The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today I would like to return to the subject of an earlier lecture given here in Bern and to pursue it further along the lines of what I am convinced must now be discussed among us. It is clear to me that definite things demanded by the signs of our difficult times must be said in public anthroposophical lectures, so that they will penetrate human ears. I am also convinced that definite spiritual scientific truths must now be spoken of among us.

In the previous lecture to which I refer, I described the participation in earthly life of souls who have gone through the portal of death. We undertook to study the type and manner of the impulses of the so-called dead, who continue to participate in what is done by human beings here on earth, and how connections are made between the forces of the so-called dead and those of the living. Today I wish to say more about this.

It must first be made clear that above all it is necessary for life between death and a new birth to be presented in a certain sense with images that have been taken from physical, sensible life on this earth and from mental pictures we acquire within this physical life on earth. Life in the sphere of the dead is such, however, that it can be understood only with great difficulty through earthly concepts and mental pictures. One must try, therefore, to approach this life from various sides.

I would like to say that one such attempt was made just before the outbreak of this world catastrophe in the Vienna lecture cycle, (see Note 10) in which I spoke about life between death and a new birth in relation to the inner forces of the soul. Today I would like to draw your attention above all to a domain that in a certain respect is and must be the primary concern for the human being in his earthly life. It must be a primary concern that this very domain is closed to the experience of souls who have gone through the portal of death. Think how much we have, as earthly human beings, through mental pictures that come to us from the mineral and plant realms. To these mental pictures must be added all the impressions and mental pictures that come to us from heavenly space: the starry sky above us, the sun, the moon. Since they enable us during our earthly life to have physical images as perceptions, they belong precisely to what I am now calling mineral nature. This mineral nature, and essentially—I say, essentially—the plant nature as nature, are excluded from what souls will perceive between death and a new birth.

In this connection there is something especially characteristic regarding the experiences of the so-called dead. When we human beings here on earth confront the mineral or plant natures, we have a quite definite consciousness. I have said on another occasion, it is true, that it is an illusion to speak of the absence of pain or the absence of pleasure in the mineral and plant realms. Through what we human beings perform with our actions, however, we make impressions on the mineral realm and also on the plant realm; we can say with a certain justification that these realms remain without such impressions, without such activities as are spread by pain or pleasure, sorrow or joy. You know that if we as human beings smash a rock, certain elemental beings will indeed experience pleasure or sorrow, but this does not enter our ordinary, everyday consciousness. It can therefore be said that within the experience of an ordinary human being on earth, he must have the feeling that, if he breaks rocks, if he undertakes any action within what is the mineral or essentially plant nature, he thereby causes neither pleasure nor pain in his environment.

This is not at all the case in the realm man enters when he has gone through the portal of death. One must be clear above all that there the slightest deed that man does, even if he only barely touches something (we must bring into service words from earthly language), is bound in this spiritual realm to arouse either pleasure or sorrow; it arouses some sort of sympathy or antipathy. You must therefore picture this realm of the dead in such a way that one cannot barely touch something, cannot make even the slightest contact, without causing whatever has been touched to experience pleasure or sorrow, that is, without calling forth sympathy or antipathy.

This has already been pointed out in my book, Theosophy, (see Note 11) in which the realm of the soul is described and in which the most important forces in that realm are sought precisely in the forces of sympathy and antipathy. Such facts must become living ideas, however. As one becomes conscious of the working together, in a certain sense, of the realm of the dead and the realm of the so-called living, one must also picture how the dead operate, so to speak, in their own realm. They operate in such a way that they must always be conscious that everything they do will call forth sympathy or antipathy, joy or sorrow; everything they do induces, if I may so express it, a resonance of living sensation. What one could call insensitivity in the sense of our plant and animal realms is not there at all on the other side of the portal of death.

In a sense, this characterizes the lowest realm that man enters when he has gone through the portal of death. Here, when he comes through the portal of birth into the physical realm, he enters the lowest domain, the mineral realm. When he enters the spiritual world, he finds himself in a realm with a universal faculty for sensations, in a realm where sympathy and antipathy hold sway. Within this realm he unfolds his forces; he works within this realm. When we picture him as being active there, we must also picture the sensation-bearing forces constantly proceeding from his actions, forces carrying sympathy and antipathy.

What is the significance of these forces in the entire web of relationships of the universe? You see, we have arrived at an issue that can be unraveled for our physical, earthly life only through spiritual science. You will realize its importance if you consider all the implications. So much has occurred in the present time that the person who will only find an explanation of the world within the physical renounces any explanation that he does not conceive of as an explanation.

Something that in modern times is regarded as such an explanation is the principle of evolution for the animal beings inhabiting the earth with us. I need only draw your attention to all that has appeared recently to support what is called the theory of evolution. One speaks today of the evolution of the animal world with a certain justification, in that it is believed that the animal world has evolved upward from imperfect beings to more perfect ones. A better way to express it would be to say that the animal world has evolved from undifferentiated beings to more and more differentiation, finally to human nature, in so far as man is a physical being. This theory of evolution has already entered popular consciousness to a great extent. It has even become in a certain sense a component of the secular religion of humanity. The various religious faiths make an effort to reckon with this theory of evolution. They no longer—at least in their more important representatives—have the courage that was still theirs only a short time ago to testify against this theory of evolution. To a certain extent they have accepted it themselves and have come to terms with it.

One could now ask, however, what is actually at work in this evolution of the animal beings, if they evolve from imperfect to more perfect beings. What is at work in all that one can observe in the animal world, not only in its evolution but in the overall existence of the animal world? Strange as it may sound to a modern person, one discovers upon entering the realm inhabited by the dead, through clairvoyant consciousness, that the forces prevailing over a large part of the animal world are coming from the dead. Man is called upon to be a co-ruler of the impulses in the cosmos. In the mineral realm he has only to do with what he constructs as machines and the like through his technology, in obedience to the laws of the mineral realm. In the plant realm, it is a matter of what he sows and cultivates as a gardener or farmer. In these two realms he can at most take only second place during his life between birth and death. With the realm that is mirrored here on earth in animal existence, however, he is much involved, in that after death certain forces immediately awaken in him, in that he immediately enters and works within a domain of forces that rule this animal realm. It is in a certain sense the basis, the foundation for his activity there, precisely as here the mineral world is our foundation; it is the very ground, the soil, on which he stands.

In our existence in the physical world we have the plant realm rising from a ground provided by the mineral realm. Similarly for the dead, the realm in which rule sympathies and antipathies—which then extend into the life of the animal realm on earth—provides the foundation for a second realm. In this second realm the same things are not so much at work in the dead, the mere experiences of pleasure or sorrow, the transmission of merely sensation-bearing impulses that then continue, that then are active in the world. This second realm works essentially with what can be called the strengthening and weakening of the will forces belonging to a human being after death. If you wish to know more about these will forces, refer to the Vienna lectures, (see Note 10) in which I pointed out that the will that is characteristic of the human soul between death and a new birth is not exactly like what we call will here in physical life. We can speak of it as will, however, although it is entirely different there; it is permeated there by elements of feeling and by yet another element that does not exist here on earth. This will in the life of the human soul after death is in a constant ebb and flow. When one is in communication with a dead human being, his soul life is experienced such that at one moment he feels strengthened in his will impulses, stronger in himself; at another moment his will is somewhat lamed; it sleeps. His will fluctuates between becoming stronger and becoming weaker. This is an essential aspect in the life of the dead.

This strengthening and weakening of the will are impulses, however, that flow not only into the basis for the realm of the dead but also into the human realm here on earth, not, to be sure, into our thoughts in ordinary consciousness but indeed into all that we experience here as will impulses and also as feeling impulses.

It is, of course, a strange fact that man, in his ordinary consciousness as a physical, earthly person, experiences clearly only his sense perceptions and his thoughts. Waking consciousness only exists in this perception and thinking. Feelings are actually only dreamt, and the will is generally slept through. No person knows what happens when he just raises a hand, that is, when the will plays into his bodily organism, in the same way that he knows his thoughts. There is also the rule of the feelings; although this is somewhat clearer in consciousness than the rule of the will, it is still dark; it is no brighter than the pictures we have in our dreams. Passions, emotions, feelings are in truth only dreamt; they are not experienced in the light of consciousness that lives in the sense perceptions and mental pictures, and our will is not experienced consciously at all.

In all that plays into waking life as dream or sleep, the dead are living. They live with souls who are incarnated in physical bodies on the earth. They live in them just as we live within the plant world, except that we are not inwardly bound to the plant world as the dead are to our feelings, emotions, and will impulses. They live continually in all of that. This is their second realm. While here we unfold our feelings and sensations in human life, the dead live in this life continually, and indeed in such a way that the fluctuating, which I have just been describing as the strengthening and weakening of the will, as the increasing or declining of the will of the dead, has a certain relation to what here on earth the so-called living are dreaming and sleeping through as feelings and will impulses.

You can see, therefore, how little the realm of the dead is separated from our earthly realm and what an inner bond there is between these two realms. As I have said, under normal conditions (with certain exceptions that I will mention later), the dead have nothing to do with the mineral and plant realms, but they have very much to do with what goes on in the animal realm. That is in a sense the ground on which they stand. They also have much to do with what goes on in the realm of human feeling and human will. In these realms we are not separated from the dead at all, but it is like this: when one goes through the portal of death and experiences the strengthening and weakening of the will, one can live with the so-called living in their physical bodies, though not with everyone. There a definite law holds sway: one can live only with those to whom one is to some degree karmically related. Someone living here who is karmically a total stranger is not even perceptible to a dead person; he simply does not exist. The world that the dead person experiences has boundaries that were made by his own karma that had harnessed him here in life. This world is not limited only to souls who are still on earth; it extends also to souls who themselves have gone through the portal of death.

This second realm thus embraces all the relationships a person has made karmically with those who are still on earth and other souls who like himself have already gone through the portal of death. This realm rises out of another realm that is common to the dead, a realm of animal existence, by which we must not picture earthly animals! I explicitly said earlier that our animals on earth reflect what exists in the spiritual world, that is, the group-souls of the animals. In relation to the dead, we must think of the spiritual being of the animals. From this common soil, then, there arises for each and every dead person, in an entirely different sense from what is the case in our earthly realm, an individual karmic realm. One person has made this relationship, another has made that one. Only that by which karmic relationships are balanced is there from the human realm.

Yet another law rules there; it shows us how this second realm is actually constituted. At first, whatever works on a dead person in this realm in such a way that it strengthens or weakens his will forces is limited to the circle of human beings in which he moved during his last earthly life, perhaps at first even during just a part of it. The individuals who were especially close to him, to whom he was especially related who have passed through the portal of death, are now still the ones with whom he lives particularly intensely. The circle widens only gradually to include persons with whom he had had only distant karmic relationships.

For some this lasts but a short time, for others longer. One can scarcely tell from the way an earthly life has taken its course how it will be after death. Many personalities, many souls whom one would not have expected, appear in the sphere of the dead person, because from the physical life one can easily make a wrong assessment. There is a fundamental law, however, that the karmic circle gradually widens, and the whole process of becoming acquainted in this circle takes place exactly as I described it in the Vienna lecture cycle, (see Note 10) where I dealt with life between death and a new birth. What I described there as an important element in the life of the dead is precisely this expanding life of will impulses. The will impulses are now for the dead what mental pictures are for the living, through which the dead person knows, through which he has his consciousness. It is extraordinarily difficult to explain to earthly human beings that a dead person knows essentially through the will, while the earthly human being knows through forming mental pictures. Obviously, this also makes it difficult to come to an understanding with the dead.

One can thus say that this realm entered by the dead as their second realm gradually widens. Later (this is always relative: for one it happens sooner, for another later) more distant karmic relationships are added to immediate ones. I mean this in the following way. When a dead person has spent a certain time in his life between death and a new birth, the circle of his experiences has widened and stretched beyond those souls—be they on earth or over yonder—with whom he had had particularly close karmic relationships. These souls now have karmic relationships apart from those of the dead person. It is like this: person A has a certain relationship with person B but not with person C. One sees how the dead person A lives with B as I have described and expands his experiences beyond B. Later it comes about that B becomes a go-between to person C. Previously A had had no relationship to C, but now he acquires that relationship directly through B's having a karmic relationship to C. Through this, the second realm slowly, gradually expands over an extremely large area. One becomes ever richer, as it were, in such inner experiences, experiences of strengthening or weakening the will, experiences that gradually accustom us to the realm of the dead—or living souls—after we ourselves have gone through the portal of death.

An essential aspect of life between death and a new birth is precisely that as souls we—if I may express myself trivially—increasingly widen our circle of acquaintances. Just as here in earthly existence we widen our experiences between birth and death, just as here we acquaint ourselves with more and more of the world around us, so there we undergo more and more experiences that relate us to the fact that one senses the existence of other souls, that one knows that through some of the souls one experiences a strengthening of the will, through others a weakening. This is an essential part of our experience there.

You can realize the actual significance of this for all existence, for all cosmic existence. It means that actually, in a certain relation between death and a new birth, a spiritual circle of acquaintances is being formed among a great portion of humanity around the earth, not just that faded ribbon the pantheists and mystics dream and thrill about. Really, if we look at what we experience between death and a new birth, we do not live all so far from human beings on earth. This is not an abstract bond but a really concrete one.

just as here on earth the animal realm stands as a third realm above the mineral and plant realms, so across the threshold we perceive as a third realm the realm of certain hierarchies, a realm with beings who never experience earthly incarnations but with whom we come into relation between death and a new birth. This realm of the hierarchies is across the threshold the same thing as what gives us between death and a new birth the fully intense experiences of our I. Through the first two realms we experience “the other”; through the hierarchies we experience ourselves. One can even say that as a spiritual being within the hierarchies man experiences himself as a son, as a child of the hierarchies. He knows himself as be is related to the other human souls as I have described it; he knows himself at the same time as a child of the hierarchies. As he feels himself here, when he perceives himself in the cosmos, as a fusion of the outer, natural forces and the surrounding cosmos, so across the threshold he feels himself organized, as it were, as a spiritual being through participation of the different hierarchies.

Here, if we observe ourselves as human beings—this should certainly not engender any pride in us—we see the so-called lower realm of nature and ourselves placed at the peak of these realms of nature. We go through the portal of death and find over there that we are on the lowest level of the realms of the hierarchies but as the fusion of impulses from the hierarchies. There, however, the fusion comes from above, while here it ascends from below. Whereas here our I is sunk into the physical organism so that it is an extract of the rest of nature, there our spirituality is sunk into the hierarchies and is an extract of them. One can also say that there it is our spirituality with which we clothe ourselves, while here it is our bodily nature in which we are clothed when we come through the portal of birth.

An imaginative perception can already picture the general course of life between death and a new birth. Indeed, it would be extremely sad for a person if he were not able to create such mental pictures. Just think! We are not separated from the dead at all in our life of feeling or of will. What is removed from our gaze is only hidden from our sense perceptions and our mental pictures. It will be a giant step forward in the evolution of the human race on earth, in that part of human evolution that we still must live through, if some day people become conscious of the fact that in their impulses of feeling and will they are one with the dead. Death can indeed rob us of our physical view of the dead and of our thoughts of them. There is nothing that we feel, however, without the dead being there with us in the sphere in which we feel; likewise, there is nothing that we will without the dead being there with us in the sphere in which we will.

I spoke earlier of exceptions regarding the mineral and animal realms. Such exceptions are especially valid for our present epoch. They did not carry much weight formerly, but we do not need to speak of this now. In our time, in which a certain materialistic conviction is of necessity spreading over the earth, human beings can easily miss the chance to acquire spiritual mental pictures during their earthly lives. In yesterday's public lecture I even went so far as to draw attention to how a person, if he fails to acquire spiritual mental pictures during his earthly life, chains himself to this earthly life; in a sense, he cannot escape from it, and he becomes therefore a source of disturbance. Many of the destructive forces working in the earthly sphere come from these dead individuals imprisoned in it. One must have compassion for such human souls rather than judge them critically, because it is not particularly easy to have to remain after death within a realm that is actually not suited to the dead. The realms in this case are the mineral and plant realms, actually that mineral realm that the animals bear within them, that man himself bears within him. These beings are permeated by the mineral realm. For individuals who have not absorbed spiritual mental pictures, the situation is such that they shrink from this experience after death; feelings are aroused at all times, warning them that they cannot enter the realms that govern animal and human spirituality and that they can enter only what is mineral and plant nature. I can scarcely depict this, because language has no words for it. One can only approach slowly and gradually what lies actually at the foundation, because the approach is at first something too frightful.

One must not imagine that such dead souls are then permanently banished from the life I described earlier. They draw near to this life with a certain dismay and fear, however, and rush back again and again into the plant and mineral realms, because the mental pictures they had constructed only have a certain significance in the mineral realm, in the realm of dead objects, the realm of physical mechanisms.

I consider it my main task today, through such mental pictures as these, to arouse in the consciousness an understanding of how the dead are participating in human evolution. One would really like to say these things today in public lectures, but one cannot, because people do not allow themselves such mental pictures unless they have already gone through something that has been communicated in our groups. By describing life between death and a new birth, particularly in its relation to earthly life, one satisfies or, said better, one is fulfilling the demand of our age. For a relatively long time our age has discarded the ancient, instinctive mental pictures concerning the realm of the dead, and now humanity must receive new mental pictures. Humanity must free itself from abstractions about the higher worlds and not merely speak of a kind of general spirituality; it must come truly to perceive what is at work as spirituality. We must be clear that the dead have not died; the dead are still living on and working in the historical process of human evolution. We must be clear that the forces that spiritually surround us are forces of the higher hierarchies but also forces of the dead. The greatest illusion that future humanity could entertain would be to believe that the social life on earth that people develop among themselves through their feelings and their will happens merely through earthly arrangements, with the exclusion of the dead. This simply is not possible, because the dead are already participating within feeling and willing.

It may be asked how it will be possible in the midst of impulses of the new age to develop consciousness in the right way to perceive this kind of gathering with the spiritual world. The evolution of humanity is proceeding in such a way that man in his physical body with his ordinary consciousness is increasingly cut off from the spiritual world. It was in order that man shall once again, as physical man, find the right access to the spiritual world that the Mystery of Golgotha took place in earthly evolution.

The Mystery of Golgotha is not only a one-time event and, as such, the greatest single event in all of earthly evolution. It is also a continuing event, an impulse that continues to be active. Humanity must do something to allow this force to work on it in the right way. For a long time I have been emphasizing that the task of our spiritual science is connected with the impulse of Golgotha, that spiritual science must exist in a certain way for the impulse of Golgotha to be understood in the right way in our age and in the immediate future. You can be sure that, as an earthly science that has become at the same time the world religion, natural science will gain greater and greater influence. I am often reproached for seeming to be unfriendly to the natural sciences, even in their radical developments, a reproach that belongs to the most old-fashioned prejudices imaginable, because whoever understands the course of the evolution of the earth understands that the natural sciences cannot be proved wrong and that, on the contrary, they will spread further and further. A kind of religious belief in them that now sweeps through the world is not to be halted in any way. It will come. It advances confidently, and it comes “for the blessing of humanity!” The time will not be long, perhaps only a few decades, before all the religious faiths will find themselves unable to save even the most simple, primitive human beings from consciousness of a purely natural existence such as natural science cultivates. This is inevitable.

Something else is also certain, however. Just as the purely natural scientific world conception gradually seizes human feeling (Gemuet), it will be less and less possible for the spiritual element itself to be cultivated by natural science. The spiritual element will have to be brought in just as strictly scientific a way, while natural science will still be recognizing the natural existence. Knowledge of natural existence will become more and more necessary for the fulfillment of those tasks that man in the future will have to undertake between birth and death. Whatever will lift him toward the spiritual world, however, will have to come to him from a spiritual science.

There is now a fundamental impulse in the widest circles to grasp the Mystery of Golgotha. This could be seen in earlier epochs, but it is especially apparent in our own time. Today one can already say that the greatest enemies to grasping the Christ impulse are the priests and clergy of the various religious faiths, no matter how strange this may sound. What keeps humanity furthest from the Christ impulse is the way in which the clergy and the theologians interpret this Christ impulse, because they are far from understanding what it actually is.

It is not my intention today to say essential things regarding the Christ impulse. We have already compiled a great deal about it in the course of time and will continue to do so. I would like to bring one aspect before you now, because it seems especially important at the present time, namely, that human beings need to perceive that the Christ impulse must, in the most profound sense, be dealt with differently from other historical impulses. People see that this is so, but they constantly make all kinds of compromises. They speak half-truths; they do not have the courage for the whole truth. What one must perceive is that it is impossible to speak about the Christ impulse with the same methods with which one speaks of ordinary history. Significant theologians say that it is foolish to speak of the Gospels being true in an ordinary historical sense, because all that can be offered as historical proof that Christ lived can be written down on a couple of sheets of paper. Well-known contemporary theologians thus acknowledge that it is useless to look to the Gospels if one wishes to deal with them only as historical sources. There is no way of proving that they are presenting historical facts. This is considered to be self-evident today. All that can be produced as historical proof similar to authentic documents concerning other personalities of world history can be written, according to the famous theologians, on a couple of sheets of paper. The real significance of this is, however, that even what stands written on those few sheets of paper is not true in the ordinary historical sense.

Humanity will have to acknowledge the fact that historical sources, such as there are for Socrates or Caesar, are simply not there for the existence on earth of Christ Jesus.

His existence must be grasped spiritually. This is the essence of the matter. Humanity will have to receive in the Mystery of Golgotha something for which there are no physical proofs but which must be grasped in a spiritual way.

Concerning everything else, humanity can always keep searching for historical proofs, but for the Mystery of Golgotha these will never, in the most profound sense, be of any use. Humanity should be urged not to grasp this important event on earth in a physical-historical way but to try to approach it with a spiritual understanding. He who will not grasp the Mystery of Golgotha through spiritual understanding of earthly evolution, without historical documents, will never be able to grasp it. This is the will of the gods, one can say. Regarding the most important event on earth, humanity must exert spiritual activity. The Mystery of Golgotha can always be refuted historically; humanity can understand it only if it rises to a spiritual comprehension of the world.

Only spiritual science as such can speak of the reality of the Mystery of Golgotha. One could say that everything else is out of date. Read the recent book by a theologian, a book remarkable in spite of everything, which develops all the Jesus theories of the new age, from Lessing to Wrede. You will find proof in such a presentation that in this field, history really must take second place, that there must be a new kind of comprehension. This can be found only on the spiritual scientific path.

We must understand this, my dear friends, and now in our time the moment has come when human beings will really be able to experience in a spiritual way the further activity of the Mystery of Golgotha. This is the reason that I have spoken of the spiritual, etheric reappearance of Christ in the twentieth century and that I presented it in my first Mystery Drama. It will be a spiritual experience, however, a spiritual, clairvoyant experience.

There is thus an inner relationship between the Mystery of Golgotha and the necessary ascent of humanity, starting from our time, to spirituality. Truly, from this time on, human beings must rise to a certain spirituality. They must grasp in this coming time that the Mystery of Golgotha can be comprehended further only by spiritual activity, that Christianity must have an essentially spiritual continuation, not just an outer continuation through historical traditions or more historical research. I hope that what I have just said will not be taken in an abstract sense, so that someone will think, if he picks up one or two concepts about the significance of the Mystery of Golgotha, that he has done everything that needs to be done. It so often happens that way. No, one must approach these things fully concretely. One must not only build mental pictures about the Christ and His activity, but one must also be able to find in a certain way the realm of Christ within the earthly realm. Christ descended into the earthly realm, and one must be able to find His domain.

Natural science, if it has someday developed to its highest level of perfection, will offer a picture of the world as it could come to be without the help of the Mystery of Golgotha. Natural science will never of itself come so far during earthly evolution that a physicist or biologist will be able to speak of the Mystery of Golgotha from his presuppositions. All science, however, will gradually, in so far as it deals with what goes on around us between birth and death, become more and more a natural science. Beside this, spiritual science will be drawing its content from the spiritual kingdom.

The question now, however, is to find not just a science but a way to stand within the spiritual realm, so that we do not find only nature. In nature we will never find the Christ impulse. How are we to find a way actually to place ourselves within the spiritual realm, not merely to have knowledge of it? You recognize from what I have been saying that the consciousness of modern and particularly of future humanity will become a merely natural consciousness, a consciousness of entirely natural facts, but that in addition to this another consciousness must be added. An entirely different consciousness must be added. For this new consciousness, the necessity of comprehending the Mystery of Golgotha as a spiritual fact will be, as it were, only the highest peak. The same approach as is needed for the Mystery of Golgotha, a readiness to penetrate through to the spiritual element in things, will have to extend through the rest of life. This means nothing other than that, beyond a purely natural view of things, there must enter human consciousness an entirely different view of things.

This view of things will come and must come when man learns, just as he now beholds the world of the senses through his sense perceptions, to observe just as consciously the course of his destiny in the world, in great events and small. What do I mean by this? Today man pays little attention to the course of his destiny. Consider some extreme cases, however. I will relate just one to you, which will show you what I mean, and it is only one case out of thousands. One could relate thousands of such cases, countless thousands.

A man leaves his house to go for a walk along a path he knows quite well. It takes him up a mountain slope to a rocky place from which there is a beautiful view. He has often gone to enjoy this view; it is his usual walk. On this day, while he is walking, a thought suddenly strikes him as if out of the blue, “Watch out! Look out!” He hears an inner voice, not as a hallucination but in the spirit, saying, “Why are you going this way? Can you not miss this pleasure just once?” He hears this in the spirit. It makes him hesitate, and he steps off the path to think for a moment. At once a tremendous mass of rock plunges down over the very spot where he would have been had he not stepped aside; it would obviously have killed him.

Now I ask you to consider for a moment what role destiny was playing there. Certainly something was active. The man is still alive. The lives of many human beings on this earth are connected with his life. All of them would have been changed if the rock had killed him. Something was accomplished there. If you try to explain it by natural laws, you will never arrive naturally at the act of destiny that took place there. Certainly you can explain by natural laws how the mass of rock came to be loosened, how the man could have been killed when the rock suddenly fell across his path, and so on. In all that can be said about the matter, however, from the standpoint of natural laws, the laws of destiny are nowhere to be found; it has nothing to do with them.

I have related to you an extreme case, but our lives are composed of just such things, in so far as our lives are a matter of destiny. It is just that man does not notice it; he pays no attention to these things. He does not notice these things as he notices what is conveyed to him through his senses as natural facts. From day to day, from hour to hour, from moment to moment, things happen of which only one example has been given, the extreme case I have just described. Think how often, for instance, you are about to leave your house and are delayed half an hour (one must study even the small things). Such things and similar ones happen thousands of times during our lives. You only see what happens when you have been delayed that half hour; you do not consider what would have happened completely differently if you had gone out as scheduled half an hour earlier!

Quite another realm is thus continually reaching into our lives, the realm of destiny, a realm to which as yet modern man pays no attention, because he casts his gaze only at what has happened and has no interest in what is constantly being prevented from happening in his life. None of you sitting here this evening can possibly know whether three hours ago you may have undertaken something that was then prevented from happening, something that would have kept you from sitting here tonight, perhaps even from still being alive tonight. You see only the thing for which spiritual impulses were already gathered in manifold ways, through which the thing did occur. You do not usually consider with ordinary consciousness that what you do in life is a result of participating spiritual impulses. Once you begin to grasp this fact, once you realize that there is a realm of destiny just as there is a realm of nature, you will find that this realm of destiny is no poorer in content than the realm of nature. Into this realm of destiny, however, which reveals itself, I should like to say, with particular clarity when some extreme incident occurs such as I have just related—becoming obvious to the human intellect—into this realm of destiny works what I was describing earlier this evening. Into the feelings and into the will impulses through which destiny moves are working the impulses of the dead. In spite of the fact that a man who says such things today is still looked upon by the entire “intelligentsia” as a superstitious fool, it is nevertheless true that, with the same exactness with which one expresses a natural law today, one can also make the following assertion: when someone has heard such a voice, it is this or that dead person who has spoken at the behest of one or another hierarchy; furthermore, from morning till evening, and especially from evening till morning, during our sleep, the impulses of the dead are constantly working into us, together with the impulses of the spiritual hierarchies who work in our destiny.

I would like to mention something here. You know already about the daimon of Socrates and what Socrates, that wise Greek, said about it, that everything he did, he did under the influence of his daimon. I spoke of this Socratic daimon in my small book, The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Mankind. In my recent book, Riddles of the Soul (see Note 12) the second chapter speaks of that learned individual, Dessoir, and you can see what he had to say about such things. I drew attention there to Socrates’ daimon. It was a matter of Socrates' coming to consciousness of something that is active in all human beings. Before the Mystery of Golgotha, certain beings directed what the dead were to carry into human life. These beings lost their power at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, and the Christ impulse took their place. Now you have the Christ impulse bound to human destiny in the way described by spiritual science. The forces, the impulses of the dead work as I have described into the sphere of our will and feeling. The dead are active, but they also experience strengthening or weakening of their own will. This whole realm is an earthly realm, an earthly realm just like the realm of nature. Since the Mystery of Golgotha, however, the Christ impulse is living within it. Christ is the directing power in this realm that I have described.

One will therefore have to found a science of the Mystery of Golgotha. It will have to be known in the future that, just as the world of natural facts permeates our world, so also a realm of destiny permeates it as the opposite pole. This realm of destiny is still scarcely noticed today. It will have to be studied in the future just as fully as the realm of nature. When one does so, one will know that in this realm of destiny one is bound up with the dead. One will know that this realm, which we have in common with the dead, is at the same time the realm of Christ. Christ descended to earth to unfold his influence through the Mystery of Golgotha in order to share with human beings on earth what we have in common with the dead, in so far as the dead are active in the earthly sphere. (I refer now not to exceptional incidents but to normal cases.)

This must not remain merely an abstract truth, merely a conceptual truth, or perhaps just a “Sunday truth,” to be recalled occasionally “because, after all, something of the sort might possibly be true.” Man should walk through this realm of destiny as consciously as he walks through the realm of his sense perceptions; he should be able to go through the world making use of his eyes and yet also feeling himself to be woven right into this realm of destiny; he should be able to feel that in this realm the forces of Christ are always united with the forces of the dead. If these things were the case, dear friends, humanity would develop in itself a real, concrete, and sensitive life with the dead. One would experience, if one felt this or that or engaged in this or that, that one is united with loved ones who have already passed on. Life would become endlessly enriched.

At the present time we do not altogether forget our departed ones. We hold them in our memory. An intense life—and that will be the only true life, because otherwise life will be slept through in so far as destiny is concerned—will take hold of humanity and will lead one not only to hold the dead in the memory but to the knowledge that when you do this, when you work toward that, when you undertake this, when you succeed in that, this or that dead soul is participating. Our bonds with the dead are by no means severed by death; they continue. This enrichment of life is the prospect for humanity in the future of the earth. In this fifth post-Atlantean epoch, humanity is actually evolving in the direction I have been describing, and truly, humanity will not be able to survive the sixth epoch if people do not begin to feel these things in the right way, unless they take the reality of destiny into their consciousness just as completely as they now absorb the reality of natural occurrences.

We must perceive concretely the connection of the Mystery of Golgotha with the problem of death. This is what I wished to point out today. This is something that is intimately related to what must now enter the consciousness of humanity, because among the many things lost by humanity is the possibility of still experiencing true reality in the feeling and will impulses. Human beings have gradually been lulled into a great illusion, namely, that they can shape this earthly life according to earthly laws. This is the greatest illusion to which humanity can succumb. We find its radical extreme, for example, in the purely materialistic socialism, which arranges everything according to economic laws, in other words, according to purely physical laws. Obviously, materialistic socialism would never accept the idea that when we human beings do the smallest deed among ourselves, the dead are participating. Socialism is the extreme in one direction. At the opposite pole is the extreme of which all so-called idealists now dream, to create, without regard to anything spiritual, purely programmatic organizations throughout the world, both domestic and international, to promote programs through which supposedly all war will be abolished. It is impossible to convince people who cherish such an illusion that they do not thereby destroy what they wish to destroy but rather are burdening themselves all the more with the monster they had wished to destroy. There is plenty of good will in these things. It is simply what must emerge from the materialistic consciousness of this time, what results—I would like to say—as the political peak of the whole essence of the world.

It will lead to the exact opposite of the desired goal. The important development that must spread over the earth is an understanding of destiny. It is this that must take hold in the making of laws and the forming of political organizations, because it must provide the foundation for the structure of social conditions. Whatever is incompatible with the spiritual evolution of humanity will simply dissolve; it will break down or wear out. This is all closely connected with what the signs of the times are proclaiming today. We have no need here to do political campaigning, if I may express it so crudely; naturally, we would not do that. The demands of the times, however, must be observed carefully by persons who wish to concern themselves with the spiritual evolution of humanity. It must be understood that on the path most commonly traveled today, the Christ will only be lost. He can be won as the rightful king and lord of the earth only through humanity's ascent to spirituality. Of this you may be sure: Christ must not be sought as the various faiths seek Him today, faiths that in a remarkable way have already acceded to every possible compromise in interpreting Christ—here and there they have even agreed on how to celebrate the Christ as a god of slaughter. Christ must be sought where He is to be found in reality, through human beings coming to understand the realm of destiny as a reality in which Christ will be found, as we have suggested today. Only then will an international organization have been created that will signify the spread of real Christianity over the earth.

You have only to reflect for a moment to realize that we have not yet approached this goal. Think what would happen if you were to offer all the people who now talk about wishing to establish peace around the world—and who does not talk about it!—a program to make Christ available to humanity. Then peace would come, lasting peace, in so far as it is at all possible on earth. Imagine what all those organizations (created, I grant you, out of sincere good will) would say if you presented them with such a program! We have even experienced a “peace program” going out from “Christ's representative on earth.” You will not have found within it, however, much of Christ. I know that these things are not taken seriously enough at the present time. Unless they are taken seriously, humanity will not be able to follow a healthy path. Just as it is a necessity that the Mystery of Golgotha be grasped on a spiritual level, so it is also a necessity that human beings understand clearly the signs of the times, that they see in spiritual science something without which even the outer social structure of the future cannot emerge.

In closing, I am obliged to say something to you that I have also had to say to the other groups. It is an unpleasant task. This matter is known to most of our friends; even so, I must make formal statements for the sake of completeness. I do not know whether you are all aware that the most unbelievable slanders are being circulated in the world, tales of a character that one wonders how such a monstrous impulse could invade people's minds. Our spiritual scientific movement must be protected from such—one has to say it—vicious slanders. It is necessary, therefore, for the immediate future, regardless of the fact that help ought to be available to our friends for problems relating to esoteric development, that what have been private conferences in the ordinary sense can no longer take place. It is precisely these private conferences that have given rise to the slanders. This statement in itself would be incomplete, however; a second must follow it, namely, that whoever wishes to—obviously, only whoever wishes to!—may relate quite frankly and fully everything that has been said or done at any time in these conferences. There is nothing in our movement that needs to be hidden, if one speaks the truth.

I am obliged to take these two steps. Give me a little time, however, and I am sure other ways and means will be found by which to allow everyone their spiritual scientific rights. The spiritual scientific movement must not be interrupted, however, by things that have nothing whatever to do with it. It is therefore particularly those who belong most truly and honestly to our movement who must understand that these conferences in the ordinary sense can no longer take place and that I also release everyone from any kind of obligation. Anyone anywhere may make known what he wishes; no one must, of course, but as far as I am concerned there is no restriction, for there is nothing that cannot be told if one reports the reality, the truth. In order that the truth may be established, however, both requirements must be fulfilled. It gives me much sorrow to have to take these measures. I know, however, that the friends who stand closest to our movement will fully perceive its necessity and will be in complete agreement with it.

We need to be conscious now of the seriousness of our present situation. For this reason, such a gathering as this is for me a particularly important, serious event. Especially now, in this catastrophic time, I hope we can be truly permeated by the consciousness that we need to stand together in support of our anthroposophical cause, to stand together in the spirit. Even if for the time being we find we are not able to meet together in space, let us remain together in spirit. This is the wish I would express as I part from you: we have been together in space; now perhaps for a time we must be together only in the spirit.

During the first half of 1910, Rudolf Steiner gave lectures that marked a new development in the movement of spiritual science (later known as anthroposophy and founded at the turn of the century).

Earlier, he had repeatedly spoken of the dawn of the Light Age in 1899, following a period of spiritual darkness known as Kali Yuga, which had lasted 5,000 years. Now in 1910 a new dimension was added: a change of consciousness regarding man's relationship to the Christ being would gradually occur.

In the lectures of 1910, published here together for the first time in English, Rudolf Steiner, traveling from Scandinavia via the major cities of Germany to Rome and Palermo, and returning to Hamburg via Hannover, spoke to small groups of prepared listeners concerning the advent of the appearance of the Christ in the etheric life-element of the earth. To begin with, He would only be seen by a few, but as the century progressed He would be perceived by an ever greater number of human beings on earth, bestowing comfort and strength to people. Steiner pointed quite specifically to the period between 1930 and 1940 (he also mentioned 1950) in this respect. The years 1933 and 1935 are singled out in some lectures—years that later marked the beginning of events precipitating the Second World War, which led to appalling suffering for countless human beings. Steiner had warned, however, that opposing powers would conspire to darken the consciousness of humanity so that the second coming of the Christ, His appearance in the etheric, might go unnoticed. He further foretold that powerful attempts would be made on the part of certain groups to proclaim false messiahs to whom people would flock, convinced that the Christ could reappear in physical form in our time. Various other occult efforts to obscure the new Christ revelation are described in the four lectures of 1917, included in this book.

The main thrust of the present collection of lectures which also includes Steiner's key 1911 lecture, “The Etherization of the Blood,” lies in helping to raise the individual consciousness of those souls seeking to find the new Christ event in our age. This means learning to understand and experience the etheric world, a super-sensible sphere closely bordering on the physical, permeating all the kingdoms of nature and human beings with a life-giving element. This etheric realm is where Christ now lives, accessible to the whole of humanity.

Although what Rudolf Steiner brings with such variety and strong images in these lectures was the result of actual spiritual perception, the New Testament contains a number of well-known prophetic passages referring to the second coming and the new spiritual consciousness that will dawn in the future. In the opening of the Acts of the Apostles, written by Luke, a pupil of St. Paul, the event of Ascension is described. It is related how Christ vanished in the clouds and, just as he disappeared from the gaze of the Apostles into this airy, water-filled garment of the earth, from which all things receive their life, so out of the clouds He would reappear (Acts: I).

In several of these lectures, Rudolf Steiner refers to the experience of Saul (later Paul) who, having crossed the desert, was drawing near to the gates of Damascus. Not having known Christ on earth, Paul suddenly experienced in the spirit His mighty presence through the light, the word, and the fullness of His being. This initiation event—unusual at that time—would now in the dawning Age of Light, so Steiner proclaimed, become more and more wide-spread. Paul may, therefore, be considered a precursor of a new form of consciousness of the spiritual world.

In conclusion, it should be mentioned that the first eight lectures, spanning a period from January to Easter 1910, were followed by the writing and premiere of the first of Rudolf Steiner's four Mystery Dramas, The Portal of Initiation, performed in August of the same year in Munich. In the opening scene of this mystery drama, the character Theodora announces in artistic form the impending appearance of Christ in the etheric, which will not depend on faith but rather on a newly won, light-filled spirit vision. In the second part of Theodora's speech, addressed to a number of friends engaged on a spiritual path, she says,

A human being
emerges from glowing light.
It says to me,
You shall proclaim to all
who have the will to hear
that you have seen
what human beings soon will experience.
Christ once lived on earth,
and from His life it follows
that as soul He embraces
human growth on earth.
He is united with the spiritual part of earth,
but human beings cannot yet behold Him
in the form in which He reveals Himself;
because they lack the eyes of spirit
that will be theirs.
Now the time draws near
when with new power of sight
human beings on earth will be endowed.
What once the senses could behold,
when Christ lived on the earth,
will be perceived by human souls.

Readers seeking renewal in their active relationship to the Christ being will find in these lectures an elaboration of the substance poignantly and concisely expressed in the words of Theodora.

