Search — Rudolf Steiner Archive (2024)

It seemed well yesterday, on the last night of the year, to enter deeply into many of the secrets of existence connected with the great super-sensible mysteries, such as the annual passing of one year into another—and of the great cosmic New Year's Eve and New Year. It seemed good to enter yesterday into those things which speak to the depths of our souls, mysteries far removed from the outer world; so, at the beginning of a New Year, it may perhaps be important to let a few at least of our great and important duties be brought before our souls.

These duties are connected above all with that which is made known to us in the course of human evolution, through Spiritual Science. They are associated with the knowledge of the road humanity must travel as it advances towards its future. A man cannot recognise the duties here mentioned, if he does not, in his own way, keep an open view in many directions. We have again and again endeavoured to do this in the course of our studies. To call up a few only of such duties before our souls may perhaps be fitting at this time, at the opening of a New Year.

It is true, that in view of this material age and all that it brings in its train, we recognise that Spiritual Science must form the basis from which we can work in a higher way for the progress of mankind. It is true, that all that seems to us necessary is so enormous, so incisive—there is (to put it mildly) so much to do at the present time, that we cannot believe that with our feeble powers we should ever be in a position to do much of what has to be done. One thing at least is important, that we should connect our interest with what has to be done, that we should acquire ever more and more interest in those things of which humanity in our time has need.

As a beginning, a group of people, however small, must be interested in that of which humanity has need, and gain a clear insight into those forces which in the evolution of time have a downward tendency, those that are harmful forces. At the opening of a New Year it is specially good to turn the interest of our circle somewhat from our own personal concerns and to direct them to the great objective interests of the whole of humanity.

To do this requires, as I have said, clear insight into that which is moving along the downward path in the human evolution of to-day. We need only carry those very thoughts which have been ours during the last few days over into the realm of the actual, there to find many of the things of which the men of the present day have need.

We have seen how at a certain moment of evolution, a far-reaching wisdom was actually lost to man; how this wisdom of the Gnostics perished; and how it is now necessary to work, so that an understanding of spiritual things may again be established, though of course in accordance with the progress of the time.

During the past autumn we have considered the deeper causes of the flood tide of materialism which took place in the nineteenth century, and I have again and again emphasised that the view of Spiritual Science in regard to this flood of materialism, in no way tends to a lack of appreciation, or want of understanding of the great progress of external, material science. This has always been recognised by us. But what we must keep specially before us is this, that the great progress made in the materialistic realms of natural science during the nineteenth century and on into the present time, has been accomplished with a falling off in the power of thought—of clear, precise thinking.

This decline in the power of thinking has taken place more especially in the domain of science. There—however much people may disbelieve it—the faith in authority has never been so strong as in our day, so that want of confidence as regards the certainty of thinking has spread widely through all the realms of popular thought. We live in an age of the most careless thinking and at the same time it is an age of the blindest trust in authority. People live to-day entirely under the impression that they must believe in, they must recognise authority, that they must have the sanction of outside powers. They desire a warrant for this or that. For the most part men do not consider to-day that it is an individual concern, that they will eventually have to take up the matter for themselves! So, they go to whom ‘right and law is bequeathed like a hereditary sickness’ and accept conclusions without weighing how those conclusions were reached; for they consider it right to accept authority blindly.

A man is ill—he takes not the least trouble to learn the simplest thing about the illness. Why should he? We have recognised and certified physicians whose business it is to look after our bodies; we need not trouble in the least about them!

If information on any subject be desired, people go to those who ought to know, to the theologian, to the philosopher, to this one or to that.

Any one following up this line of thought for himself, will find that on numberless points he himself is sunk in blindest belief in authority. If he cannot find them—do not take it ill of me, if I say—that the less he finds of this belief in authority in himself, the larger the dose he must have swallowed!

But I would now like to show how a narrow, cramped and impoverishing mode of thought has slipped even into the finest domain of spiritual life, all the world over—without distinction of nation, race or colour; that a certain element of cramped thinking is to be found where the life of spiritual culture exists in its finest form. Let us take a philosophical idea and watch how it has developed. Who is not convinced to-day, on the grounds of a belief in an authority which has come down to him through very many channels—who is not convinced that one cannot by any means arrive at the ‘thing in itself,’ but can only catch the outward phenomena, the impression on the senses, the impression made on the soul by the thing. Man can but arrive at the ‘results’ of things, but not at the ‘thing in itself.’ This is indeed the fundamental type of the thought of the nineteenth century. I have described the whole wretched business in that chapter in my book Riddles of Philosophy, which is called ‘The World of Illusion.’ Anyone who studies this chapter will find a résumé of the whole matter. Man can only perceive ‘effects,’ he cannot attain to ‘the thing in itself;’ this remains unknown.

The most capable thinkers of the nineteenth century, if we can speak of them as capable in this connection, are infected by this necessary ignorance regarding ‘the thing in itself.’

If we now turn to the trend of thought which is at the base of what I have just described, it presents itself thus: It is wrongly insisted on, that the eye can only reflect that which it can evoke within itself by means of its nervous or other activities. When an external impression comes, it responds to it in its own specific way. One only gets as far as the impression—not to that which causes the impression on the eye. Through his ear a man only gets as far as the impression made on the ear—not to the thing that makes the impression, and so on.

It is, therefore, only the impressions of the outer world that act on the senses of the soul. That which was at first established as regards a certain realm, that of colour, tone and the like, has now for a long time been extended to the whole thinking world—that can receive only the impression or effects of what is in the world. Is this incorrect? Certainly it is not incorrect, but the point—as has often been said—is not in the least whether a matter is correct or not, quite other things come into consideration. Is it correct that only pictures, only impressions of things, are called forth by our senses? Certainly it is correct, that cannot be doubted; but something very different is connected with this. This I will explain by means of a comparison.

If someone stands before a mirror and another person also stands there beside him, it cannot be denied that what is seen in the mirror is the image of the one man and also of the other. What is seen in the mirror is without doubt images—merely images. From this point of view all our sense perceptions are in fact mere images: for the object must first make an impression on us and our impression—the reaction as one might say—evokes consciousness. We can quite correctly compare this with the images which we see in the mirror; for the impressions are also images.

Thus in the Lange and Kant train of thought we have a quite correct assertion—that man is concerned with images and that therefore, he cannot come into touch with anything real, with any actual ‘thing in itself.’ Why is this? It is solely because man cannot think things out further than one assumption, he remains at one correct assumption. The thought is not incorrect, but as such it is frozen in—it can go no further—it is really frozen in. Just consider: The images that we see in the mirror are true images, but suppose the other person who stands beside me and looks into the mirror too, gives me a box on the ear, would I then say (as these are but images I see in the mirror) that one reflection has given the other reflection a box on the ear? The action points to something real behind the images! And so it is. When our thoughts are alive and not frozen, when they are connected with realities, we know that the Lange-Kantian hypothesis is correct, that we have everywhere to do with images; but when the images come in touch with living conditions, these living conditions reveal what first leads us to the thing in itself. It is not so much the case here that certain gentlemen who have thus led thoughts astray, have started from a wrong hypothesis; the whole matter hangs on the fact that we have to reckon with thoughts that were frozen, with thoughts which when at last they are reached, make people say: true, true, true—and get no further. This unworthy thinking of the nineteenth century is wanting in flexibility, in vitality. It is frozen in, truly ice-bound.

Let us take another example. During the past year I have often communicated certain things to you from a celebrated thinker—Mauthner, the great critic of language. Kant occupies himself with Critique of Idea. Mauthner went further, (things that follow must always go further)—he wrote a Critique of Speech. You will remember that during the autumn I gave you examples from the Critique of Speech. Such a man has many followers at the present day. Before he took up philosophy he was a journalist. There is an old saw which says: ‘One crow does not peck out the eyes of another.’ Not only do they not peck out each other's eyes, but the others even give eyes to the crows that are blind, especially when these are journalists! And thus this critic of language—but as I said I wish in no way to raise any question as regards the honesty of such a thinker, even as regards his solidity and depth, for I must always insist again and again that it is incorrect to say that criticism of natural or of any other science is practised here, its characteristics are only defined. So I say expressly, that Mauthner is an honourable man, ‘so are they all honourable men’—but just let us consider one process of thought which is along the lines of this Critique of Language. For example it is stated there: Human knowledge is limited. Limited—why limited according to Mauthner? Well, because all that man experiences of the world enters his soul by way of his senses. Certainly there is nothing very profound in this thought, but yet it is an undeniable fact. Everything comes to us from the outer world through the senses. But now the thought came to Mauthner that these senses are merely accidental-senses, which means that supposing that we had not our eyes and ears and other senses, we might have other senses instead, then the world around us would appear quite different. An exceedingly popular thought, especially among many philosophers of our day! So it is actually by chance that we have these particular senses, and therewith our conception of the world about us. Had we different senses we should have a different world! Accidental senses!

One of the followers of Fritz Mauthner has said roughly as follows: ‘The world is infinite; but how can man know anything of this infinite world? He can but gain impressions through his accidental senses. Through the door of these chance-senses many things enter our souls and group themselves, while without, the infinite world goes on, and man can learn nothing of the laws in accordance with which it progresses. How can man believe, that what he experiences through these chance-senses of his, can have any connection with the great cosmic mysteries beyond?’ So speaks a follower of Mauthner, who did not, however, look upon himself as an adherent of his, but as a clever man of his day. Yes, so he said. But you can transpose this line of thought into another. I will absolutely retain the form and character of the thought, but translate it into another. I will now state this other thought.

One cannot form any idea of what such a genius as Goethe really has given to mankind, for he has no other means of expressing what he had to say to men, than by the use of twenty-two or twenty-three chance letters of our alphabet which must be grouped in accordance with their own laws and set down on paper. This goes still further. How is it possible to learn anything of the genius of Goethe, through the chance grouping of letters on paper?

Clever such a man might be who believes that because Goethe had to express his whole genius by means of twenty-three letters, A.B.C. and so on,—we could learn nothing of his genius or of his ideas,—clever he might be who used such an excuse and still maintained that he had before him nothing but the twenty-three chance letters grouped in various ways! ‘Away with your explanations,’ he would say, ‘they are but fancy, I see nothing before me but letters!’ Clever, in the same way, is he who says: The world beyond is infinite, we cannot learn anything of it, for we know only what comes to us through our chance-senses.

The fact is that such inaccurate thinking does not only exist in the domain of which I am speaking, where it comes very crudely into evidence, it is present everywhere. It is active in the profoundly unhappy events of the present day, for these would not be what they are if the thinking of all humanity was not permeated with what has been pointed out in a somewhat crude form.

People will never be able to take the right interest in such things, I mean the things concerned with the true efforts of man for his real progress—true effort in the, sense of Spiritual Science—if they have not the will really to enter into such matters, if they have not the desire to recognise the things of which man stands in need. Objections are ever being raised from this side and from that, to the teaching of Spiritual Science, that it is only accessible to those who have clairvoyant perception of the spiritual worlds. People will not believe that this is not true, that what is required is, that by thought they should really be able to attain understanding of that which the seer is able to bring forth out of the spiritual world. It is not to be wondered at that people cannot to-day grasp with their thought what the seer derives from the spiritual world, when thought is built up in this way I have described. This kind of thought is ‘trumps’ and rules life in every department.

It is not because man is unable to understand with his thoughts all that Spiritual Science teaches, that it fails to be understood, but because he permits himself to be infected with the slip-shod thinking of the present day. Spiritual Science should stimulate us to intensive, courageous thinking; that is what matters: and it is well able to do this.

Of course, as long as we take Spiritual Science in such a way that we only talk about the things with which it is concerned, we shall not advance very much in the establishing of the thought for the future of humanity, which is exactly the mission of our movement to establish. When, however, we take the trouble really to understand—really to grasp the things, the matter taught,—we shall certainly make progress.

Even the conceptions of Spiritual Science are affected by the careless thinking of the present day. I have explained to you how this careless thinking acts; I quoted: ‘results only do we have in the external world, so we cannot attain to the thing in itself.’ This thought is as it were immediately frozen in; people do not wish to go any further, the thought is frozen in, they no longer see that the living interchanging activity of the reflected images leads further than to the mere image-character. This method is then applied to the conceptions of Spiritual Science. Because people are fully infected by such kind of thoughts, they say: Yes, what Spiritual Science tells on page a,b,c, are facts of Spiritual Science; these facts we cannot have before us, if we have not acquired the seer's gift. Therefore, they do not go on to think whether in their present attitude to what Spiritual Science teaches they are not making the same mistake that the whole world makes to-day. The worst of it is, that this fundamental failing of contemporary thought is so little recognised. It is dreadful how little it is recognised. It enters into our everyday thinking, and makes itself felt there, just as in the more advanced thinking of the philosophers and scientists. It is but seldom that people recognise what a really tremendous duty springs from an insight into this fact, how important it is to be interested in such things, how lacking in responsibility to permit our interest in them to be blunted.

The fact is now apparent, that in the course of the last century purely external sense-observation obtained and gave its tone to science; people laid the greatest value on the results of observation in the laboratory, or in the clinic, in the Zoological Gardens and the like, (the value of which observation must be recognised, as I have often remarked) but they desired to hold to these only and go no further. It is true that extraordinary progress has been made by these methods of natural science, quite extraordinary progress; but it is just through this progress that thought has become quite unreliable. Therefore it becomes a duty not to allow those persons to attain power in the world, who exercise this power from the standpoint of a purely materialistic experimental knowledge,—and it is power that such people want. At the present day we have reached the point, when all that is non-materialistic learning is to be driven out of the world by the brutal language of force which is used in materialistic erudition. It has already become a question of force. Among those who appeal most eagerly to the external powers to gain their external privileges, we have to recognise those who stand on the foundation of material science alone. Therefore, it is our duty to understand that force rules in the world. It is not enough that we should be interested only in what concerns ourselves personally, we must develop interest in the great concerns of the whole of humanity. It is true that as individuals and even as a small society we cannot do much to-day, but from small germs like these a beginning must be made. What is the use of people saying to-day that they have no faith in doctors; that they have no confidence in the system, and seek by every other means, something in which they can feel confidence? Nothing is affected by this, all that is but personal effort for their own advantage. We should be interested in establishing, alongside the material medicine of to-day, something in which we can have confidence. Otherwise things will get worse from day to day. This does not only mean that those who have no faith in the medical science of the day should seek out someone whom they can trust; for this would put the latter in a false position, unless he interests himself in seeing that he too should be suitably qualified to interest himself in the progress of the general condition, of humanity. It is true that to-day and tomorrow we cannot perhaps be more than interested in the matter, but we must bear in our souls such interest for the affairs of humanity if we wish to understand in their true meaning the teaching of Spiritual Science. We still often think that we understand the great interests of humanity, because we frequently interpret our personal interests as if they were the greatest interests of mankind.

We must search deeply, within the profoundest depths of our soul, if we wish to discover in ourselves how dependent we are on the blind faith in authority of the present day—how profoundly we are dependent on it. It is our indolence, our love of ease that withholds us from being inwardly kindled, and set aflame by the great needs of humanity.

The best New Year greeting that we can inscribe in our souls is that we may be enkindled and inspired by the great interests of the progress of mankind—of the true freedom of humanity. So long as we allow ourselves to believe that he who blows his trumpet before the world must also be able to think correctly,—so long as we hold beliefs derived from the carelessly organised thinking of the present day,—we have not developed within ourselves true interests in the great universal cause of mankind.

What I have just said is in no way directed against any great man in particular; I know that when such things are said especially in a public lecture, there are many who say: Natural Science and the authorities of the day were attacked by Spiritual Science; and the like. I specially quote instances from those of whom I can say, on the other hand, that they are great authorities of the present day, that they are great men,—to show that they support things which Spiritual Science has to extirpate, root and branch. Even without being a great man, one can recognise the careless thinking of great men, which has been so greatly enhanced just because of the brilliant advance in the experimental science of the day. One example, one among many,—I choose a book written by one of the best known men of the day and which is translated into German. No one can say that greatness is unrecognised by me. I repeat, I choose a book by a celebrated man of the day, in the domain of experimental Natural Science. I look up a passage in the introduction to the second volume, which deals specially with the question of the cosmology of the day; in which the great man goes into the history of the development of cosmo-conception. It runs somewhat as follows: In the times of the ancient Egyptians, the Greeks and the Romans, men tried to form a picture of the world in such and such a way; then in the last four hundred years there arose the Natural Science of to-day, which has at last drawn the great prize, which has swept all previous ideas aside and has attained to actual truth, which now has but to be further built up.

I have often laid stress on the fact that it is not so much the individual assertions that people make, it is the Ahrimanic or Luciferic characteristics which at once lay hold on people, so that they become Ahrimanic or Luciferic. Thus at the close of this introduction we read the following, which is in the highest degree noteworthy. Take a special note of what is presented to us by one who is without doubt a great and celebrated man of the day. After remarking how grand the knowledge of Natural Science is to-day, he says: ‘The time of sad decline endured until the awakening of humanity at the beginning of the new age. The new age placed the art of printing at the service of learning, and contempt of experimental work disappeared from the minds of educated people. Opposition to old opinions as expressed in the writings of various investigators, advanced at first but slowly. These hindering conditions have since disappeared, and immediately the number of workers and the means of furthering Natural Science increased in rapid succession. Hence the extraordinary progress of recent years.’

There then follows the last sentence of this introduction—‘We sometimes hear it said that we live in the best of all possible worlds: there might be some objection raised to this, but we scientists at least can assert with all certainty, that we live in the best of times. And we can look forward with confidence to a still better future. ...’ Now follows what really is astounding! This author attaches to himself, and to his age, that which great men have discovered and thought, regarding nature and the world. Therefore he says: In the firm hope that the future may be better, we can say with Goethe,—the great authority on man and nature:

‘Es ist ein gross Ergotzen
Sich in den Geist der Zeiten zu versetzen,
Zu schauen, wie vor uns ein weiser Mann gedacht,
Und wie wir's dann zuletzt so herrlich weit gebracht.’

[‘It is a great delight, to enter into the spirit of the age, to see how wise men thought before our time, and how splendidly we have advanced things.’]

In all seriousness a great man closes his remarks with these words, the pronouncement of Goethe, the great authority on nature and on man; words to which Faust replies,—for it is Wagner who says:

‘By your leave it is a great delight,
To enter into the spirit of the age, etc.—’

But Faust answers: (and perhaps we may accept what Faust says as the thought of Goethe, the great authority on nature and on man.)

‘O yes! As far as to the stars!’

This is exactly fitted for a man who can reach as far as to the stars, thus:

‘O yes! As far as to the stars!
The ages that are past, my Friend,
Are for us a book with seven seals;
What we call the spirit of the age,
Is in fact the spirit of ourselves
In which the times are mirrored.
This is in truth, often but a wail!
Men fly from the first glance of it.
A rubbish heap, a lumber room,
At most some act or state of law
With excellent pragmatic maxims
Such as are put in puppets' mouths!’

And so on. ...

Thus in 1907 wrote one of the greatest men of the day who had surely got ‘as far as to the stars,’ and who looking back on all those who had worked before him had also got so far as to make use of the saying ‘of Goethe, the great authority on man and nature.’

It is a great delight
To enter into the spirit of the age.

You smile! One could wish that this smile always might be directed against those who are capable at the present day of making such carelessness valid; for the example I have given shows that it is those who are firmly established on the ground of the scientific outlook of the day, and who are associated with progress in this domain, who are able to put forth such negligent thinking. It just proves that what is called Natural Science to-day by no means excludes the most superficial thinking. A man may be a thoroughly careless thinker to-day, and yet be held to be a great man in the realm of natural science. This has to be recognised, and in this sense we must approach it. It is a sign of our time. If this were to continue; if any one is labeled as a great man, and given out as a great authority and if people put forward what he says in this or that domain without proof, as of something of great worth—then we should never surmount the great misery of our time. I am fully convinced that countless people pass over the sentence I read out to you to-day, without a smile, although it shows forth in the most eminent degree, where the greatest faults of our day lie, which are bringing about the decline of the evolution of humanity.

We must see clearly where to make a beginning with those things necessary for man; and also see that in spite of the immense advance in external natural science, the greatest scientists of the nineteenth century, even down to our own day, have shown themselves the worst dilettantists in regard to all questions of world-outlook. The great fault of our day is, that this is not recognised—that people do not recognise that the greatest investigators in natural science in the nineteenth century proved themselves the worst of dilettantists in the question of world-outlook, when they entirely left out that which as spirit rules in the realm of natural science. People blindly followed after these great persons, not only when they gave out the results of investigations in the laboratory, or of clinical research, but also when they asserted things regarding the secrets of the universe.

So, parallel with the popularising of science which is useful and beneficial in the highest degree, we have at the same time a deterioration as regards all questions of wide import and a heedlessness of thought which is infectious and very harmful, because it is founded on the very worst kind of dilettantism of great men.

Here are to be found the tasks with which our interests must be closely associated, even if we ourselves are not able to produce anything. We must at least look things in the face, we must see clearly that it will above all lead to far, far more unhappy times than we are at present passing through, if mankind does not realise what has been here pointed out;—if, in place of careless, inexact thinking, a clear and genuine method of thought be not established again among men. Everything can be traced back to this careless thinking. All those external, often very unhappy phenomena which we encounter would not exist if this inexact, negligent thought were not there.

It seems to me specially necessary to speak of these matters at the beginning of a New Year, for they are connected with the character and attitude of our whole task. For when we accustom ourselves to consider without prejudice the method and nature of modern thought, and see how powerful it is in all the varied conditions of life, we can then form some picture of what we have to do and of what mankind stands in need. We must in the first place overcome all tendency to slackness, all love of sloth and laziness, we must see clearly that a spiritual-scientific movement has duties other than that of merely listening to lectures or reading books.

I must continually remind you to make yourselves acquainted with the necessary ideas. It is clear to all that as a few individuals,—as a small society—we cannot do much. But our own thought must move in the right direction; we must know what is in question, we must not ourselves be exposed to the danger (to put it trivially) of succumbing to the different conceptions of the world, of those who are the great men of the day in the external sciences. Great men, but dilettante thinkers as regards questions of universal import, found numerous associations of monistic or other nature without the opposition that would arise if at least it were realised that, when such societies are founded, it is as if one said: ‘I am letting this man make a coat, because he is a celebrated cobbler!’

This is foolishness, is it not? But it is just as foolish when a great chemist or a great psychologist is accepted as an authority on a conception of the world. We cannot blame them if they claim it for themselves, for naturally they cannot know how inadequate they are; but that they are so accepted is connected with the great evils of the present day. To me it seems as if a thought for New Year's Eve must ever be associated with our feelings; whereas it seems to me that that which faces us as the more immediate duty of the day, must be directly associated with our reflections on New Year's Day; I thought therefore, that the tone of what has been said to-day might be fitly associated with what was said yesterday.

The theme for this evening's lecture has been requested as “The social will as a basis towards a new, scientific procedure.” I don't know exactly what the motives are for proposing this theme, but when the request came to me I found it extraordinarily lucky because it corresponds in tone to what I consider necessary with regard to the facts which the social movement has brought into the present, and is expressed far more clearly than what formerly had been discussed and negotiated regarding the social question in the course of the last decades.

It is possible to follow the development of the social movement over a long time, up to our present times and to notice how the social impulses in their aims tend more and more to the one or other side, having something sneaking into this social will, into the social mood of recent times which can seem like a wrapping of something from quite another time when superstitions ruled in the Middle ages. These superstitions appear now again when you engage yourself deeply in the second part of Goethe's “Faust” and come to the scene where Goethe allows his Wagner to create the Homunculus, the manikin who would like to be on the way to becoming a human being, developed out of the manikin. According to Goethe it depended on Middle Age superstitions to desire the creation of something out of mere theory, mere outer dry and sober facts assimilated in the human mind into something with being, something thought up which becomes alive. The impossibility of taking abstractions drawn from outer life and forming something alive with them, was Goethe's concern in particular. The Middle Ages don't rule our current thinking as such, but it appears to me as a metamorphosis, one could say, in all the impulses and instincts of many of our contemporaries who want to address the social will and allow some superstitions to dominate. One can observe the development of social life, how it has in the course of history up to the present resulted in thoughts developing out of certain principles, certain foundations which they want to accomplish, or, as you can hear from various opinions, they want it carried out themselves, which means, just as through abstract principles the Homunculus was formed, they can create something called a social organism.

Towards such a social organism there is a striving of, what one could call, the unconscious part of modern humanity. It is only necessary to make the following clear, in order to understand this. The social life of humanity as such is admittedly nothing new; it only appears to be different in more recent times. The social structure of a community is determined, in our more recent times, by the human instincts and human subconscious impulses. The most significant aspect of the rising forces of our more recent times is that humanity can no longer remain stuck on mere instinctive will impulses, that simply out of the nature of development it must prepare the form of the social structure out of a conscious will. If it is to be prepared through a conscious will, then the will needs a basis of thoughts which need to be developed in the right way. These thoughts towards its foundation would not be mere thoughts derived out of abstractions but out of reality; they would be thoughts which familiarise one's own will with the forces in natural events which weave within the world's own powers. To a certain extent one must be allied in one's own will with the creative powers of natural existence.

This is something which wide circles of humanity still need to learn. They must learn to think that they actually can't proceed if they think: ‘What must happen in order to withdraw from a social structure formed out of a life many experience as intolerable, is to replace it with a feasible social structure.’—One cannot proceed this way. One can't imagine what social illnesses are, to a certain extent. One can only apply one's best aspirations by finding it out of people themselves, how they live together in the community and bring mutual harmony in their reciprocal relationships to unfold what is necessary in these alternate lives, to establish a social structure.

After long years of studying the social question it has come to me that the basic question, which is considered today as a uniform abstract formulation, should be seen in a threefold way: the first, being like a spiritual question, the second, like a question of law and the third as an economic question. What has arisen out of the modern capitalist economic life has developed from the basis of technology and this has hypnotised people's focus in recent times only on to economic life, and have quite drawn away the awareness of the social question beside the economic question to above all also a spiritual question and a question of rights.

I'm going to allow myself to deal with the spiritual question first, not from the basis as perhaps some of you may believe the consideration of spiritual life involves me in particular, but because I am of the conviction that if the Proletarian thinkers of today become unbiased toward the spiritual aspect, in search of a solution for the social question, it can make a contribution to just those realistically orientated observers of the social question, that the spiritual aspect must take a stand first of all. To do so is to develop insight into the soul of those people touched in their real nature by the modern social movement. You need to try and recognise the will impulses of what actually lives in the socialistic orientated circles. Above all, the origins of these will impulses need to be discovered.

You see, as technology and capitalism moved into our more recent human lives, humanity branched off more and more into the so-called ruling class, away from the development in the most varied areas of Proletarianism. Between the Proletarian forces of will and the non-proletarian life today lies a gap, no one can lie about it, a gap which can hardly be bridged if not at least an attempt is made, not only with antiquated thoughts and old will impulses active in the social movement, but with new thoughts and will impulses.

In the course of time a belief has developed within the Proletariat—and one can as far as relationships go, not at all see this belief as something unfounded—a belief has formed that the socially disadvantaged class can expect nothing from the present ruling class if they build on their goodwill, their ideas and so on. There has, if I may say so, developed a deep mistrust between the individual human classes. This mistrust has come out of the origins, which up to now did not play a role in human consciousness, origins which have always been available in the subconscious. As a result, at the start of our more recent times, the bourgeois working class has met with one final important trust and they, not out of their convictions but by feeling, have been tricked out of this final important trust. You see, we are talking about the Proletarian point of view today. Many, also earlier personalities who believed they could bring the Proletarian will and thinking into an expression, actually knew nothing about the origins of these thoughts and will impulses. What comes as challenges out of life itself, living in the social movement actually stands in a remarkable contrast with the challenges and social impulses which are being considered by the Proletarians themselves. If I want to briefly express what I mean, I must say: the Proletarian, the social culture has thus come about, but within the proletarian feelings, within the social culture and the life, rules the inheritance out of just those viewpoints and concepts of life which came about at decisive moments in their historic development.

This decisive moment in the more recent historic development must surely allow the observer to notice that within this development, the newer scientific way of thinking has grown—I ask you to please take note, I don't say natural science but the newer scientific way of thinking—in such a way out of the old spiritual impulses, but that this scientific way of thinking no longer involves the same spiritual power which the old-world view had. The old-world view sent roots and spread into human impulses as the modern scientific way of thinking. The old-world view was capable of sending impulses into the soul, through the person's sensing and experiencing towards solving a stirring question: ‘What am I actually as a person in the world?’—Such a power living in the soul has not come through the modern scientific way of thinking. Obviously through a historic necessity, which is no less of a historical disaster, the old-world view positioned itself at a decisive moment in a hostile opposition towards the newer scientific way of thinking instead of allowing it to flow into a fuller friendship which it should have carried into the spiritual life of the soul. So the following facts came about.

The capitalist machine of economic order tore a number of people out of the context of their lives, out of a context in which they had stood up to then which had quite a different relationship with regards to human feelings for their sense of dignity. There existed a connection between what a person was and what he did. Just think about the relationship which clearly continued in the old crafts up to the 13th Century and still continue in remnants later. Out of this relationship a large number of people were thrown at the machine of the modern economic order. Here was no kind of relationship to elements of production; here was no possibility to establish some or other process between the people and what they were actually doing. This is how it came about that this side of human beings, who didn't invent the modern machine age, could ask: ‘What am I worth as a human being? What am I really worth?’

This question is not to be answered out of a context, of life having become overpowered and worthless, but the answer is to be found within those who were not dependent on the outer context of life. Here nothing other rose out of these classes than what the machine age and the economic ordering imposed at the same historic time: the result was the modern scientific way of thinking.

The old classes didn't need to apply this scientific way of thinking to their beliefs and to their concept of life; they only needed to apply it to their theoretical principles. They instilled in life traditional impulses inherited from origins of olden times. The Proletarians were the only ones who were torn out of all they could not identify as their concept of life which was connected to the old outlook on life. They were, through their purely outward existence, predestined to take what was new and allow it to enter their soul content. So this Proletarian is, as paradoxical as it sounds, as unbelievable as many may see it, the actual, purely scientifically orientated person.

To acknowledge the entire scope of this fact one should not only think about what one has learnt about the Proletarian Movement but one needs to be transported through one's destiny by the possibility to think with the Proletarian, with the thoughts of such people who from one or the other side became the carriers of the Proletarian Movement. One could clearly sense what follows, as it spread itself from olden times into the direct social present.

Isn't it true, you could say: ‘Yet, the scientific way of thinking still has been extensively accepted in middle-class circles.’—If you consider intelligent middle-class circles, you will think about people whose beliefs are quite scientifically orientated: yet in their feelings, in their entire life experience, they stand within relationships which are not totally determined by scientific orientation. A person can be a materialistic thinker in modern times, can call him or herself enlightened, call themselves atheists, can acknowledge it as an honest conviction, but can't renounce all the rest of their experiences out of the old connections of life which have not originated from a scientific orientation but which had emerged out of times which carried spiritual impulses—as has been sketched as a force, in the foregoing.

Purely scientific orientation itself works quite differently. I don't say, the scientist, because obviously the scientific orientation influenced quite uneducated Proletarians: but it works quite differently where it has been imposed as a view of life on to the Proletarian.

I want to clarify this by an example. For many years I shared a podium with Rosa Luxemburg who has passed away in such a tragic way. She addressed the theme of “Science and the Worker.” I need to repeatedly think how she stirred a large audience towards being aware that actually all prejudices which are in relation to human social situations are human classifications according to the old ruling classes and this is connected to representations of what old spiritual viewpoints contained. The modern Proletarian, she believed, originated not solely from angelic, divine origins but they had at one time indecently climbed around trees from animalistic origins which she had developed, on the basis that as she had followed their development, she could substantiate the conviction: a human being is the same as another human being. All previous classification was based on some or other form of prejudice.—You should not consider her formulation but what kind of force such words had on the proletarian natured soul.

Purely considering the concept, I actually meant to say: The Proletarian is completely “scientifically” orientated in his point of view in more recent times. The scientific orientation failed to fill his soul in such a way that it could answer the question: ‘What am I actually, as a human being?’

Where did the Proletarian get this point of view? What is the basis of this scientific orientation which he sometimes had to receive in such a false way? It is after all a science. He took it as the inheritance of the middle-class people. It developed out of an old viewpoint of life, from within middle-class people at the transition into the more recent machine and capitalistic age, when machines and capitalism overpowered the people.

The following which is often heard with corresponding colouring is this: within the Proletarians their spiritual life became something which can be experienced as an ideology. This is heard most often when the background of the Proletarian view of the world is dissected: art, religion, science, ethics, law and so on are ideological mirror images of the outer materialistic reality.

However, this experience that everything is like this, that spiritual life is ideological, this didn't originate from within the Proletarians, the Proletarians received it as a dowry from the bourgeoisie. This last and big belief which the Proletarians took in from the middle-class was a result of the nourishment it received, spiritual nourishment for the soul. It could well be that as it was exposed to spiritual life, as it was called out of the old relationship to the machine and introduced into the social structure, that it could only look at what had developed as knowledge about the people and the world; it could only look upon what it had received out of the bourgeoisie: through belief, dogmatically—I could call it—it acquired ideology from the bourgeoisie. It hadn't entered into the convictions but as an experience of disillusionment which it had to be if one does not look at the spiritual as something which is created out of itself, containing a higher reality, but if one looks at it is a mere ideology. Within the subconscious awareness of a large number of carriers of the social movement it wasn't known but was clearly being experienced: ‘We have met the bourgeoisie with a strong trust, we have entered into an inheritance which should have brought us the salvation of our souls and the strength to carry it though. The middle classes didn't bring this; only ideology, which has no reality and which contributes nothing towards the support of life.’

One can argue a lot whether ideology is really the basis of spiritual life, or not. It doesn't come down to that but it comes down to spiritual life being experienced by the majority as an ideology, and so the soul becomes desolate, remains empty, the centrifugal spiritual force becomes paralysed and the result is what has happened today: The stripping of the social will from belief that somehow something spiritual could have developed, somewhere rise as a centre, a real centre from which our world view or something similar can bring salvation, also in relation to the desired formation of the social movement. I would like to say: as a negative, spiritual life has been incorporated into the development of the modern Proletarian humanity above all things; as a positive, that it demands yearnings from these people. It demands soul-supporting and as an inheritance has been given the depletion of the soul.

This is something which blows and runs quietly though our entire present day social movement which can't be grasped by concepts, which in fact makes out the form of one of the branches—we got to know three—of the present day social movement. As soon as one perceives that this is so, one can correctly ask: Where has it come from and how can it be remedied? Instead of letting will be paralysed, this social will, how can it be fired up and empowered? This is a question one must ask oneself.

Now an event occurred when the spiritual life came to a decisive point which I've indicated already. The ruling class at the time was through their situation in life connected to, what we today call, the state. It has often been stressed by some individuals—I can't enter into this today due to our limited time in how true this is—it has often been stressed that modern humanity believe that what we call the state, today, has always existed in this way. That is completely untrue. What we call the state, which for example in the Hegelian world appeared as an expression of the divine itself, was basically only a product of thinking in the last four to five Centuries. The social organism of earlier times was quite different.

Just take a single fact, take the most recently appeared fact that the free schools of earlier times, which were independently built opposite the state, were filled out by state institutions, and that, to some extent, the state had become the custodian of mankind's spiritual goods. This happened due to the civil interests in the beginning of more recent times.

The state was there to let the folk grow their souls towards it; they connected all their needs to it. Out of this impulse grew a new relationship between spiritual goods and the state, made the state the custodian of the spiritual goods of mankind and demanded from those approaching the custodian that their lives be actually defined by it.

If one looks deeper into the inner weaving of the human spiritual goods then it involves not only an outer administration of the spiritual goods—the legislation regarding universities as part of the state, of schools, of folk schools becoming part of the state—but that the state is determining the content of the spiritual goods.

Certainly mathematics doesn't have a state characteristic, but other branches of our spiritual goods have their character, have sustained the unification of these spiritual goods with interests of the state in more recent times. This growing together is not without participation of becoming an ideology from the side of spiritual goods. The spiritual goods can only really protect its own true worth, which it carries within, when it can govern itself through its own forces, when out of its direct initiative can give the state what it is, when it however doesn't receive demands from the state.

Certainly there will still be many today who will see no fundamental social facts in what I've just said. They will however see that, in reality, only the ruling spirit of mankind can give laws, when this spirit is separated and stands independently from the outer state organisation. I know that kind of objections can be made against this but this is not important. What is relevant is that the spirit, in order to unfold itself properly, calls for the ability to always develop out of the direct free initiatives of the human individual.

