The Rudolf Steiner Archive

47. The Nature of Man as the Key to the Mysteries of the World

[ 1 ] Ladies and gentlemen! Today, at the beginning of this lecture, I would like to present two images to your souls: one that is likely familiar to you from your own life, and the other that may emerge for us based on the lecture given here the day before yesterday. One of the images I would like to evoke in your minds is Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, which is well known to all of you. We see this miraculous painting, the Madonna with the Infant Christ, and we first try to intuitively put ourselves in the picture’s perspective, namely by looking at it more closely and seeing how figures—let’s say angelic figures—rise from the mysterious cloudy sky stretching above the Madonna and the Child; they appear to us as spiritual companions of the Child held by the Mother,

[ 2 ] And then the feeling may arise in our soul: the painter mysteriously wanted to place something there as a backdrop against which the enigma of humanity stands out—and not merely this enigma of humanity insofar as human beings place themselves within the universe, but also, because the child is placed in the mother’s arms, insofar as human beings come to create from within themselves.

[ 3 ] Let us first place this image before our soul in a completely objective manner and see whether today’s lecture—which is to deal with the mystery of humanity and the mysteries of the universe—might offer some sort of point of connection to what the artist has undoubtedly created here out of a deep sense of the mystery of the universe. And we become truly aware that, in this painting, Raphael is drawing upon something that has always preoccupied humanity like a mystery of the universe, when we consider that the entire composition of this painting—that everything that lives within it—is, as it were, a reemergence on a higher artistic and religious level of that which, even in ancient Egypt, born of the Egyptian way of feeling and thinking about the mystery of humanity, in the figure of Isis, who holds the child Horus in her arms.

[ 4 ] And we could cite many more examples of similar symbols, from which we would see how, at various times, the mystery of the world—the mystery of humanity’s connection to the world—is symbolized in the human mother and her child. This is the image we wish to paint in our minds so that we may establish a foundation of feeling for today’s lecture.

[ 5 ] The other image should emerge from what we considered the day before yesterday. Let us picture before us the clairvoyant person who has developed his soul to such a high degree—through the unfolding of the powers and abilities that lie dormant within today’s ordinary human being—that he can bring forth within himself those images and thoughts that enable the higher worlds to reveal themselves to him in their realities and in their beings, so that out of the twilight, from the bosom of world existence, a whole new world steps forth before his soul—a world new in relation to the outer physical world—a world that shows human beings that behind our physical things there are beings and forces that are the very foundations of this physical existence, and entities and forces that emerge from this bosom of worldly existence and that truly possess no less concrete, real existence than that which we can hear with our ears and see with our eyes. This is how we conceive of the clairvoyant in his relationship to the world: a new world of forms, of higher realities, emerging before him from the twilight of spiritual existence, created, as it were, through him in his perception as a testament to what the human soul is capable of in establishing its relationship to the external world.

[ 6 ] Isn’t it something we can describe in the context of clairvoyance as a spiritual birth—something on a higher plane, on a more spiritual plane—which we find so wonderfully symbolized on the physical plane in the Madonna and Child? For that is what we wish to consider today, my most esteemed audience: how the human being positions himself within his entire worldly environment.

[ 7 ] The most diverse thinkers in the history of human development have always reflected on this and conducted their own investigations into what the relationship between human beings and the surrounding world actually is. Today, because older ideas in this vein are quite distant from contemporary human thinking—and because it is difficult to bring to life not only the concepts of such older ideas but also the subtle nuances of feeling that these old ideas in turn conjure up before us—I do not wish to build upon older ideas; for example, merely to the idea that a man often misunderstood today—Paracelsus—held regarding humanity’s relationship to the world. Like many others, he viewed the human being as a microcosm, as a small world, in contrast to the great world, the macrocosm. But let us briefly recall what all those who viewed humanity as a small world—as a microcosm—in contrast to the great world, the macrocosm, actually had in mind.

[ 8 ] They held the view that all laws, all the various chains of facts that unfold out there in the world—not only in the physical world but also in the spiritual world—that all these chains of facts and laws are contained within human beings, as it were, in an extract, in another form, on a smaller scale; that human beings themselves are, as it were, such an extract, such an essence of worldly existence in all its individual forms. One could, as it were, rediscover in human beings everything that one finds out in the world. As I said, one need not go that far if one wishes to present this conception of the small world of the human being—of the microcosm in relation to the macrocosm—as one held by the greatest minds.