René M. Querido

Uebersinnliche Mensch und Die Fragen der Willensfreiheit und Unsterblichkeit nach Ergebnissen der Geisteswissenschaft. (Free Will, Immortality. Lecture given at Stuttgart, Germany, April 24, 1918)

All serious investigation of man has always taken as its starting point the recognition that his being is spiritual. For it is quite obvious to anyone, a philosopher, for example, studying the nature of man that the kind of science that operates within the world of the senses is not able to reach the real essence of man, or at least, if it is thought that this essence can be comprehended by an understanding limited by the senses and bound by the normal operation of the human brain, as is more or less believed by the materialistic form of monism, then we find that our need for a deeper kind of knowledge remains unsatisfied and we are left with the feeling that something further is needed to show that the real being of man is to be found outside the world of the senses. I would like to bring to your notice one of the very first thinkers in the spiritual evolution of humanity who, through tremendous effort in his own thinking, even told his students at the university and those who heard his lectures elsewhere, how in the inner life of the soul one can get away from the situation which prevents the recognition of what the being of man really is and come to a point where this is possible. This is Johann Gottlieb Fichte. And he tried in what one might call a paradoxical way to show his audience what kind of activity the soul had to develop in order to find its way from the sensible to the super-sensible. For instance, he said to the audience at the beginning of his lectures, “Try to think the wall.” Well, of course, this was easy. The audience tried to put itself into the position of thinking the wall. Then after he had let the people think the wall for a while he said, “Now try to think the person who has been thinking the wall.” Fichte knew what he wanted, and even contemporary witnesses have described the scene—how the effect was immediate and convincing, how the audience was completely nonplussed when they tried to think the person who had thought the wall, and how their thinking was in a way paralyzed when they were unable to reach the goal put before them.

Goethe always studied these questions concerning the theory of knowledge from a particularly human viewpoint, that is, he was most concerned with those things in life which bear fruit, and there is a saying of his, which is greatly illuminated by Fichte's demand and the results it had, and this is that Goethe said he managed to lead a sane and wise life because he avoided thinking about thinking. Goethe always sought to be aware of the real nature of life wherever his soul was engaged and he felt that the attempt to think thinking put a person, keeping to the ordinary means of thinking, into an impossible position. Despite this, anyone beginning to investigate the super-sensible worlds can only rely on the thinking at the outset, for he very soon sees that what the senses can teach him or what can be achieved by combining sense phenomena only raises questions that lead man away from his real being. In his thinking he is within himself, and in employing the power of his soul to penetrate the inner activity of his thinking he can expect to find something that will lead him to the real being of man.

Now it is very odd that the further we get, the more effort we make with our thinking as employed in ordinary life, the greater our doubts become of finding in it a gateway into the world where the real being of man is. In fact, at last we become convinced through this experience of our thinking that—if I may use a somewhat crude expression—we can no more think thinking than we can wash water.

And yet, the real method, the real way of penetrating to those worlds where the real being of man can be known, or, as we shall see later, be experienced, is by way of the thinking. However, this method does not use the thinking as we do in everyday life or in science, but thinking is developed in a particular way so it becomes quite a different power in the soul from what it was before. And this is the basis for understanding any investigation of the super-sensible worlds—that we learn to experience how the thinking can be developed into something quite different in the soul from what it is in ordinary life and science.

Now I have often described the main essentials that have to be undertaken in order that the thinking becomes a different power in the soul from what it was before, and so today I shall not go into the things that the thinking has to perform to get, as it were, outside itself and become this new power in the soul. I shall just mention a few things to characterize what is actually achieved when this comes about. You can find a more detailed description of how the thinking is handled in my book, Knowledge of Higher Worlds and also in the second part of my Occult Science. Today I would only like to emphasize that there are certain inner exercises that the thinking has to undertake. These concern only the soul and consist in taking particular mental images into the consciousness and in being related to them in such a way that the soul is really able to experience something within the thinking. This can happen only when the thinking is inwardly permeated by something that is not normally present. The experience then achieved is the first step toward investigating the super-sensible worlds. It comes about by strengthening the thinking by meditation (the various kinds of meditation and concentration are described in the books mentioned above), and it makes us aware that the kind of thinking employed in ordinary life and science is not suitable for the investigation of super-sensible worlds. In particular we notice that in using our ordinary thinking we do not become conscious of the forces that lead us into the super-sensible worlds. And such exercises of the thinking, and a real inner experience of it, convince us more than any purely materialistic theorizing that a bodily instrument, the physical organism, is necessary in order that we can think as we do in ordinary life between birth, or rather conception and birth, and death. And because the bodily organism is necessary, because our thinking is dependent upon the bodily instrument for all that it achieves, our thinking cannot free itself from its connection with the physical world, and we cannot use this thinking for penetrating any world except the one in which it is not possible to find the being of man. We see that because our thinking is bound to the physical instrument we are prevented from penetrating into the super-sensible worlds. We observe this when we stop all outward perception in meditation, when we intentionally blot out the operation of our senses and bring to a standstill all our inner feelings and sensations, devoting ourselves inwardly in meditation entirely to a certain thought, in order to concentrate all the powers of our soul upon this thought, and thereby strengthen our thinking.

It is precisely in our meditation that we learn how we make use of the body in order to think, and our experience brings us a greater conviction concerning the dependence of the thinking upon the physical organism than any theoretical materialist could do. But we also notice that in living within the physical organism, the latter makes something possible that could not exist without it, that the thinking is given something it could not have were there no physical organism. I hope I may be permitted to make such a paradoxical statement. Its truth will become apparent as we proceed. What we notice is what has to remain of the thought afterward if our soul life is to be sound, and this is the memory of it. It is essential in our soul life that in addition to our thinking we must also have memory. If a person were not able to hold on to what he thinks he would not, for our ordinary physical world, be a normal person. Everything depends upon our being able to preserve our thoughts in our memory. And now we observe in our inner methodical training of our thinking that the physical organism is necessary in order that memory of our thinking is retained. But here we also notice that our thinking can be released from the physical organism—only not the kind of thinking that becomes memory.

What I have just said leads the scientist of spirit on a particular path. It leads him to realize that memory, as it normally exists in the human being, is a power that is only significant in the physical world and that it has to be separated from the activity of thinking. Just as the chemist arrives at the mysteries of the material world by separating substances from one another in the laboratory, so, too, the scientist of spirit has to proceed with the various functions of the soul, but his spiritually-scientific analysis consists in purely inward processes of the soul, and this is even more the case with the synthesis, the putting together again of what has been separated. Thus the necessity arises of separating the activity in thinking which leads to the normal memory, from the actual activity of thinking itself. But how can we do this?—This is the question which now arises: Analogous to the way certain substances are treated so that constituent elements that are dissolved in it can be extracted from it, how can we extract that part of the thinking that leads to memory so that something finally remains? This comes about by constantly dwelling on certain thoughts and pictures for a very long time, even if only for a very short period each day, and by laying the emphasis in this not on seeing that a memory remains, but on observing what we do when we are occupied in thinking. Then we observe that something lives in this thinking activity, which, it is true, we also always have in everyday life and in ordinary scientific investigation, but which remains unconscious, does not reach into our consciousness. I will make this clear by the following: Let us assume we perform an external action connected with our profession or business. In doing it we are constantly producing the same thing. A person has to choose a job which leads him to perform the same action every day. This is the main thing, for our everyday lives at least, to make something which can be produced by our action. The result is the main thing. But alongside this, something else frequently takes place and even when it concerns an external action, we can regard it as something most important and essential in our ordinary lives. In carrying out the same task every day we become more skilled, our hands become more alive so that we not only produce the necessary product, but we also intensify our own activity. Perhaps we do not often notice this intensification of our activity. But we can do so.

What I have described here about ordinary life, where it naturally has quite a different significance, must be applied by the scientist of spirit to the inner experience of his thinking, of the kind of thinking that he employs in meditation, when he immerses himself in a state of forgetfulness so far as his surroundings and various experiences are concerned. And he will then find, as long as he does not overdo the individual meditations—I shall speak further about this later—that in constantly and intensively pursuing such an inner development of his thoughts he will come to observe not the thoughts but the activity itself that works in his thinking. He observes that there is such an activity of thinking through the intensification of his own experience. And it is in feeling this activity of the thinking, in strengthening this activity so that he can be conscious of it in a way that does not come about in ordinary life and science, that he fashions something in his soul that he can then separate off from the memory-activity of his thinking. For the continuation of such exercises as have been described brings about a quite definite result. And this result is that a person, in these moments which he himself controls, can immerse himself to such an extent in a new activity, which the thinking now produces, that in this new activity memory actually disappears, and he is left solely with an experience of his activity. In developing and experiencing his thinking in this way, the thoughts themselves vanish and he lives entirely within his thinking activity. The curious thing is that having grasped this point where we live solely within our inner activity, we notice that in this inner activity of the soul we are without memory as we know it in normal life. Something else is present. I would like to use an illustration to show how our whole soul life is now altered by what happens in our thinking.

There is a well-known occurrence in the life-story of the poet Grillparzer. I am not mentioning this in order to prove that Grillparzer, as far as his capacity enabled him, took the same view as is put forward here, but because his experience provides us with a lever for what has to be produced rather more artificially if we wish to rise to an investigation of the super-sensible being of man.

Grillparzer had conceived the whole outline of his Golden Fleece. He had thought out the plan, the individual events and how they were related, in short, he had conceived his drama, The Golden Fleece, in thoughts. But the remarkable thing happened that later he forgot the form in which he had conceived it. He was absolutely unable to remember it. But, lo and behold! one day at the piano as he played a piece that he had played at the time he had conceived The Golden Fleece, his memory suddenly came to life again, and the whole thing was once more present in his mind. How did this come about? Well, it shows us that the inner activity, which was the same both times he played, enabled him to find the same thought content that he had before. As I have said, this is a step toward the kind of thing we are discussing here, but only a step. We have only to proceed further on the same path in the appropriate way.

For the peculiar thing that the one meditating, the scientist of spirit, arrives at is that on the one hand he feels his ordinary memory dying away—though naturally only for those times when he is practicing spiritual investigation—while on the other something else can arise that is not of the nature of memory but comes about in another way. This is the activity in which he has immersed himself. This activity constantly reappears. And then, when we have accustomed ourselves for a while to separating the activity of thinking from the thoughts that remain as memory, we notice that the whole mood of our soul life has become different under the influence of these exercises. When we have reached a certain point in the development of our soul through these exercises we notice something that can fill us with dismay—we notice that we can experience things where no memory of them remains. And because they leave no memory behind, they remain as processes of our experience, constantly in movement, in a way real dreams, but dreams that have great power over our inner soul life. And so in this kind of “empty” consciousness that is unable to preserve any memory of what it has thought, we very soon become aware how our own experiences come to us as if from outside us, in the way that sense perceptions come to us. This does not come about through the activity of the memory, nor through our normal effort to produce thoughts. The impression we get is more or less of our whole life as far back as the moment to which we can normally remember. Our thoughts appear as real entities; they appear to be alive. They do not appear as they normally do in our memory, but they approach us as living beings. Our thinking altogether assumes quite a different character under the influence of these exercises. It really becomes quite a different power in the soul. And I would like to add a further illustration to show the surprising way this change in our thinking activity can work.

Imagine that a statue stands before us—it has a definite form. Then imagine that the moment could arrive when this statue would begin to walk, to live. We would then experience something that goes against the laws of nature. Naturally this could not happen. But I want to use this illustration because something comes about in our soul life which can be compared to this. With the thoughts we have in ordinary life and that result in memories, we have in our inner experience the impression that these thoughts have to be passive copies that imitate the outer world, that they do not have their own inner life and that if they were to lead their own lives, then our soul life would, through this inner life of our thoughts, lead its existence in pure phantasy, in dreams, hallucinations and even more serious states. In our ordinary soul life our thoughts really do have something that can be compared with the forms of a statue. Here I have no intention of saying anything against the value of sculpture. That would of course be stupid. But we can nevertheless compare a dead statue with the kind of logic that operates in our ordinary thinking where we are not conscious of the actual activity in our thinking, of that which joins our thoughts together, which unites and divides them. Whereas the statue is unable to take on life, to become active, our inner logic, the inner weaving and life of our thoughts can be taken up into our consciousness, can become inwardly alive; in the same way an inner, living and logical being can arise out of the “logic” of the statue, a being that we feel to the extent of having the impression that we are in a quite different world. From this moment onward we know that what in the first instance freed itself from the memory, the actual activity of thinking, has now freed itself from dependence upon the physical organism.

The scientist of spirit is aware at this important point in his development that he has released his thinking activity from the physical organism, that his soul, inasfar as it moves in thoughts, has left his bodily organism, and that he is no longer in his body.

However paradoxical this may appear, it is true. This experience of the scientist of spirit has been characterized in earlier lectures here, and it can frequently be referred to because it describes something that has a shattering effect on the soul when it reaches the point I have just been talking about. For we cannot get away from the fact that the development which the scientist of spirit goes through involves inner upheavals and the surmounting of difficulties which we should know something about. This has no objective value. But if we are to speak about the ways and methods employed in investigating the super-sensible being of man, we should not omit this aspect. But now I must add that the way the science of spirit works, as I have been describing it here, can come into being only in our own time. For everything that comes into being in the course of the cultural evolution of humanity has naturally to appear at a particular moment. The scientific way of thinking was made possible three or four centuries ago by the inner conditions of human evolution existing at that time. Likewise, before our time it would not have been possible to train the powers of the soul in the way I have described. There had first to be a training of several hundred years in scientific method before thinking could acquire the necessary power to undertake such a development.

In earlier times, hundreds or even thousands of years ago, there were always people who penetrated into the spiritual worlds, though they proceeded along a different path and used different powers for their development, using methods that are no longer suited to humanity as it has evolved today. These methods have to be changed, just as the way we look at nature has changed during the course of time. Nevertheless, the observers of the spirit in the past also reached the point referred to here, where they were embraced by this living, weaving power of thought, the objective power of thought that permeates everything. And they described the moment when the soul can have this shattering experience as the soul's approach to the gate of death.—This whole experience makes us aware that having cultivated the activity of thinking to the extent that it has been transformed in the way I have described, we actually enter into this living state of thinking. Alone, we are faced with an inner—not a physical—danger. This is the danger of not being inwardly able to carry what is otherwise our normal everyday self-consciousness into the world we now experience. It is the danger of entering a world where we are powerless in our souls to take our self-consciousness with us, where at first we seem to lose ourselves so that we actually reach the state of approaching the gate of death. But in approaching it, it is as if we had left ourselves behind. This losing ourselves, this no longer feeling in possession of ourselves, is a shattering experience. And in becoming completely one with it, we get to know something further—that the self-consciousness that we have, which arises at the moment to which our memory stretches back, the moment when we are aware of ourselves as an ego, this self-consciousness is really more bound to the physical organism of the body than the other powers of the soul, so that when we loosen our connection with the bodily organism we face the danger of not being able to say “I” any more, of losing ourselves. We recognize what is taken from us when we go through the gate of death, when death really divides the spirit-soul nature from the physical-bodily nature. We really achieve what I would call a theoretical but living experience of what death is from an objective, spirit-soul viewpoint.

This is a shattering experience. And this is why those who knew something about it called it the approach to the gate of death. But now we have actually to follow the path that has been described as leading to this significant experience. Only in following the exercises described in my book Knowledge of Higher Worlds and in the second part of my Occult Science can we understand how these exercises are fashioned out of the experiences of the soul. In addition to this we also proceed along another line of development which runs more or less parallel to the first, and which prevents us from losing ourselves when we approach the gate of death with our consciousness. The scientist of spirit has therefore to undertake something else if he is not to lose himself at this point but rather can take himself with him into this other world. On the one hand we have seen that in order to reach this point we have to develop our thinking, to separate the power and activity of thinking from the power in the thinking that leads to memory, but now on the other it is necessary to develop the activity of our will, again with the help of certain exercises of the soul.

And here it must be said that this development of the will involves separating something from it that belongs to it in normal life, that—to use an expression from chemistry—something must be extracted from it. Of the normal activity of our will, especially when seen from the scientific viewpoint, we know that however filled with ideals we are, the will remains full of emotions and the like, which motivate it. These have to be present or the will would not function in ordinary life.

Now in order to progress along the path parallel to the first one, the scientist of spirit has to do exercises which enable him to separate the will from all those things that have to be present within it, because there must be motivation that stems from our physical nature, from our ordinary soul life, and so on—this kind of motivation, which for our ordinary life appears to be the most essential and most valuable, has to be separated from the will. Of course, this separation should not affect our ordinary lives or we would become quite useless or even worse, but such a will that is free of our everyday will should be brought about only in those moments when we wish to investigate the spiritual worlds. And here again there are exercises to achieve this. You will also find these in the books I have mentioned.

Whereas the aim of the thought exercises is to strengthen the thinking, to immerse ourselves in the experience of our thoughts that we place in the center of our consciousness, the aim of the will exercises is to gain an increasing control in shutting out the normal activity of the will, and to command an inner peace in the whole life of the soul. Our ordinary soul life is filled with the remains of the motives of our will, our cares and other feelings, in short, all those things that arise out of our ordinary soul life. The object of the exercises is to learn to suppress all this consciously.

Here the scientist of spirit brings something about which in ordinary life can only come about unintentionally. In order to describe this I must refer to our experience in ordinary life of the 24 hour cycle with its changing rhythm of waking and sleeping. It is not necessary now to go into what happens when the transition from waking to sleeping occurs. But everyone knows from his own trivial observation of life that the activity of our senses disappears in a particular order without any direction on our part—it would serve no purpose to describe this further here—and that even what finally remains, an inner feeling of ourselves, a consciousness of our own life,—that even this disappears too. Then we remain in a state of unconsciousness.

The scientist of spirit now discovers that when a person is in this unconscious state he is nevertheless within the being of his soul. He discovers this when in undertaking a particular development of his will he learns to produce a condition which on the one hand is similar to the state of sleep, but which on the other hand is so radically different from it that one could even say it is the very opposite of the state of sleep. The development of the will is aimed at eliminating all the activity of the senses, a condition that is normally achieved only in deep, unconscious sleep. This involves the same thing with the activity in our thinking, in our feeling, and in everything connected with the motives in our will.—The whole life of our senses and of our soul has to be suppressed by our own conscious intention. Having acquired the requisite power to achieve this we notice that we are able to bring our physical, organic life to a standstill. In sleep we achieve this without any effort on our part, but now we no longer need to remain unconscious, we do not enter into sleep, but experience the transition in a conscious state. The power that enables us to suppress our organic activity also enables us in another way and at the same time to lift our spirit-soul consciousness, which is now our activity of will, out of our body, so that we are no longer, as in sleep, withdrawn from our body in a state without consciousness—I do not have to explain all this today, as nothing in our discussion depends upon it—but we are fully conscious in sleep and are aware that we are no longer in that which lives in us, but that nevertheless our consciousness has not disappeared. Consciousness is fully present, including self-consciousness and the ability to know ourselves as an ego.

The reason this state is radically different from the state of sleep is that in sleep we have no consciousness, but here we leave the body consciously in such a way that we are able to look at the latter as we would look at a table or any other object. Thus we withdraw consciously from our body and are fully aware that we are outside it because we are able to perceive it as an object outside ourselves, just as we normally see physical objects outside ourselves.

To anyone who has never heard anything about these things or can gain no understanding of them, they can naturally appear only paradoxical and unreal. Despite this, it is a real process, much more real than the processes normally at work in the soul. By means of it the soul now manages to experience itself in the will to the extent of complete consciousness.

And now our experience goes further, but in describing it, we are bound to make it appear purely pictorial, as if only a symbol or perhaps even an allegory were meant. But this is not the case, for our inner experience is absolutely real. In this state where the will is detached from our normal soul activity, and where it is conscious, we come to experience something in us that is always there, not as substance, but as spirit-soul consciousness. We become aware of a second person in us that is always present in everyone, though it cannot be brought to light by our normal consciousness. Of course, if we were to say in the normal way that each person bears a second person within him, we would frequently be understood to mean something pictorial or contrived. This is not what is meant here. We really do become aware that we carry a second person within us that really has a consciousness and is witness to all the activity of our will in normal life.

We are never alone. In the depths of our being there is a true being evolving, watching what we do, a being that is in constant activity and which we gradually come to know when we do the exercises that have been described. But before we can make closer acquaintance with this being we have to overcome another shattering experience in our souls. The other similar experience I described as the approach of the scientist of spirit to the gate of death. This one can be described as follows: In our spirit-soul experience we become aware of what weaves in the world as pain and suffering. We experience the basis, the being, of this pain and suffering. We come to know for the first time what pain and suffering are in the soul. This we must do. For in experiencing this pain and suffering we develop the ability to grasp this inner conscious being in us as an immediate inner spirit-soul experience. We can say that a person who has an open heart and mind for what surrounds him in the world will in many respects find much that is beautiful, exalted in it and will see it as the flower of the world. A person who undertakes the exercises described knows that the flower of all the beauty, the exalted nature and the glory of the world rises as if out of the ground, the earth, of the pain that weaves through the world.

Of course people can come forward with their human wisdom and say that such a statement could make one despair of the wise direction of the world, even of the wisdom of God, for why has God not seen to it that the beautiful, the wonderful, the exalted can appear without this foundation of pain?—Such people produce objections out of their human wisdom without having any deep feeling for the iron necessities of existence. Anyone who asks why the exalted, the beautiful, the flower, cannot exist in the world without the basis of pain is more or less in the same position as a person who demands of a mathematician that he should draw a triangle whose angles do not add up to 180 degrees. Necessities simply exist. They do not contradict the wise guidance of the world.—All the exalted nature and beauty of the world evolves out of what we experience in the depth of our souls as pain, just as the flower of a plant has to evolve out of its root. This leads us to a deeper conception of life and of the world, it shows us in which fundamental elements of life beauty, exaltedness and wisdom have their roots, and that these could not exist, that the power to experience them could not exist, if we were not to acquire this power which is present only inasmuch as it grows out of pain.

Now the question arises: Why is it that we experience pain just at the moment when we permeate this inner observer, this inner consciousness of the soul with life? Why just then?—Although this is more difficult to understand, I would nevertheless like to describe it as exactly as possible. It begins when, having developed the will, we experience in our newly-evolved activity of the will what the inner observer is that weaves and lives within us. Our first experience of it seems to contradict all we have experienced in our soul life since we have been able to think. It is rather like—only to a far greater degree—thinking something through most carefully, and then someone comes and disproves our argument, showing it to be untenable. What rises up out of the depths of our will is felt just like such a living refutation.—A very remarkable and odd experience! It is just this something that comes about in the life of the soul, that begins like the pain of a refutation of our own soul life, that finally evolves and intensifies to the experience of our feeling the flowing stream of pain that moves over the mother earth of existence. It is this experience of pain which makes what rises up out of the will increasingly more concrete and more real.

We then come to a full realization of what this is. We gradually come to understand why it appears like this in the form of pain, for we now become aware of what normally cannot be experienced at all in the way of thinking and willing in our everyday lives, namely, what lies at the root of our ordinary experience, what actually has evolved in the depths of the soul throughout the whole of our life, and which we grasp when we have begun to become scientists of spirit. We experience part of our soul life that is normally hidden and what remains with us when everything is removed from our soul life that is bound to the instrument of the physical body. We experience the part of us which goes through the gate of death, which when we die goes on into the spiritual world. And because this part of us that goes into the spiritual world is not at first fit to live in purely spiritual surroundings, is not suited to the life we have developed, but simply exists in it without being properly adapted to it, it therefore appears to us at first in the form of pain and suffering. In the form that it develops it is really destined for another kind of experience. So now we know how the part of us that goes through the gate of death when our body disintegrates is present in the soul, and lives in the soul as its immortal core. In our inner experience we are like a plant feeling how it gradually prepares the forces in its growth that lead to the formation of the seed in the flower, which having lived a different life in the earth, can then develop into another plant of the same kind. We become aware of a new seed of life within us.—And just as the seed grows out of the forces of the plant and can become a new plant, so, too, we now experience that this seed of life, enclosed at first within pain, can lead to a further life on earth. The only difference is that whereas the plant can be destroyed by the conditions existing in space and time so that not every seed develops into a new plant, there are no such conditions or hindrances in the spiritual world when we have passed through the gate of death, but we proceed through the spiritual world and appear in a further life on earth. Then we have to seek out another body with which to unite ourselves, and which we fashion in joining ourselves to what is produced by our father and mother. We take what exists through heredity and impress our own organization upon it so that we can enter into a new life on earth.

In following this path I have described, the scientist of spirit comes upon two factors in his inner life of the soul. The one is that he feels the danger of losing himself, the other that he acquires consciousness in his otherwise unconscious thinking. The consciousness which he normally possesses is in danger of becoming lost. But the other kind of consciousness which arises out of the will can now be employed in entering into the world. At first we experience only pain in this seed of life in the will, but if the exercises are continued in the right way we discover that the pain in fact reveals mysteries of the world to us, for what really happens is that we take this consciousness which lies in the soul into a condition which we normally experience as emptiness, and which, if we could feel it, makes us powerless, but that now it ceases to be pain and we awaken to a life which may be compared to the awakening of the senses when they have been fashioned in the embryo and are then able to perceive the physical world.

When these two factors I have described are united, they become a new sense organ, which Goethe calls the “spirit eye” and the “spirit ear.” This is now really present. Our thinking, which has been developed to the point described, is united as activity within this new consciousness. A fully developed spirit-man, now existing entirely outside the physical body, is experienced by the soul within itself and lives together with it, and this spirit-man now lives within the spiritual world. In being within the spiritual world the spirit-man possesses a higher stage of memory, not the kind of memory that arises when thoughts reappear, but when what is present in the spiritual world appears before us as living being.

Then also everything we have experienced in time before we were joined to a physical body, before our previous death and conception and birth, all this appears before us as living being. The experiences of former lives on earth come into view. A higher kind of memory arises. Paradoxical as it may seem, this is something that can be developed. In the young child, faculties that are needed in ordinary life are not yet present and have to be developed. These make us competent in life. The new memory leads us to a perception of ourselves as spiritual beings within the spiritual world. We experience ourselves as spirit within the spiritual world. And just as we are surrounded in the physical world by physical beings that are of the same nature as our physical organism, in the spiritual world as spirit-man we are with beings of a spiritual nature. Such spiritual beings never appear in physical life. They have their tasks in the spiritual world and do not alternate their lives like human souls between a spiritual life between death and birth and a physical life between birth and death. We experience all this as a spiritually objective world before us. We must in no way imagine that this world is a mere repetition of the physical world.—I will discuss this aspect in greater detail on another occasion, I would only stress now that the whole way in which the spiritual world is experienced is different.

Now since people compromise themselves today when dealing with truths about the spiritual world, I will also have to compromise more than is normally the case with the prevailing approach to life when I now give you a further illustration. Let us assume that in our spiritual experience we are concerned with a human soul that passed through the gate of death many years ago. It can then happen, in the way that one spirit perceives another, that we can feel this soul of the dead affecting us. But it is not as some would imagine that we see a very much refined material picture, or the sort of nebulous ghost as imagined by trivial and superstitious kinds of clairvoyance, but in a quite different way the spiritual enters the consciousness which has arisen out of the stream of our will. In order to characterize how the spiritual is now experienced, I must say the following: Assume that as human souls we have thoughts. The thoughts live in us. Assume that a thought could experience itself, in which case it would say: I am in the human soul. The thought would not be like something that we copy from the outer world, but would realize that it exists in a world; it would know this. Thus the connection with the spiritual world is much more real than the connection with things in the visible world, though it is a different kind of connection. What lives in the spiritual world enters our consciousness so that the latter, which we ourselves have just now taken into the spiritual world in the way described, becomes aware of other consciousnesses he now meets. Our consciousness is now aware of living with spiritual beings.

We can therefore be aware of a soul that wishes to help us or draws toward us from the spiritual world—it can be a human soul or a soul that has never incarnated in the physical world—and such a soul we experience as living within our own consciousness. We see then that in our everyday lives we really have the spiritual world living within us in our consciousness. But because ordinarily we are not aware of this, we do not normally find these spiritual beings in our usual consciousness. But when we have something spiritual to carry out, where inventiveness is required, we can feel that the activity of the soul of a person who died long ago flows into our consciousness.

It is only natural to cite personal experiences in connection with this, though not out of any immodesty. There was, for example, the soul of a person who died many years ago, and who had quite special artistic gifts which were taken through death and then gave help when certain artistic things were being done. Having acquired this spiritual perception we are able to distinguish between what originates in ourselves—although we could please our pride and vanity more by ascribing it all to our own gifts—and what lives in us that originates in the spiritual world and the beings belonging to it.

And if someone says this could all be an illusion, hallucination, then we would reply that there are also certain types of philosophy which maintain that everything we see is only a creation of our eyes. We have only to think of Schopenhauer's statement “The world is only idea.” This had such an effect on one person that he told Goethe that when he closed his eyes the sun was not there—A more recent scientist who is by no means averse to including the more marginal areas of research in his work, commented that we have long since discovered that the man is dead and can no longer open his eyes, yet the sun is still moving through the universe.

I know all the various kinds of objections that can be brought against this, but it is nevertheless essentially apt. In the science of spirit we learn to distinguish between what is real in the world and what is merely thought out or simply experienced in the soul. Only life can teach us about the world of senses. In our spirit-soul experience only our own soul can be the arbiter and can recognize the reality of the beings and events that we perceive. If we can do this, then all the objections vanish, just as the objections of the philosophical idealists vanish in face of the realities of the physical world. Even in the physical world reality can only be experienced. There is no logical proof that can be advanced; only in life itself can we learn to distinguish the real from dreams and hallucinations.

Thus, too, in the spiritual world we learn to distinguish what is dreamed from what really is.

Today I only wanted to go as far as to show how through the investigation of the spiritual world we can acquire knowledge of our own spiritual being that belongs to this spiritual world. This particular way of looking at the spiritual world, which is based on an inner development of the soul, could only arise in the age of science as we now know it, which has been a kind of preparatory training for the further development of the soul. And it is quite understandable that having immersed itself for a time in the greatness of the scientific way of thinking, humanity has rejected the possibility of the soul attaining real knowledge of the spiritual world.

Every person, whether he is a scientist of spirit or not, can take in knowledge of this spiritual world and appreciate the degree of truth it contains. This is no different from being able to value the truths and products of chemistry for our ordinary lives without actually being chemists. The scientist of spirit completely understands when those who are immersed in ordinary science and have become familiar with the faculties of the soul that share in it, who have learned to use and develop these faculties for a method of investigation that has resulted in the tremendous successes of modern science (which the science of spirit fully recognizes)—he completely understands when such people must believe for a while that it is not possible to have a science beyond the one bound to the development of the senses and of the brain, that is, which is founded on the kind of thinking that is bound to the physical organism.

But what we can experience proves that the province of real knowledge can be widened to include the spiritual world, and that we really can investigate our spirit-soul being which proceeds through births and deaths in repeated lives on earth. A brilliant scientist of the 19th century, Du Bois-Reymond, quite rightly emphasized that the approach to knowledge which has led science to its great successes does not lead us beyond the sphere of nature perceptible to our senses, and therefore could not fathom the depths of existence. He was able to express this inability to know, this “not knowing,” because he himself was immersed only in the faculties of knowledge that can comprehend the outer world of the senses. And he said that if we wanted to undertake something in order to get beyond the natural world, we would enter into supranaturalism, that is, we would immerse ourselves in the spiritual world. But then he said, Where supranaturalism begins, science comes to an end. He did not yet know—and there is good reason why he could not know—that the faculties of our mind which are sharpened and strengthened in observing nature cannot lead to the spiritual world, but that these same faculties first have to transform our thinking and our will so that they can evolve differently from the way they do in ordinary science. Then they have to bring themselves to life, to acquire strength, in order to penetrate up into the spiritual world.

And so we must admit that, from one viewpoint at least, what Du Bois-Reymond said was right—that we cannot penetrate to the spiritual world with those faculties of acquiring knowledge which have brought success to natural science. But we can develop these very same faculties by a purely inner and spiritual method to lead us into the spiritual world. Then our knowledge does not remain purely passive (though in this form it has contributed much to science), but becomes something living. It is like the transition from the statue to living logic, to inner life, when the soul itself becomes living logic which can be permeated by what it finds flowing out from the will. Thus we can only experience what the spirit is when knowledge is awakened to life which lives as living knowledge in the living world of the spirit, when knowledge is awakened to life which normally is bound to the world of the senses and to the physical organs, but which now leads the human being to living knowledge. It is in turning knowledge into living knowledge, in discovering a new man, an inner being in us that we rise to the spiritual world, in which we live as spiritual beings among spiritual events and other spiritual beings. In this way we rise to the world where our true origin, our true task and our true purpose lie.

Die Raetsel des geschichtlichen Lebens der Menschheit nach Ergebnissen der Geisteswissenschaft. (The Historical Evolution of Humanity and the Science of Spirit. Lecture given at Stuttgart, Germany, April 25, 1918)

No person with real inner sensitivity would find it any longer necessary to have to speak about a mystery when dealing with human soul life, than he would have to speak about the presence of hunger when dealing with the life of the body.

In the way it functions the life process must be so regulated that it induces hunger. It is possible to disregard hunger by the use of certain drugs and to believe that we can get away from it for a time, but in the long run this cannot be done without injury to the body. Similarly, any attempt to conceal the fact that there is a mystery in human life is bound to lead to injury in the soul. Those who disregard the mystery of the human being, either because of their condition in life or a lack of interest, very easily fall prey to a kind of soul hunger and to what happens as a result of this—a sort of atrophy in the life of the soul, an uncertainty and powerlessness, an inability to find one's way in the world.

Although no really sensitive person would find it necessary to have to speak about a human mystery in general, he would probably find more reason to consider that the great questions of life take on a new character in each succeeding period of time. As our time is so short, it is not possible to do more than indicate this fact. We can see how the outer conditions of life change from epoch to epoch, how new needs, new questions arise about the way we live. This also happens within the soul, which in its search for a solution to the mystery of man, changes its own finer qualities from epoch to epoch in order to make it possible for man to find such a solution. In this age that has been with us for three or four centuries, and particularly in the 19th century and our own day, which has culminated in the controlling of the world by means of steam, electricity, modern economic and social conditions, in this age there are also questions about the world in which the human being is placed that are of a different kind from those of earlier times. The science of spirit or anthroposophy seeks to approach the solution of the mystery of man out of the needs of modern times.

It is a mistake to regard the science of spirit, or anthroposophy, as a renewal of the views of the old mystics. Those who level this sort of criticism, from whatever viewpoint it happens to come, usually construct their own picture of the science of spirit and then criticize this picture, which actually has very little to do with what the science of spirit really is. It is only a caricature of the science of spirit that is criticized.

It is of course not possible within the framework of an evening's lecture to mention everything that would be necessary even to provide an outline of the science of spirit. Only a few further points can be added to what I have been saying about this for many years now, even in this city. It is particularly important to remember that the science of spirit does not take its origin from religion or mystical movements—although we should not conclude that it is necessarily opposed to these, as we shall see later—but it arises out of the life of the modern scientific outlook, out of a scientific approach to the world, connected with what is happening in the evolution of present-day natural science.

I do not think that anyone who despises the modern scientific outlook can penetrate the mysteries of the world as is done in the science of spirit, even if it is not the results of science that matter so much as the method of approach in conscientiously applying one's thinking to the phenomena of the world. The science of spirit must be well versed in the ways natural science investigates and thinks, and in the way in which it disciplines the inner life of the soul in the art of acquiring knowledge. The science of spirit must absorb this and reckon with it, if it is to keep abreast of the times.

It is just in connection with such an approach that the question arises: How is it at all possible for modern science and the outlook which results from it, to arrive at a view of the mysteries of the human being that really satisfies us deep down? If we are really positive thinkers we cannot permit ourselves an answer derived from preconceived opinions, or from one form of belief or another, but only from the facts of present-day scientific development and its method of thought. And so you will allow me to start with the course of scientific thought and research in more recent times. This will be regarded very much from the viewpoint of an admirer of the enormous progress made by the scientific approach in the 19th century, a viewpoint which enables one to realize that the hopes placed in natural science, particularly in the 19th century, for a solution to the great mysteries of man were absolutely honest and genuine.

To take one aspect of this, let us look at the rise of the physical and chemical sciences, along with the hopes and aspirations which came with it. We see how people steeped in the scientific outlook began to believe (around the middle of the 19th century) that the inmost being of man can be explained in terms of the physical body just as the working of the forces and forms of nature can be explained in terms of the wonderfully advanced laws of physics and chemistry. The great progress made by physics and chemistry no doubt justified such hopes for a while, and this progress led to the formulation of particular ideas about the world of the smallest particles: atoms and molecules. Even if people think differently about such matters today, nevertheless what I have to say about the atom and the molecule holds good for the whole of the scientific development. The idea was to investigate them and to explain how the substances and physical forces worked in terms of the constitution of the material molecules and atoms, and of the forces and mutual relationships brought about by this constitution. It was thought that if it was possible to explain a process in terms of the smallest particles, it would not be long before the way would be found to understand even the most complicated process, which was seen as a natural process: the process of human thinking and feeling.

Now let us examine where this approach with its great hopes has led. Anyone having studied the achievements of physics and chemistry during the past decades can only be filled with admiration for what has been achieved. I cannot go into details, but I will mention the views of a representative scientist, who sought his views in physics and chemistry in investigating the nature of the smallest physical particle, the atom,—Adolf Roland, who specialized in spectral analysis. He formulated his views on the basis of everything that is possible to know about the smallest particles that can be imagined as effective in the material world.—And how remarkable his views are! And how justified they are must be recognized by anyone who has some understanding of the subject. Adolf Roland says: According to everything that can be known today, an atom of iron must be imagined as being more complicated than a Steinway piano.

Now this is a significant statement, coming from one so familiar with the methods of modern science. Years ago it was believed that one could investigate the tiniest lifeless beings, or at least produce provisional hypotheses about them, in order to find out something about the world that constitutes the immediate surroundings of our ordinary consciousness. And what, in fact, does one find out? The scientist has to admit that having penetrated this smallest of worlds, he finds nothing that is any more explicable than a Steinway piano. So it becomes quite clear that however far we are able to go by this process of division into the very smallest particles, the world becomes no more explicable than it already is to our ordinary, everyday consciousness.—This is one of the ways of approach, with its great hopes. We see as it were, these great hopes disappearing into the world of the smallest particles. And honest scientific progress will show more and more by penetrating into the smallest particles of space that we can add nothing toward answering the great human mystery to what can be known to our ordinary consciousness.

In another sphere there have been just as great hopes, and understandably so, in view of the condition of the times. Just think of the great hopes people had with the advent of the Darwinian theory, with its materialistic bias! People thought they could survey the whole range of living beings, of plants and animals, right up to man. It was thought possible to understand man through having seen how he arose out of the species below him. And in following the transformation of the different species, from the simplest living being right up to man, it was thought possible to find material which would help solve the mystery of man.

Once again, anyone initiated into the ways of modern research can only be filled with admiration for the wonderful work that has been done on this subject even to this day. It was thought that we would find the single egg cell, out of which man had evolved, in the appropriate simplest living being, and would then be able to explain the origin of man out of this egg cell, which would be similar to what would be discovered as the simplest animal form in the world. Once again the path was taken to the smallest, this time the smallest living beings. And what has been found there? It is interesting to hear what a conscientious and important scientist of the 80's, Naegeli, had to say. He expressed his view, which has become famous, in the following way: Exact research on the individual species of plants and animals shows that even the tiniest cells of each single species have the most varied differentiation. The egg cell of a hen is just as fully differentiated from that of a frog as a hen itself is different from a frog.—In descending to the simplest living cells, by means of which it was hoped to explain the complications facing our normal consciousness, we do not arrive at anything simpler—as for instance when we study the iron atom—and in the end have to admit that it is just as complicated as a Steinway piano. Thus we have to imagine that the difference between the individual egg cells is as great as is the difference between the various species we see in nature with our ordinary consciousness.

