The Rudolf Steiner Archive

If we take note of many an observation which is made on the relation of man to Life and Death to-day, we may be reminded of a sentence which Shakespeare gives to the gloomy Hamlet:

Imperious Caesar, dead, and turned to clay,
Might block a hole to keep the wind away;
O, that the earth, which kept the world in awe,
Should patch a wall to expel the winter's flaw!

Such an utterance might be made by many an one who is subject to the suggestive effect of the many conceptions of the times which are acquired in the field of natural science, and who, might feel himself moved to follow up all the movements after death of the separate substances which compose the human body. He might feel himself justified in asking first of all: “What becomes of the oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, etc., which build up the human body after the death of man?” Quite apart from the fact that there are many people to-day who are influenced by the suggestive phrase “the indestructibility of Matter,” there are, again, others who entirely lose the ability of imagining anything in the whole vast unending space other than matter and its operations.

We can see from many an observation on the nature of death, or one which establishes the idea of an antithesis between life and death, how much depends, in expositions of this kind, on establishing conceptions and ideas in the most exact manner possible. It happens again and again that no account is taken of the fact that “death” and “life” form an antithesis which depends on the nature of that to which it refers, and that, one who makes a closer observation dare not speak in the same way of the death of a plant or an animal as of a man. To what extent this is the case shall be explained in this lecture. How little we understand the expressions used in this sphere may be shown by the fact that in the physiology of the great naturalist, Huxley, for instance, the following is to be found. It is there said, that we must distinguish between the local death and the death of the tissue in an organism, and it is expressly stated that the life of man depends on the brain, lungs and heart, but that this is a threefold condition which we could really reduce into a twofold one; that, in fact, if we could maintain the breathing by artificial means, we might quite well remove the brain of a man and he would continue to live. That means that life would continue, even if the brain were taken away. That is to say, that when a man is no longer able to form a conception of what is around him or of what is taking place within him, and if life could be maintained merely as a life-process in the organism through artificial breathing, the organism would still continue to live in the sense of this definition of natural science, and we could not really speak of death, although no brain were there at all. That is an idea which ought to make clear to anyone who—though he might not care for a life without a brain, at least find such a definition plausible—that this explanation just shows that the definition of life given by natural science is not at all applicable to man in this form. For no one would be able to call the life of an organism—even a human one—the life of man himself, even if in other respects the facts hinted at were quite correct.

Now to-day we are, perhaps, somewhat further advanced even in the field of natural science than ten years ago, when one was almost embarrassed in speaking of life at all, and when all life was traced back to the life of the smallest living creatures. This life in the smallest organisms was looked upon as a complicated chemical process. According to this view, if this definition were extended to a conception of the universe, one could only speak of the smallest parts of life as living on, so that only a conservation of matter could then be spoken of. Now, to-day, on account of the investigations on radium, for instance, the idea of the indestructibility of matter has become a more uncertain one.

I will now only draw your attention to the fact that natural science to-day is already attempting to speak of a sort of independence, at least of the smallest living creatures. It states that the smallest living creatures propagate themselves by fission; one divides itself into two, two into four, and so on. There we could not admit of a death, for the first lives on in the second and when these die they both live on in the next ones.

Now those who wished to speak of the immortality of unicellular beings have sought for a definition of death, and just this definition of the nature of death is extremely characteristic. They have found the main characteristic of death is that it leaves a corpse behind, and as unicellular beings leave no corpse behind, they, therefore, cannot really die. Thus the characteristic of that which has to do with the deepest foundations of life is sought in what life leaves behind. Now it will be clear without further explanation, that what remains behind of life passes over gradually into lifeless matter. So lifeless matter now becomes in death the outer organism of the smallest, most complicated living creature. Yet if we wish to take into account the significance which death has for life, we must not look at what is left, at what becomes lifeless matter; but must seek the cause, the principles of life, in life itself, while it is there.

I said that one cannot speak in the same sense of death in plants, as in animals and man, because an important phenomenon is not taken into consideration there. It is also found in certain of the lower animals, for example, in the ephemera; and consists in the fact that most plants and lower animals have the peculiarity that as soon as the process of fructification is established and the possibility of a new living being is created, the dying off of the old one then begins. In the plant the backward process, the process of dying off, begins the moment it has taken into itself the possibility of forming a new plant. One can therefore say quite certainly of those plants in which this can be observed, that the cause which has taken away life from them lies in the new living being or beings, which have left no life behind in the old being.

Through simple reflections one could convince oneself that this is so. There are certain plants which endure, which blossom again and again and bear fruit; and on which ever new plant-forms, like parasites, are, as it were, planted on to the old stem. But there you can convince yourself that they purchase the possibility of recreating themselves by thrusting certain parts of themselves into the realm of the lifeless, into death,—that is to say, they surround themselves with bark. We are quite justified in saying of a plant which can surround itself with bark, which can bear lifeless matter and yet continue to live, that it has a surplus of life; and because of this superfluity which it will not give up—only giving up what is necessary for the young organism—it must make itself secure by thrusting death outside. Thus it can also be said that every living being which possesses the possibility within itself beyond the bringing forth of a new creation, is confronted with the necessity of continually mastering life within itself, since it takes up inorganic lifeless matter. This can be adequately observed both in the animal and in man.

There we have a separation between life and death in the being itself. We have an exchange between a living member which develops in one direction, and a continual sinking-into itself of another member which is developing in the direction of death. If we now wish to draw near to the inmost being of man from this point of view, we must certainly bear in mind something of what has often been said before, but which is never superfluous, because it does not as yet belong to the ordinary recognised truth.

If we rest on quite ordinary conceptions—as we will to-day in the first half of the lecture—and then proceed to the question of life and death from the point of view of Spiritual Science, we must remember that what is taken into account here is certainly very little recognised to-day, for it has to do with a truth which is just as new to the man of to-day as another truth, which now belongs to the trivialities, was new, and even unknown, to the world of three centuries ago. I have often, pointed out that it is taken for granted to-day by the natural scientist, or by one who builds up his observations on natural-scientific conceptions, that it is an acknowledged fact that “everything living is born from the living.” (Of course, I am speaking here with the limitation which this sentence bears in the world of natural science. We need not embark on the question of primeval generation for instance, for it can be noticed right away that the analogous sentence which is mentioned there is also made use of in the world of Spiritual Science). Not long ago the great natural scientist, Francesco Redi, had to fight for this sentence, “Everything living is born from the living,” with all his energy. For before the appearance of this Naturalist of the 17th century, it. was considered quite possible, not only in lay circles. but even in scientific ones, for new organisms to generate from putrefying river-mud or from decaying organic matter. This was believed of worms and fishes. The idea, that the living can only develop from the living is not yet old, for only a few centuries ago Francesco Redi called forth such a storm of passion that he only just escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno. When we consider how the “fashions of the time” alter, we can judge of the fate of this truth that we must again proclaim here. For this truth, “Life can only originate from life”, called forth at that time a storm of anger. Those who feel themselves impelled to draw from the well of knowledge similar truths in other spheres, are no longer delivered to the flames of the funeral pile to-day. That is no longer the fashion. But they are made fun of and a man who communicates such things is ridiculed; those who are impelled to proclaim such things as relate to spiritual development, are condemned to suffer a Spiritual death. But the fate of the above-mentioned truth also consists in its having become a self-evident fact, a, triviality, for him who is capable of judging.

What error, then, was the cause of this truth, “Life can only originate from life”, not being recognised? A quite simple error in observation! The scientists looked at that which was immediately before them, but did not try to penetrate to the fact that the origin of a living creature lies in a seed left behind by another living creature; so that a new living organism of a certain kind can only originate because a former living organism leaves behind it a seed of a similar kind. That is to say, they looked at the environment of the developing organism, but should really have looked at that which was left behind by another living organism which was developing within this environment. This was done all through the centuries, up to the time of Francesco Redi. Quite interesting details might be gathered from books which had just as much weight in the 7th and 8th centuries as the authoritative writings of the most modern natural scientist of to-day, and in which was noted and classified quite exactly how, for instance, hornets develop from the decaying carcase of an ox; wasps from a donkey's carcase, etc. That was all nicely set out. Exactly in the same way in which mistakes were made in those times, mistakes are being made to-day in regard to the soul and spirit of man. How is this?

A human being enters into existence and his individual development, begun at birth, is observed on into later life. It is seen how the form, the different capacities and talents develop. (We will speak more exactly of this development in a later lecture). But if the scientists wish to know the nature of the human form, the nature of that with which we are dealing, they ask the question: “What are the hereditary relationships? From what sort of environment was the man born?” That is just the same method as when they look at the mud surrounding the worm which is coming forth from it, and not upon the egg. In what is formed as disposition, as different capacities in man, an exact distinction must be made between what is characteristic, what is brought over from parents and grandparents and so on, and a certain kernel which he who observers truly will not fail to recognise. Only he who approaches the spirit and soul-element as did the naturalists before Francesco Redi will be able to deny that there is a kernel in man which presents itself clearly and which cannot be referred back to what is inherited from parents and grandparents, etc. In what is developing in a man we therefore have to distinguish that which comes from the environment from that which can never be produced from that environment.

As regards the exterior of a living plant or animal, we shall always find that the new being coming forth is in reality concerned with developing according to the species of its predecessors. Take the highest animals. How far do they carry that out? As far as is in accordance with the species, and for this they are planned. Certainly many will say: “Has, then, a horse, a dog or a cat no individuality?” And they will suppose that one might just as well describe the individuality of a cat, a horse and so on—perhaps even write their biography—as we could that of a human being. If anyone likes to do this, let him do so, but we should not take it as real, but only as symbolical, as when, for example, a school task is set for pupils, such as was set for myself and my school-fellows, for which we had to write the biography of our pens! One could, then, even speak of the biography of a pen. But where truth is concerned it is not a question of attending to analogies and comparisons, but of laying hold of the essentials. What is individual in man is not that which makes him one of the species, but that which makes of him the quite distinct individual that every man is. Every man is working towards the formation of what is individual in him, just as the plant works towards the formation of the species. Every development, every advance in education or in historical evolution, rests on the fact that man goes a stage further than the mere species, in the development of the individuality.

If there were in each man no individual spirit and soul kernel which develops in a Spiritual way, as the animal develops in his species, there would be no history. One could then only speak of an evolution of the human race, but not of a history or of a cultural development. Therefore, natural science speaks of the development of the species, of a kind of evolution in the horse, but not of a history.

In the development of every man we have to see a spirit and soul kernel which has the same significance as the species for an animal. The species in the animal kingdom corresponds to the individual in man. Now in the animal kingdom every creature which tends towards what is according to species, repeats the species of his ancestors and can only originate on the basis of the physical nature of the seed of his ancestors; so the individual part of each separate man cannot originate from anything which is here in the physical world, but solely from something which is of a Spiritual nature. That is to say that a Spiritual kernel, which enters into being at the birth of man, does not merely refer back to the species “man”, in so far as man goes back to a Spiritual ancestor, to a being who has progressed, who does not belong individually to the species “man”, not, indeed, to any “species”, but to this same human individuality. If then, a man be born, there is born with him an individual kernel which is not attached to anything else than to this individual human substance. As the animal seeks his species so does man seek his own individual human being. That is to say that this individual kernel when it appears at birth has been here before, just as the germ of the species was there for the animal. We must look in the past for the spirit and soul-substance, which is the Spiritual—not physical—kernel of this individuality which is developing Spiritually. Only a man who cannot see that the soul and spirit do not develop from within the general human organism, will deny that the conclusions just drawn are correct.

Every individual human life thus carries within itself the proof that it already existed before. We are, therefore, led back from an individual human life to an individual Spiritual seed and from this again to another Spiritual seed; that is, we are led from our own individual life back to a former individual life—and then, of course, to our next life. An unbiased observation of human life proves this to be just as much a necessity as the truth proclaimed in the sphere of natural science. Suppose anyone with an unprejudiced mind were to say: “Nothing can be known about that”, then if he draws this conclusion again and again he might end by saying: “I cannot do otherwise than accept this conclusion; if I do not I am sinning against all observation and logic.” In spite of this, however, this truth about the repeated earth-lives is still but little recognised; but this truth that the Spiritual can only originate from the Spiritual, will certainly make its mark in human cultural life and will be more quickly accepted than the other truth which has been characterised. The time will come when men will realise that beliefs have changed in this respect, just as we do not now believe that lower animals, fish, etc., could originate from river-mud.

If we follow, in the further course of its life, this individual kernel of the human being which one can see, as it were, come into being at birth, it appears to a certain extent in a two-fold aspect; and this more especially in the growing human being, in youth. It appears there as something which requires a progressive development of the whole man. And he who can truly observe the intimate life of youth, who has learned to observe the child, not only from the outside but also from within, who remembers what he himself experienced in this respect, will admit that what is in him now was not there up to a certain age, but only showed itself later as a feeling of power, as a feeling of life, as a content of life which works in an extremely elevating way. What we carry within us as the individual core of our being works not only on the outer living form, but continues to work even into the most elementary formations and functions of life. When man arrives at a certain maturity and has the opportunity of taking up many things in the outside world, then this individual kernel of his being works so that he enriches himself, adapts himself to the outer world and gathers experiences. When, however, we observe this correlation between the individual core of man's being and what comes to pass in the course of his life—not only through what he learns and hears but also through experiences such as happiness and sorrow, pain and joy, we shall then see in this Spiritual life itself the same correlation on a higher plane, to that between the new embryo of the plant which develops in the blossom of the old one and the old plant whose life is taken away from it by the new seed.

If we extend this observation to the tree, we shall be able to say: “There, also, life is ever taken away, in that the tree turns into wood in the plant kingdom, but in its place certain things in the tree change into dead lifeless products: inorganic bark surrounds the tree.” In the same way we see, when we look at human life more closely, not only a progressive development but one which allows the Spiritual being of man to advance and grow, allows it to unite itself to the outer world; and as it grows ever more and more, we see it coming into conflict with the old condition; that is to say, it comes into conflict with its own self. That happens because it could in its youth build up and form organs according as it required them, while now in the further course of life this process is no longer possible; it must now go on living in a hardened life condition. So we see that when our life enriches itself by development in the course of time, when we take in what is new and thereby enrich the individual core of our being, we come into conflict with what envelops this kernel, with what we have built around it, and which is in process of growing. As long as we grow, and in so far as we thus grow, we do not take up into ourselves any Spiritual process of death. Only when we receive what is exterior to ourselves do we take in the Spiritual process of death. That is really the case throughout the whole of life, though it is less apparent in childhood than in later life. So we can say that in the realm of the spiritual, a Spiritual growing and dying takes place in the inner being of man. But in what does that process which takes place there consist? We can understand it well if we look at it for once in a lower form and take under observation anything from the realm of ordinary life, in order to form, as it were, conceptions and ideas concerning the higher realms of being. Let us take fatigue, for instance. We speak of fatigue both in the animal and human being. We must first gain an idea of the nature of fatigue. I cannot now go into all the ideas which have been collected on the subject, but we will observe the whole process of fatigue in relation to the life process. We can say that man becomes tired because he uses his muscles, and therefore fresh forces must be carried to the muscles. In this case we might say that man tires because he uses up his muses through work of some kind. Such a definition appears very plausible at first sight, only, it is not true. But it is the case to-day that we work with ideas which just merely touch the surface of things lightly, we do not wish to penetrate to the depths. For just think, if the muscles could really become fatigued, how would it be then with the muscles of the heart? They do not tire at all; they work day and night continuously, and the same is the case with other muscles in the human and animal bodies. This gives one the notion that it is not correct to say that in the relationship between work and muscle there is anything which can explain fatigue.

When does an animal or a man become tired? When their work is not occasioned through the organism nor through the life-process, but by the outer world itself; that is to say, by the world with which a living being may come into relationship through its organs. Thus, when a living being carries out work by means of it consciousness, the organs concerned becomes fatigued. In the life-process itself there is nothing which could occasion fatigue. So that the life-process, the whole of the life organs must be brought in contact with something which does not belong to them, if they are to become fatigued.

I can only draw your attention to this important fact. In the development of which some extremely fruitful points of view can be found. Thus, only that which is brought to a living being by way of a conscious process, of an incitement to consciousness, can occasion fatigue. It would consequently be absurd to speak of the fatigue of plants. We can, therefore, say that in everything that can fatigue a living being something which is foreign to it must really be present, something which does not belong to its own nature must be introduced into it.

We, can therefore, say that every disturbance of the life-process which comes about though fatigue, points to the fact, even in a quite inferior realm, that that which we have in our soul-life is not born simply from our physical life, rather does it stand positively in contradiction to the laws of that life. The contradiction between the laws of the life of consciousness and those of life and the life-process alone explains what is present in fatigue—of this you can convince yourselves if you consider it more exactly. For this reason we can say that fatigue is an expression testifying that that which comes to a life-process must be foreign to it, if it is able to disturb it. Now, the life-process can really equalise what is used up through fatigue, by sleep and rest. What is used up is compensated for by something new, which enters in place of the life-processes.

Now, an inner process of exhaustion appears in the individual human life, for the reason that man enters into relationship with the outside world. The old, which was present in the germ, enters into an exchange with the new. The result is expressed in that the individual life-kernel is transformed during individual life, but it must also for this reason throw off what has become wooden, as it were, what it has itself formed from its birth onwards. The cause of death is the calling to a new life within the human soul, just as in the animal organism the disposition to fatigue can only be caused by its entering into exchange-relationship with what is new and foreign to it. We might, therefore, say that the process of death, of gradually dying off, is one which is better understood if one takes its opposite into consideration, in which the soul stands in relationship with the organic, and which expresses itself in fatigue. Hence, we really have the seed of death in our innermost being during the whole of our individual life. We could not develop further, however, we could not possibly carry what we already are at birth a step further, if we did not in ourselves associate death with life. As fatigue is connected with the execution of exterior work, so is the thrusting off, the killing of the outer covering, with enrichment and higher development of the individual life-kernel. The psychic and Spiritual process of life and death—represents with great clarity what we might express thus: “We purchase the higher form, the further development of our life, by the beneficial act of thrusting off from us what we were before. No development would be possible if we could not thrust-off the old, for we advance through, and together with what we have worked into the new of our soul and spirit. What forces are in that? Such forces as are the fruits of our past life!” We certainly can experience the seeds of these fruits, and can experience our observations of life, we can do much else in life, but we cannot organise these into ourselves nor really carry them over into our external covering. For we do not build our covering of what we learn in one life—or at most only to a limited extent—we build it according to what we have become in our last life. We can, therefore, only build up our life by making use of what we have acquired in our past life, and we can continue to develop by thrusting off the old from us—as the tree does its bark—and passing into death. With what we then take with us through death, we are able to build up our next life, for it contains in itself the same forces as have built up our Spiritual growth when we develop freshly and happily in our youth. It is of the same nature as these. We have absorbed it from our life experiences and with it build ourselves a future living organism, a future bodily covering, which will carry within it as the germ of a future blossom, what we have gained in one life. With regard to such things as these the question is always asked, over and over again: “What help is it, after all, to man, to hear about repeated earth-lives, if he is not able to remember his former lives, if the memory of his former lives is not present?”

It lies, indeed, in the nature of the Spiritual culture of to-day that we are not yet in a position to meditate and reflect upon questions of the soul and spirit life as freely as over the things of natural life. But we must make it clear to ourselves that it is possible to develop ideas and conceptions on these questions of the soul and spirit life, in exactly the same way. We can only do this if we really observe it more exactly, if we ask ourselves what must be the position of the human memory in general; what is the nature of the human memory? There is a point of time in the personal human life, which can lead very easily to the gaining of opinions on these questions. It is the following:

We all know that there is a time in the normal life of man to-day, of which there is no memory in later life. It is the time of his earliest childhood. In the normal life of to-day man remembers up to a certain point of his childhood, then memory disappears.

Although it is quite clear to him that it is his own Spiritual I, or ego, which has built up his life, yet he lacks the power of stretching his memory beyond this point. He who examinee many children's lives, will be able to make one observation from them. It can of course only be substantiated in external life, but notwithstanding this, it is correct. From the observation of the soul of a child we discover that remembrance goes back just as far as to the point of time when the idea of “I,” the conception of his own Ego, arises within him. That is an external important fact At the moment when the child, of his own accord, no longer says: “Charles wants this,” or, “Mary wants that,” but says “I want this,” from the point of time when the conscious conception of the Ego begins, remembrance also begins. Whence comes this remarkable fact? It comes because something else is necessary for remembrance, besides the coming into contact, as it were, once or always with an object. We can come into contact with an object ever so often without any recollection of it being necessarily called forth. Remembrance rests, namely, on a quite definite soul-process, a quite definite Spiritual inner life-process, of which we can become aware if we take the following into account.

One must distinguish between the perception of an object or experience, and the conception or idea of this object or experience. In the process of perception we have something that can always recur if we stand before the object again; but in the experience we have something else besides. When we come into contact with something, and have taken in an impression of it through the eye or ear, we have then taken into ourselves something more than an inner impression of it; what we take with us is that which remains in the conception or idea and which can embody itself in the memory. That, however, must first come into being. I know that what I have just said will be very much doubted by valiant followers of Schopenhauer, by those who assert that our conception of the universe is only our idea of it. But that lies in the confusion of perception with idea. Both must be emphatically differentiated. The idea is something which is reproduced. No matter how often the outer experience can arise, if it does not receive the inner impression of the idea, it cannot be incorporated in the memory; when, on the other hand, it is stated that the idea is nothing more than what presents itself to the perception, we need only bring to notice that the idea of a hot piece of steel, no matter how hot, will quite certainly not burn any one; but the sense-experience of it will. There we have the difference between idea and sense-perception. Therefore we can say that the idea is a sense-experience turned inwards. But with this turning inwards, with this outer rebound of the object, which is in reciprocal relationship with the inner being of man, and through which the inner impression is occasioned, something else comes into consideration. Whatever is experienced inwardly in our sense-life is embodied in our Ego by every sense-impression, and by everything that we can experience in the outer world. A sense-perception can even be there without being incorporated in the Ego. In the outer world it is impossible for an idea to be kept in the memory, if it be not received inwardly into the realm of the Ego. So that in every conception we form from a sense-experience and which can be retained in the memory, the Ego stands as the point of departure. An idea which comes into our soul-life from outside, can in no way be separated from the Ego. I know, indeed, that I am speaking figuratively; but all the same these things signify a reality, as we shall see in the course of the next lectures.

We can imagine that the experience of the Ego presents something like the inner surface of a sphere, seen from outside; then the sense-experiences come along and the self-mirroring of these experiences within the sphere give rise to the idea. For that, however, the Ego must be present in every single sense-perception. The Ego-experience is in everything which can be embodied in the memory; it is actually like a mirror which rays back the experiences to us within; but the Ego itself must be there. From this we learn that as long as the child does not receive the perceptions of ideas in such a way that they become conceptions, as long as they only approach the child from the outside as sense-perceptions, and are only experienced externally between the Ego and the outer world without being transformed into an Ego-experience, as long as the child has no conception of the Ego, then no Ego-mirror, as it were, veils from him what is round about him. Just as long as that lasts, one notices that the child imagines into the surroundings many things which adults do not understand. Only through the memory of what is past, can that emerge which the Ego has already taken up, so that it is thereby pressed into the memory. When the Ego-perception appears, the Ego places itself before the ideas as a mirror; but what lies before the time of the Ego-perception can not be called forth into the memory. Therefore man always comes into touch with the outer world in such a way that his Ego experiences all the events with him, his Ego is always there. This does not imply that everything must enter his consciousness, only that his experiences do not remain merely as sense-perceptions but are transformed into ideas.

So we can now say that the inmost kernel of man, from whose centre has developed that which has now been described as passing on from incarnation to incarnation, is veiled by the Ego-conception, as is usually found in man. Man places himself before his memory with his Ego-development of to-day. It is thus quite explicable that his memory only extends as far as the sense world.

Now, can a proof be offered, through experience itself, that this can become other than it is? Can we speak of an “Extension of Memory” back into former incarnations? That is self-evident from the mere definition, if it is grasped, of what lies behind the individual Ego centre, which we ourselves cover over, as it were. If we begin to grasp it we them also perceive our inmost nature and being, we see what man does in human life;—not only what he does in common, but in his own individual life. Is there a possibility of looking behind the Ego, as it were? Yes, certainly there is. This lies in that inner soul-life of which I have already spoken, in the introductory lecture. If a man really undertakes to develop his Soul, by a severe and methodical training, in such a way that the slumbering forces within it begin to germinate, and the soul stretches out beyond itself, he can only do so by appropriating, with a certain inner renunciation, ideas which are not such as those in which the ego-experience is immediately present. The Ego-experience places everything in which it takes part before the kernel of one's being. For the training of the soul man must therefore appropriate ideas in which the Ego-experience is not present. For that, reason the inner soul exercises which a man undertakes must be done in a quite definite way. What he embodies in his soul-life depends on the content of the meditation, and he must embody something that certainly is acceptable to the inner nature of the soul, but which does not, relate to anything external. What is there that is not related to anything external? Only meditation; but meditation is as a rule applied to the outer world, therefore it is not serviceable to him who wishes to rise to the higher worlds. A life of idea must therefore be developed which calls forth, in pictures and symbols which are continually placed before the soul, such an activity in the Ego that it would form ideas it never could have formed before when it wished to acquire the truth of the ordinary sense-world. The soul must therefore incorporate into itself pictures and symbols which do not appear when we survey the external through out Ego-experience.

When we observe this, we have the following experience, about which we can only say something definite by pointing to that condition into which men enters again and again, namely, the condition of sleep. Through falling asleep, all ideas, all pain end sorrow, and so on, which man has experienced during the day, sink into indefinite obscurity, The whole conscious life of man goes down into indefinite obscurity and returns when the man wakes up again in the morning. Compare the life of consciousness in waking-up and in going to sleep. So long as man obtains only conscious impressions from the external life of the senses, he brings back with him in the morning, only what he had in his consciousness in the evening. He wakes up again with the same content in his consciousness; he remembers the same things, thinks the same thoughts, and so on. But when a man undertakes, in the specified manner, an inner training in which the Ego is not present, the position is different. He then notices, certainly, that his first step in progress consists in feeling on awaking, enriched through sleep; he feels that what he had taken up before going to sleep comes back to him with a richer content. So that he can now say: “Now I have looked behind the Spiritual world which the Ego does not cover up and, as a fruit of that, I embody into the life of my consciousness something that I had not gained from the sense-world, for I have brought it with me out of the world of sleep.”

Such are the first steps of progress in one who is leading a Spiritual life of the soul.

Now, the further possibility steps in that he may now, even during the waking-day life, fill himself with a content not permeated by the Ego-experience, although the Ego is there. The Ego-experience must take its place beside this content, just as it does with the content of all physical experiences. If we take this into account we must say that he alone who is able to look behind the Ego can gaze into the Spiritual content of a human being—he who treads such a path will often come near to developing certain feelings. The nature or these feelings will also show the nature of the way. Thus we must learn to be free from desire and especially to overcome fear and anxiety as regards coming events. We must learn to say in a calm and passionless way: “No matter what comes to me, I will accept it.” And we must not only put this to ourselves as a dry abstract conception, but must make it part of our innermost feeling. We need not become fatalists on this account (a fatalist thinks, that everything happens of itself), but we must use this means of intervening in life. If we are able to instil into the Ego this absolute balance as regards feeling and sensation, it drives with such force towards the Spiritual being of man that it separates the Ego from the perceptions which are already in our consciousness. So we remain standing within the Ego-world, yet receive a new world of inner soul-experiences. These make it alone possible for us to see, in its true individual form, the inmost kernel of man's being, which certainly develops from birth onwards as that which springs from a former life, but which could not be recognised before in its true reality. We must first see it as it is, as it really is in the present, and how it works. Now can we remember something towards which we had never turned our eyes? Just as the child has not that in his consciousness which took place before the development of his Ego-perception, so can man not keep in his memory those experiences of his former births which are not based on a knowledge of the inner kernel of man's being, on the feelings and sensations of the soul and spirit kernel, which is in every man.

He who really goes through this, who learns above all to purchase for himself a retrospect into former lives by looking towards the future with equanimity and resignation, will see that the former earth-lives are not merely a logical sequence, but that they prove to be a reality through a newly-born memory, which is really called forth. For that, however, one thing is necessary. The possibility of looking into the past can only be purchased by desirelessness, equanimity and passivity towards the future. To the extent to which we are prepared to experience the future in our feelings and sensations and are able to shut out our Ego with regard to the experience of the future, so far are we in a position to look into the past. The more man develops this equanimity, the more nearly does he approach the point of time when the past earth-lives will become a reality for him. Thus we can give the reason to the objection often made, that for the ordinary human life no remembrance is there. This objection is just as if a child of four were brought to us, with the remark: “This child cannot count”, concluding from this that consequently a man could not count either! To this one could only reply: “Wait till the child is ten years old, he will then be able to count; therefore, man can count.” The recollection of former lives is a question of development! Therefore is it necessary that one should learn to think over what, through the force of logical conclusion, has been taken as the point of the lecture to-day. It will then be found that a living spiritual soul-kernel may be present in man and that we carry it through death into a new life, as we have carried it through birth into this life.

So Spiritual Science points in no simple way, yet in a way that is substantially correct, to what, is eternal in man as regards “life” and “death.” And we may say that the logical conclusion about death and life in regard to the human being informs right away that in this human individuality the possibility is also present of gaining the memory of past lives. Then people need no longer say that unless we can remember our past lives they are of no use! Is only that which we can remember of use to us? We bear in us the fruits of past lives; we develop in ourselves in the present life without our knowledge, what we have brought over from former lives; and when we begin to look back into former earth-lives, the memory of them is certainly there. We can then say to ourselves what a good thing it was that in former times we were unable to remember back. This memory of the past can only be won in the way I have characterised as regards feelings and sensations towards the future life, but that is not all; it can only be made endurable by an attitude of soul such as has been described. Should it be aroused by artificial means and should man at the same time lead a life of desires and appetites permeated by egotism, then his soul and spirit-life must lose its balance and he must become unhinged. For certain things belong together, and others repel each other.

What is eternal in man, what comes into life through birth, that goes over from life into the Spiritual worlds through death and reappears in new embodiments; and bound up with that is the fact, that we can only evolve higher in new embodiments if we make use of the fruits of the former life. To-day I wished to point out the relations to the kernel of man's being and these two ideas. When we have this in view we shell no longer give as our answer to the question as to the nature of life and death: “The nature of death is to be learnt from the corpse”. Rather shall we say: We sought in the innermost being of man that which must bring forth new life; but in order that new life may come into being, the old must gradually die off and finally be quite extinguished, just as the old plant when it is one year old dies off, so that the new plant may take life from it. He who observes the world of death in this manner will not consider that which remains behind as a corpse, but will look in every being for those characteristics of life which are carried over into a new life. Although Shakespeare may make the gloomy Danish Prince utter that which to many appears evident from the absolute facts of the science of to-day:

Imperious Caesar, dead, and turned to clay,
Might block a hole to keep the wind away;
O, that the earth, which kept the world in awe,
Should patch a wall to expel the winter's flaw!

If such a remark is applied to the process of dying, we will yet turn, while observing man from the point of view of Spiritual Science, to the Spiritual kernel of man's being which goes through birth and death and through ever new life. We then gain the assurance, if we do not follow the ways of Oxygen, Carbon, and Nitrogen, but seek the ways of life by considering what the real kernel of Man's being experiences, that we may place opposite the words of Shakespeare this other point of view.

The humblest man on Earth,
Is a son of Eternity,
And overcomes in ever new life
The ancient death.

Translated by Antje Heymanns

It lies in the nature of current scientific observations that the phenomena we want to dedicate today’s lecture to are basically not much talked about by current natural science. Yet every human being should feel that sleep is something how is placed among the phenomena of our life as if life’s greatest riddles are presented to us through it. Surely people always must have felt the mysteriousness and significance of sleep when they spoke of sleep as the ‘brother of death.’ Today, we have to limit ourselves to speaking of sleep as such, because the coming lectures will repeatedly lead us back to the contemplation of death in many ways.

All that man in a direct sense counts as belonging to his soul experiences, all imaginations that from morning to evening surge up and down, all emotions and feelings which constitute man’s soul drama, all pain and suffering, and the will impulses as well—all of it sinks down, as it were, into an indeterminate darkness when the human being falls asleep.

Some philosophers might doubt themselves, so to speak, when they talk about the nature of the soul, about the nature of the spirit that reveals itself in human nature. Yet, they have to admit that even if it had been firmly nailed down by definitions and ideas and showed itself to be well researched, it basically seems to disappear into nothing within the course of each day.

If we look at the manifestations of our soul life in the way one usually does so scientifically and also amateurishly, then we basically must say that these are extinguished during the state of sleep; they are gone. For someone who only wants to observe the physical expressions of the soul, the human being becomes on deeper reflection, so to say, all the more a riddle. Because the actual bodily functions, the bodily activities, continue during sleep. Only what we usually call the ‘soul’ discontinues.

The question then arises as to whether one is speaking about bodily and soul matters in the right sense when one includes what appears to be extinguished on falling asleep, when actually the soul aspect is included to the full extent. Or, if already the ordinary observation of life, apart from Spiritual Science or anthroposophical observations, could show us that the soul is active and proves to be effective even when it is enveloped by sleep. However, if one wants to gain some clarity about those concepts, or one could say, if one wants to observe the manifestations of life in this field in the right sense, one must place exact terms before one’s soul.

By way of introduction, I would like to mention in advance that on this topic as well, Spiritual Science or Anthroposophy is not in a position to make generalisations of the kind that people love to make today. If today we talk about the nature of sleep, then we will only talk about the nature of human sleep. In the last lecture, with regard to other fields, we have touched on this many times—Spiritual Science knows very well that which outwardly manifests itself in the same way, as this or that other appearance by different beings, can have quite different causes in the respective beings. We have indicated that this applies to death, to the whole spiritual life and to the formation of the spiritual life of animals and human beings. Today, it would go too far to also talk about the sleep of animals. Therefore, we want to say in advance that all we talk about today applies only to the sleep of human beings.

Through our consciousness, we can speak about soul manifestations within ourselves—anyone can feel this—because we are conscious of what we imagine, want, and feel. Now the question must arise—and this is extremely important particularly for today’s observations—whether we may readily combine the definition of consciousness as we use it for the ordinary consciousness of a human being in the present with the concept of the soul or the spirit in a human being? First, to express myself more clearly about these concepts, I like to draw a comparison. A man might walk around in a room and cannot see his own face in any spot in that room. The only place he can see his face is where he can look into a mirror. His own face appears as an image in front of him. Isn’t there an enormous difference for man whether he just walks around in a room and lives within himself or whether he sees what he expresses of this living also in a mirror image? It could probably be so with human consciousness in a somewhat extended way. The human being could, so to speak, experience his soul life—and he would only become knowledgeable or conscious of this soul-life itself, the way he lives it, when it confronts him like a mirror. This could very well be. Thus, we could say, for example, that it is quite possible that the human soul life continues regardless of whether the human being is awake or asleep. But that the waking state consists of the fact that the human being perceives his soul life through a mirroring, let’s say first of all, through a mirroring within his physicality and that he cannot perceive it in the state of sleep because it cannot be mirrored in his physical body.

Although we have not yet proven anything with this, at least we would have gained two concepts. We could differentiate between the soul life as such and becoming conscious of the soul life. We can think that for our consciousness, for our knowledge of the soul life, as we currently stand in our everyday human life, everything depends on us receiving the mirror image of our soul life through our physicality because if we do not receive this, we cannot know anything about it. We would then be wholly in a sleeping state. Now that we have gained these concepts, let us try to place the phenomena of waking and sleeping life a little before our soul.

Someone who is really able to observe life, will feel very clearly, and one would like to say, will ‘behold’ how the moment of falling asleep truly proceeds. He can perceive how the imaginations, the feelings weaken in their brightness, diminish in their intensity. But this is not the most essential. When a human being is awake, he lives in such a way that he creates order through his self-conscious Ego in his whole imaginative life, whereby he summarises, as it were, all ideas with his Ego. For at the moment when we in our waking life would not summarise all our ideas with our Ego, we would not be able to lead a normal soul life. We would have one group of ideas that we would relate to ourselves and call our concepts and another group we would look at as something foreign, like an external world. Only people who experience a split in their Ego, which for people today would be a state of sickness, could have such a tearing apart of their imaginative lives into different areas. For a normal person it is essential that all his ideas are in perspective related to a single point: the self-conscious Ego.

The moment we fall asleep, we feel distinctly that, at first, the Ego will be, so to speak, overwhelmed by imaginations despite these growing dimmer. The ideas assert their independence; they live an independent life. Single clouds of ideas, as it were, form within the horizon of consciousness, and the Ego loses itself in imaginations. Then man feels how the sense perceptions like seeing and hearing and so on become blunter and blunter, and finally, he feels how the will impulses are paralysed. Now, we must point out something clearly observed by just a few people. The human being feels furthermore, as he sees things with defined borders in his daily life, that at the moment of falling asleep, something asserts itself like a feeling of being locked up in a vague fog, which occasionally makes itself felt as cooling, or with other sensations in certain parts of the body: on the hands, on the joints, on the temples, on the spine etc. These are feelings that someone falling asleep can very well observe. They are, one would like to say, the kind of trivial experiences that one can have every evening when falling asleep if one wants to.

Better experiences are had by people who, through a finer developed soul life, more precisely observe the moment of falling asleep. They can then feel something like an awakening despite falling asleep. What I am about to tell you now, can be told by anyone who has acquired certain methods of really observing these things, because it is a common human phenomenon. The moment people feel like an awakening when they are slipping into sleep can really be described as follows: something like an expanding conscience, like morality, wakes up in the soul. This is indeed the case. This is particularly shown when people observe their soul concerning what they have experienced the previous day and with which they are satisfied in their conscience. In the moment of moral awakening, they feel this especially clearly. At the same time, this feeling is quite the opposite of the feeling during the day. While the feeling during the day shows itself by things approaching us, one who falls asleep feels as if his soul is pouring itself out over a world that is now awakening. This mainly includes a relaxation, a pouring out of feeling over that which the soul, through itself can experience in relation to its moral inner being as if through an expanding conscience. Then it is a moment of inner bliss, which appears to be much longer for the one falling asleep, when it is about dwelling on things with which the soul can agree. There is often a deep conflict when the soul has to reproach itself. In short, the moral human being who, during the day, is repressed through the strong sensory impressions, relaxes and feels himself very distinctly when falling asleep.

Everyone who has acquired a particular method, or maybe even only a feeling concerning such observations, knows that at this moment a certain longing awakens, which we could describe like this: One really wants this moment to extend into the indefinite, that it would never end. But then comes something like a ‘jolt’, a kind of inner movement. For most people, this is very difficult to describe. Of course, Spiritual Science can describe this inner movement quite precisely. It is, as it were, like a demand that the soul makes on itself: You must now relax even further; you must pour yourself out further. But by making this demand of itself, the soul loses itself for the moral life in its surroundings. This is like throwing a small drop of colour into water and dissolving it: the colour can still be seen at first. But once the drop distributes itself throughout the water, it pales more and more and finally, the colour display as such stops. So it is when the soul is just beginning to swell and live in its moral mirror image where it can still feel itself, but the feeling stops once the jolt, the inner movement, occurs, as the drop of colour loses itself in the water.

This is not a theory; it can be observed and is accessible to everyone, just like a natural scientific observation is exactly accessible to everyone. If we thus observe the process of falling asleep, we can certainly say that the human being intercepts, as it were, something when falling asleep that, afterwards, he somehow can no longer be conscious of. If I may be allowed to use both of my earlier constructed ideas—the human being has, as it were, a moment of parting from the mirror of the body in which the manifestations of life appear to him as mirror images and because he has no other means to mirror what otherwise is mirrored by the body, the possibility to perceive himself, ceases.

Again, it is possible to perceive in a certain sense the day’s happenings—if one does not want to be altogether stubborn and obstinate regarding what relates to the soul and the effect of what moves into an vague darkness. I have already pointed out in another context that someone forced to memorise this or that, i.e., learn things by heart, can do this much more easily if he sleeps on it more often, and that depriving oneself of sleep is the greatest enemy of memorisation. The possibility and the ability to memorise more easily even returns once we have slept on an issue and not want to learn something by heart in one go. This is also the case with other activities of the soul. However, we could convince ourselves very easily that it would be impossible to learn anything at all, to acquire anything when the soul is involved, if it weren’t for the inclusion of sleep states among our life states. The natural conclusion that has to be drawn from such phenomena is that our soul needs to withdraw from time to time from our physical body, in order to gain strength from an area that is not within our body, because the respective strengths within the body are being worn out. We must imagine that when we wake up in the morning from sleep, that from the state in which we were then, we have brought along strength to develop abilities, that we could not develop if we were constantly shackled to our bodies. This is how the effect of sleep shows itself in our ordinary nature, when one wants to think straight and not be obstinate.

What shows itself in general when one pauses in ordinary life, and for which one needs some good will to hold one’s life phenomena together, is shown very clearly and precisely when man goes through developments that are able to lead him to a real beholding of the spiritual life. Here I would like to elaborate on what occurs when a human being has developed the forces that lie dormant within his soul in order to reach a state in which he can neither perceive with the senses nor comprehend with the mind. This will be followed up in more detail in the lecture How does one Attain Knowledge of the Spiritual World,¹ where the methods will be quite comprehensively covered. Right now though, we will highlight some of the experiences that a person, truly practising such exercises is able to have that endow his soul, as it were, with spiritual eyes and spiritual ears, and through which he can look into the spiritual world, which is not an object of speculation, but for someone who perceives with his senses, it is just as much an object as colours and forms, warmth and coldness, and sounds. How to attain true clairvoyance has already come to light in previous lectures. This spiritual development, these exercises, actually consist of a person bringing out of himself something that he has within himself, gains other organs of perception, jolting upwards, as it were, over the soul, as it is in its ordinary state, and thus perceives a world that is always around him but which cannot be perceived in the normal state. When a person undergoes such exercises, the first thing that changes is his sleep life. Anyone, who has done their own real spiritual research knows this. I would now like to talk about the very first stage of change in the sleep life of a person who is actually clairvoyant and engaged in spiritual research. The first beginnings of this possibility of spiritual research do not make the person appear very different from the normal ordinary state of consciousness because a person who performs these exercises, as we shall discuss later, will at first sleep like any other human being and is just as unconscious as anyone else. But the moment of waking up will show something very special to the one who has performed spiritual exercises. I will now describe to you some very concrete phenomena that are based on facts.

Let’s assume that a person who is practising these exercises is thinking very hard about something that another person could also be thinking about. He tries, maybe because he has a very difficult problem in front of him, to exert all his mental power to get to the bottom of it.

Perhaps he’ll be like a schoolboy: his mental power just isn’t sufficient to solve the problem. This could definitely happen. If he has now already obtained through his exercises more possibilities to experience the inner states of the soul in connection with the physical state, he will certainly feel something quite peculiar when he finds himself incapable to do something. Unlike usual, he perceives a resistance in his physical organs, for example in his brain. He properly senses that the brain puts up resistance against him, just as we feel resistance when we try to drive in a nail with a hammer that is too heavy. The brain then begins to gain a reality. The way man normally uses his brain, he would not feel it as if he were using an instrument, as is the case with a hammer, for example. A spiritual researcher feels his brain, he feels himself independent in relation to his thinking. That is an experience. But if he can’t solve a task, he feels that he is no longer able to carry out certain activities that he must perform when thinking. He feels very clearly that he is losing power over the instrument. This fact can be experienced very precisely.

If the spiritual researcher sleeps on the problem and then awakens, it will often happen that he feels up to the task without any further ado. But at the same time he also feels precisely that prior to waking up he has done something, that he has worked on something. He feels that he had been able to set something within him in motion during his sleep, that he had caused an activity. During the waking state he was forced to use his brain. He knows that. He can do nothing but use his brain when he is awake. But he was no longer able to use it properly, because—as I have described—it resisted him. During sleep, he feels, he is not dependent on using his brain. He was able to create a degree of flexibility without using the brain that was too tired or otherwise too heavily occupied. Now he feels something very peculiar: he perceives the activity that he has performed during sleep, albeit not directly. The Lord gives to his own, but not in their sleep. The spiritual researcher is not saved from having to solve his problem now in the waking state. It may come easily to him, but normally it is not so, and particularly not with things that simply must be solved by the brain.

