The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fifth Lecture

[ 1 ] We have seen that the necessary must be conceived in conjunction with the past, that, in a sense, there is as much of the necessary in the course of world events as there is of the past, because the past is reflected in the present, as we have tried to understand. And then the point is that we seek, as it were, a kind of strengthening precisely in such concepts as we wish to clarify for ourselves, so that, strengthened by such concepts, we can then approach what are actually truths of Spiritual Science. In many respects, this is the fatal flaw: that one often harbors a great longing for what one might call the hidden truths of Spiritual Science, yet shrinks from strengthening one’s thinking and mental images by assimilating and internalizing rigorous concepts. This assimilation and internalization of rigorous concepts disciplines our mind and our soul. And if we do not shy away from remaining true to ourselves inwardly as we assimilate and internalize such concepts and ideas, then we will never be in any danger from the actual concepts of Spiritual Science.

[ 2 ] However, as I have already mentioned, it has been shown time and again just how widespread the longing for truths in Spiritual Science is among many people, and how little the longing for a firm grasp of fixed concepts is. Right from the start, when we began working in our field of Spiritual Science, there were some who explained that they really couldn’t attend my lectures because, since concepts were being used, they would fall into a sort of sleep-like state! And certain individuals with particularly mediumistic dispositions even went so far as to have to leave the halls where the lectures were being held in Berlin; once, a lady was even found collapsed outside, so deeply had she been lulled to sleep by the search for clear concepts.

[ 3 ] Goethe was once accused of creating “vague concepts” with his ideas about the metamorphosis of plants and animals, and with his concepts of the primordial phenomenon related to color. — In his “Prophecies of Baki,” which I have already mentioned, he included a passage that refers to this aversion to—as people say—“pale concepts.” However, even this four-line stanza has been quite misunderstood by those who have attempted to interpret the “Prophecies of Bakis.” Goethe said: “Pale you appear to me”—the concept, the idea—“and dead to the eye. How do you call forth, from your inner strength, sacred life?” This is so aptly put by Goethe—the sentiment of those who do not like to hear sharp concepts but fall asleep at the mention of them, who always prefer to hear about mysterious mysticism in soothing words, where one can also dream, not just think. They say: “You appear pale to me, and dead to the eye.” — They say this to the one who sometimes wishes to speak in somewhat sharper terms. — And then they ask him: “How do you summon, from your inner strength, sacred life?” To this, Goethe replies:

If I were perfect to the eye, you could enjoy me with peace of mind;
Only imperfection lifts you above yourself.

[ 4 ] In other words, it is the absence of what is perfect to the eye—that is, of what is immediately perceptible—that lifts one beyond oneself. Otherwise, one is oneself dead in the world if one does not attempt to truly internalize what people often call “pale concepts.” And so, in order for all Baroque mysticism to give way to our Spiritual Science, we must sometimes also devote ourselves to the contemplation of conceptual worlds that differ by a hair’s breadth.

[ 5 ] I began by speaking of necessity. The first question is whether all the concepts that we so frequently associate with the concept of necessity in everyday life can truly all be equated with the concept of “necessity.” Some say: What is necessary must happen. — But is it really correct under all circumstances to say: What is necessary must happen? — You see, this idea that “what is necessary must happen” is something I’d like to clarify for you through an analogy. Let’s suppose we have a river here (it is drawn), a mountain range rising up here, and we observe that a river or stream begins up there. Let’s suppose we were unable to see any further than this point. We study, through some means, the course of the river or stream as it follows the mountain range, and we can say to ourselves: Based on what we might be able to observe from this vantage point, it is necessary for this stream to flow into this river. This is absolutely necessary given the mountain range, and the statement, “The stream flows into this river,” could absolutely express a necessity. But let’s suppose someone had installed a diversion and redirected the stream so that it flows this way here. Then they would have prevented what is necessary; then what is necessary would not have happened. It’s a rough comparison, but in life and in the process of becoming, it is like this: Necessities exist, but they do not always have to occur. We must distinguish between what happens and what is necessary. These are two different concepts.