In this way one arrives at the true form of one of the members of the modern social question, that one considers the spiritual life in the right way and see the necessity, that whatever is pushed into the structure of the state is gradually brought out again, so that it can unfold its own supporting power and then work back again, just because when it is freed, while it develops independently with the other members of the social structure, it can as a result really work on the social structure.

If one wants to talk about the practical aspects of the first member of the social question, one must say: The tendency of development for the spiritual life must be denationalized in the widest sense. If the spiritual life member should be denationalised which probably appears today as a paradox, one can speak in this way: the relationship in which a ruling individuality appears to people, who is involved in criminal or private law involving people—one can in certain psychological orientated circles still see that, but taking the thing from quite the wrong side—one so personal, the direction belongs directly to what must be considered internally as spiritual life. So I am counting all which is relevant in religious convictions, all artistic life, all which is related to private and criminal law, to move towards developing the tendency for denationalization.

Why should anyone who hears about mass regulation immediately think about violent revolution? Even in socialist circles of more recent times, people are gradually not thinking like this anymore. I also don't consider that from one day to the next, everything can be denationalized; but I think that through the social will humanity can enter into measures here and there—it must also happen here or there on a daily basis—towards a re-orientation for such a gradual detachment of the spiritual life from that of the state. You can imagine realistically what is actually meant by this.

The state we must see as something which in recent times has grown out of the ruling classes, created out of a particular soul of the middle classes becoming educated. To the state this bourgeoisie has now contributed not only spiritual life, but also what the later human development has overpowered in the social organism: namely the economic life. This economic life having been introduced into the life of the state has introduced the further nationalisation of traffic interests, post, railways and so on. This has resulted in a certain superstition towards the state, towards nationalised orientated associations. The last remainders of these beliefs are the beliefs of the socialist orientated people: that actually the salvation of a communal administration is only possible through a communal economy. Also, that is an inheritance accepted by the middle-class viewpoint and way of thinking.

Now spiritual life has been put on one side and the economy on the other side; in the middle, the state is positioned.

You can ask what will actually remain of the state? As we will soon see in what follows, the economic life couldn't tolerate being mixed into actual state life. Perhaps we can reach a clear picture of this question if we clearly envisage what the bourgeois classes found in the developing modern state. They found the stronghold of their rights in this state.

Let us now examine what the actual laws represent. I'm not thinking about criminal law or about private law as it isn't in the relation of one person to another, because I'm thinking of public law. Public law belongs, for example, to the dealings of ownership. What is property finally? Ownership is only the expression of the authorization of something which one personally and alone may possess and work on. Ownership has sprouted from a law. Everything which we see as material objects has its roots in the relationship of people to laws. Such laws have in our recent times, before the conception of our modern state, rejected the bourgeoisie earlier and everything connected to them; such laws found themselves best protected when they took on everything which referred to such laws as those from within the state itself.

So the tendency started of economic life being ever more drawn into the life of the state. The state penetrates the structure of the economic life with a number of laws. Now, these laws should in no way be taken in their future development to the state life. The social will must gradually develop towards the precise differentiation between everything comprising the life of law, what spiritual life actually is and what the economic life is.

The modern social movement makes it particularly clear that the ruling circles haven't taken anything of the life of rights from their modern state. While much has been taken out of the economic life, also out of the purely isolated economic life, and incorporated into the legal state structure, there is something which has not been incorporated into this legal structure and that is the labour of the Proletarian workers. This labour of the Proletarian workers was left within the circulation of the economic processes.

This struck most deeply into the minds of the modern Proletarians and could be made clear through Marxism and its followers—there is always the labour market just as there is a goods market. Just like goods are offered on the goods market and there is a demand for it, so you bring your labour—the only thing you own—on to the labour market, and it is only valid as goods. You are sold like goods; you stand in the more modern economic process as goods.

Through this we come to the true form of the second modern social claim. This is expressed from out of a certain subconscious sense regarding human worth; the modern Proletarian found it unbearable that his labour was bought and sold as goods on the labour market.

Certainly, the theory of the socialist thinker states: ‘It has come about through the objective laws of the economic life itself; the force of labour was placed on the market like other goods.’ This is in the awareness, perhaps even in the awareness of the Proletarians. However, in their subconscious, something else was weaving. In their subconscious the continuation of the old slavery prevailed, the old question of serfdom. In the subconscious one only saw how the entire person during the time of slavery could be bought and sold, that later somewhat less of the person was in bondage and all that was now left over was the labour of the workers. With this he allows himself to be taken completely into the economic process. This he felt was impossible, as unworthy.

From this the second social demand has come about in more recent times: disrobing labour from the characteristic of goods.

I know that still today many people think: ‘How can that be done? How else is it at all possible to organise economic life than through the remuneration of work activity, labour?’—With this you have already bought it! However, one needs to hold something up against it, which Plato and Aristotle already took as obvious and said it was evident, that there has to be slaves. So modern thinking needs to be forgiven if it finds it necessary to carry labour to the market.

Now one can't always imagine what will perhaps be a reality in the near future. Today however we must ask: How can labour be disrobed from the character of goods? It can only happen if it is drawn up in the area of a pure legal state, such a state which eliminates it from the spiritual life on the one side, as characterized earlier, and eliminated on the other side from all that belongs to, what was characterised earlier, as the economic process. If we divide the entire social organism, or we think of it as divided into three members: into an independent spiritual life, into legal life and economic life, then we have instead of Homunculus in the area of economy a real hom*o in the area of the economic life, then we have our spiritual eyes focused on the real social organism which is alive, not one made up of chemical agents.

I don't really want to enter into a game of analogy between biology and sociology—that's far from me—neither fall into the mistake of Schäffle nor Meray in his “World Mutation”; I don't want to go into all of that, it is not relevant here. What is of relevance is to see how, in a single natural human organism, three independent systems rule—I have presented this scientifically, at least as a sketch, in my last book “Riddles of the Soul”—likewise in the social organism three independently applicable systems need to be seen: the spiritual system, the judicial system—now the system of public rights, as mentioned where private and criminal law are excluded—and the actual economic system.

However, if you have between the spiritual and the economic life, the regulated state life, the regulated judicial life, then you have something which is capable of life inserted into the social organism, just as in the natural human organism you find the relatively independent systems of circulation, lung-heart system and circulation system, the heart-lung system between the head system and digestive system. Then again if it is fully developed from its own basis as merely economic—we think of a democratic administration on the basis of judicial life—if each one can equally have a say about his rights, that the only basis of ruling will be according to the relationship of one person to another, then the incorporation of labour in the economic process will be something quite different than the case is now.

You see, I'm not giving you some or other principle, or theory: this is how it must be done when the power of labour is to be disrobed from its characterisation of goods—but rather, I say to you: ‘We must place people in such a division in the social members that, through their actions, through their thoughts, through their will, a viable social organism is created.’—I don't want to offer general remedies but I only want to say how humanity must become members of the social organism in order for their healthy social will to continuously result in making the social organism capable of life. In this way I will, in place of theoretical thinking, introduce intimately related and trustworthy thoughts. What will happen if, despite economic life, there would exist a foundation which maintains and governs itself out of its own forces, and out of this purely human foundation, employment laws can be negotiated? Then something will come about which work in a similar way into the economic process as does the natural foundation of economic processes. We very clearly see these natural foundations of the economic process when we really study the economic process. They regulate the economic process in such a way that its regulation deprives a person of what he or she can do themselves, in the economic process. Isn't it so, you only have to observe the obvious?

Just take for once—I want to use radically clear examples—the fact that in certain regions, rather removed from our area, the banana is an extraordinarily important item. However, the work which involves bringing bananas to a place where they can be consumed is exceptionally little from our point of view, in comparison with products in our natural European region; bringing wheat from its point of origin right through to its point of consumption. This work which renders the bananas consumable is nothing in comparison to wheat, roughly compares it is as one to one hundred, or the relationship could be even greater than one to a hundred. So, one hundred times more effort is needed than that of bananas, to bring wheat to the point of consumption. So we can quote the biggest variables within the economic area which exist in connection with the regulation of economic life. These are not only dependent on what a person contributes: it depends on the yield of the earth, other relationships and so on; these things place themselves within the economic life as a constant factor, like people are one of the independent economic factors. This is how it can be seen from the one side.

Now consider for yourself the labour laws as quite separate on the other side from the economy, then it will, when it no longer has economic interests in the determination of working hours, in the application of labour independently contributing to an independent purely person to person interrelationship, it will create something independent of the economic life, which plays from the other side into this economic life, just like each side plays from the natural foundations of given factors.

One must orientate the formation of prices, which has actual worth in the goods market to how the natural factors work. One will in future, when the social organism should be viable, also have to address how production should take place, how the circulation of goods should take its course. When this commodity circulation does not determine remuneration, working hours and labour law, but when it is independent of commodity circulation, of the goods market, in the region of the state life, purely out of human endeavours, purely out of mere human points of view agree about the working hours, then it will be so that one commodity will cost as much as it will cost for the time needed to produce that particular work, which is however regulated through independent economic life, because economic life today for instance regulates employment so that the price of goods often has to regulate the economic process in working hours and employee-employer relationships. The opposite will appear by correctly dividing the members of the social organism.

These relationships can only be indicated today. You can see, however, that they come out of a social intention which is quite different from what has placed us into such a sad situation within world events; they come out of a social will which has not originated from some non-profitable spinning of human thoughts, spinning as one has to so that this or that is done in the right way, but they come out of thoughts which are so familiar with reality that it doesn't come to light when people in this or that relationship in this or that way become members of the social organism. Then they will, because they have become members of the social organism in a healthy way, be able to determine laws, then they will work in the right way.

One only has to have experienced how other social intentions determined relationships in real life, even in the then already conquered Austria. It was a state, but a state does not live purely as a life of laws; in a state, there lives, in quite a pronounced way, the economic life which has sprung from the interests of single human circles. Just think how the old Austrian parliament was up to the end of the nineties (1890's). Out of this parliament's representation originated relationships which played right into the catastrophe of war. This parliament consisted of the four curiae: the Chamber of Commerce, the great land owner, from the curia of the cities, markets and industrial sites and the curia of the established economic circles. These economic circles were not represented on the basis of an economic parliament but their interests determined the being of the state, therefore public laws were determined according to them. Just as it is impossible for a confessional inclined party, which the last German Reichstag was, to be created and influence institutions of the legal life of the state out of definitions, just so little is a social organism viable which is destined to determine the economic circles of the legal life. The life of rights must develop separated from that; only out of the relationship of one person to another, considered in a completely democratic manner. Then the rights life will regulate in a corresponding manner the threefold organism, with on the one side the economic life and on the other side the natural foundation of this economic life.

Within the economic life, which in turn has established representatives from the most varied fields, pure economic factors and interests would be needed. One would then have a social organism—if I might express myself according to the habits of the time—with three classes, three areas, each creating its own laws and own management. They will stand in a relationship, one could call it, as sovereign states and if they continue, they reckon with one another. That could invite complications, make the people uncomfortable; but it is the one and only way to make a healthy social organism viable in future. The economic life itself can only be determined out of its factors when only economically active interests appear from its foundation, which can only be determined through the necessary relationships between production and consumption. These relationships between production and consumption can only result in the economy from the associative basis, an associative basis as it could have been in the trade union, cooperative context. However today the trade union, cooperative context still maintains the character out of the state from which it has grown. They need to grow into the economic life, must become mere serving bodies of the economic life. Only then will the social organism develop in a healthy way.

I know that what I've been saying will appear extraordinarily radical. Whether it appears radical or not, is not important. What is important is for the social organism to be workable, that people, in their starting from the old instinctive social life moving towards the conscious social life, are permeated with impulses which come out of insight of how one needs to stand within the totality of the social organism. People today are considered uneducated if they don't know their multiplication tables; a person is considered uneducated if he does not know something he is supposed to know as education, but a person is not considered uneducated if he has no social awareness, or if his soul is within the social organism in a state of sleep. This is something which has to change fundamentally in future! It would be different if a judgement would consider that, what belongs to the most elementary schooling should include being equipped with a social will, just as much as one should be equipped with the multiplication tables. Today every person should know what three times three is. In the future, it would not appear more difficult to know the relationship between capitalism and ground rental if I want to choose something out of today's life. It should not be more difficult in future than to know that three times three is nine. However, this knowledge will become the foundation for a healthy involvement in the social organism which means a healthy social life. A healthy social life needs to be strived for.

In a healthy human consciousness, it is preparing itself, as I have said. One only has to have an inkling for what is being prepared and what strives towards revelation and form in our more recent time.

Just think back to the great ideals of the French Revolution: Freedom, Equality and Brotherhood. Whoever followed these ideas in the minds of people who have in the course of time experienced it as a destiny, knows, how often they have struggled with the logic within the contradiction which exist in Freedom on the one side, which point to personal initiatives, and Equality on the other side, which should be brought about in the centralization of the state orientated social organism. This is not possible. Yet, the solution for this confounding has emerged in our more recent time. Why capitalism today has not yet understood the concept of a threefold social organism is due to the concept of a completely centralised state.

If you grasp the idea which already today appear in this intention which is expressed in the ideals of Freedom, Equality and Brotherhood, then it is easy to understand that it is being considered from the point of view of the threefold organised social organism. Its first member would be the spiritual life. It should be completely permeated with the idea, the principle, of freedom. Here everything should be based on the free initiatives of people and it can be so, would be most fruitful, if it is stated this way. With reference to the constitutional state, in relation to what is between the spiritual and the economic life regulated by the being of the state, the actual political system exists, which has to permeate everything regarding the equality of relationships between people. With reference to the economic life, the one and only thing which is valid is Brotherhood, social community living the outer and inner life of one person through the other.

In the economic life within the social organism, interest is the ruling factor. This interest however brings quite a specific characteristic into the economic member. Why is it apparent that basically everything comes out of economic life? It all comes down to economic life, that in the best, most appropriate manner, the economic life shows it can also be consumed. I'm talking about consumption in the narrower sense where the spiritual is excluded. Consumption can refer for instance to labour, human labour. This is felt by the modern person: becoming a mere element of consumption in terms of his labour. He even has to, like he earns interest through his labour, through spiritual production, also inherit interests through his rest, through his calm capacity for the spiritual. The human being becomes consumed in the economic life. He has to pull himself continuously out of the economic life by the other two members of the healthy social organism, if he doesn't want to be completely consumed within the economic life.

The social question is not the same in modern life as when it originated and perhaps could be solved, and was actually solved. No, the social question exists as something which has entered modern life and can no longer be avoided in the future of humanity. There will always be a social question in the future. However, this social question will not for once, not through this or that measure, be solved, but could be regulated, through the continuous intentions of people which means that those who use people in the economic process, should be regulated from the political standpoint and forever balance out the consumption with spiritual production, through the independent spiritual organism.

Whoever has seen over the last decades how the social question has developed—and it has relatively not been all that long ago that the social question has taken on its present form—whoever has observed in intimate detail how the social question has developed out of its origins, could in relation to the social intentions/will and its focus for the future form of human life, arrive at thoughts which could be characterised in the following way.

Many people, even enlightened people, don't see the social question as something existentialistic. In my youth, I became acquainted with an Austrian minister who officiated over the Bohemian-German border and made the most grotesque declaration: “The social question stops at Bodenbach.” I remember very clearly how a large group of the first social democratic miners marched past my parents' house, heading for their gathering. I noticed how the social will had come about, not as thoughts about a social movement but through the communal life of the social movement. I had to say to myself, much has to be done and many mistakes have to be made! Even with socialistically orientated thoughts of more recent times, these mistakes were quite numerous. It appears that exactly in this area people's minds developed in such a way that they didn't experience this. The mistakes became terribly widespread.

Out of such a spirit of observation I have endeavoured to speak to you tonight about the social will. You have invited me as member of a community who studies what the social intention of humanity's healing should bring in future.

Those older people, like me for example, who speak to people who through the decades can look back, know about all that had to be gone through to get to the present moment. Then again you find some things that need to be gone through, in addition also the conviction that the mistake was not fruitless, that even today when the facts are expressed often in a frightening way, people manage to be strong enough to find the way out of what the biggest part of today's humanity has experienced as unbearable.

It is in this sense that I ask you to accept what I have allowed myself to speak about this evening. The facts speak clearly in some areas. The facts also clearly say: the more people, who are still young, can now take up a true, viable social intention, the more will the human social organism be viable and efficient. Whoever wishes to speak the word, let him do so. Doctor Boos, who has given a lecture about a week ago, announced that he was willing to have discussions.

A speaker says something (stenographic details incomplete).

Dr Steiner: What you have claimed has taken on a form as a result of you not considering what must come to the fore through the relatively independent formation, on the one hand of the constitutional state and on the other, the economic life. The labour organisations which are partly production companies or consumer companies, or even could have connections between both, are only involved with economic factors which take place within the economic life itself.

The regulation of labour law is preferred by a relatively independent state. Here nothing is decided other than on a democratic basis, I call it, as relevant to the relationship of one person to another. This is why I mention this regarding the basis of the purely democratic state, that a link exists between both factors, on this basis people stand equally before the law. As a result, the mere wishes of single economic organisations will come to an end because they must balance out the democratic legal life with the interests of other circles.

So, this is just what should be processed, a remedy should be considered towards anything damaging, which would certainly develop if for instance the working hours are fixed within the organisation of the economic life. Economic organisations should only be involved with the economy itself: in other words, the regulation in the sense of labour laws. By contrast, the fixing of working hours, only underlying the state corporation, involves the relation of one person to another.

We must not forget what a great change can develop between one person and another with one-sided interests grinding it down. Self-evidently, nothing can be totally perfect in the world, but one-sided interests will be grinded down in the democratic state structure which has its basis of equality between people.

Just consider for instance what happens when a certain economic organisation is interested in a project of short duration—they will have to be comfortable with balancing this with the interests of the individuals who would suffer during this short working time. If one doesn't consider some or other subconscious force then it would—just like in a natural organism it would always in an approximately natural way result in how many men and how many women there are, which obviously is no strict natural law nor will it become one—it would also prevent something unhealthy being created when in the right way the single factors of the social organism cooperate and not develop individual small interests, which are most harmful to others.

The foundation of my way of thinking differs from many other social thinking patterns due to the latter being more abstract. Logically the one can easily be derived from the other; results flow from one logic into another. Crucial to such questions is only actual life experience. Obviously I can't prove logically—no one can—that a discrepancy of interests may enter into such a future organism, but accept that when the forces within their own circles, which are appropriate to them, can develop, then it will be a humane development. I mean, if you consider what I have wanted to present, the fixing of working time out of the purely economic process in the legal circle of the state, then this damage will be able to develop in practical areas. This is what I wanted to add.

Another speaker says something (stenographic details incomplete).

Dr Steiner: I would like to comment on the honourable previous speaker's words as follows. Understandably with every lecture it is not possible to say everything one wants to in a single lecture, and I don't know which omissions our previous honourable speaker's conclusion has been drawn from in my lecture where I gave no opinion regarding the modern worker psyche, that I don't want to take the modern labour movement into account, and so on. Every person does it in his own way. I have for many years, for example, been a teacher in the various fields of a workers' educational school and have given rise to speech exercises in political organisations. I am entitled to be aware of a large number of workers who present their speeches today, speeches they have learnt to give as a result of my speech exercises. During these speech exercises all possible kinds of questions were discussed, questions which actually were not far from the most intimate particulars of the workers' psyche. So I don't know—I had naturally no reason to place this particular practical side of my social activities and intentions out in the open, but I can't quite rightly understand out of which omissions my talk should come from what went before, that I should be so far removed from the practical labour movement.

Certainly it is obvious that within the modern social movement the worker himself should be considered. Just contemplate by yourselves, what I have been stressing the entire evening regarding how things can actually appear within the Proletarians. I have spoken about the Proletariat as such; you would have noticed if you were listening attentively, how my belief has woven my lecture into a practical presentation as to what lives in a practical way in the proletarian labour force of today.

Regarding the accusation that I have perhaps been too one-sided in my presentation of what seems to me the fundamental meaningful fact, that the middle-class thinking methods will be conquered by the labour force, particularly by the leaders of the working class, this declaration which I have done and which I have drawn from single instances has made it clear from one side, really more accurate through the study of the workers' psyche and the entire modern labour movement.

I would like to add an example which I would like to draw your attention to. A Russian author who I know personally has recently pointed out to me in an unusual way how a philosophy adhered to by younger people in Zurich has played a big role: the Avenarius philosophy which for their part has certainly grown out of the middle-class substrate. I can hardly imagine that Avenarius considered how his philosophy would play such a role in the Russian labour movement as it is playing today. As far as I know it is strongly represented, right in Zurich, by Adler who translated the natural scientific derived philosophical conviction of Mach. Both these philosophic directions are to some extent the official philosophies of Bolshevism, of the most radical socialism. The Russian author Berdjajev said in a lecture—it is contained in the translation of a very interesting book about “Russia's political soul”—in this lecture Berdjajev has in a very clear manner worked out the political soul.

So you can give a multitude of examples; I could give you numerous examples which are similar to those which I took from the address of the deceased Rosa Luxemburg, which would prove to you that the last important heirloom, deeply interwoven with the workers movement and the middle-class life, is the scientifically orientated method of thinking. The possibility to make spiritual life into an ideology is of middle-class origin. The middle-class, if such a categorization may be made, firstly took scientifically orientated methods of thinking in the region of natural knowledge, and made it into an ideology. They did not transfer it within their class over on to scientifically orientated thinking. This latter consequence only then attracted the proletarian thinking. Certainly, proletarian thinking also drew other consequences but these consequences were drawn out of the basis which today is clearly recognisable as rooted within the middle-class' scientific method of imagination, which now created something further. The importance of this should not be misunderstood.

That which dwelled within the totality, which has developed a deep interest for the participation of the modern worker psyche in the modern labour movement, waited, I want to say, with a certain concern on the one side, but also with a certain inner satisfaction on the other side for the moment when it would appear within the modern socialist movement. What now lies in the subconscious will one day be noticed, brought into awareness and it will be said: ‘Aha, this we had in our soul's higher thinking’—if I might use this expression—‘in our soul's higher thinking, and it must come to the fore. We have the desire for our human dignity to be scientifically orientated; this is what the middle-class line of inheritance of science has now made possible. We must look for a spiritual life elsewhere.’

I believe in any case that when this moment arrives, when the entire, full longing surfaces out of a specific side of modern people only, namely the proletarian people—if it has not come into full expression in modern times—when this longing in the modern Proletariat has reached its complete education of the scientific way of thinking in their world view, with the power of old religions, when this has happened that it no longer depends on them being goods, drawn as the consequence out of the middle-class thinking methods, then one will be able to argue that the fruitful organization of social will has arrived.

To mere socialism and in its relation to what the previous honourable speaker offered, regarding the philosophy of Bergson, I believe one should not make such dogmatic statements. Understandably I don't want to discuss such philosophic questions today. The previous speaker said that Bergson was a typical representative of the bourgeois thinking methods. If this is so then socialism would have developed out of Bergson's philosophy, derived directly out of bourgeois foundations! Today one can for instance refer to Bergson's philosophy as containing many “Schopenhauer-isms” and that Bergson was much more influenced by Schopenhauer than any of you can imagine.

Now, should one want to discuss such a thing in detail, then one has to be able to argue extensively. I can't do this today but I only mention this to you because there are within the proletarian world sensitive thinkers, for instance, Mehring, Franz Mehring, who is really in many ways similar to Bergson; he characterised Schopenhauer as the representative of the most bourgeois philistinism in philosophy!

One can have different views about these things and I don't believe one should be dogmatic about it. One can have the view that Bergson is an advanced philosopher who has irrational elements within his philosophy. However, one could ask what an irrational element has to do with the social question. A Proletarian can be just as irrational as a middle-class person. I don't quite understand what this whole irrational element has to do with it. Here one already has to draw a dogmatic precondition: Bergson is the absolute example of a modern philosopher; if the Proletarians really want to think, they must become Bergsonians, not so? This involves the whole issue.

Undoubtedly there are tendencies which appear in the most varied areas of life, tendencies which focus themselves in the direction I have characterised. It would really be sad to order human life, if it is always going so straight, to go over, I would say, and always evolve it in the opposite direction from the straight one! Not so, this can't of course be the case. I would even say in the area of the judiciary, certain things are fuelled by quite psychologically orientated people. Such innumerable examples can of course be cited but it is also a secondary derivation if one doesn't really validate it but merely offers a favourite opinion. Certainly one may sympathise with things which have been said about impulses that have principles according to historic periods; but without going into the latter further—if one wants to go into all these things I will have to keep you here for a very long time—so without further examination into references I want to say the following: very many people are inwardly obstinate when one mentions threefoldness, which I spoke about today. They say three different branches which are directed and guided by different principles are not possible.

However, I haven't spoken about three different members which are directed by three different principles, but about a threefold social organism! Just consider that this threefold social organism in our time must gradually find its whole way of thinking in a corresponding way, like for instance the ancient subdivisions which you find with Plato and which were then justified. Someone once said to me after my lecture: “So we have once again a reference to Plato: the nutritionists/guardians, the fighters/auxiliaries and the producers/labourers/educational state.” Actually, what I have said is the opposite of divisions into nutrition, defence and educational states because people are not divided into classes but divisions are sought for in the social organism. We human beings will simply not be divided up! It can well be that the same person who is active in the spiritual member, is active in the judicial and even the economic member. The human being is as a result emancipated from such one-sidedness in some or other member of the social organism. It is therefore not important that people should be divided into such independent classes when a healthy social organism is developed, but that the social organism orders itself according to its own laws. That is the radical difference. Earlier, people were divided. Now, according to the way of thinking relevant to our time, the social organism will be divided by itself so that people can look at their life situation according to their needs, their relationships and abilities and how to be active in one or the other division. For instance, it will be quite possible that in future an economically active person may at the same time be a deputy in the field of the purely political state. He will then obviously make his economic interests effective in a different way as he would in relation to the field of the constitutional state. The three divisions provide the demarcation of their territories. Everything doesn't get confused and allow them to get mixed up.

It is better if the things are separated. There are of course the same human systems which are differentiated into the one or the other branch. Just as in the natural human organisation—above all I don't want to play the game of analogy but still need to mention this—there are three centralized parts: the nerve-sense system, lung-breathing system and the digestive system, there are three members in the social organism. This is something which doesn't yet belong to ordinary thinking habits, which I believe however, will be able to find its way into thinking habits and that people would not take it less thoroughly, I think, than when they only grapple with their own favourite opinion.

Dr Roman Boos: May I be permitted to refer to a question addressed to the speaker in relation to the field of criminal law? Now, when there was talk about the freedom of judges, was there also a breach against the statement that no punishment without law will be made—it seems to me this is what is meant, that criminal law as such should not be given out of free spiritual life but out of the political member, that the question possibly contains a misunderstanding with Dr Weiβ who stated that an offence is made against the principle that no punishment could be given if no specific law has not been broken. May I ask you to say more about this?

Dr Steiner: Isn't it true that in this question you obviously touch on the system of public law with the system of practical jurisdiction? What I stressed is the separating of practical judging. For this reason, I used the expression “judging,” expressly the practical judging from the general public legal life, which I thought should be central in healthy social organisms whose public political life should see to it, that a specific law will determine a procedure. That judging can't be done in the most arbitrary way is quite self-evident. However, I haven't considered such things which are abstract and in their abstraction, they are more or less obvious. Today I have also not spoken about the scope of the law but about the social organism and about the social will. Now I ask you with reference to this theme, to consider the following.

You see, I have nearly spent as much of my life in Austria as in Germany. I could get thoroughly acquainted with the Austrian life; you may believe me that it is not an impulsive assertion if I say that much of what has taken place in the so-called state recently is connected to events which during the (eighteen) seventies and eighties had resulted from deep incongruities. Don't forget that in such a state as Austria, in other fields it isn't as radically characterised, but is present in some or other form as well—particularly because in Austria the various language regions are mixed and overlap and you can for instance have the experience that a German, when he is by chance involved in some or other circuit court officiated by a Czech judge who can't speak German, is convicted by a Czech in a language he fails to understand. He doesn't know what he is convicted of and what has happened to him; all he notices is that he is led away. Just so is the reverse case when a German judge who can't speak Czech, judges a Czech who can't understand German. What I am indicating is the individual arrangement, the free formation of relationships of the judgement to the judge.

So, a state like Austria could expect great success from this. Thus, this impulse resulted in always, over the next maybe five or ten years—relationships shifted continuously—for the convicted being able to choose their judges freely.

(Gap in stenographic record)

This is not simply an object of the spiritual life, but it is foremost an object in the life of the judicial state; in that only one law is focused on, which had originated from a deed and secondly became a law of the state, already concerned with its competence; in each case it will obviously show the concerned result.

However, another question is this: when you look at things more closely you will see that all the solutions to these cases are very consequential. Today I could only give you the initial conditions; I need not talk the entire night but need to continue tomorrow again.

Anthroposophically orientated spiritual science, which I had occasion to speak of here last week and this week, is pretty well none of the things which people who do not know it believe it to be. This may already have been apparent from the two previous lectures. Above all you will hear people who have only superficially considered this spiritual scientific approach say that the results, or let us say, for the moment, the results that have been referred to, of this approach have to be completely ignored in the light of present-day natural scientific insights.

You may also hear it said that in the light of the most significant, major and crucial issues in our present time—all of them more or less in the social sphere—something said to have been brought down from the spiritual world, said to be the result of supersensible insight, proves impractical and without significance. Finally there are a third group of people who will keep stressing that this spiritual science serves to draw people away from genuine, well-founded religious responses and feelings, that it contributes to the lack of religion in our time, and that it does in fact present considerable dangers in this respect.

Today I want to speak mainly about these three misconceptions concerning anthroposophically orientated spiritual science. The day after tomorrow I’ll then attempt to present a picture of historical development in more recent times from the point of view of this supersensible science.

To enter more deeply into the whole configuration of people’s thinking in our time, we simply must look at everything which in the course of the last three or four centuries, and especially the 19th century, has given natural scientific thinking the radical significance of which I have spoken sufficiently, I think, in the earlier lectures. We need to look at this origin of natural-scientific thinking because people think in this way not only in the natural sciences. All over the world any question is—quite justifiably—considered in some way in the light of natural science. So we may indeed say that in so far as we see that the historical development of recent times has in a wholly elementary way given people’s inner life a natural-scientific orientation, this orientation has its justification. On the other hand we may also say that spiritual science would immediately give itself bad marks if it were to enter into any kind of conflict with the natural-scientific thinking of recent times. It does not get into conflict, however; quite the contrary—natural-scientific thinking and hence the whole orientation of present-day thinking, in every aspect of life, will only gain a solid foundation if those taking the natural-scientific approach are prepared to base themselves on spiritual science, making it their foundation.

Wanting to consider this question, initially I would say in a negative way, we have to take a bit of a look at how not modern natural science, but the specific way of modern thinking in natural science has arisen. And we have to say that anyone who considers history not in an outer, superficial way but by asking himself: How did the most profound abilities humanity has, also in the soul, develop through the ages? Just as an individual person develops and we cannot say that he is inwardly the same at 30, 40 or 50—how did humanity develop its ideas, its whole way of thinking, until they finally came to the ideas that tend to be dominant at the present time? Studying the evolution of the human mind without prejudice, one will find that in earlier times, and we may say until the 17th century, this humanity had different ideas on the inner life of man, on the divine principle in the world, and on nature. Going into this development more deeply we will also find confirmation in outer ways. Go back to earlier times and you’ll never find people looking at the outer world perceived through the senses, the natural world outside, and the ‘nature of the human soul’ as they called it, as separate from each other. Even in the 16th and on into the 17th century, writings on the natural order of things would always also include what people had to say about the nature of the human soul at the time. Indeed, in those days they had not only the teachings of theology that came through revelation but also a theologia naturalist¹⁰⁷ a theology that wanted to derive its teachings, its view of life, from the nature of the human soul.

This is an outward sign of a significant fact. In earlier times, before the scientific thinking of more recent times arose, people had the ideas which at one and the same time could give a satisfactory explanation of the natural world and also say something about the inner life of human beings. Concepts of soul and spirit were not as separate then from those of nature and world as has been the case from the 17th and 18th centuries onwards, when modern scientific thinking came fully into its own. And those different concepts—this is the important point—were not established in an arbitrary way in those days and changed at will. The fact that concepts changed has to do with human powers of evolution that are a necessity in the course of that evolution as is the change in body and soul constitution in the process of individual human development as we grow older, moving on from childhood to old age.

The situation is that today we have arrived at concepts, through natural science, that will no longer serve if we want to use them directly to explain the life of the human psyche. This we have seen last week. Someone who is able to think in terms of modern science, doing so in a straight and honest way, accepting the inevitable consequences, must ask himself: If we gain insight into nature, what significance does this have for the evolution of modern humanity?

A satisfactory answer to this question can only be found if one is able to investigate natural science and establish its essential nature. If you base yourself from the beginning on the belief that natural science is all and everything when it comes to explaining the world, you will not find a satisfactory answer to this question. You need to be able to ask yourself: How does natural science relate to the whole of human evolution? Only this will give a clear idea of what natural science is able to achieve.

We need to be able, as it were, to study natural science itself in a natural scientific way. And here we may well point out that significantly, even great minds who considered the matter have come to the conclusion that natural science has natural limits, as it were, limits of which we spoke in the first lecture. Thoughtful people of our present age do feel that when they try to gain an overview of what natural science registers in its different fields, they have to say to themselves: With all these ideas, all the concepts which natural science provides on the basis of the strict methods of investigation we have, we do not really get to the natural need for insight that we have in our souls. They feel, in a way, that natural science exists and cannot be other than it is—leaving aside errors and exceptions, of course—but that exactly when it meets its ideal it cannot satisfy the most profound need for insight that human beings have with regard to the world of nature.

Perhaps I may put their feelings in the following paradoxical way. People are agreed—developments have gone that way in more recent times—that our ancestors were at a childlike level of knowledge until the more recent natural science brought a change. The ancients developed ideas out of a soul quality that was more or less given to fantasy. They had ideas in which they assumed all kinds of spiritual elements in the natural world, and they also developed their concepts in accord with this. It has been said that they looked for the forces that lay behind natural phenomena. But the ideas of the ancients were childlike, so that they did not find forces but only spectres of nature. And people who are proud of the achievements of modern science were to some extent arrogant when they looked back to those earlier thinkers, people of an earlier time on earth who sought to discover what lay behind the visible world of nature. And instead of the actual forces of nature, which are at last being discovered today, those ancients were looking for all kinds of spectres, spirits that had personal qualities and the like and were behind the phenomena of nature, spirits of which in the age of natural science one could only think that they have absolutely nothing to do with the natural order but arose from a power in the human soul that was unable to penetrate to the reality of nature, and therefore developed all kinds of ideas about the natural world.

Until quite recently this was a dogma which everyone thinking in terms of natural science would consider quite natural. Today, however, some individuals, whose views are certainly worth noting, are coming to realize: If we take a real look at our concepts of nature, not given to the prejudiced idea that we are able to grasp the essential nature of the natural world with those concepts of nature, but taking these concepts of nature as they are and waiting to see how they relate to what we really experience with regard to nature when we bring the whole human being into play and not only the intellect and skills of experimentation, then these concepts of nature are like those ancient spectres when compared to unbiased insight. There are people without prejudice today who say: The ancients thought up spectres out of their inner state of soul; but we are not really doing anything different, especially if we are real natural scientists. For the ideas of nature we imagine we have in our heads are just as unreal in relation to nature as the old spectres which natural scientists believed to be unreal.

This insight has its justification. And you find the justification by asking: How does the human being gain insight into nature? Initially we are at most observing nature, having no insight. And as we observe nature what we see has a very different kind of life to it than the life of the image we are able to have in our scientific ideas. If we meet the world of nature with eyes and ears, as whole human beings, which also includes the thinking mind, and do not only think in natural laws or do experiments in laboratories; if we observe nature as it presents, and think through the observations we make, then we live with nature. And when we begin to investigate nature, we cannot take the life from nature with us. Being unable to take the life from nature with us because as living beings at one with nature we are only in immediate living experience in our observation, we really make nature poorer when we try to grasp it with natural science, sucking it in, as it were. And when we want to gain real natural scientific insight, we make nature into a spectre in doing so. This is simply a fact and can be observed just as anything else is observed.

