The Rudolf Steiner Archive

If I speak about death and immortality today, it may seem, as if at first such a consideration is caused in the personal needs of the human soul, which have little do with knowledge, with science. If you survey the series of spiritual-scientific talks that I have held, you yet realise that I applied a scientific standard to the considered objects already, even if a spiritual-scientific standard. Hence, the today's consideration does also not start from that what we find within our emotional life, within our longings and wishes towards a life that exceeds the life of the physical body. It will rather concern this: how has human knowledge to position itself to the questions of death and immortality completely in the sense, as this knowledge positions itself to other objects of our knowledge? Since if we abstain from the longing for a life which exceeds the bodily if we abstain from that what is to be understood possibly in the sense of concepts like fear of death and the like, we have the question of the nature of our whole human individuality in it as something that remains for the human knowledge regarding death and immortality.

But it may seem today, as if in case of all considerations of spiritual life these important questions of death and immortality are disregarded. Since if one takes one of the official psychologies, you find, indeed, the phenomena of the soul life discussed in detail. However, as far as they face us in the everyday life, for example, the question of the development of concepts, the question of memory, of perception, of attention and the like, but you will look in vain for a discussion about the real being of our soul life. Yes, you can find the prejudice just in most scientific circles this soul life that someone must be a dilettante who wants to put these questions as scientific ones.

But this scientific thinking has now to turn to roads different from the usual ones if it wants to consider issues like death and immortality. There that psychology is no longer enough which one calls “psychology without soul,” a psychology with which only the phenomena of the soul life should be considered, without looking at the real being of that what rests in our own individuality and whose expression the phenomena of the soul experiences are. Now spiritual science or anthroposophy is an unusual point of view regarding these as well as other questions.

Indeed, the questions of death and immortality have emerged like from dark depths of spirit already since more than one century from the Western cultural life. One has interpreted it always as a dream of single persons if it appeared with a great spirit, as for example with Lessing. One regarded it as a meaningless dream if it appeared with such men whose names are called less within the cultural life of the last decades. Concerning the questions of death and immortality spiritual science is also not in any opposition to natural sciences. Only the opinion is often spread, as if natural sciences must reject what spiritual science has to say for its part. Thus, we can experience that whenever something new appears, as it happened, for example, in the last decade with the problems of life, one points to the fact that the assumption of a real spiritual life that exceeds the only bodily, material life must be overcome gradually and completely. Spiritual science is not forced at all to deny something that appears, for example, in such discussions like in that by Jacques Loeb (1859–1924, German-American biologist) at the First Monists' Congress (Hamburg, 1911) about the problem of life. However, spiritual science has to hear repeatedly, as well as at that time, that it is over now with a spiritual-scientific consideration. For one can hope that one will succeed, finally, in the laboratory in producing life under outer material conditions.

Compared to all such matters I would like to remind you of one thing. There were times when one did not doubt really that one could once create life in the laboratory. People who have thought something to themselves with the representation of the Homunculus in the second part of Goethe's Faust and have remembered that this representation of Homunculus was really a kind of dream of the physical research of the Middle Ages and earlier times. That means that the creation not only of subordinated living beings, but also of the highest, the human being in the laboratory was a dream of the naturalists once. People who cherished this dream intended by no means that then the spirit had to be abolished from any consideration of humanity and the world.

No spiritual consideration of life contradicts the hope of producing life from the composition of outer substances. No, only the direction of the habitual ways of thinking matters. The habitual ways of thinking that develop with someone who immerses himself more and more in spiritual science show a view of a certain factor exceeding the material in the development of the human being and humanity.

The purely materialistic view of the human life says: there we see a human being entering the earthly existence, and we observe how the material processes happen this and that way, and we see the human being gradually growing up from a clumsy being to a human being who familiarises himself with life, can accomplish tasks of life. Moreover, we see descending processes after ascending ones as it were which lead gradually to the dissolution of the physical body or to death.

This materialistic consideration of life turns its attention solely to what one can reach with the senses and with methods of thinking and researching which are based on sensory views. There one is probably forced to exceed that what is given with the moment of birth or conception, because one cannot explain everything that appears in the human being if one pays attention only to those factors that prevail between birth or conception and death. Then one speaks of hereditary factors. However, as far as one remains within the purely material approach, one believes that all factors, all elements that should explain the human life consist only of that what one can observe between birth and death, or what comes into the human life by the inherited qualities of the parents or other ancestors.

However, as soon as people investigate this heredity, they realise that it is rather superstitious to lead back everything that the human being can realise in his life possibly to hereditary factors. Just in the last decade a brilliant historian, Ottokar Lorenz (1832–1904), tried once to examine families whose descent relations were known to what extent the qualities of the parents, grandparents and so on can be recognised in the lives of the descendants. However, he could get on this way of the purely experiential observation to nothing but to say, if one looks up in the line of ancestors, one finds that among the twenty to thirty ancestors whom everybody can count upwards human beings are who were either genii or idiots, wise men or fools, musicians or other artists, so that one can find all qualities, which are found with any human being, and that one does not come far in the reality if one clings to the prejudices of scientific theories if one wants to explain these or those hereditary factors, this or that expression of the human character, this or that quality.

Spiritual science adds a spiritual core to that what one can find in the line of heredity as conditions of the human life, which we cannot find in that which we search with the parents, grandparents and so on, but which we have to search within a supersensible spiritual world. So that in the course of the incarnation process something combines with the physical factors that is not physical that is of spiritual kind. This spiritual that one cannot see with physical eyes is that being that we carry in us as the result of our former lives on earth as one says. As it is true that we lead back our physical origin to our ancestors, we have to lead back a spiritual origin to a spiritual lineage, that means, to ourselves. Spiritual science is just forced to speak not only of one life on earth of the human being, but of repeated lives on earth. Indeed, one has to go far back for reasons that may become obvious in the course of these talks if we want to search our being in our previous life. So we say in the spiritual-scientific sense: we bring our essence with us from a former life, we have experienced this former life, and we have gone through death and then through a life between death and our appearance in this life.

Spiritual science is also forced to imagine this essence going through death and a supersensible life between death and a new life on earth. This essence is not a product of the material existence, but collects and forms the matter as it were, so that we receive this physical corporeality. Hence, we speak in spiritual science of repeated lives on earth. This idea of the repeated lives on earth faces us necessarily from the Western thinking first with Lessing (Gotthold Ephraim L., 1729–1781) in the work which he left as his testament, in the Education of the Human Race. There he says about this teaching: “even if it is the oldest one what the human beings have confessed to, must it not appear again at the summit of the human development?” In his Education of the Human Race Lessing also answers to some questions that can be objected the repeated lives on earth. Indeed, if such things appear with an excellent person, then people who judge this excellent spirit normally say: he performed great achievements, but later he became addicted to this strange dream of the repeated lives on earth, and one has to grant the great Lessing that he could also commit this strange mistake.—Thus, every little spirit feels called to condemn the great spirits with their “terrible mistakes.” Nevertheless, this idea did not let single persons of the nineteenth century rest, and even before the recent Darwinist natural sciences approached, the idea of the repeated lives on earth appears as a necessity of the human thinking again. Thus, it faces us in a book by Drossbach (Maximilian D., 1810–1884) about human rebirth, a somewhat confused book from our standpoint, but an attempt that allows itself just compared with scientific thinking to represent this idea. Soon afterwards, a little community was to be found which put a prize on the best writing about the immortality of the soul, and the prize winning writing by Widemann (Gustav W., 1812–1876) which was published in 1851 dealt with the problem of immortality from the standpoint of reincarnation. Thus, I could still state many a thing how the thinking has gradually induced many persons to consider this idea of reincarnation.

Then the scientific view of the human being came that was based on Darwin. At first, it considered the human being materialistically, and it will consider it still this way for a long. But if you take my book Theosophy or other books which are written in the spirit of spiritual science and natural sciences at the same time, you will realise that the scientific thinking—thought through to the end—imposes the necessity to the human being to think of the idea of incarnation. Nevertheless, it is not only this. I would like to show not only a logical consequence, but also that, indeed, the human being must come to the idea of reincarnation on basis of the same principle which prevails in natural sciences, namely of the principle of experience. However, another question arises there, is anybody able to collect experiences of that what should come in from supersensible worlds what should produce the human body and leave this body at death again?

One can realise cursorily still without spiritual-scientific foundations that something mental works on the outer body of the human being; but one does not like such considerations particularly today. If the human beings looked more exactly at the physiognomy of the human being in its different sculptural forms if one also looked at the facial play, at the gestures, which are individual with every human being, at the creative spirit, one would soon get a sensation how the spirit is internally working on the body.

Observe a human being who has been working on the big questions of life for about ten years, namely in such a way, as one does it in the outer science or philosophy where one reflects on these matters without having to say a lot. On the other side, observe a human being who has dealt with these issues so that they have become inner problems to him, so that they have taken him in states of the highest bliss, but also to the highest pains and the deepest tragedy. Consider a human being who deals with the questions of knowledge, and look at him, after he has led such a soul life for ten years, and you will realise how this work expresses itself in his physiognomy, how, indeed, the humanely mental works into the forms of the body. May one pursue now by certain methods such working on the outer physical body further to that point where not only certain forms of our face are changed in such a way that into them the character of the soul life is pressed, but where the indefinite form which the human being has at first becomes his completely elaborated figure?

It is necessary that the human being leads his soul life beyond the point where it is in the everyday life today. He has to learn to seize the supersensible in himself, that which is accessible to no outer observation. Then every human being can find both points by mere reflection, so to speak, where our life directly finds the supersensible.

These two points are the transitions from the wake state to sleep and again from sleep to the wake state. Since nobody should think so illogically that the human soul life stops with falling asleep and comes again into being with awakening. Our soul life must be in any state of existence in sleep, it must be somewhere to put it another way. The big question emerges which maybe the child puts that is justified for someone who gets involved with the questions of knowledge, namely the question: where does the soul go when the human being falls asleep? We see also other processes stopping, we see, for example, a burning candle going out. May one also ask there, where to does the fire go? Then we say, the fire is a process that stops if the candle goes out, and which begins again if it is kindled again.—May we compare the bodily process of the human being to the candle and say: the soul life is a process that goes out if the human being falls asleep in the evening, and is kindled in the morning when he awakes again? It seems perhaps to be in such a way, as if one could use this comparison. However, this comparison becomes impossible if, indeed, one could prove that not for the usual perception or sensation, but for a sensation to be attained by careful soul preparation that can face us which leaves our body with falling asleep and visits us with awakening again. If this is in such a way that while falling asleep not only a process takes place like a going out flame, but if we can pursue what leaves the body in the evening while falling asleep and visits it in the morning again if we can prove this process in its reality, then a supersensible inside the human being exists. Then one asks us this supersensible: how does it work within the body?

Even the famous naturalist Du Bois-Reymond (Emil Du B.-R., 1818–1896) pronounced the thought that one can understand the sleeping human being from the standpoint of natural sciences, but not the waking one in whom impulses, instincts, passions and so on surge up and down. You can read that what I have outlined today only briefly, more in detail in my writing How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds

I have described the methods there which we want to touch now briefly by which the human being gets around to getting to know the reality of that what leaves the body in sleep, and what with the awakening goes into him again. At first, we want to ask attentive soul viewers who have got a certain ability to listen to these important moments like falling asleep and awakening.

There we hear them saying what spiritual science can confirm absolutely that at first that changes what exists with sharp contours in the surroundings into something nebulous, into blurred forms. Then the falling asleep feels, as if his whole inner being is extended and does no longer depend on the forms of his skin; this is connected with a certain feeling of bliss. Then a strange moment occurs in which the human being can feel everything like in a brief vision that he has accomplished as satisfying moral things; this faces him vividly, and he knows that these are contents of his soul, he feels being in them. Then a jerk happens as it were, and the human being still feels: oh, this moment could last forever!—Some people just have this sensation who pay attention to the moment of falling asleep. The consciousness has disappeared.

The human being goes over to an inner essentiality at such a moment where the outer body plays no role, because the daily strain tires him. One feels as if the reality of the mental is scurrying. All methods of spiritual science which we can call experimental ones spiritual-scientifically consist in nothing but that the human being receives the inner power to keep that which is disappearing so that he can experience the moment of falling asleep completely consciously. The consciousness is kept. Since why does the consciousness dwindle while falling asleep? Because the human being cannot unfold that inner strength and willpower in the usual life to experience something else when the outer senses leave him. Let us ask ourselves, how much we experience in the usual life within the soul what is not stimulated by the outer impressions? There is a little left with most human beings surely. No wonder that the inner strength does not exist which can penetrate the soul-life and that is left by any outer experience at the moment, when it steps out while falling asleep. Any spiritual development is based on the penetration of our soul with the strength that the soul needs to receive the consciousness unless it receives it from the body. Meditation, concentration, and contemplation are experimental means to advance farther with the soul life than one can come in the usual life. I would like to bring in one example only.

Assuming that a human being can put a thought of benevolence or of something else in the centre of his experience and can exclude all the other thoughts, also those which one can get with the senses, to hold on this one thought only. Since the thoughts fly to the human being at such a moment as the bees fly to the flowers if one stands within the usual life. However, if one can have the strength to exercise concentration of thinking repeatedly, to practice meditative immersion, as soon as one can become free of the mere outer impressions, and delves repeatedly into pictorial thoughts which express something allegorically, then such a thought can startle the human soul-life, so that it becomes a stronger force than the human being normally has. Then such a human being falls asleep consciously, that means he experiences consciously that he grows with his soul life into a spiritual world. This is no dream, also no self-deception or self-suggestion, but something that is accessible, indeed, to every human being, but is to be reached only with care and energy. The human being can free himself completely from his physical corporeality. As he frees himself, otherwise, in sleep unconsciously from it, and as every human being is in sleep beyond the physical body, he will consciously live by such exercises in that what exists usually unconsciously beyond the human being. Briefly, the human being can experience a relief of his soul from the physical corporeality with soul exercises.

Indeed, one can always hold against such a representation that is based on inner experience: this is based on deceit! Nevertheless, whether it is based on deceit or on reality, this can be decided only by experience. Hence, I have to say repeatedly: what the human being believes to experience this way can absolutely be self-suggestion, for how far does the human being go self-deception! He can go so far that if he thinks, for example, only of a soda he already has its taste on the tongue. Something may well give the impression, as if it were perception of a spiritual world, but still it can be self-deceit. Hence, someone who does such exercises and makes his soul the experimenter must take all means to eliminate illusions. Nevertheless, in the end only the experience decides. Certainly, somebody can suggest the taste of a soft drink to himself, but it is another question whether he can quench his thirst with it.

There is the possibility to experience as reality what is in sleep beyond the physical body. How does one experience it? So that the human being makes his soul more and more independent and gets to know a quite new supersensible world. Indeed, he starts getting to know a world of spiritual light. Then something particular turns out there. The human being who otherwise does not consider his thoughts and mental pictures as realities takes them along when he leaves his body with his soul really. He loosens his conceptual life from all materiality, and this conceptual life experiences a transformation when the human being becomes free of his physical body. What I say now appears to materialistic minded people like daydreaming, even so it is reality. Our mere thoughts change into a world which we can compare—but only compare, it is different—with a propagating light with which we find the underlying cause of the things. So you get to the world in which you detach the thinking that is bound, otherwise, to the tool of the brain and submerge with your thinking in a newly appearing world. This expresses itself in the way that you feel more and more enlarged. You get to know a world of which the outer physical-sensory world is only a revelation. Spiritual beings, not atoms, form the basis of the outer sensory world, and we can penetrate as human beings into this spiritual world. So we are accepted by such a spiritual world as it were if we carry out this self-experiment in our soul.

We only attain a complete knowledge of the relation of this spiritual world to us human beings if we can also spiritually experience the moment of awakening. This is possible when the human being contemplates a lot about his inner life in meditation and concentration. For example, he can review that pictorially every morning or evening what he has experienced during the day or the day before to consider it contemplating or he contemplates his moral impulses and takes stock of himself. Then the human being gets around to experiencing the reverse moment consciously by such exercises where we submerge in our bodies that we experience, otherwise, unconsciously while awakening.

Then he experiences something that I can characterise only in the following way. You all may know that a healthy quiet sleep depends on our emotions. If the human being has thought ever so much, has exerted itself ever so much in his thinking, he falls easily asleep. But if anger, shame, remorse, and in particular a troubled conscience gnaw at him, he tosses and turns sleepless in bed. Not our thinking which we can carry over to the big spiritual world but our emotions can drive away the sleep.

Our emotions are associated with our soul life in the narrower sense. We share our thoughts with the world. The way in which our emotions just affect us is something intimately connected with what we ourselves are. Somebody who has learnt now in such a way to free his soul consciously from his body, also gets clear from immediate observation how he carries his emotions into the world into which he enters if he has become free of body. As blissful it makes us on one side to submerge in a world of spiritual light, free of the body, as much we feel chained in this world to our emotions gnawing at us. With it then we go into the spiritual world and have to carry it again into our body. However, by the mentioned exercises we find our emotional world again while submerging in our bodies. It faces us as something strange. We get to know ourselves submerging in our emotional world, and thereby we get to know, while we pursue it now consciously, what works in truth killing on our organism. I note here that I speak about death in a later talk that has a quite different meaning considering it with plants or animals than with the human being. Spiritual science does not take the easy way out to find these phenomena identical in the three realms if we pursue that consciously what has become the possession of our soul that it settles in our physical body and can work destroying in it. Then we get to know how our innermost being really forms the body while it combines with that what comes from father and mother and from the other ancestors as hereditary factors. There we see the human being entering in the physical life, we see him entering clumsily at first. He cannot yet speak; then we see the forms becoming more and more certain and see him becoming an active human being gradually.

Considering the whole development of the human being spiritual-scientifically, we realise how an inner essence develops and this forms the human being working on the body from the spiritual from birth or conception on. We find the same essence that works creatively on the body if we can pursue how it leaves the body and penetrates into a spiritual world. There we find two things: an element that enables us to pour out our own being like in a spiritual world of light; but we also find something in this essence that we must bring into this spiritual world, namely our emotional world, that is everything that we have got to know in life. In these two things we have on one side what is creative in the human being what leaves the body as our spiritual essence, goes through death and appears again in a new body after an interim and on the other side we have our emotions which we get to know by the spiritual-scientific view as a real being as that what destroys our body and leads to death.

Therefore, we realise how our spiritual essence enters in existence, builds up the body gradually, and we see this essence working the strongest in the first months where we do not yet have an inner soul life where we do not yet think. There we see the human being entering existence sleeping as it were. If we try to remember, we can come back to a certain point, not farther. We have slept into existence as it were. Only from the third, fourth years on the human being can feel as an ego. The reason is that the spiritual essence of the human being is busy forming the body at first. Then he comes to a point where the body has to grow only, and from then on the human being can use what flowed once in his body for his soul life which works within the physical body constantly in such a way that we take up the necessity of death at that time, where we start saying “I” to ourselves, up to which we can remember later where we begin an inner life.

What do we receive with this necessity of death? We receive the possibility to take up the outer world, to enrich our inside being perpetually, so that we become richer in life every day. In that part of our being that we carry in sleep into the spiritual world that forms our soul being everything is contained that we get as joys and sorrows, as pleasure and pain. While we live and develop a consciousness, we have the possibility for our inner essence to enrich it perpetually. We take this enrichment along if we go through death, but we can have it only because we had to destroy our bodies throughout life. Our body is built as it has developed from the preceding life. However, we absorb something new perpetually that enriches our soul life. Nevertheless, this new can no longer penetrate completely into our physical body, but only up to a certain degree. That expresses itself by the fact that we feel the fatigue of yesterday removed; but it cannot completely penetrate into our body. What penetrates into our body cannot develop completely in the bodily.

We take the former example once again. A human being works on questions of knowledge for ten years. Thus, his physiognomy has changed after ten years if this activity has been a matter of his heart. However, his body limits this change. The desire to develop internally further may still exist; but, the later absorbed can no longer work into the body. Hence, we see, because the body puts a border, the richer inner life beginning when the soul has poured forth into the body. First, we see the physiognomy of such a human being changing—of a thinker, poet or artist; then only we see the rich spiritual life developing. Not before our outside world limits us, we develop so surely, but we can no longer carry into our physical bodies what we develop in ourselves because our body is built up according to that what we have got in a former life on earth. Therefore, we have to carry through death what we still get internally. This helps us to build up the next body, so that we have built only in a body of the next life what must destroy our present body.

A view presents itself there that fits into the scientific thinking, a view of what death and immortality means what the repeated lives on earth mean. There we realise if we change our physiognomy how the human being has built that into his body what he has got in former lives on earth. We see the results of our former lives in the developing body, and we see in that what we get now what stands in the way of our bodily, so to speak, as a spiritual, the developing elements of our future life.

Spiritual science regards the earthly life as something that is between something former and something following. The later considerations will show how our perspective increases to the times of our existence which the human being spends free of body in the supersensible worlds. In order that such matters would not remain pipe dreams, it is necessary that we look at the methods that enable the soul to perceive even if it lacks the physical brain. Only because the human being enables the soul to perceive that in the supersensible what must remain, otherwise, a mere assertion it becomes a proven reality.

Today we stand strictly speaking only at the beginning of a science that deals with such matters. Just many people consider themselves as the best experts of the matters, as the most enlightened ones and regard these matters as fantasies. I would not be surprised if anybody said, this is daydreaming that completely contradicts any scientific truth!—Nobody will find it more comprehensible than I do if anybody says this. But while the human beings become engrossed more and more in spiritual science, they realise that we can prepare our souls by meditation so that it can know about itself, can develop inner forces by which it can still know, can still perceive if it leaves the body and can no longer perceive with the organs of the body. This has to be found experimentally—one may say, it is to be found spiritual-experimentally—that the soul is something that one can experience if it can no longer use the bodily organs. It goes through births and deaths and works in such a way that it builds up the body that goes through death and collects new forces to build the body during the earthly existence. With the questions of the nature of the human being, you attain answers to the questions of death and immortality at the same time.

Goethe said once in an essay that nature invented death to have much life. Spiritual-scientific research proves such a notion to be true saying, in any life, the human being enriches his soul life; he must die because his respective body is built as an effect of his former lives on earth. While killing his body, he creates the possibility to work into in a new body what now he cannot work into his body and into the world.

Such a worldview influences our lives deeply. If it penetrates our whole being if it remains not only a theory, we feel such a truth only as a truth of life. Since we say to ourselves when we have crossed the middle of our lives when our hairs begin becoming grey and our faces get wrinkles: life is going downhill!—Why is it going downhill? Because that what the soul has got cannot be brought into the body. However, what we have gained internally, and what must destroy our present bodies is worked into a new body. Someone can argue easily: you spiritual researchers state that the human being becomes weak in old age, so you say that just with the body the mind dwindles away!—As this objection is a given, it is a given that one only admits that such a man does not think about that: from what is our present brain built?—It is built from our former lives! We must destroy our bodies and our brains with our thoughts. But the thoughts, which kill the bodies, are those, which use the brain. It is obvious that something must stop that is bound to a tool like the brain. However, our spiritual being does not stop with it. That is why it occurs that we do no longer find the tools in ourselves to realise what we have appropriated in the present life if the human being moves in downward direction. Then this yet works in a soul life which is not bound to the brain, and which cannot be expressed by cerebral thoughts. This prepares itself to act creatively in the next life. One says it not only in Goethe's sense that nature invented death to have much life—but we have also to say, death is there to work out that in new forms what we acquire internally in life. In this sense, we can say if we see the age approaching: thank God, that life can go downward, that death can be! Since if it did not exist, we could not take up what flows towards us from the world in such a way that it forms us. We need death, so that we can make that what we experience the contents of our own being. Hence, we regard death as that by which just life can advance. Hence, there is no better adviser than spiritual science; it is not only a comforter towards the fear of death, but it gives us strength, while we are walking towards death and see the outside dying. Since we know that then the inside grows. Spiritual science will raise the whole life to a higher level at which life seems meaningful and reasonable.

From the following talks will arise that life does not proceed endlessly forward and backward, but that also reincarnation has a beginning and an end. Now I would only like to point to it. From that which spiritual science has to say about death and immortality arises that we have the effects of our present life in a following life.

The complete human existence disintegrates into the existence between birth and death and into that between death and a new birth. There we see what Goethe felt in terms of the simple life extended to the whole life while we look back not only at the little yesterday, but also at the big yesterday where we made our present life. We look there at the joys or pains of life and feel: joy strengthens us for the future; we must experience grief for overcoming obstacles to strengthen ourselves also for the future. There we see a big contrast expanding in the future life and think of the Goethe's verses:

If yesterday is clear and accessible,
If today you work freely and strongly,
Then you can hope for a tomorrow
That is also fortunate.

Happiness and optimism flow to us from the internally conceived spiritual science showing us: indeed, the spirit forms the material and survives while the material life is destroyed to reveal itself always anew, and which applies the newly acquired. I would like to summarise this for the purposes of the today's evening with the words:

While living the spirit shows
Always its power only,
Dying, however, the spirit shows,
How through all deaths
It always survives to higher life.

During a nice September day of this year, I drove with some friends from Zurich to the neighbouring town Einsiedeln. There a Benedictine Abbey was founded in the early Middle Ages and acquired a certain notoriety through diverse circumstances. At that day, just a pilgrimage day took place. Einsiedeln was prepared to welcome many pilgrims. At that time, I myself also wanted to do a kind of pilgrimage, but not directly to that place Einsiedeln, but from there to an adjacent site. A car was taken to drive to the so-called “Devil's Bridge.” Finally, on a quite rough way, uphill and downhill, we arrived there and found a quite modern inn that was built relatively short time ago. In this inn, a board is found: “Natal site of the doctor and naturalist Philippus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, called Paracelsus, 1493–1541.”