[ 9 ] We need only recall a figure close to us from relatively recent times, whom we had the opportunity to mention here the day before yesterday in another context; we need only refer to Goethe and to that wonderful friendship between Schiller and Goethe. When this friendship began, Schiller felt a profound need to aspire to the unique way in which Goethe viewed the world—the way he had shaped the relationship between people and the world for himself. Thus, at the beginning of this beautiful, grand friendship—one so significant for the history of ideas—Schiller writes:

For a long time now, though from a considerable distance, I have observed the course of your intellectual life and looked up to it with ever-renewed admiration. What you saw in the face of the grandeur of nature is this: You strive to understand all the details of nature and the surrounding world so that, by synthesizing these details from the totality of phenomena, you may mentally construct the most complex being that stands before us: human beings. Schiller calls this a truly heroic idea, as it had occurred to him through his contemplation of Goethe’s genius.

[ 10 ] So what does Schiller have in mind? He has in mind that Goethe studies the entire world outside, finding one law in this thing and another law in that thing, and then, when one creates a harmony in the spirit where these laws—which are distributed outside among the most diverse beings and things—interact, then one can have some sort of conception, an idea, of what truly lives spiritually within human beings. And Goethe himself sensed so rightly that, more or less externally and internally, the entire universe has created within human beings something like a mirror image of itself.

[ 11 ] We see this, for example, when Goethe points it out in his beautiful book on Winckelmann: When a person lives within the whole of nature and becomes aware of healthy nature as a whole, when harmonious contentment grants him a pure, free delight, then the universe itself—if it could view itself through the person—would exult as if it had reached its zenith and would admire its own becoming and essence. And in another passage, Goethe says: When a person contemplates the nature around them and takes in everything around them in terms of measure, number, order, and harmony, they are able to generate within themselves a higher nature within nature—something that transcends nature and yet is like the very meaning of this world, of this nature. This is what Goethe had in mind.

[ 12 ] Thus we see that even such a spirit of the modern world—even if it expresses this only in such general terms—is thoroughly imbued with the realization that everything in the human being works together that is scattered throughout the external world, and that a new world is born from within the human being, which, in essence, must appear to us as an essence, an extract, a small world in contrast to the great world.

[ 13 ] In the most real sense imaginable, the theosophical or spiritual-scientific worldview reveals to us the world of the supersensible—explored through the methods outlined to you the day before yesterday—in connection with the sensible world that unfolds before our sense organs. In the truest sense, this research shows us that everything is indeed present within the human being that appears to be an answer to the great enigmatic questions posed to us by the universe, by the cosmos. Human beings themselves can be regarded as the magic key through which we can unravel the most intimate secrets of the world around us; and in order to gain an understanding of what has just been said, we must first bring certain aspects of the human being to mind, as we were able to discuss here once before in another lecture.

[ 14 ] Since new listeners are always joining us, we must briefly address the nature of the human being in order to then show how this nature—precisely when it is considered so completely, in all its parts and components—as is possible through theosophy or spiritual science—appears to us as a true distillation, as an extract of the entire development of the world, based on physical and spiritual facts and entities.

[ 15 ] If we consider this human being in terms of his essence—in the sense of the humanities, in the theosophical sense—then he is, as we have already emphasized in other lectures, not that essentially one-membered being which external, sensory observation reveals to us—an observation that relies solely on the external organs of perception and on the mind, the intellect, which links these external perceptions together. From the perspective of spiritual science, the human being is not this one-membered being. What external science and the ordinary, everyday view of human beings can offer is, for theosophy and spiritual science, only one aspect of the entire human being—namely, the physical body. This physical body contains within itself the same substances and the same forces found in the surrounding world—inorganic, mineral, and lifeless nature.

[ 16 ] But if we now ask ourselves: In what way does this physical body of the human being—which, in all its parts as a physical body, contains nothing other than what the rest of physical nature outside it also contains—differ from this physical nature, from the mineral world? Then we must say the following. Let us consider even the most beautiful form of a mineral—any particularly wonderfully shaped mineral, such as a crystal—and look closely at this mineral form! It exists as a form, as a whole, as it appears to us, through the physical and chemical substances and forces, and is not destroyed by these physical and chemical substances and forces. This form must be destroyed from the outside, whether by arbitrary external intervention or by the forces of the surrounding world; the form of the mineral, which is held together by its own forces and the laws of physical nature, must be destroyed from the outside.

[ 17 ] This is not the case with the human form, nor is it the case with the form of any living being. The human form of the physical body—let us not consider other living beings for now, as they are of little concern to us today—does not at all follow, as the human being lives between birth and death, these physical and chemical substances and forces that are within it. When does the physical human body follow these physical substances and forces? When, then? It follows these physical substances and forces when a person passes away at death, when the physical body has become a corpse. Then they stir and come to the fore in their full force—these physical substances and forces within the body. Between birth and death, according to the spiritual-scientific view, a human being has within them at every moment a fighter against the decay of the physical body.

