The Rudolf Steiner Archive

By devoting oneself to spiritual life, it is necessary to become aware of why we, as human beings in today's world, by grasping our task as human beings in today's world, have the longing and the urge to cultivate spiritual life. This is because, since the last period of the last century, people can relate to the higher worlds in a completely different way than was the case in earlier centuries. This is something that is basically far too little taken into account: that the development of humanity from epoch to epoch always produces new impulses.

Whereas it was relatively difficult in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries to gain an understanding of the spiritual world and spiritual life from within the human soul, it will become more and more a natural need of the human soul in the coming times to seek spiritual understanding. For since the last third of the 19th century, the gates to the spiritual world have, in a sense, opened so that spiritual knowledge flows from the spiritual world for everyone who wants to receive it. In this sense, we are in a completely new epoch of human development. Those who today are drawn to anthroposophy and the anthroposophical movement as if by instinct feel what is written in the signs of the times. Fifty years ago, it would have been completely impossible to gather together to discuss the spiritual secrets of existence, because the waves of spiritual understanding had not yet begun to flow down to humanity. And we must understand that what we strive for and want must become more and more general. To do that, we must also look at the symptoms that characterize the overall development of humanity today. Today, only a few people are interested in spiritual life and have the urge to gain knowledge of the spiritual world. The masses still vigorously reject any spiritual knowledge. Now we must know how to delve into all that has led to such a state of affairs in our human development. Among the ideas that best show what has emerged as a symptom of the present era, perhaps the idea of freedom is the most important, for it is the idea that can best illustrate the evolution of the last few centuries.

It is only natural that a person out in the world today who is not seeking spiritual knowledge but who wants to be informed about the laws of the world and the human soul life, takes refuge in official science, which in turn is dominated by natural science. How do people come to know about the world? They turn to people who have learned to gain a scientific understanding of the world and who may have then also laid down in popular scientific writings how one should think about the human soul, about nature and freedom and so on. How would someone like that come to a different idea than by asking such people?

Now, in the nineteenth century, official science, in its desire to become a world view, underwent a very strange but symptomatic development. But people do not notice such very strange symptoms at all. If you ask a great scientist whether there is such a thing as an idea of freedom, he will answer: It does not exist in the sense in which the old worldviews understood this idea, because today we know that when a person, for example, consumes a certain substance, that substance immediately affects his brain, and then he can no longer properly control his brain. You see that man is dependent on his brain, so how can he be free? Or they say: In rational psychology, we show that a person who is afflicted with a mental illness and cannot speak or remember speech sounds shows abnormalities in his brain. How can you talk about freedom when man is dependent on his brain? This is what ordinary psychiatry says. For ordinary, trivial thinking, all these reasons carry a great deal of weight. Such things sound very plausible and gradually take hold in people's thinking. Unless a spiritual worldview sets minds straight again, people will fall prey to a worldview that completely denies the idea of freedom.

In this respect, science has come a long way. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, people were always looking for purpose in nature. They wondered: why does the bull have horns, why do apples grow on apple trees? — A wise world guidance, they said, has done that. It gave the bull horns to be able to push with, and it has apples grow so that man can eat them and so on. Enlightened minds of the 18th and 19th centuries have scoffed at these utilitarian reasons. They have said, ironically: Why did the world's existence cause this or that tree to grow? — Because man wants to drink wine and needs cork stoppers for his wine bottles!

Such objections to the careless way in which nature was thought of as man are entirely justified. With a person, you can always ask: what purpose does he pursue with what he does? — Now, nature had been humanized or anthropomorphized, an anthropomorphic worldview had been created that asked about goals in nature just as one can ask about a person's goal. It was perfectly legitimate for the nineteenth century to oppose this anthropomorphism, which saw nothing in nature itself, but only introduced human beings into nature. The spirits of the nineteenth century wanted to look at nature directly, to ask it themselves. They did not want to fantasize human purposes into nature. This striving was entirely justified, because the old way of looking at things transferred human soul life into nature. And it is justified to say that one wants to look at nature as it is, apart from man. It was said: We want to throw out of nature everything that belongs to man. This then led in the 19th century to an image of nature in which there was no longer anything of man in it. This gave rise to a materialistic natural science. Human concepts were pushed out of nature. In a sense, it was a correct reaction against the old doctrine of utility or teleology.

Thus a materialistic natural science arose on the premise that nothing of man can be found in this natural science. At the time, this was a perfectly justified demand. But in the second half of the 19th century, it became clear that we must also consider the human being as a natural product, we must also consider the human being as nature. This second demand, to consider the human being according to the material conditions of nature, changed everything, because the human being had been thrown out of nature. It was quite clear that man could no longer be found in this science of nature, which had been so arranged. This developed in the course of the 19th century. It was then that everything belonging to the human soul was distilled out of natural science, which can be compared to saying: I have a bottle, there is water in it. But I want an empty bottle, so I pour the water out of the bottle. And then one is surprised that there is no more water in the bottle. With the bottle, everyone immediately notices that the bottle is then empty. With science, people did not realize the folly of wanting to understand man from nature emptied of man. I am convinced that a materialistic assembly would only laugh at these simple considerations, because they are not aware of this capital mistake. Among these misconceptions, the idea of freedom, immortality and the like suffered the most. For anyone who looks at the matter as it has just been described finds it quite natural that no information about these concepts can be obtained from science.

Now it is a matter of the fact that it is indeed necessary, especially for a spiritual world view, to come to the realization that although man in his corporeality belongs to external nature and its laws, he carries something within him as a soul that can only be found by spiritual means. In other words: If we want to recognize the human being in his very own essence, then we must not look at that in man which is his outer shell between birth and death, but we must look at that which, going from incarnation to incarnation, is his actual, true essence. And it will be the task of anthroposophy to direct people's attention to those processes of the inner life that prove that there is such an eternal core of being within the human being, independent of the outer physical body.

If we first consider the human being in such a way that we admit that the actual human essence not only lives between birth and death, but is also that which places the human being in the physical world and which remains after death, then one will recognize the necessity of guiding human knowledge and cognition up to the regions where the human being, through its knowledge, participates in that higher world to which it belongs through its soul-spiritual nature. But in the moment when man enters with his knowledge into the higher worlds, he comes together with spiritual beings of the higher worlds just as he does here in the physical world with the beings of the three natural kingdoms.

Now, the most unjustified view is that which Pascal, the famous Christian researcher, once expressed and in which Maeterlinck, for example, today quite rightly agrees with him, saying that Pascal wanted that once and for all. - Pascal says: We actually have nothing from earthly existence but that it hides eternity, infinity, from us. It must be said that this belief is very widespread. Wherever one goes, one finds a justified longing for the spiritual, the eternal, which is expressed in such a way that one says: after all, earthly existence is quite unsatisfying. Only in the contemplation of the eternal can man really find satisfaction. But when one really penetrates into the eternal worlds, then something else is added to Pascal's saying. When one penetrates into eternity, one experiences that it by no means conceals earthly existence, but rather shows that everything there is designed to lead back to earthly existence.

The most peculiar objections are sometimes raised against the doctrine of re-embodiment. A lady, to whom I explained the necessity of re-embodiment with all its reasons, said to me: I do not want to come back to earth, I do not like life enough. — I tried to make her understand that her feelings had nothing to do with the matter. She listened to me and then left. From the nearest railway station she sent me a postcard on which was written: I don't want to be born again! One can laugh at such an attitude. One finds it often. One does not consider that the attitude is not important, not important what one says here on earth within this life. One just does not know that it can be quite insignificant whether one wants to return or not. They do not realize that in the time between death and the new birth they carry all the forces in their soul that long for re-embodiment, that want to return. These forces are indeed present. There everything is geared to the fact that the forces one develops there can only be satisfied when one enters earthly life again. One senses that the soul has remained imperfect, that it has not developed certain qualities in its last life on earth. Here on earth it may be unimportant whether one is perfect or imperfect, but not in the life between death and a new birth. There are irresistible forces to transform imperfection into perfection. One realizes that in many cases this can only be achieved through suffering and pain, and one knows that in order to achieve perfection, one must undergo the sufferings and joys of an earthly life. And so one enters a new incarnation with all one's might.

I have mentioned this because from such a matter one can see very clearly that our world view must become all-encompassing, that one must not draw conclusions from life between birth and death, as it presents itself to our desires and interests, about the desires and interests that one has between death and a new birth. Man only learns to think in a thorough, energetic way when he trains himself in this way to be all-round through the spiritual world view, when he learns to recognize that every thing must be considered from different sides. Even the practice of life forces man to do so in ordinary life. If one says: fire is beneficial – he is right. But if one says: Fire is very harmful, because it burns towns and villages, then that is also true. The absolute statement: Fire is good, or: Fire is evil, does not apply. With regard to fire, practical life already teaches us to recognize these two sides. But if the same is demanded for beings of the higher worlds, for example, Lucifer and Ahriman, then one does not readily accept it, but one asks: Is Lucifer a good or an evil being? Is Ahriman a good or an evil being? People want to have definitions that give them an answer to such questions, and they consider an answer to be highly unsatisfactory that says: Lucifer and Ahriman can be both good and evil. This is not demanded of fire. Here, practical life helps us to transform an incorrect judgment into a correct one.

Among the many things that are now circulating in Germany, for example, to attack us, is the fact that it was recently said: He — that is, Dr. Steiner — presents things in his public lectures as they present themselves to his view, but he avoids giving specific concepts or judgments. My dear friends, in a Greek school of philosophy, they once wanted to have a very definite concept of what a human being is. After much discussion, they agreed to say that to define the concept of a human being, a human being is a being that walks on two legs and has no feathers. The next day someone brought a plucked cockerel and said: So this is a human being, because it has two legs and no feathers. According to the definition, this must therefore be a human being! — It just so happens that when you look more closely, 'certain concepts' can be very unrealistic. Therefore, the spiritual world view will accustom people to characterizing things in a comprehensive way. Natural science has also produced a good deal of one-sided thinking, and even those who, with their spirit, would like to rise above natural scientific thinking often show - with all good will - a certain admirable naivety. In this field, one must really develop the will bit by bit to achieve full clarity.

Just as I tried to show yesterday how people who may be regarded as thorough natural scientists and whose names should not be vilified are unable to judge in the field of spiritual scientific research, so one should not, without being unjust, be immediately amazed by an idea that may be put forward with good intentions but is not sound. There is, for example, the natural scientist William Crookes. He has achieved many significant things for scientific research, but at the same time he was someone who wholeheartedly committed himself to research into immortality. He wanted to gain certainty about immortality using the usual scientific methods, and he achieved wonderful results in his mediumistic research. Now he once expressed an idea in such a way that one can also appropriate this idea, go along with it to a certain point. When someone claims that we see colors depends on the nature of our eyes, that we hear sounds, we owe to our ears, and if we had other sensory organs, the world around us would be quite different – that is quite right. When William Crookes says, “Why do you then deny the existence of a supersensible world, which is not there for you only because you have such organs that are not suited to perceive it?” — so that is also correct. He expresses this fully justified idea more precisely by assuming that he says: We perceive colors, we hear sounds, but we only see effects of electricity and magnetism. They are forces of nature, the essence of which man does not know, even if he applies them in practical life. This is found everywhere, that it is said to be natural forces, the essence of which man has not fathomed. — Admitted! In reality, it means nothing more than: Man has his eyes for colors, his ears for sounds, and so on; in the case of magnetism, man sees that the magnet attracts the iron, but he does not see magnetism itself, that which magnetism actually is. With electricity, he perceives light and heat effects, but not electricity itself. Now William Crookes says: What would the world be like for beings that could perceive electricity and magnetism directly with special sensory organs, but not light, colors, sounds, and so on? If we could not perceive light, a crystal would be opaque to us, as would glass, and there would be no point in putting windows in. They would only prevent us from having contact with the outside world. If, on the other hand, we had organs for electric current, we would see a telegraph wire as a line of light running through the dark space; we would perceive flowing, luminous electricity there. If we had an organ for magnetism, we would perceive magnets in such a way that magnetic forces would radiate in all directions, and so on. William Crookes now says: It is not unlikely that there are such beings whose organs are attuned to vibrations that our organs leave untouched. Such beings live in a completely different world from us. And he then considers what this world would look like. In this world, glass and crystal are dark bodies; metals, because they conduct electricity, are somewhat lighter, interspersed with dark parts. A telegraph wire would be a long, narrow hole in a body of impenetrable solidity. A working dynamo would resemble a conflagration, and a magnet would even fulfill the dream of medieval mystics of an eternal lamp that never goes out.

William Crookes has dealt with this beautifully, and in this way one can already give an idea of how nonsensical it is to claim that this sensual-physical world is the only one, that there is no other world than just ours, and that there cannot be beings other than human beings. All true! But there is something else that can be said about this idea – and this is where the other side of the matter begins, which concerns the true spiritual researcher. Let us suppose that we ask the question: What would it be like if, instead of eyes, man really had these organs to perceive electricity and magnetism directly, if this idea, which a person naively puts forward, were realized in us humans, what would it be like? Then we human beings would find our way around in the realm of electricity and magnetism just as directly as we now find our way around in the realm of light and sound. But that would have a consequence. If man had an organ for the direct perception of electricity and magnetism, then, at the same time as this organ, which would then be an organ of knowledge for him, he would have the power and the authority to kill or make sick every other human being. This ability would be conferred directly by such an organ.

This is what spiritual science has to say about William Crookes' idea, because spiritual science knows that the human being is permeated by such forces, which have a kinship here on earth with magnetic and electrical forces. Now the question takes on a completely different meaning; now the touch of naivety in the simple posing of such an idea becomes really apparent. While a person who has no higher vision posits the idea of looking into the electrical and magnetic forces, for the spiritual researcher what has just been said follows immediately from it. When we realize this, we first come to realize that we must not remain on the surface if we really want to delve into and understand the wisdom that underlies the order of the world. For this insight of the spiritual researcher shows us that it is very good for man that he does not have the electrical and magnetic organs, that he cannot harm his fellow human beings with them. In this way, his lower instincts and desires cannot be satisfied in such a way as to be fatal for him and the world. Man has a world around him that allows him, through a slow and gradual education, to conquer these lower forces and then ascend to the higher forces.

That is the whole purpose of evolution on earth: that man, passing through many earth-lives, in manifold undulating movements, gradually heads towards perfection, but in such a way that he learns to put his lower powers, instincts and longings at the service of higher ideas and motives. He would not be able to do this if, at the time when he was only developing morality in the course of his evolution on earth, he had been given organs that allowed him to perceive electricity and magnetism directly, because then the temptation would have been too strong to kill people he did not like for whatever reason, and to leave only those people on earth who were right for him.

Thus we see that only the spiritual world view actually gives us the opportunity to look at existence from all sides and to penetrate deeper into it. When a person really becomes a spiritual researcher, as could only be briefly characterized in yesterday's public lecture, he really enters the spiritual world and then becomes aware that the higher hierarchies are around him there, as the three kingdoms of nature are around him here. There we learn to recognize certain entities, which we call the luciferic and ahrimanic beings. What then are the luciferic beings? They are those that belong to beings who, during their previous incarnation on earth, in the old lunar age, remained behind in their development, thus did not enter into the full hardening of earthly existence, into which the human being has entered, but remained at a stage that lies before the materialization of the human being. As a result, they and their powers have remained more spiritual than the human being is. In their development they could only reach a stage that is more spiritual than the stage in which man undergoes his earthly embodiments. By permeating human nature with their powers, they have caused human nature to contain more spirituality than it should actually have. If these Luciferic forces had not been present, man would have had in his astral body, in the lower unconscious forces as compared with the conscious ego forces, a personal spiritualization in the form of the Luciferic forces, but not such forces as he now has. Through the Luciferic influence man's lower nature has become more spiritual than it would otherwise have been. Man would have received everything he should have received on earth from the progressive powers, but he would not be as spiritual as he is today. He would have escaped the Luciferic impact.

But man would also lack something else. Without this influence, man could not have had freedom, because if this influence of Lucifer had not come, he would have carried out all his actions in such a way that, when he had to do this or that, he could only have looked to the motives that would have come to him from the spiritual world in the form of ideas. Whatever man would accomplish on earth, he would accomplish in such a way that he would see the idea underlying it like a picture showing him what had to happen, without him having to form this idea. It would be like an inspiration from the higher worlds, and this would affect him in such a way that he could not possibly resist it. He would naturally follow the will of the gods.

But now the Luciferic influence was there. Through it, man has come into the position of not simply allowing the motives for an act to flow to him, but he must first prepare these motives himself through his own work from the depths of his soul. He must educate himself to moral ideas, and man would not be able to educate himself to moral ideas if the Luciferic influence had not come. For through this a more spiritual element has entered into our astral nature. Thus it is not only the idea of morality that works in our consciousness of self — for the idea of morality would work in such a way that it would not occur to any human being to do evil, since the idea of good for an action would be directly presented to his spiritual eye by divine spiritual beings — but the instincts and passions also work with it. This idea would not be able to arise in the consciousness of the ego at all if its astral nature, individually shaped by the influence of Lucifer, did not confront it. This influence of Lucifer has brought about that in our nature, out of the unconscious and towards consciousness, purification must take place, that we must work our way up to conscious moral ideas and motives in the struggle with ourselves, and then follow these ideas of our own accord. Thus it is Lucifer who enables us to follow moral ideas after we have first worked them out for ourselves.

Now we can say: So there is a power that arises from within us when we work towards moral ideas. Where is this power in man, if man is not moral by nature but must educate himself to be so; where is the power that works in the soul from out of the unconscious to present moral ideas to man? Where is it in us that we can bring it out of ourselves? If man becomes a spiritual researcher, if he is able to look into the spiritual world, then he also discovers where the power that generates moral ideas is to be found. It is constantly at work in the unconscious forces; it is in man, but in the ordinary world it is used for something quite different. When we act in the ordinary world before we have set ourselves moral goals, we act under the influence of our urges, desires and instincts. But we can only act when we put our body into action. Here we are constantly working with unconscious forces, for unless one has studied spiritual science, who knows what forces are at work when one bends an arm, puts one foot in front of the other, and so on? Without spiritual science, one does not know what forces are at work in man. No one knows how his movements, how everything that works so that he can be an active person in the physical world, how that comes about and what force is at work. This is only noticed by the spiritual researcher when he comes to so-called imaginative knowledge. First, one makes images that work by drawing stronger forces from the soul than are otherwise used in ordinary life. Where does this power come from that unleashes the images of imaginative experience in the soul? It comes from the place where the forces that make us active human beings in the world are at work, that make us move our hands and feet. Because this is the case, you can only access your imagination if you are able to remain still, if you can bring the movements of your body to a standstill, if you can control it. Then you notice how this power, which otherwise moves the muscles, flows up into the soul and mind and forms the imaginative images. So you are actually rearranging the forces. So down there in the depths of the body is something of our very own nature, of which we feel nothing in ordinary life. By switching off the physical, the spirit, which otherwise comes to expression in our actions, penetrates up into the soul and fills it with what it would otherwise have to use for the physical. The spiritual researcher knows that he must withdraw from the body what the body would otherwise consume. For imaginative knowledge, therefore, the bodily must be eliminated. In ordinary life, we do think, we do form ego-conscious images, but the just-discussed power flows down into our organs in our organism in waking consciousness, becomes effective there and is not used at all, as a rule, to become spiritually visible in the soul.

If we are not spiritual researchers, we have no control over this power; we have to leave it down there in the subconscious, but it does something, this power. It works on our moral ideas. When it flows up consciously, one educates oneself by means of this power to imaginative knowledge; if it is not consciously used for that, it serves man in his actions in the world. But man is not always in action, in activity; then this power, which sits below, is unconsciously released, and it then also works on the realization of moral ideas. So the same power that moves the limbs, that spiritually permeates the body so that man can grasp, walk, and so on, that power sometimes releases itself in the human 'body and produces moral ideals. If you can admire a moral thinker somewhere, who alone develops lofty ideals, you see in these ideals the release of the same forces that play in his hand movements and so on. So, to develop moral ideals, man must, so to speak, first come to rest.

But one can also develop moral ideals and then not follow them, because the forces we use to develop moral ideas, we also use to move and they can be used for one and for the other. Developing moral ideals does not yet mean being moral. Only following them means acting morally. The moral ideals then emerge like memories. As long as you still have to educate yourself to them, you have to use the same strength to generate them that you will need later to follow them. We carry them as memories within us as our moral norms. Therefore, man must be educated in morality so that these memories arise within him as his moral norms and he can follow them.

Who is it then that works in us to conjure up these moral ideals from our nature? That is Lucifer. He urges us to produce our moral ideas, our free morality, out of ourselves. Man owes it to Lucifer that he must produce his moral freedom out of himself. There is no freedom in nature. Freedom is only found by carrying out and realizing that which permeates the human being spiritually and soulfully. By penetrating the lower desires of the human being, Lucifer not only became the seducer of the human being, but at the same time the creator of human freedom. Through Lucifer's impulse, man was made free.

So when we study the innermost nature of our physical body in the way that science studies nature, and follow the laws of logic, we come to this origin of human freedom. If someone were to say today: I don't believe in magnetism, I only see an iron and that cannot possibly attract another iron, that's fantasy —, then this refutes life practice. But in the realm of soul and spirit, people do behave in such a way as to deny the forces that are present. Luciferic forces are inherent in freedom. Without these luciferic forces, we could not be free beings; we could never develop ethical impulses from the depths of our souls and act upon them. We will only understand freedom when we understand that the physical-sensual nature of man is permeated by a spiritual-soul nature, which is already expressed in the hand movement, but which can be released consciously in the imaginations of the spiritual researcher, unconsciously in the presentation of moral motives. When we look within, we also get to know the good side of Lucifer, and one can no longer say: Lucifer is an evil being – for he is also the bringer of human freedom.

Now, however, man also transforms other forces in his soul into bodily functions, for example, when speaking, when the speech organ is set in motion by the brain. In this case, we are not in action with the whole body, but by setting the organization of the physical body in motion from the spiritual-soul, we perform an inner activity. When we speak, spiritual-soul forces intervene in the so-called Broca's organ, which is located in the third cerebral convolution, and then in the larynx. If we withdraw this power, which acts on the Broca's organ, from speaking, as it were, if we become aware of it without using it to speak, then we have grasped it in its spiritual-soul aspect. Let us suppose, for example, that you meditate in such a way that you place yourself in the forces of your soul, which would otherwise be expressed in speech, without speaking, you remain silent. When one thus arrests the soul-life in its inner being, before it intervenes in the bodily, one has grasped a power in oneself that leads to so-called inspiration, to spiritual hearing. The occult saying about so-called “silent knowledge” is based on this. What is meant is a kind of silence in which one inwardly applies the forces that would otherwise flow into the larynx. These forces penetrate into the soul and make it inwardly active. In this way one enters into the world of inspiration.

This world of inspiration is basically a world that is separate from the world of mere imagination when the spiritual researcher enters it. It is a world through which other beings of the spiritual worlds express themselves to us. In our present cycle of time, it is the case that, as if by a law of nature, such forces are unconsciously coming more and more to expression in man as well, which otherwise only live out in the organs of the physical body and their inner activities.

When the power that a person would otherwise use to speak is released in him as if by natural necessity, this power enables him to perceive a spiritual reality, which corresponds to inspiration. This is different from perceiving images in imaginative knowledge with the eye of a true seer. This power, which is active in our moral ideas, enables us to recognize the good side of the Luciferic beings. When we can perceive with this power, which is otherwise used to speak, then we enter into the sphere for which, without all religious prejudice, the Gospel of John gives us the right understanding by saying: “In the beginning was the Word.” This “Word” is heard when one can so subdue one's own word, one's own corporeality, that the power which otherwise speaks through the larynx can be held back before the larynx, and thus be set free.

So what was the obstacle that prevented people from perceiving the word of the world from the very beginning? It was that they had to learn to speak! But in the process of further development, language will indeed become something very strange. Language has changed a great deal in the course of human development. If we go back to the original stages of language, people were still directly connected with language. Even today, in the country, we find that man lives and moves much more in it, is more closely knit to it. He still feels, when uttering a word, that there lies in it something like an image of what he sees around him. The further human evolution advances, the more abstract the word becomes; it becomes only a sign of what it is meant to express. Language becomes more and more inorganic,

increasingly arabesque-like, ever more alien to the human being. Why is this so? In this alienation of language from the inner meaning of words, those forces that were formerly used to develop language are laid bare. This in turn is connected with the fact that spiritual perception of the Christ-being will soon come, precisely because man's power to form speech is being released. In ancient times speech was closely connected with the human organism, now it is beginning to emancipate itself from it. Thus the power to form speech is being released and will be used for the perception of the World Word, the spiritual Christ.

Thus we have considered two sides of human nature; how man, on the one hand, uses the luciferic power in the free creation of moral ideals, and how, on the other hand, through the release of the speech-forming power – through something, therefore, that he shares with all mankind, since these powers are released within all mankind – he attains the power to perceive the Christ spiritually. We can penetrate to the Christ impulse because we are members of the whole human race. To the same extent that language becomes more and more abstract and the power of speech emancipates itself from the organism in human nature, man prepares himself to truly perceive the spiritual Christ. This is the other side of human evolution. While man has inwardly become freer through the influence of Lucifer, in that the latter gave him the possibility of forming his moral ideas, he will, as through an external force, acquire for himself the ability to connect with the Christ. The Christ will approach man in such a way that He will pour out His nature as the epitome of moral ideas over the whole evolution of mankind. When the Christ-being thus becomes known to all mankind, the Christ-entity will have in itself something of the nature of moral motives. And here we touch on something that shows how anthroposophy can rise to a level where the highest sense of truth can unite with the noblest moral motives. In my book 'The Philosophy of Freedom', which was completed twenty years ago, I tried to show that real freedom is present in the human soul when a person follows the moral motives that he has raised to consciousness. What is the nature of these moral motives? They do not force; we follow them without compulsion. No motive is moral that forces. Motives that we follow out of compulsion are brought to us from the outside world. Moral motives can be recognized by the fact that we cannot follow them either. We must let their value penetrate us in a free way. Man only professes the ethical-moral motives in a truly moral way when he goes to them, when they do not impose themselves on him. That is the characteristic of moral motives. The Christ, when humanity recognizes Him in spirit, will have this in common with ethical motives: that one can also deny Him, that He forces no one to acknowledge Him. The old gods still worked on other powers of the human soul. They still touched man where he had not yet raised himself to consciousness. But the Christ will consciously appear to man in his spirituality to the extent that man has freed himself in consciousness and will have risen to him. He will be there for all who want to recognize him, without forcing anyone to acknowledge him. He will appear before humanity in such a way that people can follow Him freely. Just as a moral motive does not force a person, but leaves him free to follow this motive or not, so it will also be with the Christ-Being: a person must be fully aware of the value of this Christ-Being if he wants to follow it. In the future, the recognition of the Christ-being will be at the same time a free deed of the soul for every single human being. This will be the infinitely significant fact that we may struggle to a truth that does not force us to recognize it, but that we only recognize when we see its full value.

Thus, the idea that anthroposophy gives us of Christianity — which will only come into its true form — will indeed bring a truth to people that is, in the most eminent sense, a free truth at the same time. The following, given in pictorial form, can be added to this, which can then be further understood through meditation. The same word has been used twice in the development of humanity: Once at the temptation in Paradise, when Lucifer said to man: “You will be like the gods; your eyes shall be opened.” This is the pictorial expression for the Luciferic impulse. With it, Lucifer poured spirituality into the lower nature of man and in return gave man the possibility of attaining inner freedom through moral motives. And a second time it was said, now by the Christ: Are you not gods? The same Word! From this it is evident that it is not only the content of a word that is important, but the essence that a word expresses, the way in which a word is spoken. There we see the necessary connection between the act of Lucifer and the act of the Christ, also expressed in a figurative way, as the religious documents tend to do.