Hence, the human being feels something that he has not known before in the sensory world—he senses his own activity, which presents itself to him in vivid pictures, in strange pictures that are in motion. It is just as if the thoughts he needs were living beings who would enter into all kinds of relationships with each other. Thus he senses his own, let’s call it, ‘mental activity’ that he undertook during sleep, like a series of pictures. This feeling is difficult to describe, as one is stuck in it in a quite peculiar way and has to tell oneself, ‘This is you yourself!’ But, on the other hand, one can distinguish this feeling very clearly from oneself, in the same way as one is able to distinguish a physical movement one makes from oneself. Thus one has pictures, imaginations of an activity performed before waking up. And now one can notice, if one has learned to watch oneself, that these pictures of an activity that was performed prior to waking up, connect themselves with our brain and turn it into a more flexible, more useful instrument, so that one will be able to complete something, which one could not do before because of a resistance, for example, to think certain thoughts. These are subtle things, but without them one won’t really get behind the secret of sleep. Thus, one feels that one has not performed an activity as in the awake state, but one that served the restoration of certain things in the brain which were worn out. The instrument has been restored in a way that was not possible before. One feels like a master builder of his own instruments.

The feeling during such an activity is significantly different from that during a daytime activity. The feeling one has about the day activities is comparable to copying something from a template or a model. There I am forced to follow the picture in front of me with every stroke or dot of colour. In regard to the things that appear as pictures at the moment of waking and that are, as it were, an illustration of an activity during sleep, one has the feeling of inventing the strokes, of creating the figures out of oneself, without being tied to a model. With such an occurrence one will have, as it were, intercepted what the soul did prior to waking up: one has intercepted the activity of brain regeneration. Because sooner or later one realises that what feels like a kind of coating the brain organs with what one remembers as figures is nothing other than a restoration of what has been damaged in the course of the day. One really has the feeling of being a master builder working on oneself.

Basically the difference between a spiritual researcher who perceives such things and an ordinary person is only that a spiritual researcher just perceives these things, whereas an ordinary person cannot pay attention to them and does not perceive them. The same activity that the spiritual researcher undertakes is performed by every human being, but the normal person doesn’t catch the moment when the organs are restored by the activity that takes place during sleep.

Let’s take such an experience and compare it to what was previously said about an increase in bluntness and dullness, and a reduction in brightness of the daily imaginative life at the moment of falling asleep. This latter phenomenon can only be viewed in the right light if one either frees oneself from today’s highly suggestive concepts of the world view that believes itself to be firmly based on natural science, or by actually accepting the available results of contemporary natural research. For example, in brain research, and according to the results of natural research, people who think more precisely can do nothing but acknowledge the independence of the spiritual from the physical. And it is very interesting that recently a popular book was published in which basically everything that has to do with spiritual life and the sources of spiritual life was presented wrongly and completely without any insight. But in this book, The Brain and the Human Being, by William Hanna Thomson,² a lot of smart things are said. It deals in particular with modern brain research and with many other things that are presented—for example, as I also have more often pointed out—with symptoms of fatigue, which are quite instructive. But I have already explained that muscles and nerves cannot get tired in any other way than through conscious activity. As long as our muscles only serve an organic activity they cannot become tired. It would be bad if, for example, the heart muscle and other muscles needed rest. We only become fatigued when we perform an activity that is not innate to the organism—such as an activity that belongs to the conscious life of the soul. Thus one has to say; if the soul life was born out of the human being like the heart activity, then the immense difference between fatigue and non-fatigue could not be explained. The author of the book therefore feels compelled to acknowledge that the soul relates to the physical no differently than a rider relates to his horse, i.e., that it is completely independent from the physical. This is an enormous concession from a person who thinks like a natural scientist. One could get very strange feelings if, forced by contemporary natural research, one has to confess to oneself that the relationship between the soul life and the body life must be imagined as being roughly the same as that of a rider to a horse. That is, according to the image that people had of a centaur in earlier times, when they still looked deeper into the spiritual realm.

It is not apparent that the author of the book would have thought of this, but again this thought comes to mind from the natural scientific conception, and one gets the feeling that such ideas stem from times when a certain clairvoyance still existed for many people. Today, however, certain imaginations about centaurs seem to be more compatible with what a gentleman once told me: He said:

‘The Greeks watched the Scythes, who came from the North, and other rider clans, perhaps when they emerged from a fog. They could not distinguish the shapes clearly, and so they thought that these had grown out of the horse.’ A materialist might be satisfied with such an explanation. But it is just contemporary natural scientific research that pushes for an acknowledgment of the independence of the soul from the physical.

One thing we can hereby definitely notice, and we can follow such things best if we recall certain occurrences before our soul that are not commonplace, but still exist and cannot be denied. The spiritual researcher knows how that common man in the country, at the hour of his death, suddenly began to speak in Latin, a language he had never really used and which one could prove he had only heard once in Church when he was a little boy. This is not a fable, but a reality. Of course he did not understand anything of it, when he had heard or recited it. And yet it is true. From this, the idea should be formed in every human being that what affects us in our environment contains something in addition to what we absorb into our normal consciousness. Because what we absorb into our ordinary consciousness is often dependent on our education, on what we comprehend and the like. But not only what we can comprehend unites itself with us, but we have in us the possibility to absorb endlessly more than what we take up consciously. We can even observe in every human being how at certain times he has ideas, that were not strongly noticed at the time he experienced them here or there, so that he may not remember them at all. But through certain things they re-appear, and may even place themselves into the centre of his soul life. We really have to acknowledge that what constitutes the extent of our soul life is endlessly more than what we can receive and embrace with our day consciousness. This is extraordinarily important. Because in this way our attention is steered towards something inside of us that can really only make a slight impression on our corporeality because it has hardly been noticed, and then again it lives on in us. In this way, we are pointed to the foundations of our soul life, which should actually exist for every reasonable person. Every rational person should tell himself that, what is in the world around him for his consciousness while he is consciously looking at the world, is basically dependent on the organisation of his sensory organs and on what he can understand. And no one is entitled to want to limit reality by what they can perceive. It would be completely illogical to want to deny the spiritual researcher that behind the physical world a spiritual world exists, simply for the reason that man is only allowed to speak about what he sees and hears and what he can think about, and he is never allowed to judge what he cannot perceive. Because the world of reality is not the world of the perceptible. The world of the perceptible is limited by the sensory organs. For this reason one should never —in the Kantian sense—speak of the limits of knowledge; or about what a human being may or may not know, but only about that what he has before of him in accordance with his organs of perception.

Considering this, one must say to oneself: Behind the colourful carpet of the sensory world, behind that which the warmth sense perceives as warmth or cold and so on, lies an infinite reality. Should therefore only what we perceive, or only the reality we perceive exert an influence on us? If we think that we are only shown a part or a section of the entire reality through our perception, then it is only logically tenable that there lies an infinite reality behind what can be given to us through our perception. However, this is also real for us, as we have been placed in it, so that what surges and lives outside and influences us, lives on for us. But what is our actual waking life like during the day? There really is no other way than to imagine the waking day life in this way, and to say; ‘We open our senses, our capacity to realise something immense and confront this immensity. Because each person has particular eyes, particular ears, and a certain sense of warmth, and so on, we are placing a particular section of reality in front of us. Anything else we reject, almost, as it were, fend it off, exclude it from us. So what does our conscious activity consist of? It consists of a defence against, or an exclusion of something different. And by straining our sensory organs, we are holding back something that we have not perceived. What we perceive is the remainder, are the remains of what is spreading itself around us, and what we, for the most part reject. In this way, we feel actively placed in this world, feel connected with it. Likewise, we defend ourselves through our sensory activity against a multitude of impressions, because, figuratively speaking, we are not able to bear the entire immeasurable infinity and take in only a section of it. If we think like this, then we must imagine quite different relationships between our whole organism, our entire bodily nature and between the external world, than those which we can perceive or comprehend with our intellect. Then it will not seem so unusual to think that the relationships, which we have with the outside world, live in us and that also the invisible, super-sensible or extra-sensible is active within us—and that the extra-sensible by being active in us, uses our senses to fabricate a section out of the entire immeasurable reality. Then our relationship to reality is completely different from how we are able to perceive it through our senses. Then there lies something of relationships with the outside world in our soul that does not exhaust itself through sensory perception, that eludes our waking daytime consciousness. Then it is with us as if we are stepping in front of a mirror with our inner being and have to say to ourselves:

‘Basically you are something completely different. The mirror only shows you the forms, maybe also the colours; but within you you are thinking. You are feeling within you. All of this the mirror cannot show you. It only shows you what is dependent on its laws. As a soul facing its organism, you are something completely different from what your senses show you; they limit you to what is according to their laws. When you face the world, as with a mirror—you are actually facing a world that is only made possible by the organisation of your senses!’

If you think this idea through to the end, then you will not be surprised to find that basically all life of our awake day consciousness depends very much on the organisation of our sensory organs and on our brain, just as what we see in a mirror depends on the quality of the mirror. Anyone who looks into a garden mirror and sees a caricature of their face looking towards them, will happily agree that the picture in the mirror is not dependent on them, but on the mirror. In the same way, what we perceive depends on the set-up of our mirroring apparatus, and our soul activity is limited, as it were, reflected back into itself by mirroring itself in our body life. Then it is no longer astonishing that the detail—and this can also be physiologically proven—is dependent on the physical body, whereby this or that happens one way or another in our consciousness. Because everything that the soul does in order for something to become conscious, to become knowledge for us, depends on the organisation of our body. Observation shows us that the concepts that we initially only constructed, actually correspond to the facts. The only difference is that our corporeality is a living mirror. We let the mirror in which we look be as it is. However, there is one way in which we can influence the reflection: if we breathe on the mirror, then it can no longer reflect properly. But the reflection in our physicality, which experiences the activity of our soul, is connected with the fact that when we reflect ourselves in our corporeality, the reflection itself is an activity, a process within our bodily nature, and that which appears as a reflection, we place as an activity before ourselves.

Thus the bodily life actually presents itself as if, in a certain sense, we would write down what we think and then would have the characters in front of us. This is how we write the activity of our soul into our physicality. What an anatomist can verify are only the characters, the external apparatus, because we do not completely observe our soul life if we only observe it within our physical life. We only observe it completely, if we do this independently from our physical life. This, however, can only be done by the spiritual researcher who observes the soul life as it shows itself mirrored into the waking day life at the moment of awakening. It shows that the soul life is like an architect, who builds something during the night, and acts as a dismantler during the day.

Now we have the soul life in the waking state and in the state of sleep before us. In the state of sleep we have to imagine it as independent from body life, like a rider is independent from the horse. But just like the rider uses the horse and uses up its strength, the soul consumes the activity of the body so that chemical processes run like letters of the soul’s life. With this we reach a point where the physical life, as it is limited in the senses, in the brain, is so diminished by us that we have exhausted it for the time being. Then we must begin the other activity, initiate the reverse process and again build up what has declined. This is the life during sleep—so that we, starting from the soul, perform two opposite activities on our body. So, during the awake state we have around us our world of flowing and ebbing concepts, joy and sorrow, feelings and so on. But while we have them in front of us, we wear out our physical life, we basically destroy it constantly. During sleep, we are the architects, we can restore what we have destroyed during our waking life.

So what does a spiritual researcher perceive? He perceives the architectural activity of rebuilding in curious pictures like a circular movement twisting around itself: a real process, that is the reverse of normal awake day life. It is really no fantasy when one speaks about recognising in these self-entwining movements the mysterious activity that the soul performs during sleep, which consists of reconstituting what we have destroyed during our day life—hence the recuperation through and necessity of the sleep life. So why is the sleep life such that it doesn’t enter into our consciousness? Yes, and why is it that we become conscious of our waking life? The reason for this is that for the processes we perform in our waking day life, we have got something like mirror images. However, when we are performing the other activity of rebuilding what has been worn out, we have nothing wherein this could be reflected. We are lacking a mirror for this. Only a spiritual researcher is able to show the underlying reasons for this. From a certain point onwards, the spiritual researcher experiences not only the soul activity, as I have described it, like a dream memory from sleep, but as if he was not dependent on the instrument of the body, so that he then can perceive an activity which only happens in the spirit. He can then tell himself: ‘Now you are not thinking with your brain, but you are now thinking in a completely different manner; now you are thinking in pictures, independent of your brain.’

The spiritual researcher can only experience something like what has been described earlier, when he experiences that everything that envelops him as something nebulous when he falls asleep does not disappear. Instead, if he is able to limit and withdraw his inner activity, then the mist that is perceptible at his temples, at his joints, at his spine, becomes something that reflects what he is doing—similar to the reflection of what we experience during our physical life.

The whole difference between true clairvoyance and ordinary waking day life consciousness is that the waking day life requires a different mirror for the soul activity to come to consciousness and uses our bodily nature for this purpose. However, the activity of the clairvoyant, when it radiates as an activity of the soul, is so strong that the emitted ray will be withdrawn into itself. In this way, as it were, a mirroring on one’s own inner experience, on a spirit organism, takes place. Basically, our soul is within this spirit organism during the night, even if we are not spiritual researchers. It pours itself into it. And we will not be able to cope with our whole sleep life, when it is not clear to us that indeed our physical processes—all that anatomy, physiology is able to research—cannot bring about anything but a reflection of our soul processes; and that these soul processes always, from falling asleep until waking up, live a spiritual existence. If we think differently we won’t be able to cope at all. We must therefore speak, as it were, of a secret soul life that cannot enter at all into the consciousness conveyed through our body. Thus, when one notices in a person that ideas appear in his consciousness that he has ignored for a long time, one has to say: There is something else in a human being, apart from the conceptions of his conscious soul life, to which he has paid attention when he took them in.

I have already suggested once, that it is child’s play to refute things that are a reality for a spiritual researcher. And yet they are true. Spiritual research has to say that in regard to the human being we have to deal with a human physical body that we can see with eyes, grasp with hands, and that is also known to anatomy and physiology. In addition, we have an inner member of the human being, the astral body, the carrier of everything that the human being consciously absorbs, what he really experiences during the day life, so that he can receive it reflected by the body. Between the astral body and the physical body lies the carrier of ideas that remain ignored for years, and are then brought up into the astral body to be realised. In short, between the astral body, the carrier of consciousness, and the physical body, the etheric body of man is active. This etheric body is not only the carrier of conceptions that have gone unnoticed, but in general the builder of the entire physical body.

What actually happens during sleep? The astral body, the carrier of consciousness, lifts itself together with the Ego out of the physical body and the etheric body, so that a split in the human nature occurs. During day life when man is awake, the astral body and the Ego are within the physical body and the etheric body. And the processes of the physical body work like mirroring processes, through which all that happens in the astral body comes to consciousness. Consciousness is a reflection of the experiences through the physical body, and we should not confuse consciousness with the experiences themselves. When, during sleep, the astral body of an ordinary human being leaves, it is at first not able to perceive anything in the world of the astral. The human being is unconscious there.

What ability does the spiritual researcher now acquire when things during sleep become conscious to him, even though he does not rely on his brain? He attains the ability to perceive and to mirror his soul activity in something that for him weaves and lives between things, so that during the awake day consciousness this something can be perceived in the same way as his own etheric body. The human etheric body is woven from that through which the clairvoyant person perceives; so that for a clairvoyant person the outer world becomes reflective, just as for the soul life of a normal person the physical body becomes reflective.

Now there are intermediate states between waking and sleeping. One such intermediate state is the dream. With regard to its origin, spiritual research shows that indeed dreaming is based on something similar to clairvoyance, whereby the latter is something trained, while dreaming is always imaginary. When a person leaves with the astral body, he loses the ability to obtain a reflection of his soul life through the physical body. However, under certain abnormal circumstances, which occur for everyone, he can obtain the capability to receive his soul experiences reflected through the etheric body. Indeed we must consider not only the physical body as a mirroring device, but also the etheric body. As long as the outer world makes an impression on us, it is indeed the physical body which acts as mirroring device. However, if we become still within ourselves and digest the impressions the outer world has made on us, then we work within ourselves and yet our thoughts are still real. We live our thoughts, and also feel that we are dependent on something more subtle than our physical body, namely on the etheric body. Then the etheric body is that what reflects itself in us in solitary pondering, which is not initially based on external impressions. But we are within our etheric body during our awake day consciousness; we perceive what is mirrored, but we do not perceive directly the activity of the astral body. In the intermediate state between waking and sleeping, we do not have the ability to receive external sensory impressions. But because we can still receive something that is connected to our etheric body in some way, the etheric body can mirror what we experience in our soul with our astral body. This then are the dreams that show irregularity because the human being is in a completely unusual situation during this process.

If we contemplate this, then much in our dream-world will become clear that would otherwise remain mysterious about it. We must therefore imagine the foundations of the soul life as being closely connected with the dream life. While the physical body is the mirror of the soul life and our daily interests have an impact on this, we are often connected in the remotest way through the etheric body to experiences, which we have long since left behind, and of which we become only dimly aware because the day life has a strong impact on us. Thus they remain something extremely unknown to us. However, if we are examine dreams that are based on really good observation, many peculiar things can be shown to us. For example, a good composer experiences an image, where a somewhat diabolical figure plays a sonata to him. He wakes up and is able to write down the sonata. Something became active in him that has worked like something foreign. And this was possible, because there was something in him for which the composer’s soul was ready, but which could not become effective during the awake day life, because physical life was only an obstruction and not suited as a mirror. Here we can see that the bodily life is an inhibitor and in this lies its significance. In our daily life we are only able to experience that for which the bodily life, figuratively speaking, is ‘oiled like a machine.’

The physical life is always a hindrance to us, but we manage to use it to a certain extent. After all, one does need ‘inhibitions’ everywhere. When a locomotive rides over the tracks, it is the hampering, the friction, through which it can drive, because the wheels could not turn without friction. In reality, our bodily processes are what confronts our soul life in a hampering way, and these frictional processes are at the same time mirroring processes. When we are ready in our soul for something but have not yet managed to oil our machine well, then the awake day life is a good ‘brake shoe’. But when we leave our physical body, then our etheric body is able to bring what lives in our soul life to expression—and this will appear to us as something quite foreign as it is of a more subtle nature. Then, once it is strong enough, it forces itself into the dream life, as was the case with the composer. This has less to do with the daily interests than with the hidden interests, that lie more remote in the subtle foundations. For example, in the following—note, that I am just telling you something that has actually been observed—A woman dreams, and although she has children whom she loves very much, and a husband, who loves her extraordinarily, she experiences with great joy that she gets engaged for a second time and all related events she goes through. What does she dream? She dreams experiences that are very far from her current life, that she has once gone through but cannot recognise, because the normal interests of the day are only connected with the physical body. And, what has continued to live on in her etheric body will now, perhaps because a joyful emotion has triggered the dream, be mirrored by the etheric body through another event.

A man dreams that he goes through childhood experiences, and these childhood experiences are wonderfully mirrored. One of these, especially important to him because it went close to his heart, causes him to wake up. At first the dream is very dear to him, but soon he falls asleep again and dreams on. A whole sum of unpleasant experiences now pass through his soul, and a particularly painful event wakes him up. All of this is extremely far from his present experiences. He gets up, and because he feels very shaken by the dream, walks around in the room for a while, but then he lies down again and now he has dream experiences, which he has not yet had. All events that he went through get muddled up, and he now experiences something completely new. The whole turns into a poem, which he can even write down and set to music afterwards. That is a very real fact. Now it shouldn’t be too difficult, with the concepts we have already gained, to imagine what has happened there. For a spiritual researcher it is thus; at a very specific moment in his life the man suffered a kind of break in his development—he had to give up something that lay in his soul. But even if he had to give it up, it did not disappear from his etheric body as a result of that. It was just that his ordinary interests were so strong that they pushed it back. And, where it was strong enough through inner elasticity, it forced itself out through the dream, because there the human being is freed from the hindrances of the awake day life. This means, that the respective man was truly once very close to reach what was expressed in the poem; but then it had been deadened.

Thus we can see illustrated in our dreams the independence of our soul life from our outer bodily life. We must realise that this is proof that the idea of the mirroring of the soul life in the physical life is entirely justified. In particular, the circumstance that the interests in which we are involved do not engrave themselves in a straight line in our direct experience, shows us that apart from the life, as it is lived on a daily basis, there is another life running alongside, that I have called, for a more conscious, finer observation, a kind of awakening. In it lives everything that for our spiritual life is already abstract, immaterial like our conscience that is independent of physical life—everyone can feel this. Yet during our day life this other life turns out to be very limited by our daily interests. During sleep, our soul also reveals itself as being completely filled with its moral quality. There is a real living into the spiritual, what we can describe as a jolt, as an inner movement. What we call Spiritual Science research will result in something for us through which we can consciously settle into the world that the normal human being unconsciously settles into every time he falls asleep.

People must gradually familiarise themselves with the fact that the world is far wider than what we can grasp with our senses and follow with our intellect; and that the sleep life is an area that we need because just our noblest organs, which serve our imaginative life, are worn out by our daily life. During sleep we restore them, so that they can face the world strong and vigorously and are able to mirror our soul life for us in the waking day life. Everything that is characteristic of the soul life could become clear to us through this. Who wouldn’t know that one feels wearied and tired after a good, deep sleep? People often complain about this; but it is not a symptom of an illness at all and is actually quite understandable. After all, the complete recovery through sleep only occurs an hour or an hour and a half later. Why? Because we have worked well on our organs, so that they are not only able to cope for a few more hours but for the whole day. And immediately after waking up we are not yet ready to use them, we first have to “grind them in.” Only after a while we can use them well. One should speak about a particular type of weariness in a certain way, saying that one could be happy that one can settle back into the reconditioned organs in an hour and a half. Because from sleep comes to us what we need—the architectural forces for the organs that have been worn out and used up during the day.

So we may now say that our soul life is a life of independence, a life of which we have something like a reflection through our consciousness during our waking day life. Consciousness is a reflection of the interactions of the soul with its environment. During the waking day life we are lost to our surroundings, to something foreign, are devoted to something that is not ourselves. But during sleep—and this is the nature of sleep—we withdraw from all outer activity to work on ourselves. The comparison is apt; the ship which has served shipping while it was at sea will be rebuilt and repaired when it arrives in port.

Someone who believes that during sleep nothing happens to us, could also think, that nothing needs to be done to the ship when it returns to port from a voyage. But when the ship sails again, he will see what happens, if it has not been repaired. This is how it would be if our soul did not work on us during sleep. We are brought back to ourselves when we sleep, while during the day life we are lost to the outside world. A normal human being is just not able to perceive what the soul is doing during sleep in the same way as he perceives the outside world during the day.

In the lecture How to attain Knowledge of the Higher World? we will see that also in the spirit a mirror image can be attained as a realisation, through which man can then come to perception in the higher worlds. All this illustrates that the soul, just when it is not conscious of itself and knows nothing of its own activity, but is busy with itself, works on itself, and independently of the physicality, obtains those forces which serve precisely to build up the body.

Thus we may summarise what we have said, and characterise the nature of the soul with words that from the knowledge of the nature of sleep can build a kind of foundation for many things in Spiritual Science:

The soul itself restores
Enveloped still in sleep
Flees into spirit worlds
When senses constrictions
Oppress it! ³

• 1. GA 60 Lecture 7. How Does one Attain Knowledge of the Spiritual World?, 15 December 1910, Berlin.
• 2. William Hanna Thomson, Brain and Personality, 1907, published in Germany under the title Das Gehirn und der Mensch, Verlag K R Langewiesche, Düsseldorf, 1910.
• 3. Poem translated by Norbert Mulholland.

These lectures were published under the title Spiritual Science's Answer to the Large Questions of the Present Time. In German: ‘Der Geist im Pflanzenreich,’ in Antworten der Geisteswissenschaft auf die Grossen Fragen des Daseins.

How spiritual science must recognize the living and weaving spirit in all beings surrounding us by proceeding from the principle that the knowing human being should understand himself in his knowing has been touched upon in the lectures about The Human Soul and the Animal Soul and The Human Spirit and the Animal Spirit.¹ It was said that the person knowing himself could never think of taking into his own spirit—as spiritual content—ideas, concepts, and mental images of things and beings if these concepts and ideas, this spiritual content through which the human being wants to make comprehensible what resides in the objects, were not first present in these objects, were not placed into them. All drawing forth of the spiritual from things and beings would be pure fantasy, would be a self-made fantasy, if we were not to presuppose that wherever we gaze and are able to discover the spirit, there this spirit is actually present.

Although still only in small circles, this general presupposition of the spiritual content of the world is made rather frequently. Even those who speak of the spirit in objects, however, usually remain with speaking about the spirit in general, i.e., they speak about the existence of spiritual weaving, of spiritual life lying at the basis of the mineral, plant, and animal realms, etc. To enter into the means by which the spirit individualizes itself for us, how it manifests itself particularly in this or that form of existence, is not yet given much thought in the wider circles of our educated contemporaries. Offense is usually taken to those who speak not only of the spirit generally but of its particular forms, its particular ways, how it makes itself felt behind this or that phenomenon. Nevertheless, in our spiritual science, we should not speak about the spirit in the vague and general way indicated today; rather, we should speak in such a way that we recognize how the spirit weaves behind the mineral or plant existence, how it is active in the animal and human existence. Our task today is to say some thing about the nature of the spirit in the realm of plants.

It must be admitted that if we do not begin with abstract philosophy, or with abstract theosophy, but if we begin with unbiased observations of reality and at the same time—as it must be on the healthy ground of spiritual science—we stand firm on the ground of natural science and then want to speak about ‘the spirit in the realm of plants,’ we not only collide with unjustified prejudices of our scientists or other educated contemporaries but also come into conflict with more-or-less justified concepts that have, and must have, the power of strong suggestion.

Especially in this contemplation, which is to concern itself with the spirit that finds its expression, its physiognomy, as it were, in the realm confronting us in the gigantic trees of the primeval forest, or those growing on Teneriffa thousands of years ago, as well as in the small, unassuming violet hiding in the quiet woods or elsewhere—especially in such a contemplation a person may feel himself in a rather difficult position, if the natural scientific concepts of the nineteenth century have been absorbed. Yes, a person feels himself in a rather difficult position if he has worked through to what should be said about the spirit in this area, for how could it be denied that great and wonderful discoveries in the realm of material research—even in the realm of the nature of plants—were made in the nineteenth century, thoroughly illuminating the nature of plants from a certain standpoint.

Again and again we should be reminded that in the second third of the nineteenth century the great botanist, Schleiden, discovered the plant cell. He was the first to place before humanity the truth that every plant body is built up out of small—they are called ‘elementary organisms’—independent entities, ‘cells,’ which appear like the building blocks of this plant body. While previously plants were able to be considered only in relation to their crude parts and organs, now attention was directed to how every leaf of the higher plants consisted of innumerable, tiny microscopic formations—the plant cells. No wonder such a discovery had a powerful influence on all thinking and feeling in relation to the plant world! It is entirely natural that the person who first discerned how the plant is built up out of these building blocks would arrive at the thought that by investigating these small formations, these building blocks, the secret of the nature of plants could be revealed.

The ingenious Gustav Theodor Fechner must already have experienced this idea when, around the middle of the nineteenth century, he actually tried to take into his thought sequences something like a ‘plant soul,’ although it could be said that his excessively fantastic elaboration of the nature of plants may have appeared somewhat too early. Fechner spoke comprehensively about a soul of plants (e.g., in his book Nanna), and he spoke not only as one who merely fantasizes but as one thoroughly and deeply acquainted with the natural scientific advances of the nineteenth century. He was unable, however, to think that plants are merely built up out of cells; rather, when he looked at the forms, the structures, of individual plants, he was led to assume that sense reality is the expression of an underlying soul element.

Now, you must admit that in contrast to what spiritual science has to say today about the life of the spirit in the realm of plants, Fechner's explanations appear rather fantastic, but his thoughts were actually an advance. In spite of this, Fechner had to experience the resistance that can come especially through the thinking into which the human spirit had penetrated by the discoveries of the nineteenth century. It must simply be understood that even the greatest individuals were fascinated by what they beheld when, under the microscope, the plant body revealed itself as a structure of small cells. They could in no way conceive how someone could still come up with the idea of a ‘plant soul’ after the material aspects had shown themselves in such a grandiose way to the searching human spirit. It is therefore easy to understand that even the discoverer of the plant cell became the greatest and most vehement opponent of what Fechner wished to say concerning the soul nature of plants. And it is rather interesting to see the fine and subtle mind of Fechner in battle with Schleiden, who became famous through his epoch-making discovery for botany but who did away, in a materialistically crude way, with everything that Fechner wanted to say about plants out of his intimate contemplations.

In a battle such as the one between Fechner and Schleiden in the nineteenth century, something basically took place that must be experienced by every soul who penetrates into the science of our time, working through the doubts and riddles that arise nevertheless, especially when one enters into the achievements of natural science. He will have grave doubts if he is able to work himself out of the frequently quite compelling concepts in such a realm. Whoever is not acquainted with this compelling quality of the materialistic natural scientific concepts of the nineteenth century may find trivial, possibly even narrow-minded, what is said out of the world view that wishes to place itself on the firm ground of natural science. One who approaches matters with a healthy sense for truth and a serious concern for solving life's riddles, however, and is at the same time armed with the botanical concepts of the nineteenth century, can have quite tragic inner soul experiences. Something about this need only be suggested here.

Thus we can learn, for example, what the botany of the nineteenth century has brought. There is much in this botany that is actually magnificent and truly astounding. A person who approaches the natural scientific concepts with a healthy sense for truth reaches the point where these concepts affect him like suggestion, with a tremendous power; they do not let him loose but whisper in his ears again and again, ‘You are doing something stupid if you leave the sure path on which one studies how cell relates to cell, how cell is nourished by cell,’ and so on. Finally it becomes necessary to tear oneself loose from the materialistic concepts in this realm. There is no other choice, no matter how firmly one wishes to be held by the suggestive power of the world views that are merely a consequence of outer materialistic concepts. After a certain point it no longer works. Not many people today experience that point. The suggestive power is experienced by most people who feel fascinated by the natural scientific results, and they do not dare take even a single step beyond what the microscope shows. The next step is taken only by very few. It is clear, however, to whoever maintains a healthy sense for truth, especially regarding the natural sciences—and this is necessary if one wishes to approach the spirit in the realm of plants—that first a person must occupy himself with a certain mental image, for otherwise he will always succumb to error, will always enter a labyrinth such as happened to Fechner despite his serious attempts to examine the symbolic, the physiognomic aspects of individual plant forms and structures.

I would like to suggest to you what is significant here first by means of a comparison. Imagine that someone found a piece of matter, some kind of tissue, on a path. If he examines this piece of tissue, in certain cases it may happen that he doesn't get anywhere. Why not? If this piece of tissue is a piece of bone from a human arm, the examiner will not get anywhere if he wants to look merely at this piece of bone and to explain it out of itself, for it would be impossible for this piece of tissue to come into existence without the prior existence of a human arm.

One cannot speak about the tissue at all if it is not considered in connection with a complete human organism. It is impossible, therefore, to speak about such a formation other than in connection with an entire being. Consider the following comparison. We find an object somewhere, a human hair. If we wanted to explain how it may have originated there, we would be led completely astray, because we can explain this only by considering it in connection with an entire human organism. By itself it is nothing; by itself it cannot be explained.

This is something that the spiritual investigator must consider in relation to the whole scope of our observations, of our explanations. He must direct his attention to the question of whether any object confronting him can be considered by itself or whether it remains inexplicable by itself, whether it belongs to something else or can be examined better as an isolated entity.

Curiously enough, the spiritual investigator becomes aware that it is generally impossible to consider the world of plants, this wonderful covering of the earth, as something existing by itself. When confronted with the plant he feels just as he does regarding a finger, which he can consider only as belonging to a complete human organism. The plant world cannot be considered in isolation, because to the view of the spiritual investigator the plant world at once relates itself to the entire planet earth and forms a whole with the earth, just as the finger or piece of bone or the brain forms a whole with our organism. And whoever merely looks at plants by themselves, remaining with the particular, does the same as one who wishes to explain a hand or a piece of human bone by itself. The common nature of plants simply cannot be considered in any other way than as a member of our common planet earth.

Here, however, we come to a matter that may annoy many today, though it is valid nevertheless for the spiritual scientific view. We come to look differently at our whole planet earth than is done customarily by today's science, for our contemporary science—be it astronomy, geology, or mineralogy—basically speaks about the earth only in so far as this earthly sphere consists of rocks, of the mineral element, of lifeless matter. Spiritual science may not speak in this way. It can only speak in such a way that everything found on our earth—that which a being coming from outer space, as it were, would find in human beings, animals, plants, and stones—belongs to the whole of our earth, just as the stones themselves belong to our earth. This means that we may not look at the earth planet as a dead rock formation but rather as something that is in itself a living whole, bringing forth the nature of plants out of itself, just as the human being brings forth the structures of his skin, of his sense organs, and the like. In other words, we may not consider the earth without the plant covering that belongs to it.

An outer circumstance might already suggest to us that, just as every stone has a certain relationship to the earth, so also everything plant-like belongs to it. Just as every stone, every lifeless body, shows its relationship to the earth by being able to fall onto the earth, where it finds a resistance, so every plant shows its relationship to the earth by the direction of its stem, which is always such that it passes through the center of the earth. All stems of plants would cross at the earth's center if we extended them to that point. This means that the earth is able to draw out of its center all those force radiations that allow the plants to arise. If we look at the mineral realm without also adding the plant covering, we are looking only at an abstraction, at something thought out. We must also add that the natural science that proceeds purely out of the outer material likes to speak about how the origins of all life—including plant-life—must lie in the lifeless, the mineral element.

This issue does not exist at all for the spiritual investigator, because the lower is never a precondition for the higher; rather the higher, the living, is always the precondition for the lower, the nonliving. We will see later, in the lecture, What Has Geology to Say About the Origin of the World,² that spiritual research shows how everything rock-like, mineral—from granite to the crumb of soil in the field—originated in a manner similar to what natural science says today about the origin of coal. Today coal is a mineral, we dig it out of the earth. What was it millions of years ago according to natural scientific concepts? Extensive, mighty forests—so says natural science—covered large portions of the earth's surface at that time; later they sank into the earth during shifts of the earth's crust and were then transformed chemically in regard to their material composition, and what we dig up today out of the depths of the earth are the plants that have become stone. If this is admitted today in relation to coal, it should not be considered too ridiculous if spiritual science, by its methods, comes to the conclusion that all rocks found on our earth have in the final analysis originated from the plant. The plant first had to become stone, as it were. Thus the mineral is not the precondition for the plant-like, but rather the reverse is the case, the plant-like is the precondition for the mineral. Everything of a mineral nature is first something plant-like that hardens and then turns to stone.

Thus in the earth planet we have something before us concerning which we must presuppose the following: it was once, with respect to its densest quality, of a plant nature, was a structure of plant-like being, and only developed the lifeless out of what was living, progressively hardening, turning to wood, turning to stone. Just as our skeleton first separates itself out of the organism, so we have to look at the earth's rock formations as the great skeleton of the earth being, of the earth organism.

Now, if we are able to consider this earth organism from a spiritual scientific viewpoint, we can go still further. Today I can give only the first outlines of this, because this is a cycle of lectures in which one thing must lead to the next. We can ask ourselves, what is the situation with the earth organism as such?

In studying an organism we know that alternations of different conditions are revealed. The human and animal organ isms reveal a waking and a sleeping condition alternating in time. Can we, from a spiritual scientific viewpoint, find something similar regarding the body of the earth, the earth organism? To outer consideration, what follows may appear to be a mere comparison, but for spiritual research it is not a comparison but a fact. If we study the curious lawfulness of summer and winter, how it is summer on one half of the earth and winter on the other half, how this relationship alternates, and if we pay attention to how this lawfulness—as wintertime and summertime—is to be discerned in relation to all earthly life, then it will no longer appear absurd if spiritual science tells us that winter and summer in the earth organism correspond to waking and sleeping in the organisms around us. It is simply that the earth does not sleep in time in the same way as other organisms but is always awake somewhere and al ways asleep at some other portion of its being. Waking and sleeping move around spatially: the earth sleeps in the part where there is summer, and it is awake in the part of its being where there is winter. Thus the whole earth organism con fronts us spiritually with conditions like waking and sleeping in other organisms.

The summer condition of the earth organism consists of a very specific relationship of the earth to the sun, and because we are dealing with a living, spirit-filled organism we may say that it surrenders itself to an activity that proceeds spiritually from the sun. In the winter condition the earth organism closes itself off from this sun activity, drawing itself together into itself. Now let us compare this condition with human sleep. I will now speak of what appears to be a mere analogy; spiritual science, however, provides the evidence for these observations.

If we study the human being in the evening, when he is tired, as his consciousness is diminishing, we find that all thoughts and feelings that enter our soul during the day from the outside, all pleasure and suffering, joy and pain, sink into an indefinite darkness. During this time, the human spirit being—as we have shown in the lecture about the nature of sleep³—passes out of the human physical body and enters the spiritual world, surrendering itself to the spiritual world. In this sleep condition it is a curious fact that the human being becomes unconscious. For the spiritual investigator (we will see how he comes to know this) it is revealed that the inner aspect of the human being, the astral body and ego, actually draw themselves out of the physical and etheric bodies, but they do not simply draw themselves out and float over him like a cloud formation; rather this whole inner aspect of the human being spreads itself out, pours itself out over the whole planetary world around us. As incredible as it may seem, it is nevertheless revealed that the human soul pours itself out in a unified way over the astral realm. The investigators who were acquainted with this realm knew well why they called what departs from the physical the ‘astral body.’ The reason was that this inner element draws out of heavenly space, with which it forms a unity, the forces it needs in order to replace what the day's efforts and work used up from the physical body. Thus the human being in sleep passes into the great world and in the morning draws himself back within the limits of his skin, into the small human world, into the microcosm. There, because his body offers him resistance, he again feels his ego, his self-consciousness.

This breathing out and breathing in of the soul is a wonderful alternation in human life. Of all those who have not spoken directly from an occult, spiritual scientific point of view, I have actually found only one individual who made so fitting a remark about the alternation of waking and sleeping that it can be taken directly over into spiritual science, be cause it corresponds with spiritual scientific facts. It was a thoroughly mathematical thinker, a deeply thoughtful man, who was able to encompass nature magnificently with his spirit: Novalis. He says in his Fragments:

Sleep is a mixed condition of body and soul. In sleep, body and soul are chemically united. In sleep the soul is evenly distributed throughout the body—the human being is neutralized. Waking is a divided, a polar condition; in waking the soul is pointed, localized. Sleep is soul-digestion; the body digests the soul (removal of the soul stimulus). Waking is the condition of the soul stimulus influence: the body partakes of the soul. In sleep the bonds of this system are loosened; in waking they are tightened.

Thus sleep for Novalis means the digestion of the soul by the body. Novalis is always conscious that in sleep the soul becomes one with the universe and is digested, so that the human being can be further helped in the physical world.

With respect to his inner being, then, the human being alternates in such a way that in the daytime he draws himself together into the small world, into the limits of his skin, and then expands into the great world during the night, drawing forth through surrender forces from that world in which he is then imbedded. We will not understand the human being unless we understand him as formed out of the entire macrocosm.

For that part of the earth where it is summer, there is something similar to what goes on in the human being in the condition of sleep. The earth gives itself to everything that comes down from the sun and forms itself as it should form itself under the influence of the sun activity. In that part of the earth where it is winter, it closes itself off from the influence of the sun, lives within itself. There it is the same as when the human being has drawn together into the small, inner world, living in himself, while for the part of the earth where it is summer it is the same as when the human being is surrendered to the whole outer world.

There is a law in the spiritual world: if we direct our attention to spiritual entities far removed from one another—such as, for example, the human being here on one side and the earth organism on the other—the states of consciousness must be pictured as reversed in a certain sense. With the human being, stepping out into the great world is the sleep condition. For the earth, the summer (which one would be inclined to consider a waking condition) is something that can only be compared with the human being falling asleep. The human being steps out into the great world when he falls asleep; in summer the earth with all its forces enters the realm of sun activity, only we must be able to think of the earth and the sun as spirit-filled organisms.

In wintertime, when the earth rests within itself, we must be able to think of its condition as corresponding to the waking condition of the human being, although it may be tempting to consider winter as the earth's sleep. When we consider entities as different from one another as the human being and the earth, however, the states of consciousness appear re versed in a certain way. Now, what does the earth accomplish when it is under the influence of surrender to the sun being, to the sun spirit? To have an easier comparison, we would do well to turn the concepts around now. The earth's surrender to the sun being is simply something that may be compared spiritually with the condition of the human being when he awakens in the morning and emerges out of the dark womb of existence, out of the night, into his joys and sorrows. When the earth enters the realm of sun activity—although this could be compared with the sleep condition of the human being—all the forces that sprout forth from the earth allow the resting winter condition of the earth to pass over into the active, the living, summer condition.

What, then, are the plants in this whole web of existence? We could say that when spring approaches, the earth organ ism begins to think and to feel, because the sun with its being lures out the thoughts and feelings. The plants are nothing but a kind of sense organ for the earth organism, awakening anew every spring, so that the earth organism with its thinking and feeling can be in the realm of the sun activity. Just as in the human organism light creates the eye for itself in order to be able to manifest through the eye as ‘light,’ so every spring the sun organism creates for itself the plant covering in order to look at itself, to feel, to sense, to think by means of this plant covering. The plants cannot directly be considered the thoughts of the earth, but they are the organs through which the awakening organization of the earth in spring, together with the sun, develops its thoughts and feelings. Just as we can see our nerves emanating from the brain, developing our feeling and conceptual life through the eyes and ears together with the nerves, so the spiritual investigator sees in what transpires between earth and sun with the help of the plants the marvelous weaving of a cosmic world of thoughts, feelings, and sensations. The spiritual investigator finds that the earth is surrounded not merely by the mineral air of the earth, by the purely physical earth atmosphere, but by an aura of thoughts and feelings. For spiritual research the earth is a spiritual being whose thoughts and feelings awaken every spring, and throughout the summer they pass through the soul of our entire earth.

The plant world, however, which is a part of our entire earth organism, provides the organs through which our earth can think and feel. Woven into the spirit of the earth are the plants, just as our eyes and ears are woven into the activities of our spirit.

In spring a living, spirit-filled organism awakens, and in the plants we can see something that is pushed out of the countenance of our earth in some realm where it wants to begin to feel and think. Just as everything in the human being tends toward a self-conscious ego, so it is also in the realm of plants. The whole plant world belongs to the earth. I have already said that a person would be close to insanity if he did not think of how all feelings, sensations, and mental images are directed toward our ego. Similarly, everything the plants mediate during summertime is directed toward the earth's center, which is the earth ego. This should not be said merely symbolically! As the human being has his ego, so the earth has its self-conscious ego. That is why all plants strive toward the earth's center. That is why we may not consider plants by themselves but rather must consider them in interaction with the self-conscious ego of the earth. What unfolds itself as thoughts and sensations of the earth is similar to the thoughts and sensations that live in us, similar to whatever arises and disappears in us during our waking state, what lives in us astrally, if we speak from the viewpoint of spiritual science.

Thus we cannot picture the earth only as a physical structure, for the physical structure is for us something like our own physical body, which can be seen with the outer eyes and touched with the hands, and which is observed by outer science. This is the earth body that present-day astronomy or geology studies. Then we have to direct our attention to what in the human being we have come to know as the etheric body or life body. The earth also has such an etheric body, and it also has an astral body. This is what awakens every spring as the thoughts and feelings of the earth, which recede when winter approaches so that the earth rests in its own ego, closed off within itself, retaining only what it needs in order, through memory, to carry over the preceding into the following, retaining in the plant's seed forces what it has conquered for itself. Just as the human being, when he falls asleep, does not lose his thoughts and sensations but finds them again the next morning, so the earth, awakening again from sleep in the spring, finds the seed forces of the plants in order to permit what has been conquered in an earlier time to emerge again from the living memory of the seed forces.

When regarded in this way, the plants can be compared with our eyes and ears. What our senses are for us, the plants are for the earth organism. But what perceives, what achieves consciousness, is the spiritual world streaming down from the sun to the earth. This spiritual world would not be able to achieve consciousness if it did not have its sense organs in the plants, mediating a self-consciousness just as our eyes and ears and nerves mediate our self-consciousness. This makes us aware that we speak correctly only if we say that those beings who stream from the sun down to the earth, unfolding their spiritual activity, encounter from spring through summertime the being that belongs to the earth itself. In this exchange the organs are formed through which the earth perceives those beings, for the plants do not perceive. It is a superstition, shared also by natural science, when it is said that the plant perceives. The spiritual entities that belong to the earth activity and the sun activity perceive through the plant organs, and these entities direct toward the center of the earth all organs they need in order to unite them with the center of the earth. Thus what we have to see behind the plant covering are the spiritual entities that weave around the earth and have their organs in the plants.