[ 18 ] From the perspective of spiritual science, we therefore speak of a second aspect of the human being that permeates this physical body and acts within each of us as a force fighting against the decay of the physical body. The fact that the physical substances and forces between birth and death—or between conception and death—do not follow their own laws but, as it were, contradict themselves stems from the fact that the etheric or life body, as the second aspect of the human being, is this ceaseless fighter against decay. In the context of spiritual science, we must imagine that upon death, the physical body is abandoned by the etheric or life body. As a result, the physical substances and forces become active and dynamic. The etheric body, however, returns to its own world.

[ 19 ] For those who rely solely on the intellect—which applies to the external physical world—this etheric body is, at most, a speculation, or at most something that can be attained through thought. There are already many people today who stand on the ground of pure scientific scholarship and who have long since departed from the view that a human being consists merely of a conglomeration of physical substances and forces; they thus, so to speak, speculate and conceive of something that lies behind the physical substances and forces, and which, in every living being, determine its particular organization. For such thinking, therefore, it remains speculation.

[ 20 ] For that stage of human development that was revealed to you here the day before yesterday—for what we might call the developed consciousness of the seer—this etheric or life body is a reality, something that belongs to him, something that confronts him when, for example, he has developed his imaginative thinking. There he clearly perceives how a truly real being steps out of the human physical body at death. But no one should form a conception of this etheric or life body as if it were, in turn, actually a kind of physical body—only very thin, very nebulous. No, it is in no way physically perceptible; it is perceptible only to the open eye of the seer—it is visible and perceptible only to the spiritual eyes. This, then, is the second member of the human being, and it is of great importance that this—as it were—double of the human physical body be regarded as a distinct, real entity.

[ 21 ] From the standpoint of spiritual science, one must not object: One can certainly acknowledge that these life phenomena occurring in human beings are something special; but they are, after all, functions and activities of the physical body and its complex interplay. No! For spiritual science, the exact opposite is true; what occurs physically, what appears as the physical activity of the organism, is an outflow of the spiritual. To begin with, whatever occurs in the physical body—be it the circulation of the blood, the regular activity of the respiratory system, or the activity of the digestive system—everything, absolutely everything that occurs in the physical body is forged and developed from this etheric body or life body. It is the higher aspect, and we will have to explain in more detail, particularly in connection with the next member of the human being, how we are to conceive of this, how we are to regard the higher members, so to speak, as the active, functioning elements.

[ 22 ] Even in material terms, spiritual science regards the physical body as something that has crystallized out of the etheric body in the course of evolution, just as a piece of ice crystallizes out of water; it is, so to speak, a condensation of the etheric body, and all the forces that circulate the blood, all the forces active in the physical body, are, as such, born out of the etheric body. This etheric body or life body—and I ask that you not confuse the term “ether” with what physicists refer to as “ether,” for the hypothetical ether of physics has at most the name in common with it—is shared by human beings and plants. Plants and every living being also possess such a life body or etheric body.

[ 23 ] Now, however, let us turn to the third aspect of human nature. We can immediately get an idea of this if we imagine a person standing before us and ask ourselves: Is there really nothing more to this person standing before us than what the eyes can see on the outside, what the ears can hear in his voice, and what the hands can feel? Is there nothing else contained within this skin? Well, this person’s soul can tell us that there is something entirely different within this skin: a being, a sum of desires, instincts, and passions; a sum of pleasure and suffering; of concepts; of moral ideals; of intellectual ideas—all of this lives right there before us.

[ 24 ] And for primitive man, what has just been mentioned is truly a higher, more immediate reality than that which lives in his body as muscles, bones, or blood—of which, as a primitive man, he may have only a very vague conception. Much closer to his soul, much more real to him, is what has just been mentioned: the sum of pleasure and suffering, of instinct, desire, and passion. We designate this sum as the third element of the human being, and we shall now use this third element specifically to clarify how spiritual science must relate to what we present here as the real elements of the human being.

[ 25 ] The materialist thinker—or even the purely realist thinker—will say: Instincts, desires, and so on are produced by the interaction of forces within the human body. In this view, what we refer to as the third element would appear merely as a result of physical activity, much as the movement of a clock’s hand appears to be a result of the mechanical mechanism of the movement. For those endowed with clairvoyant consciousness in the sense described the day before yesterday, this third element of the human being—what is called, if you will pardon the expression, the astral body—is a fact. For while in death one sees, through clairvoyance, the etheric body detach itself from the physical body—thereby surrendering the physical body to the physical substances and forces in their own nature—the developed clairvoyant consciousness perceives the astral body, in the evening when a person falls asleep, slipping out of the physical body and the etheric body, which remain connected to one another during ordinary sleep, and this astral body—this third member of the human being, this sum of drives, desires, passions, instincts, and pleasure and pain—passes into a world that the human being cannot perceive, but in which he lives between the moment of falling asleep and the moment of waking up.