Lucifer is the bringer of personal freedom for the individual human being; Christ is the bearer of freedom for the whole human race, for all humanity on earth. That is the significance of anthroposophy: it teaches us that the recognition of the Christ-being will take place in such a way that it is up to the individual to recognize the Christ or not, just as it is up to the individual not to be moral.

The Christ should be a free truth for the human soul. All other truths, which belong to all mankind, constrain us. But there are still truths in the bosom of the world that are connected with the Mystery of Golgotha, the recognition of which must be free acts of the human being and which ennoble and refine this human being by being recognized by the human being of his or her own free will. Thus does free truth, free concrete truth, reach so deeply into the developing nature of man on earth. It shows us how truth, won in freedom, belongs to the fundamental laws of human evolution.

It has been shown to us how freedom could only come into human development through the influence of Lucifer, and that man first had to rise to the truth with the help of this Luciferic impulse. In this way, humanity was still compelled to the truth; one could only recognize the truth through compulsion. But man can see this as an ideal for the future, that he can develop in such a way towards freedom and recognize truths in a free way, as set out here. Much could be said about anthroposophy, but it would be difficult to find anything more intimately connected with our need for freedom than the above statement about free truth. It must speak in the most profound and noble way to what lies at the core of our human destiny.

We can only truly grasp what it means to be human on earth when we realize what stands before us as a conscious ideal: the ideal of freedom and truth, of truth that will create an outer body for itself in freedom.

It was necessary to speak to you about such ideas of freedom at the very moment when we have won our own liberation as an Anthroposophical Society from fetters that had become impossible for us, in order to use these ideas to give a feeling-based indication of the way one should think in a society that makes such ideals the goal of its togetherness.

Now I would like to say to you in the warmest way – as all friends who have come together with our Swedish friends here from out of town will feel with me – how deeply satisfying it is, and even more deeply satisfying at the end of our event, that here in this country, what has been presented here has met with such a deep, fundamental understanding, that such a fundamental understanding has developed here for what we want with the founding of the Anthroposophical Society. And truly, not to fight against anything, but to serve in the right way our freely conceived anthroposophical ideal, may this be chosen as a farewell word. May the society that you have founded among yourselves contribute much more work and achievement to what we were able to discuss today in our lecture on the freedom of the soul in the light of spiritual scientific knowledge. May that which is already there, waiting and hoping, flow down from the spiritual worlds through this work, and may it surely come true for us humans when our work is done, which will be so tremendously significant for the development of humanity's spiritual striving. May this be the work of this branch in particular! With these words, I would like to have said my farewell to you.

for the inauguration of the Vidar branch.

A number of friends from out of town have come to visit our friends in Bochum to see the branch of our spiritual endeavor that has been established here under the Christmas tree. And there is no doubt that all those who have come from out of town to celebrate the opening of this branch with our Bochum friends feel the beauty and spiritual significance of our Bochum friends' decision to found this place of spiritual endeavor and feeling here in this city, in the middle of a field of material activity, in the middle of a field that, so to speak, mainly belongs to the outer life. And in many ways, each of our dear branches, here in this area more than anywhere else, can be a symbol for us of the significance of our kind of anthroposophical spiritual life in the present day and for the future development of human souls.

We are truly not in a situation where we can look critically or disparagingly at what is going on around us when we are in the midst of a field of the most modern material activity, because we are rather in a field that shows us how it must become more and more in later outer life on earth. We would only show ourselves to be foolish if we wanted to say: ancient times, when one was more surrounded by forests and meadows and the original life of nature than by the chimneys of the present, should come back again. One would only show oneself to be unintelligent, for one would prove that one has no insight into what the sages of all times have called “the eternal necessities in which man must find himself.” In the face of the material life that covers the earth, as the 19th century in particular has brought about and which later times will bring to mankind in an even more comprehensive way, in the face of this life there is no justified criticism based on sympathy with the old, but there is only and alone the insight that this is the fate of our earth planet. From a certain point of view, one may call the old times beautiful, one may look upon them as a spring or summer time for the earth, but to rage against the fact that other times are coming would be just as foolish as it would be foolish to be dissatisfied with the fact that autumn and winter follow spring and summer. Therefore, we must appreciate and love it when, out of an inwardly courageous decision, our friends create a place for our spiritual life in the midst of the most modern life and activity. And it will be right if all those who have only come to visit our branch for the sake of today leave with a grateful heart for the beautiful activity of our Bochum friends, which is carried out in a truly spiritual scientific way.

What is so endearing about what we have been calling our “branch initiations” for years is that on such occasions, friends from outside the circle that has come together in a particular place often come from far and wide. As a result, these friends from afar can ignite the inner fire of gratitude that we must have for all those who found such branches, and that, on the other hand, these friends from afar can take with them a vivid impression of what they have experienced, which keeps the thoughts alive, which we then turn to the work of such a branch from everywhere, so that this work can be fruitful from all sides through the creative thoughts. We know that the spiritual life is a reality, we know that thoughts are not just what materialism believes, but that thoughts are living forces that, when we unite them in love, for example over any place of our work, there they unfold, there they are help.

And I would like to be convinced that those who have brought their visit here will also take with them the impulse from today's get-together to think often and often of the place of our work, so that our friends here can feel when they sit together in silence, into that which, by the grace of the hierarchies, becomes spiritual knowledge for us, so that our friends, when they sit together in silence again, may cherish the feeling that creative thoughts are coming from all sides into their working space, their spiritual working space.

Looking at what is, and not practicing an unjustified criticism of existence, is something we are gradually learning through our anthroposophical worldview. There is no doubt that the earth is undergoing a development. And when we, equipped with our anthroposophical knowledge, yes, when we look back with understanding, with what we can know outside of anthroposophical knowledge, to earlier times in the development of the earth, then earlier times appear to us in relation to the earth, which is is riddled with telegraph wires and swept by those electric currents, these times of the earth appear to us like spring and summer time, and the times we are entering appear to us like the autumn and winter time of the earth. But it is not for us to complain about this, but for us to call this a necessity. Nor is it for us to complain, just as it is not for a person to complain when summer comes to an end and autumn and winter arrive.

But when autumn and winter come, the human soul has been preparing for centuries to erect the sign for the living word to enter into the evolution of the earth in the depths of the winter night. And in this way the human heart, the human soul, showed that what is created from the outside by summer without human intervention must be created by human intervention from within.

When we rejoice in the sprouting, sprouting forces of spring, which are replaced by gentle summer forces from the outside, without our intervention, winter, with its blanket of snow, covers what would otherwise, without our intervention, please us during the summer and always brings new proof that divine-spiritual forces prevail throughout the world, so we receive during the cold, dark winter time, we receive what is placed in winter as the summer hope for the future, which tells us that just as spring and summer come after every winter, so too, once the earth has reached its goal in the cosmos, a new spiritual spring and summer will come, which our creative powers help shape. Thus the human heart erects the sign of eternal life.

In this very sign of eternal spiritual life, we feel united today with our friends in Bochum, who some time ago founded their branch here. It is wonderful that we can inaugurate it just before Christmas.

Perhaps to some who at first glance look at it superficially, all that has been discovered about Christ Jesus through our spiritual science, and all that has been revealed to it about Christ Jesus, will look at it superficially, it may seem as if we are replacing the former simplicity and childlikeness of the Christmas festival, with its memories of the beautiful scenes from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, with something tremendously complicated. We must draw people's attention to the fact that at the beginning of our era two Jesus-children entered into earthly evolution; we must speak of how the ego of one Jesus-child moved into the bodies of the other Jesus-child; we must speak of how, in the thirtieth year of Jesus' life, the Christ-being descended and lived for three years in the bodies of Jesus of Nazareth. It might easily appear as though all the love and devotion which men through the centuries have been able to summon up for their own salvation, when they were shown the Christ Child in the manger, surrounded by the shepherds, when the wonderfully moving Christmas carol sounded to their ears, when the Christmas plays were celebrated here and there, when the lights appeared on the Christmas tree, delighting the most childlike hearts, it might appear that in the face of all what so immediately kindles the human heart to intimacy, to devotion, to love, when the warm feeling, the warm sensation, should fade away when one has yet to take in the complicated ideas of the two Jesus children, of the passing over of the one ego into the body of the other, of the descent of a divine spiritual being into the bodily shell of Jesus of Nazareth. But we must not indulge in such thoughts, for it would be a bad thing if we did not want to submit to the law of necessity in this area.

Yes, my dear friends, in the places that lay outside the forest or in the middle of the fields and meadows, the snow-capped mountains and distances or the wide plains and lakes spoke down and into them. In those places that were not traversed by railroad tracks and telegraph wires, hearts could dwell there that were immediately ignited when the manger was built and when one was reminded of what the Gospels of Matthew and Luke told of the birth of the wonderful child. What is contained in these narratives, what has happened on earth in such a way that these narratives bear witness to it, lives and will continue to live. It just takes time, which occurs, we may say, in the “earthly winter”, a time of railways and telegraph wires and meals, stronger forces in the soul, to ignite warmth and intimacy in the heart in the face of the external mechanism, in the face of the external materiality. The soul must grow strong in order to be so inwardly convinced of the truth of what has happened in preparation for the Mystery of Golgotha that it lives firmly in the heart, however outwardly the mechanical natural order may intervene in earthly existence. The knowledge of the child in Bethlehem must penetrate differently into the souls of those who are allowed to live on the edge of the forest, on mountain slopes, by the lakes and in the midst of fields and meadows; the knowledge of the same being must penetrate differently to those who must have grown to the newer conditions of existence.

For this reason, for our own time, those whom we call the Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Feelings tell us of those higher contexts that we must consider when speaking of the Child of Bethlehem. With our newer insights, we stand no less soul-filled before the Christmas tree because we must know something different from what earlier times knew. On the contrary, we come to a better understanding of those earlier times, we come to understand why the hope and joy of the future spoke from the eyes of young and old at the Christmas tree and at the manger. We learn to understand how they lived in a way that went beyond what could be seen immediately, when we explain to ourselves, in our own terms, the reasons why we feel such deep, heartfelt love for the Child of Bethlehem. We may call the Jesus child, the one from the Nathanic line of the House of David, in the most beautiful sense, in the most beautiful sense, “the child of humanity, the child of man”. For what do we feel when we look at this child, whose essential nature shines through even in the descriptions of Luke's Gospel?

Humanity took its origin with the origin of the earth. But much has passed humanity in the course of the Lemurian, Atlantean and post-Atlantean times. And we know that this was a descent, that in primeval times there was an original knowledge and original looking, an original connection with the divine-spiritual powers, an old inheritance of a knowledge of the connection with the gods. What lived in the souls of human beings from divine beings has increasingly become less and less. Over time, people have come to feel their connection with the divine spiritual source less and less through their direct knowledge. They were increasingly thrown out into the field of mere material observation, of sensuality. Only in the early years of life, in childhood, did people know how to revere and love innocence, the innocence of the human being who has not yet taken up the descending forces of the earth.

But how, now that we know that with the Jesus child an entity came to earth that had not previously been on earth as such, that was a soul that had not gone through the rest of the evolution of mankind on earth — which I have indeed presented in my “Occult Science Outline», was held back, as it were, in the innocent state before the Luciferic temptation, that such a soul, a childlike human soul in a much, much higher sense than is usually meant, came to earth, how can one not recognize this human soul as the «child of humanity»? What we human beings, even in the most tender childhood, may no longer have in us, because we carry within us the results of our previous incarnations, which we cannot recognize in any of us, even in the moment when we first open our eyes on the field of the earth, is presented in the child who entered the earth as the St. Luke's Boy Jesus. For in this child there was a soul that had not previously been born on earth out of a human body, that had remained behind when the evolution of humanity began anew on earth, and that appeared on earth at the very beginning of our era, in the infancy of humanity. Hence the marvelous event that the Akasha Chronicle reveals to us: that this child, the Nathanic Jesus-child, immediately after his birth, uttered intelligible sounds to his mother only, sounds that were not similar to any of the spoken languages of that time or of any time, but from which sounded for the mother something like a message from worlds that are not the earthly worlds, a message from higher worlds. That this child Jesus could speak, could speak immediately at his birth, that is the miracle!

Then it grew up as if it were to contain, concentrated in its own being, all the love and loving ability that all human souls together could muster. And the great genius of love, that was what lived in the child. He could not learn much of what human culture has achieved in earthly life. The Nathanian Jesus Child was able to experience little of what had been achieved by people over the course of thousands of years until he was twelve years old. Because he could not, the other ego passed into him in his twelfth year. But everything he touched from the earliest, most tender childhood was touched by perfected love. All the qualities of the mind, all the qualities of feeling, they worked as if heaven had sent love to earth, so that a light could be brought into the winter time of the earth, a light that shines into the darkness of the human soul when the sun does not unfold its full external power during this winter time. When later the Christ moved into this human shell, we must bear in mind that this Christ-being could only make itself understood on earth by working through these shells.

The Christ-Being is not a human being. The Christ-Being is an Entity of the higher Hierarchies. On earth It had to live for three years as a human being among human beings. For this purpose, a human being had to be born to It in the way I have often described for the Nathanian Jesus child. And because this human child could not have received — since it had not previously set foot on earth, had no previous education from earlier incarnations — because it could not have received what external culture had worked for on earth, so a soul entered this child that had, in the highest sense, worked for what external culture can bring: the Zarathustra soul.

And so we see the most wonderful connection when Jesus Christ stands before us. We see the interaction of this human child, who had saved the best human aspiration, love, from the times when man had not yet fallen into Luciferic temptation, until the beginning of our era, when it appeared on earth for the first time, embodied, with the most developed human prophet Zarathustra, and with that spiritual essence which, until the Mystery of Golgotha, had its actual home within the realms of the higher hierarchies, and which then had to take its scene on earth by entering through the gate of the body of Jesus of Nazareth into its earthly existence. That which is the highest on earth, and which we can only glimpse in its purity in the still innocent gaze of the human being, in the eye of the child, that is what the human child brought with him to the highest degree. That which can be achieved on earth as the highest, that is what Zarathustra contributed to this human child. And that which the heavens could give to the earth, so that the earth might receive spiritually, which it receives anew each summer through the intensified power of the sun, that the earth received through the Christ-being.

We will just have to learn to understand what has happened to the earth. And in the times to come, the soul will be able to swell with intimacy, the soul will be able to strengthen itself through a power that will be stronger than all the powers that have so far been connected to the Mystery of Golgotha, in a time that can offer little outward support to the strengthening of those forces that tend towards man's true source of power, towards man's innermost being, towards an understanding of how this being flows from the spiritual-cosmic. But in order to fully understand such, we must first understand ourselves as one once understood the Christ Child on Christmas Day; we must first rise to the knowledge of the spirit. Times will come when, as it were, one will look at earthly events with the eye of the soul. Then one will be able to say many a thing to oneself that one cannot yet say to oneself in the broadest circles today, for which only spiritual science enables us today, so that we can already say many a thing to ourselves that one cannot yet say to oneself in the broadest circles today.

We see spring approaching. During the approaching spring, we see the plants sprouting and sprouting from the earth. We feel our joy igniting in what comes out of the earth. We feel the power of the sun growing stronger and stronger to the point where it makes our bodies rejoice, to the point of the Midsummer sun, which was celebrated in the Nordic mysteries. The initiates of these mysteries knew that the Midsummer Sun pours itself over the earth with its warmth and light to reveal the workings of the cosmos in the earth's orbit. We see and feel all this.

We also see and feel other things during this time. Sometimes lightning and thunder crash into the rays of the spring sun when clouds cover these rays. Irregular downpours pour over the surface of the earth. And then we feel the infinite, uninfluenced, harmonious regularity of the sun's course, and the — well, we need the word — changeable effectiveness of the entities that work on earth as rain and sunshine, as thunderstorms, and other phenomena that depend on all kinds of irregular activity, in contrast to the regular, harmonious activity of the sun's path through space and its consequences for the development of plants and everything that lives on earth, which cannot be influenced by anything. We feel the infinite regular harmony of the sun's activity and the changeable and fickle nature of what is going on in our atmosphere like a duality.

But then, when autumn approaches, we feel the dying of the living, the withering of that which delights us. And if we have compassion for nature, our souls may become sad at the dying of nature. The awakening, loving power of the sun, that which regularly and harmoniously permeates the universe, becomes invisible, as it were, and that which we have described as the changeable weather then prevails. It is true what earlier times knew, but what has faded from our consciousness due to our materiality: that in winter, the egoism of the earth triumphs over the forces that permeate our atmosphere, flowing down from the vast cosmic being to our earth and awakening life on our earth.

And so the whole of nature appears to us as a duality. The activity of spring and summer is quite different from that of autumn and winter. It is as if the earth becomes selfless and gives itself up to the embrace of the universe, from which the sun sends light and warmth and awakens life. The earth in spring and summer appears to us as showing its selflessness. The earth in autumn and winter appears to us as showing its selfishness, conjuring forth from itself all that it can contain and produce in its own atmosphere. Defeating the working of the sun, the working of the universe through the selfishness of earthly activity, the winter earth appears to us.

And when we look away from the earth and at ourselves with the eye that spiritual research can open for us, when we look beyond the material and see the spiritual, then we see something else. We know that, yes, in the elemental forces of the earth's atmosphere, which appear to be at work only in the unfolding of the sun's forces, in the spring and summer struggles that take place around us, the elemental spirits live, innumerable spiritual entities live in the elemental realm that swirl around the earth, lower spirits, higher spirits. Lower spirits, which are earthbound in the elemental realm, have to endure during the spring and summer season that the higher spirits, which stream down from the cosmos, exercise greater dominion, making them servants of the spirit that streams down from the sun, making them servants of the demonic forces that rule the earth in selfishness. During the spring and summer season of the earth, we see how the spirits of earth, air, water and fire become servants of the cosmic spirits that send their forces down to earth. And when we understand the whole spiritual context of the earth and the cosmos, then during spring and summer these relationships open up to our souls and we say to ourselves: You, earth, show yourself to us by making the spirits, which are servants of egoism, servants of the cosmos, of the cosmic spirits, who conjure up life out of your womb, which you yourself could not conjure up!

Then we move towards autumn and winter time. And then we feel the egoism of the earth, feel how powerful those spirits of the earth become, which are bound to this earth itself, which have detached themselves from the universe since Saturn, Sun and Moon time, feel how they close themselves off from the working that flows in from the cosmos. We feel ourselves in the egoistically experiencing earth. And then we may look within ourselves. We examine our soul with its thinking, feeling and willing, examine it seriously and ask ourselves: How do thoughts emerge from the depths of our soul? How do our feelings, affects and sensations emerge first? Do they have the same regularity with which the sun moves through the universe and lends the earth the life forces that emerge from its womb? They do not. The forces that reveal themselves in our thinking, feeling and willing in everyday life are similar to the changeable activity in our atmosphere. Just as lightning and thunder break in, so human passions break into the soul. Just as no law governs rain and sunshine, so human thoughts break out of the depths of the soul. We must compare our soul life with the changing wind and weather, not with the regularity with which the sun rules our earth. Out there it is the spirits of air and water, fire and earth, that work in the elemental realm and that actually represent the egoism of the earth. Within ourselves, these are the elemental forces. But these changing forces within us, which regulate our everyday life, are embryos, germinal beings, which, only as germs, but as germs, resemble the elemental beings that are found outside in all the vicissitudes of the weather. We carry the forces of the same world within us as we think, feel and will, which live as demonic beings in the elemental realm in the wind and weather outside.

When the times approached in which people, who were at the turning point of the old and the new times, felt: there will come a time reminiscent of the wintertime on Earth. Indeed, there were teachers and sages among these people who understood how to interpret the signs of the times and who pointed out: Even if our inner life resembles the changeable activity of the outer world, and just as man knows that behind the activity of the outer world, especially in autumn and winter, the sun still shines, the sun lives and moves in the universe, it will come again - so man may also hold fast to the thought that, in the face of his own fickleness, which lives in his soul, there is a sun, deep, deep in those depths where the source of our soul gushes forth from the source of the world itself. At the turn of the ages, the sages pointed out that just as the sun must reappear and regain its strength in the face of the earth's selfishness, so too must understanding develop from those depths of our soul for that which can reach this soul from the sources, where this soul is connected in its life itself with the spiritual sun of the world, just as earthly life is connected with the physical sun of the world.

At first this was expressed as a hope, pointing to the great symbol that nature itself offered. It was expressed in such a way that the winter solstice was set as the celebration for the days when the sun regains its strength, the time when it was said: however the selfishness of the earth may unfold, the sun is victorious over the selfishness of the earth. As if through the darkness of a Christmas in the world of elemental spirits, which represent the egoism of the earth, the spirits that come from the sun and show us how they make the egoistic spirits of the earth their servants.

At first it felt like a glimmer of hope. And when the great turning point had come, when nothing but desolation and despair should have been felt in human souls, the Mystery of Golgotha was preparing itself. It showed in the spiritual realm that, yes, there are forces at work within the human being that can only be compared to the changeable forces of the earth's atmosphere, to earthly egoism. They manifested themselves in ancient times, when people still carried within them the legacy of the ancient powers of the gods, like the forces that show themselves in spring and summer: they were servants of the old hierarchies of the gods. But in the time when it was heading towards the Mystery of Golgotha, the inner forces of human souls became more and more like the outer demonic elemental spirits in autumn and winter. These forces within us were to break away from the old currents and workings of the gods, just as the changeable forces of our earth withdraw from the activity of the sun in winter. And then, for man in his evolution on earth, what had always been symbolically depicted in the hope that it would come about in the victory of the sun over the winter forces, the winter solstice of the world began, in which the spiritual sun underwent for the whole evolution of the earth what the physical sun always undergoes at the winter solstice. These are the times in which the Mystery of Golgotha occurred.

We must really distinguish between two periods on earth. A time before the Mystery of Golgotha, when the earth is heading towards autumn through its summer, when the inner forces of human beings become more and more similar to the changeable forces of the earth, and the great Christmas festival of the earth, the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, when breaks over the earth, which is indeed winter time for the earth, but where out of the darkness the victorious spirit of the sun, the Christ, approaches the earth, bringing the souls within what the sun brings to the earth externally in the way of growth forces.

So we feel our whole human earthly destiny, our innermost human being, when we stand at the Christmas tree. So we feel intimately connected with the human child, who brought message from that time, where humanity had not yet fallen into temptation and thus the disposition to decline, brought the message that an ascent will begin again, as in the winter solstice the rise begins. On this day in particular, we feel the intimate relationship of the spiritual within the soul with the spirit that permeates and flows through everything, that expresses itself externally in wind and weather, but also in the regular, harmonious course of the sun, and inwardly in the course of humanity across the earth, in the great festival of Golgotha.

Should humanity not develop a new piety out of these thoughts, a piety that is not meant to remain a mere thought but can become a feeling and an intuition, a piety that cannot become dulled even by the most extreme mechanism, as it must unfold more and more on earth? Should not Christmas prayers and Christmas songs be possible again, even in the abstract, telegraph-wired and smoke-filled earth's atmosphere, when humanity will learn to feel how it is connected with the divine spiritual powers in its depths, by intuiting in its depths the great Christmas festival of the earth with the birth of the boy Jesus?

It is true, on the one hand, what resounds through all human history on earth: that the great Christmas festival of the earth, which prepared the Easter festival of Golgotha, had to come one day. It is true that this unique event had to occur as the victory of the spirit of the sun over the fickle earth spirits. On the other hand, it is true what Angelus Silesius said: “A thousand times Christ may be born at Bethlehem, and not in thee, thou art still lost forever.” It is true that we must find within us, in the depths of our soul, that through which we understand the Christ Jesus.

But it is also true that in the places at the edge of the forest, on the lakeshore, surrounded by mountains, people, after a summer spent in the fields and pastures, were able to look forward to the symbol of the Christ Child , that they felt something else in their souls than we do, who must also feel the power to sense the Christmas message in the face of our smoky, dry, abstract and mechanical times. If these strong thoughts, which spiritual science can give us, can take root in our hearts, then a solar power will emerge from our hearts that will be able to shine into the bleakest external surroundings, to shine with the power that will be like when in 'our inner being itself light kindled light on the tree of our soul life, which we, because its roots are the roots of our soul itself, are to transform more and more into a Christmas tree in this winter time. We can do it if we absorb, not just as theory, but as direct life, what the message of the spirit, what true anthroposophy can be for us. So I wanted to bring the thoughts of Christmas from our spiritual science into the space that we want to consecrate today for the work that our dear friends here have been doing for a long time.

In the name of that deity who is regarded in the north as the deity who is supposed to bring back rejuvenating powers, spiritual childhood powers of aging humanity, to which Nordic souls in particular tend when they want to speak of what, flowing from the Christ Jesus being, can bring our humanity a new message of rejuvenation, to this name our friends here want to consecrate their work and their branch. They want to call it the “Vidar Branch”. May this name be as auspicious as it is auspicious for us, who want to understand the work that is being done here, what has already been achieved and is intended by loving, spirit-loving souls here. Let us truly appreciate what our Bochum friends are attempting here, and let us give their branch and their work the consecration that is also intended to be a consecration for Christ today, by unfolding our most beautiful and loving thoughts here for the blessing, for the strength and for the genuine, true, spiritual love for this work. If we can feel this way, then we will celebrate today's festival of the naming of the “Vidar” branch in the right spirit with our friends in Bochum.

And let us let our feelings reach up to those whom we are naming as the leaders and guides of our spiritual life, to the Masters of the Wisdom and the Harmony of Feelings, and let us implore their blessing for the work that is to unfold here in this city through our friends:

You who guide the spiritual life, give people
what they need according to the times,
you work with us when our friends devotedly serve the spiritual life
here in this city.

We would like to send this up as a prayer to the spiritual leaders, the higher hierarchies, at this moment, which is solemn in two respects. And we may hope that what has been promised will prevail over this branch, despite all the resistance that is piling up more and more, despite all the obstacles and opposition, what has been promised for our work: that through it the mystery of Christ will be incorporated anew into humanity in the way it must happen.

That this may prevail, that may be our Christmas gift today: that this branch too may become a living witness to what flows as strength into the evolution of humanity from higher worlds and can ever more and more give human souls the consciousness of the truth of the words:

The senses speak
The things in the vastness of space,
They change in the stream of time;
Recognizing, the human soul,
From the vastness of space,
And unreachable by the stream of time,
Into the realm of eternity.

Our dear friends in Bochum will return to their work here imbued with this feeling. Those who, through their meeting with them, are now aware of their work will think of it often and with great intensity. These thoughts can unfold their special power all the more because we were able to consecrate the work immediately before Christmas this year, before the festival that can always be a symbol for us of all that the spirit has achieved in victory over the material, over all the obstacles that it can and must face in the world.

A Christmas Gift

It could easily seem as if the simple, loving joy that has expressed itself in hundreds and hundreds of hearts over long periods of time, when such a play about the divine child and his destiny on earth passed by these hearts , it might easily seem as if this simple, loving joy were affected by our spiritual-scientific worldview, by the seemingly so complicated, so much-evoked insights of Christ Jesus, to which we must strive within our worldview. Every heart and every mind will certainly be joyfully seized when it can become aware of such a play again, as it has been throughout the centuries during this Christmas season in the hearts of people, both in the cities and in the most lonely deserts, of those people who have gone through a certain spiritual life and of those people who remained in the simplicity of rural life, how all these hearts felt drawn to the divine child, in whom they perceived the forces that once entered into the becoming of humanity and saved this becoming from the spiritual death to which it was otherwise believed to be subject by virtue of the eternal laws of the world. Every heart, every mind must be seized when it sees again how this divine child has been worshiped.