It is important, however, to have the courage to admit that this is the case and that in gaining insight into nature we really come to a kind of view that takes the image gained of nature as a spectre. We come to put this truth to our souls, saying that insight into nature is therefore something that takes us into something ghostly. In the hither and thither of gaining scientific insight into nature the human being behaves in such a way that he moves away from nature, from the observation of nature, and nurtures a ghost of nature.

There has been someone in more recent human history who has said what I have just been saying in a less open and therefore also less paradoxical way, but who had a profound feeling for this. This was Goethe. He already knew how to approach nature in this way, a way that was in harmony with itself. He was misunderstood as a result and considered an amateur in the field of science. Even today, it takes a lot of effort—I am allowed to say this because I have been trying for decades to get people of our time to develop an understanding of Goethe in this direction—to understand Goethe’s way of looking at nature.

What way is this? This way, which will be developed more and more and which may indeed still have been amateurish or imperfect in Goethe’s case, needs to be developed further in a truly scientific way. It will then lead to genuine insight into nature in all spheres. What is it? It is that we can approach the gaining of insight, in so far it moves away from nature itself and is more reflective—I spoke of this last week, but from a different point of view—in such a way that we use this reflection not only to give nature opportunity to present the human mind with its ghostly nature. Goethe did not seek to establish natural laws. These are always abstractions, something dead compared to living nature. Goethe sought to find pure phenomena, or archetypal phenomena, as he called them. He wanted to use human thinking not as something that might provide explanations for nature, discovering laws such as the conservation of energy or of matter, which are entirely thought up. No, Goethe sought to use thought to bring phenomena together in such a way that nothing of the human being himself would speak any more through these natural phenomena but the phenomena would speak purely out of themselves.

If we now progress from the instinctive quality of Goethe’s thought to gaining insight in full conscious awareness, in a reflective way, where does this take us? We will then answer the question in a way which is only possible with perception that goes beyond the senses. We will ask: What is it, really, which we observe in the natural world when we use our senses? It is a spectre of the kind I mentioned, a making ghostly. It is, of course, already there in the natural world, for we suck it out of it. But what else is there in the world of nature, apart from this, when we are in lively interchange with it, using our eyes and ears, giving ourselves up directly to the impressions gained through the senses?

Someone who trains his power to form ideas on the one hand and his powers of will on the other to develop supersensible perceptiveness will reach a point where he says to himself: ‘The supersensible is actually therein anything the senses perceive in the natural world around us.’ It is merely that we leave the supersensible aside, and indeed have to leave it aside when we seek insight into the natural world. Why? Because we human beings, being organized in our physical bodies the way we are whilst here on earth between birth and death, have transformed our own spiritual and eternal aspect into a body that is perceptible to the senses. We are not human by virtue of dwelling in a house of the supersensible that lives in us but by virtue of having entered, through birth or conception, from a supersensible world into the sensual sphere. The supersensible element which before this lived in a purely spiritual sphere has changed into a sensual body that lives to the full as something sensual and on death returns to the supersensible, as I have shown in the previous lecture.

Being human and therefore organized for the senses, observation of nature has to move away from the supersensible in us when it becomes scientific insight into nature. A truly supersensible way of thinking will thus tell us the following here. We come to realize that when we have nature before us in all the rich variety of light and colours, in many shades, and all the other phenomena perceived through the senses, something supersensible is revealed that is not separated from what we perceive through the senses; it is a supersensible element within the sensual. Yet when we look at it as human beings and seek to explain, we can only take from nature what we human beings—being sensual creatures that belong to sensuality between birth and death and not to the supersensible that comes to revelation in the sensual—are able to digest. Being organized in that way, we make our science of nature into a mere image of the sensual because of our own sensual nature. This image of the sensual must be a spectre, for the world of nature that surrounds us also has the supersensible within it.

Someone who truly develops the ability to observe the supersensible—you will also find the way described in my Occult Science or Knowledge of the Higher Worlds (How to Know Higher Worlds)—will say to himself: Supersensible aspects exist for everything in the universe outside. And if we go beyond the spectre which we have to create for ourselves in the image we have of nature, we come not to dead atoms, nor to energy or matter, but to a supersensible, spiritual aspect. This can and must make it possible for us to find a way of gaining supersensible insight.

Someone who gains insight into the way human beings relate to nature around them will not look for dead atoms, nor molecules, nor for something that is super-sensibly sensual, but for the truly supersensible. Supersensible investigation does not provide material bases for the colours and sounds that surround us. Instead you find spiritual, supersensible entities that are present everywhere in the natural world. If the study of nature is taken in the right sense, which is when it purely seeks to consider phenomena inwardly, in the Goethean way, you do not have something dead with regard to the truths that lie beyond the phenomena, but something that is alive and spiritual. It is particularly if you investigate the natural world honestly and consistently, if rational thinking and experimentation skills do not lead you to think that you can discern something relating to nature, but if you know that you can do no other but let nature become phenomenon, letting it express itself, then you will know that with these phenomena, which Goethe called ‘archetypal phenomena’, you have the supersensible immediately before you. It will then not be necessary to use laws of energy and matter to explain things. Instead you will find it becomes necessary to explain things out of the spiritual aspect. Essentially this leads to a view that is genuinely objective and unbiased, I would say a natural scientific study of the process of gaining insight into nature itself.

How does the science of the spirit, which seeks supersensible insight of its own accord, relate to this? If you follow the way to supersensible perception which I characterized for you last week, you will say: When a person transforms his ability to form ideas and powers of will and truly becomes able to perceive the supersensible in the way we see colours with our eyes and hear sounds with our ears; when a person sees this supersensible element the way he normally sees the sensual sphere in life, this transition to supersensible vision is truly like an awakening in the inner experience of the soul. And the spiritual investigator does indeed go through this living experience. We may say that just as in ordinary life someone wakes from the life of sleep and dreams and realizes that during his sleep and in the life of dreams he lived merely in images, and then knows how to connect his will with outward reality, the person with spiritual perception who advances to supersensible investigation will awaken from the world in which we are in our ordinary waking state. He will have another world before him that relates to the everyday world of the senses the way this everyday world of the senses relates to the world of dream images. It is an awakening. This can come to life in the soul.

The phenomena we have all around us in the world then become images relating to the higher, supersensible world, just as someone thinking in a healthy way will take dream images to be images of what we have in the world of the senses. Let me give an example to indicate how the everyday world perceived through the senses changes into a world of images for someone with spiritual perception. These things just have to be rightly understood, not in some kind of mystic dream, nor in any kind of nebulous way. In ordinary natural science the way of looking at the human being is to attach equal value to the head, the trunk, the extremities—with the part that continues in an inward direction, I mean now, so that from the morphological point of view everything sexual also belongs to the extremities. From the usual point of view, these three parts of human nature are something absolute, I would say, something of equal value. From the spiritual point of view, the human being who is before us as a creature perceived through the senses becomes the image of his higher, supersensible nature, just as everyday experiences turn into images when we dream of them. And when we thus consider the human being in the light of his eternal supersensible nature, our understanding of the human being will also change.

Bringing image nature into our search for insight completely changes human perceptiveness. Head and—to take just these two parts of human nature—extremities nature are then no longer equal in value, for in the configuration of the head, if studied exactly, you see something which in it forms resembles the life in the spirit that preceded the individual’s entrance into the world of the senses. And in the nature of the extremities you see what is there already as potential—embryonic as yet, but it will develop—for what the individual will be in the future, above all when he goes through the gate of death to enter into the supersensible world. It may still sound strange today, but this is what will develop from Goethe’s theory of metamorphosis if it is taken up in a truly spiritual-scientific way.

Goethe considered the changing form of an individual plant, the changing form of an individual animal or human being to be like images of a basic configuration. In a comprehensive spiritual theory of metamorphosis, the head will be seen as a metamorphosis of the person’s extremities, but in such a way that the one refers to the past, the other to the future. The human being’s external configuration will then be the image of what he is in spirit. And everything then becomes image of the supersensible, just as a dream becomes image when we enter into sleep. The human being’s reality in the supersensible sphere becomes image of this supersensible whilst he is awake in the sensual sphere, just as the sensual becomes image when he falls asleep. This is an immediate finding made in the supersensible, something I may call an empirical finding.

Let us now compare what this supersensible perception gains out of itself concerning the nature of the world and indeed the human being when it seeks to penetrate the nature of the human being. The human being and the whole of nature becomes image and this needs to be related to a supersensible reality. This does not entirely agree with anything a thinking modern natural scientist finds in final conclusion. He finds that his natural phenomenon turns into a spectre, an image. Supersensible insight shows that everything we perceive in the sphere of the senses must turn into image and needs to be related to something that is supersensible. In short, nothing brings us as much to a harmonious concept of the world as the discoveries made not as a modern natural scientist adhering to dogma but as a thinking natural scientist, someone who is able to observe his natural science itself in a natural scientific way. His findings will agree with anything the spiritual scientist has to say about the natural world in so far as it is open to observation. This is something that must come for humanity.

People need to be in a position where they can truly see how the way to the supersensible and the way to the sensual which is penetrated with thought come together. This alone will give a total image of the world that makes us not merely possessors of a ghostly reflection of nature but lets us realize, lets us admit that using the ordinary way of explaining nature we had to create such a ghostly reflection, yet at the same time shows us how we can go beyond this image of nature and enter into the supersensible realm of the spirit. This is the way in which natural-scientific thinking will also have to go if it is to go beyond the sphere into which it has to take itself of necessity, especially when meeting its own ideal. Contradictions arise when we believe we have grasped nature in the study of it but have really only taken hold of something that will not allow us to look down on the old ‘spectres’, for it is but spectre itself, and the spiritual reality must be sought behind it.

Insight in the spirit, of the kind which is meant here, thus is not in opposition to natural science. Quite the contrary, it provides natural science with the element that it must find to understand itself; it provides something which unconsciously is the goal of every true natural scientist’s search; it provides the element which alone can give satisfaction, for natural scientific investigation must by its very nature inevitably lead to dissatisfaction, especially if done in the accepted way.

If people will gradually perceive the true nature of supersensible insight they will find that natural science of the more recent kind can only survive if they complement it with the science of the spirit. People working in the field must themselves desire to have supersensible insight. This alone will bring true insight into nature, that is, access to the supersensible realm.

I only wanted to mention this briefly. One could give many lectures and show that the very idea of natural science demands a science of the spirit if it is not to come to nothing, with misunderstanding arising about the findings made in natural science. I just wanted to show that natural scientists must themselves look for this science of the spirit. Great triumphs have been celebrated in natural science, and tremendous advances have been made on the human road to knowledge. But if natural science continues along the way it is going now, it will go beyond itself and take us to the spirit. Today the situation is that only people who are able to think scientifically themselves should take a critical attitude to natural science, not taking a negative stance from either ignorance or antipathy, but a positive one. If I may make a personal remark, which I am only doing because it is perhaps connected with the factual situation, it is this. Many people have accused me of publishing some works in which intense efforts were made to justify 19th-century natural science, so that they are wholly based on natural science—as far as this is possible when using the natural scientific way of thinking. However, I would not be entitled to say a single word to you today or to other audiences where I take the direction I have taken today if I could not also say that I knew how to be very positive, wholly in agreement in so far as agreement is justifiable, with natural science. I think you have to know natural science and appreciate its achievements before you are allowed to speak about it. All the talk about natural science by ‘mystics’ or theosophists who know nothing about it is wholly inappropriate.

This, I think, will suffice to refer briefly to the first misapprehension suffered by people who know nothing about anthroposophically orientated spiritual science but who talk about it.

The second misapprehension is that people consider anything that goes in the direction of supersensible insight to be impractical and of no use in everyday life. A negative view is taken of this especially in the present time because present-day people are truly, in the fullest sense of the word, compelled to throw themselves into practical life. Well, let us consider this from just one aspect, though it is an important one, and that is the view taken of human social life. Scientific and other views of this have in fact become slogans and major themes in more recent times. Essentially the things that have happened in this field are also wholly in accord with the natural-scientific way of thinking. In my view it is not helpful for the people who want to be sociologists, being such in the right sense of the word for our time and wanting to establish a science of sociology, to try more and more to adopt ideas and concepts from natural science, applying them to human social life. I would actually consider this to be a great deal less helpful because theories really have very little significance when it comes to practical life in the real sense, something which is particularly evident from the supersensible point of view.

Think of everything Lasalle was thinking of when he developed the approach which he then presented in his famous lecture on science and the workers.¹⁰⁸ His ideal was that human social life would need to be taken out of the instinctive sphere into a scientific approach, exactly through modern socialism. He believed that the proletariat needed to learn to think in scientific terms and that this would bring about a new age. We then saw how in Marxism, with its materialistic view of history, and with a thinking that was deliberately scientific, people tried to establish an approach on the basis of a theory that was to be taken up into human minds and would lead to social structures for the world. Well, people who today, when the last four years have swept across the world, are still unable to see that human minds will be little influenced by anything based on such theories, will no doubt come to see it in the decades which lie ahead. Theories really count for little when it comes to what we should really be considering here, and that is social community life, structuring it out of the human impulses in the most comprehensive sense possible. A great deal lies in these few words ‘structuring social relationships out of the human impulses.’

Again one might say a lot about the many attempts made to structure this social life in a way that would be worthy of humanity as it is now. I do, however, consider this less important. I would consider it much more important to consider that life has indeed taken on a structure, though this has led to the terrible world disaster we have seen evolve over the last four years. At least some of the causes that led to this terrible world disaster must be sought in the very real contradiction and opposition among the impulses into which human social life has driven itself in every part of the world.

People have rightly said that in earlier times—the very times when natural scientific thinking did not yet have the modern form I have been characterizing for you—life was corporate. They had trade and craft guilds, and a wide variety of ways that brought people together.

Then came the age of modern individualism with its ideal of human freedom. People felt they owed it to this ideal of freedom, to this impulse of individualism, to dissolve the old corporations. If you look at history you’ll find that they were gradually dissolved. You could see how economic life progressed, and how in recent times corporations have arisen again in life. I can’t and won’t go into detail, for otherwise one would have to show how step by step on the one hand corporate associations or unions such as consumer associations arose, and how people tried to cope with life partly by the old style of community life persisting or coming alive again. The old corporations have not returned, but new ones have arisen and are part of our social structure, including the trusts that have formed. I would attach much more value to this practical configuration of social life, as it has arisen, rather than to theories that people have developed on the subject.

However, the way it all came to be configured, even if we have to take account of a wide variety of interests coming into it, and other impulses in modern life, we nevertheless have to say that the modern corporation has evolved in many different spheres; something belonging to earlier times persists because it is still in accord with human instincts and will impulses. And the inmost impulse in the way people have configured the world—‘configured’ is the operative word here, for it is not what people thought about it but how they have configured the world, creating communities, relating person to person, though unconsciously so—has again been the natural scientific thinking of more recent times, but in a quite specific way.

Looking back with understanding on what brought people together in the past, when they lived in trade and craft guilds—I do not, of course, defend them, knowing that it was right to get rid of them—and how they lived in those communities, we see a considerable difference from the element which brings them together today. A most outstanding characteristic—everyone who knows about these things has to admit this—of the old communities was that people understood one another both within such communities and from community to community. Of course, everything always only goes to a certain point in the world; but the people understood one another. Masters and journeymen understood one another, for the master knew what lived in the journeyman’s soul. They had a positive attitude to each other. Why? Because the instincts and impulses of will from which those communities arose still had a spiritual and soul element in them, a spiritual and soul element that was connected with the bodily element.

The element which brought it about in earlier times that people were able to look not only at the natural world with the ideas which they then had but also at the soul, with ideas that lived instinctively, unconsciously in human beings and made the natural world and the inner life into one, also lived in the instincts and brought it about that people were close through the blood—son connected with father, daughter with mother, or as a member of a nation or a guild—if there was a blood connection or some other interest, this meant that people demanded community out of their instincts, yet those instincts had inborn impulses of spirit and soul in them.

Then came the thinking that goes with natural scientific culture. Our more recent times have not been configured in their actual structure where human beings are concerned by anything but exactly the thinking that goes with natural science. It is because people came to think about nature in a way where they presented the phenomena in such a way, even if they did not admit to this, that with their ghostly content they no longer had anything to do with the human being. Because of this, the human being stands on his own. Earlier peoples were connected with the natural world. Lightning would flash out there, and thunder roll, with rain coming from the clouds. People of old would see a force of nature reflected in this. They would be aware of one drive or another within themselves and instinctively see such drives reflecting also the same as such a force of nature. They would act out of nature, as it were, for their perception of nature was such that they had not yet set themselves apart from it.

In the last few centuries, the human being was set apart from nature by the very fact of progressing to the pure natural phenomena. Perception of nature will finds its proper mission in the progress of human evolution when it does not provide absolute knowledge—which is today’s superstition, the natural-scientific superstition—but makes human beings free. We will only understand the mission which natural science has in the progress of human evolution when we see that it is nature’s task to teach us freedom.

In the more recent natural science, the human being has to set the natural phenomena apart, making himself remote from nature, and he therefore stands on his own as an individual. Before coming to the supersensible world by taking the supersensible way to which I have been referring so that he would relate to the world again—super-sensibly now, as he had done in a natural way in earlier times—before the human being entered on the road which he will have to take for the future, he was, as it were, poised wholly on the point of his individual person. Natural science placed him on the needle point of his individual nature. Natural science has determined the state of the human soul. It had taken up his instincts. Because of this modern people relate to one another not like the people of earlier times, through blood or guild, but as individuals, as persons. They have to find their associations and social communities in freedom. Initially they thus found them only from instinct, but their instincts in this direction were contradictory, because the time for instincts had passed. On the one hand people can no longer think in terms of instincts but must think consciously, letting natural science educate them in this. On the other hand people did not yet have the opportunity to make themselves part of the world again through supersensible perception. They thus became part of a new world, which they thought about, and related to the old world in a way in which they no longer thought about it. They transplanted the old instincts into a world which thanks to modern natural-scientific thinking was no longer present in their minds. It was because of this that the schism and contradiction arose in modern social life which we perceive if we see what lives at a deeper level of the soul for the humanity of more recent times.

Socialism, distinctly an ideal of humanity, was established with inadequate means. Why? Insight into nature does not place human beings in the world but sets them apart, with awareness of being an individual person growing all the time. Because of this, they can only form communities out of selfish instincts. Their thinking is different from anything created by instinct in communities. Disharmony results, with the consequence that a disharmonious social order must arise if you only have natural science and apply only natural-scientific concepts to the structuring of social life. A contradiction must arise, a living inner objection, and this will continue until humanity finally decides to say: In modern life in particular people inevitably create disharmony in establishing social order unless they bring supersensible insight into social community life, supersensible sentience and purpose. For as long as we do not relate person to person in such a way that we see in the other individual the image, the phenomenon, of the immortal human being, for as long as we do not see in every individual with whom we live in a social context an individual who does reflect a supersensible reality, for as long as we are not willing to add to the knowledge natural science can provide for sociology and social impulses, the insights gained from spiritual insight, modern social thinking, and above all modern social structures, with concepts applied in practice, will result in a life that must dissolve itself and lead to strife and disharmony.

Anyone who understands this inner connection will know how much the situation I have just outlined has influenced events in the last four years. I would not say that it was the only cause, but it did play quite a considerable, and indeed a very major role. Anyone who wants and seeks socialism, honestly so, must guide humanity to concepts that are not merely natural-scientific, for the element that lives and has its being in life from person to person is different from anything that can be found with the natural-scientific approach.

This is apparent in that there is a specific ideal in natural science, an ideal that is indeed justifiable. It is to do more and more experiments, with less and less description and observation. What is an experiment? Initially it is something made up by the rational mind, which actually takes us away from nature and—as I have shown in last week’s lecture—into the nothingness of person. Anything we show experimentally essentially only appears to have to do with the life of nature. In reality it has to do with the element in nature that is dying. This is evident if we try and apply anything gained in the experimental way of thinking to the configuration of social life. Anyone who wants to bring purely natural-scientific concepts, utterly honest, straight and indeed ideal natural-scientific concepts, into social life, brings something into life that does not lead to ascent, to life, but to social death. If humanity is not prepared to bring supersensible elements as well as natural-scientific knowledge to social life it will be found that with all social purpose, with all socialism, the structures created would bring disorder and decline.

A socialism that directs people away from the supersensible will create social structures of destruction, social structures that direct us elsewhere. At most people will use old things and bring out-of-date ideas to realization. For what has happened until now, not through social theories but through practical socialism? Has socialism led to a radical configuring of the world? Then people would not have accepted the old forms, which is what they have in fact been doing until now. Socialism in those old forms is rather like someone who disapproves of the crinoline, yet does not try and get beyond it but puts padding into it instead. And so we see people keeping the old forms, padding them out, in the social thinking of more recent times. For what do most of the leaders of our more recent socialism want? To gain power where others gained power, taking over power rather than giving it a new form.

I would say that this, too, is experimental proof, only in another aspect, that we can only speak of socialism if we also have the will to take humanity to the realm of the supersensible, to the impulses that we must give to modern humanity if they are to get out of the tendency to create the disasters to which purely natural-scientific impulses have taken them. In social life in particular, those impulses must be supersensible ones.

Spiritual science truly is not impractical in this field. For the time being one can only express regret that there are many people who deem themselves really practical, terribly practical, feel really pleased about their own life practice, and look down on the impractical people who want to introduce something to the world out of ideas, out of the spirit. Well, we know this element of middle-class thinking which today considers itself to be great in practical life and brutally rejects anything that might come from the spirit. This life practice will reduce itself to absurdity, to impossibility. For to be truly practical, we have to go for the whole of reality, not half or a quarter of it. If you have a horseshoe magnet and someone comes and says: ‘You can use it to attract other iron; it’s a magnet’ and you then say: ‘Oh no, the shape shows me it’s a horseshoe for shoeing a horse’, you are like someone who wants to organize social life only according to concepts that leave aside anything not perceptible to the senses. Someone who knows that for a true life practice you need the whole of reality and that includes the supersensible, is like someone who does not misuse a horseshoe magnet to shoe a horse but uses it as a magnet. This, then, is the second misapprehension of which I wanted to speak today, again just referring to it briefly.

The third concerns something that is entirely part of the inner life, having to do with the element which in many respects must be most sacred to people—religious life.

Very many people in that field speak ill of anthroposophically orientated spiritual science, among them above all official representatives, and also non-official representatives, of one positive religious confession or another, people who, of course, do not indulge in the authority principle, as people put it politely today. They speak ill of this spiritual science as something that would take people into irreligiosity, giving them apparent insight into the spirit rather than the element that will directly show the way by which they can come into the supersensible, religious sphere on the basis of their own essential nature. It would be tempting, but time is short and there are also other things to be considered, so I won’t talk about any particular religious confession but about inner religious feeling as such.

If we consider the true nature of gaining insight in the spirit as it is meant here, we will, I believe, very soon find that just as it is not impractical nor antisocial nor unscientific, so, too, it is not irreligious and not in the least liable to deflect anyone from profoundly religious feeling. Considering what has been said so far, we have to ask what the essence is of the newer form of supersensible insight which we seek to find through anthroposophy.

The essence is that the way that leads to supersensible investigation must ultimately reach an impersonal sphere. Just consider how radical I had to be last week in saying that the things human beings see by way of spirit lie before birth or after death, and that the essence of life between birth and death is that the human being has assumed material form. We may say that spiritual science, which through supersensible insight takes us to the truly immortal aspect, the indisputably immortal aspect of the human soul, can actually be in agreement with materialism in this area. In spiritual science we know that the material human being is a metamorphosis, a transformation of the spiritual, and that the spiritual gains from going down into the material abyss where it can develop freedom by the very fact of gaining insight into nature.

It is not a precondition that in doing their investigations human beings must move from the personal, from immediate experience here in the body, to the impersonal. Supersensible insight presupposes an inner state of mind that progressively enters into the impersonal in spirit, just as in earlier times human beings who did not yet have insight into nature were physically—physically in general terms—in the supersensible sphere.

We must make spiritual investigations in an impersonal way if we want the light of the spirit to shine into matter and substance. However, the more we make this supersensible way of investigation our own and the further we go with this method of investigation which demands an impersonal approach, the more do we feel something flowing out as if from the other pole of the human being, the will pole, and this is an immediate religious response. This immediate inner response also seeks to go towards the supersensible, but in such a way that our individual nature is not lost and that everything directly connected with our individual nature between birth and death can unite with the supersensible element.

If we know the right way of going into the supersensible through science, then an inner power, which makes itself known above all as a need to venerate the spiritual, points the way for us to the religious element. The true evolution on the way into the spiritual world through supersensible perception is that we feel driven more and more to deepen our religious life and actually come to understand what the religious life means to us. The science of the spirit inevitably takes us from the personal to the impersonal so that the light of the spirit may once again shine into the sensual world.

Religious life will thus inevitably be deepened if we approach the spirit in this way, for it is a deep-down part of our human nature that we not merely behold the spiritual as it shines out, full of wisdom, but venerate it. This veneration must come from our individual, personal nature, however. Anything seen in the spirit cannot enter into this region of human experience as it is but has to go through renewal, metamorphosis; it needs to change, to be transformed into something personal. When the human being is on the one side receiving the light of the spirit, he must go and venerate this spiritual principle and search for the place where he can find religious life, religious deepening.

On the other side, the side of representatives of religious life, it will also be necessary to see things in the right light. In early times it was said by people who professed themselves religious, and it is still being said to this day, that the old pagan approach had consisted in wanting to find the way to the divine through mere wisdom. Again and again we may, however, repeat, with full justification that wisdom does not reveal the divine in the world—not the divine, but certainly the supersensible element in which human beings have their immortality. The divine cannot, however, be recognized in its divine nature, for it needs to meet with an inner response of veneration. The spiritual must first find its way to the personal, a way to where the human being is an individual person. There he either comes to serve Jehovah by taking the route of studying nature—so that he perceives the spirit which from generation to generation is active as a supersensible principle in the blood—or he looks to the spirit which relates to his soul as the redeemer, and that is Christ Jesus ... [record of the lecture incomplete at this point].

Human beings must find the way to the sensual world, where they are in their individual nature. On the other hand they need the kind of understanding that not only says that wisdom will not reveal the divine because this needs veneration, but that the supersensible cannot be perceived out of wisdom alone, nor from religion alone. Religion must be complemented with vision of the supersensible, otherwise it will only appear to be adequate in a natural-scientific age, at the same time persisting with old views and turning against new ones. Religion, taken in the right way, is not threatened by the emergence of new truths, including those that are supersensible.

Many other misapprehensions exist. If religious people believe that supersensible perception could in some way be harmful, going against their own, justifiable endeavours, anyone who believes this is not taking account of the progressive evolution of humanity. Being part of modern evolution, where on the one hand we do not have any opportunity for finding the right kind of social life unless the way to the supersensible is taken, have we not also seen how this very natural-scientific thinking has made people abandon religion, so that taking up the natural-scientific approach made the individual go towards irreligiosity? [Part of lecture not taken down.] Present-day spiritual science addresses human nature more powerfully so that religious veneration may develop, unless people want to turn away from this, like some who are superficial in their natural science. Supersensible life must address the soul more strongly today, for the soul has gained greater conscious awareness and individuality. The power of religious life needs to be stronger if it wants to develop in its old form.

Another misapprehension in this particular field is that people think the science of the spirit, as it is meant here, would serve to create a sect or establish a religion. In the science of the spirit, one sees human evolution far too clearly for this. One knows that effective principles come into play consecutively in human evolution just as they do in the life of the individual. People cannot have the same inner attitudes when they are 40 as they had when they were 20. In the same way, humanity cannot have the same inner attitude in the 20th century as in earlier centuries and millennia.

In spiritual science one always considers reality and does not judge it by thought-up concepts. Because of this, one does not talk the way some people do today who want to establish a religion of the future in a scientific way; instead one knows that the time for creating religions has passed; it came to an end exactly when Christianity arose. The inner attitude in which humanity could be taken hold of by a religious inner experience which then had to be propagated was closely bound up with the state of the world as it was in earlier times. Today we, as humanity, have entered into an inner attitude that truly had to be developed by means of natural science, and in which one also seeks to penetrate into the supersensible sphere, using the approach of natural science, and in gaining this supersensible knowledge seeks to gain ever greater clarity concerning the principle which in religious ages came to revelation in a religious way, but can now no longer found religions itself. A true science of the spirit will help us to gain increasing insight into what was given to humanity by way of religion; it will also free this religious element from the bonds created by people who in their desire for power and other things took it in the wrong direction. I can only refer to this briefly, for it would take us too far to go into detail here.

With these brief references I merely wanted to indicate that spiritual science by its very nature can neither make people irreligious, nor can it found any kind of new religion or the like. All these things come up because people are not fully considering what the science of the spirit which is meant here is really intended for, yet people will insist on their views. We may thus also say that the attacks that are currently raining down on this anthroposophically orientated spiritual science, coming also from representatives of religious confessions, are due to misapprehensions and misinterpretations, which sometimes are quite deliberate. People who are serious about the religious life of humanity would have least reason to cast aspersions on the science of the spirit. For this will take humanity back to true religiosity, whereas the age of natural science on its own and merely positive religion that seeks to preserve traditions must inevitably take humanity away from true religion. Positive religion comes from a time when human beings related differently to the world. But people will not let themselves be pushed back, just as a 40-year-old cannot be 20 again.

A religious confession that resists supersensible insight of the recent kind will thus dig its own grave, however great the desire to consolidate by means of external power. Again and again I have to remind you, as I also did here in Zurich last year, that the Roman Catholic priest who gave his inaugural lecture as rector of a university on the subject of Galileo,¹⁰⁹ drawing attention to the fact that the Roman Catholic Church, his own Church, went against Galileo in the past, continuing to do so until 1822,¹¹⁰ was a much better representative of theology and religion. This was Professor Muellner, Roman Catholic theologian and philosopher. Beginning his rectorate at Vienna University, he had to stress that true religiosity, and indeed also true Roman Catholicism, should not go against advances in human knowledge, since every further advance in human knowledge only showed the marvels of the divine in the world in an even more magnificent and glorious light. That is a truly religious and also truly Christian way of thinking.

Just as some who have a true feeling for the religious element do not need to feel that external natural-scientific knowledge goes against this, so there is no need for them to feel this about insight into spheres beyond that of the senses, which actually and inevitably must take human beings straight back to religiosity, though this would be an independent religiosity that is anchored in the individual nature of a person. It would be reasonable to say, therefore, that one should take a very good look exactly at the attacks made on anthroposophical spiritual science from this direction; for they really and truly do not come from where people pretend they come from. They arise from the fear and from lack of interest which I have characterized as a general human attitude to the science of the spirit in the first of these lectures. One only has to read aright what is said in this respect. However, it will not be possible to get the people who write these things to change their minds, and we should not be so naive as to think that one can make them change their minds. Refutation would not help at all. What is more, it will be equally impossible to get the people for whom these things are usually written to see how wrong they are. Yet the progress of human evolution will not be held up for people who have an honest feeling for the things that the powers behind developments in more recent times have brought to human souls.

In today’s lecture—the day after tomorrow I will round it off with another, again very positive look at recent history considered in the light of spiritual science, which will take us directly into human life today and to the most burning questions we have today—I believe I have shown that the search for supersensible insight, which is the endeavour in the science of the spirit, is neither inimical to natural science nor impractical in social terms, let alone a danger to religious life. On the contrary, I believe I have shown that for those who are able to see clearly the powers which our present time must bring to the human soul, and especially the powers which the future will bring, will understand that spiritual-scientific knowledge is important for three burning questions of our time and the immediate future.

For centuries, and especially also today and even more so in future, science has been and will be at the heart of human endeavour. The question will arise as to what science can do for the extreme human need to find the supersensible world. The answer can only be given by a science that does not leave spiritual science aside.

Another burning question of today and the immediate future will be: How do we find the impulses that can configure our social life? The answer will have to be: Only insights gained through the science of the spirit go through the metamorphosis when they enter into human life that will enable them to lead to an immediately conscious social life from person to person and hence also to the social configuration of the human race around the globe.

And the third burning question will be: How can the inmost need, the need in the human soul to revere the divine in an age that through science has taken us to individual and personal awareness, be met by means of greater powers than those which people have been able to have in earlier times? Again the answer must be: This needs the supersensible vision which when it comes to the human individual in a living way, metamorphoses into the individual human nature, becoming personal within it. Such powers can only come from the supersensible through the science of the spirit, through supersensible perception that gives the knowledge and vision which modern religiosity needs. This should truly meet the deepest needs of the soul, indeed the very depths of soul for human beings in our present time and in the future.

• 107. Theologia naturalis, also called ‘natural theology’—understanding God on the basis of the natural world, the existence and nature of this world and of the human being; an important element in Greek philosophy, with Thomas Aquinas and in Enlightenment.
• 108. Lasalle, Ferdinand (1825–1864). Die Wissenschaft und die Arbeiter. Eine Verteidigungsrede vor dem Berliner Kriminalgericht gegen die Anklage, die besitzlosen Klassen zum Hass und zur Verachtung gegen die Besitzenden öffentlich aufgereizt zu haben. (Speech in defence made at the Berlin Criminal Law Court to counter the accusation of having publicly incited the unpropertied classes against property-owning people). Zurich 1863.
• 109. Laurenz Müllner, Die Bedeutung Galileis für die Philosophie, Inaugurationsrede gehalten am 8. November 1894 an der k. k. Universität Wien, Wien 1894. Reprinted in Anthroposophie, Zeitschrift für freies Geistesleben, vereinigt mit der Monatsschrift Die Drei, 16. Jg., 1. Buch, Okt.-Dez. 1933, S. 29-57; dort auch eine kleine Zusammenstellung ‘Rudolf Steiner über Laurenz Muellner’ (S. 25-28) und eine Photographic Muellners.
• 110. See note 38.

In this last lecture I want to deal with a particular question which connects up with the lecture in which I discussed Schiller's influence on the present. The problem of aesthetics in Germany comes in here because Schiller stands in close relationship to the establishment of aesthetics as a science—the science of the beautiful.

We have seen what Schiller's attitude was to the beautiful at different periods of his life. Schiller saw in the beautiful something which had a peculiar cultural value. Now a science of aesthetics such as we know today is only 150 years old. It is true that Aristotle had written on Poetics, but for centuries these views remained stationary. We know that even Lessing harked back to Aristotle. No real advance was made until the Eighteenth Century when Baumgarten grew up in the Wolffian philosophy and wrote a book on the beautiful called Aesthetica in 1750. He distinguishes the beautiful from the true in that, as he says, the true contains a clear idea, while the beautiful exists in unclear and confused ideas. It was only a few years before Schiller's time that ideas like this could occur.

We have a sort of aesthetics even in Kant's Critique of Judgment, but in him we have nothing but theory; he never had a living idea of what beauty is, and never got three miles away from his birthplace at Königsberg, and never saw any important work of art; and so could only write from the standpoint of abstract philosophy. Schiller, in his Aesthetic Letters, was the first to grasp the problem in any living way.

What was the position at the time? Goethe looked longingly to Greece, and Winckelmann also cast a regretful glance back at the age when men copied the divine in their art. Schiller felt the same regretful longing during his second period, as we can see from his Götter Griechenlands. Again, in Greek drama, what is it but a religious feeling that lies at the back of it. It is based on the mystery, the secret of God who becomes man, who suffers as man, dies and rises again. What happened in the soul was regarded as a purification; and even through the Poetic of Aristotle there still passes a faint breath of it. The tragic was to consist in the “production of an action which aroused pity and fear and aimed at the purification of these feelings.” It was difficult to understand what was meant by that; and Lessing meditated a good deal about it. In the Nineteenth Century a vast literature grew up around the problem, and whole libraries could be filled with books dealing with Katharsis. The idea was not understood because men did not understand from what it had grown up.

In Aeschylus we can still see something of this “drama of the God.” In the middle of the action stood Dionysos as the great dramatic figure, and the chorus round about him accompanied the action. This is how Edouard Schuré has recreated for us the mystery drama. The dramatic cult-action had the definite object of leading man to a higher level of existence. It was seen that man is gripped by passions, that his lower life makes him kin to them; but he can rise above them if the higher that lives in him is purified; he can raise himself by looking at the divine pattern. This type of representation was meant to bring man more easily to ennoble himself than could be achieved by teaching. As Schopenhauer said, it is easy enough to preach morality but very hard to establish it. It was only at a later age of humanity that Socrates' view grew up that virtue is teachable. But virtue is something that lives in man and is natural to him, as eating and drinking are; he can be led to it, if the divine is awoken within him, by the picture of the suffering god. This purification by the divine pattern was called Katharsis. Pity and fear were to be called forth; ordinary sympathy which is connected with the personal was to be raised to the great impersonal sympathy when the god was seen suffering for mankind. Then the dramatic action was humanised, and in the Middle Ages we can see how morality separated off and appeared independently. Thus in Christianity there was produced partially what lived incarnate in the Mysteries. The Greek looked with his own eyes on the god who rose again from humiliation. In the mysteries virtue was not merely preached but put before the eyes of men.