[ 26 ] Now, of course, someone who wishes to rely solely on his senses might ask: Can you really imagine that mere passions, mere desires, mere instincts exist somewhere? — Yes, that is precisely what humanity will gradually have to incorporate more and more into its habits of thought if it wishes to advance toward a true understanding of the supersensible world—that an existence of this soul-life is entirely possible and real in and of itself, indeed, just as we have seen before that the physical body appears as a kind of condensation of the etheric body, so too does the etheric body appear as a condensation of this soul-spiritual form, which we now refer to as the astral body.

[ 27 ] If you resolve to think freely and confidently, you can form a picture from everyday life of how the soul and spirit influence the physical. Let us take two well-known inner emotional experiences: the feeling we call shame, and the feeling we call fear or dread. When one feels shame, one blushes; when one feels fear, one turns pale. What does this mean, first of all, in a sensory, physical sense? In the case of someone who, as we say, blushes with shame, the blood must perform a very specific movement; it is, so to speak, driven from the interior of the body toward the surface; the opposite occurs when a person turns pale under the influence of fear or dread.

[ 28 ] Only someone who indulges in misguided speculation here might seek the physical causes of the psychological. Anyone who thinks impartially and with certainty will ask: What has been going on in the soul? A sense of shame is an experience of the soul, something purely psychological; a sense of fear is something purely psychological. What do they do? They give rise to a physical activity; they give rise to an activity in the movement of the blood; it is a physical process brought about by something psychological. This is the natural way of thinking in this field; it is, so to speak, the final step in how we must conceive of the psychological in its effect on the material. Just as the blood is actually altered under the influence of the soul—in terms of its circulation and its distribution—we need only now consider that, fundamentally, all material processes are conditioned and brought about by their soul-spiritual causes, which lie behind them and which human beings simply do not perceive as easily in every instance as in this primitive case, which can nevertheless serve as an example.

[ 29 ] Now, as you become more and more immersed in spiritual science, it reveals that it is not merely external activities and processes that are brought about by the spiritual-soul aspect, but that matter itself crystallizes out of the spirit, so that everything that confronts us physically in terms of substance and force appears to us, roughly speaking, as a condensation of the spiritual-soul aspect. And so this astral body of the human being is what we must grasp in its independence; it is what we must address as an independent member that creates means of expression within the physical and etheric bodies.

[ 30 ] And within this astral body, we then see the fourth member of the human being. When we consider the astral body, we can say: Although it is not as perfect in the animal kingdom as it is in humans—humans share this body with animals. Just as humans share their physical body with the mineral world and their etheric body with plants, so do they share the astral body with the animal kingdom. But there is also a fourth component of the human being, through which the human being is the crown of earthly creation, distinguishing him from all the creatures and beings in the physical world that are closest to him. This is what we in spiritual science call the actual “bearer of the ‘I.’”

[ 31 ] I have already mentioned this here once before; today I will simply [bring it up again] so that we can address the topic as we have framed it. In our language, there is a name that differs from all other names. You can say “bell” for any bell, “desk” for any desk, “clock” for any clock—everything can be designated from the outside by a name. Only one thing cannot, and this one thing bears, in our language, the name for every human being: the simple name “I.” The name “I,” when it is meant to denote the innermost core of your own being, can never be heard from the outside; no one can ever call out “I” to you and mean you.

[ 32 ] Here, even in the naming, you have something that can lead you to the character of this very essence—the most human aspect of the human being, the fourth member—through which humanity is the crown of earthly creation. Those who have sensed that the human inner being is making itself known—which must be experienced from within through spiritual perception—have always seen in this “I” essence something like a drop from the ocean of divine substance. For this reason, this “I” or “I am” has been designated by certain religions—which had insight into these matters—as the ineffable name of God within the human breast, ineffable to the outer world; it can resound only when the Divine within the human being becomes conscious of itself. That which bears this “I” within the human being—this “I” which, for example, is elevated to the divine by the God of the Old Testament and designated by the famous word [“Jehovah”]—we therefore also refer to this fourth member as the “bearer of the ‘I,’” as the innermost essence of the human being, by which he distinguishes himself from the entities and forces surrounding him.

[ 33 ] Thus, we conceive of human beings, as they stand before us today, as fourfold beings—just as the Pythagorean school had already conceived of them—as beings consisting, first and foremost, of the physical body that we see with our eyes, can feel with our hands, and which is studied by physical science—a science whose great and admirable achievements are by no means to be belittled by theosophy or spiritual science, but are to be fully recognized. We then have, as the second member of the human being, the etheric or life body; as the third member, the astral body; and as the fourth member, the I-bearer.