And yet, it is only apparent if one wanted to believe that through our increasingly complicated knowledge of the miracle of Bethlehem, this direct warmth, this elementary feeling, could somehow be affected. It is, I say, only seemingly looked at the circumstances if one can think so. For we live in a very different world today, and will increasingly live in a very different world from the centuries that passed such plays in their seasons, not in the way we do, but in the way of direct life. Our complicated time, which has looked so deeply into scientific thinking and imagining, needs a different impulse of the soul in order to be able to look up again to the divine child who has brought the greatest impulse into the becoming of humanity. Only seemingly more complicated is our view, which speaks of the two Jesus children, of the Solomon-like and the Nathan-like Jesus child. For we see in the Nathanian Jesus child, as it were, the child of the whole of humanity, that being of humanity which remained behind when the other humanity began its earthly path, remained behind in spiritual worlds, before the tempter, the Luciferic principle, approached humanity. We see that it remained, as it were, at the stage of human childhood and was retained as the spiritual childhood impulse of humanity in the spiritual realm until 'the time was fulfilled', when it was born as an exceptional human being in the Nathanian Jesus child and appeared as a human that did not pass through the incarnations on earth before, but that appeared for the first time in an earthly embodiment and that, immediately after birth, addressed his mother in a language that only she understood, a language that sounded like it came from the heights of heaven. And more and more people will be convinced that, in order to understand the different way in which humanity is understood in our time, we need to look up to the divine child, whom we revere in the boy Jesus, the son of Nathan, who remained behind on the childhood stage of humanity in the spiritual realm, who was born with those human qualities, with those original characteristics that all human beings would have had if they had not entered into earthly existence through the luciferic temptation. It was with all these qualities, which were the very property of humanity before the luciferic temptation, that the Nathanic Jesus-child entered into humanity.

We need to know this today, we need to know that we have the childhood of all humanity in this boy Jesus, so that we can feel from the depths of our soul the same feelings that simple people of the past felt – but only felt, which we can know if we want to continue along the spiritual path – when they encountered the glorification of the divine child in such games. What speaks most to our soul in such a play, as it has come to us, is precisely the child's deepest innocence, humanity's own divine child innocence in the face of what the tempter in the guise of Lucifer or the later Ahriman, who is to be seen as the medieval “devil”), has made of humanity. The contrast between Herod, who was seduced by the devil and then killed by him, and the child of humanity who preserves the principle of human innocence and leads to eternal life, is deeply moving.

Such ideas, as they live in such plays, they truly did not come from superficial feelings. They arose from the intuitive recognition of the deepest secrets of the world, which were known, even if only intuitively, from the Middle Ages, from the cities to the deserts of the mountains and the countryside. Only the way in which human souls turned to those secrets was different from the way in which we must fathom them again.

And it is easy for the soul's gaze to turn from such a play to representations in which, one might say, with all the means of the highest art, as they arose in the 13th and 14th centuries from the abundance of Christian feeling, the whole mystery of the coming of humanity to earth and the relationship of the human soul to that which lives as the eternal divine in the human being was depicted. So today, when we want to celebrate the holy Christmas in our own way, I would like to turn my gaze away from these games to a magnificent representation, in which we are able to admire the very origins that lead from the highest feeling and, one might say, from “scientific-artistic knowledge” for the Middle Ages, to such simple games. I would like to direct our view to one such supreme artistic representation, which contains, as it were, the very origins of what is then found in such simple games.

In Pisa, the western Italian city, is the famous cathedral where, as we have mentioned several times, Galileo observed the swinging church lamp, and through his genius discovered the laws without which modern physics would be unthinkable. Adjacent to this church, we find the famous Camposanto, enclosed by high walls, on which medieval art has embodied what was thought about the divine secrets and the connection of man with these divine secrets, with the eternal spiritual principle thought in the human being. Some of these medieval secrets are picturesquely depicted on the walls of the Camposanto of Pisa. This churchyard was covered with soil that the crusaders brought from the tomb of Jesus Christ. And anyone who visits this churchyard today and picks up a handful of earth can get the feeling that there is something under this earth that the crusaders once brought from Palestine to spread out on this churchyard, which was to be considered particularly sacred.

Among the paintings on the walls of the Camposanto is one called “The Triumph of Death”. However, it has only been called that since 1705. Before that, everyone who saw it and knew it and spoke of it called it “Purgatory”. And there certainly were also a “heaven” and a “hell” on the walls of the Camposanto. But this Purgatory contains most profoundly the way in which the medieval soul viewed the mystery of the human soul and its connection with the eternal in the human being. Today, much of this image has already been corrupted. But through the corrupted, one can still see what the painter, unknown to history today, wanted to conjure up on the wall of the great mysteries of becoming human.

First we see a procession of kings and queens emerging from a mountain cave and developing mightily, full of self-confidence and arrogance and imbued with the feeling: We know what one is on earth if one belongs to such a class! The procession emerges from a mountain cave and, as it comes out of the cave, it encounters three coffins guarded by a hermit. Suddenly, the hunting party finds itself standing before these three coffins. The contents of the coffins are characteristically different: one contains a skeleton, the second a corpse that has already begun to decompose, with worms gnawing at it, and the third a recently deceased person who has only just begun to decompose. The procession stops before these three coffins. A hermit is sitting in front of these coffins, as if to indicate with his gesture: Stop! Look at what you really are as human beings at this memento mori. Further up, above the mountain, on a second ascending hill, we see three hermits sitting, some of them bringing food, but some of them also deeply absorbed in their books, pondering the secrets of becoming human. The whole thing is arranged in such a way that the one mountain at the top forms the ceiling, as it were. Where the hunting procession encounters the coffins, the three hermits are seated at the top, representing peace and having the ability to enter the depths of the human soul to find the connection between that human soul and the realms of the eternal. And if we look further, we see all kinds of dismembered people immediately joining the hunt, which is standing in front of the memento mori. Further on, we see people listening to the sounds of a harp; behind the harp stands a figure with a finger to its mouth. Above them, we see a host of angelic beings on one side, and devilish ones in hideous images – the painter has used all his imagination to depict the devils – on the other. So that on the far right of the picture we see the angels leaning down to the people listening to the harp. Between them and the mountain, from whose crater fire is coming, we see the devils developing.

But all this is actually there for the one who looks at it, to draw attention to something that one might not want to notice on superficial examination, but which gradually leads to an insight into the deepest human secrets. What is it that is supposed to be depicted here? It is characteristic of the medieval science when we see how the hunting party stops in front of the three corpses: first a skeleton, then the second, a corpse already eaten away by worms, and then the third, a bloated body, one that has only recently died – a motif that we often find in the Middle Ages. We understand it only when we ask: Why do people come out of the mountains? What are those who are there in the hunt? — and when we know: These are not the living, these are the deceased who are in Kamaloka! The image says: Such bodies do you have on you - the skeleton as the physical body, the corpse eaten by worms as the etheric body, and that which belongs to the recently deceased as the astral body. Remember, you who are living, what you should see of the secrets of existence after death! Thus we see the mystery of the three human covers expressed in a medieval way.

One would like to say: strange and wonderful. The hermit, who is sitting a little elevated directly in front of the three coffins, indicates to us through his whole gesture that man needs to penetrate into the mysteries of existence in order to recognize how he is connected to the eternal sources for his temporary existence. The picture is completed by the mountain itself arching over the whole, and the hermits sitting at the top, in silent contemplation and a peaceful life in nature, showing us, as it were, how one can connect with the inner workings of human nature by turning inward.

That is what the painter wanted to depict, and not a “triumph of death”, as the painting was later called when its meaning was no longer understood. From the painting itself, we can see how right those were who spoke of the Purgatory, that is, of what we call Kamaloka. What the painter intended was to show that we, as we are in life, do not always belong to those who recognize the meaning of life after death and relate to the eternal in human nature in the right way , as the painter shows us in those who are no longer in life but in the life after death; for we are dealing with those who are in the hunting procession with people who are in Kamaloka, who have already died. They see what happens to the body after death.

And when we look at the sick, at the ailing people, we see on the one hand what is physical, and on the other hand we see how the devils and the angels depart with the human souls. And we see the depths that are revealed before us: Every devil has a soul in his claws, which he leads away, and every angel carries a soul under his wings, but these souls are different. And that is what I would like to point out at this Christmas hour. The souls that are taken by the devils, who are rightly deformed but formed with the right understanding, are souls that have the form of older people. And those who are taken by the angels to the bliss of heaven are souls that the painter shaped as children. In this we sense the view that prevailed throughout the Middle Ages: that something in man must remain childlike throughout his earthly existence, that people can retain something, however old and outwardly aged they become , of childlikeness, of innocence of feeling throughout their whole life; that, on the other hand, there are people who grow old not only physically but also in soul, because they have accepted the soul-earthly. For only on earth do we grow old. Those who grow old can only do so through guilt, through that which distracts from the eternal heavenly. Therefore, their souls look like people who have grown old, whereas the souls of those who remain connected to that which maintains the connection with the eternal in the spiritual world retain the childlike form.

That is what speaks so powerfully to the observer in this image from the Camposanto in Pisa: that there is something in human nature that we can recognize as expressing the eternal in man in the first three years of childhood, which I tried to show in the little book 'The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Humanity'. This sense of being at home with the divine spiritual heights that occurs in childhood was felt in the Middle Ages. This was expressed even in such magnificent works of art as in this picture of the Camposanto in Pisa, which is perhaps the most interesting picture of the early Middle Ages in this respect, and which was so magnificent that it was attributed to Giotto and many other great contemporaries, which is impossible because it was painted after Giotto. The way in which the medieval human being related to the child is most magnificently expressed in this picture. We encounter this feeling everywhere. We find it so wonderfully expressed in these simple Christmas carols, we find it in the fact that the legend of the Christ Child has found its way into all hearts with inexpressible warmth, and how this legend of the child has made people aware of their connection to the Christ impulse. People needed the certainty that the principle of the child had come to save the eternity of the human soul. Just as the human being who has preserved his or her own eternity is brought by the angels into the realm of the blessed as a human being in the form of a child, as depicted by the painter, so too must one imagine that in the form of the innocent child, that which we know to have united itself with the Christian divine impulse, with the Christian divine essence, in his thirtieth year.

Thus, I would say, the connection between the heights of medieval spiritual life, as they present themselves to us in such a picture in the Camposanto at Pisa, and the simple games, which, admittedly, only originated later in the way one was presented here, but which all contain the impulses that express what we are again seeking in the tone and manner of our time. So it was not just — as people today would like to persuade people — how the souls of people in earlier centuries related to the child Jesus. Just as we must now assimilate the teaching of the Nathanic Jesus Child, who in His twelfth year of life took up the I of Zarathustra and in His thirtieth year the Christ-being, as we must understand it in order to realize what had to happen in the process of becoming human, In order to save the eternal in his being, medieval man did not need all the science that is given in concepts and 'theories, but rather what was given in such grandiose views of the nature of the human soul, as expressed in the image just characterized. Different times demand different ways of presenting eternal mysteries, and different times have had their different ways of presenting eternal mysteries. Time and again, it is the manifestation of the fact that man may have great hope for his soul. In the time before the mystery of Golgotha, it was the hope that there would come what corresponds spiritually in man to what the sun is physically in our planetary system. What we can know today, was felt deeply at all times.

In spring we see life, the plants sprouting from the earth and sprout and see them grow towards summer. We look up at the sun and know: they emanate from the sun, the forces that fertilize the earth, so that it can bring forth the living life of the sprouting and sprouting plants and the other beings. And in addition to what takes place so regularly from year to year in a sacred order, we see the regularity of the sun's path, which at its exact hour fills every place with the power of blessing, with which it must be filled, that which that belongs to the earth's atmosphere itself, such as the storms that sweep across the fields, the rain that pours down from the clouds, and the fog that spreads over the earth. We may see order and rule in what emanates from the sun for life on earth. In spring and summer, if we observe nature carefully, we have the feeling that the sun, triumphantly hurrying over the earth, is able to do something about the wind and weather that the earth, so to speak, allows to arise on its surface. But when we approach autumn and winter, and the power of the sun loses its strength and intervenes less in earthly existence, then we feel the changeable nature of our own earthly activities in a different way. And anyone who contemplates this alternation between spring and summer on the one hand and autumn and winter on the other with a little reflection can say: in spring, the sun with its holy order triumphs over the fickle effects that the egoism of the earth brings forth from the nature of the earth. But winter is the time when the earth forms that which is in the egoistic atmosphere, where that which is in it conquers that which blesses the earth from the cosmos.

The person who observes his inner being in thinking, feeling and willing sees how the impulses of feeling, the affects, the forces of will arise in him in a disorderly fashion from the moment he wakes until he falls asleep. He can feel how this changeable nature in his own inner being can only be compared to that which is in the earth's atmosphere. And indeed, just as the earth's atmosphere changes, so does what dominates our thinking, feeling and willing. Our soul has the same forces within it, albeit only in embryonic form, as those that work outside in air and weather and in the elemental forces. They dominate our thinking, feeling and willing as forces within us. Outside, they are elemental forces, demonic powers that live in air, water and fire and in what we have around us in lightning and thunder, in the changeable effects of our atmosphere. When we think, feel and will, we are fundamentally only related to what the earth develops out of its own selfishness in winter. And this has been felt at all times. When winter approached, when the earth's egoism became more effective with the elemental forces, which now did not follow the sun as they followed the ruling sun in spring and summer, then it was felt that all this was related to man's own inner being. O winter time, man felt, even if he did not express it clearly, you are related to my own inner being! But when the depth of the winter night came, when the time of the winter solstice came, then man felt by the way the sun now developed its new strength so that it could grow and grow more and more and gain strength towards spring and summer, man felt: the sun's power always conquers the selfishness of the earth. And then man felt courage and hope within himself and could say to himself: Just as in the physical world the cosmic sun always triumphs over the terrestrial forces of the earth, however the sun rises on a dark winter's night, if only we can feel it, so there must also be something in the depths of the soul that reigns as a spiritual sun, which will come and triumph — as the annual sun triumphs in the winter solstice — which will come as a spiritual sun in the great winter solstice! First it was hoped, then it was known, that the time of the great winter solstice had come, when one learned to understand the time of the Mystery of Golgotha as the rising of the spiritual sun within man.

And now we look back to those ancient times in the evolution of the earth, when there was an earthly spring and an earthly summer, before the Mystery of Golgotha had come. Then man still carried within him the legacy of the old times, the old clairvoyance, which made it possible for him to see into the spiritual world, where the consciousness of the connection with the divine-spiritual world still existed. But we live in the winter of the earth, that cannot be denied, in the time when it has really come about that we are not only surrounded more and more by mechanical forces outside, which are at work in machines, in industry, in the industry, in the commercial conditions of the earth's economy, but we also live in such a way that we no longer have the spiritual-divine world around us, as we did in the time of the earth's spring and summer. But what the human being felt as a symbol, the victory of the sun at the winter solstice as the victory of the spiritual sun in the depths of the human soul, that is what today's humanity can feel in the face of the Mystery of Golgotha and its preparation through that birth, which we celebrate every year renewed at Christmas. Just as a person who lives through the winter need never despair of the power of the sun, but may hope that the joys taken from him by the fall will reappear after the depths of the winter night, so too may a person look at what has taken place in connection with the Mystery of Golgotha and say to himself: Even if, like the winter storms on winter's winter night, so too may selfishness, the winter night of the human soul, rule without order in our own inner being. Yet we can never lose hope, for whatever may appear in our own soul that is contrary to the weather, must be counteracted by that which, since the Mystery of Golgotha, is connected with all human life on earth: the Christ impulse, which entered the evolution of humanity through the body of the Nathanian Jesus child , which could enter through the fact that in the Nathanic Jesus was born the child of humanity, the child with those qualities that belonged to the human soul when it had not yet gone through earthly incarnations, which had not yet been implanted with what comes from entering into earthly incarnations, the child that still had the qualities of the spiritual heights in which it may be eternal.

I wanted to present these ideas to you so that we can see from them how, in view of the human child's powers, which are at the same time his eternal powers, people can feel a supreme sense of what one has always felt and should continue to feel at the sight of the divine child at Christmas. And even if our knowledge must become different, even if we must gain the other conceptions in place of what the medieval conception saw in the picture that I indicated — the conception of the two Jesus children, the drawing over of the essence of the one into the other, the taking possession of the body of the Nathanian Jesus child by the Christ essence — then we can look with our most sacred feelings and with our strongest hopes to the realization that since the Mystery of Golgotha something lives in our human becoming that has been drawn into our earthly aura, to which we need only appeal in our joy of celebration, as hope for the indestructibility of our human being.

It is just as necessary for us to remember this as it was for the people who took joy in the simple games. Indeed, we may say something else: we take no less joy in the simple games. We feel connected to those people who found joy in these games because, in our way, we appreciate what was given to people when the child of humanity entered into earthly existence. We appreciate how they were given the strongest hope, the strongest impulse that human beings need to of Golgotha, can be sustained by the vision that, as in the physical cosmos the sun triumphs over earthly egoism, so in the depths of the human soul will live ever more and more the impulse that flowed out through the Mystery of Golgotha as the spiritual solar impulse of human evolution on earth. Once the event was there as a historical one, through which this impulse entered into earthly life, but it is meant to awaken again and again in remembrance, as can happen through such festivals. For it is true, on the one hand, that the Christ-being once entered into the earth aura through the Mystery of Golgotha; and on the other hand, what Angelus Silesias said with the beautiful words:

If Christ is born a thousand times in Bethlehem

And not in you, you will remain lost forever!

What is born in Bethlehem should be born deeper and deeper in our own soul, so that we see fulfilled in this own soul what the medieval sensibility wanted to see fulfilled by seeing the destiny of souls permeated by the Christ impulse in those childlike figures, into the realms of the blessed and do not fall into the claws of Ahriman, to whom only those souls remain that have become so attached to earthly life that they appear old, while the destiny of the soul is not to grow old on earth, but to remain young. And only the fate of the body on earth is to grow old. Man's higher destiny is to preserve spiritual youth in this aging body in connection with the Mystery of Golgotha, so that he may feel more and more within himself the hope that, however the winter storms may prevail in the soul and however the temptations temptations may live in the soul, the living confidence can never die that what has flowed into the earth aura through the Mystery of Golgotha can arise from the depths of the soul, and what we want to revive in our souls through such festivals.

So I tried to summarize what we can feel as the Christmas spirit from a reflection that seeks to combine with these few words what we feel about Christmas from our anthroposophical worldview with what people in earlier times experienced from the message of the divine child in a play like the one we presented. The words express this:

In the depths of man's soul
The spiritual sun lives confident of victory;
The right powers of the mind
They are able to sense it
In the winter of the inner life,
And the heart's hope:
He sees the victory of the spiritual sun
In the Christmas blessing light,
As the symbol of the highest life
In the winter's deep night.

There exist within the sphere of Esoteric Science different principal ideas, which then run as leading-threads, leit-motifs through the entire Esoteric Movement. Such an idea, is that of Rhythm in Numbers; and another is that of the Macrocosm and the Microcosm. The secret of Number expresses itself in the fact that certain phenomena follow each other in such a way that the 7th in a series of events reveals itself as a kind of conclusion, whereas the 8th may be designated as the beginning of quite another series of events. One finds this fact reflected in the physical world, in the relation of the octave to the Key-note.

For those who endeavour to penetrate in occult spheres, this principle becomes the basis of a very comprehensive view of the cosmos. Not only are tones, sounds, arranged according to the Law of Number, but also events in the course of time; events in the spiritual world are also so arranged that one finds in them a relationship, just as one finds in the Rhythm of Sound.

Still more important is the relationship between the Macrocosm and the Microcosm. We find a physical image of this at every touch and turn. Let us consider the relationship of the whole plant to the seed. In the entire plant we see a Macrocosm, in the seed a Microcosm. In a certain sense we find compressed in the seed, as in a point, the forces which are divided later over the entire plant. In a similar way we can look upon the development of each individual human being from childhood to old age as a Microcosm, whereas the evolution of a race, a people, is to be conceived as a Macrocosm. Every nation has its childhood in which it absorbs important elements of civilisation,. An instance of this is to be seen in the Romans, who absorbed into themselves the Greek civilization. As a people grows, it draws out of itself the necessary forces for its own further evolution. Therefore it is so important that each member of a nation should experience what his whole race undergoes, because each single member of a race relates himself to the whole nation as the seed to the whole plant. In the highest degree we find the relationship between Macrocosm and Microcosm existing in man as he meets us in the world of sense and the cosmos surrounding him. As man stands before us in the world of sense, he has concentrated into his being the forces of the Universe, just as the forces of the plant are concentrated in the seed or germ.

Now we must ask ourselves:—Are these forces distributed in some way over the Macrocosm, just as the plant-forces of the seed are distributed over the entire plant? Esoteric Science alone can give us an answer to this question, for in his earthly life man only learns to know himself as a Microcosm; but he lives not only in the Microcosm, but also has a life within the entire Universe. To state, that in his experience from waking to sleeping man oscillates between a life in the Macrocosm and a life in the Microcosm, at first appears to be merely an assertion. When he sinks into slumber, his consciousness ceases to work, his feelings and emotions cease to exist for him, and external science will bestir itself in vain if it endeavours to find within the sleeping human being that which constitutes his soul life in the waking condition. Even logically it is impossible to conceive that man's soul-life is destroyed when he goes to sleep and that when he awakes it arises again as if out of nothingness. External science in no very distant future will have to admit that one can just as little recognise the soul-life by external, material facts, as one can recognise the lungs by studying the laws of oxygen. In addition to studying the laws of oxygen, we have to learn to know the lungs in their organic functioning. In the same way we learn that in our external laws there is nothing of the physical life which we draw in with our breath on waking in the morning, and which we expire when we go to sleep. To the occultist going to sleep and waking up is nothing but a kind of breathing:—Every morning man draws into himself with his waking breath his spiritual, psychic nature, and he breathes that out again on going to sleep. Where is the spiritual, psychic part of man when he is asleep,—that part which corresponds as it were to the air in space which he has breathed out of his body? Occult science shows us that it is surrounded by the atmosphere of the spiritual world, just as we are surrounded by the atmosphere of the air; the only difference being that our atmosphere extends only for a few miles, whereas the spiritual atmosphere fills the entire cosmos.

Consider the quantity of air which man inspires in his body, in comparison with the entire atmosphere. The same quantity which, after inspiration exists inside the human body, is added, after expiration, to the atmosphere around one. Thus in the sense of occultism, we can say that after an inspiration the same amount of air is in the Microcosm which after expiration is in the Macrocosm. It is just the same with that psychic spiritual life which is actually present within our body; from waking to going to sleep that is in the Microcosm, but from sleeping until waking in the morning that is in the Macrocosm.

Just as an external physical science teaches us concerning the existence of a physical atmosphere, so Occult Science speaks of a spiritual Cosmos, which takes up into itself our souls when we sleep. Spiritual Science can only be attained through spiritual methods, the methods of initiation. Daily experience reveals to us the life of the soul in the Macrocosm, but life within the spiritual, psychic Macrocosm we only learn to know through initiation.

So we must speak first of the Science of Initiation whenever that transition from the Microcosm to the Macrocosm is to be discussed, and this science of Initiation is of special significance, because we enter that spiritual world after death. That crossing of the Threshold of Death signifies a definite forsaking of the body by the soul.

The methods of Initiation give an intimate exercise for the soul; just as in everyday life we work on our bodily environment, so we must train our souls to work in a spiritual psychic way on the Macrocosm and receive impressions from it. We must endeavour to release those spiritual, psychic forces which are bound up with our physical life, to set them free from the body. Three Soul-Forces are bound up with the body in ordinary life, which can be made free through Initiation. The first of the Soul-Forces is the power of thought. In ourordinary life we use it for shaping our thoughts, for forming ideas about the things around us. Let us attempt to enter into the nature of this Thought-Force. What happens when we think and form concepts? Even physical science will admit that every time we grasp a thought which relates to anything sensible, a process of destruction takes place in our brain. We have to destroy the finer structures of the brain, and this destruction is very evident in the signs of fatigue.

What the everyday-thinking destroys in this way is replaced in sleep; but through the methods of initiation we attain a condition in which our thinking-power is set free from the physical brain, and then nothing is destroyed. This we attain by Meditation, Concentration and Contemplation. These are certain processes in our souls which are to be distinguished from the ordinary life of the soul. In order to speak quite concretely, an example shall be given. Those ideas and soul processes which fill our ordinary life are but little adapted to kindle meditation in our souls. We must choose quite different ones. Suppose you have two glasses of water before you; one empty, the other half full. Now suppose we pour water out of the half-full glass into the empty one, and imagine that the half-full glass becomes fuller and fuller be cause of what we are doing. The materialist would consider this kind of thing foolish; but, my dear friends, with a concept suitable for meditation it is not a question of its reality but of whether it is one which will form ideas in the soul. Just because it relates to nothing real, it can direct our senses away from reality. It may be a symbol especially for that soul-process which we describe as the mystery of love. The process of love is something like that half-full glass from which man pours into the empty one, and which thereby becomes fuller and fuller. The soul does not become more empty, it becomes fuller in the same measure in which it gives; and in this way that symbol may have great significance.

Now, my dear friends, if we treat such an idea in this way, so that we apply all our soul-powers to it, then it is a meditation. We must forget everything else in the presence of that idea, we must even forget ourselves; our entire soul life must be directed to that one idea for a long period, say for a quarter of an hour. It is not sufficient to perform such an exercise once, or even a few times. It must be repeated again and again and then according to the endowment of the individual there will gradually be revealed a change in our soul-life. We notice that through this we gradually develop a power of thinking which no longer destroys the brain. Anyone who goes through such an evolution will find that this meditation evokes no fatigue, and that the brain is not destroyed. That appears to contradict the fact that beginners in meditation so often fall asleep, but that is because when we first begin to meditate we are still connected with the external world, and have not yet learned to free our thoughts from the brain. When after repeated efforts, we are able to meditate without fatigue, then we have freed our thought from the physical brain, and then a transformation appears in the whole of our human life.

As formerly, when asleep we were outside our body, without consciousness so we are now outside it and are at the same time conscious. And, just as in ordinary everyday life we think of our ego as being within our skin, so after meditation we experience ourselves outside our body. The body becomes an
object on which we look down. Now, however, we learn to know it differently than in sleep we learn to know it as the sum of magnetic forces which chain us to our body. It is something into which we wish to dive down. And we recognise that these are the same forces which draw us each morning to our physical body, and which before birth we drew fur ourselves from the spiritual world when we sought a stream of heredity in which tofind a new physical body. We then learn why we felt drawn to our parents and ancestors.

Let us take one idea, one soul-experience, which is different from that we have, on passing from the Microcosm into the Macrocosm. When we look from the Macrocosm to our body, we say on confronting each of our experiences: “This is outside us.” But if we have developed the Pauline experience, we have already developed an element of soul which is something within us, yet external to us; and when we are outside our bodies we feel the Christ-experience as an inner experience. This may be called the first meeting with the Christ-Impulse in the Macrocosm.

