The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Transformations of the Human Elements of Feeling and Thought from the Fourth to the Fifth Cultural Epoch II

[ 1 ] Yesterday I tried to draw your attention, through somewhat figurative descriptions, to the great difference in the spiritual constitution of human beings during the fourth and fifth post-Atlantean epochs—the latter of which we ourselves are living in. This is a difference to which, in fact, people today—in our present time—are not inclined to pay much attention. Let us just consider for a moment what an average person of the present day, who is “smart”—that is, who has internalized the prevailing concepts of our time—might have to say about what I hinted at yesterday. He will likely say something like this: It’s all well and good what that ancient Greek imagined in his mind about the succession of generations from Tantalus to Iphigenia, and it’s all well and good that Iphigenia is, in a sense, placed within an aura of prevailing fate. But that’s all just imagination, after all. — It is the viewpoint that is quite generally held by intelligent people today. Koridan, whom we have just encountered in *The Palatinate Shepherds’ Play*, does not say this from the outset, but Mops does: “It’s all just imagination!” But this is roughly the Mops-like (pardon me!) viewpoint taken today regarding these matters.

[ 2 ] Now we need only focus our full attention on the immensely persuasive power this viewpoint holds for people today, on how impossible it is for people today to imagine that someone might step right into our midst who—instead of offering an explanation regarding such a personality, a “hereditary burden,” as I quoted to you yesterday— could come up with something similar to the myth of Iphigenia and Tantalus. And if he were to do so, everyone would naturally say: Fiction! In fiction, anything goes, but such fiction has absolutely nothing to do with truth or with real knowledge. — And, when it comes down to it, that is the standpoint currently taken toward all art. Contemporary humanity is entirely of the view that truth can only be attained through concepts, through theories—specifically those concepts and theories derived from external physical reality—and everything else, no matter how beautiful it may be, is simply fiction. It is impossible to imagine today that any other standpoint could be justified or even possible, or that anyone could take a different standpoint without actually being out of their mind. Just imagine for a moment that someone would even make the suggestion—I dare to say this here, but I am well aware that it is only possible to say this among ourselves—let’s suppose someone were to come up with the idea of saying: In medical lecture halls, there should be less talk of hereditary predisposition and the like; instead, things should be presented in a manner reminiscent of a Greek myth. If the person in question were to say this as if he meant it to be taken seriously—as if he weren’t just making a bad joke—the very least that contemporary culture would do to him would be to send him to a sanatorium. After all, it’s hardly conceivable that anything else could happen, is it! So deeply rooted is the conviction in the present that no other perspective is even possible: truth can only be found in the manner that is currently officially recognized, and everything that people once sought through their souls was simply childishness, it was myth, it was fiction—it was not truth. But since we have finally come “so wonderfully far,” we can also be certain—so thinks the person of the present—that from now on, in all future earthly ages, souls will never perceive any concept of truth other than what has just been indicated. One can be entirely convinced of this: If it were ever possible to transform air travel into ether travel, and if the ether—in the sense understood by today’s physicists—were truly present in the universe, and if a balloon were constructed that would carry some of our intelligent Earthlings—who have never been so foolish as to join a society of Spiritual Science—to Mars, and on Mars they were to reveal views of some kind that differed from the one just suggested, one would say: Of course, these Martians are just making things up! They have not yet grasped how to recognize the way in which truth can truly be found. That another point of view might be possible is something that, under certain circumstances, might even be taken seriously in the present by a person who does not share the perspective of Spiritual Science; but then, under certain circumstances, if he is truly capable of serious reflection on worldview, a grim fate may await him. There was one man, Nietzsche, who attempted to apply a different standard and who, in the spirit of his book *Beyond Good and Evil*, even rebuked the truth. But he was referring to the truth that the present age alone recognizes, and there he sought to assert a different standpoint—namely, the standpoint of life, the standpoint of the life of the soul above all else. He was unable to arrive at Spiritual Science, and so he had to pay for this very perspective with his mental health. Another perspective, for example, would be to ask: How do concepts such as those processed in Greek mythology affect the human soul? And how do concepts such as those processed by the present day—following the model of “hereditary burden”—affect the human soul? How do these concepts affect the human soul, the entire life of the human soul? How do they affect it? And there is indeed a tremendous difference. A person can summarize a number of generations—such as those from Tantalus to Iphigenia—whether by doing so in an original way [like Nietzsche] or by believing in such a summary as something real: whoever can bring such mental images—and the feelings linked to them—to life within their soul introduces a life-giving element into the entire life of the soul. But the one who works only with concepts such as “hereditary burden” introduces into the life of the soul a deadly element, a withering element. And this withering element will gradually be brought about under the influence of one-sided physical, biological, and so on, knowledge—a withering, a deadly element. Never will this physical, chemical, and biological science of the present be able to produce anything that can contribute to the inner fulfillment of the life of the soul.