[ 6 ] Now let us recall various things. Let us first recall the obvious point we learned yesterday: that the past influences the present and, in a sense, exists in the present as a reflection. But let us also recall something else where we would need to use the image of the mirror. We have, after all, often emphasized how human cognition actually proceeds under the influence of ordinary everyday consciousness. The human being, in fact, is always outside of his body and his bodily functions with the part that cognizes. “That part lives in the things,” as I have often said. And the fact that a person perceives something is based on the fact that their experience of the things is reflected in their body. So that, schematically, if we regard this as the body (it is drawn), we can say: With the part that perceives, we are outside the body, and what we experience in the things is reflected in the body.

[ 7 ] So let’s assume we see the color blue; in reality, we experience that blue within a blue flower—in chicory, for example. It’s just that we don’t become aware of it there, but rather through its reflection in the eye. Our eye is part of our reflective apparatus. We see the experience we have within the chicory by allowing it to be reflected in our eye. — We also live in this way within sounds. But this life within sounds does not initially come to our consciousness; rather, it only comes to our consciousness through its reflection in our hearing organ. Our entire cognitive organism is a reflective apparatus.

[ 8 ] That was what I tried to justify philosophically back then, at that last philosophy conference in Bologna.

[ 9 ] Our cognition thus arises as a reflection from our organism, as a reflection of what we experience. And if you take this concept of reflection—whether it be the reflection of the past in the present or the reflection of our experience through our own cognitive organism—you will have to admit one thing: what is added as a reflection to a thing or an event is of the utmost indifference to that thing and that event. It has absolutely nothing to do with the thing or the event directly. When you look at a reflection, you can easily imagine that everything is just as it is, even without looking at that reflection. The reflection, then, is simply added to everything else—to what is reproduced in the reflection. This is particularly true of our cognition. It makes no difference to the image whether we are forming this very cognition or not.

[ 10 ] Imagine you are walking through a landscape. Do you think the landscape is any less beautiful—or even any less what it is—if you were not walking through it and experiencing it as it reflects within you, in and of itself? This is something that is added to the landscape; the landscape itself is completely indifferent to it. Is it indifferent to you, too? No, it is not indifferent to you. For by walking today through a landscape reflected within you, by experiencing what is reflected there, you have, within certain limits, become a different person in your soul by tomorrow. What you have experienced there—which is utterly indifferent to the landscape—marks for you the beginning of an inner richness of the soul that can grow within you.

[ 11 ] But what does that actually mean? It means that if we first consider the landscape from this perspective, we can say: This event unfolds up to this point (it is depicted). The fact that you are walking through the landscape takes place separately, alongside it. The landscape is reflected within you. This now becomes a further experience in your soul. How did that which continues to grow and weave within your soul come about? It came about because something entirely new has been added to what has unfolded up to this point. Something has truly arisen in your soul out of nothing. For in contrast to everything that has gone before, the reflection is, of course, a nothing—a true, real nothing. That is to say: you are connecting to that which does not need to be connected to at all. You are joining in. You are joining the necessary unfolding as a living being that connects to something which was also not conditioned by what came before. For you could just as well have stayed away. Then everything that you gain from the reflection would simply not occur.

[ 12 ] By thinking about something like this, you arrive at the concept of chance. That is where the true concept of chance lies. And from this you can see at the same time that, where chance occurs, essences—or the essential—must collide, truly must collide, one might say. From this, however, you can see that chance is possible in the world. And if it were not possible, this enrichment—which an essence experiences in the way I have described to you—could not take place.

[ 13 ] In this sense, chance is certainly a valid concept. It is something within the workings of the world, and it shows us that new points of connection can be derived from reflection in the unfolding of the world. If it were impossible for one link to connect to the other links in the world’s becoming without reflection arising, then what falls under the concept of “chance” would be absolutely ruled out. If it were the case that the meadow drew you in as if with threads, that the conditions for your passing through lay within it, and if a reflection did not arise within you in the way I have described—namely, that it is indifferent to the meadow—but rather if the meadow were to imprint its own image upon you, then there would be nothing but what is necessary, lawful becoming. But then, as difficult as it is to conceive, there would be no present anywhere at all. Nowhere would there be the present! — What follows from this? That those beings who do not wish to participate in such a connection cannot proceed further if they pursue such a becoming; they must turn back (it is depicted). For that is the law of devils and ghosts: they must exit again through the opening through which they entered. You can already see this illustrated in Goethe’s *Faust*. They cannot initiate a new wave of becoming, but must return to where they came from. Yet precisely because such a thing—a new wave of becoming—is possible in the unfolding of the world, freedom is also possible.