This was the goal of my pilgrimage at first: the birthplace of the famous, in many respects also infamous, Theophrastus Bombastus Paracelsus von Hohenheim. At first one saw meadows with many flowers and grazing cows all around in a strange place where many ways crossed. One could feel something particular by the peculiar of nature as you can hardly find it in Europe anywhere but in the Alpine regions. Nature has something there, as if the plants have an own language, as if they wanted to say anything, as if they could become rather talkative. This site is also suitable to grow together with that which the spirit of nature can tell you.

There the picture of a boy emerged before my soul who grew up during the first nine years of his life in that nature who really had his birthplace in a house which stood once there, and which was replaced with the new one. Since the old doctor Bombast von Hohenheim lived in the fifteenth century at this place, and his little son was the future Paracelsus. I tried to put myself in the situation of that boy about whom I knew that he had grown together with the whole nature already from his earliest childhood. I tried to imagine this boy in this nature talking intimately with the plants. In a certain respect, the outer configuration definitely shows what that boy Paracelsus let speak to himself from the early morning to the late evening, except those times in which he went with his father on the ways that this undertook to the adjacent places. One can consider as sure that the father could exchange some interesting thoughts about the interesting questions with the little boy in the midst of nature at that time, questions that that child could already put about what the experience of nature directly shows. Something that matured in that boy that we may come to know in the life of Paracelsus faces us in a childlike figure if we have the picture of the old honest-good, but very expert licentiate, the old Bombastus von Hohenheim taking the inquisitive boy by the hand.

While this picture emerged in my soul, I remembered another picture which I already had many years ago when I stood in Salzburg in front of a house where a board displayed that in this modest house Theophrastus Bombastus Paracelsus von Hohenheim died at the age of 48 years. Between these two pictures this eventful, this unique life is enclosed to me.

If we look a little closer at his life, we find, indeed, still completely with the character of the fifteenth, sixteenth centuries, a deep knowledge of nature arising which became then medical science and philosophy, theosophy. A knowledge of nature, which originates from deeper clairvoyant soul forces whose true figure I have already suggested in the talks of this cycle. What waked up these deeper soul forces and enabled Paracelsus to look within nature behind that what the outer senses and the outer intellect can recognise only, was really caused by the intimately adherence with nature, by feeling his soul forces related to that what germinates, sprouts and blossoms in nature. When the nine-year-old boy moved with his father to Carinthia into a similar nature, he could also feel related with the spirit of nature.

Paracelsus growing up in such a way advanced further and further just in an individual, in a quite peculiar and personal view of nature. How could this be different? Everything was connected that took root in his mind with the forces peculiar to him and with the abilities, with the way as he stood to the things how they were talking to him. Hence, he also especially appreciated throughout his life to have grown together so intimately with nature. If he wanted to stress to his enemies that his inside was related to nature, he often pointed to it later. These were his words: “Give ear how I justify myself: I am not spun subtly by nature, it is also not the habit of my country that one attains something with silk spinning. We are brought up neither with figs, nor with mead, nor with wheat bread; but with cheese, milk, and oat bread, this cannot make subtle fellows. Those are educated in soft clothes and in women's rooms, and we who grew up in pine cones do not understand each other well. This is why someone can even be considered as rude who believes to be subtle and gracious. The same applies to me what I regard as silk, the other call it drill.” He is of such a type, he thinks, as the human beings are who have not completely separated themselves from the topsoil of natural existence but are intimately connected with it. He takes his power and wisdom from this connection. That is why his motto was throughout his life: “Let no man belong to another who can belong to himself.” This penetrated his whole character; it shows us this man mental-plastically. Hence, we can understand that when he came to the university later he could not familiarise himself with the way how he should continue scholarly now what he knew about medical science naturally, only encouraged by the conversations with nature and with his father. He could not cope with this at first actually.

In order to realise what he had to withstand there, we have to look at how at that time medicine was done. There it was authoritative above all what one could have in the old traditions and documents of the old doctors Galen (131-~200 AD), Avicenna (AbÅ« AlÄ« al-Husain ibn AbdullÄh ibn SÄ«nÄ, ~980–1037) and others. The lecturers dealt preferably with commenting and interpreting what one could read in the books. This was deeply antipathetic to the young Philippus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, and he probably thought above all that a big distance was between that which one could get directly and intuitively from the spiritual work of nature and what had gone away so far from it as scholarship, as mere intellectual concepts and ideas. Hence, he wanted to go through another school. He went through this other school thoroughly. We soon see Paracelsus leaving the university and wandering about in Germany, Austria, Western and Southern Europe, Poland, Holland, Lithuania, and Scandinavia, with the intention to get to know something from the way everywhere—to speak with Goethe—“how nature lives in creating.” Since he had the thought in mind, actually: indeed, the whole nature is a uniform, but she speaks in many languages, and just because one learns to recognise how one and the same thing changes its form in the different regions, one advances to the being of the inner unity, to that what underlies as something spiritual everything only sensorily discernible. However, he wanted to get to know not only how any ore, any metal directly results from the configuration of the mountains and of its source to get such a picture how nature lives in creating, he wanted to get to know not only how the plants assume other shapes depending on the climate and the environment, but he had something else still in mind. He said to himself: with its surroundings, the whole human organism is connected. One cannot understand the human body and soul as the same everywhere; at least one does not recognise the human being if one looks at him only at one place.

Therefore, he wandered through the different regions that were accessible to him to recognise with his look deeply penetrating into the spiritual how the human being is related with nature, depending on the different influence of climate and region. Not before one experiences this different influence everywhere, one gets to that what informs us about the nature of health and illness in the sense of Paracelsus. Hence, he was never satisfied to get to know any illness only at one place, but he said to himself, the fine substances are different which compose the human organism, depending on whether the human being lives, for example, in Hungary, in Spain or in Italy, and nobody recognises the human being who cannot pursue the finer substances with penetrating look.

When one reproached him that his “high school” was vagrancy, he referred to the fact that the divine spirit does not come to anybody who is sitting on the fireside bench. He realised that the human being has to go where the divine spirit works in the different shapes of nature. A clairvoyant knowledge developed in him that he could have only because of his connection with nature.

However, Paracelsus also felt that this knowledge had so intimately grown together with his soul that he became more and more aware that, actually, one could bring to mind only by an intimate way of pronouncing what he had learnt directly on the high school of nature. He called nature his “book” and the various areas of the earth the “single pages” of this book which one reads walking on them. He despised those increasingly who studied the old Galen, Avicenna and others only and removed from the book that spreads out with its various pages as the “book of nature” in front of him. However, he also felt that that what he could learn in such a way in his high school could be put only intimately into words. Hence, he wanted to use another language than Latin that had become foreign, actually, to the immediate soul life, which was used in those days only at the universities. Since he believed that he could not succeed in bending the words and in formulating so that they could immediately express what flowed out of all being. Therefore, he felt the urge to express in his mother tongue what he wanted to express. Two things resulted from that. Once, that he had a high self-confidence of the value of his knowledge not because of boasting or arrogance, for he was a humble nature strictly speaking. That is why he said that one could not learn anything from medical science, actually, but one must approach nature directly again while renewing medical science.—Hence, his proud words: “Who wants to follow the truth has to go to my kingdom. Follow me, you Galen, Avicenna (AbÅ« AlÄ« al-Husain ibn AbdullÄh ibn SÄ«nÄ, ~980–1037, Persian polymath), Rhazes (AbÅ« Bakr Muhammad ibn ZakarÄ«yÄ ar-RÄzÄ«, 854–927, Persian polymath), Montagnana (Bartolomeo da M., ~1380–1452) and Mesue (YÅ«hannÄ ibn MÄsawayh, ~777–857, Assyrian physician), I do not follow you. You from Paris, you from Montpellier, you from Swabia, you from Meissen, you from Cologne, you from Vienna, and from the regions of the Danube and Rhine rivers, you from the islands, you from Italy, you from Dalmatia, you from Sarmatia, you from Athens, you Greeks, you Arabs, you Israelites. Follow me and I do not follow you ... I become the king, and the kingdom will be mine, I lead the empire and gird your loins!” Not from arrogance and haughtiness, but from the consciousness that nature speaks out of him, he said, the kingdom is mine.—With it, he meant the kingdom of scientific and medical knowledge of his time.

The second thing that resulted was that he was soon by such a disposition and such a knowledge an opponent of the official representatives of his discipline. First, they could not stand at all that he expressed himself in German what they regarded only as possible to express in Latin language. He was a complete innovator of that. They could also not understand that he walked through the lands and wanted to learn. They could not at all believe that someone who was connected with the whole nature had a living sensation of the fact that the human soul-life is everywhere a fruit of natural existence in the region and that one has not only to observe the plants blossoming and the animals thriving there. Hence, Paracelsus appreciated farmers, shepherds, even knackers who worked in and with nature. He was convinced that in their simple knowledge something would be included of a real knowledge of nature from which he might learn something, so that he learnt as it were as a vagrant from vagrants. Hence, he says about himself: “I followed the art at the risk of my life and was not ashamed of learning from vagrants, headsmen, and barbers. My teaching was tested sharper than silver in poverty, fear, war and misery.”—One could not forgive him this. When he was appointed later at the university of Basel—as it were like by an error of the representatives of his discipline—, one of the scholars noticed with horror that Paracelsus walked in the street not in the costume of the professors, but like a vagrant, like a carter. This was not acceptable; this violated the reputation of the entire profession.

Therefore, it happened then that he encountered the contradiction of his colleagues where he wanted to apply what he had learnt from the big book of nature, and experienced what those have to experience who have to experience envy and opposition the worst. However, what one could least forgive him was that he was successful with his deep insights into nature where others had no success where they had applied everything that was in their power and could reach nothing. It is true if one offered resistance to him there or there he was not sparing with rude words, but if one considers the conditions with which he worked, one knows that it was completely justified. Where he was urged to discuss this or that medical problem with these or those colleagues, the debates became heated. There, for example, the others talked in Latin that he understood rather well, then he shouted back towards them in German what he regarded as proofs, they regarded, as follies. A picture of the whole way resulted how he collided with his contemporaries.

We can briefly explain in the following way what he gained as insight. He said: the human being, as he faces us as a healthy and ill being, is not a single entity, a single species, but he is placed in the big nature. One can assess health and illness in a certain respect only if one knows all effects that originate from the big world, from the macrocosm to pull the human being into their circles.—Thus, the human being appeared to him at first like a single entity in the macrocosm. This was one direction as he looked at the human being. Then he said to himself: someone must attain an intimate knowledge of all events in the big nature outdoors who wants to assess how all phenomena which happen, otherwise, outdoors in wind and weather, in rising and setting of stars and so on flow through the human nature as it were, work into them.—Because Paracelsus did not confine himself to the special knowledge of the human being, but let the clairvoyant gaze wander over the whole macrocosm, over physics, astronomy, chemistry, and collected everything that he could get hold of, the human being was a part of the macrocosm for him.

However, besides the human being appeared to him as a being independent largely, while he processes the substances of the macrocosm and by the way, in which he processes them, he lives either in connection or in opposition with the macrocosm. As far as the human being is a part of the macrocosm, Paracelsus looks at him as the lowest, most primitive, purely physical-bodily human being. But as far as the human being receives a certain circulation of substances and forces in his organisation and develops independently, is active independently in them, Paracelsus saw something included in the human being that he calls the “archaeus” that was to him like an inner master builder whom he also called the “inner alchemist.”

He draws the attention to this inner alchemist who transforms the outer substances which do not resemble what the human being needs as material inside as he changes milk and bread into meat and blood. This was to him a big riddle. In it expressed itself what he saw working as the inner alchemist who adapts himself harmoniously in the universe or opposes it. This was to him the human being in a second direction who can have such an inner alchemist in himself who transforms the substances into poisons destroying the organism, or into those means furthering and developing the organism.

Then he distinguished a third one: that what is the human being apart from the outer world. There Paracelsus realised that the human organisation is so designed that in the cooperation of the forces and organs a little world, a microcosm, an image of the big world exists. Notabene: this is something different from the first viewpoint of Paracelsus. After the first viewpoint, the human being is a part of nature. As far as with his third viewpoint the single parts of nature co-operate, he finds a likeness of the mutual relation of sun and moon in blood and heart, in the nervous and cerebral systems and in the interactions of them. In the other organs, he finds an inner kingdom of heaven, an inner world edifice. The outer world edifice is to him like a big symbol that recurs in the human being like a little world. In a mess that can originate in this little world, he sees the third way in which the human being can become ill.

He saw the fourth viewpoint in the passions and desires, which exceed a certain measure, for example, rage and fury. They react then again on the physical organisation.

Finally, he still saw the fifth viewpoint that is by no means admitted today, in the way, how the human being is integrated into the course of the world, and how to him from the whole spiritual development the causes of illness can result.

Paracelsus developed five viewpoints this way which he demanded not theoretically, but which he realised from the nature of the human being in immediate view of the relation of the human being to nature. Because he saw the human being placed in nature, and did not intellectually but clairvoyantly consider the way in which the single parts co-operate Paracelsus could position himself in a particular way to the sick human being. Strangely enough, he related not with one, but with all soul forces to the whole world. Hence, his nice sentence: with the mind we learn to recognise God the Father in the world; by faith we learn to recognise Christ, the Son; and by imagination, we learn to recognise the Spirit.

As the knowledge of the healthy and sick human being results from these three aspects, he wanted to put the human being before his soul. However, he wanted to look not only at the human being, but he wanted to observe how the single things are related in nature with each other and with the human being. Something peculiar could thereby happen: if he faced a sick person, he beheld how nature worked under the just cited viewpoints; the irregularity of the substances and of the organs resulted to his intuitive sight. He had the whole human being before himself.

He could not dress in abstract words what he experienced in front of the sick person, he could not formulate it; but he settled in the sick person. He needed no name of the illness, but while he was like submerged in the illness, he realised something quite new: how he had to combine the substances that he knew in nature, so that he could find means against this illness. However, it was also not only the mental in which he submerged, but also the moral, the intellectual and spiritual. Call him a vagrant if you want, as one did; maybe call charlatanism what he did. Nevertheless, stress also that he was bared of all means that he had to run up debts and so on. But then do not forget that he unselfishly became completely one with the illness he faced.

Hence, one could say, if he used everything that nature gave him for the sick person, the most important remedy would be love above all. Not the substances heal, he said, but love.—Love also worked from him onto the sick person, because he completely saw himself transported in the nature of the other human being. The second what had to arise from him by his especially intimate relation to nature was that he beheld the effective means in any single case that he applied; he beheld it developing its forces in the human organism. From it, the second arose to him: confident hope. He calls love and hope his best healing powers, and he never set himself to work without love and hope. The man who walked around as a vagrant was completely filled with the most unselfish love. However, he often had weird experiences. His love went so far that he cured those free of charge who had no money. However, he also had to live on something. Some people often cheated him out of his fee; then he went on and did not care. However, also collisions happened with the surroundings. Thus, the following occurred to him, for example.

When he was in Basel, because he was later appointed city doctor, also like by a kind of error, he accomplished some famous cures. Once he was called to a Canon Lichtenfels who had an illness that nobody could cure. Paracelsus had stipulated a fee of hundred thalers if he cured him; the canon agreed. Then Paracelsus gave him the remedy, and after three or four times the illness was cured.

There the canon meant if this was done so easily, he also does not pay the hundred thalers,—and Paracelsus was left with nothing. He sued the canon to set an example; but he did not win his case at the Basel court: he should keep to his rate. Then he distributed, as one said, bad flyers against the court and especially against the canon. This bred bad blood. A friend drew his attention to the fact that his stay was no longer safe in Basel. Then he fled in the dead of night from Basel. Had he gone half an hour later, he would have been imprisoned.

Someone who knows the peculiar life of this person understands the impression deeply penetrating into our hearts originating from the picture that comes from Paracelsus' last years: a picture that shows a face in which a lot of spiritual is expressed. He experienced a lot, but at the same time, the life badgered this soul and this body badly. On one side, you notice the suffering, relatively young man with the old features, wrinkles, and baldness and which struggle and striving which essence of the whole time evolution were in Paracelsus and on the other side, how he had to experience the tragic of a human being who confronted his time this way. Even if it is a legend, what should have happened in Salzburg that the Salzburg doctors would have decided once to incite one of his servants to precipitate Paracelsus from a rock who thereby met his death and was carried to his house. Even if that is not true, the life of Paracelsus was already in such a way that one must not split his skull; one worried his life out so that we understand his early death completely.

Such a man like Paracelsus made a deep impression on all who searched the way to the spiritual worlds in the next time. Someone who knows Goethe's life feels that Paracelsus whom Goethe got to know soon made a deep impression on him. Goethe had grown together like Paracelsus as it were with the surrounding nature. On another occasion, I have already told that Goethe showed this emotional attachment as a seven-year-old boy while he built an altar, rejecting everything that he has as religious explanations about nature from his surroundings. He took a music stand, laid minerals of his father's collection and plants on it, waited for the sun rise in the morning, collected the sun beams with a burning glass and lighted a little aromatic candle, which he had put on top, to light a sacrificial fire which was kindled in nature itself, and offered a sacrifice to the God of the big nature that way. This affinity to nature appears with Goethe so early and develops later into the great, also clairvoyant ideas about nature. We see in Goethe who is already in Weimar this way of thinking working on in the prose hymn To Nature: “Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by her, we are unable to escape her, and unable to penetrate deeper into her. Uninvited and unwarned she takes us along in the circulation of her dance until we are tired and fall from her arms ...”

Also in another way, we see a lot of resemblance between Goethe and Paracelsus. He becomes a true student of nature in botany and zoology. We realise how he tries to recognise the being of the objects of nature on his Italian Journey spiritually observing how the single appears in its variety. It is nice as he sees the innocent coltsfoot transformed which he knows from Germany. There he learns how the outer forms can express the same being in various way. Thus we realise that he wanted to recognise—everywhere searching the unity in the variety—the uniform as the spirit. It is significant what he writes from Rome to his friend Knebel (Karl Ludwig von K., 1744–1834) in Weimar on 18 August 1787: “After I have seen many plants and fish near Naples and in Sicily, I would be tempted if I were ten years younger to travel to India, not to discover anything new, but to look at the discovered in my way.” He wants to behold intuitively spiritually what spreads out in the sensory world. Paracelsus headed for the spirit in nature, Goethe headed for the spirit.

No wonder, hence, that Paracelsus' life appeared beside Faust's life vividly in Goethe's soul. If we open ourselves to Goethe's life especially, his Faust stands not only as the Faust of the sixteenth century before us who was a kind of contemporary of Paracelsus in a certain respect, but Paracelsus himself stands before us as he worked on Goethe. We have something in the Faust figure in which Paracelsus played a part. Why did Goethe resort to Faust?—One tells in the legend of Faust that he laid the Bible behind the bank for a while, became a doctor of medicine, and wanted to study the forces of nature.

Indeed, we realise that Paracelsus remained loyal to the Bible and was even a Bible-expert, but we see him laying the old medical authorities, Galen, Avicenna and others “behind the bank,” even burnt them once and went directly to the book of nature. This trait did a big impression on Goethe. And further: do we not see a similar trait when Faust translates the Bible into his “beloved German,” so that that which comes from it can directly flow into his soul, and when Paracelsus translates that into his beloved German which natural science is to him? We could state some other traits that would show that in Goethe something of the reappeared Paracelsus lived when he created the Faust figure. Yes, one would like to say, one sees in the Faust—Goethe translates it only into the ideal—what often happened between Paracelsus and his honest father when they were together, where Faust tells how he had contact with his father. Briefly, we can look at Paracelsus if Faust works as a figure of the Goethean creating on us.

While we have both figures beside ourselves, something faces us that shows in peculiar way how Goethe could make something quite different from the Faust figure as from the Paracelsus figure of the sixteenth century. If we look at the Goethean Faust, he is dissatisfied about what the different sciences, medicine, theology and so on can give him. However, Goethe can present this Faust not in such a way that we see the immediate settling in nature. Goethe could do it, but there had to be something for him, why he did not do it. Why did he not do it?

There it is remarkable at first, what is not only an outer fact that Paracelsus died with a harmonious soul that has grown together with the spirit of nature in the years in which we can imagine Faust saying the words:

I've studied now, to my regret,
Philosophy, Law, Medicine,
and—what is worse—Theology
from end to end with diligence ...
(Verses 355–357)

What now Faust further experiences, he experiences it in an age which Paracelsus did not reach in the physical world. Therefore, Goethe presents a kind of Paracelsus as it were from the age on in which Paracelsus died, but a Paracelsus who could not settle in the living spirit of nature.

How does he present him? Although he shows that Faust found a deep understanding of nature, also a kind of feeling related with nature, it is different than it was with Paracelsus. We feel this, when Faust speaks to the spirit of nature:

Spirit sublime, all that for which I prayed,
all that you now have granted me
you showed your face to me, but not in vain.
You gave me for my realm all Nature's splendour,
with power to feel and to enjoy it. You grant
not only awed, aloof acquaintanceship,
you let me look deep down into her heart
as if it were the bosom of a friend.
You lead the ranks of living beings past me,
and teach me thus to know my fellow creatures
in air and water and in silent wood.
(Verses 3217–3227)

Faust grows together with her in a way, because he was separated from nature before. Nevertheless, Goethe cannot show that Faust penetrates so vividly into the details of nature as Paracelsus penetrated; he cannot show that this happens at once, while he speaks to the sublime spirit of nature. Goethe cannot show how Faust would grow together with nature, but he must show an inner soul development. Faust has to go through a merely mental-spiritual development to reach the depths of the creating of nature and world. Thus, we realise with this way of Faust, although he often reminds of Paracelsus, that everything that Faust experiences is experienced in the moral, in the intellectual, in the emotional life, and not like with Paracelsus with whom as it were the feelers reach nature. It had really to happen that Faust could ascend to unselfishness, to the intimate love of the spiritual at the end of the second part, not while he grows together with nature, but goes even farther away from her. Goethe lets Faust go blind:

The darkness seems to press about me more and more,

But in my inner being there is radiant light.
(Verses 11,499#8211;11,500)

Faust becomes a mystic, he develops the soul in all directions, and he faces the resisting Mephistophelean forces. Briefly, Faust must develop purely inside his soul, has to raise the spirit in his soul. When this spirit is raised inside, the manifest to the senses is destroyed even with Faust because he goes blind: “But in my inner being there is radiant light.”

Faust realises—we recognise this at the end of the drama—that the spirit working in nature forces up the inner soul forces if the human being develops them. If this spirit is developed enough, the human being directly attains what penetrates as something spiritual the human being and nature.

Thus, Goethe let his Faust experience an inner soul path so that his Faust comes to the same goal to which Paracelsus came. If one thinks about what induced it, one realises that the powers of time cause the successive epochs of development, the historical life.

One recognises then what it means that the year of Paracelsus' death is something before that big revolution which the work of Copernicus caused for the outer natural science. Paracelsus' life still falls into the time in which it was right that the earth was stationary in the universe that the sun walks around it, and so on; this still worked beyond Paracelsus. Only after his death, the quite different kind of the view of the solar system and the world system prevailed. People literally lost the ground. Someone who regards the Copernican world system as a matter of course today gets no idea of that storm which broke out when the earth “was set in motion.” One can say, the ground under the feet faltered literally. But that also caused that the spirit did no longer stream immediately like an aroma into the soul as with Paracelsus. If Copernicus had confined himself to that which the senses perceive, he would never have put up his world system. Because he did not trust in the senses, he could put up his world system, while he exceeded the sensory appearance with intellect and reason. The course of development was this way. The human being had to develop his mind and his reason immediately. The times since the sixteenth century have passed not without effect.

While Goethe had to lift his Faust out of a Paracelsus figure of the sixteenth century to a Faust figure of the eighteenth, he had to consider that the human being could no longer be connected with nature in such an immediate and primitive way as Paracelsus was. Hence, Faust became a figure that could not discover the forces of existence, the sense of being by the immediate connection with nature but by the hidden forces from the depths of the soul.

However, at the same time the essentials appear that in the human being the stream of existence does not pass by insignificantly. Paracelsus is a son of his time as a great, superior figure. Goethe created a figure in his Faust poetically, which he made the son of his time in a certain direction which learnt to use reason and intellect in the natural sciences of his time, and which could work out the mystic. Hence, one has to say, because Goethe felt pressured into presenting not a Paracelsus figure but another figure, the deep caesura appears in the development of the European humanity in this period. The importance of such a caesura even appears in the greatest geniuses, and in the difference between these both figures. It is interesting for someone who wants to get to know Goethe to the highest degree to look at his creating in the Faust figure, because his Faust informs us about Goethe more than his other figures.

If we look at spiritual science from these observations, it can feel intimately related with Goethe, but can also feel intimately related with Paracelsus in another way. How with Paracelsus? Paracelsus could receive the deepest insights into nature from the developed forces of his soul by immediate contact with nature. However, this time in which one was able to do this is past since Copernicus, Galilei, Giordano Bruno and Kepler. Another time has begun. In his Faust Goethe showed the type of this time in which one has to work with the hidden soul forces, so that higher sensory forces come into being from the depths of the soul. As the eyes see the colours as the ears hear the tones, these higher senses perceive the spirit in the surroundings and that which one cannot behold as spirit with the usual senses.

