all the Einsteinerei and the like, all that which today, as the great, terrible addiction to abstraction, goes through the world, which is quite suitable for further developing the forces of decline; while for the benefit of humanity it can only be to make use of the forces of the rising, the real powers of body and soul and spirit. That is what I wanted to speak to you about today.