[ 14 ] Now, with the exception of a certain class of insights, none of our insights involve a pure reflection, but only an impure one, insofar as all manner of impulses play a role in our insights. Drawing from our past, these insights are not pure concepts that we form for ourselves. Once we have appropriated the pure concept, we no longer need merely to recall it; rather, the concept can be formed anew each time. It does indeed become a habit, but it is a habit that has then closed the chapter on the past and that always evokes a new reflection within the concept. The concepts we form are pure reflections. They come from the other side, passing through us to the things themselves. Therefore, when we capture an impulse in concepts, the concept can be an impulse of freedom. — This is what I attempted at the time to elaborate on more fully in my *Philosophy of Freedom*. It is precisely this thought that is elaborated upon in my *Philosophy of Freedom*.

[ 15 ] But the concept of freedom necessarily encompasses the concept of chance. In this sense, we must adopt rigorous concepts, for they also hold the deepest significance for life. I would like to cite a case that we have discussed on several occasions, but which is particularly relevant here. Let us suppose, for a moment, that we are faced with illness. We must never approach illness from the perspective of the past—that is, of necessity—but must always maintain the perspective of the present. This means we must bring this perspective of the present to life by helping as much as we possibly can. If the illness has led to death, only then is it time to introduce the concept of necessity at all and to understand that the event was necessary. There, it immediately transitions into life. There we must strictly adopt the following standpoint: necessity in relation to the past, immediate life in relation to the present! — Thus, by attempting to illuminate concepts from perspectives that are more fruitful, a certain way of handling these concepts can become ingrained in our souls, as we have seen in this single example.

[ 16 ] Now, however, there is much to be said about the concept of chance. That will happen in due course. For now, I wanted to introduce you to this concept of chance and show you to what extent it is justified. The easiest way to look at the process of becoming is this: once you’ve heard something about karma, you say, “Everything is karmically necessary.” — So if someone has (as illustrated here) an incarnation, followed by the life between death and a new birth, and then another incarnation, and if they experience something in this second incarnation, they say: “Well, that is the consequence of what happened in the previous incarnation.” — But it is not absolutely necessary that we consider the matter solely from the perspective of the present incarnation; we can, after all, think of the future incarnation, incarnation number three (it is drawn). Something may happen there that we attribute to the present incarnation through karma. In the present incarnation, however, it may well be a first instance—that is, it may have become reality directly out of the reflection through a living being. And that is the essential point: that out of the reflection, which is unreal, something becomes real through a living being. Through this, the contingent is transformed into the necessary in the process of becoming. Then, once the contingent has passed, it becomes a necessity.

[ 17 ] Goethe beautifully conveyed to us what he called the “words of a wise man.” He spoke these words when he was experiencing great pain in his life. It was then that he coined, in reference to the evolution of the human race, the words of, as he put it, “a wise man.” And it went like this: “The rational world is to be regarded as a great, immortal individual that inexorably brings about what is necessary”—that is, it brings something about, and once it is brought about, it becomes woven into the past and is a necessity—“and thereby even makes itself master over the contingent.” — A beautiful sentence for meditation! We can also learn something from it: that Goethe wrote this sentence under the influence of great pain, a pain that caused his entire sensibility, his entire inner life, to look toward the process of becoming within humanity and to ask himself: How does this process of becoming actually take place? And then the realization welled up from his soul: that in the rational world, human beings collectively bring about the necessary and thereby make themselves masters over the contingent—that is, they eternally subordinate this contingency to the necessary.

[ 18 ] I do not wish to leave what I have said here without a brief aside. Such an insight is truly a good meditation phrase, because there is an immense depth to it, and it flows out of us when we meditate on it. We should not merely stop at an abstract understanding of such a sentence, which flowed from the venerable Goethe when he experienced great sorrow in 1828. There is so much life within such a sentence! And the aside I wish to make is this: we must always regard insights as a grace bestowed upon us. And it is precisely the person who gains insights from the spiritual, from the supersensible world, who knows how such insights are then bestowed upon him as a grace when he is prepared for them, when his own being is able to meet a certain current that flows into him from the spiritual world. It is precisely with regard to supersensible insights that one experiences time and again that one must be prepared, and that one must be able to wait for them; that one is not always ready to gain a particular insight directly from the spiritual world.