Thus, the modern human being has to experience the deeper soul forces, while he does not grow together with nature as Paracelsus did but while he turns away from her. However, if he gets around to bringing up the deeper forces from his soul, to developing an understanding also of what lives invisibly as a spiritual and supersensible behind the visible, behind the sensory nature, if the human being works out the Faustian from himself, then the Faustian becomes the clairvoyant insight into nature. In a way any human being can experience developing the inner spirit that he can say indeed—even if he cannot believe to have solved the riddles of the world by what his eyes and outer senses teach him: “But in my inner being there is radiant light.” This can lead us to the spirit that prevails in everything.

Thus, the way from Paracelsus to Goethe is extremely interesting if one sees reviving in the Faust figure from Goethe's soul what for Paracelsus what also for Faust is the essentials is: the fact that the human being can penetrate into the depths of the world and into the laws with which the everlasting immortal spirit of the human being is related not by the outer senses, but only by an immediate connection with nature, as with Paracelsus, or by a development of higher senses, as Goethe poetically indicated in the continuation of the Faust figure of the sixteenth century. That is why for Paracelsus that became more and more a principle that then Goethe stressed for his Faust with the words:

Nature, mysterious in day's clear light,
lets none remove her veil,
and what she won't reveal to your mind,
you can't extort from her with levers and with screws.
(Verses 671–674)

With it one does not mean—neither in the sense of Paracelsus nor in that of Goethe—that one could not investigate the spirit of nature, but that the spirit reveals itself in nature, indeed, to the spirit woken in the soul, but not to the instruments which we have in the laboratory, not to the levers and the screws. Hence, Goethe says: “What she won't reveal to your mind, you can't extort from her with levers and with screws.” But to the spirit she can reveal it. This is the right interpretation of this Goethean word. Since Goethe agreed absolutely with Paracelsus, while he created a reflection of Paracelsus in his Faust, and Paracelsus together with Goethe would have regarded the spirited words as valid:

to understand some living thing and to describe it,
the student starts by ridding it of its spirit;
he then holds all its parts within his hand,
except, alas! For the spirit that bound them together.

Goethe adds, namely, when he conceived his Faust first, because he himself was still in high spirits in a juvenile way and did not belong to the “extremely clean and superfine” people in the sense of Paracelsus:

which chemists, unaware they're being ridiculous,
denominate encheiresin naturae.
(Verses 1936–1941)

However, this wants to say that nobody who wants to approach nature without developed higher cognitive forces can recognise the primal grounds of nature and cannot recognise how the immortal spirit of the human being is connected with nature, or to speak with Jacob Böhme where it comes into being (German: urständet).

If one covers the way from Paracelsus to Goethe as we have tried to outline it today, then you realise that Paracelsus and Goethe are living confessors of the other principle, not of the principle of those views of nature and world which they wanted to meet with the Goethean saying:

To understand some living thing and to describe it,
The student starts by ridding it of its spirit;
He then holds all its parts within his hand,
Except, alas! For the spirit that bound them together.

No! Paracelsus and Goethe approach nature and the human being in such a way that for them counts:

Who wants to recognise and understand some living thing,
looks for the spiritual light in primal grounds.
There he holds all its parts within his hand,
And never will he misjudge
The truth of the things within the spiritual tie.

What spiritual science has to say about the origin of the human being must be of the highest interest to all those persons who are interested in spiritual science out of the big questions of worldview. Since one met the question of the origin of the human being with immense interest from all sides in the last decades that has been enkindled in particular in the second half of the nineteenth century by the big, admirable progress of natural sciences. One can understand that with the powerful way with which natural sciences have tried to rise as the worldview the question of the origin of the human being had to be repeatedly put.

Now in case of a superficial consideration it may appear, as if just compared with this question that worldview, which wants to stand on the firm ground of natural sciences, and spiritual science would face each other with the starkest contrast. But if one considers the conditions within the scientific development, as they still existed few decades ago or maybe still before short time, then it may seem plausible to accept such a stark contrast. Since one has only to think what it signified in 1864, when from the scientific views of Darwin which already began seizing the broadest circles, on a German naturalists' meeting,—before still Darwin had expressed the question of the origin of the human being—Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) applied Darwin's principles to the science of the human being. He represented not only the relationship of the human being his form and life conditions with the higher animals, but he energetically represented the immediate origin of the human being from the higher animal world.

At that time, one probably had to suppose that the coming discoveries of scientific research would confirm more and more what Ernst Haeckel had pronounced in 1864 like a courageous program of research that the proper use of the scientific principles would lead to the fact that one might recognise how from the animal orders the order of the human being has gradually developed. If that which Haeckel announced at that time like a kind of program that yet counted to himself already as irrefutable truth had proved to be true if the scientific research had really followed this path, today the mentioned radical contrast would certainly exist between natural sciences and spiritual science. But now this did not happen that way. Natural sciences themselves produced quite different results and have taken consequences from them, in particular in the last decades, as one had assumed at that time. The fact that one has ever so big difficulties in our days to see clearly in this realm if one tries to show the relation of natural sciences to spiritual science, is due solely to the fact that the popular spreading of scientific knowledge does not keep abreast of the discovery and production of this knowledge. We stand there even today compared with the popular consciousness in such a way that with many people like a firm dogma, in particular in the popular literature, the view is spread, as if really only someone stands on the firm ground of scientific knowledge who completely accepts the assertion that the human being has externally developed in the course of time from animal forms which are directly next to him. This faith is widespread, so that one simply says to someone who wants to counter something to this dogma: you know just nothing about that what arises as worldview if one really stands on the firm ground of scientific facts.

Most people, actually, know nothing about it, because the popular literature shows everything in such a way that one can know nothing about the fact that this belief has become rather fragile during the last years. Since what natural sciences delivers as facts our question is for the materialistic-monistic worldview already in an alarming proximity of that what spiritual science has to say. Since one would like to say: natural sciences have developed with our question during the last years in such a way that everywhere one has to doubt the old views of a direct origin of the human being from the animal order bordering on him. If we outline the development of science only briefly, before we come on the spiritual-scientific things, it will become obvious that spiritual science contradicts the facts of natural sciences, actually, much less than the scientific theories and hypotheses which are still held by a materialist-monistic worldview.

We turn back to the views that could find quite comprehensible spreading, for example, in the sixties, seventies of the nineteenth century. Which view has formed when Darwin (Charles Robert D., 1809–1882) published his brilliant book The Descent of Man in 1871 after his book On the Origin of Species had appeared in 1859 with him and his followers? There the view has formed that once in a bygone time the human being has gradually developed from the forms which belong to the simian species, from forms, indeed, which did not comply with the forms of these animal species which have survived until today, but which were externally related in a way to them. One regarded a kind of being as ancestor of the human being which had four limbs which were shaped more of the same kind, a kind of a four-handed being with which also the today's feet of the human being were like hands. Thereby the human being would have been a kind of a haired four-handed climbing animal with an imperfectly developed brain and with an accordingly different developed skull. Then such a pithecoid being would have developed to the today's human being in more or less straight line by the adaptation to the relations and by everything that has arisen in the struggle for existence. One has gone so far that one has not only dedicated himself to the view, as if the outer forms and the living conditions of the human being belonging more to the animal had gradually developed from such animal-like forms, but as if also all spiritual activities of the human being only showed a higher developmental level of the mental activities in the animal realm.

One has in particular tried there to show that the human thinking, feeling and willing only turn out as a perfection of simpler, more primitive mental activities which are also found in the animal realm, which were so transformed then just as the outer forms of the brain or the limbs. It would be important that such a view would have to lead to the assumption that everything that the human being experiences today as his spiritual, as the contents of his soul life, actually, is only the product of a physical-bodily life which can be traced back to times in which there is, actually, only a still animal, bodily life where it does not make sense to speak of such spiritual processes or spiritual contents as they were found in the human soul today. The human spiritual life would have developed like a kind of superstructure of former lower forms, so that one would not be entitled to connect the human spiritual life to a spiritual world reaching to our physical world.

For even more distant times of the past would arise that the animal life has developed from lower forms and that the mental of the animals must be led back to an existence in which there have been only those processes and beings which the human being regards today as if they contain nothing spiritual. However, with it the spirit would be, so to speak, an appearance for this worldview, a mock substantiality which develops from the bodily, and everything spiritual would have to be led back to something sensory-physical.

One knows quite sufficiently that in the second half of the nineteenth century worldviews mushroomed which were completely invigorated by the just characterised spirit that saw their greatness to break with all old views of the origin of the human being from a spiritual world and of an acceptance of the human being in a spiritual world when he dies. One may say that just the fairest sense of truth and sharpened intellectual conscience have led to such a worldview with the most manifold personalities in the course of the nineteenth century. To a worldview which had at that time by no means a materialistic attitude in the background, but which absolutely wanted to act and think in harmony with a noble and real idealism which said to itself, no one can hope that he belongs to a spiritual world immediately, but only that the spirit which has developed from the material existence finds a more or less long existence in the human soul. Even the human culture will further the spiritual in the course of development, but that what one himself could do in the spiritual,would not survive in a spiritual world, but can live on with the entire erasing of his individuality only in that what the human race produces as culture.

Nay, one is allowed to say that even with many persons much soul heroism was mixed in such a view, and that one cannot state any contrast to moral worldviews just with the leading persons. Since many people have said to themselves, it is just that what the soul has to strive for that it works unselfishly based on that what it can gain in the world, and then dedicates itself unselfishly again, knowing that it is extinguished, and that only its actions live on. One repeatedly stressd that it is, actually, egotistic to search immortality in any form.

Spiritual science is generally not inclined to belittle things that have arisen from a real sense of truth and an intellectual attitude, but it has to understand how such views form. Spiritual science could never get involved with the depreciation of worldviews pointing to the morally fateful that must arise from the characterised worldview. Nevertheless, it is something different if an objective view of the world, a deeper knowledge proves everywhere that such a worldview is fragile. There one has to say, everything that has been done in such an admirable way by developmental history, by comparative anatomy, by palaeontology and geology and the other natural sciences and what seemed to be decided to confirm such a worldview has led just more and more to the fact that it has become impossible to stop on basis of the scientific facts at such a worldview today.

Hence, certain researchers got around to fighting against ideas that have developed on basis of former assumptions and hypotheses just because the most advanced scientific knowledge has brought facts to light which do not comply at all with certain hypotheses and views. I would like to point to a person like Kollmann (Julius K., 1834–1918) because he is typical for the views that we find in various nuances also with others, namely, because they have a basis in the facts. Kollmann had to conclude from that what arose from the observations of developmental history, from the observations of the prenatal human being, of the human embryo and the animal embryos, and from that what appeared to him in palaeontology that one could not suppose that the ancestors of the human being were formed in a former time is such a way as, for example, the orthodox Darwinians have assumed and assume still today. One cannot assume the figures of the human beings in such a way that one may notice a low sloping forehead, a still undeveloped shrivelled brain, so to speak, and a figure that reminds of the today's figures of apes. On the contrary he saw himself repeatedly forced because of his discoveries to suppose that one has just vice versa to assume a cerebral configuration exceeding the today's unity of the human brain and the brains of apes from which then the today's brain of the apes would have developed from an original form which must have been more similar, actually, to our brain than to the present brains of apes. So that one would have to regard the present brain of apes as degeneration of a form which does no longer exist today, and which one has to assume as the original form of the human brain because it has become more definite in its formation. In addition, the same researcher had to assume that one cannot derive the human being from the forms of the higher animals but from small Pygmy-like beings. Hence, he looked everywhere for rests of such an old, dwarfish human race.

If you open yourself to such a hypothesis, you will say to yourself, the question is soon solved, actually, why palaeontology, geology, cannot show any documents of such a prehistoric man assumed by Kollmann, and why everything that can be found of fossilised apes and human beings differs from this prehistoric man's form.—You can soon realise this. If you consider the today's earth conditions, you must say to yourself that it is impossible that such a prototype which would be that of the human being and of the apes at the same time would be capable of surviving today that it could exist under the present earthly living conditions.—However, from that follows that today the earth must have conditions quite different from those of former times that we must look back at former times that had quite different living conditions, and that we could find on no earth that already had the present living conditions the original form of the present human being. Thus, we would have to go back to such conditions on earth that would differ much from that what we have as ideas of the present earth. Such a scientific hypothesis points to the fact that, actually, our earth must have had another figure in prehistory and all conditions must have been different from those of today.

However, with it the whole question is generally shifted. Why did it happen that the naturalists advanced to such a worldview? Because they had to break from their ideas by their sense of truth and their intellectual conscience with the old view, for example, with that of Linné (Carl von L., 1707–1778, Swedish botanist and zoologist) after which the single forms of the living beings would have been put as it were side by side in the world. This view was not abreast with the scientific research to accept arbitrary acts of creation that had put the single forms of the animals and of the human being on earth. If one goes into it, why this view did not seem scientific, one must answer: it rightly seemed not scientific if one considers the principles and formative conditions of the living beings, because positioning the animal forms and human forms side by side cut across the physical principles. If on the other side the scientific facts themselves forced to assume quite different conditions of the earthly existence in former times, then the basis is no longer valid. Then one cannot say that it is difficult to imagine the single forms of the living beings in such a material independence of each other and to understand a spiritual dependence of each other only.

However, the mentioned naturalist is only one type. Of quite special importance is that what such scientific thinkers like Klaatsch (Hermann K., 1863–1916) and Snell (Karl S., 1806–1886, mathematician and natural philosopher) have to say from particular scientific results. They realised and pronounced it in the clearest way that after that what can be observed as scientific facts generally there can be no talk that the human being is directly related to higher, pithecoid mammals.

Today I cannot go into the results, for example, of haemotology of the last years, although it would be interesting. Today I would like to go into the figure. However, one could say about Friedmann's research (Adolph Hermann F., 1873–1957, The Convergence of the Organisms. An Empirically Founded Theory as Substitute of the Theory of Evolution. 1904) completely the same what I have said about the morphological development. These last-called researchers thought that one cannot speak of the fact that the human being has developed from higher mammals because a conscientious study of the results of palaeontology forces us to realise that the formative forces and conditions of the higher mammals can be only understood in such a way that they go back to basic forms which are much more similar, actually, to the human being than to the present pithecoid mammals. The present monkeys would be much more unlike the original forms from which they would have to be derived than the human being is compared with this original form.

This is an exceptionally interesting turn which has come especially from Klaatsch in the development of zoology that the researchers saw themselves forced to the view: if one observes, for example, the human hands, it is impossible to believe even a moment that they have changed from the limbs of the present higher mammals, but one has to assume original forms in primeval times which were much more like the present human hands than to the present limbs of the higher mammals.

That is why, Klaatsch said, for example, if we realise that the gibbon, this strange species of apes always adduced because of its humanoid appearance, has limbs which are most like the human ones, one must say, it lacks them, because the human form has developed from its form, but because it has kept the prototype best of all apes from which also the human being is descended and which he has kept best of all.

Thus, this researcher got around to assuming a kind of living being in primeval times whose constitution the present human being has kept best of all, and that those animal forms show the most divergences which have developed then beside the human being from these original forms of primeval times. Thus, the human being would have kept an original life form best of all that existed for this researcher long before not only our apes but also the other mammals existed. A prototype that goes back to those times in which our mammals did not yet exist. It is interesting that Klaatsch almost says, one must think this prototype of the animals more related to the old dragons about which geology tells than the present mammals and monkeys. So that all mammals are descended from a prototype which they would have distorted to caricatures, while the human being has kept it best of all.

We find out not with the help of spiritual science which scientists regard as fantastic, but which we find within the scientific research in such a way that the researchers who feel urged by that what they realise to assert such matters. But now one can say that such researchers do strange leaps and that one can argue a lot against it. But if one imagines that strange living being from which the human beings and the mammals should be descended, one must say to himself, under the present conditions such a living being is still quite impossible, it cannot exist at all today.

The human being has just adapted his form of that time gradually to the present conditions. It is interesting now that a researcher like Klaatsch feels pressured by the development of that prototype of the human being, what even nothing would have to do with the principles which produced the different figures of the mammals, into assuming places of development from such a prototype just where the human being would be in the least disturbed by the Darwinian struggle for existence. Since he says, if the human being had to fight against predators in areas where predators were especially spread, he could never have survived this fight; he had to be saved from it in regions that were away from this struggle for existence.—Thus such a researcher tries to show—because he has still always a materialist-monistic thinking in the background—how the present human foot has formed from a limb of the primeval beings, supposing that the second pair of the limbs was used for climbing. This prototype of the human being would have stayed—of course, this is pure hypothesis of the researcher—in regions where it lived on high trees. It was not a climbing animal, indeed, but adapting to his climbing because it could rest upon trunks it could form the delve of the foot and the peculiar sharp position of the big toe. Since when the human being became a being, Klaatsch thinks, that walked on the ground, he had to have already formed the foot for it; he had to form this foot from other conditions that way.

However, this is a weird conclusion and a strange hypothesis. For one can raise the justified objection that the feet when it was still a climbing hand had to be adapted to the conditions of that time. The materialist-monistic thinking is not enough. Nevertheless, it is interesting to observe how such a researcher gets around to rejecting that Darwinian principle of the struggle for existence for the creation of the human being from a primal being so that he wants just to keep away the human being from this struggle for existence. How could one say there that the present scientific facts confirm the programme of worldview that was designed in the dawn of Darwinism so daringly? The extremely interesting fact seems to turn out to us that naturalists felt pressured into pointing to forms as original forms of the human being that do not exist today that are only hypothetical forms, so to speak, for the naturalists. This goes so far that, for example, Klaatsch can say, compared with all ideas that the human being has developed by the struggle for existence from higher mammalian forms during the ice age, this is a childish idea which could not at all be maintained today. Of course such an idea called childish by this researcher will still be represented everywhere in the popular literature, and still enough writers of this popular literature say that they state facts, while these are only hypotheses which fail compared with that what other researchers state as facts. That is why the scientific thinking completely leads out of what is often given even today as a scientific worldview.

How is the course of the scientific research from former times up to now? During the seventies one said: look at the higher mammalian forms, there you have a picture how the human being has looked in distant past. One says today, in these mammalian forms you have animal forms which have originated only from the fact that they have deviated completely from a primal human being, what cannot be found in palaeontology for which there is no outer evidence, but what can be constructed today only from that what is found by geology. Natural sciences themselves lead back to creations that do no longer exist today. Thus, the human being is connected in primeval times to forms that are surely different from that what one still believed before relatively short time that the human beings are descended from it.

This way shows that it must flow directly into that which spiritual science has to say about the origin of the human being. In what way does spiritual science differ from scientific-materialistic monism the question of the origin of the human being?

Spiritual science has to assume that the present human being goes back to a past that we are led to former embodiments at first. What lives today as mind or soul in the human being, we must look at this after that what has arisen in the last talks in such a way that it can have not only a life within the physical body in which it faces us in the sensory world at first, but that it can also have a life in the so-called disembodied state, so that the whole human life consists of the part, which is spent in the time from birth or conception to death, and of that part, which lasts from death to a new birth where the human being lives in a purely spiritual world and uses and transforms the forces that he has got in the physical body.

The human being then goes through a new birth to existence in such a way that he attains, indeed, the outer forms of his body from the line of heredity in such a way that that what is hereditary does not enclose the real human essence. Since this is in a spiritual world before the human being enters existence. In this spiritual world, he has equipped himself with corresponding forces from former lives, and he can experience plastic formations and transformations then by this spiritual essence, in so far as he has inherited forms as body forms and is composed of physical materials, that he is transformed that way and that he is organised in the first years of childhood individually, so that the body can become a useful tool for the spiritual-mental that enters him as something independent. Hence, we consider the spiritual-mental as something independent, as something first in spiritual science which works on the human being so that he takes over the material basic scaffolding of his figure from heredity, but that he works the subtler, more individual configuration into this according to the spiritual-mental conditions. But we do not see the spiritual-mental essence working on the human figure in such a way, as if it shapes the whole human being, but in such a way that within that physical body still so much mobility remains that the spiritual-mental essence can work into it.

If we trace back the human being to former times, we realise that the life in the spiritual is attached to the life in the sensory world between the last death and the birth of our present life but that then a previous life on earth is attached and then a spiritual life again and so on. Turning back with the means of spiritual research to the former existence of the human being, we realise that the embodiments stop once in this primal time, so to speak, that there the spiritual-mental essence of the human being existed but different from now where he enters the physical existence by birth, but came from the spiritual world also as now he also comes out if he combines with the conditions of heredity. However, we would realise that he came originally from the spiritual world in distant primeval times in such a way that he found earthly relations that were completely different from the present ones.

Spiritual science shows that this spiritual-mental found such earthly conditions in primeval times that at that time much more was to be transformed of that what was given as body to the human being as a spiritual-mental being. In the end, we come back to such primeval times in which the human spiritual-mental did not yet depend on finding a ready body in which it had only to form the subtler formations of the brain, of the glandular system et cetera. We come back to primeval times in which the spiritual-mental of the human being found such conditions that without the processes of the present heredity and reproduction the material conditions and principles of that time could be directly transformed by the spiritual. Thus we are led back not to a hypothetical form which should have had a sensory-physical existence once as Klaatsch assumes it for the time of the dragons, but we are led back in truth to a spiritual prototype.

In the first embodiment of the human being we have to see the directly formative working out of the physical body, and then under the advancing conditions of the earth the more solid formations of the human body were transferred, so to speak, more and more to heredity, and the possibility remained for this inner, weaker and weaker growing spiritual essence only to form within the line of heredity. That is why today the spiritual-mental only organises the subtler relations: the structures of the brain, of the blood circulation, of the glandular system. It finds the physical body given by heredity. But if we go back to the primeval times, we find there quite different conditions on earth and quite different conditions of the body in which the spiritual does not only transform the rest of the physical substances as it is the case today, but it formed the whole human being immediately from itself. In the spiritual-scientific sense the present human form crystallised from the spiritual as we can see a salt cube crystallising from a salt solution. As it is not necessary that the salt cubes which all resemble each other because of their inner structure are descended from just one, just as little it is necessary to remember that a bodily blood relationship exists with the animals if that what the human being has today in his forms, in his skeleton and in the construction of the other organs reminds of the relations and the functions of the animals which have similar forms. We have to lead back the similarity of the forms to the form principle that we can recognise even today as something immediately spiritual-mental. I have explained this in detail in my Occult Science. An Outline.

As spiritual science leads the human being to a spiritual prototype of the human being which is interspersed so strongly with forces that it still masters the matter, this idea should be presented. Besides, I wanted to show how natural sciences can only form the prototype to which they are led there, and which is not pithecoid from the hypothetical idea. But natural sciences still think that this prototype must have worked as a material being in primeval times. It has not worked as a material being in primeval times, just as little as today, for example, the sleeping human being adjusts certain conditions of production as a material being during the time from falling asleep up to awakening. While today the spiritual-mental works more during sleep than during the waking state, namely removes tiredness, we have to imagine that what is there creating in the human being what removes tiredness during sleep, so increased in primeval times that it could cause the forms of the whole human being. If then one asks himself, which sense does the whole evolution have, so one has to say, already the present human being shows not in daring hypotheses, but by a consideration without prejudice in what the sense of such a development is contained. If we look at the human being in his life how he remembers his childhood with his consciousness, the thread of memory breaks off once, and for the usual consciousness we can only hear from our parents, or from our brothers and sisters how we were there before this time, but we would have to set our origin much later. Did now the mental-spiritual not exist in these times that we cannot remember, in the hazy like sleeping life of the child? It existed; it was even stronger in the first years of childhood than later in relation to outer effectiveness.

Before the ego-consciousness appeared in the human being, this dreamlike-active human being worked just on the subtler formations of the brain and the physical body, and because it sent his forces into it, an inner human soul being with ego-consciousness did not yet come about. When then the human being had developed the subtler formations of his body from his soul, this force working on the human being from without transformed into a conscious inner soul life. That is why we see the creative power of the spiritual-mental becoming weaker and weaker for the outer figure, so that it can appear as consciousness. Hence, it is not absurd if spiritual science goes back in time and looks at the spiritual-mental in such a way that it created the human figure first, and then it has assumed shape that was kept by heredity through the generations. The spiritual-mental forces could withdraw to an inner life, to a human soul life becoming more and more conscious. Thus, this spiritual-mental essence of the human being has only become weak in truth with the outer creation, but that which it has lost and which it has delivered to heredity appeared in the forces of consciousness that develop in the cultural processes on and on.

Now it must interest how compared with this human creation one has to think the origin of the animal world. There I can say something only briefly that I have further explained in the Occult Science. One can say that the earthly conditions with which the human being had to familiarise himself developed sooner than the human body. The human being entered the sensory world from the supersensible world at a certain time, so that he as a purely spiritual prototype worked the spiritual-mental into the bodily so far that he could appear as a bodily being. We have to imagine that that into which he worked was quite different from the later forms of the body, namely flexible, plastic in itself.

The human being formed this plastic material in a time in which it was possible for the human forms, because the animal realm spiritual science has to assume that it formed in the sensory matter in a substantially earlier time that it could not wait, until the conditions had arisen which gave the human being his present form. The human being waited as it were, until the earth was ripe so that he could impress that in the plastic organic matter as the present form of the human body that was reflected in his spiritual. The animals attained the body forms earlier and under other conditions, and that caused—while with them the prototype is spiritual—that this spiritual-mental of the animals working in much narrower conditions appeared in other forms in the animals. Hence, we have to consider the animals as beings which the human being sent ahead as it were to the earthly existence and which we have to consider—because they did not embody themselves in the conditions in which the human being embodied himself—as embodied in old forms which were not adapted to the later conditions on earth.

If spiritual science wants to think strictly in the sense of natural sciences, it does not only want to think its logic completely in the sense of natural sciences, because you will have realised that the just done explanations are not only thought strictly scientifically, but that also the facts of natural sciences completely point to that what I have said today: that simply those forms which the naturalists imagine from the facts as material-sensory prototypes must be transformed into spiritual-mental forms which only led to the present human form because they have embodied themselves later in the earthly conditions than the animal forms did.