[ 3 ] Anyone who wants to can see this just by looking at external things. Try a little experiment. Buy Ostwald’s little book *Naturphilosophie*—which is available in the ReclamBibliothek—and try to make sense of it if you’re seeking nourishment for your soul! See for yourself how what an outstanding chemist has to say about all manner of natural relationships is discussed at length over many pages, while what is meant to serve the soul is crammed into just a few pages and presented in such abstract terms that it can do nothing but wither the soul! And the trajectory of development does not suggest that these biological, physical, and chemical disciplines promise anything soul-fulfilling for the future. That is by no means the case. On the contrary, the further the individual sciences advance, the less they will be able to offer anything that even remotely resembles spiritual nourishment. And when the time comes when the connection between individual souls and the old religious mental images has been completely eradicated by modern natural science, then the soul would have no nourishment at all; then the souls of adults—perhaps children would still be preached all sorts of things for a long time that their parents themselves do not believe— then the souls of adults would simply pass their days by starting with breakfast, sipping the newspaper between spoonfuls. Now, the newspapers will contain less and less about humanity’s spiritual treasures, and more and more about other things. Then people will go about their daily work, fulfilling the duties necessary for humanity’s material sustenance. Then they’ll have lunch, do something similar in the evening, and if there are people who have time, they’ll kill time with games or the like, because it cannot be filled with any thoughts that possess real value beyond a spiritual world. Yes, what will they do in the evening? Perhaps it will still be acceptable for people to watch plays or the like—even though they do not believe in them. Some will read a book, perhaps about things from the “childlike” eras of humanity—which were beautiful, after all—but which produced works like the paintings of Raphael or Michelangelo. And one can be quite clear about this: it is quite beautiful, but none of it has anything to do with reality.

[ 4 ] Let us make no mistake: the times are moving in the opposite direction of what withers and kills spiritual life. If we now consider precisely what yesterday’s discussion can teach us, we find that there is already an immense sense of desolation in it. For what is the meaning of the transition from the fourth post-Atlantean epoch to our fifth post-Atlantean epoch? This purpose lies in the fact that in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch—in the ancient Greek era, for example—people were not as isolated in their souls as they are today; they still possessed an inner connection among souls, but they also perceived this inner connection in certain final remnants of visions, of inspirations from Diana—as they were understood at that time—of inspirations from Diana, Artemis, and from what emerges from the subconscious depths of the soul. This truly appeared to people in images. One could say that regarding human relationships—or, to put it another way, regarding social life—people still possessed the last remnants of spiritual, visionary images, and they guided their lives by these. It is utterly nonsensical to believe that the Greeks would have invented something in the same way that we embellish things in the present. It is utterly nonsensical to believe that. When the Greeks undertook the Trojan War and thus prepared for a campaign against Troy, it would have been entirely impossible for them to embark on such an undertaking for any reasons that were acquired through the intellect or animated by emotion in the way they are today. That would have been completely unthinkable for the Greeks. They knew that if they were to undertake such a thing, they had to place themselves within a broader human and cosmic context, and that what had to live within their souls could not be anything that had anything to do with ordinary sensations operating on the physical plane. They looked to the deeper reasons and brought them to life in imaginative visions. Certainly, they said: it was a contest between the three goddesses Aphrodite, Hera, and Athena, and Paris was to receive the prize of this contest, Helen. It was an image, but within that image the Greeks felt and sensed great spiritual connections that permeated the world.