It is remarkable that in our time natural science is actually moving toward a recognition of such spiritual scientific findings, for it is nothing less than full recognition of the situation to say that our physical earth is only a part of the whole earth, that the gaseous sun ball is only a part of the whole sun, and that our sun, as it appears to us physically, is only a part of the soul-spiritual entities who interact with the soul-spiritual entities of the earth. Just as the human world is connected with its environment, and just as human beings have their organs in order to live and to develop themselves, so these entities, which are real, create for themselves in the plant covering an organ in order to perceive themselves. As I said, it is superstitious to believe that the plant as such perceives or that the single plant has a kind of soul. This is just as superstitious as speaking of the soul of an eye. Although a remark able linking of facts, self-evident to spiritual science, impelled outer science throughout the nineteenth century to recognize what has just been said, it is nevertheless a fact that outer science does not know its way around very well in this realm; this is still so today, for what science has brought together so far about the sense life of plants completely sup ports what I have just said about the spirit and its activity in the realm of plants, but in outer science it cannot be comprehended as such. We can see this in the following example. In 1804 Sydenham Edward discovered the unusual plant called the Venus fly-trap, which has bristles on its leaves. When an insect comes near this plant so that contact with the bristles occurs, the insect is trapped by the leaf and then seemingly devoured and digested. It was remarkable when man discovered that plants can eat, can even take in animals, are meat eaters! But it was not known quite what to do with this, and this is interesting, because this discovery has repeatedly been forgotten and then rediscovered, in 1818 by Nuttal, in 1834 by Curtis, in 1848 by Lindley, and in 1859 by Oudemans. Five people in succession discovered the same thing! And science could not do much more with this discovery than for Schleiden, who made such a contribution to research of the plant world, to say that one should be on guard and not succumb to all kinds of mystical speculations attributing a soul to plants! Today, however, science is again prepared to attribute a soul to the individual plant, for example the Venus fly trap. This would be as superstitious as attributing a soul to the eye, however. Especially people such as Raoul France, for example, have immediately interpreted these things in an outer sense, saying, ‘There the soul element is evident, manifesting in a way analogous to the soul element of the animal!’

This shows how necessary it is, especially in the realm of spiritual science, not to succumb to all kinds of fantasies, for here outer science has succumbed to the fantasy that by attributing a soul nature to the Venus fly-trap, it can be thrown together with the human or animal soul nature. If this is done, a soul should also be attributed to other entities that attract small animals and, when these animals have come near, surround them with their tentacles so that they remain caught within. If one speaks of a soul in the Venus fly-trap, a soul can also be attributed to a mouse trap! We should not speak like this, however. As soon as there is the wish to penetrate into the spirit, things must be understood accurately and exactly, and one must not conclude from apparently similar outer qualities that the inner qualities work in the same way.

I have already directed attention to the fact that some animals exhibit something similar to memory. When an elephant is led to the drinking trough and on the way there someone irritates him, it can happen that when the elephant returns he has retained water in his trunk and sprays the person who irritated him earlier. It is said that here we can see that the elephant has a memory, that he remembered the person who irritated him and resolved: ‘On the way back I will spray him with water!’ But this is not the case. With the soul life it is important for us to follow the inner process exactly and not immediately to speak of memory when a later event occurs as an effect of an earlier cause. Only when a being truly looks back to something that took place at an earlier time do we have to do with memory; in every other case we are dealing only with cause and effect. This means that we would have to look exactly into the structure of the elephant's soul if we wished to see how the stimulus applied results in something that calls forth an effect after a certain time.

Therefore we must not interpret things such as what we encounter in the Venus fly-trap by thinking that the entire arrangement of the plant is there in order to determine an inner soul nature of the plant, but rather that what goes on there is brought about from outside. The plant serves as organ of the entire earth organism even in such a case. How the plants on the one hand pertain to the ego of the earth and on the other hand to the aura of the earth—the astral body, the earth's world of sensations and feelings—was shown particularly by this research in the nineteenth century. One can actually be grateful to those natural scientists—such as Gottlieb Haberlandt—who simply presented the facts they discovered in their research, and did not—like Raoul France or others—draw from these results purely outer conclusions. If the natural scientist were to present things as they really are, then one could be grateful to him; if he draws from them conclusions regarding the soul life of a single plant, however, then he should also immediately conclude something about the soul life of the single hair or tooth.

If we now study grain-producing plants, we discover remarkable little organs present in all these plants. Small structures in the starch cells are discovered. These cells are constructed in quite a remarkable way, so that within them there is something like a loose kernel. These structures have the unique property that the cell wall remains insensitive to the kernel at only one spot. If the kernel slips to another spot, it touches the cell wall, leading the plant to return to its earlier position. Such starch cells are found in all plants whose main orientation is toward the center of the earth, so that the plant has an organ within that always makes it possible for it to direct itself in its main orientation toward the center of the earth. This discovery, made during the nineteenth century by various scientists, is certainly wonderful, and it is most remarkable if it is simply presented as it is. Even if Haberlandt, for example, believes that this is a matter of a kind of sense perception by plants, he nevertheless presents the facts so clearly that one must be especially grateful for his dry and sober presentation.

But now let us turn to something else. If the leaf of a plant is studied, it is discovered that the outer surface is actually always a composite of many small, lens-like structures, similar to the lens in our eye. These ‘lenses’ are arranged in such a way that the light is effective only if it falls onto the surface of the leaf from a very specific direction. If it falls from another direction, the leaf instinctively begins to turn in such a way that the light can fall into the center of the lens, because when it falls to the side it works in another way. Thus there are organs for light on the surface of the leaves of plants. These light organs, which actually can be compared with a kind of eye, are spread out over the plants, but the plant does not see by means of them; rather the sun being looks through them to the earth being. These light organs bring it about that the leaves of the plant always have the tendency to place themselves perpendicularly to the sunlight.

In this—in the way the plant surrenders itself to the sun's activity in spring and summertime—we have the plant's second main orientation. The first orientation is that of the stem, through which the plants reveal themselves as belonging to the earth's self-consciousness; the second orientation is the one through which the plants express the earth's surrender to the activity of the sun beings.

If we now wished to go still further, we would have to find, if the previous considerations are correct, that through this surrender of the earth to the sun, the plants somehow ex press how the earth, through what it brings forth, really lives in the great macrocosm. We would have to perceive some thing in the plants, so to speak, which would indicate to us that something works into the plant world that is brought about outside especially by the sun being. Linnaeus pointed out that certain plants open their blossoms at 5 a.m. and at no other time. This means that the earth surrenders itself to the sun, which is expressed in the fact that certain plants are able to open their blossoms only at very specific times of the day; for example, Hemerocallis fulva, the day lily, blossoms only at 5 a.m.; Nymphaea alba, the water lily, only at 7 a.m., and Calendula, the marigold, only at 9 a.m. In this way we see a marvelous expression of the earth's relationship to the sun, a relationship that Linnaeus termed the ‘sun clock.’ The plant's falling asleep, the folding together of the petals, is also limited to very specific times of the day. A wonderful lawfulness and regularity is evident in the life of plants.

All of this shows us how the earth is surrendered—like the human being in sleep—to the great world, living within it. Just as it allows the plants to bloom and wilt, it shows us the spiritual weaving between sun and earth. Looking at matters in this way, however, we would have to say that we gaze there into deep, deep mysteries of our environment. For the serious seeker after truth, this puts a stop to the possibility—regardless of how fascinating the results of purely material research are—to think of the sun merely as a ball of gas racing through space; it puts a stop to the possibility that the earth can be considered as it is by astronomy and geology today. There are compelling reasons that must lead the conscientious natural scientist to admit the following: ‘In what natural science reveals, you may no longer see anything but an expression of the spiritual life lying at the foundation of everything!’ Then we regard the plants as a physiognomic expression of the earth, as the expression of the features of our earth. Thus what we call our aesthetic feeling in relation to the plant world deepens especially through spiritual science. We stand before the gigantic trees in the primeval forest, before the quiet violet or lily of the valley, and we look at them as single individualities, yes, but in such a way that we say, there the spirit that lives throughout space expresses it self to us—sun spirit! earth spirit! Just as we recognize in a human being the piety or impiety of his soul, so we can come to an impression, from what looks at us out of the plants, of what lives as earth spirit, as sun spirit, of how they battle with one another or are in harmony. There we feel ourselves as living and weaving within the spirit.

Just as an illustration of how spiritual science can be verified by the natural science of the nineteenth century, I will relate to you the following. Listeners who have heard lectures here in the past will recall how I have indicated that there are plants in the earthly world that are misplaced, that do not belong in our world. One such plant is mistletoe, which plays such a remarkable role in legends and myths, because it be longs to an earlier planetary condition of our earth and has remained behind as a remnant of a pre-earthly evolution. This is why it cannot grow on the earth but must take root in other plants. Natural science shows us that mistletoe does not have those curious starch cells that orient the plant toward the center of the earth. I could now begin briefly to take apart the entire botany of the nineteenth century bit by bit, and you will find little by little how the plant covering of our earth is the sense organ through which earth spirit and sun spirit behold each other.

If we pay heed to this, we receive a science—as seems appropriate for the plant world that we love and that gives us so much joy—a science that can at the same time raise our soul, bring it close to this plant world. With our soul and spirit we feel ourselves belonging to the earth and to the sun; we feel as if we had to look up to the plant world, as it were, we feel that it belongs to our great mother earth. We must do this. Everything that as animal or human being seems to be independent of the immediate effect of the sun is actually, through the plant world and its dependence on the plant world, indirectly dependent on the sun. The human being does not undergo the kinds of transformations that plants go through in winter and summer, but it is the plant that gives him the possibility of having such a constancy within himself. The substances that the plant develops can be developed only under the influence of the sun, through the interrelationship of sun spirit and earth spirit. The carbohydrates can arise only if the sun spirit and the earth spirit kiss through the plant being. The substances developed here yield what the higher organisms must take into themselves in order to develop warmth. The higher organisms can only thrive through the warmth developed by taking up the substances prepared by the sun via the plants.

Thus we must look to mother earth as to our great nourishing mother. We have seen, however, that in the plant covering we have the physiognomy of the plant spirit, and through this we feel as though standing in soul and spirit. We gaze, as it were—just as we gaze into the eyes of another person—into the soul of the earth, if we understand how it manifests its soul in the blossoms and leaves of the plant world.

This is what led Goethe to occupy himself with the plant world, which led him to an activity that consisted fundamentally of showing how the spirit is active in the plant world and how in the plant the leaf is formed out of the spirit in the most diverse forms. Goethe was delighted that the spirit in the plant forms the leaves, rounds them, and also leads them to wind around the stem. And it was remarkable when a man who truly recognized the spirit—Schiller, who met Goethe after a botanical lecture in Jena—when Schiller, who was not satisfied by the lecture, said, “That was just an observation of plants as they are in isolation!” whereupon Goethe took out a sheet of paper and sketched in his way, with a few lines, how for him the spirit is active in the plant. Schiller, who was un able to understand such a concrete presentation of the spirit of the plant, said in reply, “What you are drawing there is only an idea!” to which Goethe could only say, “Isn't it nice that I can have ideas without knowing it and can even see them with my own eyes!”

Especially in the way in which a man like Goethe studied the plant world on his journey over the Brenner—when he looked at the coltsfoot with completely different eyes—the way in which he saw in this how the spirit is active on the earth and forms the leaves, shows us how we can speak of a common spirit of the earth that brings itself to expression only in the manifold plant being as in his own special organ. What is physical is spirit; we simply have the task of pursuing the spirit always in the right way. Whoever pursues the plant as it grows out of the common spirit of the earth will find the earth spirit that Goethe already had in view when he let his Faust address the spirit active in the earth, who says of him self:

In Lebensfluten, in Tatensturm
Wall' ich auf and ab,
Webe hin and her!
Geburt and Grab,
Ein ewiges Meer,
Ein wechselnd Weben,
Ein gluhend Leben,
So Schaff ich am sausenden Webstuhl der Zeit
Und wirke der Gottheit lebendiges Kleid.

In the tides of life, in action's storm,
Up and down I wave,
To and fro weave free,
Birth and the grave,
An infinite sea,
A varied weaving,
A radiant living,
Thus at Time's humming loom it's my hand that prepares
The robe ever-living the Deity wears.

The person who beholds in this way the spirit in the plant life of the earth feels himself strengthened by seeing what he must consider his inner being poured out over the whole environment he is allowed to inhabit. And he must say to himself, “If I study what encircles my space, I find it confirmed that the origin of all things is to be found in the domain of the spirit.” And an expression of the relationship of human spirit and human soul, and also the relationship of plant soul and plant spirit, we can encompass in these words:

Die Dinge in den Raumesweiten,
Sie wandeln sich im Zeitenlauf.
Erkennend lebt die Menschenseele
Durch Raumesweiten unbegrenzt
Und unversehrt durch Zeitenlauf.
Sie findet in dem Geistgebiet
Des eignen Wesens tiefsten Grund.

To the sense of man there speak
The things in breadths of space
Transforming themselves in course of time.
Knowing lives the human soul
Unbounded by the breadths of space,
Unaltered by the course of time;
It finds in the realm of spirit
Its own being's deepest ground!

• 1. Berlin, November 10 and 17, 1910
• 2. Berlin, February 9, 1911.
• 3. Berlin, November 24, 1910.

Before I start with today’s topic, I would like to make you aware that today’s discussions are the beginning of a whole series of such discussions, and that basically all subsequent topics this winter could have precisely the same title as today’s topic. The path a human being must take if he wants to attain knowledge of the spiritual world will be explored in the course of the next lectures in relation to the most diverse phenomena of human and scientific life in general and to various cultural personalities of mankind.

Allow me to start with something personal, although this topic, this contemplation, must head, so to speak, in the direction of the most impersonal, most objective Spiritual Science. Yet the path into the spiritual world is such that it must lead through the most personal to the impersonal. Thus in spite of the impersonal, the personal will often be a symbolic feature of this path, and one gains the opportunity to point out many important things just by starting, so to speak, from the more intimate immediate experience. To the observer of the spiritual world many things in life will be symbolically more important than they initially seem to be. Much that might otherwise pass by the human eye, without particularly attracting attention, can appear to be deeply important to someone who wants to study intensely an observation such as the one that forms the basis for today’s examinations. And I can say that the following—which may at first seem like a trifle of life to you—belongs for me to the many unforgettable things on my path of life that on the one hand marked the longing of today’s human beings to truly ascend to the spiritual world. Yet on the other hand, they marked a more or less admitted impossibility of somehow gaining access to the spiritual world by means, that were not only provided by the present, but were also available in the past centuries, insofar as they were externally accessible to man.

I once sat in the cosy home of Herman Grimm. Those of you who are somewhat familiar with German intellectual life will associate much with the name of Herman Grimm. Perhaps you will know the spirited, important biographer of Michaelangelo and Raffael, and might also know, as it were, that the sum of education of our time, or at least of Central Europe, or let’s say it even more narrowly, of Germany, was united in the soul of Herman Grimm. During a conversation with him about Goethe, who was so close to his heart, and about Goethe’s view of the world, a small thing happened that belongs to the most unforgettable things on my path of life. In response to a remark I made—and we will see later how exactly this remark can be of importance in relation to the ascent of man into the spiritual world—Herman Grimm answered with a dismissive movement of his left hand. What lay in that gesture is what I consider, as it were, to be one of the unforgettable experiences on the path of my life. It was supposed to be in relation to Goethe, how Goethe wanted to find the way into the spiritual world in his own way.

In the course of these lectures we will have another talk about Goethe’s path into the spiritual world. Herman Grimm willingly followed Goethe’s pathways into the spiritual world, but in his own manner.

It was far from his mind to enter into a conversation about Goethe, in which Goethe would be seen as the representative of a human being who had really brought down spiritual realities—also as an artist— from the spiritual world and then undertook to embody them in his works of art. For Herman Grimm, it was much more obvious to say to himself: Alas, with the means that we as human beings have nowadays, we can only ascend to this spiritual world by way of fantasy. Although fantasy offers things that are beautiful, great and magnificent and are able to fill the human heart with warmth; but Knowledge, well-founded knowledge was not something that Herman Grimm, the intimate observer of Goethe, wanted to find in Goethe either. And when I said that Goethe’s whole fundamental nature is based on his willingness to embody the true in the beautiful, in the art, and then attempted to show that there are ways outside of fantasy, ways into the spiritual world that will lead you on more solid and firmer ground than fantasy—then it was not the rejection by someone who would not have liked to follow such a path. Herman Grimm did not use this gesture to express his rejection of such a path, but—in a way only those who knew him better would understand—he laid in it roughly the following: There may well be such a path, but we human beings cannot feel a calling to find out anything about it!

As I said, I do not wish to present this here as a personal matter in an importune way, yet it seems to me that just in such a gesture the position of the best human beings of our age towards the spiritual world is epitomised. Because later I had a long conversation with the same Hermann Grimm on a journey that led us both from Weimar to Tiefurt. There he explained how he had freed himself entirely of a purely materialistic view on world events, from the opinion that the human spirit, in the successive epochs, would produce out of itself that which constitutes the real soul-wealth of man. At that earlier time Herman Grimm talked about a great plan that was part of a piece of work that was never realised. Those of you who have occupied themselves with Herman Grimm will know that he intended to write a ‘History of the German fantasy’. He had envisaged the forces of fantasy to be like those of a goddess in the spiritual world who brings forth out of herself that which human beings create for the benefit of world progress. I would like to say: In that lovely region between Weimar and Tiefurt, when I heard these words from a man, whom I, after all, acknowledge as one of the greatest minds of our time, I had a feeling that I would like to express in these words; ‘Today, many people say to themselves: One must be deeply dissatisfied with everything that external science is able to say about the sources of life, about the secret of existence, about world riddles—but the possibility to step powerfully into another world is missing.’

There is a lack of intensity of willingness to realise that this world of spiritual life is different from what man imagines in his fantasy. Many enjoy going into the realm of fantasy, because for them it is the only spiritual realm that exists. About 17 years ago, on the journey to Tiefurt, I met Herman Grimm, who already through his scriptures and many, many other things, had made an impression on me. Facing this personality I remembered just then that, 30 years ago, I had glanced at just the passage in one of Grimm’s Goethe lectures,¹ which he had held in the winter of 1874/75 in Berlin, and where, with reference to Goethe, he spoke of the kind of impression that a purely external study of nature, devoid of spirit, must make on a spirit like his own. Already 30 years earlier Herman Grimm appeared to me to be the kind of human being whom all feelings and emotions urge upwards into the spiritual world, but who, unable to find the spiritual world as a reality, can only perceive it in its weaving and workings as a fantasy. And on the other hand—just because he was like this—he did not want to acknowledge that Goethe himself searched for the sources and riddles of existence in a different realm, not just in the realm of fantasy, but in the realm of spiritual reality.

There is a passage where Herman Grimm speaks about something that must affect our souls today, at the beginning of our contemplations. This passage refers to something which, as I have already indicated, and although its importance cannot be denied by Spiritual Science, is regarded as an impossibility by natural science—or by a worldview that claims to stand on the firm ground of natural science. It is an impossibility not only for feeling and emotion but also for a realisation that truly understands itself. What I mean is the Kant-Laplace theory that explains our solar system as if it were made up only of lifeless, inorganic substances and forces, and as if it had clenched itself out of a giant gas ball. I would like to read to you the passage from Herman Grimm’s Goethe lectures that shows you what this world-view, which is so fascinating, so deeply impressive today, meant for a spirit like Herman Grimm’s:

As much as Goethe here prohibits reason to accept as truth more than one can indeed grasp with the five fingers of a hand, the more he grants license to the poet’s fantasy, to create out of an unconscious, dreaming force pictures of what the spirit wishes to behold. However, he sharply upholds the boundaries between both of these activities. A long time ago, already in his youth, the great Kant-Laplace fantasy about the origin and the future downfall of the globe, had gained ground. Out of the primeval, cosmic, in itself rotating world-nebula—the children learn this at school already—the central drop of gaseous matter forms itself, which later becomes the Earth and, as a solidifying ball in incomprehensible periods of time, goes through all phases including the episode of mankind’s habitation. This ball will finally crash back into the sun as burnt out slag: This is a long, but completely comprehensible process for the audience, that does not require any further external intervention for its implementation apart from the endeavour by some outside power to maintain a constant heating temperature on the Sun.

There cannot be imagined a more futile perspective for the future than the one that is being imposed on us today in this expectation as a scientific necessity. A carrion bone, around which a hungry dog made a detour, would be a more refreshing appetising piece in comparison to this latests excrement of creation—the form in which our Earth would finally pass to the Sun again. The inquisitiveness with which our generation embraces such things and thinks it believes them, is a sign of a sick imagination. Scientists of future epochs will use a lot of astuteness to explain it as a historical phenomenon of the time.

I felt it was necessary to point out such a quote, as basically it is rarely done these days. Today, when the concepts of these world-views have such a fascinating effect, and when they seem to be based so solidly on natural science, little reference is made to the fact that there are, after all, spirits who are deeply connected to the cultural life of our time, and yet relate in such a way out of their whole soul make-up to something about which countless people now say: It is obvious that things are like that, and anyone who does not concede that they are like that is really a simpleton! Yes, already today we see many people who feel the deepest longing to forge links between the soul of man and the spiritual world. But on the other side, we see only a few outside of those circles that are more deeply engaged with what we call Spiritual Science, who are busying themselves with means that could lead the human soul to what could after all be called the land of its longings.

Therefore, when we speak today about ways that are to lead man into the spiritual world, and speak so that what we say applies not only to a tight circle, but is addressed to all those who are equipped with a contemporary education, we still encounter strong resistance in a certain respect. Not only is it possible that what will be presented is regarded as daydreaming and fantasy, but it may also easily annoy many people of the present. It can actually be an annoyance to them because it deviates so much from those ideas that are currently considered valid in the widest circles, and which are the suggestive and fascinating imaginations of people who consider themselves to be the most educated.

In the first lecture it was already hinted at that the ascent into the spiritual world is basically an intimate affair of the soul and is in stark contrast to what is common for the imaginative and emotional life both in popular and scientific circles. Namely a scientist easily makes the demand that to be valid as science today, something has to be verifiable at any time and for anyone. And he will then also refer to his external experiment that can be proven anytime to anyone. It goes without saying that this demand can not be met by Spiritual Science. We are about to see why not. Spiritual Science here means a science that does not speak about the spirit as a sum of abstract terms and concepts, but as something real and of real entities. Spiritual Science therefore must contravene the methodical demands that are currently so easily established by science and world-views: to be verifiable anywhere and at all times by anyone. Spiritual Science very often encounters resistance in popular circles for the reason that in our time, even where there is an inner longing to ascend to the spiritual world, feelings and emotions are penetrated and permeated by a materialistic view.

Even with the best intentions, even if one yearns for the spiritual world, one cannot help but imagine the spirit as in some way material again, or at least imagine the ascent into the spiritual world as somehow connected to something material. That is why most people may prefer that you talk to them about purely external matters, like what they should eat or drink or shouldn’t eat and drink, or what else they should undertake purely externally in the material world. They would much rather do this than be asked to introduce intimate moments of development into their souls. But that is exactly what ascending into the spiritual world is all about.

We now want to try to map out—entirely in line with Spiritual Science’s own view—how this ascent of a human soul into the spiritual world can happen. The starting point must always be a person’s current life situation. A human being, as he is placed in our present world, lives completely and firmly in the external sensory world. Let’s try to become clear about how much would remain in a human soul, if one would disregard the concepts that the outer sense perceptions of the physical world have ignited within us, and that which has entered into us through the outer physical experiences, through eyes and ears and the other senses. And disregard that which is stimulated of sufferings and joys, of pleasure and pain within us through our eyes and ears, and what our rational mind has then combined from these impressions of the sensory world. Try to eliminate all of this from the soul, imagine it away, and then ponder what would be left behind. People who honestly undertake this simple self-observation will find that extremely little will remain, especially in the souls of people of the present time. And it is just so that initially the ascent into the spiritual world cannot proceed from something that is given to us by the external sensory world—it has to be undertaken so that a human being develops forces within his soul, which ordinarily lie dormant in it. It is, so to speak, a basic element for all possibilities of ascent into the Spiritual world, that a person becomes aware that he is capable of inner development, that there is something else in him than what he is initially able to survey with his consciousness.

Today, this is actually an annoying concept for many people. Let’s take a very special person with a contemporary education, for example, what does a philosopher nowadays do, when he wants to establish the full meaning and the nature of Knowledge? Someone like this will say: ‘I will try to establish how far in general we can get with our thinking, with our human soul forces, what we can comprehend of this world.’ He is attempting in his own way—depending on what is momentarily possible for him—to comprehend a world view and to place it before him, and usually he will then say, ‘We simply cannot know anything else, because it is beyond the limits of human knowledge.’ Really this is the most widespread phrase that can be found in today’s literature: ‘We cannot know this!’

However, there is a another standpoint that works in a completely different way from the one just described, by saying: ‘Certainly, with the forces I have now in my soul, which are now probably the normal human soul forces, I can recognise this or that, but here in this soul is a being capable of development. This soul may have forces within it that I first have to extrapolate. I first have to lead it along certain pathways, must lead it beyond its current point of view, and then I will see whether it could have been my fault when I said that this or that is beyond the limit of our knowledge. Perhaps I just need to go a little further in the development of my soul, and then the boundaries will expand and I will be able to penetrate more deeply into things.

In making judgments, one does not always take logic seriously, otherwise one would say: ‘What we can recognise depends on our organs.’ For this reason, someone who is born blind cannot judge colours. He would only be able to do so, if through a fortunate operation he were to become capable of seeing colours.

Likewise it may be possible—I do not wish to speak of a sixth sense here, but of something that can be brought forth from the soul in a purely spiritual way—that spirit eyes and spirit ears can be brought forth from our soul. Then the great event could happen for us—which occurs at a lower level when the one born blind is so lucky to be operated on—so that then for us the initial assumption could become a truth: Around us is a spiritual world, but to be able to look into it, we first have to awaken the organs within us. This would be the only logical thing to do. But, as I said, we do not always take logic very seriously, because people in our time have very different needs than finding their way into the spiritual world when they hear about it. I have already told you that once, when I had to give a lecture in a city in southern Germany, a courageous person, who wrote feature articles, opened his article with the words; ‘The most obvious thing about theosophy is its incomprehensibility.’ We like to believe this man that for him theosophy’s most outstanding characteristic is its incomprehensibility. But is this in any way a criterion? Let’s apply this example to mathematics about which someone would say: ‘What I notice most about mathematics is its incomprehensibility.’ Then everyone would say: ‘Quite certainly, this is possible, but then, if he wants to write feature articles, he should be so good and learn something first!’ Often it would be better to transfer what is valid for one particular subject and apply it correctly to another.

So people have nothing left to do than either to deny that there is a development of the soul—and they can only do this by speaking a word of power—namely, when they refuse to go through such a development, or, alternatively they can immerse themselves into the development of their soul. Then the spiritual world becomes for them an observation, reality, truth. But in order to ascend into the spiritual world, the soul must become capable—not for physical life, but for the realisation of the spiritual world—of completely transforming itself in a certain relation to the form it initially has, and in a certain way becoming a different being.

This could already make us aware of something that has been emphasised repeatedly here, namely, that someone who feels the urge to ascend into the spiritual world, must first and foremost make it clear for himself time and again whether he has gained a firm foothold in this world of physical reality and whether he is able to stand firm here. We have to maintain certainty, volition and sentience in all circumstances that take place in the physical world. We must not lose the ground beneath our feet if we want to ascend from this world into the spiritual one. Doing anything that can lead our character to stand firm in the physical world is a preliminary stage. Then it is a matter of bringing the soul to a different kind of feeling and willing for the spiritual world, than the feeling and willing in the soul normally are. The soul must become, as it were, inwardly a different feeling and willing organism than it is in normal life. This brings us to that which can, on the one hand, initially really place Spiritual Science in a kind of opposition to what is recognised as ‘science’ today. On the other hand, it places Spiritual Science yet again directly next to this science with the same validity that external science has. When it is said that everything that is supposed to be science, needs to be at any time and by anyone verifiable, then, what is meant by this is that what is deemed to be science must not be dependent on our subjectivity, on our subjective feelings, on any decisions of will, will impulses, feelings and emotions that we only carry individually within ourselves. Now, someone who wants to ascend into the spiritual world, must first take a detour through his innermost soul, must reorganise his soul; at first he must completely turn his gaze away from what is outside in the physical world. Normally, a human being only turns away from looking at what is within the physical world when he is asleep. Then he does not let anything enter into his soul through his eyes, his ears, nor through the entire organisation of his senses. But for that he also becomes unconscious and is not able to live consciously in a spiritual world.

It has now been said that it is one of the basic elements of spiritual realisation for a human being to find within oneself the possibility to go beyond oneself. However, this means nothing else than to first let the spirit become effective within oneself. In today’s ordinary human life we all know only one kind of turning away from the physical world, namely when we enter into the unconsciousness of sleep. The contemplation of The Nature of Sleep ² has shown us that a human being is in a real spiritual world during sleep, even if he knows nothing about it. For it would be absurd to believe that a person’s soul-centre and spirit-centre disappears in the evening and newly comes into being in the morning. No, in reality, it outlasts the stages from falling asleep to awakening. However, what for a normal person today is the inner strength to be conscious—even if there is no stimulation of consciousness through sense impressions or through the work of the rational mind —is missing in sleep. The soul life is so turned down during sleep, that the person is unable to kindle or awaken what allows the soul to experience itself inwardly. When the human being wakes up again, events from the outside enter. And because a soul content is gifted to the human being in this way, he becomes conscious of himself by means of this soul content. He is not able to become conscious of himself if he is not stimulated externally, because his human strength is too weak for this, when he is left to himself in his sleep.

Hence the ascent into the spiritual world means an arousal of such forces within our soul that enable it, as it were, to truly live consciously within itself, when it becomes, in relation to the external world like a human being who is asleep. Basically, the ascent into the spiritual worlds demands a spurring on of internal energies, an extraction of forces that are otherwise asleep, that are, as it were, paralysed within the soul, so that man cannot handle them at all. All those intimate experiences that a spiritual researcher must experience in his soul, ultimately aim at what has just been characterised. And today, I would like to summarise something for you about the path that leads upwards into the spiritual world. This has been presented in detail by element, so to speak, by their rudiments, in my book published under the title: How to attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds? ³ But today, I do not want to repeat myself by just presenting you an excerpt from this book. Instead, I wish to approach the issue from a different side, that is what the soul must do with itself to rise up to the spiritual world. One who is interested in this more deeply, can read the details in the book mentioned above. However, no one should think that what was presented in detail there can be summarised here in the same words and sentences. Those who are familiar with the book will not find that it is a summary of what has been said there, but a description of the topic from a different angle.

For a spiritual researcher who wants to direct his steps into the spiritual world, it is extremely important that much of what would lead other people directly to a realisation and a goal becomes for him simply a means of education, an intimate means of education of the soul. Let me illustrate this with an example. Many years ago I wrote a book, The Philosophy of Freedom. As it is out of stock since years, it is currently not available, but hopefully a second edition will appear in the near future.⁴ This Philosophy of Freedom was conceived in such a way that it is quite different from other philosophical books of the present time, which more or less aim by what is written to share something about how things are in the world or how they must be according to the ideas of the authors. However, this is not the immediate aim of this book. Rather, it is intended to give someone who engages with the thoughts presented there a kind of workout for his thoughts, so that the kind of thinking, the special way to devoting oneself to these thoughts is one in which the emotions and feelings of the soul are set in motion—just as in gymnastics the limbs are exercised, if I may use this comparison. What is otherwise only a method of gaining insight, is in this book at the same time a means of spiritual-soul self-education. This is extraordinarily important. Of course this is annoying for many philosophers of the present time, who associate something quite different with philosophy than that which may help a human being to progress a little further—because, if possible, he should remain as he is, with his normal innate capacity to gain knowledge. Therefore, in regard to this book it is not so important to be able to argue about this or that, or if something can be understood one way or another, but what really matters is that the thoughts which are connected as one organism, are able to school our soul and help it to make a bit of progress.

This is also the case with my book Truth and Science. And so it is with many things that are initially supposed to be basic elements to train the soul to rise up into the spiritual world. Mathematics and geometry teach man knowledge of triangles, quadrangles and other figures. But why do they teach all this? So that man can gain knowledge about how things are within space, which laws they are subject to and so on. Essentially, the spiritual ascent to the higher worlds works with similar figures as symbols. For instance, it places the symbol of a triangle, a quadrangle or another symbolic figure before a student, but not so that he will win immediate insights through them, as he can acquire these also by other means. Instead, with the symbols he receives the opportunity to train his spiritual abilities so that the spirit, supported by the impression he gains from the symbolic pictures, ascends into a Higher World. Thus it is about mental training, or, do not misunderstand me, it is about mental gymnastics. Therefore, much of what is dry external science, dry external philosophy, what is mathematics or geometry, becomes a living symbol for the spiritual training that leads us upwards into the spiritual world. If we have let this affect our soul, then we will learn to understand what basically no external science understands, that the ancient Pythagoreans, under the influence of their great teacher Pythagoras, spoke of the universe being made up of numbers because they focussed on the inner laws of numbers. Now let us look at how we encounter numbers everywhere in the world. Nothing is easier than to refute Spiritual Science or Anthroposophy, because from a standpoint, imagined to be superior, one can easily say: There are these Spiritual Scientists again, coming out of their mystic ⁵ darkness with numerical symbolism and say that there is an inner regularity of numbers, and, for example, one has to consider the true foundation of human nature according to the number seven. But something similar was meant also by Pythagoras and his students, when they talked about the inner regularity of numbers. If we allow those marvellous connections, which lie in the relationships between numbers, to affect our spirit then we can train it in such a way that it wakes up when it would otherwise be asleep and develops stronger forces within itself to penetrate into the spiritual world.

Thus it is a schooling through another kind of science. It is also what is actually called the study of someone, who wants to enter deeply into the spiritual world. And for someone like this, gradually everything that for other people is a harsh reality, becomes more or less an external allegory, a symbol. If a human being is able to let these symbols have an effect on him, then he is not only freeing his spirit from the outer physical world, but also imbues his spirit with strong forces, so that the soul can be conscious of itself, even when there is no external stimulation. I have already mentioned that if someone lets a symbol like the Rosy Cross affect him, he can feel an impulse to ascend into the spiritual world. We imagine a Rosy Cross as a simple black cross with seven red roses attached in a circle at the crossing of the beams.

What should it tell us? One who allows it to have an effect on his soul in the right way will imagine: For example, I look at a plant; I say of this plant that it is an imperfect being. Next to it I place a human being, who in his nature is a more perfect being, but even only in his nature. For if I look at the plant, I have to say: In it I encounter a material being which is not permeated by passions, desires, instincts, that bring it down from the height where it otherwise could stand. The plant has its innate laws, which it follows from leaf to flower to fruit; it stands there without desires, chaste.

Beside him lives the human being, who certainly by his nature is a higher being, but who is permeated by desires, instincts, passions through which he can stray from his strict regularity. He first has to overcome something within himself, if he wants to follow his own inner laws as a plant follows its innate laws. Now the human being can say to himself; The expression of desires, of instincts in me is the red blood. In a certain way, I can compare it with chlorophyll, the chaste plant sap in the red rose, and can say: If man becomes so strong within himself that the red blood is no longer an expression of what pushes him down below himself, but of what lifts him above himself—when it becomes the expression of such a chaste being like the plant sap, which has turned into the red of a rose, or in other words; when the red of the rose expresses the pure inwardness, the purified nature of a human being in his blood, then I have before me the ideal of what man, by overcoming the outer nature, can achieve and which presents itself to me under the symbol of the black cross, the charred wood. And the red of the rose symbolises the higher life that awakens when the red blood has become the chaste expression of the purified, instinctive nature of man, which has overcome itself.

If one does not let what is depicted be an abstract concept, then it becomes a vividly felt evolutionary idea. Then a whole world of feelings and emotions comes to life within us; we will feel within ourselves a development from an imperfect to a more perfect state. We sense that development is something quite different from the abstract thing that external science provides us with in the sense of a purely external Darwinism. Here, development becomes something that cuts deep into our heart, that pervades us with warmth, with soul-warmth—it becomes a force within us that carries and holds us. It is only through such inner experiences that the soul becomes capable of developing strong forces within itself, so that it can illuminate itself with consciousness in its innermost being—in the being that otherwise becomes unconscious when it withdraws from the external world.

It is of course child’s play to say; ‘Then you recommend an idea of something completely imaginary, of something entirely made up. But only those concepts which are reproductions of external ideas are valuable, and an idea of the Rose Cross has no external counter-image.’ But the point is not that the concepts we use to school our souls are reflections of an external reality, instead it is about concepts that are strength-awakening for our soul and that draw out of the soul what lies hidden within it.

When the human soul is dedicated to such pictorial ideas, when, so to speak, everything that it normally values as reality now becomes a cause for pictures that are not arbitrarily retrieved from fantasy, but are inspired by reality, just like the symbol of the Rosy Cross, then we say: The human being makes an effort to move upwards to the first stage of knowledge of the spiritual world. This is the stage of ‘Imaginative Knowledge’ that leads us above and beyond what is immediately concerned with the physical world only.

Hence, a human being who wishes to ascend into the spiritual world works in his soul with very particular concepts in a precisely determined way, to let the otherwise external reality affect him. He works in this soul itself. When the human being has worked in this way for some time, then it will be so that the external scientists can tell him: This has only a subjective, only an individual value for you. But this external scientist does not know that when the soul undergoes such a serious, regular training, there exists a stage of inner development when the possibility for the soul to express subjective feelings and emotions ceases completely. Then the soul arrives at a point where it must tell itself: Now concepts arise within me that I encounter like I normally meet trees and rock, rivers and mountains, plants and animals of the outer world that are as real as otherwise only external physical things are, and to which my subjectivity can neither add anything to them nor can it take anything away from them.

So there actually exists an intermediate state for everyone who wants to ascend into the spiritual world, where man is subject to the danger of carrying his subjectivity, which is only valid for himself, into the spiritual world. But man must pass through this intermediate state, for then he reaches a stage where what the soul is experiencing becomes as objectively verifiable—to anyone with the ability to do so—as all things in the outer physical reality. Because, after all, the principle that applies to external science—for something to be regarded as scientifically valid it must be verifiable at any time by anyone—also applies only to one who is sufficiently prepared for this. Or do you believe that you would be able to teach ‘the law of corresponding boiling temperatures’ to an eight-year-old child? I doubt it. You will not even be able to teach him the theorem of Pythagoras. Thus it is already bound to the basic principle that the human soul must be appropriately prepared if one wants to prove something to it.

And just as one must be prepared to understand the theorem of Pythagoras—even though it is possible for everyone to understand it—one must be prepared through a certain soul exercise if one wants to experience or realise this or that in the spiritual world. However, what can be realised, can then be experienced and observed in the same way by anyone who is appropriately prepared. Or, when messages are conveyed from observations of Spiritual Science by those who have prepared their soul for this, such as, that a particular man is able to look back on repeated Earth lives so that these become a fact for him, then it is likely that people will come and say; ‘There he brings us some dogmas again and demands that we should believe in these!’ Yet a spiritual researcher does not approach his contemporaries with his realisations so that people should believe them.

People who believe that we speak about dogmas, should ask themselves, is the fact that a whale exists a dogma for someone who has never seen one? Certainly, it is explainable in this way: A whale is a dogma for someone who has never seen one. Yet spiritual research does not approach the world with messages alone. Neither does it do so when it understands itself; instead it clothes what it brings down from the higher worlds in logical forms. These are exactly the same logical forms with which the other sciences are permeated. Then anyone will be able to verify, by applying a healthy sense of truth and unbiased logic, whether what the spiritual researcher has said is right. It has always been said that a schooling of the soul is necessary for someone wanting to explore spiritual facts by self-searching, whereby the soul must have gone through what is now being described here. But to understand what is being communicated, all you need is a healthy sense of truth and unbiased logic.

Now, if the spiritual researcher has allowed such symbolic terms and pictures to affect his soul for a while, he will notice that his feeling and emotional life becomes completely different from what it was before.

What is the feeling and emotional life of man in the ordinary world like? Nowadays it actually has become somewhat trivial to use the expression ‘egoistic’ everywhere, and to say that people in their normal life are egoistic. I do not want to express it in this way, but prefer to say: In their normal lives people are at first closely tied to their human personality, for example, when something pleases us, yes, especially in relation to things which we enjoy of the noblest spiritual creations, things of art and beauty. The saying, there is no accounting for taste, already expresses that much is connected to our personality and depends upon our subjective stance towards things. Check how everything that can please you is related to your upbringing, in which place in the world, in which profession your personality is placed, and so on, in order to see how feelings and emotions are closely connected to our personality. But when one does exercises of the soul, like the ones described, one notices how feelings and emotions will become completely impersonal. It is a great and tremendous experience when the moment arrives in which our feeling and our emotional life becomes, so to speak, impersonal. This moment comes, it certainly comes, when a human being on his spiritual path, inspired by those who undertake his spiritual guidance, allows the following things to really affect his soul. I will now list some of these things that will affect our whole feeling and emotional life in an educational way if someone allows them to work on his soul for weeks, or months.

The following can be considered. We focus our attention on what we find at the centre of philosophical observations, on the spiritual centre of the human being, the Ego—if we have learned to rise to the concept of Ego—which accompanies all our ideas, the mysterious centre of all experience. And if we continue to further the respect, this reverence and this devotion, which can connect to the fact, that for many is certainly not a fact but a figment of the imagination,—that there is an Ego living within us!—if this becomes the greatest, the most momentous experience to keep telling yourself that this ‘I am’ is the most essential of the human soul, then mighty, strong feelings develop in relation to the ‘I am’, which are impersonal. These lead directly to an insight into how all of the world’s secrets and mysteries that float around us are concentrated, as it were, in a single point—the Ego-point— to comprehend the human being from this Ego-point. For example, the poet Jean Paul ⁶ talks about becoming conscious of the Ego in his biography:

“I will never forget what manifested in me, which I have never told anyone about, whereby I stood at the birth of my self-consciousness, and of which I can tell at which place and at what time it happened. One morning, when I was a very young child, I stood under the front entrance and looked left at the woodshed, when suddenly the inner vision—I am an I—flashed before me like a bolt of lightning from the sky and since then has remained shining; there my Ego had seen itself for the first time and forever. Memory errors are hardly imaginable here, and since there was no extraneous retelling, nothing could be added and mixed into the narrative about an occurrence which took place only within the veiled inner sanctum of a human being—only the novelty lent permanence to these everyday, incidental circumstances.

It is already quite a lot to feel the devotion for the concentrated crowdedness of the world-being at one point, with all the shivers of awe and with all the feelings for the greatness of this fact. Yet, when a human being feels this time after time and allows it to affect him—although it will not enlighten him in regard to all the riddles of the world—it can give him a direction entirely focussed on the impersonal and the innermost human nature.

Thus we educate our emotional and our feeling life by relating it to our Ego-beingness. And when we have done this for a while, then we can focus our feelings and emotions in a different direction and can tell ourselves; this Ego within us is connected to everything we think, feel and perceive, with our entire soul life, it glows and shines through our soul life. We can then study human nature with the Ego as the centre point of thinking, feeling and willing, without taking ourselves into consideration or getting personal. The human being becomes a mystery to us, not we to ourselves, and our feelings expand from the Ego across to the soul. We can then transition to a different kind of feeling. In particular, we can acquire this beautiful feeling without which we are not able to lead our soul further into spiritual knowledge—this is what one would like to call it: The feeling that in each thing we encounter, as it were, an access to something infinite opens up for us. If we let this appear before our soul again and again, then it is the most wonderful feeling. It can be there when we go outside and look at a wonderful nature spectacle: cloud-covered mountains with thunder and lightning. This works greatly and forcefully on our soul. But then we must learn not only to see what is great and powerful there, but we may take a single leaf, look at it carefully with all its ribs and all the wonderful things that are part of it, and we will be able to perceive the greatness and might that reveals itself as something infinite in the smallest leaf, and we will hear and feel as if we were at the greatest spectacle of nature. It may appear to be strange, yet there is something to it, and afterwards one must express oneself grotesquely; it may make a great impression when a human being witnesses a glowing lava flow ejected from the Earth. But then, let us imagine someone looks at warm milk or the most ordinary coffee, and sees there how small crater-like structures form and a similar scenario unfolds on a small scale. Everywhere, in the smallest and in the greatest is access to an infinity.