Schiller felt very intensely the desire to give men back this knowledge to unite the sense-world and the moral. The core of his poetry is the longing to reconcile these two—the senses and morality, that morality which Kant had interpreted so rigidly that duty led men away from everything which appeared as natural inclination. Schiller, on the contrary, demanded that duty should coincide with inclination; he wanted passion to be so cleansed that it could become identical with duty. This is why he revered Goethe so much, for in him he saw a perfect union of the sense-world and the moral.

He looked for this unification in the beautiful. And since Schiller possessed to an unusual degree the German quality of an aesthetic conscience, he wanted to make art a means of raising man to a higher level of existence. During the classical period there was a strong feeling that the beautiful did not exist merely to fill up idle hours but that it was the bridge between the sense-world and the divine. Schiller pushed far enough to find freedom here. Inclination is no longer to be suppressed: he remarked that a man must be very low in the scale if he has to be virtuous in opposition to his own inclinations. His inclination must be developed so far that he acts virtuously of himself. Earlier in his The Stage as a moral Institution he had preached something very like the severe Kantian morality.

“In the conquest of the matter by the form lies the secret of the master.” But what is, in fact, the material of the poet? In what attitude can we find the right view of the beautiful? As long as we are interested only in a single face, we have not yet got the true artistic view; there is still a clinging to matter. (“Heed the `what' but heed more the `how'!”) As long as a poet shows that he hates a villain, as if this were a personal interest, he still clings to matter and not the form; he has not yet reached the aesthetic view. He only attains that if the villain is represented in such a way that the natural order, and not the poet, inflicts the punishment. Then the “world karma” is accomplished; world-history becomes a world-judgment. The poet disregards himself and looks at world history objectively. This means moreover that what Aristotle said is realised, that poetry is truer than history. In history we cannot always survey the whole event; it is only an extract that lies before us so that we often get an impression of injustice. In this way a work of art is truer than history.

Thus was created a pure and noble conception of art; the purification, the Katharsis, stands beyond sympathy and antipathy. The spectator should stand before a work of art with a pure, almost godlike feeling, and see before him an objective, divine image of the world, and create for himself a microcosm. The dramatist shows us within a limited framework how guilt and atonement are connected, shows us in detail what the truth is, but gives this truth universal currency. Goethe means the same thing when he says that the beautiful is a manifestation of natural laws which, without the beautiful, would never find expression.

Goethe and Schiller looked for a realism, but it was an idealistic realism. Nowadays we think that we can get realism by an exact copying of nature. Schiller and Goethe would have said that that is not the whole truth; the sense-world only represents a part of what is perceptible and lacks the spiritual; nor can we regard it as truth unless we bring the whole tableau of nature simultaneously into a work. The work of art is however still only an extract of the real. In that they strove for truth, they could not admit the immediate truth of nature.

In this way Schiller and Goethe laboured to awaken an idealism, which had actually existed in earlier times. In Dante we have got a representation not of external reality but of what passes in the human soul. Later on, men demanded to see the spiritual in external form. Goethe showed in Grosskophta how anyone who materialises the spirit becomes subject to delusions; Schiller also occupied himself with this materialisation of the spiritual. At that time, there was a good deal of investigation along these lines; and much of what we nowadays call spiritualism engaged men's attention. In this, lies the occasion of the Geisterseher, which treats of these things. Before he had struggled upward, by the help of Kantianism and the artistic, to higher views, Schiller depicted the dangers to which anyone who seeks the spiritual in the external world instead of in himself, is subject. That is the origin of the Geisterseher.

A prince whose faith has become alien to him and who is not strong enough to waken the spiritual in his own soul, is greatly excited by a strange prophecy which a mysterious stranger announces to him and which is shortly afterwards fulfilled. In this mood he falls in with some tricksters who skilfully employ certain circ*mstances to bring him into a state of mind in which he will be receptive for the appearance of a spirit. The business is proceeding when suddenly a stranger interrupts and unmasks the trick; but himself produces an apparition in place of that of the trickster, and this apparition makes an important pronouncement to the prince. The prince is torn by doubts, for this stranger is none other than the man who had just prophesied to him; and he soon begins to think that both parties are concerned in the plot since the trickster, though he had been locked up, soon escaped. New and inexplicable incidents make him strive for an explanation of all the secrets; as a result, he comes into complete dependence on an occult society, losing all moral stability. The novel was never finished. In it the struggles of a seeker after spirits are represented in a terrifying fashion; we see how the longing for the spiritual leads men downwards when he looks for it in the external. No one who clings to the material, even if he only seeks to find the spiritual appearing in sensible form, can penetrate to the spiritual. The spiritual has to unveil itself in the soul of man.

That is the true secret of the spiritual; that is why the artist sees it first as beauty. The beautiful, conquered and permeated by the spirit, is made real in a work of art. Hence it is the worthy material of the spiritual. At first the beautiful was the only means for Schiller by which it could reveal itself. He looked with longing back to the time of the Greeks when there existed another means for the awakening of the spiritual: when man raised himself to the divine while bringing god down, making god into man and raising himself by god's means. Mankind must now rise once more to the divine by conquest over the material. Schiller in his plays was always striving higher until the physical fell away more and more until the

Und hinter ihm in wesenlosem Scheme
Lag, was uns alle bändigt, das Gemeine.

which Goethe cried to him after his death, became the full truth. The word “gemein” is not used here in any low, contemptuous sense; it is the common humanity, the common fashion of men that is meant, above which Schiller had raised himself. He had raised himself, as a true seer, to the vision of the spiritual.

He must stand as a pattern before us. That has been the whole object of these lectures; so far as it was possible in a few hours, to trace out this struggling soul of Schiller's, as it rises to greater and greater heights of spiritual insight, and seeks to grasp the spiritual, so that he may impress it upon the sense world. In this struggle we really get to know Schiller, and in him Goethe's words are in truth fulfilled:

Nur der verdient die Freiheit und das lieben
Der Täglich sie erobern muss.

Only he deserves freedom and life
Who daily must conquer them anew.

In this way Schiller fought his way upward, till he became the master of an etheric spirit-permeated form.

WITH BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

ABELS, JOAN (b. India – d.1962 Heidenheim a. d. Brenz)
Eurythmist. Took part in the very first performance of eurythmy in 1913 in Munich, subsequently continuing the work in Dornach. After retiring from eurythmy, he took on the office work at the Canteen.

AEPPLI, WILLI (Accra 1894–1972 Basel)
Swiss teacher. Member of the Society from 1921. At the Christmas Foundation Conference he was the representative of the Swiss Anthroposophical Society. From 1927 to 1954 he taught at the Rudolf Steiner School in Basel, and in 1954 became an adviser to the Association of Waldorf Schools in Germany. Wrote books on education.

ALEXANDER THE GREAT
See Note 77.

BEMMELEN, DANIEL J. VAN (Indonesia 1899–1983)
Dutch member from 1921. In 1923 co-founder and teacher at the first Dutch Waldorf school, ‘De Vrije School’ at The Hague.

BESANT, ANNIE
See Note 39.

BRANDTNER, W.
Secretary to the Anthroposophical. Society in Porto Alegre, Brazil, founded in 1920.

BÜCHENBACHER, DR HANS (Fürth 1887–1977 Arlesheim)
Lectured on the threefold social order. At the Christmas Foundation Conference he was the representative of the Free Anthroposophical Society in Germany. 1931-1935 President of the Anthroposophical Society in Germany. Later leader of the Working Group for Philosophy and Psychology at the Goetheanum in Dornach.

BÜRGI-BANDI, LUCIE (Bern 1875–1949 Bern)
Member from 1907. On the Council of the Johannes branch in Bern. 1913-1925 on the Council of the Bauverein. In March 1925 appointed by Rudolf Steiner to join the administration group for the building of the Goetheanum. Founder member of the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung.

CARNEGIE, ANDREW
See Note 61.

CESARO, DUKE GIOVANNI ANTONIO OF (Rome 1878–1940 Rome)
Son of Baroness de Renzis (see below). Member of various town councils in Sicily (Radical Party, later Social Democratic Party). Member of Parliament. 1922-24 Minister for Post and Telegraphy. Co-publisher of Lo Spettatore. Political writings. In 1926 he joined the anti-fascist National Alliance. At the Christmas Foundation Conference he was the representative of the Novalis group in Rome.

COLLISON, HARRY (London 1868–1945 London)
Lawyer, painter and writer. Member from 1910. Leader of the Myrdhin group in London. Authorized by Rudolf Steiner to translate his works into English. Founder of the Anthroposophical Publishing Company. From 1923 General Secretary of the English Anthroposophical Society.

CROSS, MARGARET FRANCES (Preston 1866–1962 Hemel Hempstead)
Owner and head of a private school, interested in Rudolf Steiner's work. The school subsequently became The New School, Kings Langley, Hertfordshire.

DONNER, UNO (Helsingfors 1872–1958 Arlesheim)
Engineer. Founded and ran textile factories, among others. Met Anthroposophy in London in 1913. 1923-1932, at Rudolf Steiner's suggestion, General Secretary of the Finnish Anthroposophical Society. Participated in the agricultural course given by Rudolf Steiner at Koberwitz, Breslau in 1924. From 1928 he endeavoured to run a large farm on bio-dynamic lines. A bequest in his will led to the founding of the Donner Institute for Religious History and Cultural Research at the University of Abo in Finland.

DRECHSLER, LUNA (b. Lemberg/Lvov – d.1933 Poland, in her fifties)
Painter and sculptress. Active in political life (town council). Worked on the first Goetheanum. Initiated the founding of the Polish Anthroposophical Society and became its General Secretary.

DUNLOP, DANIEL NICOL (Kilmarnock 1868–1935 London)
Initially a member of the Theosophical Society. From 1918 a member of the Anthroposophical Society in England and leader of the Human Freedom group. Organiser of the summer schools in Penmaenmawr (1923) and Torquay (1924). Founder of the British Weleda Company. 1930-1935 General Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in England.

DÜRLER, EDGAR (St Gallen 1895–1970 Arlesheim)
Businessman. Member of the Society from 1921. Worked for Futurum AG, Dornach, part of the time on the board of directors. Later member of the board of directors of Ilag AG, then Weleda AG, Arlesheim. Then for many years chairman of the board of directors.

EISELT, DR HANS (b. Prague – d.1936 Prague)
Having met Anthroposophy early in life, he worked for it until his death. He was leader of the branch in Prague and also lectured and ran the administration of the national Anthroposophical Society. He took the shorthand notes when Rudolf Steiner lectured in Prague. At the Christmas Foundation Conference he was the representative of the council of the Society in Czechoslovakia.

ERZBERGER, MATTHIAS
See Note 5.

FERRERI, CHARLOTTE (d.1924 in Milan)
Born in Honolulu as the daughter of an American missionary. Leader of the Leonardo da Vinci group in Milan. This group had resigned as a body from the Theosophical Society in 1913 and then joined the Anthroposophical Society. Later she was co-founder of a group in Honolulu. At the Christmas Foundation Conference she represented Honolulu.

FREUND, IDA (d.1931 in Prague)
An active member from 1909/10 in Prague. Her public charitable work was honoured after her death by the establishment of an Ida Freund Foundation.

GEERING-CHRIST, RUDOLF (Basel 1871–1958)
Bookseller and publisher. Founder member of the German Section in 1902 and of the Paracelsus branch in Basel in 1906, of which he became the chairman in 1921. 1922/23 he was a member of the inner working group at the Goetheanum. From 1913-1925 he was a member of the council of the Bauverein and in March 1925 he was appointed by Rudolf Steiner to join the administration group for the building of the Goetheanum.

GEUTER, FRIEDRICH (Darmstadt 1894–1960 Ravenswood)
Met Anthroposophy through Herbert Hahn when both were working as interpreters at a prisoner of war camp for British and French prisoners. After a spell at Der Kommende Tag, he began his lifetime's curative work at the Sonnenhof under Ita Wegman. From 1929 onwards he lived and worked in England, founding two homes for mentally handicapped children.

GEYER, REVEREND JOHANNES (Hamburg 1882– 1964 Stuttgart)
Heard Rudolf Steiner lecture for the first time when he was a student. Member from 1910. From 1912 pastor of the Protestant church. From 1919, at Rudolf Steiner's suggestion, a teacher at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart.

GLEICH, GENERAL GEROLD VON
See Note 8.

GNÄDIGER, FRANZ (d.1971)
Priest of the Christian Community. For a time secretary to Friedrich Rittelmeyer. At the time of the Christmas Foundation Meeting he lived in Zurich, from 1934 in Bern.

GOYERT, WILHELM RUDOLF (Witten a. d. Ruhr 1887–1954 Arlesheim)
Art dealer. Co-founder of the first Waldorf school in Cologne, named ‘Neuwacht School’ by Rudolf Steiner.

GROSHEINTZ, DR. MED. DENT. EMIL (Paris 1867–1946 Dornach)
Member from 1906 and co-founder of the Paracelsus branch in Basel. From 1908 to 1913 he was a member of the council of the German Section. In 1912 he placed a parcel of land he owned in Dornach at the disposal of Rudolf Steiner for the Goetheanum. From 1913 to 1915 he was deputy chairman of the Bauverein, from 1915 to 1924 chairman, and 1924/25 deputy chairman when Rudolf Steiner was chairman. In March 1925 Rudolf Steiner appointed him chairman of the administration group for the building of the Goetheanum. In 1920 he was founder-member and president of the branch at the Goetheanum, which he remained until 1946. 1922/23 he was a member of the inner working group at the Goetheanum.

GROSHEINTZ, DR OSKAR (d. 1944 in Basel)
Member from 1907 and chairman of the Johannes branch founded in Bern on his initiative. Took part in the performance of the Mystery Dramas in Munich.

GYSI, PROFESSOR DR MED H. C. ALFRED (Aarau 1864–1957 Zurich)
Eminent researcher in the field of dentistry who did pioneering work on dental prosthetics. Lecturer and professor at the dental institute of the University of Zurich, of which he was a co-founder. In 1902 he was one of the three Swiss founder members of the German Section and chairman of the Zschokke branch in Zurich which he founded in 1908 and to which he gave house room until 1920. ‘To his manner of working we owe the fact that Dr Steiner's most important Zurich lectures were scientific in character.’ (Marie Steiner, Erinnerungen I (Memoires, I). In 1913, together with Dr Emil Grosheintz, Frau Marie Schief and Frau Marie Hirter-Weber, he was one of the four Swiss members to make the land on the Dornach hill available for the building of the Goetheanum. He was a member of the council of the Bauverein till 1920. At the beginning of the twenties Professor Gysi withdrew from the Anthroposophical Society.

HAAN, PIETER DE (Utrecht 1891–1968 Holland)
Member from 1912. Having been the intended General Secretary for Holland, he withdrew in favour of Zeylmans van Emmichoven when the latter was suggested by Rudolf Steiner. From 1964-66 manager of the Philosophisch-Anthroposophischer Verlag in Dornach.

HAHL, ERWIN (d.1958)
A native of Württemberg. Heard Rudolf Steiner lecture for the first time in 1919 in Stuttgart. From 1922 he worked in Yugoslavia, where he endeavoured to found a branch in Zagreb. At the Christmas Foundation Conference he was the representative of the work in Yugoslavia.

HARDT, DR MED HEINRICH (Stargard 1896– 1981)
Met Anthroposophy in Rostock, where he was a student. Co-initiator of the lectures Rudolf Steiner gave for young doctors in January and at Easter 1924 in Dornach. Later he was for many years the doctor at the Lauenstein home for the handicapped.

HART-NIBBRIG, FRAU J (b. Holland–1957 Dornach in her late eighties)
Was a member of the Theosophical Society before 1913. From about 1924 she lived in Dornach. She was close to Marie Steiner.

HARTMANN, EDUARD VON
See Note 53.

HENSTRÖM, SIGRID
Member from 1911. From 1924 chairman of the branch in Stockholm. At the Christmas Foundation Meeting she was the representative of the Swedish Society.

HEROSTRATOS
See Note 76.

HOHLENBERG, JOHANNES (1881–1960 Kopenhagen)
Painter and writer. From 1923 General Secretary of the Danish Anthroposophical Society. From 1926 he was the joint publisher and from 1929 the publisher of the Scandinavian anthroposophical journal Vidar till it was closed down in 1940. From 1947 to 1954 he published the cultural and political journal Øjeblikket in Denmark.

HUGENTOBLER, DR JAKOB (d.1961)
Teacher. A member of the council of the Zschokke (later Paracelsus) group in Zurich and then of the Johannes branch in Bern.

HUSEMANN, GOTTFRIED (b.1900–1972 Arlesheim)
Co-founder and priest of the Christian Community.

IM OBERSTEG, DR ARMIN (b.1881–1969 Basel)
Eminent lawyer. Member from 1919. A helpful supporter of the Goetheanum. For many years president of the cafe and restaurant co-operative at the Goetheanum and legal adviser to Weleda AG.

INGERÖ, KARL (d.1972 in Oslo)
At the Christmas Foundation Conference he was the representative of the Norwegian Anthroposophical Society. Rudolf Steiner and Marie Steiner were guests in his house on several occasions.

JONG, PROFESSOR DE
See Note 64.

KAISER, DR WILHELM (Pery 1895–1983 Dornach)
Astronomer. Met Rudolf Steiner in 1918. Worked with Dr Elisabeth Vreede in the Goetheanum archives for a while. Lectured extensively in Germany and Switzerland. Wrote many books.

KAUFMANN (LATER ADAMS), DR GEORGE (Maryampol 1894–1963 Birmingham)
Mathematician and physicist. Member from 1916. Acted as consecutive interpreter for English-speaking audiences for 110 lectures, conferences and conversations by and with Rudolf Steiner in England and Dornach. Translated several of Rudolf Steiner's works and wrote numerous books.

KELLER, KARL (Basel 1896–1979 Arlesheim)
Journalist and editor in Basel. Heard Rudolf Steiner lecturing for the first time in 1917. As a member of the staff of the Swiss news agency he was able to publicise an essay written by Rudolf Steiner in the autumn of 1924 on the rebuilding of the Goetheanum.

KELLERMÜLLER, JAKOB (Räterschen 1872–1947 Dornach)
Engaged by Rudolf Steiner as doorkeeper for the first Goetheanum, he performed this task until 1946.

KOLISKO, DR MED EUGEN (Vienna 1893–1939 London)
Member from 1914. From 1920 teacher and school doctor at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart. From 1923 to 1935 on the council of the German Anthroposophical Society. Then lived in England.

KOLISKO, LILLY (Vienna 1889–1976 Gloucester)
Collaborated with Rudolf Steiner at the biological research institute in Stuttgart, publishing works on the spleen and on microorganisms in 1922 and 1923.

KOSCHÜTZKY, RUDOLF VON (Upper Silesia 1866–1954 Stuttgart)
Member from about 1917. He was originally a farmer but worked as a war correspondent in the First World War. From 1922 priest of the Christian Community. He participated in bringing about the agricultural course and then became a member of the management of the resulting research group of anthroposophical farmers.

KREBS, CHRISTIAN (d.1945)
A member in Sweden. Participated in the agricultural course given by Rudolf Steiner at Koberwitz, Breslau, in 1924.

KRKAVEC, DR OTOKAR
Member in Prague. At the Christmas Foundation Conference he was the representative of the council of the Society in Czechoslovakia.

KRÜGER, DR BRUNO (b.1887–1979 Stuttgart)
Public prosecutor in Berlin. From 1921 he worked with the federation for the threefold social order in Stuttgart, lecturing on this subject. After the failure of the threefold project he worked as a lawyer in Stuttgart.

LEADBEATER, CHARLES WEBSTER
See Note 40.

LEER, EMANUEL JOSEF VON (b. in Amersfoort – 1934 Baku)
Dutch wholesale merchant. Member from 1909. Giver of strong financial backing to the various institutions. 1922/23 president of the management committee of the International Laboratories and the Clinical and Therapeutic Institute AG in Arlesheim. In 1924 the first president of the first management committee of the Weleda AG, Arlesheim.

LEHRS, DR ERNST (Berlin 1894–1979 Eckwälden)
Scientist. Member of the Society from 1921. Teacher at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart. From 1923 a member of the committee of the Free Anthroposophical Society confirmed by Rudolf Steiner after the Christmas Foundation Conference, and thus an officer of the General Anthroposophical Society. Published scientific writings. From 1952 he taught at the seminar for curative education at Eckwälden.

LEINHAS, EMIL (Mannheim 1878–1967 Ascona)
Merchant. Member from 1909. In March 1920 co-founder, later managing director and finally liquidator of Der Kommende Tag AG in Stuttgart. From 1921 to 1923 in the central Vorstand of the Anthroposophical Society, from February 1923 a member of the council of the German Society in Stuttgart. Member of the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung from 1949. Aus der Arbeit mit Rudolf Steiner. Sachliches und Persönliches (Working with Rudolf Steiner), Basel 1950.

LEISEGANG, HANS
See Note 36.

LJUNGQUIST, ANNA (d.1935 in Dornach)
One of the early pioneers of anthroposophical work in Sweden. At the Christmas Foundation Conference she was the representative of the Swedish Anthroposophical Society.

MACKENZIE, PROFESSOR MILLICENT
Professor of education at University College, Cardiff, Wales from 1910. At her instigation, Rudolf Steiner gave a course of lectures for English teachers at the Goetheanum at Christmas 1920 and he was also invited to lecture at educational conferences in Stratford-on-Avon (Spring 1922) and in Oxford (August 1922). These public lectures in England led to the founding of the Educational Union under the chairmanship of Professor Mackenzie, the purpose of which was to gain an entry for Rudolf Steiner's educational ideas particularly in English and American organizations.

MAIER, DR RUDOLF (Schorndorf 1886–1943 Hüningen)
Member from about 1908/09. From 1920 to 1924 leader of the scientific research institute of Der Kommende Tag AG in Stuttgart.

MARYON, LOUISE EDITH (London 1872–1924 Dornach)
Sculptress working in Dornach from 1914. Collaborated with Rudolf Steiner in the field of the sculptural arts, especially on the wooden sculpture ‘The Representative of Man between Lucifer and Ahriman’. On her initiative the coloured eurythmy figures came into being and also the three ‘eurythmy houses’ to provide living accommodation for those working at the Goetheanum. At the Christmas Foundation Conference she was chosen to be the Leader of the Section for the Sculptural Arts.

MAURER, PROFESSOR DR THEODOR (Dorlisheim 1873–1959 Strasbourg)
Writer and anthroposophical lecturer. At the Christmas Foundation Conference he was the representative for the Alsace.

MAYEN, DR MED WALTHER
He came from Breslau. Worked in connection with Anthroposophy in South America, including Porto Alegre in Brazil.

MERRY, ELEANOR (Durham 1873–1956 Frinton-on-Sea)
English writer and painter. Member from 1921. Together with D. N. Dunlop she organized the summer schools at Penmaenmawr (1923) and Torquay (1924).

MONGES, HENRY B. (1870–1954 New York)
Professor of architecture. Member from 1916. Participated actively in founding, shaping and maintaining the Anthroposophical Society in America. He was its first chairman, and from 1923 its General Secretary. He secured the publication rights for Rudolf Steiner in the USA, translated his works and founded a publishing company.

MORGENSTIERNE, ETHEL

MÜCKE, JOHANNA (Berlin 1864–1949 Dornach)
Belonged to the socialist trade union movement and was a member of the management of the workers' educational establishment where she met Rudolf Steiner during his time as a teacher there (1899-1904). Member from 1903. From 1908 until her retirement (1935) she was the business manager, first in Berlin and from 1924 in Dornach, of the Philosophisch-Anthroposophischer Verlag founded in 1908 by Marie Steiner for the publication of Rudolf Steiner's work. From the end of 1911 until 1913 she was on the council of the German Section and from 1921 to 1923 on the council of the German Anthroposophical Society. Her book Erinnerungen an Rudolf Steiner und seine Wirksamkeit an der Arbeiter-Bildungsschule in Berlin 1899-1904 (Memories of Rudolf Steiner and his work at the Workers' Educational Establishment in Berlin 1899-1904) was published in Basel in 1955.

MUNTZ-TAXEIRA DEL MATTOS, FRAU (b. Holland – d. 1931 in Brussels)
At the Christmas Foundation Conference she was the representative of the Belgian Anthroposophical Society as its General Secretary. Translated works by Rudolf Steiner into French.

NEUSCHELLER-VAN DER PALS, LUCY (St Petersburg 1886–1962 Dornach)
Together with her husband she first heard Rudolf Steiner speak in 1908 in Berlin. Both thereupon became members. Later she took up eurythmy. With her husband she went to America in 1913 and there built up the eurythmy work and participated in the founding of the Rudolf Steiner School in New York. She moved to Dornach in 1959.

PALMER, DR MED OTTO (Feinsheim 1867–1945 Wiesneck)
Member from 1908 at which time he was a practising doctor in Hamburg. In 1921 at the request of Rudolf Steiner he took on the management of the Klinisch-Therapeutisches Institut in Stuttgart. From 1923 onwards a member of the council of the German Anthroposophical Society.

PEIPERS, DR MED FELIX (Bonn 1873–1944 Arlesheim)
Member from 1904. In 1906/7 established a private clinic in Munich. Played the role of Benedictus when the Mystery Dramas were performed in Munich (1910-1913). Co-founder of the Bauverein and member of its council from 1911 until 1925. From 1911 to 1913 a member of the council of the German Section. From 1915/16 leader of the anthroposophical work in Munich. From 1921 to 1924 worked as a doctor at the Klinisch-Therapeutisches Institut in Stuttgart.

POLLAK, RICHARD (Karlin, Prague 1867–1940 Dachau)
He and his wife were both artists and took part in the painting of the large dome of the first Goetheanum (1914-1919). In the concentration camp at Dachau he gave over a hundred anthroposophical lectures to those doomed to accompany him through death.

POLZER-HODITZ, LUDWIG COUNT OF (Prague 1869–1945 Vienna)
Member from 1911. In 1917 he used his influence to interest the Austrian government in Rudolf Steiner's movement for the threefold social order. From 1919 to 1921 he worked in Austria for the threefold movement. He became chairman of the Austrian Anthroposophical Society at its foundation in October 1923. At the Christmas Foundation Conference, he was the representative of the council of the Austrian Society.

PUSCH, HANS LUDWIG (1902–1976)
Actor. Participated in Rudolf Steiner's dramatic course given in 1924 and subsequently worked as a member of the Goetheanum stage ensemble under Marie Steiner. Moved to the USA in 1939 where he lectured, gave courses in speech formation and staged the Mystery Dramas.

PYLE, WILLIAM SCOTT (b. America – d.1938 The Hague)
Painter. From 1921/22 in Dornach. In 1929/30, together with his wife Mieta Pyle-Waller, he designed the scenery for the third and fourth Mystery Dramas. At the suggestion of Rudolf Steiner he worked at the production of new plant-based paints (‘Anthea Paints’).

RATHENAU, WALTHER
See Note 6.

REICHEL, DR FRANZ (d.1960 in Prague)
One of the representatives of the council of the Anthroposophical Society in Czechoslovakia.

RENZIS, BARONESS EMMELINA DE (d.1945 in Rome)
Member from 1909. Was one of the pioneers of the Anthroposophical Society in Italy. After Rudolf Steiner lectured there in 1909 she became the leader of a branch in Rome and concerned herself with the translation of his works into Italian.

RIHOUET-COROZE, SIMONE (Paris 1892–1982 Paris)
Member from 1913. In 1921 she founded the Paris eurythmy school and the journal Science spirituelle. From 1931 to 1976 she was General Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in France. Translated the works of Rudolf Steiner and published the journal Triades. Wrote Rudolf Steiner, une Epopee de l'Esprit au XXe Siècle, Paris 1951.

SAUERWEIN, ALICE (b. Marseille – d.1931 in Switzerland)
Sister of the prominent French journalist and anthroposophist Jules Sauerwein. Founded the Paris group ‘Saint-Michel’ for whom Rudolf Steiner gave lectures in 1913 and 1914. From its founding in 1923, she was the General Secretary of the French Anthroposophical Society till 1930.

SIMON, FRÄULEIN

SCHMIDT, HERR

SCHMIEDEL, DR OSKAR (Vienna 1887–1959 Schwäbisch Gmünd)
Chemist. Member from 1907. Participated in establishing the Weleda company and was a member of its management from the beginning and later in Schwäbisch Gmünd.

SCHUBERT, DR KARL (Vienna 1889–1949 Stuttgart)
Member from about 1910. In February 1920 Rudolf Steiner requested him to take on the remedial class at the Waldorf School in Switzerland. He was thus the first anthroposophical curative teacher. Later he assisted in the establishment of curative establishments in Germany and other countries.

SCHWARZ, LINA (d.1947)
Met Anthroposophy in 1912 and was one of the pioneers of anthroposophical work in Italy. Worked in the Milan branch, which she represented at the Christmas Foundation Conference. She took over the leadership after the death of the founder, Charlotte Ferreri. She made excellent translations of Rudolf Steiner's works.

SCHWEBSCH, DR ERICH (Frankfurt/Oder 1889–1953 Freiburg i.Br.)
Writer about music, teacher. Member from about 1919. At the request of Friedrich Rittelmeyer, he contributed the essay ‘Goethe und Rudolf Steiner’ to his anthology Vom Lebenswerk Rudolf Steiners (On the Life's Work of Rudolf Steiner). This drew him to the attention of Rudolf Steiner who requested him to join the Waldorf School in Stuttgart. He taught there from 1921. Its re-institution after the Second World War was largely due to his initiative. In 1946 he brought the Waldorf schools in Germany together in the Association of Waldorf Schools, of which he was the chairman.

SCHWEIGLER, KARL RICHARD
Brother of the painter Emil Schweigler. Member from 1918 (St Gallen). Founded a working group in Rorschach in 1921. Lived in Dornach from 1922.

STEFFEN, ALBERT (Murgenthal/Aargau 1884–1963 Dornach)
Swiss poet. Met Rudolf Steiner in 1907 in Munich. Lived in Dornach from the autumn of 1920 onwards. Became editor of the weekly Das Goetheanum when it was established in 1921. From Christmas 1923 till 1925 Vice-president of the General Anthroposophical Society and Leader of the Section for Belles-Lettres. From Christmas 1925 President of the Society. Writer of poetry and plays, eg In Memoriam Rudolf Steiner, 1925, and Begegnungen mit Rudolf Steiner (Meetings with Rudolf Steiner), 1955.

STEIN, DR WALTER JOHANNES (Vienna 1891–1957 London)
Member from 1913. From 1919 to 1932 teacher of history at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart. From 1923 to 1928 a member of the council of the German Anthroposophical Society. Later he worked in England.

STEINER, MARIE, NEE VON SIVERS (Wloclawek/Russia 1867–1948 Beatenberg/ Switzerland).
From 1902 Rudolf Steiner's closest colleague in building up the Movement and the Society. At Christmas 1914 they married. With him she developed the Goetheanistic stage arts of speech formation and eurythmy. At Christmas 1923 she became the Leader of the Section for the Spoken Arts and Music. With the Philosophisch-Anthroposophischer Verlag, which she founded in 1908, she ran the editing and publishing of Rudolf Steiner's written works and his lectures. In 1943 she founded the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung to continue with this work. See Rudolf Steiner The Course of My Life; Marie Steiner von Sivers Correspondence and Documents 1901-1905; Hella Wiesberger Aus dem Leben von Marie Steiner-von Sivers (From the Life of Marie Steiner), Dornach 1956; Marie Steiner, ihr Weg zur Erneuerung der Bühnenkunst durch Anthroposophie. Eine Dokumentation (Marie Steiner. Her Path to a Renewal of Stagecraft through Anthroposophy. A Documentation), Dornach 1973.

STIBBE, MAX (b. Padang 1898 – d.1983)
Teacher. Member from 1920. In 1923 he became co-founder and teacher at the first Dutch Waldorf school ‘De Vrije School’ at The Hague.

STOKAR, WILLY (Schaffhausen 1893–1953 Zurich)
Member from about 1916. Writer. 1921-23 colleague of Willy Storrer in the smaller working committee at the Goetheanum, among other things for tours of the building and as a lecturer. From time to time he was also a member of the management committee of Futurum AG, Dornach.

STORRER, WILLY (Töss bei Winterthur 1896–1930 Dornach)
From 1919 onwards worked with Roman Boos in the threefold movement and in his secretarial and organizational work at the Goetheanum. In the early summer of 1921 he took on the responsibility for Dr Boos's work in this area. After the founding of the weekly journal Das Goetheanum, Rudolf Steiner entrusted him with the administrative side. He thus became manager of the Verlag am Goetheanum. In 1920 he was a founder-member and the secretary of the branch at the Goetheanum. In 1923 he co-founded the Neue Generation branch. Belonged to the smaller working committee at the Goetheanum till the Christmas Foundation Conference in 1923. From time to time he was also a member of the management committee of Futurum AG. On 3 May 1930 he met with a fatal accident in his private aeroplane on the Gempen in Dornach.

STUTEN, JAN (Nijmegen 1890–1948 Arlesheim)
Musician. Member from about 1910. From 1914 he was a permanent musician at the Goetheanum (composing and conducting). He portrayed a number of roles on the stage under the direction of Rudolf Steiner, among others that of Faust. Later he also created scenery (in 1928 for the first and second Mystery Dramas). Composer of various works, above all stage music for Faust, Parts One and Two and for Rudolf Steiner's funeral. Member of the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung.

THUT, PAUL (b.1872–1955 Bern)
Engineer. Director of the power station at Bern. Member in Bern for many years.

TRIMLER, DR

TRINLER, KARL (d.1964)
Arlesheim and Basel.

TYMSTRA, FRANS (b.1891–1979 Arlesheim)
From Holland.

UNGER, DR CARL (Bad Cannstatt 1878–1929 Nuremberg)
Member from 1902/03. Till his death he was the leader of the main branch in Stuttgart, which he had founded in 1905 together with Adolf Arenson. From 1913 to 1923 he was a member of the central Vorstand of the Anthroposophical Society. From 1923 he was a member of the council of the German national Society. At the Christmas Foundation Conference he represented that council and also the Porto Alegre group in Brazil. From January 1914 to September 1915 he was the technical building manager of the first Goetheanum and from 1913 to 1925 in the council of the Bauverein. Before beginning a public lecture on Anthroposophy in Nuremberg on 4 January 1929 he was shot dead by a mentally ill man. His collected works have been published in three volumes.

USTERI, DR ALFRED (Säntis area of Switzerland 1869–1948 Reinach)
Papers on botany. Plant drawings; lectures at the Goetheanum.

VREEDE, DR ELISABETH (The Hague 1879–1943 Ascona)
Member of the Theosophical Society as early as about 1902. From April 1914 she worked at the Goetheanum where from 1919 onwards she set up the archive of Rudolf Steiner's lectures. In 1920 she became a founder-member and later the secretary of the branch at the Goetheanum. In 1922/23 she was a member of the smaller working committee at the Goetheanum and from Christmas 1923 till 1935 she was a member of the founding Vorstand of the General Anthroposophical Society and the Leader of the Section for Mathematics and Astronomy.

WACHSMUTH, DR GUENTHER (Dresden 1893–1963 Dornach)
Permanently in Dornach from 1921. In 1922/23 in the smaller working committee at the Goetheanum. From Christmas 1923 till 1963 he was a member of the Vorstand of the General Anthroposophical Society in the capacity of Secretary and Treasurer, and Leader of the Natural Science Section. He wrote, among other things: Rudolf Steiners Erdenleben und Wirken. Eine Biographie (Rudolf Steiner's Life and Work), Dornach 1941 and 1951; Die ätherischen Bildekräfte in Kosmos, Erde und Mensch (The Etheric Formative Forces in Cosmos, Earth and Man), Stuttgart 1924.

WACHSMUTH, DR WOLFGANG (Dresden 1891–1953 Arlesheim)
Worked for various publishing companies. He met Anthroposophy towards the end of the First World War. In Stuttgart from 1920 he took over the management of the publishing company Der Kommende Tag AG until it was dissolved in 1924/25. From time to time he was a member of the council of the Anthroposophical Society in Germany.