[ 34 ] During sleep, the I-bearer, together with the astral body, leaves the physical body and the etheric body; the physical body and the etheric body remain in bed, while the astral body and the I live in the spiritual world, gathering strength there to restore balance to the manifestations of human life that come to expression through fatigue, and in the morning to re-enter the physical or etheric body in order to make use of the physical organs and, through them, to connect with the physical world outside.

[ 35 ] In death, however, we see once again how the physical body remains behind and the “I,” the astral body, and the etheric body leave the human being; how, later on — this can only be described today — a large part of the etheric body detaches itself like a second corpse, so that the human being continues to live on in a spiritual existence with something like an essence of the etheric body, and later certain parts of the astral body detach themselves as a third, invisible corpse. This would now lead to a description of human life after death; today, however, we shall merely allude to it.

[ 36 ] Thus, when we consider the nature of the human being in its entirety from a theosophical or spiritual-scientific perspective, we see it as consisting of these four aspects. Let us now examine these four aspects of the human being in terms of their mutual relationship and relative importance.

[ 37 ] From a certain point of view, one might say: The physical body is the lowest link in the human being; it is the outwardly physical aspect; the etheric body is already more spiritual and subtle; the astral body is even more spiritual; and the “I” is the most spiritual. One could say, then, that the “I” is the highest and most perfect in a spiritual sense, while the physical body is the most imperfect. But this is true only in one respect. From another perspective—and this is what matters when we wish to consider the human being in relation to the universe—it is precisely the physical human body that is the most perfect component of human nature. If only we truly do not regard it with mere intellect, but immerse ourselves with our whole soul in its wondrous structure, then we will already see how this physical body, in its own way, is today essentially more perfect than the astral body.

[ 38 ] If you consider the astral body—the vessel of pleasure and pain, of desire and passion—in its relationship to the physical body, even—one might say—only in broad strokes, then you must ask yourself: What a marvelous structure is the human heart, what a marvelous structure is the human brain, and what a marvelous unity is the concerted effort of all the individual physical organs of the human being! In contrast to these marvelous, harmonious voices of the individual physical organs and their harmonious interplay, what does the human astral body—the bearer of instinct, desire, and passion—often do? It is often the troublemaker; it is the very thing that brings disorder and disharmony into the physical human body. Pleasure, desire—none of this is attached to the physical body; all of this is attached to the astral body.

[ 39 ] And now consider the pleasures and passions to which the astral body drives people; how people, through their passions, pleasures, and desires, are in fact constantly launching attacks on their physical bodies; how many of the pleasures people indulge in are truly poisons for the heart! How wonderful it is that this physical body has an organ in its heart so marvelously constructed that it often withstands the attacks of the astral body for decades!

[ 40 ] In its own way, the physical body is the most perfect member that human beings possess today, even though it is the lowest. Next comes the etheric body—it is one degree less perfect than the human physical body; the astral body is considerably more imperfect, and the true “I”—oh, that is the infant among the components of human nature; even today, it remains the most imperfect part of human nature—this “I” that human beings can scarcely grasp, which for many is considered so incomprehensible that what was quoted the day before yesterday as a statement by the great philosopher Fichte still holds true: Most people would rather consider themselves a piece of lava on the moon than a “self”; it takes quite a bit to grasp this “self,” to regard it as something real—it is, in fact, a mere point, one might say.

[ 41 ] Consider how much you can comprehend when you have a human being in front of you in his physical form—how much you can grasp when anatomy, physiology, and so on reveal the human being to you! How much substance does the human physical form possess, and how little substance does the “I” hold for most people! In the distant future—certainly, these higher, supersensory aspects of the human being will become ever richer and richer, and a time will come when the “I” will be just as much a realm of reality in itself as the human physical body is today. But the “I” is now in the very beginning of its development; it is, so to speak, still just a baby and must become ever richer and richer in content as the human being develops from the present into the distant future. The astral body is already further along, but it is, in a certain sense, imperfect. For it is in the astral body that the good and evil of human nature reside, and only when evil is completely overcome by good will the astral body possess the perfection that the physical body already possesses today.

[ 42 ] Therefore, from the perspective of spiritual science, we regard the physical human body as the oldest component of human nature—the component that existed before the other human components came into being, in a time long, long ago. But now comes the essential point. Back then, in that ancient past, it was not physical; it was spiritual. And just as in the comparison given the day before yesterday, the ice gradually crystallizes out of the water as a solid, so too has today’s physical human body—the complex body—gradually emerged from an originally spiritual substance that was as spiritual as today’s “I,” the human spiritual “I,” through a process of increasing differentiation and structuring.

[ 43 ] This brings us back to a very distant past, when human beings possessed, of all that they have now, only the physical body—but even that was spiritual. And so, originally, we were in an entirely spiritual world; nothing remained of what we today call the material and physical. The human physical body, as it is visible to our eyes and tangible to our sense of touch today, is a densification of what was originally spiritual—a form that rested in a spiritual environment just as our physical human body today rests in its physical environment, in the physical external world. Indeed, spiritual science leads us back to a spiritual origin even with regard to the physical human body; this physical human body has undergone transformations and metamorphoses up to its present stage.