Nevertheless, natural sciences show their results not only with hypotheses, but also with experiments. Spiritual science does also not stay behind natural sciences in this respect. I have already pointed in previous talks to the fact that the human being can develop further in relation to his spiritual-mental, that he can work by intimate soul processes—meditation, concentration and the like—on his spiritual-mental in such a way that it becomes much stronger in itself than it is in the normal life. Today I can point only to the fact that the thoughts must be generated in the meditative life from human arbitrariness if they should educate the human being to a spiritual researcher, while all the other thoughts are formed from the surrounding relations. If he begins with full perseverance, dedicating himself to such a meditative life if he puts certain images, feelings, and will impulses consciously in the centre of his soul life, he can separate his spiritual-mental from the bodily. Then he can advance to an inner life, even if one laughs and mocks so much at this, where he knows: now I live in my spiritual-mental essence and I am directly connected by it with the spiritual world. I experience not by my senses or by the mind that is bound to the brain, but I experience a spiritual-mental human being in myself, who has emerged from his physical body, even from his cerebral instrument.

I have mentioned that the human being has the feeling in the first stadia of such an advance if he has not yet advanced far enough: now you experience an inner spiritual life, but you cannot transform it into concepts.—This is a transitional state that can seem rather doubtful to you. It is true, while you consider yourself, otherwise, as a reasonable person if you can form concepts of your experience, something is there now, if you cannot conceptualise the things, so that you cannot consider yourself as a reasonable person but as an idiot. You experience something, but you cannot understand it!

As strange as it sounds, you become a kind of idiot in a certain higher sense for a certain time. But if you then advance, you transform this spiritual-mental essence in such a way that it receives even stronger forces to take part consciously in that what the spiritual-mental essence does what is usually unaware. While you work in the first childhood unconsciously on your outer configuration, you notice now that the spiritual-mental essence is so strong that you create an organ now consciously, while you work on your cerebral organisation, so that you can understand what you could not understand before. The communicability of spiritual science is based on that. What you can behold in the first times of spiritual-scientific experience is so uncertain, so completely an experience in a new element of existence that it has no conceptual contours. However if it remained only in such a way, you would not be able to inform of spiritual science. You can inform of it, now you can lead down these experiences into your consciousness and can conceptualise them. However, you are able to do this only with the brain. Therefore, the spiritual researcher has to transform his brain consciously; that is why he feels his brain first like a block that he has to transform.

Thus, we can positively experience the work of the human being in this higher spiritual development out of his spiritual being as an experimental work on the organisation of the matter.—Higher spiritual knowledge proceeds always in such a way that the human spiritual life that exists only in the spiritual is worked into the matter. There we see the human soul, which becomes aware of itself on a certain step continuing the process that we see taking place at the beginning of the human development from the spiritual world, and then it points to that which the human being experiences as a spiritual researcher, to the spiritual origin of the human being. As the former states appear in memory to him in his everyday life, in the life between birth and death, so that he knows if he has become fifty years old what he has experienced at the age of twenty, thirty years et cetera, and his consciousness is extended backward, the human consciousness is extended by meditation and concentration backward beyond birth into regions which are completely hidden to us usually if we adhere only to the brain in the earthly-bodily.

There we have a matter that is still far from the today's consciousness for which an understanding will be there in relatively short time if civilisation has been fertilised by spiritual science. An area is touched in which the human consciousness crosses the border of the brain and the senses. We thereby attain an extension of our memories beyond the present life, an extension of the consciousness for mental and spiritual processes. Then, indeed, these mental and spiritual processes present themselves in such a way that one can say: one does no longer work only with logical conclusions as one does it in geology, palaeontology, comparative anatomy and other sciences, but one works with facts which face us spiritually like recollections of the former times of our earth days. The spiritual beholding increases. Then you experience that spiritual original state of your life on earth, while the spiritual-mental essence is developing, which is conjured up before the spiritual eye in which then not the forms of the beings are included as they are round us, but those beings that have not yet assumed forms, that look like crystals that have not yet assumed forms and are suddenly materialised.

Briefly, we learn to recognise what is in the human being, apart from the bodily formative forces, without considering the bodily which is hereditary. One gets to know him spiritual-mentally, and then we can imagine how the human being was in his place of origin when he worked himself formatively into the bodily and embodied himself in the sensory world the first time.

With it, I have stated a result which every human being can check if he uses the necessary perseverance and courage to such a self-experiment. If the human being experiences his spiritual-mental essence in himself, he does not experience, before he understands it, anything that faces him as something completely strange, although it is not born out of the sensory environment, but as something quite new. He feels, it is related to your whole innermost nature what you feel as the innermost impact; you yourself are this as something everlasting that forms the basis of any outer bodily formation as the first.

There one feels that one faces the whole human being now not with the senses, but spiritually. There we find a strange possibility of comparison with that what faces us in the everyday life. The spiritual researcher experiences that he cannot say, what I develop is connected with my brain or with my eyes et cetera, but he has to say, it is connected with the whole human being.—It is as if we consider a child in the usual life. There we see a child laughing and crying different from the adult human being. It is different, indeed. The child laughs and cries with the whole body. That what comes about with the adult only by the outflow of the lachrymal glands goes into the whole organism of the child. It feels shaken by what expresses itself in crying. The same applies to laughing: the child laughs with the whole body where maybe the adult turns up his mouth only.

The whole human being is seized at first by that what seizes the soul, and then only it seizes the lachrymal glands or the laughing muscles. The influence specialises in a particular organ. Pursue how you feel something like a tension in the breast with an emotion in a certain time of life, later in life this concentrates upon a quiet feeling in the larynx that the human being can notice if he pays attention to it. The spiritual-mental works its way out of the whole human being and then it specialises in single parts.

The spiritual researcher exactly experiences the same process. There he feels the second human being developing in himself. He feels that this inner human being works only to a lower degree on the arrangement of the organic than he has worked originally at the beginning of the earth evolution.

I have stated single facts which can confirm the assertion that still today the human being would not come—as natural sciences still believe—if he is led back to the original place of his earth existence, to an original life form, which is, indeed, different from the today's form, but it is still a sensory human form or animal form. However, we realise that we are led back to a spiritual-mental prototype and that generally, before the first embodiment was possible in a physical human form, the human being existed as a spiritual-mental being. The human being is also in this respect that being which creates itself from his innermost spiritual-mental essence and gives itself its forms after the conditions that it has in the spiritual-mental. However, the spiritual-mental is also for the human being in the past the original. The spirit is the actually creative, and later the material life appears in the outer world developed by the spirit.

Today it should concern only of showing you this special chapter about the origin of the human being back to the point of his development, when he not yet was a sensory but a spiritual-mental being. If natural sciences further pursue the ways that I have indicated today, they will meet with spiritual science. Someone who considers the matters without any prejudice has to say, it has only seemed, as if one can lead back the human being to animal original forms, as if one had to consider the spiritual-mental as an arrangement of physical forms. It is vice versa: that what one has believed that it was the result of the sensory turns out to be the original, the creative, and the sensory is a result. Everywhere the human being is led to the spiritual where he can perceive with the senses and think with the mind. If he recognises the eternity of the spirit, he feels protected in the spiritual-mental of the world that we must consider as everlasting.

Everything originates from the spirit! This is the knowledge of spiritual science. Because everything originates from the spirit, and the material existence is only a transitory state in which we should appropriate forces which we cannot appropriate somewhere else, we feel the material existence as a point of passage again to a spirit-filled life in future. As the earthly embodiments of the human being have started by the fact that he has arisen from a purely spiritual being, they will end if they have fulfilled their task for the human being: to give him that what impressed itself in the human being to take it with him into the spiritual world. As the human being returns after every death to the existence on earth to develop what he could not yet develop as we look back at a beginning of incarnation, we see approaching an end of incarnations in the future, but with it also the return of the human being to the spiritual world.

Everything originates from the spirit. The human soul lives in the spirit that feels powerful in it. It returns to the spirit if it has accomplished its goal on earth and has got what the bodily can give. From the spirit—through the matter—to the spirit! Spiritual science has to give the big important answer to the question of the origin and of the determination of the human being.

It is a prominent trait of the human being to want to orient himself in the human development to get a certain view of the position of his own personality within the present life. The human being has often to put questions to himself how the past was from which everything developed that surrounds us in the present, which life guilt we have incurred and which life work we have accepted, what according the course of the human development may originate from his desires and longings, from his hopes and ideals for the future. It is certainly healthy to put these questions. Since the human being differs thereby from the other, earthly beings that he recognises the position that he has got within the development not only as such from its conditions and from its causes, but that he can also influence it from the consciousness of his task. We realise this way that for the purposes of modern time the consideration of the human development accepts a form that starts from the mentioned viewpoints.

We realise, for example, that at the beginning of the modern cultural direction Lessing (Gotthold Ephraim L., 1729–1781) writes his Education of the Human Race as the ripest document of his mental development. He tries to show there that a certain continuous plan exists in the development of humanity. One can distinguish an old period in which humanity had to follow moral impulses and commandments which were given from without, while the continuous education by the spiritual-divine forces intends that humanity gets around more and more to grasping the good as an own impulse of its being to do the good from the mere concept—doing the good for the sake of the good.

We also realise how Lessing comes from such a consideration to the necessity to accept repeated lives on earth for the human soul because for him the human development is advancing. So that for him the question had to arise: if a human soul lives in a former period and takes up certain impulses during it, how does it comply with the sense of human development if this soul had died for the development forever when it dies? Only thereby he could connect a sense with the development while he said to himself, the soul returns repeatedly to the life on earth and in these lives, the soul is educated by the leading powers to the summit of development. This is Lessing's basic idea when he was stimulated to his Education of the Human Race. Then we see again how from a profound insight of nature and human being Lessing's successor, Herder (Johann Gottfried H., 1744–1803), tries to show humanity as a whole in his Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784–1791) and to show how in certain times other factors have worked on the human being than in later times, so that Herder also realises a sensible plan in the development of humanity. Actually, the deeper human consideration of the following times has never again left the ideas that Lessing, Herder and others stimulated. But the trait of the nineteenth century which was only directed to the outer appearance also seized history, so that that what one has thought and reflected about the continuous plan of human development stayed more in the background with those who directed their attention upon the spiritual, while the official science of history was not courageous enough to investigating the real effective forces and factors in the human development.

Of course, spiritual science tries again to recognise the concrete, actual sense of human history. However, there one has to say that in various fields prejudices tower up repeatedly which are not due, indeed, to the present research results, but to the present thoughts about these research results. This happens in particular if one wants to investigate the big laws of human history and that what should arise as a force for the present and as hope and as ideals for the future. One likes very much to regard the nature of the human being as something that could have experienced no inner development in a certain respect, but that it has been, actually, always in such a way as it is today.

At most, one admits that the present human being has experienced a development his animal nature. One traces back them either really up to those prehistoric men whom we have dug out of prehistoric graves or other places of finding, who show less perfect figures than the civilised humans of today who show such only with the outer physical form. One can trace back the descent of the human being hypothetically even further and believes to have something in any animal form from which the human being could have developed. The fact that a sensible consideration of the usual history already shows that the human soul life has changed since millenniums very much, one wants to pay little attention to it in the present, and one hardly admits that three, four, five millenniums before our calendar the whole spiritual condition was quite different from that in the present. One has to mention one fact only at first that should just strike those who academically consider the development of the human soul whose basic significance one does not properly appreciate.

Today one speaks of the fact that the human being has to think logically that he has to connect his concepts, his mental pictures logically with each other, nay that he can only judge in logical way. With it one proves that one has the view that the formation of mental pictures is subjected to inner logical laws, and that one can reach truth as it were only by logic. But now one also knows from the historical development that the Greek philosopher Aristotle founded this logic as science only few centuries before our calendar.

One may say: if one really knows the spiritual development of humanity, one has also to realise that the human being became aware of the logical laws, actually, only after the time when the Greek philosopher Aristotle had brought these laws into a certain form. Would it not be a matter of course and appropriate that one thinks about such a fact and asks himself, how does it happen that the thinking about logical laws has come into the human development only in a certain age?—If one thought appropriately about this fact, one would come to the result which absolutely corresponds to truth that the human beings have developed their consciousness relatively late in such a way that they could realise the logical laws in their souls. So the logic originated only in a certain time because before the whole constitution of the human soul was in such a way that it could not become aware of the logical laws. Humanity has developed only gradually to logical thinking, has developed towards the Greek-Roman age.

However, the present human being has if he does not want to get involved with the deeper results of spiritual research, only one possibility to gain a mental picture of that which is, actually, a consciousness that is not filled with logic laws. If the human being wants to form a mental picture of a pre-logical consciousness by the outer materialistic observation of nature, it can happen only in such a way that he turns to the instincts of the animals.

What can he learn from these instincts of the animals? I have repeatedly drawn your attention to the fact that it would be quite impossible to speak of the animal instincts in such a way as if in the life and activity of the animal realm logic, inner reasonableness did not exist. Everything that happens in the life of the animal realm makes us aware of this reasonableness. We see that insects live under certain conditions that make it to them impossible to get to know the circumstances under which their descendants have to develop in the first time of their existence. Although the full-grown insect lives in quite different conditions than the caterpillar needs them, still, we realise that the insect lays its eggs with big wisdom where then the hatching caterpillar finds the proper conditions. There we see that reason really works in it. Everywhere we see reason and logic in the realm of animals prevailing with which we cannot speak of the fact that they have something of it in their consciousness. If we see the miraculous dens of the beavers and other performances of the animals, if we look at the whole instinctive life of the animals and see, for example, that animals feel treacherous weather, earthquakes, volcano eruptions and other elementary events partly long ahead and behave according to them—but this is only a metaphor, because it happens by the reason prevailing in the animals that they “foresee” such things—we have to say, the instinctive life of the animals shows that the animals are enmeshed in a kind of logic and reason that everywhere objective reasonableness and objective laws interweave the environment.

Thus, the human being can get an idea how that what happens by him can still happen in another way. It needs not only to happen beccause the human being if he wants to do this or that says to himself, this is my goal, it has to look that way, and the tools have to look that way. But something similar can develop without doing these conscious considerations out of other forms of consciousness, out of subconscious forms in the world coherence as human conscious reasonableness develops in the human being. Spiritual science now points to the fact that our kind of reasonableness has developed only gradually that by no means the human being was an animal being with only animal instincts before but a being which had a form of consciousness different from the present logical consciousness but also different from the animal instinct. If you look at this what I have already said here about the possibility to develop slumbering forces of the human soul and about a kind of clairvoyant consciousness, then we can turn our view to the possibility to educate ourselves to forms of consciousness different from the today's only logical consciousness that sets itself only reasonable goals.

I have drawn your attention to the fact that by meditation and concentration someone who wants to become a spiritual researcher and wants to behold deeper into the undergrounds of the soul has to attain another consciousness, so that spiritual research aims at another kind of consciousness that is developed educationally from the present form. Such a clairvoyant consciousness can perceive in the spiritual world independently from the body and its senses. It becomes also apparent that in former times humanity had a form of consciousness different from the present logical, intellectual one. Our present consciousness has only developed since the Greek-Roman age. The human being had to be educated for it at first. We have now exceeded the Greek-Roman period, and today spiritual-scientific research shows that the form of our consciousness can be further developed to higher forms. The hypothetical idea may arise from it at first that that consciousness which Aristotle brought as it were in laws has developed again from other forms of consciousness, so that we would discover other forms of consciousness, of the soul life going back in human history.

Those who believe to stand on the firm ground of science, but stand only on their own prejudices cannot yet search such different forms of the soul life. Since they cannot imagine that at the starting point of humanity, with the primeval human beings a consciousness existed different from the instinctive consciousness like that of the present animals. But if we trace back the development of humanity not only up to a point where the human being would have been an animal and would have developed animal forms only, but if we trace back him to that point where he existed only as a wholly spiritual being, then one can no longer look for such forms of consciousness which are similar only to the animal instinct. Then we come to such forms of consciousness that correspond to an old human form that we have to imagine more and more as a spiritual-mental one, the further we go back. So that we have to imagine the human development in such a way that also the soul life was involved more and more in the material. Thus, we have to ascend in the development of humanity to forms of consciousness that correspond to a more spiritual inwardness.

Now not only the facts of spiritual research but also the outer facts show that we get to another kind of soul-life the farther we go back, even to prehistorical times explorable in historical way as it were. We do no longer find such mental pictures as we develop them today, by which we reflect the outside world if we go back beyond the Greek-Roman age. Not without good reason the Western historical philosophers have always begun their histories of philosophy with Thales five to six centuries before the Christian calendar because they recognised that one can generally only speak of a reasonable, logical reflection of the world. Only our present has managed to break this. Today where one measures everything with the same yardstick, one also wants to begin the history of philosophy far in the oriental thinking not paying attention to the fact that the soul conditions of experiencing the things was quite different within the pre-Greek cultures than it has become later from the Greek culture on. It needs the superficiality of the “profound” beholders of the East, for example, of Deußen (Paul D., 1845–1919, German Orientalist and Sanskrit scholar) to lead the history of philosophy beyond Thales. This can happen only if one has no notion of the development of the human soul, and that the oriental spiritual life has contents different from that what begins from the Greek-Roman age on for the inner life of human history. If we examine what faces us in ancient times, we have to say, the human being felt pressured more or less into thinking vividly about the world, not in the intellectual forms in which we live today, but in thought structures facing us as myths. That faces us as Imaginations what the human being takes up in his soul to get any explanation of the world. Images are contained in the myths. The strange appears that we find images on the bottom of all cultures very soon if we go back to the pre-Greek times, and the farther we go back, the more a kind of Imaginative worldview faces us.

Someone attains a kind of Imaginative knowledge as the first level of clairvoyant knowledge who makes his soul an instrument of spiritual research by that self-education which I have characterised in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds? Someone who opens himself to this Imaginative knowledge which presents itself again in a kind of images in his soul, says to himself, if I compare this Imaginative knowledge to the miraculous imaginations of the Greek and pre-Greek myths, something faces me that, on the one side, is the same or similar, but, on the other side, is totally different.

If the modern spiritual researcher rises to Imagination, he keeps his logical thinking in his Imaginations that reflect the spiritual processes that are behind the sensory phenomena, he keeps it and aims almost at the logical thinking.

That means that he brings all connections of reason, the whole character of the present consciousness into it and an Imaginative knowledge would not be right which could not give some indication in what way the images are connected, in what way everything forms a whole within the Imaginative world. Just in this respect, I made a rather strange experience quite recently. In my book Occult Science. An Outline. you find the attempt to show not only the human development on earth Imaginatively, but also the former embodiments of our earth in other, preceding heavenly bodies. You find everything that was shown in this respect represented in such a way that it corresponds to the logical consciousness and the facts of sensory life. Now a theologian who had read this book said to me once, what I have read there is absolutely logical and rational, so that one could deign to remember that the author got around to writing this book completely out of the today's cultural life only by logical conclusions.—This made me wonder and I said to myself, then the whole representation has not come about maybe by clairvoyance but by mere logic.—He said this, although he had to admit that he could not find by his own logic what is given in this book as knowledge. One meets this fact often today that such representations are put up by mere logic, even if the results are pieced together from trains of thought to make them comprehensible. However, everything that you read in the Occult Science is not found by logical conclusions. It is hard to find these matters by logic. However, after they have been found, they are interwoven with logic. They are found of course also not without logic, but not at all on the way of logical conclusion, everything does absolutely correspond to Imaginative knowledge.

I have given this as an example what one can aim at by self-education of the present consciousness as a kind of Imaginative knowledge that can lead us to the undergrounds of the things. If we compare such a knowledge to myths and legends, we have found that it is important to recognise these clairvoyant experiences that the human beings had in the undergrounds of natural existence. However, it was necessary that they were cleverer than the human beings of the logical epoch were to be able to express what they investigated by such tremendous images. Since compared with some myths of nature or creation is that what our modern science is often only bungle and dilettantism, because an Egyptian or Babylonian myth about the work of good and evil outranks the modern monistic interpretation of the world. One feels in the thoughts of those human beings that they lived together with the forces of nature that the modern human being visualises laboriously in mental pictures. However, one realises that neither mind nor usual imagination but Imagination formed the myths, as they appear great and full of sap evenly in a certain respect with all peoples on earth. Only not that Imagination about which we talk spiritual-scientifically but an Imagination that was still free of the intellectual element. It was an original clairvoyant, not yet completed Imagination, no mere imagination. It did not resemble something animal even if it was dark and dreamlike, but it was not yet impregnated with logical thinking. Thus, we see the peoples intimately connected with that what prevails in the depths of the beings and expressing the immediate co-operation with the everlasting existence without applying logic in the great tremendous pictures of the myths. That is not academic in the modern sense, but it was the science of ancient times.

In this sense, we come to the rise of our present intellectual human attitude in the Greek-Roman culture. We see another kind of soul life preceding it which—because it was not yet logical because it was still dreamlike, but at the same time was more intimately connected with the spiritual basic facts of any working—could now vividly express this working. Hence, one can maybe find no other word that characterises the being of the immediately preceding culture of the Egyptians or Chaldeans than with the term culture of revelation. Against it, we can characterise the Greek-Roman culture in such a way that it experiences a kind of gradual dusk of the old culture of revelation. Indeed, in the older time of the Greeks, the revelations still arose vividly from the things, but then, in particular with Socrates, the intellectual culture dawned, and those things gradually disappeared which originated from the old culture of revelation, so that the human being made that the contents of his soul life which presents itself to him by his senses.

Before the human being had looked at the things, so that he saw the rushing spring that he saw what happened in wood and meadow. Everywhere he turned his glance to the things, but from every plant something emerged that spoke spiritually to him like a revelation. He formed this then in the images, for example, of the nymphs et cetera. What worked in the depths of the things what was shown to the old dreamlike clairvoyant consciousness disappeared gradually and a full, wholehearted recognition of that what the human being perceived with his senses replaced it. The culture of perception appeared where the human being positioned himself with that what he is and what he perceived in the world. He grew fond of it because of his whole physical organisation in such a way that Hellenism was like penetrated by the saying which is delivered to us by a great Greek who says there, I prefer to be a beggar on earth than a king in the realm of shades.

In the old culture of revelation, one could not have said this way. This was only possible when the world had advanced up to the culture of perception, to that what the senses see and what the intellect develops on basis of the senses as an intellectual view, because one only knew that behind the sensory world a spiritual world exists. One could speak only that way after this spiritual world had disappeared which is behind the sensory world.

One also felt this dawning of a quite new age. In the Greek-Roman epoch one felt the impulse that prompted the human being to produce an intellectual culture from himself.

Once one felt secure in a being of revelation to which one felt spiritually related. But now one felt that one entered into a new element where one was on his own. For that who observes the finer nuances of historical development this trait becomes especially clear. It becomes even clearer if we think that, indeed, such a life in a culture of revelation showed to the human being that he was secure as a spiritual being within the spiritual world, which he perceived clairvoyantly, but that at the same time he was less aware of his ego. Only a people of the culture of perception could completely shift for its own personality. Hence, in the Greek-Roman age with the possibility of processing the perception internally with this intellectual element, the reflection of the human being about his ego arises at the same time, which at first one experienced only in the mind as a concept, as an idea, as something invisible within the usual reality. Hence, one less appreciated the ego in the ancient times. Someone who investigates the ancient cultures deeper always recognises that the old myths and legends speak of gods, and if the human being did his work, he was aware that a god worked with this activity, another god with that activity, and motivates him.—The human being felt penetrated with spirit, but not yet with an ego. The human being attains the ego-consciousness only by the intellectual culture.

Even in the language development, we can prove that something gradually appeared that did not exist in the cultures of revelation where the human being considered himself as a vessel of the gods. The Greek had to experience the big tragedy at first that his view darkens and he had to say to himself, this is the tragic. I prefer to be a beggar on earth than a king in the other world that is uncertain to me.—However, it has become uncertain only in the Greek-Roman age. Because still in this strange age the old mysteries played a role, one could think about this transition of the soul still mythically while a quite new consciousness came into being.

What would have the human being said who already thought quite intellectually at that time if he had turned his glance to this important point of human history where the soul was torn out from the old culture of revelation to be educated to the ego-consciousness? He would have said to himself, in ancient times the human being was in the body in such a way that he beheld the spiritual-mental everywhere.—He did not behold an ego in this spiritual-mental, but he beheld the spiritual beings outranking him and would have said to himself, they live in my actions; they live in my perception, in my life, everywhere.—Now, the human being turned his glance to the world, and asked himself in this time of transition, “who I am?” The answer to this question fulfilled him with shudder, so that he had to say to himself, I do no longer receive the answer that gods are penetrating me, but I feel penetrated with an isolated ego.

A human being would have said this to himself who was penetrated with the intellectual consciousness. However, someone who would still have brought over something from former times who would have imagined from the point of view of the ancient consciousness would have said, the river god Cephissus and a nymph had a son, called Narcissus. This appears in the human soul as a picture. Narcissus saw himself in a spring in the Mount Helicon. One had forecast to him that he must die when he sees himself. That means, the human ego loses its connection with the divine when he realises his connection with the divine. There Narcissus sees himself and is condemned with it to death. The transition of the old culture of revelation is described to that of perception only in another way.