WEGMAN, DR MED ITA (Java 1876–1943 Arlesheim)
Member from approximately 1903. Studied medicine in Zurich. In 1921 she founded the Klinisch-Therapeutisches Institut in Arlesheim which resulted in close collaboration with Rudolf Steiner in the field of medicine. From 1922 to 1924 she was on the council of management of the International Laboratories in Arlesheim. From 1922-23 in the smaller working committee at the Goetheanum. From Christmas 1923 to 1935 she was the Recorder of the Vorstand of the General Anthroposophical Society and Leader of the Medical Section. From 1924-25 she was Rudolf Steiner's physician. Together they wrote Fundamentals of Therapy.

WEISS, FRAU

WERBECK, LOUIS MICHAEL JULIUS (Hamburg 1879–1928 Hamburg)
Member from 1910. From 1917 leader of the Pythagoras branch in Hamburg. From 1923 he was a member of the council of the German Anthroposophical Society. He wrote Die wissenschaftlichen Gegner Rudolf Steiners und der Anthroposophie durch sie selbst widerlegt (The Scientific Opponents of Rudolf Steiner and Anthroposophy Disproved by Themselves) and Die christlichen Gegner Rudolf Steiners und der Anthroposophie (The Christian Opponents of Rudolf Steiner and Anthroposophy), Stuttgart 1924.

WINDELBAND, WILHELM
See Note 41.

WULLSCHLEGER, FRITZ (Zofingen 1896–1969 Zofingen)
Teacher. Member from 1920. Member of the School Association for Independent Education in Switzerland. (See Note 56.

ZAGWIJN, HENRI (d.1954)
Composer and writer from Rotterdam. Set to music Rudolf Steiner's verses ‘Im Seelenaug ...’ and ‘Die Sonne schaue ...’ Wrote Die Musik im Lichte der Anthroposophie (Music in the Light of Anthroposophy). Teacher at the Waldorf school in The Hague.

ZEYLMANS VAN EMMICHOVEN, DR MED F W WILLEM (Helmond 1893–1961 Johannesburg)
Member from 1920. Founder of the Rudolf Steiner Clinic in The Hague, co-founder of the Anthroposophical Society in Holland and from November 1923 its General Secretary. Wrote, among other works, Rudolf Steiner, Eine Biographie (Rudolf Steiner, A Biography), Stuttgart 1961.
[Note: a reader who was at the funeral of Dr Zeylmans van Emmichoven has reported he died in Cape Town, not Johannesburg. His ashes were scattered on Table Mountain. e.Ed]

Dear friends, once again, let us first of all remember those who are out there at the front, in the great arena of present-day events:

Spirits of your souls, guardian guides,
On your wings let there be borne
The prayer of love from our souls
To those whom you guard in the spheres.
Thus, united with your might,
A ray of help our prayer shall be
For the souls it seeks out there in love.

And for those who because of those events have already gone through the gate of death:

Spirits of your souls, guardian guides,
On your wings let there be borne
The prayer of love from our souls
To those whom you guard here on earth.
Thus, united with your might,
A ray of help our prayer shall be
For the souls it seeks out there in love.

May the spirit we are seeking as we work towards spiritual knowledge, the spirit who has gone through the Mystery of Golgotha for the good of the earth, for the freedom and progress of man, be With you and the hard duties you have to perform.

A week ago we gave some consideration to imaginative meditation. We found as a result of our considerations that all insight or perception which is genuine perception of the supersensible worlds has to be won by considering the world in a way that is independent of the body. Our ordinary everyday perception has to make itself independent of the conditions imposed by the body, the senses, the nervous system, etc. Ordinary daytime consciousness is achieved when man's spirit and soul elements use the physical body as a tool. Spiritual perception consists in certain more subtle processes which involve man. Some discussion of these processes will form the first part of today's talk.

I said: ‘More subtle processes’. They are finer, more subtle, than the ordinary processes used for everyday perception, observation, apprehension, because man is only able to base himself on what is familiar to him in everyday life, and can only gradually rise to finer, more subtle processes. We should all be able to achieve the most satisfying, the greatest, knowledge of the spiritual world if there was an easy way of being in full conscious awareness for at least a fraction—just a small fraction, a minute if you lik—of the part of our life we spend between going to sleep and waking up again. (I am speaking of no mere dream-like consciousness but full conscious awareness.) Any form of initiation always consists in making conscious the part of us which during the night, when we are asleep, is unconscious and outside the body.

The process of attaining to genuine higher knowledge always consists in making conscious what otherwise remains in a state of sleep and unconsciousness between going to sleep and waking up again'

There is one part of the human being—and this may surprise you—one part of the physical human being that basically is always asleep. These are things one need not necessarily go into at the very beginning-of one's anthroposophical life—the finer points of spiritual science can only come to our attention gradually. When it is said that man is awake in the daytime and asleep at night we naturally assume his ego and astral body to be fully united with the physical and ether bodies during the day whilst having a separate existence outside the physical and ether bodies at night. It is only gradually that we progress from a rough outline of the facts established through spiritual science to more specific truths. Very generally speaking, it is correct that during sleep man's ego and astral body are outside his ether and physical bodies. There is however a part of the body that is asleep also between waking up and going to sleep, at least essentially so. Oddly enough this is the part of the human body we call the ‘head’. This is asleep when we are awake. You might well think the head to be the part that is most awake. In reality, however, it is the least awake part of us. In his thinking activity, and in head work altogether, man is awake. This is only possible, however, because even when we are awake the relationship of the ego and astral body to the head organs is such that they—that is the ego part of the head, the astral part of the head—cannot unite completely with the physical and ether part of the head. They always experience a life of their own outside the physical and ether part of the head. They always experience a life of their own outside the physical and ether parts of the head, as it were. A close union between the astral and the physical parts of the head occurs only when we have a headache. If we have a powerful headache, the astral, physical and ether parts of the head are very much united. We are least able to think when we have a headache. The reason is that the bond between the astral, physical and ether parts of the head is too strong. Our thinking, in which we are awake, and all other waking soul life bases on the fact that the ego and astral body of the head are in a way outside the head and therefore reflected, mirrored, in the physical and ether body of the head. Similarly we are only able to see ourselves in a mirror because we are outside it. It is this mirroring effect that provides the images for everyday consciousness. Those are mirror images we experience and take note of in everyday life. Living thus outside the head, with the head asleep and ego and astral activity reflected back by the hard skull, we are able to feel the inner ego and the inner astral body to be our own. In the other parts of the body ego and astral activity are still influencing the activity of the physical and ether bodies to a much greater extent. If the same held true for the head we would be conscious of the activity of digestive organs, and perhaps also rhythmical activity like that of the heart, In our heads—or perhaps not be conscious of them—and there could be no question of thinking activity. Thinking depends on activity being reflected, thrown back, and absorbed. The heart and other organs with the ability to absorb take in ego and astral body activity. The organs of the head do not absorb it but rather reflect it; the result is that it can be experienced in the inner soul.

During the night, between going to sleep and waking up, the whole ego and the whole astral body—again this is not entirely accurate but merely an approximation—but by far the greater part of the ego and astral body is outside the physical and ether bodies. Between going to sleep and waking up man is able to relate to a far greater part of his ego and astral body the way he relates to his head when awake. But the rest of the organism has not yet progressed as far as the head, it has not yet reached a point where it reflects the way the is able to reflect. Because of this, there can be no conscious awareness during sleep. Considering the way we move our hands we have to say to ourselves: ‘These hands, in so far as we are able to move them, have of course four elements to them—ego, astral body, ether body and physical body. All of these are present and active when we move our hands.’ Now imagine someone found himself in a position where his hands were tied to his body, tied in such a way that he could never move them, for they would be firmly attached to his body. Let us also assume this person had the gift of moving the ether body, or at least the astral body, of his hands independently whilst his physical hands remained immovable. This would have a highly significant result. He would be extending his astral or ether hands beyond his physical hands which are tied and immovable. We'll never go to the effort of actually executing this manoeuvre; when we move any of the astral or etheric parts of our hands we simply move our physical hands as well.

This is something we would find difficult to do in a natural way whilst on earth, yet in the course of evolution it will be achieved, though in a less crude fashion than just described. It will be achieved as mankind develops further in the course of earth evolution and grows towards Jupiter. Then his hands, his physical hands, will in fact become immovable. On Jupiter human beings will no longer have physical hands that are mobile organs, for they will be fixed. On the other hand their astral and ether hands will in part be able to move outside those physical hands. Only a trace of the physical hands will be left on Jupiter and they will be immobile; the astral or ether hands on the other hand will be able to move freely, like wings. As a result, Jupiter man will not merely think with his brain, for his fixed hands will enable him to reflect into the elements now united with his physical hands. His thinking will be much more alive, much more all-embracing. When a physical organ comes to rest, the spirit or soul element belonging to it will be liberated and able to develop spiritual and soul activity.

You see, it is the same with the brain. When we were still living on the Old Moon we had organs up here [the cranium] that moved like hands. These organs have become fixed. On the Old Moon we did not yet have a solid cranium; the organs now folded up to form the brain were then able to move like hands. Because of this, men living on the Old Moon were not yet able to think the way men do on earth. A clairvoyant assessing thought activity clearly perceives that in a human being who is awake the sleeping organs in his brain do indeed move like wings, the way I have described that astral and ether hands would move if our physical hands could be immobilized. It really happened that with the transition from the OW Moon to the earth state 'hands' were brought under control up here. They are still held fast by the solid skull and because of this the etheric and astral elements are free. Our organs need to be developed further. These hands cannot remain as they are when we develop to the Jupiter state—they will undergo a physical change, just as our brain underwent the change that made it an organ of reflection. This is a process we may consider one of natural evolution.

The initiation process is a different one. Here, we take some mantric meditation or other and make it the centre of our thoughts, entering into it completely. When we do this it is really important that we do not make use of our physical organs in forming and holding the thought. We must withdraw from the physical body, the sphere of our physical senses, with this thought. We must hold on to this thought and have no help from the physical world as we meditate. In our ordinary everyday thinking activity we have the help of the physical body, of the physical world. We think when impressions reach us through the senses. This makes thinking a comfortable process—the world makes both a physical and an etheric impression on us and this provides support for our thinking. When we meditate we must go apart from all that is physical, and that includes all ideas or concepts. Entirely of our own free will we have to make a thought the centre of our conscious mind. As a result something very specific occurs, a process more subtle than the process of perception. We have to reach a point where we forget the rest of the world—as though the rest of the world were not there and nothing really existed in space and time except for the one thought. When we have reached the point where we are indifferent to the whole world, living only in that meditative thought, something occurs which physical science will never be able to demonstrate. This subtle process of meditation causes heat consumption—a very small amount of heat is used, is taken away. It is a process we cannot demonstrate by physical methods but consumption does take place. We may return to the subject on some other occasion.⁴⁸ We shall see then that it is possible to prove too to ordinary scientists, on the basis of processes everyone will be able to observe, that the process of meditation involves a subtle heat process and also a subtle light process.

We use up some of the light we have taken in; we consume light. There is something else we consume, but let us for the moment just consider the fact that we use up heat and light. These things we take in make happen what I spoke of a week ago, that something evolves which is very delicate and alive. When we are thinking in the ordinary everday way, something lives within us that leaves its imprint on the organism, triggering a process that also has to do with heat; it leaves its imprint and the process which takes place causes us to have memory. This, however, must not happen when we meditate. When we live in a pure thought or feeling content, separate from everything else, the heat, light, etc., we consume does not leave its imprint on the body, it leaves its imprint in the general ether. It triggers a process outside us. Dear friends, if you are seriously, genuinely meditating, you are impressing your thought form into the general ether; it will be there within it. And if you then look back on a meditation this will not be the usual way of remembering; You are looking back to something which has left its imprint in the cosmic ether.

It is important to take note of this. It is a subtle process and we perform it in such a way that it establishes a link between us and the etheric and astral world surrounding us. A person wjo develops only the ordinary everyday kind of perception and thinking is only involved with himself; it is a process that takes place entirely within us. On the other hand, someone taking up real, genuine meditation lives in a process that at the same time is also a cosmic process. Something goes on there, though it is exceedingly subtle. What happens is that a small amount of heat is used up during meditation. When heat is used up coolness develops; the general cosmic ether is cooled down when we meditate. Light is used up as well so that it is subdued; darkness arises, subdued light. The result is that when someone meditates in some place in the world and then goes away, he leaves behind in that place a very slight coolness and a very slight reduction in light. The general light state is subdued, has grown darker. A clairvoyant is always able to detect where someone has been meditating, genuinely going through the process of meditation. When the person leaves, a shadow image of him remains and this is also cooler than the surrounding area. A cool dark spectre is thus left in that place; we have engraved it there. In a very delicate and subtle way, something has been done in that place which we may very roughly compare with what happens on a photographic plate. A kind of spectre is produced. This is a process which takes place not only within man but as a cosmic reality; man makes himself part of the cosmos through this.

There is one thought human beings meditate on even if they are of not to meditation, if they know nothing whatsoever of any kind of nonphysical science. There is one thought human beings do meditate of on. It is seemjingly small, but of infinite importance in life: the thought of the I or ego. When we think of the I or ego we always think independently of the body. In so far as we have a relationship to the cosmos through our ego, certain things connected with the ego—even if people are not aware of this in life—are thought in such a way that they are like the branches of a tree, if I may put it like this. Certain thoughts, feelings, will impulses become like branches, or else like feelers mobile feelers. These will be grouped around the ego. All is life, therefore, the human being has trailing behind him what he is thinking as an ego, and this stretches out mobile feelers or tentacles in all directions. Man is always leaving a spectre-like jellyfish behind him, all through his life. This is a very real thing, for at one and the the same it contains everything a person has lived through—in so far he has thought and felt it with his ego. This remains. And when the human being has gone through the gate of death he will gradually learn to look back on what he has left behind. This makes it possible for a link to exist between what a human being experiences after death and what he has left behind.

Being in the earth state we must first of all reach the point in meditation where our organs are held fast through the will; the ability to meditate properly depends on really freeing our thinking, feeling and emotions as we meditate, so that the body is not involved. The result is that we are capable of such powerful inner concentration that we are able to choose what does and does not become engraved, leaving a photographic impression as it were, in the cosmic ether. Something we need to stress again and again is that real, genuine meditation is a very real process, an absolutely genuine process.

If we consider that the human being leaves this behind—that, fundamentally speaking, all his experiences are contained in what he leaves behind and that it remains—we will, of course, realize that when the human being has gone through the time between death and new birth and comes down to earth again he will still find in the cosmic ether what he previously left there. Here we see in real terms how karma comes about. For the spectre of himself which man has produced will now influence him and in conjunction with his later life give rise to what will be his karma.

Such insights can only be gained slowly and gradually. A real process is taking place, one that goes beyond us, having an effect on the cosmos, and because of this the person meditating gets the feeling that meditating is something different from the usual kind of thinking activity. With the latter we have the feeling that it is we ourselves who put the thoughts together, taking one with the other; it is we ourselves who make the decisions. Meditating, we gradually get the feeling: It is not just you yourself who is meditating, for something is going on of which you are indeed part, but it also takes place outside you, as something that has happened and remains. That is the feeling which should arise. If I throw a fragile object across the room I have the feeling that what happens is not only what went on before it flew through the air but also something that followed, once the object has become separate from me. In the same way meditation gives rise to the feeling: It is not just you who is thinking. You fan thoughts into flame but they then whirl away, they whirl and exist in their own right. You are then no longer their master for they enter into a life and identity of their own.

When we thus feel ourselves to be within the atmosphere in which our thoughts are active and have a life of their own as if those thoughts actually moved through our brain in waves—when we begin to feel this we come to feel certain and sure that we are within a spiritual world, that we are merely one element weaving within all that is weaving there. It is important that we really achieve such stillness, such inner calm, in our meditation that we achieve the significant feeling: ‘It is not you alone who is doing this; it is being done. You have started to set these waves in motion but now they spread around you. They have a life of their own in which you are merely the centre.’

So you see, my friends, that it is an experience which actually leads to recognition of the spiritual world. It is an experience we have to wait for, possessing our souls in patience. It is extraordinarily important, yet it needs patience, persistence and self-denial to wait for it. This one experience will be enough to make us fully convinced that the spiritual world does objectively exist.

You will be able to see from what has been said here that a state of alternation between waking and sleeping really is a general necessity. We are asleep and awake here in the way that is familiar to us. We sleep and awake so that our brain, which is active throughout the day, shall also be able to immerse itself in that part of us which by day takes care of the organs and at night is outside us, always remaining unconscious. This rhythm between sleeping and waking has to take place; we have seen that it also takes place in the great process of cosmic evolution. Now our brain is really asleep, to enable us to think, and our hands are awake—that is our whole relationship to our hands is free, awake, whereas we do not move them in sleep. On the Old Moon we were quite awake as far as the brain is concerned but we have since learned to sleep; we have been able to evolve into thinkers on earth because we have learned to let the brain sleep. On the Old Moon the brain was still awake, but here it has achieved the ability to sleep. Because of this man is able to think. The mid-body will learn to sleep on Jupiter and thinking will then become a wider experience. That is how the state of alternation between sleep and waking undergoes its evolution. It is, however, quite a general state which may be found in all kinds of different areas. We may say that wherever we look it is apparent that a state of alternation between waking and sleeping is essential. Let me give you a rather peculiar example, one that is peculiar yet may have special meaning for us at the present time.

If you want to find out what went on in the cultural and literary life of the early 19th century you will of course look up a history of literature. This will tell you which poet was important and which was not; and the record will only go a certain way, for poets who were of no importance at all will not be mentioned. And so a person who knows anything at all will know which poets were important at the beginning or in the middle of the 19th century and which were not. They'll know that. Undoubtedly, there must also have been people who wrote poetry during the 19th century and yet are totally unknown to most if not all people today. I think you will agree that there must have been people of whom nothing at all is known today. But a time will come when the picture people have, say of literary life in the 19th century, will be different, completely different. Then a poet given many pages today will be given just half a page whilst another, who is not even mentioned today, will be given ten or twenty pages. Things are going to change. And, indeed, it will be necessary for thing to change quite profoundly. It is particularly when we consider that spiritual science is an element that now has to enter into the process of civilization, taking hold of human knowledge and entering into it everywhere, that we become aware of how men and women will have to change their approach and learn to think. Let me give you an instance.

I think you will agree that something new has to develop in place of present-day cognition, the process in which knowledge is on the whole obtained by giving validity only to whatever man gains by making use of his physical organisation. The new thing which must develop will give validity also to what may be gained by taking the path of spiritual initiation. Today the situation is such that a genuine scientist only considers valid, considers scientifically proven, what has been gained through a path of knowledge based on the instruments of the physical body. Everything else is considered a figment of the imagination. It may just be accepted as hypothesis, but even this is not allowed to go far or else the hypothesis will be called utter fantasy. So that is the situation today. But a time will have to come when validity attaches to insights gained on the path to spiritual knowledge, and, what is more, insights gained in the physical world are fully illumined and truly fathomed only through spiritual insights. That is how it will have to be.

Well, we are not merely speaking metaphorically but in completely real terms if we say we are now living in an age when men are asleep as far as the gaining of insight is concerned—or at least the majority of people are. Courtesy comes easy here, for we can exclude anyone with an interest in spiritual science—they are of course awake when it comes to the gaining of spiritual knowledge. The rest of mankind, then, is asleep when it comes to spiritual insight; they are sleepyheads. And our most highly esteemed science arises because they are really asleep. We are in an age when this genuine reality is being missed by a human race that is utterly and completely asleep. This has been in preparation for a long time and we might say that just as there is the going-to-sleep stage before we sleep so we are able to observe a kind of dream-state and a struggle against sleep when it comes to gaining spiritual insight. It slumbers sweetly. But it has not been easy to achieve this full sleep-state and a struggle against sleep is apparent in certain major events in the first half of the 19th century when some individuals still has a certain intuition, an inner experience dawning, of spiritual truths, of conditions in the spiritual world. As it progressed the 19th century really could do no other, in its desire to achieve those sweet slumbers, but forget poets who still had special knowledge of the spiritual world. They do not fit into this state of spiritual slumber.

I have once before spoken of the poet Julius Mosen whose Ritter Wahn (Sir Illusion) and also Ahasver clearly showed that Julius Mosen had a living relationship with the spiritual world.⁴⁹ This knight called Ritter Wahn—taken from an earlier legend but given qualities by Julius Mosen which reveal his connection with the spiritual world—this Ritter Wahn is looking for the man on this earth who could tell him about conquering death. The main theme of Julius Mosen's poetic work Ritter Wahn is that Sir Illusion, that is a man in the ordinary state of knowledge, knowledge based on illusion, is looking for someone who is able to tell him how to get beyond the state of illusion connected with physical life. He holds the man able to give him that information in very high regard. Julius Mosen then described the way his knight intended to find the man who will tell him how to gain knowledge that does not depend on the physical body:

Henceforth through all the lands on earth I'll wander,
Eastward, wherever my valiant steed may go,
From king to castle through every land meander.

Until I find the man who will with surety say:
I can preserve your body from the reaper,
I can beat death and can his power stay.

He is the one whom through eternity
I'll serve; these hands grown strong in war
Shall work for him, and wrestle mightily.

Sir Illusion thus wants to learn how knowledge can be attained that is not overcome by the body but itself overcomes the body, continuing through eternities. The longing for this was already there. And the knight then first of all fought the old man Ird, as Julius Mosen called him. This is something people did not understand, this word Ird. But if they could have read it in the original they would not have interpreted Ird as ‘death’, they way Rudolf von Gottschall did who was a professor of literature at Leipzig [1823–1909]. It should have been interpreted as ‘earth’ or ‘world’. So Sir Illusion first of all fought the old man Ird. He overcame him. We spoke of the spirit overcoming the earthly on the last occasion, of the spirit vanquishing earth, time and space. After this the knight overcame the old man Space and arrived at the gates of heaven, that is the spiritual world. He then developed a longing to return to earth because he had not lived life to the full. The whole of this beautiful poetic work tells us that there has been a man once before who wrestled with the problem of initiation, who knew something of the existence of such a problem of initiation. And in his Ahasver Julius Mosen presented a similar theme.

Another German poet who is quite frequently mentioned is Wilhelm Jordan [1819–1904]. Very little mention is made however of the work in which he presented himself at his most spiritual: Demiurgos. This appeared in the 1850s. It is quite a significant work, for in Demiurgos it is really shown how spiritual entities, spiritual powers that may be good or evil, approach man, enter into his soul and manifest here on earth with the help of human beings. So if we see a human being before us we have to remember: 'This person does of course consist of everything we know about, but something acts into him that comes from higher spiritual entities.' Demiurgos basically consists in a description of how man is connected with the spiritual world. In three handsome volumes Jordan shows how spiritual entities are influencing the soul of man.

That was the struggle against sleep, and after this, sleep took over completely. Those were people who still found in their dreams what mankind now has to strive for in spiritual science, emerging from the sweet slumber of purely external, positivist cognition. We must really see this as a process, the way human beings enter into spiritual dreams to end up in a state of idleness, in the sleep of idleness.

We may ask ourselves why there still was such a person as Julius Mosen, a man able to describe spiritual progress and depicting something of an initiation process in the travels of his knight. Where did such things come from? The answer is very strange. Julius Mosen fell ill and for much his life was almost totally paralyzed. What is the significance of such a paralysis? It means that the physical body dried up as it were, separating from the astral and ether bodies. Because of the paralysis the astral and the ether bodies were more free. In this case a disease process had brought about what we have to struggle for in the process of initiation. Such a disease process should not, of course, be seen as one of genuine cognition nor as something desirable to be brought on deliberately. Yet in an age that may be said to have been entering into a state of idleness, the cosmic order caused a man to be born on earth who had been given that particular relationship between his physical and his soul and spirit elements. So there he lay, paralyzed and unable to move his limbs but with a soul and spirit that were alive and active. It was his paralysis that made them free and able to enter into the spiritual world. Something initiation seeks to achieve in a healthy way was here brought about through illness. A man had to spend much of his life Paralyzed and unable to leave his bed, but his soul and spirit triumphed over his physical paralysis and rose in freedom. This is why that man was actually able to write works that strike us as being spiritual by nature. The same could also be achieved in a healthier way than in the case of Julius Mosen, though perhaps it would not have the same depth.

It was possible to achieve it in a healthier way. During the first half of the 19th century it was still possible for a poet to reveal the process of the culture and civilization of man in the course of history by letting shine through everywhere into the figures he describes the connection which exists between the spiritual worlds and man as he walks about on this earth. In the 1830s a beautiful poetic work appeared, Auffenberg's Alhambra.⁵⁰ Auffenberg is a spiritual poet and his Alhambra is a significant work. Thus we have three works—four if we count Ahasver—Ritter Wahn, Ahasver, Demiurgos and Alhambra. There is much more still to be said about such works which are not easy to get hold of nowadays. They show us that in this age everything to do with man's relationship to the spiritual world is fading away like a dream, as it were, in the face of the general materialistic slumber state. Before, mankind was open to things spiritual, though, of course, the people who are now describing the intellectual life of that time fail to mention the men who did have full awareness of the spiritual world. When someone writes a history of philosophy today he will also fail to mention anyone having awareness of the spiritual world, or no mention is made of the way the most outstanding figures were working in•; concord with the spiritual world.

It is interesting to compare Ritter Wahn, a work pulsing With genuine spiritual life, and Jordan's Demiurgos which also contains something of spiritual life. Jordan was probably a healthy man; the spirit and soul element did not separate from the physical and ether bodies the way it did in the case of Mosen whose body was paralyzed. The consequence was that Jordan was only capable of producing a work such as his Demiurgos in his young years, when he was still more flexible, with an inner energy, elasticity and logic capable of grasping things relating to soul and spirit. Later he fell into the crude Darwinism which had come into intellectual life, and this found reflection in his Nibelungen and other works. This man therefore had to join the rest in succumbing to the lullaby of materialism. It is important for us to realize that it is the mission of our age to bring an insight into the intellectual process, the process of human evolution, which arises out of genuinely spiritual perception—an insight the universal spirit may be said to be pointing to in the tragic fate of Julius Mosen:

Man is no longer able to reach the spiritual world simply without his own volition'. There have been times in the past when this was Possible, where the purely natural constitution of man was such that spirit and soul elements, astral body and ether body, were freer and more independent of the physical body. That time has passed, however. In our present materialistic age—and for the rest of earth existence, in the course of which it will grow more and more intensive—man in his normal state will need a compact union between spirit-soul element and physical body. This, however, does not permit man to achieve some form of awareness of the spiritual world simply through natural circ*mstances. The reason why this has to be so is that the will must be given opportunity to be active. Imbued with the Power of spiritual science, man must be able to use inner will impulses, acting out of freedom, to separate the spirit-soul element from the Physical body during meditation, through concentration. To achieve spiritual insight the way people did in the past we would have to be sick, paralyzed, have our limbs paralyzed in the second half of our life. Our present organization would make this necessary. In the past it was not necessary. Then, man did not have to be paralyzed, for the union between astral body, ether body and physical body was such that people had clairvoyant vision. Today it could only be acieved through illness. What happened in the case of Julius Mosen has been put there more or less as visible evidence.

We really must use spiritual science to bring before our mind's eye the profound spiritual background to what shows itself in the world. At the same time we must come to see how the necessity which now exists for mankind gradually to accept spiritual science is intimately bound up with profound impulses in the history of the spirit. The necessity arises not from arbitrary choice of some individual but from the great cosmic spiritual evolution which has to take its course throughout the period of earth evolution. Man's mission and task is to enter more and more into genuinely spiritual experience as he moves towards the future, so that mankind does not dry up the way the whole of earthly civilization is drying up, and the spirit will truly be able to continue to live on this earth.

One of of many things capable of bringing such insight home to man is something I have spoken of a number of times: the fact that numerous people are now, within a relatively short span of time, bearing their soul principle upwards when they still have unused ether bodies which contain powers that could have gone on to provide for physical life for many years. Because they are now going through the gate of death due to the terrible historical events of our time they are taking their unused ether bodies up into the spiritual world. And these will be the people who in future will make a major contribution to spiritualizing human civilization. Apart from all else, these major events of our time are profoundly significant in human evolution because the creation of unused ether bodies can yield forces that stream out into earth evolution, forces that will be able to prove that the spiritual world is real.

We know, however, that it would not help, dear friends, to have any number of suns in this world if men were unable to receive the light of the sun through their eyes. It is true, as Goethe has said, that if the eye were not of like kind with the sun it could never see the sun.⁵¹ Just as the sun would be shining in vain if there were no eyes to take in its light, so organs will have to come to life out of the souls of men which will really be able to take in the spiritual life which is streaming down from the cosmos and the world where men live between death and new birth, a world which also contains those unused ether bodies. Thus the great sacrifice brought in war must join into the spiritual cosmic sphere; it has to be taken up by human souls receptive for things of the spirit. And it would be a dreadful thing if the only science to survive were to be the one that now considers itself to be the one and only one, a science which does nothing but record the facts perceptible to the outer senses, using them to make intellectual judgements. If science merely repeats what is also there without science, it cannot form a link with divine and spiritual reality. This is something only possible for elements awakening in the human soul that truly go beyond sensory perception. These will be able to unite with the spiritual reality so that the process of earth evolution itself will remain spiritual, alive in the spirit. Any progress for mankind depends on the spiritual entering into the process of human soul development, and the decision as to whether something is true or false can only be made out of the spirit. Today, people think they can decide one thing or another, prove one thing or another, without the spirit; yet the final authority when it comes to making decisions relating also to sense-perceptible truths is living spiritual experience.

When the old experience of the spirit vanished during the first half of the 19th century, evidence was again given, one might say, of what the spirit could bring about in certain people, to demonstrate the non-nature of scientific argumentation concerned only with external, sense-perceptible things. A man who wrote under the name of Dr Mises' did a great deal at that time to show that everything, but everything, can be proved, and that the opposite can also be proved, so that the final authority still lies in the relationship to spiritual life. This man had seen many things happen in science, in medical science—he was a member of the medical profession—he saw new drugs coming up all the time for one disease or another. He lived at a time, for instance, when people started to prescribe iodine for the treatment of goitre. It was a time when this remedy was much celebrated, when people wanted to demonstrate—this was in the 1820s—what a valuable remedy iodine was. So one day Dr. Mises sat down and demonstrated that one could easily prove, using all the scientific principles, that Iodine was an excellent thing. the reason being that the moon consisted of iodine, as could be clearly proven.⁵² And he provided irrefutable evidence in support of this. His intention was to show that it is possible to prove anything we want to prove. And we certainly can. The intellect, which is bound to the brain, really is able to prove yes or no with regard to simply everything. It is almost always the case that some scientific view or other comes to the fore and the opposite comes up at another time; people are able to prove something just as well as the other side is able to disprove it. Anything where we do not have the yes-no wave surging up and down in such Ahrimanic fashion, anything which is real progress in a human evolution which is good and divine, bases on the spiritual.

We must be clear in our minds that the present age has produced its own characteristic cultural features on the basis of being the age when nonphysical science is asleep, and because slumber of the mind has spread to an extraordinary degree over all the things that tend to be regarded as science. This slumber of the mind is necessary. I am not being critical, but merely stating a fact. With all due regard it has to be said, to be emphasized, that it was necessary for the whole of science to go to sleep for a time as far as the spiritual world Was concerned. Now, however, the time has come when there must be an awakening, new vitality, in spiritual life, and we can sense the longing for this which exists everywhere. This, dear friends, will provide the foundation for the feeling that must bring us to life now, in these pain-racked times. We may only be able to have a faint notion that it is possible for man to find the way to the spiritual world, but because we have the feeling we must look for this way. We must seek a way in which our spiritual thoughts can meet with what is streaming down from those unused ether bodies. And a time will come when we shall really be able to look back on these days which are so full of pain and laden with destiny and do so from a certain spiritual elevation. This spiritual elevation will come when more and more people find impulses for spiritual science out of the genuine content of life awareness within them.

I have always from the depths of my soul given you a final thought here in this place in recent times, and this is something which will then come true. Let us make it our hope, a hope anyone who is connected with spiritual science can and indeed should cherish in days like these which are laden with fate.

Out of courage shown in battle,
Out of the blood shed in war,
Out of the grief of those who are left,
Out of the people's deeds of sacrifice
Spirit fruits will come to grow
If souls with knowledge of the spirit
Turn their mind to spirit realms.

• 48. It appears that the theme was not taken up again in this form and that none of the audience returned to it either. For a consideration of the subject from a different point of view. sec the lectures given by Rudolf Steiner in Dornach on 17 December 1920 in Die Brücke zwischen der Weltgeistigkeit and dem Physischen des Menschen, GA 202 (Engl. The Bridge Between Universal Spirituality and the Physical Constitution of Man, trs. not mentioned: New York: Anthroposophic Press 1958) and on 13 January 1924 in Mysterienstätten des Mittelalters. GA 233a (Engl. Rosicrucianism and Modern Initiation, trs. Mary Adams. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1965).
• 49. Mosen. Julius (1803–1867): Ritter Wahn published in 1831 (due to the interest created by Rudolf Steiner. a new edition was published by Der Kommende Tag AG, Stuttgart in 1921). Ahasver published in 1838.
• 50. von Auffenberg. Joseph (1798–1857). Alhambra, an epic work in dramatic form, appeared in 1828–1830 in 3 volumes
• 51. Goethe: Zahme Xenien III.
• 52. Fechner, Gustar Theodor (1801–1887): Beweis, dass der Mond aus Jodin besteht 2nd edn. Leipzig 1932. [Jodin appears to be a spoof word made up by Dr Fechner—it could perhaps be rendered into English as ‘iodene’. (Translator)]

Lecture 3 of 16 from the volume: Human History in the Light of Spiritual Investigation. The volume of the Complete Edition of the works of Rudolf Steiner containing the original text of the this lecture, among sixteen others, is entitled: Menschengeschichte im Lichte der Geistesforschung. (No. 61 in the Bibliographical Survey, 1961).

Words spoken by Shakespeare's most famous character: “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy” are, of course, perfectly true; but no less true is the saying composed by Lichtenberg, a great German humourist, as a kind of rejoinder: “In philosophy there is much that will be found neither in heaven nor earth.” Both sayings are illustrations of the attitude adopted nowadays to many things in the domain of Spiritual Science. It seems inevitable that widespread circles, especially in the world of serious science, will repudiate such matters as prophecy even more emphatically than other branches of Spiritual Science. If in these other branches of Spiritual Science—in many of them at least—it is difficult to draw a clear line between genuine research and charlatanism, or maybe something even worse, it will certainly be admitted that wherever super-sensible investigation touches the element of human egoism, there its dangers begin. And in what realm of higher knowledge could this be more apparent than in all that is comprised in the theme of prophecy as it has appeared through the ages! Everything covered by the term ‘prophecy’ is closely connected with a widespread, and understandable, trait in the human mind, namely, desire to penetrate the darkness of the future, to know something of what earthly life in the future holds in store.

Interest in prophecy is connected not only with curiosity in the ordinary sense, but with curiosity concerning very intimate regions of the human soul. The search for knowledge concerning the deeper interests of the human soul has met with so many disappointments that earnest, serious science nowadays is unwilling to listen to such matters—and this is really not to be wondered at. Nevertheless it looks as though our times will be obliged at least to take notice of them, and also of the subjects of which we have been speaking in previous lectures and shall speak in the future. As will be known to many of you, the historian Kemmerich has written a book about prophecies, his aim being to compile facts which can be confirmed by history and go on to show that important happenings were pre-cognised or predicted in some way. This historian is driven to make the statement—at the moment we will not question the authenticity of his research—that there are very few important events in history that have not at some time been predicted, conjectured and announced in advance. Such statements are not well received in our time; but ultimately, in the sphere where history can speak with authority, it will not be possible to ignore them because proof will be forthcoming, both in respect of the past and of the present, from outer documents themselves.