And if we steadily keep researching, even if so much has been revealed to us, there is still something more under the cover, which perhaps we may have explored on the surface. So right now we are sensing what may result in a revelation of something intensely infinite at any point in the universe.

This imbues our soul with feelings and emotions that are necessary for us, if we want to attain what Goethe has called ‘spirit eyes’ and ‘spirit ears’.⁷ In short, it is a realisation of our feeling life, which is usually the most subjective to the point where we feel ourselves as if we were merely a setting where something is happening—where we no longer consider our feelings to be part of us. Our personality has been silenced. It is almost as if we were painters and stretching a canvas and painting a picture on it. Hence, when we train ourselves in this way, we stretch our soul and allow the spiritual world to paint on it. One feels this from a certain point in time onwards. Then it is only necessary to understand oneself, and in order to recognise what the world essentially is, it is necessary to consider a particular stage in the life of the soul as solely and only decisive.

So indeed what a human being acquires in ardent soul striving becomes the deciding of truth. It is in the soul itself where the decision must be made if something is true or not. Nothing external can decide, but the human being, by going beyond himself, must find within himself the authority to behold or discover the truth. Yes, basically we can say; in this regard we cannot be entirely different from all other human beings. Other people search for objective criteria, for something that provides us with a confirmation of truth from the outside. Yet a spiritual researcher searches within for confirmation of the truth. Thus he does the opposite. If this were the case, one could say in pretence; ‘Things are not looking too good when Spiritual Scientists in their confusion want to turn the world on its head.’ Yet in reality natural scientists and philosophers don’t do anything different from what spiritual researchers are doing, they only do not know that they are doing it. I will provide you with proof of this, taken from the immediate present.

At the last conference of natural scientists, Oswald Külpe ⁸ gave a talk about the relationship of natural science to philosophy. There he came up with the idea that the human being, by looking into the sensory world and perceiving it as sound, colour, warmth and so forth, only has subjective qualities. This is only a slightly different slant from what Schopenhauer said; ‘The world is our conception.’ But Oswald Külpe points out that what we perceive with our external senses, in short, everything that appears to be pictorial is subjective. And in contrast to this, what physics and chemistry say—pressure, the forces of attraction and repulsion, resistance and so on—must be characterised as objective. So in this way we partly have to deal with something purely subjective in our world-views, and partly with something that is objective such as pressure, forces of attraction and repulsion.

I do not want to go further into the criticism that has been voiced, but only want to address the mindset. It seems so terribly easy for a contemporary epistemologist to prove that because we cannot see without our eyes, light could only be something produced by our eyes. But what happens in the external world, it is said, when one ball hits another, those forces which cause resistance, pressure and so on, must be shifted into the outer world, into space. Why do people think that? At a particular point Oswald Külpe gives this away very clearly when he speaks about sensory perceptions—because he regards these as pictures, he says; ‘They cannot push or attract each other, neither can they pressure nor warm each other. They cannot have such and such large distance in space that would allow them to send light through space at such and such speed, nor can they be arranged as a chemist would arrange elements. Why does he say this of sensory perceptions? Because he sees sensory perceptions as pictures that are brought about solely by our senses.

Now I want to present a simple thought to you, to illustrate that the pictorial nature does not change anything. Things do push against or attract one another. When Mr Külpe now observes the sensory perceptions, this world—which supposedly could neither attract nor repel—simply does not face Mr Oswald Külpe as reality, but as a mirror image. Then he really has pictures in front of him. But push, pressure, resistance and anything that is placed into this world as different from sensory perceptions, will in no other way be objectively explained than through the pictorial nature of the sense perceptions. Why is this so? Because when the human being perceives pressure, push and so on, he turns what lives within the things, into sensations of the things. Man should study, for example, that when he says that one billiard ball hits another, what he experiences as the impact force is what he himself puts into these things! And someone who is standing on the ground of Spiritual Science, is not doing anything else. He makes what lives in the soul the criterion for expressing the world. There is no other principle of knowledge than that which can be found through the development of the soul itself. So the others do the same as the spiritual research. But only spiritual research is aware of this. The others do it unconsciously, they have no idea that they do the same at an elementary level. They just remain standing on the very first level and deny what they themselves are doing. Therefore we are allowed to say, Spiritual Science is in no way contrary to other research on the truth: the other researchers do the same, yet they take the first step without knowing about it, while spiritual research consciously takes the steps as far as a particular human soul can take according to its level of development.

Once it has been achieved that our feelings have, in a certain way, become objective, then, what I have already indicated will even more certainly come about, as it is a necessary pre-requisite for progress into the spiritual worlds. This is that man learns to comprehend how to live in the world in such a way that the weaving and living of an all-encompassing spiritual regularity within the spiritual world is presupposed. In daily life man is far removed from such a way of thinking. He gets angry when something happens to him that he doesn’t like. This is quite understandable as a different standpoint must be hard won. This other standpoint consists in saying; we have come from a former life, we have placed ourselves into the situation in which we are now, and have led ourselves to what is now facing us out of the lap of the future. What approaches us there corresponds to a strictly objective spiritual regularity. We accept it, because it would be an absurdity not to accept it. What approaches us from the lap of the spiritual worlds, whether the world admonishes us or praises us, whether joyful or tragic things happen to us, we will accept it as wisdom-filled experience and interweaving of the world. This is something that slowly and gradually must become once more the whole basic principle of our being. When it does, our will begins to be schooled. Whereas prior to this our feelings needed to be reorganised, now our will is transformed, becomes independent of our personality and thereby turns into an organ of perception of spiritual facts.

After the stage of ‘Imaginative Knowledge’, there occurs for man what can genuinely and truly be called inspiration, the fulfilment through spiritual facts. We must always be clear that man can attain the training of his will at a particular stage only, when his feelings are in a certain way already purified. Then his will can connect with the lawfulness of the world and he will exist as a human being only so that those facts and entities which want to appear to him, can erect a wall before him in his will, on which they can depict themselves for him, so that they can exist for him.

I could only describe for you some of what the soul must go through in silent, patient devotion, if it wants to ascend into the higher worlds. In the following lectures I will have much to describe of the evolution of the world history that the soul must experience to rise up into the spiritual worlds. So consider what has been said today as an introduction only, so that through such schooling our feeling and willing life and our complete imaginative life will develop to become bearers of new worlds, so that we will actually step into a world that we recognise as reality, just as we recognise the physical world as a reality of its own kind.

At a different occasion I have already mentioned that when people say,‘You only imagine what you believe to see,’ then it must be replied, that only the experience, the observation can yield the difference between reality and appearance, between reality and fantasy, just as this is also the case in the physical world. You must win the difference by relating to reality. For example, someone who approaches reality with a healthy thinking can distinguish a red-hot iron in reality from one that only exists in imagination—and no matter how many ‘Schopenhauerians’ may come—he will be able to tell both apart, he will know what is truth and what is imagination. Hence, man can orientate himself on reality. Even about the spiritual world he can only orientate himself on reality. Someone once said that if a person only thought about drinking a lemonade, he could also perceive the lemon taste on his tongue. I answered him, ‘imagination can be so strong that someone who has no lemonade in front of him, could perhaps feel the taste on his tongue through the lively imagination of a lemonade. But I would like to see, if someone has ever quenched his thirst with an imaginary lemonade only. Then the criterion begins to become more real. Thus it is also with the inner development of a human being. Not only does he learn to know a new soul-life, new concepts, but in his soul he collides with another world and knows: you are now facing a world that you can describe just as you can describe the outside world. This is not mere speculation, which could be compared with a thought development only, instead it is about the forming of new organs of perception and the unlocking of new worlds that truly stand before us just as real as our external, physical world.

What has been hinted at today is that contemporary circumstances made it necessary to point out that spiritual research is possible. This is not to say that everyone should immediately become a spiritual researcher. For it must always be emphasised that when a human being with a healthy sense of truth and unprejudiced logic allows the information from Spiritual Science to approach him—even if he himself is not able to look into the spiritual worlds—yet all that which arises from such messages can turn into energy and feelings of strength for his soul, even if he at first believes in Haeckelianism or Darwinism. What the spiritual researcher has to say, is suitable to speak more and more to man’s healthy sense of truth, all the more so, as it is connected to the deepest interests of every human being. There may be people who do not consider it necessary for their salvation to know how amphibians and mammals relate to each other, or something like this. But all people must warm up to what can be said on the sure basis of spiritual research: that the soul belongs to the sphere of eternity—insofar as it belongs to the spiritual world, descends at birth into the sensory existence and enters again into the spiritual realm through the gate of death. It has to be for all human beings of profound interest, that the strength, which sinks more and more into the soul, is of a quality that the soul can gain certainty from it to stand in its place in life. A soul that does not know what it is and what it wants, what the essence of its nature is, can become hopeless, can ultimately despair and feel dreary and desolate. Yet a soul that allows itself to be filled by the spiritual achievements of Spiritual Science cannot remain empty and desolate if only it does not accept the messages of Spiritual Science as dogmas, but as a living life that streams through our soul and warms it. This provides comfort for all the suffering in life, when we are being led upwards from all temporal suffering to that which can become comfort for the soul from the share of the temporal in the eternal. In short: Spiritual Science can give man what he needs today in the loneliest and most work-intensive hours of his life due to the intensified circumstances of our time —or, if the strength would want to leave him, Spiritual Science can give him what he needs to look into the future and go energetically towards it.

Hence, Spiritual Science—as it arises from spiritual research, from those who want to undertake steps into the spiritual world—can forever confirm what we want to summarise in a few words that express with sensitivity the characteristics of the path into the spiritual world and its significance for the people of the present. What we want to summarise in this way is not supposed to be a contemplation on the theories of life, but one on remedies, means of strengths, tonics for life:

The Spirit World remains shut to you
Unaware of the spirit in yourself
That shines in your soul
And can uphold light for you
In world depths, on world heights! ⁹

• 1. Herman Grimm: Goethe-Lectures, Berlin 1877, 23rd Lecture, Pages 215 et seq.
• 2. Lecture GA 60 #5, The Nature of Sleep, Berlin, 24 November 1910
• 3. Now published under the title - How to Know Higher Worlds, GA 10.
• 4. The Second Edition of the The Philosophy of Freedom was published not until 1918. At this occasion Rudolf Steiner gave a lecture about the genesis of this book, which is featuring as the sixth lecture of the cycle Historical Symptomatology, Dornach 1942. Newly published in Rudolf Steiner's Letters, Volume 2, Dornach 1953
• 5. This was mentioned in the earlier lecture What is Mysticism?, given on 10 February 1910, as part of The Architect House Lecture Series, 1909/1910, and was printed as part of Paths of Soul Experiences, GA59
• 6. The Works of Jean Paul, Berlin 1865, Volume 16, Page 26 et seq.
• 7. For example in Goethe’s Colour Theory, Goethean Science, edited by Rudolf Steiner, Volume 1, Bern 1947, Pages 107 and 262.
• 8. Oswald Külpe, 1862-1915, Philosopher and Psychologist, Epistemology and Natural Sciences, Lecture given on 19 September 1910 at the 82nd Assembly of German Natural Scientists and Medical Doctors, Leipzig 1910.
• 9. Poem translated by Norbert Mulholland.

Translated by Antje Heymanns

When we look at what seems to have run like a kind of Leitmotif through this winter’s lecture cycle, when we focus on what lives within man as his nature and which we observe not only once between birth and death, but which we presuppose to exist in repeated Earth lives—then the question about the foundation of man’s development in his one life, in one earthly incarnation, appears to become quite essential for us, especially in our present time. Because the human being of the present certainly questions and searches when he encounters the peculiar manifestations of predisposition, talent and education of human beings. However, as he is not much inclined to look away from what appears to be manifesting itself in a life, and to focus his gaze instead on the real builder, the actual creator within a human being, then even the questions of this contemporary will easily assume the character of a half-measure, of vagueness. You see, when one presumes that something exists in human nature that like the actual inner enlivening force runs through many lives, then one encounters the completely enigmatic nature of this human being that is worthy of exploration. Then one will want to see questions about predispositions, talents and education in a completely new light, in a very different light from how they can be seen, when one’s gaze focuses only on what is presently so often emphasised: heredity, predispositions inherited from one’s ancestors. It is not as if Spiritual Science wants to turn the eyes away from that what is expressed in inherited characteristics—it is not so that it ignores all careful observations of all that what the outer senses and the intellect focussed on these could say. However, Spiritual Science knows that all this relates to the very essence of man like something that man uses by taking it in, just as in physical life the outer matter is absorbed by the small germ of a living being who determines its own form out of itself; yet what is supposed to enable it to express this form in its external life—the substantial, the material—it acquires from its environment. By and large, we must recognise the way a human being lives as a confluence of everything that comes into being at birth, with that in which man’s essence and individuality will be embedded and from which it draws its spiritual and soul nourishment.

For example, if we as educators have tasks concerned with a human soul who steps into existence and from hour to hour, from week to week reveals more and more of its inner abilities; if we face a human being who is growing up like a holy riddle that we have to solve, that has come to us from infinity so that we provide it with an opportunity to unfold itself and to develop, then a whole sum of new tasks, new views, new possibilities will indeed arise for all human relationships in existence. Thus we see a human being step into existence at birth and presuppose that, in a certain way, he brings the core of his being at birth into existence. If we do not look at catchwords and theories but at facts, then external natural science also shows us how this spirit and soul core of a human being continues to work on a child even after its birth, and how what we encounter as bodily organisation changes, and is plastically shaped under the influence of spirit and soul. External science, for example, can also illustrate how what we must first see as a tool for external activities, how this brain, when it is stepping into existence at birth, is a still an undefined, yet still quite plastically malleable matter in a human being; and how, what he endeavours to absorb of spiritual treasures of his environment, penetrates forming and shaping the plastic matter of our brains like an artist and works on it.

If we make the assumption—and this is a fact and has been mentioned several times already in different contexts—that a human being, who, after birth, would helplessly be placed on a lonely island, cannot acquire the ability to speak, then we must say: The spirit and soul content that we meet wrapped up in language from birth onwards is not something that emerges from man’s inner being, it is not merely attached to his disposition, or something that he receives, as it were, without the influences of his spirit and soul environment—like he receives his second set of teeth at age seven due to inner predisposition—instead speech is something that works on a human being. Speech works like an actual sculptor, who, as it were, forms the brain. We can well follow, also externally, scientifically, this sculpturing of the brain throughout the early times, yes, even for years. If it will then anatomically and physiologically be proven that human language ability, memory for certain language concepts, is bound to one or another organ and each word is, as it were, kept like a book in a library, then we are allowed to ask: What has shaped the brain for this initially? And we can answer: The same that existed as spirit and soul in the language vocabulary in a human being’s environment.

This shows us, that in regard to a human being’s entire soul-development, we have to differentiate everything he experiences in his thoughts, imaginations and feelings—also in his will impulses and emotions—everything, so to speak, that is merely inner experience, from something else that remains an inner experience so that it intervenes in the outer physical organisation, plastically sculptures it, and thus shapes it into a tool for future mental capabilities or future spirit and soul life. This can be illustrated best by tracking one ability of a human being throughout his life, that shows quite different sides, although these different sides have been repeatedly thrown together by external psychology: when we follow our memory.

When we acquire something through our memory, by memorising, then we do this by way of tools, of which one of the main ones is repetition. We have then made it our own, and are able to repeat it. Yet everyone knows the awkward thing—forgetting; because things are forgotten again, disappear from our memory, so that we are unable to reproduce them at a later date. Or aren’t you able to remember how much you had to learn and recite by heart in your youth, and how much of it you are no longer able to recite by heart? But does really everything disappear that we have memorised?

We will now only consider that of which man will say later: I have forgotten it —namely that which he is unable to retrieve so that he can reproduce it. Is it really completely gone? It is present in a similar way to what has already been mentioned, which in normal human life is always forgotten: like the wonderful, rich, first experiences of childhood are forgotten. In our normal human life, we can only remember back to a certain point in time. Yet prior to this point in time we have gained infinitely many impressions. Who would not acknowledge this, if he would observe the development of a child in its first life years in a really unbiased way.

But is it forgotten in the sense we normally speak about forgetting? Is it really not there at all? Does it no longer play a role in the human soul? Yes, it does play an important role in the human soul. Because what our first childhood impressions are like, whether we experience joyful or sad things, love or indifference, these or other outer impressions, on these depends infinitely more than what is usually thought—such as what someone is capable of doing later in life—depends on the overall mood and the entire constitution of his soul.

What is forgotten in the early years is more important than is generally acknowledged, as it forms and shapes us in our soul being. This is also the case with what we learn later—we forget the wording, the thought, but it remains in us as a certain mood of soul. If a person learnt at a certain age, for example, ballads or other literary works about great heroes with very specific tasks, with quite defined characteristics, then he might forget the thoughts and occurrences and so on, and will not be able to reproduce them; but what he has learnt remains within the structure of his own character, maybe as soul strength, or as a way to face life and allow joy and sorrow to approach him.

What we forget turns into moods, sentimental values, yes, into will impulses; it becomes what rests more or less unconscious within our soul life, yet it still works and forms within us. Only sometimes, through very particular processes later in life, it is revealed that those forgotten things are actually not quite forgotten. Because, if one takes relevant measures and places something familiar in front of someone’s soul, then that person will remember something that was seemingly forgotten. Thus one can prove that the memory is still present within him, but something like a blanket has been put over it in the unconscious layers of his soul life. In this way we can really see how what we forget, what disappears from our memory works formative and creative on our soul, and then often reveals itself in the mood with which we face joy and suffering, in our courage, in our bravery or cowardice; or also in our fearfulness and anxiety towards life. What we see sinking down, as it were, out of the treasure trove of memory into our more subconscious, works creatively on our soul itself. Basically, we ourselves are what the things we have forgotten have made of us. Because what else is a human being actually, than the way how he enjoys, how he can be brave, and so on! If we look at a human being not in an abstract but in a concrete way, then we have to say:

The human being is the harmonic interweaving and inter-play of his characteristics, so that he himself is limited by what flows down into deeper levels of his consciousness. We observe this in the course of life.

From all that has been taken into account so far, and from what is still to be added, it can follow that the soul-spiritual that sinks into deeper layers, sinks even deeper when a human being crosses the threshold of death. Because every time when someone, through what he absorbs, wants to work formative on his external physical organisation during his life, he finds that in this life a particular organisation already exists. This is shaped one way or another, he enters life with these or other dispositions. That what is creative in our souls must storm against this. Let's assume that through what we absorb courage could be build up within us as a trait. But if we have an organisation that is more suited to being chicken-hearted than to be a courageous human being, then we must more or less fight against something that we have got in our life from our structure. When we go through the time between death and a new birth, the essence of this human development lies in us creating in advance the archetype, the original shape of our new physical body, for our new physical earthly structure.

There we do not meet any limits and resistances such as are presented to us between birth and death. We build plastically with what we have obtained during life, the basis, the basic strengths for a new corporeality within wider limits than it is the case between birth and death. Hence we may say: Those forgotten concepts, which only affect our soul during our life between birth and death, work to shape our next physical organisation when we step through the portal of death, until the time of our re-incarnation, and work themselves into what is connected with our new bodily structure. In this way, we will stride through birth into our new existence with such dispositions that reach down into even deeper levels of our being than those ideas that were forgotten in the life between birth and death.

From all of this it becomes quite understandable that the human being, because he brought forth from life, from his immediate environment, the causes for the organisation of a new corporeality, that he indeed needs in a certain way the same conditions again.

It is different with animals, where, as we have seen from observations on the ‘human soul and animal soul’ and ‘human spirit and animal spirit’, the organisation is determined by line of heredity. There the animal appears with wholly defined tendencies that want to express themselves plastically, because these tendencies were not derived from the animal’s environment. Let us consider how little an animal acquires from the external world through education or conditioning, and how little it therefore needs a stage, located in the outer world, to bring out again what has been absorbed of educational principles. The human being, however, needs such a stage. Therefore he steps clumsily into this world, steps into the world so that we once again only have to put the finishing touches to the finer formation of his organisation. This explains the living and weaving of man’s individuality, of his true essential beingness, in the early years of his existence. Therefore his spirit organ, his brain, steps plastically determinable, malleable into existence, and basically, only after birth the last decisive pathways, lines and directions are added, that determine how the predispositions must be realised.

This illustrates, how what matters in regard to development needs to be viewed as something that came across from earlier developmental stages, and therefore it is less important to have defined, stubborn educational principles, than to look at each individual human being, at each individuality as a problem, as a holy riddle that needs to be solved, and that it is up to us to create opportunities, so that this riddle is solved in the best possible way.

An education is uncomfortable if it cannot establish any firm educational principles at all, but instead has to appeal to a principle that is related to the artistic within the educator, to observe what emerges from the essential nature of a human being. It is even more inconvenient than someone saying in a regimented way: these or those abilities are to be expressed in this way or that way. But we only have the right attitude towards the growing human being if we regard him in each case as an individuality, as something special in itself.

Although if one insists on seeing things trivially, and some people have a talent for seeing everything trivially, you could say: Individuality does not only show in a human being, but also in each single animal. Of course it shows. No one speaking from the basis of Spiritual Science will deny this. I have often said, that if one speaks about individuality in this sense, then one must be more precise, must be conscious, that if one wants to see things trivially, you can also speak about the biography and individuality of a quill. I knew a man, who—because in his days nibs were still cut from goose quills—was able to distinguish between the quills, because everyone cut their own quills, each one developed a personal relationship with him. And because the latter had an excellent fantasy, he would have been able to write a detailed biography of every single quill. However, as far human beings are concerned, it is not about applying the standard of triviality, but a standard drawn from the depths of realisation.

It is just through such observations that we can see the way and manner in which a human being forms and shapes his actual being, plastically forms his outward appearance, his outer organisation and lives out his actual being in it. From this, in turn, we can see how life happens in the early years and how it reshapes and remodels itself with the development of man, and what it utilises of what it can absorb from its environment. In the first years of a human being’s life we find that it is of very special importance to preserve for him his abilities, so to speak, to intervene plastically, malleably in his physical or body and soul organisation, and that we do not block the opportunity for him to intervene plastically.

We block someone’s opportunity most of all, if we stuff him too early with concepts and ideas that relate only to the external sensory nature and which have the strictest contours, or if he is pinned down to an activity that is theoretically confined to very specific forms. Then there is no variability, no modification, and no opportunity to develop the spirit and soul capabilities, in the way the soul is active from day to day, from hour to hour. Let us assume a father would be a terribly obstinate man, who has adopted the following principle:

My boy must become like I was! Throughout my whole life I have made shoes for my customers in this way, and my boy must make his shoes in the same way. My boy must think like me! Thus, into the environment of this boy a spirit and soul structure is brought, that works on his spirit and soul organisation just like it has worked on the father. Through this, the boy will be pressed into very specific forms, although this should be about exploring the individuality that steps into existence, and then, based on insight gained from this, shaping the spirit and soul organisation.

The educational instinct of humanity has already created a wonderful tool through general consciousness by which the human being in the early years of life is given the possibility to work on the changeable, the modifiable, the flexible of his spirit and soul, so that there is free scope for the forming of the human being. That is ‘play’. This is also the best way to keep a child occupied without giving it concepts that are bound into fixed contours, but such that give the thoughts room for manoeuvre, so that it can wander off here or there.

Only then one will find the course of thought that is predetermined by the inner predisposition. If I tell a fairy tale in such a way that it stimulates the inner activity of the child, without concepts being formed in pre-determined contours, but so that the outlines of the concepts remain flexible, then the child works like someone who tries and by trying attempts to find out what is right. The child works on finding out how its spirituality needs to move so that it can best sculpt its organisation in the way it is internally pre-formed. And it is the same with playing. Play differs from activity that is pressed into solid forms in that when playing one is to a certain extent able to do what one wants—so that one does not have sharp contours in thoughts and mobilities of organs from the outset. Hence, the soul-spiritual organisation of a human being will have an effect again in a free, determinable way. Play and the activity of the spirit and soul of the child in the first years of life, as just described, arise from a deep awareness of what the nature and essence of a human being really are.

Whoever who wants to become a real educator, will, also for the later years, definitely be conscious that indeed each single ability, as it were, must first be studied, recognised and determined in an evolving human being. Yet there is an opportunity to observe certain great principles. Such principles then lead us to the way in which the essential core of a human being, which stretches from birth to birth, utilises the external that lies in the line of heredity.

It is most interesting to focus on the way in which the spirit and soul core of a human being utilises the qualities, characteristics, virtues and so on, of father and mother, of paternal and maternal ancestors in completely different ways to build something new. And indeed: the paternal and maternal qualities are not equally used by the individual core of a human being, instead this is based on a very specific law. Just this law is infinitely instructive. If we attempt to grasp it in its completeness to fully see through it, then we must look at how two things assert themselves in the human soul. One of these is the rationality, to which we now want to add the ability to think in pictures, in concepts, faster or slower, cleverer or dumber. The other is the general direction of will and feeling, of the emotions, the interest that we take in our surroundings. The whole manner of how we are able to perform something, depends on whether we have a spirit that is agile or slow, or dull, or one that penetrates into things; if we are astute or not. What a human being is able to achieve for his fellow human beings and how we achieve it depends on us understanding of how to connect our interests in the right way to what goes on in our surroundings. Some people have good pre-conditions, but they have little interest in their fellow men and the environment. In this case the interest does not draw the abilities out. Hence it is necessary to pay as much attention to the interest within us, as to whether the flexibility of our rationality allows us to achieve this or that for our contemporaries.

Now, we can imagine that the whole kind of interest is linked to the way a human being’s desires are shaped, how the external approach to the entire life is organised, how a human being develops as being clever or clumsy. In short, the whole nature of the soul life—which is connected to our interactions with the external world and our greater or lesser interest and our skilfulness for this outer world—the most important elements for this are inherited by a human being from the father. Our interests and that which from these interests makes us skilful and capable to use our organs and our entire being, is as a rule an inheritance from the father. Thus the soul takes the appropriate elements from the father, so that it can form those characteristics within itself. In contrast, the intellectual agility, with which imaginative activity, pictorial imagination and inventiveness are connected, are received by our individuality when we come into existence at birth as heirloom from the mother’s characteristics. You will find that Schopenhauer has in a certain way hinted at this extraordinarily interesting chapter; he had an inkling of it, however, he was not in a position to also point out the deeper things.

On the other hand we are allowed to also say something else. In a certain way the following is borrowed from the father; how, what lives in the father as his manner of relating to objects, what his interests are, the desires towards objects, how he demands, wants, wills, if he is a brave man who courageously intervenes in life conditions or withdraws faint-heartedly, if he is pedantic or generous, also his characteristics that are connected to the will-impulses. By contrast, all that is flexibility of the soul, of the rationality, we find is passed on from the mother. Now, however, an interesting difference comes to light, which can only be observed when looking at the whole scope of life. Then you will find evidence of this everywhere; namely with regard to sex, there is a immense difference. It can be said that the relationship of a son to his father and mother is wonderfully described in Goethe’s words : “I’ve got my stature from my father, to lead a serious life,” this includes all that is related to the interactions of a human being with the external world. “From my mama I’ve got the cheerful nature, the joy to fabulate,” —this includes the entire nature of the spiritual life.

Yet when we now look at the daughter, it becomes apparent that in a peculiar way, the father’s qualities appear in the daughter so that they are now lifted one level above the nature of the will-impulses, from the nature that expresses itself more in the communications with the environment—into the soul.

Hence we can find a father’s qualities—of course this applies only in the same circumstances—who always courageously steps in, who has a lively interest in this or that, and therefore lives out a certain seriousness in his communications with his environment—are being adopted by the individuality of the daughter in such a way that they are lifted up into the soul, so that a daughter exists with a serious soul life, with the character life of the father translated into the soul which makes, what was probably viscous in the father, more flexible, so that the most important qualities that we encounter in the father as more external, show themselves as more internalised by the daughter.

Therefore we can say: the character traits of the father live on in the soul of the daughter; the soul characteristics of the mother, the alertness of the spirit as well as the talents and abilities that can be developed, live on in the son. Goethe’s mother, the old ‘Mrs Councillor’, was a women who was able to fabulate, in whom the fantasy functioned in the most wonderful way. This went down one level in the son, became an aptitude, an organisation, so that the son Goethe had the ability to give to humanity what lived in the mother. We can see, how the maternal qualities are lowered by one level in the sons, so that they are transformed into organ abilities; whilst the father’s characteristics are lifted up one level by the daughters, so that we encounter them as internalised and spiritualised.

Perhaps nothing is more characteristic than the beautiful contrast between Goethe and his sister Cornelia, who was just like the old Councillor, internalised, spiritualised a quiet, serious nature and thus was able to be for the poet, already in his boyhood, what he needed: an exceptionally good companion. Now take this into account and consider how Goethe, according to his description, felt unable to develop a favourable relationship with his father. This was because the paternal characteristics were externalised in the old Mr Councillor. What Goethe needed were these characteristics, but he could not understand them as they existed in his father, whom they fitted. Spiritualised they lived in his sister, who could thus be such a good comrade to him.

Now walk with me through history and you will see how each step confirms what has been said and how wherever you find hints, you could provide historical confirmation of such a matter. The most beautiful confirmation in this regard we got from the mother of the Maccabees , who with heroic greatness lets her sons face death for what she believes and what her fathers believed, with these great, beautiful words: “I have given you the outer corporeality; but the one who has created the world and human beings, has given you what I could not give you, and he will take care that you will get it back again, if you lose it for the sake of your faith!”

How often will just the maternal element be held up to us in history: from Alexander’s mother and the mother of the Gracchen to our present time, when we see characteristics appear in a person that show that someone is able to affect his surroundings, that he has the strength and talents and also the body and soul organisation for this. We could open the history of great man everywhere, wherever we wanted to: everywhere we will find the maternal characteristics translated in such a way that they have descended one level, and have become abilities placed into life. Let us take the example of Bürger's mother and his father, from whom he has also inherited the willpower characteristic. Basically, he did not have much in common with his father: his father was glad when he did not need to concern himself with the development of the little boy. Yet the mother had a wonderfully agile spirit; it was she who possessed the right grammatical and stylistic expression. This in turn was necessary for the poet, he inherited those traits from his mother, and they just came about because he belonged to the next generation. Or, let us think of Hebbel and the relationship he had with his father. Anyone who knows the poet Hebbel better will sense that in all the rough idiosyncrasies and stubbornness of interests there is a distant echo of his father’s legacy. In this respect, the old master bricklayer Hebbel has bequeathed much to his son. But the son and his mother understood each other. It was the mother who protected her son from becoming a master bricklayer in his birthplace, instead of later giving his dramas to mankind. It is quite touching to read how Hebbel himself tells in his wonderful diaries, what connected him with his mother.

These examples could be multiplied ad infinitum. Yet we should definitely not conclude that things are wrong, just because we believe to be observing life and encounter something different here and there. This would be like someone saying: The physicists verify for us the law of gravity; I will now, by way of installing many contraptions, prove to them, that this law can be impaired. Laws are not there for us to consider every single circumstance, but to focus on what is probable. This it how we must do it in natural science and how we must do it in Spiritual Science. Yet Spiritual Science is not at present advanced enough to proceed in a similar way. If one takes this into account, one finds confirmation of the above law of paternal and maternal heredity everywhere. Yet when looking at a whole human being, one must be clear, that what we call the human soul, and which expresses itself in the entire body and soul structure of man, is nothing simple. Again, one could have an unreserved will for trivialities and ask: ‘Why do you Anthroposophists have the quirk to distinguish three soul-members in the soul, and even multiple members in human nature? You are talking about a sentient soul, an intellectual soul and a consciousness soul. It would be much easier to talk of the soul as of a unitary entity in which one thinks, feels and wills.’ Yes, it is certainly more simple, more convenient—and also trivial. At the same time, this is something that scientific observation of a human being cannot in truth promote. Not out of a desire to divide and to make many words has the structure of the human soul into a sentient soul arisen—which means into the part, that initially establishes contact with the environment and receives perceptions and feelings from outside, and in which desires and instincts also develop. This then is to be separated from the part in which, in a certain sense, what has been gained has already been processed. We activate our sentient soul when we face the outer world, receive from it impressions of colours and sounds, but also by allowing that to come to the surface what we as normal human beings initially cannot control: our drives, desires and passions. But when we withdraw and process within what we have absorbed by way of perceptions and so on, so that what has been stimulated in us by the external world transforms itself into feelings, then we live in our second soul-limb, the intellectual or mind soul. And insofar as we direct and guide our thoughts and are not being kept on a leash, we live in the consciousness soul.

In ‘Occult Science’ or in ‘Theosophy’ you will see, that the three sheaths of the soul have even more relationships—of a different kind—to that what is in the external world. This is so not because we enjoy to categorise, but because what is called the sentient soul is related to the cosmos in a completely different way from what we call the consciousness soul.

It is the consciousness soul that isolates man, that leads him to perceive himself quite rightly as an internally self-contained being. What we call the intellectual soul, is what brings him into a relationship with his environment and the entire cosmos, hence he is a being that appears to be like an extract, like a confluence of the whole world. Through the consciousness soul man lives within himself, isolates himself. The main, most important thing that one experiences in the consciousness soul is that what amongst a man’s aptitudes is the latest one to be developed: The ability to think logically, so that we can form opinions, thoughts and so on. This rests within the consciousness soul. In relation to these characteristics, the individual core of a human being that comes into existence at birth is in fact the most inclined to isolation. This innermost core of a human being is the last to reveal itself. While its sheathing, its bodily organisation is the earliest to emerge, its actual individuality emerges last. But the way a human being currently is—he has been different in the past and will be different in the future—he actually develops his opinions, terms, concepts in the most isolated part of his being. These therefore exert the least influence on the overall construction and detailing of his entire personality and only emerge as aptitudes when the entire personality is already firmly established and plastically shaped.

There we see how the talents of man develop in a particular sequence. Firstly, we see what lives in the least isolated, separated element of the human being, in the sentient- or emotional soul. This has therefore the most strength to intervene in the entire human organisation. Hence we can see that getting close to a child with opinions, theories and ideas is least likely, when this sentient soul wants to shape these most intensely from within. We will only get close to a child when we affect its sentient soul—as I have presented in my essay ‘The Education of the Child from the perspective of Spiritual Science.’ Especially during the first life years one has to ensure not to develop theories or teachings, but that the child is instead encouraged to imitate, that one sets living examples for it to copy. This is of infinite importance, because this urge to imitate appears as one of the very first predispositions that one can influence. Admonitions and teachings are least effective during this time.

The child imitates what it sees, because it must form itself in accordance with its relationship to the external world. We lay the first foundation for the whole personal nature of the child, when during the first seven years we are living examples of what the child is allowed to imitate, when we can guess how we must behave in the presence of the child. However, this is for many a most peculiar educational principle. Most people will ask how the child should behave, and there comes Spiritual Science with its demands: the people should learn from the child how they must behave in its environment—down to words, attitudes and thoughts! Because the child is much more receptive in its soul than is generally believed, especially more receptive than an adult human being.

There are people with a certain sensitivity, who, for example, immediately recognise when a person comes in who is going to spoil the good mood. Even though little attention is paid to this nowadays, it happens incredibly often with children. And what you do in detail is much less important than the kind of person one endeavours to be, what kind of thoughts, of concepts one nurtures. It is not enough, that one keeps silent in front of the child about something, but allows oneself to think thoughts that are not meant to be for the child. But instead our thoughts need to be lived out in such a way that we have the feeling: this may live on in the child and should live on. This is inconvenient, but it is still right!

When the change of teeth has occurred, consideration will be given to what we may call ‘building on authority’—not building on what someone might do, but what he holds within himself as personality. It is most important that a child in the first years of life must be able to imitate what we speak, do and think, and in the second epoch perceives us as a human being on whom it can rely, so that it can say: What he does, is good! It is not so that we are admonishing the child from the seventh to the fourteenth, sixteenth year of life, based on the principle to develop a moral theory to show it that this must be done, that must be stopped—but rather we pass on to the child the best treasure, when its rational or intellectual soul can have the perception: What this human being next to me does, is good! I must refrain from doing, what he refrains from doing! — This is of infinite importance.

Only from the age of about fourteen to sixteen, does the possibility arise for a human being to build upon the most isolated part of his being, on the consciousness-soul, i.e. on that which forms in his consciousness soul: on his opinions, concepts and ideas. However, these must first have a solid foundation, and this must be created. If we do not create this by providing the opportunity through education, as the individuality allows us to recognise, and if we do not thereby clear the way for free development, then the human being will be seized by a different element: by the firmness of his hull nature. Then he externalises himself; his individuality, which goes from life to life, does not intervene, but he becomes a slave to his bodily organisation, which comes from the outside into the human being and subjugates him. Man shows this by not being master of his spiritual and soul part, but by being completely dependent on his body and soul organisation and showing rigid characteristics that are unchangeable. On the other hand, a human being in whom we took care to ensure that his predispositions are realised as far as possible, retains a certain flexibility throughout his whole life, and is also able to cope with new situations in later life. In comparison, in another person the organisation is externalised and takes on rigid forms, and that person retains them throughout his whole life. We live in an epoch, where the individuality of someone is little appreciated and hence there are few opportunities to convince oneself that the individuality is still agile and vigorous and able to cope with new situations and truths. We now arrive at a chapter in which we can gain insight into how some people simply must face life.

How many people, when they have looked into a world view and are convinced of it, try to convince others of it as well. They believe it is a very commendable effort when they say: Since I am seeing it so clearly, I should actually be able to convince everyone else of this! However, this is naivety. Our opinions are not dependent on something being logically proven to us. This is possible in the fewest cases. Because opinions and convictions of a person are formed out of completely different substrata of his soul—out of his will nature, his mind and emotional nature, so that a person can understand your logical arguments quite well, can follow your astute conclusions and then afterwards does not take them in at all, simply because what a person believes and what he professes does not flow from his logic or his understanding, but from the whole personality, namely from those limbs where will and mind arise. However, our thinking is the last of all our dispositions to emerge, when the bodily organisation has long since been completed. This is the most isolated field. This is where we find the least access to other people. We can reach more people, when we seize them in those parts that lie deeper: their mind and will. Here, intervention in bodily organisation still happens. However, if a human being grows up in a very materialistic sphere, lets say, where only material substance is deemed valid, then, during the time of his growing up, a sum of mind and will-impulses are formed that plastically shape his physicality and his brain. Later he can then acquire quite good logical thinking, but this no longer intervenes in the plasticity of his brain. Logical thoughts are the most powerless within the human soul. Therefore it is especially important to also find access to other people in the soul, not just in logic. If someone has already trained his brain in a certain way, then this brain, which only reflects the old concepts over and over again, cannot realise logic anymore because it has become physical. Hence, in regard to such world views, which are build on the purest, the sharpest of logic, as is the case with Spiritual Science, one cannot hope to be effective by going from person to person to convince someone. If someone, who understands the spiritual scientific impulse, would like to believe that he could convince people by persuasion or by way of logic—if for instance someone wants to believe that a spiritual scientist indulges in such illusion—then he is very much mistaken! Because in our era there is a large number of such people who, due to their overall personality, their will nature and emotional nature do not look out for what the spiritual world and spiritual research are. Out of the great mass of people who live around us, those who have a disposition for Spiritual Science will self-select, will go to what they dimly foresee, what they already have within their souls. A selection, a choice can only be made with regard to a worldview based on what is capable to purely encompass logic, human consciousness. Hence the Spiritual Scientist approaches human beings and knows how to differentiate between them: There is someone to whom you can preach for years, he is unable to grasp your thoughts. You first would have to make him conscious of this; would have to speak to his soul, but he himself is not able to reflect from out of his whole soul-toolkit, out of his brain. Another man is built in such a way that he can understand what Spiritual Science shows in its logically developed way, and he therefore also finds his way into what is basically already living in his soul.

In this way and manner we have to face the great cultural tasks of the present or the future. We need to recognise how the total personality of a human being relates to what a person, in the course of his development and education, is able to absorb incrementally of new truths, of such things that really must be united with his personality. When we have once again understood, that basically the soul-spiritual is the shaper, the sculptor, the artist for body and soul, then one will place greater importance on conducting the development of the spirit and soul in a human being in such a way that he can get a handle on it—especially in the years when he is open for education—and is powerful in regard to the way in which he can affect his body and soul. We have to be clear that a lot can be sinned against in this regard. We can see from our presentations, how human preference and so on, contributes much more to the formation of views than pure logic. One could only let pure logic alone speak when desires and instincts are completely silent. Prior to that we must be clear, that if we believe we have one-sidedly shaped a person’s aptitudes in a particular area, then what we have not considered will come to light in a peculiar manner.

Let us assume that we educate a man in such a way that we only bring to expression his abstract talents, as it is often done at school. Then the pure concepts and abstract ideas cannot intervene in the whole soul- and emotional life. This then remains undeveloped, uneducated and will confront us later in all kinds of trivial lifestyles. Later in life, two natures often become apparent. Even in people of high standing—if they have not been able to integrate within themselves what is located in the depth of personality—preferences, inclinations, likings, which are more deeply rooted assert themselves in other ways. Which examinee would not have experienced, that no matter how clever the examiner is who confronts him, who is able to maintain an overview over much of his science—the one-sidedness will come to expression by him having a preference for how the answers he wants to hear have to be worded. And woe betide many an examinee, if he doesn’t know how to put what he has to say into the words the examiner wants to to hear.

In this regard, in a book about psychology by Moriz Benedict, a lot of correct things were said about mistakes in human education. Also this, which is true: When two candidates were tested by two different examiners the misfortune happened that one candidate gave Examiner A answers shaped as if the Examiner B had asked the questions. If he would have given the answers to the other examiner, he would have passed the exam splendidly. And with the other candidate it was the other way round! Hence both failed the exams!

This can illustrate to us how what is indisputable can very well be clothed in logical forms. Yet as soon as we are not able to immerse our ideas in thought-education during our upbringing, no suitable field can be found to work from here formatively on man. How then must we behave towards the human being? In the time in which a person is preferably still being modelled plastically, and in which abstract concepts and ideas are least effective, we must behave in such away that we confront him with as few concepts and ideas as possible, and only with ideas that are as pictorial as possible. For this reason I have stressed that the pictorial, the illustrative—which is as little removed as possible from the actual picture, the form and contour—is taken up conceptually. Because what is absorbed in this way as a picture, as a form or as a figure of fantasy, has great strength to intervene in our bodily organisation. That the pictorial we encounter in the design intervenes in the physical organisation can already be deduced from seeing how little it helps to try and convince someone who is sick, who is in a particular situation, that he should be doing this, and refrain from doing that. This is of little help. But if you set up an apparatus, something like an electrifying machine , so that the sick person can form a picture for himself, and then give him two handles that do not let any current go through—as long as he has the picture in front of his eyes, he will feel the current, and that will help! But wherever it is so beautifully declaimed that imaginative power plays a major role, we must be clear, that this is not about any kind of imaginative power but only about visual imagination.

We live in an age in which it has become customary, to pay very little homage to the following principle of Spiritual Science—that a human being only becomes able to form concepts and ideas between the age of fourteen or sixteen and age twenty-one, twenty-two; that one then picks up concepts that are only to be shaped later. Instead, before this age, people nowadays become mature enough to write newspaper articles, which are either above the line or not up to standard, that are printed and then accepted by people. This then makes it difficult to keep abstract concepts away until the characterised age and to put the pictorial, the illustrative in front of a person’s eyes. Because the illustrative has the power to intervene in the organisation of body and soul.

You can always find confirmation of what I am saying now, however, one does not always pay attention to it. Moriz Benedikt , for example, complains that many college students are often quite clumsy in later life. Why is this so? Because the whole education is so nondescript, so little concerned with the illustrative and adheres only to abstract ideas even when languages are taught. In contrast, we can feel the illustrative that we encounter, right into our hand, because the objects themselves step in front of us as pictures.