But now we must discuss a second kind of Initiation-Force. Just as we had to release the power of thought, so we have to release that force of which we make use of in our speech. Materialistic science says that our organs of speech come from our brain centres. But my dear friends, it was not the Brocha-organ in the brain which developed speech, but the contrary; speech built up the Brocha-organ in the brain.

The power of Thinking works destructively, but speech, which comes from our social environment, works constructively. Now we can also take the force which built up this Brocha-organ in the brain, and release it. We do this when we permeate our meditation with feeling. When I meditate on this sentence: “In the Light radiates Wisdom”, that reflects no external truth; but it has a deep meaning, a deep significance. If we permeate our feeling with the following; “we will seek to live with Light that radiates Wisdom”, then we feel that we gradually grasp that power which generally comes to expression in words but which now lives in our soul. You have heard of ‘golden silence’, that refers to the fact that we have in our soul a force which creates the word. We can grasp this force, just as we can grasp the power of thought; and in so doing, we overcome Time, just as through grasping of the power of thought we overcome space. The memory, which in ordinary everyday life extends back to one's childhood, then extends into the pre-natal life. That is the way to get experiences of our life from the last death until the present birth, and is also the way to perceive the evolution of humanity; because we then perceive those forces which guide the development of the history of man. Then we learn to know life from birth right up to death. If we but develop the force of the Silent Word, we learn to know the spiritual basis of our life on earth. And here again it is the case that we come to an historic point, to the Mystery of Golgotha; because this is the path along which we come to the ascending and descending development of man, the point when Christ incarnated. We then recognise Christ as He is, in His very own forces. A special light then falls on the first lines of the Gospel according to St. John.

As through the freeing of our thought we unite ourselves with the Christ as He was on earth, so through the freeing of the Word we unite ourselves with the Mystery of Golgotha.

And then a third force can become independent through meditation. Meditation can not only affect the brain and the larynx, but the blood-circulation in the heart. We feel this working in a weak form in such processes as blushing and turning pale. There a psychic element affects the pulsing of the blood and reachel to the heart. Now this soul-power can be drawn away from the pulsation of the blood and be made an independent power of the soul. This happens through Meditation, when the will unites itself with one's meditations. Again we meditate: “In the Light radiates Wisdom”; but now we form for ourselves the resolve of uniting our Will with it, so that we will to accompany this radiating wisdom right through the evolution of humanity. Now if we carry out such a Meditation, we reach the point when the forces of the all stream into the soul.

My dear friends, these forces can be grasped, one can draw them out of the blood, though not entirely; but they build a clairvoyant force through which we can transcend our Earth. We then learn to know the Earth as a reincarnating planet, which will incarnate anew and we human beings with it. In this way we grow through the spiritual, psychic world, right out into the Macrocosm.

In a certain way we experience how life between death and birth must be opposed to the life of the one incarnation; for what man experiences after death when free from his body, is experienced here by the Initiate. Let us take the chief characteristic of what offers itself in a condition free of the body, for that is the same as the life after death.

Living in the Microcosm we perceive through the physical organs of the senses; after death we look down on to the body as do the Initiates, but we cannot then perceive what the sense organs perceive. The Initiate can learn about the life between death and rebirth, because he has found here the transition from the Microcosm to the Macrocosm. We cannot converse, with the dead in our ordinary human speech, but if we have learnt to set the power of speech free from the body, then we learn to recognise in what way we can be together with the dead; and if we set free our power of thought, we can speak with those who are living between death and rebirth. In this way a seer could speak with the soul of one who had gone before. He had been an excellent man, but in a material sense had only concerned himself about his own people. He had lived without religious or Anthroposophical ideas. And so the Seer could experience from that man who had died: “I know that I lived with my family, with my own people, and they were the sunshine of my life. They are still living. I know it, but I can only see them up to that point of time when I left the earth. I can establish no connection with them now”. My dear friends, conditions are indeed complicated after death. The seer could see the following: The wife still showed in her being, something like the results of the influence of her husband. The husband could see these results, not as one person sees another, but as if reflected in a mirror. There certainly was a power of seeing but only as if one looked into a mirror and saw an image. That affects one in a terrible way, because one cannot see people as they really are; but just as we can see the physical body in existence, in the same way after death we must learn to see the soul.

A connection however, is still possible between the dead and the living on earth, if only the latter will permeate themselves with spiritual life, on this rests the benefits which we can show to the dead. If anyone has gone through the Gate of Death with whom our interests were bound up,—we can read to him;—we can imagine him standing before us. We read to him in a low voice, or we can send him thoughts, but he will only receive an impression if we send him ideas and concepts containing spiritual life.

Now the task of Anthroposophy will be understood when we realise that in this way we can wipe away the abyss which separates us from the dead. Even a soul which was at emnity with Anthroposophy can feel a benefit through such reading; for there are two sides to be distinguished in the life of our souls. There is what we have experienced there consciously, and the sub-conscious depths, which make their way up, like the dpeths of the sea, it only expresses itself in waves. For instance, there may be two brothers—one an Anthroposophist and the other an enemy. This can only be a fact in the outer world, because the inner process is, that a deep longing for what is religious exists in the soul of the second and he only seeks to deaden it by opposing Spiritual Science.

His conscious idea is a kind of opiate, the object of which is to help him to forget what is going on, in the depths of his soul. Death does away with all that, and we hunger especially after those sub-conscious longings of ours; so these readings of Anthroposophical writings is especially beneficial, because gradually there will come from that the consciousness of union with the dead. But even before we have that feeling the only risk we run is that the dead may not listen to us when we read eo them.

So we see that through the living grasp of Anthroposophical teaching the dead and the living in Microcosm and Macrocosm come into relationship. This occurs in yet another sphere; when the seer observes sleeping souls he sees that some souls go through the portal of sleep who have no spiritual interests; others souls go through the portal of sleep who during the day have taken in spiritual thoughts. A distinction can be seen between them, for sleeping souls are like seeds in a field; and the dead nourish themselves on that which is brought by the sleeping souls in the way of spiritual ideas. If when we go to sleep, we do not carry up into the spiritual world spiritual ideas and concepts we deprive the dead souls of their nourishment. With our reading we can give them spiritual stimulation; with the spiritual ideas we carry through with us on going to sleep we give the dead their nourishment.

And so, through what man creates in his own soul in this way, he throws a bridge across from the Microcosm to the Macrocosm. What we take into ourselves is as a grain of corn; the living mission, not merely the theoretic mission of Anthroposophy. I might represent as theory transformed into the elixir of life. Because immortality then becomes an experience; just as the seed is a guarantee for another seed, so do we develop spiritual, psychic powers which are the guarantee for our coming again. Not only do we understend but we experience immortality in ourselves. Thus from the time we grow grey-headed we experience that part of us which goes through the Gate of Death. In this sense Anthroposophy can become the elixir of life, can permeate us, as the blood permeates our physical body. Only then are Theosophy and Anthroposophy what they ought to be.

If we seek to recognise this and to gather it into the basic feeling that the human soul is just as much connected with the spiritual world as our physical bodies are connected with the physical world, then we may experience the feeling:

The Beings in the worlds of Space
Who alter in the course of Time,
Speak to the minds of Men.
The Soul of Man experiencing,
Presses beyond the boundaries of Space,
And, undisturbed by Time,
Enters the Realm of the Eternities.

It might seem as if our world conception, based on spiritual science, could impair that simple joy, so full of love, that filled many hundreds of hearts throughout the ages whenever one of the old plays, such as the one we have just seen, portraying the Heavenly Child and His earthly destiny was performed for them.¹ It really seems as if that simple, loving joy could be impaired by our teachings concerning Jesus Christ that encompass such a wealth of things and that are apparently so complicated. Yet, we must strive to understand them in accordance with the impulses streaming through our world conception. Indeed, every heart and soul will be filled with joy because such a play can make us realize again how the souls of men, whether they had undergone a certain experience in spiritual life or had lived a simple country life, whether they came from large cities or the loneliest hamlets, felt themselves drawn to the Heavenly Child. In him they felt the strength that had once entered the evolution of mankind, and that had saved it from the spiritual death it otherwise, because of the eternal laws of the universe, could not have escaped.

Nevertheless, it is an illusion to think that our more complicated way of approaching the miracle of Bethlehem with our understanding impairs the spontaneous warmth of this elementary feeling. Let me repeat that it is looking at things in an unreal way if this is thought to be the case. Actually, today we face another world, a world that will become increasingly removed from past centuries. In the past, plays like the one we have just seen, were performed for people who could experience them directly, not only through memory as we do. On the contrary, our complicated age needs another kind of soul impulse that will enable us to look up again to the Heavenly Child who brought the greatest of all impulses into man's evolution.

Our teachings concerning the two Jesus boys, the Solomon child and the Nathan child, only appear to be more complicated. In the Nathan Jesus boy we see the Child of Humanity, the Being of mankind who was left behind when humanity descended into earthly incarnations before the approach of the Tempter or luciferic principle. He was the Child who was left behind in the spiritual world, remaining, as it were, in the childhood stage of mankind until the time had come for his birth as that exceptional human being, the Nathan Jesus. He appeared then for the first time as a human being in an earthly body, and soon after birth addressed his mother in a language that could be understood only by her. Considering the different way things are understood today, it will be gradually realized how necessary it is to look up to the Heavenly Child who is worshiped in the Nathan Jesus boy. It was he who had remained behind with all the primal qualities man possessed before the Temptation, and it was he who entered the world endowed with all these qualities. In him, we can see mankind as a whole as it was in its childhood. We must bear this in mind if we wish to understand what simple folk felt when they saw the Heavenly Child glorified in such a play.

What appeals to us most of all in this play is the Child's divine innocence contrasted with the Tempter's evil work. The contrast between Herod, who is led astray and carried off by the devil, and the Child of Humanity, who safeguards man's principle of innocence, is deeply moving, even though the images of such a play proceed from a knowledge based on feeling. Throughout the Middle Ages city people and simple folk of mountain and grove alike had an inkling of the deepest secrets of the universe. Although it was only a vague notion, they nevertheless knew of such things. They approached these secrets in another way, however, and not as we would when we try to find them again today.

It is easy to turn from a play like this to the representations of the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which present with the highest art the mystery of human evolution on earth and the relationship of the human soul with all that lives in it as the eternally divine. So now I should like to turn your attention away from this play to a wonderful painting. In it we can admire fundamental elements expressing the loftiest feelings, which could also give rise to something as simple as this play.

At Pisa in Western Italy there is a famous cathedral where Galileo silently observed the swinging lamp that led him to discover the laws without which modern physics would be unthinkable. Annexed to this cathedral is the famous churchyard, the Campo Santo, enclosed by high walls. It contains a wealth of medieval art and other material concerning medieval notions of divine secrets and man's relation to them. The walls of the cemetery were covered with paintings that expressed this, and the earth had been brought from the Holy Land by the Crusaders to be strewn on the cemetery, which was considered to be specially sacred.

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Among the paintings in the Campo Santo is one that was mentioned for the first time in 1705 as "The Triumph of Death." (see above) Before that it was known as "Purgatory." Undoubtedly, a heaven and hell are to be found depicted on these walls. This Purgatory painting expresses in the deepest way how the medieval mind imagined the relationship between man's evolution and the primal element in man's soul. Today much of it is damaged but it is still possible to distinguish what this unknown painter wished to present in connection with the profound secrets of human evolution.

This painting depicts a train of kings and queens on horseback emerging from a cavern in a stately procession. They are fully self-conscious and aware of what their rank on earth implies. The procession emerging from the cavern finds three coffins guarded by a hermit. There are characteristic differences in the contents of the three coffins. In one there is a skeleton; in another, a corpse, already food for worms; in the third, a body not long dead and just beginning to decay. The procession halts before these three coffins. A hermit sits above them and his gesture seems to say, "Behold in this reminder of death what you really are as human beings. "Higher up, we see some hermits sitting on a hill. Some are gathering food, others are bending over their books, meditating the secrets of existence. These hermits portray the peace of those who can receive into their souls the connection between the human soul and the forms of the eternal. Further on, we see numerous invalids and all kinds of suffering. They adjoin the hunting party, which is standing before the reminder of death, the three coffins. At a greater distance, some people are listening to music. Behind them is a figure with a finger on his lips. Spread over the whole, we see a host of angelic beings on one side, and devilish beings on the other. On the extreme right, angels are bending down to the human beings who are listening to the music. Between them and a mountain that is emitting flames as if from a crater we can see the forms of the flying devils.

When one looks at all this more closely and deeply, it offers an insight into the most profound human secrets. What does it represent? There is a characteristic connection between medieval science and what we are again striving to attain in spiritual science. The hunting party halts before three corpses. It is the theme of the three corpses that is so often to be found in the work of the Middle Ages. We ask why the people come out of the mountain because, in reality, they are also dead. "These are the bodies you possess," is what they hear. The physical body is represented by the skeleton; the etheric body by the corpse half eaten by worms; the astral body by the recently deceased. "Remember, you living ones, the secrets of existence that must be contemplated after death." This is what is expressed in the painting. Thus we find in a painting of the Middle Ages the mystery of the three members of man. In the whole gesture of the hermit sitting above the three coffins, we find that we must, indeed, penetrate the secrets that show us how our existence is bound up with the eternal fount of life. The hermits above, immersed in peaceful contemplation and in the life of nature, show how a relationship can be established between man's soul and the eternal.

"Purgatory" (kamaloka) is the correct name for this painting, not "The Triumph of Death." The people depicted in it are already dead, even those of the hunting party who see what becomes of the body. When you look carefully at the angels and devils, you will note that each devil seizes a soul in its claws to carry off, and every angel bears away a soul under its wings. There are different kinds of souls. This is what I wish to tell you now that Christmas is with us. The souls that are carried off by devils have the aspect of older people, whereas the souls that are borne away by angels have been depicted by the artist as children. Here we find a conception that was prevalent in the Middle Ages. Men used to think that some people preserved a childlike innocence in their feelings and sentiments throughout life, no matter how old they grew, and that there were others who grew old not only physically but also in their souls. This could happen only through sin, which led man away from the eternal and from the holy things of heaven. So, for this reason, the sinful souls look like old people, and the souls of those who have preserved their connection with the spiritual world keep their childish form.

This painting in the Campo Santo shows in a most wonderful way that human nature contains something we must look upon as the expression of man's eternal being during the first three years of childhood. I have tried to explain this in my book, The Spiritual Guidance of Man. In the Middle Ages men felt this close connection between what appears in childhood and the divine spiritual heights, and they tried to express it in this painting in the Campo Santo. Because it is such a wonderful painting it has been ascribed to Giotto and others, but they lived much earlier and it is not possible that they could have done it. It expresses in a monumental and marvelous way the relationship of medieval humanity with the Child. We find it expressed in many ways, and also in the wonderful simplicity of the Christmas plays. We can see how the legend of the Child brought to the knowledge of man his relationship with Christ Jesus. He needs this certainty that this principle, which is able to rescue the eternal in the human soul, entered his soul through the Child. In the painting the artist has portrayed the human beings who have preserved the eternal in themselves with the forms of children borne by angels into the land of the blessed. In the same way we must see in the form of the innocent child the Being that is brought before the world so magically, uniting himself in his thirtieth year with the divine impulse of the Christ.

So this Campo Santo painting of the Middle Ages expresses all that is connected with simple plays like the one we have seen today even though it was created somewhat later, and with what we are seeking again in another age. Even in the past the attitude toward the Jesus child was not a simple one. In order to understand how man can save the eternal part of his being, our teachings must include the knowledge of the Nathan Jesus boy, who received the ego of Zarathustra in his twelfth year and the Christ in his thirtieth. Medieval man, however, did not need all the knowledge that is conveyed through thoughts and theories. He received it instead in the sublime imagery of the human soul such as that, for instance, that came to expression in the painting I have just described. Ever and again will we find manifest the fact that man may, indeed, cherish a great hope for his soul. Before the Mystery of Golgotha he hoped for the coming of what could then be seen only physically in the sun and planets, and also for the birth in him of its spiritual counterpart.

All our knowledge has always lived deeply in the feelings of men. We see the plants grow out of the soil in springtime, and we see how the sun calls the living plants and other beings from the earth. We also see, however, something else besides the holy order of these events that take place annually. We see it interfering with the regularity of the sun's forces that are active everywhere at the right moment; it belongs to the atmosphere of the earth itself. In the storms that ride over the fields, in the mists that spread out over the earth, we see something that does not possess the holy order of the sun's course. In spring and summer we feel that the sun journeys along triumphantly and is stronger than the changeable influences of the weather on the earth. In spring and summer the holy order of the sun's forces is victorious over what the earth produces out of its egoism as the weather changes. But in winter, the earth and its influences of weather triumph over what descends, full of blessings, from the universe.

He who observes his inner life of thinking, feeling and willing, and the disorderly way in which these impulses of thought, feeling and will arise, can feel that the changing capriciousness of his thinking, feeling and willing resembles the changes of the weather, which become manifest in the elements of water, fire, air and earth, all active as demoniacal forces. They live in what is around us as thunder and lightning and in the atmospheric changes of the weather. Indeed, our thinking, feeling and willing are related only with the changeable influences of weather experienced during winter. With the approach of winter, man always felt the close connection between weather changes and his inner life. "O winter, how deeply you are related to my own inner being," is the feeling that lived in man. When the winter solstice drew near and spring and summer approached, man felt how the sun's forces were always victorious over the egoism of the earth. Then he was filled with strength and courage and could feel that just as he was able to experience outwardly the sun's victory over the forces of the earth when it breaks into the dark night of winter, so he should be able to experience something that was active within him, deep down in his soul, as a spiritual sun that would reign triumphant during the earthly winter solstice.

Thus, the Mystery of Golgotha was seen to be in man's inner being like the rising of the earthly sun. We realize that the spring and summer of the earth's evolution occurred in the ages before the Mystery of Golgotha. Then man still possessed through his atavistic clairvoyance the inheritance of his link with the divine spiritual worlds. Now we are living in the winter of earthly evolution and undoubtedly the mechanical forces of industrial and commercial life will grow increasingly strong. The earth's winter can be found externally in the world, but also within, because we no longer have the divine spiritual world of the earth's spring and summer around us. Man used to see in the sun's victory during the winter solstice a symbol for the victory of the spiritual sun in the depths of the human soul. Modern man can experience this again today when he contemplates the Mystery of Golgotha and prepares himself for the approaching Christmas festival. In the past man looked at the Mystery of Golgotha and said, "No matter how wildly and chaotically the winter storms may rage in us, there is one hope that can never be abandoned. The Christ impulse, related to all human life on earth, will assert itself, in contrast to the weather-like changes in the human soul." This can occur because the Child of Humanity, born in the Nathan Jesus boy, entered mankind with all the qualities possessed by the human soul before it descended into its earthly incarnations.

My dear anthroposophical friends, I wished to place thoughts like these before you so that you can gather from them all that can be felt in the contemplation of the child force in man—that force that is also the force of eternity. This was, and can always be felt when we contemplate the Child on Christmas Eve. Although we must acquire other feelings than those expressed, for instance, in the painting I have described, although we must rise to a knowledge concerning the two Jesus boys, nevertheless, it remains necessary that we connect such knowledge with our most sacred feelings and strongest hopes. Then we shall know that, since the Mystery of Golgotha, the aura of our earth contains something to which we shall never turn in vain when we wish to be filled with hope in our earthly suffering, and with strength and courage in all our joys. It is just as necessary for us to remember this as for those men who felt so happy when they could watch a simple Christmas play. Indeed, we, too, feel just as happy when we see such a play because we feel our relationship with those men of the past who enjoyed it so keenly. We, too, can appreciate the bounty that was given to us with the Child that entered mankind.

Through the strength obtained in the contemplation of the Heavenly Child, it has made it possible for man to remain upright during the winter of the earth. We know that the physical sun triumphs over the egoism of the earth in spring. We also know that the spiritual impulse of the sun that flowed into the evolution of the earth will acquire ever greater strength in the depths of the human soul. When we celebrate the Christmas festival, we must be mindful of this impulse. Once, the historical event took place. It is indeed true that the Christ being entered the aura of the earth. True also are the words of Angelus Silesius:

Were Christ to be born
A thousand times in Bethlehem
And not in you,
Then forever lost you must remain.

The child born at Bethlehem must be born in ever greater depths of the soul in order that man may take hold of what is expressed in the Campo Santo painting as the childlike soul, borne aloft spiritually by the wings of angels and thus saved from the clutches of Ahriman. It is the earthly destiny of the soul to remain young even though the body may grow old. Man's higher destiny is to preserve this spiritual youth in relation to the Mystery of Golgotha, even when the body grows old. The soul will then feel increasingly sure that no matter how wildly the winter storms may rage within, and no matter how great the temptations, there is one steadfast hope that never fails. The impulse that entered with the Mystery of Golgotha can rise from the depths of the soul. This should live in our memories during the Christmas festival.

I should like to convey in the following words what we should try to experience as Christmas feeling arising from our anthroposophical world conception. Let this stand as a contrast to what men used to experience in the past in a simple and spontaneous way.

Triumphant in man's deepest soul
Lives the Spirit of the Sun;
Quickened forces, set astir,
Awake the feelings to His presence
In the inner winter life.
Hope, impulse of the heart,
Beholds the Spirit victory of the Sun
In the blessed Light of Christmas,
The sign of highest life
In the winter's deepest night.

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(In Rudolf Steiner's own handwriting.)

• 1. See Christmas Plays from Oberufer, translated by A.C Harwood. Available from Anthroposophic Press. Spring Valley, N.Y.

In these four lectures which I am giving in the course of our General Meeting, I should like to speak from a particular standpoint about the connection between Man and the Cosmos. I will first indicate what this standpoint is.

Man experiences within himself what we may call thought, and in thought he can feel himself directly active, able to exercise his activity. When we observe anything external, e.g. a rose or a stone, and picture it to ourselves, someone may rightly say: “You can never know how much of the stone or the rose you have really got hold of when you imagine it. You see the rose, its external red colour, its form, and how it is divided into single petals; you see the stone with its colour, with its several corners, but you must always say to yourself that hidden within it there may be something else which does not appear to you externally. You do not know how much of the rose or of the stone your mental picture of it embraces.”

But when someone has a thought, then it is he himself who makes the thought. One might say that he is within every fiber of his thought, a complete participator in its activity. He knows: “Everything that is in the thought I have thought into it, and what I have not thought into it cannot be within it. I survey the thought. Nobody can say, when I set a thought before my mind, that there may still be something more in the thought, as there may be in the rose and in the stone, for I have myself engendered the thought and am present in it, and so I know what is in it.”

In truth, thought is most completely our possession. If we can find the relation of thought to the Cosmos, to the Universe, we shall find the relation to the Cosmos of what is most completely ours. This can assure us that we have here a fruitful standpoint from which to observe the relation of man to the universe. We will therefore embark on this course; it will lead us to significant heights of anthroposophical observation.

In the present lecture we shall have to prepare a groundwork which may perhaps appear to many of you as somewhat abstract. But later on we shall see that we need this groundwork and that without it we could approach only with a certain superficiality the high goals we shall be striving to attain.

We can thus start from the conviction that when man holds to that which he possesses in his thought, he can find an intimate relation of his being to the Cosmos. But in starting from this point of view we do encounter a difficulty, a great difficulty—not for our understanding but in practice. For it is indeed true that a man lives within every fibre of his thought, and therefore must be able to know his thought more intimately than he can know any perceptual image, but—yes—most people have no thoughts! And as a rule this is not thoroughly realized, for the simple reason that one must have thoughts in order to realize it. What hinders people in the widest circles from having thoughts is that for the ordinary requirements of life they have no need to go as far as thinking; they can get along quite well with words. Most of what we call “thinking” in ordinary life is merely a flow of words: people think in words, and much more often than is generally supposed. Many people, when they ask for an explanation of something, are satisfied if the reply includes some word with a familiar ring, reminding them of this or that. They take the feeling of familiarity for an explanation and then fancy they have grasped the thought

Indeed, this very tendency led at a certain time in the evolution of intellectual life to an outlook which is still shared by many persons who call themselves “thinkers”. For the new edition of my Welt- und Lebensanschauungen im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (Views of the World and of Life in the Nineteenth Century).¹ I tried to rearrange the book quite thoroughly, first by prefacing it with an account of the evolution of Western thought from the sixth century B.C. up to the nineteenth century A.D., and then by adding to the original conclusion a description of spiritual life in terms of thinking up to our own day. The content of the book has also been rearranged in many ways, for I have tried to show how thought as we know it really appeared first in a certain specific period. One might say that it first appeared in the sixth or eighth century B.C. Before then the human soul did not at all experience what can be called “thought” in the true sense of the word. What did human souls experience previously? They experienced pictures; all their experience of the external world took the form of pictures. I have often spoken of this from certain points of view. This picture-experience is the last phase of the old clairvoyant experience. After that, for the human soul, the “picture” passes over into “thought”.

My intention in this book was to bring out this finding of Spiritual Science purely by tracing the course of philosophic evolution. Strictly on this basis, it is shown that thought was born in ancient Greece, and that as a human experience it sprang from the old way of perceiving the external world in pictures. I then tried to show how thought evolves further in Socrates, Plato, Aristotle; how it takes certain forms; how it develops further; and then how, in the Middle Ages, it leads to something of which I will now speak.

The development of thought leads to a stage of doubting the existence of what are called “universals”, general concepts, and thus to so-called Nominalism, the view that universals can be no more than “names”, nothing but words. And this view is still widely held today.

In order to make this clear, let us take a general concept that is easily observable—the concept “triangle”. Now anyone still in the grip of Nominalism of the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries will say somewhat as follows: “Draw me a triangle!” Good! I will draw a triangle for him:

“Right!” says he, “that is a quite specific triangle with three acute angles. But I will draw you another.” And he draws a right-angled triangle, and another with an obtuse angle.

Naturally, this goes further. Let us suppose that someone says the word “lion”. Anyone who takes his stand on the basis of Nominalism may say: “In the Berlin Zoo there is a lion; in the Hanover Zoo there is also a lion; in the Munich Zoo there is still another. There are these single lions, but there is no general lion connected with the lions in Berlin, Hanover and Munich; that is a mere word which embraces the single lions.” There are only separate things; and beyond the separate things—so says the Nominalist—we have nothing but words that comprise the separate things.

As I have said, this view is still held today by many clear-thinking logicians. And anyone who tries to explain all this will really have to admit: “There is something strange about it; without going further in some way I can't make out whether there really is or is not this ‘lion-in-general’ and the ‘triangle-in-general’. I find it far from clear.” And now suppose someone came along and said: “Look here, my dear chap, I can't let you off with just showing me the Berlin or Hanover or Munich lion. If you declare that there is a lion-in-general, then you must take me somewhere where it exists. If you show me only the Berlin, Hanover, or Munich lion, you have not proved to me that a ‘lion-in-general’ exists.” ... If someone were to come along who held this view, and if you had to show him the “lion-in-general”, you would be in a difficulty. It is not so easy to say where you would have to take him.

We will not go on just yet to what we can learn from Spiritual Science; that will come in time. For the moment we will remain at the point which can be reached by thinking only, and we shall have to say to ourselves: “On this ground, we cannot manage to lead any doubter to the ‘lion-in-general.’ It really can't be done.” Here we meet with one of the difficulties which we simply have to admit. For if we refuse to recognize this difficulty in the domain of ordinary thought, we shall not admit the difficulty of human cognition in general.