[ 5 ] People today might even have a mental image of the Greeks waging the Trojan War for reasons similar to those we have today, and that someone then sat down and devised the entire myth as a poetic explanation of the Trojan War. But this, too, is a superficial modern mental image. The myth was a vision; it was the imaginative representation of the deeper forces at work there. Now, of course, if it did not lead us too far astray from our present task, I could discuss how Helen served as the representative—the imaginative embodiment—of Greece’s entire relationship to the Near East, how the rivalry among the three goddesses revealed the driving force of the Greek spiritual life, and how Greek spiritual life had to work its way up to what it later presented to the world. But as I said, an examination of this myth would take us too far afield from our current task.

[ 6 ] Let us consider that there were still remnants of a visionary form of clairvoyance that sought the truth through images, and that poetry was not as it is today—presented as something that is contrived—but rather that it was a visionary experience that then found expression in external forms, yet was not opposed by a dry, pedantic, purely theoretical science that would have prided itself on its concepts of truth, as contemporary theoretical science does. People still perceived the interconnections between one another. This has been completely lost. It had to be lost because individualism had to emerge. People would never have arrived at that individualism for which the great educator must be the culture of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, and which will gradually develop during this fifth post-Atlantean epoch. People had to lose even the last remnants of the old clairvoyance in order to be completely torn away—each one on their own—from what can still be perceived of these connections. Human beings had to be, so to speak, confined in their individual forms of existence on the physical plane through their soul experiences. They had to be confined. This could only happen by their losing everything that led them beyond their own bodies, so that they became entirely enclosed within their own bodies. If you have a vision of what connects you to other human beings, then you have a perception of social life. Human beings of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch were no longer to possess this. They became entirely dependent on what they could experience within their own skin. And so the individualistic conception of the human being arose in its first stage—the stage that could be described as the most brutal—a stage on which, in a certain sense, humanity still stands today.

[ 7 ] If a person today wants to feel what he truly is, he first thinks—no matter how beautiful his other theories may be—of that which is within his body, within his skin, truly within his skin. It is difficult to form a clear mental image of this very thing, because it is true and yet is not believed at all in the present day; for people like to delude themselves with all sorts of idealism in order to hide from the fact that, deep down, they believe only in themselves, insofar as they are enclosed within their own skin. But this transition had to take place. It had to take place for this reason: because human beings must gradually come to realize how, in a certain sense and within certain limits, they themselves bring about—out of their own karma—what lies within their skin. What was “fate” in the Greek sense was not something human beings had brought upon themselves; it bound them to their lineage. What people of the future will experience as karma will consciously connect them with other human beings. People will have to consciously experience their karma as something real. As you can easily imagine, it is still infinitely difficult for people today to experience karma as something conscious. People accept it as a theory, but to perceive karma as a conscious reality—that is truly still very, very difficult for people today. For I have said before: Let us suppose we receive a slap in the face from someone. Certainly, outwardly—insofar as we are confined within our physical bodies and are beings between birth and death—we must defend ourselves against it. But a higher perspective must be applied here: Who actually gave you that slap? Who placed the one who slapped you there, so that he might slap you? He would not be standing there if you had not placed him there through the way you are connected to him by karma. — Just think how incredibly difficult it is for people today to conceive of this! Christians believe themselves to be people of the present, but they will truly follow very little of the advice given to them: “If someone strikes you on the left cheek, turn the other cheek”—in thought, at least; outwardly, it simply won’t work. And people still do not make this distinction between the inner and the outer. It becomes utterly difficult for them to live in accordance with karma in any way.

[ 8 ] And yet, as we make our way through life—from our embryonic stage, through birth, and through early childhood—what helps shape our physical body is our karma. Between our last death and our present birth, we have lived through this experience—and have even made it a point to experience how we are to live out our karma, and what kind of body we must give ourselves so that it can live out its karma. We act—I would say, shaping—upon our body through the forces of the soul. We even act in a localizing way by placing ourselves in that part of the world where we can live out our karma. Thus, with the consciousness we possess between death and a new birth, we shape our personal destiny.