Naegeli therefore proves by means of his own scientific conscientiousness that the approach of Darwinism with its materialistic bias is of no value.

But now there is another interesting fact. We could, of course, think that Naegeli, the great botanist, was really a one-sided personality, and in any case what he said was spoken in the 80's and that science has progressed and that his views are out of date. But we can also study the very latest developments on this subject, which have been well summed up by a most significant person, one of the most eminent pupils of Ernst Haeckel:—Oskar Hertwig. In the last week or two there has been published his summing up of what he has to offer as a result of his research on—as he calls his book,—Das Werden der Organismen. Eine Widerlegung von Darwins Zufalls theorie.

Just imagine, we are confronted by the fact that one of the great pupils of Haeckel, the most radical exponent of materialistic Darwinism, has in the course of his life come to refute this materialistic Darwinism in the most thorough and complete way. I myself often heard from Haeckel's own lips that Oskar Hertwig was the one from whom he expected the most, and whom he expected to be his successor. And now we find today that it is Oskar Hertwig who refutes what he had absorbed as scientific Darwinism from his teacher, Haeckel! And he does it thoroughly, for his work—if I may use the expression—has a certain completeness.

This is what I wanted to say, to start with. I shall come back to the question later. I would only like to add that Oskar Hertwig makes use of everything that even the most recent research has brought to light in order to prove that what Naegeli said was absolutely true, so that one can say that the present-day position of biological research shows that a study of the smallest living entities does not tell us any more than does a study of the various species that we can perceive quite normally. For these smallest living entities, the cells, are, according to Naegeli and Hertwig, just as different as are the species themselves. A study of them only teaches us that nothing can be discovered in this way that cannot also be discovered by our normal perception in looking at the ordinary world.

Nor is it much different when—I can only mention this briefly—instead of looking at the very small, we look at the very large, the world of astronomy. For here too there has been the most wonderful progress in more recent times, for instance, in the study of the way the heavenly bodies move, which surprised everyone so much in 1859, and which has had such tremendous consequences in astronomy and especially in astrophysics.—And what has been the result? A thing one hears frequently from those who are at home in this subject is: Wherever we look in the world, whether we discover one or the other substance, this is not the main thing, for we find exactly the same substances with exactly the same forces in the universe, in the relatively large, as we find working here on the earth, so that when instead of looking into the very small, we examine the very large we only find what we know from our ordinary experience of space and time in everyday life. It is just in deepening what can be achieved by natural science and in particular in feeling deep admiration for what natural science has achieved that the way for a modern science of spirit or anthroposophy is prepared. But the latter is also well aware that however admirable these achievements of natural science are, however significant they may be for particular purposes, however necessary they may be for sound human progress, they can never penetrate the real mystery of man. This they themselves have proved until now.

The science of spirit or anthroposophy therefore takes its cue from natural science and tries to go quite a different way, and this way is not connected with trying to explain what we experience with our normal consciousness by means of a study of the very small or the very large, nor with methods using microscopes, telescopes or anything that can be attained by our senses or instruments which help them, nor by any scientific methods used in the sense world, nor by studying anything other than what we experience in our normal consciousness, but the science of spirit seeks to approach a solution to the mystery of man by a quite different kind of perception, as far as it is possible for human beings to do this.

In giving an outline of how one can imagine this other way of looking at the things that surround us, and at the events that happen around us in the world, I will make use of a comparison which will help to make the matter clearer.

In ordinary life we are familiar with two states of consciousness, the state of our normal consciousness which we have from the time we awaken in the morning to the time we go to sleep in the evening—this is our normal day consciousness. We are also familiar with the state of our so-called dream consciousness, in which pictures rise chaotically out of depths of the organism that are not accessible to human consciousness, and these pictures appear to be completely without any form of order. It is our experience that makes us aware of the difference between this chaotic dream consciousness and our orderly day consciousness which is encompassed by the real world.

The science of spirit or anthroposophy shows us that just as we awaken out of the chaotic dream consciousness into our ordinary day consciousness there is also a further awakening out of our day consciousness to—as I have called it in my book, Riddles of Man—a perceptive consciousness. The science of spirit does not deal with a reversion into a world of dreams, visions or hallucinations, but with something that can enter into human consciousness, into ordinary day consciousness in the same way that this day consciousness replaces our dream consciousness when we awaken. The science of spirit or anthroposophy is therefore concerned with a perceptive consciousness, with a real awakening out of our ordinary day consciousness, with a higher consciousness, if I may use such an expression. And its content is derived from the results of this perceptive, higher consciousness.—Just as the human being awakens from his dream world, where pictures move chaotically to and fro, into the world of the senses, so now as a scientist of spirit he awakens from the normal day consciousness into a perceptive consciousness, where he becomes a part of a real, spiritual world.

Now, first of all, I must give an idea of what this perceptive consciousness is. It is not acquired by means of any particular fantastic, arbitrary act or fantastic arbitrary decision, but it is acquired by a person working as a scientist of spirit, work which takes a long time, that is no less toilsome than work in the laboratory or observatory, which is pieced together out of the smallest fragments, perhaps even with only small results, but which are necessary for the progress of science as a whole. But everything that the scientist of spirit has to do is not done as in the laboratory or observatory with ordinary methods and appliances, but is done with the only apparatus that is of any use to the science of spirit, the human soul. It consists of inner processes of the human soul, which, as we shall now see, have nothing to do with vague or chaotic mysticism, but which demand systematic and methodical work on the human soul.

How does one acquire the wish to pursue such spiritual work, such an inner development, such a higher self training? It is possible to do it by taking our ordinary conscious life as a starting point, and gradually coming to a particular kind of conviction that becomes more compelling as one immerses one's mind in the modern scientific outlook. For several hundred years already there have been some personalities with this attitude of mind, and today this is increasingly the case. I cannot mention individual names now, but this inner experience, which gradually emerges under the influence of the scientific way of thinking as a distinct and necessary inner outlook and attitude, will affect increasingly wider circles of people and will become a common conviction with all the consequences that such a conviction is bound to entail.

There are two things that we are concerned with here. The first is that we have to acquire a certain view of the human ego, or what we call our self, by means of true and intimate observation, carried out willingly and with discipline. We address this self, we express it in one word, when after a certain point in our childhood development, we begin to use the word “I.” In our honest self-observation based on self-training we ask: What is this ego really like? Where is it to be found in us? Is it possible to find it or, if we are honest and conscientious, do we not have to admit as the great thinker Hume did, who did not arrive at his convictions arbitrarily, but by honest, self-observation, that however much I look into myself, I find feelings, ideas, joy and sorrow, I find what I have experienced in the world, but I do not find an ego anywhere? And how can I in any case—as he quite rightly says—find this ego? If it could be found so easily it would also have to be present when I sleep. But when I sleep, I know nothing about this ego. Can I assume that it is extinguished in the evening and revives again in the morning? Without actually being grasped by the mind, it must be present even when the mind is not working in sleep.

This is absolutely clear. And all those who are familiar with present-day literature on this subject will increasingly find this clear and obvious, that this will become more and more the case.

How are we to understand this? I would have to speak for hours if I were to go into details to prove what I am now saying.—I can only just mention the one fact that the ego of which we are speaking is present in the same way in our day consciousness as it is in the deepest, dreamless sleep. The ego always sleeps. It sleeps when we are asleep, and it sleeps when we are awake, and we know only about a sleeping ego when we are awake, about what lives, even as far as our waking consciousness is concerned, in a hardly conscious sphere of our soul life. Even when we are wide awake in our ordinary consciousness the ego is still only present as it is when we sleep. The reason we cannot imagine anything like an ego in us is because the rest of our soul life is present and, like the black spot in our eyes, cannot see.—The ego is made dark in our souls in a way, and can only be perceived as something we cannot imagine. The ego is always asleep and there is no difference between the way the ego should be imagined in sleep and when we are awake.

It is the same when we consider our minds; for if we train our self-observation properly we realize that our mental images have exactly the same existence in our waking day life as they do in the night in the chaotic mental images of our dreams. In our minds we dream, even when we are awake.

These truths that our ego sleeps and that we dream in our minds and imagination, even when we are awake—these truths, it is true, are washed away by our active life in the day. But for anyone able to observe the human soul they prove to be great and shattering truths which stand at the start of every spiritually scientific investigation.

And if we were then to ask, to ask one's self-observation: This is all very well, but how do we actually distinguish our ordinary waking life of the day from our dream life and our sleeping life? What happens at the moment when we wake up?—As I have said, I cannot go into details—you can find all the details necessary to understand more completely what I am now saying in outline in my book Knowledge of Higher Worlds and its Attainment.—The question arises: What actually happens when we wake up, if our ego really remains asleep and our ideas and images, even in waking life, are like dream pictures? What is the difference between the waking and the sleeping human being?

Trained self-observation provides the answer: It is solely the penetration of the will into the soul life which differentiates waking life from sleeping and dreaming. The fact that we are awake and do not dream is due solely to the will pouring into us. It is because of this that we do not have dream pictures rising up without any direction of will, that we unite ourselves to the outer world with our will and with our will become a part of the outer world. It is what awakens the dream pictures to the substance of real-ness that they are images of an outer world, that brings it about that after waking up we are able to incorporate ourselves into the world through our will.

However paradoxical this may sound to many people today, it will have to become a basic conviction of a future outlook and will indeed become so, because it is bound to follow from a science based on true self-observation.

It is the flashing of the will into our minds that gives us our real connection with the outer world, which we experience with our ordinary consciousness. It is this that provides us with real self-observation in our ordinary consciousness. But we cannot remain in this consciousness if we really wish to fathom the actual nature of the things that surround us and the connection of human beings with the world. There has to be a similar transformation in our soul life, in the ordinary soul life we have in the day, in relation to the transformation that happens in our sleeping and dreaming life when we wake up. And a transformation can come about by working arduously towards a change, firstly in the life of our minds, and secondly, in the life of our will.

And I would like to point out at the start that what we call the science of spirit or anthroposophy is not based on anything metaphysical, spiritualistic or anything vaguely mystical, but that it is a true continuation of the well-founded and human scientific way of thinking. And so we can, for instance, link on to the sound beginnings that are to be found in the Goethean outlook upon nature and the world.

Allow me this personal remark, because it has something to do with what I have to say. That I am linking on to this Goethean outlook upon nature and the world is due to the fact that my destiny led me to immerse myself in it and to take from it what leads, as we shall see, to real perception into the spiritual world that surrounds us, surrounds us in the same way that the sense world does. What is so noteworthy with Goethe—and which is still not appreciated today—is that for instance he is able to bring physical phenomena that normally are only considered quite apart from the soul being, right into the life of the human soul. It is really quite wonderful to see how Goethe treats the physical aspects in his Theory of Color, which is still looked down upon by most people today, how he starts with the physical and physiological aspects and leads from them to what he expresses so beautifully in the section, “The Physical and Moral Effect of Color.” Naturally, one compromises oneself in many respects if one speaks about Goethe's Theory of Color. It cannot be spoken about as a matter of course because in its present form physics does not allow for any possibilities of discussing a justification of Goethe's theory. But the time will come when Goethe's Theory of Color will be vindicated by a more advanced kind of physics.

I can refer to what I have said about the artistic side of this in my book Goethe's Conception of the World, and in my introduction to Goethe's scientific writings. (Published in English as Goethe the Scientist—Ed.) Today, however, I am not concerned with vindicating Goethe's Theory of Color, but only wish to deal with method, with how Goethe manages to evolve beyond purely physical considerations in the chapter “The Physical and Moral Effect of Colors.” Here he describes so beautifully what the human soul experiences when it perceives the color blue. Blue, says Goethe, pours into the soul the experience of coldness because it reminds us of shadow. Blue rooms bestow a feeling of sadness on all the objects in the rooms.—Or let us take what Goethe says about the experience of the color red. Red, says Goethe, produces an experience purely according to its own nature. It can produce the experience of seriousness and worthiness, or of devotion and grace—of seriousness and worthiness in its darker and thicker shades, of devotion and grace in its lighter and thinner shades.—So we see that Goethe does not only deal with the immediate physical nature of color, but he brings the soul into it, the experiences of sympathy and antipathy, as immediate experiences of the soul, as we have in life when we feel joy and sorrow. It may be that the intensity with which Goethe studied the colors is hardly noticeable, but nevertheless he goes through all the colors in a way that one can do if one allows one's soul life to pervade them,—that is, Goethe does not separate the physical from the soul experience. In doing this he laid the foundation for a kind of observation which even today is naturally only in its beginnings, but which will find a serious and worthy further development in the science of spirit. For the human being's relationship to color is exactly the same as exists with the rest of his senses. He is so fully taken up with the perception of something physical, with what works through his eyes and ears, that he does not perceive what radiates through and permeates the physical percept as an element of soul; he does not experience its full power and significance in his inner life. It is like not being able to see a weak light against a strong one. For it is above all the physical object that our eye normally perceives so strongly.

Now it is possible to take what is to be found in Goethe in its first beginnings—albeit instinctively with him because of his naturally sound outlook—a stage further. And it can also be looked at from another viewpoint. Goethe never deals with colors only as they exist in the world, but he also deals with the reaction they stimulate, their effect on the organism. How wonderful, even compared with the latest experiments in physics done by Hertwig, Hume and others, are the things that Goethe brought to light about the reaction of the eye, how the colors are not only perceived as long as one looks at them, but then they only gradually fade away. In all this there are in our ordinary perceptions weak beginnings which can be applied much more to the inner life of our mental images and can undergo further development. For in the conscientious and careful development of particular aspects of our cognitive and imaginative life there is to be found an aspect of science that belongs to the science of spirit or anthroposophy. Goethe's attitude to color has to be applied by those who wish to penetrate into the spiritual world by means of the science of spirit to the content of our minds, which for our normal consciousness is really only a world of dream pictures permeated by the will. The scientist of spirit also approaches the outer world in exactly the same way as our ordinary consciousness approaches the pictures in our minds, concepts and ideas. A sound thinking person does not become any different from anyone else. But if he is to receive a revelation of the spiritual world he has to effect a particular kind of perceptive consciousness. And he does this by inducing a certain metamorphosis in the life of his mind.

The details of what has to be done you can find in the book already mentioned. I only want to put before you now the main principles.

The scientist of spirit gradually manages to free his mental images from their normal task by a particular kind of methodical approach to the content of his mind. The normal function of our mental images is that they enable us to have pictures of the outer world. These pictures are the end result. But for the scientist of spirit they are a beginning, for whatever their significance, whatever kind of picture of the world they give, he immerses himself in its inner life, the inner effects of the picture, the image. And he does this in such a way that he does not look to its content, but to the forces that develop in it, and he does this when his consciousness has been completely brought to rest and becomes alive in the activity of his imagination and thinking.

Normally, a scientist starts with nature as it is in the world and ends up with his ideas. The scientist of spirit has to start with the inner activity of his ideas, with a kind of meditative activity, but which is not at all the same as the kind of meditation normally described and which is nothing more than brooding on something that is on one's mind—no, what we are concerned with here is that the soul is brought to rest, its activity is stilled, so that the life of the soul approaches certain ideas that can be grasped and surveyed like a calm sea. They should then become active in the life of the soul, active solely in the life of the mind. After a great amount of meditative work which is certainly not less than work done in the laboratory or observatory, we arrive at a stage where we perceive remarkable things happening, affecting the life of the soul in this inner life of the mind. One of the most important and significant faculties of the soul that we develop in our normal consciousness is our memory, our ability to remember. What is it that our memory, our ability to remember brings about? It enables us to call up at a later time mental images that we have formed at an earlier time. First of all, we have an experience and this is taken into the mind. The resulting image is like a shadow of the original experience. The experience disappears, but the fact of its existence continues.—We carry the image of the experience in us. Years later, or whenever it might be, we can recall it. What we recall out of the total organism of our spirit, soul and body as a memory image is a shadow-like copy of what was imprinted on the memory in the first place.

If we pursue the methods actively and energetically that are given and described in my books for the cultivation of the mind, we acquire a much stronger kind of activity in the soul working in the memory. However paradoxical it may appear, I have to describe it, because I do not want to speak about the generalities of the science of spirit, but to deal with the positive and concrete aspect of it, upon which it is based. The scientist of spirit experiences that a mental image is brought alive, and by bringing the peace of his consciousness constantly to bear upon this image he gets to the point where he knows: Now you have exercised the powers of your thinking to such an extent that you can continue no further.—Then something shattering happens. The moment arrives when we know that we cannot continue to use our thinking in the same controlled way, but have to let it go, just as we let an idea or image go that then sinks into forgetfulness and that later can be recalled out of this by our memory. But when an image that we have as a result of an energetic meditative life is let go, it enters into much greater depths of our life than an image that is taken into our memory. The scientist of spirit then experiences—this is only one example, other experiences have to be linked to this, but now I only wish to give a few examples—that he has strengthened an image by the powers of his thinking to such an extent that he can allow it to sink into his being so that it is no longer present. But then it appears later, according to the images we have—this has all to be regulated—these images remain present. We acquire views in the course of time in which these images have to remain present, deep down in the unconscious. Some images remain for a longer period in the subconscious, others a shorter period and we acquire the power to recall them again and again. We do not do this by exerting ourselves in trying to remember an image. Images are recalled by peaceful immersion in ourselves; It is not like the way our ordinary memory works, for here we are dependent upon a mood of expectancy that we bring about at the right moment. We become aware of this mood of expectancy by other things which cannot be described here. We have a mood or feeling of expectancy; we do not do anything to bring about an image or an experience. We simply have this peaceful expectancy, this purely selfless immersion in ourselves and only after hours, weeks or even only after years does there come back what we have perceived in the very depths of our being, as if in a kind of abyss. And then the opposite happens from what takes place in our normal consciousness.

With our normal consciousness the experience comes first in all its vividness and then the shadowlike image is produced. Here something quite different happens. We start with something which leads at the same time to self-discipline and self-education, and this is an image which we put before our souls and let it be present in the soul for weeks or months until the moment comes when it can be completely immersed. Then it emerges again—but how it emerges is the surprising thing, for it is not anything as shadowlike as the normal image.

This experience is brought about by working on the image in a certain way and we know full well, if we are familiar with things that lead to such results as these, that we are dealing here with something sound and not morbidly introspective. These are not the same forces that lead to hallucinations or visions, or that produce morbid or unsound states of any kind, but they are the forces that produce precisely the opposite and, in fact, have the effect of banishing everything in the nature of hallucinations and visions.—It is the opposite process. The soul, in undergoing this, is not as it is in everyday life with its normal, healthy understanding, but it has to be much healthier and sounder if the exercises which belong to this whole development and which have to be done regularly are to overcome everything that would lead one astray. What this leads up to is something we have not known before—something spiritual, something super-sensible, that we now perceive in ourselves. What is it that perceives? It is what Goethe called the eye or the ear of the spirit, of which he had an instinctive presentiment.

From the moment onward when we have had an experience such as I have just described, we know that we do not have only a physical body, but that we have a finer, more inward body that is in no way made up of physical substance. However paradoxical it may appear to many people today when in the science of spirit or anthroposophy we speak of a fine etheric body, a soul body, it is nevertheless a truth—but a truth that can really be investigated only in this way I have described. We now know that we have something in ourselves in which spiritual perception can arise, just as perception can arise in the physical organism in the physical eye. We know that the eye or the ear of the spirit, as Goethe called it, becomes something from which there springs something out of the etheric world, out of the super-sensible body. We cannot use this super-sensible body like a physical body, but we know that it exists and we know that there has to be a science of spirit for us to find it. It does not come into being by means of any arbitrary act of the will, but it comes into being with the help of the most recent philosophical thought.

Let me cite a few facts that are especially important in this connection for the formation of a judgment about anthroposophy. The philosophers of more recent times who inherited the work of their predecessors done around the turn of the 18th to the 19th century and in the first half of the 19th century, pointed out, albeit instinctively and not as a result of method, that man does not have only a physical body, which provides the basis for his being, but he also has what one can call an etheric, a soul body. Only the terminology for this fine body was different, a body which exists as a fact for the science of spirit.

This kind of assumption led Immanuel Hermann Fichte (1797-1879) to his conception of the process of death, which he expressed in the following way: “For we hardly have to ask how the human being acts in regard to himself” when “going through death ... With this concept of the continuing existence of the soul we are not therefore bypassing our experience and laying hold of an unknown sphere of merely illusory existence, but we find ourselves in the midst of a comprehensible reality accessible to our thinking.” And now Fichte says—and this is what is important—this consciousness points to something beyond itself. “... Anthroposophy produces results founded on the most varied evidence that according to the nature of his being as also in the real source of his consciousness man belongs to a super-sensible world. Our ordinary consciousness, however, which is based on our senses and on the picture of the world that arises through the use of sight, and which includes the whole life of the sense world, including the human sense world, all this is really only a place where the super-sensible life of the spirit is carried out in bringing the otherworldly spiritual content of ideas into the sense world by a conscious free act ... This fundamental conception of man's being raises `Anthropology' in its final result into `Anthroposophy'.”

Into an “anthroposophy!” He uses the expression, anthroposophy. We can see from this the longing for the science that today has to become a reality.

To cite another example—owing to lack of time I can only quote a few examples—I would like to bring in the important German thinker, Vital Troxler (1780-1866), who also did some important teaching in Switzerland. He speaks out of the same approach, but still instinctively, because the science of spirit or anthroposophy did not exist at that time: “Even in earlier times philosophers distinguished a fine, noble, soul body from the coarse body ... a soul, which contained within it a picture of the body which they called a model and which for them was the inner higher man ... More recently even Kant in his Dreams of a Spiritual Seer dreams seriously as a joke about a wholly inward soul man, that bears within its spirit-body all the limbs normally to be found outside ...”

And now Troxler says: “It is most gratifying that the most recent philosophy, which ... must be manifest ... in anthroposophy, climbs to greater heights, and it must be remembered that this idea cannot be the fruit of mere speculation ...”

I do not need to quote the rest. He means that there must be a science which leads to the super-sensible, to the qualities of this super-sensible body, just as anthropology leads to the physical qualities and forces of the physical human body.

I have dealt with characteristic thinkers on this subject in my book, The Riddles of Man. They did not work out these things as the present-day science of spirit can do, but they spoke out of instinctive longing for a future science of spirit that has now to become a reality through this present science of spirit. Thus also the son of the great Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the important philosopher, Immanuel Herman Fichte.

In his Anthropology, the second edition of which appeared in 1860, Fichte says that there can be nothing that persists in matter: “In the elements of matter it is not possible to find the unifying form principle of the body that is active during our whole life. We are therefore directed to a second, essentially different cause in the body. Insofar as this contains what persists in the digestion it is the true, inner, invisible body that is present in all visible matter. The outer manifestation of this, formed out of the never-ceasing digestion may henceforth be called `body' which neither persists nor is a unity and which is the mere effect or image of the inner bodily nature, which casts it into the changing world of substance in the same way that an apparent solid body is made out of the particles of iron filings by a magnetic force, but which is again reduced to dust as soon as the binding force is taken away.”

Thus we see that Immanuel Hermann Fichte instinctively finds himself in the position of having to accept a force-body which holds the material components together in a material body in a certain formal structure like a magnetic force.

You notice, too, that Fichte also longs for an anthroposophy when he deals with the super-sensible in man and draws our attention to it.

Anthroposophy does not appear at a particular time without reason, but it is something that has long been anticipated by the really deep core of our soul life. This can be seen quite clearly in the examples I have given.

Now I must turn to the other aspect of the development of our soul life, the development of the will. What I have said so far was concerned with the development of the mind. The will, too, can be led beyond the condition it has in our normal consciousness. If you imagine that someone—I only want to mention the most important things, the rest can be read in my books—that someone were to look at his inner life in the same way that we look at our ordinary life between human beings under normal conditions, the life of the human community, we can notice our reaction when a desire or impulse awakens when we say: Conditions allow this impulse, this desire to take its course; another time the conditions do not allow us, or we do not allow it. We see that we evolve a certain responsibility toward outer life that is rooted in our conscience. We develop quite definite feelings, a particular configuration of our soul life in our conscience, concerning what we do or do not do. Our normal consciousness is subject to our soul life in developing such inner demands or standards—we obey logic, but when it comes to thinking or not thinking, to whether thinking is clear or restricted, how cool and logical our relationship is to this as compared to our relationship to outer life! We accept the one because we can, as it were, grasp it in spirit, as a mental image; we reject the other. But one cannot experience the intensive life that we feel in our human responsibility when it comes to our purely logical and scientific thinking.

The second kind of exercise consists in pouring out a certain kind of inner responsibility over our thinking, over our mind, so that we reach the point of not only saying: This opinion is valid, this opinion is properly conceived, I can give it my assent and so on, but also that we manage to preserve a mental image in the same duty-bound consciousness as we have when we do not go through with the one or the other action. Morality—though quite a different kind of morality from the one we have in normal life—is poured out over our mind, over our mental images. Inner responsibility poured out over the life of our mental images results in attitudes where in dealing in certain experiences we allow ourselves some mental images and reject others, in the one case accepting them, in the other rejecting them by a justified but temperate antipathy. From this new aspect, sympathy and antipathy activate our inner life. This again has to be practiced for a long time. I will give an example of how this can be supported by accustoming ourselves to allowing a mental image to be present in our souls in as manifold a way as possible.

In ordinary life one person may be a monist, another a dualist, the third a materialist, the fourth a spiritualist and so on. If we learn to immerse ourselves in the life of our mental images our concepts take on a different aspect in the living inner experience of the world of our mental images so that we come to recognize: Of course, there are concepts of materialism, they can be used for a particular province, for a particular sphere of the world. In fact, they must be available, for one can only get something out of immersing oneself in a particular sphere of the world if one has grasped materialism in all its many aspects. For another sphere of the world spiritualistic concepts are needed, for a third, monistic, for a fourth, the concept of idealism and so on. Monistic, dualistic concepts—they enrich the life of our minds and we know that such concepts mean no more than do different photographs of a tree taken from different points. We learn now to immerse ourselves in an inner element, an inner tolerance, that once again is an outpouring of moral substances over our inner life. It is just like someone receiving a picture of a tree that he has actually seen, who would never say, if he received a picture of the tree taken from a different angle, that it was not the same tree. Just as we can have four or even eight pictures which all portray the same tree, so we learn to look at all sorts of ideas, which singly would represent a one sided picture of reality, and to learn about them, to look into them with great care and immerse ourselves in their manifoldness. This is normally underrated when it comes to doing the exercises which have now to be undertaken. This is something that is not much understood today, even by the best, but it does lead to the further development of the will in a way similar to the development of the mind that I have described. We then experience that the will liberates itself from being bound to the body.

Just as oxygen can be extracted from water, so the will is released by means of the energetic pursuit of these various exercises that are described, and it becomes freer and freer, and more and more spiritual. By these means we awaken a real, higher man in ourselves that is not just an image of an ideal nor something thought out. We make the discovery which is still a paradox to most people today, but which is quite real for the science of spirit, that a second, more subtle man lives in us, having a quite different consciousness from our normal consciousness. And this consciousness that we can awaken in this way shows us that it is a much more real man than the one that we live in the physical body and move around in. This man in us can make use of the eye of the spirit, as I called it earlier, in the etheric body, in the way I have described.

The acceptance of such another consciousness of another more all-embracing man—this has a far more intimate connection with nature and its beings and to the spiritual world than our normal consciousness.—The acceptance of this also was instinctively foreseen by the more penetrating scientists of the 19th century. Here, too, the science of spirit brings about a fulfillment. I would only like to point out how Eduard von Hartmann worked in this direction, though I do not wish to advocate his philosophy in detail in any way. In his really controvertible work, The Philosophy of the Unconscious, Hartmann referred to the fact that an unknown soul quality is to be found behind the normal consciousness of the human being that—as Eduard von Hartmann describes it—comes to expression painfully in a way, and which has a kind of underground telephone connection with the unconscious spiritual nature of the outer world, and which can work its way up, and does work its way up, through the astral nature and pours out of the unconscious or subconscious into our normal, everyday consciousness.

Eduard von Hartmann really pointed instinctively to what the science of spirit teaches as a fact. Only he believed that this other consciousness of the human being could only be arrived at by theoretical hypotheses, analytical concepts and inferences. This was what he was lacking because he never wanted to take the path which is appropriate to his time: not just to formulate the life of the soul theoretically, but to take it actively into training in the two ways that have been described.

It has been possible to see from this that the acceptance of this spiritual nature in everything is much more helped by the solution of the mystery of the human being—even from a philosophical viewpoint, if it really remains philosophical—than all that can be done by the rest of science in the ways described above. And this can be proved by what has happened. Just in these matters Eduard von Hartmann proves a remarkable figure.

In 1869 he published his Philosophy of the Unconscious. Here he discussed how the spiritual that lives in the soul, hidden, as it were, in the spiritual soul, also lives in nature, and how the materialist today has only a one-sided idea of how the spiritual that lives in the soul also permeates and invades nature. In was 1869 that The Philosophy of the Unconscious was first published. It was the time when people had the greatest hopes of gaining a new view of the world on the basis of the new Darwinian approach, the laws of natural selection and the struggle for existence. Hartmann energetically opposed everything connected with this approach from a spiritual viewpoint, and naturally enough the scientists who were full of materialistic interpretation of Darwinism reacted to what Hartmann said. They said: Well, of course, only a philosopher can speak like that who is not at home in real scientific research and who does not know how conscientiously science works!—And many works were published by various scientists attacking Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious. They all wrote basically the same thing—Hartmann was a dilettante and one should not bother to listen to him any further. One only had to protect the layman who always fell for such things; that is why Hartmann's position should be exposed.

Among the many works that appeared there was also one which was anonymous. From start to finish everything was brilliantly refuted. It was shown how from the viewpoint which a scientist had to have, he understood nothing about how science works in its approach to the great mystery of the world!—The scientists were tremendously enthusiastic and were in full agreement with what the anonymous author had written, and it was soon necessary to reprint this ingenious, scientific work. Oskar Schmidt and Ernst Haeckel themselves were full of praise and said: It is a pity that this colleague of ours, this significant scientific thinker, does not say who he is. If he will only say who he is we will regard him as one of ourselves.—In fact, Ernst Haeckel even said: I myself could have said nothing better than what this anonymous author has marshaled from the scientific viewpoint against Hartmann.

And lo and behold, a second edition was needed just as the scientists had wished, But now in the second edition the author revealed himself. It was Eduard von Hartmann himself who had written the work! This was a lesson that could not have been executed more brilliantly for people who constantly believe that those who do not adopt their own attitude could not possibly understand anything about their learning and knowledge. It is a lesson from which we can still learn today, and particularly those could learn who, when it comes to opposing what the science of spirit teaches, approach it with a similar attitude.

The scientist of spirit or anthroposophist knows quite well the sort of things that can be leveled against anthroposophy, however well it may be presented. He is fully aware of what can be said against it, just as Eduard von Hartmann was able to present what the scientists found to be excellent and to their liking. Such lessons, it is true, are soon forgotten, and the old habits soon return. But we can recall them, and we should learn from them. It is not only with Eduard von Hartmann but also with others that an instinctive feeling has arisen that quite a different kind of consciousness is at work in the depths of the human soul.

I would remind you of Myers, the English scientist and editor of the reports of psychic experiments which were published in many volumes and which set out to show how there is something hidden in the human soul that exists alongside our ordinary experience,—what James, the American, called the year of the discovery of one of the most significant facts, namely the discovery of the unconscious in 1886. Today scientists on the whole know very little about such things. They know nothing of Eduard von Hartmann's arguments, nothing about James, nothing about 1886 when Myers discovered the unconscious, the part of us that is of a spirit-soul nature and is connected with the spirit-soul nature of the world, and that rises into and awakens our normal consciousness. It is the same as I have described as awakening as if out of our everyday consciousness, out of a dreaming state, and makes our ordinary consciousness into a perceptive consciousness.—But in Myers and James it is to be found in a chaotic and immature state, rather like a hope or promise.—It becomes a real fact for the first time with the science of spirit or anthroposophy.

And so we see—however paradoxical it may appear today—that the development of the inner powers of the soul emerges on two fronts. I can only indicate how what I have described in its first beginnings, when systematically carried out, eventually leads to our being increasingly able to learn to use the spiritual eye in the etheric body by means of the other man that lives in us, and we discover this world of inner processes in ourselves and are able to feel ourselves as belonging to it. How we then learn not only to overcome our conception of space, but also of time. We come to look at time in quite a different way. And, as I have said, we become able not only to carry ourselves back in our memories into the past, but also to gain experience of ourselves at earlier points of time and also to carry ourselves back beyond the time that we normally remember.

You all know that we can remember back only to a certain point in our childhood. This is as far as we can think back to. What we experienced in the first years of our childhood we can only be reminded of from outside. But now we can carry ourselves back to the time in our earliest childhood when as human beings we were not yet able to recognize or perceive our powers, to the time when the forces we need for our ordinary consciousness were needed for the initial growth of the body. That is to say, we learn to perceive not with the ego of our earliest childhood, but the ego that has brought our spiritual nature out of the spiritual world and united itself with what has been inherited in the way of physical forces and substances from our father, mother and ancestors. We go back to this spiritual human being. From the present moment we look back with an awakened consciousness and see through the sense world into the spiritual; we have a spiritual world before us. Similarly, when we carry ourselves back in time we then have a qualitative experience of the life that we live in the body and that comes to an end with death. On the one hand, our ordinary perception cuts us off in our normal consciousness from spiritual reality; on the other, our bodily experience cuts us off in our normal consciousness from what exists beyond the gate of death. The moment we reach the time which we can remember back to, we see on the other hand life bordered by death, and we see what death makes of us. What is beyond death is revealed, together with what is beyond birth, only divided, kept apart by our life in the body. The spiritual man, the eternal in us, is experienced in that we see our physical life as a river; the one bank is birth and the other bank is death. Death, however, is revealed together with what exists before birth.

We also see maturing in us what leads from this life to a further life on earth. For if we have gone through the gate of death we then see what lives in us. Just as we can say that there is something that lives in the plant which, having gone through the dark and cold time of year, develops into a new plant, so we see how our spirit-soul nature that is within us in this life goes through the spiritual world between death and birth and appears again in a new life on earth. All this becomes accessible to our perception when we develop the powers of the soul in the way that it has been described. Just as we grow accustomed to a physical world through our open eyes and open ears, so we accustom ourselves to a spiritual world, really become concretely aware of a spiritual world that exists around us. We live together with spiritual beings, spiritual forces. Just as we recognize our life, our body, as the expression of our spiritual being which begins at birth, or rather at conception, so we also come to know our physical life on the earth, our physical earth, as a further condition or state of something that has been preceded in planetary existence.

We come to see our earth as a metamorphosis, a transformation of an earlier planet, in which we existed as human beings at an earlier stage, not yet with the present-day physical body, but in a spiritual state and with the nature we have today in a spiritual form. The animals have undergone a downward evolution, the human being has evolved in such a way that the point at which man and animal meet is to be found in the spiritual and not in the physical. Man's evolution on the earth is a continuation of the life on an earlier planet, which has been transformed into the present earth, and which will similarly be transformed into the next stage and will enable the human being to take into himself an ego that today is still slumbering in him, but which will become more and more awake in the further course of evolution. The whole world will be spiritualized.

When we speak about nature we do not content ourselves with referring to a vague pantheism existing in the outer world, but in looking at the being of the earth we speak of rising stages that we get to know. Nor do we enter into a spiritual world with a vague pantheism, but as a concrete individual and real human being.

Today one is forgiven least of all for saying such a thing as this. Nevertheless it is true that a real, concretely spiritual world is opened up to us, the spiritual world that we belong to with our spiritual man, just as with our physical man we belong to ordinary physical reality.

And so in bringing about a methodical awakening of inner life the science of spirit or anthroposophy adds knowledge of spirit to natural knowledge and introduces a different picture of the world from the one we have in our ordinary consciousness. In this connection the science of spirit will gradually have to be taken into the hearts of those who are longing for it, but who for the most part do not know that this longing exists in their hidden feelings. But it is there, and it will come to be more and more recognized.

It is remarkable how even the most eminent thinkers of our time and of the immediate past have not yet been able to grasp the details of the kind of experience I have been describing. I wanted to cite the great philosopher Eduard von Hartmann who had an idea of what it was about, but who was only interested in reaching another consciousness in the human being theoretically, and who was unable to discover that one cannot find one's way into the spiritual by theories or hypotheses, but only by experience, by working upon one's thoughts in such a way that they are sent out as messengers into an unknown world, from which they return as experience, and that leads one into the spiritual world, as I have described. But the experience of it must be based on accepting the existence of a world of ideas and images as real.

Forgive me if I say something personal once more, but it is very much connected with this whole subject. I do not particularly wish to do so, but you will see why I refer to it.

In 1894 I attempted in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity to provide the world with just such a philosophical approach as a preparation for the science of spirit, where the individual human viewpoints, which sometimes have such remarkable names, could be understood, not as a choice of mutually exclusive views, but that they could be seen like photographs or different pictures of the same object and that these concepts could be allowed to speak for themselves so that one has a many-sided picture.

Eduard von Hartmann studied this Philosophy of Spiritual Activity in 1894, and he sent me his copy in which he had made notes. I would like to read a passage from the letter he sent me. It contains singular, philosophical expressions but what he means is quite clear even without going into what these expressions mean.

In the first place he says, for instance: “The title should be `Monism based on the theory of knowledge—ethical individualism,' and not `Philosophy of Spiritual Activity'.”

But he has an instinctive feeling for the fact that these two aspects are supposed to throw light on one and the same thing. He thinks, however, that they cannot be brought together. They are in fact brought together in the life of the soul and not by means of empty theories. This is what he meant. And similarly in other points.

Eduard von Hartmann therefore says: “In this book neither Hume's absolute phenomenalism nor Berkeley's phenomenalism based on God are reconciled, nor this more immanent or subjective, phenomenalism and the transcendental panlogism of Hegel, nor Hegel's panlogism and Goethean individualism. Between these two aspects there yawns an unbridgeable abyss.”

Because all these views exist in such a living way, they all testify to the same thing, they characterize one and the same thing from varying viewpoints!

Hartmann has an inkling of this, a feeling for it, but he does not see that what is important is not a hypothetical and theoretical way of putting them together in thought, but a living way of experiencing them as a unity.

He therefore goes on to say: “Above all, the fact is ignored that phenomenalism leads with absolute inevitability to soliphism [this may be a coined word, a `typo,' or the translator really meant solipsism - e.Ed] (that is, to a doctrine of being one, a doctrine of the ego), to illusionism and to agnosticism, and nothing is done to prevent this plunge into the abyss of un-philosophy, because the danger is not even recognized.”

This danger certainly has been recognized! And Eduard von Hartmann once again instinctively uses the right expression: “plunge into the abyss of un-philosophy.”

This is precisely what I have described today! Of course, this plunge into the abyss is not prevented by un-philosophy or by any hypotheses setting out to be philosophical, but only by our real life being led into the other existence, by the unconscious being made conscious, so that what is experienced objectively and independently in the soul can be guided back again into the conscious.

You can see here how the science of spirit or anthroposophy has gradually to get to grips with the longings and hopes for such a science, that exist at the present time, but which in themselves cannot get as far as what has to be achieved in the science of spirit, because for this to happen it is imperative to see that intimate work on the soul has to be done which does not remain mystically subjective, but is just as objective as ordinary science and knowledge.

What then has been done about this up to now? I have cited Oskar Hertwig to you. Oskar Hertwig is one of those who felt the significance of Eduard von Hartmann!

Ernst Haeckel is one of those who mocked most at what Eduard von Hartmann published in his Philosophy of the Unconscious.

Oskar Hertwig still cites Eduard von Hartmann continuously and does so in full agreement with what he says, even where Eduard von Hartmann says that the way in which the idea of natural selection is treated as a modern superstition is like a childhood disease, a scientific childhood disease of our times. This is cited by Oskar Hertwig, himself a pupil of Haeckel, as an appropriate statement about natural science by Eduard von Hartmann. And there is much more like this. It all adds up to a clear statement as to what science is unable to recognize and what it would really have to recognize. But what has happened is that the pupils of the great teachers of science of the 19th century have already started to refute everything that existed earlier in the nature of the hopes I have been talking about.