Let us keep to the triangle, for it makes no difference to the thing-in-general whether we clarify the question by means of the triangle, the lion, or something else. At first it seems hopeless to think of drawing a triangle that would contain all characteristics, all triangles. And because it not only seems hopeless, but is hopeless for ordinary human thinking, therefore all conventional philosophy stands here at a boundary-line, and its task should be to make a proper acknowledgment that, as conventional philosophy, it does stand at a boundary-line. But this applies only to conventional philosophy. There is a possibility of passing beyond the boundary, and with this possibility we will now make ourselves acquainted.

Let us suppose that we do not draw the triangle so that we simply say: Now I have drawn you a triangle, and here it is:

In that case the objection could always be raised that it is an acute-angled triangle; it is not a general triangle. The triangle can be drawn differently. Properly speaking it cannot, but we shall soon see how this “can” and “cannot” are related to one another. Let us take this triangle that we have here, and let us allow each side to move as it will in any direction, and moreover we allow it to move with varying speeds, so that next moment the sides take, e.g., these positions:

In short, we arrive at the uncomfortable notion of saying: I will not only draw a triangle and let it stay as it is, but I will make certain demands on your imagination. You must think to yourself that the sides of the triangle are in continual motion. When they are in motion, then out of the form of the movements there can arise simultaneously a right-angled, or an obtuse-angled triangle, or any other.

In this field we can do and also require two different things. We can first make it all quite easy; we draw a triangle and have done with it. We know how it looks and we can rest comfortably in our thoughts, for we have got what we want. But we can also take the triangle as a starting-point, and allow each side to move in various directions and at different speeds. In this case it is not quite so easy; we have to carry out movements in our thought. But in this way we really do lay hold of the triangle in its general form; we fail to get there only if we are content with one triangle. The general thought, “triangle”, is there if we keep the thought in continual movement, if we make it versatile.

This is just what the philosophers have never done; they have not set their thoughts into movement. Hence they are brought to a halt at a boundary-line, and they take refuge in Nominalism.

We will now translate what I have just been saying into a language that we know, that we have long known. If we are to rise from the specific thought to the general thought, we have to bring the specific thought into motion; thus thought in movement becomes the “general thought” by passing constantly from one form into another. “Form”, I say; rightly understood, this means that the whole is in movement, and each entity brought forth by the movement is a self-contained form. Previously I drew only single forms: an acute-angled, a right-angled, and an obtuse-angled triangle. Now I am drawing something—as I said, I do not really draw it—but you can picture to yourselves what the idea is meant to evoke—the general thought is in motion, and brings forth the single forms as its stationary states.

“Forms”, I said—hence we see that the philosophers of Nominalism, who stand before a boundary-line, go about their work in a certain realm, the realm of the Spirits of Form. Within this realm, which is all around us, forms dominate; and therefore in this realm we find separate, strictly self-contained forms. The philosophers I mean have never made up their minds to go outside this realm of forms, and so, in the realm of universals, they can recognize nothing but words, veritably mere words. If they were to go beyond the realm of specific entities—i.e. of forms—they would find their way to mental pictures which are in continual motion; that is, in their thinking they would come to a realization of the realm of the Spirits of Movement—the next higher Hierarchy. But these philosophers will not condescend to that. And when in recent times a Western thinker did consent to think correctly in this way, he was little understood, although much was said and much nonsense talked about him. Turn to what Goethe wrote in his “Metamorphosis of Plants” and see what he called the “primal plant” (Urpflanze), and then turn to what he called the “primal animal” (Urtier) and you will find that you can understand these concepts “primal plant” and “primal animal” only if your thoughts are mobile—when you think in mobile terms. If you accept this mobility, of which Goethe himself speaks, you are not stuck with an isolated concept bounded by fixed forms. You have the living element which ramifies through the whole evolution of the animal kingdom, or the plant-kingdom, and creates the forms. During this process it changes—as the triangle changes into an acute-angled or an obtuse-angled one—becoming now “wolf”, now “lion”, now “beetle”, in accordance with the metamorphoses of its mobility during its passage through the particular entities. Goethe brought the petrified formal concepts into movement. That was his great central act; his most significant contribution to the nature-study of his time.

You see here an example of how Spiritual Science is in fact adapted to leading men out of the fixed assumptions to which they cannot help clinging today, even if they are philosophers. For without concepts gained through Spiritual Science it is not possible, if one is sincere, to concede that general categories can be anything more than “mere words”. That is why I said that most people have no real thoughts, but merely a flow of words, and if one speaks to them of thoughts, they reject it.

When does one speak to people of “thoughts”? When, for example, one says that animals have Group-souls. For it amounts to the same whether one says “collective thoughts” or “group-souls” (we shall see in the course of these lectures what the connection is between the two). But the Group-soul cannot be understood except by thinking of it as being in motion, in continual external and internal motion; otherwise one does not come to the Group-soul. But people reject that. Hence they reject the Group-soul, and equally the collective thought.

For getting to know the outside world you need no thoughts; you need only a remembrance of what you have seen in the kingdom of form. That is all most people know, and for them, accordingly, general thoughts remain mere words. And if among the many different Spirits of the higher Hierarchies there were not the Genius of Speech—who forms general words for general concepts—men themselves would not come to it. Thus their first ideas of things-in-themselves come to men straight out of language itself, and they know very little about such ideas except in so far as language preserves them.

We can see from this that there must be something peculiar about the thinking of real thoughts. And this will not surprise us if we realize how difficult it really is for men to attain to clarity in the realm of thought. In ordinary, external life, when a person wants to brag a little, he will often say that “thinking is easy”. But it is not easy, for real thinking always demands a quite intimate, though in a certain sense unconscious, impulse from the realm of the Spirits of Movement. If thinking were so very easy, then such colossal blunders would not be made in the region of thought. Thus, for more than a century now, people have worried themselves over a thought I have often mentioned—a thought formulated by Kant.

Kant wanted to drive out of the field the so-called “ontological proof of God”. This ontological proof of God dates from the time of Nominalism, when it was said that nothing general existed which corresponded to general or collective thoughts, as single, specific objects correspond to specific thoughts. The argument says, roughly: If we presuppose God, then He must be an absolutely perfect Being. If He is an absolutely perfect Being, then He must not lack “being”, i.e. existence, for otherwise there would be a still more perfect Being who would possess those attributes one has in mind, and would also exist. Thus one must think that the most perfect Being actually exists. One cannot conceive of God as otherwise than existing, if one thinks of Him as the most perfect Being. That is: out of the concept itself one can deduce that, according to the ontological proof, there must be God.

Kant tried to refute this proof by showing that out of a “concept” one could not derive the existence of a thing, and for this he coined the famous saying I have often mentioned: A hundred actual thalers are not less and not more than a hundred possible thalers. That is, if a thaler has three hundred pfennigs, then for each one of a hundred possible thalers one must reckon three hundred pfennigs: and in like manner three hundred pfennigs for each of a hundred actual thalers. Thus a hundred possible thalers contain just as much as a hundred actual thalers, i.e. it makes no difference whether I think of a hundred actual or a hundred possible thalers. Hence one may not derive existence from the mere thought of an absolutely perfect Being, because the mere thought of a possible God would have the same attributes as the thought of an actual God.

That appears very reasonable. And yet for a century people have been worrying themselves as to how it is with the hundred possible and the hundred actual thalers. But let us take a very obvious point of view, that of practical life; can one say from this point of view that a hundred actual thalers do not contain more than a hundred possible ones? One can say that a hundred actual thalers contain exactly a hundred thalers more than do a hundred possible ones! And it is quite clear: if you think of a hundred possible thalers on one side and of a hundred actual thalers on the other, there is a difference. On this other side there are exactly a hundred thalers more. And in most real cases it is just on the hundred actual thalers that the question turns.

But the matter has a deeper aspect. One can ask the question: What is the point in the difference between a hundred possible and a hundred actual thalers? I think it would be generally conceded that for anyone who can acquire the hundred thalers, there is beyond doubt a decided difference between a hundred possible thalers and a hundred actual ones. For imagine that you are in need of a hundred thalers, and somebody lets you choose whether he is to give you the hundred possible or the hundred actual thalers. If you can get the thalers, the whole point is the difference between the two kinds. But suppose you were so placed that you cannot in any way acquire the hundred thalers, then you might feel absolutely indifferent as to whether someone did not give you a hundred possible or a hundred actual thalers. When a person cannot have them, then a hundred actual and a hundred possible thalers are in fact of exactly the same value.

This is a significant point. And the significance is this—that the way in which Kant spoke about God could occur only at a time when men could no longer “have God” through human soul-experience. As He could not be reached as an actuality, then the concept of the possible God or of the actual God was immaterial, just as it is immaterial whether one is not to have a hundred actual or a hundred possible thalers. If there is no path for the soul to the true God, then certainly no development of thought in the style of Kant can lead to Him.

Hence we see that the matter has this deeper side also. But I have introduced it only because I wanted to make it clear that when the question becomes one of “thinking”, then one must go somewhat more deeply. Errors of thought slip out even among the most brilliant thinkers, and for a long time one does not see where the weak spot of the argument lies—as, for example, in the Kantian thought about the hundred possible and the hundred actual thalers. In thinking, one must always take account of the situation in which the thought has to be grasped.

By discussing first the nature of general concepts, and then the existence of such errors in thinking as this Kantian one, I have tried to show you that one cannot properly reflect on ways of thinking without going deeply into actualities. I will now approach the matter from yet another side, a third side.

Let us suppose that we have here a mountain or hill, and beside it, a steep slope. On the slope there is a spring and the flow from it leaps sheer down, a real waterfall. Higher up on the same slope is another spring; the water from it would like to leap down in the same way, but it does not. It cannot behave as a waterfall, but runs down nicely as a stream or beck. Is the water itself endowed with different forces in these two cases? Quite clearly not. For the second stream would behave just as the first stream does if it were not obstructed by the shape of the mountain. If the obstructive force of the mountain were not present, the second stream would go leaping down. Thus we have to reckon with two forces: the obstructive force of the mountain and the earth's gravitational pull, which turns the first stream into a waterfall. The gravitational force acts also on the second stream—one can see how it brings the stream flowing down. But a skeptic could say that in the case of the second stream this is not at all obvious, whereas in the first stream every particle of water goes hurtling down. In the case of the second stream we must reckon in at every point the obstructing force of the mountain, which acts in opposition to the earth's gravitational pull.

Now suppose someone came along and said: “I don't altogether believe what you tell me about the force of gravity, nor do I believe in the obstructing force. Is the mountain the cause of the stream taking a particular path? I don't believe it.” “Well, what do you believe?” one might ask. He replies: “I believe that part of the water is down there, above it is more water, above that more water again, and so on. I believe the lower water is pushed down by the water above it, and this water by the water above it. Each part of the water drives down the water below it.” Here is a noteworthy distinction. The first man declares: “Gravity pulls the water down.” The second man says: “Masses of water are perpetually pushing down the water below them: that is how the water comes down from above.”

Obviously anyone who spoke of a “pushing down” of this kind would be very silly. But suppose it is a question not of a beck or stream but of the history of mankind, and suppose someone like the person I have just described were to say: “The only thing I believe of what you tell me is this: we are now living in the twentieth century, and during it certain events have taken place. They were brought about by similar ones during the last third of the nineteenth century; these again were caused by events in the second third of the nineteenth century, and these again by those in the first third.” That is what is called “pragmatic history”, in which one always speaks of “causes and effects”, so that subsequent events are always explained by means of preceding ones. Just as someone might deny the force of gravity and say that the masses of water are continually pushing one another forward, so it is when someone is pursuing pragmatic history and explains the condition of the nineteenth century as a result of the French Revolution.

In reply to a pragmatic historian we would of course say: “No, other forces are active besides those that push from behind—which in fact are not there at all in the true sense. For just as little as there are forces pushing the stream from behind, just as little do preceding events push from behind in the history of humanity. Fresh influences are always coming out of the spiritual world—just as in the stream the force of gravity is always at work—and these influences cross with other forces, just as the force of gravity crosses with the obstructive force of the mountain. If only one force were present, you would see the course of history running quite differently. But you do not see the individual forces at work in history. You see only the physical ordering of the world: what we would call the results of the Saturn, Moon and Sun stages in the evolution of the Earth. You do not see all that goes on continually in human souls, as they live through the spiritual world and then come down again to Earth. All this you simply deny.”

But there is today a conception of history which is just what we would expect from somebody who came along with ideas such as those I have described, and it is by no means rare. Indeed in the nineteenth century it was looked upon as immensely clever. But what should we be able to say about it from the standpoint we have gained? If anyone were to explain the mountain stream in this “pragmatic” way, he would be talking utter nonsense. How is it then that he upholds the same nonsense with regard to history? The reason is simply that he does not notice it! And history is so complicated that it is almost everywhere expounded as “pragmatic history”, and nobody notices it.

We can certainly see from this that Spiritual Science, which has to develop sound principles for the understanding of life, has work to do in the most varied domains of life; and that it is first of all necessary to learn how to think, and to get to know the inner laws and impulses of thought. Otherwise all sorts of grotesque things can befall one. Thus for example a certain man to-day is stumbling and bumbling over the problem of “thought and language”. He is the celebrated language-critic Fritz Mauthner, who has also written lately a large philosophical dictionary. His bulky Critique of Language is already in its third edition, so for our contemporaries it is a celebrated work. There are plenty of ingenious things in this book, and plenty of dreadful ones. Thus one can find here a curious example of faulty thinking—and one runs up against such blunders in almost every five lines—which leads the worthy Mauthner to throw doubt on the need for logic. “Thinking”, for him, is merely speaking; hence there is no sense in studying logic; grammar is all one needs. He says also that since there is, rightly speaking, no logic, logicians are fools. And then he says: In ordinary life, opinions are the result of inferences, and ideas come from opinions. That is how people go on! Why should there be any need for logic when we are told that opinions arise from inferences, and ideas from opinions? It is just as clever as if someone were to say: “Why do you need botany? Last year and two years ago the plants were growing.” But such is the logic one finds in a man who prohibits logic. One can quite understand that he does prohibit it. There are many more remarkable things in this strange book—a book that, in regard to the relation between thought and language, leads not to lucidity but to confusion.

I said that we need a substructure for the things that are to lead us to the heights of spiritual contemplation. Such a substructure as has been put forward here may appear to many as somewhat abstract; still, we shall need it. And I think I have tried to make it so easy that what I have said is clear enough. I should like particularly to emphasise that through such simple considerations as these one can get an idea of where the boundary lies between the realm of the Spirits of Form and the realm of the Spirits of Movement. But whether one comes to such an idea is intimately connected with whether one is prepared to admit thoughts of things-in-general, or whether one is prepared to admit only ideas or concepts of individual things—I say expressly “is prepared to admit”.

On these expositions—to which, as they are somewhat abstract, I will add nothing further—we will build further in the next lecture.

• 1. First published (two volumes) in Berlin, 1900–1. In 1914 the contents were recast and published in a different form as Die Rätsel der Philosophie (Riddles of Philosophy). The fourth edition is included in the Complete Edition of Rudolf Steiner's work. (Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach, Switzerland.)

The study of Spiritual Science should always go hand in hand with practical experience of how the mind works. It is impossible to get entirely clear about many things that we discussed in the last lecture unless one tries to get a kind of living grasp of what thinking involves in terms of actualities. For why is it that among the very persons whose profession it is to think about such questions, confusion reigns, for example, as to the relation between the general concept of the “triangle-in-general” and specific concepts of individual triangles? How is it that people puzzle for centuries over questions such as that of the hundred possible and the hundred real thalers cited by Kant? Why is it that people fail to pursue the very simple reflections that are necessary to see that there cannot really be any such thing as a “pragmatic” account of history, according to which the course of events always follows directly from preceding events? Why do people not reflect in such a way that they would be repelled by this impossible mode of regarding the history of man, so widely current nowadays? What is the cause of all these things?

The reason is that far too little trouble is taken over learning to handle with precision the activities of thinking, even by people whose business this should be. Nowadays everyone wants to feel that he has a perfect claim to say: “Think? Well, one can obviously do that.” So they begin to think. Thus we have various conceptions of the world; there have been many philosophers—a great many. We find that one philosopher is after this and another is after that, and that many fairly clever people have drawn attention to many things. If someone comes upon contradictions in these findings, he does not ponder over them, but he is quite pleased with himself, fancying that now he can “think” indeed. He can think again what those other fellows have thought out, and feels quite sure that he will find the right answer himself. For no one nowadays must make any concession to authority! That would deny the dignity of human nature! Everyone must think for himself. That is the prevailing notion in the realm of thought.

I do not know if people have reflected that this is not their attitude in other realms of life. No one feels committed to belief in authority or to a craving for authority when he has his coat made at the tailor's or his shoes at the shoemaker's. He does not say: “It would be beneath the dignity of man to let one's things be made by persons who are known to be thoroughly acquainted with their business.” He may perhaps even allow that it is necessary to learn these skills. But in practical life, with regard to thinking, it is not agreed that one must get one's conceptions of the world from quarters where thinking and much else has been learnt. Only rarely would this be conceded to-day.

This is one tendency that dominates our life in the widest circles, and is the immediate reason why human thinking is not a very widespread product nowadays. I believe this can be quite easily grasped. For let us suppose that one day everybody were to say: “What!—learn to make boots? For a long time that has been unworthy of man; we can all make boots.” I don't know if only good boots would come from it. At all events, with regard to the coining of correct thoughts in their conception of the world, it is from this sort of reasoning that men mostly take their start at the present day. This is what gives its deeper meaning to my remark of yesterday—that although thought is something a man is completely within, so that he can contemplate it in its inner being, actual thinking is not as common as one might suppose. Besides this, there is to-day a quite special pretension which could gradually go so far as to throw a veil over all clear thinking. We must pay attention to this also; at least we must glance at it.

Let us suppose the following. There was once in Görlitz a shoemaker named Jacob Boehme. He had learnt his craft well—how soles are cut, how the shoe is formed over the last, and how the nails are driven into the soles and leather. He knew all this down to the ground. Now supposing that this shoemaker, by name Jacob Boehme, had gone around and said: “I will now see how the world is constructed. I will suppose that there is a great last at the foundation of the world. Over this last the world-leather was once stretched; then the world-nails were added, and by means of them the world-sole was fastened to the world-upper. Then boot-blacking was brought into play, and the whole world-shoe was polished. In this way I can quite clearly explain to myself how in the morning it is bright, for then the shoe-polish of the world is shining, but in the evening it is soiled with all sorts of things; it shines no longer. Hence I imagine that every night someone has the duty of repolishing the world-boot. And thus arises the difference between day and night.” Let us suppose that Jacob Boehme had said this.

Yes, you laugh, for of course Jacob Boehme did not say this; but still he made good shoes for the people of Görlitz, and for that he employed his knowledge of shoe-making. But he also developed his grand thoughts, through which he wanted to build up a conception of the world; and for that he resorted to something else. He said to himself: My shoe-making is not enough for that; I dare not apply to the structure of the world the thoughts I put into making shoes. And in due course he arrived at his sublime thoughts about the world. Thus there was no such Jacob Boehme as the hypothetical figure I first sketched, but there was another one who knew how to set about things. But the hypothetical “Jacob Boehmes”, like the one you laughed over—they exist everywhere to-day.

For example, we find among them physicists and chemists who have learnt the laws governing the combination and separation of substances; there are zoologists who have learnt how one examines and describes animals; there are doctors who have learnt how to treat the physical human body, and what they themselves call the soul. What do they all do? They say: When a person wants to work out for himself a conception of the world, then he takes the laws that are learnt in chemistry, in physics, or in physiology—no others are admissible—and out of these he builds a conception of the world for himself. These people proceed exactly as the hypothetical shoemaker would have done if he had constructed the world-boot, only they do not notice that their world-conceptions come into existence by the very same method that produced the hypothetical world-boot. It does certainly seem rather grotesque if one imagines that the difference between day and night comes about through the soiling of shoe-leather and the repolishing of it in the night. But in terms of true logic it is in principle just the same if an attempt is made to build a world out of the laws of chemistry, physics, biology and physiology. Exactly the same principle! It is an immense presumption on the part of the physicist, the chemist, the physiologist, or the biologist, who do not wish to be anything else than physicist, chemist, physiologist, biologist, and yet want to have an opinion about the whole world. The point is that one should go to the root of things and not shirk the task of illuminating anything that is not so clear by tracing it back to its true place in the scheme of things. If you look at all this with method and logic, you will not need to be astonished that so many present-day conceptions of the world yield nothing but the “world-boot”. And this is something that can point us to the study of Spiritual Science and to the pursuit of practical trains of thought; something that can urge us to examine the question of how we must think in order to see where shortcomings exist in the world.

There is something else I should like to mention in order to show where lies the root of countless misunderstandings with regard to the ideas people have about the world. When one concerns oneself with world-conceptions, does one not have over and over again the experience that someone thinks this and someone else that; one man upholds a certain view with many good reasons (one can find good reasons for everything), while another has equally good reasons for his view; the first man contradicts his opponent with just as good reasons as those with which the opponent contradicts him. Sects arise in the world not, in the first place, because one person or another is convinced about the right path by what is taught here or there. Only look at the paths which the disciples of great men have had to follow in order to come to this or that great man, and then you will see that herein lies something important for us with regard to karma. But if we examine the outlooks that exist in the world to-day, we must say that whether someone is a follower of Bergson, or of Haeckel, or of this or that (karma, as I have already said, does not recognise the current world-conception) depends on other things than on deep conviction. There is contention on all sides!

Yesterday I said that once there were Nominalists, persons who maintained that general concepts had no reality, but were merely names. These Nominalists had opponents who were called Realists (the word had a different meaning then). The Realists maintained that general concepts are not mere words, but refer to quite definite realities. In the Middle Ages the question of Realism versus Nominalism was always a burning one, especially for theology, a sphere of thought with which present-day thinkers trouble themselves very little. For in the time when the question of Nominalism versus Realism arose (from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries) there was something that belonged to the most important confessions of faith, the question about the three “Divine Persons”—Father, Son and Holy Ghost—who form One Divine Being, but are still Three real Persons. The Nominalists maintained that these three Divine Persons existed only individually, the “Father” for Himself, the “Son” for Himself, and the “Holy Ghost” for Himself; and if one spoke of a “Collective God” Who comprised these Three, that was only a name for the Three. Thus Nominalism did away with the unity of the Trinity. In opposition to the Realists, the Nominalists not only explained away the unity, but even regarded it as heretical to declare, as the Realists did, that the Three Persons formed not merely an imaginary unity, but an actual one.

Thus Nominalism and Realism were opposites. And anyone who goes deeply into the literature of Realism and Nominalism during these centuries gets a deep insight into what human acumen can produce. For the most ingenious grounds were brought forward for Nominalism, just as much as for Realism. In those days it was more difficult to be reckoned as a thinker because there was no printing press, and it was not an easy thing to take part in such controversies as that between Nominalism and Realism. Anyone who ventured into this field had to be better prepared, according to the ideas of those times, than is required of people who engage in controversies nowadays. An immense amount of penetration was necessary in order to plead the cause of Realism, and it was equally so with Nominalism. How does this come about? It is grievous that things are so, and if one reflects more deeply on it, one is led to say: What use is it that you are so clever? You can be clever and plead the cause of Nominalism, and you can be just as clever and contradict Nominalism. One can get quite confused about the whole question of intelligence! It is distressing even to listen to what such characterisations are supposed to mean.

Now, as a contrast to what we have been saying, we will bring forward something that is perhaps not nearly so discerning as much that has been advanced with regard to Nominalism or to Realism, but it has perhaps one merit—it goes straight to the point and indicates the direction in which one needs to think.

Let us imagine the way in which one forms general concepts; the way in which one synthesizes a mass of details. We can do this in two ways: first as a man does in the course of his life through the world. He sees numerous examples of a certain kind of animal: they are silky or woolly, are of various colours, have whiskers, at certain times they go through movements that recall human “washing”, they eat mice, etc. One can call such creatures “cats”. Then one has formed a general concept. All these creatures have something to do with what we call “cats”. But now let us suppose that someone has had a long life, in the course of which he has encountered many cat-owners, men and women, and he has noticed that a great many of these people call their pets “Pussy”. Hence he classes all these creatures under the name of “Pussy”. Hence we now have the general concept “Cats” and the general concept “Pussy”, and a large number of individual creatures belonging in both cases to the general concept. And yet no one will maintain that the general concept “Pussy” has the same significance as the general concept “Cats”. Here the real difference comes out. In forming the general concept “Pussy” which is only a summary of names that must rank as individual names, we have taken the line, and rightly so, of Nominalism; and in forming the general concept “Cats” we have taken the line of Realism, and rightly so. In one case Nominalism is correct; in the other. Realism. Both are right. One must only apply these methods within their proper limits. And when both are right, it is not surprising that good reasons for both can be adduced. In taking the name “Pussy”, I have employed a somewhat grotesque example. But I can show you a much more significant example and I will do so at once.

Within the scope of our objective experience there is a whole realm where Nominalism—the idea that the collective term is only a name—is fully justified. We have “one”, “two”, “three”, “four”, “five”, and so on, but it is impossible to find in the expression “number” anything that has a real existence. “Number” has no existence. “One”, “two”, “three”, “five”, “six”,—they exist. But what I said in the last lecture, that in order to find the general concept one must let that which corresponds to it pass over into movement—this cannot be done with the concept “Number”. One “one” does not pass over into “two”. It must always be taken as “one”. Not even in thought can we pass over into two, or from two into three. Only the individual numbers exist, not “number” in general. As applied to the nature of numbers, Nominalism is entirely correct; but when we come to the single animal in relation to its genus, Realism is entirely correct. For it is impossible for a deer to exist, and another deer, and yet another, without there being the genus “deer”. The figure “two” can exist for itself, “one”, “seven”, etc., can exist for themselves. But in so far as anything real appears in number, the number is a quality, and the concept “number” has no specific existence. External things are related to general concepts in two different ways: Nominalism is appropriate in one case, and Realism in the other.

On these lines, if we simply give our thoughts the right direction, we begin to understand why there are so many disputes about conceptions of the world. People generally are not inclined, when they have grasped one standpoint, to grasp another as well. When in some realm of thought somebody has got hold of the idea “general concepts have no existence”, he proceeds to extend to it the whole make-up of the world. This sentence, “general concepts have no existence” is not false, for when applied to the particular realm which the person in question has considered, it is correct. It is only the universalising of it that is wrong. Thus it is essential, if one wants to form a correct idea of what thinking is, to understand clearly that the truth of a thought in the realm to which it belongs is no evidence for its general validity. Someone can offer me a perfectly correct proof of this or that and yet it will not hold good in a sphere to which it does not belong. Anyone, therefore, who intends to occupy himself seriously with the paths that lead to a conception of the world must recognise that the first essential is to avoid one-sidedness. That is what I specially want to bring out to-day. Now let us take a general look at some matters which will be explained in detail later on.

There are people so constituted that it is not possible for them to find the way to the Sprit, and to give them any proof of the Spirit will always be hard. They stick to something they know about, in accordance with their nature. Let us say they stick at something that makes the crudest kind of impression on them—Materialism. We need not regard as foolish the arguments they advance as a defence or proof of Materialism, for an immense amount of ingenious writing has been devoted to the subject, and it holds good in the first place for material life, for the material world and its laws.