[ 44 ] That stage of human existence in which the physical human body was spiritual in the most distant past—at its very earliest stage, when it had not yet been joined by an etheric body or an astral body, let alone an “I”—is called, strange as it may sound to you (since you immediately think of an external celestial body), the human Saturn body. This name was applied by spiritual science to that most ancient past of humankind, when the physical human body developed from the spiritual womb of the cosmos. At this first stage of human existence—the Saturn stage of humankind—the physical human body was still simple and primitive.

[ 45 ] And now comes the second stage: the etheric or life body becomes integrated into this physical human body. For this to happen, the physical human body must already have been raised to a higher level; it must be capable of being permeated by the etheric or life body, so that we can say: At this second stage of human existence, the human being consists of a physical body and an etheric body; he stands roughly at the level of today’s plants, but is not a plant; humanity never passed through a plant stage as plants exist today; rather, humanity was entirely different, even when it consisted only of the physical and etheric bodies and was at the level of plant existence. In spiritual science, this stage of human existence is called the solar stage. These are terms that one must accept, because the celestial bodies do, in a certain sense, have something to do with what we call the Saturn stage, the Sun stage, and so on.

[ 46 ] Then comes a third stage of human existence: the astral body is added to the physical body and the etheric body, and the human being rises to the stage of animality. In spiritual science, we call this the lunar stage of existence. So now we have before us the human being at the stage of animality, consisting of the physical body, the etheric body, and the astral body.

[ 47 ] Now, however, something very peculiar occurs at every stage of human existence. Originally, in the sense of spiritual science, only the human being actually existed. Human beings, who possess the most perfect physical body among the beings that surround us, developed this physical body in the distant past; this physical body has undergone many transformations, and through these transformations—as it incorporated the etheric body and then transformed again as it incorporated the astral body—it has attained ever greater perfection.

[ 48 ] At each such stage, a peculiar phenomenon occurs: certain beings are left behind, unable to keep pace with the evolution. During the period when human beings incorporated the etheric body into their physical bodies, certain human beings—who had previously possessed only a physical body—remained at the stage where they had only a physical body; they did not acquire the ability to incorporate an etheric body, and so to speak, they remain stuck in the cosmic evolution of the worlds. It is true that it is not only students in high school or middle school who are held back; rather, this concept of “failing to keep up” applies to the entire cosmic existence.

[ 49 ] Those beings who remained at the first stage of human development—when human beings incorporated their etheric bodies—are humans who have fallen behind by one stage; they have, as it were, been cast out of human evolution and have fallen into decadence. These beings are the ancestors of our present-day animals. Thus, at the beginning of evolution and development, we had humankind as the firstborn of our creation, and we had the animal kingdom as the second-born creation—that which did not keep pace and has therefore always lagged behind.

[ 50 ] We must imagine very precisely how this lag occurs in the course of evolution. A worldview rooted in external matter will perceive the imperfect alongside the perfect and, if it thinks in a strictly Darwinian-materialistic way, will—in light of the imperfect animal and the perfect human being—come to the conclusion—I need not elaborate on the specific conclusions and views involved—that perfect human beings have gradually evolved from imperfect animals.

[ 51 ] This conclusion is logically on exactly the same level as if someone—it is only a comparison, but logically it is entirely accurate—were to see two people standing side by side, one of whom is ragged and down-and-out, while the other is gifted and uses this gift for the benefit of his fellow human beings, thereby becoming a useful member of human society. He sees an imperfect and a perfect person standing side by side and concludes: Since the perfect comes from the imperfect, the perfect must originate from the imperfect—or at least from something similar. The facts may very soon refute him, may show him that the two people are brothers, that they perhaps have the same parents, that one has risen by developing the abilities within him, while the other has fallen.

[ 52 ] This is how it is throughout all of creation. In the very first, most primordial structure of the world, so to speak, we endowed human beings with the ability to integrate ever higher and higher aspects of their being. First, in a purely spiritual state, they received their physical body; this physical body, provided it remained on the path of development, became capable, after some time, of integrating the etheric body. Those human ancestors—if I may use the term, naturally in a different sense than in ordinary cultural history—who did not keep pace were still at the stage of the purely physical body at the time when humanity had already integrated its etheric body, and they always lagged one stage behind; and thus, during the Lunar stage—the next stage—they only integrated the etheric body when human beings had already integrated the astral body. In this way, they always lagged one stage behind. Now, those beings who, during the third stage of human existence—when human beings had already integrated their astral bodies—had still remained at the first stage, and who therefore could not even take on an etheric body, were cast out of the course of evolution and were later placed alongside human beings as the plant kingdom.