Oskar Hertwig is extraordinarily interesting because he shows that science today cannot have any objection to such a philosophy as Eduard von Hartmann's.

If the scientists find their way to Eduard von Hartmann, they will also find their way to the science of spirit. But then the general consciousness of humanity too will be able to find its way.

The science of spirit will encounter opposition enough from other directions as well. To conclude, I would like to mention briefly the objections that are constantly brought by the adherents of various religious organizations against the science of spirit. It is remarkable how it is just from the religious viewpoint that the science of spirit is attacked. It is said, for instance, that what the science of spirit has to say contradicts things in the Bible or that are held according to tradition.—But is this really what we should be concerned about? Could we think of not wanting to discover America because it cannot be found in the Bible or in Christian tradition?

If anyone believes that the power of the greatest thing in the world—Christianity—could be endangered because of some discovery, he cannot have much faith in it!

When I hear of how objections can be made by Christians, I recall a theologian, this time not Protestant, but Catholic, a teacher of Christian philosophy, member of a Catholic faculty of theology, who gave his inaugural lecture on Galileo—and we know how the church dealt with Galileo. This really genuinely Christian and Catholic priest, who up to the time of his death never denied that he was a true son of the church, said in his lecture on Galileo: It is with injustice that a really perceptive Christianity turns against the progress of natural science as brought about by such people as Galileo. It is with injustice that Christianity declares certain ideas which are falsely said to be derived from Christianity, to be irreconcilable with natural science. For modern science, thinks this priest and professor of theology, only appears to be irreconcilable with the more limited view of the world held by the ancient peoples, but not with the Christian view, for this Christian view, properly understood, is bound to confirm the discoveries of more and more wonders in the world, and is bound to confirm the glory of the Godhead and the glory of the Christian view; it is bound to confirm the wonders that divine grace has instituted upon the earth.

We can say the same about the science of spirit, for there is no contradiction between it and Christianity, properly understood. But contradiction exists only between it and a false teaching that unjustly purports to originate from Christianity. The only thing that the science of spirit cannot be reconciled with is a narrowly conceived scientific view of the world and not with a broadly based Christian view. And the discoveries of the science of spirit, the wonders that it finds in the spiritual world, will not mean an end to the wonders that Christianity teaches us about, but on the contrary will confirm them.

Laurenz Mueller, also a genuinely Christian theologian and professor, speaks in a similar vein: Christianity does not contradict and is not intended to contradict a doctrine of evolution properly understood, as long as it does not set out to be a purely causal evolution of the world and to place man only within the framework of a physical causality.

The science of spirit does not clash with Christianity, because it does not lead to the deadening of religious life and vision, but, on the contrary, it encourages and fires religious life and vision.

And those today who still believe that their Christianity would be endangered by the science of spirit will gradually have to realize that whereas wrongly understood science has driven away more and more souls, both outwardly and inwardly, anthroposophy or the science of spirit, because it kindles religious life, will bring even educated people back to the great mysteries, not only of Christian teaching, but also of Christian deeds and ceremonial services. This will largely be the work of the future, in fact, of the relatively near future.

Just in this connection one could wish that things would be better understood and that above all there were more willingness to understand the matter, that one would not formulate a picture without really going into it and then setting up this picture as something contradictory to Christianity.

I can only mention this very briefly. I would have to speak for a long time if I had to go into everything in detail—but this could be done—to show that Christianity has not the slightest grounds for turning against such ideas as repeated lives on earth.

To finish with, allow me to say a few words about the teachings of natural science.

Today natural science has arrived at the point of realizing what it cannot attain. Oskar Hertwig—to keep to our former example—hits upon something in a remarkable way in his book Das Werden der Organismen. Eine Widerlegung von Darwins Zufallstheorie.

In a remarkable way he comes to the conclusion that it is not any objective research, nor analytical research into scientific facts, that has led to the materialistic philosophy of Darwinism, but it arises from the fact that the people of this age have borne this materialistic outlook in themselves, have borne the belief in the unspiritual nature of the outer world in themselves, and have applied this to nature.

And here it is very interesting to feel the weight of Oskar Hertwig's own words to show the real nature of the situation.

Hertwig says: “The principle of utility, the conviction of the necessity of unrestricted commercial and social competition, materialistic tendencies in philosophy, are forces that would have played an important part, even without Darwin. Those who were already under their influence greeted Darwinism as a scientific confirmation of the ideas they already cherished. They could now look at themselves, as it were, in the mirror of science.”

“The interpretation of Darwin's teaching,” Oskar Hertwig continues, “which is so ambiguous in its uncertainties, also allows for a varied application in the other spheres of economic, social and political life. Each person can get what he wants from it, just as from the Delphic oracle, and can draw his own conclusions concerning social, hygienic, medical and other questions, and can call on the scientific learning of the new Darwinian biology with its unalterable laws of nature, to confirm his own views. If however these laws of nature are not what they are made out to be”—and Oskar Hertwig sets out to prove, and does prove, that they are not really laws of nature, “could there not also be social dangers when they are applied in various ways to other spheres? We surely do not believe that human society can use for fifty years such phrases as bitter struggle for existence, survival of the fittest, of the most useful, the most expedient, perfection by selection etc., without being deeply and substantially influenced in the whole direction of this kind of ideas.”

This is what a scientist is already saying today. He is not just saying that these materialistically formulated ideas of Darwinism are wrong, but that they are injurious, that they inevitably lead to difficulties in the soul life, and to social and political harm. Only the restricted and one-sided views of certain scientists could maintain otherwise. And sometimes this works out in the most terrible way.

A great scientist of the present day for whom I have great respect—and it is just because I have respect for him that I cite him now—hints in a remarkable way at how the scientist does not perhaps wish to be understood, but at how he must be understood on the basis of his attitude toward what can be expected of a purely naturalistic view of nature. The scientist, for whom I have the greatest respect, says at the end of a significant book—and these are now his own words that I am quoting: “We live today in the best period of time”—this is what he maintains, it cannot be proved with full validity, but he asserts: “we live today in the best period of time, at least we scientists, and we can even hope for better,” he says, “for in comparing the science of today with the achievements of earlier scientists we can say with Goethe who knew so much about nature and the world:

The pleasure ... is great, to cast

The mind into the spirit of the past,

And scan the former notions of the wise,

And see what marvelous heights we've reached at last.”

—Thus speaks a first class scientist at the end of an important book!

I do not know whether many people notice and think about the person whom Goethe makes say this. Is it really Goethe, the one who knew so much about the world and nature, who says this? No, he puts it into the mouth of Wagner

And Faust replies to Wagner:

“How strange, that he who cleaves to shallow things

Can keep his hopes alive on empty terms

And dig with greed for precious plunderings,

And find his happiness unearthing worms!”

This is the real view of the one who knew so much about the world and nature!

And if scientists today do not yet realize what can be built on the basis of the sound foundations to be found in a view of the world, such as also shone through Goethe, one can understand what Oskar Hertwig so rightly says: The materialistic conception of the world and Darwinism with its materialistic bias have arisen out of the general materialistic attitude of the times, their naturalistic methods, their materialistic impulses and feelings, and which have then been applied to nature. But the facts disprove this.

The scientist of spirit replies to this out of what he believes to be a deeper knowledge of the world and of man: No, it is not such a narrow view like the one prevalent around the middle of the 19th century that should affect our study of nature, but our views should be formulated according to the highest possible content that spirit and soul can attain, and they should then be applied to nature to see if nature really confirms them. We can then expect that the resultant view will not be anything like Darwinism. This latter believed the world to exist according to certain laws and, as we have seen, nature herself has disproved this belief.

The science of spirit strives to study the human soul in its depths, and to draw out of these depths the spirit that exists in the broadest and most embracing sense as the foundation of existence in spiritual beings and forces. It is not a one-sided but a many-sided path that it takes, for there is not only one path it follows, but it follows all the paths on which the human soul is led, from out of its own rich inner life. The science of spirit may be allowed to hope that the questions, the mysteries, which nature has put to it will not be refuted by nature, but that the spirit in nature will affirm them because the spirit that lives in nature also lives in man, and not, as in the other case, to deny what the science of spirit or anthroposophy envisages the real nature of the human mystery to be.

Wie Kann die Erforschung der Uebersinnlichen Wesenheit des Menschen Bewirkt Werden? (The Supersensible Being of Man. Lecture given at Basel, Switzerland, January 12, 1916)

Of all the problems related to the soul life of the human being and that have constantly to be faced by each individual, those concerning free will and immortality are among the most important. I have planned today's lecture so that these two questions can be discussed in conjunction with each other. I have not united these two fundamental problems of human soul life arbitrarily, but I hope to be able to show how intimately they belong together and how it is hardly possible to make a thorough study of the one without the other.

Anyone dealing with these two problems who has any grasp of what we are concerned with in human and spiritual history will immediately be aware of two facts. Apart from approaching such problems through faith, about which I intend to make neither positive nor negative comment here, people have tried to come to grips with them purely on the basis of thinking, scientifically and philosophically. Entirely on this basis of thinking attempts have been made to gain the most shrewd, penetrating and profound knowledge about the two problems. Anyone who tackles them cannot fail to note how individual scientists have disputed and acted in quite contradictory ways when dealing with free will and immortality.

There must be some reason why humanity finds it so difficult to get anywhere with questions which lie so close to the efforts of the human soul, and which arise out of the deepest needs of the soul. The human soul incessantly tells itself that within the human being is hidden something that exists beyond birth and death, and which one should be able to investigate scientifically. It also tells itself that there must be something like free decision at the root of human action, a not being bound to natural necessity as a falling stone is. But when on the basis of its thinking, the soul then tries to investigate the things that are so important to it, it can set out with the greatest hopes of achieving something, but soon other considerations show that it is possible to say as much against it as for it.

The approach I have represented for many years now—and also in these lectures here—seeks to clarify these questions from its own viewpoint and it thinks it recognizes not only the path that has to be followed to arrive at a conception of the two problems that is humanly satisfying, but it believes it also recognizes why it is that there is so much of a contradictory and unsatisfactory nature in other approaches to the problems. As is usual in these lectures given from the viewpoint of the science of spirit, in dealing with such problems I am obliged to take a quite different course from that taken by ordinary science. Science takes the facts, makes pronouncements about its findings, and then reaches its conclusions on the basis of these findings. The scientist of spirit normally has to proceed differently, especially when dealing with such subjects as these today.

The scientist of spirit first must give an idea as to how he arrives at his results. He has constantly to describe the path upon which the source of his findings is revealed to him. For naturally he is dealing with things that cannot be reached by means of the ordinary senses, and which are far removed from the usual processes of knowledge. He therefore has to give an idea of the path upon which he reaches a point where his findings appear set out before the eye of the spirit.

Such questions as we have before us today are of particular concern to the human being himself, for they are pre-eminently questions of human self-knowledge.

It is quite possible to say—as I have already done here many times—that the science of spirit is definitely an admirer of the magnificent and tremendous progress which humanity has enjoyed as a result of scientific work in recent times. But it is precisely because it realizes how to value the findings of natural science, as far as they can be valued, that it also knows how far these scientific methods can go, and where they can obtain no information.

We have to admit that for such questions as we are considering today, questions that concern human self-knowledge above all, the magnificent and admirable work of scientific thinking and particularly its method of thinking are more of a hindrance than a help. Therefore by way of introduction let me give you an example.

Serious and well-intentioned scientists have constantly directed their particular way of thinking to what goes on within the human being himself, to what surges to and fro in his soul life. We can take an example to show how the scientist is bound to miss the way that would lead to a solution, not because of any mistake he makes, but because of his method. A good scientist, Waldstein, has published among his works, which are very good in parts and which deal with the border-area embracing the nervous system and the soul, a dissertation on the unconscious ego. He speaks about all sorts of things that go on in the human soul, and which are of significance to the soul but of which our ordinary consciousness is not aware. He says, for instance—and anyone can think of hundreds of thousands of similar examples—supposing I stand in front of a window of a bookshop and look into it. My eye falls on the most varied collection of books. It is a scientific bookshop. Nothing but serious books are there. Because of my profession I am attracted by one particular book that is in the window: Concerning Mollusks.—And the moment I see this book, Concerning Mollusks, I cannot help beginning to laugh quietly. Now I am, after all, a serious scientist and there is no apparent reason why I should begin to laugh when I see this book, Concerning Mollusks. What has caused me to laugh when looking at the title of a book about mollusks? I close my eyes—the scientist continues—in order to find out what has caused me to laugh. And, lo and behold!—now that my eyes are no longer drawn toward the book I can hear dimly in the distance amid many other noises and hardly audible, for it is a long way off, the sound of a barrel organ, and this barrel organ is playing the very tune to which I first learned to dance decades before as a very young man. At that time I attempted to learn the steps of the quadrille to this tune. I did not give much attention to the tune then, for I was very much occupied, first, in learning the steps and then in giving attention to my partner in the proper way. So even at that time I only noted the tune in a half-dreaming state. But now, although I have not concerned myself with this tune in any way more recently, the moment I see the book about mollusks, this tune strikes up in the distance, and I have to laugh quietly. Had I not closed my eyes—for when I looked at the book I knew nothing about a barrel organ playing, it simply beat on my ear unnoticed—I would not have discovered why I had to laugh when I saw the book. This shows me how remarkable are the things that go on inside us, that move and work in the subconscious, and how this subconscious nature pursues its ways in the human being.

Such examples he describes in great numbers, and others have cited similar ones. But in following such learned dissertations one very quickly notices that although the people certainly know that they are dealing with something that belongs to a knowledge of what works and lives in the human being, their scientific thinking cannot achieve anything that leads to a furtherance of a real knowledge of what lives in man as his true being. For this we have to advance a stage further. And this is what I must deal with first—the path that leads us to self-knowledge. But I want, first of all, to place the two questions before you so that you see how they have to be dealt with in order to be felt and understood absolutely clearly.

In choosing where we begin with this, we should not take the hardly perceptible impressions in the human self, such as those of the barrel organ, for then we only arrive at what it is that affects the self, and not what lies behind it. To put the question satisfactorily, we have to ignore this continual movement into which all sorts of things are incorporated, such as the sound of the barrel organ, and turn to something that has a different relationship to human life. In our soul life there is a continual movement of mental images which are gained through our normal way of perception, and also feelings and will impulses—all these play a role when we hear something like a barrel organ. But basically, the whole of our ordinary everyday soul life is more or less similar to the case of the barrel organ. It is true that we are fully conscious of at least part of what lives in our ordinary consciousness, but there is also an immeasurable amount, the origin of which we do not know. Science quite rightly looks for causes of what plays into our soul life in this way in the physical body, the part of us that passes away with death. We are completely taken up with this interplay of our mental images. But there is one thing where we have to admit that it has a quite different character from this continual movement of our feelings and sensations. This is the realization,—which brings with it a certain power of judgment,—that we cannot simply allow our mental images to come and go as they please. On the contrary, we have to take ourselves in hand and say: Some ideas and images are right, others are wrong.—We begin to develop logic in our thinking,—logic that is designed to enable us to have the right relationship to reality.

Can it be the normal interplay of our mental images that is at work when we say that something is right or wrong? No, it cannot be the normal interplay, for now right and wrong ideas or images appear. All now depends on our being able to judge according to something that rejects wrong ideas—which arise out of bodily necessities, just as much as good ones do—and accepts good ideas. Something therefore of a quite different nature from what can otherwise be found by normal scientific self-observation, plays into our soul life. That is why the philosophical approach has constantly entered in at this point.

Whenever the attempt has been made to save the human being from being simply the outcome of his physical functions, it has always been pointed out how something plays into the soul life that cannot come from the body. Sometimes it is the right thing, sometimes the wrong; both appear in the same way. But it is just on this point that we can see that this kind of approach cannot pursue the matter to a conclusion, that it is really impossible to find out anything in this way. For we get no further than establishing the facts, while the fundamental causes and real nature of the case are sought in vain.—That is the one point.

On the other hand, there is the fact that among all the other things that take place in our soul life we are also able to say Yes or No to a particular action, to decide to do it or to leave it undone. But this contradicts every kind of scientific observation. For this action can only take place on the basis of our bodily nature, our human nature, and this means that we have to seek this basis in our human nature according to laws which function according to necessity. Human freedom does not come into it.—This is the other boundary. We have to start with these two points.

Twenty-five years ago in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity I attempted to make these two boundaries or limits my starting point, and purely on the basis of observation sought to establish what lives in the human soul, what really happens in the human soul when an action is performed where a person feels he is employing his freedom.

At that time I did this in such a way as to remain within purely philosophical considerations. Today I will try to offer a solution, as far as is humanly possible, on the basis of the findings of the science of spirit. In order to do this, however, it is necessary to approach these two points that I have just characterized as the border points of genuine self-knowledge, in a way that only the science of spirit can approach them.

One of the characteristic things about the science of spirit is that we do not allow the soul to investigate in its everyday condition. Our ordinary consciousness does this, as does science too, but in the science of spirit we evolve the soul beyond the point it attains if simply left to its own natural development. We ourselves must take the soul in hand, and it has to develop into something different. For it has to be able to see and perceive something different from what can be perceived with the ordinary means of acquiring knowledge. It has, if I may indicate this right at the outset, to be able to grasp with its spiritual eye the spirit that lives in man.

Most people maintain that this is a subject for belief only, but this is really simply because they do not wish to make any effort to consider such things as the human spirit, that they say this. The actual method and practice of the scientist of spirit proves that it is not just a belief that is acquired, but knowledge as certain in its sphere as is scientific knowledge in the natural sphere. We must, of course, be quite clear that by undertaking certain exercises and functions, the soul has to attain a quite different constitution from the one it has in normal life and ordinary science. It has to acquire a different kind of perception. In my writings, where more detailed information about these matters can be found, I have called the first stage that the soul reaches in investigating the spiritual world, imaginative knowledge.

How do we acquire this imaginative knowledge? Mainly by applying our thinking, our minds in a different direction from the one usual in everyday life. To take the example already cited, we have to try to introduce something into our thinking that is as remote as possible from the barrel organ. For the barrel organ introduced a kind of unknown quantity into the soul life, which was not even noticeable. Precisely the opposite must be the case if we wish to train our souls, to prepare ourselves for spiritual investigation. Nothing must enter our soul unless the soul itself admits it. This can only be done if we succeed—naturally only for the purposes of our investigations—in eliminating the past we have lived through, and the future we look forward to, and in concentrating in our souls solely on the present, as far as possible in one comprehensible mental image, a mental image that we have put together ourselves so that we know what is in it. And we have to do this again and again.

What is characteristic about this is that such activity should be completely removed from any kind of dream life in the soul. No one can become a scientist of spirit in the right way who is fond of giving himself over to self-indulgence and dreaming. No one who willingly indulges in a false mystical way, in something indefinite, can ever become a scientist of spirit. For such indulgence does not lead to the science of spirit. We can only take up the science of spirit if we experience something in our souls that we ourselves have put there with every conceivable effort of our own consciousness, and then constantly concentrate upon it and devote ourselves to it. In my writings I have called this meditating, and by this I mean meditating in the proper sense that we are directed toward our own consciousness, our own soul activity.

There is a further point I would like to mention. Not only must this meditating be far removed from any kind of dream state or false mysticism, it must also be removed from everything that produces hypnotic and suggestive conditions in the soul. Staring at shining objects, for example, by means of which hypnotists produce a hypnotic state is the very opposite of the first condition of a spiritually scientific training. All the various kinds of exercises that dull the consciousness are the very opposite of spiritually scientific training.

What we are concerned with is placing ideas, feelings and will impulses, of which we have a clear picture, into the center of our soul life with full consciousness, so that we are as clear as we are when using the full powers of our thinking. In fact, this absolutely clear thinking, carried out with our full consciousness, must be our example and pattern. We have to be careful not to stop at this, however, for then we achieve nothing, but this should be a pattern for all the activity the soul undertakes in exercises directed toward finding the path into the spiritual world.

It may perhaps take years of trying, but the passing years stand us in good stead, for the fact that we get older as we do the exercises is a great help in enabling something to happen. Constant attempts to concentrate our soul life upon our self-directed mental images by means of meditation, results in the development of our imaginative life. This means that we no longer need only to use pictures and mental images that we ourselves put together, but that such pictures, such imaginations, themselves appear as objective entities in the soul, and in fact, we can live in such imaginations. It is only when we have prepared ourselves in the way I have described, that these imaginations no longer arise out of the body, but out of the life of the soul.

But we also become conscious of gradually following an inner necessity. In living in this world of pictures—for it is the imaginative world that we first experience—we gradually cease to believe that we can arrange the pictures as we please, but that we are bound to certain laws, just as we are bound to laws in the outer world.

You can set a chair upon the table; it stays there. If you put it somewhere in the air, it falls down. If in looking at the outer world you wish to remain within reality, you find yourself bound to certain laws. As you develop your soul in the right way you will gradually see that you are similarly bound to laws in your inner world that are just as objective as, for instance, the law that a chair can only stand on something that supports it. On the one hand, we feel that with our consciousness we are part of the world in which the pictures exist; on the other hand, we feel bound to the underlying order which may be compared to the kind of order that exists in the physical world.

In two particular respects we have to be able to differentiate carefully what we experience. We should not confuse the latter with what people experience under the influence of ordinary visions, for these ordinary visions come from the body. They are not induced by ourselves, and do not take the place in the soul. Imaginations, on the other hand, are processes which take place in the soul. Whoever has not learned to differentiate between imaginations and visions can, it is true, become a visionary who allows all sorts of vague clouds to arise out of his body, but he can never become a scientist of spirit. We are simply not consciously present when visions arise, and this is a most important point. It is in fact just as important and actual as the cautionary rules we adopt when pursuing chemical, physical and physiological methods.

I would like to cite a critic of the spiritual scientific approach who has a high opinion of his own book wisdom. I have no wish to speak about all the rubbish he has said concerning my science of spirit, but I shall quote something from a book of this so-called learned gentleman. This book has attracted considerable notice and has already gone into a second edition after quite a short time. The author relates what happens to him sometimes when lecturing. For a time he speaks in such a way that he thinks over everything he says, but then sometimes he has observed that he does not think any longer, or at least thinks about something else, but yet he continues to speak.

Well, first I promise never to impose myself upon you by ambling on when I have ceased to think! On the other hand, it must be emphasized that whoever believes it is possible to approach the mysteries of the soul when acting this way, is from the start much too stupid to be able to grasp anything about the fundamentals of what the true science of spirit is. He is also much too stupid to make any remotely correct statements about the science of spirit. With this one statement he proves how far he is from what is meant here. For the most essential thing is that the science of spirit must emphasize that consciousness must be present wherever the spiritual is sought. All visions and every kind of undirected dreaming, even if it is impressive enough to captivate a public without thinking as to the means by which it is captivated,—all this is quite out of the question, not only when we speak, but also in connection with what goes on inside us in our souls, if we are on the path to the spirit indicated by the science of spirit.

The other thing that has to be differentiated from what I have called imagination, is our ordinary fantasy. Our higher imaginative life is not simply an act of our fantasy any more than it is a visionary or undirected mystical experience. With our fantasy, it is true, the pictures have a certain law and order, but they are arranged inwardly in quite a free way.—With our fantasy we are not so bound to the objective course of the pictures as we are in our ordinary perception or in the life of imagination where we know that the chair cannot stand in the air.

If, therefore, in our inner training of the soul we reach the point of having before us what we cannot have before us in our ordinary consciousness, in our ordinary everyday life, we do not simply experience a world of pictures that arises out of the soul, the origin of which the soul itself has experienced bit by bit. We now experience a new world, a world of pictures, a world that otherwise we do not have around us. This is the first thing that anyone has to struggle for who wishes to penetrate into the real spiritual world.

But now something specially important happens on this path toward spiritual investigation. The visionary is satisfied with this world of pictures. He says that that is what he has sought. The dreamer is also satisfied.—But the person who achieves imaginative knowledge is by no means satisfied with this world of pictures. He regards it only as a means for proceeding further. For the experience of this world of pictures is accompanied by a strengthening of our means of experience. We have to find quite different inner forces in our soul life if we want to hold on to these pictures, or be really consciously present when they come into existence. These forces are quite different from those we must use when ordinary pictures arise, when speaking in the ordinary way, or when writing books. This strengthening of our consciousness is the important factor, for by these means the soul becomes stronger than it is otherwise in life, or needs to be. There is nothing to be gained by this world of pictures other than a strengthening of our soul life. We should say to ourselves: This whole world of pictures is only a preparation for the spiritual world.

Then, having experienced ourselves—and I say “experienced ourselves” intentionally—we realize that there is not really any objective world in these pictures, but that we have the means to penetrate into this objective world. We have, as it were, in this world of pictures a spiritual eye and a spiritual ear, but they are not yet transparent. Imagine that you have eyes in your eye sockets, but that they are not made of a transparent glasslike substance, but are darkened and opaque. This is the nature of this world of pictures within us, which is more likely to cut us off from the spiritual world, but which can be strengthened by taking into our souls the first available means to penetrate into the spiritual world. We have to acquire a further power. And this is acquired by feeling the power that we experience in these pictures. In experiencing them to the full, we acquire a second power. You can find more detailed information in my books.

The second power consists in making the pictures transparent and transaudient, then doing away with them, just feeling ourselves in the pictures, having only strengthened our own self, but making the whole world of pictures transparent. We have to be in it, but we no longer have to see it. This is a condition that the visionary does not want at any cost, for he is immensely satisfied to feel himself in the pictures, to have, as he thinks, “the whole spiritual world” before him. He has no wish to make the pictures transparent. The scientist of spirit utilizes what he experiences with the pictures only to strengthen his ego that thereby becomes stronger than the ordinary ego, and can now maintain itself. When the ego maintains itself, it also maintains the world of pictures for itself, but by means of this inner strength it no longer directs its gaze to the perception of the world of pictures. The latter is overcome, so that although we live in this world of pictures we no longer perceive it and no longer look at it as something coming to us as a reality from outside.

Further energetic practice of the exercises having made the imaginations transparent, the second thing necessary in order to enter the spiritual world comes about. This is what I call inspired knowledge. In using this word I would ask you to take it only in the sense that I have explained here, and not to confuse it with all sorts of superstitious notions. It is what appears in the soul when the latter has been strengthened in the world of pictures and then has eliminated. The world of pictures becomes transparent, and the outer objective spiritual world makes itself known in spiritual hearing, spiritual perception. It is not that then we have only the strengthened self before us, for our experience now gives us the possibility of knowing that there is a spiritual world around us, just as there is a physical world around us which we perceive with our physical eyes and ears. In fact, anyone who is of the opinion that proper investigation is not necessary in order to enter the spiritual world, or that talk about the spiritual world is only a lot of meaningless words, is quite wrong. And likewise wrong is the person who maintains that the scientist of spirit is a kind of visionary whose task is easy compared with the serious work which goes into the discoveries made in the laboratory and observatory. However difficult it may be for us to adopt the methods of ordinary science, it is even more difficult to master all the preparation necessary for the soul to get beyond the stage of imagination and enter the spiritual world as I have described. Irresponsible statements about such matters can come only from those who have never bothered to get a true idea of what the science of spirit is.

Having now penetrated into the spiritual world when it is revealed to us in a way similar to our experience of color and sound in the physical world, something happens which we feel in a remarkable way. By continuing to apply ourselves to inspiration we continue to experience it and what happens then is what can be called a reversal of going to sleep. It is most important to grasp this. We know that by means of imaginative and inspired knowledge we have gone through all the various conditions that we normally only experience when we go to sleep. This making ourselves free of the physical body in imagination and inspiration is the same as when, in going to sleep, the physical body follows only its own laws, which have nothing to do with what happens in the soul. Notice what happens when we go to sleep: our normal perceptions become unclear and sink away, then we become unconscious. This sinking away of our physical perceptions does not happen because the physical body is tired, but because something else takes the place of our perceptions—namely, imaginations. It is not that we develop a lower form of soul activity, but a higher. This is even more the case with inspiration.

If we proceed even further it is as if we were to wake up in the middle of sleep and see our bodies lying there apart from our souls. This is a real experience. We see that when we have experienced inspiration we are outside our bodies. We are not unconscious, however, but within the spiritual world. We now enter into what made itself known in inspiration, we enter into it, coming to know its beings and processes, step by step. In my writings I have called this third stage of spiritual knowledge, intuition.

We penetrate into the spiritual world by imagination, inspiration and intuition. This is how we immerse ourselves in the spiritual world by the transformation of the soul. It cannot be attained by empty phrases or meaningless mystical talk about losing oneself in this or the other, but only by really earnest work on the soul.—Having reached this stage—and we do not have to call it a higher stage than our ordinary life, but only a different kind of knowledge—we then have quite a different relationship to the outer world than we have without this knowledge.

Although it is well known to many of you after all the lectures I have given here, I would nevertheless like to mention in passing that it is not that a scientist of spirit is a scientist of spirit from the moment he wakes up until he goes to sleep as, say, a chemist is a chemist even when not in his laboratory. For the times when the scientist of spirit is not actually immersed in the spiritual world he is an ordinary human being like anyone else. He naturally lives according to what the outside world demands of him. It is a great mistake to imagine that the scientist of spirit becomes a different person. Many misunderstandings arise in the outside world about various kinds of societies because their members constantly suggest that they are a higher kind of human being. This is quite irresponsible and is certainly not meant here. What is meant is that in certain states of life we train the soul to enter the spiritual world, and that during these states, in this condition of soul, the soul has a different relationship to the outer world than usual, even regarding the more subtle distinctions in life.

It may well seem odd to you, but it is nevertheless true, that it means a great deal to those who look at life in a one-sided way, whether one is a materialist or a spiritualist—spiritualist not in the sense of Spiritualism, but of German philosophy. It is really all the same to a scientist of spirit whether a person is a materialist or spiritualist. But this is not the point. For the materialist who approaches the outer material world with his deepened self, however material the phenomena are that he investigates, proceeds from matter to spirit, because spirit lies at the roof of all matter. If you start with matter and do not stop halfway, however rabid a materialist you may be, but are willing to apply your thinking to the investigation, you will then be on the right track. Neither should a spiritualist stop halfway, for then he only speaks eternally about spirit, and perhaps even despises matter. The important thing is not to talk about spirit, but to find the way from spirit to matter, to immerse oneself in matter, and to take the spirit with one into it. It is a fact that the spiritualists, who always chatter about spirit and have no idea of how to apply this spirit to our more immediate and useful life, are perhaps even more harmful than the materialists.

Whether we start from matter or from spirit is not important. What is important is that we continue our investigations to a conclusion. But in a certain respect this does not happen in the case of the methods pursued by modern science. Although modern physiology and biology deal almost exclusively with the material aspect, even when studying the human being, their methods—that is, their method of thinking, not the facts they discover—cannot get behind the real mysteries of, say, human evolution. And for the questions we are now considering it is just this that is so important.

You are well aware that the idea of evolution is one of the special achievements of modern science. But evolution has become a pretty threadbare word. The whole of science, including the human being, has come within the orbit of the idea of evolution, and this has led to the discovery of much useful and significant material. However, despite this, science has really only discovered half of what is necessary to make the human being understandable. For the human being is not as simple as all that, and cannot simply be understood on the basis of this single line of evolution.

Man is a complicated being. If we are to apply the idea of evolution to the human being and really penetrate the real mysteries of his nature, we must apply the idea of evolution to the human organism, as the latter appears to our everyday senses, quite differently from the somewhat oversimplified approach attempted by science until now. For in dealing with the human being we have to differentiate between different parts—the head with the senses and the nervous system (for simplicity's sake I call it the head organism), the more central organism connected with the breast and abdominal regions, and the third, consisting of what takes place at the periphery of man's body. Anyone who has seen a human skeleton will know that what is expressed so differently from animals in the formation of man's extremities, his arms and hands, his legs and feet, is not only different in its outward expression, but this differentiation is also continued on a more inner level.

Everything we experience outwardly concerning the human being is in the first instance, material. We come to know the real mysteries of this when we are in the position of being able to immerse ourselves in this material manifestation. Then in applying the idea of evolution as held by modern science we find that it only explains the middle of the three parts, the breast region. The human being considered from the aspect of his head organism cannot be explained by this idea of evolution. Why should this be?—Because the head of man not only undergoes a forward evolution, but within this forward evolution it also evolves in the opposite direction, a retrogressive evolution. The head, instead of building up, reduces, takes something away from the straightforward course of evolution, does not stop when the impetus of evolution comes to an end, but then ossifies more than the rest of the organism. We can see in this peculiar ossification of the head a trivial outer expression of the fact that anatomically the brain is strangely undifferentiated, a fact that the findings of modern science also point to—modern science and the science of spirit point to the same fact. Looking at the human being as a head organism, we are not concerned with one straight line of evolution, but with a development that at one time moves forward, then stops and becomes retrogressive.

In becoming familiar with imagination, inspiration and intuition, our inner experience enables us to penetrate further into the structure of the material world than—however odd it may appear—those who always want only to experience the spirit. This experience of the spirit presupposes that we can penetrate into the material sphere. We then experience what our minds, which really make us human beings, really are. What happens in the unconscious when our minds are active? This is very odd—in using our minds, our heads become hungry. The head loses substance. Every idea that is permeated by our thinking is a partial condition of hunger. Ascetics, who have set about it in the wrong way, have then tried to let the whole body starve in order to call up certain ideas. This is wrong. In fact, the right thing comes about simply by establishing a certain unstable equilibrium. In our organism we have only a proper equilibrium and are properly nourished insofar as our middle organism is concerned, and respecting our head, only in sleep. All the time we are awake the head must suffer from undernourishment. This is the retrogressive evolution. It is derived from the withdrawal of evolution, from reducing substance.

And lo and behold, we come upon something that is tremendously important, that provides the bridge from natural to scientific knowledge.

We ask: How do our minds function? Is it due to a forward, germinal kind of evolution? No, it is due to evolution becoming retrogressive, where evolution stops and crumbles, thus making room for soul experience. If we believe that evolution simply continues in a straight line as it does in our purely animal, middle organisms, we never arrive at a concept of the independence of our minds, of our experience of thinking. This only happens when we know that evolution has to withdraw, as does everything that induces growth and life, in order that room is made within the head for the soul. Only in knowing how the head is the foundation of our soul life do we come to appreciate the independence of our experience. In penetrating to imagination, inspiration and intuition we see, therefore, how our thinking, whether right or wrong, affects our soul life. The body has to suspend its functions in order that the soul life can be present.

We can then proceed further. The thinking part of us that takes up an independent position in the organism can be perceived, and we can see what it is and how it enters the human being when we say that one thing is right and another wrong, how it emerges out of our organism. And we have learned to recognize what sort of experience we have in imagination, inspiration and intuition. But now, in what way do we experience our thinking? We find that as it exists in everyday life, providing it is a real kind of thinking, it does not simply follow the haphazard way of our mental images, but evolves logically, rightly or wrongly, and that it is an unconscious form of inspiration to the human being. This is the great discovery that we make.

The science of spirit leads us consciously into the sphere of inspiration. This can come about only by recognizing the fact that something flows into us that tells us to reject one thing and accept another. This is an unconscious form of inspiration.—Where does it come from? We discover this through the science of spirit in our experience of imagination, inspiration and intuition. If, having attained to imagination we do not rest there but immerse ourselves in inspiration, we come to see what it is that inspires us. This turns out to be the life that we lived before entering the body given to us by our mother and father, at birth or at conception. We now realize that this physical life is a continuation of a spiritual life that we have lived. Now through the thinking itself we learn that the human being descends from out of a spiritual world and enters into an existence where the mother and father provide him with a bodily vehicle which comes into being at birth or conception. In recognizing our thinking as unconscious inspiration and in perceiving intuitions, that is, in speaking of an intuitive thinking, of intuition living in our thinking, we are really speaking about the spirit-soul existence of man which he has before birth, or rather, before conception.

In future the problem of immortality will be expanded considerably. Thus far, people have only interested themselves egoistically in what happens after death. But the life that we live here in a physical body is the continuation of a spiritual life. The science of spirit opens up the possibility of looking at our life here in conjunction with the immortal soul as it was before it entered into the physical body at birth or conception.

Let us observe the human being from another aspect of his evolution. Here I shall have to say something very paradoxical. But I also know that the paradox I am going to speak about, which perhaps people will regard as somewhat perverse, will in fact be a solid possession of the science of the future.

Let us look at the organism belonging to our extremities, that is, everything connected with the formation of our arms and hands, feet and legs, and see how these are continued on the inward plane. Here we have quite a different picture of evolution. With the head organism we saw how evolution has to be retrogressive. In the limb organism we have the odd situation that it is a shade ahead of what is normal in the middle organism; our extremities, our limbs, are really over evolved. Here the human being progresses beyond the norm established in the evolution of the head. Even the form—the time is unfortunately too short to go into all the details—and the whole life of our limb organism provides proof that we are here concerned with over-evolution, for it tends toward something for which the human being has no need for the preservation of his body. Our evolution goes beyond this, whereas our heads have evolved retrogressively. What is the consequence of this?—Because of this over evolution something is brought to life unconsciously in us that we only recognize when we have attained a grasp of the imaginative life and when this has then been deepened through inspiration and intuition.

When the spiritual eye of the scientist of spirit perceives the limb organism, he sees how something is added to the organism. This something is, in fact, an imagination which arises as a matter of course in its own right. The extremities overdo evolution, thereby allowing something to be taken into the soul that cannot be seen with our normal eyes, but which appears immediately when we attain to imaginative life. Through the medium-ship of our limbs an imagination is produced, having nothing to do with our life here in the body. What have we here that is integrated into our limbs, and that can only be grasped as an imagination? It is nothing other than what later goes through the gate of death, that provides the foundation for the continuation of life after death.

On the one hand, what exists before birth, before conception, unfolds its life in our heads, that have undergone retrogressive evolution to allow inspiration to work in our thinking, on the other, what bears our soul life in a kind of vehicle into the spiritual world after death, is integrated into our limb organism. Thus on the one hand we are endowed with unconscious inspiration in our heads, while on the other we are endowed with unconscious imagination in our limbs, whereby the part of us that goes through the gate of death lives unconsciously in us, bearing us into immortality after death. We therefore come to know life before birth and life after death in two different ways, the former as unconscious inspiration, the latter as unconscious imagination.

It is possible to study biologically and physiologically the connection between the limb organism and the rest of the human organism. We then have only to see how in their structure the primary sexual organs are connected with the feet, and the secondary sexual organs, that is, the breasts only, are connected with the arms. Thus we have before us the physical basis for producing a new life, which then separates off, that has been integrated into the human being through the limb organization. This physical basis is complete when the human being reaches puberty, though he continues his life beyond this.

What we have here as our physical organization has its counterpart. The physical organism, insofar as it is connected with the sexual organization, is the basis for producing further physical life. The spirit-soul nature, which is the basis of the organism of our extremities is, on the other hand, necessary in order to produce what is sent beyond the gate of death and brings about the next life on earth.

We have here a starting point for a rigorous scientific investigation of the problem of immortality. And when more than twenty-five years ago I pointed out in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity that it is necessary to observe correctly if we wish to approach freedom, I also indicated that on the other hand we have to progress toward purely intuitive thinking. Today I would add: This intuitive thinking is to be perceived before birth or conception. This was already written in The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity when I called the one element of the human will, intuitive thinking. The other element that arises as imaginative life I called, for the purposes of discussing freedom, moral fantasy, in order to make the book possible for those who consider the science of spirit a lot of nonsense. It is described there from a philosophical viewpoint. The scientist of spirit adds that what is described there as moral fantasy is a part of what lives in the human organization as unconscious imagination and which then emerges in moral action.

I said at that time that the interaction of moral fantasy and intuitive thinking is responsible for action on the part of the human being based on free will. Today I would add: What is the thinking? It is our inspiration here, that belongs to the sphere of pre-earthly existence. When does it become manifest?—It becomes manifest when we are able to work out an action that is so dear to us that it has nothing to do with our instincts and inclinations, that it is as dear to us as a person whom we really love because we have come to recognize and respect his inmost being. When we perform an action out of love—that is, not out of egoism, nor on the basis of our fluctuating mental images or ideas, but out of insight into the inner necessity of the action—then we give ourselves over to intuitive actions, we are then inspired by the life before birth.