[ 19 ] This must be said precisely in a context such as ours. You see, it is all too easy for misconceptions to pile up one on top of another regarding the way in which supersensible knowledge can flourish and be fruitfully disseminated. Quite a few people come to me and ask, out of the blue, about this or that, and often expect to receive information about areas that are completely beyond my reach at the very moment they are asking me these questions. They expect me to tell them the absolute truth. For it is, after all, a widespread conviction that whoever speaks from the spiritual world actually knows everything that exists in the spiritual world, and that he can provide information about anything at any time in any way he chooses. And if he does not answer a question immediately, he is often told: “The one who asks is probably not allowed to know that,” or something similar. But what underlies this is an overly simplistic understanding of the correspondence that exists between the supersensible world and the human soul. One should be aware that “readiness for the truth” is what is particularly necessary for the direct reception of truths from the spiritual world. Misunderstandings about these matters must gradually be dispelled. Certainly, those who are, so to speak, still further removed from the actual realm of truth in spiritual life will feel the need to ask all sorts of questions. To them, answers can then be given from memory based on what has been researched. But no spiritual researcher should be asked to produce original truths out of thin air; rather, one should be aware that the researcher experiences this, so to speak, as if—to boldly translate it into the physical realm—one were cutting into flesh with a knife by demanding that he provide information about something that lies outside the scope of his research to date.

[ 20 ] Everything that leads human beings upward into the spiritual worlds is ultimately subject to certain laws. And these laws must be gradually assimilated so that misunderstandings regarding the influx of spiritual truths into the physical world may diminish more and more. Only by striving to free ourselves from all selfishness in this regard—including the arbitrary desire for knowledge—can we lay a sound foundation for the spiritual movement as it should and must be today. Certain spiritual truths simply must be incorporated into the world today. But one should not oppose them with the aspirations one brings from the world in which one previously lived, nor should one seek to apply everything—just as one previously did—to the spiritual truths as well. One must not undermine this spiritual movement in this way. Spiritual movements have mostly been undermined by the fact that people were by no means willing to adapt their way of life to spiritual truths, but instead brought the way of life they had already had into the realm of receiving spiritual truths. And so it came to pass that in the 18th century, from the stream that flowed into European spiritual life through Jakob Böhme, a society was founded. It is reported today—and truthfully so—that this society had a number of members, but that only one remained: the very person who founded the society! — Now, I always hope that more than just one will remain among us. But back then, that was precisely the case in an attempt to found a society. And it was said that an enormous number of those who became followers subsequently turned into quite peculiar people. I do not wish to list everything that is said about the followers of that society in the 18th century.

[ 21 ] By immersing oneself in the spiritual world—and this can certainly be achieved through the study of Spiritual Science—one develops, more and more, a sense, a feeling of being immersed in a spiritual world. And by grasping the world in which one lives with clearly defined concepts, one also prepares oneself to rise in a proper and understanding way into the higher worlds. Those who are not willing to think about “necessity” and “chance” as clearly as we have just attempted to do will not easily rise to the concept of “providence.” For, you see, one can learn a great deal from the spiritual beings that surround us.