[ 53 ] Thus, when we look at the animal kingdom, we see, as it were, humans who have fallen, who have not reached their evolutionary goal—humans who have fallen into decadence. Modern humans do not descend from any animal beings; on the contrary: animal beings have, in this way—by failing to keep pace with evolution—descended; they have retained certain forms that humans have outgrown; they are human brothers who have fallen. The entire plant kingdom contains beings that are nothing other than what humanity has separated from itself. Thus, as human beings, we look at the animals and say: We have advanced beyond this stage; they have remained at these stages by depriving themselves of the possibility of reaching ever higher stages; and in the same way, we look at the plant kingdom and say: It has been separated from the human kingdom and has descended. The fourth stage of human existence is that in which the physical body, after undergoing four transformations; the etheric body, after three; and the astral body, after two—have all received the true “I.” This is our present earthly existence. This has been carefully prepared through four stages of development of the physical body, which has become ever more perfect, so that it could become the vehicle for the etheric body and the astral body; and these, in turn, have gradually become so perfect that they could become the vehicle for that which now appears as the “infant” of human nature—the spiritual element that, so to speak, must be protected by its outer sheaths. It was only during this final interlude—though still in a time so remote that no geology can trace it back to today—that the “I” became integrated; only clairvoyant retrospect, achieved in the manner described the day before yesterday, leads us back to the point where the other bodies, through transformation, could become protective sheaths for the “I.” It was at this very moment that, so to speak, the final influx arrived, one that remained at the very first stage of human existence; there, as the last of the kingdoms, the mineral kingdom appeared. This was a momentous moment in the ongoing development of humanity. When, within himself, the human being first saw his “I” shine forth in a dim, twilight-like consciousness, the mineral kingdom arose around him in its present form.

[ 54 ] If we consider this from a spiritual perspective, we must therefore imagine that the development was exactly the opposite of what is usually assumed. Today, of course, it is easy to say from the standpoint of a purely material view of the world: Plants need the mineral kingdom as a foundation; animals need the plant kingdom as a foundation. Certainly, in their present physical forms, they need this foundation. But they did not need it in their spiritual stages of existence. When human beings were still spiritual, they did not need to eat or drink, nor did they need to breathe. When they began to breathe, the capacity to do so already existed, albeit in a different way than today. When the plant kingdom was at its first stage, it did not yet require the soil of the mineral kingdom. Only when the mineral kingdom came into being did it form the solid foundation; then the other kingdoms, too, became increasingly physical.

[ 55 ] In their physical form, these kingdoms arose last; our entire world was formed out of the spiritual, and now we see a wondrous kinship between this fourfold human nature and everything around us. We look at our physical body and then gaze out at the surrounding world of the mineral kingdom. We look at all the crystals, at all the minerals—whether they meet our gaze from the atmosphere above the Earth, in cloud formations and air currents; whether these inanimate formations of the Earth meet our gaze in the surging waters of a river or come toward us as a trickling spring; whether they appear to us as shaped minerals or as plants, and so on.

[ 56 ] We look at the entire physical world around us and ask ourselves: In what way are we connected? We are connected in that what exists as the physical world around us is, in a certain sense, the matter and substance of our organism when we view it spiritually. What is out there around us has, as it were, come into being in such a way that it has separated itself out as the most incapable and coarse element—one that had not undergone all those stages of development from the physical body to the reception of the etheric body, the astral body, and so on. We can visualize this as follows: imagine we have a substance in which some salt—for example, a colored salt—is dissolved, and we allow the substance to cool. The salt settles to the bottom and covers the surface, remaining there as the coarsest substance. Thus we see how, out of that which, as Spirit, forms the origin of all existence, the mineral kingdom separates itself as the coarsest—and this is related to our physical body. Then we see the plant body and look within ourselves and know that we carry an etheric body within ourselves; we know that the plant kingdom is the human being’s residual etheric nature. We feel connected to everything that is outside of us. We know of the animals: These are the residual astral bodies; they have been set apart from human nature. Finally, after this unusable material has been separated out, we—as the beings who must be called the highest on the physical plane—have restructured and transformed all three of these ancestral stages of humanity in such a way that, in the end, the “I” could be received into the protective sheaths as the actual spiritual essence of the human being.

[ 57 ] Thus, we look around us and find everything we possess as human beings in the realms of the world—the sensory and the supersensory—except for that which is our “I,” which we can find only in the spiritual realm itself. Thus we see how, through this comprehensive view of humanity, we come to recognize our kinship with the entire surrounding world in a way that—one might say—does not demean but rather uplifts human beings. Indeed, we can even state a reason why this had to be so, why the other realms had to be set apart. Here, however—since time does not permit otherwise—we can only cast a brief glance toward our future.