But where does the power to do this come from?—It is the power that takes us into the spiritual world after death. This goes on in us subconsciously. As moral action freely unfolds, there lights up what lies before birth or conception. This unites with what enters into the spiritual world after death. During our life between birth and death we already carry out actions where what lies before birth plays a part in us in our intuitive thinking, that flows as inspiration into our lives. What lies beyond death is really not connected with us at all, but is nevertheless carried out by us. It is characterized by being performed out of love: this is the truly free action. We therefore have to say that what enters us as inspiration by way of our intuitive thinking, has no connection with our body. And what works imaginatively has no significance for the moment, but only after death. These two factors, having nothing to do with the body, are the real forces that work in the true, free act of will in the human being. The profound mystery is that when we investigate the free will we find that nothing mortal in the human being carries out the actions, but we find that free actions are carried out by the immortal part of man.

The problems of free will and of immortality are intimately connected because the only truly free actions are those in which the super-sensible plays a part, which is not yet bound to the body, which the human being has evolved in the spiritual world before he bears a body, and in which this super-sensible is joined to what results from over evolution, which has as yet no significance for our present development, but which will have significance after death, and which shines into those actions that are carried out apart from us. This is why I said in The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity that one cannot put the question: Is the human being free or unfree?—For this always leads to the wrong answers. It is not a question of “either—or,” but of “both—and.”

The human being performs many actions arising out of the needs of his body, out of the interplay of mental images rising up out of the body as a result of the impulses of the body. But he always has the ideal of performing actions where he can say: What is to happen here is so free that I do not come into it; it is as free of me as the human being whom I love; it only happens because I realize that it should happen. Our whole human thinking is set in this direction, and it gradually seeks to infiltrate into our unfree action. The human being extricates himself from unfree actions by evolving increasingly toward his true self, especially in what he does and wills, where the spheres of before birth and after death shine into his willing. He evolves toward freedom within the sphere of unfreedom; he is on the way to becoming increasingly free. This is not a question of “either—or” but of action. Those who put the question in this way cannot possibly find an answer to the problem of freedom. On the contrary, it is a question of “both—and.” The human being is free in his actions inasmuch as the immortal soul is revealed to him underlying the life of the physical body. What he does is released by his thoughts, flowing by way of love into deeds, and his freedom will be measured by the extent to which this happens.

In conclusion today I would simply like to show how the problems of immortality and free will illumine each other, and how they are so closely connected with each other. Free will can only be the possession of an immortal being. No one can be an adherent of free will without recognizing man's immortality at the same time. And those who do recognize man's immortality know that the human being is on the path of evolution toward freedom.

The kind of considerations we have discussed today, in which the science of spirit enables us to approach the most important questions that then point to the necessity of selfless self-knowledge, are normally fraught with prejudices. For they indeed make great demands upon us. We have to take ourselves rigorously in hand if we are to succeed in persevering with the whole power of our souls in what I have called imaginative ideas. It is something we have yet to learn. It would be much more comfortable if we could answer the most profound questions and mysteries of human life without all this.

What leads people today to regard the science of spirit as nonsensical and irrelevant? It is because they are unconsciously afraid of the powers that have to be developed in order to grasp the spirit in a completely free kind of experience of the spirit. For courage is necessary for such investigation, courage to believe that we do not immediately fall into an abyss of nothingness when we are dependent upon our own powers for producing a particular kind of experience which we ourselves place before our souls. It is certainly easier to want to penetrate the mysteries of life with outer means than to be told that the soul needs an inner strengthening far beyond anything found in ordinary life. It is therefore largely a matter of comfort and fear that leads to opposition to the science of spirit. Such things, however, will gradually be overcome by a humanity that is increasingly thirsting for truth.

I would like to close today's lecture by quoting, in a somewhat modified form, the words of a German thinker. The science of spirit is slandered by many people today because it is not properly understood and recognized, because people do not see how necessary it is for human life. But if we really contemplate the course of human evolution, we are bound to say that however overbearing the opposition, the misunderstandings, the slanders that oppose the truth, the truth will find its own way through the narrowest cracks in the rocks of human evolution, however great the pressure from the rocks may be. The truth we have been talking about today—that on the one hand we recognize the needs of present day humanity, existing in the subconscious, and that on the other we look into the spiritual world and see how it reveals itself to us on the path from imagination to intuition—this is the kind of truth that must be seen by the scientist of spirit as the kind that will find its way through, however great the weight of opposition and slander that rests upon it. For the truth winds its way against obstacles through the tiniest cracks in the rock of human evolution, and is bound to triumph in the end.

Das Wesen Der Anthroposophie. (The Nature of Anthroposophy. Lecture given at Elberfeld, Germany, January 24, 1922)

Goethe's observation of human beings and of humanity led him to the following short but comprehensive and significant conclusion that “the most valuable thing about history is the enthusiasm it stimulates.”

We may well be surprised at such a view of historical knowledge, for Goethe was, after all, a person who had deep insight into human life, and yet what he seems to be saying is that it is not the knowledge we acquire about the course of human history that is important, but rather the feelings and enthusiasm that history stimulates. However, the more we feel impelled to go into what is called historical knowledge, the more Goethe's judgment seems to be confirmed. We only need remember that when the catastrophic events began in which the whole of humanity is now embroiled, a number of people—and there were quite a few of them—believed from their reading of history and especially their picture of economic and other material causes in world history, that the war could last four or six months at the most. We have to admit that this conclusion was really not at all stupid. Nor, judging by the historical standards that humanity is accustomed to apply to its own historical evolution, was it in any way shortsighted. And yet, despite this—was this conclusion really founded on what was actually happening?

Let us take as another example what happened to a not insignificant person. It is true that it took place a long time ago, but it can still be mentioned. It concerns a professor of history at a university. This person gave a brilliant inaugural lecture in which he said that a study of the historical evolution of humanity suggested that the European countries would in future form a more or less united family in which there could be all sorts of differences but in which it would become impossible for the various peoples, the members of this great family, to cut each other to pieces. This judgment, the reality of which can hardly be doubted, was made on the basis of historical observation by Friedrich Schiller when he took up his professorship at the University of Jena in 1789. One has the impression that Schiller believed he could arrive at conclusions in his study of history that in a sense rise to a kind of prophecy. Immediately after Schiller had come to this conclusion there followed the events of the French Revolution and all that it brought with it. And if we take everything that has happened up to the present day we find that what even this gifted man had learned from his study of history has been completely disproved by the facts in the most terrible way. We could add hundreds and hundreds of similar examples.

This makes it imperative to take a closer look at what we normally call history and to see how far it really enables us to form judgments about what is going on around us. In such times as ours this is particularly important. History should teach us to recognize what each day brings—and today each day brings a very great deal. Catastrophic events breaking over the whole earth demand judgment from us. We must know what to think of the American West and how it can evolve in the future, and of the Asiatic East. How can we do this if history is regarded in the way we have just touched upon?

Let us take one or two examples by way of introduction to see how a view of history is attained from all the various things that happen in human life. I would like to characterize different aspects of this, starting from the various assumptions that lie close at hand.

At the beginning of our present century, when the events we are now witnessing were being prepared, it happened by what we normally call chance that two men made an historical, all embracing judgment about their country. It is most interesting to study the particular way in which these two looked at history. Although they lived not so far from each other, their two nations are quite different in character. The one is the German historian, Karl Lamprecht, who in 1904 at the invitation of Columbia University in America gave his American listeners his comprehensive judgment about the history of the German nation. The other is Wilson, who at about the same time gave a lecture in which he presented his comprehensive judgment about the American nation. It is interesting to compare these two, and it would be even more valuable to take a third, but the time is too short.—For instance, I can only recommend you to compare what I am saying today with a wonderful statement of Rabindranath Tagore about the spirit of Jesus. If the time allowed us to compare all three we would have a wonderful picture of literary, historical study.

I shall begin with the rather odd views that Karl Lamprecht, the German historian, came to about his own German nation. He has got beyond the merely factual kind of historical observation pursued by Ranke and others, for he sets out to study the inner course of human evolution. He seeks the motivating forces and directs his view to the example of his own nation. I can only give a brief picture of the views that Karl Lamprecht came to, and which he then presented in these lectures at Columbia University. He said that German history can be divided into clearly differentiated epochs according to the inner character of human deeds, of the constitution of the human soul, of the way in which human beings work.

We can go back to a period which came to an end in about the third century A.D. and we find that everything that happened in the German nation at that time arose out of a kind of activity of the imagination which felt itself stimulated to think in symbols and images. Even revered figures and personalities are often presented to the people in images and revered in images. Then there comes a time which is sharply differentiated from this. Whereas in the earlier period it is clear that the imaginative conception of life, which, according to Lamprecht's view, lies at the root of history, leads to the fact that social conditions are organized in a military structure, we see that from the 4th or 5th century to the 11th century it is superseded by a quite different way of thinking and quite different inner motives. In place of the merely comradely sort of life we find a kind of life that is more like a society. And in place of a living in images that always sees images for the things that happen, we have now, thinks Lamprecht, the concept of type. The single, eminent personality is regarded as a type of the times and revered, portrayed and characterized as such from all sides, even in the primitive art that has come down to us.

Then follows a relatively short period, from the 12th to the middle of the 15th century. Lamprecht characterizes this as arising out of all the impulses that were at work when power based on land and obedience evolved out of the old estates and the conditions on them, or being concerned with the way in which the constitution of the soul came to expression in art, with the way men were respected, with the way they acted, and finally with the way knighthood and town life evolved. Lamprecht characterizes it as the time of the conventional conception of life, for at that time life was based on conventions, agreements and a generally fixed way of doing things. For Lamprecht there is then an important break in the historical evolution of the German people which happens at around the middle of the 15th century. He believes that the individual personality that begins to break through for the first time, for the conventional relationships between human beings which are governed by considerations going beyond the merely individual, are no longer uppermost. The individual then enters decisively into historical evolution. Lamprecht shows quite justifiably how something very important begins at this time. Until then, human beings had lived an existence primarily based on deeds, on actions, founded on impulses of the will which arose out of the deepest recesses of the soul, whereas from the middle of the 15th century onward it is the intellect, the understanding, that belongs to the individual personality, that becomes the decisive factor. This lasts until the middle of the 18th century.

What then follows we should call a higher stage of individualism. Lamprecht differentiates it from the earlier period by saying that the age of subjectivism then begins in which a higher kind of understanding becomes particularly significant for human evolution. Lamprecht describes various aspects of this evolution from this viewpoint quite well. He shows, for instance, how the more rudimentary impulses of earlier centuries which prevailed in the relations of the various peoples to each other, turn into a kind of diplomacy based solely on the understanding and intellect. He gives many such examples from many aspects of life. We are still in this age of subjectivism.

From this brief description I have given you can see how an historian tries to explain what happens in history in terms of the nature and evolution of the human being himself. As we shall see in a moment, what Lamprecht put forward is intimately connected with the German way of looking at things. We can see that it is an attempt to use every possible means that are available for reaching a reality which has soul-spirit factors, for penetrating into the real nature of history. But if we then investigate how Lamprecht applies the ideas outlined in his lectures to his detailed description of history, we cannot help feeling bitter disappointment. This is because Lamprecht's views of history never convince us that the efforts he makes in observing certain inner powers of the human soul lead to any sort of convincing result. It is a struggle for a new view of history, but nowhere would we stop and say: Now we can, for instance, really see the inner reasons why the German people have evolved to what they are today. And this question constantly comes to mind when we study Lamprecht's view of history.

Let me compare it with Wilson's view of his own American people. It is something very remarkable, and in order not to be misunderstood I would point out that I am anything but an admirer of Woodrow Wilson. The actual fact of the matter will become clear in further lectures. For the moment I would only mention that my attitude toward Wilson has not arisen during the last six years, for already before the war I expressed my rejection of his approach in a lecture cycle given in Helsingfors in 1913 at a time when many in this country rejected the views expressed in his book, “Only Literature,” which was translated into German, and in his dissertations on freedom—as there were also many in Germany who were deceived and thought he was a great man for reasons which I will not go into now. It is neither chauvinism, that has grown to such proportions today, nor anything other than an entirely objective study of Wilson's approach that leads me to say what I have to say about him.

I have been particularly interested by this parallel phenomenon of Wilson speaking in his lectures about the American people. It is particularly important from one viewpoint because Wilson, when it comes to discovering the virtual factor in viewing a limited phenomenon of historical evolution and in what is needed in order to have some understanding of it, really hits the nail on the head. In this lecture Wilson says that those who live in the east, the New Englanders, do not look at the American people in the right way. And he also describes the quite wrong attitude taken by those living in the south. For he derives the nature of the American and his historical evolution from the events that took place in the 19th century in the center between the west and the east of the North American states when all sorts of people mixed with each other.—Out of their way of life there then arose what Wilson calls the American nation.

It is interesting to see how he succeeds in showing that American history really only begins when those who lived in the east looked toward the west and began to colonize it. Dutch, German, English, French and so on, all came together and formed something that did not come into being through the work of politicians but through those who tilled the land and tended the forests. And then he describes how the three most important political questions of America find their solution under the influence of these conditions. I cannot go into details but would like all the same to state what I think is the important point: the most important questions were those of the attitude of the state toward property, of tariffs and of slavery. All these arose under the influence of these conditions. As far as these conditions are concerned his view of history hits the nail on the head. And there are also further lectures in addition to this one where he speaks about history in general, where he gives his opinion as to how history ought to be studied. And something quite remarkable can happen to anyone viewing things as a whole.

I must say that I find Woodrow Wilson as a thinker and scientist an extraordinarily unsympathetic personality. On the other hand, in another person who has perhaps been too little recognized. I find an extraordinarily sympathetic personality, and this is Hermann Grimm, who applied his historical approach primarily to art, in which, however, his historical ideas are to be found. I have it from him personally because he himself described it to me on many occasions. It lived in him in a wonderfully comprehensive way. On one hand I read in “Only Literature” some of the things that Wilson laid down. On the other, I read what Hermann Grimm said about how history should be studied and how he looked at the evolution of humanity in the light of history. And one comes to the remarkable conclusion that in reading Wilson and Grimm a sentence of Grimm could often be transposed word for word into Wilson's work, and vice-versa. Sometimes there are quite short paragraphs that, from a superficial viewpoint could belong quite well to either of them. Only try to acquire the necessary knowledge, which is quite easy to do in this subject, and you will see the truth of what I say.

How are we to understand this? There is, after all, an enormous difference between these two people and the way they look at history.—There is nothing better than such an example for showing what has to be learned at the present time: that the literal content of a matter is not the whole matter! This is something our age has got to learn, but finds so difficult to learn. For however much our age imagines it lives in reality, it really loves the abstract and theoretical. When they find a few sentences the same with two different authors people are inclined to say that it is the same! The content, the purely literal content, is sometimes quite remote from the actual reality, and however odd this may sound it is proved by this example. For what are we dealing with here? Only the science of spirit can enlighten us, and only the science of spirit can detect the difference between the American historical approach of Woodrow Wilson and that of Karl Lamprecht. The abstract minds of the present time are completely taken in by what Woodrow Wilson says. Now it is not so, but before the war they were taken in. For they do not see the real point. Wilson says many excellent things. But compare them with what Hermann Grimm says, with what Karl Lamprecht says, who perhaps even make great mistakes. What Grimm and Lamprecht say, even when it sounds the same as what Wilson says, is achieved in wrestling with the matter in their souls; it always has the mark of having been permeated by the personality.

For one who is able to see through such things, Wilson's words betray the fact that the personality is possessed by its views. Of course one would have to see the details of the content of his words in the spirit in which it lives in him. Nevertheless, we can see that these things rise up from the unconscious depths of the soul and are not worked over personally by the soul, but simply push through from below. This personality is possessed by what lives below the consciousness.

I certainly do not pass this judgment lightly for I am quite aware that it has far reaching consequences. But I am also aware that it has been arrived at objectively. This is the great difference—on the one hand a personal struggle with truth, on the other a statement of something by which one is merely possessed, where one is more or less an outward medium for something rather indefinite. In this respect Wilson provides a brilliant characterization of his people, one that could hardly be bettered. I must say that some of the statements he makes about the Americans hit home. He says that it is because the American nation has come into being on the basis of work on the land and in the forests that the people have evolved what characterizes them today—the mobility of the eyes, the tendency suddenly to take up bold and adventurous ideas and the tendency to think up plans that can be realized anywhere without much feeling for one's home.

Mobility of the eyes, tendency toward bold, adventurous ideas—these are characteristic of a situation where there is no direct personal struggle, no conscious struggle with the things that are going on, but of a situation where something unconscious plays a part, where the human being is really only more or less a mediator for what is at work. Wilson could offer no greater proof of what he described as American than the history he himself wrote.

I only wanted to show by way of introduction how our view of history is dependent upon the sort of people we are, and how even today historical observation is still largely dependent upon this. I wanted to show how a study of the writing of history itself should enlighten us as to the real nature of the situation.

Now, for example, what is Karl Lamprecht's intention, for he is certainly not possessed by his ideas but, struggles personally for his ideas of history? He wants to introduce a science of soul into history. He wants to understand the historical evolution of humanity on the basis of soul impulses. He is seeking a science of soul applicable to his own times. What does he find? He looks for it in the so called psychologists, in those who investigate the soul. In these psychologists he honestly tried to find something their souls experience within themselves, something that he could then apply to his historical studies. But precisely this made him unsure, and resulted in the fact that there is nothing in his way of looking at history that can offer any convincing satisfaction. Why is this? Because what nowadays is officially pursued as psychology hardly penetrates into the true self, into the real inner soul being of man.

Now the inner soul life of man comes to expression in a quite different way when one is confronted by another person and has to act with him in this situation. And it is on this basis that the historical evolution of humanity proceeds. What proceeds there cannot be viewed in the way that historical research of the present time views it. What has modern historical research grown accustomed to? What has Karl Lamprecht found in the psychologists that can help historical research? He found what has evolved on the pattern of scientific method. And in the 19th century historical research was drawn more and more into a sphere where history is regarded in the same way as nature. The same method of acquiring knowledge, the same kind of knowledge, the same kind of judgment that are used to observe and understand the phenomena of nature were applied to the historical evolution of humanity. Karl Lamprecht sees something significant in applying to his method of looking at history what had led to sure results in natural science.

In this respect too, one can say out of an historical instinct, Hermann Grimm made an excellent observation when he gave his opinion of the famous historian Gibbon. Gibbon, who wrote a history of the decline of the Roman Empire, is an historian who really carries out in exemplary fashion the kind of method suited to studying nature, only he has applied it to history. What really happened here? Hermann Grimm observed quite correctly. Gibbon was a very shrewd, scientific observer of history, but he described all the forces, which he did excellently for the first Christian centuries, all the forces which tend toward decay, which led to the fall of the Roman Empire, which brought to an end the evolution which had been in progress for a long time. Grimm rightly reproaches Gibbon with the fact that something quite different was also happening in the centuries when the Roman Empire was declining, something positive, for the forces connected to the birth of Christianity were entering into historical evolution. These are the forces of progressive evolution, the forces which existed positively alongside the negative forces of decay. They are simply missing from Gibbon's history.

Herman Grimm came to this important observation out of his historical instinct. He did not know the basis for it, for it is only with the science of spirit that we can get to the bottom of such things—the science of spirit whose method works with forces that otherwise slumber in the soul and which will be developed thus enabling the human being really to see into the spiritual. This science of spirit discovers that we cannot grasp the progressive forces of historical evolution bearing the future if we use only the form of knowledge that happens to be excellent for natural science.

What happens when we apply to historical evolution the method that is right for natural science? We find the forces of decay. We find the part of life that becomes dead in historical evolution, in the social life of humanity. If we apply only what our understanding, our ordinary consciousness can grasp, then we find ourselves restricted to studying the impulses of decay. The impulses of growth, of forward evolution, that carry historical evolution in a positive sense, elude this kind of observation. They also elude this kind of observation when we are confronted by real life and wish to take hold of it.

It is shocking that one must say such things, but the present time must learn to grasp things as they really are. Taking care to observe what happens and not to sleepwalk through reality, we should try to get together a parliament or something similar where only people intellectually educated according to the scientific pattern have to vote on what should happen both in social life and in life as a whole; we should create a parliament of people who have fashioned their intellect according to scientific method and let no one else in except those who are fully educated in these things, and you can be quite sure that these people will come to decisions which will very quickly lead the community into decline in every possible sphere. For their way of thinking can be applied only to the forces of decline and decay. It can observe only the declining forces in human evolution. The forces of growth are such that they cannot be comprehended by the powers of our ordinary consciousness. And here I must come back to something that I indicated here several months ago in a lecture about how the unconscious comes to be revealed.

Looked at superficially, this human soul life, in fact human life as a whole, proceeds in alternating states of waking and sleeping. Because we are naturally all very industrious, we are awake two thirds of our lives and are asleep one third. These conditions alternate. But this is not absolutely correct, for what we call sleeping and dreaming also extends to a large extent into our waking life. Our waking life is completely awake only in part. Beneath the surface of our waking life is something that sleeps, even when we are awake. A very significant man, Friedrich Theodor Vischer, had a kind of instinctive feeling for this when he pointed out how closely our feeling life and our passions are related to our dream life. Those who are really able to investigate and observe such things discover that what we experience as our feelings are conscious in us in a quite different way from our perceptions and mental images. For, in fact, we are only really awake in the latter. Our feelings shine through out of the unconscious spheres of the soul just as dreams do. We are not more strongly conscious of our feelings than we are of our dreams; we do not know them as they really are, but only observe their reflection in the sphere of consciousness. We raise our feelings into the waking condition by having them before our minds. We dream the whole day by allowing our souls to be permeated by feelings, and we are asleep inasmuch as we have will impulses and go through the world with such impulses, the motive you know as coming from your will impulses. You know what it is that as perception stimulates the will. How what you want comes about, how your mental images lead to movement in your limbs and hands,—all this proceeds in a sleeping state. We sleep and dream beneath the surface of our normal consciousness.

Having learned to look at the human being in this way, if we then learn to see history as it really is, we become aware of all those actions and impulses at work in the historical evolution of humanity, which are not forces of decay. They come to be recognized as something which the whole of humanity in living together dreams and sleeps. However odd and paradoxical it may sound this will become a most important truth once more, without which there can be no satisfaction in historical research—that the forces carrying humanity forward in its historical evolution do not belong to the normal forces, we use in natural science, for these impulses in history in no way proceed from our ordinary waking consciousness, but proceed from our dreaming and sleeping. This is not a comparison or picture but something real in the deepest sense.

This is why in earlier times, when people were still connected with the life of the spirit in their soul life, even if only unconsciously, they sought their information about social life and historical evolution from a different source than what we call history today. They sought their knowledge in myths, sagas, pictures. And they knew more about the impulses to be found in their own people than can be discovered today purely by means of the understanding that is confined to our ordinary consciousness, and that has provided such magnificent results in science. That is where it belongs.

Now Karl Lamprecht quite rightly observed that a new age began in the middle of the 15th century. But he was not able to make use of this fact. He said that the individual human being then began to be significant, to become intellectual. History really only begins in this age. At first it is studied according to the pattern of science. Of course, we cannot return to the old ways, but the impulses which lie at the root of historical evolution are subconscious.

When a person is possessed by something in the subconscious working in his soul, then something bursts through from the subconscious, as with Wilson, resulting in a brilliant and appropriate observation. But this makes it all the more difficult for someone who is called to be an individuality, an individual soul, to struggle for the truth. It is therefore necessary, especially in this intellectual age, in order to understand social, historical and moral life that something else emerge that can see into the part of the human being that cannot be grasped by our ordinary consciousness, that can see into the part where our ordinary consciousness no longer operates, where we dream and sleep away our normal life.

I have previously described this as imaginative knowledge, inspired knowledge and intuitive knowledge.—This is what looks into the spiritual world, and what can look below the threshold of our consciousness, where the real, true spirit works. The real nature of history, that humanity normally only dreams and sleeps through, can only be called forth if history is studied with the help of imagination and inspiration. In other words, because the real course of history is something that proceeds in the subconscious and does not reveal itself to our ordinary consciousness, it is imperative to apply what I have called the spiritual scientific method,—imagination, inspiration and intuition—to history, to the social, moral and legal life of humanity if we wish to come to know them as they are fundamentally. These facets of reality which first appear before the soul in pictures, in imaginations, must be called forth from the depths of historical evolution. These imaginations must then inspire. Then we shall come upon what is really at work in historical evolution. Attempts in the past such as those of Karl Lamprecht can occasionally come about through instinct, but it can only become truly spiritually enlightened knowledge when history is deepened by the science of spirit.

Now I do not wish to omit contrasting what today is called history with a few historical findings of the science of spirit. I would like to take as my starting point the fact that Karl Lamprecht instinctively divined something I have already mentioned—that a new age arose out of the old around the middle of the 15th century.

If we look with the eye of the seer—if we look with our perceptive consciousness into history, we do in fact find that there is an important turning point that begins roughly about the beginning of the 15th century. Everything that Karl Lamprecht says about subjectivism and the type is of lesser importance than this. Something begins at the turn of the 15th century that is not sufficiently recognized, that brings about a significant and tremendous change in the whole of human life, and which comes to expression most typically in the life of Central Europe. If we go back to the time before this age we find that the configuration, the structure of the human being and his actions are characterized by the fact that his understanding still operates in an instinctive way. In the science of spirit we therefore distinguish the more instinctive rational soul, where cleverness itself is still instinctive. This is superseded around the middle of the 15th century, and not according to the comfortable notion that nature makes no leaps, but is superseded by decided a leap, by a quite different configuration of the human soul. What in the science of spirit we call the consciousness soul which grasps everything through the consciousness, now becomes typical for humanity. And we can grasp what has happened since that time when we recognize that a whole age can be understood only by taking into consideration how this instinctive understanding, this rational soul, began to operate in more or less the same way in the 7th or 8th century B.C., how this understanding molded Greek history, Roman history, Roman law, Roman politics. Thus everything can be grasped only in the light of this instinctive kind of understanding. And we can comprehend what begins to happen around the middle of the 15th century, what is suddenly different in what takes place, only if we know that at that time the consciousness soul began to work.

The consciousness soul has a quite different relationship to reality, for it does not work instinctively from within, but makes the human being think and consider, drawing conclusions and proceeding purely intellectually. It is in this age that we live today. And what we have to study, and what can be observed in every detail, is what this consciousness soul brings to the very foundations of the soul. For the soul life comes to expression quite differently in such people as the Italian or Spanish who still have much that belongs to an older heritage, from such people as the British who have been particularly attracted to the material aspects of life by their geographical situation in evolving the consciousness soul. It is different again in Eastern Europe where there is no natural tendency for the consciousness soul to evolve, where today the evolution of the consciousness soul is slept through. And it is only in the age that will follow this present age of the consciousness soul that those who today are the Russian people will be ready to evolve their particular kind of soul which at the moment cannot be observed at all with the ordinary senses in the people who live in the east of Europe. Today it is imperative to acquire a deeper understanding for what is happening all over the earth. And also a deeper understanding is needed for what is taking place in the individual human being, inasmuch as he belongs to the great dream of history that can be understood only when we can call forth something from the dreaming human soul that cannot be approached with our normal observation: that from the 7th, 8th century until the 14th, 15th century instinctive willing and understanding evolved, and that a great change then comes about, under whose influence we now stand. This is one example.

I will cite another example. At a place such as this, where I have spoken for so many years, I will not shrink from describing the findings of the science of spirit quite concretely for the simple reason that we would not make any progress with the science of spirit if we did not gradually proceed to a description of concrete events.

Normally history draws only upon ordinary observation and ordinary documents for its study of earlier epochs. As I have said previously, the spiritual scientific method is based upon a particular development of powers slumbering in the human soul. It was explained how the soul is led to perceive spheres of life that never manifest themselves in the soul in normal life. Then was shown how the soul can free itself from the body, how it can then pursue knowledge independently of the body. Then the soul begins to utilize forces which, it is true, are present in normal life, but which remain in a slumbering state in the subconscious, the unconscious. Man's real life cannot be grasped by our ordinary powers of knowledge.

Let us take an ordinary phenomenon, but one which leads us deeply into the mysteries of human life, even of ordinary, everyday life. Let us take the fact that we can learn something by heart. In this way we can study how the human memory behaves. Now people usually believe that we master a mental image of what we take in, that we then have it in our consciousness and after a time it rises up again out of consciousness. This superstition is taught by countless psychologists. This is supposed to be science, this superstition that the ideas that we take in wander down into some indefinite sphere, wander about in the unconscious part of the soul, and that when need them they rise up again and appear as memory images. Such a view can only come about because no one has learned how to observe the real life of the soul. In fact, what happens is quite different. At the time we take in a mental image there is in our consciousness only the fact of this taking in. Parallel with this activity is another of quite a different nature that remains unconscious, that slips into the human organization and is responsible for something happening that is quite different from the formation of the mental image. This activity that takes place parallel with the formation of the image is unconscious. The memory is developed unconsciously. Now we have taken in new images. The parallel activity has functioned.

You can get a rough idea of what it is like—the time is too short to provide further proof—by remembering what it is like yourselves. Think of all the various other things you have had to do when learning a poem by heart or when trying to remember things for exams when you really have to cram,—think of all the things you have to do apart from taking in the image in order that the thing sticks! With our consciousness we try to support what happens unconsciously. There is really a parallel activity, and when people strike their foreheads when cramming themselves with what they have to remember, it is all a support for this unconscious activity. The mental image that we take in does not remain; it is temporary. What exists down below and is shaped and prepared there is something that we can perceive inwardly just as we can perceive things outwardly—the mental image is formed anew, it is something different from the original one.

Every time we use our memory the mental image has to be formed anew according to the inner copy. This is the true state of affairs. But the activity on which the memory rests, remains unconscious. Supposing it is drawn up into the consciousness so that we work in it and do consciously what otherwise takes place subconsciously in the parallel activity of forming images,—what have we then? It is the same power that is used when we apply imaginative knowledge. It forms the organism. We penetrate below the thresh-hold of consciousness, we penetrate to a sphere that we constantly exercise in life, but which remains unconscious. And we can always penetrate even deeper. The money then expands. We then acquire the possibility—and here I have to make a rather big leap because I have still to describe further findings—of following historical evolution from a purely spiritual viewpoint and of acquiring insight into the meaning and into the forces existing over the whole earth that carry the evolution of humanity. A number of laws are then revealed that go far beyond that ordinary observation can provide, but which for the first time raise what the human being sleeps and dreams through in his normal historical evolution, into consciousness.

The science of spirit, working with imagination, inspiration and intuition, can reach further back through the expansion of our memory into the memory of humanity so that we are really able to perceive what humanity has experienced. This can come about through the continuation of our own memory. It is true that it is much more difficult to do this than any other kind of scientific work—because we are ourselves deeply involved in it. Then we are able to reach back into earlier epochs of human evolution than the one I have just mentioned, which began in the 7th, 8th century B.C. and continued until the 15th century. We reach back into earlier times than this, into the time which followed what geology calls the ice age and by many geologists is called the flood. We must think of this as having taken place earlier than is normally believed—we go back thousands of years. What we come to then is not an ape-like humanity—this is a scientific superstition—but to a humanity whose soul constitution is quite different to today's. Allow me for once to risk describing in public a finding of the science of spirit. One must approach the science of the spirit without bias if one is not to regard its findings as merely fantastic. We reach back into an ancient epoch of earth evolution, about which we may say the following:

If we look at a human being and observe how he evolves, we see that what has to do with his bodily development takes place in the first years of childhood and in the later years of childhood up to puberty. And if we look still further we note that what develops in our souls goes hand in hand with our bodily development, right into the twenties. But then it stops. Our soul development no longer participates in this bodily development as it does with a child at the change of teeth, in growing and at puberty. The body and the soul then go their own separate ways. This is typical of our development from between the 25th and 30th years until old age—our souls no longer participate in what is developing in the body.

This was quite different in the first age that I will now describe, and which reaches back thousands of years. At that time the soul remained connected with the development taking place in the body until old age. The soul participated in this development right into the fifties and in the decline of the body in a way that today only happens in our childhood years. Because of this, the human being was able to experience something that he can no longer experience. As a matter of course we no longer experience in our souls the decline of our bodily organism. We are already withdrawn from our bodies. What happens in the soul comes to expression in our cultural life, where the soul is no longer dependent upon the bodily organism. At that time in Asia and India the soul-spirit life remained dependent on the life of the physical body until the fifties. This was quite a different kind of experience.

Then came the next epoch of historical evolution, when the dependence did not last so long, for at that time the soul's participation in the life of the body lasted until the forties. Then there was a further epoch when this participation lasted until the middle of the thirties. Here something quite special happened, which was still experienced by the old Egyptians and Chaldeans. And this was, that because the human being begins to decline in the life of the body after the age of 35, they were still able to experience this decline in their souls. Then this age came to an end, which was followed by the age I have already mentioned: the age of Greece and Rome, the effects of which lasted into the 15th century. In their soul life at that time people still remained more or less participants in the life of the body at least into their thirties. No one believes this today because no one really studies with inner personal interest what has come into being through the evolution of humanity. Since the 14th, 15th centuries the age has begun when the human being participates with his bodily life in the spirit-soul life until the end of the twenties. We no longer experience what the decline of human life is. In Greek and Latin times the beginning of the thirties was experienced within the instinctive understanding. At the present time this participation of the bodily life is concluded at the end of the twenties.

You can see that this is a remarkable law of history! As far as soul experience is concerned the age is progressively reduced, its final experience of the body is connected with an ever younger age. This is one of the most comprehensive and important laws of human evolution. Whereas the individual human being always grows older, humanity—if you now carry what I have just said to its logical conclusion—in its experience of the body, becomes younger. This means that it does not experience growing old as a reflex feeling in the soul; it only experiences its effect. But what the soul actually experienced in earlier times was quite different. It had something which enabled a person to look directly into the spiritual world by means of his instinctive knowledge. This must now be achieved again by humanity, only consciously. We have to learn to look into a sphere that cannot be perceived because today humanity can only experience what the body produces up to the age of 27.

I realize it is probably a bit much to speak about this growing younger of humanity, about the non-participation of the soul-spirit in the life of the body. But it does form the beginning of a true knowledge of history. For this true knowledge of history will be concerned with what is otherwise slept through, and we shall be able to understand properly what happens in history when we are able to appreciate such great, all-embracing laws.

I may be permitted to mention a personal experience. Those who have often heard me speak know that I mention personal experiences only if there is a particular reason to do so. It was because I directed my spiritual investigation to such matters that I came to know about what I have just told you—the growing younger of humanity and the influence on humanity due to the fact that the soul-spirit nature only experiences the life of the body in our younger years. That is how I found out about it. And I am quite convinced that anyone else applying the method of the science of spirit will find a law of history, though not of the kind that I characterized at the beginning of the lecture. And so I asked: How old was humanity then in the Greek age in its participation in the life of the body? At that time it continued until the beginning of the thirties. This was a tremendous change. For it is at this age that the human being enters upon a declining development. And in earlier times when he noticed this decline of the body he was granted a special form of spirituality. We study this spirituality when we study ancient wisdom and learning.

I have said that thinking is connected with a declining development. When the soul shared to a very large extent in the declining development of the body, it evolved a particular wisdom. This wisdom became lost in the age which began in the 7th century B.C. and ended in the 15th century. This age—inasmuch as we are interested in it and are still in it—represents the middle of evolution. If a new impulse had not arisen at that time there would have been the threat of a total break in our spiritual connection to the universe. The impulse came. When studying this growing younger of humanity I certainly did not think about such an impulse. That came later, and it belongs to one of the most shattering findings of the science of spirit.

I could see that the general course of human evolution had brought humanity to a crisis where its connection with the spiritual was threatened. What happened in this crisis?—I first came upon it after having found out about its origin. This is important, and I must single it out as a personal experience. I was shown the significance of the Mystery of Golgotha that occurred just in this age: the new impulse that gave humanity a fresh impetus. The Mystery of Golgotha thus finds its place in the historical evolution of humanity in a wonderful way.

Only for special reasons would I ever break what is expressed in the law that one should not use the name of God in vain. The science of spirit certainly leads to the great religious impulses, but I regard it as a duty to allow religious impulses to be cultivated by those who are called to do so. However, I know that what is achieved by the science of spirit also deepens the religious impulses of the human soul. It is precisely the thoughts presented by the science of spirit that can provide a really Christian view of life. But you cannot get people to accept this. They would only reproach us if they found that we have constantly to speak about the great religious content of evolution in a way that does not please them. They also reproach us if we do not do this because we leave it to them, knowing full well that by occupying ourselves with the science of spirit the religious life will certainly be deepened. For they say that the science of spirit, of course, does not talk about Christianity. These are the misunderstandings which are readily thrust into the battle against the science of spirit. We are reproached for whatever we say. If we do not speak about something because we feel that others are called to do this, we are then misunderstood and told that the science of spirit has no Christianity, or whatever it may be.

As I have said, the fact that this event concerning the whole cosmic connections of the universe happens at one particular moment in the evolution of humanity, belongs to the most shattering things that we can experience, especially since in my case—if you will allow me this personal remark—it was an experience quite unsought for.

I only wanted to indicate to you the beginning of a view of world evolution as seen by the science of spirit.

The forces that seek to penetrate more deeply into history have been divined instinctively, especially in our central European evolution. We only have to ask: How does the individual soul participate in this historical evolution? I have mentioned previously how in looking at thinking on the one hand and at the will on the other, we bring to expression in the overdevelopment of the sexual organism something that leads our spiritual-scientific observation to the eternal in the soul, to that which exists in the spiritual world before birth or conception, and which enters through the gate of death. This also leads to something else. The part of us that unites with our physical organism and that comes down from the spiritual world when we are conceived, when we are born, is intimately related—I have already said this today—to the part of us that operates throughout the whole course of our lives and makes us into complete and living human beings, intimately related to what works out of our souls as memory. If we now grasp not only the fact that the thinking can be conceived as inspiration, but also grasp the element that unites with our bodily organism, that flows out of inspiration and accompanies our memory and our growth, then we find that we not only emerge from a spirit-soul existence before beginning this bodily life, and which is united to what we evolve in life, but that within the part of us that goes through death is contained the desire to enter a human life again after the soul has been through a purely spiritual life, and that within this part of us is to be found not only what inspires us, but forms us, which not only comes from a spirit-soul existence before birth, but comes from previous incarnations upon earth.

Imagination, inspiration and intuition provide us with a true idea of previous lives on earth and a justified prospect of future lives on earth. I can only touch upon this for there is insufficient time for a more detailed description. But when we look at individual human life as it proceeds through repeated existences upon earth, we find something in historical evolution that can be grasped concretely. The human being naturally takes part in the various epochs I have described. He lives through the various cultures of the earth and he bears himself as soul from one epoch to the next, taking with him what he has evolved.

In the present epoch, when the consciousness soul is evolved, the human being unconsciously brings with him what he possesses from the previous epoch in which he once lived, and in which the instinctive soul worked instinctively in the understanding, and he now works upon this. Now we can fully grasp what this dream of history consists of, how human souls that live in each epoch work together and return again and again. This idea arose instinctively in the cultural life of Central Europe. But it has never been developed. The science of spirit is called upon to do this.

The pedants or “very clever people”—and I mention this in inverted commas—say: Of course, Lessing managed some wonderful things, but then he grew old and wrote his Education of the Human Race. If one has the necessary mean attitude, it is easy to be so very clever, much easier than being able to penetrate the mysteries of human life as did Lessing. Lessing achieved something immense. He indicated, if only in somewhat amateur fashion, how inner forces guide the evolution of man and of humanity. He says: There was once a time when human beings were educated in a quite particular way. Then there was a time when people were educated differently. Now is the time when self-education begins.—He had a feeling for the successive epochs, just as Karl Lamprecht had. Lessing had a feeling for even more in that he pointed out that the forces of one epoch are taken over into the following epochs by the human souls constantly reincarnating.