[ 22 ] Today’s intellectual culture is, in many ways, devoid of spirit. I have tried to illustrate just how devoid of spirit it is through some of the remarks I have quoted from Fritz Mauthner. I would like to add one of Fritz Mauthner’s most curious remarks so that you can see what an honest person comes to—a person who does not merely say of this science, as it exists today and as it is universally represented: “This is the only science that exists; we now know what our foolish ancestors did not know, and we have finally shed their lack of understanding”—but who can honestly take what are today’s general perspectives and then arrive at remarkable conclusions regarding a particular matter. I have told you before that Fritz Mauthner “outdid” Kant. He wrote not only a “Critique of Pure Reason” but also a “Critique of Language.” He attacks the words at every turn. And he has formulated a specific definition for the transition of a word from one domain to another. I deliberately cite a false example—one that Mauthner, however, considers correct—from his *Dictionary of Philosophy*: In the realm of the older Latin cultures, there was the word *veritas* = truth. Now he says that this word *veritas* was adopted into modern German culture—that it was simply adopted as is—and from this the word “Wahrheit” arose. He calls this a “loan translation.” And he traces such loan translations with tremendous acuity and great conscientiousness across many cultures. Loan translations—how words migrate and how such loan translations are formed—that is what he traces. He delves deeply into words. Nowhere does he have the desire to examine “all the power and seeds” behind them, but he delves into words with immense diligence. And so he attempted something like the following: Let’s assume that certain views exist within a people. From these views, Fritz Mauthner takes only the words, for to him, thought consists of words. Now he says: These words exist; but we can trace them back to another people. The second people, where the words are found, has loan translations from the first. And then he manages to do the following. I must give you this example, for it is truly too good to pass up as a way to arrive, from this example, at the present way of thinking—the way one must actually think if one is true to this approach. It is very important not to overlook such things. So he traces various loan translations—that is, he examines how words have changed from region to region—including the following: “Coffee has remained a loanword, or more precisely, a foreign word; in German, at least, neither its spelling nor its pronunciation has become standardized. ‘Patate’ is a loanword in English from some Native American language; in ‘Karzoffel’ we have either a loan translation or a hybrid shift in meaning; in ‘Erdapfel’ and ‘Grum-, Bodebirn,’ we have a paraphrase or descriptive term. The Romans adopted from the Greeks the custom of placing a ‘corona,’ a wreath, on the victor’s head during a competition or a feast. Floral wreaths were likely worn elsewhere as well. But it was not until the Renaissance that the noun and verb were reintroduced; there were poets’ crowns and crowned poets, where “crown” then meant “wreath,” as in Latin. Indeed, even the plant species that was native to the Greeks—at least in historical times—was imported both linguistically and in reality. The laurel (strictly speaking, the *laurus* and not the berry; the *baccalaureus*—then became, once again, a symbol associated with a specific title, the *baccalaureat* (French *bachelier*), only to take on yet another new meaning in the English *bachelor*) became, in Speidel’s witty phrase, the “vegetable of glory,” and the crowned poet was called *poeta laureatus* from Petrarch on through Tennyson. The common laurel needed no substitute. The myrtle wreath, which somewhere in the Orient—based on some erroneous observation or an even more erroneous folk etymology—became a symbol of sexual life and then, ironically, of chastity, was easier to obtain in Germany as a herb than as a flower; and so our German brides walk down the aisle under a wreath or crown of real leaves and artificial flowers. Generally speaking, during Eastertime here, the palm is replaced by the only green thing of the season, the willow catkin; and because “palm”—the natural plant decoration in the Orient—has become a prefix in words such as Palm Sunday, Palm Week, etc., denoting precisely this festive season, the substitute green willow branches are called “palm branches” or “palm catkins.”

[ 23 ] As you can see, he traces such loan translations that pass from one ethnic group to another. And he then goes on to say the following: “The spread of Christianity among the Western peoples is an inexhaustible source of such real-world loanwords, including verbs. One can read about the spread of the material elements of Christian worship and the spread of Christian ideas in the book itself. (See the article on Christianity.)”

[ 24 ] Well, if we look up the entry “Christianity,” we find a beautiful sentence there: “I do not wish to say or prove anything more here about Christianity—as it has emerged as a creation of the Germanic and Germanic-Romance peoples and still provisionally dominates Western culture through forms, words, and considerations—than this one thing: that Christianity as a whole represents the most immense loan translation or chain of loan translations that we can observe in the light of history.”

[ 25 ] So what is Christianity according to Mauthner: a collection of loan translations! That is to say: the words were already there where Christianity originated! And when we look for it in Europe today, we must look for loan translations there. These loan translations—that is Christianity, and nothing else—he asserts. If, by some chance, something other than the adoption of specific words in loan translations had come about, the entire culture would have developed differently. But the important thing is that this is, after all, a genuine consequence of our current scientific premises. It is a genuine, honest consequence, and those who do not draw this conclusion are simply more dishonest than Fritz Mauthner. Anyone who stands on the ground of current science must simply say: To me, the whole of Christianity is nothing but a sum of loan translations! — One might object, for example, that Mauthner merely demonstrates to what extent “coffee” entered our language as a loan translation, but not how coffee itself came to Europe. Certainly, one could say: The man has not demonstrated how, given that Christianity is a collection of loan translations, Christianity had to come to Europe. He has not decided anything on the matter at all. — One cannot simply make that objection; rather, one must say: If one thinks in terms of current scholarship, then one simply cannot know anything about the matter. One excludes oneself from the matter. That is it.