It could be said, that if you want to imagine an object, you must move in such a way that you feel with your hand in a circle or in an elliptic shape the growing together with the object in pictures. It is not only imitating the manual dexterity, but also feeling and learning to love objects, that show us how a pictorial, an illustrative imagination twitches in our limbs, makes our limbs agile and mobile. Today we can find many people, who, if a button is torn off, are not able to sew on a new one. This is a great disadvantage. The most important things is, that we are able to intervene in the external world with everything we have. Of course, we cannot learn everything. But we can learn about how the spirit and soul slide down out of the spiritual into body and soul and make our limbs agile. And no one, whom we have instructed in his youth to try and copy the feeling of what is outside of him, will be a clumsy person later in life. Because what already lies below the threshold of our consciousness, can work most essentially on our organisation. This also applies to language. One learns a language best at a time when one is not able to understand the language grammatically, for at that time one learns with the part of the soul-being that belongs to deeper layers.

This is how humanity developed—and this is how the individual human being must develop. Elsewhere I have pointed out how Lorenz Müllner , in a school-director’s speech, drew attention to the St. Peter’s Church in Rome—how magnificent it stands there, how secretly the spatial laws are embedded within the mechanics of the cupola construction, so that one can see the spatial mechanics expressed in the most wonderful way. Now he pointed out though, that only through the laws which Michaelangelo expressed therein, and which Galilei subsequently by way of his high-flying spirit discovered, did Galileo give mechanical science to us. I have also pointed out, that the date of Michaelangelo’s death almost coincides with the birthdate of Galilei, so that the abstract laws of mechanics—which live in the consciousness soul of a human being—appeared later than that, what Michaelangelo had built into the space out of his deeper soul-members. Just as the higher members of the soul develop on the foundation of the lower ones, just as we have to develop our limbs based on our predispositions, so that we can look back on them and gain an understanding of them—so it works in every single life. In each individual life, too, man must be surrounded by human company, must place himself into that which immerses him in a kind of atmosphere, into the spirit and soul of our surroundings. Then, what a human being brings with him into existence, is shaped and built. But the human being does not only bring along what is given to him from the hereditary line, but something that will be determined in the most diverse way by a third, namely by the eternal individuality of the human being. This human individuality needs the inherited characteristics, must acquire and develop them. This also stands higher than that which comes into existence with our individuality. We step into existence at birth: A creative, productive spirituality acquires—when we cannot yet build any concepts—the plastic substances from the hereditary line. Only later the consciousness-soul is added. So we look at something individual within human nature, which plastically forms the capabilities and talents. When we become educators, it is our task to solve, what we consider to be a spiritual riddle, for each human being anew.

This all points us to a mood. When Goethe, at the excavation of Schiller’s bones found his skull and saw the distinctive forms, saw how the human individuality had worked on this, he saw: into this form the liquid spirit of Schiller had to pour itself, so that he could become what he did become, which Goethe was able to express thus:

What greater gain in life can man e'er know
Than when God-Nature will to him explain
How into Spirit steadfastness may flow,
How steadfast, too, the Spirit-Born remain.^*

Such an expression by Goethe needs to be understood in the context of the situation. If one takes it without looking at what it is that as spirit-made in firm shape is sculptured, misunderstands him. Nor does anyone understand him, who is unaware of the depth of Goethe’s insight into the eternal weaving of an individuality, who goes from birth to birth and always newly reincarnates, and who is the true architect of the human being. How we have received our organs from the spirit, which in turn are organs of spirit, basically could be said by simply using a childish comparison: the clock shows us time, but we could not use it, if it had not first been formed by the human spirit. — We need our brain for thinking in the physical world, but we could not use it for thinking, if the cosmic spirit would not have formed it. And we would not have sculptured it with such an individuality, if not our individuality had poured itself as a spiritual product into our brain, which was formed out of suitable human species substance. Then we understand more deeply, what we were able to say today, and what Goethe meant when he pointed towards that in a human being, which in his nature is determinative for all his talents and capabilities—as if the stars themselves would be perceived like any situation in the world, and how that which effects man’s inner being as something eternal, passes through the threshold of death only to advance to new forms of development. In short, we may summarise what we have observed today, in the mood of Goethe’s thoughts, which he expressed in the “Orphic Primal Words”:

As stood the sun to the salute of planets
Upon the day that gave you to the earth,
You grew forthwith, and prospered, in your growing
Heeded the law presiding at your birth.
Sibyls and prophets told it: You must be
None but yourself, from self you cannot flee.
No time there is, no power, can decompose
The minted form that lives and living grows. ^*

• *. Translator Unknown *
• *. Translator Unknown *

Among the ideas advanced by Spiritual Science, that of Reincarnation occupies a foremost place. The idea that the human individuality has to manifest over and over again in a single personality in the course of the development of mankind on the Earth is at present but little understood, and, moreover, it is generally unpopular. As we have seen and shall still see, many questions arise in Spiritual Science, among them that of the meaning of repeated earthly lives.

When we study the evolution of human life on Earth in the light of Spiritual Science, we find that there is a very deep meaning behind the fact that the human individuality passes, not only once, but many times through earthly life. Every epoch and every age has its special content, its special characteristics, and all the varied possibilities which it offers have to be assimilated over and over again by the individual life-germs of man. This is possible because man, with all that composes his being, is connected not once and for all, but over and over again with the living stream of evolution. Looking upon this evolution as a rational progress into which new contents, new qualities are poured, we begin to realise the true significance of those Great Ones who have been the leading and guiding spirits of the different epochs. From each of these Great Ones, new qualities, new impulses for the progressive evolution of humanity have emanated and in the course of these lectures we shall be considering important questions connected with such leaders of mankind.

To-day our attention is turned to an individuality who, so far as historical investigation goes, is shrouded in mystery—an individuality lost in dim prehistoric ages, of whom no documentary records exist. I refer to the personality of Zarathustra.

A personality such as that of Zarathustra, whose gifts to humanity, in so far as they are preserved for us, seem so strange to the present age, makes us realise what great differences arise in the sum total of human nature during the various epochs. Superficial opinion may state that ever since man has been man, he has thought, felt and conceived ideas of morality exactly as he does to-day. But Spiritual Science shows us that the life of the human soul and the nature of man's thought, feeling and will, have undergone great changes in the course of human evolution. Human consciousness in olden times was of quite a different nature and we have reason to believe that, in the future, other stages of consciousness will be reached, again very different from the normal consciousness of to-day.

When we turn our attention to Zarathustra, we must look back over an infinitely long period of time. It is true that certain modern investigators have fixed the date of Zarathustra as contemporary with that of Buddha, which would mean that he lived some five or six centuries before the Christian era. It is however significant that our modern historians, after careful investigation of the traditions referring to Zarathustra, have been obliged to indicate that the personality hidden beneath the name of “Zarathustra,” the original founder of the Persian religion, must be placed a great many centuries before Buddha. Greek historians have repeatedly pointed out that Zarathustra must have lived about five or six thousand years before the Trojan War. We are prepared to state that historical research will, however unwillingly, eventually be forced to admit that the Greek tradition is correct in regard to the epoch in which Zarathustra lived. Spiritual Science, which is based on inner knowledge, agrees with the Greek tradition and it is therefore reasonable to indicate that Zarathustra, living as he did thousands of years before the birth of Christianity, was confronted by a consciousness entirely different from that of the present day.

I have often pointed out, and I shall explain it further, that human consciousness in ancient times was bound up with certain dream states, or rather clairvoyant states, in normal human life. Primeval man did not contemplate the world with the strong, clearly-defined sense perceptions of to-day. We shall best understand the way in which man of those primeval times took his environment into his consciousness, if we think of a last remnant of the ancient consciousness, still left to us in dreams. Everybody knows how dream images appear and disappear, how they emerge and fade away. To our present consciousness they are for the most part dream pictures, meaningless reminiscences of the outer world. Interwoven though they are with higher states of consciousness, they are incomprehensible to people of our time. Images, ever-changing pictures, symbols—of these our dream consciousness consists. Everyone has experienced how a fire, for instance, is symbolised in a dream. Think of the difference between a dream and ordinary waking consciousness. Such as it is, this dream state represents the remnant of a primeval consciousness of man. Man then lived in a world of images—images not vague or empty but proceeding from a real external world. In this ancient consciousness there were intermediate states between waking and sleep and in these states man was face to face with the spiritual world. The spiritual world actually entered into his consciousness. Nowadays the door into the spiritual world is locked against the normal consciousness of man, but this was not the case in olden times; for he then entered into those intermediate states between waking and sleep when the spiritual world appeared before him in dreamlike images. In these dreamlike images he saw the working and the weaving of the spirit behind the physical world of sense. He had direct experience of the spiritual world, although by the time of Zarathustra this was already indistinct and dim. A man of antiquity could say to himself: “I behold the outer physical world and the life of sense, but I also have experiences and perceptions in a different state of consciousness; I know that there is another world behind the world of sense—a spiritual world.”

Evolution consists in one faculty being acquired at the expense of another, and thus as the epochs took their course, the faculty which man once possessed of understanding the spiritual world became less and less. Our clear reasoning and cognitional faculties, our present logical thinking which we regard as the most important feature of modern culture—these did not exist in those early times. They had to be developed by man in the epoch to which we now belong, at the expense of the old clairvoyant consciousness. Clairvoyant consciousness will have to be cultivated again in the future evolution of mankind, but in a different way. It has to be added to the purely physical consciousness that is bound up with the faculty of intellectual logic. A rising and a falling can be traced in the evolution of human consciousness and we see therein a deep purpose in man's development.

The old consciousness described above dates back to a prehistoric age of which there is no documentary evidence. Zarathustra himself belongs to this age of which, as yet, no historical traditions have reached us. He was one of those leading personalities who gave a stimulus for great steps forward in the civilisation of mankind. Whatever the level of human consciousness at the time, these leading personalities must always draw from the source which we may call Illumination, Initiation into the higher mysteries of the universe. Among such personalities were Hermes, Buddha and Moses, as well as Zarathustra, whom we are to study in the course of these lectures.

Zarathustra lived at least eight thousand years before our present era, and the gifts to civilisation which poured from his enlightened spirit shine forth clearly across the centuries. Those who penetrate into the inner currents of human evolution can detect them even after this lapse of time. Zarathustra was one of those whose soul had experienced Truth, Wisdom and Intuition to an extent far transcending the normal consciousness of the age. In that part of the Earth which later on was known as the Persian Empire, Zarathustra proclaimed mighty truths from the super-sensible worlds—regions lying far above the normal consciousness of the men of that time.

If we would understand the significance of Zarathustra's teaching, we must realise that his mission was to communicate a certain conception of the universe to one particular section of humanity, while other streams had, as it were, a different mission in human culture. The personality of Zarathustra is all the more interesting to us in that he lived in a part of the world directly adjoining on its South side another land whose people transmitted an entirely different order of spirituality to mankind. I refer to the peoples of India, from whom arose the Vedic poets. The region permeated with the mighty impulse of Zarathustra lies to the North of the land from which the great teaching of Brahma went forth. Zarathustra's message to the world was fundamentally different from the Brahministic teachings of the great leaders of ancient Indian thought. These Indian teachings have come down to us in the Vedas, and in the profound philosophy of the Vedanta, of which the revelations of Buddha represent, as it were, the final splendour.

We shall understand the difference between the two thought currents—the one proceeding from Zarathustra and the other from the ancient Indian teachings—when we consider that man can reach the spiritual world along two paths of approach. There are two ways by which we may raise the inner powers of the soul above their normal level so that we may pass from the world of the senses into the super-sensible world. One way is to penetrate deeply into our own souls, to immerse ourselves, as it were, in our inner being. The other way leads behind the veils spread around us by the physical world. Both ways lead into the super-sensible world. If in the intimate experiences of soul life we so deepen our feelings, ideas, and impulses that the powers of soul grow stronger and stronger, we can descend mystically into the “Self.” Passing through that part of our being which belongs to the physical world, we may indeed find our real spiritual essence—the imperishable essence that passes from incarnation to incarnation. When we pierce through the veil of the inner being with all the desires, passions and inner experiences of soul (which are only one part of us in so far as we live in a physical body) we then reach our eternal essence and enter a world of spirit. On the other hand, if we develop powers which not only perceive the physical world with its sounds, colours, sensations of warmth and cold—if we so strengthen our spiritual powers that they can penetrate behind the encircling veil of colour, sound, warmth, cold and other physical phenomena—then our strengthened spiritual forces will reach the super-sensible worlds, stretching before us into boundless distances, into infinity. The first way is that of the Mystic; the second the way of Spiritual Science. It was along one of these two ways that the great teachers attained to the revelations of truth which they had to inculcate into mankind as the basis of culture.

In primeval times the evolution of humanity was such that only one of the two ways was open to a particular people. Only later, in the Greek epoch (coinciding with the beginning of the Christian era) did these two currents mingle and gradually become a single current of culture. When we speak to-day of the ascent into higher worlds, it is right to state that the man who would make the ascent must to a certain extent develop both kinds of spiritual powers within his soul—the mystical powers on the path into the inner self and the powers developed by Spiritual Science as it penetrates the outer world. To-day these two paths are no longer strictly separate from one another, for it is part of the purpose of human evolution that the two currents should meet. Before the Greek and Christian eras these two methods of development were practised by different peoples living in regions not very far apart in space. We find traces of them in ancient Indian culture, in the Vedic songs and in the Zarathustrian civilisation to the North. All that we so greatly admire in the old Indian culture—which later on found expression in Buddhism—all this was attained through inner contemplation, by turning away from the outer world. The eye had to become insensitive to physical colour, the ear to physical sound, the senses to turn away from outer impressions, and finally, with his inner powers of soul made strong, man attained to Brahma. In Brahma, he felt himself united with the inner being of the Cosmos, moving and creative. And so there arose the teaching of the Holy Rishis which flowed into the Vedas and lived on in the Vedantic philosophy and in Buddhism.

The other path springs from the teachings of Zarathustra. Zarathustra handed down to his disciples the secret of how to strengthen the powers of understanding in order to penetrate the veil of the outer world of sense. Zarathustra did not teach as did the Indian mystics: “Turn away from colours, sounds and all the outer impressions of the senses, and seek the way into the spiritual worlds entirely by means of inner contemplation, in your own soul life.” On the contrary, Zarathustra taught: “Strengthen the powers of knowledge and understanding for everything that lives, be it plant or animal; understand all living things in air and water, on the mountain heights or in the valleys. Look upon this world!” We know that for the Indian mystic, this world was Maya—illusion; he turned from it in order to find Brahman; but Zarathustra taught his disciples rather to penetrate the world with understanding and to feel, behind the outer realm of physical phenomena, the reality of a spiritual power, active and creative. This is the other path.

It is remarkable how these two paths converge in the Greek age, where the understanding of things spiritual was far deeper than it is in our time. This understanding was expressed in symbolical imagery, in mythology. The two thought currents, the mystic path into the inner self and the other leading into the outer Cosmos, blended in Greek culture. One current derived its name from the mystical God Dionysus, the mysterious being who was to be found when a man descended more and more deeply into his inner being and there discovered the sub-human element which formerly he did not know, and from which he evolved into full manhood. This element, still unpurified, still partly animal, was known by the name of Dionysus. The other element, in which the eyes of spirit beheld the phenomena of the physical world, was expressed by the name of Apollo.¹ Thus we find the teachings of Zarathustra expressed in the cult of Apollo and the mystic doctrine of contemplation in the cult of Dionysus in Greece. In ancient times, these two currents arose separately, but in the Apollonian and Dionysian cults they were united and blended. If we, in our modern culture, undergo a true spiritual training, we can re-experience them both in one.

Nietzsche had an inkling of the significant difference between the cults of Apollo and Dionysus. True, he did not enter very deeply into the matter, but in his first Essay, “The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music,” he shows that the Apollonian and Dionysian cults of ancient Greece are represented on the one hand in the mystic current, and on the other in the current which is now expressed by Spiritual Science.

Zarathustra taught his disciples to see the Spirit behind every physical phenomenon. The whole civilisation inspired by him was based on this principle. Now it is not enough to say that behind the world of the senses there is the Divine-Spiritual. Man may think he has discovered a great truth here, but it leads to nothing but a vague Pantheism. We may think we express a truth when we say: “God is at work behind every physical phenomenon”—but this is merely a conception of a nebulous spiritual power behind all things physical. A teacher like Zarathustra, who had actually ascended to the spiritual world, did not speak in this abstract and vague terminology to his disciples and his people. He showed that just as individual physical phenomena are different, so the spiritual essence behind them is at one time more evident, at another less. He taught how behind the physical Sun—the origin of all life and activity—there is the centre of spiritual life.

Let us try to condense into simple language the doctrines which Zarathustra tried to inculcate into his disciples. He spoke thus: “Man, as we perceive him, is not merely composed of a physical body, for this physical body is but the outer manifestation of the Spirit. Just as the physical body is nothing but the manifested crystallisation of the Spiritual in man, so the Sun, in so far as it is a body of luminous matter, is nothing but the external body of a spiritual Sun.” The spiritual part of man is spoken of as the “Aura”—or “Ahura,” to use the old expression—in distinction to his physical body and in the same sense the spiritual part of the physical Sun may be called the “Great Aura,” for it is all-embracing. Zarathustra called that which lies behind the physical Sun, Aura Mazda or Ahura Mazdao—the Great Aura. With this spiritual essence behind the Sun, all spiritual experiences and conditions are bound up, just as the existence and well-being of plants, animals and all that lives on Earth are bound up with the physical Sun. Behind the physical Sun lives the spiritual Lord and Creator, Ahura Mazdao. This is the derivation of the name “Ormuzd,” Spirit of Light. While the Indians searched mystically in the inner self to find Brahma, the Eternal, shining like a luminous centre in man, Zarathustra pointed his disciples to the great periphery, showing them that the mighty Spirit of the Sun, Ahura Mazdao, the Spirit of Light, dwelt in the physical body of the Sun. Ahura Mazdao has to face his enemy—Ahriman, the Spirit of Darkness—just as man, who bears within himself the enemies of his good impulses, strives to raise his real spiritual being to perfection and has to battle against his lower passions, desires, and the delusive images of lying and falsehood.

Zarathustra was able to transmute his conception of the universe from mere doctrine into real feeling, real vision. And so he was able to teach his disciples that within them was an active principle of perfection. Whatever their development might be at the time, they were taught to realise that this principle of perfection could raise them to higher and higher stages of existence. They were taught that passions and desires, lying and deceit within the soul lead to imperfection. Zarathustra taught of the attacks made upon Ahura Mazdao in the outer world by the principle of imperfection, by the evil which casts shadow into the light, by Angra Mainyus—Ahriman.

Zarathustra's disciples were thus enabled to realise that the great universe is reflected in each individual. The real significance of this doctrine lay, not in its theoretical concepts and ideas but in the feeling it called forth in man—a feeling which taught him of his relationship to the universe and made him able to say: “Here I stand—a little world, but a little world which is a replica of the great world. In human beings, the principle of perfection is opposed by evil; in the great universe, Ormuzd and Ahriman face one another. The whole universe is, as it were, a man grown immeasurably great and the highest human forces are Ahura Mazdao—their enemy, Ahriman.”

If man directs his attention truly to the physical world he must finally discover that all phenomena are part of the great cosmic process; he is filled with awe when spectro-analysis reveals the fact that the same substances which exist on Earth exist also on the farthest stars. In the light of Zarathustra's teaching, man felt himself in his spiritual being, part of the Spirit of the whole Cosmos; he felt himself emanating from this Spirit. Herein lies the great significance of the doctrine.

The teaching was not abstract but very concrete. Even when people of our time have a certain feeling for the Spiritual behind the physical world it is very difficult to make them realise that there must necessarily be more than one central spiritual power. But just as there are different natural phenomena—heat, light, chemical forces and the like—so there are different orders of lower spiritual Powers, subordinate forces whose realm of activity is more limited than that of the One All-Embracing Power. Zarathustra made a distinction between Ormuzd and other lower spiritual beings, who were his servants. Before we turn to consider these lower spiritual beings, let us realise that the doctrine of Zarathustra is not mere dualism, a teaching of the two worlds of Ormuzd and of Ahriman. He taught that underlying these two currents in the universe there is one power whence both the realm of light (Ormuzd) and the realm of darkness (Ahriman) proceed. Old Greek writers tell us that the unity behind Ormuzd and Ahriman was worshipped by the ancient Persians as the LIVING UNITY, but it is difficult to re-create this idea nowadays. Zarathustra calls this Zervane Akarene—that which lies behind the light. To get at some conception of the meaning of this, let us think of the course of evolution. We must conceive of all creation as travelling towards greater and greater perfection, so that if we look towards the future, the Ahura of Ormuzd grows clearer and clearer. Looking into the past, we see the Ahrimanic powers in opposition to Ormuzd; in course of time, however, their existence must cease. In all these things we must understand that a survey of the future and of the past leads to the same point. It is very difficult for the man of to-day to realise this. Let us think of a circle, by way of illustration. If we start at the lowest point and pass along one side, we arrive at the opposite, the highest point. If we pass along the other side, we also arrive at the same point. If we enlarge the circle, we have further to go, and the curve of the arc becomes flatter and flatter. Draw the circle larger and larger, and the arc eventually becomes a straight line; thereafter both lines lead to infinity. But before this, with a smaller circle, we arrive at the same point along both sides. Why should we not assume that the same result obtains when the sides of the circle are flat and its fines straight? In infinity, the point must then remain the same on the one side as on the other. Therefore to conceive of infinity, we may imagine a line continuing indefinitely on both sides—in effect, a circle.

This is an abstract conception of what underlies the Zarathustrian doctrine of Zervane Akarene—Zaruana Akarana. Taking the concept of Time, we look into the future on the one side and into the past on the other. Time, however, is welded into a circle; the completion takes place in infinity. This is symbolically represented as the serpent biting its own tail; into the serpent the Power of Light which grows brighter and brighter, is woven on the one side, and on the other the Power of Darkness, which appears to grow deeper and deeper. While we ourselves remain in the centre, Ormuzd and Ahriman, Light and Shadow, are intermingled, and into all this is woven the self-contained, mysterious “Zaruana Akarana”—Time.

This ancient conception of the universe did not merely state vaguely: Outside and behind the world of the senses which works upon eyes and ears, there is “Spirit.” A kind of alphabet, records of the spiritual world were revealed. Suppose we to-day take a page of a book. We see letters on it and we build up words from these letters, but we must first have learnt to read. Those who have not learnt to read in the spiritual sense, cannot understand Zarathustra; they cannot read the sense of his teaching but merely see signs and symbols. Only those who know how to build up these signs into a doctrine to which their souls respond can understand Zarathustra.

Now behind the world of the senses, in the ordered grouping of the stars, Zarathustra perceived a symbolic writing in cosmic space. Just as we have a written alphabet, so Zarathustra saw in the starry worlds of space, a kind of Alphabet of the spiritual worlds, a language through which they became articulate. Thus arose the science of penetrating into the spiritual world and of reading and interpreting the constellations. He knew too, how to decipher the signs in which the Cosmic Spirits inscribe their activities into space. Their language is the grouping and movement of the stars. Zarathustra and his disciples saw that Ahura Mazdao creates and manifests by describing an apparent circle in the heavens, in the sense of our Astronomy, and this circle was for them the outward sign of the way in which Ormuzd manifested his activity to man. Zarathustra showed—and this is a most important point—that the Zodiac is a line which returns on itself, forming a circle as the expression of the rotation of Time. In the highest sense, he taught that while one branch of Time goes forward into the future, the other turns backwards into the past. Zaruana Akarana, the self-contained line of Time, the circle described by Ormuzd, the Spirit of Light, is what was later called the Zodiac. This is the expression of the spiritual activity of Ormuzd. The course of the Sun through the Zodiac is the expression of the activity of Ormuzd. The Zodiac is the expression of Zaruana Akarana. Zaruana Akarana and Zodiac are one and the same word, like Ormuzd and Ahura Mazdao. Two things must here be remembered.

When the Sun passes in summer through the light, his full powers fall upon the Earth; they are the forces of spiritual light sent forth by Ormuzd from his realm of light. The signs of the Zodiac through which Ormuzd passes in the summer or in the daytime reveal his activity unhampered by Ahriman. The signs of the Zodiac below the horizon are symbolical of the realm of shadow through which Ahriman passes. What, then, are the expressions of Ormuzd (who represents the light part of the Zodiac) and of Ahriman (the dark part), in their activity on Earth? Now there is a difference between the influence of the Sun in the morning and at noon time. When Ormuzd ascends from Aries to Taurus, the effect of his rays is not the same as when he is descending. His rays differ in summer and in winter and they differ with every sign through which the Sun passes. The course of the Sun through the signs of the Zodiac revealed to Zarathustra the many sides of the activity of Ormuzd, and he beheld here the expressions of spiritual beings who are, as it were, the servants, the “sons” of Ormuzd, who execute his commands. These subservient powers, each having their own special activity, are the “Amschaspands” or “Ameschas Pentas.” While Ormuzd represents the collective activity of the Zodiac, the Amschaspands have to perform the specialised activities expressed in the raying forth of the Sun from Aries, Taurus, Cancer, and so forth. The activity of Ormuzd is expressed in the raying of the Sun through all the light signs of the Zodiac—from Aries to Libra or Scorpio. According to Zarathustra, Ahriman works from the centre of the Earth, from the darkness where his servants, the Amschaspands, dwell; they are the opponents of the good genii surrounding Ormuzd. Zarathustra distinguished twelve orders of spiritual beings, six or rather seven, on the side of Ormuzd; six, or rather five, on the side of Ahriman. They are symbolised as good and evil genii, or subservient spirits, according to whether the Sun's course runs through the light or the dark signs of the Zodiac. Goethe was thinking of these helpers of Ormuzd when he wrote at the beginning of Faust, in the Prologue in Heaven:—

“But ye, pure
Children of God, enjoy eternal beauty:—
Let that which ever operates and lives
Clasp you within the limits of its love;
And seize with sweet and melancholy thoughts
The fronting phantoms of its loveliness.” (Shelley's translation).

The Amschaspands of Zarathustra are the same beings to whom Goethe refers as the “pure children of God,” who serve the highest Divine Power.

There are twelve Amschaspands or genii; below, there are other spiritual powers of which the teaching of Zarathustra distinguished twenty-eight grades. The number is approximate, for it varies between twenty- four, twenty-eight, and thirty-one. These subordinate powers are called Izerads or Izods. What class of beings are these? If we think of the Amschaspands as the twelve great powers in Space, then the Izods are the subordinate forces behind the lower activities of Nature, and of these, there are from twenty-four to thirty-one. There is yet a third group of spiritual powers—powers which, in our sense, are not really active in the physical world as such. They are called by Zarathustra, Ferruhars or Frawashars. The twelve forces behind which the Amschaspands live are active in all the physical activities of light upon the Earth: behind the Izods we must imagine the forces affecting the animal kingdom. The Frawashars are to be thought of as the spiritual beings guiding the group-souls of the animals.

Thus Zarathustra saw a real super-sensible world behind the world of sense: Ormuzd and Ahriman, behind them Zaruana Akarana, below them the Amschaspands, good and bad. Now what are the Izods and Frawashars? According to Zarathustra they are the spiritual essence pervading the macrocosm, the living essence² of the external physical phenomena we perceive with our senses. Man, as he stands in the world, is a replica of this greater world; therefore he contains within himself all the powers which ensoul the greater world. Just as we have recognised Ormuzd in the struggle of man towards perfection, and Ahriman in man's impure instincts and impulses, so we can also find in man the imprint of the other spiritual beings, the lesser genii.

And now I have to speak of something which may appear extraordinary to-day to the usual conceptions of the Cosmos held by man. The time, however, is not far distant when even external science will discover that there is super-sensible element behind all physical phenomena, a spiritual world behind the world of the senses. It will then be realised that the physical body of man in all its parts, is an image of the whole Cosmos The Cosmos pours itself into, and densifies within the physical body of man. Thus, according to the conception of Zarathustra—which much resembles that of Spiritual Science—we can say that both Ormuzd and Ahriman work upon man: Ormuzd as the impulse towards perfection, and Ahriman as the impulse in opposition to this. But the spiritual activities of the Amschaspands are also at work in man. We must think of these beings as so far densified in man that they are physically manifest.

In the time of Zarathustra there was, of course, no science of anatomy in our sense of the word, but he and his disciples, with their spiritual conception of the world, saw the twelve currents of the Amschaspands as a reality. They saw these currents flowing towards man and working in him. The human head was to them the visible expression of the activities of the seven good and five evil currents of the Amschaspands. How is this truth expressed at the present time? To-day, the anatomist has discovered the existence of twelve pairs of cerebral nerves which are repeated in the body. These are the physical counterparts, the frozen currents, as it were, of the Amschaspands. There are twelve pairs of nerves and by their means man can either attain the highest perfection or sink to the greatest evil. Thus the spiritual teaching given by Zarathustra to his disciples appears again, materialised, in our own age. People may regard it as so much fancy on the part of Spiritual Science to say that Zarathustra was referring to the twelve pairs of cerebral nerves when he taught of the Amschaspands, but the world will have much to learn besides this, for it will be found that all the moving and weaving Cosmos works on further in man. The ancient teachings of Zarathustra are indeed revived in modern physiology. The twenty-eight to thirty-one Izods occupy the same subordinate position to the Amschaspands as do the twenty-eight nerves of the spine to the nerves of the brain. The spinal nerves which stimulate the soul life of man are created by the spiritual currents of the Izods outside; they work into us and crystallise, as it were, into the spinal nerves. And in that which is not of the nature of the nerves but which makes us individuals, which does not now pour in from outside, but lives within—there dwell the Frawashars or Ferruhars. They live in those thoughts which transcend the merely physical activity of the brain and nerves.

There is a remarkable connection between the tendencies of our own time and the doctrines which Zarathustra gave in spiritual pictures flowing behind the veil of the world of sense. There is, however, one significant thing to be remembered. The teachings of Zarathustra influenced the thought of the people for a very long time and then for a while they receded into the background. Sometimes it was the mystical way of thought which predominated, sometimes the occult, after Greek thought had in a measure united the two currents. Nowadays there seems to be a tendency to the mystical way. Many feel drawn towards Indian occultism with its tendency towards introspection and this explains the fact that little heed is paid to the essential features of the doctrines of Zarathustra in the spiritual life of to-day. There is a great deal of ancient Persian thought in our own spiritual life, yet in a sense, its most essential features, the very core of the doctrine of Zarathustra, is lost to our age. When we realise once more that the teachings of Zarathustra are the spiritual prototypes of countless examples of physical research, then the key-note of our present day culture will be replaced by another. Now one important feature in almost all other mystical currents of culture is missing in the religion of Zarathustra. The reason for this is its entire preoccupation with macrocosmic phenomena. Other religious systems have accentuated the contrasts presented by the division of the sexes. In most old religious systems, Goddesses and Gods are contrasting symbols of the two streams active in the world. The religion of Zarathustra rises above this conception in the symbols of Goodness as Light and Evil as Darkness. Hence the sublime purity of this religion and the nobility which lifts it above ideas which play an ugly part in any endeavour to deepen the thought life of our time. Even the Greek writers stated that the highest Godhead had perforce to create Ahriman as well as Ormuzd in order that there might be the necessary contrast. This implies that one Primal Power was set over against another. In the Hebrew religion, woman, Eve, is the symbol for the evil which came into this world. In the religion of Zarathustra there is no element of sex antagonism. The ugly things which nowadays enter so largely into our daily literature, pour into our thoughts and feelings and so unpleasantly accentuate the chief causes of health and disease without touching upon the essentials of life—all these will disappear when the “heroic” conception of Ormuzd and Ahriman is understood, when the true Zarathustrian influence spreads in present-day culture, clothed in the words of its great founder. These things pursue their own course in the world and nothing can arrest the progress of the truth inherent in the culture of Zarathustra. If we follow the progress of culture in Asia Minor, down to later times among the Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, and even up to the Christian era, we find traces of concepts derived from the illumination of the great Zarathustra. And we shall not wonder at the view expressed by a Greek writer, that the great spiritual leaders of the races imparted to the people part of a future culture of which they stood in need. This Greek writer pointed to Pythagoras, showing what he had learned from his great predecessors—Geometry from the Egyptians, Arithmetic from the Phoenicians, Astronomy from the Chaldeans—and how he had turned to Zarathustra's doctrines to learn from them the sacred teaching of the relations of man to the spiritual world and the true conduct of life. The same writer asserts that the conduct of life laid down by Zarathustra leads man above all minor conflicts, that they all culminate in the one great conflict between Good and Evil, where victory can only be gained by purification from evil, lying and falsehood. The worst enemy of Ormuzd bears the name of “Calumny”—one of the chief qualities of Ahriman. The Greek writer tells us that Pythagoras could not find the highest moral idea (the moral purification of man) among the Egyptians from whom he learnt Geometry, nor among the Phoenicians from whom he learnt Arithmetic, nor among the Chaldeans from whom he learnt Astronomy; but that he had to turn to the followers of Zarathustra to understand the heroic conception of the universe, since purification alone can vanquish evil. This shows the high value placed upon the noble teachings of Zarathustra in olden times.

What I have said may be illustrated by quotations from historical documents. Plutarch, for instance, says that Zarathustra teaches the worship of Light because Light is the greatest factor for the well-being of the Earth and the highest spiritual factor is Truth. This is in complete agreement with what has been said.

Let us now return again to the ancient Vedic conceptions. They were the result of a mystic descent into the inner being. Before man can penetrate to the inner light of Brahma, he meets with his own passions, his wild and semi-human impulses. These oppose his entry into the true life of spirit and soul. The Indian mystics realised that the mystic union with Brahma could only be attained by the elimination of all the impressions of the physical world, that the sensuous appeals of colours and sounds must cease. So long as these elements enter into meditation, the opponents of the attainment of perfection are there. The Indian mystic would have said: “Cast away all that may enter the soul from the outer powers; deepen yourself in the innermost core of your own soul; descend into the realm of the Devas, and when you have vanquished the lower Devas you will find the kingdom of Brahman. But shun the world of the Asuras, those beings who would fain penetrate into you from the world of Maya, the outer world. These must on no account be allowed to enter.”

And now listen to what Zarathustra taught his disciples: “The peoples of the South are differently constituted and they seek the spiritual world in another way. Their way would not help a nation whose mission is not only to dream and meditate in this wonderful world, but to teach mankind the art of Agriculture and the conquest of savagery. Do not look upon external things merely as Maya; you must penetrate behind this veil of colour and sound around you. Shun all that threatens to keep your soul within the bonds of egoism, shun all that bears the stamp of the Deva qualities! Make your way through the realm of the lower Asuras and ascend to the higher. Your nature is such that you can do this if you will!” In India the Rishis had taught that man was not so organised as to enable him to seek what lies in the realm of the Asuras, and that he should therefore shun their world and enter that of the Devas.

This is the difference between the Indian and Persian cultures. The Indian peoples were taught that the Asuras are evil spirits and must be avoided, for the organisation of the Indians was such that they only could know the lower Asuras. The Persian peoples, on the other hand, knew only the lower Devas and were therefore taught: ‘Penetrate to the realm of the Asuras and you will be able to rise from there to the realm of the higher Asuras.’

The impulse which Zarathustra gave to the men of his epoch lay in the fact that he had a gift for mankind which could work on through all the ages—a gift which would make clear the upward path and conquer all the false doctrines deceiving man on his path to perfection. Zarathustra therefore looked upon himself as the servant of Ahura Mazdao, and as such, he personally knew the opposition of Ahriman. His teaching was intended to aid mankind to a heroic conquest of the Ahriman principle. We find his words recorded in the documents of a later era. Inspired by the inner impulse of his mission, and fired by the passion with which he felt himself the antagonist of Ahriman, he said: “I will speak! Harken, ye who journey from afar, and ye that come from near at hand, with longing to hear. Mark well my words! No longer shall the Evil One, the false leader, conquer the Spirit of Good. Too long has his evil breath permeated human speech. I will refute him with the speech which the Highest, the Primal One has put into my mouth. I will speak what Ahura Mazdao says to me. And he who hears not my words nor understands their meaning as I speak them will experience much evil ere the end of the world-cycles!” Thus spake Zarathustra.

May we realise from these words that Zarathustra's message to mankind can be felt and experienced through all later epochs of culture. Those of us who have ears to hear the dim echoes still living in our time, will, if they listen with spiritual ears, hear the faint tones of Zarathustra's words to mankind thousands of years ago. For those who have ears to hear, the message of Zarathustra and other great Leaders of whom we shall speak in these lectures, may be summed up in the following words: “These God-sent Spirits shine as stars in the heavens of Life Eternal. May it be vouchsafed to every soul to behold their radiance in the realms of earthly life.”

• 1. See Chapter VI. of “The East in the Light of the West” by Rudolf Steiner. Anthroposophical Publishing Company
• 2. das Wesenhafte

The title of this lecture series is, Spiritual Science's Answer to the Large Questions of the Present Time, published in German as, Antworten der Geisteswissenschaft auf den Grossen Fragen des Daseins.

It is a far cry from the great Zarathustra or Zoroaster, who formed the subject of our last lecture in this series, to the three great personalities who provide the subject matter of our lecture to-day, and the gulf of time which, in our imagination, we are called upon to span is wide indeed. It is a gulf which stretches from a time thousands of years ago, long before our Christian Era. A time which we can only understand by attributing to the human beings existing then a mental outlook utterly foreign to our own. From this distant standpoint of time, we pass to the 16th and 17th centuries of our own era, to the time when that spirit was first kindled which, ever since, has been the source and inspiration of all vital and progressive culture from then to the present day. As we shall see, this spirit, which burnt so fiercely in the 16th and 17th centuries in individuals such as Galileo and Giordano Bruno, found a fresh medium in a personality so near our own times as that of Goethe.

Galileo and Giordano Bruno are the two names we must mention when we review the beginnings of that epoch in our human evolution at which Natural Science had reached the same turning-point as Spiritual Science has reached to-day. The same great impulse which was then given to the thought of Natural Science will be, in a certain sense, given to this of Spiritual Science in the immediate future. Hence the importance of a comprehensive survey of the lines of thought and feeling of the men of that day, viz.: during the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th centuries—the time of Galileo and of Giordano Bruno—so that we may be able to understand their teaching in the full sense of the word.

Casting a retrospective glance over the centuries immediately preceding theirs, viz:—from the 11th to the 15th centuries, we must try and realize what at first sight appears to be the peculiar conception of the Science current in those days, and how wide was the field which the term then embraced. We must realise that during these centuries, Scientific Knowledge was viewed from an entirely different standpoint from that from which it is viewed to-day. The popular conception of Scientific Knowledge was then very different from the ideas which prevailed in later times and from those which prevail to-day. For we are now speaking of the days before the printing-press, of those days when, for the majority of the people, their sole means of participating in Spiritual and intellectual life was through the Church or the school, etc.—That is to say they could only learn from oral instruction. Hence the necessity, if we would understand those times, of obtaining a correct picture of the scientific methods pursued by the educated men of that day.

In the times preceding those of Galileo and Giordano Bruno, there was an impulse towards Science, but it was an impulse which is very difficult for the modern mind to understand. We can only understand it by placing ourselves, in imagination, in an entirely different mental atmosphere from that by which we are surrounded to-day. In those days, whatever auditorium you might have entered where Science was being taught, you would always have noted one thing. Let us take, for example, a lecture on Natural Science. No matter what branch of Natural Science it might be, whether Medicine or another, the lecturer would base all his deductions solely upon the authority of ancient writings, especially upon those of Aristotle. To-day, the lecturer on Science bases his thesis upon the results of modern investigation, carried out in such or such an institute, where scientific methods of research are followed. But the lecturer of the days preceding those of Galileo and Giordano Bruno based his thesis upon the ancient writings, especially upon those of Aristotle, which were the foundation of all Science in those days.

The figure of Aristotle stands out pre-eminent as an intellectual giant in the history of human progress; and the service he rendered to his time is unspeakably important. But, for the moment, the interesting point for us is the fact that the books of Aristotle were seldom read in the sense in which they were originally given, but the traditional rendering gave the tone, and was everywhere considered determinant.

No matter whether it were a question of the definition of a principle or of an axiom, or the question of any truth whatever, it was always referred to Aristotle. “Such was Aristotle's opinion on this point,” “you will find it expressed thus by Aristotle”. Now the modern investigator or the lecturer on Science, or even the popular lecturer, always emphasizes the fact that this or that has been observed in some place or another. But the scientific teacher in the centuries preceding Galileo and Giordano Bruno laid stress upon the fact that a few centuries ago, the great authority, Aristotle, made such or such an assertion upon such or such a question. Just as to-day we refer, in Spiritual matters, to the authority of the revelations of religious documents and tradition and not to personal investigation, so, in those days, teachers of Science did not refer to nature the observation of nature, but referred back to written authority. They referred back to the writings of Aristotle.

It is extraordinarily interesting to study a University discourse and to note how doctors and their colleagues relied upon the theories of Aristotle.

Now Aristotle was an intellectual giant; and though we must admit that even such an intellectual individuality should not be taken literally after the lapse of so many centuries, still, on the other hand, we must acknowledge that the works of Aristotle are so prodigious and so magnificent that even if they learnt nothing new, if men had studied Aristotle diligently, that is to say the original Aristotle, they would have accomplished a great deal. For the deeply illuminating teachings and theories of Aristotle could not have failed to have been of the greatest benefit to them.

This, however, was not the case. The lecturers of those days and the teachers who preached Aristotle in season and out of season, as a rule, understood nothing at all about him.

The doctrines taught in the time preceding that of Galileo and Giordano Bruno and claiming to be those of Aristotle were an almost incredibly mistaken version of his teaching. To-day, I will confine myself to showing you from the standpoint of Spiritual Science the place Galileo and Giordano Bruno took in the intellectual life of their time. I would call to mind in this connection an incident which is perfectly true and which I have often related before.

One of the most devoted adherents of Aristotle was at the same time a friend of Galileo's. Galileo, like Giordano Bruno, was an opponent of the followers of Aristotle, and with good reason, but not of Aristotle himself. Galileo maintained that men ought to go to the great book of Nature, which speaks so clearly to man, and learn from there the meaning of the Spirit in Nature. They should not rely entirely upon the books of Aristotle for their final authority. Now at that time, the School of Aristotle taught a marvelous doctrine concerning the seat of the nerves. Their theory was that the whole nervous system originated in the heart, that from the heart, the nerves spread to the brain and from thence spread over the entire body. “This”, said they, “is the teaching of Aristotle, therefore it must be true.” Galileo, who based his information upon the investigation of the human body, carried out by means of his physical eyes, and did not rely upon the teaching of ancient writings and ancient tradition, affirmed that the nerves had their seat in the brain and that the chief nerves originated in the brain. Galileo told this to one of his friends and wished him to see for himself and be convinced. “Yes, indeed, I will see it,” said the friend who took the opposite view, and he attended a demonstration on the human body. Then, indeed, this scholar, who was a devout follower of Aristotle, was greatly astonished and said to Galileo:—“It does indeed seem as if the nerves originated in the brain; yet Aristotle maintained that they originate in the heart. If there appears to be any contradiction here, I would believe in Aristotle rather than in Nature.” Such was the mental attitude which Galileo had to combat. Aristotle, or rather the distorted view of Aristotle, was dragged into all questions connected with Science.

To quote another instance:—A scholar of the Church wrote a treatise on immortality. Let us consider for a moment the method they employed in those days. They took their subject matter from the Church Doctrine, adding to that what they believed to be the teaching of Aristotle on the subject. Thus they used the words of Aristotle to support their own views, twisting his teaching so that they could claim its support, no matter from which side of the question, whether for or against, they wished to argue. To return to our scholar of Divinity. He had collected various passages from Aristotle in order to demonstrate the opinion of Aristotle upon the question of the immortality of the soul. Now this also is a perfectly true incident. The clergy had to submit their books to their superiors before publication. In this case, the superior objected to the book. “It is dangerous,” he said, “It would be better not to attempt it, for these extracts from Aristotle (in support of immortality) might also be used to support the opposite view.” The author of the book wrote back “If it is only a question of demonstrating more clearly the most acceptable meaning of Aristotle on this subject, then I will support it by another quotation, for one could quite well go on making quotations.” In short, from every point of view, Aristotle was used and abused.

From these two incidents, we can see how greatly Aristotle was misunderstood at the time of Galileo and Giordano Bruno. We will take the example of the origin of the nerves in the heart. The meaning of this statement is hidden. We can only understand it when we realize that Aristotle lived at the end of the period of ancient Greek culture and, therefore, at the end of the period of the old clairvoyant consciousness. Because Aristotle looked back into the past, he transmitted a Science that arose out of a clairvoyant consciousness which was able to see behind the material world into the Spiritual. It was this clairvoyant consciousness which had produced the old Science. The essence of this primeval Science was transmitted by the Greek culture as ancient Science, and this it was which Aristotle possessed. He was one of the last who recorded it. But Aristotle was not himself capable of developing that clairvoyant consciousness, for he only possessed an intellectual consciousness.