Somebody who would have imagined the transition to the new consciousness still in the way of the old consciousness would have said to himself, if the human being once looked at the environment, he beheld spiritual-divine forces everywhere, indeed, with his old Imaginative view. This old Imaginative consciousness gradually disappeared, and what last remained, actually, were the worst forces of the spiritual, spiritual beings that worked outdoors. The human being who imagined the new in the old kind became aware of them as Gorgons. There the new human being, Perseus, rises, mutilates the Gorgons, the Medusa, that means that consciousness which existed like the last rest, shown as Medusa's head with poisonous snakes in place of hair. Then it is shown how from the mutilated Medusa two beings originate: Chrysaor and Pegasus.

I am no friend of the allegorical-symbolic interpretation of myths. I mean it—also not in the sense of an allegorical-symbolic interpretation—in such a way that someone who has experienced the rise of the new to which humanity should develop with the old consciousness has still clairvoyantly beheld the birth of Chrysaor and Pegasus by Medusa. What did he behold? Chrysaor is the image that the human being received as an instalment for the lost old clairvoyance. Pegasus is the personification of imagination. Since the imagination is caused because the old Imagination disappeared, and the human beings do no longer have the power to enter the new epoch with a force of the old consciousness. They replace the old Imagination which beheld the spiritual reality by something that does not go into the spiritual reality but into the everlasting working of the human soul and that wants to show the new constitution of the human soul. Pegasus is nothing but the ego-culture. This develops further. Hence, we hear how that what has led to the ego-culture, Chrysaor, marries Kallirrhoe. Geryoneus originated, the modern intellectual culture of which the Greek felt that it led the human being from the old clairvoyant culture, but that it had to do this, because he would never have been able to attain the self-consciousness otherwise. Again the figure of Chrysaor has something tragic in itself, it characterises what the intellectual culture experiences. Someone who felt this the deepest, the poet Robert Hamerling (1830–1889), said about this intellectual culture, we see the conscious intellectual culture developing in the course of the human evolution from the ancient unconscious mythical culture. However, this culture leads like every development to its death. If the mere intellectual culture advanced in its way only—Hamerling and everybody who is able to assess the peculiar intellectual culture—recognises that it would dry out, would extinguish any liveliness and energy.

While spiritual science draws the attention to the fact that the intellectual culture must not remain an intellectual culture, it shows that humanity had to get necessarily to the intellectual culture to develop the ego-consciousness, but that it can get again to something that can be more than an intellectual culture. What does the intellectual culture give to the human being? It gives a picture of the world. What does the human being care about today in particular? Take the highest ideal which people have in mind that the concepts do not all deviate from the outer reality. They call everything impossible that does not comply immediately with the sensory-material reality. However, for spiritual research the intellectual culture is not only something that can depict reality but something that can educate the soul that brings up the forces of the soul. The humanity of the future will thereby get again to an Imaginative culture by which it is connected with the spiritual backgrounds of the things.

Thus, the intellectual culture is the necessary element to form the human ego in the course of human history. We see that the old clairvoyance had to be blunted by the intellectual culture, so that the ego flashes and can settle in those incarnations which the soul had in the Greek-Roman culture, and which it has and will still have for some time. Then we realise how in the future a new Imaginative culture is kindled with which humanity again is taken up in the spirit and in the spiritual life. Thus, the present is connected with the past, and the present teaches us what has to develop for the future. The consciousness of this transformation of the consciousness faces us greatly at a place of human history. However, I would like before to draw your attention still to the fact that with the old culture of revelation also a certain epoch of humanity was reached. The culture of revelation is completely penetrated with an old Imaginative life. If we went back even farther, we would meet an old culture which points everywhere in the Near East not to the culture which is described in history as the Persian one, but to a much older one from which the Persian culture originated. This older culture for their part followed again the ancient Indian culture. That is why we find the ancient Persian and the ancient Indian cultures as the precursors of the culture of revelation.

If we survey these cultures, we find the language that had arisen from the spiritual, but from the not yet conscious spiritual that is not penetrated with reason and logic. As even today the child learns speaking, before it learns thinking, humanity learnt speaking before thinking. From the deep undergrounds of the Imaginative consciousness, not from the animal instincts, a language developed from a clairvoyant consciousness that was still a higher one than the revelation consciousness of the ancient Egyptian culture. Beyond the ancient Indian culture the element of language developed. The language is a pre-conscious creation of the human mind. This points back to even older times in which the language gradually developed from a still subconscious spiritual activity.

Then we see that ancient Indian culture maturing which we admire just because we can call it a culture of unity in the best sense of the word. This is not the culture of the Vedas. These are an echo of the real ancient Indian culture only and originated not much longer before our Christian calendar than we live today after its beginning. One may characterise this ancient Indian culture while one says, the ancient Indian did not yet generally feel the difference of the material and the spiritual when he looked at nature. He did not yet see the spiritual separated from the material, he did not see at all the colours and the forms as we do today, but for him the spiritual bordered directly on the material. He saw the spirit as real as he saw the outer material colours: a culture of unity. He still saw the spiritual just as the material.

Hence, he felt the supreme spirit everywhere in the things that one later called Brahman, the world soul that one felt prevailing everywhere. However, this culture, which faces us in primeval times as a starting point of human history, did not enable the human being to be active in the material, to develop his forces in the material really. Hence, in the north in the area of the later Persian empire another culture spread out which was completely penetrated by the attitude that the human being belongs, indeed, to the spiritual world, but has to work on the material here on earth.

The ancient Persian people were a diligent working people compared to the ancient Indian people. They wanted to combine with the spiritual forces to impress the spirit in the material configuration of the earth by own power and work. Hence, the Persian felt united with his god of light and said, he penetrates me, because the human being lost the connection with the divine only in the time of the culture of perception, in the Greek-Roman epoch. The spirit of light, Ahura Mazdao, lived in the ancient Persian. Against it, he considered that which he had to overcome as the resisting matter, as interspersed with the forces of opposition, Ahriman, the dark spirit. Thus before the revelation culture that is connected with the Persian which we can call the culture of Mithra enthusiasm. We can imagine Ahura Mazdao who is symbolised by the sun in the following way: while later the human being still felt spirit-filled, and even later ego-filled, an enthusiasm in the spirit existed in these ancient Persian times, really an existence in God and a working of God by the human being. The ancient Ahura Mazdao culture was an enthusiastic culture preceding the culture of revelation.

One can observe such a thing just by spiritual science wonderfully as the poet especially feels, for example, when Robert Hamerling imagines something similar at the end of his writing The Atomism of the Will. He does not yet recognise spiritual-scientifically but with elementary intuitions that humanity has developed from an elementary connection with the spiritual forces of nature, that humanity formed language and myths on this elementary level. However, the intellectual culture is destined to lead the human being to a point where he completely realises his ego, his central spiritual-mental essence.

Another culture pointed to that magnificently. At that time, one pointed to it when one knew prophetically: a time comes, when that lives consciously in the human being—but it develops only in his innermost core—what lives and weaves in the world as the highest spiritual-divine. However, this time must be expected, it will come. Then something enters in the human being that penetrates his core spiritually. The spiritual forces approach as it were to prepare this impetus of the human ego. However, we are not yet allowed to speak of that now which still exists in the human being in such a way, as if the highest divine-spiritual already penetrates him. The divine is still unpronounceable. The ancient Hebrew culture felt that way; it felt the ego-culture, the intellectual culture approaching, while it possibly said to itself, the God who lives in the human soul can be characterised only with an unpronounceable name.—Hence, their view of the unpronounceable name of Jahveh. Jahveh or Jehovah is even a substitute with the unpronounceable name of the divine, because what was composed with these letters, indeed, is not to be vocalised, is not to be pronounced, because as soon as one pronounces it, it becomes something different from that what develops only in future as the spiritual being of the human being. The human being had to descend to the sensory-material world in the course of development, whereas he rises to the spiritual again in future times.

Then the Christian culture entered with necessity into that age which has produced the ego-culture. It regards the Christ impulse as that by which the human ego receives the impulse to settle in the spiritual in future again as the human being has once descended from the spiritual. Someone who can realise why Plato, Socrates and others were possible only in Greece, and why at that time the ego-consciousness emerged in a determining point, also understands why the Mystery of Golgotha had to take place just in the Greek-Roman culture as the main focus of the whole human development. Only someone who does not think about these connections and does not know what human consciousness means and how it changes can also not realise how the Christ impulse—characterised from another viewpoint in the previous talk—positions itself in the course of human development from the past through the present to the future. Just in the ancient Hebrew culture, the being of that appears what appears in the human ego. Now one can go into the details if one surveys history that way. Philosophers often stated that the Greeks said, any philosophy begins with marvelling.

Yes, it has to begin with the astonishment, as well as it has appeared in Greece. We can prove this if we look at history and at present in the right light. There something of the old clairvoyant consciousness has remained that does no longer work in such a way as it worked once. This is the dream. The dream is the last, decadent heirloom of the old clairvoyance, because already the conditions of the ego-consciousness work on it. What does the dream lack? Pursue the visions how they surge up and down, you will realise that one thing is absent. We would never accept the way they come and go in the awake consciousness. Why? Because the human being cannot be astonished in the dream, because astonishment appears only with the ego-consciousness in the culture of perception, and because something is contained in the dream that comes from times without ego-consciousness. The Greeks gave what appears as an ego-worldview with a miraculous characteristic saying, it begins with marvelling. However, the dream still lacks another thing. While dreaming we can do the most unbelievable things, and never conscience torments us. Conscience belongs to the ego-consciousness. It appeared only when the ego-consciousness developed. One can prove this, while one compares, for example, the dramas of Aeschylus and Euripides. With Aeschylus there is never talk of conscience, but with Euripides the conscience already plays a role. Conscience appears together with the ego-consciousness in the human development, and the dream lacks conscience, it is only an heirloom of the old clairvoyant consciousness.

We realise, while human history changed into the present, how from the old clairvoyant consciousness—from which language and myths have arisen—the intellectual consciousness gradually develops which is now at a climax of its development.

That is why spiritual science appears anticipating the necessary forces for the future in our time. It has to point to the fact that humanity has not to die away as awfully as Robert Hamerling may show the killing of a mere intellectual culture, but that the intellectual culture opens a new way of familiarising ourselves again with the spirit. Spiritual science knows what a poet and philosopher of modern time expresses so wonderfully at the end of his work where he pronounces his pain about the intellectual culture that has darkened the old elementary being together with the world undergrounds, but let the ego arise. There the poet says, “The divine kingdom, the golden age that is set in the legends at the world end to be aimed at, only means the withdrawal of any life into the spirit that can be also carried out individually.” Thus, a work of Robert Hamerling closes in hope for the future that any life develops back to the spirit as any human life arises from the spirit. Past, present, and future move together, so that the ego-consciousness is in the middle, in the present, which he did not have before. However, he will keep this ego-consciousness as an heirloom and take it with him into spiritual heights, so that we can speak again of a spiritual age of humanity. No oppressive future ideal arises if we understand human history spiritual-scientifically. How are we put in life that often is so full of suffering and pains how can we relate to the world goals in our ideas? We can answer this big human question in such a way in particular from spiritual science with certainty which gives us vitality and confidence for all human future at the same time, as the poet about whom I have just spoken answers it anticipating and with imagination.

In 1856, he inserted nice words in his Venus in Exile that touch past, present, and future of humanity, which, indeed, he did not yet speak out of the consciousness of spiritual science. But that what the human soul expected and is renewed later in another form faces us in the old myths and legends so wonderfully. What spiritual science can say reasonably, the poetic mind expressed it in an anticipating way:

Why did I throw myself in the abyss of earthly being,
Threatened by grief and death's fury,
Why do I float in the sea of coloured appearance,
Why do I swim through waves of pain to the goal?
I do not know it. One thing is only certain to me:
In my deepest inside the voice sounds
That consents joyfully to the lot of life
And shoulders this earthly destiny.
(Literal translation)

There are people who regard the deed of Copernicus as the biggest of the cultural revolutions which humanity has ever experienced as far as the historical memory reaches. One has to admit that the impression and the influence of this spiritual revolution was so significant for any outer thinking of the human beings that, indeed, hardly something more effective can be compared with it. One can bring to mind also easily what it had to mean to the world of the sixteenth century, the earth on which one believed to stand firmly resting in the universe, not only to have to retrain the relation of the own residential place, of this planet, of the sun, of the whole universe. The human beings literally lost the ground of their view. What they had regarded as firm up to then that the sun and the whole starry heaven circles around this firm earthly residential place, and everything that is spread out in space exists only because of this earthly residential place, one had now to assume that the earth is something that hurries with big speed through the cosmic space. They had to imagine the sun as something that does not move in relation to the earth and the earth even as something moving.

Even if the time is relatively short, since this spiritual wave descended upon humanity, one does not at all realise today, which change of thinking was necessary to submit to the new way of thinking in this area. But it is also necessary to realise that hardly any idea of humanity seized the whole human education and culture in such relatively short time and settled down that we have to think today that the human being has to learn the Copernican world system as one of the most elementary teachings and knowledge already as a child at school. If one looks at its significance and effectiveness, it becomes twice interesting to ask oneself: how does this progress position itself generally in the whole development of the human spirit?

In the last talk, I have spoken about Human History, Present, and Future in the Light of Spiritual Science. What appeared to us as the biggest event of human development presents itself just in a nice special case if we look at the action of Copernicus. What happened, actually, at that time in the sixteenth century when already after the death of Copernicus his great work On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres appeared before the educated world? Copernicus had yet believed that it complied with his position as a Catholic canon so that he dedicated it to the pope, and was, still, on the index of the forbidden books of the Catholic Church up to 1821.

Only from the whole attitude of his time one can understand the action of Copernicus, actually, only if one takes the fact into account that in the centuries up to the appearance of Copernicus in the cultural life, Aristotelism prevailed in science. Since those medieval thinkers and researchers who preceded Copernicus stood on the ground of that what Aristoteles had produced as a scientific spirit centuries before the Christian calendar. As far as these philosophers and researchers of the Middle Ages were Christian, they connected the Christian doctrines harmoniously with that what they had taken up as a scientific way of thinking from Aristotle.

The teaching of Copernicus is a break in a certain respect, one would have to say, not with the teaching of Aristotle, probably, but with that what had arisen from Aristotle by the Christian researchers. These called Aristotle a precursor of the Lord, of Christ the things of the natural world order. For them the whole worldview disintegrated into two parts: in a part which could originate only from the Christian revelation, from the tradition of the scriptures. This part dealt with that what is generally inaccessible to the human reason but only to faith. They took the second part of their worldview from Aristotle, and they penetrated everything with Aristotelian attitude that the human being can attain by research and science. If one sees Aristotle having an continuous effect on the intellectual culture of the Middle Ages that way, and if one sees him then replaced by Copernicus and his great successors Kepler, Galilei, Giordano Bruno and others, then one has to ask oneself, how was the original Aristotle, and how was his teaching which the Christian scholars of the Middle Ages regarded as Aristotelian?

If one becomes engrossed in the comprehensive, magnificent work of Aristotle, one realises that Aristoteles has summarised the reflections of the preceding culture epochs. But they face us with Aristotle in a strange way. Of course, in this context I cannot dwell on the teachings of Aristotle, I would like to draw your attention only to one thing that is necessary just for spiritual science to understand the action of Copernicus and the character of his age.

With Aristotle, you find that logically and reasonably processed and brought in ideas what he had taken over from old times. If you only wanted to refer to that which his reason could understand, we would realise that the ideas of human reason cannot enclose everything that we find in the teachings of Aristotle. There we find the idea that universe and nature are ensouled, are spirit-filled. He pronounces distinctly that not only the human physical body, but also the spiritual-mental of the human being are born out of the universe. The human body because the matter is spread out in the universe. But the spiritual-mental has arisen from the universe because he imagines the universe as spirit-filled, as ensouled. What we see in the stars is for Aristotle not only an accumulation of matter, but also the material embodiment of a soul being, and the passage of a star through the universe is for him not only the result of mere mechanical or physical forces, but also the expression of the will of the star's spirit or the star's soul.

If one goes deeper in detail, one everywhere finds something quite peculiar shining through. With his wholly logical, abstract explanations, one finds an old knowledge shining through which was still delivered to the Greeks, and which Aristotle brought in rational ideas. One can understand Aristotle only properly if one takes that as a basis, which I have said in the last talk, the whole human development proceeded in such a way that humanity originated from a consciousness different from the present one which is organised mainly to the intellect.—Against it there was on the bottom of every human soul a kind of innate clairvoyance in olden times which we can achieve by instruction today as I have explained it in the book How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds

Humanity has developed from this clairvoyant knowledge which existed in ancient times and which became weaker and weaker in the course of human development. Humanity could behold in that which is deeper in the things than that which only the senses and the reason can understand. Everywhere one finds an original knowledge hidden on the bottom of human cultures, a knowledge by Intuition, Inspiration, and Imagination. But this original knowledge had to get lost gradually, because only on this condition humanity could develop the intellectual culture.

The main concern of scientificity and scientific worldviews could develop only because the old hazy clairvoyant knowledge gradually changed into our knowledge. Since the old clairvoyant consciousness lacked our logical thinking completely. What one knew at that time what the originally clairvoyant human soul gained was continued up to the Greek times. This old knowledge of humanity still shines strangely through with Plato, the teacher of Aristotle. We find this old knowledge in the form as the modern human being can no longer attain it for himself, for example, in the Oriental cultures, mainly in the ancient Indian culture. It is interesting to realise that in the Indian culture from the ancient culture of humanity, which was able to behold in the spiritual world, something similar originates as we find it with Aristotle. In the Indian culture something arises at last that the human beings gained as it were by the education for millenniums, by the internalisation up to the logical thinking which has now to get to a world explanation without clairvoyance purely by itself. We realise that this old culture maintains its knowledge, but educates the soul in such a way that that which is delivered is grasped in logical, reasonable ideas. With the Indian culture, we see the interesting fact that the humanity of the East stops on that level beyond which it does not get, a level that resulted since centuries before our Christian calendar.

With Aristotle, we see that the logical culture, the intellectual culture assuming another character while it develops from the old clairvoyant knowledge. We realise that still the teaching of the ensoulment of the world sounds through. But while humanity develops from the old clairvoyance the culture of the thinking, the logic arises with Aristotle as a kind of separate science that can become now again the instrument of a quite different disposed research.

If we compare Aristotle and the Indian culture, we have to say: the Indian culture comes to a dead point, it comes as it were to a dead end where the thought always when it wants to recognise something positive has to turn back to the ancient culture and its clairvoyant results.

Against it, with Aristotle we see the ancient culture ending, indeed, that, but the thought is so maintained that it can seize something else. One does not understand Aristotle properly if one does not see his whole philosophy related to his psychology. Since for Aristoteles it would be absurd that the human soul was only a function, a result of the activity of the human body. He was clear in his mind that the physical body is gifted if the human being enters the world directly from the spiritual world with the spiritual-mental essence. He would never have believed that the human being arises only from heredity, but he derived the spiritual-mental from that what he called the world of God from which he let the most significant inner core of the soul arise.

Just as little, Aristotle let the spiritual-mental essence of the human being stop at death, but he was clear in his mind that that what lives in us and works and uses the body as tool lives on after death. However, he was also clear in his mind that the physical life is by no means superfluous or useless, but that the soul must submerge necessarily in the physical life because it can only there attain that what it has to bring into the spiritual world after death. It is interesting how Aristoteles imagined the destiny of the human soul core as bound to the destiny of the life, which it experienced here between birth and death. He lets it be bound to the life on earth so that the soul relieved of its body lives on after death in the spiritual world, but has to look back at a world in which it was. While it turns the spiritual view down, it sees its former physical body. It realises the good or bad, nice or ugly, clever or silly actions, sensations, or thoughts he had in life. Thus the soul is bound in this retrospect of the physical life to this view, while that what of it lives in the spiritual world is dependent from its corporeality.

There Aristotle had the sombre idea that the soul experiences for all eternity what it has—bound to the physical body—to experience. Since Aristotle was too far away from the original, human culture that still knew something of repeated lives on earth. That is why he could not show how the soul appears after death in a new human body again and uses the sight of its last life on earth during its existence in the spiritual world so that it transforms the experiences of the previous life on earth and uses them as an opportunity to compensate in a new life on earth what it did wrongly or imperfectly. Concerning the imperfect the only consolation is that the soul gets a new stimulus to make the defects more perfect in the next life. Aristotle did not know this because he did not recognise that at his time the human culture had come to that point where the human being did research by the instrument of the brain that exists only between birth and death. Only that way Aristotle could become the founder of the logical, scientific thinking while he clouded the view of repeated lives on earth and the life in a spiritual world for his time. He did not go so far of binding the spiritual-mental to the bodily, although he had lost the view of the repeated incarnations of the spiritual-mental. The fact that this is in such a way is proved in particular in a book that has just appeared and belongs quite certainly to the best works of the literature on Aristotle if it is not generally the best about the worldview of Aristotle. The book that I recommend very much is Aristotle and His Worldview (1911) by Franz Brentano (1838–1917).

I would just like to read out the words of this excellent expert of Aristotle to show what he writes about the destiny of the soul after death out of a deep penetration with the whole way of Aristotelian thinking: “But how? Is the idea of retaliation not completely shattered?—One could mean it, and then it would be explained, why Aristotle did not refer to retaliation in the beyond in the ethics in contrast to Plato. That is not the case. We remind of the difference to which I drew the attention with the spirits of the spheres in the comparison with the godhead. Similar differences exist also here, and if the dead look at the world and feel intertwined into it with their lives on earth, then the one recognises himself as identical with someone who accomplishes good actions, and another with someone who accomplishes shameful actions. This knowledge, which they attain, is at the same time an everlasting, glorifying, or condemning Last Judgement, a Last Judgement that takes place as such in front of everyone for all eternity. Should one not regard this as retaliation and as completely adequate to the true merit?”

We realise here at the same time that not only the religious confession, but also the science of Aristotle have assumed an everlasting connection of the soul with this one life on earth. Here we have an explanation why one has also spoken of everlasting reward and punishment so stubbornly where the medieval doctrine wants to be scientific. As an old tradition, Aristotle had his spiritual view and his conviction that something spiritual penetrates the human being and lives in him. His mission was to lead out the old culture from a spiritual culture.

Now not a deep understanding, but strictly speaking only the outer tradition of Aristotle remained the whole Middle Ages through beyond Copernicus; one swore on the works of Aristotle. Everywhere one taught at the schools what one had found in them. But the instrument of reason matured, hidden to outer observation, in the human souls. What Aristotle had to tell of the old spiritual teachings of wisdom was misunderstood and interpreted sophistically, so that those who came then, Kepler, Galilei, Giordano Bruno, could not help scrapping that what one had taken over of the belief in Aristotle. What Aristotle had delivered as contents got lost. But an inner soul culture developed, the culture of the intellect, of the reason. Reason, thinking is empty in itself if it has no object of research. We still find the old spiritual wisdom with Aristotle as the object of research. But it gradually disappeared. The Middle Ages had, so to speak, only for that more talent which one can see with the senses and understand with the intellect. Copernicus was that man who now turned the glance to the world in such a way that he understood the world coherence in space, as this could be understood with the mere outer reason at first that summarised by logic and mathematics what spread out in space. Because the spiritual original culture was anxious, above all, to understand the human being, as he is on earth, in relation to his spiritual-mental and in relation to his origin from the spiritual-mental of the world, the old teachings considered the outer spatial conditions only a little. The old teaching simply accepted the sensory appearance, because it did not give something to understand space and time but to recognise what lives in the depths of the human soul and is born from the spiritual-mental depths of the universe. Only when the reason felt alone with the thought, it got the urge to understand the outer reality. We can characterise the age of Copernicus even better with someone who is even greater than Copernicus is although he did not work in the scientific area so impressively on humanity as Copernicus did.

Imagine a spirit who is put into the fifteenth, sixteenth centuries when the greatness of the old spiritual culture had disappeared from the general consciousness longtime ago when in the human soul the possibility developed to grasp the outer sensory reality greatly with the forces of the strong human personality. If we imagine a human being who is just endowed with this tendency we have the older contemporary of Copernicus, the genius Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) who was able to grasp the immediate sensory reality in such a depth that his Communion in Milan, even if it is disfigured, still takes our deep fancy. Leonardo da Vinci is a person who created this completely from the depths of his soul as an artist; he was not only a painter and sculptor, but also an engineer and architect, he was scientifically active in a comprehensive sense. His scientific records have a great effect on us if we study them. He is the greatest representative of the time that developed to the sixteenth century; he was a man in whose inside largely and immensely all forces had become fertile which Aristotle had directed to the consideration of the world. What was abstract with Aristotle became immediate, lively, spiritual reality with Leonardo da Vinci. He also faces us that way where he grasps the world as a scientist.

The canon Copernicus is also endowed with that what humanity could learn as culture, as self-education from Aristotle. He investigated in all silence, during four times nine years, as he himself says, not some outer facts—this is the typical that he did not investigate outer facts—, but that he accepted that what the senses, the outer reason knew about the outer facts of the solar system. That who appears compared with Copernicus as “half-advanced,” Tycho de Brahe (1546–1601), seems virtually pioneering with the investigation of sensory facts, whereas Copernicus contributed nothing to the investigation of outer facts. What did Copernicus really achieve? Someone who intensely studies his writings knows that he did not apply the culture which humanity could gain by Aristotle to the old spiritual culture like Aristotle, to the knowledge of the spiritual-mental of the human being and of the universe but to the outer sensory reality.

Let us grasp the inner relation of the stars to the sun not in such away as the medieval science and Aristotelism have grasped it, but let us assume that the sun is in the centre, and that the planets circle round it. What would result from this assumption? Copernicus possibly asked himself. He could say to himself, we have obeyed a methodical, a logical principle of Aristotle more than those do who want to explain the sense-perceptible in their way. They have to assume complex movements of the single planets, and put up laws that constitute the solar system at last. But an old principle that can make sense to the human beings just by the logic of Aristotle says that we should never use a complex thought if a simple thought can explain the world coherence.