[ 26 ] No wonder, then, that a person who, in addition to being who he is and what I have already described to you, is actually quite intelligent, says the following: “I do not go as far as James (Psychology 5.297), who considers any improvement in memory to be impossible; it would not be impossible for the organs responsible for memory to become more efficient through practice, just as has been demonstrated for the organs responsible for muscular activity. In any case, school psychology—which believes it can strengthen young people’s memory through meaningless exercises—is based on the old associationist psychology, which sees in memory the “thought-thing” as a force, and in the mental images of other “thought-things” with which this force learns to interact. But if memory is nothing other than and apart from its activity—just as the soul is nothing other than and apart from its experiences—then there remains no “thought-thing” that could be strengthened; the iron will that does not allow itself to forget useful knowledge, that remembers with effort where it cannot be done without effort—that is a matter of character; and in this sense, an individual’s memory is indeed as unchangeable as character. Quite apart from that, however, the senseless drills of our school are at least as useless as training the wrong muscles would be for the desired use of the limbs. Anyone who has learned nothing more in his youth than to walk on his hands cannot make any use of it later, unless he intends to perform in the circus.”

[ 27 ] He believes that our children are trained in school in such a way that they actually learn to use their brains incorrectly—as if they were merely required to learn to walk on their hands, a skill that is of no use to them in life. But even though he recognizes this, he cannot come up with anything to take its place. I have explained to you how, in this regard as well, the revival of what we pursue in our eurythmy is important.

[ 28 ] “Walking on one’s hands, head down—that is the main thing our young people are trained to do. Bible verses (in elementary school), all the tributaries of a foreign river (in middle school), tables and technical details prepared in reference books (at the university)—these are the memory exercises that are defended on the grounds that they supposedly strengthen the memory. For my state examination in legal history, I was required to list the thirteen privileges of a cardinal in the order established by God; nor was I allowed to forget the privilege of the pallium, which is woven by certain nuns in a certain convent.

[ 29 ] And shouldn't school limit itself to cultivating the student's character, accustoming that character to work, and finding the nearest, most convenient, or best paths between useful mental images of the real world?»

[ 30 ] And now one would expect the man to come up with something to take its place! Anyone who is reasonably intelligent can see that intellectual culture, as it is currently practiced, cannot go on like this. But one expects him to now present what he intends to put in its place. But then the entry ends—that’s it! The entry ends; as I said yesterday, it just couldn’t quite catch the tail. — Almost every entry in this dictionary is like that: it tries to reach the tail hanging at the back but can’t quite reach it.

[ 31 ] If one struggles to make sense of the concepts of “necessity” and “chance,” and if one learns to grasp that the human world itself must be regarded as an “immortal individual” that always brings about what is necessary, and thereby rises above the contingent to become its master—and if one adds to this the concept one must have if one wishes to understand anything of the spiritual world’s inflow into the human soul—then one gradually works one’s way up to a concept that represents something that is exalted above the necessary and the contingent, and that is the concept of providence. One can indeed grasp the concept of Providence in the world if one gradually works one’s way up to it. I have, after all, often pointed out to you that observing the world tells us nothing at all about what is at work in the world. It would be helpful, in order to truly grasp what I have just said, not to immerse oneself in language the way Mauthner does, but rather to delve a little into the genius of language that lives behind the words. Sometimes one might even find evidence of this in Mauthner himself. For given the immense diligence with which he gathers his material, those who perceive the spirit at work in language will sometimes find profound insights in Mauthner’s work that are usually overlooked. The spirit of language already leads us to feel ourselves within a realm of feeling that transcends necessity and chance. For there are many things happening around us in which we participate through speech, yet about which we know nothing at all, because we are unable to fully bring them into our consciousness. This is, I would say, the spiritual world that weaves and reigns around us. And when we speak, for example—and this is, of course, merely an example—these spiritual worlds are also speaking at that very moment. We should try to become aware of this as well.