Again, there are people who, owing to a certain inwardness, are naturally predisposed to see in all that is material only the revelation of the spiritual. Naturally, they know as well as the materialists do that, externally, the material world exists; but matter, they say, is only the revelation, the manifestation, of the underlying spiritual. Such persons may take no particular interest in the material world and its laws. As all their ideas of the spiritual come to them through their own inner activity, they may go through the world with the consciousness that the true, the lofty, in which one ought to interest oneself—all genuine reality—is found only in the Spirit; that matter is only illusion, only external phantasmagoria. This would be an extreme standpoint, but it can occur, and can lead to a complete denial of material life. We should have to say of such persons that they certainly do recognize what is most real, the Spirit, but they are one-sided; they deny the significance of the material world and its laws. Much acute thinking can be enlisted in support of the conception of the universe held by these persons. Let us call their conception of the universe: Spiritism. Can we say that the Spiritists are right? As regards the Spirit, their contentions could bring to light some exceptionally correct ideas, but concerning matter and its laws they might reveal very little of any significance. Can one say the Materialists are correct in what they maintain? Yes, concerning matter and its laws they may be able to discover some exceptionally useful and valuable facts; but in speaking of the Spirit they may utter nothing but foolishness. Hence we must say that both parties are correct in their respective spheres.

There can also be persons who say: “Yes, but as to whether in truth the world contains only matter, or only spirit, I have no special knowledge; the powers of human cognition cannot cope with that. One thing is clear—there is a world spread out around us. Whether it is based upon what chemists and physicists, if they are materialists, call atoms, I know not. But I recognize the external world; that is something I see and can think about. I have no particular reason for supposing that it is or is not spiritual at root. I restrict myself to what I see around me.” From the explanations already given we can call such Realists, and their concept of the universe: Realism. Just as one can enlist endless ingenuity on behalf of Materialism or of Spiritism, and just as one can be clever about Spiritism and yet say the most foolish things on material matters, and vice versa, so one can advance the most ingenious reasons for Realism, which differs from both Spiritism and Materialism in the way I have just described.

Again, there may be other persons who speak as follows. Around us are matter and the world of material phenomena. But this world of material phenomena is in itself devoid of meaning. It has no real meaning unless there is within it a progressive tendency; unless from this external world something can emerge towards which the human soul can direct itself, independently of the world. According to this outlook, there must be a realm of ideas and ideals within the world-process. Such people are not Realists, although they pay external life its due; their view is that life has meaning only if ideas work through it and give it purpose. It was under the influence of such a mood as this that Fichte once said: Our world is the sensualised material of our duty.² The adherents of such a world-outlook as this, which takes everything as a vehicle for the ideas that permeate the world-process, may be called Idealists and their outlook: Idealism. Beautiful and grand and glorious things have been brought forward on behalf of this Idealism. And in this realm that I have just described—where the point is to show that the world would be purposeless and meaningless if ideas were only human inventions and were not rooted in the world-process—in this realm Idealism is fully justified. But by means of it one cannot, for example, explain external reality. Hence one can distinguish this Idealism from other world-outlooks:

We now have side by side four justifiable world-outlooks, each with significance for its particular domain. Between Materialism and Idealism there is a certain transition. The crudest kind of materialism—one can observe it specially well in our day, although it is already on the wane—will consist in this, that people carry to an extreme the saying of Kant—Kant did not do this himself!—that in the individual sciences there is only so much real science as there is mathematics. This means that from being a materialist one can become a ready-reckoner of the universe, taking nothing as valid except a world composed of material atoms. They collide and gyrate, and then one calculates how they inter-gyrate. By this means one obtains very fine results, which show that this way of looking at things is fully justified. Thus you can get the vibration-rates for blue, red, etc.; you take the whole world as a kind of mechanical apparatus, and can reckon it up accurately. But one can become rather confused in this field. One can say to oneself: “Yes, but however complicated the machine may be, one can never get out of it anything like the perception of blue, red, etc. Thus if the brain is only a complicated machine, it can never give rise to what we know as soul-experiences.” But then one can say, as du Bois-Reymond once said: If we want to explain the world in strictly mathematical terms, we shall not be able to explain the simplest perception, but if we go outside a mathematical explanation, we shall be unscientific. The most uncompromising materialist would say, “No, I do not even calculate, for that would presuppose a superstition—it would imply that I assume that things are ordered by measure and number.” And anyone who raises himself above this crude materialism will become a mathematical thinker, and will recognize as valid only whatever can be treated mathematically. From this results a conception of the universe that really admits nothing beyond mathematical formulae. This may be called Mathematism.

Someone, however, might think this over, and after becoming a Mathematist he might say to himself: “It cannot be a superstition that the colour blue has so and so many vibrations. The world is ordered mathematically. If mathematical ideas are found to be real in the world, why should not other ideas have equal reality?” Such a person accepts this—that ideas are active in the world. But he grants validity only to those ideas that he discovers outside himself—not to any ideas that he might grasp from his inner self by some sort of intuition or inspiration, but only to those he reads from external things that are real to the senses. Such a person becomes a Rationalist, and his outlook on the world is that of Rationalism. If, in addition to the ideas that are found in this way, someone grants validity also to those gained from the moral and the intellectual realms, then he is already an Idealist. Thus a path leads from crude Materialism, by way of Mathematism and Rationalism, to Idealism.

But now Idealism can be enhanced. In our age there are some men who are trying to do this. They find ideas at work in the world, and this implies that there must also be in the world some sort of beings in whom the ideas can live. Ideas cannot live just as they are in any external object, nor can they hang as it were in the air. In the nineteenth century the belief existed that ideas rule history. But this was a confusion, for ideas as such have no power to work. Hence one cannot speak of ideas in history. Anyone who understands that ideas, if they are there are all, are bound up with some being capable of having ideas, will no longer be a mere Idealist; he will move on to the supposition that ideas are connected with beings. He becomes a Psychist and his world-outlook is that Psychism. The Psychist, who in his turn can uphold his outlook with an immense amount of ingenuity, reaches it only through a kind of one-sidedness, of which he can eventually become aware.

Here I must add that there are adherents of all the world-outlooks above the horizontal stroke; for the most part they are stubborn folk who, owing to some fundamental element in themselves, take this or that world-outlook and abide by it, going no further. All the beliefs listed below the line have adherents who are more easily accessible to the knowledge that individual world-outlooks each have one special standpoint only, and they more easily reach the point where they pass from one world-outlook to another.

When someone is a Psychist, and able as a thinking person to contemplate the world clearly, then he comes to the point of saying to himself that he must presuppose something actively psychic in the outside world. But directly he not only thinks, but feels sympathy for what is active and willing in man, then he says to himself: “It is not enough that there are beings who have ideas; these beings must also be active, they must be able also to do things.” But this is inconceivable unless these beings are individual beings. That is, a person of this type rises from accepting the ensoulment of the world to accepting the Spirit or the Spirits of the world. He is not yet clear whether he should accept one or a number of Spirits, but he advances from Psychism to Pneumatism to a doctrine of the Spirit.

If he has become in truth a Pneumatist, then he may well grasp what I have said in this lecture about number—that with regard to figures it is somewhat doubtful to speak of a “unity”. Then he comes to the point of saying to himself: It must therefore be a confusion to talk of one undivided Spirit, of one undivided Pneuma. And he gradually becomes able to form for himself an idea of the Spirits of the different Hierarchies. Then he becomes in the true sense a Spiritist, so that on this side there is a direct transition from Pneumatism to Spiritism.

These world-outlooks are all justified in their own field. For there are fields where Psychism acts illuminatingly, and others where Pneumatism does the same. Certainly, anyone who wishes to deliberate about an explanation of the universe as thoroughly as we have tried to do must come to Spiritism, to the acceptance of the Spirits of the Hierarchies. For to stop short at Pneumatism would in this case mean the following. If we are Spiritists, then it may happen that people will say to us: “Why so many spirits? Why bring numbers into it? Let there be One Undivided Spirit!” Anyone who goes more deeply into the matter knows that this objection is like saying: “You tell me there are two hundred midges over there. I don't see two hundred; I see only a single swarm.” Exactly so would an adherent of Pneumatism stand with regard to a Spiritist. The Spiritist sees the universe filled with the Spirits of the Hierarchies; the Pneumatist sees only the one “swarm”—only the Universal Spirit. But that comes from an inexact view.

Now there is still another possibility: someone may not take the path we have tried to follow to the activities of the spiritual Hierarchies, but may still come to an acceptance of certain spiritual beings. The celebrated German philosopher, Leibnitz, was a man of this kind. Leibnitz had got beyond the prejudice that anything merely material can exist in the world. He found the actual, he sought the actual. (I have treated this more precisely in my book, Riddles of Philosophy.) His view was that a being—as, for example, the human soul—can build up existence in itself. But he formed no further ideas on the subject. He only said to himself that there is such a being that can build up existence in itself, and force concepts outwards from within itself. For Leibnitz, this being is a “Monad”. And he said to himself: “There must be many Monads, and Monads of the most varied capabilities. If I had here a bell, there would be many monads in it—as in a swarm of midges—but they would be monads that had never come even so far as to have sleep-consciousness, monads that are almost unconscious, but which nevertheless develop the dimmest of concepts within themselves. There are monads that dream; there are monads that develop waking ideas within themselves; in short, there are monads of the most varied grades.”

A person with this outlook does not come so far as to picture to himself the individual spiritual beings in concrete terms, as the Spiritist does, but he reflects in the world upon the spiritual element in the world, allowing it to remain indefinite. He calls it “Monad”—that is, he conceives of it only as though one were to say: “Yes, there is spirit in the world and there are spirits, but I describe them only by saying, ‘They are entities having varying powers of perception.’ I pick out from them an abstract characteristic. So I form for myself this one-sided world-outlook, on behalf of which as much as can be said has been said by the highly intelligent Leibnitz. In this way I develop Monadism.” Monadism is an abstract Spiritism.

But there can be persons who do not rise to the level of the Monads; they cannot concede that existence is made up of beings with the most varied conceptual powers, but at the same time they are not content to allow reality only to external phenomena; they hold that “forces” are dominant everywhere. If, for example, a stone falls to the ground, they say, “That is gravitation!” When a magnet attracts bits of iron, they say: “That is magnetic force!” They are not content with saying simply, “There is the magnet,” but they say, “The magnet presupposes that supersensibly, invisibly, a magnetic force is present, extending in all directions.” A world-outlook of this kind—which looks everywhere for forces behind phenomena—can be called Dynamism.

Then one may say: “No, to believe in ‘forces’ is superstition”—an example of this is Fritz Mauthner's Critique of Language, where you find a detailed argument to this effect. It amounts to taking your stand on the reality of the things around us. Thus by the path of Spiritism we come through Monadism and Dynamism to Realism again.

But now one can do something else still. One can say: “Certainly I believe in the world that is spread out around me, but I do not maintain any right to claim that this world is the real one. I can say of it only that it ‘appears’ to me. I have no right to say more about it.” There you have again a difference. One can say of the world that is spread out around us. “This is the real world,” but one can also say, “I am clear that there is a world which appears to me; I cannot speak of anything more. I am not saying that this world of colours and sounds, which arises only because certain processes in my eyes present themselves to me as colours, while processes in my ears present themselves to me as sounds—I am not saying that this world is the true world. It is a world of phenomena.” This is the outlook called Phenomenalism.

We can go further, and can say: “The world of phenomena we certainly have around us, but all that we believe we have in these phenomena is what we have ourselves added to them, what we have thought into them. Our own sense-impressions are all we can rightly accept. Anyone who says this—mark it well!—is not an adherent of Phenomenalism. He peels off from the phenomena everything which he thinks comes only from the understanding and the reason, and he allows validity only to sense-impressions, regarding them as some kind of message from reality.” This outlook may be called Sensationalism.

A critic of this outlook can then say: “You may reflect as much as you like on what the senses tell us and bring forward ever so ingenious reasons for your view—and ingenious reasons can be given—I take my stand on the point that nothing real exists except that which manifests itself through sense-impressions; this I accept as something material.”

This is rather like an atomist saying: “I hold that only atoms exist, and that however small they are, they have the attributes which we recognize in the physical world”—anyone who says this is a materialist. Thus, by another path, we arrive back at Materialism.

All these conceptions of the world that I have described and written down for you really exist, and they can be maintained. And it is possible to bring forward the most ingenious reasons for each of them; it is possible to adopt any one of them and with ingenious reasons to refute the others. In between these conceptions of the world one can think out yet others, but they differ only in degree from the leading types I have described, and can be traced back to them. If one wishes to learn about the web and woof of the world, then one must know that the way to it is through these twelve points of entry. There is not merely one conception of the world that can be defended, or justified, but there are twelve. And one must admit that just as many good reasons can be adduced for each and all of them as for any particular one. The world cannot be rightly considered from the one-sided standpoint of one single conception, one single mode of thought; the world discloses itself only to someone who knows that one must look at it from all sides. Just as the sun—if we go by the Copernican conception of the universe—passes through the signs of the Zodiac in order to illuminate the earth from twelve different points, so we must not adopt one standpoint, the standpoint of Idealism, or Sensationalism, or Phenomenalism, or any other conception of the world with a name of this kind; we must be in a position to go all round the world and accustom ourselves to the twelve different standpoints from which it can be contemplated. In terms of thought, all twelve standpoints are fully justifiable. For a thinker who can penetrate into the nature of thought, there is not one single conception of the world, but twelve that can be equally justified—so far justified as to permit of equally good reasons being thought out for each of them. There are twelve such justified conceptions of the world.

Tomorrow we will start from the points of view we have gained in this way, so that from the consideration of man in terms of thought we may rise to a consideration of the cosmic.

• 2. “Unsere Welt ist das versinnlichte Material unserer Pflicht.” The rendering given is that of Professor Robert Adamson, in the series of Blackwood's Philosophical Classics for English readers. Alternative words for versinnlichte might be “sense-perceptible” or “tangible”. The quotation is from Fichte's work, Über den Grund unseres Glaubens an eine göttliche Weltregierung (1798).

Yesterday I tried to set forth those world-outlooks which are possible for man; so possible that certain valid proofs can be produced for the correctness of each of them in a certain realm. For anyone who is not concerned to weld together into a single system all that he has been in a position to observe and reflect upon in a certain limited domain, and then sets out to seek proofs for it, but who wants to penetrate into the truth of the world, it is important to realize that broadmindedness is necessary because twelve typical varieties of world-outlook are actually possible for the mind of man. (For the moment we need not go into the transitional ones.) If one wants to come really to the truth, then one must try clearly to understand the significance of these twelve typical varieties, must endeavour to recognize for what domain of existence one or other variety holds the best key. If we let these twelve varieties pass once again before our mind's eye, as we did yesterday, then we find that they are: Materialism, Sensationalism, Phenomenalism, Realism, Dynamism, Monadism, Spiritism, Pneumatism, Psychism, Idealism, Rationalism and Mathematism.

Now in the actual field of human searching after truth it is unfortunate that individual minds, individual personalities, always incline to let one or the other of these varieties have the upper hand, with the result that different epochs develop one-sided outlooks which then work back on the people living at that time.

We had better arrange the twelve world-outlooks in the form of a circle (see Diagram 11), and quietly observe them. They are possible, and one must know them. They really stand in such a relation to one another that they form a mental copy of the Zodiac with which we are now so well acquainted. As the sun apparently passes through the Zodiac, and as other planets apparently do the same, so it is possible for the human soul to pass through a mental circle which embraces twelve world-pictures. Indeed, one can even bring the characteristics of these pictures into connection with the individual signs of the Zodiac, and this is in no wise arbitrary, for between the individual signs of the Zodiac and the Earth there really is a connection similar to that between the twelve world-outlooks and the human soul. I mean this in the following sense.

We could not say that there is an easily understandable relation between, e.g. the sign Aries and the Earth. But when the Sun, Saturn, or Mercury are so placed that from the Earth they are seen in the sign Aries, then influence is different from what it is when they are seen in the sign Leo. Thus the effect which comes to us out of the Cosmos from the different planets varies according as the individual planets stand in one or other of the Zodiacal signs. In the case of the human soul, it is even easier to recognize the effects of these twelve “mental-zodiacal-signs” (Geistes-Tierkreisbilder). There are souls who have the tendency to receive a given influence on their inner life, on their scientific, philosophic or other mental proclivities, so that their souls are open to be illuminated, as it were, by Idealism. Other souls are open to be shone upon by Materialism, others by Sensationalism. A man is not a Sensationalist, Materialist, Spiritist or Pneumatist because this or that world-outlook is—and can be seen to be—correct, but because his soul is so conditioned that it is predominantly influenced by the respective mental-zodiacal-sign. Thus in the twelve mental-zodiacal-signs we have something that can lead us to a deep insight into the way in which human world-outlooks arise, and can help us to see far into the reasons why, on the one hand, men dispute about world-outlooks, and why, on the other hand, they ought not to dispute but would do much better to understand why it happens that people have different world-outlooks. How, in spite of this, it may be necessary for certain epochs strongly to oppose the trend of this or the other world-outlook, we shall have to explain in the next lecture. What I have said so far refers to the moulding of human thought by the spiritual cosmos of the twelve zodiacal signs, which form as it were our spiritual horizon.

But there is still something else that determines human world-outlooks. You will best understand this if I first of all show you the following.

A man can be so attuned in his soul—for the present it is immaterial by which of these twelve “mental-zodiacal signs” his soul is illuminated—that the soul-mood expressed in the whole configuration of his world-outlook can be designated as Gnosis. A man is a Gnostic when his disposition is such that he gets to know the things of the world not through the senses, but through certain cognitional forces in the soul itself. A man can be a Gnostic and at the same time have a certain inclination to be illuminated by e.g. the mental-zodiacal-sign that we have here called “Spiritism”. Then his Gnosticism will have a deeply illuminated insight into the relationships of the spiritual worlds. But a man can also be, e.g. a Gnostic of Idealism; then he will have a special proclivity for seeing clearly the ideals of mankind and the ideas of the world. Thus there can be a difference between two men who are both Idealists. One man will be an idealistic enthusiast who always has the word “ideal”, “ideal”, “ideal”, on his lips, but does not know much about idealism; he lacks the faculty for conjuring up ideals in sharp outline before his inner sight. The other man not only speaks of Idealism, but knows how to picture the ideals clearly in his soul. The latter, who inwardly grasps Idealism quite concretely—as intensely as a man grasps external things with his hand—is a Gnostic in the domain of Idealism. Thus one could say that he is basically a Gnostic, but is specially illuminated by the mental-zodiacal-sign of Idealism.

There are also persons who are specially illuminated by the world-outlook sign of Realism. They go through the world in such a way that their whole mode of perceiving and encountering the world enables them to say much, very much, to others about the world. They are neither Spiritists nor Idealists; they are quite ordinary Realists. They are equipped to have really fine perceptions of the external reality around them, and of the intrinsic qualities of things. They are Gnostics, genuine Gnostics, only they are Gnostics of Realism. There are such Gnostics of Realism, and Spiritists or Idealists are often not Gnostics of Realism at all. We can indeed find that people who call themselves good Theosophists may go through a picture-gallery and understand nothing about it, whereas others who are not Theosophists at all, but are Gnostics of Realism, are able to make an abundance of significant comments on it, because with their whole personality they are in touch with the reality of the things they see. Or again, many Theosophists go out into the country and are unable to grasp with their whole souls anything of the greatness and sublimity of nature; they are not Gnostics of Realism.

There are also Gnostics of Materialism. Certainly they are strange Gnostics. But quite in the sense in which there are Gnostics of Realism, there can be Gnostics of Materialism. They are persons who have feeling and perception only for all that is material; persons who try to get to know what the material is by coming into direct contact with it, like the dog who sniffs at substances and tries to get to know them intimately in that way, and who really is, in regard to material things, an excellent Gnostic. One can be a Gnostic in connection with all twelve world-outlook signs. Hence, if we want to put Gnosis in its right place, we must draw a circle, and the whole circle signifies that the Gnosis can move round through all twelve world-outlook signs. Just as a planet goes through all twelve signs of the Zodiac, so can the Gnosis pass through the twelve world-outlook signs. Certainly, the Gnosis will render the greatest service for the healing of souls when the Gnostic frame of mind is applied to Spiritism. One might say that Gnosis is thoroughly at home in Spiritism. That is its true home. In the other world-outlook-signs it is outside its home. Logically speaking, one is not justified in saying that there could not be a materialistic Gnosis. The pedants of concepts and ideas can settle such knotty points more easily than the sound logicians, who have a somewhat more complicated task. One might say, for example: “I will call nothing ‘Gnosis’ except what penetrates into the ‘spirit’.” That is an arbitrary attitude with regard to concepts; as arbitrary as if one were to say, “So far I have seen violets only in Austria; therefore I call violets only flowers that grow in Austria and have a violet colour—nothing else.” Logically it is just as impossible to say that there is Gnosis only in the world-outlook-sign of Spiritism; for Gnosis is a “planet” which passes through all the mental-constellations.

There is another world-outlook-mood. Here I speak of “mood”, whereas otherwise I speak of “signs” or “pictures”. Of late it has been thought that one could more easily become acquainted—and yet here even the easy is difficult—with this second mood, because its representative, in the constellation of Idealism, is Hegel. But this special mood in which Hegel looks at the world need not be in the constellation of Idealism, for it, too, can pass through all the constellations. It is the world-outlook of Logicism. The special mark of Logicism consists in its enabling the soul to connect thoughts, concepts and ideas with one another. As when in looking at an organism one comes from the eyes to the nose and the mouth and regards them as all belonging to each other, so Hegel arranges all the concepts that he can lay hold of into a great concept-organism—a logical concept-organism. Hegel was simply able to seek out everything in the world that can be found as thought, to link together thought with thought, and to make an organism of it—Logicism! One can develop Logicism in the constellation of Idealism, as Hegel did; one can develop it, as Fichte did, in the constellation of Psychism; and one can develop it in other constellations. Logicism is again something that passes like a planet through the twelve zodiacal signs.

There is a third mood of the soul, expressed in world-outlooks; we can study this in Schopenhauer, for example. Whereas the soul of Hegel when he looked out upon the world was so attuned that with him everything conceptual takes the form of Logicism, Schopenhauer lays hold of everything in the soul that pertains to the character of will. The forces of nature, the hardness of a stone, have this character for him; the whole of reality is a manifestation of will. This arises from the particular disposition of his soul. This outlook can once more be regarded as a planet which passes through all twelve zodiacal signs. I will call this world-outlook, Voluntarism.

Schopenhauer was a voluntarist, and in his soul he was so constituted that he laid himself open to the influence of the mental constellation of Psychism. Thus arose the peculiar Schopenhauerian metaphysics of the will: Voluntarism in the mental constellation of Psychism.

Let us suppose that someone is a Voluntarist, with a special inclination towards the constellation of Monadism. Then he would not, like Schopenhauer, take as basis of the universe a unified soul which is really “will”; he would take many “monads”, which are, however, will-entities. This world of monadic voluntarism as been developed most beautifully, ingeniously, and I might say, in the most inward manner, by the Austrian philosophic poet, Hamerling. Whence came the peculiar teaching that you find in Hamerling's Atomistics of the Will? It arose because his soul was attuned to Voluntarism, while he came under the mental constellation of Monadism. If we had the time, we could mention examples for each soul-mood in each constellation. They are to be found in the world.

Another special mood is not at all prone to ponder whether behind the phenomena there is still this or that, as is done by the Gnostic mood, or the idealistic or voluntary moods, but which simply says: “I will incorporate into my world-conception whatever I meet with in the world, whatever shows itself to me externally.” One can do this in all domains—i.e. through all mental constellations. One can do it as a materialist who accepts only what he encounters externally; one can also do it as Spiritist. A man who has this mood will not trouble himself to seek for a special connection behind the phenomena; he lets things approach and waits for whatever comes from them. This mood we can call Empiricism. Empiricism signifies a soul-mood which simply accepts whatever experience may offer. Through all twelve constellations one can be an empiricist, a man with a world-conception based on experience. Empiricism is the fourth psychic mood which can go through all twelve constellations.

One can equally well develop a mood which is not satisfied with immediate experience, as in Empiricism, so that one feels through and through, as an inner necessity, a mood which says: Man is placed in the world; in his soul he experiences something about the world that he cannot experience externally; only there, in that inner realm, does the world unveil its secrets. One may look all round about and yet see nothing of the mysteries which the world includes. Someone imbued with a mood of this kind can often say: “Of what help to me is the Gnosis that takes pains to struggle up to a kind of vision? The things of the external world that one can look upon—they cannot show me the truth. How does Logicism help me to a world-picture? ... In Logicism the nature of the world does not express itself. What help is there in speculations about the will? It merely leads us away from looking into the depths of our own soul, and into those depths one does not look when the soul wills, but, on the contrary, just when by surrendering itself it is without will.” Voluntarism, therefore, is not the mood that I mean here, neither is Empiricism—the mere looking upon and listening to experience and events. But when the soul has become quiet and seeks inwardly for the divine Light, this soul-mood can be called Mysticism.

Again, one can be a mystic through all the twelve mental constellations. It would certainly not be specially favourable if one were a mystic of materialism—i.e. if one experienced inwardly not the mental, the spiritual, but the material. For a mystic of materialism is really he who has acquired a specially fine perception of how one feels when one enjoys this or that substance. It is somewhat different if one imbibes the juice of this plant or the other, and then waits to see what happens to one's organism. One thus grows together with matter in one's experience; one becomes a mystic of matter. This can even become an “awakening” for life, so that one follows up how one substance or another, drawn from this or that plant, works upon the organism, affecting particularly this or that organ. And so to be a Mystic of Materialism is a precondition for investigating individual substances in respect of their healing powers.

One can be a Mystic of the world of matter, and one can be a Mystic of Idealism. An ordinary Idealist or Gnostic Idealist is not a Mystic of Idealism. A Mystic of Idealism is one who has above all the possibility in his own soul of bringing out from its hidden sources the ideals of humanity, of feeling them as something divine, and of placing them in that light before the soul. We have an example of the Mystic of Idealism in Meister Eckhardt.

Now the soul may be so attuned that it cannot become aware of what may arise from within itself and appear as the real inner solution of the riddle of the universe. Such a soul may, rather, be so attuned that it will say to itself: “Yes, in the world there is something behind all things, also behind my own personality and being, so far as I perceive this being. But I cannot be a mystic. The mystic believes that this something behind flows into his soul. I do not feel it flow into my soul; I only feel it must be there, outside.” In this mood, a person presupposes that outside his soul, and beyond anything his soul can experience, the essential being of things lies hidden; but he does not suppose that this essential nature of things can flow into his soul, as does the Mystic. A person who takes this standpoint is a Transcendentalist—perhaps that is the best word for it. He accepts that the essence of a thing is transcendent, but that it does not enter into the soul—hence Transcendentalism. The Transcendentalist has the feeling: “When I perceive things, their nature approaches me; but I do not perceive it. It hides behind, but it approaches me.”

Now it is possible for a man, given all his perceptions and powers of cognition, to thrust away the nature of things still further than the Transcendentalist does. He can say; “The essential nature of things is beyond the range of ordinary human knowledge.” The Transcendentalist says; “If with your eyes you see red and blue, then the essential being of the thing is not in the red or blue, but lies hidden behind it. You must use your eyes; then you can get to the essential being of the thing. It lies behind.” But the mood I now have in mind will not accept Transcendentalism. On the contrary, it says: “One may experience red or blue, or this or that sound, ever so intensely; nothing of this expresses the hidden being of the thing. My perception never makes contact with this hidden being.” Anyone who speaks in this way speaks very much as we do when we take the standpoint that in external sense-appearance, in Maya, the essential nature of things does not find expression. We should be Transcendentalists if we said: “The world is spread out all around us, and this world everywhere proclaims its essential being.” This we do not say. We say: “This world is Maya, and one must seek the inner being of things by another way than through external sense-perception and the ordinary means of cognition.” Occultism! The psychic mood of Occultism!