[ 9 ] This is the idea that is completely opposed to the Greek concept of fate. But in order to arrive at this idea as a living one, a person must pass through individualism; he must first come to terms with himself as an individual—I would say, in a very brutal way. And humanity is on this path of perceiving itself as an individual. But humanity has, I would say, had to pay a price—truly had to pay a price—for having to live out the sensation: “I am enclosed within my skin and my flesh.” Humanity has had to pay a price. That is: that he became a slave—a slave of the soul—to this physicality. He allowed himself to be enslaved by physicality, and the body initially became the master of a new, believed-in destiny. An Iphigenia felt this at the age I spoke of yesterday—every single sentence in yesterday’s account is correct: I roughly indicated how many years they still had left until they turned twenty—an Iphigenia who had visions reaching all the way back to Tantalus, visions that are interpreted today as reminiscences brought about by heredity; such an Iphigenia is no longer possible in our present time; such an Iphigenia, who above all grasps—morally and ethically—that which lives within her generation, all the way up to Tantalus: “Hear this! I am of the lineage of Tantalus!”—that is not possible today. For today the doctor steps up beside her and explains: “Hereditary predisposition!” “Your father, your mother, your grandfather, your grandmother, and so on—they all had this or that condition; a hereditary predisposition! And that is the source of it all!” —But this makes it clear that the soul of today lives on, gasping for breath under the yoke of physicality, gasping even in its perception and in its feelings.

[ 10 ] Essentially, my dear friends, we can see this gasping beneath physicality when we consider what has become of human beings under a certain 19th-century worldview. People focused their attention solely on the physical, and because they focused solely on the physical, they concluded that human origins lay purely in the animal world. Even scientifically, human beings gasp for breath under the very bonds that tie them to their physicality. And it will hardly be easy to draw people’s attention to what lies at the root of this. For when you draw their attention to all this, people may come and say: “Do you really think you can refute the valid aspects of Darwinism? It’s all well proven, after all!” -- Certainly it is well proven, quite certainly it is well proven, but that is not the point; the point is that the sense of truth has changed. In light of this altered sense of truth, one can, of course, rigorously prove all these things. One must be out of touch with the present to fail to sense what this is actually about.

[ 11 ] But all of this has practical consequences! With tremendous vehemence, external culture is moving toward putting thoughts into practice in everyday life and no longer allowing impulses from the spiritual-soul realm to have any influence within that practical life at all. And how close we already are today to asserting such things—for example, in pedagogy or didactics, in education! How close we already are today to asserting such things in the education of young children! But just imagine if it ever comes to the point where people demand not only the things they demand of young children today, but entirely different things—if it ever comes to the point where all parents are required to have a child who has reached a certain age—which will then be determined by scientific and statistical data—examined by a materialistic doctor for their inherited characteristics. By then, however, the school system will have been divided into various categories, and following the medical examination by the materialistic doctor, children will have to be placed in this or that school—and perhaps even in this or that kindergarten—depending on their “hereditary burden.”

[ 12 ] Even today, people are still astonished when someone speaks from such a perspective. But that is precisely the problem with being astonished. One should not be astonished by these things at all, because if the form of Darwinism that is theoretically advocated today were true, then that is exactly how it would have to be done. That is the main point: then that would be the only way, and it would be unconscionable of people not to do it that way. A minor detail might occur—a trivial detail, for example—that, let’s say, someone once, in whatever way, deceived the doctor a little, and a doctor issued a certificate that, in the opinion of others who are not officially authorized to do so, is incorrect; whereas the child should have been placed in Ward Two, where certain “hereditary predispositions” exist, the child may have been placed in Ward Five, where, according to the medical certificate, the future geniuses are, and then it might turn out that the child has become smarter than the one who examined him! But that could only happen through an “error.” That something like that would be possible—well, that wouldn’t be very clever, would it!

[ 13 ] This is simply meant to give you a sense of the direction in which this trend is heading—a direction that, in many ways, is still merely theoretical today. Today, it is merely the fat droplets on the surface of the soup, but these fat droplets will become increasingly powerful. More and more materialistic “fat” will be added to it, and eventually the entire plate will be filled with this materialistic “fat,” and humanity will have to spoon it out. But this is precisely the point at which people must arrive, through a worldview, at the ability to overcome the great dangers inherent in the practical application of current theories. Once what is contained in our Spiritual Science has attained inner spiritual vitality in a large number of souls, then no one will be able to talk about all sorts of “hereditary burdens” to a person in whom the truths of Spiritual Science have attained inner spiritual vitality; rather, that person will say: No matter how much you may try to prove to me what was lacking in my father, my mother, my grandfather, my grandmother, and so on, I know that, apart from what I carry in my hereditary impulses, I also have that soul which has nothing to do with these hereditary impulses, because at the time when the preceding generation—the one that passed on these traits—was alive, this soul was in the spiritual world between death and my present birth. I carry these forces within me as well, and one day I will see if I can overcome this “hereditary burden”! — Certainly, as long as one believes in the theory of heredity, and as long as the truths of Spiritual Science have not become second nature, one will not be able to overcome heredity. One will only be able to overcome it when the concepts of Spiritual Science truly come alive in people’s souls and become second nature. But for that to happen, much more must yet take place.