The domain we are considering today has never been in such disrepute as it is nowadays, nor regarded as so dubious a path of human endeavour. Only a few centuries ago, for instance in the 16th century, very distinguished and influential scholars engaged in prognostication and prophecy. Think of one of the greatest natural scientists of all time and of his connection with a personage whose tendency to be influenced by prophecies is well known: think of Kepler, the great scientist, and his relations with Wallenstein. Schiller's deep interest in this latter personality was due in no small measure to the part played in his life by prophecy. The kind of prophecy in vogue in the days of Kepler—and only a couple of centuries ago leading scientific minds all over Europe were still occupied with it—was based upon the then prevailing view that there is a real connection between the world of the stars, the movements and positions of the stars, and the life of man. All prophesying in those times was really a form of astrology. The mere mention of this word reminds us that in our day too, many people are still convinced that there is some connection between the stars and coming events in the life of individuals, even, too, of races. But prophetic knowledge, the prophetic art as it is called, was never so directly connected with observation of the movements and constellations of the stars as was the case in Kepler's time.

In ancient Greece an art of prophecy was practised, as you know, by prophetesses or seeresses. It was an art of predicting the future induced by experiences arising perhaps from asceticism, or other experiences leading to the suppression of full self-consciousness and the presence of mind of ordinary life. The human being was thus given over to other Powers, was in an ecstatic condition and then made utterances which were either direct predictions of the future or were interpreted by the listening priests and soothsayers as referring to the future. We need only think of the Pythia at Delphi who under the influence of vapours rising from a chasm in the earth was transported into a state of consciousness quite different from that of ordinary life; she was controlled by other Powers and in this condition made prophetic utterances. This kind of prophecy has nothing to do with calculations of the movements of stars, constellations and the like. Again, everyone is familiar with the gift of prophecy among the people of the Old Testament, the authenticity of which will certainly be called into question by modern scholarship. Out of the mouths of these prophets there came not only utterances of deep wisdom, which influenced the life of these Old Testament people, but fore-shadowed the future. These predictions, however, were by no means always based upon the heavenly constellations as in the astrology current in the 15th and 16th centuries. Either as the result of inborn gifts, ascetic practices and the like, these prophets unfolded a different kind of consciousness from that of the people around them; they were torn away from the affairs of ordinary life. In such a condition they were entirely detached from the circ*mstances and thoughts of their personal lives, from their own material environment. Their attention was focused entirely on their people, on the weal and woe of their people. Because they experienced some thing superhuman, something reaching beyond the individual concerns of men, they broke through the boundaries of their personal consciousness and it was as though Jahve Himself spoke out of their mouths, so wise were their utterances concerning the tasks and the destiny of their people.

Thinking of all this, it seems evident that the kind of divination practised at the end of the Middle Ages, before the dawn of modern science, was only one specific form and that prophecy as a whole is a much wider sphere, connected in some way with definite states of consciousness to which a man can only attain when he throws off the shackles of his personality. Astrological prophecy, of course, can hardly be said to be an art in which a man rises above his own personality. The astrologer is given the date and hour of birth and from this discovers which constellation was rising on the horizon and the relative positions of other stars and constellations. From this he calculates how the positions of the constellations will change during the course of the man's life and, according to certain traditional observations of the favourable or unfavourable influences of heavenly bodies upon human life, predicts from these calculations what will transpire in the life of an individual or of a people. There seems to be no kind of similarity between this type of astrologer and the ancient Hebrew prophets, the Greek seeresses or others who, having passed out of their ordinary consciousness into a state of ecstasy, foretold the future entirely from knowledge acquired in the realm of the Supersensible. For those who consider themselves enlightened men of culture today, the greatest stumbling-block in these astrological predictions is the difficulty of realising how the courses of the stars and constellations can possibly have any connection with happenings in the life of an individual or a people, or in the procession of events on the Earth. And as the attention of modern scholarship is never focused on such connections, no particular interest is taken in what was accepted as authentic knowledge in times when astrological prophecy and enlightened science often went hand in hand.

Kepler, the very distinguished and learned scientist, was not only the discoverer of the Laws named after him; not only was he one of the greatest astronomers of all time, but he devoted himself to astrological prophecy. In his time—also during the periods immediately preceding and following it—numbers of truly enlightened men were votaries of this art. Indeed if we think objectively about life as it was in those days, we realise that from their standpoint it was as natural to them to take this prophetic art, this prophetic knowledge, as seriously as our contemporaries take any genuine branch of science. When some prediction based upon the constellations—and made perhaps, at the birth of an individual—comes true later on, it is of course easy to say that the connection of this constellation with the man's life was only a matter of chance. Certainly it must be admitted in countless cases that astonishment at the fulfilment of astrological prediction is caused simply because it came true and because people have forgotten what did not come true. The contention of a certain Greek atheist is, in a sense, correct. He once came in his ship to a coastal town where, in a sanctuary, tokens had been hung by men who had vowed at sea that if they were saved from shipwreck they would make such offerings. Many, many tokens were hanging there—all of them the offerings of men who had been saved from shipwreck. But the atheist maintained that the truth could only be brought to light if the tokens of everyone who in spite of vows had actually perished in shipwreck, were also displayed. It would then be obvious to which category the greater number of tokens belonged. This implies that a really objective judgment could only be reached if records were kept not only of those astrological predictions which have come true, but also of those which have not. This attitude is perfectly justified but on the other hand there is certainly much that is very astonishing. As in these public lectures I cannot take for granted a fundamental knowledge of all the teachings of Spiritual Science, I must speak in a way which will convey an idea of the significance of the subjects we are studying.

Even a confirmed sceptic must surely feel surprise when he hears the following. Keeping to well-known personages, let us take the case of Wallenstein. Wallenstein wished to have his horoscope drawn up by Kepler—a name honoured by every scientist. Kepler sent the horoscope. But the matter had been arranged with caution. Wallenstein did not write to Kepler giving him the year of his birth and saying that he would like him to draw up the horoscope, but an intermediary was chosen. Kepler therefore did not know for whom the horoscope was intended. The only indication given was the date of the birth. There had already been many important happenings in Wallenstein's life and he requested that they too should be recorded, as well as predictions made of those still to come. Kepler completed the horoscope as requested. As is the case with many horoscopes, Wallenstein found very much that tallied with his experiences. He began (it was often so in those days) to have great confidence in Kepler and on many occasions was able to adjust his life according to the prognostications. But it must be said too, that although many things tallied, many did not, so far as the past was concerned and, as subsequently transpired, the same was true of the predictions made about the future. It was so with numbers of horoscopes and in those days people were accustomed to say that there must be some inaccuracy in the alleged hour of birth and that the astrologer might be able to correct it. Wallenstein did the same. He begged Kepler to correct the hour of birth; the correction was only very slight but after it had been made, the prognostications were more accurate. It must be added here that Kepler was a thoroughly honest man and it went very much against the grain to correct the hour of birth. From a letter on the subject written by Kepler at the time it is obvious that he did not favour such procedure on account of the many possible consequences. Nevertheless he undertook to do what Wallenstein asked—it was in the year 1625—and gave further details about Wallenstein's future; above all he said that according to the new reading of the positions of the stars, the constellation that would be present in the year 1634 would be extremely unfavourable for Wallenstein. Kepler added—as well he might, for the date lay so far ahead—that even if this were a cause of alarm, the alarm would have passed away by the time of these unfavourable conditions. He did not therefore consider them dangerous for Wallenstein's plans. The prediction was for March 1634. And now think of it: within a few weeks of the period indicated, the causes occurred which led to the murder of Wallenstein. These things are at least striking!

But let us take other examples—not of second-rate astrologers but of really enlightened men. The name of an extraordinarily learned man in this sphere will at once occur to us—Nostradamus. Nostradamus was a doctor of high repute who, among other activities, had rendered wonderful service during an epidemic of the plague; he was a man of profound gifts and the selflessness with which he devoted himself to his profession as a doctor is well known. It is known, too, that when on account of his selflessness he had been much maligned by his colleagues, he retired from his medical work to the isolation of Salon where, in 1566, he died. In Salon he began to observe the stars, but not as Kepler or others like Kepler had observed them. Nostradamus had a special room in his house into which he often withdrew and, as can be gathered from what he himself says, from this room he watched the stars, just as they presented themselves to his gaze. In other words he made no special mathematical calculations but immersed himself in what the soul, the heart, the imagination can discover when gazing with wonder at the starry heavens. Nostradamus spent many an hour of reverent, fervent contemplation in this curious chamber with its open views on all sides to the heavens. And from him there came not only specific predictions, but long series of diverse and remarkably true prophecies of the future. So much so, that Kemmerich, the historian of whom I spoke just now, cannot but be astonished and attach a certain value to the prophetic utterances of Nostradamus. Nostradamus himself made some of his prophecies known to the public and was naturally laughed to scorn in his day, for he could quote no astrological calculations. As he gazed at the stars his predictions seemed to rise up in him in the form of strange pictures and imaginations, for instance of the outcome of the battle at Gravelingen in the year 1558, where the French were defeated with heavy loss. Another prediction, made long beforehand, for the year 1559, was to the effect that King Henry II of France would succumb “in a duel” as Nostradamus put it. People only laughed, including the Queen herself, who said that this clearly showed what reliance could be placed upon prediction—for a King was above engaging in a duel. But what happened? In the year predicted, the King was killed in a tournament. And it would be possible to quote many, many predictions that subsequently came true.

Again there is Tycho de Brahe, one of the brilliant minds of the 16th century and of outstanding significance as an astronomer. The modern world knows little of Tycho de Brahe beyond that he is said to have been one who only half accepted the Copernican view of the world. But those who are more closely acquainted with his life know what Tycho de Brahe achieved in the making of celestial charts, how vastly he improved the charts then existing, that he had discovered new stars and was, in short, an astronomer of great eminence in his day. Tycho de Brahe was also deeply convinced that not only are physical conditions on the Earth connected with the whole Universe, but that the spiritual experiences of men are connected with happenings in the great Cosmos. Tycho de Brahe did not simply observe the stars as an astronomer but he related the happenings of human life with happenings in the heavens. And when he came to Rostock at the age of 20, he caused a stir by predicting the death of the Sultan Soliman, which although it did not occur exactly on the day indicated, did nevertheless occur. The indication was not quite exact but this will probably not bring an outcry from historians, for they might well argue that if anyone were intent upon lying he would not tell a half-lie by introducing the difference of a mere day or so into the prediction.

Hearing of this, the King of Denmark requested Tycho de Brahe to cast the horoscopes of his three sons. Concerning his son, Christian, the indications were accurate; less so in the case of Ulrich. But about Hans, the third son, Tycho de Brahe made a remarkable prediction, derived from the movements of the stars. He said: The whole constellation and everything to be seen goes to show that he is and will remain frail and is unlikely to live to a great age. As the hour of birth was not quite accurate, Tycho de Brahe gave the indications very cautiously ... he might die in his eighteenth or perhaps in his nineteenth year, for the constellations then would be extremely unfavourable. I will leave it an open question whether it was out of pity for the parents or for other reasons, that Tycho de Brahe wrote of the possibility of this terrible constellation in the eighteenth or nineteenth year being overcome in the life of Duke Hans ... if so, he said, God would have been his protector; but it must be realised that these conditions would be there, that an extremely unfavourable constellation connected with Mars was revealed by the horoscope and that Hans would be entangled in the complications of war; as in this constellation, Venus had ascendancy over Mars, there was just a hope that Hans would pass this period safely, but then, in his eighteenth and nineteenth years, there would be the very unfavourable constellation due to the inimical influence of Saturn; this indicated the risk of a “moist, melancholic” illness caused by the strange environment in which Hans would find himself. And now, what was the history of Duke Hans' life? As a young man he was involved in the political complications of the time, was sent to war, took part in the battle of Ostend and in connection with this, as Tycho de Brahe had predicted, had to endure the ordeal of terrible storms at sea. He came very near death, but as the result of friendly negotiations set on foot for his marriage with the daughter of the Czar he was recalled to Denmark. According to Tycho de Brahe's interpretation, the complications due to the unfavourable influences of Mars had been stemmed by the influences of Venus—the protector of love-relationships: Venus had protected the Duke at this time. But then, in his eighteenth and nineteenth years the inimical influence of Saturn began to take effect. One can picture how the eyes of the Danish Court were upon the young Duke: all the preparations for the marriage were made and the news that it had taken place was hourly awaited. But there came instead the announcement that the marriage was delayed, then news of the Duke's illness, and finally of his death. Such things made a great impression upon people at the time and must surely surprise posterity.

Now world-history sometimes has its humorous sides! There was once, in a different domain altogether, a certain Professor who asserted that the brain of the female always weighs less than that of the male. After his death, however, his own brain was weighed and proved to be extremely light. He was the victim of humour in world-history!

The horoscope of Pico de Mirandola (a descendant of the famous philosopher) prophesied that Mars would bring him great misfortune. He was an opponent of all such predictions. Tycho de Brahe proved to him that all his arguments against prognostications from the stars were false, and he died in the year that had been indicated as the period of the unfavourable influence of Mars.

Numbers of examples could be quoted and we shall probably realise that in a certain sense it is not difficult to make objections. For example, a very distinguished modern astronomer—a man greatly to be respected too, for his humanitarian activities—has argued that Wallenstein's death cannot be said to have been correctly predicted in the horoscope drawn up by Kepler. In a certain respect such arguments must be taken seriously. We cannot altogether ignore Wilhelm Foerster's argument that Wallenstein knew what had been predicted; that in the corresponding year he remembered his horoscope, hesitated, did not take the firm stand he would otherwise have taken and so was himself the cause of the misfortune. Such objections are always possible.

But on the other side it must be remembered that although in illustrations produced by science, external data are of value, the modern age accepts these data as an absolutely adequate basis for scientific truths. Many things may be problematical. But we should not shut our eyes to the fact that careful comparison of events that had actually occurred in life with indications obtained from the stars, did indeed lead, in earlier times, to confidence in prognostications of the future. People were certainly alive to mistakes but they did not conceal things that were genuinely astonishing, nor did they accept these things entirely without criticism. In those times too they were quite capable of criticism and in all probability applied it on many occasions.

I wanted to quote very striking examples in order to show that in accordance with the standards of modern science too, it is possible to take these matters seriously. And even when we take what there is to be said against them, we shall have to admit that the reasons which in times of the relatively near past made brilliant minds place firm reliance in them, were not bad but sound and well-founded reasons. Even if these reasons are rejected, it must be admitted that the impression they made on brilliant and enlightened minds was such that these men believed—quite apart from details—that there is a connection between events in the lives of individuals and of peoples, and happenings in the Cosmos. These men believed that there is a real connection between the macrocosm, the great world, and the microcosm, the little world.

They believed that human life on the Earth is not a chaotic flow of events but that law manifests in these events, that just as celestial events are governed by cyclic law, so too a certain cyclic law, a certain rhythm is manifest in human and earthly conditions. To explain what is here meant, I shall speak of certain facts that can be collated by observation, as truly as the most exacting facts of chemistry or physics today. But the observations must be made in the appropriate spheres. Suppose we observe something that happens in a man's life during his childhood. If we study the longer sweep of human life, remarkable connections will come to light, for example, between the life of earliest childhood and that of very old age; a connection is perceptible between what a man experiences in the evening of his life and what he experienced in early youth. We shall be able to say: If, during youth, we were shaken by emotions due to alarm or fright, we may possibly have been exempt from their effects all through our life, but in old age things may appear of which we know that their causes are to be sought in very early childhood. Again there are connections between the years of adolescence and the period immediately preceding old age. Life runs a circular course.

We can go still further, taking as an example the case of someone who, say at the age of 18, was torn right away from the course his life had taken hitherto. Until then he may have been able to devote himself to study but was suddenly obliged to abandon this and become a merchant, perhaps because his father lost his money, or for some other reason. To begin with he gets on quite well but after a few years, great inner difficulties make their appearance. In trying to help such a person to overcome these difficulties, we cannot apply any general, abstract principles. We shall have to say to ourselves: At the age of 18 there was a sudden change in his life and at the age of 24—that is to say, six years later—difficulties cropped up in his life of soul. Six years earlier, in his twelfth year or thereabouts, certain things happened in his soul which actually explain the difficulties appearing in his twenty-fourth year: six years before, six years later—the change of profession lies between. Just as above a pendulum swinging to right and left there is a point of equilibrium, so, in the case quoted, the eighteenth year is a pivotal point. A cause generated before this pivotal point has its effect the same number of years afterwards. So it is in man's life as a whole. Human life takes its course not with irregularity but with regularity and according to law. Although the individual does not necessarily realise it, there is in every human life one centre-point; what lies before—youth and childhood—allows causes to rest in the depths of subsequent happenings, and then what took place a number of years before this centre-point of life reveals itself in its effects an equal number of years afterwards. In the sense that birth is the point polar to death, the happenings of childhood are the causes of happenings during the years that precede death. In this way life becomes comprehensible.

In the case, for example, of illness occurring, say, at the age of 54, the only really intelligent approach is to look for a pivotal point at which a man passed through a definite crisis, reckoning back from there to some event related to the fifty-fourth year somewhat in the same sense as death is related to birth, or the other way round. The fact that happenings in human life reveal conformity to law and principle does not gainsay our freedom. Many people are apt to say that this conformity to law in the course taken by events contradicts man's freedom of will. But this is not the case and it can only appear so to superficial thinking. A human being who at the age, say, of 15, lays into the womb of time some cause, the effects of which he experienced in, say, his fifty-fourth year, no more deprives himself of his freedom than does someone who builds a house and then moves into it when it is ultimately ready. Logical thinking will never say that the man deprives himself of his freedom when he moves into the house. Nobody deprives himself of freedom by anticipating that causes will have their effects later on. This principle has nothing directly to do with freedom in life.

Just as there are cyclic connections in the life of the individual, so too are there cyclic connections in the life of the peoples, and in life on the Earth in the general sense. The evolution of mankind on the Earth divides itself into successive epochs of culture. Two of the epochs most closely connected with our own, are the period of Assyrian-Egyptian-Chaldean civilisation and that of the later culture of Greece and Rome; then, reckoning from the decline of Greek and Roman culture and its aftermaths, comes our present epoch. According to all the signs of the times this will last for a very long time yet. There, then, we have three consecutive periods of culture.

Close observation of the life of the peoples during these three epochs will reveal, during the Greco-Latin period, something like a pivotal point in the evolution of mankind. Hence, too, the curious fascinating of the culture of Greece and Rome. Greek art, Greek and Roman political life, Roman equity, the conception of Roman citizenship ... it all seems to stand like a kind of pivotal point in the stream of the evolutionary process: After it—our own epoch; before it—the Egypto-Chaldean epoch. In a remarkable way, those who observe deeply enough will perceive certain conditions of life during the Egypto-Chaldean period operating again today, in quite a different but nevertheless related form. In those times, therefore, causes were laid into the womb of the ages, which now in their effects come again to the fore. Certain methods of hygiene, certain ablutions customary in ancient Egypt, also certain views of life are now, strangely enough, in the forefront again—naturally in absolutely different forms; in short, the effects of causes laid down in ancient Egypt are becoming perceptible today. In between—like a fulcrum—lies the culture of Greece and Rome.

The Egypto-Chaldean epoch was preceded by that of the most ancient Persian culture. According to the law of cyclic evolution, then, it can be foreshadowed that just as in our civilisation there is a cyclic re-emergence of Egypto-Chaldean culture, so ancient Persian culture will re-emerge in the epoch following our own. Law is revealed everywhere in the flow of evolution! Not irregularity, not chaos—but also not the kind of law conjectured by historians: that the causes of everything happening today are to be sought in the immediately preceding period, the causes of happenings in the recent past again in the immediately preceding period, and so forth. This is how historians build up a chain of events—the one directly following the other. Closer observation, however, reveals the existence of cycles, breaks ... what was once present appears again at a very much later time.

External observation itself can discern this. But it will be quite apparent to those who study the evolution of humanity in the light of Spiritual Science that there is evidence of spiritual law in the flow of happenings, in the stream of the ‘Becoming’ and that a certain deepening of the life of soul will enable men actually to perceive the threads of these inner connections. And although it is not easy to grasp everything that belongs to this sphere, although it may sometimes tend to charlatanry or humbug and direct its appeal to the lower impulses and instincts, nevertheless the following is true: When a man is able to eliminate personal interests and quicken the hidden forces of spiritual life, so that his knowledge is drawn not merely from his environment or from remembrances of his own life and that of his nearest acquaintances, when he is uninfluenced by material and personal considerations ... then he grows beyond his own personality and becomes conscious of the presence of higher forces with him, which it is only a matter of developing by appropriate exercises. When these deeper forces are brought to the surface, happenings in the life of a human being will also reveal their hidden causes and such a soul will then glimpse the truth that whatever has transpired through the ages throws its effects into the future. The law presented to us by Spiritual Science is that no happenings—and this also applies to the domain of the Spiritual—float meaninglessly along the stream of existence; they all have their effects and we must discover the law underlying the manifestation of these effects in later times. Therewith the insight will come that this law also embraces the return of the individuality into the present earthly life, where the effects of earlier lives are working themselves out.

Just as knowledge of the workings of Karma, the Law of Destiny, arises from insight into how causes lie in the womb of time and appear again in transformation, so too this insight was present in all those who have taken prophecy seriously or have actually engaged in it; they have been convinced that laws prevail in the course taken by human life and that the soul can awaken the forces whereby these laws may be fathomed. But the soul needs points of focus. In its facts, the world is an interconnected whole. Just as in his physical life the human being is affected by wind and weather, it is not difficult to assume that there are connections in everything around us, even though the details are obscure. Without actually seeking for laws of Nature, something in the courses of the stars and constellations evokes the thought: The harmonies perceptible there can call forth in us similar harmonies and rhythms according to which human life runs its course. Further observations will then lead on to the details.

As may be read in the little book, The Education of the Child in the Light of Spiritual Science, epochs can be distinguished in the life of the individual: from birth to the change of teeth, from then to puberty, then the years up to twenty-one and again from twenty-one to twenty-eight ... 7-year periods clearly different in character and after which new kinds of faculties are present. If we know how to investigate these things we shall find clear evidence of a rhythmic stream in human life, which can as it were be found again in the starry heavens. Strikingly enough, if life is observed from this point of view (but such observation must be calm and balanced, without the wonted fanaticism of opponents) it will be found that round about the twenty-eighth year something in the life of soul indicates, in many cases, a culmination of what has come into being after four periods of seven years each. Four times seven years—twenty-eight years ... although the figure is not absolutely exact, this is the approximate time of one revolution of Saturn. Saturn revolves in a circle consisting of four parts, passes therefore through the whole Zodiacal circle, and its course has an actual correspondence with the course of man's life from birth to the twenty-eighth year. Just as the circle divides into four parts, so too these twenty-eight years divide into four periods of seven years each. There, in the revolution of a star in cosmic space, we see indications of similarity with the course taken by human life.

Other movements in the heavens, too, correspond to rhythms in human life. Little attention is given today to the very brilliant researches made by Fliess, a doctor in Berlin; they are still only in the initial stage but if ever they are properly studied, the rhythmic flow of births and deaths in the life of humanity will be clearly perceived. All such research is only at the beginning; but in time to come it will be realised that one need only regard the stars and their movements as a great celestial clock and human life as a rhythm that runs its own course but is in a certain sense determined by the stars. Without looking for actual causes in the stars, it is quite possible to conceive that because of this inner relationship, human life runs its course with a like rhythm. Suppose, for example, we often go outside the door of our house or look out of the window at some particular time in the morning and always see a certain man on the way to his office ... we glance at the clock, knowing that every day he will pass at a definite time. Are the hands of the clock the cause of it? Of course not! ... but because of the invariable rhythm we can assume that the man will pass the house at a definite time. In this sense we can see in the stars a celestial clock according to which the life of man and of peoples runs its course.

Such things may well be vantage-points for the observation and study of life, and Spiritual Science is able to indicate these deeper connections. We shall now understand why Tycho de Brahe, Kepler and others, worked on the basis of calculations—Kepler especially, Tycho de Brahe less. For insight into the soul of Tycho de Brahe reveals a certain similarity with that of Nostradamus. Nostradamus, however, does not need to make calculations at all; he sits up in his attic and gives himself up to the impressions made by the stars. He ascribes this gift to certain inherited qualities in his organism, which for this reason is no cause of hindrance to him. But he also needs that inner tranquillity of soul that arises after he has put away all thoughts, emotions, cares, and excitements of everyday life. The soul must face the stars in purity and freedom. And then what Nostradamus prophesies rises up in him in pictures and images; he sees it all before him in pictures. If he spoke in astronomical terms of Saturn or Mars being injurious, he would not, in predicting destiny, have been thinking of the physical Saturn or the physical Mars, but he would have pondered in this way: Such and such a man has a warlike nature, a temperament that loves fighting, but he also has a kind of melancholy making him subject to moods of depression which may even affect him physically. Nostradamus lets this interweave in his contemplation and a picture rises before him of future happenings in the man's life: the tendency to melancholy and the fighting spirit intermingle—“Saturn” and “Mars.” This is only a sense-image. When he speaks of “Saturn” and “Mars,” his meaning is: There is something in this man which presents itself to me as a picture but which can be compared with the opposition or conjunction between Saturn and Mars in the heavens. This was merely a way of expressing it; contemplation of the stars evoked in Nostradamus the seership that enabled him to see more deeply into souls than is otherwise possible.

Nostradamus, therefore, was a man who by acting in a certain way was able to waken to life inner powers of soul otherwise slumbering within the human being. In a mood of devotion, of reverence, he completely put away all cares and anxieties, all concerns of the outer world. In utter forgetfulness of self, with no feeling of his own personality, his soul knew the truth of the axiom he always quoted: “It is God Who utters through my mouth anything I am able to tell you about your concerns. Take it as spoken to you by the Grace of your God I ...” Without such reverence there is no genuine seership. But this very attitude ensures that those who have it will not abuse or make illicit use of their gift.

Tycho de Brahe represents a stage of transition between Nostradamus and Kepler. When we contemplate the soul of Tycho de Brahe, he seems to be one who is calling up remembrances from an earlier life, rather reminiscent of Greek soothe-saying. He has in him something that is akin to the soul of an ancient Greek seeking everywhere for the manifestations of cosmic harmony. Such is the attunement of his soul—and his astrological insight is really an attitude of soul—it is as if astronomical calculation were merely a prop helping him to call up those powers which enable pictures of happenings in the past or the future to take shape before him. Kepler's mind is more abstract, in the sense that modern thought is abstract—in a still higher degree. Kepler has to rely more or less upon pure calculation in which there is, of course, accuracy, for according to knowledge derived from clairvoyance there is an actual relation between the constellations and the actions of men. As time went on, astrology became more and more a matter of reckoning and calculation only. The gift of seership gave place to purely intellectual thought and it can truly be said that astrological forecasts now are nothing but intellectual deduction.

The farther we go back into the past, the more we shall find that the utterances of the ancient prophets concerning the life of their peoples rose up from the very depths of their souls. So it was among the Hebrew prophets; in communion with their God and free of their personal interests and affairs, they were wholly given up to the great concerns of their people and could perceive what was in store. Just as a teacher foresees that certain qualities in a child will express themselves later on, and takes account of them, the Hebrew prophet beheld the soul of his people as one unit; the Past mellowed in his soul and worked in such a way that the consequences were revealed to him as a great vision of the Future.

But now, what does prophecy mean in human life, what does it really signify? We shall find the answer by thinking of the following: There are certain great figures to whom we always trace streams of happenings in history. Although today the preference is for everyone to be at one level, because it goes against the grain when a single personality towers over all the others (in their desire that all faculties shall be equal, people are loath to admit that certain men are more forceful than the rest)—in spite of this, great and advanced leaders are at work in the process of historical evolution. Things have come to such a pass nowadays that the mightiest happenings are conceived to be the outcome simply of ideas and not to lead back to any one personality. There is a certain school of theology, which still claims to be Christian, although it contends that there need have been no Christ Jesus as an individual. In reply to the retort that world-history is after all made by men, one of these theologians said: That is as obvious as the fact that a forest is composed of trees; human beings make history in the same sense that trees make a forest ... But think of it—surely the whole forest could have grown up from a few grains of seed? Certainly the forest is composed of trees but the primary step is to find out whether it did not originate from grains of seeds once laid in the soil. So, too, it is a matter of inquiring whether it is not, after all, the case that events in human evolution lead back to this or that individual who inspired the rest.

This conception of world-history suggests the thought of “surplus” forces in men who play leading parts in the evolution of humanity. Whether they apply these forces for good or ill is another matter. Such men work upon their environment out of the surplus forces within them. These surplus forces, which need not be drawn upon for the affairs of personal life, may express themselves in deeds or they may find no outlet in deeds; but with others, some kind of hindrance always seems to prevent this. Nostradamus is an interesting example: he was a doctor and in this capacity brought blessing to very many human beings. But the thought that someone is doing good, often goes against the grain! Nostradamus became an object of envy and jealousy and was accused of being a Calvinist. To be a Jew or a Calvinist was looked upon askance and circ*mstances therefore forced him to withdraw from his work of healing and abandon his profession. But were the forces used in this inspiring work no longer within him when he had retired? Of course they were! Physics believes in the conservation of energy or force. What happened in the case of Nostradamus was that when he threw up his work, the forces in him took a different direction. If his medical activities had continued, these forces would have produced quite other effects in the future. For where can our deeds really be said to end? If, like Nostradamus, we withdraw from some activity, the flow of our deeds is suddenly stemmed—but the forces themselves are still there. The forces in Nostradamus' soul remained and were transformed, so that what might have expressed itself in deeds at some future time, rose up before him in pictures. In his case, deeds were transformed into the gift of seership. The same may be true of human beings endowed with a faculty for prophecy today; and it was true in the case of the ancient Hebrew prophets. As biblical history indicates, these men had a real connection with forces belonging to the past and to the future of their people; their own soul, their personal life, was nothing to them. They were not war-like by nature but had within them surplus forces which from the very beginning took the same form as those of Nostradamus after their transformation. Forces, which in others poured into deeds, revealed themselves to the Hebrew prophets in the form of mighty pictures and visions. The gift of seership is directly connected with the urge to action in men, with the transformation of surplus forces in the soul.

Seership is therefore by no means an incomprehensible faculty; it can be reconciled with the kind of thinking pursued in natural science itself. But it is obvious, too, that the gift of seership leads beyond the immediate Present. What is the way, the only way, of reaching out beyond the Present? It is to have ideals. Ideals, however, are usually abstract: man sets them before him and believes that they conform to the realities of the Present. But instead of setting up abstract ideals, a man who desires to work in line with the aims of the super-sensible world tries to discover causes lying in the womb of the ages, asking himself: How do these causes express themselves in the flow of time? He approaches this problem not with his intellect but with his deeper faculty of seership. True knowledge of the Past—when this is acquired by the operations of deeper forces and not by way of the intellect—calls up before the soul pictures of the Future, which more or less conform to fact. And one who rightly exercises the gift of seership today, after having pondered the stream of evolution in olden times, will find a picture rising up before him as a concrete ideal. This picture seems to tell him: Mankind is standing at the threshold of transition; certain forces hitherto concealed in darkness are becoming more and more apparent. And just as today people are familiar with intellect and with imagination, so in a Future by no means distant, a new faculty of soul will be there to meet the urge for knowledge of the super-sensible world.

The dawn of this new power of soul can already be perceived. When such glimpses of the Future astonish us, our attitude will not be that of the fanatic, neither will it be that of the pure realist, but we shall know why we do this or that for the sake of spiritual evolution. This, fundamentally, is the purpose of all true prophecy. We realise that this purpose is achieved even when the pictures of the Future outlined by the seer may not be absolutely accurate. Anyone who is able to perceive the hidden forces of the human soul knows better than others that false pictures may arise of what the Future holds in store; he understands, too, why the pictures are capable of many interpretations. To say that although certain indications have been given, they are vague and ambiguous does not mean very much. Such pictures may well be ambiguous. What matters, is that impulses connected with evolution as it moves on towards the Future, shall work upon and awaken slumbering powers in man. These prophesyings may or may not be accurate in every detail: what matters is that powers shall be awakened in the human being!

Prophecy, therefore, is to be conceived less as a means of satisfying curiosity by prediction of the Future than as a stimulating realisation that the gift of seership is within man's grasp. Shadow-sides there may well be—but the good sides are there too! The good side will be revealed above all when men do not go blindly through the day nor blindly onwards into a remote future but can set their own goals and direct their impulses in the light of knowledge. Goethe, who has said so many wonderful things about the affairs of the world, was right when he wrote down the words: “If a man knew the Past, he would know what the Future holds; both are linked to the Present as a Whole complete in itself.” (“Wer das Vergangene kennte, der wusste das Kunftige; beides schliesst an heute sich rein, als ein Vollendetes, an.”) This is a beautiful saying from the “Prophecies of Bakis.”

And so the raison d'être of prophecy does not lie in the appeasem*nt of curiosity or the thirst for knowledge, but in the impulses it can give to work for the sake of the Future. The unwillingness to be really objective about prophecy today is due to the fact that our age sets too high a value on purely intellectual knowledge—which does not kindle impulses of will. But Spiritual Science will bring the recognition that although there have been many shadow-sides in the realm of ancient and modern prophecy, nevertheless in this striving for consciousness of the Future a seed has formed, not for the appeasem*nt of cravings for knowledge or of curiosity, but as fire for our will. And even those who insist upon judging everything in the human being by cold, intellectual standards, must learn from this vista of the world that the purpose of prophecy is to stimulate the impulses of will.

Having considered how attacks against prophecy may be met and having recognised its core and purpose, we have a certain right to say: In this domain lie many of those things with which academic philosophy will have nothing to do ... that is certainly true. But the light of this very knowledge will reveal, in connection with those facts which illustrate the other saying, that data of intellectual knowledge—however correct they may be—are sometimes completely valueless because they are incapable of engendering impulses of will. Just as it is true that there are many things undreamed of by philosophy, so on the other side it is true that a great deal in the realm of scientific research into the things of heaven and earth comes to nothing because it does not quicken the seed of right endeavour. But progress in life must be made in the light of a kind of knowledge which reveals that at the beginning, the middle and the end, everything turns upon human activity, human deeds!

We have already seen that teaching history is beneficial only for developing children at about the age of twelve. Considering history is a kind of preparation for the period of life that begins with sexual maturity, that is, at about the age of fourteen or fifteen. Only at that time can human beings gain the capacity for independent reasoning. A capacity for reasoning, not simply intellectual reasoning, but a comprehensive reasoning in all directions, can only develop after puberty. With the passing of puberty, the supersensible aspect of human nature that carries the capacity of reason is born out of the remainder of human nature. You can call this what you like. In my books I have called it the astral body,but the name is unimportant. As I have said, it is not through intellectual judgment that this becomes noticeable, but through judgment in its broadest sense. You will perhaps be surprised that what I will now describe I also include in the realm of judgment. If we were to do a thorough study of psychology here, you would also see that what I have to say can also be proven psychologically.

When we attempt to have a child who is not yet past puberty recite something according to his or her own taste, we are harming the developmental forces within human nature. These forces will be harmed if an attempt is made to use them before the completion of puberty; they should only be used later. Independent judgments of taste are only possible after puberty. If a child before the age of fourteen or fifteen is to recite something, she should do so on the basis of what an accepted authority standing next to her has provided. This means she should find the way in which the authority has spoken pleasing. She should not be led astray to emphasize or not emphasize certain words, to form the rhythm out of what she thinks is pleasing, but instead she should be guided by the taste of the accepted authority. We should not attempt to guide that intimate area of the child’s life away from accepted authority before the completion of puberty. Notice that I always say “accepted authority” because I certainly do not mean a forced or blind authority. What I am saying is based upon the objective observation that from the change of teeth until puberty, a child has a desire to have an authority standing alongside her. The child demands this, longs for it, and we need to support this longing, which arises out of her individuality.

When you look at such things in a comprehensive way, you will see that in my outline of education here I have always taken the entire development of the human being into account. For this reason I have said that between the ages of seven and fourteen, we should only teach children what can be used in a fruitful way throughout life. We need to see how one stage of life affects another. In a moment I will give an example that speaks to this point. When a child is long past school age, has perhaps long since reached adulthood, this is when we can see what school has made of the child and what it has not. This is visible not only in a general abstract way but also in a very concrete way.

Let us look at children’s play from this perspective, particularly the kind of play that occurs in the youngest children from birth until the change of teeth. Of course, the play of such children is in one respect based upon their desire to imitate. Children do what they see adults doing, only they do it differently. They play in such a way that their activities lie far from the goals and utility that adults connect with certain activities. Children’s play only imitates the form of adult activities, not the material content. The usefulness in and connection to everyday life are left out. Children perceive a kind of satisfaction in activities that are closely related to those of adults. We can look into this further and ask what is occurring here. If we want to study what is represented by play activities and through that study recognize true human nature so that we can have a practical effect upon it, then we must continuously review the individual activities of the child, including those that are transferred to the physical organs and, in a certain sense, form them. That is not so easy. Nevertheless the study of children’s play in the widest sense is extraordinarily important for education.