Of course it is easy to object to this by saying that human souls do not remember their previous lives. This is the same as saying that a four year old child cannot do arithmetic, therefore the human being cannot do arithmetic. Memory of earlier lives has first to be gained through the kind of knowledge I have referred to previously. Without this knowledge it is not possible to penetrate the sphere that is dreamed as history. This is something that humanity must grasp, for it is intimately connected with the present evolution of humanity.

Tremendous questions are presented to our souls today. One question is: What is the constitution of the human soul like in the east, in our center and in the west? We possess a science of history which, as we saw at the beginning, has gone quite astray. We need a science of history that can penetrate to those deeper forces of the human soul which bring what otherwise only dreams and sleeps, into our consciousness. When imagination and inspiration reach down into our experience of history that otherwise sleeps, we shall realize what it is that works between man and man in our social existence. Then quite different social laws will come into being from the ones of the past few centuries. What then emerges will be quite equal to the demands of life, the demands of reality. People experience history today in an odd way, and in conclusion I would like to give a few examples of this.

A certain J. H. Lambert was born in a South German city in the 18th century. In the 19th century, roughly in the middle of the forties, a monument was erected to him in that city. On the monument is a celestial globe as a sign that this man penetrated the laws of the heavens, as these things were done in the 18th century. Not much is known about this. He penetrated further than is possible with the Kant-Laplace theory. In the 1840's his native city erected a monument to him. A hundred years earlier his father, after several people had pointed out to him that his fourteen year old son was very talented and should be supported, applied for support. The worthy city gave 40 franks, but on condition that the son take himself off and did not return. A hundred years later—such is the course of history—a monument was erected.

Such things happen again and again. You may remember at the beginning of the war, particularly here in this city, I often had occasion to refer to a most significant thinker who once lived here, Karl Christian Planck. I referred to him at that time and had also spoken of him much earlier in my books. Now we see that people begin to take note of him, but not in the way that I meant. If Planck were alive today in conditions that are quite changed, he would express what he said, even in the 1880's, quite differently. Humanity can make use only of what is ardently experienced of reality, and not of what comes from looking back. Because people believe we need a new impetus, they think that a highly gifted and thoughtful person would say the same things today as he said in the 1880's. We honor the memory of such people if we continue to work in their spirit, and if we ask: How would they speak today if they were to speak out of the great spirit out of which they spoke then?

Today the times demand that we grasp what underlies the evolution of humanity, particularly concerning history. Then we shall not hear judgments like those I quoted at the beginning of the lecture. Nor will vague prophecies be uttered. But history will be described in such a way that we confront reality with feeling, which otherwise is only dissipated in dreams; that we confront reality with deeper forces, that we are equal to the demands made upon us. And the demands of the present time are tremendous.

We must know what is stirring in humanity from east to west, what is coming out in the events of today. We must be equal to this reality that is hammering so dreadfully upon our doors. We must take up the laws of history that are not contained in the laws today, laws that penetrate deeper than the purely intellectual, than the kind of understanding that has produced such great results in science, but which cannot grasp the social, political, historical and moral life of man. Goethe felt this. He not only expressed his impressions of the historical knowledge of his time, but he also expressed something that should come to be. What made an impression upon him was the best thing about history is not its abstract laws but the impulses that penetrate into our feelings and our enthusiasm.

By means of imagination, inspiration and intuition it will be possible to unveil what men sleep through. This will sink down into our feelings and enthusiasm. When reality draws toward us and we can approach reality, inwardly permeated by these impulses, we shall not utter prophetic or vaguely mystical statements, but in future our study of history will result in the fashioning of spiritual laws, not such as it has already, but laws which penetrate the human soul to the point of arousing enthusiasm which is equal to and can tackle the situation as it really is.

Not only is what Goethe said at that time true—what can be said today is also true. For today the following holds good: History must generate enthusiasm for the true, real and complete understanding of reality, for it is the best that can be offered to the life of the soul.

The most valuable aspect of history in the future will be the enthusiasm that it generates in the human soul.

Die Menschenraetsel In Der Philosophie Und In Der Geistesforschung (Anthroposophie). (The Mystery of the Human Being. Lecture given at Zurich, Switzerland, October 9, 1916)

It is often said today that when man's spiritual life is in a confused, chaotic condition and human souls have lost their courage, their confidence, and their hope for the future, then all kinds of occult and mystical endeavors are likely to spring up. And in circles which are not inclined to make exact distinctions, Anthroposophy is often reckoned among such endeavors. This evening's subject, which concerns the nature of Anthroposophy, is intended to show you how little it is justified to confuse anthroposophical research with much else with which it is often confused today. Anthroposophy starts from that scientific seriousness and conscientious exactitude which have been developed particularly in the natural sciences in the course of recent centuries and especially in the nineteenth century. Anthroposophy, however, seeks to develop what can be achieved within certain limits by natural science, up to what can be called the supersensory worlds, up to the comprehension of those fundamental riddles with which the deepest longings of the human soul are concerned, the longing for the comprehension of the eternal in the human soul and of the relation of this soul to the divine, spiritual foundations of existence.

Although Anthroposophy begins from scientific foundations, it had to develop—since it is concerned with these comprehensive problems which concern all human beings—in such a way that it comes to meet the understanding of the simplest human heart, and the practical needs of human souls and spirits at the present time, when there is so much need for inner steadiness and certainty, for strength in action, and for faith in mankind and its destiny. Anthroposophy had to come to meet varied social and religious endeavors in the way that I will describe this evening, although having itself a thoroughly scientific origin. But Anthroposophy must take more seriously than do many who believe that they are standing on the firm basis of present-day scientific research, the possibilities which this research leaves open. Anthroposophy has to contemplate with particular attentiveness what are regarded by some careful thinkers today as the limits of science.

If we use the methods of scientific research, observation of the sense world, experiment, and thought, which combines the results of observation and experiment, and find in this way the laws of nature as we are accustomed to regard them, we easily come to the conviction that this research has its limits. It cannot reach beyond the world of the senses and its laws, and cannot comprehend more of the human being than that part of it which belongs to this sense world as the human physical, bodily nature. It has to accept that it has limits as far as the real value, dignity, and being of man are concerned, and that it cannot penetrate the real soul and spirit of man. Anthroposophy, if it seeks to be taken seriously, has to take conscientious account of these things. It has to see this danger seriously: one may not arbitrarily extend that thinking which has been acquired in natural science, beyond the sense world. It would be arbitrary to do so because this manner of thought has acquired its strength and its training through the use of the senses and at once becomes empty, vague and unsatisfactory if it attempts by itself to penetrate to regions which are beyond the sense world. You know that there are certain philosophical speculations, through which thought by itself attempts to go from the sense-given data to the supersensory. Such thinking, relying upon itself alone, attempts to make all sorts of logical inferences which lead from the temporal to the eternal. But anyone who in an unprejudiced way makes the attempt to satisfy the needs of his soul for a knowledge of the eternal through such logical inferences will soon be dissatisfied, for he will recognize that this thinking, which can observe the beings and phenomena of nature so confidently, must at once lose its confidence when it leaves the realms accessible to the senses. Hence the conflict of different philosophical systems; each chooses according to its subjective peculiarities the way in which it leads beyond the world of the senses and develops its own theory. No harmonious, satisfactory conception of the world can come about in this way. Anthroposophy has to see clearly how an unprejudiced mind must regard such ways of thought, which rely upon themselves alone. Here it sees one danger which must be overcome if the eternal in man and in the universe is to be truly known.

Thus Anthroposophy recognizes the limits set to our knowledge of nature, and it must recognize on the other hand how some more far-reaching minds look elsewhere for the help in answering the great riddles of existence, which natural science cannot give them. They turn to what is called mysticism or inner contemplation, where the soul seeks to turn and to descend into its own depths, and to discover there what cannot be found by science, or in the ordinary consciousness. But he who takes the search for the eternal as seriously as the anthroposophist must do, has to recognize in these other paths the illusions into which such mystics often fall. Anyone who can observe the life of the human soul without prejudice knows the meaning of the human memory in the whole life of the soul. Memories have their origin in the external perceptions of the senses; here we receive our impressions. We call up again the pictures of such impressions from our memories, often years later, and it may then happen that some external sense impression has been received by our soul, perhaps half unconsciously, without being observed with the necessary attentiveness. It has sunk into the furthest depths of the soul, and it comes up again, intentionally or unintentionally, years later. It may not reappear in its original form, but changed in such a way that it will only be recognized by someone with an exact knowledge of the soul's life. What was originally stirred in the soul by an outer impression has been received by all kinds of feelings and impulses of will, received indeed by the organic, bodily constitution; it may arise in the soul years later, entirely changed. He who has taken hold of it may believe that what is really only a transformed sense impression, which has passed through the most varied metamorphoses and has reappeared during mystical self-immersion, is the revelation of something that is eternal and does not originate from the external world of the senses. Anthroposophy has to see how mystics, who look for their revelations in this way, fall into the most grievous illusions; and it has to recognize that such mysticism is a second danger. It has to overcome the dangers which arise both at the limits of our knowledge of nature and at the limits of our own human soul life.

I had to say this first, in order that it can be seen how conscientiously Anthroposophy is alert to all the sources of error which can arise. For I will now describe the ways Anthroposophy itself adopts in order to reach the spiritual, supersensory worlds. I will have to describe much that is paradoxical, much that today is quite unusual.

It is easy to believe, and many people do believe, that Anthroposophy is nothing but a more or less fantastic attempt to acquire knowledge of worlds with which serious scientific research should have nothing to do. Anthroposophy sees clearly, in what ways knowledge about the spiritual is NOT to be achieved and in this way comes to a starting point for genuine research. Having learned about the ways which can lead to illusions and errors, it reaches a real preliminary answer to this question. It can say: With the ordinary powers of knowledge which we have in everyday life, and which are used by our recognized sciences, it is not possible to go further (because of the limits of our knowledge of nature and of mystical self-immersion) than external nature, and what is received by a man from this external nature into the life of his soul. If we are to reach further, we must call on powers in the soul's life which in our ordinary existence are still asleep, and of which man is ordinarily unconscious. Anthroposophy develops such sleeping powers in the soul in order that, when they are awakened, they can achieve knowledge of realms to which our ordinary powers cannot reach. Serious and exact researchers do indeed already speak today about all sorts of abnormal powers of the human soul, or of the human organism, through which they try to show that man is involved in other relationships than those recognized by ordinary biology or physiology. But Anthroposophy is not concerned with such abnormal powers of the soul either. It uses the normal powers of the human soul life, but develops these further. For this one thing is indeed necessary from the first which I would like to call intellectual modesty.

We must be able to say to ourselves: In early childhood we came into the world in a dreamlike condition, and could only use our own limbs very imperfectly, or were quite unable to orientate ourselves in the world. But through education and through life itself, powers which at first only slept in us developed out of the depths of our human constitution. And now that we possess the powers developed by education and by life we must be able to say to ourselves: Within our souls may sleep other powers also which could be unfolded from some starting point that life provides, just as the powers of the child have been developed up to the present time. That this is indeed the case can only be shown in practice, and this is what anthroposophical research does. First we have to consider the whole life of the human soul, in order that we can develop its powers further, from the condition in which we found them in ordinary life.

To begin with, we are concerned with the human power of thought on the one hand, and with the will on the. other. Between these two, between the thinking which has trained itself through the impressions of the senses, and also through the guidance given to us in life—between this power of thought and the power of will through which we can enter life as active human beings, lies the whole realm of our feelings. For anthroposophical research we shall be principally concerned in developing our powers of thought and will up to a higher level than they possess in ordinary life. For knowledge about the eternal cannot be achieved by outer measures, but only through an intimate education of the powers of the soul themselves. But when the power of thought on one side and the power of the will on the other, are developed further than in ordinary life, then the power of feeling, which is the deepest, most essential part of the human soul, will also be in some way transformed, as we shall see. To begin with, we are concerned with the question: How is the power of thought to be prepared for a higher stage of knowledge than that acquired in ordinary life?

Now in my book, “Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment,” and in other books as well, I have described these methods and exercises. Today I will describe the development of the soul's capacities in principle, and must refer you to these books for the details. For an introductory lecture it must be sufficient to point out the fundamental principle, which makes clear the real purpose and essence of the matter.

The power of thought which we have in ordinary life depends upon the external impressions of the senses. These impressions are living ones. Before us stands the world of colors and tones, and from it we receive living impressions. There remain behind in our soul the thoughts formed through these impressions, and we regard these thoughts rightly as shadowy. We know that in ordinary life these thoughts have a lesser degree of intensity for the soul than the impressions of the senses. We know too that the ordinary thoughts connected with sense impressions are in a sense taken more passively by man than are the immediate sense impressions.

Now our first task is to take that very vitality with which the soul experiences the impressions of the senses as a standard for the enhanced and strengthened life of thought which is to be developed in Anthroposophy as an instrument of research. The life of thought is to be enhanced and intensified in the following way. What I have to describe will appear simple, though the science of the spirit as a whole, as it is intended here, is no simpler than research in an observatory, in chemical or physical laboratories, or in a clinic. What I am here describing in principle in a simple way demands in practice, according to a man's capacities, years, months, or weeks. There are many such exercises for the soul. I will choose a few characteristic ones.

First, we must observe how we really stand toward thought in ordinary life. Strange though it sounds, the unprejudiced observer of his own thought should really say: The expression, “I think” is not quite exact. Thought develops in contact with external things; we only become conscious because in a sense we look back on our own physical organism and regard ourselves in a way from outside, that this developing thought is bound to our physical organism. Hence we say, “I think.” For the ordinary consciousness this “I think” is by no means fully justified. Anthroposophical research works in a direction through which it can become fully justified. It takes for example a simple idea or a simple group of ideas, and puts it in the midst of the soul's whole conscious life. The whole conscious life of the soul is concentrated on this one idea or group of ideas. This can be achieved through practice; I have described particular exercises in the books I have mentioned.

These exercises can help one to guide one's attention in such a way that it disregards everything else which otherwise occupies the soul from outside or from within, and by one's own innermost decision, as otherwise happens only with tasks of a mathematical kind, one is exclusively concerned with a simple group of ideas or single idea. But it is best, and should really be so, that an idea of this kind is not taken from one's memory. In memory, all sorts of experiences are engaged in alteration and metamorphoses, as I have already indicated.

Therefore it is good to seek out the ideas upon which attention is to be directed, from a book, or something of the kind, which is quite new to one—like an entirely new sense impression to which the living attention of the soul can be directed, and which has its effects through itself alone. Or one can receive from a person, who has experience in these things, a group of ideas of this kind, in order to have something which is entirely new.

There is no need to fear that in this way another person acquires power over one's soul in an improper manner, for it is not a question of letting this group of ideas have an influence upon one, but of developing the soul's own strength through uttermost attentiveness. The result then is that just as the muscles of an arm can be strengthened by exercise, thinking as a power of the soul can be made stronger and more intensive by being concentrated with the uttermost attentiveness upon a definite group of ideas, and by the repetition of such exercises in a rhythmic sequence. In this way the life of thought itself, without being dependent upon the impressions of the senses, can be made as living and intensive as is otherwise the experience of an external sense impression. Before, we had only pale thoughts, as compared with the living sense impressions; now, through these exercises, which I call meditation or concentration, a thinking is to be developed which gains inner strength until it is just as vivid as are sense impressions.

Here you see at once, that anthroposophical research goes in the opposite direction from that followed in the development of certain pathological conditions. What comes about in visions and hallucinations, through medium-ship, or through suggestion under hypnosis and things of this sort, goes in a diametrically opposite direction from the extension of the normal power of thought in anthroposophical research. If a man develops anything which leads him to hallucinations or visions, through which he becomes susceptible to suggestion, the powers of his soul are diverted in a certain way from the sense impressions and stream down into his physical organism. A man who suffers from hallucinations and visions becomes more dependent upon his physical organism than he is upon external sense impressions.

But the anthroposophical path of knowledge aims at the kind of experience which the soul has with external sense impressions. One who practices meditation and concentration must devote himself by his own individual choice, with the attentiveness he develops by his own decision, to that content which he has placed in the midst of his consciousness. Something comes about in this way which is different in principle from all pathological conditions, which can only be confused with the anthroposophical path through misunderstanding. If a man becomes subject to hallucinations and visions, or if he becomes open to suggestions under hypnosis, his whole personality is submerged in this life of hallucinations and visions. Into this disappears his ordinary consciousness, with its power of healthy human judgment.

The opposite is the case when a kind of higher consciousness is developed through meditation and concentration, carried out in the way I have described. If a man really acquires a power of thought which is enhanced and strengthened in this way, he has indeed higher faculties of soul.

But the ordinary clear-minded human being as he is occupied otherwise in knowledge and the fulfillment of his duties, remains active, side by side with the new, in a sense, second personality. The everyday man stands beside this second personality, who possesses a higher power of knowledge; he stands beside him with the ordinary power of knowledge, actively testing and criticizing. That is a difference in principle, which cannot be emphasized enough, when anthroposophical knowledge is described. And then, when in this way, thinking has been strengthened by meditation and concentration, one becomes able to say at a certain point of development: Now I am really the one who thinks within me; now I have experienced in an increased measure my own I within the world of my thoughts. As I experience myself otherwise in the external life of the senses, I experience myself now in thought itself.

This thinking is transformed, however. It does not appear before the soul's gaze like the ordinary pale thinking which is developed for use in the sense world. It is an abstract thinking no longer; it is experienced as intensively as colors and tones and one feels oneself strongly within it. And at a certain point one knows that one is no longer thinking with the help of the bodily instrument. (For ordinary thought always uses the physical instrument; Anthroposophy acknowledges this completely.) Now thinking has detached itself from the nervous system. This is known through inner experience. One knows when the moment has come in which the soul can live independently in thoughts, which however are no longer abstract, but pictorial.

The soul now really experiences itself for the first time, and at a certain moment, when a man is sufficiently mature, the first result of anthroposophical research appears before the soul's gaze. The entire earthly life appears in a mighty single picture, stretching back from the present moment toward birth. Otherwise this earthly life can be reached by memory, but to begin with it is a subconscious or unconscious stream within the soul. With or without our own decision, a few memory pictures can be raised from time to time from this stream, which goes back into our early childhood; but the stream of memories living in the soul more or less unconsciously is not what is meant by the great picture of our lives described here, through which we have in a single moment the inner being of our human experience before us, insofar as this experience takes place on earth. It is not as if we had particular events before us as they appear in memory; we have what can be contemplated as those impulses, which give us our abilities, that which gives us, from within, our moral powers, and that too which from within guides the powers of our growth and our assimilation. We have before us what I have called in the books I have mentioned the body of formative forces, or if we make use of older names which have always existed for such things, the human etheric body or life body.

This is a second, supersensory organism. It cannot be reached on the paths of ordinary natural science, or on the paths of logical thought alone; one must have developed what I have described as an enhanced power of thought, which is called, in the books I have mentioned, “Imaginative knowledge”—not as something concerned with fantasy, but because this thinking lives in the soul in a pictorial form and is itself knowledge. And so one experiences in addition to the external physical body, with its spatial limits, what I would like to call a time body, which is in constant movement, which can be perceived by the soul all at once, like a mighty picture of our life, and which contains everything that has worked from within upon our form, as far back as we can see in our earthly lives.

This body of formative forces, which is the first element in the higher, supersensory man, cannot be immediately represented in a drawing. Anyone who wished to draw it would have to realize that this is like painting a flash of lightning of which only a single moment can be represented. Anything drawn or painted of the etheric body would be like a flash of lighting, held fast only for a moment of its unceasing movement.

Through this the knowledge has been acquired that man in his inner being does not contain only the result of chemical and physical processes in his physical body; it has been learned in direct perception that man bears within him something akin to the nature of thought, and which can be reached through concentrated and strengthened thought processes. It is the first result of anthroposophical development, that one comes to know in perception this first super-sensory member of man's nature, the body of formative forces, or etheric body.

In order to reach further it is now necessary not only to do exercises of concentration and meditation in the way that has been described. It is necessary to observe that although one can give one's attention to such meditation and concentration by one's own decision with absolute clarity like a mathematician making his calculations, one gradually becomes completely absorbed in the subject of this concentration. It becomes difficult to detach oneself from the object of this uttermost attentiveness. Thus side by side with these exercises in concentration, it is necessary to do others which are entirely different. These have the aim of making possible the dismissal from the soul of all that has been placed before one's consciousness through one's own decision, and upon which one has concentrated. This must be dismissed with exactly the same clarity and conscious choice. By doing for a long time, in rhythmic sequence, such exercises in the rejection of ideas which first have been placed in the center of our consciousness with all our strength, a particular faculty of soul is acquired which has great importance for further research. One becomes able to achieve what I would like to call “an empty consciousness in full wakefulness.”

What is meant by this can become clear when we consider how a man who receives no external impressions, or has impressions that are similar to none at all, because they are monotonous or continually repeated, has his power of attention weakened. Under such conditions a man's consciousness becomes sleepy and dull. To achieve an empty consciousness without regular practice is impossible. It can be done only through practicing first an awareness of strongly intensified thoughts which are then dismissed from consciousness. Our consciousness can then remain so intensive and wakeful that it can retain this wakefulness, even when it has at first no content. This empty consciousness has to be achieved if one wishes to reach beyond the first result of anthroposophical research, the power of perceiving in a single picture the soul's inner being since birth.

If such exercises in the dismissal of ideas have been practiced long enough, and a certain maturity in doing this has been achieved, one will be able to dismiss this whole picture of life, which I have described, after it has been present to the soul. A second stage of higher knowledge is achieved if one can dismiss from consciousness (without letting this consciousness then be filled by external impressions) this life picture, which consists of our entire inner human being as it reveals itself during this earthly life as something constantly mobile forming our body from within. This life picture is our inner, etheric, earthly manhood, our body of formative forces, which is to be dismissed from consciousness.

I have called the first stage by the name “Imaginative knowledge;” it gives us only our subjective inner being in a life picture, as I have described. One must be entirely clear that through this first stage of supersensory knowledge one has only this subjective inner being. Then one will not fall into illusions, and even less into visions or hallucinations. A spiritual researcher in the anthroposophical sense is completely clear about every step of his path of knowledge.

If an empty consciousness is achieved through the dismissal of this life picture, the second state of higher super-sensory knowledge begins. I have called it “Inspiration.” Nothing superstitious or traditional is meant by this, but simply what I myself describe.—A terminology is necessary. When this has happened—when an empty consciousness has arisen through the dismissal of the life picture, the body of formative forces—then there arises in the soul through Inspiration what the soul itself was as a being of pure soul and spirit before birth, or, more precisely, before conception, when it was within a world of soul and spirit. The great moment now comes in such research, where one comes to know in immediate contemplation what is eternal in man's nature.

You see, the one who speaks from anthroposophical points of view cannot point to abstract conceptions which prove through logical inference or in some way that immortality exists. Step by step, he has to show what the soul has to do in intimate inner exercises in order to reach that moment when it can perceive what lives as eternal being within our soul. It can perceive this eternal being in the soul at that moment when the soul united itself through conception with the physical, bodily forces which are derived from parents and grandparents.

You may ask: When through Inspiration something of soul and spirit can be perceived, how does one know that this is the spiritual entity of the soul before conception? I can only explain through a comparison what is experienced directly at this point: Anyone who remembers an earthly event has perhaps a picture of what he experienced ten years ago. The content of this picture tells him that he does not have something before his mind which is directly aroused by an event of the present. He knows that the content of the picture directs him to something which happened ten years earlier. What now is experienced through inspired consciousness shows through its own content that it is something utterly different from what is present in the physical, sensory nature, where the soul is within the body. Time itself is part of the experience, as with the memory of earthly events. The impression itself reveals that we are concerned with the life before birth, with the experience through which the soul passed in a pure world of soul and spirit, before it has entered through the mother's body into the physical, sensory nature, which clothes it during earthly life.

After this stage of inspired knowledge has been achieved, and the question of immortality opens out toward a certain solution in one direction, in the direction of unborn-ness,—through other exercises which again have the character of knowledge, the other direction of the problem of immortality can be pursued. This can only happen through certain exercises of the will. Again, you will find exact details in the books I have mentioned, but here I will describe the matter in principle.

Man's will does not think; it does not resemble ordinary thought. Ordinary thought is aroused through external impressions, while man's will originates from within his organism. But in ordinary life we experience what this will is, only in a peculiar way. Take the simplest decision of the will, for example, the movement of the arm or hand, which is carried out because of an impulse of will. What of this impulse of will is really present in consciousness? Ordinarily this is not considered. But methodical research must have a firm starting point. At first we have the thought: we intend to raise and move the arm or hand. How this thought then dives down into our organism, how it stimulates the muscles and takes holds of the bones, how will makes itself effective within our organism, is completely unknown to the ordinary consciousness. Only later through an external impression, with which he can connect a thought, is he aware of the arm or hand which has been raised; of what happens between the first thought and the last impression, it must be said by real knowledge of the soul: This is beyond the grasp of our consciousness just as our experience between falling asleep and waking is beyond our consciousness, with the exception of the chaotic dreams borne up out of the waves of sleep.

It can be said: Man is really entirely awake only insofar as his life of ideas and thought is concerned. Through the element of will, a kind of sleep is included in our waking life. Paradoxical as it sounds, it must be said: Between the thought, which aims at an impulse of will, and the executed action there is a transition which is entirely comparable with falling asleep and awaking. The thought falls asleep into the unknown realm of will and awakens again when we observe the executed action.

The more one penetrates into the mysteries of the will (I can only indicate this briefly) the more one realizes that between these two regions I have described, the thought of intention and the thought which takes account of the observed execution of the act, there is really a kind of sleep present in man's waking life. A great alteration in the nature of the will can then be achieved by exercises, by particular exercises of the will.

Of the many exercises for the will mentioned in my books, I will single out a few here.—The will can be exercised, for example, by the direct influence of thought. The capacities of thinking, feeling and willing, which we have to distinguish in abstract thought when we wish to describe anything about the soul, do not lie so far apart in the real life of the soul, but play into one another. Thus the will plays into our thinking, when we connect or distinguish thoughts.

Now one can perform an exercise of the will by thinking backwards by one's own decision, something which ordinarily is thought of forwards, in the sequence of the external facts. For example, one can think a play backwards, from the fifth act to the first, beginning with the last events of the fifth act and ending with the first events of the first act. Or one can feel in thought the last lines of a poem, or of a melody in reverse order.

An exercise which is particularly valuable is at evening to allow the experience of the day to pass in part vividly before the soul, beginning with the last event of evening and progressing toward the morning. Everything must be taken atomistically as possible; one must go so far as to imagine the ascent of a staircase in reverse, as if it were a descent from the top to the lowest step. The more one forms ideas in this way in an unaccustomed sequence which is not dependent on the external facts, the more one liberates the will, which is accustomed to abandon itself passively to the external facts, from these, and also from the physical body.

After doing such exercises, further support can be won through others which I would like to call “exercises in serious self contemplation and self education.” One must be able to judge one's own actions and impulses of will with the same objective detachment as one can judge the actions and impulses of will of another personality. One must become in a sense the objective observer of one's own resolves and actions.

And one must go further: If you observe life, you know how you have changed in the course of the years. Everyone knows how in the course of ten years he has changed in his whole mood and attitude.—But what has been made of us in the course of the years, has been achieved by life, by external reality. These things must be seen objectively; it must be recognized how passively man accepts this external reality.

But now a man can practice self-education actively, in order to find the way into higher worlds. He can take his self-education in hand, by deciding, for example: “You will overcome this habit.” He uses all his powers to overcome a particular habit, or to acquire some new quality. If through one's own training, one achieves what otherwise is attained only through the influence of life, one gradually acquires the detachment of the will from the physical bodily nature. Something now happens which again I can only describe in a paradoxical way.

These things sound paradoxical because present-day thought is unaccustomed to them, but they are absolutely secure results of the anthroposophical path of knowledge which can be followed in the way I am describing, in order to enter higher worlds.

Although it will sound strange, you can make a comparison between an eye in which the vitreous body is obscured, or which has some kind of cataract so that through some opacity it cannot serve for vision, and an eye which is entirely healthy and transparent. The eye, which does not draw attention through its own bodily nature but takes a selfless part in our whole organism, through this very fact serves for our seeing. In ordinary life, our whole physical organism is comparable to a great opaque eye. Through such exercises of the will, our entire organism is made transparent. This is not done in any unhealthy way but in a way that is thoroughly healthy for ordinary life.

Nothing which is abstract or unhealthy for ordinary life should be attempted for the sake of achieving an entry into higher worlds.—It is a spiritualization of the will. We penetrate into the realm lying between the two thoughts—the thought containing the purpose of an action, and the thought of the action after it has been perceived. By making our organism in a sense entirely transparent for the soul, we enter a spiritual world. This is our task!

Just as the eye is not in the organism for its own sake, the whole physical organism is no longer there when these exercises of the will are continued; in a sense it becomes transparent. And just as it is the physical organism which catches up our impulses of will and makes them opaque, put them to sleep, through its instincts and impulses, its emotions and its entire organic processes,—in the same way everything now becomes transparent, as through the transparent, vitreous body of the eye, what is material is transparent in the eye. Through thus forming our entire physical organism into a transparent sense organ, we have now raised to a higher level a power of the soul which many are unwilling to accept as a means of knowledge, as I well know. It should indeed not be regarded as a means of knowledge as it exists in ordinary life. But through its further development it becomes such a means. This is the power of love.

It is the power of love which in ordinary life gives men a value as social beings. Love is the best and noblest power in ordinary life, individually and socially. When it is enhanced, as it can be enhanced through these exercises of the will, and when these exercises of the will make our organism transparent in this way, love develops to a higher level.

We gain the power to pass over into objective spiritual reality and the third stage of knowledge begins, that of true Intuition,—what I have called “Intuitive knowledge.” The word intuition is used also in ordinary life, and I will return to this point. Not in the sense used in ordinary life, but in this developed form as I have explained it, am I using the phrase “Intuitive knowledge” here. This is a knowledge in which man stands within the spiritual after he has made his body in a sense transparent, has transformed it into a sense organ. Through this knowledge something fresh enters the consciousness of the soul; we now learn how man can live within the will which has become independent of the physical body.

Man lives with the thought, which he has strengthened and united with his will, outside his body; and this provides him with the reflection in knowledge of the process of death.

What happens at death in full reality: that the soul and spirit detach themselves from the physical body and, after the human being has passed through the gate of death, continue their own existence in the world of soul and spirit—this is perceived in a picture, in a reflection that is a basis for knowledge, through intuitive perception, when, through an exercise of the will, we have transformed our whole organism into a sense organ. Thus immortality consists of two sides; on the one hand, of Unbornness, and on the other side, of Immortality, in the exact sense,—the fact that the soul is not destroyed by physical death. The eternity of the human soul consists in Unbornness and Immortality. It can be perceived through real anthroposophical research. Thus man comes to know in direct perception his own eternal and immortal being.

But as man comes to know his own being of soul and spirit, he also comes to know the environment in its soul and spirit nature. Through Inspired and Intuitive knowledge he comes to know the world of soul and spirit, in which the human soul lives before conception and after death. It is a world of real spiritual beings. Just as the world which we perceive with our senses lies before us with all its beings, there lies before the soul which is learning to experience itself in its existence as soul and spirit, the world from which we came at conception and through birth, and into which we enter again at death.—And just as our own bodily nature falls away from us, there falls away the sensory, bodily element which related us to other human beings, and we find ourselves in company with other men through our existence in soul and spirit.

Thus immortality, and the period of our existence in the spiritual world, become real results of knowledge. And this world of soul and spirit which always surrounds us, and which cannot be investigated by thought relying on its own resources beyond the laws of nature—this world of soul and spirit which is hidden in the spiritual part of nature, as the colors and tones are hidden in the sensory world—appears before the perception which can be developed in the way that has been described. The whole of nature then becomes something different from which it was in sense perception. It is not as though external nature with its material qualities and substances were to disappear. Before supersensory knowledge all this remains in existence, just as the healthy human being with his sound human understanding remains side by side with the personality which develops as the possessor of higher power of knowledge. To external nature is added a supersensory, spiritual nature, if you will allow me the seeming contradiction.

I will give one example for this spiritual perception within nature: For our ordinary sight and scientific knowledge the sun with its definite outlines exists in cosmic space. Through astronomy and astrophysics we form a definite picture of the form of the sun as something present in physical space and having its effects there. However, the sun becomes something quite different for the kind of research which uses the higher faculties that I have described. Through this it can be learned that the physical body of the sun present in space is only the body for a spiritual reality—and that this spiritual reality fills the whole space accessible to us. What belongs to the nature of the sun fills all the space accessible to us, and passes as a stream of forces through minerals, plants and animals, and through our human organism as well. In a way it is consolidated or concentrated in the external, spatial body of the physical sun, but what belongs to the sun-nature is present everywhere.

Just as we learn about external nature by representing it in abstract thoughts, through which external nature lives on in pictures, in the same way the spiritual foundations of nature live on more deeply in our spiritual human being. If we observe our abstract thoughts within us, we recognize that they are pictures of external, perceptible nature. If we observe the spiritual element in the external world and perceive how what belongs to the sun-nature works on within our being, we really come to know our own organism. For we find what belongs to the sun's nature within our own human constitution, in all those forces which work particularly strongly while we are still growing; these are the forces permeating us in our youth and which have their point of departure particularly in our brain and work in a plastic and constructive way upon our physical organism especially during early childhood. We come to know what is akin to the sun-nature in our own organism. And we come to know our particular organs: heart, lungs, brain, and so on, with a characteristic development of the sun forces in each. We come to know each organ, as far as its constructive, formative forces are concerned by learning about its relationship with the sun-nature.

I do not hesitate to describe these things, which are assured results of anthroposophical research, although they still appear paradoxical and perhaps fantastic to man today.

Just as we come to know the sun-nature, we can come to know all that stands in relation to the moon. We know the physical outlines of the physical moon; but the moon-nature too fills the whole of cosmic space accessible to us, and has its effects in all realms of nature,—has its effects in plant, mineral and animal,—has its effects too in our physical organism. We come to know the moon-like forces in their work within the whole human being. These are the destructive powers, those powers which are particularly active as we grow old. But these destructive forces are always active, in youth as in old age, within the process of assimilation, side by side with the sun forces.

We come to know how the whole cosmos with its forces streams into man. We come to know all that is present in man as varied processes. We understand the connection of the universe with the human being. And as I could describe in principle what the sun-nature and moon-nature are, the same could be done for other forces in the universe as well. A more intimate relationship than that recognized by ordinary science becomes known in this manner between the human being and the spirit in the universe.

In this way I have reached the point where I can describe how Anthroposophy, although it has developed as knowledge of the supersensory in the way I have described, can come to meet practical life and every region of scientific study. First I must point out how man becomes transparent for knowledge in quite another way, when he is understood in his relationship to the universe. Even physical man becomes the sum of many processes; what appeared to us before as the separate organs of heart, lung and brain, is transformed in a way that we never imagined into processes, in their growth and change. We come to know how constructive and destructive forces are contained in every organ in a different way.

As spiritual physiology and biology can be built up, such knowledge proves itself fruitful, particularly in the field of medicine, for pathology and therapy. When the human organism becomes transparent in this way, abnormal constructive forces, processes of rampant growth, can be known for what they are in the human organism. The abnormal destructive forces, processes of inflammation for example, can be understood in their connections too. For example, one comes to know what exists as polar opposite to an abnormal construction, that is, a process of rampant growth, through understanding the cooperation of sun-nature and moon-nature. One comes to know the corresponding remedy in a plant or a mineral. One comes to know how a process of rampant growth in the human organism corresponds to a destructive process in a plant or a mineral, and similar things. In short, one can go on from mere experiment among remedies to clear knowledge of how everything in nature, through the constructive and destructive processes contained within it, and through the other cosmic processes at work in everything, has its effects in the human organism.

When this is worked out in detail, it proves so fruitful that quite a number of physicians have felt themselves called to take up a rational medicine of this kind. Already there exist clinics at Dörnach near Basle and in Stuttgart, led by trained physicians who have taken up in a fruitful way the results of anthroposophical research into the basic spiritual facts which can supplement all that external research into the human body and into remedies can discover.

It must be emphasized that neither in this field, or in any other, does Anthroposophy engage in any unjustified opposition against what is really justified as scientific in the present time. On the contrary, Anthroposophy, when it is rightly understood must build on exact scientific method. Recognized medicine is in no way to be attacked, but only to be developed further.

Another field is that of the arts. Anthroposophy has existed already for two decades. At a particular time, a number of friends of the anthroposophical conception of the world could feel the necessity of building of Anthroposophy its own home. For reasons which I cannot describe in detail here, this home was built near Basle.

How would this home have been built by a different spiritual movement? If something of the kind was necessary in another spiritual movement, an architect would have been chosen who would have erected a building in the Classical, Renaissance, Rococo, Romanesque or Gothic style, or in a mixture of these styles. This would have been an outer frame for what was done inside it.

Anthroposophy cannot act in this way. It does not desire to produce a theory—something only concerned with the intellect, with the head,—and which can be contained in any sort of building. Anthroposophy seeks to work upon the whole human being. Just as it makes use of the whole human being as a sense organ, so everything that comes into the world through it proceeds from the whole, the entire human being. One cannot imagine a nutshell being formed by any other laws than is the nut itself. It is the same when Anthroposophy has to build, paint or carve, in order to provide a surrounding for itself. Everything artistic then must in a sense proceed from the same laws from which proceed the ideas that are spoken from the rostrum, out of the perception of the spiritual world. Hence, an ordinary, existing style was formed. It may still be very imperfect—it is a first attempt, a first beginning.

What has to be attempted can be described in this way: The shape of every wall and column, all sculpture and painting at Dörnach had to manifest the same thing as do the words spoken from the rostrum when Anthroposophy expresses in ideas what can be discovered in higher words through immediate perception. The spoken word is only another form of all that should work in an artistic way as the surrounding; everything really has flowed into artistic form.

What did Goethe say, when he wished once to express his ideas of art in the most intimate way? He said “Art is a manifestation of secret laws of nature, which without it would never be revealed.” And he also said significantly, “The man to whom nature begins to reveal her most intimate mysteries, feels a deep longing for her most worthy interpretress, Art.” One feels this longing most of all when the spirit which works in nature reveals itself in one's soul through supersensory vision. For then one receives no abstract allegories, but a real spiritual formative power, which has a sense for the materials and which can be embodied in particular substances as true art. Anthroposophy thus has a fruitful effect upon the field of art in all its forms.

A third field where it is shown how Anthroposophy provides fertile new impulses for life, is education. This has often been described in detail in lectures and writings in connection with the foundation and rapid growth of the Waldorf School in Stuttgart. It is a question of transforming what Anthroposophy can give into immediate educational skills; it is not a question of imposing anthroposophical ideas upon the children in the school. Through the fact that Anthroposophy provides a real knowledge of man, it gives a spiritual foundation for carrying out in practice the good principles expressed by the great educators of the nineteenth century. In educational practice, a real knowledge of man is needed. When one has come to know the whole of the human being fully, in body, soul and spirit, it is possible to derive from the child's nature itself the curriculum and the aims of education for each year of the child's school life.

Finally, to mention a few other areas, I would like to point out that Anthroposophy can have a fruitful effect upon social life as well, since the knowledge it achieves is concerned with the whole human being. We have seen how the one-sided use of the way of thinking developed in natural science has its definite limits, and cannot reach the true being of man, so that this way of thinking, if it shapes social purposes, is bound to work destructively.

I do not think that today there is sufficient unprejudiced judgment in wide circles capable of realizing the destructive character, for all human culture, of what has become, in the east of Europe, practical reality—and realized illusions at the same time. Those social impulses are derived from taking into account external nature alone. Like a great threat, there hangs over our entire present-day civilization what has begun its destructive course in the east of Europe. [Steiner refers to the spread of Communism resulting from the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, October 1918.—Ed.]