Again, one can be an Occultist throughout all the mental-zodiacal signs. One can even be a thorough Occultist of Materialism. Yes, the rationally-minded scientists of the present day are all occultists of materialism, for they talk of “atoms”. But if they are not irrational it will never occur to them to declare that with any kind of “method” one can come to the atom. The atom remains in the occult. It is only that they do not like to be called “Occultists”, but they are so in the fullest sense of the word.

Apart from the seven world-outlooks I have drawn here, there can be no others—only transitions from one to another. Thus we must not only distinguish twelve various shades of world-outlook which are at rest round the circle, so to speak, but we must recognize that in each of the shades a quite special mood of the human soul is possible. From this you can see how immensely varied are the outlooks open to human personalities. One can specially cultivate each of these seven world-outlook-moods, and each of them can exist on one or other shade.

What I have just depicted is actually the spiritual correlative of what we find externally in the world as the relations between the signs of the Zodiac and the planets, the seven planets familiar in Spiritual Science. Thus we have an external picture (not invented, but standing out there in the cosmos) for the relations of our seven world-outlook-moods to our twelve shades of world-outlook. We shall have the right feeling for this picture if we contemplate it in the following manner.

Let us begin with Idealism, and let us mark it with the mental-zodiacal sign of Aries; in like manner let us mark Rationalism as Taurus, Mathematism as Gemini, Materialism as Cancer, Sensationalism as Leo, Phenomenalism as Virgo, Realism as Libra, Dynamism as Scorpio, Monadism as Sagittarius, Spiritism as Capricorn, Pneumatism as Aquarius, and Psychism as Pisces. The relations which exist spatially between the individual zodiacal signs are actually present between these shades of world-outlook in the realm of spirit. And the relations which are entered into by the planets, as they follow their orbits through the Zodiac, correspond to the relations which the seven world-outlook-moods enter into, so that we can feel Gnosticism as Saturn, Logicism as Jupiter, Voluntarism as Mars, Empiricism as Sun, Mysticism as Venus, Transcendentalism as Mercury, and Occultism as Moon (see >Diagram 11).

Even in the external pictures—although the main thing is that the innermost connections correspond—you will find something similar. The Moon remains occult, invisible when it is New Moon; it must have the light of the Sun brought to it, just as occult things remain occult until, through meditation, concentration and so on, the powers of the soul rise up and illuminate them. A person who goes through the world and relies only on the Sun, who accepts only what the Sun illuminates, is an Empiricist. A person who reflects on what the Sun illuminates, and retains the thoughts after the Sun has set, is no longer an Empiricist, because he no longer depends upon the Sun. “Sun” is the symbol of Empiricism. I might take all this further but we have only four periods to spend on this important subject, and for the present I must leave you to look for more exact connections, either throughout your own thinking or through other investigations. The connections are not difficult to find when the model has been given.

Broadmindedness is all too seldom sought. Anyone really in earnest about truth would have to be able to represent the twelve shades of world-outlook in his soul. He would have to know in terms of his own experience what it means to be a Gnostic, a Logician, a Voluntarist, an Empiricist, a Mystic, a Transcendentalist, an Occultist. All this must be gone through experimentally by anyone who wants to penetrate into the secrets of the universe according to the ideas of Spiritual Science. Even if what you will find in the book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, does not exactly fit in with this account, it is really depicted only from other points of view, and can lead us into the single moods which are here designated as the Gnostic mood, the Jupiter mood, and so on.

Often a man is so one-sided that he lets himself be influenced by only one constellation, by one mood. We find this particularly in great men. Thus, for example, Hamerling is an out-and-out Monadist or a monadologistic Voluntarist; Schopenhauer is a pronounced voluntaristic Psychist. It is precisely great men who have so adjusted their souls that their world-outlook-mood stands in a definite spiritual constellation. Other people get on much more easily with the different standpoints, as they are called. But it can also happen that men are stimulated from various sides in reaching their world-outlook, or for what they place before themselves as world-outlook. Thus someone may be a good Logician, but his logical mood stands in the constellation of Sensationalism; he can at the same time be a good Empiricist, but his empirical mood stands in the constellation of Mathematism. This may happen. When it does happen, a quite definite world-outlook is produced. Just at the present time we have an example of the outlook that comes about through someone having his Sun—in spiritual sense—in Gemini, and his Jupiter in Leo; such a man is Wundt. And all the details in the philosophical writings of Wundt can be grasped when the secret of his special psychic configuration has been penetrated.

The effect is specially good when a person has experienced, by way of exercises, the various psychic moods—Occultism, Transcendentalism, Mysticism, Empiricism, Voluntarism, Logicism, Gnosis—so that he can conjure them up in his mind and feel all their effects at once, and can then place all these moods together in the constellation of Phenomenalism, in Virgo. Then there actually comes before him as phenomena, and with a quite special magnificence, that which can be unveiled for him in a remarkable way as the content of his world-picture. When, in the same way, the individual world-outlook-moods are brought one after another in relation to another constellation, then it is not so good. Hence in many ancient Mystery-schools, just this mood, with all the soul-planets standing in the spiritual constellation of Virgo, was induced in the pupils because it was through this that they could most easily fathom the world. They grasped the phenomena, but they grasped them “gnostically”. They were in a position to pass behind the thought-phenomena, but they had no crude experience of the will: that would happen only if the soul-mood of Voluntarism were placed in Scorpio. In short, by means of the constellation given through the world-outlook-moods—the planetary element—and through the nuances connected with the spiritual Zodiac, the world-picture which a person carries with him through a given incarnation is called forth.

But there is one more thing. These world-pictures—they have many nuances if you reckon with all their combinations—are modified yet again by possessing quite definite tones. But we have only three tones to distinguish. All world-pictures, all combinations which arise in this manner, can appear in one of three ways. First, they can be theistic, so that what appears in the soul as tone must be called Theism. Or, in contrast to Theism, there may be a soul-tone that we must call Intuitionism. Theism arises when a person clings to all that is external in order to find his God, when he seeks his God in the external. The ancient Hebrew Monotheism was a particularly “theistic” world-outlook. Intuitionism arises when a person seeks his world-picture especially through intuitive flashes from his inner depths. And there is a third tone, Naturalism.

These three psychic tones are reflected in the cosmos, and their relation to one another in the soul of man is exactly like that of Sun, Moon and Earth, so that Theism corresponds to the Sun—the Sun being here considered as a fixed star—Intuitionism to the Moon, and Naturalism to the Earth. If we transpose the entities here designated as Sun, Moon and Earth into the spiritual, then a man who goes beyond the phenomena of the world and says: “When I look around, then God, Who fills the world, reveals Himself to me in everything,” or a man who stands up when he comes into the rays of the sun—they are Theists. A man who is content to study the details of natural phenomena, without going beyond them, and equally a man who pays no attention to the sun but only to its effects on the earth—he is a Naturalist. A man who seeks for the best, guided by his intuitions—he is like the intuitive poet whose soul is stirred by the mild silvery glance of the moon to sing its praises. Just as one can bring moonlight into connection with imagination, so the occultist, the Intuitionist, as we mean him here, must be brought into relation with the moon.

Lastly there is a special thing. It occurs only in a single case, when a person, taking all the world-pictures to some extent, restricts himself only to what he can experience on or around or in himself. That is Anthropomorphism. Such a person corresponds to the man who observes the Earth on its own account, independently of its being shone upon by the Sun, the Moon, or anything else. Just as we can consider the Earth for itself alone, so also with regard to world-outlooks we can reckon only with what as men we can find in ourselves. So does a widespread Anthropomorphism arise in the world. If one goes out beyond man in himself, as one must go out to Sun and Moon for an explanation of the phenomenon of the Earth—something that present-day science does not do—then one comes to recognize three different things, Theism, Intuitionism and Naturalism side by side and each with its justification. For it is not by insisting on one of these tones, but by letting them sound together, that one arrives at the truth. And just as our intimate corporeal relation with Sun, Moon and Earth is placed in the midst of the seven planets, so Anthropomorphism is the world-outlook nearest to the harmony that can sound forth from Theism, Intuitionism and Naturalism, while this harmony again is closest to the conjoined effect of the seven psychic moods; and these seven moods are shaded according to the twelve signs of the Zodiac.

You see, it is not true to talk in terms of one cosmic conception, but of

cosmic conceptions which all have their justification. We have twenty-three legitimate names for cosmic conceptions. But all the rest can arise from the fact that the corresponding planets pass through the twelve spiritual signs of the encircling Zodiac. And now try, from what has been explained, to enter into the task confronting Spiritual Science: the task of acting as peacemaker among the various world-outlooks. The way to peace is to realize that the world-outlooks conjointly, in their reciprocal action on one another, can be in a certain sense explained, but that they cannot lead into the inner nature of truth if they remain one-sided. One must experience in oneself the truth-value of the different world-outlooks, in order—if one may say so—to be in agreement with truth. Just as you can picture to yourselves the physical cosmos; the Zodiac, the planetary system; Sun, Moon and Earth (the three together) and the Earth on its own account, so you can think of a spiritual universe: Anthropomorphism; Theism, Intuitionism, Naturalism; Gnosis, Logicism, Voluntarism, Empiricism, Mysticism, Transcendentalism, Occultism, and all this moving round through the twelve spiritual Zodiacal signs. All this does exist, only it exists spiritually. As truly as the physical cosmos exists physically, so truly does this other universe exist spiritually.

In that half of the brain which is found by the anatomist, and of which one may say that it is shaped like a half-hemisphere, those activities of the spiritual cosmos which proceed from the upper nuances are specially operative. On the other hand, there is a part of the brain which is visible only when one observes the etheric body; and this is specially influenced by the lower part of the spiritual cosmos. (see Diagram 9 and Diagram 11.) But how is it with this influencing? Let us say of someone that with his Logicism he is placed in Sensationalism, and that with his Empiricism he is placed in Mathematism. The resulting forces then work into his brain, so that the upper part of his brain is specially active and dominates the rest. Countless varieties of brain-activity arise from the fact that the brain swims, as it were, in the spiritual cosmos, and its forces work into the brain in the way we have been able to describe. The brains of men are as varied in kind as all the possible combinations that can spring from this spiritual cosmos. The lower part of the spiritual cosmos does not act on the physical brain at all, but on the etheric brain.

The best impression one can retain from the whole subject would lead one to say: It opens out for me a feeling for the immensity of the world, for the qualitatively sublime in the world, for the possibility that man can exist in endless variety in this world. Truly, if we consider only this, we can already say to ourselves: There is no lack of varied possibilities open to us for the different incarnations that we have to go through on earth. And one can also feel sure that anyone who looks at the world in this light will be impelled to say: “Ah, how grand, how rich, the world is! What happiness it is to go on and on taking part, in ways ever more varied, in its existence, its activities, its endeavours!”

We have been concerned with the possible varieties of world-outlooks, of world-outlook-moods and so on, which can find place in the human soul, and, since I can take only single points of view from this wide field, I should like to illustrate one of these points of view by means of a special example.

Let us suppose that a person so lives in the world that among his natural predispositions we find the special forces through which he is influenced by the world-outlook of Idealism. We will say that he makes this world-outlook into a dominating factor in his inner life, so that the soul-mood which I designated yesterday as Mysticism, and called the Venus mood, flows towards Idealism and is nourished by its powers. Hence, if one speaks in the symbols of astrology, one would say that the spiritual constellation of such a man, according to his natural predispositions, is that Venus stands in Aries.

I remark expressly, so that no misunderstanding may arise, that these constellations are of much greater importance in the life of the person than the constellations of the external horoscope, and do not necessarily coincide with the “nativity”—the external horoscope. For the enhanced influence which is exerted on the soul by this standing of Mysticism in the sign of Idealism waits for the propitious moment when it can lay hold of the soul most fruitfully. Such influences need not assert themselves just at the time of birth; they can do so before birth, or after it. In short, they await the point of time when these predispositions can best be built into the human organism, according to its inner configuration.

Hence the ordinary astrological “nativity” does not come into account here. But one can say: A certain soul is by nature such that, spiritually speaking, Venus stands in Aries—Mysticism in the sign of Idealism. Now the forces which arise in this way do not remain constant throughout life. They change—that is, the person comes under other influences, under other spiritual signs and also under other moods of soul. Let us suppose that a man so changes that in the course of his life he comes into the soul-mood of Empiricism; that Mysticism has moved on, as it were, into Empiricism, and Empiricism stands in the sign of Rationalism. You see, as I drew it in the preceding lecture, going from inwards outwards in the symbolic picture, that Empiricism stands in relation to Mysticism as does the Sun to Venus. With regard to its mood the soul has progressed to Empiricism and has at the same time placed itself in the sign of Rationalism. The result is that such a soul changes its world-picture. What the soul formerly produced, perhaps as a specially strong personality in the time when in its case Mysticism stood in the sign of Idealism, this will pass over into another nuance of world-outlook. What the soul asserts and says will be different when in this way its world-outlook-mood has passed over from Mysticism to Empiricism, and the latter has placed itself in the sign of Rationalism. However, from what I have now explained, you can gather that human souls can have an inclination to change the sign and mood of their world-outlook. (See Diagram 11.) For these souls the tendency to change is already given. Let us suppose that such a soul wants to carry this tendency further in life. It wants to swing forward from Empiricism to the next soul-mood, i.e. to Voluntarism; and if it wants to swing forward also in the zodiacal signs, then it will come into Mathematism. It would then pass over to a world-outlook which in this symbolical picture leads away at an angle of 60 degrees from the first line, where Mysticism stood in the sign of Idealism; and such a soul, in the course of the same incarnation, would bring to expression a mathematical world-structure permeated by and based upon the will.

And now I ask you to notice how I work out this matter. It will be seen that two such constellations as are here present in the soul disturb each other in the course of time; they influence each other unfavourably when they are at an angle of 60 degrees with regard to each other. In physical astrology this a favourable constellation; in spiritual astrology this so-called sextile aspect is unfavourable. We can see this because this last position—Voluntarism in Mathematism—comes up against a severe hindrance in the soul. The soul is not able to develop, because it cannot find anything to lay hold of, since the person in question has no natural gift for Mathematism.

This is how the unfavourable character of the sextile aspect expresses itself. Hence this configuration, Voluntarism in the sign of Mathematism, cannot establish itself. The consequence is that the soul does not try to move forward in this way. But because it cannot take the path to Voluntarism in Mathematism, it turns away from the configuration it now has—Empiricism in Rationalism—and seeks an outlet by placing itself in opposition to the direction it cannot take. Such a soul, accordingly, would not swing forward to Voluntarism in the direction of Mathematism, but would place itself with Voluntarism in opposition to its Empiricism. The result is that Voluntarism would stand in opposition to Rationalism in the sign of Dynamism. And in the course of its life, such a soul would have as its possible configuration one in which it would defend a world-outlook based on a special pressing in of forces, of Dynamism permeated by will—a will that wants to effect its purpose by force. In spiritual astrology things are again different from what they are in physical astrology; in physical astrology “opposition” has a quite different significance. Here, “opposition” is brought about by the soul being unable to proceed further along an unfavourable path; it veers round into the opposing configuration.

I have shown you here what the soul of Nietzsche went through in the course of his life. If you try to understand the course he takes in his early works, you will find that the placing of Mysticism makes it comprehensible. From this period we have “The Birth of Tragedy”; “David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer”; “The Use and Abuse of History”; “Schopenhauer as Educator”; “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth”. Then the soul of Nietzsche moves on; a second epoch begins. Here we find “Human, all too Human”; “The Dawn of Day”; “The Joyful Wisdom”—all proceeding from the oppositional configuration. These are writings based on the will to power, on the will saturated with force, with power.

Thus you see how an inner conformity to law exists between the spiritual cosmos and the way in which man stands within it. If we employ the symbols of astrology, but taking them to express something different, we can say: In the case of Nietzsche, up to a certain time in his life Venus stood in Aries, but when for his soul this configuration passed over into “Sun in the sign of Taurus”, he could get no further. He could not go with Mars into the sign of Gemini, but went in the oppositional position; thus he went with Mars into the sign of Scorpio. His last phase was characterized by his standing with Mars in Scorpio. But one can sustain this configuration only if one penetrates into the lower position (below the line Idealism—Realism in Diagram 11) where one plunges into a spiritual world-outlook, Occultism or something similar; otherwise these configurations must work back unfavourably upon the person himself. Hence the tragic fate of Nietzsche. One can go through with the upper configurations if one is able, owing to external circumstances, to place oneself in the world in a corresponding way. The configurations below the line from Idealism to Realism can be sustained only if one dives down into the spiritual world—a thing that Nietzsche could not do. By “placing oneself externally in the world” I mean placing by means of education, by means of external conditions; they come into account for all that lies above the line running from Idealism to Realism. Meditative life, a life devoted to the study and understanding of Spiritual Science, comes into account for all that lies below the line.

In order to grasp the importance of what has been sketched out in these lectures, we must know the following things. We must make it clear to ourselves what thinking really is; how it enters into human experience.

The uncompromising materialist of our day finds it suits his purpose to say that the brain forms the thought—more exactly, that the central nervous system forms the thought. For anyone who sees through things, this is about as true as to say when one looks into a mirror that the mirror has “made” the face. In fact, the face is outside the mirror; the mirror only reflects the face, throws it back. The experience a man has of his thoughts is quite similar. (We will leave aside for the moment other aspects of the soul.) The experience of real, active thinking no more arises from the brain than the image of a face is created by the mirror. The brain, in fact, works only as a reflecting apparatus, whereby it throws back the soul-activity and this becomes visible to itself. The brain has as little to do with what a man perceives as thoughts as a mirror has to do with your face when you see it in a glass. But there is something more than that. When someone thinks, he really perceives only the last phases of his thinking-activity, of his thinking experience. And now, in order to make this clear, I want to take up once more the comparison with the mirror.

Imagine that you are standing there and want to see your face in a mirror. If you have no mirror, then you cannot see your face. You may look as long as you like, but you will not see your face. If you want to see it, you must work up some material so that it reflects your face. That is, you must first prepare the material so that it can produce the reflection. Then, when you gaze at the surface, you see your face. The soul has to do the same with the brain. The actual perceiving of a thought is preceded by a thinking activity that works upon the brain. For example, if you want to perceive the thought “lion”, your thinking activity first sets in motion certain parts of the brain, deep within it, so that they become the “mirror” for the perception of the thought “lion”. And the agent who thus makes the brain into a mirror is you yourself. What you finally perceive as thoughts are the reflections, the mirror-pictures; what you first have to prepare so that the right reflection may appear is some part or other of the brain. You, with your soul-activity, are the very thing that gives the brain the form and capacity for reflecting your thinking as thoughts. If you want to go back to the activity on which the thought is based, then it is the activity which, from out of the soul, takes hold of the brain and gets to work there. And when from out of your soul you set up a certain activity in your brain, this brings about a reflection such that you perceive the thought “lion”. You see, a soul-spiritual element has to be there first. Then, through its activity, the brain is made into a mirror-like apparatus for reflecting the thought. That is the real process, but such a muddled idea of it prevails that many people nowadays cannot grasp it at all.

A person who makes a little progress in occult perception can separate the two phases of his soul-activity. He can trace how it is that when he wants to think something or other, he has first not simply to grasp the thought, but to prepare his brain for it. If he has prepared it so that it reflects, then he has the thought. When one wants to investigate occultly, so that one can picture things, one always has, first, the task of carrying through the activity which prepares the picturing. It is this that is so important for us to notice. For it is only when we keep these things well in mind that we have before us the real activity of human thinking. Now for the first time we know how human thinking-activity is carried out. First, this activity lays hold of the brain, in connection somewhere with the central nervous system. It sets in motion—let us say if we wish—the atomistic portions in some way, brings them into some sort of movement; by this means they become a mirror-apparatus; the thought is reflected, and the soul becomes conscious of the thought. Thus we have to distinguish two phases: first the work on the brain from out of the psychic-spiritual in preparation for the external physical experience; then the perception takes place, after the work on the brain has prepared the ground for this act of perceiving by the soul. In the ordinary way this preparatory work on the brain remains entirely unconscious. But an occult researcher must start by actually experiencing it. He has to go through the experience of how the soul-activity is poured in, and the brain made ready to reflect the thought as an image.

What I have now explained happens continually to a person between waking up and going to sleep. The thinking activity is always working on the brain, and so, throughout the waking state, it makes the brain into a mirror-apparatus for the thoughts. But it is not sufficient that the only thinking-activity worked up in us should be that worked up by ourselves. For one might say it is a narrowly limited activity that is here worked up in this way by means of the psychic-spiritual. When we wake up in the morning and are awake through the day, and in the evening fall asleep again, then the psychic-spiritual activity which belongs to the thinking is working all day long upon the brain, and thereby the brain becomes a reflecting-apparatus. But the brain must first be there; then, the soul-spiritual activity can make little furrows in the brain, or, one might say, its memoranda and engravings. The main substance and form of the brain must first be there. But that is not enough for our human life.

Our brain could not be worked upon by our daily life if our whole organism were not so prepared that it provides a basis for this daily work. And this work of preparation comes from the cosmos. Thus as we work daily at the “engraving” of the brain, which makes it into a mirror-apparatus for our daily thought, so, in so far as we cannot ourselves do this engraving, this giving form, form has to be given to us from the cosmos. As our little thoughts work and make their little engravings, so must our whole organism be built up from out of the cosmos, according to the same pattern of thought-activity. For example, that which appears to us finally in the sign of Idealism is present in the spiritual cosmos as the activity producing Idealism, and it can so work upon a man that it prepares his whole organism so that he inclines to Idealism. In like manner are the other varieties of moods and signs worked in upon men from out of the spiritual cosmos.

Man is built up according to the thoughts of the cosmos. The cosmos is the “great thinker” which down to our last finger-nail engraves our form in us, just as our little thought-work makes its little imprints on our brain every day. As our brain—I am referring only to the small portions where imprints can be made—stands under the influence of the work of thinking, so does the whole man stand under the influence of cosmic thinking.

Take the example I gave you, the example of Nietzsche—what does it mean? It means that through an earlier incarnation Nietzsche was so prepared in his karma that at a certain point of time, by virtue of his earlier incarnation, the forces of Idealism and of Mysticism (working together because Mysticism stood in the sign of Idealism) so worked upon his whole bodily constitution that he was in the first place capable of becoming a mystical Idealist. Then his constellation altered in the way indicated.

We are thought out from the cosmos—the cosmos thinks us. And just as we, in our little daily thought-work, make little engravings in our brain, and then the ideas “lion”, “dog”, “table”, “rose”, “book”, “on”, “right”, “left”, come into our consciousness as reflections of that which we have prepared in our brain—i.e. just as we, through the working-up of the brain, finally perceive, lion, dog, table, rose, book, on, off, right, write, read—the Beings of the cosmic Hierarchies work in such a way that they carry out the great thought-activity which engraves upon the world things far more significant than our daily thought-activity can accomplish. So it comes to pass that not only the tiny little markings arise and are then reflected singly as our thoughts, but that we ourselves, in our whole being, appear again to the Beings of the higher Hierarchies as their thoughts. As our little brain-processes mirror our little thoughts, so do we mirror the thoughts of the cosmos which are engraved upon the world. When the Hierarchies of the cosmos “think”, they “think”, for example, men. As our little thoughts emerge from our little brain-processes, so do the thoughts of the Hierarchies arise from their work, to which we ourselves belong. As parts of our brain are for us the reflecting-apparatus which we first work up for our thoughts, so are we, we little beings, the substance which the Hierarchies of the cosmos prepare for their thoughts. Thus we might say, in a certain sense, that we can feel ourselves with regard to the cosmos as a little portion of our brain might feel with regard to ourselves. But as little as we, in our soul-spiritual nature, are our brains, so little are the Beings of the Hierarchies “we”. Hence we have an independent status in relation to the Beings of the higher Hierarchies. And we can say that while in a certain manner we serve them so that they may be able to think through us, yet at the same time we are independent beings with identities of our own, as indeed, in a certain way, the particles of our brain have their own life.

Thus we find the connection between human and cosmic thoughts. Human thought is the regent of the brain; cosmic thought is such a regent that we belong with our whole being to that which it has to accomplish. Only, because in consequence of our karma it cannot direct its thoughts on to us all equally, we have to be constituted in accordance with its logic. Thus we men have a logic according to which we think, and so have the Spiritual Hierarchies of the cosmos their logic. And their logic was indicated in the diagram I drew for you (see lecture three, Diagram 11). As when we think, for example, “The lion is a mammal”, we bring two concepts together to make a statement, so the Spiritual Hierarchies of the cosmos think two things together, Mysticism and Idealism, and we then say: “Mysticism appears in Idealism.” Imagine this first as the preparatory activity of the cosmos. Then resounds the Creative Fiat, the Creative Word. For the Beings of the Spiritual Hierarchies the preparatory act consists in the choice of a human being whose karma is such that he can develop a natural bent for becoming a mystical Idealist. Into the Hierarchies of the cosmos there is rayed back something that we should call a “thought”, whereas for them it is the expression of a man who is a mystical Idealist. He is their “thought”, after they have prepared for themselves the cosmic decision—”Let Mysticism appear in Idealism.”

We have now, in a certain sense, depicted the inner aspect of the Cosmic Word, of Cosmic Thought. What we drew in a diagram as “cosmic logic” represents how the Spiritual Hierarchies of the cosmos think. For example: “Let Empiricism appear in the sign of Rationalism!” and so on. Let us try to realize what can be thought in the cosmos in this way. It can be thought: “Let Mysticism appear in the sign of Idealism! Let it change! Let it become Empiricism in the sign of Rationalism!” Opposition! The next move on would represent a false cosmic decision. After verification, the thought is changed round. The third standpoint must appear: “Voluntarism in the sign of Dynamism.” These three decisions, through being spoken over a period in the cosmic worlds, give the “man Nietzsche”. And he rays back as the thought of the cosmos.

Thus does the collectivity of the Hierarchies speak in the cosmos! And our human thinking-activity is a copy, a tiny copy, of it.

Worlds are related to the Spirit or to the Spirits of the cosmos as our brain is to our soul. Thus we may have a glimpse into something which we ought certainly to look upon only with a certain reverence, with a holy awe. For in contemplating it we stand before the mysteries of human individuality. We learn to understand—if I may express myself figuratively—that the eyes of the Beings of the higher Hierarchies roam over the single individualities among men, and that individuals are to them what the individual letters of a book are to us when we are reading. This we may look upon only with holy awe: we are overhearing the thought-activity of the cosmos.

In our day the veil over such a mystery as this must be lifted to a certain degree; for the laws which have here been shown as the laws of the thinking of the cosmos are active in man. And the knowledge of them can help us to understand life, and then to understand ourselves; so that even when, for one reason or another, we have to be placed one-sidedly in life, we know that we belong to a great whole, for we are links in the thought-logic of the cosmos. And in learning to grasp these relations, Spiritual Science acts as our guide. It teaches us to understand our one-sided predispositions as much as it enlarges our all-round knowledge. Thus we can find the frame of mind which is necessary precisely in our time. For today, when in many leading minds there is no trace of insight into the relationships we have touched on here, we experience the effects of these relations or connections but do not know how to live under them. And thus they create conditions which call for adjustment.