Copernicus used the simplest thought, not by a special intention. Because he took the view to summarise the outer sensory facts, he put the sun in the centre of the system and let the planets circle round it. That which one could only explain in complex way once, the place of a star, when it was seen, arose easier. Thus, Aristotle gave the impulse, although those did not understand him who believed to be true Aristotelians in the Middle Ages, which brought humanity on that level on which it grasped the idea inside Copernicus to apply the idea of simplicity to the outer universe.

That which Aristotle still applied to spiritual wisdom originated from the old culture of the humanely mental for science. But that what has originated from the old spiritual culture as an instrument begins spreading over the sensory world and surveying it lawfully. If then we realise how the action of Copernicus keeps on working in Kepler, Galilei, Giordano Bruno, even still in Newton, it becomes clear to us everywhere that the age of Copernicus gave humanity the mission to add the culture and science of the sensory world to the old spiritual culture and science.

However, it was also necessary for it that the human habitual ways of thinking, feeling, and willing were directed to the immediate physical outer reality. This also appears in a strange way that it combines with the action of Copernicus. We still see souls like Leonardo da Vinci and those who belong to him arising from the Renaissance culture, which breaks with the medieval avoidance of nature and which brings joy of the immediate reality to the human beings. This was necessary to be able to understand the outer reality also immediately with the scientific reason with Galilei, Kepler and Copernicus.

It is interesting to realise that it becomes more difficult to the human beings, so to speak, in one area and easier in the other area to familiarise themselves to the quite new way of thinking and to apply the new mental pictures to the universe. We realise too that it becomes difficult to humanity to accept the outer reality at first as the basis of an intellectual culture in the origin of the Faust legend in the sixteenth century that also has a historical background. There we realise that the human beings felt the new thinking as something by which they lost the old coherence with the spiritual of the world. As far away that what is connected with the Faust figure seems to be from the feeling that the human being is torn out from the spiritual culture and is a slave of all mistakes and errors that arise from his personality. Nevertheless, it is reflected in the popular education of the sixteenth century as the consciousness, while it tells about Faust that he laid the Bible behind the bank for a while and became a worldly man and doctor The latter represented a researcher in the outer nature. It is interesting to observe that a naive person like Copernicus felt: you have only brought the thought of simplicity on the solar system up to the inward-looking human soul.

As a devout man, he had to say to himself, recognising the laws of the universe in their true form, I contribute, actually, to the knowledge of the divine thoughts working in the world.—In his naivety, he could believe that it was right to dedicate his work to the pope. But friends had kept him from publishing his work, so that he received the correction of the first sheet only on his deathbed, because he believed that it was not right to keep it longer from fear. Now, but we realise the peculiar that the time culture had to position itself to it. The work was published only after his death. The publisher weakened what Copernicus wanted to say in a preface in which he said in a careful way that this work would be not something that counts on the facts of the world directly, but it would be a possible hypothesis among other hypotheses. Now we have to be clear in our mind that the action of Copernicus is the starting point of a cultural epoch within which we still are, because it is a straight progress from Copernicus to our days. But that peculiarly presents itself which in his naivety Copernicus regarded as well founded on the Christian faith. It appears in a peculiar way what he did at that time if we compare it to that what was connected with it in the course of the centuries. One knows it well. Copernicus himself still escaped from any persecution because he saw his world-revolutionising work only on his deathbed. Those who kept on working in his sense Galilei, Giordano Bruno, experienced another destiny. This is known to all world. We realise exactly here what arises from the action of an ingenious human being, how everything that becomes later common property of humanity can only assert itself by opposition. Really, one has to confess that one feels it as something quite peculiar if one looks at the action of Copernicus as a necessity just in such a way, as we have done it today—and realises now that this action keeps working as, but also the opposing attitude keeps on working.

If one looks at the time of Copernicus in this cultural-moral sense, the following arises. He himself believed that this action did not at all contradict his confession that he believed to have as a man devoted to his church. Since when the action of the Copernicus took place, and the culture of the outer sensory world seized humanity, there still enough existed of the culture of the old times with which humanity connected that what is spread out in the universe as a spiritual and formed the contents of the Aristotelian teachings. It would be not at all possible at the time of Kepler, Galilei, also of Newton, to count as a reasonable person if one stated that possibly only from the cooperation of the material processes the human soul rises in its activity, as the flame comes into being from the material processes of the candle. Just for the greatest spirits, this would not have been possible. Although his doctrine worked so world revolutionising later, Copernicus remained firmly founded on the belief in the spirit working in the universe.

Kepler, his great successor, still worked as an astrologer beside that he was a great astronomer. This is important for the characteristic of the age of Copernicus that Kepler worked as an astrologer. Only from this viewpoint one has to consider that he was convinced—although he inserted three principles named after him in science—that something spiritual-mental works in all mechanical processes of the universe, so that one could get to know something of the human destiny from the constellations of the stars.

Galileo also felt that the human soul was embedded in the spiritual-mental of the world. Since Galilei was of the view that one was not allowed to stop at a science of paper but has to advance to a science of reason after Copernicus and after he had invented his telescope with which he had discovered the Jupiter moons and the fact that the Milky Way was composed of single star formations. Galilei was, as others of his time, an opponent of Aristotle but only of the misunderstood Aristotle. Against it, he was penetrated by that what one can call culture of thought, internalisation of the thought up to the logical conception of the outer reality. But he had never become estranged to the idea that the human mind can understand by logic at successive times what is spread out in space and time. But compared with this human reason, which can recognise the secrets of the universe successively by the consideration of that what the senses perceive, Galilei saw the divine spirit working and interweaving in the world and of which he felt reverentially that it pre-thinks the universe in one single moment and does not after-think it as the human being does. So for Galilei the divine spirit formed the basis of all world phenomena which the world thought creates within one moment on its own terms whose image the world is which then the human mind and intellect can maybe understand successively, at least through many ages.

For the age of Copernicus, the consciousness was not yet lost generally that the human soul is based on the spiritual-mental of the universe. Even with Newton, we still recognise that he imagines—although he believes to have explained the forces of the outer universe as mechanical ones by the principle of gravitation—that the spiritual-mental of the human being is so firmly based on the spiritual-mental of the universe that he became an interpreter, a commentator of the Apocalypse at the same time. Just the principal documents of this age were still filled with that what had, indeed, disappeared of the old science which still went on sounding with Aristotle, and which knew that the spiritual-mental is connected inside the human being with the spiritual-mental in the universe outdoors. The old knowledge had disappeared, but the traditions were still there to which one could dedicate himself quietly, because in the human heart something lived that wanted to dedicate itself to them quietly. Nevertheless, something different was the habitual ways of thinking. We see the thought on its own becoming impoverished. Where these spirits wanted to advance to an understanding of the spiritual-mental life, Kepler, Galilei, Giordano Bruno, Newton, all traditions still could live in their souls. But if they wanted to understand the soul life with the principles attained with their reason, these soul forces turned out to be incapable, even if they were alive ever so much. As to the shine of a past old wisdom Galilei tended to the reason of his God, as he believed it, and as it existed in the tradition of his faith.

However, those who wanted then to look for a lawful connection of the human soul with the spiritual-mental of the world in similar way, as they had looked at the time of Copernicus for a lawful connection of the earth with the stars, the spatial universe, faced the impoverishment of thought put on its own. With one of the most enthusiastic spirits of the Copernican age, with Giordano Bruno, we see this impoverishment of the thought that had brought itself to interpret the world in the sense of Copernicus. He points to the fact that where one had supposed the so-called “eighth sphere” behind the fixed star sphere according to the previous view nothing exists everywhere but worlds as the earth is, it is only a small world in the big one. One has only to remember his miraculous and astute worldview that breaks down a lot of that what had remained to humanity from old times, and then one recognises that just Giordano Bruno wants to enliven the consciousness of the spiritual coherence of the human soul with the spiritual world. He is clear in his mind that if one looks at a physical being like the human being, one has to imagine that it arises from a spiritual universe that the spiritual of the universe concentrated in a human body as it were to extend again at his death and to concentrate later again. He imagines the repeated lives on earth this way. But his thought does not become full of contents, not internally rich.

The thought that had showed its momentum and its fertility towards the outer world shrinks with Giordano Bruno and later with Leibniz (Gottfried L., 1646–1716) whom we can consider as a successor of Giordano Bruno to that which both called a monad. What is a monad? Something of which one imagined that it is born from the spiritual world. As to Leibniz even a monad includes something like a reflection of the whole universe. But this view did not bring more than the dry abstraction that the monad is a reflection of the universe. Thus, one may admire the strength of Leibniz's philosophy as an effect of the action of Copernicus. But if we penetrate into his philosophy that imagines the world composed of monads, we realise that it cannot say a lot about the human soul, because it is surely only a little if one says that the soul is a reflection of the universe. We see nothing but abstract descriptions, if we look at the philosophy which goes back directly to the action of Copernicus. Strictly speaking, this philosophy remains poor. The old spiritual science of Aristotle which had the traditions of the old culture and an uncertain consciousness of it still speaks of the human being as composed of different members of his being, It understands him as a harmonious arrangement, relates the different members to the different outer states and facts, still connects what drops from the human being at death with that which comes from a spiritual world and goes to a spiritual world, and gets concrete mental pictures full of contents about the spiritual in the soul that way.

We still see a real science with divine contents with Aristotle. We still see the spiritual described as one really describes something spiritual today again. But it shrunk to the miserable monad in the age of Copernicus. The same Giordano Bruno who finds the most enthusiastic words where he points to the greatness and infinity of the universe finds the poorness of the monad for the soul only. Now a few concepts, pieced together, should show the human soul, its conceptualised being.

There we realise how the ages work how the human missions work. Humanity would never attained its today's culture unless Copernicanism had come, but we realise at the same time how spiritual science had to become impoverished inevitably at first. Now only in our time, we realise that something appears that will show again that now, after the human thought wanted to be only an instrument of understanding the outer sensory world for a while, this human thought also becomes means to get to an inside world exceeding the mere thought. Since wherefore the thought was used since Copernicus up to now? It was used for understanding the outer sensory world; it was the instrument of the outer facts, which the eyes see and which can be grasped, with the instrument of the brain. The thought had to offer an objective, clear image of the sensory world. After this kind of soul condition has hardened, the thought may now become again something else, something that educates the human soul in itself. The human being must no longer use the thought only as an image of the outer reality, but he has to separate it in such a way that it does not depict the outer reality, but works if the soul excludes all appearance in meditation and concentration, so that the thought becomes internally creative, and that the soul gets contents different from the contents of the shrivelled monad.

In the Copernican age the thought received its mission to be an image of the outer reality, it will go over to preparing the soul, will bring up inner hidden forces from the depths of the soul by which this can look at that which forms the basis of the old Aristotelian culture. These will be no old, traditional thoughts that are the most fertile ones. No, these will be the thoughts that are found by the age of natural sciences. Just the thoughts that are built up on the age of Copernicus bring out those soul forces, which let the soul behold itself and then the spiritual-mental of the universe. Now the human soul has to develop the thought for the other mission to take the thought as a means of education of the soul for a culture of the higher self, for a beholding in the spiritual world.

We stand at this turning point today, and this turning point in the human culture has to take place. If we understand the necessity by which the age of Copernicus came into being, we can also understand the necessity that the time has to change into a new one in which the thought exceeds itself and in which we get to the nature of the soul if we no longer talk about the soul in abstractions, but in real descriptions of its actions, qualities, and characteristics. If one considers spiritual science in such a way, those will not maybe come to their own who run after everybody today who states anyhow that he knows anything of spiritual science.

We live not only in a critical age today but also in an age where many people without examining run at once after every prophecy et cetera. Just as today a part of humanity is too much critical, the other part is too much gullible and takes everything as a revelation of spiritual worlds. Real spiritual science wants to have to do nothing with what arises from such a need. Since it is not possible today that spiritual science can bring the human beings to an understanding of our age unless one tries to understand the lawfulness of humanity and of the evolution generally. Hence, it also happened when once a spirit, Lessing (Gotthold Ephraim L., 1729–1781), intended to survey the development of humanity in the same way as Copernicus had surveyed the principles of space that he got to the hypothesis of the repeated lives on earth. How will it be then with those who take spiritual science seriously?

Just there we can also learn a lot from Copernicus. I have already stated once what Galilei experienced with a real follower of Aristotle. One of his friends believed due to the no longer understood Aristotle that Aristotle had taught that the nerves of the human being originate from the heart. Galilei who stood on the ground of real sensory observation said to the person concerned, I want to lead you to a corpse and show you that Aristotle was not right, because the nerves of the human being originate from the brain.—Really, this follower of Aristotelism also looked at the corpse and said then, if I look at nature, it seems to me, as if the nerves originate from the brain, but from Aristotle I know that the nerves originate from the heart, and if nature contradicts Aristotle, I believe in Aristotle and not in nature. This is no fairy tale; this is a fact that shows that the big facts have to be accepted in the human culture in spite of all opponents.

Hence, we must not be surprised if anything appears in our time that one could characterise in the following way. Anybody could want to show to another with the whole development of the child that not everything that the human being bears in himself can originate from mere physical heredity. This could happen in such a way that he says to the other. have a look at everything that spiritual science has said about this field.—Then there one could imagine that somebody of the quite clever people would answer, yes, if you spiritual scientists talk in such a way, it seems, as if from a former life on earth that came over which appears as effect with the adolescent human being. But monism says it different. If the spiritual observations contradict monism, I believe in monism and not in the spiritual observation.

Maybe such a thing could also recur in our time like that what took place when the age of Copernicus appeared in humanity. Many people could say today, we have to regard the teaching of repeated lives on earth as a hypothesis that explains the human life reasonably, but we cannot yet convince ourselves of it. Indeed, one says that those who have developed the inner beholding behold the soul in a state where it belongs to a lawful spiritual world that it reaches beyond birth and death. But what does it avail us who cannot observe the human soul going through the repeated lives on earth and if we must accept the teaching of the repeated lives on earth as hypothesis?

Someone who could say this from a materialistic-monistic way of thinking would give evidence of the fact that he is not yet so far as the Catholic Church is with the Copernican teaching with which it was also not yet careful some decades ago. Since as what had people to regard the Copernican teaching? Copernicus had done nothing but grasping a thought as simply as possible and had taken it as basis of the phenomena. With this thought, he had worked hard for a proof, not by investigations, of that what takes place. If one takes his thought, one can say, that's right.

The same applies completely to those today who cannot do the way to the spiritual beholding of the human soul and its immediate nature or do not want to do it. Since spiritual science shows that everything that presents itself as human destiny, as human work and as laws of this work is only explicable if one accepts the principle of the repeated lives on earth and of karma. It is shown that today one can have the same certainty the spiritual-mental of the human being as Aristotle could have certainty by his logic compared with the contents of his teaching that came from the old wisdom, and as the followers of Copernicus had certainty of his teaching in relation to the outer phenomena in space.

In 1543, the work of Copernicus was published. In 1851, a real proof of the Copernican teaching was possible only because then Foucault (Léon F., 1819–1868) showd the rotation of the earth on its axis with the pendulum experiment which showed the rotation of the plane of oscillation of a long and heavy pendulum. From the constancy of the pendulum rotations one could find inner evidence of the Copernican teaching only in 1851.

Thus, it happens with outer facts. In relation to reincarnation the human being can start the way any time which leads him to the spiritual beholding, and which shows where from the living comes which goes from life to life. The inner evidence that was given for Copernicanism only after centuries can be offered for reincarnation any time. But as little as it was necessary for the acceptance of the principle of reincarnation and karma that somebody has this spiritual beholding as it was for the acceptance of Copernicanism that the inner evidence would have already been given with Foucault's pendulum experiment. I said, someone who would reject the teaching of reincarnation and karma because of the given reasons would turn out to be even more intolerant than the Catholic Church was which did not wait until 1851 to withdraw the work of Copernicus from the List of Prohibited Books, but it withdrew it already in 1821.

However, we who stand on the ground of spiritual science can learn with Copernicus, Kepler, Galilei, and Giordano Bruno, how that what has to settle in the human culture will settle in spite of all opposition. Since today the attitudes that opposed Copernicus, Kepler, Galilei, Giordano Bruno and others are also there, even if by those who regard spiritual science as daydreaming, as speculative fiction, as follies, although they belong to the “enlightened” people. Indeed, they do not write or print a List of Prohibited Books, but they ban spiritual science as the Catholic Church banned the teaching of Copernicus.

Indeed, they can brace themselves against the human progress, but they cannot prevent it. Those who call spiritual science daydreaming have to withdraw their edicts just as the edicts against Copernicanism were withdrawn. Spiritual science, filled with its truth, can wait for the year “1821” of the materialistic monists, and it will wait. It waits while speaking to those who understand already before that spiritual science opens their eyes again towards the spiritual worlds with which the innermost being of the human nature is connected in such a way that the human soul gives itself hope, confidence, and strength.

The soul can say to itself about the connection of its forces with the universe what I tried to express in my second mystery play The Soul's Probation the feeling together with the spiritual of the universe:

In your thinking cosmic thoughts do live,
Within your feeling cosmic forces play,
Within your will cosmic beings work.
Abandon yourselves to cosmic world thoughts,
Experience yourself through cosmic forces,
Create yourself anew from cosmic will.
End not at last in cosmic distances
By fantasies of dreamy thought beguiled;
Begin in farthest spirit-realms
And end in the recesses of your soul.
The plan divine then shall you recognise
When you have realised your self in you.
(Somewhat changed translation by H. Collison and others)

Eurythmy ¹ Eurythmy is said to be an art that uses movement forms of the human organism in and out of space, as well as moving groups of people, as its means of expression. However, it is not about mimic gestures or dance movements, but about a real, visible language or song. When speaking and singing, the human organs shape the air stream in a certain way. If one studies the formation of sound, vowels, consonants, sentence structure, verse formation, and so on, in a spiritually alive way, one can form very definite ideas about the plastic forms that arise during the corresponding speech or song revelations. These can now be recreated by the human organism, especially by the most expressive organs, the arms and hands. This makes it possible to see what is heard when singing or speaking.

Because the arms and hands are the most expressive organs, eurythmy consists primarily of the shaped movements of these organs; then the movement forms of the other organs are added in a supportive way, as with ordinary speech, facial expressions and ordinary gestures. The difference between eurythmy and dance can be seen particularly clearly by looking at the eurythmic accompaniment of a piece of music. In this case, what appears to be dance is only a secondary matter; the main thing is the visible singing that is created by the arms and hands.

One should not think that a single form of movement in eurythmy is arbitrary. At a particular moment, a certain form of movement must be created as an expression of something musical or poetic, just as a certain tone must be created in singing or a certain sound in speech. In the language of movement of eurythmy, the human being is as bound as in singing or speaking to tone and sound. But he is equally free in the beautiful, artistic design of eurythmic movement forms as he is in language or song.

This enables us to present a piece of music that is being played in eurythmy, in a visible song, or to present a recited or declaimed poem in a visible language at the same time. And since language and music come from the whole human being, their inner content appears all the more vivid when the audible is accompanied by the visible. For everything that is sung and spoken actually moves the whole human being; in ordinary life, the tendency to movement is only held back and localized in the organs of speech and song. Eurythmy only reveals what is always inherent in these human expressions of life as a tendency to move, but which remains hidden in the disposition. - A kind of orchestral interaction of the audible and visible is achieved by adding eurythmy to instrumental music performance and to recitation or declamation.

For recitation and declamation to be presented in connection with eurythmy, it is important to note that these must occur in a truly artistic form of language. Reciters or declaimers who only emphasize the prose content of the poem cannot participate in eurythmy. True artistic poetry arises only through the imaginative or musical shaping of language. The content of prose is not the artistic element; it is only the material through which the pictorial aspect of language, or also the beat, rhythm, verse structure and so on, should reveal itself. All poetic language is already a hidden eurythmy. The reciter or declaimer must bring out of the poem what the poet has put into it through the pictorial, plastic or musical aspect of language. Dr. Steiner has been specially training this art of recitation and declamation for years. Only such a language art can be performed together with eurythmy, because only then can the reciter offer the ear what the eurythmist presents to the eye in the way of sound formation and sound sculpture. It is only through such interaction that what really lives in poetry is brought before the soul of the listener and spectator.

Eurythmy is not intended for an indirect understanding of the intellect, but for direct perception. The eurythmist must learn the visible language form by form, just as a human being must learn to speak. But the effect of eurythmy accompanied by music or speech is one that is felt directly through mere contemplation. Like music, it also has an effect on people who have not learned the forms themselves. For it is a natural, an elementary revelation of the human being, while language always has something conventional about it.

Eurythmy has arisen in the present day in the same way as all the arts arose in their corresponding epochs. These arose from the fact that one brought a soul content to revelation through corresponding artistic means. When a certain artistic means had been mastered to such an extent that it could be used to reveal to the senses what the soul experiences, an art was created. Eurythmy is created by learning to use the most noble of artistic means, the human organism, this microcosm, itself as a tool. In the art of mime and dance, this only happens in relation to parts of the human organism. Eurythmy, however, uses the whole human being as its means of expression. But before such a performance, the audience's forbearance must always be appealed to. Every art had to go through an initial stage. This also applies to eurythmy. It is at the beginning of its development. But because it uses the most perfect instrument imaginable, it must have unlimited possibilities for development. The human organism is this most perfect instrument; it is in reality the microcosm, containing in concentrated form all the secrets and laws of the world. If, through the shaping of movements in eurythmy, we can bring to manifestation what is contained in the essential nature of the organism as a language that physically expresses the whole experience of the soul, then we must be able to express the secrets of the world artistically in a comprehensive way.

What eurythmy can offer at present is only the beginning of what is possible in the direction indicated. But because it makes use of means of expression that can have such a relationship to the nature of the world and of man, it may be hoped that in its further development it will prove itself to be a fully-fledged art in its own right alongside the others.

• 1. These “introductory words” were spoken before the eurythmy performances that took place in connection with my lecture series during my English tour to Ilkley, Penmaenmawr and London.

I

The remains of the Goetheanum now cover the Dornach hill. Its construction was the result of an initiative by members of the Anthroposophical Society. Anthroposophy is the name I used when, twenty years ago in Berlin, I gave a lecture cycle on the world view that I believe is a direct continuation of Goethe's way of thinking. I chose the name in memory of a book by the Herbartian Robert Zimmermann, “Umriß einer Anthroposophie” (Outline of an Anthroposophy), which appeared decades ago. The content of this book, however, has nothing to do with what I presented as “anthroposophy”. It was modified Herbartian philosophy in the most abstract form. I wanted to use the word to express a world view that, through the application of the spiritual organs of perception of the human being, brings about the same knowledge of the spiritual world as natural science brings about through the sensory organs of perception of the physical.

About a year and a half before the lecture cycle mentioned above, I had already given lectures on another area of this anthroposophical world view at the invitation of Countess and Count Brockdorff in the “Theosophical Library” in Berlin at the time. The content of these lectures is published in my book “Mysticism in the Dawn of Modern Spiritual Life”. As a result of these lectures I was invited to join the Theosophical Society. I accepted this invitation with the intention of never advocating anything but the content of what had presented itself to me as the anthroposophical world view. It was always my view that I should lecture to all people who wanted to hear me, regardless of the name of the party under which they had joined together in any group, or whether they came to my lectures without any such preconception.

At the same time that I was invited to join the Theosophical Society, a number of members of that society founded a German section of it. I was invited to become its General Secretary. Despite serious misgivings, I accepted. I did not change my intention to present the Anthroposophical worldview to the world. What I myself call “Theosophy” is clearly evident from my book “Theosophy”, which I wrote shortly afterwards. This Theosophy emerges as a special field of Anthroposophy.

At the same time that the members of the Theosophical Society were inaugurating the German section in Berlin with speeches by Annie Besant, I was giving the series of lectures on anthroposophy that I have just mentioned.

I was now invited to give lectures to members of the Theosophical Society quite often. But basically, from the very beginning of this activity, I was opposed by those members of the Theosophical Society who were dogmatically attached to the teachings of some of the older leaders of that society. The circle of those personalities who found something in the Anthroposophical worldview increasingly formed itself as an independent one. In 1913, these leaders expelled them from the Theosophical Society when I called the consequences drawn from the teachings of these leaders and presented to the world absurd and declared that I did not want to have anything to do with such absurdities.

The Anthroposophical Society was founded in 1912 under the influence of these events. With the help of those personalities who later held leading positions in the Society, I was able to add the performance of “mysteries” to my lecturing activities even before that. As early as 1907, the anthroposophically oriented members in Munich performed Schuré's adaptation of the Eleusinian mystery at the Theosophical Congress. In 1909, he presented the play “Children of Lucifer” by the same author, which was followed by the presentation of “The Children of Lucifer” by the same author in Munich in 1909. As a result, in the following years, 1910-1913, my four own, very modern mystery dramas were performed for the members of the anthroposophical circle, also in Munich.

This expansion of anthroposophical activity into the field of art was a natural consequence of the nature of anthroposophy. The reasons for this have been frequently presented in this weekly publication.

Meanwhile, the circle that had become the Anthroposophical Society had grown so much that the leading figures within it were able to build Anthroposophy a home of its own. Munich was chosen as the location for this, because most of the supporters of the building intention were located there and had developed a particularly dedicated activity at that time.