[ 14 ] Certainly, one may believe that the truths of Spiritual Science will gradually gain ever greater persuasive power for those who come to understand them, but other factors will also have to come into play. That is why I began today by including an aperçu on art. Consider how far what is called “truth” today has strayed from art and poetry since Greek times, and how, in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, a gulf arose between what people call “truth” and what they call “art.” But this has a great deal to do with how the present generation—present humanity—has positioned itself in relation to art in general. And in this regard, it is truly worthwhile for you to take a look around and see how people today relate to art in general. There is one art form in which—precisely because it is primarily significant for the fifth post-Atlantean epoch and its aftermath—world-historical errors cannot exactly be made; I say “cannot exactly be made”; in which people are compelled even today to look to the artistic: that is music. It is solely in music that people today are inclined to recognize the artistic, because the very nature of music compels them not to view it as a representation of external reality. For it is only in the very outermost reaches of music that one can fail to recognize the artistic. If one were to listen here and there to see whether music imitates the sound of waves or the rustling of the wind or the like, one would realize that what imitates the sound of waves or the rustling of the wind or similar phenomena is a secondary matter in music; that what really matters is something entirely different—inner form, which in reality cannot be observed externally on the physical plane in any way. Thus, by its very nature, music is protected from being drawn too strongly into the tendencies of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch.

[ 15 ] The present age has fewer inclinations toward poetry. This is where those elements come into play that lead from the artistic to the non-artistic, and in certain forms of poetic expression, these elements are particularly evident. How many people today still have a genuine appreciation for the artistic in poetry, just as one must have an appreciation for the artistic in music? When confronted with something, most people ask: Does this correspond to this or that model in the reality out there? Yes, we have an entire art of naturalism that judges everything poetic solely by its correspondence to external, physical reality, whereas in poetry it is a secondary matter whether anything corresponds to external, physical reality. It is just as irrelevant to a work of poetry whether a character is portrayed truthfully in the external, physical sense, or whether a musical composition imitates the roar of the wind or the play of ocean waves. So one might say that the present generation is less inclined toward poetry than toward music. In truth, what matters is not whether I describe something in four stanzas that corresponds to this or that reality, but rather how the second stanza emerges from the first, how the third from the first two, and so on; in a sonnet, what matters is not expressing this or that, but how the lines intertwine: four, four, three, three lines; the four lines—how do they intertwine? What inner impulses live within them—similar to melodies or harmony, but transferred to the realm of the imagination, to the realm of sound? —I have very little feeling for this.

[ 16 ] A woman—a very witty woman—once gave me a short story—it was a long time ago, about thirty years—and told me to read it and give her my opinion. This novella was of such a nature—one was dealing with a very witty woman—that it was told in the same way one would recount an external event, so that I found myself compelled to say: “The whole thing requires that, first and foremost, you create an outline—that you, so to speak, develop three ‘stanzas’ of the novella: a first ‘stanza’—I mean this in a figurative sense—a second, a third—and that an inner framework, an artistic structure, be woven into it.” — You should have seen the look that lady gave me—to demand something like that! “What,” she said, “am I supposed to write three stanzas?”—that’s how she mocked my advice.

[ 17 ] Then there is the next art form, for which the present generation has even less aptitude: painting. Painting, as it expresses itself through form and color, must focus on the artistic rather than on the external: How does what is depicted there resemble this or that person physically? The artistic quality can also lie in physical resemblance—for example, in portraiture or similar genres—but then what matters is something entirely different from mere representation. What matters is that the artistic quality emerges precisely through the manner in which the subject is treated. And there is currently very little of this to be found among humanity. What people judge first and foremost in painting today is entirely comparable to judging, in music, the resemblance of a melodic form or the like to something external and natural.