Note this well. Not without reason was Aristotle the first historian of Logic. This is because the intellectual argumentative thought was to become dominant. Thus, Aristotle assimilated the ancient teaching and reduced it into a logical system in his writings. Hence there is much in his writings which we cannot understand until we have learnt what it is he really meant. Thus, when he speaks of nerves, we must not ascribe to the word the meaning given to it to-day, nor the meaning it had even in the time of Galileo and Giordano Bruno, which was already related to our own. When Aristotle speaks of the nervous system, he means the Etheric Body of man. By which we mean the super-sensible part of human nature, which is closely connected with the human physical body. This Etheric body can now no longer be seen by man, the power of doing so having been lost during man's progressive evolution. Aristotle could no longer see it, but he knew about it, the knowledge having come to him from those times when the clairvoyant consciousness saw, not only the physical body, but also the Etheric Aura, the Etheric Body, which is really the builder and strength-giver of the physical body.

Aristotle drew his teaching from those times in which man perceived the Etheric Body as we now-a-days perceive colours. Thus, if you look at the Etheric Body instead of at the physical body, the former is truly the origin of certain currents. For Aristotle, this origin was not in the brain, but in the heart. The description given by Aristotle of these currents had usually been designated by the title of nerves. By those currents he did not mean nerves in our sense of the word, but he meant super-sensible currents, super-sensible forces. These proceed from the heart, flow to the brain and, from thence, are distributed to the various activities of the human body. These are matters which we cannot understand until we have learnt by means of Spiritual Science about the super-sensible parts and principles of human nature.

Man had lost the power of seeing clairvoyantly even so long ago as the centuries preceding Galileo and Giordano Bruno. Hence people had no idea that Aristotle was speaking of the Etheric Current. They thought he meant the physical nerves, so they asserted that “Aristotle states that the physical nerves proceed from the heart.”

Such was the contention of the devout followers of Aristotle. Those, however, who had studied in the book of Nature could not allow this. Hence the great battle between Galileo and Giordano Bruno and the School of Aristotle.

The followers of Aristotle completely misunderstood him; no-one understood the real Aristotle; Galileo and Giordano Bruno naturally did not understand him either, for they did not take the trouble to penetrate to the real meaning of the works of Aristotle. Thus Galileo and Giordano Bruno were the two great Intellectuals of their time, who turned away from the pedantry of the Scholastics and of book-learning to the great book of Nature itself, which is available to each and all

Professor Laurenz Muellner, for whom, as philosopher, I have the greatest admiration, refers to this in a lecture which he gave in 1894 as Rector of the Vienna University. In this lecture, he drew attention to the fact that the great Galileo, with his wonderful knowledge and grasp of all the great laws of mechanics, had discovered the laws which govern the distribution of space. Now it is just these laws which govern the operation and, distribution of space which strike the eye and stir the emotions so very forcibly when we see them exemplified in St. Peter's at Rome. This mighty building influences us all. And each one experiences something tangible, which we can all understand. Let me illustrate this by the following example:—Speidel, the Viennese journalist, and the sculptor Natter were driving in the neighborhood of Rome. As they approached the city, Speidel suddenly heard a most extraordinary exclamation from Natter, who was a very genial spirit. Natter sprang suddenly to his feet. His friend could not think what was the matter with him, for he only heard the words “I am frightened”. As Natter would say no more then, it was only later that his friend heard that the exclamation had been called forth by the sight of the dome of St. Peter's in the distance.

Something akin to terrified wonder at the effect of the marvelous distribution of space, created by the genius of Michelangelo, overwhelms all who see this wonderful building. Laurenz Muellner draws attention to the fact that it is owing to Galileo, that great thinker, that it has become possible for mankind to conceive mathematically and mechanically such an effect of space-distribution as meets the eye in the wonderful building of the dome of St. Peter's, at Rome. At the same time, we must not forget that Galileo, who discovered the laws of Mechanics, was born when Michelangelo, the builder of St. Peter's, was almost on his deathbed. This means that it was from the Spiritual forces of Michelangelo that that skill in the distribution of the laws of space arose, which was not available to the intellect of man until later.

From this, we must infer that what we may term intellectual knowledge, knowledge governed by reason, may come much later than the actual composition of matter in space.

If such matters are carefully and thoughtfully considered, it will be seen that human consciousness has undergone a change; that, earlier, men possessed a certain clairvoyance and that the manner of thinking with the intellect does not go back very far. This habit or manner of thinking with the intellect, owing to certain historical necessities, arose during the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Minds like those of Galileo and Giordano Bruno are the first harbingers of what was to come. Hence their fierce opposition to the school of Aristotle and especially to those who first completely misinterpreted Aristotle—who may be taken as the expression of the ancient wisdom—and then used their misinterpretation of him as an argument against Natural Science. We have now indicated Galileo's position in the world. He was, in the highest sense of the word, the man who first inaugurated the system of severe thought necessary for Natural Science, that system of the relation of Natural Science to Mathematics, which has continued on his lines from his day to our own.

What is it that distinguishes Galileo from all other men up to his time? It is the doctrine which he was the first to realize and which he preached with such noble courage, thus proving himself a child of his age. The feelings which possessed Galileo can be to some extent rendered in the following words, which will help us to understand his whole soul and attitude of mind. “Here we stand as men upon the earth. Nature spreads herself out before us, with everything requisite for our senses and for our reason, which is connected with the instrument of the brain through nature”. Galileo says this many times, in various passages in his works, as may be verified, ”through Nature speaks the Divine Spiritual. We men approach Nature, view it with our eyes and study it with our other senses. What we perceive with our eyes, what we receive through our senses, is implanted in Nature by Divine Spiritual Beings. At first, the thoughts of the Divine Spiritual Beings exist yonder; then, as if springing forth from the thoughts of these Beings, come the visible things of Nature as the revelation of. Divine thought. Then come our powers of perception and, above all, our reason, which is inseparable from the brain. There we stand, ready to spell out, as from the letters of a book, and to arrive at the author's meaning, that which Divine thoughts have expressed in Nature.”

Galileo took his stand firmly on the ground upon which all the great minds in the course of earthly evolution have taken their stand. He believed that the manifestations of Nature, the things of Nature, are as the letters of an alphabet, which express the mind of the Divine Spiritual beings. Thus the human mind exists that it may read what the Divine Spiritual Beings have written there, written in the form of minerals, in the course of natural phenomena, in the course of the movements of the stars. Human nature exists that it may read the thoughts of the Divine Mind. To Galileo, however, the Divine Mind is only distinguished from the human mind by the fact that everything that can be thought is thought by Divine Mind at once, in a single moment, unfettered by space or time. Let us apply this to any single field; to the field of Mathematics. We see at once how extra ordinary this conception is. If a student desires to learn all that has as yet been learnt by mankind about Mathematics, he will have or to toil at Mathematics for years. Then, as you know, man's conception of Mathematics depends greatly on time. Now, Galileo argued thus:—What humanity succeeds in grasping in the course of many years is conceived by the Divine thought in one second. Divine thought is unfettered by space or time. Above all, the human mind must not suppose that with its reason limited, as it is, by space and time, it can immediately understand the Divine Mind. Man must strive. He must observe each step. He must study each separate phenomenon carefully. He must not think that he can afford to ignore the phenomena, that he can leave out of account what God has planned as the foundation of the phenomena. Galileo affirmed that it was wrong not to wish to know the, true meaning of the wonderful manifestations which Nature unfolds, by means of human reason, that it was wrong not to strive to ascertain the truth by minute investigation. He affirmed that to endeavour to arrive at the truth by speculation, instead of studying carefully the details of the various phenomena, was an entirely false method of thought.

But the motive which prompted Galileo was quite other than those which give rise to similar language to-day. Galileo would not limit the human mind to observation because he denied the operation of the Divine Mind in Nature; on the contrary, just because the Divine Mind manifests itself in Nature and reveals itself as so great, so powerful and so wonderful; because (to the Divine Intelligence) all creative thought springs into being in a moment, while the human mind requires an eternity in which lovingly to decipher the letters of the Alphabet and can only arrive gradually at the detailed thoughts which they represent. It is humility at the thought of how far human reason is below the Divine Reason which prompts Galileo to warn his contemporaries. “you can no longer see behind the things of sense. Not because this was never possible to man, but because the time for doing so has gone by.”

Observation, experience and individual thought; these composed the standard which Galileo placed before his contemporaries. This he was able to do because, in a certain sense, his mind was cast in a mathematical mould and because his method of thinking was so rigidly mathematical. In illustration of this we will take the matter of the telescope. Galileo heard that a discovery had been made in Holland, by means of which it was possible to perceive the most distant stars in the firmament. We must bear in mind that there were no newspapers in those days. He only heard from travelers that some thing had been discovered in Holland of the nature of a telescope. Galileo could not rest till he had found out for himself what this was and himself invented a telescope by means of which he made the great discoveries which confirmed the theories which had recently been promulgated in the Copernican-cosmo-conception. In order to understand these things aright, we must remember these two facts:—that nothing was then understood of the old super-sensible science, and that Galileo was a pathfinder for the new science. Secondly, that a short time before, Copernicus had given a new aspect to the conception of the world through external thought concerning the movements of the planets round the Sun. We must put ourselves in the position of the men of that time and try to enter into the mentality of those who believed, as men had done for thousands of years before them:—“Here we stand on the firm earth, immovable in space.” To men with views such as these, the idea was now presented for the first time, that the earth was spinning round the Sun with incalculable rapidity. Such a conception literally out the ground from under their feet. We cannot be surprised at the excitement such an idea created in all, whether partisans or opponents. To minds like that of Galileo, the way by which Copernicus had arrived at his conclusions was particularly convincing. Let us examine in the light of the present time the means by which Copernicus arrived at his conclusions.

What made Copernicus arrive at the conception that the planets move round the Sun?

Up to his time, a theory of the universe had prevailed, which was itself not understood because it was intended to be taken in a Spiritual sense. As then understood, it was indeed an impossible conception. Men had to suppose that the planets described the most complicated movements—circles—and then circles within circles. It was precisely this terrible complication of ideas which had to be got rid of. This it was which was so obnoxious to certain types of mind.

In reality, Copernicus made no new astronomical discoveries. Be said to himself “Let us proceed along the simplest lines of thought in order to arrive at an explanation of the movements of the planets.” He expressed his system of the universe in the simplest of terms. And with what a wonderful result! The Sun was placed in the centre while the planets revolved around it in circles or in ellipses, as Kepler proved later. The whole conception of the universe was reduced to a wonderful simplicity.

It was this simplicity which so greatly influenced the mind of Galileo. For he always emphatically affirmed that “the human mind is capable of recognizing truth in its simplicity.” Beauty is to be found in the simple, not in the complex. And truth is beauty.

It was because of its Beauty and because of the simplicity of its Beauty that the Copernican theory of the system of the Universe was accepted by so many minds at that time. Galileo in particular accepted it because he found in the teaching of Copernicus that Beauty in simplicity for which he was seeking.

Now he could see the Moons of Jupiter, which hardly anyone would believe in. The eyes of Galileo were the first to see the Moons of Jupiter which encircle him as the planets do the Sun. It was a solar system in miniature. Jupiter with his Moons was as the Sun with his planets. This discovery confirmed the theories of a solar system constructed in accordance with a conception. It seemed so to Galileo, who applied the theory of Copernicus in miniature to a visible world. Hence Galileo was indeed a Pioneer of the New Science.

Thus it came about that he divided the presence of mountains in the Moons, that there were spots in the Sun and that the Nebulae extending across the stars were disintegrated worlds of stars. In short, all which may be expressed as the revelation of the Divine Wisdom expressed in the world of sense. All this made a tremendous effect upon Galileo. With his mathematical mind, the question of time, which was completely lost sight of in the material conception of the visible world, naturally influenced him greatly. Galileo first created the impulse in the human mind to admit that we cannot see behind the material veil with our normal consciousness: “The super-sensible is not to be understood by the human senses. It cannot be comprehended by human reason. Divine Reason grasps it outside time and space, while man's reason is limited to time and space. Let us confine ourselves to that which, in time and space, our human reason can understand.”

Now, seeing that Galileo achieved such greatness in so many things, he is also, from the point of view of philosophy, one of the most important pioneers of the modern Spiritual development of humanity. Can we then wonder that we also see in him a mind who wished to make clear to himself and to others the relation of man to the world of sense and to his own soul-life.

It is a popular fallacy that Kant was the first to draw attention to the fact that the world around us is nothing but illusion and that it is not possible to arrive at “the thing in itself,” at things as they really are. Expressed rather differently, Galileo had already demonstrated this idea; only, behind the visible, he always saw the all-pervading thoughts of the Divine Spiritual, and it was only from humility and not from principle that he said that only after long aeons of time would mankind be fit to draw nearer to it.

But Galileo said:—“When we see a colour, it makes a certain impression on us. For example, red. Is the red colour in the things?” Galileo used a very remarkable illustration, which showed at once that the primary conception was incorrect. That, however, is immaterial to our purpose. The point we wish to emphasize is the conception itself as an idea of that time. Galileo said:—“If you take a feather and tickle a man on the soles of his feet or the palms of his hands, the man will experience a sensation of tickling. Now is the tickling in the feather? No. It is entirely subjective. What is in the feather is quite different. As the tickling is subjective, so too is the red colour subjective, which is visible in the world.” Thus he compared colours and even sounds with the tickling caused by the application of a feather to the soles of the feet.

Once we realize this, we can already trace in Galileo the beginnings of what came down to us as the philosophy of our modern times. For modern philosophy doubts the possibility of Man's ever being able to penetrate behind the veil of the world sense in any way whatsoever.

Thus we see in Galileo, who was born in 1664, the quiet, determined pioneer, while Giordano Bruno, who was somewhat older, being born in 1648, reflected in his mentality all the great truths which were fermenting in the minds of men such as Copernicus, Galileo himself and others at that period. The mind of Giordano Bruno mirrors for us all the great ideas of that time in a mighty, comprehensive system of philosophy.

What was Giordano Bruno's own personal attitude to the world, quite apart from the mental attitude of the men of his day? Giordano Bruno (who only knew the corrupted version of Aristotle) argued thus:—“Aristotle maintains that a sphere exists which extends to the Moon, thence to the different spheres of the stars; then comes the sphere of
the Divine Spiritual. Thus, according to Aristotle, the Living God must be sought for outside the spheres of the stars.”

Giordano was viewing the Universe according to the conception of Aristotle. He saw first the earth, then the spheres of the Moon and of the Stars. Then, finally, beyond these again, beyond this world and beyond that inhabited by man, in the great periphery of this world, the Divine Spirit, which literally directs the revolutions and movements of the world of the planets.

Giordano Bruno could not reconcile this conception with the actual human experience of his day. That which could now be perceived by means of the human senses, that which he himself perceived when he looked at plants, animals and man, that which he saw when he looked at mountains, seas, clouds and stars, all this appeared to him as a marvelous image of what lives in the Divine Spirit itself. In the moving stars, in the clouds sailing through the air, he saw not only a script written by the Divine Being, but something which might pertain to the Divine Being as a finger or a limb does to ourselves. The fundamental conception of Giordano Bruno was not that of a God who directs the visible world from outside, from the periphery, but a God who is incorporate in every single manifestation of the visible, whose bodily form is the visible world.

If we seek to understand how it was that he arrived at such a conclusion, we find that it was the result of the joy of the intoxication of delight in the spirit of the new age which had just begun. This new age had been preceded by a time during which man had been content to grope about amongst the old ideas of Aristotle. A time in which the leading Scholars, if they walked through woods and fields, had no eyes for Nature and all her beauties, but had their minds wholly set on Parchments and Writings which had originated with Aristotle.

Now, however, the time had come when the voice of Nature began to make itself heard by men. Great discoveries revealed themselves one after another. Mighty minds like that of Galileo pressed on from point to point, recognizing the Divine in Nature herself at every step.

The theory of the God in Nature, in contradistinction to the mediaeval conception of Nature, from which God was eliminated, was accepted everywhere with an universal delirium of joy. To this spirit, every fibre of Giordano Bruno's being responded. “There is Spirit in all things,” he says, “This is proved by physical research. Wherever we see a visible creation, there we shall meet the Divine.” There is only one difference between the physical and the Divine. Because we are men and confined within narrow boundaries, the visible appears to us to be limited by time and space. To Giordano Bruno, the Spirit of God exists behind the sense-world. Not in the way in which (as he thought) it had existed for Aristotle or the men of the Middle Ages. He believed the Divine Spirit to be self-existing; and Nature only the body by means of which its Spirit manifested itself in all its beauty.

Nevertheless, man cannot perceive the whole of the Divine Spirit in Nature, he can only see a part. In all things, in all time and in space, the Divine Spirit is to be found. This was the creed of Giordano Bruno. Hence he says “Where is the Divine? In every stone, in every leaf, the Divine is everywhere. In all creation, specially in beings possessing a certain independent existence”. These beings, which recognise their own independence, he terms Monads. By a Monad, he means something which floats and flourishes in the ocean of divinity. All Monads are mirrors of the Universe. Thus Giordano conceived of the universal Spirit as divided into many Monads, and in each Monad that was an individual Spirit, there was something which was a reflection of the Universe.

Such a Monad is the human soul, and they are many. Indeed, the human body itself is composed of many Monads, not of one. If we understand the truth about the physical body according to the ideas of Giordano Bruno, we shall not see the fleshly human body, but a system of Monads; these Monads cannot be clearly seen, just as we cannot distinguish the separate midges in a swarm; the chief Monad is the human soul. When the human soul comes into existence at birth, so said Giordano Bruno, the other Monads which belong to the soul collect together and, by this, the existence of the Chief-Monad, of the Soul Monad, is made possible. When death approaches, the Chief-Monad discharges and disperses the other Monads.

According to Giordano Bruno, birth is the assembling of many Monads round a Chief-Monad, while death is the separation of the inferior Monads from the Chief-Monad, so that the Chief-Monad may be able to take on another form. For each Monad is obliged to take on, not only the form by which we know it here, but every form which it is possible to take on in the Universe. Giordano Bruno conceives of a procession through every form. Thus he approaches as close as possible—in his enthusiasm—to the idea of the re-incarnation of the human soul.

And with reference to the conception of our collective reality, he says:—Man, with his normal consciousness, stands confronted by this reality. What he first receives are the impressions of the senses. These are his first means of knowledge. Of these, there are four, says Giordano Bruno. The first means by which man acquires knowledge is by the impressions of the senses.

The second are the images we construct in our imagination when the things which have impressed the senses are no longer before us, when we only remember what we have experienced. Here we already penetrate further into the soul. This second channel of knowledge he terms “the power of imagination.” The word must not be taken to mean what it does to-day, but it must be understood in the sense in which it was used by Giordano Bruno. After a man has received what the impressions of sense have to give him, he enters (forming the picture within himself) into the impressions. The impression is made from without on the within. It then follows that man, while he penetrates the things with his reason and then proceeds further, draws nearer to the truth, instead of going further away from it. Hence Giordano Bruno recognises reason, the intellect, as the third means of acquiring knowledge, and in this he has in mind the moment when we leave the objects visible to our senses and ascend to the realm of thought. Then something higher and truer than any impression created by the senses flows towards us.

According to Giordano Bruno, the fourth stage is Reason. Reason to him is a living and weaving in the regions of Pure Spirit.

Thus the system of Giordano Bruno comprises four stages of knowledge. He does not, however, classify them in the same way as they are classified, for example, in my books, “The Way of Initiation” and “Initiation and its Results”, under the headings of Present Knowledge, Imaginative Knowledge, Inspirational Knowledge and Intuitive Knowledge. His classifications are more in the abstract. We must, therefore, think of him in the following way: Giordano Bruno lived first at that point of time when the knowledge of visible phenomena was, advancing, therefore he used expressions which resemble those used now to express knowledge of the ordinary visible world, rather than those which relate to the higher worlds. But when Giordano Bruno looks up to the Spiritual World, we can have no doubt of his meaning from the tremendous emphasis with which he says “The Divine Spirit which exists in everything, which has its bodily form in all things, possesses that of which we have the representation, as the idea is the conception of the thing”.

“In what way is the world in God? How is the Spirit in God?” he asks, and replies: “The Spirit is in God as Idea, as the Thought that precedes the Word.” In everything is the Spirit in Nature, as form, he replies, by which he means, that the idea which exists in the Divine Spirit is in the crystal, which has a form; it is in the plant, which has a form; in the animal, which has a form; it is in the human body, which has a form. Of all visible things which have form, a counterpart exists in the human soul as the concept of them.

Giordano Bruno carries this still further. The things of Nature are shadows of the Divine Ideas. “Note well”, he says, “Our concepts are not the shadows of things, they are the shadows of the Divine Thoughts.” Thus, if we have the things of Nature around us and thus have the shadow of the Divine Idea, our concepts will be again fructified thereby. While we are forming our concepts, the Divine Spirit is weaving His Ideas into the original, so that we come in direct contact with the stream which connects us with the Divine Idea.

When we study the theories of that Physical Science which is to-day called Monism, (unlike that of Giordano Bruno), what strikes us most is the fact that, if we would be consistent in speaking of these theories, we must say “they do not mention the Divine Thought”. But Giordano Bruno did not say that, he was a Spiritualist in the strictest sense of the word. What he has to gibe us out of the true inspiration of the Renaissance relates to the Monads. The assembling of the Monads at birth and their dissolution at death refers to the Divine Thoughts, which, in his conception of the world, flow into the world of ideas; and in his own words “The human thought is a reflection of the Divine.” If this is once thoroughly understood, we shall understand something of the spirituality of Giordano Bruno.

But for this, one thing is necessary: we must distinguish between the real and the unreal Giordano Bruno, between the Giordano Bruno who was so greatly misunderstood and the real man himself.

Giordano Bruno was the master-mind, who, by his unbounded enthusiasm, spread broadcast among his contemporaries the more intellectual achievements of Galileo in the realms of Scientific Thought. This is why every utterance of Giordano Bruno carried such weight. All the joy and enthusIasm of the Spirit of the age, all its delight in the discovery of the working and weaving of Nature in the physical world, was concentrated in the personality of Giordano Bruno. This flood of rejoicing was itself crystallized into a system of philosophy, for the Divine Spirit which dwells in all visible things most certainly illuminated the soul of Giordano Bruno, and he was conscious of it. Hence we can understand those utterances of Giordano Bruno, which we do well to remember; they sound as if Nature herself had a direct message for men in those days. We can only quote a few words here.

Consider how wonderful the following thought is, to which Giordano gives expression in contradistinction to the teaching of Aristotle on the same subject. “The Spirit of Divine intelligence is not beyond the visible world, it is not exterior to it, it is everywhere, wherever we may look. The Divine Intelligence does not dwell in any place exterior to the visible world. It does not dwell in that vague realm, of which we may say ‘something moves in circles wide’, it does mot dwell in a revolving, encircling realm, with which we can communicate only from a great distance. The Divine Spirit is the united principle of that vital force, which is in everything and in Nature herself.”

Such was the language which rang out at that time, such the convictions which sprang from the innermost depths of the soul of Giordano Bruno. The question now remains how best to reproduce this language to-day, so that it will speak directly to our hearts and minds. Hermann Brunnhofer, who called attention to this and had to submit to being called a too enthusiastic admirer of Giordano Bruno, put his words into fine verse:

Non est Deus vel intelligentia exterior
Cirounrotans et circumducens;
Dignuis enim illi debet esse
Internum prinzipuim Motus,
Quod est Natura propria, species propria, anima propria,
Quam habeat tot quot in illius
Gremio et corpore vivent
Noe generali Spiritu, corpore.

Anima, Natura animantia
Plantea, Lapides quae univena ut
Disimus proportionaliter cumastro
Euden composita ordine, etaedem
Contemperata complexion um, symmetus,
Secundum genus, quantumlebet secundum
Specierum numeros singula deslingunlui.

1. Giordano Bruno says philosophically: It is worthy of God to be the inner moving principle of things.
2. See also: Herman Brunnhofer, The Influence of Giordano Bruno upon Goethe—Goethe's Journals—Vol. VII, 1886.

Goethe translates this line for line in the poem beginning:

“What Kind of God were He who from the World
Remained aloof and the great Universe Around His finger twirled?” etc.

This is a poetical translation of the mind of Giordano Bruno through the instrumentality of the mind of Goethe. It was not merely that Goethe wrote these verses with Giordano Bruno's works lying beside him. Some other influence must have been at work than that which would have made Goethe merely recast the words of Giordano Bruno in a poetical form. We see in this how the spirit of Giordano Bruno becomes fully alive in Goethe. Nevertheless it is not only a couple of centuries which have to be bridged when we pass from the days of Galileo and Giordano Bruno to Goethe. We must realise that what in the case of Giordano Bruno had its origin in the first great enthusiastic mood from which arose the philosophic cult of Nature, became in Goethe a mood leading him with complete devotion from one thing to another and finally causing him to bring back into Nature the God whose existence man now learned to feel in Nature herself. In Goethe the mood of Giordano Bruno had become his own. It was born in him, as it were. It was already present in him when, at the age of seven, he took the music desk belonging to his father and arranged on it mineral ores from his father's collection, so as to have some products of Nature herself—for the same purpose he took plants from his father's herbarium. He then placed a little stick of incense on the top of the heap and waited, burning glass in hand, for the Sun to rise, so that he might enkindle the incense from its rays and thus consummate a sacrifice culled from the forces of Nature to the God who lives in the plants and minerals and to whom he had erected an altar.

Thus did Giordano Bruno live in Goethe at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, but in such a way that what lived as the innermost attitude of his soul, Goethe carried into every detail of Nature.

It was this mental attitude which made it impossible to Goethe to understand how the Scientific investigators of that day could attach such importance to the outward signs which differentiate men from animals. The physical Scientists of the eighteenth century maintained that man did not possess the same number of small bones in the upper part of the jaw bone as the animals—viz. the inter-maxillary bones—which contain the sheath of the upper teeth. Animals possess these and this is where men differ from animals. Goethe could not understand this highly materialistic idea. This indeed could not be the God who was the inner vital principle of Nature. The God of whom Giordano Bruno spoke as “circumroians et circumducens.” He must be a God who worked outside Nature, a God who, first of all, made the animals, then made man and then, in order to differentiate man from beast, arranged that animals should have the inter-maxillary bones, while these should be wanting in man.

Goethe was the great investigator of Nature, who endeavoured to show that that which existed in Nature as form was capable of rising higher, and that it is not in anything external, such as the inter-maxillary bones, that the difference between the human and the animal world is to be found, but that something exists in man which, though it may be clothed with tones and muscles like those of the animals, constitutes the higher mind of humanity. This is only another proof of the magnitude of Goethe's genius. He not only discovered traces of the inter-maxillary bone and proved that it had only disappeared in man because it was a subordinate bone, but he also shows that the vertebrae may be distended if the activity of the mind contained in the brain finds this to be necessary. A long time ago, when I was studying the Scientific writings of Goethe, in order to understand his assertion that the bones of the skull are transposed vertebrae, the latter having been extended into the cavities of the skull, I came to the inevitable conclusion that Goethe must have conceived the idea that the brain itself was transposed spinal marrow and that this change had been wrought by the mind. That not only the covering tissue, but that the brain itself had been moved up from the vertebrae and spinal marrow to a higher level. It was a wonderful moment im my life when I discovered that, in the last decade of the eighteenth century, Goethe had written in pencil on a slip of paper “The brain is in reality only a piece of transposed spinal marrow.” Professor Bardeleben relates this in his article in the Weimar Year-Book on “Goethe as Scientific Investigator.”

Thus we see the mood which first appeared in Giordano Bruno applied by Goethe to the different parts of living beings. We see how Goethe applied the ideas of Giordano Bruno—to whom, as we have seen, he approaches so closely, even in his choice of words—in a practical way to everything in natural scientific thought.

This is why Goethe laid such stress upon finding in the whole plant world the metamorphosis of the primal archetypal plant (Urpflanze). Added to the great achievements of Goethe as artist were his noteworthy achievements as a scientific investigator of Nature. In a certain sense, the spirit which had come down from the clairvoyant stages of perception to a material form of vision was incorporated in Goethe, as a personality who saw the Divine in all his observations of Nature, even in the individual plants. The expression “Urpflanze”, Primal Archetypal plant. What did Goethe mean by that? He meant to indicate the Spiritual essence in the various species of Plants. With regard to this, the conversation between Schiller and Goethe at Jena, after a meeting of the Botanical Society, which they had both attended, is important. When they had left the assembly, Schiller said:—“What they said about plants was very unsatisfying.” Goethe replied:—“It might have been expressed differently. We ought to be able to see, not only those parts of the plant which we hold in our hands, but also their Spiritual relationship.” Then he took a piece of paper and drew the structure of a plant in a few strokes. He showed to Schiller that the type is not only present in the Lily, the Dandelion or the Ranunculus, but in all plants. Then Schiller, who could not understand the structure of the primal plant) said:—“That is no reality, it is nothing but an idea.” Goethe was very puzzled and said:—“It would gratify me very much to think that I could have ideas without knowing it and even see them with my physical eyes.” For Goethe could perceive the Spiritual element which permeates all plants. He saw it so clearly that he could even draw it. The same applies to the primal archetypal animal in all animals.

Thus Goethe pursued the God who does not work from without the material world, but who lives and operates within all visible things. Thus he followed the Divine Spirit which moves invisibly in everything, working in a concrete way from plant to plant, through leaf, blossom and fruit. It works in the same way from one animal to another, and also from one bone to another, from one animal form to another. It is interesting to note that Goethe was not understood by the men of his own time, not even by Schiller. But little by little the spirit of Goethe will take root even in the thought of the Natural Scientists. It will be acknowledged that Goethe's ideas were a stage higher than those of Giordano Bruno. Giordano Bruno spoke of a God, a pantheistic God, who is to be found everywhere, in plants and in animals. But Goethe, although he too sought the great spirit who does not operate from without, said further:—We must not only seek for Him in general; we must study the detailed phenomena and look for the Spirit in the separate things. For it lives in one way in plants, in another in mineral; one way in this bone and another way in that.

The Spirit is in perpetual action; it forms the various parts of matter, matter follows the moving spirit. This can be expressed as one universal spirit, as was done by Giordano Bruno. It can also be sought with deep devotion in every single detail, as Goethe did. In this way, man draws nearer and nearer to the Spirit at work in the outspread carpet of Nature, by degrees will that Spirit reveal itself.

If we study the successive stages of progress represented by Galileo, Giordano Bruno and Goethe, and search for the root principle which directed such great minds, we shall learn by degrees to adhere to the root principle which directed them, and not to be led away by the will-of-the-wisp of superficial criticism. For even the greatest minds do not escape criticism. Let us take Galileo with his great conception of the Divine, which embraced the whole of Creation in the span of one moment, and was unfettered by space or time. When we consider this, the question is bound to arise:—“What do the men of to-day know about the real significance of Galileo?” As a rule, they know little more about him than the one incident which is assuredly not true, that he said, as is supposed, “It moves, nevertheless.” A fine saying, truly, but, as can be seen from the investigations of the Italian scholar, Angells de Gubernatis, it cannot be true. And how often do we not hear that the last words of Goethe were:—“More light”, which is exactly what he never did say.

Hence we see that these great minds must be studied in the light which Spiritual Science is able to throw upon them, We cannot, as we are so fond of doing, judge of the past with our own, individual, unaided, modern mind.

These three master-minds form a wonderful, harmonious triad, which marks the beginning of our modern age; in Galileo and in Giordano Bruno we see the dawn, in Goethe we see the Sun itself, which show how the Spirit of the modern age already taught him to see that the smallest atom of matter cannot exist without Spirit behind it, which brings one atom in touch with another.

I would call to your remembrance an incident which Goethe relates himself. Many years after the death of Schiller, it was decided to transfer his remains from their grave to the Princes Mausoleum. There was some difficulty in deciding which were really the bones of Schiller. Goethe was attracted by a skull, which he saw must have belonged to a man of the type of the genius of Schiller; on closer inspection, he decided that this must be Schiller's skull, as he recognised it from the strongly marked peculiarity in the shape of the skull. This skull was accordingly placed in the Princes Mausoleum. Here he recognised the principle, which was also recognised by Galileo, that the spirit (or genius) must be sought for humbly and mathematically.

The ancient church lamp still hangs in the cathedral at Pisa, swinging backwards and forwards before countless souls. But Galileo had only sat before it once, when he measured the beating of his pulse by the regular swinging of the lamp and thus discovered the laws of balance, which are of such vast importance to-day. This was a Divine Inspiration. There are many such cases. At the grave of Schiller, Goethe was inspired with the thought which lived in the philosophic inspiration of Giordano Bruno. “Spirit is inseparable from matter. It is everywhere. Not, however, tossing it wildly about and driving it round, but, as Spirit which exists in the minutest atom.” This conception of the Spiritual, which existed in Giordano Bruno, was re-born in Goethe's soul, as he held the skull of Schiller in his hand, and, as water congealed into ice, so was the Spirit of Schiller made manifest to him in the skull of Schiller.

Goethe's entire spiritual standpoint lies before us when we study the poem which he wrote after having looked on Schiller's skull. Especially those lines, which are so often misinterpreted, and which we can only understand when we realise that in the situation which we have described above, Goethe saw the individuality of Schiller in plastic form before him, as if frozen.

Then he cries, as he must do, forced thereto by the similarity of the Spirit which united Giordano Bruno and Goethe:

Was kann der Mensch imleben mehr gewinnen,
Als dass sich Gott-Natur ihm offenbare,
Wie sie das Feste ladesst zu Geist verrinnen,
Wie sie das Geisterzeugte fest bewahre.

What can a man wrest more from life
Than that Nature, all-divine, reveal to him
How that she causeth the firm and formed to melt into Spirit,
And how what is born of the Spirit she holdeth fast in form.

It could weigh like a nightmare on the world-conception based on spiritual science if in all earnestness and truthfulness it were obliged to come into opposition to the well-founded results of the investigations carried out by natural science—investigations which in the course of the last centuries, and especially during the nineteenth century, have accomplished such great things and brought such blessings on mankind, not only in the field of knowledge but in the whole field of human progress. But it would be particularly depressing if spiritual science were compelled to take a stand in opposition to a branch of natural science which is comparatively one of the youngest, but which by virtue of its nature and its special tasks is able not only to arouse human interest in the deepest sense of the word, but also to open perspectives into the very coming-into-being of our planet, as well as into the origin and evolving forms of the creatures inhabiting it. This young branch of natural science is Geology, the science which, especially since the second third of the nineteenth century—but also already prior to that—has made such tremendous strides and achieved results of real importance, even though the great questions about which we shall have to speak still remain open. Our main purpose today will be to envisage the relationship in which spiritual science must stand to geology—and to answer the question, how much from the point of view of spiritual science—that knowledge which has always formed the base of our considerations here—has geology to say about the question concerning the origin, the gradual emergence and evolution, of the earth and its living organisms?

To answer this question we must first think briefly of the way in which the methods employed in the specific study of geology really work. It is, of course, well known that geology draws the content of its knowledge from the solid ground of our earth itself, and that out of what it finds there—within the earth's strata—it forms its conclusions concerning the way in which our planet may have come into existence and the changes it has undergone in the course of time. We know, if, for instance during railway-construction or work in stone quarries or mining-operations, any breaking-up of the ground gives us the opportunity of studying deeper layers of the earth in regard to their rock formations or other contents, that these layers present a different appearance from that of the ground on which we tread—which is the outermost surface. But within this surface-layer, too, we discover very manifold variations when we investigate the ground as to the nature of its rock-formations and mineral character. And it is perhaps also known that some of the most interesting studies are concerned with layers of the earth's surface whose character is clearly such that we can say: the material which covers the ground must originally have been dissolved in water or have been subject to the force of water in some other way, must once have been washed up as it were by the waters in times long past. We still see today how rivers carry accumulations of shifting rocky material far away and deposit them in other parts. We see the ground covered by such alluvial deposits and we must conceive that in the same way, in far distant times, successive layers of deposits were formed. Over one layer which originated in that way we have to imagine another covering it which, on examination, proves to be different in character from the one below. Thus in its successive layers, the earth shows us how the character of their rock-material differs. It stands to reason that the upper strata must be the latest, superimposed by the most recent occurrences on the earth. As we have occasion to penetrate more and more deeply and to study the lower parts of the earth's crust, we come to strata which are the deposits from earlier and ever earlier times, successively overlaid by the later ones. Likewise it is common knowledge that within these strata of the earth all kinds of forms have been embedded, originating, according to present-day concepts, from organic beings of the animal kingdom, from plants which, carried away by the waters and the alluvial layers, have met with their death, as it were, and by this natural process have become thus entombed, and then, more or less changed or unchanged, are to be found there in the rock-material as the remains of prehistoric organic beings. Nor is it difficult to come to the conclusion that a certain relationship must be presumed between such a layer of rock-material and the fossil remains of animals and plants within it. But we must not imagine that the younger strata have overlaid the older ones so conveniently over the whole face of the earth; on the contrary, there is clear evidence that sometimes older strata—recognisable by their character—extend to the surface, that in the course of the earth's development manifold disturbances have occurred through sets of layers having become intermingled, overlaid, upturned, and so on. So that it is by no means an easy task for the geologist to determine how one layer has been deposited over the subjacent layer. These are matters which can only be mentioned briefly here. In any ease we need not concern ourselves with the irregularities just referred to; we may assume that the geologists have access to the earth's strata with their fossiliferous constituents, and that from this they draw their conclusions as to the appearance of the earth at the time when the present top layer had not yet been deposited or successive lower beds did not yet exist, and that in this way it is possible to form some idea of the appearance which our earth must have presented in times gone by.

Moreover, it is an interesting and generally known fact that the upper layers—and therefore the youngest of our terrestrial material—contain fossils of more highly developed forms of animal- and plant-life, and that in the deeper layers we come to fossil remains of less developed forms of life, which today we are accustomed to count among the lower species and genera of the animal- and plant-kingdoms. We then come, as it were, to the lowest layers of the earth's crust, overlaid again and again by others; we come to the so-called “Cambrian” layer of our earth's development and find there only fossil remains of animals which did not yet possess a spinal column. We find other animals with a spinal column in the upper layers, which geology is therefore justified in regarding as the younger layers in earth-evolution:

Thus geology seems to be fully in conformity with what natural science knows today from other inferences, namely, that in the process of the earth's evolution the living creatures have developed by slow degrees from quite primitive to more perfect forms. When we now examine the Cambrian bed, namely, the lowest layer, and imagine that all the other layers had not yet come into existence, we shall have to assume that in the most ancient times there existed only the lowest animal forms, which as yet had no skeleton and were the first predecessors of the still undeveloped animals which were entombed in the deposits covering the lowest stratum of the rock-material. Then we must imagine that these beings have had descendants, that the latter may have underdone changes under the then prevailing, different conditions. In the next layer, which is again younger, we discover those animals in which there are already some indications of skeleton-like structures. And as we approach the younger layers we see evidence of more highly-developed animal species, until we come to the tertiary layers, where we already find the mammals, and then, in layers still younger than the tertiary layers, man.

As you know, there is a line of thought today which simply assumes that the lower animals of the Cambrian period have had descendants, some of which remained unchanged, while others developed towards vertebrate forms and so on; so that the appearance of more highly developed animals in the later, younger layers has to be explained by the assumption that the most primitive and simple forms of animal- and plant-life gradually evolved to higher forms. That would give a clearly outlined picture of the gradual development of life and also of the other occurrences on our earth—roughly as it might have presented itself to the eye of an observer who could have looked on during the billions and billions of years which geology has calculated for these happenings. Some idea of the methods applied and of the manner in which research is conducted may be gained from the following.—If, for instance, one observes how certain layers are still being formed today as alluvial deposits washed up by river-action or the like in the course of so and so many years, and if by measuring the thickness of such a layer a certain measurement is obtained by which it can be reckoned how many years it has taken for that layer to be deposited – then one can calculate how long the accumulation must have taken of all the layers we have had under review—provided that conditions were the same as they are today. As a result, the most divergent figures are obtained from the calculations made by the geologists. There is no need to enlarge upon contradictions which arise from this; for anyone who understands the contradictions will know that they have no essential significance, although they are really sometimes rather pronounced and amount to many billions of years according to the results obtained by different investigators.

When we contemplate all this we have, after all, only a picture of the course which, according to the ideas of geology (conceived and expressed precisely in the tone applied in the present description), the events in the evolution of our earth have taken during the later billennia. Moreover, geology compels us to presume that all these happenings have been preceded by others. For all these layers which contain remains of animal life rest, as it were, on others, and such others, having pushed through the overlaid layers, then protrude over the surface, form mountains, and thus become visible. The tenets of geology, therefore, lead to the conclusion that all fossil-carrying layers of our earth are resting on some other layer—a conception which takes us back, so to speak, to an age of our earth which preceded all “life.” For the composition of this oldest and lowest stratum of the earth's crust shows us that, when it came into being, there could not—at least according to ideas prevailing at the present time—have been on the earth any “life” as it is today. For geology finds itself compelled to assume that the lowest stratum owes its origin to a fire-process within which any possibility of life is unthinkable. Geology, therefore, would take us back in the process of our earth-evolution to olden times when as it were out of a fire-process the oldest rock-formations and minerals originated, while only later the basic foundation of the lowest layer was overlaid by the younger, fossiliferous layers through other events, events which occurred when, through radiating its warmth into cosmic space, the earth had cooled down sufficiently to make life possible. One has to envisage all this as being accompanied by processes of a physical and chemical nature, which cannot be described in detail.

If in this way we look back into those oldest times of our earth when a certain degree of cooling down had already taken place (for geology conceives the earth before the time of the first rock-formation as still in a state of heat), we find our globe, evolving towards the surface, possessed of a basic layer, and we observe how over this basic layer have spread those layers which with their fossilised remains provide living witnesses of the fact that life has existed on the earth for a very long time. When we consider those oldest layers upon which the life-carrying layers are resting, and study their rock-material which consists mainly of what is called granite,¹ we envisage our globe in a form which, according to modern geology, still presents itself in a kind of lifeless condition. That is where the upper layers are open, and granite protrudes and forms mountains, so to speak, as a witness of the oldest times of our earth.

When Goethe, who besides being a great poet was also a great student of Nature and of natural philosophy, found this oldest rock-formation of the earth—granite—it was borne in upon him that this granular rock-material is something on which, as on the bone-skeleton of the earth, everything else rests. Intuitively, Goethe experienced this as the echo of a primeval quiescence of our planet—and it was with reverence that he regarded this rock-formation. A man of his calibre was bound to contemplate the occurrences within earth-evolution not merely with his intellect but also with his heart, searching for what these remains can reveal of the earth-being. Profoundly moving and leading more deeply into the secrets than all abstract thinking are the words spoken by Goethe when face to face with this “oldest son of the earth” as he calls the granite:

“... With such sentiments I approach you, you most ancient, most noble monument of the time. Sitting on a high, bare summit with a free view over a wide landscape, I can say to myself: There you are resting directly on ground which reaches down to the very lowest depths of the earth. No newer layer, no accumulations of alluvial deposits have interposed themselves between you and the firm basement of the primeval world; you do not walk, as you do in those fruitful, beautiful valleys, over a perpetual grave; these summits have produced nothing living, have devoured nothing living; they are prior to all life, above all life. – At this moment, as the inner attracting and moving forces of the earth are directly affecting me, as it were, while the influences of the heavens are weaving more closely about me, I become attuned to higher contemplations of nature; and as the human spirit vitalises everything, so too does a secret stir within me, a secret of a sublimity which I cannot resist. Such loveliness, I tell myself as I am looking down from this bare summit and hardly able to see some modestly growing moss far away on the river bank, such loveliness, I say, overcomes the man who wants to open his soul only to the oldest, the first and deepest sense of truth.”

Goethe: Abhandlung über Granit.

That is the mood which came over Goethe when he contemplated this rock-formation, which by its whole nature showed that it could not contain anything living, and consequently could not, like the overlying layers, have engulfed anything living.