We need only recall what a person who set the tone for culture once said: “A human being is only a human being so long as he or she plays; and a human being plays so long as he or she is a whole human being.” Schiller1 wrote these words in a letter after he had read some sections of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister. To Schiller, free play and the forces of the soul as they are artistically developed in Wilhelm Meister appeared to be something that could only be compared with an adult form of children’s play. This formed the basis of Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. He wrote them from the perspective that adults are never fully human when carrying out the activities of normal life. He believed that either we follow the necessities of what our senses require of us, in which case we are subject to a certain compulsion, or we follow logical necessity, in which case we are no longer free. Schiller thought that we are free only when we are artistically creative. This is certainly understandable from an artist such as Schiller; however, it is one-sided since in regard to freedom of the soul there is certainly much which occurs inwardly,in much the same way that Schiller understood freedom. Nevertheless the kind of life that Schiller imagined for the artist is arranged so that the human being experiences the spiritual as though it were natural and necessary, and the sense-perceptible as though it were spiritual. This is certainly the case when perceiving something artistic and in the creation of art.

When creating art, we create with the material world, but we do not create something that is useful. We create in the way the idea demands of us, if I may state it that way, but we do not create abstract ideas according to logical necessity. In the creation of art, we are in the same situation as we are when we are hungry or thirsty. We are subject to a very personal necessity. Schiller found that it is possible for people to achieve something of that sort in life, but children have this naturally through play. Here in a certain sense they live in the world of adults, through only to the extent that world satisfies the child’s own individuality. The child lives in creation, but what is created serves nothing.

Schiller’s perspective, from the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, can be used as a basis for further development. The psychological significance of play is not so easy to find. We need to ask if the particular kind of play that children engage in before the change of teeth has some significance for the entirety of human life. We can, as I said, analyze it in the way that Schiller tried to do under the influence of Goethe’s adult childishness. We could also, however, compare this kind of play with other human activities. We could, for example, compare children’s play before the change of teeth with dreaming, where we most certainly will find some important analogies. However, those analogies are simply related to the course of the child’s play, to the connection of the activities to one another in play. In just the same way that children put things together in play—whatever those might be—not with external things but with thoughts, we put pictures together in dreams. This may not be true of all dreams, but it is certainly so in a very large class of them. In dreaming, we remain in a certain sense children throughout our entire lives.

Nevertheless we can only achieve a genuine understanding if we do not simply dwell upon this comparison of play with dreams. Instead we should also ask when in the life of the human being something occurs that allows those forces that are developed in early children’s play until the change of teeth, which can be fruitful for the entirety of external human life. In other words, when do we actually reap the fruits of children’s play? Usually people think we need to seek the fruits of young children’s play in the period of life that immediately follows, but spiritual science shows how life passes in a rhythmical series of repetitions. In a plant, leaves develop from a seed; from the leaves, the bud and flower petals emerge, and so forth. Only afterwards do we have a seed again; that is, the repetition occurs only after an intervening development. It is the same in human life.

From many points of view we could understand human life as though each period were affected only by the one preceding, but this is not the case. If we observe without prejudice, we will find that the actual fruits of those activities that occur in early childhood play become apparent only at the age of twenty. What we gain in play from birth until the change of teeth, what children experience in a dreamy way, are forces of the still-unborn spirituality of the human being, which is still not yet absorbed into, or perhaps more properly said, reabsorbed into the human body.

We can state this differently. I have already discussed how the same forces that act organically upon the human being until the change of teeth become, when the teeth are born, an independent imaginative or thinking capacity, so that in a certain sense something is removed from the physical body. On the other hand, what is active within a child through play and has no connection with life and contains no usefulness is something that is not yet fully connected with the human body. Thus a child has an activity of the soul that is active within the body until the change of teeth and then becomes apparent as a capacity for forming concepts that can be remembered.

The child also has a spiritual-soul activity that in a certain sense still hovers in an etheric way over the child. It is active in play in much the same way that dreams are active throughout the child’s entire life. In children, however, this activity occurs not simply in dreams, it occurs also in play, which develops in external reality. What thus develops in external reality subsides in a certain sense. In just the same way that the seed-forming forces of a plant subside in the leaf and flower petal and only reappear in the fruit, what a child uses in play also only reappears at about the age of twenty-one or twenty-two, as independent reasoning gathering experiences in life.

I would like to ask you to try to genuinely seek this connection. Look at children and try to understand what is individual in their play: try to understand the individuality of children playing freely until the change of teeth, and then form pictures of their individualities. Assume that what you notice in their play will become apparent in their independent reasoning after the age of twenty. This means the various kinds of human beings differ in their independent reasoning after the age of twenty in the just the same way that children differ in their play before the change of teeth.

If you recognize the full truth of this thought, you will be overcome by an unbounded feeling of responsibility in regard to teaching. You will realize that what you do with a child forms the human being beyond the age of twenty. You will see that you will need to understand the entirety of life, not simply the life of children, if you want to create a proper education.

Playing activity from the change of teeth until puberty is something else again. (Of course, things are not so rigidly separated, but if we want to understand something for use in practical life, we must separate things.) Those who observe without prejudice will find that the play activity of a child until the age of seven has an individual character. As a player, the child is, in a certain sense, a kind of hermit. The child plays for itself alone. Certainly children want some help, but they are terribly egotistical and want the help only for themselves. With the change of teeth, play takes on a more social aspect. With some individual exceptions, children now want to play more with one another. The child ceases to be a hermit in his play; he wants to play with other children and tobe something in play. I am not sure if Switzerland can be included in this, but in more military countries the boys particularly like to play soldier. Mostly they want to be at least a general, and thus a social element is introduced to the children’s play.

What occurs as the social element in play from the change of teeth until puberty is a preparation for the next period of life. In this next period, with the completion of puberty, independent reasoning arises. At that time human beings no longer subject themselves to authority; they form their own judgments and confront others as individuals. This same element appears in the previous period of life in play; it appears in something that is not connected with external social life, but in play. What occurs in the previous period of life, namely, social play, is the prelude to tearing yourself away from authority. We can therefore conclude that children’s play until the age of seven actually enters the body only at the age of twenty-one or twenty-two, when we gain an independence in our understanding and ability to judge experiences. On the other hand, what is prepared through play between the ages of seven and puberty appears at an earlier developmental stage in life, namely, during the period from puberty until about the age of twenty-one. This is a direct continuation. It is very interesting to notice that we have properly guided play during our first childhood years to thank for the capacities that we later have for understanding and experiencing life. In contrast, for what appears during our lazy or rebellious years we can thank the period from the change of teeth until puberty. Thus the connections in the course of human life overlap.

These overlapping connections have a fundamental significance of which psychology is unaware. What we today call psychology has existed only since the eighteenth century. Previously, quite different concepts existed about human beings and the human soul. Psychology developed during the period in which materialistic spirit and thought arose. Thus in spite of all significant beginnings, psychology was unable to develop a proper science of the soul, a science that was in accord with reality and took into account the whole of human life. Although I have tried hard, I have to admit that I have been able to find some of these insights only in Herbart’s psychology. Herbart’s psychology is very penetrating; it attempts to discover a certain form of the soul by beginning with the basic elements of the soul’s life. There are many beautiful things in Herbart’s psychology. Nevertheless we need to look at the rather unusual views it has produced in his followers. I once knew a very good follower of Herbart, Robert Zimmermann, an aesthete who also wrote a kind of educational philosophy in his book on psychology for high-school students. Herbart once referred to him as a Kantian from 1828. In his description of psychology as a student of Herbart, he discusses the following problem:

If I am hungry, I do not actually attempt to obtain the food that would satisfy my hunger. Instead, my goal is that the idea of hunger will cease and be replaced by the idea of being full. My concern is actually with ideas. There exists an idea that must arise contrary to inhibitions, and which must work against those inhibitions. Food is actually only a means of moving from the idea of hunger to the idea of being full.

Those who look at the reality of human nature, not simply in a materialistic sense, but also with an eye toward the spiritual, will see that this kind of view is somewhat one-sidedly rationalistic and intellectual. It is necessary to move beyond this one-sided intellectualism and comprehend the entire human being psychologically. In so doing, education can gain much from psychology that otherwise would not be apparent. We should consider what we do in teaching not simply to be the right thing for the child, but rather to be something living that can transform itself. As we have seen, there are many connections of the sort I have presented. We need to assume that what we teach children in elementary school until puberty will reappear in a quite different form from the age of fifteen until twenty-one or twenty-two.

The elementary-school teacher is extremely important for the high-school teacher or the university teacher—in a sense even more important, since the university teacher can achieve nothing if the elementary-school teacher has not sent the child forth with properly formed strengths. It is very important to work with these connected periods of life. If we do, we will see that real beginning points can be found only through spiritual science.

For instance, people define things too much. As far as possible, we should avoid giving children any definitions. Definitions take a firm grasp of the soul and remain static throughout life, thus making life into something dead. We should teach in such a way that what we provide to the child’s soul remains alive. Suppose someone as a child of around nine or ten years of age learns a concept, for instance, at the age of nine, the concept of a lion, or, at the age of eleven or twelve, that of Greek culture. Very good; the child learns it. But these concepts should not remain as they are. A person at the age of thirty should not be able to say she has such-and-such a concept of lions and that is what she learned in school, or that she has such-and-such a concept of Greek culture and that was what she learned in school. This is something we need to overcome. Just as other parts of ourselves grow, the things we receive from the teacher should also grow; they should be something living. We should learn concepts about lions or Greek culture that will not be the same when we are in our thirties or forties as they were when we were in school.

We should learn concepts that are so living that they are transformed throughout our lives. To do so, we need to characterize rather than define. In connection with the formation of concepts, we need to imitate what we can do with painting or even photography. In such cases, we can place ourselves to one side and give one aspect, or we can move to another side and give a different aspect, and so forth. Only after we have photographed a tree from many sides do we have a proper picture of it. Through definitions, we gain too strong an idea that we have something.

We should attempt to work with thoughts and concepts as we would with a camera. We should bring forth the feeling within the child that we are only characterizing something from various perspectives; we are not defining it. Definitions exist only so that we can, in a sense, begin with them and so that the child can communicate understandably with the teacher. That is the basic reason for definitions. That may sound somewhat radical, but it is so. Life does not love definitions. In private, human beings should always have the feeling that, through incorrect definitions, they have arrived at dogmas. It is very important for teachers to know that. Instead of saying, for instance, that two objects cannot be in the same place at the same time, and that is what we call impermeable, the way we consciously define impermeability and then seek things to illustrate this concept, we should instead say that objects are impermeable because they cannot be at the same place at the same time. We should not make hypotheses into dogmas. We only have the right to say that we call objects impermeable when they cannot be at the same place at the same time. We need to remain conscious of the formative forces of our souls and should not awaken the concept of a triangle in the external world before the child has recognized a triangle inwardly.

That we should characterize and not define is connected with recognizing that the fruits of those things that occur during one period of human life will be recognized perhaps only very much later. Thus we should give children living concepts and feelings rather than dead ones. We should try to present geometry, for example, in as lively a way as possible. A few days ago I spoke about arithmetic. I want to speak before the end of the course tomorrow about working with fractions and so forth, but now I would like to add a few remarks about geometry. These remarks are connected with a question I was asked and also with what I have just presented.

Geometry can be seen as something that can slowly be brought from a static state into a living one. In actuality, we are speaking of something quite general when we say that the sum of the angles of a triangle is 180°. That is true for all triangles, but can we imagine a triangle? In our modern way of educating, we do not always attempt to teach children a flexible concept of a triangle. It would be good, however, if we teach our children a flexible concept of a triangle, not simply a dead concept. We should not have them simply draw a triangle, which is always a special case. Instead we could say that here I have a line. I can divide the angle of 180° into three parts. That can be done in an endless number of ways. Each time I have divided the angle, I can go on to form a triangle, so that I show the child how an angle that occurs here then occurs here in the triangle. When I transfer the angles in this way, I will have such a triangle. Thus in moving from three fan-shaped angles lying next to one another, I can form numerous triangles and those triangles thus become flexible in the imagination. Clearly these triangles have the characteristic that the sum of their angles is 180° since they arose by dividing a 180° angle. It is good to awaken the idea of a triangle of a child in this way, so that an inner flexibility remains and so that they do not gain the idea of a static triangle, but rather that of a flexible shape, one that could just as well be acute as obtuse, or it could be a right triangle (see diagram).

Imagine how transparent the whole concept of triangles would be if I began with such inwardly flexible concepts, then developed triangles from them. We can use the same method to develop a genuine and concrete feeling for space in children. If in this way we have taught children the concept of flexibility in figures on a plane, the entire mental configuration of the child will achieve such flexibility that it is then easy to go on to three-dimensional elements—for instance, how one object moves past another behind it, forward or backward. By presenting how an object moves forward or backward past another object, we present the first element that can be used in developing a feeling for space. If we, for example, present how it is in real life—namely how one person ceases to be visible when he or she moves behind an object or how the object becomes no longer visible when the person moves in front of it—we can go on to develop a feeling for space that has an inner liveliness to it. The feeling for three-dimensional space remains abstract and dead when it is presented only as perspectives. The children can gain that lively feeling for space if, for instance, we tell a short story.

This morning at nine o’clock I came across two people. They were sitting someplace on a bench. This afternoon at three, I came by again and the same two people were sitting on the same bench. Nothing had changed.

Certainly as long as I only consider the situation at nine in the morning and three in the afternoon, nothing had changed. However, if I go into it more and speak with these people, then perhaps I would discover that after I had left in the morning, one person remained, but the other stood up and went away. Though he was gone for three hours,he then returned and sat down again alongside the other. He had done something and was perhaps tired after six hours. I cannot recognize the actual situation only in connection with space, that is, if I think only of the external situation and do not look further into the inner, to the more important situation.

We cannot make judgments even about the spatial relationships between beings if we do not go into inner relationships. We can avoid bitter illusions in regard to cause and effect only if we go into those inner relationships. The following might occur: A man is walking along the bank of a river and comes across a stone. He stumbles over the stone and falls into the river. After a time he is pulled out. Suppose that nothing more is done than to report the objective facts: Mr. So-and-So has drowned. But perhaps that is not even true. Perhaps the man did not drown, but instead stumbled because at that point he had a heart attack and was already dead before he fell into the water. He fell into the water because he was dead. This is an actual case that was once looked into and shows how necessary it is to proceed from external circ*mstances into the more inner aspects.

In the same way if we are to make judgments about the spatial relationship of one being to another, we need to go into the inner aspects of those beings. When properly grasped in a living way, it enables us to develop a spatial feeling in children so that we can use movements for the development of a feeling for space. We can do that by having the children run in different figures, or having them observe how people move in front or behind when passing one another.

It is particularly important to make sure that what is observed in this way is also retained. This is especially significant for the development of a feeling for space. If I cast a shadow from different objects upon the surface of other objects, I can show how the shadow changes. If children are capable of understanding why, under specific circ*mstances, the shadow of a sphere has the shape of an ellipse—and this is certainly something that can be understood by a child at the age of nine—this capacity to place themselves in such spatial relationships has a tremendously important effect upon their capacity to imagine and upon the flexibility of their imaginations.

For that reason we should certainly see that it is necessary to develop a feeling for space in school. If we ask ourselves what children do when they are drawing up until the change of teeth, we will discover that they are in fact developing experience that then becomes mature understanding around the age of twenty. That understanding develops out of the changing forms, so the child plays by drawing; at the same time, however, that drawing tells something. We can understand children’s drawings if we recognize that they reflect what the child wants to express.

Let us look at children’s drawings. Before the ages of seven or eight or sometimes even nine, children do not have a proper feeling for space. That comes only later when other forces slowly begin to affect the child’s development. Until the age of seven, what affects the child’s functioning later becomes imagination. Until puberty, it is the will that mostly affects the child and which, as I mentioned earlier, is dammed up and becomes apparent through boys’ change of voice. The will is capable of developing spatial feeling. Through everything that I have just said, that is, through the development of a spatial feeling through movement games and by observing what occurs when shadows are formed—namely, through what arises through movement and is then held fast—all such things that develop the will give people a much better understanding than simply through an intellectual presentation, even though that understanding may be somewhat playful, an understanding with a desire to tell a story.

Now, at the end of this lecture, I would like to show you the drawings of a six-year-old boy whose father, I should mention, is a painter so that you can see them in connection with what I just said. Please notice how extraordinarily talkative this six-year-old boy is through what he creates. I might even say that he has in fact created a very specific language here, a language that expresses just what he wants to tell. Many of these pictures,which we could refer to as expressionist, are simply his way of telling stories that were read to him, or which he heard in some other way. Many of the pictures are, as you can see, wonderfully expressive. Take a look at this king and queen. These are things that show how children at this age tell stories. If we understand how children speak at this age—something that is so wonderfully represented here because the boy is already drawing with colored pencils—and if we look at all the details, we will find that these drawings represent the child’s being in much the way that I described to you earlier. We need to take the change that occurred with the change of teeth into consideration if we are to understand how we can develop a feeling for space.

What I especially tried to stress yesterday was that in that spiritual development of the West which found its expression in scholasticism not only that happens which one can grasp in abstractions and which took place in a development of abstractions, but that behind it a real development of the impulses of western humanity exists. I think that one can look at that at first, as one does mostly in the history of philosophy, which one finds with the single philosophers. One can pursue, how the ideas, which one finds with a personality of the sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth centuries, are continued by personalities of the tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth centuries, and one can get the impression by such a consideration that one thinker took over certain ideas from the other and that a certain evolution of ideas is there.

One has to leave this historical consideration of the spiritual life gradually. Since that which manifests from the single human souls are only symptoms of deeper events which are behind the scene of the outer processes. These events which happened already a few centuries before Christianity was founded until the time of scholasticism is a quite organic process in the development of western humanity. Without looking at this process, it is equally impossible to get information about that development, we say from the twelfth until the twentieth years of a human being unless one considers the important impact in this age that is associated with sexual maturity and all forces that work their way up from the subsoil of the human being. Thus, something works its way up from the depths of this big organism of European humanity that one can just characterise saying: those old poets spoke very honestly and sincerely who began their epic poems as Homer did: sing to me, goddess, on the rage of the Peleid Achilles—, or: sing to me, muse, on the actions of the widely wandered man.—These men wanted to say no commonplace phrase, they felt as inner fact of their consciousness that not a single individual ego wants to express itself there but a higher spiritual-mental that intervenes in the usual state of human consciousness.

Again—I said it already yesterday—Klopstock was sincere and figured this fact out in a way, even if maybe only instinctively, when he began his Messiah; now not: sing, muse, or: sing, goddess, on the redemption of the human beings -, but he said: sing, immortal soul -, that means: sing, individual being that lives in the single person as an individuality.—When Klopstock wrote his Messiah, this individual feeling had already advanced far in the single souls. However, this inner desire to stress individuality originated especially in the age of the foundation of Christianity until High Scholasticism. In that which the philosophers thought one can notice the uppermost, which goes up to the extreme surface of that which takes place in the depths of humanity: the individualisation of the European consciousness. An essential moment of the propagation of Christianity in these centuries is the fact that the missionaries had to speak to people who more and more strove for feeling the inner individuality.

Only from this viewpoint, you can understand the conflicts that took place in the souls of such human beings who wanted to deal with Christianity on one side and with philosophy on the other side as Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas did. Today the common histories of philosophy describe the soul conflicts too little, which found their end in Albert and Thomas. There many things intervened in the soul life of Albert and Thomas.

Seen from without it seems, as if Albert the Great who lived from the twelfth to the thirteenth century and Thomas who lived in the thirteenth century wanted to combine Augustinism and Aristotelianism only dialectically on one side. The one of them was the bearer of the ecclesiastical ideas; the other was the bearer of the cultivated philosophical ideas. You can pursue their searching for the harmony of both views everywhere in their writings. Nevertheless, in everything that is fixed there in thoughts endlessly much lives that did not pass to that age which extends from the middle of the fifteenth century until our days, and from which we take our common ideas for all sciences and also for the whole public life.

It appears to the modern human, actually, only as something paradox: the fact that Augustine really thought that a part of the human beings is destined from the start to receive the divine grace without merit—for they all would have to perish because of the original sin—and to be saved mental-spiritually. The other part of humanity must perish mental-spiritually, whatever it undertakes.—For the modern human being this seems paradox, maybe even pointless. Someone who can empathise in the age of Augustine in which he received those ideas and sensations that I have characterised yesterday will feel different. He will feel that one can understand that Augustine wanted still to adhere to the ideas that not yet cared about the single person that just cared about the general-human influenced by such ideas as those of Plotinism. However, on the other side, the drive for individuality stirred in the soul of Augustine. Hence, these ideas get such a succinct form, hence, they are fulfilled with human experience, and thereby just Augustine makes such a deep impression if we look back at the centuries, which preceded scholasticism.

Beyond Augustine that remained for many human beings what the single human being of the West as a Christian held together with his church—but only in the ideas of Augustine. However, these ideas were just not suitable for the western humanity that did not endure the idea to take the whole humanity as a whole and to feel in it like a member, which probably belongs to that part of humanity, which is doomed. Hence, the church needed a way out.

Augustine still combated Pelagius (~360-418) intensely, that man who was completely penetrated with the impulse of individuality. He was a contemporary of Augustine; individualism appears in him as usually only the human beings of the later centuries had it. Hence, he could not but say, it can be no talk that the human being must remain quite passive in his destiny in the sensory world. From the human individuality even the power has to originate by which the soul finds the connection to that which raises it from the chains of sensuousness to the pure spiritual regions where it can find its redemption and return to freedom and immortality.—The opponents of Augustine asserted that the single human being must find the power to overcome the original sin.

The church stood between both opponents, and it looked for a way out. This way out was often discussed. One talked as it were back and forth, and one decided for the middle. I would like to leave it to you whether it is the golden mean. This middle was the Semipelagianism. One found a formula which announced: indeed, it is in such a way as Augustine said, but, nevertheless, it is not completely in such a way as Augustine said; it is also not completely in such a way as Pelagius said, but it is in a certain sense in such a way as he said. Thus, one can say that, indeed, not by God's everlasting wise decision the ones are destined to sin, the others to grace; but the matter would be in such a way that, indeed, there is no divine predetermination but a divine foreknowledge. God knows in advance whether the one is a sinner or the other is someone who is filled with grace.

Besides, we do not take into account when this dogma was spread that it did not at all concern foreknowledge, but that it concerned taking plainly position whether now the single individual human being can combine with the forces in his individual soul life which can cancel his separation from the divine-spiritual being. Thus, the question remains unsolved for dogmatism, and I would like to say, Albert and Thomas were on one side forced to look at the contents of the dogmas of the church, on the other side, however, they were fulfilled with the deepest admiration of the greatness of Augustine. They faced that what was western spiritual development within the Christian current. Nevertheless, still something played a role from former times. It lived on in such a way that one sees it being active on the bottom of their souls, but one also realises that they are not quite aware of it that it has impact in their thoughts that they cannot bring it, however, to an exact version.

One must consider this more for this time of High Scholasticism of Albert and Thomas than one would have to consider a similar phenomenon, for example, in our time. I have already emphasised the why and wherefore in my Worldviews and Approaches to Life in the Nineteenth Century. I would only like to note that this book was extended to The Riddles of Philosophy where the concerning passage could not return because the task of the book had changed. We experience that from this struggle of individuality the thinkers who developed this struggle of individuality philosophically reach the zenith of the logical faculty of judgement.

One may rail against scholasticism from this or that party viewpoint—all this railing is fulfilled with little expertise as a rule. Since someone who has sense for the way in which the astuteness of thoughts comes about with something that is explained scientifically or different, who has sense to recognise how connections are intellectually combined which must be combined intellectually if life should get sense—who has sense for all that and for some other things already recognises that so exactly, so conscientiously logically one never thought before and after High Scholasticism. Just these are the essentials that the pure thinking proceeds with mathematical security from idea to idea, from judgement to judgement, from conclusion to conclusion in such a way that these thinkers always account to themselves for the smallest step.

One has only to mind that this thinking took place in a silent monastic cell or far from the activities of the world. This thinking could still develop the pure technique of thinking by other circ*mstances. Today it is difficult to develop this pure thinking. Since if one tries anyhow to present such activity to the general public which wants nothing but to string together thoughts, then the biased people, the illogical people come who take up all sorts of things and allege their crude biased opinions. Because one is just a human being among human beings, one has to deal with these things that often are not at all concerned with that which it concerns, actually. One loses that inner quietness very soon to which thinkers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries could dedicate themselves who did not think much of the contradiction of unprepared people in their social life.

This and still some other things caused that wonderful sculptural, on one side, but also in fine contours proceeding activity of thinking which is characteristic for scholasticism and at which Albert and Thomas aimed exceptionally consciously.

However, please remember that there are demands of life, on one side, which appear as dogmas which were similarly ambiguous in numerous cases as the characterised Semipelagianism, and that one wanted to maintain the dogmas of the church with the most astute thinking. Imagine only what it means to consider Augustinism just with the most astute thinking. One has to look into the inside of the scholastic striving and not only to characterise the course from the Fathers of the Church to the scholastics along the concepts that one has picked up.

Just many semi-conscious things had impact on these spirits of High Scholasticism. You cope with it only if you look beyond that what I have characterised already yesterday and if you still envisage such a figure that entered mysteriously under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite into the European spiritual life from the sixth century on. Today I cannot defer to all disputes about whether his writings were written in the sixth century or whether the other view is right that at least leads back the traditional of these writings to much earlier periods. All that does not matter, but that is the point that the thinkers of the seventh, eighth centuries and still those like Thomas Aquinas studied the views of Dionysius the Areopagite, and that these writings contained that in a special form which I have characterised yesterday as Plotinism, but absolutely with a Christian nuance. That became significant for the Christian thinkers up to High Scholasticism how the writer of Dionysius' writings related to the ascent of the human soul to a view of the divine.

One asserts normally that Dionysius had two ways to the divine. Yes, he did have two. One way is that he asks, if the human being wants to ascend from the outside things to the divine, he must find out the essentials of all things which are there, he has to try to go back to the most perfect ones, he must be able to name the most perfect so that he has contents for this most perfect divine which can now pour itself out again as it were and create the single things of the world from itself by individuation and differentiation.—Hence, one would like to say, God is that being to Dionysius that one has to call with many names that one has to give as most distinguishing predicates which one can find out of all perfections of the world. Take any perfection that strikes you in the things of the world, and then call God with it, then you get an idea of God.—This is one way that Dionysius suggests.

He says about the other way, you never reach God if you even give him one single name because your endeavour to find the perfections in the things, the essentials of the things, to summarise them to characterise God with. You have to free yourself from everything that you have recognised in the things. You have to purify your consciousness completely from everything that you have found out in the things. You must know nothing of that which the world says to you. You must forget all names that you have given the things and you have to put yourself in a soul condition where you know nothing of the whole world. If you can experience this, you experience the unnamed one who is misjudged immediately if you give him any name; then you recognise God, the super-God in his super-beautifulness. However, already these names would interfere. They can serve only to make you aware of that which you have to experience as unnamed.

How does one cope with a personality who gives not one theology but two theologies, a positive one and a negative one, a rationalistic and a mystic theology? Someone who can just project his thoughts in the spirituality of the periods from which Christianity is born can cope with it quite well. If one describes, however, the course of human development during the first Christian centuries in such a way as modern materialists do, then the writings of the Areopagite appear more or less folly. Then one simply rejects them as a rule. If you can project your thoughts, however, in that which one experienced and felt at that time, then you understand what a person like the Areopagite only wanted to express, actually, at which countless human beings aimed. For them God was a being that one could not recognise at all if one took one way to Him only. For the Areopagite God was a being that one had to approach on rational way by naming and name finding. However, if you go this way only, you lose the path, and then you lose yourself in cosmic space void of God. Then you do not find your way to God. Nevertheless, one must take this way, for without taking this way you cannot reach God. However, one has still to take a second way. This is just that which aims at the unnamed. However, if you take one way only, you find God just as little; if you take both, they cross, and you find God at the crossing point. It is not enough to argue whether one way or the other way is right. Both together are right; but every single one leads to nothing. One has to take both ways and the human soul finds that at the crossing point at which it aimed.

I can understand that some people of the present shrink from that what the Areopagite demands here. However, this lived with the persons who were the spiritual leaders during the first Christian centuries, then it lived on traditionally in the Christian-philosophical current of the West, and it lived up to Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas. It lived, for example, in that personality whose name I have called already yesterday, in Scotus Eriugena. As I have told yesterday, Vinzenz Knauer and Franz Brentano who were usually meek flew into a rage if Plotinus came up for discussion. Those who are more or less, even if astute and witty, rationalists will already rail if they come in contact with that which originated from the Areopagite, and whose last significant manifestation Eriugena was.

A legend tells that Eriugena was a Benedictine prior in England in his last years. However, his own monks stabbed him repeatedly with their styluses—I do not say that it is literally true, but if it is not quite true, it is approximately true—until he was dead because he had still brought Plotinism into the ninth century.

However, his ideas that further developed at the same time survived him. His writings had disappeared more or less; nevertheless, they were delivered to posterity. In the twelfth century, one considered Scotus Eriugena as a heretic. However, this did yet not have such a meaning as later and today. Nevertheless, the ideas of Scotus Erigena deeply influenced Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas.

We realise this heritage of former times on the bottom of the souls, if we want to speak of the nature of Thomism. Something else is considered. In Plotinism, you can realise a very significant feature that arose from a sensory-extrasensory vision of the human being. One gets great respect for these things, actually, when one finds them spiritual-scientifically again. There one would like to confess the following. There one says, if one reads anything unpreparedly like Plotinus or that which is delivered from him, then it appears quite chaotic. However, if one discovers the corresponding truths again, these views take on a different complexion even if they were pronounced different at that time. Thus, you can find a view with Plotinus that I would like to characterise possibly in the following way.

Plotinus looks at the human being with his bodily-mental-spiritual peculiarities from two viewpoints at first. He looks at them first from the viewpoint of the work of the soul on the body. If I wanted to speak in modern way, I would have to say the following. Plotinus says to himself at first, if one looks at a child growing up, then one realises that that still is developed which develops from spiritual-mental as a human body.

For Plotinus is everything that appears material in particular in the human being—please be not irked by the expression—an exudate of the spiritual-mental, a crust of the spiritual-mental as it were. We can interpret everything bodily as a crust of the spiritual-mental. However, when the human being has grown up to a certain degree, the spiritual-mental forces stop working on the bodily.

One could say, at first, we have to deal with such an activity of the spiritual-mental in the bodily that this bodily is organised from the spiritual-mental. The spiritual-mental works out the human organisation. If anything in the organic activity attains a certain level of maturity, we say, for example, for that activity to which the forces are used which appear later as the forces of memory, just these forces which have once worked on the body appear in a spiritual-mental metamorphosis. What has worked first materially from the spiritual-mental, gets free from it if it is ready with its work, and appears as an independent being, as a soul mirror if one wants to speak in the sense of Plotinus.

It is exceptionally difficult to characterise these things with our concepts. One comes close to them if one imagines the following. The human being can remember from a certain level of maturity of his memory. He is not able to do this as a little child. Where are the forces with which he remembers? They develop the organism at first. After they have worked on the organism, they emancipate themselves and still work on the organism as something spiritual-mental. Then only the real core, the ego lives again in this soul mirror. In an exceptionally pictorial way this double work of the soul, this division of the soul into an active part which builds up, actually, the body and into a passive part is portrayed by that ancient worldview. It found its last expression in Plotinus and devolved then upon Augustine and his successors.

We find this view in a rationalised form, in more physical concepts with Aristotle. However, Aristotle had this view from Plato and from that on which Plato rested. If you read Aristotle, it is in such a way, as if you have to say, Aristotle himself strives for conceptualising all old views abstractly. Thus, we recognise in the Aristotelian system that also continued the rationalistic form of that which Plotinus gave in another form, we recognise a rationalised mysticism in Aristotelianism continued until Albert and Thomas Aquinas, a rationalistic portrayal of the spiritual secret of the human being.

Albert and Thomas knew that Aristotle had brought down that by abstractions what the others had in visions. Therefore, they do not at all face Aristotle in such a way as modern philosophers and philologists do who quarrel over two concepts that come from Aristotle. However, because the Aristotelian writings have not come completely to posterity, one finds these concepts or ideas without being related to each other. Aristotle considered the human being as a unity that encloses the vegetative, lower principle and the higher principle, the nous,—the scholastics call it intellectus agens. However, Aristotle distinguishes the nous poietikos and the nous pathetikos, an active and a passive human mind. What does he mean with them?

You do not understand what he means if you do not go back to the origin of these concepts. Even like the other soul forces these two kinds of mind are active in the construction of the human soul: the mind, in so far as it is still active in the construction of the human being which does not stop, however, like the memory once and emancipates itself as memory but is active the whole life through. It is the nous poietikos. This builds up and individualises the body from the universe for itself in the sense of Aristotle. It is the same as the soul constructing the human body of Plotinus. That what emancipates itself then what is destined only to take up the outer world and to process the impressions of the outer world dialectically is the nous pathetikos, the intellectus possibilis. What faces us as astute dialectic, as exact logic in scholasticism goes back to these old traditions. You do not cope with that what happened in the souls of the scholastics if you do not take into consideration this impact of ancient traditions.

Because all that had an impact on the scholastics, the big question arose to them that one normally regards as the real problem of scholasticism. In that time when humanity had still a vision that produced such things like Platonism or its rationalistic filtrate, Aristotelianism, in which, however, still the individual feeling had not reached the climax, the scholastic problems were not yet there. Since that which we call intellect and which has its origin in the scholastic terminology on one side is just an outflow of the individual human being. If we all think in the same way, it is only because we all are organised equally individually and that the mind is attached to the individual that is the same in all human beings. They think different, as far as they are differentiated. However, these nuances have nothing to do with real logic. However, the real logical and dialectic thinking is an outflow of the general human but individually differentiated organisation.

Thus, the human being stands there as an individuality and says to himself, in me the thoughts emerge by which the outside world is represented internally; there the thoughts which should give a picture of the world are arranged from the inside. There, on one side, work mental pictures inside of the human being that are attached to single individual things, like to a single wolf or to a single human being, we say to Augustine. Then, however, the human being gets to other inner experiences, like to his dreams for which he does not find such an outer representative at first. There he gets to those experiences, which he forms for himself, which are chimaeras as already the centaur was a chimaera to scholasticism.

Then, however, are on the other side those concepts and ideas that shimmer, actually, to both sides: the humanity, the type or genus of lion, the type or genus of wolf, and so on. The scholastics called these general concepts universals (universalia). When the human beings still rose to these universals in such a way as I have described it yesterday, they felt them as the lowest border of the spiritual world. To experience in such a way, it was not yet necessary to have that individual feeling which prevailed then during the later centuries. With individualised feeling, one said to himself, you rise from the sensory things up to that border where the more or less abstract, but experienced things are, the universals humanity, lion, wolf and so on.

Scholasticism understood this very well that one could not say just like that, these are only summaries of the outer world, but this became a problem for it with which it struggled. We have to develop such general concepts, such universal concepts from our individuality. If we look out, however, at the world, we do not have the humanity, but single human beings, not the type wolf, but single wolves. However, on the other side, we cannot regard that what we study as the wolf type or the lamb type, the material that is contained in these summaries as the only real. We cannot accept this just like that, because then we would have to suppose that a wolf becomes a lamb if one feeds it with lambs only long enough. Matter does not do it; the wolf remains wolf. Nevertheless, the wolf type is something that one cannot only equate with the material just like that.

Today it is often a problem, which people do not at all take seriously. Scholasticism struggled intensely with this problem, just in its period of bloom. This problem was directly connected with the ecclesiastical interests. We can get an idea of it if we take into consideration the following.

Before Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas appeared with their special elaboration of philosophy, already some people had appeared like Roscelin (R. of Compiègne, ~1050-1120, French theologian and philosopher), for example, who asserted and were absolutely of the opinion that these general concepts, these universalia were nothing but that what we summarise from the outer individual things. They are, actually, mere words, mere names.—This nominalism regarded the general things, the universalia, only as words. However, Roscelin was dogmatically serious about nominalism, applied it to the Trinity, and said, if—what he considered right—this summary is only a word, the Trinity is only a word, and the individuals are the only real: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Then the human mind summarises this three: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit with a name only.—Medieval spirits expanded such things to the last consequences. The church was compelled to declare this view of Roscelin a partial polytheism and the doctrine heretic on the synod of Soissons (1092). So one was in a certain calamity compared with nominalism. A dogmatic interest united with a philosophical one.