[ 18 ] However, the decline from music to poetry is also evident in other ways; it is also noticeable in other ways in the present day. Someone may consider himself a musical genius, but he must still learn something; yet poetic geniuses today already regard it as something utterly dreadful if they are expected to have learned anything regarding finer technical skills. And a similar tendency is already almost present with regard to painting or the like.

[ 19 ] However, one descends even further in terms of understanding the present when one turns to sculpture. When people pass judgment on it, they can hardly consider anything other than what might result, for example, if one heard a sequence of notes and spent the whole night trying to determine which natural phenomenon it resembled. Most judgments made about plastic art—about sculpture—are actually of this kind, and it is precisely in sculpture that one can first see that an understanding of sculpture will return when Spiritual Science can be actively sought within the human personality. Recall some of what I have presented here—and had to present here specifically—regarding the manner of empathizing with space above and below, to the right and left, in front and behind—recall all these discussions. Recall those discussions I have had regarding the left and right sides of the human being, and consider how deeply this experience of the human etheric body—which first shapes the physical forms—can be developed; an experience that the Greeks possessed instinctively, that was lost during the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, and that must be revived. One can already say: The time must come when sculpture will be understood in such a way that everything which today compels people to form their judgments is set aside, and that everything is embraced which people currently only allow themselves to experience in relation to music.

[ 20 ] Not to mention architecture! For if people today weren’t forced to place their chairs somewhere in the room along with the table and build a shell around them, and if they weren’t forced to somehow enter the rooms and look out into the open, then they wouldn’t find any forms at all today that in any way constitute architectural design. For what do architects actually do? They study Renaissance forms, classical forms—that is, they imitate them, because one cannot simply place mere cubic forms or polyhedral or similar boxes everywhere. Whether architecture will once again be able to give birth to forms will depend entirely on people learning anew to sense how the creative force of the world pours itself into these forms. For this had to be lost in the age of individualism. And so it is already necessary to revive it; it is necessary that, alongside what is to bring life back into the mental images of the human soul, the understanding of the artistic also be incorporated—that the artistic play an essential role. That is why it is good that a number of our dear friends have not merely listened to theoretical lectures on art within the context of our efforts in Spiritual Science, but have also actively participated in the creation of certain forms and other artistic works—even if what may arise from this is only a beginning for something yet to come.

[ 21 ] I would like to say that the last refuge chosen by today’s ideologues is what they call “reason informed by external experience.” With this reason informed by external experience, people have now constructed the current worldview of materialism, and more and more, purely mechanical, biological, physical, and chemical concepts are to become decisive for the worldview as well, and there is no inclination to consider the vitality of these concepts—the way in which they can enliven the soul. I have expressly emphasized that the great advances in scientific research must be acknowledged by our Spiritual Science, and that we should not make fools of ourselves or bring disgrace upon ourselves by constantly railing against scientific progress. One rails against it only as long as one is unfamiliar with it. Once one becomes acquainted with it, one is already left with an impressive impression. And we really ought to take this to heart: we should not rail against natural science simply because we belong to Spiritual Science, if we have no understanding whatsoever of even a single branch of natural science. But let us turn our attention once more to the worldview values present in contemporary science—or rather, to the way in which contemporary scientific concepts can become significant worldview values. We are living today in a difficult, oppressive time. We see how infinitely oppressive death is sweeping across vast expanses. We see how suffering and pain are spreading—a picture that every soul should hold before its eyes today. Especially in our present age, it is so distressing when souls turn their gaze away from the great events of the world and concern themselves so much with their own personal affairs. From this perspective, my dear friends, it has caused me, for example, such infinite pain over the past year that so many personal matters have come to light right within our own ranks at a time when the great concerns of humanity could be touching our souls so intensely. But I do not wish to speak of this or that; I merely wish to draw attention to it.