Let us take the example of Wundt, whom I mentioned yesterday. His one-sidedness is brought about through a quite definite constellation. Let us suppose that he could ever struggle on to an understanding of Spiritual Science, then he would look upon his one-sidedness in such a way that he would say to himself: “Now because I stand here with my Empiricism, etc., I am in a position to do good work in certain fields. I will remain in these, and will make up for it in other ways through Spiritual Science.” To such a decision as this he would come. But he refuses to know anything about Spiritual Science. What does he do in consequence? Whereas he could carry out something good and productive in the constellation which is his, he turns what lies within his range into a complete philosophy. Otherwise he could probably do something greater, much greater; indeed he would be most useful if he would leave philosophizing alone and go in for experimental psychology—a thing he understands—and if he would inquire into the nature of mathematical conclusions—which he also understands—instead of making a concoction of all kinds of philosophy; for then he would be on the right lines.

But this must be said of many. Therefore Spiritual Science, while it must evoke the feeling by which we recognize how there should be peace between world-outlooks, must also point sharply to cases where persons go beyond the necessary limits set for them by their constellations. These persons do great harm by hypnotizing the world with opinions that get by without any attention being paid to the constellation behind them. All forms of one-sidedness that try to claim universal validity must be strongly repulsed. The world does not admit of being explained by a person who has special predilections for this or that. And when he wants to explain it on his own, and so to found a philosophy, then this philosophy works harmfully, and Spiritual Science has the task of rejecting the arrogance of this pretentious claim to universality. In our time, the less feeling there is for Spiritual Science, the more strongly will this one-sidedness appear. Hence we see that knowledge of the nature of human and cosmic thought can lead us to understand rightly the significance and the task of Spiritual Science, and to see how it can bring into a right relationship other so-called spiritual streams, especially philosophic currents, in our time. It must be wished that knowledge of the kind that we have tried to bring together for ourselves in these four lectures should inscribe itself deeply into the hearts and souls of our friends, so that the course of the anthroposophical spiritual stream through the world would take a quite definite and right direction. It would thereby be recognized more and more how a man is formed through that which lives in him as cosmic thought.

With the aid of such an explanation as this we see more depth that we could otherwise do in a thought of Fichte's, where he says: “What kind of a philosophy a man has depends on the kind of man he is.” Yes, indeed, the kind of philosophy a man has does verily depend on the kind of man he is! The fact that Fichte (in the first period of the incarnation he was then living through as Fichte) could say, as the basic nerve of his philosophy of life: “Our world is the sensualised material of our duty” [see footnote 2], shows even as does the previously quoted saying (which he gave out later) how his soul changed its constellation in the spiritual cosmos. That is, it shows how richly this soul was endowed, so that the spiritual Hierarchies could remould it so that through it they could think various things for themselves. Something similar could be said of Nietzsche, for example.

Many different ways of viewing the world emerge if one keeps before one's soul such things as have been described in these four lectures. The best we can gain from these descriptions is that with their aid we should come to look ever more and more deeply, with perceptive feeling, into the spiritual features of the world.

If only one thing were to be achieved by means of such a lecture-course as this, it would be that as many as possible of you should say to yourselves: “Yes, if anyone wants to enter into the spiritual world—i.e. into the world of truth, and not into the world of error—he must really set out upon the path! For much, much must be taken into consideration along this path in order to come to the sources of truth. And if at the beginning it might seem to me as if a contradiction appears here or there, if in one place or another I could not understand something, I will still say to myself that the world is not there in order to be grasped by every condition of human understanding, and that I would rather be a seeker than a man whose sole attitude towards the world is such that he only inquires ‘What can I understand?’ ‘What can I not understand?’”

If one becomes a seeker, if one earnestly sets to work along the path of the seeker, then one learns to know that one must bring together impulses from the most varied sides in order to gain an understanding of the world. And then one unlearns every kind of attitude towards the world that asks “Do I understand that?” “Do I not understand that?”, and instead one seeks and seeks and goes on seeking. The worst enemies of truth are cosmic conceptions that are exclusive and strive after finality; the conceptions of those who want to frame a couple of thoughts and suppose that with them they can dare to build up a world-edifice.

The world is boundless, both qualitatively and quantitatively. And it will be a blessing when there are individual souls who wish for clear vision with regard to that which is appearing in our day with such terrible overweening narrow-mindedness, and wants to be “universal”. I might say: “With bleeding heart I declare that the greatest hindrance to knowledge of how a preparatory work of thought-activity is carried out in the brain, how the brain is thereby made into a mirror and the life of the soul reflected from it—a fact which could throw endless light on much other physiological knowledge—the greatest hindrance to the knowledge of this fact is the crazy modern physiology which speaks of two kinds of nerves, the ‘motor’ and the ‘sensory’ nerves.” (I have touched on this in many lectures already.) In order to produce this theory, which crops up everywhere in physiology, it is a fact that physiology had first to lose all understanding. Hence it is a theory now recognized all over the earth, and it acts as a hindrance to all true knowledge of the nature of thought and the nature of the soul. Never will it be possible to understand human thought if physiology sets up such an obstacle to true knowledge. But things have gone so far that an indefensible physiology forms the introduction to every textbook of psychology and teaching about the mind, and makes it dependent on this falsity. Therewith the door is bolted also against knowledge of cosmic thought.

One first learns to recognize what thought is in the cosmos when one comes to feel what human thinking is: that in its true nature it has nothing to do with the brain except that it is the master of the brain. But when one has thus recognized thought in its essence, when one has come to know oneself in thinking, then one feels oneself inwardly within the cosmic, and our knowledge of the true nature of cosmic thought. When we learn to know rightly what our thinking is, then we learn also to know how we are “thought” by the Powers of the cosmos. Indeed we may gain a glimpse into the logic of the Hierarchies. The single components of the decisions of the Hierarchies, the concepts of the Hierarchies, I have written down for you. In the twelve spiritual signs of the Zodiac, the seven world-outlook-moods, and so on, lie the concepts of the Hierarchies; and human beings are constituted in accordance with the verdicts of the cosmos which result from these concepts. Thus we feel ourselves within the logic of the cosmos—that is (if we really grasp it) within the logic of the Hierarchies of the cosmos. We feel ourselves as souls embedded in cosmic thought, just as we feel our thoughts, the little thoughts we think, embedded in our soul-life.

Meditate sometimes on the idea: “I think my thoughts,” and “I am a thought which is thought by the Hierarchies of the cosmos.” My eternal part consists in this—that the thought of the Hierarchies is eternal. And when I have once been thought out by one category of the Hierarchies, then I am passed on—as a human thought is passed on from teacher to pupil—from one category to another, so that this in turn may think me in my true, eternal nature. Thus I feel myself within the thought-world of the cosmos.

IN THESE four lectures which I am giving in the course of our General Meeting, I should like to speak from a particular standpoint about the connection between Man and the Cosmos. I will first indicate what this standpoint is.

Man experiences within himself what we may call thought, and in thought he can feel himself directly active, able to exercise his activity. When we observe anything external, e.g. a rose or a stone, and picture it to ourselves, someone may rightly say: “You can never know how much of the stone or the rose you have really got hold of when you imagine it. You see the rose, its external red colour, its form, and how it is divided into single petals; you see the stone with its colour, with its several corners, but you must always say to yourself that hidden within it there may be something else which does not appear to you externally. You do not know how much of the rose or of the stone your mental picture of it embraces.”

But when someone has a thought, then it is he himself who makes the thought. One might say that he is within every fiber of his thought, a complete participator in its activity. He knows: “Everything that is in the thought I have thought into it, and what I have not thought into it cannot be within it. I survey the thought. Nobody can say, when I set a thought before my mind, that there may still be something more in the thought, as there may be in the rose and in the stone, for I have myself engendered the thought and am present in it, and so I know what is in it.”

In truth, thought is most completely our possession. If we can find the relation of thought to the Cosmos, to the Universe, we shall find the relation to the Cosmos of what is most completely ours. This can assure us that we have here a fruitful standpoint from which to observe the relation of man to the universe. We will therefore embark on this course; it will lead us to significant heights of anthroposophical observation.

In the present lecture we shall have to prepare a groundwork which may perhaps appear to many of you as somewhat abstract. But later on we shall see that we need this groundwork and that without it we could approach only with a certain superficiality the high goals we shall be striving to attain.

We can thus start from the conviction that when man holds to that which he possesses in his thought, he can find an intimate relation of his being to the Cosmos. But in starting from this point of view we do encounter a difficulty, a great difficulty—not for our understanding but in practice. For it is indeed true that a man lives within every fibre of his thought, and therefore must be able to know his thought more intimately than he can know any perceptual image, but—yes—most people have no thoughts! And as a rule this is not thoroughly realized, for the simple reason that one must have thoughts in order to realize it. What hinders people in the widest circles from having thoughts is that for the ordinary requirements of life they have no need to go as far as thinking; they can get along quite well with words. Most of what we call “thinking” in ordinary life is merely a flow of words: people think in words, and much more often than is generally supposed. Many people, when they ask for an explanation of something, are satisfied if the reply includes some word with a familiar ring, reminding them of this or that. They take the feeling of familiarity for an explanation and then fancy they have grasped the thought

Indeed, this very tendency led at a certain time in the evolution of intellectual life to an outlook which is still shared by many persons who call themselves “thinkers”. For the new edition of my Welt- und Lebensanschauungen im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (Views of the World and of Life in the Nineteenth Century).¹ I tried to rearrange the book quite thoroughly, first by prefacing it with an account of the evolution of Western thought from the sixth century B.C. up to the nineteenth century A.D., and then by adding to the original conclusion a description of spiritual life in terms of thinking up to our own day. The content of the book has also been rearranged in many ways, for I have tried to show how thought as we know it really appeared first in a certain specific period. One might say that it first appeared in the sixth or eighth century B.C. Before then the human soul did not at all experience what can be called “thought” in the true sense of the word. What did human souls experience previously? They experienced pictures; all their experience of the external world took the form of pictures. I have often spoken of this from certain points of view. This picture-experience is the last phase of the old clairvoyant experience. After that, for the human soul, the “picture” passes over into “thought”.

My intention in this book was to bring out this finding of Spiritual Science purely by tracing the course of philosophic evolution. Strictly on this basis, it is shown that thought was born in ancient Greece, and that as a human experience it sprang from the old way of perceiving the external world in pictures. I then tried to show how thought evolves further in Socrates, Plato, Aristotle; how it takes certain forms; how it develops further; and then how, in the Middle Ages, it leads to something of which I will now speak.

The development of thought leads to a stage of doubting the existence of what are called “universals”, general concepts, and thus to so-called Nominalism, the view that universals can be no more than “names”, nothing but words. And this view is still widely held today.

In order to make this clear, let us take a general concept that is easily observable—the concept “triangle”. Now anyone still in the grip of Nominalism of the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries will say somewhat as follows: “Draw me a triangle!” Good! I will draw a triangle for him:

“Right!” says he, “that is a quite specific triangle with three acute angles. But I will draw you another.” And he draws a right-angled triangle, and another with an obtuse angle.

Then says the person in question: “Well, now we have an acute-angled triangle, a right-angled triangle and an obtuse-angled triangle. They certainly exist. But they are not the triangle. The collective or general triangle must contain everything that a triangle can contain. But a triangle that is acute-angled cannot be at the same time right-angled and obtuse-angled. Hence there cannot be a collective triangle. ‘Collective’ is an expression that includes the specific triangles, but a general concept of the triangle does not exist. It is a word that embraces the single details.”

Naturally, this goes further. Let us suppose that someone says the word “lion”. Anyone who takes his stand on the basis of Nominalism may say: “In the Berlin Zoo there is a lion; in the Hanover Zoo there is also a lion; in the Munich Zoo there is still another. There are these single lions, but there is no general lion connected with the lions in Berlin, Hanover and Munich; that is a mere word which embraces the single lions.” There are only separate things; and beyond the separate things—so says the Nominalist—we have nothing but words that comprise the separate things.

As I have said, this view is still held today by many clear-thinking logicians. And anyone who tries to explain all this will really have to admit: “There is something strange about it; without going further in some way I can't make out whether there really is or is not this ‘lion-in-general’ and the ‘triangle-in-general’. I find it far from clear.” And now suppose someone came along and said: “Look here, my dear chap, I can't let you off with just showing me the Berlin or Hanover or Munich lion. If you declare that there is a lion-in-general, then you must take me somewhere where it exists. If you show me only the Berlin, Hanover, or Munich lion, you have not proved to me that a ‘lion-in-general’ exists.” ... If someone were to come along who held this view, and if you had to show him the “lion-in-general”, you would be in a difficulty. It is not so easy to say where you would have to take him.

We will not go on just yet to what we can learn from Spiritual Science; that will come in time. For the moment we will remain at the point which can be reached by thinking only, and we shall have to say to ourselves: “On this ground, we cannot manage to lead any doubter to the ‘lion-in-general.’ It really can't be done.” Here we meet with one of the difficulties which we simply have to admit. For if we refuse to recognize this difficulty in the domain of ordinary thought, we shall not admit the difficulty of human cognition in general.

Let us keep to the triangle, for it makes no difference to the thing-in-general whether we clarify the question by means of the triangle, the lion, or something else. At first it seems hopeless to think of drawing a triangle that would contain all characteristics, all triangles. And because it not only seems hopeless, but is hopeless for ordinary human thinking, therefore all conventional philosophy stands here at a boundary-line, and its task should be to make a proper acknowledgment that, as conventional philosophy, it does stand at a boundary-line. But this applies only to conventional philosophy. There is a possibility of passing beyond the boundary, and with this possibility we will now make ourselves acquainted.

Let us suppose that we do not draw the triangle so that we simply say: Now I have drawn you a triangle, and here it is:

In that case the objection could always be raised that it is an acute-angled triangle; it is not a general triangle. The triangle can be drawn differently. Properly speaking it cannot, but we shall soon see how this “can” and “cannot” are related to one another. Let us take this triangle that we have here, and let us allow each side to move as it will in any direction, and moreover we allow it to move with varying speeds, so that next moment the sides take, e.g., these positions:

In short, we arrive at the uncomfortable notion of saying: I will not only draw a triangle and let it stay as it is, but I will make certain demands on your imagination. You must think to yourself that the sides of the triangle are in continual motion. When they are in motion, then out of the form of the movements there can arise simultaneously a right-angled, or an obtuse-angled triangle, or any other.

In this field we can do and also require two different things. We can first make it all quite easy; we draw a triangle and have done with it. We know how it looks and we can rest comfortably in our thoughts, for we have got what we want. But we can also take the triangle as a starting-point, and allow each side to move in various directions and at different speeds. In this case it is not quite so easy; we have to carry out movements in our thought. But in this way we really do lay hold of the triangle in its general form; we fail to get there only if we are content with one triangle. The general thought, “triangle”, is there if we keep the thought in continual movement, if we make it versatile.

This is just what the philosophers have never done; they have not set their thoughts into movement. Hence they are brought to a halt at a boundary-line, and they take refuge in Nominalism.

We will now translate what I have just been saying into a language that we know, that we have long known. If we are to rise from the specific thought to the general thought, we have to bring the specific thought into motion; thus thought in movement becomes the “general thought” by passing constantly from one form into another. “Form”, I say; rightly understood, this means that the whole is in movement, and each entity brought forth by the movement is a self-contained form. Previously I drew only single forms: an acute-angled, a right-angled, and an obtuse-angled triangle. Now I am drawing something—as I said, I do not really draw it—but you can picture to yourselves what the idea is meant to evoke—the general thought is in motion, and brings forth the single forms as its stationary states.

“Forms”, I said—hence we see that the philosophers of Nominalism, who stand before a boundary-line, go about their work in a certain realm, the realm of the Spirits of Form. Within this realm, which is all around us, forms dominate; and therefore in this realm we find separate, strictly self-contained forms. The philosophers I mean have never made up their minds to go outside this realm of forms, and so, in the realm of universals, they can recognize nothing but words, veritably mere words. If they were to go beyond the realm of specific entities—i.e. of forms—they would find their way to mental pictures which are in continual motion; that is, in their thinking they would come to a realization of the realm of the Spirits of Movement—the next higher Hierarchy. But these philosophers will not condescend to that. And when in recent times a Western thinker did consent to think correctly in this way, he was little understood, although much was said and much nonsense talked about him. Turn to what Goethe wrote in his “Metamorphosis of Plants” and see what he called the “primal plant” (Urpflanze), and then turn to what he called the “primal animal” (Urtier) and you will find that you can understand these concepts “primal plant” and “primal animal” only if your thoughts are mobile—when you think in mobile terms. If you accept this mobility, of which Goethe himself speaks, you are not stuck with an isolated concept bounded by fixed forms. You have the living element which ramifies through the whole evolution of the animal kingdom, or the plant-kingdom, and creates the forms. During this process it changes—as the triangle changes into an acute-angled or an obtuse-angled one—becoming now “wolf”, now “lion”, now “beetle”, in accordance with the metamorphoses of its mobility during its passage through the particular entities. Goethe brought the petrified formal concepts into movement. That was his great central act; his most significant contribution to the nature-study of his time.

You see here an example of how Spiritual Science is in fact adapted to leading men out of the fixed assumptions to which they cannot help clinging today, even if they are philosophers. For without concepts gained through Spiritual Science it is not possible, if one is sincere, to concede that general categories can be anything more than “mere words”. That is why I said that most people have no real thoughts, but merely a flow of words, and if one speaks to them of thoughts, they reject it.

When does one speak to people of “thoughts”? When, for example, one says that animals have Group-souls. For it amounts to the same whether one says “collective thoughts” or “group-souls” (we shall see in the course of these lectures what the connection is between the two). But the Group-soul cannot be understood except by thinking of it as being in motion, in continual external and internal motion; otherwise one does not come to the Group-soul. But people reject that. Hence they reject the Group-soul, and equally the collective thought.

For getting to know the outside world you need no thoughts; you need only a remembrance of what you have seen in the kingdom of form. That is all most people know, and for them, accordingly, general thoughts remain mere words. And if among the many different Spirits of the higher Hierarchies there were not the Genius of Speech—who forms general words for general concepts—men themselves would not come to it. Thus their first ideas of things-in-themselves come to men straight out of language itself, and they know very little about such ideas except in so far as language preserves them.

We can see from this that there must be something peculiar about the thinking of real thoughts. And this will not surprise us if we realize how difficult it really is for men to attain to clarity in the realm of thought. In ordinary, external life, when a person wants to brag a little, he will often say that “thinking is easy”. But it is not easy, for real thinking always demands a quite intimate, though in a certain sense unconscious, impulse from the realm of the Spirits of Movement. If thinking were so very easy, then such colossal blunders would not be made in the region of thought. Thus, for more than a century now, people have worried themselves over a thought I have often mentioned—a thought formulated by Kant.

Kant wanted to drive out of the field the so-called “ontological proof of God”. This ontological proof of God dates from the time of Nominalism, when it was said that nothing general existed which corresponded to general or collective thoughts, as single, specific objects correspond to specific thoughts. The argument says, roughly: If we presuppose God, then He must be an absolutely perfect Being. If He is an absolutely perfect Being, then He must not lack “being”, i.e. existence, for otherwise there would be a still more perfect Being who would possess those attributes one has in mind, and would also exist. Thus one must think that the most perfect Being actually exists. One cannot conceive of God as otherwise than existing, if one thinks of Him as the most perfect Being. That is: out of the concept itself one can deduce that, according to the ontological proof, there must be God.

Kant tried to refute this proof by showing that out of a “concept” one could not derive the existence of a thing, and for this he coined the famous saying I have often mentioned: A hundred actual thalers are not less and not more than a hundred possible thalers. That is, if a thaler has three hundred pfennigs, then for each one of a hundred possible thalers one must reckon three hundred pfennigs: and in like manner three hundred pfennigs for each of a hundred actual thalers. Thus a hundred possible thalers contain just as much as a hundred actual thalers, i.e. it makes no difference whether I think of a hundred actual or a hundred possible thalers. Hence one may not derive existence from the mere thought of an absolutely perfect Being, because the mere thought of a possible God would have the same attributes as the thought of an actual God.

That appears very reasonable. And yet for a century people have been worrying themselves as to how it is with the hundred possible and the hundred actual thalers. But let us take a very obvious point of view, that of practical life; can one say from this point of view that a hundred actual thalers do not contain more than a hundred possible ones? One can say that a hundred actual thalers contain exactly a hundred thalers more than do a hundred possible ones! And it is quite clear: if you think of a hundred possible thalers on one side and of a hundred actual thalers on the other, there is a difference. On this other side there are exactly a hundred thalers more. And in most real cases it is just on the hundred actual thalers that the question turns.

But the matter has a deeper aspect. One can ask the question: What is the point in the difference between a hundred possible and a hundred actual thalers? I think it would be generally conceded that for anyone who can acquire the hundred thalers, there is beyond doubt a decided difference between a hundred possible thalers and a hundred actual ones. For imagine that you are in need of a hundred thalers, and somebody lets you choose whether he is to give you the hundred possible or the hundred actual thalers. If you can get the thalers, the whole point is the difference between the two kinds. But suppose you were so placed that you cannot in any way acquire the hundred thalers, then you might feel absolutely indifferent as to whether someone did not give you a hundred possible or a hundred actual thalers. When a person cannot have them, then a hundred actual and a hundred possible thalers are in fact of exactly the same value.

This is a significant point. And the significance is this—that the way in which Kant spoke about God could occur only at a time when men could no longer “have God” through human soul-experience. As He could not be reached as an actuality, then the concept of the possible God or of the actual God was immaterial, just as it is immaterial whether one is not to have a hundred actual or a hundred possible thalers. If there is no path for the soul to the true God, then certainly no development of thought in the style of Kant can lead to Him.

Hence we see that the matter has this deeper side also. But I have introduced it only because I wanted to make it clear that when the question becomes one of “thinking”, then one must go somewhat more deeply. Errors of thought slip out even among the most brilliant thinkers, and for a long time one does not see where the weak spot of the argument lies—as, for example, in the Kantian thought about the hundred possible and the hundred actual thalers. In thinking, one must always take account of the situation in which the thought has to be grasped.

By discussing first the nature of general concepts, and then the existence of such errors in thinking as this Kantian one, I have tried to show you that one cannot properly reflect on ways of thinking without going deeply into actualities. I will now approach the matter from yet another side, a third side.

Let us suppose that we have here a mountain or hill, and beside it, a steep slope. On the slope there is a spring and the flow from it leaps sheer down, a real waterfall. Higher up on the same slope is another spring; the water from it would like to leap down in the same way, but it does not. It cannot behave as a waterfall, but runs down nicely as a stream or beck. Is the water itself endowed with different forces in these two cases? Quite clearly not. For the second stream would behave just as the first stream does if it were not obstructed by the shape of the mountain. If the obstructive force of the mountain were not present, the second stream would go leaping down. Thus we have to reckon with two forces: the obstructive force of the mountain and the earth's gravitational pull, which turns the first stream into a waterfall. The gravitational force acts also on the second stream—one can see how it brings the stream flowing down. But a skeptic could say that in the case of the second stream this is not at all obvious, whereas in the first stream every particle of water goes hurtling down. In the case of the second stream we must reckon in at every point the obstructing force of the mountain, which acts in opposition to the earth's gravitational pull.

Now suppose someone came along and said: “I don't altogether believe what you tell me about the force of gravity, nor do I believe in the obstructing force. Is the mountain the cause of the stream taking a particular path? I don't believe it.” “Well, what do you believe?” one might ask. He replies: “I believe that part of the water is down there, above it is more water, above that more water again, and so on. I believe the lower water is pushed down by the water above it, and this water by the water above it. Each part of the water drives down the water below it.” Here is a noteworthy distinction. The first man declares: “Gravity pulls the water down.” The second man says: “Masses of water are perpetually pushing down the water below them: that is how the water comes down from above.”

Obviously anyone who spoke of a “pushing down” of this kind would be very silly. But suppose it is a question not of a beck or stream but of the history of mankind, and suppose someone like the person I have just described were to say: “The only thing I believe of what you tell me is this: we are now living in the twentieth century, and during it certain events have taken place. They were brought about by similar ones during the last third of the nineteenth century; these again were caused by events in the second third of the nineteenth century, and these again by those in the first third.” That is what is called “pragmatic history”, in which one always speaks of “causes and effects”, so that subsequent events are always explained by means of preceding ones. Just as someone might deny the force of gravity and say that the masses of water are continually pushing one another forward, so it is when someone is pursuing pragmatic history and explains the condition of the nineteenth century as a result of the French Revolution.

In reply to a pragmatic historian we would of course say: “No, other forces are active besides those that push from behind—which in fact are not there at all in the true sense. For just as little as there are forces pushing the stream from behind, just as little do preceding events push from behind in the history of humanity. Fresh influences are always coming out of the spiritual world—just as in the stream the force of gravity is always at work—and these influences cross with other forces, just as the force of gravity crosses with the obstructive force of the mountain. If only one force were present, you would see the course of history running quite differently. But you do not see the individual forces at work in history. You see only the physical ordering of the world: what we would call the results of the Saturn, Moon and Sun stages in the evolution of the Earth. You do not see all that goes on continually in human souls, as they live through the spiritual world and then come down again to Earth. All this you simply deny.”

But there is today a conception of history which is just what we would expect from somebody who came along with ideas such as those I have described, and it is by no means rare. Indeed in the nineteenth century it was looked upon as immensely clever. But what should we be able to say about it from the standpoint we have gained? If anyone were to explain the mountain stream in this “pragmatic” way, he would be talking utter nonsense. How is it then that he upholds the same nonsense with regard to history? The reason is simply that he does not notice it! And history is so complicated that it is almost everywhere expounded as “pragmatic history”, and nobody notices it.

We can certainly see from this that Spiritual Science, which has to develop sound principles for the understanding of life, has work to do in the most varied domains of life; and that it is first of all necessary to learn how to think, and to get to know the inner laws and impulses of thought. Otherwise all sorts of grotesque things can befall one. Thus for example a certain man to-day is stumbling and bumbling over the problem of “thought and language”. He is the celebrated language-critic Fritz Mauthner, who has also written lately a large philosophical dictionary. His bulky Critique of Language is already in its third edition, so for our contemporaries it is a celebrated work. There are plenty of ingenious things in this book, and plenty of dreadful ones. Thus one can find here a curious example of faulty thinking—and one runs up against such blunders in almost every five lines—which leads the worthy Mauthner to throw doubt on the need for logic. “Thinking”, for him, is merely speaking; hence there is no sense in studying logic; grammar is all one needs. He says also that since there is, rightly speaking, no logic, logicians are fools. And then he says: In ordinary life, opinions are the result of inferences, and ideas come from opinions. That is how people go on! Why should there be any need for logic when we are told that opinions arise from inferences, and ideas from opinions? It is just as clever as if someone were to say: “Why do you need botany? Last year and two years ago the plants were growing.” But such is the logic one finds in a man who prohibits logic. One can quite understand that he does prohibit it. There are many more remarkable things in this strange book—a book that, in regard to the relation between thought and language, leads not to lucidity but to confusion.

I said that we need a substructure for the things that are to lead us to the heights of spiritual contemplation. Such a substructure as has been put forward here may appear to many as somewhat abstract; still, we shall need it. And I think I have tried to make it so easy that what I have said is clear enough. I should like particularly to emphasise that through such simple considerations as these one can get an idea of where the boundary lies between the realm of the Spirits of Form and the realm of the Spirits of Movement. But whether one comes to such an idea is intimately connected with whether one is prepared to admit thoughts of things-in-general, or whether one is prepared to admit only ideas or concepts of individual things—I say expressly “is prepared to admit”.

On these expositions—to which, as they are somewhat abstract, I will add nothing further—we will build further in the next lecture.

• 1. First published (two volumes) in Berlin, 1900–1. In 1914 the contents were recast and published in a different form as Die Rätsel der Philosophie (Riddles of Philosophy). See Riddles of Philosophy, Anthroposophic Press, New York, 1974.