[ 32 ] Let’s try to make just a small start on this. We have brought together the past and necessity, and we have brought together counterforce and immediate life with chance. For if everything were necessary, then everything would be past, and nothing new could come into being—that is, there could be no life. So when we place ourselves, with our own lives, within the becoming of the world, we are surrounded by necessity—that is, the reflected past—and by what is called chance: the life of the present. These are intertwined. We have, as it were, two currents: the life of the present, which is called mere chance, and, like an undercurrent, the reflected past—the necessary. That which is considered true in the ordinary sense of the physical plane can, in essence—if we understand truth to mean conformity with what already is—refer only to the past, that is, to the necessary. What is true must be what is past and necessary; what is in the process of living emergence, we must always produce. We must live within this. Within this, we must appropriate living concepts that flow directly from the necessary, in relation to the living. Here we cannot look to something with which the concept corresponds, but can only live within the concept itself. Therefore, when we face the stream of becoming with our lives, we can preserve within ourselves the past—which is part of life’s stream of becoming—by making the past itself, in its reflection, a present reality. And we can make it a continuous present reality.

[ 33 ] One of humanity’s virtues may lie in the fact that it carries on the past—which is, in essence, a rigid necessity—in a living way; that is, that it carries on its reflection, preserves it within itself, and allows it to live on. What “virtue” carries the past forward in life? Loyalty! — In life, fidelity is the virtue that relates to the past, just as love is the virtue that relates to the present, to immediate life. But in this regard, we come to what I wish to say about the genius of language, which we should become aware of. You see, in the German language there is an echo of the past, of what is essential, and of ordinary truth. For “truth” has nothing to do with veritas at all. Truth is connected with “preserving,” with that which “proves itself,” with that which “endures,” with that which continues, with that which comes down from the past. And in English, there is an even stronger resonance with this same meaning, in that what in German is the virtue of fidelity is also present in the word “true.” This is how the genius of language works. And German has preserved this in a proverbial expression as well. When one wants to express that another person has spoken the truth and that one believes them—both objectively and subjectively—one still says “auf Treu und Glauben” [in good faith] instead of “auf Wahrheit und Glauben” [in truth and faith]. This is how the genius of language works, which is wiser than what people do.

[ 34 ] And when one then moves on from fidelity, through love, to what one—as I have already mentioned—can call grace, that which one must wait for, one arrives at the concept of providence; that is, one enters the world where providence reigns.

[ 35 ] If Fritz Mauthner were to come across the word “providence” now, he would immediately try to determine where it was borrowed from and how it relates to “to see,” “to foresee,” and so on! But the one who focuses on reality seeks out the world to which this points—a world in which neither necessity nor chance, but rather the union of both, is to prevail. And that is the world in which the past, as we understand it, does not exist at all.

[ 36 ] How many times have I told you this: The moment you look into the spiritual world—when you look into the past—it is as if the past has come to a standstill. It is still there. Time becomes space. The past ceases to be the immediate past. Then the concept of necessity also ceases to have any meaning. One does not have a past, a present, or a future, but rather one has something enduring. For my sake, Lucifer has remained frozen in the moon’s evolution, just as someone who was walking with another person remains standing while the other continues on—because he has become too comfortable, or because his feet have grown sore. Just as the one who has remained there has nothing to do with the place where the other has arrived after some time, so too does Lucifer have nothing directly to do with our earthly existence. He has simply remained in the lunar existence. There he still stands today. In the spiritual world, we cannot speak of a past, but only of a continuous reality. Lucifer is there just as he was back then. When one looks into the spiritual world, all concepts of necessity and chance change; there, providence reigns.

[ 37 ] So I wanted to begin by at least outlining the areas in which we must seek what is designated by the terms necessity, chance, and providence. This is only the beginning of the matter. After we have discussed other matters for a while, we will return to these topics so that we, too, may occasionally indulge in reflections that might be regarded—in quotation marks, so to speak— “more mystical” minds—in quotation marks—might be regarded as unnecessary within our movement, but which I must regard as very necessary, because I believe that it is essential for every true mystic to engage in thinking from time to time.