Sketchy though it is, what I have been able to illustrate so far shows nevertheless—as if outlined in a rough charcoal drawing—the picture given us by geology today of the course of the evolution of the earth and its living creatures. It was not, however, always so conceived; this way of thinking has developed only very gradually. In the days of Goethe, for instance, when he occupied himself with geology, a certain dispute was raging about the origin of our earth—the dispute between the Plutonists and the Neptunists, as it was called. One of the principal supporters of the latter was the geologist Werner, who was also acquainted with Goethe. He held that, generally speaking, nothing that we are able to observe of the accumulated layers within the earth's crust can be traced back to any kind of action by fire, but that everything we can learn from investigations points to the earth having in effect consolidated out of nothing but a watery element, out of a watery form of the planet, that even the oldest strata are alluvial deposits from water and that, consequently, granite too owes its origin not to the action of seething fire, but to watery deposits—and only in the course of time, through later occurrences, underwent changes which make its watery origin less apparent today. Everything, so to speak, has originated from water—that was the basic conception of the Neptunists and especially of Werner. Contrary to this, the contention of the Plutonists was based on the assumption that the earth, together with the whole planetary system, had emerged out of a gaseous cosmic nebula in a state of high temperature, had detached itself through cooling down, that this process of cooling continued through radiating heat into cosmic apace, and that then the time came when heat-conditions made the formation of granite and perhaps of similar kinds of rock-material possible; but that through the radiation of heat only the surface-crust of the earth was cooled down, while the interior remained in a state of fiery fluid, and that volcanic eruptions and earthquakes are living witnesses that the interior of the earth beneath the crust remains in a fiery-fluid state. The adherents of the Neptunistic school, on the other hand, saw the cause of all volcanic phenomena in processes which, through pressure from within or through chemical conditions in the interior of the. Earth—by no means thought of as fiery—made it possible for mighty catastrophes to take place in the interior and erupt outwards. So that only at this juncture events occur which in their upward trend have the effect of pushing up whole mountain-massifs out of the interior of the earth.—In short, here we see a very interesting dispute being carried on as recently as the first half of the nineteenth century about the conception which, on the one hand, can be briefly put in the words used by Goethe in his “Faust:” “Everything has its origin in water,” as against the other contention that fundamentally all terrestrial formations are the result of fire-processes and that it must be imagined that on the surface of the outer crust—corresponding in its relationship to the interior to that between the egg-shell and the yolk of the egg—events have taken place through which quite a thin layer has remained in a cooled condition, forming, as it were, a covering sheet all round the mighty earth-volcano, which this planet under our feet was conceived to be.

Now we must ask ourselves: What has this external investigation to tell us? And what, with the means elucidated, in the lectures given so far, has spiritual science to reveal about the origin of the earth? (Concerning the present and earlier evolutionary stages of the earth, more detailed information can be found in my book “Occult Science.”) How far, then, does geology lead us? We will now put into plain words what geology can tell us. It is this:—

Look at the layer-formations to be found in the earth's upper crust. The order of their superpositions shows that alluvial deposits have formed—in any case, in most recent times—as a result of which animal beings have been entombed, whose descendants are still on the earth, but also those which have now become extinct and of whose existence as inhabitants of the earth we know only from the excavation of their remains. Then we are led to the lowest layer of the earth's crust; it still belongs to that part which is to the whole planet what the egg-shell is to the yolk of the egg, and shows signs that it might well owe its origin to fire-action. But those with deeper insight—Goethe, for example—are more cautious in their pronouncements—also when they are intent on thinking entirely in terms of geology. And it is interesting to hear what Goethe says about this lower layer:

“... In the innermost bowels of the earth it (this layer) rests, firm and unshaken; its back rises on high, where its summit was never reached by the all-surrounding waters. So much, and so little more, do we know of this rock-material. Composed in a mysterious way of known constituents, it does not entitle us to trace its origin to fire anymore than to water.”

Thus Goethe already points out that in the last resort neither fire-action nor water can be thought responsible for the mysterious formation of this oldest son of our earth—granite. If against the investigations of geology, which anyhow have reached a point from which they cannot lead us any further, we quite simply set down what spiritual science has to say, what clairvoyant investigation has revealed, it presents itself somewhat in the following way.

When with the eyes of Spirit—which can be sharpened by the methods repeatedly indicated in these lectures—we look at the prehistoric times of our planet, we observe what would have presented itself to our physical eyes approximately during the periods covered by geological research. We also see how in this research into the past, geological investigation had to resort to speculative phantasy. And looking backward from those beings which from our human point of view we call perfect today, we come to ever less and less perfect forms of life on the earth with a mixture, at times, of grotesque forms as, for instance, the various Saurian types such as Ichthyosaurus, Plesiosaurus, Dinosaurus, Archaeopteryx. We then find creatures without any vertebrate skeleton, and so, with clairvoyant vision, we do indeed come to a tellurian epoch in which we cannot find such beings as are now living on our earth. We must admit, therefore; that drawing from its own sources, spiritual-scientific research also reveals this gradual advance in degrees of perfection. When we now go back in time and clairvoyant research comes to the period connected by geology with granite, which according to the modern theory coagulated out of the tellurian mass already cooled but still subject to the effects of fire-action, we must ask: What has geology, what has spiritual science, to regard as prerequisites for conditions prevailing in an earlier time?

If in the field of geology we remain on really safe ground (and no student of natural science ought to doubt what I am now saying), geology has only suppositions in regard to what precedes the granite-age; likewise geology can have no more than suppositions about conditions in the interior of the earth. For the bores that have been driven into the earth by drilling-operations reach depths which must be regarded only as tiny pin-pricks. There are suppositions, hypotheses, and nothing else—at best some dim divination about conditions which preceded the weaving and surging processes in granite-formation and so forth.

Now spiritual science—with the specific outlook often characterised here—follows earth-evolution backward into prehistoric times and finds in the domain which eyes can observe ever less and less perfect beings as the forerunners of all forms of life on the earth at the present time. But, tracing evolution backward in this way, spiritual science finds that there is a stupendous difference in the earth's appearance as compared with what it is at present. When we go back to pre-historic times, the earth does not present itself in the very least as we know it today, as the mineral base on which we walk surrounded by air with its fog and cloud-formations and so on. A great number of substances which are now in the interior of the earth were still in the surroundings of the earth in earlier times and settled only by degrees. This must also be admitted by geology. But we find, the further we go back, that our earth appears more and more as an utterly different planetary body, becomes something totally different; as we go further back, what is now the surrounding air does in effect take on the character of a living entity; in the environment of our earth we do not find only such mineralised air and cloud-formations as we have them now, but in the most ancient times we find within all that belongs to our earth something like live members of a great living being. And as we go back in this way we can see ourselves as if we were quite tiny beings today, standing within a human organism: if, standing within it on a firm, bony base, we looked out into outer space, we should there observe the blood-system, the nervous-system and so on, like an outer world. Thus one who stood on the earth in the remote past and looked out into space would not have seen a weaving, mineralised air but intense, pulsating life. And the further we go back the more this would be the case. So that we could go back to the epoch to which we assign granite-formation and reflect: There the earth is essentially a mighty, living body, containing multifarious and varied life within it, not yet inhabited by such living beings as move today on its surface or live in the water, and so on, but having their life within it—like parasites of the entire living earth-organism, swimming as it were in its blood, as today masses of rain float through the air. And then we come to a period of which we must say: It is true that on the earth's surface the heat is so great that life cannot develop; but in the environment life is developing which wants to, but cannot descend. Why is it that it cannot descend? Down in the depths, through the fire-process, under conditions of intense heat—it is there that what the living organism of our earth segregates out of its system as our living organism segregates the hard parts, the bones from the soft parts, is first absorbed. And now we look at the granite-formation and say: Originally the material which the granite contains—quartz, feldspar and mica – is in a state of dissolution within the great living being “Earth.” The 1atter needs for its development the capability to discard these substances: it segregates them and lets them fall to earth. What is below absorbs these segregations, builds up a basic massif, a bone-structure in the living being “Earth.” And when we go still further back we must investigate the causes as to why the whole living earth segregates from its organism the substances which today, as chemical-substances, form our earth and which at the same time are not those which appertain to the animal, plant, or human organism. These chemical substances were at that time segregated in a similar way through the effect of fire or water action, and were then transformed into the bone-structure of the earth.

When we now reflect how it is that there are these substances which were eliminated from the living earth-being and form a solid foundation from which life has departed, and when we search for the causes which could have brought this about—then we come to something which, if spoken of as part of the development of our earth, is still apt to cause wide-spread annoyance today—not indeed among the thinkers in natural science (for they ought to acknowledge it) but especially among those who on the strength of a few preconceived ideas want to build up a world-conception. But a true picture must be given of the facts established by the investigations of spiritual science. They show that these processes—the segregation of the rock-materials—have been preceded, within the living being of the earth, by a process which in terms of anything occurring today can only be described as similar to our own internal-functioning, little known to external science, but already described to some extent in these lectures – as similar to that activity which functions all day in our own body when through work, through mental effort, we exert our muscles or the instrument of our brain—in short, our whole body. What is in operation here is the process we call “fatigue.” It is, in essence, a kind of destructive process of the organism. Therefore we can say: As we live our waking life today from morning till night, through thinking, feeling and willing, processes of destruction are working within us which we then feel us “fatigue.” A world-conception based on natural science would not readily admit that such processes of spirit-and-soul, working into matter as they do, underlie external effects in nature. But they functioned; they were at work in that mighty organism which the earth once was. And when the earth approached the time when granite and similar material segregated, it was laid hold of by all such destructive processes—which were the means whereby forces of spirit-and-soul worked upon matter. Into that organism into which formerly were worked not only the substances appertaining today to the plant, animal and human organisms, but also the substances which today constitute our earth-massif – into this organism flowed the effects of all these destructive processes that were due to the working of forces of spirit-and-soul. These destructive processes were introduced into the life of the great being “Earth” by forces which then brought about the ejection.- through a process of segregation, as it were—of those chemical substances which today are incorporated in the make-up of our earth, and which are not to be found in organic bodies.

Thus spiritual science leads us back to the earth as an organism—not to a primeval state in which the earth was, so to speak, dead matter; on the contrary, the earth was originally a mighty organism. From the point of view of spiritual science one must practically reverse the way of asking a question that is put quite wrongly today. No science which assumes that the earth was once a dead globe in which only chemical and physical processes were active will be able to explain how life could arise out of this dead globe. This is a highly controversial question; but as a rule it is put quite wrongly. For generally people ask: How could “life” have developed out of the lifeless?—But that is not how it is: the living is not preceded by the lifeless, but them reverse is the case; the lifeless is preceded by the living. The lifeless mineral is a product of segregation, as our bones are segregations of our organism. Similarly, all rock-material is a product of segregation in the earth-organism, and processes of spirit-and-soul forces—processes of destruction in the first place—are the means of producing such segregations in the organism of the earth. And were we to go further back we should see how this path would lead us much further still. We are led by what operates in the mineral domain to the earth as an organism, and indeed we already see, as we go still further back, that we are being led not only to an organism, but to a formation of our planet that is permeated with the working of forces of spirit-and-soul. No longer do we trace life back to the lifeless, but we trace the lifeless back to processes of segregation from the living, and we regard the living as a state emanating from the sphere of the spirit and of the soul. And the further we go back, the nearer we come to that sphere in which lies the real origin of the present minerals, the plant-forms and so on: we approach the Spiritual and we let spiritual science tell us that it was not merely out of a lifeless, fiery nebula that there came into existence all that we perceive in the manifold forms of earthly phenomena, but that all this has taken shape out of the Spiritual, that originally our earth was pure Spirit, and that the course of evolution was such that on the one side emerged those forms which tend more towards the mineral element, and that on the other side the possibility arose for certain new forms to develop, capable of responding to spiritual functions of a new order. For if we now proceed in the opposite direction and say: In the old rock-material we have something which segregated out of the original organism of the earth, and if we then go on to our present age, this segregation is going on all the time. Granite is merely the oldest segregation; but the processes which bring about the segregation will be ever less and less living processes; for more and more they will tend to be mere chemical, mere mechanical processes; so that at last, in our time, we still have only those effects due to water-action, which can be observed when, for instance, a river carries rock-material from one place to another. But what we perceive there as the result of mechanical-chemical processes is only the final product; this has turned into the minerals in accordance with the laws of nature; it is a state resulting from what was originally at work in the realm of the life-forces.

And so we see how actually in the course of the development of our earth something takes place in connection with the formation of the ground beneath us, which we find in a similar way in the individual human or animal organism. There we see, how a man lives to a certain age, how he then passes through the gate of death, leaving his body as a corpse, and we see the continuation of those processes which are purely mineral processes; during the body's lifetime, however, these chemical and physical processes were an integral part of those working through the forces of spirit-and-soul. Similarly we come back to a time of earth-existence when the processes which today are of a chemical and mechanical nature were caught up and perpetuated by organic—yes, by spiritual and soul-processes. But what is taking place on the ground formation of our earth is, so to speak, only the one stream, left from earlier—to begin with more living, organic processes—and then spiritual processes. This foundation had to come into existence, had to form itself, so that on its firm ground, life of a different order could function – that life which gradually became our life, in order that as time went on such cerebral instruments could develop in living beings which enabled them to become “inwardly” aware of the spirit, inwardly able to form thoughts and produce feelings which, as it were, repeat the outer processes in reflective and emotional awareness. Therefore the whole mass of our earth's substance had to be “sifted,” the present purely mineral substances had to be discarded—and those retained which today can form the organisms which are permeated by a part only of the substance of the old massif. These are the parts which only now can form themselves, for example, into what man is today. The spirit which lives in the human head, in the human heart, that is to say in a being whose organisation is as it were, more refined than that of the planetary being of the earth as a whole, this spirit could only originate in a being from which were eliminated those substances which today do not belong to organic 1ife. This “sifting” of the whole mass of our earth's substance had taken place, and the one part was given over as a foundation to the purely mineral life in order that on it can develop a new life, which we see entering its lowest form at the moment which in later times geology has marked as that of the emergence of the most primitive beings in Cambrian form.

When, with the outlook of spiritual science, we thus observe life as it is today, we shall have to say: This life was originally in the outer atmosphere encircling the earth; then it descended as it were, but could not set foot on the surface of the earth until after it had sent down in advance all that it needed of mass-substance—as a basis on which to function. The process of decomposition, caused by processes in the domain of the spirit-and-soul forces, introduces two currents which have since been in operation: an ascending current, which unfolded a life of a finer, higher order – this needed only a part of the mass-substances—and another current which continued the process of decomposition and provides a foundation for the finer organisms, which then culminate in the human being. The development of these finer organisms is in the ascendancy. Why? Because (and again this would not be admitted today) through having segregated the coarsest material as in a mighty process of elimination, which then became the surface of the earth, they were in a position to isolate themselves more or less from the earth and its inner processes—and are now open to cosmic influences streaming towards the earth from outside. They are now exposed to the more spiritual effects of the cosmos and it is to this that they owe the ascent from primitive forms of life to that of man.

Looking thus at the development of the earth, we regard the firm ground on which we walk – irrespective of the various processes—in such a way that we say to ourselves: On it we stand; it contains—in the granite and in the superimposed deposits—that which the kingdoms of the living beings could not use except as material ejected to form the ground on which to walk. And what exists as its continuation is a process of destruction and decomposition. That should logically lead to the following reflection – When the modern geologist gives us his explanation of the earth's crust with its valleys and mountains built up in successive layers, this would appear to be something like a decaying corpse, in which an old process of destruction and decomposition continues to work. From the standpoint of spiritual science, we move about on a ground in process of destruction which had to come about in order to give us the firm, solid ground we need when we consider the blossoming forces which point to the future and move in the opposite direction to those we encounter in the body of the earth; for these future-building forces are something which, independent of the solid ground of the earth penetrates into human souls, into human spirits, perhaps also into those beings which are outside the human element, and are only beginning their ascent on the foundation of the solid earth. In the latter itself we should, however, have something in a state of decomposition. From the point of view of spiritual science our earth would appear as a progressively disintegrating dead body, and the geological laws would at the same time be those governing the decomposition of the earth-corpse. And man on earth would be a being who lifts himself out of the dead earth body, just as the human soul, passing through the gate of death, rises from the corpse and abandons it to those forces which bring about its decomposition and destruction.

This may seem to be a gloomy picture. But it can only be so if one despairs of the spirit, regards the spirit as merely bound to matter, and believes that together with man's desertion of the living body of the earth, his end has come. But if we look at things as presented by a sound observation of nature, we shall say: In some way it must obviously come about that not only the individual human being but the whole of humanity gradually throws off the earth-body in order to be able to rise step by step to other realms of development. And so, from the standpoint of spiritual science, the mid-period of earth-evolution had already been passed ever since the time when “the oldest son of the earth” was segregated, and the beings which are beginnings in preparation for the future will unfold further on the foundation thus laid down.

What does modern geology say to this conception of spiritual science?

When dealing with words, theories, hypotheses, world-conceptions so light-heartedly and readily advanced by currents of thought on factional lines and the like, it is easy enough to demonstrate that spiritual science in itself is a contradiction of the way of thinking prevailing in natural science. But if spiritual science, which works as conscientiously and, methodically as any other science, is considered in relation to natural science, it is obviously necessary to pay attention to what natural science really has to say and, particularly in reference to what has been brought forward today, to raise the question: What has geology to say concerning the origin of the earth?—Nowadays, things of a very secondary nature are often presented to the general public in popular scientific publications and in the form of popular views of the world; and then it is said: “Science” has established this end that. If this is compared with what those half-crazy spiritual investigators say, it will strike a good many people as something which cannot be taken at all seriously.—For that is what will be said by many people who perhaps do not know much more about spiritual science than what has come to them indirectly through remote sources. But clearly there is need to turn to what real science and real spiritual science have to say. For spiritual science must not be regarded as being on a par with popular world-conceptions which are only seemingly derived from “science;” spiritua1 science must be examined with the sternness which should be applied to every true science and which its genuine investigators will always demand.

And now we come to somethin6 which I cannot describe to you better than by drawing your attention to a work by one of the most eminent geologists of our time, and which a well-known contemporary geologist has called “the geological epic of the nineteenth century,” namely “The Face of the Earth” by Eduard Suess. It can truly be said that this work, on which Suess has been engaged not merely for years but for decades, gives a comprehensive survey—compiled with the greatest care imaginable—of the investigations which geology, this youngest branch of natural science, has carried out in the course of a few decades. And what does this book show us?

Suess is a man who said: Let us for once set aside all the prejudices of the Neptunists, of the Plutonists, and all the theories amassed by the geologists of the nineteenth century; do not let us speculate, but let us observe the physiognomy, the picture presented by the earth's surface. Starting from a mental attitude based, it is true; on sense-perception but pure and unclouded by any theory or hypotheses. Eduard Suess arrived at results which differed from those that had been current for many decades. He came to the conclusion that the mountains which tower over us as seemingly mighty massifs, can after all only be likened to wrinkles on the peel of an apple, and can be explained in no other way than by assuming that certain forces of a purely physical-chemical nature are at work in the body of the earth-planet, as the result of which the unevenness, the valleys and mountains, the various layers and so on, have been formed; so that generally speaking, the distribution of water and land, the formation of continents and so forth, can be explained as the result of folds being formed, of certain forces piling up earth-massifs and thus forcing some particular masses of rock up into towering mountains. Other forces again have brought about the collapse of what has been piled on high; and in that way oceans are formed. In short, to such collapses, up-pilings, foldings and the like, he ascribes, for instance, the formation of the Alps. In an ingenious way we are thus shown that the face of the earth has emerged as the result of such aggregations, subsidences, foldings and so on. The formation of oceans and continents is explained asbeing brought about through certain subsidences causing the waters to be drained off in one direction, so that what had formerly been covered by sea becomes dry land. We are therefore concerned here with an earth-surface subject to processes due to a shaking up of earth-masses through mechanical forces, and to subsidences. And in trying to obtain a general picture of what is happening on the ground on which we walk, Suess arrives at an odd conclusion: that fundamentally the whole process that is taking place on the earth's surface is one of destruction, and that the ground where today we plough the fields and which yields to us the fruits of the earth, only came into existence through the occurrence elsewhere of foldings, subsidences—in short, through processes of destruction. I need quote only a short passage from this most important work of present-day geology and you wil1 see where Eduard Suess's purely sense-perceptive method of research has led this most conscientious natural scientist:

“... The collapse of the globe is what we are witnessing. True, it had already begun a very long time ago, and so the brevity of the span of human life lets us be of good cheer. Not only are there traces of it in the high mountain ranges. Great blocks of earth have sunk hundreds, yes, in certain cases, many thousands of feet, and not the slightest sign of graded subsidences on the surface, but only the differences in the kinds of rock or deep mining betray the existence of a fracture. Time has levelled everything. In Bohemia, in the Palatinate, in Belgium, in Pennsylvania, in numerous places, the plough draws its furrows above the mightiest fractures.”

(Eduard Suess, Das Antlitz der Erde, Vol. 1, page 778.)

Here we have the results of conscientious scientific research concerning the ground on which we walk. And now think of what spiritual science has to say about the inauguration of this process through a process of destruction proceeding from forces of spirit-and-soul, a process which on the one side has its continuation in the physical-mechanical process of destruction taking place on the earth's surface, and which careful research impels geology to admit. So it is in all fields. When you take the results of real research and go by facts, you will always find: here stands spiritual science with all it has to say out of clairvoyant research, and there, provided only that it is free from monastic, materialistic or other prejudices, natural science stands firmly on the pure and sound basis of facts; and everywhere, as you will see, spiritual science links up with natural science in such a way that the latter on the pure basis of facts provides ample proof of what spiritual science as such has to offer. Never are there any grounds for contradictions between spiritual science and true natural science. Contradictions arise only between a sound spiritual science which deals with realities, and the theories of phantasts and of those who, while they claim to be standing on the firm ground of science, at once lose their foothold when their theories do not concur with what the facts proclaim, and adhere to what they themselves would like to say about the facts. Spiritual science lets the spiritual facts speak for themselves and tell what they have to reveal of the cosmic mysteries; natural science speaks of what it has established by its own methods: the two are in full concord. If you ignore those popular works which declare this or that to be a “scientific fact” and go to the sources, then you will find, especially in the field of geology, that the geologists everywhere get to a certain point—and then put a question-mark. Arriving at those question-marks, one can take them as a starting-point for spiritual research. Then spiritual science tells us: if it is true what clairvoyance reveals, the external factual material must appear in this or that form.—In the case of geology it was this: if what spiritual science has to describe is right, then, with the present process of decomposition continuing, our globe must now be in a state of collapse. Geology, adhering to facts, has shown that according to the laws it is so! The findings of true natural science everywhere are in line with the results of spiritual scientific investigation.

When we consider the whole spirit and meaning of this exposition, we shall in no wise be taken aback by the thought that we are walking on ground which is a dead body in process of disintegration. For we realise that on this ground something has developed which again contains seeds for the future. The lectures to follow will show more and more clearly that just as man looks to his spirit, so the spiritual, which once created for its own purpose the ground on which we set our feet, is advancing towards future epochs when it will be revealed on ever and ever higher planes. And when such a man as the geologist Suess—because in his intercourse with nature he enters into all that is beautifu1, even in the destructive processes—expresses his admiration for the wonders of the Face of the Earth, he clothes it in his monumental work in these memorable words:

“In the face of these open questions we rejoice in the sunshine, in the starry firmament and in all the manifold features on the face of our earth, which has been created by these very processes—recognising at the same time the extent to which life is governed by the character and destiny of the planet.”

If even a geologist, rising above all pessimism, experiences such a moment in his soul, how much more does the spiritual investigator who knows the truth of the words of Goethe: “Nature has invented death in order to have abundant life,” and who also knows through perceptive cognition that it is true to say, “Nature has invented death in order to have ever higher and ever more spiritual life;” how much more must the spiritual investigator, knowing this, say: Although we have to regard that which has produced out of itself a higher life as a corpse in process of destruction, nevertheless in all that moves on this ground we see, lighting up seeds of what can quicken hope and assurance in our hearts and tells us: We walk on the ground which a primeval world has given us, and which, through a process of disintegration, or destruction, has let the ground under our feet become what it is. We walk on this ground, divining – as in the spirit we rise to heavenly heights—that in the course of future development we shall have to leave this ground at the right time, in order that we may be received into the fold of the spiritual world with which, if we have the right understanding, our inmost being feels so firmly united.

• 1. It must be pointed out that this lecture was given in the year 1911. Granite was formerly classified by geology as belonging to the archetypal rock-formations, as is also indicated in the descriptions given here by Rudolf Steiner. Today, the rocks included in the Archaean System are only old gneiss-formations and other crystalline schist-formations. It is held today that Granite is of eruptive origin and that there are various epochs of granite-formation. [The above statements refer in general to the actual archetypal rock-material, also when granite is spoken of.

While it is of vital importance in Spiritual Science to study the whole spiritual life of humanity as it advances from one epoch to another, rising slowly to the surface from hidden depths, it is perhaps of still greater significance to study the culture and civilisation of ancient Egypt. We realise this the more strongly when we try to penetrate deeply into this ancient Egyptian spiritual life.

The echoes sounding to us across the ages seem at first to be as full of mystery as the Sphinx itself, standing there as a memorial of the civilisation of ancient Egypt. The mystery grows deeper still when we find that even external research has recently been compelled to go back to ages more and more remote in order to explain the culture of later Egyptian times of which certain physical evidence is still available. According to external research the prime of Egyptian culture must be dated at least seven thousand years before our era, perhaps even earlier still. This may be one reason for the great interest evinced to-day in Egyptian culture, but another is that man of the present day feels, whether he likes it or not, that there is a mysterious connection between this ancient civilisation and his own aims and purposes. It is not without significance that Kepler, at the very dawn of the development of modern Natural Science should have spoken of the achievements of Science up to that time and his own contributions to knowledge, in words like these: “When I have endeavoured to unravel some of the mysteries of the course of the planets round the Sun, I have tried to peer into the secrets of cosmic space. And it has often seemed to me as though I have actually penetrated to the mysterious sanctuaries of the Egyptians and brought their holy vessels into our modern age. I have felt then that the significance of my message to the world will only be understood in the future.” So strongly did one of the greatest minds of modern times feel himself related to ancient Egyptian culture that he could only express the keynote of his knowledge by speaking of it as a renewal of the wisdom given to the disciples in the secret sanctuaries and places of learning in ancient Egypt, although it was clothed, naturally, in different words. It must therefore be of great interest to us to understand how these ancient Egyptians themselves conceived of their whole culture, of their whole nature as human beings.

A certain very significant incident has been preserved by Greek tradition. It indicates not only what the Egyptians themselves felt but the way in which Egyptian culture was regarded by the civilised world in general in olden times. An Egyptian sage once said to Solon: “You Greeks are still children. All you know is the outcome of your own contemplation and vision; you have no ancient traditions, no wisdom hoary with age, and children you will remain.” Wisdom hoary with age—the significance of this expression only dawns upon us when the light of Spiritual Science is cast upon the whole mode and nature of Egyptian thought and feeling.

In the successive epochs different forms of consciousness have unfolded in humanity. Our consciousness to-day, the way in which we grasp the outer world by means of our senses and the combining of intellect and reason, in short, our scientific mode of thought, has not always been in existence; consciousness has ever been subject to the laws of evolution. Not only is the external world of form subject to these laws but man's qualities of soul and consciousness also. This is an indication of the fact that we can only understand ancient centres of culture if we begin by admitting what Spiritual Science tells us, namely, that in olden times, in the place of our present intellectual consciousness, men possessed a clairvoyant consciousness unlike our waking consciousness and yet unlike the complete absence of consciousness during sleep. Traces of this consciousness of prehistoric man are now only retained atavistically as a waning heritage, in the picture world of dreams. But whereas our dreams are chaotic and meaningless in ordinary life, the picture consciousness of the Ancients was “clairvoyant,” although, indeed, of a hazy, dreamlike nature. The pictures referred not to the physical world but to the spiritual world behind. In reality, all clairvoyant consciousness, that of prehistoric man, as well as the clairvoyance acquired by true discipline in this age, works in pictures and not in the concepts and ideas of outer physical consciousness. The pictures must be related to the spiritual realities lying behind the sense-realities of the physical world.

The marvellous pictures that have come down to us in the mythologies are not merely phantastic concepts of Nature, as materialistic consciousness imagines to-day. On the contrary, these pictures indicate an actual vision of the spiritual world. If we study the old mythologies and legends—not with the materialistic consciousness of to-day, but with a true feeling for man's spiritual achievements—the strange stories related in the mythologies will reveal a wonderful connection with cosmic laws higher than our laws of physics, chemistry and biology. A note of spiritual reality permeates the old mythologies and religious systems.

Now it must be clearly understood that the several peoples built up this world of pictures in different ways, according to their own nature, temperament and race. These picture-worlds represented, to the several peoples, the higher forces underlying the purely external forces of Nature. We must also realise that in the course of evolution there have been many transitional stages between the old clairvoyant consciousness and the objective consciousness of modern man. The ancient clairvoyance grew dim and gradually faded away. Clairvoyant powers decreased little by little in the different peoples and the pictures arising before the souls of those still able to gaze into the spiritual world contained less and less of spiritual force. The higher worlds gradually closed their doors until only the lowest stages of spiritual activity were perceptible to lower clairvoyance. Then, so far as humanity in general was concerned, the old clairvoyance died out entirely. Waking consciousness was limited to the physical world around and to ideas and conceptions of physical phenomena. Thus arose our modern science. The old clairvoyant powers gradually faded as the development of present-day consciousness proceeded—although of course the process varied in the different peoples.

All that we know from olden times, even what external documents have told us in recent Egyptian research (if we understand aright) proves the truth of what Spiritual Science asserts, namely, that the mission of the ancient Egyptian people was to look back to still earlier times when their leading Individualities were able, with their wonderful powers of clairvoyance, to gaze into the spiritual worlds. In the people of Egypt a somewhat feebler clairvoyant power was preserved on into relatively late times. The later Egyptians—down to the last millennia before the Christian era—knew from actual experience of another mode of vision besides that of ordinary daily life, a vision enabling man to see into the spiritual world. But they only knew the lowest images of the realm of which this vision made them aware, and they looked back to olden times when their Priest-Sages were able, in the golden prime of Egyptian civilisation, to gaze into the very depths of the spiritual world.

The mysteries of the spiritual worlds were preserved, more especially by the earlier Egyptians, with great piety and reverence for thousands of years. Those who lived in the later Egyptian epoch could say: “Even now we can still perceive a lower spiritual world; vision of the spiritual world is possible and to doubt it would be as senseless as to doubt that our eyes can behold the external world.” These later Egyptians had, it is true, only a dim perception of the spiritual worlds, but they felt that there had once been an age when their predecessors had gazed more deeply into all that lies behind the physical world. And this old Wisdom-teaching—of which the Egyptian Sage spoke to Solon—was preserved in wonderful scripts in the Temples and on the columns, bearing witness to deep and all-embracing clairvoyant powers in days of hoary antiquity. The Being to whom the Egyptians looked up as the embodiment of the primal glory of that old clairvoyant wisdom, was called by the name of HERMES. And when in later times a man came forth with a message which was to renew the ancient wisdom, he also (according to the custom of Egyptian sages) called himself “Hermes,” and his disciples, believing that he had revived the primeval wisdom of the old Hermes, called this first Being, “the Thrice-Greatest,” “Hermes Trismegistos.” (It was of course, only the Greeks who called him Hermes; among the Egyptians he was known as Thoth). We can only understand this primeval Being if we realise what the Egyptians, under the influence of the later teachings of Hermes or Thoth, took to be the true Mysteries of the Cosmos.

Such beliefs as have been handed down to us from Egyptian times by external evidence seem very strange. Various Gods, of whom the most important are Osiris and Isis, are represented in forms not wholly human; we often find human bodies and animals heads, or an amalgamation of human and animal forms. Wonderful legends of this world of Gods have come down to us and there is something very remarkable in the Egyptian animal-worship, the worship of the cat and so forth. Certain animals were even recognised as being sacred animals; deep veneration was paid to them for they were regarded as the embodiment of higher beings. It is even said that cries of lamentations were uttered at the death of cats. Again, we are told that if an Egyptian saw a dead animal, he dared not approach for fear of being accused of having killed it, in which case he would have been severely punished. It is said too, that in the age when Egypt was subject to Rome, any Roman who had killed a cat was in danger of death, because his act aroused such fury among the Egyptians. This animal-worship is an enigma in the sphere of Egyptian thought and feeling. And again—what a curious impression is made on modern man by the Pyramids, standing on their four-cornered bases, with their triangular sides! Strange indeed are the Sphinxes and everything that is being continually excavated and brought to our knowledge from the depths of Egyptian civilisation. And now we will ask ourselves: of what nature was the life of feeling and ideas among the ancient Egyptians? What had Hermes taught them? How did they acquire all these strange conceptions?

We must realise that all these Legends, especially the more significant, contained a deeper wisdom and their purpose was to convey in picture form, knowledge of definite laws of spiritual life, laws higher than those of external Nature. The Egyptian legend of the God and Goddess, Osiris and Isis, is a case in point. According to the legend, Osiris was a Being who lived in dim primeval times in regions later inhabited by human beings. Osiris is represented in the legend as the benefactor of humanity under whose wise guidance Hermes or Thoth gave the Egyptians their ancient culture. Osiris had an enemy, for whom the Greek name was Typhon. Typhon pursued Osiris, killed him, dismembered the body, hid it in a coffin and threw it into the sea. Isis, the sister and spouse of Osiris, sought unceasingly for him who had been torn from her by Typhon or Seth, and when at length she found the fragments of his dismembered body, she buried them in different places in the land where Temples were then erected. Then, after the death of Osiris, Isis gave birth to Horus. A spiritual ray descended upon Isis from Osiris, who had meanwhile passed into another world. The mission of Horus was to conquer Typhon and, in a certain sense, to re-establish the dominion of a life, which, proceeding from Osiris himself, was again to stream into mankind.

Such a legend must not be analysed merely in the sense of allegory or symbol. It should be used as a means whereby we are led into the whole world of feeling and perception of the old Egyptians; for only so can our understanding of such figures as Osiris and Isis become really living. It is not right to state crudely that Osiris is the Sun, Isis the Moon and so forth. An astronomical interpretation of this kind leads men to believe that the legend only contains symbolical images of certain occurrences in the Heavens. This is not the case. Rather must we go back to the feelings living in the ancient Egyptians and envisage the nature of their upturned gaze to super-sensible, invisible Powers underlying the world of sense, and typified in the figures of Osiris and Isis.

Let us try to conceive what the names of Osiris and Isis conveyed to the ancient Egyptian. He said to himself: “Behind man there is a higher spiritual essence, which does not proceed from his material existence. This spiritual essence has ‘condensed' into material, human existence. The real evolution of man has proceeded from a more spiritual existence. When I look into my own soul I realise that I have a longing for the Spiritual, a yearning towards the spiritual wellsprings of being from which I myself have descended. The forces from which I came forth are still living within me. My highest powers are inwardly related to these primordial Osiris-powers within me, bearing witness that I was once a super-sensible being dwelling in other worlds, in worlds of Spirit. And although this being of Spirit has but a dim and instinctive life, although it had perforce to be clothed with the physical body and its organs in order to perceive the physical world, yet in days gone by this being lived a purely spiritual existence.”

According to the ancient Egyptian conception, human evolution must be regarded as a duality, consisting of the Osiris-forces and the Isis-forces. “Osiris-Isis”—this was the duality. Let us consider our own being, as we now exist. The idea of a triangle, for instance, must have been preceded by active thinking. After having been active in soul, we may then be passive as regards the result of our thinking and conceptual activity. Ultimately we perceive in our soul the form that has been built up by our active thinking. Now the act of thinking bears the same relation to the final thought, the conceptual act to the final concept, the active principle to the product of the active principle there before us, as Osiris to Isis. In short, activity per se is a Father-Principle, a masculine Principle. The Osiris-Principle is male, active—filling the soul with thoughts and feelings. The old Egyptian said to himself: “Man as he stands here to-day has within him substances living in his blood or forming his bones, but these substances were not always within his blood or bones, they were spread over cosmic space. This physical body is a combination of substances which have now passed into the human form, whereas they once filled the Cosmos. The same is true of the powers of thought. The active principle of thought has become the power of ideation in man. Just as the substances in the blood now live in the human form but were formerly spread over cosmic space—so the Osiris-power now living within us as the active principle of thought was once spread over the spiritual universe as the Osiris-power that permeates and weaves in the Cosmos, pouring into human beings, just as in the case of the substances composing blood and bones in the bodily nature of man. Into the thoughts and ideas there flow, from out of the Cosmos, the living and weaving Isis-Powers.”—This is how we must envisage the attitude of soul in the ancient Egyptians towards Osiris and Isis.

This old consciousness could find no expression for such ideas in the world surrounding physical existence on Earth; for everything here was known to be of the world of space and it could offer no outer image of the super-sensible world. And so, in search of some form of language, some kind of script in which to clothe such conceptions as “the Osiris-Power is active within me”—men reached out to the script placed by heavenly bodies in cosmic space. They said: “The super-sensible power of Osiris may be envisaged as the active power of light proceeding from the Sun, living and moving through space. Isis may be seen in the sunlight reflected by the dark Moon—just as the soul is dark when the active principle of thought does not enter. The Moon awaits the light of the Sun in order to reflect it, even as the soul awaits the Osiris-Power to reflect it back as Isis-Power.” But when the old Egyptian said—“The Sun and Moon out there show me how I can best picture the activities of my soul,”—he knew at the same time: there is no mere chance connection between the Sun with its outpouring light and the reflecting Moon, but this radiating and reflected light has some inner connection with the super-sensible forces I feel within my soul.

Although we would not describe a clock as something that drives its hands with the help of little demons, but as a mechanical contrivance, we realise, nevertheless, that the thought of the inventor, the thought proceeding from the soul of a human being is at the back of the construction of the clock. Something spiritual, therefore, is responsible for its mechanism. Just as the hands of a clock are interrelated and dependent upon each other, so did the Sun and Moon appear to the Egyptians as the expressions of a mighty cosmic clock. When we gaze at this mighty clock in space, it seems at first sight to be subject to mechanical laws, yet in the last resort it is subject to those laws which a man felt in his soul when he spoke of the powers of Osiris and Isis. The old Egyptian did not merely say: “Sun and Moon are images of the relation between Osiris and Isis.” He also felt: All that lives in my being was once subject to the mysterious relationship between light and the Sun and Moon.

Again, a relation similar to that between Osiris and Isis and the Sun and Moon was seen to exist between the stars and planets and the other Gods. The Egyptians saw in the positions of the Heavenly Bodies, images of their own super-sensible life, or of traditional experiences of ancient Seers, but in these expressions of the mighty cosmic clock they saw a portrayal of forces within their own souls. Thus the great cosmic clock, with the movements of its stars and the relation of its moving stars to the fixed stars, was a revelation of underlying spiritual, super-sensible forces—forces which had determined the positions of all the stars and had created in a cosmic script, an expression of super-sensible activities.

Such were the feelings in regard to this higher world, feelings which had been handed down to the Egyptians by their traditions of ancient clairvoyance. They knew of the existence of this spiritual world because they themselves still possessed the last remnants of ancient clairvoyance. But now they said: “We have descended from this spiritual world and we are now placed in a world of matter manifesting in physical phenomena, physical processes. We come from the world of Osiris and Isis; the highest qualities within us, the qualities which make us strive towards higher perfection, came forth from Osiris and Isis. These qualities live invisibly within us as energy and power. The physical part of man's being is derived from external circumstances, is taken from the outer world. This physical part of man is but the vesture of Osiris-Isis.”

Now this conception of primeval wisdom was the one dominating feeling in the soul of the old Egyptian; it filled his whole life of soul. A man may imbue his soul with abstract ideas and yet remain untouched in his moral and ethical life; his sense of destiny or his happiness may be quite unaffected. Abstract and mathematical concepts of Natural Science may be so deeply absorbed that a man can discuss electricity and other forces of a similar nature without feeling any need to concern himself at the same time with problems of destiny. Now the feeling of kinship with Osiris and Isis, the vision of the spiritual world existing in ancient Egypt—these things could not be conceived of apart from thoughts of destiny, happiness and moral impulses. For the ancient Egyptian said to himself: “I bear a higher Self within me, but since I have entered into a physical body this higher Self withdraws to the background and is at first not wholly manifest. Osiris and Isis are the primal source of my being; but Osiris and Isis belong to the archetypal worlds, to the golden, holy ages of long ago. The Osiris-Isis nature is now subject to the forces which have condensed outer physical substances into man's body. Osiris and Isis are fettered within the corruptible body, and this body is subject to decay even as the outer forces of Nature.”

The legend of Osiris and Isis must thus be interpreted in terms of the inner life. Osiris, the higher power in man, spread over cosmic space, is overcome by forces which are subject to destruction in the realm of human nature. The Osiris-power living in man is fettered by Typhon—fettered within a form that is the “coffin” of the spiritual nature of man. Into this coffin the Osiris-nature in man disappears and is invisible to the outer world. The mysterious Isis-nature remains, in order that in future ages, after it has been permeated by the power of the intellect, it may again reach the well-springs of man's being. Thus there lives in man a hidden quality which strives to bring Osiris to life again. The Isis-power lives in the human soul in order gradually to lead man back again to Osiris. So long as man remains a physical being he cannot of course be separated from the world of matter, yet it is the Isis-power which enables him, while he remains a physical being in the outer physical world, to maintain in his inner being a striving towards a higher Ego. And according to every true thinker, this higher Ego is there, deeply concealed in all the powers of man. This being—who is not the outer physical man but the man who has an unceasing urge to rise to the light of spirit, who is ever impelled by the hidden Isis-forces—appears as the earthly son of One who did not arise in the earthly world. He is the earthly son of Osiris who remained in the spiritual worlds. This invisible being—the being who strives to reach the Higher Self, was known by the name of Horus, the posthumous son of Osiris.

Thus the old Egyptians looked up with a certain sadness to the Osiris-origin of man, but at the same time they gazed into their innermost being, saying: “The soul has retained something of the Isis-power and this Isis-power gives birth to Horus who has the urge to strive towards spiritual heights. In these heights man finds Osiris.” Man can attain to Osiris in a twofold way. The Egyptian said: “I came forth from Osiris and to Osiris I shall again return. Osiris, my spiritual origin is within me: Horus will lead me back to Osiris his Father; but Osiris can only be attained in the spiritual world. He could not enter into the physical nature of man. In the physical nature of man he was vanquished by the Typhon-forces which are subject to decay because they are forces of external Nature.”

Osiris can therefore only be reached along two paths. One is the path leading through the Portal of Death; the other is the path through the Portal leading not to physical death but to Initiation. The Egyptian therefore said: When man passes through the Portal of Death and has passed the stages of preparation, he comes to Osiris. When he is freed from the sheaths of his earthly body in the spiritual world, the consciousness of his kinship with Osiris awakens within him. The dead man feels that in the spiritual world he may himself be called “Osiris.” And so, after death, everyone was an “Osiris.”

The other path to Osiris—the other path into the spiritual world—is through Initiation. To the Egyptian this path was a means whereby man could learn to know the Invisible, the Supersensible in human nature—Isis, or rather the Isis-power. In the knowledge gleaned from everyday life man does not penetrate to the depths of his soul, he does not reach the Isis-power. Yet there is a means whereby he can pierce through to this Isis-power, whereby he reaches the true Ego and realises that it is enveloped in physical matter. If we follow this path we reach the spiritual home of the Ego. This, then, was the teaching of ancient Egypt: Man must descend into his own innermost being; there he first understands his physical nature—the expression of his Ego. He must force his way through this physical nature. He beholds the outer world, the creation of spiritual, super-sensible Powers, in the three kingdoms of Nature: in the stones with their forms based on mathematical laws, in the plants with their life-filled forms which are the dwelling place of Divine Powers, and in the animals. But when he beholds Man he must penetrate through the outer form to the Isis-powers of the soul.

Part of the Initiation into the Isis-Mysteries, therefore, consisted in showing man how he was clothed in matter. The processes enacted when a man thus plunged into his own nature, were practically the same as occur at death but they were enacted in a different way. The aspirant had to pass in actual life through the Portal of Death, to learn of the transition from physical to super-physical vision, from the physical to the spiritual world—in short the transition experienced in actual death. He had to follow this path of descent into his own inner being, to learn what can only be experienced there. And in this region he learnt, in the first place, how the blood, the physical instrument of the Ego, is formed from Nature. Now the system of nerves is the physical instrument for the soul-activities of Feeling, Willing and Thinking and the instrument of the Ego is the blood. If a man would descend into his instruments—so thought the old Egyptians—he must descend into his physical-etheric sheaths, into the etheric qualities of soul. He must learn to be independent of the forces in his blood upon which he otherwise depends, and, after having first freed himself from these forces, he must then enter into the marvellous processes of his blood. He must learn to know his higher nature in its physical aspect. This he can only do when he is able to contemplate himself as he contemplates an outer object. Now man can only know an object as object if he himself is outside it; thus if he wishes to perceive himself, he must stand outside his own being. That is why Initiation develops forces which enable the soul-powers to have real experiences without making use of physical instruments. The physical instruments are there objectively before man, just as after death his spiritual being looks down at his physical body.