[ 58 ] We might ask: Why? Does it make sense that, in the course of evolution, human beings separated the other kingdoms from themselves, and what significance does this have? It has a significance that we can understand through a comparison. Imagine that something coarse has been mixed into a substance and has dissolved in it. If we want the substance to be pure, we must allow it to cool. In the same way, humanity had to elevate itself by separating from the other kingdoms everything that was unsuitable for the development of an “I”; it had to create a foundation upon which it could develop. In the future, of course, humanity will have the task of redeeming these other kingdoms; it will have to gradually raise them up to its own spirituality. This can only be mentioned today; for what should particularly come to the fore in our consciousness today is that within the human being, as we have before us, the entire physical and spiritual world— insofar as we can initially reach them—is not only reflected, but that he therefore possesses this entire world around him within himself because, fundamentally speaking, he has separated the other kingdoms from within himself; for they are, figuratively speaking, flesh of his flesh and blood of his blood, even if this is meant in a spiritual sense.

[ 59 ] And so the human being feels himself to be part of the entire environment, and on a higher level he regards everything that lives within him as having been born from the bosom of the spiritual world; and just as the bark forms a layer around the living interior of the tree and protects it, so too has the spiritual within the human being protected itself through the coarser realms of nature, as it were, like the bark of human existence; and just as the bark is merely the lignified part of the tree’s soft tissues, so the remaining realms—that which surrounds the human being—are what has developed from original human nature in the sense described here. Thus, human beings come to realize that they are born from the womb of the entire world’s existence, and it is no wonder that, on the level of clairvoyant consciousness, they feel as though they are giving birth to new worlds, for the worlds that surround us and on which we walk were developed from within us in ancient times.

[ 60 ] The future world that will surround human beings will also be born from within them. Clairvoyant consciousness gives birth to it spiritually and has it before it, and it is then as if, out of the twilight darkness of the spiritual womb of the world, forms were emerging before the clairvoyant consciousness—forms that are still spiritual today but will only descend into the physical world in the future. We see the spiritual realm around us populating itself with spiritual figures, and this spiritual realm will appear to us as the higher realm in contrast to what is already mysteriously hinting at itself today in human creativity on a lower level; and there, the image takes shape for us in a wondrous way, emerging from the artist’s intuition. Raphael did this in part out of tradition as well: what Raphael has mysteriously woven into his painting regarding the fate of humanity takes shape as a feeling; the twilight of the world’s womb—the spiritual forms are born from it above, and as the sensory embodiment, as the most important physical embodiment of that which is born from the twilight of the universe as a human being and becomes ever more perfect in its physical form, this appears to us in the mother with her child, who possesses within herself the power to shape within herself the mysterious laws that have emerged through all of human evolution into the human being, so that he brings forth his own repetition from within himself.

[ 61 ] Anyone who can feel something like this will realize how the spiritual in the clouds and the physical in the Madonna and Child come before us as a great symbol of human destiny in this mysterious child; and then, standing before this painting, one learns that—even if perhaps unconsciously on the part of the artist in question—it has been born out of the perception and feeling that how a human being is a world—yet one intimately connected to the greater environment—a small world, a microcosm, set against the greater world—one senses how the artist has woven this mystery into his painting, and one then feels how what a human being receives through his relationship to the surrounding natural world can confront us anew in human creations, as, for example, in true art, the human being offers us something like a solution to the riddle of the world in his own way, and we then feel, in this specific instance, when this riddle of the world speaks to us symbolically through Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, just how true Goethe’s words are—which we have already cited—and which lead us so deeply into the microcosmic human being and into the macrocosmic wholeness of the world. We feel what Goethe felt when he presented this human being before him as the very solution to the entire mystery of the world, saying that when the human being perceives the healthy world in its entirety around them, they take in measure, number, order, and harmony and create a new, higher world out of this world, thereby giving meaning to the entire external world in the first place. And in every detail, down to the deepest sensation, Theosophy—or spiritual science—shows us that, in fact, human beings contain within themselves, in a certain sense, everything we find out in the world; that human beings themselves are the solution to the riddle of the world; that it is human beings who come to us as the answer when we ask about the true riddle of the world.

[ 62 ] In the highest sense, my esteemed audience, the question can be posed this way: let us look out into the world! It appears wondrous to us in all its fields, in all its realms; it presents us with nothing but questions. Where is the answer? Everything asks us—where should we look if we want to find the answer? The answer is always right before us. We need only be able to interpret this answer correctly through spiritual science. This answer to the riddle of the world—it is “the human being.” This is what the ancient poet had in mind as well when, looking at the world around him, he spoke these beautiful words:

Many mighty things live here on our Earth; yet nothing is mightier than humankind.