I myself saw myself only as the representative of these supporters of the building intention. I believed that I had to concentrate my efforts on the inner spiritual work of Anthroposophy and gratefully accepted the initiative to create a place of work for it. But at the moment when the initiative was realized, the artistic design was for me a matter of inner spiritual work. I had to devote myself to this design. I asserted that if the building was to truly frame the anthroposophical world view, then the same principles from which the thoughts of anthroposophy arise must also give rise to the artistic forms of the building. The fact that this should not be done in the manner of a straw-and-stone allegory of building forms or of a symbolism tainted by thought is inherent in the nature of anthroposophy, which, in my opinion, leads to real art.

The idea of building the structure in Munich could not be carried out because influential artistic circles there objected to the forms. Whether these objections would have been overcome later is not worth discussing. The supporters of the building intention did not want the delay and therefore gratefully accepted the gift of Dr. Emil Grossheintz, who had already purchased a piece of land on the Dornach hill for the building.

So the foundation stone was laid in 1913 and work began immediately.

The supporters of the building project named the building the “Johannesbau” in reference to a character in my mystery dramas named Johannes Thomasius. During the years of construction, I often said that I started from the study of Goethean forms of thought in the construction of the anthroposophical worldview many years ago, and that for me their home is a “Goetheanum”. As a result, non-German members of the Anthroposophical Society in particular decided to continue to give the building the name “Goetheanum”.

Since anthroposophy, at the time when the building was started, had already found members with academic training and experience in the most diverse fields, and therefore stood in prospect of applying spiritual scientific methods in the individual sciences, I was allowed to suggest adding to the name of the building: “Freie Hochschule für Geisteswissenschaft” (Free University for Spiritual Science).

Friends of anthroposophy have been working on this building for almost ten years. Difficult material sacrifices came from many sides: artists, technicians and scientists worked together in the most dedicated way. Anyone in the anthroposophical circle who had the opportunity to work on the project did so. The most difficult tasks were willingly taken on. The spirit of the anthroposophical world view worked through enthusiastic hearts on the “Goetheanum”. To my great joy, the construction workers, who at first were at least indifferent to anthroposophy, have been of the opinion since 1922 that the misgivings about anthroposophy that were expressed in such wide circles are unfounded.

My colleagues and I had turned our thoughts to the continuation of our work. We had planned a science course for the end of December and the beginning of January. Friends of the anthroposophical cause from many countries were present again.

In addition to the artistic activities, eurythmy and declamation had been added years ago, under the direction of Mrs. Marie Steiner, who has made this one of her many fields of work. On New Year's Eve, we had a eurythmy performance from 5 to 7 p.m. My lecture began at 8 p.m. and ended half an hour after 9 p.m. I had spoken about the connection between human beings and the phenomena of the course of the year in an anthroposophical way. Shortly thereafter, the Goetheanum went up in flames; by New Year's morning 1923 it had burned down to the concrete substructure.

II

When I had the honor of inaugurating the first course of lectures held at the Goetheanum in September and October 1920, it seemed to me to be of primary importance to point out how spiritual-scientific knowledge, artistic form and religious inwardness are sought from a single source in anthroposophy. In the opening speech I briefly pointed this out, and in lectures on the building idea in Dornach I wanted to show how art in the Goetheanum was drawn from the same spirituality that seeks to reveal itself in ideas when anthroposophy appears in the form of knowledge.

In this respect, the attempt that was made with the Goetheanum has been misunderstood by many. It has been said that the work here is done in symbolism. Those who have spoken in this way always seemed to me to be people who had visited the Goetheanum but had not really looked at it. They thought: a particular world view is presented here. The people who produce it want to create symbols of what they teach in the building forms and in the rest of the artistic work that they add inside and out. With this dogma, one often visited the Goetheanum and found it confirmed, because one did not look at it and because one judged the matter as if anthroposophy were nothing more than a rational science. Such a science, however, if it wants to express itself artistically, will usually achieve nothing more than symbolism or allegory.

But at the Goetheanum, no abstract ideas were embodied. The shaping of ideas was completely forgotten when form was created from artistic perception, line from line and surface from surface. When colors were used on the wall to depict what was also seen directly in the color picture.

When I occasionally had the opportunity to personally show visitors around the Goetheanum, I said that I actually dislike “explaining” the forms and images, because the artistic should not be suggested by thoughts, but should be accepted in direct contemplation and perception.

Art that arises from the same soil as the ideas of true anthroposophy can become real art. For the soul forces that shape these ideas penetrate into the spiritual realm from which artistic creativity can also come. What one forms in thought out of anthroposophical knowledge stands for itself. There is no need to express it symbolically in a semi-artistic way. On the other hand, through the experience of the reality that anthroposophy reveals, one has the need to live artistically in forms and colors. And these colors and forms live for themselves again. They do not express any ideas. No more or no less than a lily or a lion expresses an idea.

Because this is related to the essence of anthroposophical life, anyone who used their eyes and not their dogmatizing minds when visiting Dornach will not have become aware of symbols and allegories, but of real artistic attempts.

But there was one thing I always had to mention when speaking of the architectural idea of the Goetheanum. When the time came to carry out this building, one could not turn to an artist who was supposed to create a home for Anthroposophy in the antique, Renaissance or Gothic style. If anthroposophy were mere science, mere content of ideas, then it could have been so. But anthroposophy is life, it is the grasping of the universal human and the world in and through man.

The initiative of the friends of this world view to build the Goetheanum could only be realized if this building, down to the last detail of its design, was created out of the same living spirit from which anthroposophy itself springs. I have often used an image: look at a nut and the nutshell. The shell is certainly not a symbol of the nut. But it is formed out of the same laws as the nut. Thus the structure can only be the shell, which artistically proclaims in its forms and images the spirit that lives in the word when Anthroposophy speaks through ideas.

In this way, every style of art is born out of a spirit that has also revealed itself ideationally in a world view.

And in a purely artistic sense, a style of building has been created for the Goetheanum that had to move from symmetry, repetition and so on to that which breathes in the forms of organic life. The auditorium, for example, had seven columns on either side. Only one on the left and right had capitals of the same shape. In contrast, each following capital was the metamorphic development of the previous one. All this resulted from artistic intuition; not from a rational element. It was not possible to repeat typical motifs in different places; rather, each structure was individually designed in its place, just as the smallest link in an organism is individual and yet designed in such a way that it necessarily appears in its formation in the place where it is. Some people have taken the number seven of the columns as an expression of something mystical. This too is a mistake. It is precisely a result of artistic perception. By allowing one capital form to arise artistically from the other, one arrived at the seventh with a form that could not be exceeded without falling back on the motif of the first.

It may be said, without indulging in illusions, that the building at the Goetheanum was not the only one to be confronted with the prejudices just mentioned. Gradually, quite a number of people came forward who wanted to look with unprejudiced eyes at what had arisen from unprejudiced perception.

Goethe speaks from his artistic feeling the words: “He to whom nature begins to reveal her secret, feels an irresistible longing for her most worthy interpreter, art,” and “Beauty is a manifestation of secret natural laws that would have remained hidden forever if it had not appeared.” According to the forms that the human concept of knowledge has taken in modern times, it is believed that the essence of natural things and natural processes can only be expressed by formulating laws (natural laws) in a conceptual way. But what if there were an artistic basis to nature's creative activity? Then the person who starts from the prejudice that it can only be expressed intellectually would not come close to the full essence of nature. And so it is. When one has penetrated to the secrets of nature through the realm of ideas, full of the life of the world, then one experiences: there is still something that does not yield to thought, that one can only reach when one tunes the soul into the realm of ideas through artistic contemplation. Goethe felt this when he wrote the sentences quoted. And the Goetheanum was shaped out of such a feeling. Anyone who sees a sect in people who practice anthroposophy will easily explain the symbolism of a sectarian view into the architectural forms of the Goetheanum. But anthroposophy is the opposite of all sectarianism. It strives for the purely human in full impartiality.

The small domed room of the Goetheanum was painted in such a way that it was not started from an ideational figurative, to which colors were glued, but rather a color experience was there first; and from this the figurative was born. In devotion to the essence of the color, the soul's creative power is strengthened to the figurative that the experienced colors demand. When painting, one feels as if there were nothing in the world but living, weaving colors, which are creative and generate essence out of themselves.

When one has to speak about the intentions behind the creation of the Goetheanum, one feels the pain of its loss, for which words are not there. For the whole essence of this building was geared towards contemplation. The memory hurts unspeakably. For one remembers soul experiences that urge towards contemplation. But the possibility of contemplation has been taken away since that New Year's Eve.

III

At the Goetheanum, an artistic sense could lead one to the insight that anthroposophy is not a sect or a religion. You can't build a church or a temple in this style. Two cylinder casings, with different sized bases, interlocked on the sides where they were cut out. They were closed at the top by a larger and a smaller dome. The domes were hemispherical and also interlocked, with sectors cut out where they touched.

The small domed room was to serve as a stage for mystery plays when it was completely finished. But it had not yet been set up for that purpose. Until now, only eurhythmy performances had taken place in this room. — The larger domed room enclosed the rows of spectators and listeners. There was nothing that would have given this two-part room the character of a temple or cult building.

The bases of the twelve columns around the small domed room had been converted into twelve chairs. One could recognize a meeting room for a limited number of participants; but not something church-like. Between the columns there was to be a sculptured group in the center of which was to be a figure in which one could recognize Christ. It was to be the emblem that genuine spiritual knowledge leads to Christ, thus uniting with the content of religion.

Those who entered through the main portal should be addressed by the whole in an artistic way: “Recognize the true human being.” The building was designed to be a home of knowledge, not a “temple.

The two rooms were separated by a curtain. In front of the curtain was a lectern that could be lowered when the stage area was used.

One need only look at the shape of this lectern to see how little was thought of it in terms of a church. All these forms were artistically drawn from the overall design of the building and from the meeting of the designs that led to the place where the speaker stood.

These forms were not an architectural and sculptural temple interior, but the framing of a place of spiritual knowledge. Anyone who wanted to see something else in them had to first interpret artistic untruth into them. But it was always satisfying for me when I was allowed to hear from those who were authorized to say: these forms speak in the true way of what they want to be. And that I was able to hear such words, that happened several times.

But it should not be denied that some things about the building must have been strange to those who approached it with familiar ideas about architecture. But that was in its essence; and it could not be otherwise.

When people become acquainted with anthroposophy, some of them also experience something of this kind of alienation. It initially appears as knowledge of the human being. But as it develops its knowledge of the human being, it expands into knowledge of the world. The human being recognizes his own nature; but this grasping is a merging with the content of the world.

When you entered the Goetheanum, you were surrounded by walls. But the treatment of the wall in its sculptural design had something that contradicted the character of the wall. We are accustomed to seeing the wall treated in such a way that it closes off a space from the outside. Such a wall is artistically opaque. The walls of the Goetheanum, with their protruding column forms and the designs that were supported by these columns, were intended to be artistically transparent. They were not meant to shut out the world, but to catch the eye with their artistic formations in such a way that the observer felt connected to the vastness of the universe. If one could not immediately focus one's attention on this peculiarity, these forms appeared as if one suddenly became aware of an incomprehensible window where one had expected an opaque blackboard.

The glass windows set into the outer wall were also adapted to this character of the wall. These were visible between two columns. They were made of monochrome glass, into which the artistic motifs were engraved. It was a kind of glass etching. The image was created by the different thicknesses that the monochrome glass acquired through the etching. It could only be seen as an image in strong sunlight. Thus, what had been artistically conceived in terms of form for the rest of the wall was also physically achieved in these windows. The image was only there when the wall interacted with the outside world. Two windows on the left and right were the same color. The windows from the entrance to the beginning of the stage were different colors, arranged in such a way that the colors in their sequence created a color harmony.

At first, what was seen in the windows might have been incomprehensible. But for those who had absorbed the anthroposophical world view, the strangeness would have been revealed purely through contemplation, not through intellectual or symbolic interpretation. And the whole was a home for those who sought anthroposophy. Anyone who claimed to understand these pictures without an anthroposophically oriented view resembled someone who wanted to enjoy a poem in a language artistically without first understanding the language.

The same applied to the pictorial motifs that covered the inner two dome surfaces. But it is wrong to say that one should first have a worldview in order to understand the images and forms. One did not need to read books or listen to lectures in order to have an anthroposophical orientation for these images, but one could also gain this orientation without the preceding word by simply looking into the images. But one had to come to it. If one did not want to, one stood before it, as – without, of course, even remotely suggesting an artistic comparison of values – before Raphael's Disputa, if one did not want to orient oneself to the mystery of the Trinity.

The auditorium was designed for nine hundred to one thousand people. At the western end of the auditorium, there was a raised space for the built-in organ and other musical instruments.

This entire wooden structure stood on a concrete substructure that was larger in plan, so that there was a raised terrace around the outside of the auditorium. In this substructure, under the auditorium, were the places for depositing clothes, and under the stage area were machines. It must have seemed amusing to those who had seen the contents of this concrete substructure when they heard that opponents of the anthroposophical worldview were talking about all sorts of mysterious things, even about underground meeting places in this concrete building. The Goetheanum had goals that truly did not require dark, mysterious meeting places or magic instruments. Such things would not have fitted into the architectural concept of the whole. They would have been artistically unmotivated.

The domes were covered with Nordic slate from the Voß slate quarries. The bluish-grey sheen in the sunlight combined with the color of the wood to create a whole that many a person who has made their way up the Dornach hill to the Goetheanum on a bright summer's day has welcomed with sympathy.

Now they encounter a pile of rubble with a low concrete ruin rising up out of it.

IV

The art of eurythmy seemed to come into its own at the Goetheanum. It is visible speech or singing. The individual performs movements with his limbs, especially the most expressive movements of the arms and hands, or groups of people move or take up positions in relation to each other. These movements are like gestures. But they are not gestures in the usual sense. These relate to what is presented in eurythmy as the child's babbling to the developed language.

When a person reveals himself through language or song, then he is there with his whole being. He is, so to speak, in the system through his whole body in motion. But he does not express this system. He captures this movement in the making and concentrates it on the speech or sound organs. Now, through sensual-supersensible observation – to use this Goethean expression – one can recognize which movement of the whole physical human being underlies a tone, a speech sound, a harmony, a melody, or a formed speech structure. In this way, individuals or groups of people can be made to perform movements that express the musical or linguistic element in a visible way, just as the speech and singing organs express it aurally. The whole person, or groups of people, become the larynx; the movements speak or sing as the larynx sounds.

Just as in speech or song, nothing in eurythmy is arbitrary. But it makes just as little sense to say that momentary gestures are preferable in eurythmy as it does to say that an arbitrary tone or sound is better than those that lie within the lawful formation of speech or sound.

But eurythmy is not to be confused with dance either. Musical elements that sound simultaneously can be eurythmized. In this case, one is not dancing to music but visibly singing it.

Eurythmic movements are derived from the human organism as a whole in the same orderly way as speech or song.

When poetry is eurythmized, the visible language of eurythmy is revealed on stage and at the same time the poetry is heard through recitation or declamation. One cannot recite or declaim to the eurythmy as one often likes to do, by merely pointing out the prose content of the poetry. One must really treat the language artistically as language. Meter, rhythm, melodious motifs and so on, or even the imaginative aspect of sound formation, must be worked out. For every true poetry is based on a hidden (invisible) eurythmy. Mrs. Marie Steiner has tried to develop this kind of recitation and declamation, which goes hand in hand with the eurythmic presentation. It seems as if a kind of orchestral interaction of the spoken and visibly presented word has really been achieved.

It turns out to be inartistic for one person to recite and perform eurythmy at the same time. These tasks must be performed by different people. The image of a person who wanted to reveal both in themselves would fall apart for the immediate impression.

The development of the art of eurythmy is based on insight into the expressive possibilities of the human body, insight that draws on both the senses and the supersensory. As far as I know, there is only scant evidence of this insight from earlier times. These were times when the soul and spirit were still able to shine through the human body to a greater extent than they are today. This scant tradition, which incidentally points to quite different intentions than those present in eurythmy, was of course used. But it had to be independently developed and transformed, and above all, it had to be completely reshaped into an artistic form. I am not aware of any tradition in the formal movement of groups of people that we have gradually developed in eurythmy.

When this eurythmic art appeared on the stage of the Goetheanum, one should have the feeling that the static forms of the interior design and the sculpture related to the moving human beings in a completely natural way. The former should, so to speak, accept the latter pleasantly. The building and the eurythmic movement should merge into a single whole. This impression could be heightened by accompanying the sequence of eurythmic creations with lighting effects that flooded the stage in harmonious radiance and sequence. What is attempted here is light eurythmy.

And if the forms of the stage took up the eurythmic designs as something belonging to them, so did those of the auditorium take up the recitation or declamation that occurred in parallel with the eurythmy, which sounded from a seat on the side of the stage, where it meets the auditorium, through Marie Steiner. Perhaps it is not inappropriate to say that the listener should feel in the building itself a comrade in the understanding of the word or tone heard. If one does not want to claim more than that such a unity of building form and word or music was striven for, then what has been said will not sound too immodest. For no one can be more convinced that all this has been achieved only in a highly imperfect way than I myself. But I have tried to shape it in such a way that one could feel how the movement of the word naturally ran along the forms of the capitals and architraves.

I would only like to suggest what can be tried for such a building: that its forms do not merely enclose what is depicted in them on the outside, but contain it in a living unity in themselves in the most direct impression.

And if I were to express my opinion on this, I would hold back. But I have heard what has been said from others.

I also know that I have shaped the forms of the building sensitively, out of the state of mind from which the eurythmy images also come.

The fact that the forms of eurythmy were continuously shaped in the experience of what could be experienced in the creation of the building forms will not be perceived as a contradiction of what has been said. For the harmony between the two was not achieved by intellectual intention, but arose out of a homogeneous artistic impulse. Probably eurythmy could not have been found without the work on building. Before the building idea, it existed only in its first beginnings.

The instructions for the soul-based shaping of the moving speech forms were first given to the students in the hall built into the south wing of the Goetheanum. The interior architecture of this hall in particular was intended to be a resting eurythmy, just as the eurythmic movements within it were moving plastic forms, shaped by the same spirit as these resting forms themselves.

It was in this hall that the smoke was first detected on December 31, which came from the fire that destroyed the entire Goetheanum when it grew up. One feels, when one has been lovingly connected with the building, the merciless flames painfully penetrating through the sensations that poured into the resting forms and into the work attempted within them.

V

Of course, some objections can be raised against the stylistic forms of the Goetheanum. I have always described them as a first attempt to undertake something artistic in the direction characterized in the preceding remarks.

Those who refuse to accept any transition from the cognitive representation of the nature of the world and of world processes through ideas to pictorial artistic embodiment must reject these forms of expression. But what is it ultimately based on, this desire to visualize something of the world's content through knowledge in the soul? But only because in the experience of the ideas of knowledge one becomes aware of something in which one knows the outer world to be continuously active within oneself. Through knowledge the world speaks in the human soul. He who merely imagines that he has formed his own ideas about the world, he who does not feel the world pulsating within him when he lives in ideas, should not speak of knowledge. The soul is the arena in which the world reveals its secrets.

But anyone who thinks of knowledge in such a realistic way must ultimately come to the conclusion that his thinking must pass over into artistic creation if he wants to experience the content of the world in certain areas within himself. One can close one's mind to such a view. One can demand that science must stay away from artistic visualization and express itself only in the formation of ideas that are demanded by logical laws. But such a demand would be mere subjective arbitrariness if the creative process of nature were such that it could only be grasped artistically in certain areas. If nature proceeds as an artist, then man must resort to artistic forms in order to express it.

But it is also an experience of knowledge that in order to follow nature in its creative work, the transition of logically formed ideas into artistic images is necessary.

For example, up to a certain point it is possible to express the human physique through logical thinking. But from this point onwards, one must allow the process to enter into artistic forms if one does not want a mere ghostly image of the human being, but rather the human being in his or her living reality. And one will be able to feel that in the soul, by experiencing the form of the body in artistic and pictorial terms, the reality of the world is revealed in the same way as in the logically formed ideas.

I believed I was presenting Goethe's view of the world correctly when, at the end of the 1980s, I described his relationship to art and science as follows: “Our time believes it is doing the right thing when it keeps art and science as far apart as possible. They are said to be two completely opposite poles in the cultural development of humanity. Science should, so it is thought, sketch out for us a world view that is as objective as possible; it should show us reality in a mirror or, in other words, it should adhere purely to what is given, divesting itself of all subjective arbitrariness. The objective world is decisive for its laws; it must submit to it. It should take the standard of truth and falsity entirely from the objects of experience. The two creations of art are to be completely different. The self-creative power of the human mind gives them their laws. For science, any interference by human subjectivity would be a falsification of reality, a transgression of experience; art, on the other hand, grows on the field of ingenious subjectivity. Its creations are the product of human imagination, not reflections of the outside world. Outside of us, in objective being, lies the origin of scientific laws; in us, in our individuality, that of aesthetic ones. Therefore, the latter have not the slightest cognitive value; they create illusions without the slightest reality factor. Anyone who understands the matter in this way will never gain clarity about the relationship between Goethean poetry and Goethean science. But this means that both are misunderstood. The world-historical significance of Goethe lies precisely in the fact that his art flows from the source of being, that it contains nothing illusory, nothing subjective, but appears as the herald of the lawfulness that the poet has overheard in the depths of natural activity to the world spirit. At this level, art becomes the interpreter of the secrets of the world, as science is in another sense. This is how Goethe always understood art. For him, it was a revelation of the primal law of the world; science was the other. For him, art and science arose from the same source. While the scientist delves into the depths of reality to express the driving forces of reality in the form of thoughts, the artist seeks to incorporate these same driving forces into his material. Goethe himself puts it this way: “I think that science could be called knowledge of the general, abstract knowledge; art, on the other hand, would be science applied to action. Science would be reason and art its mechanism, which is why it could also be called practical science. And so, finally, science would be the theorem, art the problem.” And Goethe expresses something similar with the words: ”Style rests on the deepest foundations of knowledge, on the essence of things, insofar as we are allowed to recognize it in visible and tangible forms.” (See my introduction to Goethe's scientific writings, which will soon be published as an independent book by the Stuttgarter Kommenden Tag-Verlag.)

What I meant at the time: that Goethe is right when he thinks of the relationship between art and science in this way; that seems right to me today too. That is why what was expressed in his work in the form of knowledge could be presented in artistic form at the Goetheanum.

Anthroposophy has the supersensible content of the world for its representation, insofar as it is accessible to human contemplation. One feels that every expression of this content through logically formed ideas is only a kind of thought-gesture that points to this content. And the artistic form appears as the other gesture through which the spiritual world responds to the thought-gesture; or perhaps the other way around, the world reveals the idea in response when one asks it through the artistic image.

The stylistic forms of the Goetheanum could not, therefore, be a naturalistic imitation of any inanimate or animate object in the world around us. The experience of what is happening in the spiritual world had to guide the hand that formed the sculpture and applied the paint to the surface. The spiritual content of the world had to be allowed to flow into the lines and reveal itself in the color.

No matter how many objections are raised against these stylistic forms of the Goetheanum, the attempt that was made was to create an artistic home for a striving for knowledge in the sense of Goethe's intentions, a home that was from the same spiritual source as the knowledge cultivated in it. The attempt may have been imperfectly successful; it was there as such: and the Goetheanum was built in the spirit of Goethe's view of art.

Thus one came to feel that the Goetheanum was the home of Anthroposophy; but after the disaster of December 31, after the one side, one also feels, with Anthroposophy, homeless. Sympathetic visitors came to the scene of the fire on January 1st, saying: we want to keep alive in our hearts what we have experienced in this building.

VI

The Goetheanum has only experienced nine major events. In September and October 1920, lecture series took place over three weeks on a wide range of scientific topics. The impetus for this came from the circle of scientists working in the Anthroposophical Society. The entire organization of the lecture cycles was also in their hands. Teachers from the Free Waldorf School and other personalities with training in various fields of knowledge — including artists — were involved. The idea behind the event was to show how the individual scientific fields can be illuminated by the anthroposophical method of research.

It struck me at the time, as I witnessed these cycles, that not everything appeared as if it had been born out of the spirit of the Goetheanum. When individual insights into nature or history were illuminated out of the spirit of anthroposophical concepts as a whole, one felt harmony between the structure and the presentation of knowledge. When individual questions were discussed, this was not the case.

I had to think of how, during the construction, the anthroposophical work had grown beyond the stage it was at when construction began. In 1913, the idea of those personalities who had decided to build it was to create a place for the anthroposophical work in the narrower sense and for those artistic performances that had grown out of the anthroposophical perception. At that time, the individual scientific fields were only included in the anthroposophical work of knowledge to the extent that they naturally integrated into the broader presentations of spiritual scientific observation.

The building was conceived as an artistic vessel for this spiritual content. This relationship was the basis for the design of the building. It was allowed to be so. For it was important to express artistically how anthroposophy should be placed in the context of human life as a whole. If the treatment of individual scientific fields was considered later, this should be done in separate extensions.

A different approach is needed for the reconstruction of the Goetheanum. The construction of a central place for anthroposophy in the narrower sense was obvious because it was the will of the personalities who advocated its construction to build this place out of wood. Such a central place can be artistically imbued with this material. Another material would then have been considered for the extensions. A second wooden structure is out of the question. Before the Goetheanum was tackled, I told the leading personalities what artistic feelings for wood and for another material would be considered. They decided on wood because at that time they took the view that they should proceed as idealistically as possible. This idealism bore the beautiful fruit that understanding souls had before them, at least for a short time, a home for anthroposophy that could not have been built in another material with such verve in the lines and such expressiveness in the forms. Today, this fruit is a tragic memory. There are no words for the pain of loss. The idealism of those who commissioned me to build in wood must therefore be given all possible credit.