If social impulses are deepened by considering not only in an external way what is instinctive and natural in man and reckoning free actions in a sense as more highly developed instincts, then the true freedom of man in the spirit can be recognized. I have attempted to do this in my “Philosophy of Spiritual Activity” [published at the beginning of the nineties] on the basis of such anthroposophical principles. In this way a sum of social impulses can arise which relate whole human beings to whole human beings, and which can correct and spiritualize what is hanging over human civilization in such a destructive way, as a threatening specter of the future.

These are a few examples which show how Anthroposophy can be fruitful for life. If one considers the ethical and moral life in an unprejudiced way, as I have attempted to consider it and to place it upon a secure basis in The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, one comes upon the concept of Intuition of pure thinking, through an unconscious moral Intuition of pure thinking, through an unconscious moral Intuition. The true moral impulses which arise from the conscience are moral; their true source through Inspired and Intuitive knowledge as I have described these today from the anthroposophical point of view.

Thus with its knowledge Anthroposophy comes to meet the most intimate and important feelings and impulses of the human soul, above all, religious devotion. It would be utterly misleading if it were said that Anthroposophy sought to institute a new sect or found a new religion. Since Anthroposophy stands upon the basis of knowledge in the way I have described today, it cannot have about it, or desire anything of a sectarian nature. Nor can it institute a new religion. But if the supersensory reveals itself to knowledge, this can only be of benefit for the religions, and the religious needs of mankind.

One would believe that the representatives of religious faiths must feel deep satisfaction if a spiritual stream appears in our time, able to confirm from the side of knowledge what is sought by faith. Fundamentally it is incomprehensible that the official representatives of religious faiths do not see in Anthroposophy a confirmation of religious life, but often regard it as if it were something hostile. If they really grasped the fundamentals of Anthroposophy, and did not regard it superficially, they would see in it the firmest basis for real piety and real religious life.

For when the light of knowledge comes to meet the seeking soul, not only from the world of the senses but from supersensory worlds as well, then faith is not harmed, but strongly supported; and ethically too, the soul acquires powerful sources of goodness. For moral action it receives meaning, security, and purpose for life, since it comes to know itself as a member of a spiritual world as the external body is a member of a physical world. In this knowledge of himself as a member of a spiritual world, man can come to recognize again his true human dignity and a true ethics and morality worthy of his manhood.

I would like to sum up, as in a picture, what I have tried to describe as the nature of Anthroposophy. We have the human being before us; we see the form of his physical body. We only come to know his whole being when we see how his physiognomy is the expression of his soul and spirit. We have in natural science, which is fully recognized in its justified purposes by Anthroposophy, in a sense the knowledge of the external body of the world. In the natural science of the physical we have something that is itself a kind of intellectual body. Just as we have only the whole of man before us when his soul and spirit is revealed through his physical bodily nature, in the same way we have the knowledge of the world in its entirety, only when as if through a kind of wonderful physiognomy, through all that science offers us in its facts, its experiments, its hypotheses, its natural laws—a cosmic knowledge in soul and spirit comes to expression. For that body of knowledge, given in external natural science, Anthroposophy seeks to be the soul and spirit of a real and complete knowledge of man and of the world.

Born in Austria in 1861, Rudolf Steiner received recognition as a scholar when he was invited to edit the Kürschner edition of the natural scientific writings of Goethe. In 1891 Steiner received his Ph.D. at the University of Rostock. He then began his work as a lecturer. From the turn of the century until his death in 1925, he delivered well over 6000 lectures on the Science of Spirit, or Anthroposophy.

The lectures of Rudolf Steiner dealt with such fundamental matters as the being of man, the nature and purpose of freedom, the meaning of evolution, man's relation to nature, and the life after death and before birth. On these and similar subjects, Steiner had unexpectedly new, inspiring and thought-provoking things to say. Through a study of the transcripts of lectures like those contained in this book, one can come to a clear, reasonable, comprehensive understanding of the human being and his place in the universe.

In all his years of writing and lecturing, Steiner made no appeal to emotionalism or sectarianism in his readers or hearers. His profound respect for the freedom of every man shines through everything he produced. The slightest compulsion or persuasion he considered an affront to the dignity and ability of the human being. Therefore he confined himself to objective statements in his writing and speaking, leaving his readers and hearers entirely free to reject or accept his words. He addressed the healthy, sound judgment and good will in each person, confident of the response in those who come to meet his ideas with the willingness to understand them.

Among the many activities springing from the work of Rudolf Steiner are the Bio-Dynamic Farming and Gardening Association which aims at improved nutrition resulting from methods of agriculture outlined by Rudolf Steiner; the art of Eurythmy, created and described by him as “visible speech and visible song;” the medical and pharmaceutical work carried out by the Clinical and Therapeutical Institute of Arlesheim, Switzerland, with related institutions in other countries; the Homes for the education and care of mentally retarded children; and new directions for work in such fields as Mathematics, Physics, Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Music, Drama, Speech Formation, Social Studies, Astronomy, Economics and Psychology.

The success of Rudolf Steiner Education (sometimes referred to as Waldorf Education) has proven the correctness of Steiner's concept of the way to prepare the child for his or her eventual role as a resourceful, creative, responsible member of modern adult society.

The transcripts of Rudolf Steiner's many lectures on a wide variety of subjects are a storehouse of spiritual knowledge as it can become fruitful in many fields of modern life. However, Steiner himself stressed that his lectures were not intended for print, and are not a substitute for what he expressed in his written works on the Science of Spirit or Anthroposophy. Therefore, if the reader finds the following lectures of interest, or if they arouse questions and points upon which he wishes further clarification, he is certain to find the latter in the fundamental books included in the series of Major Writings of Rudolf Steiner listed at the end of the present volume.

The Publishers

[ 1 ] In looking at the world at the present time with open eyes we are constantly confronted with what is called the social question. Those who take life seriously have in some way to consider what is involved in this question. And it must appear as a matter of course that a way of thinking that has undertaken to promote the highest ideals of humanity should somehow come to terms with the demands made in social life. The way of thinking practiced by the science of spirit sets out to do just this for the present time. It is therefore only natural if questions arise about the relationship of the science of spirit to the social question.

[ 2 ] Now it may appear at first as if the science of the spirit has nothing in particular to say about this. What characterizes it more than anything else is the deepening of the soul life and the awakening of the ability to see into the spiritual world. Even those who have had only a passing acquaintance with the ideas promoted by speakers and writers whose work is based on the science of spirit are able by means of unbiased observation to give recognition to this striving. It is, however, more difficult to see that this striving has practical significance at the present time. And in particular it is not easy to see its connection with the social question. Someone may well ask how such a teaching can improve our bad social conditions, a teaching which is concerned with reincarnation, with “karma,” with “the super-sensible world,” with “the origin of man” and so on. Such a way of thinking appears to be divorced from all reality, whereas in fact it is now an imperative necessity for everyone to take his whole thinking in hand in order to do justice to the tasks which the reality of earthly life places before us.

[ 3 ] We shall now take two of the many views concerning the science of spirit which we inevitably come across today. The one is, that it is seen as the expression of uncontrolled fantasy. It is only natural for such a viewpoint to exist. And least of all should it be inconceivable to someone striving according to the method of the science of spirit. Every conversation that takes place in the presence of such a person, everything that goes on around him that brings happiness and joy to the human being, all this can teach him that he makes use of a language which for many is bound to be quite ludicrous. He must of course add to this understanding of his surroundings the absolute certainty that he is on the right path. Otherwise he would hardly be able to hold his own when he becomes aware of the clash between his ideas and those of others who belong to the educated and thinking part of humanity. If he has the necessary assurance, if he knows the truth and weight of his views, he can say: I know quite well that at the present time I can be regarded as an oddity and I can see why this is, but the truth is sure to prevail even when it is ridiculed and mocked, and the effect it has does not depend upon the views which people have about it, but upon its own firm foundations.

[ 4 ] The other view affecting the science of spirit is that although its thoughts may be beautiful and satisfying, these really apply only to the inner life of the soul and cannot be of any value for the struggles of daily life. Even those who turn to this substance of the science of spirit to satisfy their spiritual needs can all too easily be tempted to say: This world of ideas cannot tell us anything about how to deal with social needs and material needs.—But this opinion is based upon a complete misjudgment of the real facts of life and in particular upon the misunderstanding about the fruits of the way that the science of spirit looks at things.

[ 5 ] Practically the only question that is asked is: What does the science of spirit teach? How can what it teaches be proved? And then what people seek to get out of it is found in the feeling of satisfaction which is given by the teachings. Nothing Could be more natural. For we have first to acquire a feeling for the truth of statements that we meet. But what we really have to seek, the real fruit of the science of spirit cannot be sought in this. For this manifests itself only when those who are inclined toward the science of spirit tackle tasks in practical life. It depends on whether the science of spirit helps them to take up these tasks judiciously and with understanding to seek ways and means of solving them. If we want to work effectively in life we have first to understand life. Here we come to the heart of the matter. As long as we only ask: What does the science of spirit teach, we shall find its teachings too “exalted” for practical life. But if we direct our attention to the schooling that our thinking and feeling go through by means of these teachings, we shall then stop raising such an objection. However odd it may appear to a superficial view, it is nevertheless true that the ideas of the science of spirit, even if they may appear to be lost in the clouds, create an eye for the proper conduct of daily life. The science of spirit sharpens our understanding of the demands which social life makes just because it leads the spirit into the luminous heights of the super-sensible. However paradoxical this may appear, it is nevertheless true.

[ 6 ] An example will show what is meant. An extremely interesting book has recently appeared called As a Worker in America (Berlin, K. Siegismund). The author is a certain government councilor named Kolb who took it upon himself to spend several months as an ordinary worker in America. Through doing this he acquired a judgment about human beings and life which apparently neither the education which led to his councillorship had been able to give him, nor the experiences he had had in his post and in the other positions one occupies before becoming a councilor. Therefore for years he held a relatively responsible position, and it was only after he had left this and lived for a short time in a distant country that he got to know life in such a way that he was able to write the following noteworthy sentence in his book: “How often had I asked with moral indignation when I saw a healthy man begging: Why doesn't the scoundrel work? Now I knew. Yes, in practice things are different from what they seem to be in theory, and even the most unpleasant aspects of political economy can be managed quite bearably at one's desk.” Now there is not slightest intention here of creating a misunderstanding. The fullest possible recognition must be given to a man who persuades himself to leave his comfortable position in life and to undertake hard work in a brewery and a bicycle factory. The high esteem accorded to this deed is strongly emphasized in order to avoid the impression that we are about to indulge in negative criticism of him.—But to everyone who wants to see, it is absolutely clear that all the education and knowledge that he had gained had failed to give him the means of judging life. Let us try to understand what is implied in this admission: We can learn everything that makes us capable of taking a relatively important position, and at the same time we can be quite isolated from the life which we are supposed to influence.—Is this not rather like being educated at an engineering school and then, when faced with building a bridge, not knowing anything about it? But no: it is not quite like that. A person who has not studied the building of bridges properly will soon have his weaknesses made clear to him when he begins the actual work. He will prove himself to be a bungler and will be rejected everywhere. But a person who is insufficiently prepared in social life will not reveal his weaknesses so quickly. Badly built bridges collapse, and even the most prejudiced will realize that the builder was a bungler. What is bungled in social life only comes to light in the sufferings of those whose lives are regulated by it. It is not as easy to have an eye for the connection between the suffering and this kind of bungling as it is for the relationship between the collapse of the bridge and an incapable builder.—“But,” someone will say, “what has all this to do with the science of spirit? Does the scientist of spirit really believe that his teachings would have helped Councillor Kolb to have a better understanding of life? What use would it have been to him to have known something about reincarnation, karma, and all the super-sensible worlds? No one would want to maintain that ideas about planetary systems and higher worlds would have enabled the councilor to avoid having to admit one day that the most unpleasant aspects of political economy can be managed quite well at one's desk.” The scientist of spirit can really only answer—as Lessing did in a particular case: “I happen to be this `no one,' and I insist upon it.” Only this does not mean to say that the teaching of “reincarnation,” or knowledge about “karma” enables a person to act in the right way in social life. That would naturally be naive. It would of course be no good directing those destined to be councilors to Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine instead of sending them to Schmoller, Wagner or Brentano at the university.—What it depends upon is this: Would a theory of political economy originating from the scientist of spirit be such that it could be managed well at one's desk but would let one down in actual life? And this would not be the case. When can a theory not hold its own in life? When it is produced by means of a thinking that is not trained for life. Now the teachings of the science of spirit are just as much the real laws of life as are the theories of electricity for a factory for electrical apparatus. In setting up such a factory we have first to acquaint ourselves with theories about electricity. And in order to work in life we have to know the laws of life. The teachings of the science of spirit may appear to be remote from life, but they are, in fact, just the opposite. To a superficial view they appear divorced from the world; to a true understanding they reveal life. It is not just out of curiosity that we retire into a “spiritual-scientific circle,” in order to get hold of all sorts of “interesting” information about the worlds beyond, but we train our thinking, feeling and willing on the “eternal laws of existence” in order to enter into life and to understand it clearly. The teachings of the science of spirit are a roundabout way to thinking, judging and feeling according to life.—The movement for the science of spirit will not be rightly orientated until this is fully realized. Right action arises out of right thinking, and wrong action arises out of wrong thinking or out of a lack of thinking. If we believe that something good can be brought about in the social sphere, we have to admit that it depends on human capacities. Working through the ideas of the science of spirit brings about an increase in the capacities needed for working in social life. In this connection it is not simply a matter of which thoughts we acquire through the science of spirit, but of what is made of our thinking through them.

[ 7 ] Of course it must be admitted that within the circle of those who have taken up the science of spirit, there is not all that much to show so far. Nor can it be denied that just for this reason those outside the science of spirit have every reason to doubt what has been maintained here. But it must also not be overlooked that the movement for the science of spirit as it is at the moment is only at the beginning of its work. Its further progress will consist in entering into all the practical spheres of life. We shall then see, for instance, as far as the “social question” is concerned that instead of theories “which can be managed quite well at one's desk” there will be ideas which give us insight to reach unprejudiced judgments about life and to stimulate our will to such action as brings welfare and blessing to our fellow human beings. Some people would say that the case of Kolb shows that it would be superfluous to refer to the science of spirit. It would only be necessary that in preparing themselves for any particular occupation people would not learn only theories in their studies, but that they be brought into touch with life through having a practical as well as a theoretical training. For as soon as Kolb had a look at life, what he learned was sufficient to change his opinions.—No, it is not sufficient, because the lack lies deeper than this. If someone sees that his insufficient education only enables him to build bridges which collapse, this does not say that he has already acquired the ability to build bridges that do not collapse. He must first undergo a really suitable preparatory training. Of course we need do no more than look at social conditions, however insufficient a theory we may have about the fundamental laws of life, to prevent us from saying to someone who does not work: “Why doesn't the scoundrel work?” We can understand from the conditions why such a person does not work. But does this mean that we have learned how conditions should be brought about in which human beings can prosper? It is doubtless true that all the well-intentioned people who have thought up plans for the improvement of man's lot have not judged as Councillor Kolb did before his journey to America. They were surely all convinced before such an expedition that not anyone who gets on badly can be dismissed with the phrase, “Why doesn't the scoundrel work?” Therefore are all their plans for reform fruitful? No, because they often contradict one another. And so we have the right to say that the positive plans for reform which Councillor Kolb had after his conversion cannot have much effect. It is an error of our times that everyone considers himself capable of understanding life, even when he has not taken the slightest trouble to come to grips with the fundamental laws of life and when he has not first trained his thinking to see the real forces at work in life. Furthermore, the science of spirit is a training for a true judgment of life because it gets to the roots of life. It is no use seeing that conditions bring the human being into unfavorable situations in life, in which he is found; we have to acquaint ourselves with the forces by means of which favorable conditions can be created. Our experts in political economy can do this just as little as someone can do arithmetic who does not know his two times table. However many rows of numbers are put before him, merely looking at them will not help him. If reality is placed before someone who understands nothing about the underlying forces of social life, however penetratingly he may be able to describe what he sees, he will not be able to make anything of how the forces of social life interact to the well-being or detriment of man.

[ 8 ] A way of looking at life that leads to the real sources of life is necessary at the present time. And the science of spirit can be just such a way. If all those who wish to form an opinion as to “social needs” were to go through the teachings about life to be found in the science of spirit, we should get much further.—The objection that those who take up the science of spirit only “talk” and do not “act,” is no more valid than the one that the opinions of the science of spirit have not yet been tested and so could be exposed as vague theories like the political theory of Kolb. The first objection does not mean anything because it is naturally not possible to “act” as long as the ways to action are barred. However much a person who has great experience in dealing with people knows what a father should do to bring up his children, he cannot “act” unless the father employs him to this end. In this respect we have to wait patiently until the “talk” of those working according to the science of spirit has some effect on those who have the power to “act.” And this will happen. The other objection is just as irrelevant. And it can be raised only by those who are unfamiliar with the real nature of the truths put forward by the science of spirit. Those who are familiar with them know that they do not come into existence as things can be “tried out.” The laws of human well-being are laid in the fundament of the human soul just as surely as the two times table. We have only to penetrate sufficiently deeply into this fundament of the human soul. Of course, we can make what is written into the soul in this way evident just as we can make evident that twice two are four if we place four beans in two groups next to each other. But who would maintain that the truth “twice two are four” first has to be “tested” with beans? The true situation is: Whoever doubts a truth of the science of spirit has not yet recognized it, just as only a person could doubt that “twice two are four” who has not yet recognized the fact. However much the two differ, because the latter is so simple and the former so complicated the similarity in other respects is nevertheless there.—Naturally this cannot be realized so long as we do not enter into the science of spirit itself. This is why it is not possible to offer a “proof” of this fact for someone who does not know the science of spirit. We can only say: First get to know the science of spirit and then all this will become clear to you.

[ 9 ] The important role of the science of spirit in our times will be revealed when it has become like a leaven in the whole of our life. As long as the way into this life is not trodden in the full sense of the word, those working in harmony with the science of spirit will not have advanced beyond the first beginnings of their work. And as long as this is the case they will no doubt also have to listen to the reproach that their ideas are inimical to life. Yes, they are just as inimical to life as was the railway to a life that regarded the mail coach as the “symbol of true life.” They are just as inimical as the future is inimical to the past.

[ 10 ] In what follows, particular aspects of the relationship between “the science of spirit and the social question” are discussed.—

[ 11 ] There are two opposing views concerning the “social question.” The one sees the causes of good and bad in social life more in the human being, the other more in the conditions in which men live. Those who represent the first view want to encourage progress by endeavoring to increase the spiritual and physical ability of the human being and his moral feeling; those who tend toward the second view are above all concerned to raise the standard of life, for they say that when men learn to live properly, their ability and ethical feelings will rise by themselves to a higher level. We cannot deny that today the second view is constantly gaining ground. To stress the first view is felt in many circles to be the expression of a quite antiquated way of thinking. The point is made that anyone who has to struggle with the bitterest poverty from morning to night cannot do anything about the development of his spiritual and moral powers. Such a person should first be given bread before you talk to him about spiritual matters.

[ 12 ] This last assertion in particular can easily become a reproach to a striving like the science of spirit. And it is not the worst people who make such reproaches today. They say, for instance: “The genuine theosophist does not descend willingly from the devachan and karmic spheres to the earth. One prefers to know ten words of Sanskrit rather than be taught what ground rent is.” This we read in an interesting book, The Cultural Situation of Europe at the Reawakening of Modern Occultism, by G. L. Dankmar (Leipzig, Oswald Mutze, 1905).

[ 13 ] This is an easy enough way of putting the objection. It is pointed out that nowadays families of eight people are herded together into a single room so that even air and light are insufficient, and the children have to be sent to school where weakness and hunger cause them to break down. It is then said: Should not those who are concerned about the progress of the masses concentrate all their efforts on alleviating such conditions? Instead of directing their thinking to teaching about the higher worlds of the spirit they should direct it to the question: How can these terrible social conditions be dealt with? “Let Theosophy descend from its icy loneliness to the people; let it put the ethical demand of universal brotherhood earnestly and truly at the top of its program, and let it act according to this without worrying about all the consequences; let it make the word of Christ about loving one's neighbor a social deed and it will become and remain a precious and indispensable possession of humanity.” This is what we read in the above-mentioned book.

[ 14 ] Those who make such an objection against the science of spirit mean well. In fact, we must even admit that they are right concerning some people who have studied the teachings of the science of spirit. Among the latter there are, without doubt, some who are interested only in their own spiritual needs, who only want to know something about the “higher life,” about the destiny of the soul after death, and so on.—And it is certainly not wrong to say that at the present time it appears more necessary to work for the common good and to develop the virtues of loving one's neighbor and of human welfare than, in isolation from the world, to cultivate any higher faculties which might be dormant in the soul. To desire the latter above all else could mean a kind of refined egotism where the well-being of one's own soul is placed higher than the normally accepted human virtues. Another remark that is heard just as frequently is that only those who are “well off” and who therefore have “time to spare” can take an interest in such things as the science of spirit. And therefore we should not wish to stuff people who have to toil from morning to night for a miserable wage with talk about universal human unity, about “higher life,” and similar things.

[ 15 ] It is only too true that in this respect quite a number of sins are committed by those following the science of spirit. But it is just as correct to say that life led according to the science of spirit, rightly understood, must lead the human being, as an individual, to the virtues of willingly offered work, and of striving for the common good. At any rate, the science of spirit cannot prevent anyone from being just as good a person as the others who do not know or do not want to know anything about the science of spirit.—But as far as the “social question” is concerned, all this misses the main point. Much more is necessary to penetrate to this main point than the opponents of the science of spirit wish to admit. We can agree without hesitation with these opponents that much can be achieved with the means that have been suggested by many for the improvement of man's social condition. One party wants one thing, others something else. To a clear-thinking person, some of the demands which such parties make prove to be devoid of any real substance; on the other hand, some of it certainly contains the making of something really substantial.

[ 16 ] Robert Owen, who lived from 1771 to 1858 and who certainly was one of the noblest social reformers, emphasized again and again that the human being is molded by his environment in which he grows up, that his character is not formed by himself, but by the conditions in which he lives. What is so obviously right in such a statement should not be disputed. But neither should it be treated with a disdainful shrug of the shoulder, even if on the surface it appears to be more or less self-evident. Rather, it should be readily admitted that much in public life can be improved by working according to such ideas. The science of spirit, therefore, will never prevent anyone from doing anything for human progress which sets out to produce a better lot for the oppressed and suffering classes of humanity.

[ 17 ] The science of spirit must go deeper. Really effective progress cannot be achieved by such means any longer. If we do not admit this, we have not recognized how conditions come about in which people live. For inasmuch as the life of man is dependent on these conditions the latter themselves are brought about by man. Or who has arranged it that one person is poor and another rich? Other people, of course. But the fact that these other people have normally lived before those who flourish or do not flourish under the conditions, does not alter anything in this situation. The sufferings which nature itself places upon the human being are not directly concerned with our social position. These sufferings have to be mitigated or even removed by human action. If something is lacking in this respect it is in the arrangements that human beings make for each other.—A thorough knowledge of things teaches us that all evils connected with social life originate in human actions. In this respect it is not the individual human being but the whole of humanity that is the “fashioner of individual fortune.”

[ 18 ] However certain this is, it is also true that by and large no part of humanity, no caste or class, maliciously causes the suffering of another part. All the statements that support this are based on a lack of understanding. Nevertheless, although this too is really a self-evident truth, it must be mentioned. For even if such things can easily be grasped with the understanding, in practice people still act in a different way. Those who exploit their fellow men would naturally not want the victims of their exploitation to suffer. We would make considerable progress if people not only found this self-evident, but also adapted their feelings to it.

[ 19 ] This is air very well, but what are we supposed to do about such statements? Thus, without doubt, a “socially minded person” might object. Is the exploited person supposed to look at the exploiter with benevolent feelings? Is it not only too understandable that the former hates the latter and out of hate is led to his party views? It would certainly be a bad recipe—the objection would continue—if the oppressed were admonished to practice human love for his oppressor, somewhat in the same sense as the saying of the great Buddha: “Hate will not be overcome by hate, but only by love.”

[ 20 ] Even so, it is only the knowledge which follows from this point that can lead us to truly “social thinking” at the present time. And it is here that the approach of the science of spirit begins. This of course must not cling to the surface of our understanding, but must penetrate into the depths. It therefore cannot remain satisfied with merely showing that misery is created by any particular conditions, but it has to advance to the only knowledge that is fruitful, that is, as to how these conditions are created and continuously created. Compared with these deeper questions, most social theories prove to be only “vague theories” or even mere manners of speech.

[ 21 ] As long as our thinking remains on the surface, we attribute quite a wrong influence to conditions and to external things altogether. These conditions are in fact only an expression of an inner life. Just as the human body can be understood only when it is known to be the expression of a soul, the outer conditions of life can be rightly judged only if they are seen as the creation of human souls that embody their feelings, attitudes and thoughts in them. The conditions in which we live are created by our fellow human beings, and we shall never create better ones unless we set out with other thoughts, attitudes and feelings from those that those creators had.

[ 22 ] Let us consider these things in detail. A person who maintains a home in grand style, who can travel first class on the railway, may easily appear on the surface to be an oppressor. And a person who wears a threadbare coat and who travels fourth class will appear to be the oppressed. But one does not have to be an incompassionate individual nor a reactionary in order to understand the following clearly. Nobody is oppressed or exploited because I wear a particular coat, but only because I pay the man who made the coat for me too little. The poor worker who has acquired his inferior coat for little money is, in relation to his fellow human beings in this respect, in exactly the same position as the rich man who had a better coat made. Whether I am poor or rich, I exploit if I acquire things for which insufficient payment is made. Actually today nobody ought to call someone else an oppressor; he ought first to look at himself. If he does this carefully he will soon discover the “oppressor” in himself. Is the work which you have to deliver to the well-to-do delivered only to them at the price of bad wages? No, the person who sits next to you and complains to you about oppression enjoys the work of your hands on exactly the same conditions as the well-to-do whom you have both turned against. One should think this through and one will then find a different way of approaching “social thinking” from the more usual ones.

[ 23 ] Thinking things over in this way makes it clear that the concepts “rich” and “exploiter” must be completely separated. It depends on individual ability or on the ability of our forefathers, or on quite different things, whether we are now rich or poor. The fact that we exploit the work of others has absolutely nothing to do with these things. At least not directly. But it is very much connected with something else. And that is, that our social situation and environment are built upon personal self-interest. We have to think very clearly for otherwise we shall arrive at a quite wrong idea of what is said. If I acquire a coat today it appears quite natural, according to the conditions which exist, that I acquire it as cheaply as possible. This means: I have only myself in mind. Here, however, we touch the point of view that governs our whole life. Of course, it is easy to raise an objection. We can say: Do not the socially-minded parties and personalities try to do something about this evil? Is there not an effort to protect “work?” Do not the working classes and their representatives demand higher wages and shorter working hours? It has already been said above that the present-day view can have absolutely nothing against such demands and measures. Nor is there any intention here of agitating for one or the other of the existing party demands. From the present point of view, we are not concerned with taking sides on particular points, “for” or “against.” This, in the first place, lies quite outside the approach of the science of spirit.

[ 24 ] However many improvements are introduced to protect a particular class of workers and that would certainly contribute much to the raising of conditions of one or the other group of people, the actual nature of exploitation will not be mitigated. For this depends on a person acquiring the products of another person's work from the point of view of self-interest. Whether I have much or little: if I make use of what I have to satisfy my self-interest, the other person is bound to be exploited. Even if in maintaining this point of view I protect his work, it may seem that I have done something, but in fact I have not. For if I pay more for the work of the other person he will also have to pay more for mine, providing the one is not supposed to acquire a better position through the deteriorating position of the other.

[ 25 ] This can be clarified by another example. If I buy a factory in order to earn as much as possible for myself, I shall see that I acquire labor as cheaply as possible, etc. Everything that happens will be done from the point of view of self-interest.—If, on the other hand, I buy a factory from the point of view of looking after 200 people as well as possible, all my actions will take on a different character.—In practice today the second case can certainly hardly be differentiated from the first. This simply depends on the fact that a solitary selfless person cannot achieve much in a community which otherwise is based on self-interest. It would be quite different, however, if work not based on self-interest were universal.

[ 26 ] A “practical” thinker will naturally be of the opinion that no one could manage to help his workers get better wage conditions just by a “good attitude.” For we cannot increase the return on our goods through meaning well, and without this it is not possible to offer better conditions for the workers.—But it is important to realize that this objection is completely erroneous. All our interests, and therefore all our social conditions, change when in acquiring something we no longer have ourselves in mind, but others. What does a person have to look to who only looks after his own well-being? To seeing that he earns as much as possible. How others have to work in order to satisfy his needs cannot be his concern. He therefore has to develop his powers in the struggle for existence. If I establish an undertaking which is to bring in as much as possible to myself, I do not ask how labor that works for me is mobilized. If I do not consider myself but hold the point of view: How does my work serve others? everything changes. Nothing then forces me to undertake anything prejudicial to someone else. I then place my powers not at my own disposal, but at someone else's. The consequence of this is a quite different unfolding of the powers and capacities of the human being. How this changes social conditions in practice will be discussed at the end of the essay.—

[ 27 ] In a way Robert Owen can be called a genius in practical social activity. He possessed two characteristics which may well justify him being called this: a far-ranging eye for measures that would serve social life, and a noble love for human beings. We only have to consider what he achieved by means of these two capacities in order to appreciate their significance. He created a model industrial set-up in New Lanark and employed his workers in such a way that they not only had a dignified existence materially, but that they also lived in conditions which were satisfactory from a moral point of view. The people who gathered there were in part those who had come down in the world and were given over to drink. Better elements were mixed with these, and their example had an effect. And so the best possible results imaginable were attained. What Owen achieved there makes it impossible to place him on the same level as other more or less fantastic “improvers of the world”—the so-called Utopians. He restricted himself to measures which could be put into practice, that anyone not inclined to day-dreams could assume would lead, within a particular limited area, to the abolition of human suffering. And it is not being impractical to believe that such a small area could serve as an example, and that from it a healthy development of the human condition in the social sphere could be stimulated.

[ 28 ] Owen presumably thought along those lines. That is why he was not afraid to take another step in the direction he had already taken. In 1824 he worked toward setting up a kind of small model state in Indiana, in North America. He acquired a district where he wanted to found a human community based upon freedom and equality. Everything was so arranged that exploitation and servitude were an impossibility. Whoever takes such a task upon himself has to bring with him the best social virtues: a desire to make one's fellow men happy, and a belief in the goodness of human nature. He must be convinced that if work organized in the appropriate way appears certain to bring blessing, the desire to work will unfold within human nature.

[ 29 ] Owen believed this so strongly that a lot of serious things had to happen before he began to waver.

[ 30 ] These serious things really did begin to happen. After much noble effort Owen had to admit that “the realization of such colonies must always come to grief unless the general way of living is transformed first;” and that it would be more valuable to influence humanity in a theoretical way rather than by practical measures. This social reformer was forced to this view by the fact that there were sufficient people who disliked work, who wished to get rid of their work on others, for strife, quarrels and finally bankruptcy to ensue.

[ 31 ] Owen's experience can be a lesson to all who really want to learn. It can be a bridge for all artificially created and thought-out measures for the salvation of humanity to a social work which is more fruitful and which reckons with actual reality.

[ 32 ] Through his experience Owen was able to be completely cured of the belief that all human misery comes about through bad “conditions” in which people live, and that the goodness of human nature would come to life of itself if these conditions were improved. He was forced to the conviction that good conditions can be maintained only if the human beings who live in them are naturally inclined to maintain them, and when they do this with enthusiasm.

[ 33 ] One might at first think that it would be necessary to give theoretical instruction to those who are to live in such conditions, that is, in explaining to them that the measures are right and meet the purpose. It is not difficult for an unbiased person to read something like this into Owen's confession. But even so, it is only possible to achieve a really practical result by penetrating more deeply into the matter. We have to advance from merely a belief in the goodness of human nature that deceived Owen, to a real knowledge of man.—However clear people have been about how purposeful certain measures are which can bring blessing to humanity—in the long run all such clarity cannot lead to the desired goal. For the human being is not able to gain the inner impulse to work by having a clear understanding if, on the other hand, the impulses to be found in egotism rear their heads. This egotism happens to be part of human nature. And this means that it stirs in the feelings of the human being when he lives together with others and has to work within a community. This necessarily leads to the fact that in practice most people think the best social conditions to be those where the individual can best satisfy his needs. Thus under the influence of egotistical feelings the social question comes to be formulated quite naturally as follows: What must be done in society in order that each person can have the returns of his work for himself? And particularly in our own times with their materialistic way of thinking, only a few people would base their view on any other assumption. How often does one hear it accepted as a matter of course that a social order based on goodwill and feeling for one's fellow human beings is an absurdity. Rather it is assumed that the totality of a human community can prosper best when the individual can pocket the “full” or greatest possible yield of his work.

[ 34 ] Exactly the opposite of this is taught by the science of spirit, which is founded on a deeper knowledge of the human being and of the world. It shows that all human misery is simply a consequence of egotism, and that misery, poverty and distress must necessarily arise at a particular time in the human community if this community is based on egotism in any way. It is naturally necessary to have deeper knowledge than the kind to be found here and there sailing under the flag of social science, in order to understand this. This “social science” takes only the outer aspect of human life into account, and not the forces which lie deeper. In fact, it is even very difficult with the majority of modern people to awaken even a feeling in themselves that one can speak about such forces. They regard anyone who comes along with such ideas as peculiar. Now in this essay it is not possible to attempt to evolve a social theory based on these deeper-lying forces. For this would need a much fuller work. The only thing that can be done is to point to the true laws which govern how people work together, and to show what reasonable social considerations arise for someone familiar with these laws. Only a person who builds up his view of the world on the science of spirit can have a full understanding of the matter. And it is to convey such a view of the world that this whole magazine works. One cannot expect it from a single article on the “social question.” All that this article can hope to do is to shed some light on this question from the spiritual point of view. After all, there will be some people who are able to have a feeling for the Tightness of what is briefly described here and which cannot possibly be explained in every detail.

[ 35 ] Now, the main social law set forth by the science of spirit, is the following:“The well-being of a total community of human beings working together becomes greater the less the individual demands the products of his achievements for himself, that is, the more of these products he passes on to his fellow workers and the more his own needs are not satisfied out of his own achievements, but out of the achievements of others.” All the conditions within a total community of people which contradict this law must sooner or later produce misery and distress somewhere. — This law holds good for social life with absolute necessity and without any exceptions, just as a natural law holds good for a particular sphere of natural processes. But it should not be thought that it is sufficient for this law to be held as a universal moral law, or that it should be translated into the attitude that everyone should work in the service of his fellow men. No, in actual fact the law will be able to exist as it should only if a total community of people succeeds in creating conditions where no one ever can claim the fruits of his own work for himself, but where, if at all possible, these go entirely to the benefit of the community. And he in turn must be maintained by means of the work of his fellow human beings. The important thing is to see that working for one's fellow human beings and aiming at a particular income are two quite separate things.

[ 36 ] Those who imagine that they are “practical people”—the scientist of spirit has no illusions about this—will only be able to smile about this “hair-raising idealism.” But despite this, the above law is more practical than anything which has ever been thought out by “practical people,” or that has actually been introduced. If we really study life we can find that each human community that exists or has existed has two tendencies in its social set-up. One of these corresponds to this law, the other contradicts it. This has to be the case, irrespective of whether people want it or not. Every community would collapse immediately if the work of the individual did not benefit the whole. But from times immemorial human egotism has thwarted this law. It has sought to get as much as possible for the individual from his own work. And it is just what has been produced through egotism in this way that has always led to distress, poverty and misery. This means that the aspect of human conditions that is bound to prove impractical is the one that is introduced by the “practical people,” that reckons either with one's own egotism or somebody else's.

[ 37 ] Now of course we are not only concerned with understanding such a law, but actual practice begins with the question: How can the law be carried out in real life? It is clear that it says nothing less than this: The smaller the egotism is, the greater the human well-being. Thus in putting the law into practice, our concern is with people who extricate themselves from the path of egotism. This is in practice, however, quite impossible if the well-being of the individual is measured according to his work. Whoever works for himself is bound gradually to succumb to egotism. Only someone who works for others can gradually become an un-egotistical worker.

[ 38 ] For this, one prerequisite is necessary. If a person works for another he must find in this other person the reason for his work; and if someone is supposed to work for the community he must be able to feel the value, the being and the significance of this community. He can do this only if the community is something quite different from a more or less undefined collection of individuals. It has to be permeated by a real spirit in which each person can partake. It has to be such that everyone says: It is right, and I want it to be like that. The total community must have a spiritual mission; and each individual must wish to contribute to the fulfillment of this mission. None of the indefinite and abstract ideas of progress which we normally read about are able to provide the formulation of such a measure. If only these ideas prevail, an individual will work here or a group there without seeing that their work is of any use beyond satisfying their own needs or perhaps the interests they happen to have. This spirit of the total community must be alive right down into each individual.

[ 39 ] From earliest times good has prospered only where such a life has been somehow permeated by a spirit common to the whole community. An individual citizen of an old Greek city, or even a citizen of a free city in the Middle Ages, had at least something of a vague feeling of such a spirit. In this respect it makes no difference that, for instance, the Greek way of life was dependent on an army of slaves who did the work for the “free citizens,” and who were not urged on by the spirit of the community, but by the compulsion of their masters.—The only thing we can learn from this example is that human life is subject to development. Humanity has reached a stage today where the kind of solution of the social question practiced in ancient Greece is no longer possible. Even the most noble Greek did not find slavery wrong, but a human necessity. That is why, for instance, the great Plato could put forward an ideal for the state in which the spirit of the community finds its fulfillment in the fact that the majority of workers are compelled to work by the few with understanding. The task of the present day, however, is to put people in a position where each one can do his work for the whole community out of the impulse to be found within his own being.

[ 40 ] This is why no one should think of looking for a solution to the social question applicable to all times, but of how we must formulate our social thinking and actions in accordance with the immediate needs of the present in which we live.—It is not possible today for anyone to think up something theoretical or to put it into practice so that it could solve the social question. For he would have to have the power to force a number of people into the conditions he has created. There can be no doubt that had Owen had the power or the will to force all the people of his colony to do the work appointed them, the undertaking must have succeeded. But at the present time, such force cannot be used. It must be possible for each person to do what he is called upon to do according to his ability and measure of power, out of his own accord. Just because of this, it can never be the case that a mere point of view can convey to people how economic conditions can best be ordered—in the way that Owen in the above-cited confession thought that people should be influenced “from a theoretical point of view.” An economic theory by itself can never be a stimulus to work against the powers of egotism. Such an economic theory can for a while give the masses life which on the surface, appears like idealism. But in the long run, such a theory can help no one. Whoever injects such a theory into a crowd of people without giving it something really spiritual, commits a sin against the real purpose of humanity.

[ 41 ] The only thing that can help is a spiritual view of the world which can permeate the thoughts, feelings and will, in short, the whole soul of the human being, out of what it is in itself and out of what it is able to offer. The faith that Owen had in the goodness of human nature is only partly right, the other part being a gross illusion. He is right, inasmuch as a “higher self,” that can be awakened, slumbers in everyone. But it can only be redeemed from its slumber by a view of the world which has the characteristics mentioned above. If people are brought together in conditions such as were thought out by Owen, the community will prosper in the best possible way. But if people are brought together who do not have such a view of the world, what is good in these conditions will sooner or later of necessity have to become worse. With people who do not have a view based on the spirit, the conditions which further material well-being must also necessarily intensify egotism and thereby produce distress, misery and poverty.—The original meaning of the saying is undoubtedly right: Only an individual can be helped by the gift of bread alone; a community can only acquire its bread by being helped to a view of the world. It is also of no use to wish to procure bread for each individual in the community. After a while it would inevitably come about that many have no bread.