And so the pupil in the Isis-Mysteries was first taught the secrets of his own blood. He passed through an experience which may be described as an approach to the Threshold of Death. This was the first stage of Initiation into the Isis-Mysteries. The pupil had to behold his own blood, to behold himself as object, to plunge down into the sheath that is the instrument of his Isis-nature. In the sanctuaries of Initiation he was led to two Portals, where he was shown in picture form the processes taking place in his inner being. Two doors stood before him, one open, the other closed. These teachings, echoing down to us across the ages, harmonise most wonderfully with what man believes at the present day, although he now gives a materialistic interpretation to everything. The old Seers of Egypt said: “When man is in the underworld he comes to two doors; through two doors he enters into his blood and his inner being.” The modern anatomist would speak of the two entrances lying beside the valves of the heart. If the pupil wished to penetrate into his body he would have to pass through the “open” door, for the “closed” door is there to prevent the blood stream from taking a wrong path. These anatomical phenomena are material images of what the ancient sages experienced in clairvoyant form. The forms were of course not so exact as the structures confronting the modern anatomist, yet they represented what clairvoyant consciousness perceived when it gazed at the inner being of man from without.

The next stage of the Isis-Initiation may be described as follows: The pupil was led through the tests of Fire, Air and Water—that is to say he learnt to know the nature of the sheaths around his Isis-nature. He learnt to know Fire as it courses through his body, using the blood as its instrument; he learnt to know how air enters the body in the form of oxygen; he learnt to know his watery nature. Fire, Air and Water—the warmth of the breath, the fluidity of the blood. And his knowledge of the sheaths, of Fire, Air and Water purified him until he finally attained to his Isis-nature. This again may be expressed by saying: Only when the pupil reached this stage did he feel that he had really “come to himself,” realising his spiritual existence, no longer limited to the human faculties pertaining to the outer world but able to gaze into the spiritual world. In the outer world we can only see the physical Sun by day; at night it is hidden from us by matter. In the spiritual world, however, it is not so; in the spiritual world man beholds the spiritual Powers at the very time the physical eyes are not functioning. In the Isis-Initiation it was said: When a man is purified he beholds the spiritual beings face to face; he can see the Sun at Midnight. That is to say, when darkness prevails, the spiritual life and the primal spiritual Powers behind the Sun are visible to those initiated in the Isis-Mysteries.

Such was the path of the soul to the Isis-powers, the path which might be traversed by those who while still living sought to energise their deepest forces of soul. There were still higher Mysteries—the true Osiris-Mysteries. In these Mysteries man learnt how through the Isis-power he might find himself one with the spiritual super-sensible Power whence he himself had come forth.—He knew Osiris and Osiris arose within his soul.

Now when the old Egyptian wished to depict the relation between Isis and Osiris, he used a script drawn from the movements of the Sun and Moon in the Heavens; he used the relationships of the other starry bodies to express the activities of the other spiritual Powers. His script was drawn from the Zodiac in its condition of comparative rest, and from the Planets moving across the constellations. In all the mysteries thus revealed, the ancient Egyptian saw a spiritual script. He knew: Nothing that is on the Earth can help me to express what man experiences if he goes forth to seek Osiris with the Isis-power within him. The starry constellations themselves must be the script.

Hermes, or Thoth, the mighty Sage of antiquity, was revered by the Egyptians as having had the most profound insight into this relation of man to the Cosmos. It was Hermes who expressed with the greatest sublimity the relation of the stars to these spiritual Powers and to events in the Cosmos. The language of Hermes was the language of the stars themselves. The relation of Osiris to Isis, for instance, could be explained exoterically to the people in the form of legends. Those who were preparing for Initiation were taught in greater detail of the light proceeding from the Sun, its reflection by the Moon, and the marvellous processes enacted by the light passing from the new Moon through different phases to the full Moon. The primal forms of writing were derived from processes taking place in the Heavens. Man little knows to-day that the consonants are images of the Zodiacal constellations, of a cosmic element that is at rest; the relations of the vowels to the consonants are images of the connections between the moving Planets and the Zodiac. The earlier forms of the letters of the alphabet were in this sense derived from the Heavens.

The ancient Egyptians felt that the great Hermes had himself been taught by the Powers of the Heavens and that he expressed, in his own being, the deepest soul life of man. All that was expressed in the deeds of man, even in daily pursuits where mathematical sciences, geometry (which Pythagoras afterwards learnt from the Egyptians), land-surveying and the like, were needed—all these things were traced back to the wisdom of Hermes who had seen the processes and phenomena of Earth to be reflections of heavenly activities as expressed in the stellar script. This script was brought down by Hermes into mathematics and geometry and he taught the Egyptians to find, in the stars, the counterpart of earthly happenings.

Now we know that the whole life of Egypt was deeply bound up with the floods of the Nile, with the deposits swept down by the Nile from the mountainous lands in the South. And we can realise how necessary it was for the Egyptians to know in advance when these floods would occur. They reckoned time according to the stellar script in the Heavens and when Sirius, the Dog Star, was visible in the Sign of Cancer, they knew that the Sun would shortly enter this Sign and that its rays would charm forth all that the flooding of the Nile bestowed upon the soil. They said: “Sirius is the Watcher; it is he who tell us what is to come.” And they looked up in gratitude to the Dog Star, to Sirius, for it was he who enabled them to cultivate their land aright and provide for the needs of their daily life. They looked back to ages of hoary antiquity when mankind had first been taught that the movement of the stars is the expression of the mighty cosmic timepiece.

Thus did the Egyptians take counsel from the stellar script. Hermes, or Thoth, was the great Spirit who, according to the oldest traditions, had given the original script of the Cosmic Wisdom and with the inspiration flowing into him from the stars, had built up the alphabet, had taught men the principles of agriculture, geometry, land-surveying—in short all they needed for their physical life. Physical life, however, is but the body of a spiritual life, a cosmic spiritual life whence Hermes drew his inspiration. Thus all culture and civilisation came to be bound up with the name of Hermes, and indeed the Egyptians felt themselves connected with him in a still more intimate sense.

Suppose, for example, that an Egyptian living in the year 1322 before our era, were looking up to the Heavens. He would behold a certain constellation. The ancient Egyptians had a convenient method of reckoning time-conditions, convenient, that is to say, for purposes of calculation; twelve months of thirty days each, with five additional days—making three hundred and sixty-five days in the year. They had reckoned thus for centuries, for the method was really a mathematical convenience. After three hundred and sixty-five days a year had run its course. Now as we know from Astronomy, this leaves a quarter of one day unaccounted for; that is to say, the Egyptian year fell a quarter of a day too early. If you reckon it out, you will see that every successive year began a little earlier than the last. So month by month the year receded until, after a lapse of four times three hundred and sixty-five years it returned to the beginning. Thus it always happened after a period of one thousand, four hundred and sixty years that the heavenly relationships were readjusted with the earthly calculation. In the course of one thousand, four hundred and sixty years the year receded through a complete cycle. If you reckon this back three times from the year 1322 before our era, you have the epoch to which the Egyptians ascribed their holy primal Wisdom. They said: “In those ancient times men possessed the very highest clairvoyance. Each of the great Solar Years denoted a stage in the waning of clairvoyant power. We are now living in the fourth stage. Our culture has reached a point where we have only traditions of the teaching of antiquity. But we look back through three great Cosmic Years to an age when the greatest of our Sages taught his pupils and successors what we to-day possess—though in much changed form—in writing, mathematics, geometry, the science of land-surveying and astronomy.” At the same time the old Egyptians said: “Our human calculations—which adhere to the convenient numbers of twelve times thirty plus five supplementary days—bear witness how the divine-spiritual world must correct our affairs, for our intellect has estranged us from Osiris and Isis. We cannot reckon the year accurately. But we look up to a hidden world where the Powers guiding the stars correct us.”

Thus even in their Chronology the old Egyptians looked up, as it were beyond the feeble quality of the intellect, to spiritual Beings and Powers living in hidden worlds, who in accordance with deeper laws, supervised protected and watched over all that man has to experience on Earth. And in Hermes, or Thoth, they revered the Being whose inspiration flowed from these watchful Powers of Heaven. Hermes was not only a great Teacher, but a Being to whom the old Egyptians looked up with feelings of deepest gratitude and reverence, saying: “All that I possess comes from Thee! Thou wert there in days of old and lo! Thy blessings stream into the world for the healing of men through those who have been Thy messengers.” Thus both the original source of Power—Osiris—and Hermes, or Thoth,—the Guardian of that Power—were not only known to the wisdom of the ancient Egyptians, but their souls were filled with a deep moral feeling, a feeling of reverence and gratitude. All external evidence shows that the wisdom of the Egyptians (especially in very ancient times, and later to a less and less degree) was permeated with religious feeling. All human knowledge was bound up with feelings of holy awe, all wisdom with piety, all science with religion. In the later Egyptian epoch this no longer appears in its purest form. For just as in the successive epochs it is the mission of the several peoples to express the Spiritual in different forms, so do the several civilisations begin to fall into decadence when their prime has been reached. Most of what has been preserved from ancient Egyptian culture belongs to the period of decadence and one can only surmise what lies behind the marvellous pyramids, for instance, and the strange animal cults. The Egyptians knew: The age when wisdom itself was working was preceded by another, when all beings—not only man—descended from divine-spiritual heights. If we would understand the innermost nature of man we must not look at his outer form, but penetrate to his inner being. What we see externally are stages at which primordial creation has remained stationary; such stages are to be seen in the three kingdoms of Nature. The first stage is the world of the minerals and stones—the forms of which are expressed in the Pyramids. The second stage is the world of plants and the inner forces of this world are expressed in the Lotus flower. The third stage is represented by the animal forms, strewn, as it were, along the path to man. Divine forces which have not attained to the human stage have poured and crystallised into the different animal forms. Such were the feelings of the old Egyptian when he beheld the retarded forces of the Gods. He looked back to primeval ages when all creation sprang from Divine Powers. He felt that Divine Powers had remained at an earlier stage of development in the beings of the three lower kingdoms of Nature and had finally risen to human form in his own being. We must always be mindful of the feelings, the consciousness of the old Egyptians, for then we shall realise that their wisdom had a moral effect in their souls. Their conception of the Divine world and Supersensible forces gave rise to a relation to the animals, which only assumed a grotesque form when Egyptian culture entered upon its period of decline. The imperfections of later Egyptian culture were not there at the beginning when it was filled with spiritual revelation. We must not—as is so often done to-day—ascribe primitive and simple conditions to the early stages of civilisations. On the contrary, primitive conditions belong to periods of decadence which set in after the original spiritual treasures have been lost. Barbaric conditions are not to be regarded as the original states of civilisation; they are in reality the result of the decadence of civilisations which have fallen from their spiritual prime.

Such a statement may be a cause of irritation to the science that describes all civilisations as having originated from old primitive conditions such as survive in savage tribes to-day. Primitive states of culture still in existence are to be regarded as stages of decadence; at the beginning of human life on Earth the early civilisations were directly inspired from the spiritual world by the Spiritual Beings standing behind external history. This is what we are told by Spiritual Science.

Again it may be asked: Does the science of to-day, representing as it does, the heights of modern culture, come into collision with this statement of Spiritual Science? I should like here to quote from a recent work by Alfred Jeremias, The Influence of Babylon on the Understanding of the Old Testament, which shows that outer research too has found its way back to an ancient culture permeated with sublime and far-reaching conceptions and that the so-called barbaric civilisations must be regarded as the outcome of decadence. This point is clearly made in the book:

The oldest records, as indeed the whole cultural life of the Euphratean civilisations, postulate the existence of scientific and at the same time religious conceptions not only in the secret lore of the Temples but according to which the State organisation was regulated, justice declared, property administered and protected. The further back we go into ancient times, the more do we find the domination of these conceptions; only when the ancient Euphratean culture enters on its period of decadence do other forces make themselves felt.

External science is here beginning to open up paths which can unite with what Spiritual Science has to introduce into modern civilisation. If it advances along these paths it will gradually abandon the dead image of primitive conditions at the starting-point of human civilisations and will come instead to the Great Individualities. And they appear before us in all sublimity because it was their task to transmit to men who still possessed the power of clairvoyance, the greatest blessings in every branch of culture. And so we look back to mighty figures—to Zarathustra, to Hermes—who appear so sublime because they were the first to give the great spiritual impulses to mankind in those remote ages of which the Sage spoke to Solon. Hermes stands there as a great Guide of mankind. As we contemplate these great Individualities, we feel a strengthening of our own powers. We realise that the Spirit not only lives in the Cosmos but flows into cosmic deeds, into the evolution of man himself. Our own life is fortified, we have greater confidence in our own actions, our hopes and purposes are strengthened by the contemplation of these great Individualities. We who are born in after ages look up to Them, seeking the fulfilment of our own existence in Their mighty powers of soul, understanding our own actions in the light of the eternal Spirit pouring into humanity through Them.

That Buddhism and the teaching of Buddha should frequently be discussed to-day, is a fact of special interest in the study of human evolution; for an understanding of the essential nature of Buddhism—or rather the longing for such an understanding—has only made itself felt comparatively recently in the spiritual life of the West. Think for a moment of Goethe, who so powerfully influenced Western culture at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When we examine Goethe's life and writings we find no trace of the influence of Buddhism; yet shortly afterwards there are distinct traces of Buddhist influence in one who was in a certain sense a disciple of Goethe—I refer to Schopenhauer. Since his time, interest in the spiritual life of the East has steadily increased, until in our age many people feel an inherent desire to understand what really entered human evolution through all that is connected with the name of the great Buddha.

It is true that most people connect Buddhism, among other things, with the idea of reincarnation. Yet with regard to its essentials one cannot do so—at all events in the form in which this truth is now often conceived. For to those who have deeper insight, this linking up of Buddhism with the teachings of repeated earthly lives is almost tantamount to saying that the deepest understanding of ancient works of art is to be found among those peoples who set about destroying them at the beginning of the Middle Ages! Grotesque as this may sound, it is nevertheless true, and its truth is brought home to us by the realisation that the whole mood of Buddhism is to undervalue earthly lives, indeed its aim is rather to reduce their number. Liberation from rebirth—this is the innermost nerve of Buddhist thought. To be freed from repeated earthly lives—reincarnation being of course an already recognised truth—is the essence of Buddhism.

Even a superficial study of the history of Western spiritual life should tell us that the idea of reincarnation is not really essential to the understanding of Buddhism—and vice versa. For within our Western culture we find that Lessing had a magnificent conception of the idea of reincarnation and yet was quite uninfluenced by Buddhistic thought. His most mature work The Education of the Human Race concludes with a confession of belief in repeated earthly lives. “Is not all Eternity mine?” he exclaims, feeling that man's sojourn on earth may become fruitful if earthly lives are repeated. We are not on this earth for nothing. We are active in earthly life and we may look forward to an ever fuller life wherein the fruits of past lives may ripen. The prospect of a rich and greater future, the consciousness of continuous activity—these are the essentials of Lessing's thought. On the other hand, the essence of Buddhism is that it urges man to strive for such knowledge and wisdom as will free him from all desire for rebirth. Only when in one such earthly life he can liberate himself from this necessity—only then will he enter the state that may be called “Eternity.”

I have endeavoured to show you in the course of these lectures that Spiritual Science has taken the idea of reincarnation neither from ancient tradition, nor from Buddhism, for the idea of reincarnation arises of necessity from an unprejudiced observation of life in the sense of Spiritual Science. It would therefore seem superficial to connect Buddhism directly with the idea of repeated earthly lives, for to understand the essence of Buddhism we must turn our gaze in quite another direction. Here I must again remind you of the law of human evolution which we considered in connection with the great Zarathustra. [See Anthroposophy, Easter, 1927.]

In the course of the ages the whole constitution of man's soul has passed through different stages and conditions. The events of which outer history and outer documents tell are really a comparatively late phase in the evolution of mankind, and when with the help of Spiritual Science we go back to prehistoric ages, we find that the nature of the soul and of man's consciousness in those early times was very different indeed from what it is to-day. Let me briefly recapitulate.

In normal human life to-day we examine objects with our senses and form chains of thought with our practical wisdom and science (in effect our essentially intellectual consciousness), which has developed from quite a different kind of consciousness. In the chaotic medley of the dream we have a last remnant—an atavistic heritage—of clairvoyant faculties that were normal in the soul of prehistoric man. In those early times the nature of the soul was such that in a condition midway between waking and sleeping, man gazed into all that lies hidden behind the world of sense. Our consciousness to-day alternates between the waking and sleeping states and we think of “intelligence” in connection with waking life only, but in more ancient days pictures continually arose and passed away before the soul of man. These pictures were not as void of meaning as are our dream pictures to-day but were related to super-sensible events. Out of the condition of consciousness arising from these flowing pictures, our present so-called intellectual consciousness gradually evolved. A kind of primeval clairvoyance preceded the gradual development of our modern consciousness. Prehistoric man, gazing into the super-sensible worlds with this dreamlike clairvoyance, not only acquired knowledge but experienced a deep inner satisfaction and bliss as he felt the connection of his soul with a spiritual world. In his intellectual consciousness to-day man knows with certainty that his blood is composed of substances which also exist externally in physical space, indeed that his whole organism is built up materially. With equal certainty, prehistoric man knew that, so far as his soul and Spirit were concerned, he had come forth from the spiritual world into which he gazed with his clairvoyant consciousness.

I have said before, that certain phenomena in human history, of which external facts also speak, can only be understood if this spiritual origin of man's earthly life is admitted. Even science is less inclined to agree with the assumption of materialistic anthropology, that in prehistoric ages the general condition of humanity was such as we find still existing among the most primitive peoples to-day. It is becoming more and more evident that sublime conceptions of a spiritual world were current among ancient peoples, though clothed in pictorial forms. Myths and legends are only intelligible if we trace them back to a primal wisdom which was altogether different in its nature from the intellectual science of to-day. True, there is not much sympathy as yet with the view that primitive peoples to-day are not typical of the original spirituality of man but represent the decadence of an earlier time. Neither is it generally admitted that originally all peoples possessed a lofty wisdom, derived from clairvoyant powers. But facts will in time compel thinking people to admit, hypothetically at all events, some of the truths investigated by Spiritual Science and fully corroborated by Natural Science. What Spiritual Science has to say about the future evolution of man will also one day be verified. Thus we must look back, not only to a kind of primeval wisdom, but also to primeval feelings and perceptions in man whose clairvoyant powers gave him knowledge of his connection with the spiritual world.

Now it is easy to understand the possibility of two streams arising in the gradual transition from this ancient clairvoyance of the human soul to our modern intellectual mode of observing the material world. The one stream can be traced among peoples in whom the memories and instincts were preserved, and who felt that through his clairvoyant perception, man was once united with the spiritual world but has descended into the world of the senses. This feeling gradually extended into a general attitude of soul, till it could be said: “We have entered the phenomenal world but this world is maya, illusion.” Only when he was linked with the spiritual world could man know his true being. And so among those peoples who had preserved this dim remembrance of ancient clairvoyant powers, there arose a sense of loss, and a certain indifference to their material environment and all that can be apprehended by the intellect.

On the other hand there is a second current, of which the religion of Zarathustra is typical.—“We must adapt ourselves to the new world which now enters our consciousness for the first time.” These men did not look back with regret to something that man had lost. On the contrary, they felt impelled to seek and acquire all the powers that would enable them to penetrate and understand the surrounding world of sense. The urge arose within them to unite themselves with the world, not to look back with regret, but to look forwards, to be warriors. “The same Divine-Spiritual essence of which we were once a part is also poured into the world immediately surrounding us. It is in this surrounding world that we must seek it. Ours [is] the task to unite with the good spiritual elements and so help forward the evolution of the world!” This conception is typical of the stream of thought which had its rise in Asiatic regions lying north of the lands where men looked back with sorrow to what man had once possessed.

In India arose a spiritual life which was the natural fruit of this backward-turning gaze to men's former union with the spiritual world. Consider the Sankhya philosophy or the Yoga system and discipline. It was the constant endeavour of the ancient Indian to rediscover his connection with the spiritual world whence he had come forth; he tried to disregard all that surrounded him in the world, to free himself from the links binding him to the world of the senses and by eliminating this world to find again the spiritual realms whence he had descended. Reunion with the world of Spirit, release from the world of sense—this is Yoga.

Only when we see these principles as the fundamental tendencies of Indian spiritual life can we understand the mighty impulse of the Buddha as it flamed up in a last gleam across the evening skies of Indian spiritual life a few centuries before the Christ Impulse was destined to dominate Western thought. We can only understand the figure of Buddha when we contemplate him in this setting. On the soil of India it was possible for a mode of thought and consciousness to arise which gazed at a world in the throes of decline, of a descent from Spirit into maya—the great “Illusion.” It is also natural that as the Indian looked at the external world with which human life is so closely interwoven, he should have evolved the idea that this descent from Spirit into the world of maya had proceeded stage by stage, as it were, passing from epoch to epoch. We can now understand the deeply devotional mood of Indian culture—albeit a culture representing the glow of sunset—and how the concept of Buddhahood there finds a natural place. The Indian looked back to an age when man was united with the spiritual world; he then descended to a certain level, rose once more and again sank, rose, sank—but in such a way that each descent was deeper than the last.

According to ancient Indian wisdom, a Buddha arises whenever an epoch of decline draws to its close. The last of the Buddhas—Gautama Buddha—was the Being who incarnated as the son of King Suddhodana. The Indian, therefore, looked back to former Buddhas, of whom five had already appeared during the time of man's gradual descent from the spiritual world, and who, coming again and again into the world of men could bring them something of that primordial wisdom whereby they could be sustained in earthly life and not utterly lost in maya. In his descending path of evolution man loses hold of this wisdom and when it is lost, a new Buddha appears. Of these, Gautama Buddha was the last.

In the course of many earthly lives such a being as a Buddha must previously have reached the level of a Bodhisattva before he can attain to Buddhahood. According to Eastern Wisdom, Gautama Buddha was first a Bodhisattva, and as such was born into the royal house of Suddhodana. By dint of inner effort he attained, in his twenty-ninth year, the illumination symbolically described as “sitting under the Bodhi tree.” The wisdom arising from this could then be revealed in the great Sermon of Benares. In his twenty-ninth year, this Bodhisattva rose to the dignity of Buddhahood and was then able, as Buddha, to bring again to mankind a last remnant of the Ancient Wisdom. And when in the following centuries man again sinks so low that the last remnant of the wisdom brought by Buddha disappears, another Bodhisattva, Maitreya Buddha, who, according to Eastern Wisdom, is expected to appear in the future, will rise to the dignity of Buddhahood.

Legends tell us of all that was enacted in the soul of the last Bodhisattva who was to become Gautama Buddha. Up to his twenty-ninth year he had known only the surroundings of his royal home. Human misery and suffering—all life's sorrows—were hidden from him. He grew up seeing only the joys of life. But the Bodhisattvic consciousness was ever present—a consciousness teeming with the inner wisdom of former earthly lives. The legend is well-known and we need only consider the main details. We read how Gautama left the royal Palace and saw something he had never seen before—a corpse. At the sight of the corpse he realised that death consumes life, that the element of death enters life with its fruitfulness and power of increase. He saw a sick man—disease eats its way into health. He saw an old man tottering wearily along his way—age creeps into the freshness of youth.

We must of course realise that he who was to become Buddha passed through all these experiences with Bodhisattvic consciousness. Thus he learned that the destructive element of existence has its place in the wisdom-filled process of “being and becoming,” but so deeply was his soul affected that he cried out—so the legend runs—“Life is full of suffering!” Let us try to enter into the soul of Gautama the Bodhisattva. He possessed mighty wisdom, although he was not as yet fully conscious of this wisdom. In his earlier years he had seen only the fruitfulness of life. Then his eyes fell on the image of destruction, of corruption, and within his soul the feeling arose that all attainment of knowledge and wisdom leads man to increasing life. His soul is then filled with the idea of “Becoming”—a process of perpetual fruitfulness. The idea of fruitful growth proceeds from wisdom. Gazing into the world, what do we behold? Forces of destruction, sickness, old age, death. Knowledge and wisdom cannot surely have brought old age, sickness and death into the world. Something else must have been their cause! And so the great Gautama felt—because he was not yet fully conscious of his Bodhisattvic wisdom—that man may be filled with wisdom and through this wisdom be filled with ever-fruitful forces of growth, but life reveals decay, sickness, death and many other destructive elements. Here was a mystery unfathomable even to the Bodhisattva. He had passed through many lives, through incarnation after incarnation had accumulated an ever-increasing store of wisdom, until he had reached a point whence he could survey life from the very heights of existence. Yet when he left the palace, and life in its grim realities stood before him, the meaning of it all did not wholly penetrate his consciousness. The accumulated knowledge and wisdom of earthly lives cannot, in effect, lead to the solution of the ultimate mysteries of existence, for these mysteries lie hidden beyond the region of the life that passes from incarnation to incarnation.

This conception, quickening in the soul of the great Gautama, led him finally to full illumination “under the Bodhi tree.” We may express the results of his wakened consciousness as follows: “We are living in a world of illusion. Life after life we live in this world of maya whither we have passed from a spiritual existence. In this life we may rise in Spirit to infinite merit—yet the wisdom of innumerable lives will never solve the great riddles of old age, of sickness, death.” He then realised that the doctrine of suffering was greater than the wisdom of a Bodhisattva. In his illumination he knew that all that is spread abroad in the world of illusion is not true wisdom, for even after countless births, outer existence gives us no understanding of suffering, nor can we release ourselves from pain. Outer existence contains something that is far removed from true wisdom. And so it came about that the Buddha saw an element void of wisdom as the cause of old age, sickness and death. The wisdom of this world could never bring liberation; liberation could only proceed from something this world cannot give. Man must withdraw from outer existence and from his repeated births.

From this moment onwards Buddha saw that the doctrine of suffering was the principle necessary for the further progress of humanity. Devoid of wisdom was the “thirst for existence,” which seemed to him the cause of the suffering that had entered into the world. Wisdom on the one hand, a meaningless thirst for existence on the other. And so he realised: “Only when Man is liberated from the wheel of births can he be led to true redemption, to true freedom, for of itself the highest earthly wisdom cannot save him from suffering.” Buddha then sought the means whereby man could be led away from the scene of his successive births to a world which we must learn to understand aright, for many fantastic and grotesque ideas have arisen as to the meaning of “Nirvana.” One who has reached a point in life where there is no more a thirst for existence and no desire for rebirth, passes into Nirvana. What is the nature of this world?

According to Buddhism, the world of redemption and bliss eludes all descriptions derived from the world sense and space man knows in earthly life. Nothing in the physical world of space points to liberation. All the words man uses to describe the world around him must be silenced; they do not and cannot apply to the world of bliss. It is absolutely impossible to form an idea of the realm entered by one who has been liberated from the necessity for re-birth, for since it has no resemblance to anything in the objective world, it can only be characterised by a negative term—Nirvana. A man enters Nirvana only when everything that connects him with earthly existence has been blotted out.

Yet for the Buddhist, Nirvana is no empty void. Rather is it a life of bliss no words can describe. Here we have the root-nerve of Buddhism and an expression of its pervading mood. From the Sermon of Benares where it was taught for the first time, this doctrine of the suffering of life, of suffering and its cause in the “thirst for existence” permeates all that we know of Buddhism. One thing alone can lead to human progress, and that is redemption from rebirth. And the first step is the following of a path of knowledge which leads beyond earthly wisdom. Treading this path a man will find the means gradually to reach and enter Nirvana. In other words, he may learn so to use his earthly incarnations that he is finally freed from their necessity.

Turning now from this somewhat abstract conception of Buddhism to its fundamentals, we find that such an attitude towards life tends to “isolate” man; it raises the question of the aims and destiny of his life as an individual personality in the world. How could it be otherwise in a conception of the world built upon such a foundation? It was believed that man had descended from spiritual heights to find himself in a world of maya from which the wisdom of a Buddha now and again can rescue him, as the last Buddha had taught. Such a conception of the goal of all human striving could be characterised in no other way than as an isolating of man from his whole environment, for his earthly embodiments followed a descending path in a descending earthly order. How did Buddha himself seek illumination? Unless we consider this, we shall never understand Buddha himself, or Buddhism. He sought illumination, as we know, in complete isolation. He went out from his father's palace into solitude. All knowledge gained from previous lives must be silenced in a life of solitude, where he must seek an inner illumination of the soul which shall reveal the mystery of the suffering world. In isolation the Buddha awaits the enlightenment which reveals: The cause of suffering inheres in the thirst for existence and rebirth which burns in every individual soul. The world too thirsts for existence and this is the cause of all the suffering and all the destructive elements in life.

Now we cannot understand the essential nature of Buddha's illumination and teaching unless we compare it with Christianity. Six hundred years after the appearance of the great Buddha, quite different conditions are present. Man's whole attitude to the world and to his environment has changed. How has it changed? Oriental thought contemplates one “Buddha-epoch” after another. “History” is not a process of descent from a higher to a lower level; rather is it an effort to attain a definite goal, a possibility of union with the whole world, with the past, and with the future. Such is the oriental conception of history. But the Buddhist stands there isolated and alone and is concerned only with his individual life. In his individual existence he strives for liberation from the thirst for existence and hence from the cycles of his births.

Six hundred years later, the Christian has quite a different attitude. Putting aside prejudices now widely spread in the world, we may describe the Christian conception as follows. In so far as the Christian conception is based on the Old Testament, it points to a primal humanity when man's relationship to the spiritual world was not at all the same as in later times. We read of this in the mighty pictures of the Book of Genesis. The attitude of the Christian to the world is very different from that of the Buddhist. The Christian says: “Wisdom lives within my soul and this wisdom arises from the very nature of the soul. Wisdom, knowledge and morality—all these arise within me as a result of the way in which I observe the world of sense and co-ordinate my impressions by means of my reasoning faculties.” But in an older age the constitution of the human soul was altogether different. Something happened then which cannot merely be called, in the Buddhistic sense, a descent from Divine-Spiritual heights into a world of maya, but must be spoken of as the “Fall of man.” The Fall is bound up with the whole of human existence. Man feels that there are forces within him which had their origin in a far-off past and were part of a process which caused the human being not merely to “descend” but to descend in such a way that his relationship to the world was completely changed. If the conditions obtaining before this event had prevailed, man would have been a different being to-day. The Fall was due to man's own sin, even though he sinned unconsciously.

Thus in Christianity we are concerned not merely with the direct descent of which the Buddhist thought but, with an altered state of things in which the factor of temptation plays an essential part. The Christian who pierces the surface of Christianity into its depths must say that because of an event which happened untold ages ago, the subconscious workings of his soul are different from what they were designed to be. The Buddhist says:—“From a state of union with the Divine-Spiritual world, I have been transported into this world of maya and illusion;” the Christian:—“I have descended into this world. If I had descended in the original state of my soul I should everywhere be able to look behind the illusion of physical ‘appearances’ into reality and find the truth. But since another factor has entered into the process of descent I myself have turned this world into illusion.” The two modes of thought are very different. The Buddhist asks why this world is illusion and is taught that illusion is its very nature. The Christian asks the same question but realises: “The fault is mine! My powers of cognition and the state of my soul no longer enable me to see the original reality. My actions are not fruitful. I myself have drawn a veil of illusion over the world.” The Buddhist says that the world is in itself the Great Illusion, therefore he must overcome the world, but the Christian feels himself in the world, and in the world he must seek his goal.

When the Christian realises that Spiritual Science can lead him to the knowledge of successive earthly lives, he can resolve to use them as a means whereby the goal of life may be attained. He knows the world to be full of sorrow and error, because man himself has wandered so far from his primal state that his vision and his actions have changed the world around him into maya. Yet he need not alienate himself from this world in order to enter into blessedness. Rather must he overcome the forces which make him see the world as illusion and thus be led back to his true original nature. There is a higher man. If this higher man could look upon the world, he would see it in its reality; he would not pass through an existence of sickness and death but a life of health, full of the freshness of youth. A veil has been drawn before this inner man because humanity took part in a certain event in the evolution of the world. Man is not an isolated entity, an individual, nor is thirst for existence responsible for his present state. He is indeed one with all humanity and shared in the original sin of the whole human race.

And so the Christian feels himself bound up with the whole historical course of humanity, realising as he gazes into the future that he must find once more that higher nature which man's process of descent has veiled. He says: “I must seek, not Nirvana, but the higher man within me. I must find the way back to my Self. Then will the surrounding world no longer be illusion but reality—a world in which I am able to overcome sorrow, sickness and death by my own efforts.” The Buddhist seeks liberation from the world and from rebirths by overcoming the thirst for existence. The Christian seeks liberation from the lower man, seeks to awaken the higher man within, whom he himself has veiled, in order that he may behold the world in its truth. How great a contrast lies here between the wisdom of Buddha and Paul's words: “Not I, but Christ in me!”—words which express a consciousness that places man in the world as an individuality! The Buddhist says: “Man has descended from spiritual heights because the world has urged him downwards; therefore a world that has implanted in him the thirst for existence must be overcome. He must leave this world!” But the Christian says: “It is not the fault of the world that I am as I am. Mine is the fault!” The Christian stands in the world acknowledging that beneath his ordinary consciousness a power is at work which once gave him a clairvoyant picture-consciousness. Man “sinned” and lost this spiritual vision. For this he must make amends if he would reach his goal. In later life a man does not feel it unjust that he should suffer from the faults of youthful actions committed in a different consciousness. Equally, he should not feel it an injustice that he should atone in his present state for an act arising out of an earlier consciousness. This former consciousness he no longer possesses, for his intellect and reason have usurped its place. Atonement is only possible when the will arises in man to press forwards with his present Ego-consciousness, to that higher state described in Paul's words: “Not I, but Christ in me!” The Christian should say: “I have descended into conditions other than those ordained for me from the beginning. I must re-ascend—not with the help of the Ego I now possess but through a power which can live within me and lead me beyond my human Ego. This I can only do if Christ works in me, leading me to behold the world in its reality and not in illusion. The forces which have brought illness and death into the world can be overcome by what Christ fulfils in me.”

The innermost heart of Buddhism only reveals itself when we compare it with Christianity. Then we realise the words of Lessing in his Education of the Human Race: “Is not all Eternity mine?” That is to say: If I use the opportunities of successive embodiments to bring the Christ Power to life within me, I shall reach at last the sphere of the Eternal. This has hitherto eluded me because I have covered myself with a veil.

Reincarnation shines with a new radiance in the sunlight of Christianity and will indeed in the future penetrate Christian culture more and more deeply as an occult truth. This however is not the point at issue. The point is that the essential attitude of Buddhism makes the world responsible for maya or illusion, while the Christian holds himself, as man, responsible—knowing that the path to “redemption” lies in his own innermost being. In the Christian sense, redemption is also a “resurrection” because the Ego is raised to a higher Ego whence it has descended. The Buddhist believes in the “original sin” of the world and seeks liberation from the world. The Christian's conception is an historical one, for human life is seen as linked both with an event of a prehistoric past and with a future event through which he may reach a point where his whole life will be illuminated by the Being of Christ.

Thus Christianity does not point to successive Buddhas, recapitulating more or less the same truths through the successive epochs, but to a unique event occurring in the course of human evolution. While the Buddhist pictures his Buddha sitting under the Bodhi tree, rising to enlightenment as an isolated individual, the Christian looks to Jesus of Nazareth, into whom the Spirit of the Cosmos descended. The enlightenment of the Buddha under the Bodhi tree—the Baptism by John in Jordan—these two pictures stand clearly before us. Buddha sits under the Bodhi tree in the solitude of the soul. Jesus of Nazareth stands in the waters of Jordan and the very Spirit of the Cosmos descends into his inner being—the Spirit in the image of the Dove.

The Buddha deed contained for his followers the message: “Quench the thirst for existence; tear thyself away from earthly existence and follow Buddha to realms which no earthly words can describe!” The Christian realises that from the Deed of Christ flows redemption from the original sin of man, and he feels: If the influx of the spiritual world behind the physical grows as strong within me as it was in Christ Himself, I shall carry into my future incarnations a force that will enable me to cry with St. Paul, “Not I, but Christ in me!” And so I shall rise to the spiritual world whence I descended.

Deeply moving in this light are the words of Buddha to his intimate disciples: “Page after page I look back upon my former lives as upon an open book; I see how in life after life I built a material body wherein my Spirit dwelt as in a temple. Now I know that this body in which I have become Buddha, is the last.” And referring to Nirvana, whither he was to pass, he said: “The beams are breaking, the posts are giving way; the material body has been built for the last time and will now be wholly destroyed.” Compare these words with an utterance of the Christ recorded in the Gospel of St. John. Christ indicates that He is living in an outer body: “Destroy this Temple and in three days I will build it up again.” Here we have exactly the opposite conception, for it can be thus interpreted: “I shall accomplish a deed that will make fruitful and living all that from God—from primeval humanity—flows into this world and into us.” These words indicate that the Christian, through repeated earthly lives, comes to cry in truth, “Not I, but Christ in me!” We must however understand that the re-building of this Temple has an eternal significance in that it points to the in-pouring of the Christ Power into all who share in the collective evolution of mankind. There can be no repetition of the Christ Event in the course of evolution. The true Buddhist assumes a repetition of earthly epochs, a succession of Buddhas having each a fundamentally similar mission, but the Christian looks back to the Fall of Man and must point also to a further and unique event—the Mystery of Golgotha and man's redemption from the Fall.

There have been times in the past, and indeed in our own days, when men have looked for a renewal of the Christ Event; but such an expectation can only arise from a misunderstanding of the basic facts of man's historical progress. True history must take its start and pursue its course from a central point. Just as there must be one equilibrating point on a pair of scales, so in “history” there must be one event to which both the past and the future point. To imagine that the Christ Event could be repeated is as meaningless as to suppose there could be two focal points in a balance. Eastern wisdom speaks of a succession of similar individualities, the Buddhas, and herein lies the difference between the Eastern and the Western conceptions of the universe, for the Christ Impulse is a unique event and to deny this is to deny an historical progress in evolution—that is, to have a false idea of history.

The consciousness that the individual is indissolubly bound up with humanity as a whole, that not mere repetition but a great purpose rules throughout the course of evolution is Christian in the deepest sense and cannot be separated from Christianity. Human progress inheres in the fact that an older Eastern conception has evolved into a new one. Man has advanced from thinking that the wheels of world-events roll on in an endless repetition to the belief that there is meaning and an onward-flowing significance in the changing events of human existence.

Thus Christianity first gives reality to the doctrine of repeated earthly lives. For now we say that man passes through repeated lives on earth in order that the true meaning of human life may again and again be implanted in him, each time as a fresh experience. Not only the isolated individual strives upwards, for a yet deeper meaning lies in the striving of humanity as a whole, and we ourselves are bound up with this humanity. No longer feeling himself united with a Buddha who urges liberation from the world, man, gazing at the central spiritual Sun, at the Christ Impulse, grows conscious of his union with One Whose Deed has balanced the event symbolised in the “Fall.”

Buddhism can be best described as the sunset of a mode of thought that was nearing its decline but flamed into a mighty afterglow when Gautama Buddha appeared. This is not to honour the Buddha less; we revere him as the great Spirit who once brought to man a teaching pointing to the past, and the sense of union with a primeval wisdom. The Christ Impulse points with the hand of power to the future, and must live with ever increasing strength in the soul till man realises that not redemption but resurrection—the “transfiguration” of material existence can alone give meaning to man's earthly life.

Concepts or dogmas are not the only driving forces in life, though many may feel more drawn to Buddhism than to Christianity. Rather are the essentials such impulses, perceptions and feelings as give meaning to human evolution. There is indeed something of a Buddha-mood to-day in many souls, drawing them towards Buddhism. Goethe could not feel this mood, for through his recognition that the Spirit which is the source of the human Spirit permeates also all external things, he could greatly love life. During his first stay in Weimar, freeing himself from all narrowness and prejudice, he closely studied the outer world. He passed from plant to plant, from mineral to mineral, seeking behind all these that Spirit whence the Spirit of man descends, and with this all-pervading Spirit he sought to unite himself. Goethe once said to his pupil Schopenhauer: “All your splendid conceptions will be at war with themselves directly they pass into other minds.” Schopenhauer's motto can be expressed in his own words: “Life is full of perplexity. I try to make it easier by contemplation.” Trying to find an explanation of the origin of existence he turned naturally to Buddhism, and his ideas assumed a Buddhistic colouring.

In the course of the nineteenth century the different branches of culture yielded such great and mighty results that the human mind did not feel able to assimilate the mass of scientific achievements pouring in from external research. The sense of helplessness grew greater and greater before the overwhelming mass of scientific facts. True, this world of facts tallies in a wonderful way with Spiritual Science, but we see at the same time that thought in the nineteenth century was not equal to coping with it. Man began to realise that his faculties of knowledge could not assimilate all the facts nor could his mind gauge them. And so he began to seek a philosophy or a world-conception that did not attempt to wrestle with all the facts of the outer world. In contrast to this, Spiritual Science takes its start from the deepest principles and experiences of spiritual knowledge; it is able to compass and elaborate all the facts brought to light by outer science and to show how the Spirit lives in outer reality. Now many people do not like this, So far at least as knowledge is concerned, they draw back from the investigation of the world of facts and strive to reach a higher stage merely in the inner being, by a development of soul. This has led to an “unconscious Buddhism” which has been in existence for some time now. We can find traces of it in the philosophies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. When such people—and they are really unconscious Buddhists—come into contact with Buddhism, their longing for ease makes them feel more readily drawn to this mode of thought than to Spiritual Science. For Spiritual Science deals with the whole mass of facts, with the knowledge that Spirit manifests in them all.

It is really, therefore, an element of unbelief and paralysis of will, born of a feebleness of spiritual knowledge, that awakens the attraction to Buddhism to-day. Whereas the Christian conception of the universe—as it lived in Goethe, for instance—demands that man should not give way to his own weakness and speak of “boundaries of knowledge,” but rather feel that something within him can rise above all illusion and lead to truth and freedom. True, a certain amount of resignation is demanded here, but not the resignation which shrinks back before “boundaries of knowledge.” In the Kantian sense resignation means that man is altogether unable to penetrate the depths of the universe. This is a resignation born of weakness, but there is another kind whereby man can say with Goethe: “I have not yet reached the stage where the world can be known in its truth, yet I can evolve to it.” This resignation leads him to the stage where he can bring to birth the “higher man”—the Christ-man. He is resigned because he knows that for the moment he has not reached this highest level of human life. This indeed is a “heroic” resignation, for it says: “We pass from life to life with the feeling that we exist, and we know as we look towards the future that in the repetition of earthly existence all Eternity is ours.”

And so two great streams of thought can be seen in human evolution. The one is represented by Schopenhauer who says: “This world with all its suffering is such that we can only know man's real position through the works of great painters. They portray figures whose asceticism brought something like freedom from earthly existence, who are already lifted above terrestrial life.” According to Schopenhauer, the greatness of this liberated human being consists in the fact that he is able to look back upon his earthly existence and feel: This bodily covering is now nothing but an empty shell and has no significance for me. I strive upwards, in anticipation of the state I shall attain when earthly existence has been conquered and I have overcome all that is connected with it. Herein is the great liberation—when nothing remains to remind me in the future of my earthly existence. Such was Schopenhauer's conception, permeated as he was with the mood Buddhism had brought into the world. Goethe, stimulated by a purely Christian impulse, looks out upon the world as Faust looks out upon it. And if we in our time rise above external trivialities, though realising that our works will perish when the earth has become a corpse—we too can say with Goethe: We learn from our experiences on earth; what we build on earth must perish, but what we acquire in the school of life does not perish. Like Faust, we look not upon the permanency of our works but upon their fruits in the eternity of the soul, and gazing at horizons wider than those of Buddhism, we can say with Goethe: “Aeons cannot obliterate the traces of any man's days on earth.”—

“Es kann die Spur von meinen Erdentagen
Nicht in Aeonen untergehen!”