In contrast to today, one felt it as something very real in that time, and just with the relationship of the universalia to the individual things Thomas and Albertus struggled spiritually; it is the most important problem for them. Everything else is only a result as far as everything else got a certain nuance by the way how they positioned themselves to this problem. However, just in how Albertus and Thomas positioned themselves to this problem, all forces are involved which had remained as tradition of the Areopagite, of Plotinus, Augustine, Eriugena and many others. One still knew that there were human beings who beheld beyond the concepts into the spiritual world, into the intellectual world, in that world about which also Thomas speaks as about a reality in which he realises the intellectual beings free of matter that he calls angels. These are not mere abstractions but real beings that have no bodies only. Thomas placed these beings into the tenth sphere. While he imagines the earth circled by the sphere of the moon, then of Mercury, Venus, and sun and so on, he comes via the eighth and the ninth spheres to the Empyrean, to the tenth sphere. He imagines all that absolutely interspersed with intelligences, and the intelligences to which he refers back at first send down what they have as their lowest border as it were in such a way that the human soul can experience it. However, in such a way as I have pronounced it now, in this form which is more based on Plotinism it does not appear from the mere individual feeling to which just scholasticism had brought itself, but it remained belief for Albert and Thomas that there is the manifestation of these abstractions above these abstractions. For them, the question originated, which reality do these abstractions have?

Albert and Thomas still had an idea of the work of the mental-spiritual on the bodily and its subsequent mirroring if it has worked enough on the bodily. They had images of all that. They had images also of that which the human being becomes in his single individual life what he takes up as impressions of the outside world and processes it with them. Thus, the idea developed that we have the world round ourselves, but this world is a manifestation of the spiritual. While we look at the world, while we see the single minerals, plants, and animals, we suspect that that is behind them, which manifests from higher spiritual worlds.

If we consider the realms of nature with logical decomposition and with the greatest possible mental capacity, we get to that which the spiritual world has put into the realms of nature. Then, however, we have to understand the fact that we are in contact with the world by our senses. Then we turn away from the world. We keep that as memory, which we have taken up from the world. We look back remembering. There only the universal like “humanity” appears to us in its inner conceptual figure. So that Albert and Thomas say, if you look back if your soul reflects that to you, which it has experienced in the outside world, then the universalia live in your soul. Then you have universalia. You develop from all human beings whom you have met the concept of humanity. You could live generally only in earthly names if you remembered individual things only. While you do not at all live only in earthly names, you must experience universalia. There you have universalia post res, universals that live after the things in the soul. While the human being turns his soul to the things, he does not have the same in his soul what he has after if he remembers it, but he is related to the things. He experiences the spiritual in the things; he translates it to himself only into the form of the universalia post res.

While Albert and Thomas suppose that the human being is related to something real when he is related to his surroundings by his intellectual capacity, so not only to that what the wolf is because the eye sees it, the ear hears it and so on, but because the human being can think about it, the type “wolf” develops. He experiences something that he grasps intellectually abstractly in the things that is also not completely absorbed in the sensory entities. He experiences the universalia in rebus, the universals in the things.

One cannot distinguish this easily because one normally thinks that that which one has in his soul at last as a reflection is also the same in the things. No, it is not the same in the sense of Thomas Aquinas. What the human being experiences as an idea in his soul and explains with his mind to himself is that by which he experiences the real, the universal. So that the form of the universals after the things is different from that of the universals in the things, which then remain in the soul; but internally they are the same.

There you have one of the scholastic concepts whose clearness one normally does not consider. The universals in the things and the universals after the things in the soul are as regards content the same, different only after their form.

Then, however, something else is added. That which lives in the things individualised points to the intellectual world again. The contents are the same, which are in the things and after the things in the human soul, but they have different form. Again in other form, but with the same contents: are the universalia ante res, the universals before the things. These are the universals as they are included in the divine mind and in the mind of the divine servants, the angels.

Thus, the immediate spiritual-sensory-extrasensory view of ancient time changes into the views which were illustrated only just with sensory pictures because one cannot even name that which one beholds in extrasensory way after the Areopagite if one wants to deal with it in its true figure. One can only point to it and say, it is not all that which the outer things are. - Thus, that which presented itself as reality in the spiritual world to the ancient people becomes something for scholasticism about which just that astuteness of thinking has to decide. One had brought down the problem that was once solved by beholding into the sphere of thinking, of the ratio. This is the nature of the view of Thomas and Albert, of High Scholasticism. It realises above all that in its time the feeling of the human individuality culminates. It realises all problems in their rational logical figure.

The scholastic thinking struggles with this figure of the world problems. With this struggle and thinking, scholasticism stands in the middle of the ecclesiastical life. On the one side, is that of which one could believe in the thirteenth, in the twelfth centuries that one has to gain it with the thinking, with the astute logic; on the other side were the traditional ecclesiastical dogmas, the religious contents.

Let us take an example how Thomas Aquinas bears a relation to both things. There he asks, can anyone prove the existence of God by logic? Yes, one can do it.—He gives a range of proofs. One of them is, for example, that he says, we can only gain knowledge at first, while we approach the universalia in rebus and look into the things. We cannot penetrate by beholding—this is a simply personal experience of this age—into the spiritual world. We can thereby only penetrate with human forces into the spiritual world that we become engrossed in the things, get out the universalia in rebus. Then one is able to conclude what is about these universalia ante res before, he says. We see the world moved; a thing always moves the other because it itself is moved. Thus, we come from one moved thing to another moved thing, from this to another moved thing. This cannot go on endlessly, but we must come to the prime mover. If he were moved, however, we would have to look for another prime mover. We must come to an unmoved prime mover.—With it, Thomas just reached—and Albert concluded in the same way—the Aristotelian unmoved mover, the first cause. The logic thinking is able to acknowledge God as an inevitably first being as the inevitably unmoved prime mover.

No such line of thought leads to Trinity. However, it is traditional. One can reach with the human thinking only so far that one tries whether the Trinity is preposterous. There one finds: It is not preposterous, but one cannot prove It, one must believe It, one must accept It as contents up to which human intellectuality cannot rise.

Thus, scholasticism faces the so important question at that time, how far can one reach with the human intellect? However, by the development of time it was placed still in quite special way in this problem, because other thinkers preceded. They had accepted something apparently quite absurd. They had said, something could be theologically true and philosophically wrong. One can say flatly, it can absolutely be that things were handed down dogmatically, as for example the Trinity; if one contemplates then about the same question, one comes to the contrary result. It is possible that the intellect leads to other results than the religious contents.—This the other problem that the scholastics faced: the doctrine of double truth. Both thinkers Albert and Thomas made a point harmonising the religious contents and the intellectual contents, searching no contradiction between that what the intellect can think, indeed, only up to a certain limit, and the religious contents. However, what the intellect can think must not be contradictory to the religious contents; the religious contents must not be contradictory to the intellect.

This was radical in those days because the majority of the leading church authorities adhered to the doctrine of double truth: that—on one side—the human being must simply think something reasonable, as regards content in one figure, and the religious contents can give him it in another figure. He has to live with these two figures of truth.—I believe that one could get a feeling for historical development if one thought that people were with all their soul forces in such problems few centuries ago. Since these things still echo in our times. We still live in these problems. Tomorrow we want to discuss how we live in these problems. Today I wanted to characterise the nature of Thomism generally in such a way as it lived at that time.

The main problem to Albert and Thomas was how do the intellectual contents of the human being relate to the religious contents? First, how can one understand what the church specifies as faith, secondly how can one defend it against that which is opposite to it? Albert and Thomas were very much concerned with it. Since in Europe that did not live exclusively which I have characterised, but there were still other views. With the propagation of Islam, other views still asserted themselves in Europe. Something of Manichaean views had remained in Europe.

However, there was also the doctrine of Averroes (Ibn Rushed, 1126-1198, Andalusian polymath) who said there, what the human being thinks with his pure intellect does not belong to him especially; it belongs to the whole humanity.—Averroes says, we do not have the intellect for ourselves; we have a body for ourselves, but not everybody has an intellect for himself. The person A has an own body, but his intellect is the same as that of person B and again as that of person C.—One could say, to Averroes a uniform intelligence of humanity exists, in which all individuals submerge. They live with their heads in it as it were. When they die, the body withdraws from this universal intelligence. Immortality does not exist in the sense of an everlasting individual existence after death. What lasts there is only the universal intelligence, is only that which is common to all human beings.

Thomas had to count on this universality of the intellect. However, he had to position himself on the viewpoint that the universal intellect not only combines intimately with the individual memory in the single human being, but that that which during life combines also with the bodily forces form a whole that all formative, vegetative and animal forces, as the forces of memory are attracted by the universal intellect. Thomas imagines that the human being attracts the universal and then draws that into the spiritual world, which his universal has attracted so that he brings it into the spiritual world. Hence, to Thomas and Albert not pre-existence but post-existence can be as Aristotle had assumed. In this respect, these thinkers continue Aristotelianism, too.

Thus, the big logical questions of the universals combine with the questions that concern the world destiny of the single human beings. In the end, the general logic nature of Thomism had an impact on all that—even if I wanted to characterise the cosmology of Thomas and the enormous natural history of Albert. This logical nature consisted of the following: we can penetrate everything with keen logic and dialectic up to a certain border, and then we must penetrate into the religious contents. Thus, both thinkers faced these two things without being contradictory: what we grasp with our intellect and what is revealed by the religious contents can exist side by side.

What was, actually, the nature of Thomism in history? For Thomas it is typical and important to prove God, while he strains the intellect and at the same time, he has to concede that one comes to an idea of God as one had it as Jahveh rightly in the Old Testament.—That is, he gets to that uniform God whom the Old Testament called the Jahveh God. If one wants to get to Christ, one has to pass over to the religious contents; one cannot get to it with that which the human soul experiences as its own spiritual.

Something deeper was in the views of double truth against which High Scholasticism simply had to oppose out of the spirit of time, that one could not survey, however, in the age in which one was surrounded everywhere by the pursuit of rationalism, of logic. The following fact was behind it: those who spoke of double truth did not take the view that that which theology reveals and that which the intellect can reach are two different things, but are two truths provisionally, and that the human being gets to them because he took part in the Fall of Man to the core of his soul.

This question lives as it were in the depths of the souls until Albert and Thomas: did we not take up the original sin also in our thinking? Does the intellect lead us to believe other truth contents than the real truth because the intellect has defected from spirituality?—If we take up Christ in our intellect, if we take up something in our intellect that transforms this intellect, then only it consorts with the truth, with the religious contents. The thinkers before Thomas wanted to take the doctrine of the original sin and the doctrine of the redemption seriously. They did not yet have the power of thought, the logicality for that, but they wanted to make this seriously. They presented the question to themselves: how does Christ redeem the truth of the intellect that is contradictory to the spiritually revealed truth in us? How do we become Christians to the core? Since the original sin lives in our intellect, hence, the intellect is contradictory to the pure religious truth.

Then Albert and Thomas appeared and supposed that it is wrong that we indulge in sinfulness of the world if we delve purely logically into the universalia in rebus if we take up that which is real in the things. The usual intellect must not be sinful. The question of Christology is contained in this question of High Scholasticism. High Scholasticism could not solve the problem: how can the human thinking be Christianised? How does Christ lead the human thinking to the sphere where it can grow together with the spiritual religious contents?

This question shook the souls of the scholastics. Hence, it is,—although the most perfect logical technique prevails in scholasticism—above all important that one does not take the results of scholasticism, but that one looks through the answer at the big questions which were put at that time. One had not yet advanced so far with Christology that one could pursue the redemption from the original sin up to the human thinking. Hence, Albert and Thomas had to deny the intellect the right to cross the steps over which it can enter into the spiritual world. High Scholasticism left behind the question: how does the human thinking evolve into a view of the spiritual world?

Even the most important result of High Scholasticism is a question: how does one bring Christology into thinking? How is thinking Christianised?—Up to his death in 1274, Thomas Aquinas could bring himself to this question. One could answer it only suggestively in such a way that one said, the human being penetrates into the spiritual nature of the things to a certain degree. However, then the religious contents have to come. Both must not be contradictory to each other; they must be in concordance with each other. However, the usual intellect cannot understand the contents of the highest things on its own accord, as for example, Trinity, the incarnation of Christ in the person Jesus and so on. The intellect can understand only so far that it can say, the world may have originated in time, but it may also exist from eternity. However, the revelation says, it originated in time. If you ask the intellect once again, you find the reasons, why the origin in time is more reasonable.

More than one believes, that lives still in modern science, in the whole public life, which was left of scholasticism, indeed, in a special figure. Tomorrow we want to speak about how alive scholasticism is still in us and which view the modern human being has to take of that which has survived as scholasticism.

The subject that we shall discuss now is a very wide one, and today it will not be possible to deal with it as extensively as I should have liked. But we shall continue these considerations later on. In these considerations, I should like to give you a basis for the understanding of freedom and necessity, so that you may obtain a picture of what must be considered from an occult point of view, in order to understand the course of the social, historical and ethical-moral life of man.

We emphasized that, as far as the life between birth and death is concerned, we only experience in a waking condition what we perceive through the senses, what reaches us through our sense-impressions and what we experience in our thoughts. Man dreams through everything contained as living reality in his feelings, and he sleeps through everything contained as deeper necessity, in the impulses of his will, everything existing as the deeper reality. In the life of our feelings and of our will we live in the same spheres which we inhabit with the so-called dead.

Let us first form a conception of what is really contained in the life of our senses from an exterior aspect. We can picture the sense-impressions as if they were spread out before us—I might say, like a carpet. Of course, we must imagine that this carpet contains also the impressions of our hearing, the impressions of the twelve senses, such as we know them through Anthroposophy. You know that in reality there are twelve senses. This carpet of the sense impressions covers, as it were, a reality “lying behind”—if I may use this expression (but I am speaking in comparisons). This reality lying behind the sense perceptions must not be imagined as the scientist imagines the world of the atoms, or as a certain philosophical direction imagines the “thing in itself.” In my public lectures I have emphasized that when we look for the “thing in itself,” as it is done in modern philosophy and in the Kant-philosophy, this implies more or less the same as breaking the mirror to see what is behind it, in order to find the reality of beings that we see in a mirror. I do not speak in this sense of something behind the sense perceptions; what I mean is something spiritual behind the sense-perceptions, something spiritual in which we ourselves are embedded, but which cannot reach the usual consciousness of man between birth and death. If we could solve the riddle contained in the carpet of sense perceptions as a first step toward the attainment of the spiritual reality, so that we would see more than the manifold impressions of our sense-impulses—what would we see, in this first stage of solving the riddle, of solving spiritually the riddle of the carpet woven by our senses? Let us look into this question.

It will surprise us what we must describe as that which first appears to us. What we first see is a number of forces; all aim at permeating with impulses our entire life from our birth—or let us say, from our conception—to our death. When trying to solve the riddle of this carpet of the senses, we would not see our life in its single events, but we would see its entire organization. At first it would not strike us as something so strange; for, on this first stage of penetrating into the secret of the sense-perceptions, we would find ourselves, not such as we are now, in this moment, but such as we are throughout our entire life between birth and death. This life, that does not extend as far as our physical body, and that cannot be perceived, therefore, with the physical senses, permeates our etheric body, our body of formative forces. And our body of formatives forces is, essentially, the expression of this life that could be perceived if we could eliminate the senses, or the sense-impressions. If the carpet of the senses could be torn, as it were (and we tear it when we ascend to a spiritual vision) man finds his own self, the self as it is organized for this incarnation on earth, in which he makes this observation. But, as stated, the senses cannot perceive this.

With what can we perceive this? Man already possesses the instrument needed for such a perception, but on a stage of evolution that still renders a real perception impossible. What we would thus perceive cannot reach the eye, nor the ear—cannot enter any sense organ. Instead—please grasp this well—it is breathed in, it is sucked in with the breath. The etheric foundation of our lung (the physical lung is out of the question, for, such as it is, the lung is not a real perceptive organ) that which lies etherically at the foundation of our lung, is really an organ of perception, but between birth and death the human being cannot use it as an organ of perception for what he breathes in. The air we breathe, every breath of air and the way in which it enters the whole rhythm of our life, really contains our deeper reality between birth and death. But things are arranged in such a way that here on the physical plane the foundation of our entire lung-system is in an unfinished condition, and has not advanced as far as the capacity of perceiving. If we were to investigate what constitutes its etheric foundation, we would find, on investigating this and on grasping it rightly, that it is, in reality, exactly the same thing as our brain and sense organs from a physical aspect, here in the physical world. At the foundation of our lung-system we find a brain in an earlier stage of evolution; we might say, in an infantile stage of evolution. Also in this connection we bear within us, as it were (I say purposely, “as it were”), a second human being. It will not be wrong if you imagine that you also possess an etheric head—except that this etheric head cannot yet be used as an organ of perception in our everyday life. But it has the possibility of perceptive capacity for that which lies behind the body of formative forces, as that which builds up this body of formative forces. However, that which lies behind the etheric body as creative force is the element into which we enter when we pass through the portal of death. Then we lay aside the etheric body. But we enter into that which is active and productive in this body of formatives forces. Perhaps it may be difficult to imagine this; but it will be good if you try to think this out to the end.

Let us imagine the physical organization of the head and the physical organization of the lung; from the universe come cosmic impulses that express themselves rhythmically in the movements of the lungs. Through our lungs we are related with the entire universe, and the entire universe works at our etheric body. When we pass through the portal of death, we lay aside the etheric body. We enter that which is active in our lung-system, and this is connected with the entire universe. This accounts for the surprising consonance to be found in the rhythm of human life and the rhythm of breathing. I have already explained that when we calculate the number of breaths we draw in one day, we obtain 25,920 breaths a day, by taking as the basis 18 breaths a minute (hence 18 x 60 x 24). Man breathes in and breathes out; this constitutes his rhythm, his smallest rhythm to start with. Then there is another rhythm in life, as I have already explained before—namely, that every morning when we awake we breathe into our physical system, as it were, our soul being, the astral body and the ego, and we breathe them out again when we fall asleep. We do this during our whole life. Let us take an average length of life—then we can make the following calculation:—We breathe in and breathe out our own being 365 times a year; if we take 71 years as the average length of human life, we obtain 25,915. you see, more or less the same number. (Life differs according to the single human being.) We find that in the life between birth and death we breathe in and out 25,920 times what we call our real self. Thus we may say;—There is the same relationship between ourselves and the world to which we belong as there is between the breath we draw in and the elements around. During our life we live in the same rhythm in which we live during our day through our breathing. Again, if we take our life—let us say, approximately 71 years, and if we consider this life as a cosmic day (we will call a human life a cosmic day), we obtain a cosmic year by multiplying this by 365. The result is 25,920 (again, approximately one year). In this length of time, in 25,920 years, the sun returns to the same constellation of the Zodiac. If the sun is in Aries in a certain year, it will rise again in Aries after 25,920 years. In the course of 25,920 years the sun moves around the entire Zodiac. Thus, when an entire human life is breathed out into the cosmos, this is a cosmic breath, which is in exactly the same relationship with the cosmic course of the sun around the Zodiac as one breath in one day in life. Here we have deep inner order of laws! Everything is built up on rhythm. We breathe in a threefold way, or at least we are placed into the breathing process in a threefold way. First, we breathe through our lungs in the elementary region; this rhythm is contained in the number 25,920. Then we breathe within the entire solar system, by taking sunrise and sunset as parallel to our falling asleep and awaking; through our life we breathe in a rhythm that is again contained in the number 25,920. Finally, the cosmos breathes us in and out, again in a rhythm determined by the number 25,920—the sun's course around the Zodiac.

Thus we stand within the whole visible universe; at its foundation lies the invisible universe. When we pass through the portal of death we enter this invisible universe. Rhythmical life is the life that lies at the foundation of our feelings. We enter the rhythmical life of the universe in the time between death and a new birth. This rhythmical life lies behind the carpet woven by our senses, as the life that determines our etheric life. If we would have a clairvoyant consciousness, we would see this cosmic rhythm that is, as it were, a rhythmical, surging cosmic ocean of an astral kind. In this rhythmically surging astral ocean we find the so-called dead, the beings of the higher hierarchies and what belongs to us, but beneath the threshold. There arise the feelings that we dream away, and the impulses of the will that we sleep away, in their true reality.

We may ask, in a comparison, as it were, and without becoming theological: Why has a wise cosmic guidance arranged matters so that man—such as he is between birth and death—cannot perceive the rhythmical life behind the carpet of the senses? Why is the human head, the hidden head that corresponds to the lung-system, not suitable for an adequate perception? This leads us to a truth which was kept secret, one might say, right into our days, by the occult schools in question, because other secrets are connected with it; these must not be revealed—or should not have been revealed so far. But our period is one in which such things must reach the consciousness of mankind.

The occult schools that were inaugurated here and there keep such things secret for reasons that will not be explained today. They still keep them secret, although today these things must be brought to the consciousness of mankind. Since the last third of the nineteenth century, means and ways were given whereby that which occult schools have kept back (in an unjustified way, in many cases) becomes obsolete. This is connected with the event that I mentioned to you—the event which took place in the autumn of 1879. Now we can only lift the outer veil of this mystery; but even this outer veil is one of the most important pieces of knowledge concerning man. It is indeed a head that we bear within us as the head of a second man; it is a head, but also a body belongs to this head, and this body is, at first, the body of an animal. Thus we bear within us a second human being. This second human being possesses a properly formed head, but attached to it, the body of an animal—a real centaur. The centaur is a truth, an etheric truth.

It is important to bear in mind that a relatively great wisdom is active in this being—a wisdom connected with the entire cosmic rhythm. The head belonging to this centaur sees the cosmic rhythm in which it is embedded, also during the existence between death and a new birth. It is the cosmic rhythm that has been shown in a threefold way, also in numbers—the rhythm on which many secrets of the universe are based. This head is much wiser than our physical head. All human beings bear within them another far wiser being—the centaur. But in spite of his wisdom, this centaur is equipped with all the wild instincts of the animals.

Now you will understand the wisdom of the guiding forces of the universe. Man could not be given a consciousness which is, on the one hand, strong and able to see through the cosmic rhythm, and on the other hand, uncontrolled and full of wild instincts. But the centaur's animal nature—please connect this with what I have told you in other lectures dealing with this subject from another point of view—is tamed and conquered in the next incarnation, during his passage through the world of cosmic rhythms between death and a new birth. The foundation of our lung-system in the present incarnation appears as our physical head, although this is dulled down to an understanding limited to the senses, and what lies at the basis of our lung-system appears as an entire human being whose wild instincts are tamed in the next incarnation. The centaur of this incarnation is, in the next incarnation, the human being endowed with sense perception.

Now you will be able to grasp something else:—You will understand why I said that, during man' s existence between death and a new birth, the animal realm is his lowest realm and that he must conquer its forces. What must he do? In what work must he be engaged between two incarnations? He must fulfill the task of transforming the centaur, the animal in him, into a human form for the next incarnation. This work requires a real knowledge embracing the impulses of the whole animal realm; in the age of Chiron, men possessed this knowledge atavistically, in a weaker form. Although the knowledge of Chiron is a knowledge weakened by this incarnation, it is of the same kind. Now you see the connection. You see why man needs this lower realm between death and a new birth; he must master it; he needs it because he must transform the centaur into a human being.

What Anthroposophy sets forth has been attained only in single flashes outside the occult schools. There have always been a few men who discovered these things, as if in flashes. Especially in the nineteenth century a few scattered spirits had an inkling, as it were, that something resembling the taming of wild instincts can be found in man. Some writers speak of this. And the way in which they speak of these things shows how this knowledge frightens them. High spiritual truths cannot be gained with the same ease as scientific truths, which can be digested so comfortably by the mind. These high truths often have this quality; their reality scares us. In the nineteenth century some spirits were scared and tremendously moved when they discovered what speaks out of the human eye that can look round so wildly at times, or out of other things in man. One of the writers of the nineteenth century expressed himself in an extreme manner by saying that every man really bears within him a murderer. He meant this centaur, of whom he was dimly conscious.

It must be emphasized again and again that human nature contains enigmas which must be solved gradually. These things must be borne in mind courageously and calmly. But they must not become trivial, because they make human consciousness approach the great earnestness of life. In this age it is our task to see the earnest aspect of life, to see the serious things that are approaching and that announce themselves in such terrible signs.

This is one aspect, preparing the way for certain considerations that I shall continue very soon. The other aspect is as follows:—Man passes through the portal of death. Last time I mentioned the great change in man's entire way of experiencing things, by showing you how a connection with the dead is established—what we tell him seems to come out of the depths of our own being. In the intercourse with the dead the reciprocal relationships are reversed. When you associate with a human being here on earth, you can hear yourself speaking to him—you hear what you tell him, and you hear from him what he tells you. When you are in communication with the dead, his words rise out of your own soul, and what you tell him reaches you like an echo coming from the dead. You cannot hear what you tell him as something coming from yourself; you hear this as something coming from him. I wished to give you an example of the great difference between the physical world in which we live between birth and death, and the world in which we live between death and a new birth.

We look into this world when we contemplate it from a certain standpoint. When we look through the carpet woven by our senses, we look into the rhythm of the world—but this rhythm has two aspects. I will show you these two aspects of the rhythm in a diagram, by drawing here, let us say, a number of stars—planets if you like [The drawing can not be rendered.]. Here are a number of stars or planets—the planetary system, if you like, belonging to our Earth. Man passes through this planetary system in the time between death and a new birth. (A printed cycle of lectures contains details on these things.) Man passes through the planetary system. But in passing through the world which is still the invisible world, he also reaches—between death and a new birth—the world which is no longer visible, and is not even spatial. These things are difficult to describe, because when we imagine anything in the physical world we are used to imagine it spatially. But beyond the world that can be perceived through the senses lies a world which is no longer spatial. In a diagram I must illustrate this spatially. The ancients said:--Beyond the planets lies the sphere of the fixed stars (this is expressed wrongly, but this does not matter now), and beyond this lies the super-sensible world. The ancients pictured it spatially, but this is merely a picture of this world.

When man has entered this super-sensible world, in the time between death and a new birth, one can say (although this is also rendered in a picture):—Man is then beyond the stars, and the stars themselves are used by man, between death and a new birth, for a kind of reading. Between death and a new birth, the stars are used by man for a kind of reading. Let us realize this clearly. How do we read here on earth? When we read here on earth we have approximately twelve consonants and seven vowels with various variations; we arrange these letters in many ways into words; we mix these letters together. Think how a typographer throws together the letters in order to form words. All the words consist of the limited number of letters that we possess. For the dead, the fixed stars of the Zodiac and the planets are what the letters—approximately twelve consonants and seven vowels—are for us, here on the physical plane. The fixed stars of the Zodiac correspond to the consonants; the planets are the vowels. Beyond the starry heaven, the outlook is peripheral. (Between birth and death, man's outlook is from a center; here on the earth he has his eye, and from there his gaze rays out to the various points.) It is most difficult of all to imagine that things are reversed after death so that we see peripherally. We are really in the circumference, and we see the Zodiac-starsthe consonants and the planets—the vowels, from outside. Thus we look from outside at the events taking place on earth. According to the part of our being which we imbue with life, we look down on the earth through the Taurus and Mars, or we look through the Taurus, in between Mars and Jupiter. (You must not picture this from the earthly standpoint, but reversed—for you are looking down on the earth.) When you are dead and circle round the earth, you read with the help of the starry system. But you must picture this kind of reading differently. We could read in another way, but it would be more difficult, from a technical aspect, than our present reading system. It is possible to read differently—we could read in such a way that we have a sequence of letters—a, b, c, d, e, f, g, etc.—or arranged according to another system and instead of arranging them in the type-case, we could read in the following way:—If the word “he” is to be read, a ray of light falls on h and e; if “goes” is to be read, a ray falls on g, o, e, s. The sequence of the letters could be there, and they could be illuminated as required. It would not be arranged so comfortably, from a technical aspect—but you can picture an earthly life in which reading is arranged in this way—an alphabet is there, and then there would be some arrangement which always illuminates one letter at a time; then we can read the sequence of the illuminated letters, and obtain as a result, Goethe's Faust for instance.

This cannot be imagined so easily; yet it is possible to imagine this, is it not?

The dead reads in this way, with the aid of the starry system: the fixed stars remain immobile, but he moves—for he is in movement—the fixed stars remain still and he moves round. If he must read the Lion above Jupiter, he moves round in such a way that the Lion stands above Jupiter. He connects the stars, just as we connect h and e in order to read “he.” This reading of the earthly conditions from the cosmos—and the visible cosmos belongs to this—consists in this—The dead can read that which lies spiritually at the foundation of the stars. Except that the entire system is based on immobility—the entire godly system of reading from out the universe is based on immobility.

What does this mean? This means that according to the intentions of certain beings of the higher hierarchies, the planets should be immobile, they should have an immobile aspect; then the being outside engaged in reading would be the only one moving about. The events on the earth could be read rightly from out the universe if the planets would not move, if the planets had an immobile position.

But they are not immobile! Why not? They would be so, if the world's creation had proceeded in such a way that the Spirits of Form, or the Exusiai alone, had created the world.

But the luciferic spirits participated in this work, and interfered—as you already know. Luciferic spirits brought to the earth what used to be law during the Moon-period of the Earth, where several things were governed by the Spirits of Form; luciferic spirits brought this system of movement to the Earth from the Moon-period. They caused the planets' movement. A luciferic element in the cosmic spaces brought the planets into movement. In a certain respect this disturbs the order created by the Elohim; a luciferic element enters the cosmos. It is that luciferic element which man must learn to know between death and a new birth; he must learn to know it by deducting, as it were, in what he reads, that which comes from the movement of the planets, or the moving stars. He must deduct this—then he will obtain the right result.

Indeed, between death and a new birth we learn a great deal concerning the sway and activity of the luciferic element in the universe. Such a thing, like the course of the planets, is connected with the luciferic.

This is the other side that I wished to point out. But from this you will see the connection between the other life between death and new birth, and the present life. We might say that the world has two aspects; here, between birth and death we see one aspect, through our senses. Between death and a new birth we see it from the reversed side, with the soul's eye. And between death and a new birth, we learn to read the conditions here on earth in relationship with the spiritual world. Try to realize this, try to imagine these conditions. Then you will have to confess that it is, indeed, deeply significant to say that the world which we first learn to know through our senses and our understanding is an illusion, a Maya. As soon as we approach the real world, we find that the world that we know is related to this real world in the same way in which the reflection in the mirror is related to the living reality before the mirror, which is reflected in it. If you have a mirror, with several shapes reflected in it, this shows that there are shapes outside the mirror, which are reflected by the mirror. Suppose that you look into the mirror as a disinterested spectator. The three figures which I have drawn here [diagram not available] fight against each other; in the mirror you see them fighting. This shows that the mirrored figures do something, but you cannot say that the figure A, there in the mirror, beats the figure B in the mirror! What you see in the mirror is the image of the fight, because the figures outside the mirror are doing something.

If you believe that A, there in the mirror, or the reflected image of A, does something to B, there in the mirror, you are quite mistaken. You cannot set up comparisons and connections between the reflected images, but you can only say:—What is reflected in the mirrored images points to something in the world of reality, which is reflected. But the world given to man is a mirror, a Maya, and in this world man sees causes and effects. When you speak of this world of causes and effects, it is just as if you were to believe that the mirrored image A beats the mirrored image B. Something happens among the real beings reflected by the mirror, but the impulses leading to the fight are not to be found in the mirrored A and in the mirrored B. Investigate nature and its laws; you will find, at first, that such as it appears to your senses it is a Maya, a reflection or a mirrored picture. The reality lies beneath the threshold which I have indicated to you, the threshold between the life of thought and the life of feelings. Even your own reality is not contained at all in your waking consciousness; your own reality is contained in the spiritual reality; it is dipped into the dreaming and sleeping worlds of feeling and of will. Thus it is nonsense to speak of a causing necessity in the world of Maya—and it is also nonsense to speak of cause and effect in the course of history! It is real nonsense! To this I should like to add that it is nonsense to say that the events of 1914 are the result of events in 1913, 1912, etc. This is just as clever as saying:—This A in the mirror is a bad fellow; he beats the poor B, there in the mirror! What matters is to find the true reality. And this lies beneath the threshold, which must be crossed by going down into the world of feeling and of will—and does not enter our usual waking consciousness.

You see, we must interpret in another way the idea that “something had to happen” or “something was needed;” we cannot interpret it as the ordinary historians or scientists do this. We must ask:--Who are the real beings that produced the events of a later period, which followed an earlier one? The preceding historical events are merely the mirrored reflections—they cannot be the cause of what took place subsequently.

This, again, is one side of the question. The other side will be clear to you if you realize that only a Maya is contained in the waking reality embraced by our thoughts and by our sense perceptions. This Maya cannot be the cause of anything. It cannot be a real cause. But pure thoughts can determine man's actions. This is a fact taught by experience, if man is not led to deeds by passions, desires and instincts, but by clear thoughts. This is possible and can take place—pure ideals can be the impulses of human actions. But ideals alone cannot effect anything. I can carry out an action under the influence of a pure idea; but the idea cannot effect anything.

In order to understand this, compare once more the idea with the mirrored image. The reflection in the mirror cannot cause you to run away. If you run away it displeases you, or something is there which has nothing to do with the reflection in the mirror. The reflection in the mirror cannot take a whip and cause you to run away. This image cannot be the cause of anything. When a human being fulfills actions under the influence of his reflected image, i.e., his thoughts, he fulfills them out of the Maya; he carries out his actions out of the cosmic mirror. It is he who carries out the actions, and for this reason he acts freely. But when he is led by his passions, his actions are not free; he is not free, even if he is led by his feelings. He is free when he is led by his thoughts, that are mere reflections, or mirrored images. For this reason I have explained in my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity that man can act freely and independently if he is guided by pure thoughts, pure thinking, because pure thoughts cannot cause or produce anything, so that the causing force must come from somewhere else. I have used the same image again in my book The Riddle of Man. We are free human beings because we carry out actions under the influence of Maya, and because this Maya, or the world immediately around us, cannot bring about or cause anything. Our freedom is based on the fact that the world that we perceive is Maya. The human being united himself in wedlock with Maya, and thus becomes a free being. If the world that we perceive were a reality, this reality would compel us, and we would not be free. We are free beings just because the world which we perceive is not a reality and for this reason it cannot force us to do anything, in the same way in which a mirrored reflection cannot force us to run away. The secret of the free human being consists in this—to realize the connection of the world perceived as Maya—the mere reflection of a reality—and the impulses coming from man himself The impulses must come from man himself, when he is not induced to an action by something that influences him.

Freedom can be proved quite clearly if the proofs are sought on this basis:—That the world given to us as a perception is a mirrored reflection and not a reality.

These are thoughts that pave the way. I wish to speak to you about things that lie at the foundation of human nature—that part of human nature that can perceive reality and has not attained the required maturity in one incarnation, but must be weakened in order to become man in the next incarnation. The centaur, of whom I spoke to you, who is to be found beneath the threshold of consciousness, would be able to perceive truth and reality, but the centaur cannot as yet perceive. What we perceive is not a reality! But man can let himself be determined by that part of his being which is no longer, or is not yet, a centaur; then his actions will be those of a free being. The secret of our freedom is intimately connected with the taming of our centaur-nature. This centaur-nature is contained in us in such a way that it is chained and fettered, so that we may not perceive the reality of the centaur, but only the Maya. If we let ourselves be impelled by Maya, we are free.

This is looked upon from one side. From the other side we learn to know the world between death and a new birth. That which otherwise surrounds us as the universe shrivels up, and enables us to read in the cosmos; the physical letters are a reflection of this. The fact that languages contain today a larger number of letters (the Finnish languages has still only twelve consonants) is due to the different shadings; but, essentially, there are twelve consonants and seven differently shaded vowels. The various shadings in the vowels were added by the luciferic element; what causes the vowels to move corresponds to the movement of the planets.

Thus you see the connection of that which exists in human life on a small scale; the connection between the reading of the letters that are here on the paper, and that which lives outside, in the cosmos. Man is born out of the cosmos, and is not only the result of what preceded him in the line of heredity.

These are some of the foundations that will enable us gradually to reach the real conceptions of freedom and necessity in the historical, social and ethical-moral course of events.