The building is closely connected with the fate of anthroposophical development in recent years, precisely because of the lack of the marked harmony at the first event. The first series of lectures as a whole reveals itself as something that did not grow quite organically out of the same idea as the building itself. It was as if something had been carried into the purely anthroposophical building. In the outer reality of human coexistence, things do not always follow the path demanded by the inner workings of a spiritual context. Anthroposophy is absolutely predisposed to extend its developmental tendencies to where they also lead into the most specialized fields of knowledge. But that is not how it happened in the Anthroposophical Society. A different path has been taken. Scientifically educated personalities have become members of the Society. Science was their way of life and their education. Anthroposophy has become a matter of the heart for them. They have allowed themselves to be inspired by it for their science. Thus we have received scientific explanations from anthroposophically minded personalities before the individual fields of knowledge were born out of anthroposophy itself. Much has been achieved by the fact that, when the need arose, lecture cycles were held in front of small groups from the most diverse fields of knowledge, inspired by the anthroposophical spirit. What came out of this is not to be presented here as something that was hasty or the like. But just as, for example, in the pedagogical field, educational methods have emerged directly from anthroposophy, as is the case in the artistic field with eurhythmics, so it has not been destined by fate for the Anthroposophical Society to do so in other fields. In certain areas, a faster pace was demanded of anthroposophy out of a well-seen contemporary necessity. This requires that individual scientific fields that are already being worked on and anthroposophical development must first grow into each other.

This was also expressed in the disharmony of the first event in 1920, as described. If a reconstruction comes about, it will be able to contain - in a different material - individual rooms - for example on the first floor - for scientific events and artistic work, and thus the space for the anthroposophical in the narrower sense. On the one hand, such a building will correspond to its material, and on the other hand to the development that anthroposophical endeavors have taken in recent years.

The disharmony was only an expression of the endeavor to create a home for anthroposophy in the narrower sense that was artistically appropriate to its stage of development up to 1918. Perhaps I may cite this as proof of how Anthroposophy as a spiritual content and its home as an artistic unity were felt during the elaboration of the latter.

But today, in a strange harmony with this architectural idea of the Goetheanum, I feel what was then in me, when the first event was set up in it, to open the Goetheanum itself in a festive manner. The program of that series of lectures could not be taken as the occasion for such a celebration. It should only take place when an event had become possible whose whole would be in complete harmony with the original building idea. It did not come to that. The Goetheanum died away before then. In the hearts of those who loved it, there was a lasting funeral service.

The next essay will deal with the further events that could still take place in the dear building.

VII

Even if it was not possible for us to reveal the opening ceremony, the building idea and the event of the Goetheanum in full harmony, we were still able to make attempts in various directions over the course of more than two years to bring the anthroposophical spirit to bear.

The first three-weekly lecture cycle was followed by a second one-weekly cycle in April 1921. The aim was to show how the individual fields of human knowledge can be significantly expanded if their paths of research are continued into the spiritual realm.

On this occasion, it gave me particular satisfaction to be able to point out such a possible expansion for a number of fields of knowledge through my own lectures.

During these events, I was also always given the task of showing visitors around the building and talking about the artistic aspects of the Goetheanum. On the one hand, I was reluctant to say anything theoretical about art. Art is meant to be looked at. But these tours had another side to them. One could avoid wanting to 'explain' art in an unartistic way. I did that too, as far as it seemed permissible to me from those who were looking at the building. But there were plenty of opportunities to talk about anthroposophical matters in a free, fragmentary, aphoristic way, linking it to the forms and images that could be seen. And the lectures could then be woven into a whole with what was said during the tour. Then one felt very intimately how good the anthroposophically oriented word was when spoken at a pillar or under a picture that came from the same spirit as the word itself.

These events always included eurythmy performances. They made it clear how the building demanded that the insights presented in it had to be shaped into a whole by artistic means. The inner space of the Goetheanum seemed to brook no lecture cycle that was not rounded off by artistic elements. I believe it was felt to be a necessity when Marie Steiner added her art of recitation and declamation to the lecture events from the organ room.

We also had the joy of hearing Mrs. Werbeck-Svärdström unfold her wonderful art from this organ room, sometimes together with her three sisters. What the participants were able to hear there will certainly be unforgettable.

Personally, it always gave me the greatest joy to hear Albert Steffen speak from the Goetheanum podium. What he says is always meant to be felt in plastic forms. He is like a sculptor of language; a sculptor who carves in wood. I perceived a harmony between the building forms and his language sculptures, which he placed in the building at once deliberately and confidently.

In August 1921, we were able to hold an event that was thanks to the English painter Baron von Rosenkrantz. This event felt particularly at home in the building. The band stepped before the soul's eye, connecting spiritual-scientific research and spirit-revealing art. It is understandable that attention was drawn to what the building was intended to be an experiment for, on this occasion in particular.

At the end of September and the beginning of October, a number of German theologians who carried the impulse for a Christian religious renewal gathered at the Goetheanum. What was worked out here came to a conclusion in September 1922. I myself must count among the festivals of my life what I experienced with these theologians in September 1922 in the small hall of the south wing where the fire was later discovered. Here, with a group of nobly enthusiastic people, it was possible to follow the path that leads spiritual knowledge into religious experience.

At the end of December and beginning of January 1922, a group of English teachers gathered at the Goetheanum. That this was possible was due to the dedicated efforts of Prof. M. Mackenzie. She and Prof. Mackenzie had taken part in the course organized by Baron von Rosenkrantz in August. On this occasion, the distinguished English educationalist decided to invite English teachers to visit the Goetheanum during the Christmas holidays. Together with a number of teachers from the Stuttgart Waldorf School, I was invited to speak again in the hall of the south wing about pedagogy, education and teaching practice. The English educators were joined by others from Scandinavia, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany and so on.

In September 1922, I was invited to give ten lectures on “Cosmology, Philosophy and Religion from the Point of View of Anthroposophy”. Once again, the cycle of my lectures was rounded off by teachers from the Waldorf School and other personalities from the Anthroposophical Movement, through their lectures and the discussions they held with the participants. I went to each of my lectures and came away from them with a deep sense of gratitude to those who initiated the building of the Goetheanum. For it was precisely in these lectures, in which I had to cover a wide range of knowledge from an anthroposophical point of view, that I had to feel the benefit of being able to express ideas that had been given artistic form in the building.

Events such as the “Dramatic Course”, given by Marie Steiner in July 1922, and a National Economic Course, which I myself held in July and August 1922, did not take place within the rooms that were lost to us on New Year's Eve. But they belong to the circle of what the Goetheanum has inspired.

Eurythmy performances have been taking place at the Goetheanum for many years. I have tried to describe their close connection with the nature of the building in an earlier article.

A cycle of lectures on natural science was planned for the end of December and beginning of January 1922 to 1923. Once again, personalities working in the field of anthroposophy were to give lectures and hold discussions with me. I added other lectures on purely anthroposophical subjects to the lectures on knowledge of nature. Only the first part of this event could still take place at the Goetheanum. After the eurythmy performance and my lecture on New Year's Eve, the flames took the building in which we would have liked to continue working.

The lectures had to be continued in an adjoining room, while outside the flames consumed the last remains of the Goetheanum, which we loved so much.

Anyone who has studied the forms that make up the living structure of the Goetheanum could see how Goethe's ideas on metamorphosis were incorporated into the architectural ideas. These metamorphosis ideas became clear to Goethe when he wanted to embrace the diversity of the plant world in spiritual unity. To achieve this goal, he searched for the archetypal plant. This was to be an idealized plant form. In it, one organ could be developed to particular size and perfection, while others could be small and unattractive. In this way, one could also devise an immense number of special forms from the ideal original plant; and then one could let one's gaze wander over the external forms of the plant world. One found this realized in one form, that in the other, derived from the original plant. The whole plant world was, so to speak, one plant in the most diverse forms.

But with this, Goethe assumed that a formative principle prevails in the diversity of organizations, which is recreated by man in the inward mobility of thought forces. He thus ascribed something to human knowledge whereby it is not merely an external observation of world beings and world processes, but grows together with them into a unity.

Goethe had applied the same principle to the understanding of individual plants. In the simplest way, he saw an entire plant in the leaf. And in the multiform plant he saw a leaf developed in a complicated way; so to speak, many leaf-plants combined again according to the leaf principle into a unity. — Likewise, the various organs of animal formation were transformations of a basic organ for him; and the whole animal kingdom the most diverse forms of an ideal “primordial animal”.

Goethe did not develop the idea in all its aspects. His conscientiousness led him to stop on unfinished paths, especially in relation to the animal world. He did not allow himself to go too far in the mere formation of thoughts without repeatedly having the ideational confirmed by the sensuous facts.

One can have a twofold relationship to these Goethean metamorphoses of ideas. One can regard them as an interesting peculiarity of the Goethean spirit and leave it at that.

But one can also attempt to bring one's own activity of ideas in the Goethean direction. Then one will find that in fact secrets of nature are revealed, to which one cannot gain access in any other way.

More than forty years ago, I believed I had realized this (in my introductions to Goethe's scientific writings in Kürschner's Deutsche National-Literatur) and called Goethe the Copernicus and Kepler of the science of the organic. I proceeded from the view that for the inanimate, the Copernican act consists in noticing a material connection independent of man; but that the corresponding act for the animate lies in discovering the right mental activity by which the organic can be grasped by the human mind in its living mobility.

Goethe accomplished this Copernican feat by introducing the spiritual activity through which he worked artistically into knowledge. He sought the path from artist to knower and found it. The anthropologist Heinroth therefore called Goethe's thinking a representational one. Goethe spoke with deep satisfaction about this. He took up the word and also called his poetry a concrete one. He thus expressed how close the artistic and cognitive activities were in his soul.

Immersing oneself in Goethe's spiritual world could give courage to lead the view of the metamorphoses back to the artistic. This helped to develop the architectural idea of the Goetheanum. Wherever nature unfolds in living activity, she creates forms that grow out of each other. One can come close to nature's creative activity through artistic-sculptural work, if one lovingly and empathetically grasps how she lives in metamorphoses.

It is now possible to call a building the “Goetheanum” which has been created in such a way, both architecturally and sculpturally, that the assimilation of Goethe's metamorphic view of life has dared to attempt to be realized in its forms.

And in the same way, anthroposophy itself is also the direct further development of Goethe's views. Anyone who embraces the idea of the transformation not only of the sensory forms – in which Goethe, in accordance with his particular soul character, remained – but also of what can be grasped in soul and spirit, has arrived at anthroposophy. This is only a very elementary observation. In the human soul, we see thinking, feeling and willing at work. Anyone who is only able to see these three forms of soul life side by side or in their interaction cannot penetrate deeper into the essence of the soul. But anyone who gains clarity about how thinking is a metamorphosis of feeling and willing, feeling a metamorphosis of thinking and willing, and willing a transformation of thinking and feeling, connects themselves with the essence of the soul. If Goethe, who wanted to be oriented towards the sensually descriptive, was highly satisfied to hear that his thinking was called objective, then a spiritual researcher can find a similar satisfaction when he realizes how his thinking becomes “spiritually animated” through the metamorphosis view. Thinking is “representational” when it can become so entwined with the essence of sense perceptions that this essence is experienced as resonating within it. Thinking becomes “spirit-animated” when it is able to absorb the spirit into its own currents and movements. Then thinking becomes spirit-bearing, just as perception, directed to the sense world, becomes color- or sound-bearing. Then thinking metamorphoses into intuition.

With this metamorphosis, however, thinking has been freed from the body. For the body can imbue thinking only with sense-perceptible content.

One conquers the living through the contemplation of metamorphosis. One thereby enlivens one's own thinking. It is transformed from a dead to a living one. But in this way it becomes capable of absorbing the life of the spirit by contemplation. Anyone who, on the basis of what Goethe's writings contain, wants to form the judgment that Goethe himself would have rejected anthroposophy may be able to cite external reasons for doing so. And one may concede that Goethe would have been very cautious in such a case, because he himself would have felt uncomfortable pursuing the metamorphosis into areas where it lacks the control of sensory phenomena. But Goethe's world view merges with anthroposophy without artifice.

Therefore, that which rests securely on Goethe's world view could be cultivated in a building that bore the name Goetheanum in memory of Goethe.

Upon those who admire the writings of Albert Steffen he has bestowed a lyric gift. We must say a “gift,” for whoever has found in this poet the earnest searcher into the riddles of human destinies who wills, through striving formative power, to reveal mysteries of the world in the nature of the soul, had a longing for this most personal communication. He must be grateful for the gift.

The booklet is small in the number of its pages. The gift is great. For cut of a fullness of heart and soul one here bestows gifts who has much to say of such a nature as enriches the life which receives it. It is good for all who receive it, but one alone could give it just as it is—Albert Steffen. For that which everyone. should behold he beholds with an utterly personal artist's eye.

The first impression may be strange. For Steffen really lives in realms of feeling which are his own wholly personal possession. But one can quickly come to feel at home in these realms. For the dwelling place in which the poet Steffen molds the world in his special way is permeated through and through with warmth of heart and is filled with genuine goodness. Steffen's images are often brought up from very deep mines, but they have been shaped by a man who never loses his living artistic sense in the depths of his thinking.

Steffen often confronts world problems in whose presence others become philosophers. He remains the artist. Others draw all sorts of rounded lines. Steffen makes a few strokes and creates many angles. The whole is then more pictorial than the rounded forms of the others. Many remain on the surface lest they should become lyric brooders. Steffen frequently descends to a great depth below the surface, but there he can speak with such penetration that all brooding vanishes for the listener.

Steffen's compositions arise from that region of the soul where one beholds cosmic mysteries and feels human riddles. But the spirit who there ventures often into abysmal depths in vision and in feeling, and often soars aloft to the stars, remains the molder of images, the creator of tones, is never misled into the coldness of mere ideas. Steffen paints in words. The words have colors. And the colors work like those of paintings which have outlived the centuries and still remain.

Steffen strides through nature likewise seeing and feeling. And nature reveals through him her spirit beings. In this revelation there is wisdom—tragic wisdom, wisdom filled with goodness, wisdom that wakens love, wisdom that is unveiled to the interpreter of riddles who, while interpreting, is wholly filled with the power of the poet, and in molding forms is wholly sustained by the artist's serene enthusiasm.

Steffen descends into the depths of the soul. He brings up pictures which are like copies of the beings of nature—of a nature not seen with the eyes and without whose accessibility to fantasy the world seen with the eyes would be a deception. These pictures of spirit-nature are sharply outlined, but their outlines are drawn, not by the intellect, but by the human heart.

In the presence of these images, one often has the feeling that an unknown power in the poet has compelled nature to yield them, and that, once this power had set them there, Steffen drew their forms.

Steffen, the poet, never stands alone. He is always surrounded by a world. He does not utter only his own feelings. When he expresses his own feelings, he causes one to sense always an immeasurable world around him. His images often give the impression at first of having been taken out of empty space; then, when one has fully understood the images, they acquire a background. Then they reveal a world, whereas at first, they seemed to manifest only themselves. Frequently they are like human beings who are at first very reserved but later emanate a love-bestowing warmth. It will sometimes seem as if a poem of Steffen's were an assertion of defiant willfulness, and this seeming willfulness holds one fast. But one then finds that the seeming willfulness is a veil concealing devotion to truth such as can be attained only through purification of soul.

Steffen's lyrics frequently have their source in the mountains; but, as offspring of the mountains, they have wandered through the plains, like brooks that become rivers. They still bear within them their mountain birth, but on the plain, which gives them stillness, they mirror the sun and they magically create there also for the soul of one who enjoys them the reflected moonlight and the stars. They whisper riddles of nature, and the whisper becomes to the ear a familiar language.

A tender poem, Felicitas, penetrates to the heart as if awaking emotions which stream out into cosmic space. One is in the quiet chamber and yet in the expanse of the universe; a child of man with his suffering and yet a creature of the starry worlds.

Oft, wenn ich in der Nacht
von bangem Traumgesicht
emporgeschreckt, betracht,
wie leicht der Leib zerbricht,
wenn immer schwerer lasten Angst und Wahn,
ich weinen muss ob meiner dunklen Bahn:

Lauf ich zum Fenster schnell,
die Sterne anzuschaun,
wie scheinen sie so hell,
dann darf ich doch vertraun,
ich weis es ja, dass mich an Kindesstatt
der Sternenhimmel angenommen hat.

Oft when I in the night,
By fearful vision waked,
Reflect with doleful fright
How fragile bodies break,
My heart o'erburdened with the dream and fear
I must bewail my road of life so drear.

To open window then
I run the stars to view,
How brightly they do shine,
And so, with faith renewed,
I know in truth that they have taken me,
The starry heavens, as their own child to be.

And how deep the reverent devotion that speaks from Steffen's lyrics! It is a reverence that dares to brood because, in brooding, it never loses touch with the heart. It is a piety that dares to give form to that which evokes the deepest reverence, because in molding this into form it preserves always the inner quality of prayer.

Ich geh durch rote Aecker:
es schläft der Keim.
Ich geh durch grüne Saaten:
es sprosst der Halm.
Ich geh durch goldne Felder:
es reift der Korn.
Ich find den Müller
und der Müller spricht:
Die Erde is der Angesicht
des Menschensohnes.
Und “wer mein Brot verzehrt,
der setzt den Fuss auf mich.”
Ich knie nieder,
und er reicht der Speise,
dass ich mich sättige
auf meiner Erden-Reise.

I walk through brown-red acres:
The germ still sleeps.
I walk through greening earth:
The shoots appear.
I walk through golden fields:
The grain grows ripe.
I find the miller
And the miller speaks:
The earth is the countenance
Of the Son of Man.
And “he who eats my bread
He sets his foot on me.”
I kneel me down,
And he hands me food,
That I be sated
On my earthly road.

Such is the mood which fills the heart with experiences drawn from the realm of the eternal in the human soul. The personal is elevated to the level of the impersonal, not to be lost in this but to find itself in its truth and its essential being. And this finding has its reflection in Steffen's lyric poetry itself. The poet feels himself to be in the stream of cosmic being, and he says:

Die Sprache formt Schicksal,
gemäss den Lauten,
streng oder milde.
Näh oder Ferne vom ewigen Urwort Bestimmt meine Freiheit und Not.

Speech forms destiny,
In accord with the sounds,
Stern or mild.
Nearness or farness from primordial Word
Determines my freedom and need.

One who hears such words from the poet soul of Steffen senses that in him destiny searches for the secrets of language in order to shape life's need as “stern or mild,” and in the freedom of the spirit to give meaning to existence.

When Steffen carries his pain to “bush or tree” in order to make the trees his teachers in peace of soul, his feeling is then revealed in the strictness of the sonnet form, and one has the feeling that what is said can be revealed in this form alone. The compositions of this kind in Weg-Zehrung (Bread of Life) are like the receiving of the form by the poet, who finds peace in this for his emotion, which, without this form, would tend to strive outward into the infinite.

The fact, however, that in Steffen emotion also can bear its own measure within itself is evident when, in soaring upward from the personal to participation in the experience of the World Being, he expresses himself in the form of the hymn, and likewise when he finds the possibility of imparting himself in such a way that silence, while the heart is full, is forborne only to the very least degree.

Du blickst so irr,
so hoffnungsleer
warum, warum?
O sag's, o deut's.

Thou seem'st so lost,
So void of hope,
But why, but why?
Oh tell me, explain!

Christus in mir—
Ist es so schwer.
Er geht herum:
Ich bin sein Kreuz.

To Christ in me—
It is so hard.
He moves about:
I am His Cross.

Part II of VII in a series of articles written for Das Goetheanum (Vol. 2, 21 January 1923) celebrating ten years of the Goetheanum. This translation was originally published in Anthroposophy Vol. 2, No. 1-2, January/February 1923, pages 4-7. Translation revised for Anthroposophy Today, No. 9, Spring 1990.

The first course at the Goetheanum was held in September and October 1920. In my opening address I felt that more than anything it was necessary to point out that in anthroposophy we go to one and the same source for knowledge of the science of the spirit, artistic form and religious depth of inner life. In my opening address I made only brief reference to this; in my lectures on the underlying concept of the building at Dornach I tried to show how the art of the Goetheanum was drawn from the same spiritual source as the ideas that come to the fore when anthroposophy takes the form of a science.

The attempt that was made in creating the Goetheanum has been widely misinterpreted in this respect. People have said that it was intended to be symbolic. It has always seemed to me that the people who said such things cannot have used their eyes and really looked at the Goetheanum when they visited it. They came with the fixed idea that the building represented a certain philosophy and that creators of that philosophy wanted to use architectural design and other means to represent their teachings in symbolic form. They found their ideas confirmed because they did not see the building for what it was. In their view anthroposophy was the same as any other intellectual discipline, and it is true that if such a discipline wants to find expression in art it will usually get no further than symbolism and allegory.

But the Goetheanum did not portray abstract ideas. Nothing was further from the minds of those who let the shape of the building arise out of artistic feeling, letting line follow line, surface follow surface out of artistic sensibility, and presented in colour on the walls and cupolas their direct vision of images that were in colour.

Occasionally, when I had the opportunity to show visitors around the building, I would say that I felt it would be wrong to ‘explain’ the forms and colours, for art should not be brought home to people by presenting thoughts about it; art is there to be looked at, to let our feelings respond to it.

Art that springs from the same ground as the ideas that make up true anthroposophy can become genuine art. The powers of soul that give form to these ideas that make up anthroposophy penetrate to the spiritual source that can also produce the impulse to be creative as an artist. Thoughts formed on the basis of anthroposophical insight exist in their own right and one simply does not have the desire to give them symbolic form in some kind of half-baked art. On the other hand when we experience the reality that anthroposophy reveals, the desire arises to let it come alive in colour and form. Those colours and forms exist in their own right and do not represent ideas; they do so just as little, or as much, as a lily or a lion represent an idea.

This is of the very essence of anthroposophical life and anyone visiting the Goetheanum and using their eyes rather than their dogmatic intellect will have found genuine attempts in artistic expression rather than symbols or allegories.

Something I had to say over and over again in speaking of the design concept of the Goetheanum is that it would be quite impossible to engage an artist who would create a home for anthroposophy in the Classical, Gothic or Renaissance style. We could have done so if anthroposophy were no more than a body of knowledge, of ideas. Anthroposophy is a way of life, however; it means taking hold, both in and through the human being, of all that is human and of the world.

The initiative to build the Goetheanum, taken by friends of anthroposophy, could only be brought to realisation by letting the design, down to the smallest detail, arise from the same living spirit that is the source spring of anthroposophy itself. I have sometimes used the metaphor of a nut in its shell. The shell certainly cannot be called a symbol of the nut. It has however been formed out of the same laws and principles as the nut. In the same way the building can only be a shell the form and images of which reveal in art the spirit that lives in the word when anthroposophy uses the language of ideas. Every style in art has in fact been born out of a spirit that also came to expression in the ideas of a philosophy.

The style of architecture that developed for the Goetheanum arose entirely in the sphere of art; symmetry, repetition and so on had to give way to living organic form principles. The auditorium for instance had seven columns on either side. Only corresponding columns on the left and the right had matching capitals. Apart from that, every succeeding capital was an evolution in metamorphosis from the preceding one. The whole had arisen out of artistic feeling; the element of thought had not come into it. It simply had not been possible to repeat the same design for different places; every form was individually created in its particular place, just as the smallest part of an organism has its own individual and necessary form for its own particular place.

The mystical significance that has been attached to the fact that there are seven columns does not exist. The number of columns is entirely the result of artistic feeling. As the form of one capital developed out of another, artistic feeling had taken us to a point with the seventh column where we could go no further without returning to the motif of the first column.

I think we are not deceiving ourselves if we say that not everyone looked at the building with prejudiced eyes. There have been many people over the years who were prepared to look with open and unbiased eyes, aesthetically, at something that had arisen from open and unbiased feeling.

Goethe spoke out of his own feeling for art when he said that when nature begins to reveal her open secret, those to whom it is revealed feel an irresistible longing for her most worthy exponent, which is art. He also said that beauty manifested the hidden laws of nature, laws that would have remained hidden for ever if beauty did not exist.¹ The notion has come up in our modern age that true knowledge of the things of nature can only be presented by developing theories as to the laws of nature. But what if nature were creating those things out of an artistic impulse? This would mean that anyone caught up in the prejudice that nature can only be presented in terms of rational thought would be unable to grasp the whole of it. And that is indeed the case. Having penetrated the secrets of nature in our ideas in a way that is truly alive, we find that something remains that cannot be reached by means of thought; it can only be reached if we change from the thoughtful to the artistic approach in heart and mind. That was how Goethe felt when he wrote the lines referred to above. The Goetheanum was created out of that kind of feeling.

Anyone who considers anthroposophists to be a sect will find it easy to see the symbolism of sectarian ideas in the architectural design of the Goetheanum. But anthroposophy is anything but sectarian. It seeks to be wholly and completely human in all it does, without prejudice.

The inside of the small cupola was painted not by starting from figurative ideas and applying colour; instead, colour was first experienced and the figurative aspect developed out of this. If we give ourselves up to colour, the creative powers of the soul are enhanced until the forms and figures are actually demanded by the colours themselves. As you paint you come to feel – in the moments of creative work – as if nothing else existed in the world but living, weaving colours, colours that are creative in themselves and beget realities of being.

Man in his inner being does not belong to the earth;
he is of another world and therefore needs forms that
belong to him in his character as a native of that world.

—Rudolf Steiner, The Arts and Their Mission, p. 21, from a lecture given in Oslo in 1923.

• 1. J. W. Goethe, Sprüche in Prosa.