[ 22 ] How do people today respond to such overwhelming historical events? There may be some who say: Doesn’t the transience of the physical world strike us so clearly—especially at this time, when we see thousands upon thousands of deaths sweeping across the earth—that people must awaken within themselves all that can arise in them in the form of mental images about the eternal forces of the human soul? Aren’t these very events particularly suited to directing human thoughts toward the eternal forces of the human soul? And so one might imagine that perhaps someone who was already very inclined to surrender completely to Ahriman—that is, to materialism—might be prompted, precisely by the force of the present impressions of the futility of the transitory, of the withering away of the transitory, to turn their gaze toward the eternal. That would be conceivable. But let us look at some of what is actually coming to light; let us take one of the most distinguished contemporary scientists with a worldview rooted in natural science—let us take Ernst Haeckel. What is the general content of Ernst Haeckel’s “thoughts on eternity”? He says: One sees in the present how countless people pass through death, how an inexplicable fate breaks into human physical life on earth—I’ll put it in our own words now: Doesn’t this show how worthless any thought of the eternity of the human soul is, when one sees that people can be mowed down like this? Is this not proof that the scientific worldview is correct when it says: Nothing of any significance extends beyond the mere physical body? Is what we are now experiencing not proof that those who speak of the eternity of the human soul are wrong?

[ 23 ] One cannot say that the person who, based on current concepts and through present-day events, is made aware of eternal forces in the human soul is more logical than the one who says: “After all, we see people dying because of what I can only call chance!” How can one believe that there is truly meaning in human development or that eternal values exist! — One cannot say that one view is more or less logical based on the present. You cannot deem one set of ideas logical and the other illogical if you are seriously consulting logic. For whoever argues in this way is reminiscent of what lies at the heart of current scientific achievements. One can truly admire these achievements infinitely. One might say: What has chemical science achieved, and what has mechanical science achieved! It may have led to truly marvelous accomplishments when it comes to bringing about this or that for human progress, but it has also used its marvelous achievements to create ingeniously horrific instruments of murder. One is just as possible for this science as the other. This science can be entirely neutral. It can produce the most marvelous instruments for exploring the mysteries of nature, and—through those very same achievements—the most horrific instruments of murder! And that is the nature of this science. It can prove, based on harrowing events, that human souls cannot be absorbed into transience, and—it can prove this just as well!—that these very events demonstrate that the human soul is something transitory. These scientific concepts are entirely neutral.

[ 24 ] Something positive must come; the message, the revelation from the spiritual worlds must come, and these spiritual worlds must work through their inner power! You know that what comes through these revelations will not contradict, but will be in full harmony with the achievements of natural science—yet it cannot arise from them. That is why those who believe that the concepts of natural science will ever develop into a satisfactory worldview are asserting something completely nonsensical. Spiritual research must be added to the concepts of natural science, and therein lies the path to escaping the great dangers of the present. We must recognize that the downward path is precisely the one associated with the greatest progress, and that the upward path is the one that must come from the revelation of spiritual life. We must be radical solely and exclusively in regard to this reality of world events. That is what matters. Only Spiritual Science will be in a position to speak once again of deeper mysteries.

[ 25 ] Truly, my dear friends, it is not easy for the concept of karma to take root in people’s souls. This will only happen when a larger number of people are able to recognize the narrowness of concepts such as “hereditary burden”—the invalidity and fruitlessness of such concepts—and to look instead at what lives within the soul. Then, when people come and see a child about whom the physical doctor says: “This is how it manifests itself, but there’s nothing that can be done, because the father was like this, the mother was like that, the grandfather was like this, the grandmother was like that, and so on,” one must resign oneself—if the physical doctor says this, then people must have a sense that this, too, can be true: that there is a soul within who has prepared herself for something entirely different from what the physical doctor believes based on heredity—for something entirely different between her last death and her new birth—and that, above all, this must not be left fallow, but rather these forces must be developed at all costs. Spiritual insights must become voices in the world, and one may perceive it as unconscionable if one does not turn one’s gaze toward that which is spiritual and soulful. One will have to realize that these spiritual qualities remain latent if one does not turn one’s attention to them during the course of education. For at a certain age, physicality has already come to the fore; the spirit can no longer break through, and then what one should have noticed remains untapped for that particular incarnation.

[ 26 ] This is where Spiritual Science takes on practical significance. It is my hope that this practical significance will be recognized. These are the things I wanted to bring to your attention today in connection with yesterday’s discussion.