[ 42 ] Knowledge of these fundamentals removes several illusions from those who set themselves up to be bringers of happiness to the people. For it makes work designed to improve the social well-being a really difficult matter. And it means too that the overall success of such work can, in certain conditions, only be pieced together out of very small individual successes. Most of what whole parties proclaim as remedies for social life loses its value and proves to be vain delusion and empty talk without sufficient knowledge of human life. No parliament, no democracy, no agitation of the masses, nothing like this can have any meaning for someone who looks more deeply, if it goes against the law mentioned above. Such things can only have a favorable effect if they conform to the intention of this law. It is a serious illusion to believe that an elected member of a particular parliament can contribute anything to the salvation of humanity unless his work is carried out in conformity with the main law of social life.

[ 43 ] Wherever this law appears, wherever someone works according to it as far as is possible in the position which he occupies in the human community, good is achieved, even if in very small measure in individual cases. And it is only by means of such isolated examples of work which arise in this way, that beneficial progress in the whole social sphere will come about.—It is also true that in some cases larger communities have a natural tendency which enables them to achieve a greater result in this direction. There are also some particular human communities where something of this sort is being prepared within their natural tendencies and capacities. They will make it possible for humanity to take a step forward in social evolution. Such communities are known to the science of spirit, but it cannot undertake to speak publicly about such matters.—And there are also means of preparing larger groups of people to take such a step forward, even within a reasonable space of time. What anyone can do, however, is to work in conformity with the above law in his own particular sphere. There is no position which a person might have in the world where this is not possible, however insignificant or without influence it may appear to be.

[ 44 ] The most important thing is that each person seek out the ways to a view of the world which is based on real knowledge of the spirit. The spiritual approach of anthroposophy can develop into such a view for everyone, when it evolves more and more according to its content and inherent possibilities. By means of it the human being comes to know that it is not by chance that he is born in a particular place at a particular time, but that he is placed out of necessity into the situation in which he is by the spiritual law of cause, karma. He can see that it is his own well-founded destiny that has placed him into the human community in which he lives. He can also become aware of how his abilities have not come to him haphazardly, but that their existence is dependent on the law of cause.

[ 45 ] And he can realize all this to the extent that it does not remain just a matter of sense or reason, but gradually fills his whole soul with inner life.

[ 46 ] He will come to feel that he is fulfilling a higher purpose when he works in accordance with his place in the world, and in accordance with his abilities. The result of realizing this will not be a kind of shadowy idealism but a tremendous impulse of all his powers, and in this respect he will regard his action just as much a matter of course as in other respects he regards eating and drinking. And furthermore, he will realize the particular significance of the human community to which he belongs. He will come to understand the relationships which his human community has to other communities, and so the individual personalities of these communities will draw together through a unified picture of spiritual aims, a picture of the common mission of the whole human race. And his knowledge will be able to reach out from the human race to the meaning of the entire earth existence. Only someone who will have nothing to do with a view of the world tending in this direction could be doubtful that it could have the effect suggested here. Of course, it is true that today most people have little inclination to go into such things. But the right approach of the science of spirit cannot fail to attract increasingly wider circles. To the extent that it does this, people will do the right things to further social progress. One cannot doubt this, just because no particular view of the world has so far brought happiness to humanity. According to the laws of human evolution it has never been possible to achieve what is now gradually becoming possible: to transmit a view of the world to every person with the prospect of the practical result already indicated.

[ 47 ] The views of the world that have existed so far have been available only to individual groups of people. But what good has been achieved in the human race so far, stems from the various views of the world. Only a view of the world that can inspire everyone and can kindle inner life in everyone is in a position to lead to a universal salvation. This the approach of the science of spirit will always be able to do, where it really evolves according to what is latent within it.—Of course, we should not only look at the form which this way of looking at life happens to have at this moment, in order to recognize what has been said as right, it is imperative to realize that the science of spirit has still to evolve and rise to its lofty cultural mission.

[ 48 ] Until today, for several reasons it has not been possible for it to show the countenance it will have one day. One of these reasons is that it must first gain a foothold somewhere. It has therefore to turn to a particular group of people. And naturally this can only be one that through the particular nature of its development has a desire to seek a new solution to the riddle of the world, and which can bring to such a solution understanding and interest by means of the few people in it who have the necessary preparatory training. Of course, the science of spirit has for the moment to clothe its message in a language suited to this group of people. The science of spirit will find further means of expression to speak to wider circles of people to the extent that conditions allow. Only someone who insists on having fixed dogmas can believe that the present form of the message of the science of spirit is a lasting or even the only possible one.—Just because the science of spirit is not concerned with remaining a mere theory, or merely with satisfying curiosity, it has to work slowly in this way. To its aims belong the practical points of human progress characterized above. But it can bring about this progress of humanity only if it creates the necessary conditions for it. And these conditions can be created only when one person after the other is conquered. The world moves forward only when human beings want it to. But in order to want it, everyone has to work in his own soul. And this can only be achieved step by step. If this were not the case, the science of spirit also would produce a lot of woolly ideas and do no practical work.

If Theosophy were to assert that it has in the last few decades brought any new thing into the world, it could easily and very effectively be contradicted. For it is easy to believe that any particular truth or achievement in a special branch of human knowledge, in man's conception of the world or in his world of thought, might enrich the advancing ages, but not that which concerns his innermost and deepest being—the source and origin of all human wisdom—could appear at any particular time. This in itself could not be believed; hence it is only natural that the belief that Theosophy could bring in or want to bring in anything completely new, must call forth a certain distrust against the movement itself.

But ever since Theosophy set out to obtain an influence upon modern civilisation, it has always described itself as possessing the old primeval wisdom, which man has ever sought and endeavoured to acquire in many different forms in the various ages. It is the task of the Theosophical Movement to look for these forms in the various religions and world-conceptions through which the peoples, throughout the ages, have striven to press through to the source of truth. Theosophy has brought to light the fact that in the various ages, even in the most primeval times, that wisdom by which man sought to attain his goal, has always in its really most profound essence been one and the same. That is a truth, Theosophy teaches us to be modest concerning the acquirements of our own times.

The well-known statement, which, in its lack of humility, boasts of the progress made in the 19th century, is felt to be particularly limited when we observe life in a deeper sense, extending through hundreds of thousands of years. But I do not wish to lead you back to those primeval ages.

I should like to ask you, by means of the example of a great personality of modern times, how he tried to carry out the wisdom-teaching inscribed in the Greek Temples; “Know thyself!” He, who made this saying his own, was really in complete harmony with the teaching and views of Theosophy. This personality is none other than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. He certainly belongs not only to the German nation, but to many other civilized men of the present age and belongs indeed more or less to us all. Goethe is a spirit who affects us in a very special way. No matter to what part of his life we turn in study, we find, not only the great Poet very pre-eminently there, but, if we go more deeply into the subject, we soon discover in him the Wise One, to whose wisdom we turn back again after long years, always to discover something new.

We find that Goethe was one of those spirits who had within him an inexhaustible fund of greatness. And if we have learned to add to our own small stock of wisdom, by turning back to Goethe again and again, we are constantly astonished anew and stand in admiration before that which before was hidden from us, because there was in ourselves no responsive echo of the realm which expressed itself through him. No matter how polished a man may be, no matter how much wisdom he may have discovered in Goethe, if after some years he turns to him again, he will convince himself anew that there is still an infinite fund of what is beautiful and good in the works of Goethe. This experience may come in particular to those who believe profoundly in the evolution of the human soul. It has often been said that in his “Faust,” Goethe produced a sort of Gospel. If this be so, then, besides his Gospel, Goethe also produced a sort of secret Revelation, a sort of Apocalypse. This Apocalypse is concealed within his works, it forms the conclusion to his “Unterhaltung deutscher Ausgewanderten,” and is read only by few. I am always being asked where in Goethe's works this “Märchen” is to be found! Yet it is in all the editions and forms, as I have just said, the conclusion to the above. In this fairy tale, Goethe created a work of art of eternal beauty. The direct, symbolical impression of the work of art will not be interfered with, if I now try to give an interpretation of this fairy tale; Goethe put into this tale his most intimate thoughts and conceptions.

In the latter years of his life he said to Eckermann: “My dear friend, I will tell you something that may be of use to you, when you are going over my works. They will never become popular; there will be single individuals who will understand what I want to say, but there can be no question of popularity for my writings.” This referred principally to be the second part of “Faust,” and what he meant was that a man who enjoyed “Faust” might have a direct artistic impression, but that one who could get at the secrets concealed in “Faust” would see what was hidden behind the imagery. But I am not speaking of the second part of “Faust,” but of the “Fairy Tale of the Green Serpent and the Beautiful Lily,” in which Goethe spoke in an even more intimate way than in the former. I shall try to disclose in the course of this lecture the Mysteries concealed in these remarkable pictures, and to explain why Goethe made use of these symbolical images to express his most intimate thoughts. Anyone who is capable of understanding the Fairy Tale knows that Goethe was a Theosophist and a mystic. Goethe was acquainted with that wisdom and conception of the world which we try to give forth in a popular way in Theosophy; and the Fairy Tale itself is a proof of this; only, at the time when Goethe was writing, the endeavour had not yet been made to clothe the highest truths in words and to give them forth in open lectures by the power of reason; these most intimate human psychic truths were not then spoken of openly. Those who gave a hint of them put them into symbolical form, and expressed them by symbols. This was an old custom, dating from the middle ages, when it was thought that it would be impossible to put the highest insight into the abstract form, but that a sort of experience or initiation was necessary. This made it impossible for people to speak of these truths, who believed that a particular sort of mood, a sort of special soul-atmosphere was needed in order to understand such truths; they could not be grasped merely by the intellect. A certain mood was necessary, a certain disposition of the soul, which I will call a psychic atmosphere. The language of reason seemed to them to be too arid, too dry and cold to express the highest truths. Besides which they still retained a sort of conviction that those who were to learn these truths should first make themselves worthy of them. This conviction brought it to pass, that in the olden times, down to the 3rd century A.D.—the truth about the human soul and the human spirit was not given out publicly as it is now, but those who wished to attain to such knowledge had first to be prepared to receive that which was to be given to them in the Sanctuaries of the Mysteries. Therein all that had been preserved of the secrets of nature and of the laws of cycles, was given out as something which, to put it concisely, could not be learned and recognised as dry truths, but which the students had to recognise as living truths and learn to live them. It was not then a question of thinking wisdom, but of living it; not merely a question of permeating wisdom with the glow of the intellect, but of making it the mainspring of life, so that a man is transformed thereby. A certain shyness must possess a man before the Holy of Holies; he had to understand that truth is divine, that it is permeated by the Divine Cosmic Blood, which draws into the personality, so that the divine world lives anew within. The recognition of all this was included in the word “development.” This had to be made quite clear to the Mystic, and this it was which he was to attain through the stages of purification, on the way to the Mysteries, he was to acquire the holy shyness before the Truth, and to be drawn away from the longing for the things of the senses, from the sorrows and joys of life, from all that surrounds us in ever-day life. The Light of the Spirit, which is necessary to us when we withdraw from the profane life, we shall receive when we give up the other. When we are worthy to receive the Light of the Spirit, we shall have become different people; we shall then love with real, earnest sympathy and devotion, that which we are wont to look upon as a shadowy existence, a life in the abstract. We then live the Spiritual life which to the ordinary man is mere thought. But the Mystic learns to sacrifice the Self that clings to the everyday life, he learns not only to penetrate the truth with his thought but has to live it through and through, to conceive it within him as Divine Truth, as Theosophy. Goethe has expressed this conviction in his “West-Ostlichen Divan:”—

So lang dud as nicht hast,
Dies ‘stirb im Werde’,
Bist du nur ein trüber Gast
Auf der dunkeln Erde—

This it is that the Mystics of all ages have striven for,—to let the lower nature die out, and to allow that which dwells in the Spirit to spring forth; the extinction of sense reality, that man may ascend to the Kingdom of “Divine Purposes.” “To die in order to become.” If we do not possess this power we do not know of the forces that vibrate into our world, and we are but a “trüber Gast” (gloomy guest) on our Earth. Goethe gave expression to this in his “West-Ostlichen Divan,” and this he tries to represent in all the different parts of the “Fairy Tale” of the “Green Serpent and the Beautiful Lily!” The transition of man from one stage of existence to a higher one. That was the riddle he wanted to solve, the riddle as to how a man who lives in the everyday world,—and who can only see with his eyes, and hear with his ears,—can lay hold of this “dying and becoming!”

This was the question for the Mystics of all ages; and this great question was always called “Spiritual Alchemy.” The transmutation of man from the every-day soul to the Spirit-soul, one to whom the things of the Spirit are just as real as the things of this Earth, such as tables and chairs and so on, are to the ordinary man. When the alchemical transmutation had taken place in a man, he was then considered worthy to have the highest truths communicated to him, he was then led into the Holy of Holies. He was then initiated, and supplied with the teachings which instructed him as to the purposes of nature, those purposes which run through the plan of the world. It is an initiation of this kind which is described by Goethe, the initiation into the Mysteries, of one who has been made worthy to receive them.

There are two proofs of this—in the first place Goethe himself took a great deal of trouble to become acquainted with the secret which may be called the Secret of Alchemy. Between the studies he made at Leipzig and Strassburg he had already discovered that Alchemy had a Spiritual side, and knew that ordinary Alchemy was nothing but a reflection of the Spiritual, and all that is known of Alchemy consisted only in the symbolical expressions of realities. That is to say, he referred to that Alchemy which is concerned with the forces of the inner life.

Alchemists have also left indications of how this could be worked. As they were only able to describe the transmutation of the human forces by means of symbols, they therefore spoke of one substance being transmuted into another. All they related concerning the transmutation of matter, referred to what the human soul-life developed within itself at a higher stage, when it became transmuted spiritually. All that the great Spirits have disclosed about the Spiritual Realms to those men who are still bound to the life of every day, was taken by them as referring to the transmutation of substances and metals in the retorts, and they took great trouble to try and discover by what mysterious methods the transmutation of substances could be brought about.

Goethe, in one part of his “Faust,” shows us what he himself understood as to such things. In the first part of “Faust,” in the walk in front of the garden, he points clearly to the false, wrong and petty material conceptions that are held as to Alchemy. He makes fun of those who strive with such feverish efforts to discover these secrets, and who pour forth the lower substances, according to numberless receipts, in company of the Adepts.

“There a Red Lion, with the Lily wedded,
“A wooer bold, within the tepid bath,
“From bridal-bower to bridal-bower was speeded
“Racked by the naked fire's flaming wrath.”

The union with the Lily, which is made fun of by Goethe is what he wished to illustrate in his Fairy Tale, of the Green Serpent and the beautiful Lily.

The highest transmutation which man can accomplish is illustrated by Goethe in the symbol of the Lily. It is of like significance with what we call the Highest freedom. When a man follows the primal and eternal laws, in accordance with which we have to complete the primal and eternal circuit of our existence, and if he also recognises the primal and eternal evolution of his freedom, he will then find himself at a certain stage of his development which is accomplished by a disposition of the soul, which may be described by the symbol of the Lily. The highest forces of the soul, the highest state of consciousness, in which a man may be free because he will then not misuse his freedom, and will never create a disturbance in the circle of freedom,—this state of soul, which was communicated to the Mystics in the Mysteries, in which they were collectively transmuted,—this was from all time described as the “Lily.”

That which Spinoza expresses at the end of his “Ethics,” (dry and mathematical as he was in his other writings)—when he says that man ascended into the higher spheres of existence and penetrated them by means of the laws of nature,—this state of mind may also be described as the Lily, Spinoza describes it as the realm of Divine Love in the human soul, the realm in which man does nothing under compulsion, but in which everything belonging to the domain of human development takes place in freedom, devotion and utter Love, where everything arbitrary is transmuted by that Spiritual Alchemy in which every activity flows into the stream of freedom.

Goethe has described that Love as the highest state of Freedom, as the being free from all desires and wishes of our every-day life. He says, “Self-seeking and Self-will are not permanent, they are driven out by the Ego. Here we must be good.” The Divine Love, which is referred to by Spinoza, and which he wishes to attain through Spiritual Alchemy,—that it is with which man should unite himself, that it is with which man should unite his will. Human will active at every stage, is that which in all ages was known as the “Lion,” the creature in which the Will is most strongly developed, and that is why the Mystics have always called the will of man: the “Lion.” In the Persian Mysteries there were seven Initiations; there were the following: first the Raven, then the Occultist, then the Fighter; at the fourth grade the student was already able to look back at his life from the other side, and had really become Man, hence the Persians called one who had overcome the Lion stage a Persian. That was the fifth stage, and a man who had got so far that his actions flowed quickly along, just as the Sun runs its course in the Heavens above, was called a Sun-runner. But he who accomplished all his actions out of absolute and ceaseless love, was looked upon by the Persians as belonging to the grade of the “Father.” At the fourth grade, a man stood at the parting of the ways; he had then, besides his physical body, his etheric double, and that body which is subject to the laws of passions and desires, wishes and instincts; he was now organized for a higher life. These three bodies form, according to Theosophy, the lower part of man. From these the lower man is born. When a man was initiated into this grade and could see this connection the Persians called him a “Lion.” He then stands at the parting of the ways, and that which compelled him to act according to the laws of nature is transmuted into a free gift of Love. When he reaches the eighth stage of Initiation, when he has evolved himself into a free man, one who can allow himself to do, out of free love, what he was formerly driven to do by his own nature, this connection between the Lion and the free loving being, is described in Alchemy as “the mystery of human development.” This is the mystery Goethe represented in his Fairy Tale. First of all he shows us how this man of will stands there, drawn down to the physical world from higher spheres, from spheres of which he himself knows nothing. Goethe is conscious of the fact that man, in so far as his spiritual nature is concerned, comes originally from higher spheres; that he was led into this which Goethe represents as the world of matter, the world of sense-existence, this is the Land on the bank of the River.

But in the Tale of the green Serpent and the beautiful Lily, there are two Lands, one on this side of the River, and the other beyond. The unknown Ferryman conducts the man across from the far side into the Land of the sense-world;—and between the Land of spiritual existence and the sense-world there flows the River, the water which divides them. By water, Goethe describes that which the Mystics of all ages have symbolized as water. Even in Genesis the same meaning is applied to this word as we find in Goethe. In the New Testament too we find this expression in the conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus. “He who is not born again of water and the Spirit, cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.” Goethe understood perfectly what was signified by the expression “born again of water.” And we can see in what sense he understood it by his “song of the Spirit.”

Seele des Menschen	Soul of humanity
Nie gleichat du dem Wasser!	How like to the water!
Schicksal des Menschen	Fate of humanity
Wie gleichst du dem Wind!	How like to the wind!

The world of humanity, the world of longing and wishes, the world of passions and desires, is a land inserted between our Spirit and our senses. Our senses know neither good nor evil, they cannot err. Anyone who goes into this question, knows that when we study the laws of nature, we cannot speak of good or evil. When we study nature in the animal world, we find that there are objectionable animals and useful ones, but we cannot speak of good and evil ones. Only when man plunges into the water—into the soul-world—does he become capable of good and evil. This world which is inserted between the Spiritual and the world of senses, is the River over which the Spirit passes from the unknown spheres. The innermost of man came across the River of passions and desires—and when he goes through further development he becomes like the Will-o'-the-wisp.

Thus man is subject to the laws within him, after he has crossed the River, and before he has received the Divine Spark which will take him across to the other world. He is therefore put ashore by the Ferryman who brings men across the River from the far bank to the near one. Nobody can be guided over by the Ferryman but all can be brought over by him. We feel ourselves being brought over without any action of our own, by the forces lying beneath our consciousness, which go ahead of our actions. By means of these forces we feel ourselves placed in the world of sense,—on the hither side; the Ferryman who brought us across from the Land of the Spirit, has put us into this world and cannot take us back to that country again to which we must however return, the Land of the beautiful Lily. The Will-o'-the-wisps wanted to pay the Ferryman his fare with gold, but he demanded fruits of the Earth, which they did not possess; they had nothing but gold, and he would not be paid with that. Gold coins, said he, were injurious to the River, it cannot bear such gold; which signifies that man can purchase wisdom with the fruits of the Earth. This is a profound wisdom; gold signifies the force of wisdom dwelling in man, and this is his guide through life. This force of Wisdom makes itself felt when a man is placed among the things of sense, as the forces of knowledge and reason. But this wisdom is not the wisdom which furthers his development. When it forms part of a man's nature, it makes him self-seeking and egotistical. If this force of reason and this knowledge were to join forces with what flows in the River, their passions would throw up huge waves; for whenever man does not place his wisdom at the service of selflessness, but simply throws it into the River, when he cultivates (frohmen) his passions, the River throws up great waves. Hence it is impossible to satisfy the River with gold; with that wisdom. So the Ferryman throws back the wisdom which has not yet passed through the stage of selflessness. He throws it back into the chasm, where reigns the profoundest darkness, and there it is buried. We shall hear why this is so.

The Ferryman demanded three cabbages, three artichokes, and three onions.—Thus he demands the fruits of the Earth. Now by what means can man attain his development? By ennobling the lower desire-forces of his nature, so that he purifies the sense-nature within him and casts this purified nature into the River, and thereby .................. this it is which Schiller refers to in his letters on the aesthetic education of man. He alone understands freedom who has set his own nature free;—when the outer sense-nature is so ennobled that it seeks for the good and the beautiful because it is no longer misled by passion, when we no longer throw our wisdom into the River, but reward our passions with the fruits of the Earth so that our sense-nature itself is taken up by them, just as the fruits of the Earth would be accepted by the River, we have then attained the first grade of initiation as expressed in the words, “Ye must know that I cannot be paid except with the fruits of the Earth.” Then the Will-o'-the-wisps proceed further on this side of the River, that means that man tries to follow his own way of life further.

On this side of the River he meets with the green Serpent, the symbol of human endeavours, of human knowledge. This Serpent had previously had a wonderful experience—the Ferryman had ferried over the piece of gold and concealed it in a cleft of the Earth, and here the Serpent had found it. The wisdom that brings men forward is still a hidden treasure, concealed in the mysteries, hence if a man wishes to find wisdom he must seek it far from all human self-seeking. When a man had made himself worthy to receive it, it will be found in its proper place;—the Serpent, the symbol of human striving after knowledge, permeates itself with the gold; this “self” is entirely permeated with wisdom, and becomes luminous. Then the Serpent desired from the Will-o'-the-wisps that which is a cause of pride to the self-seeking man, when he throws about him and pricks himself with,—this human knowledge which when used in the service of egoism is objectionable and worthless, will be attained when man crawls humbly on the ground as does the Serpent, and strives to recognize the reality piece by piece. If a man stands there, proud and stuck-up, he will never attain it, he can only receive it when like the Serpent, he goes horizontally on the ground and lives in humility,—then the gold of wisdom is in its place. Then the man may venture to permeate himself with wisdom—that too is why the Will-o'-the-wisps call the Serpent their relation, and say “We really are related on the side of light.” Indeed they are related, the wisdom that serves the self is related to the wisdom which serves humility; the Serpent is related to the Will-o'-the-wisps.

Now the tale relates further that the Serpent had been under the Earth in the clefts of the rock, and there had met something resembling human forms—the Serpent had reached a temple; this is none other than a symbol of the Mystery Temples of all ages,—this concealed Temple which was in the clefts below the Earth is the symbol of the Sanctuaries of Initiation. In this Temple the Serpent found the three great priests of Initiation; these priests were gifted with the highest forces of human nature, which theosophy calls Atma, Buddhi, Manas. They are called by Goethe the King of Beauty, the King of Wisdom, and the King of Strength or Will;—with these three basic forces of the soul, into which the human soul must be initiated, the Mystic had to be united in the Temple of the Mysteries—and Goethe represents the Serpent, all luminous within, because it had taken in the gold of wisdom, humility.

The old man with the lamp is another figure—what does he represent? He has a lamp which has the peculiarity of only shining when another light is there. Because the Serpent is luminous and illuminates the inner Hall of the Mystery Temple with its own radiating light,—Goethe expresses these thoughts in another passage in the words “If the eye were not sensitive to the Sun it could not perceive the light.” Here he expresses in poetic words what he expressed in the fairy tale in pictures; what we in Anthroposophy call “occult knowledge” is expressed by the old man with the lamp,—the light of occult knowledge cannot shine to anyone who had not prepared himself to receive it.

It appears to no one who has not worked his way up to that higher stage of development at which his higher self, his selfless nature shines forth from within, bringing light to meet light,—the highest wisdom is called occult, because it only appears when a man brings his own light to meet it. When those two lights, the intuitive light from above, and the light that comes from the personal, shine into one another, they then give that which man experiences in his transmutation as Spiritual Alchemy—then the space around him become light, he then learns to recognise the highest Spiritual forces, the gifts of the three Kings; Wisdom, Beauty, and Strength,—the gift of the golden King is Wisdom, that of the silver King is Beauty or Piety, the gift of the bronze King is Strength or force of Will. Man can only understand his innermost forces, he can only understand himself when he meets with the light of the lamp which can only shine when there is already a light. Then the three Kings appear in their radiance, and at the same time the significance of the fourth King becomes apparent—the King who is composed of the metals of the three others;—he is the symbol of the lower nature, in which the noble forces of Wisdom, Beauty, and Strength work together as disorderly and inharmonious chaos. These three forces that live in a highly developed soul are also to be found in lower natures, though there they are chaotic and inharmonious. This fourth King is the Kingdom of the present world;—the Chaotic mixture of Wisdom, Beauty, and Strength,—the soul-forces which can only attain the highest when they work together harmoniously,—affect one another in a chaotic way in the present age. The old man said of the fourth King “Er wird sich setzen” (here he will sit down)—The Chaotic mixture will have disappeared when that which Goethe so ardently longed for shall have come to pass, that is, that the Temple shall no longer be hidden, but shall be raised to the full light of day, when it shall have ascended from the depths, and all men will be able to serve in the Temple of Initiation, which will be a bridge across which all men may pass to and fro. That will be a time when all men will have made themselves worthy of being influenced by the highest wisdom, piety, and strength and will. The Temple will then have fulfilled its task. It will have raised itself above the river of passions, and the forces of passion will have become so pure and noble that the highest Spiritual can uplift itself in the Temple, in the clear light of day, above the stream of passions and desires. To this end it is necessary that mankind should be filled with the “Stirb und werde” (dying and becoming) which Goethe so distinctly outlined in his “West-Ostlichen Divan.” Goethe was frequently asked for the solution of the riddle and he replied “The solution of the riddle lies in the fairy tale itself, and not in one word alone.” There is a passage during the conversation in the Temple which we take to be the solution of the riddle. The solution is not a thing which can be expressed in words, but in an inner resolve; that was indicated by Goethe in the fairy tale. The Serpent said “I will sacrifice myself, I will purify myself through selflessness.” It is precisely this which must be taken as the profoundest solution of the riddle, it is an act, and not a doctrine. Till now one could only pass across the River in two ways. The one was when at noon the green Serpent laid itself across the River and formed a bridge, so that at the mid-day hour it was possible to go across the River. This means that at the present age there are moments in a man's life when the Sun is at noon for him, when he is ripe to yield himself to the highest Spiritual light; but he is always drawn away again and again from these noon-tide moments of life, into the lower world full of passions. In such noon-tide moments the elect of the Spirit can pass across from the shore of the sense-life to the shore of the Spirit.

But there is yet another way to pass over the River, and that is in the evening, when the shadow of the great giant is thrown across the River,—that too can form a bridge, but only in the hour of twilight. What is this shadow of the great giant? Goethe went into this question more deeply with his intimate and trusted friends; with them he spoke about the forces symbolized by him in the “Fairy Tale.” On one occasion when Schiller was planning a journey to Frankfort, Goethe wrote to him: “I am very glad you did not come here, to the West, for the shadow of the giant might have got hold of you unawares.” The meaning of the giant is moreover clearly expressed in the “Fairy Tale” itself, the giant who is weak, can do nothing of himself; but his shadow can form a bridge across to the far side. This giant is the crude mechanical forces of nature. Its shadow is sometimes able, when the light is no longer strong, to conduct the men of crude passions across the River. These are the people who, when their clear day consciousness is extinguished, pass over into the Land of the Spirit in trance, somnambulism, psychic vision, or some of the many similar conditions of the soul. Thus the clear day consciousness was also extinguished in the wild delirious acts by which at that time men tried to push their way into this realm of Freedom.

They wanted to penetrate into the realm of the beautiful Lily—But the shadow of the giant can alone reach across. Man is only able to overcome his passions in the twilight of his consciousness, when he is in an almost unconscious state, and not when living in clear consciousness. These are the two ways of reaching the opposite bank: First, in the holy moments of the noon-day hour, by the Serpent; and secondly, in the twilight of the consciousness—by the shadow of the giant.

But this one thing must be striven after:—the Serpent must sacrifice itself completely. Not only should it lead men over the River of passions at the noon-day hour, but at all hours of the day it should be ready to form the bridge from one side to the other; so that not only a few may be able to wander across, but that all men should be able to cross backwards and forwards at any time. The Serpent made this resolution, and so did Goethe; Goethe points to an age of selflessness, when man will not put his forces at the service of his lower self but at the service of unselfishness.

There are a few other thoughts connected with these basic thoughts about the Fairy Tale. I cannot go into them all today, and will only touch upon a few. We find the wife of the old man with the lamp, she is connected with the representatives of human occult knowledge. She keeps the house of the old man. To her come the Will-o'-the-wisps, they have licked off all the gold from the walls, and had at once given away all the gold which enriched them, so that the living “Mops,” who ate up the gold, had to suffer death. The old man is the force of reason, which brings forth that which is useful. It is only when occult force unites with this which forwards material civilization, when the highest is united with the lowest in the world, that the world itself can follow its proper course of development. Man should not be led away from everyday life, but should purify the everyday civilization. In the world man is surrounded in his dwellings by that which hangs as gold upon the walls. All that is around him is the gold. On the one hand he is a man of knowledge and on the other a useful man. Thus he has around him the two-fold experience of the human race; all the collective experience of humanity has been collected together in human science. Those who strive after this, seek what is written in the scriptures. They lick off the historical wisdom, as it were.

This it is which surrounds man in his strivings; this it is with which man must entirely permeate himself. But it can not be of use to that which is alive. The living Mops swallowed the gold and died of it. That wisdom which only rules as the dead wisdom of books, and which has not been made alive by the Spirit, kills everything living. But, when it is once again united with the origin of Wisdom, with the beautiful Lily, then it wakes to life again. That is why the old man gives the dead Mops to his wife, that she may carry it to the beautiful Lily. The Lamp has one great peculiarity, everything dead was made alive through it; and what was alive was purified by it. This transmutation is brought about in man by occult knowledge. Besides this, the old woman is begged by the Will-o'-the-Wisps to pay their debts to the Ferryman. These three fruits represent the human sense for usefulness in material civilization, which is to pay tribute to the passions. For from whence should the actual driving forces of nature come, if not from the technique, from the cultivation of material nature? It is an interesting fact that the shadow of the giant as it comes up from the River, takes one of the fruits of the Earth away with it, so that the old woman only has two left. Now she required three for the Ferryman and so had to renounce the River. Something then happens, something full of significance. She has to plunge her hands into the River, whereby she turns so black that she scarcely remains visible. She is still there, but she is almost imperceptible. That shows us the connection between external civilization and the world of the passions. Material civilization must be placed at the service of the Astral, of the soul. As long as the nature of man is not sufficiently ennobled to offer itself as tribute to the River of the passions, so long does technique remain in debt to the River of man (the soul of man). As long as human endeavours are devoted to human passions, man works invisibly at something of which he cannot perceive the final aim. It is invisible, yet it is there; it can be felt, but is not externally perceptible. Everything man does on the road to the great goal, until he pays his debts to the River or the Soul,—all that he has to throw into the River of passions becomes invisible, like the hand of the wife of the old man with the Lamp. As long as the sense-nature is not fully purified, as long as it is not consumed, as it were, by the fire of the passion it cannot shine, and remains invisible; that is what excites the old lady so much that she can no longer reflect any light of her own. This might be gone into more fully, in greater detail; every single word is fraught with meaning. But it would lead us too far to go into all that to-day.

So let us hurry on to the great procession in which we encounter a youth, who tried to capture the beautiful Lily too early, and in so doing crippled all his life forces. Goethe says (in another place): “A man who strives for freedom without having first liberated his own inner self, falls more deeply than before into the bonds of necessity. If he does not set himself free, he will be killed.” A man who has prepared himself, who has been purified in the Mysteries, and the Temple of the Mysteries, so that he may unite himself in a proper way with the Lily, he alone will escape death. One who has died to the lower to be born again in a higher sense, can grasp the Lily. The present time is represented by the crippled youth, who wanted to attain the highest by violence. He complains to all whom he meets that he cannot secure the Lily. He must now make himself ripe enough to do so, and to this aim those forces must be combined which are symbolized by those who took part in the procession. It consisted of the old man with the Lamp, the Will-o'-the-Wisps and the beautiful Lily herself. The procession thus included all the different beautiful forces, and it was led down into the clefts of the Earth to the Temple of Initiation. That too, is a profound feature of the enigmatical Fairy Tale, in that it allows the Will-o'-the-Wisps to open the door of the Temple. The self-seeking wisdom is not without object, it is a necessary stage of transition. Human egoism can be overcome if it is nourished by wisdom and permeated with the gold of true knowledge. This wisdom can then be used to open the Temple. Those who unconsciously serve wisdom in an external sense, will be led to the real sanctuaries of wisdom. Those learned men who only bury themselves in books are nevertheless our guides. Goethe does not undervalue science. He knew that science herself uncloses the Temple of Wisdom; he knew that everything must be proved and accepted by science, and that without her we cannot penetrate the Temple of the highest Wisdom. Goethe himself sought this wisdom everywhere. He only considered himself worthy of recognizing the highest revelation in Spiritual life, in Art, after he had gone through the study of Science. He sought wisdom everywhere, in physics, biology, etc.,—And so, he admits the Will-o'-the-Wisps into the Temple, they who resting on themselves alone occupy a false position towards the others, towards the others who enter through experience and observations, like the Serpent. They cause the Temple to be opened and the procession passes in. Now follows what Goethe intended to apply to the whole of mankind; the whole Temple moves up and ascends through the cleft in the Earth. The Temple can now be set up over the River of the Soul, over the River of passions and desires, because the Serpent sacrificed itself. The Self of man has become selfless, the Serpent is transformed into precious stone, which forms the piles of the bridge. And now men can more freely go to and fro from the world of sense to the world of the Spiritual.

The union between sense and spirit is brought about by man, when he becomes selfless, by a sacrifice of himself, such as was made by the Serpent, which offered itself as a bridge over the River of passions. Thus the Temple ascended from the clefts of the Earth and is now accessible to all who cross the bridge, to those who drive over as well as to those who go on foot. In the Temple itself we meet once more with the three Kings; and the youth who had been made pure by having recognized the three soul-forces, is now presented to them. The golden King goes up to him and says “Feed my Sheep,”—in this Goethe gave expression to a thought which was very deeply engraved in his soul, that of uniting beauty with piety. It is the commandment given in the Bible. He applied these words to the youth in the same sense as when in Rome he stood before the statue of a God, and said “Here is necessity (notwendigkeit) it could not be different from what it is, this is a God. I feel that the Greeks worked according to the same Divine Laws that I am seeking.” It is a personal note of Goethe's when he causes the silver King to appear as Beauty and Piety: And then the King of Strength comes to the youth and says “The sword in the left hand, and the right hand free,”—the sword was not to serve for attack but for defence. Harmony was to be brought about, not conflict. After this event the youth was initiated into the three soul-forces; the fourth King has nothing more to say, he subsides into himself. The Temple has risen from its concealment into the clear light of day. Within the Temple there was raised a small silver Temple, which is none other than the transformed hut of the Ferryman. It is a remarkable feature that Goethe transformed the hut of the Ferryman,—he who carries us over into the land of the Spirit,—into pure molten silver so that it becomes a small altar, a small Temple, a Holy of Holies. This hut which represents the holiest in man, the deepest core of his being which he has preserved as a recollection of the land from which he came and to which the Ferryman cannot take him back, represents something which existed before our evolution. It is the memory that we are descended from the Spirit,—the memory of this stands as a Holy of Holies within the Temple.—The giant,—the crude force of nature, which lives in nature without the Spirit, and could not work through itself alone, but only as a shadow,—has been given a remarkable mission. Now this giant stands upright, and now only does he show the time. This is a profound thought—when man has laid aside everything belonging to his lower nature and has become entirely spiritualised, then the lower forces of nature will no longer spring up around him in their original elemental power,—in the form of storms, as they now do—the mechanical crude force of nature will then only perform mechanical service; man will always require these mechanical nature-forces, but they will no longer have power over him, he will use them in his service. His work will be the hour-hand of Spiritual culture, it will be the hour-hand pointing to the regular mechanical necessity, and will go regularly as the course of a clock. The giant himself will then no longer be necessary. We must not interpret the Fairy Tale pedantically, by interpreting every word, but we must feel our way into what Goethe wanted to say, and which he painted in such beautiful pictures. Goethe in his Fairy Tale brought out what Schiller expressed in his Aesthetic Letters;—the union of Necessity with Freedom. What Schiller tried to express in these letters Goethe could not grasp in abstract thought, but gave in the form of a Fairy Tale. “When I want to express these thoughts in all their living force I require pictures and pictures and pictures, such as the ancient priests of Initiation made use of in the Mysteries.” He did not teach his pupils by means of abstract thoughts, but by bringing the whole drama of Dionysos before them, by showing them the great course of the evolution of man, of the resurrection of Dionysos; and he also showed that which went on invisibly in the drama of “Dionysos and Osiris.”

Thus Goethe wished to express what lived in him in the form of drama and pictures, so we will not interpret the Fairy Tale in the ordinary way, but as theosophy would teach us to do, as representing the uniting of the lower nature of man with the higher; the union of the physical with the etheric body; the life-force and the passions and desires, with the higher nature of man:—the three purely Spiritual soul forces Atma, Buddhi, Manas, which we represented as the three Kings. This is the course of the evolution of man up to the time when every man will be himself an Initiate. This is what Goethe tried to express in a truly theosophical fashion. Just as those priests of Initiation expressed their wisdom in the form of pictures, so Goethe expressed in pictures in his Apocalypse that which represents the evolution of humanity,—that which will some day become the highest act of man—the transformation of the lower nature into the higher and the transmutation of the lower metals, the lower soul-forces into the gold of wisdom. The transmutation of that which dwells alone in the pure noble metal of wisdom is represented by the King who is embodied in the gold. Goethe wished to express this human alchemy, this Spiritual transmutation, in a somewhat different manner from what he had concealed occultly in the second part of “Faust.” Goethe was in the true sense of the word a Theosophist. He understood what it means that all the transitory things we see with our senses, are nothing but symbols, but he also understood that what man is trying to do is impossible to describe, but can be accomplished by an act, and that the “Unzulängliche” is that which lives among us on this side of the River, and we must experience it if the purpose of human evolution is to be fulfilled. Goethe also expressed this to this end in the “Chorus Mysticus” and included it in the second part of “Faust.” The highest soul-force in man is symbolically represented as the beautiful Lily, and the male principle—the force of Will unites with her. He expresses this in the beautiful and expressive words with which the second part of “Faust” concludes. These final verses are a mystical creed. We can only understand them completely when we see our own intimate life come to life again in the story of the green Serpent and the beautiful Lily.

Even before the close of the 18th century, when Goethe passed on to his work on the second part of “Faust,” his nature had already been transmuted and he had attained the vision of a higher world.

It is of profound significance if we are able to understand the words written by Goethe in his testament, the second part of “Faust,” when he had completed his course on the Earth. After his death, this second part was found in his writing table, closed and sealed. He put this book as a gospel into the world, as a testament. And this testament closes with his mystical creed:

Alles Vergängliche ist nur sin Gleichnis
Das Unzulängliche hier wird's Ereignis.
Das Unbeschreibliche, hier ist's getan,
Das ewig Weibliche zieht uns hinan.

One translation is as follows:

All things transitory
But as symbols sent,
Earth's insufficiency
Here grows to event.
The indescribable, here it is done.
The Woman Soul leads us upward, and on.