The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Eighth Lecture

[ 1 ] The last time we spoke here during my previous visit, we considered some spiritual facts relating to the life of the human soul after a person has passed through the gate of death. Today we will first consider some facts of the spiritual world connected with this event—facts that can shed further light on it; facts that, just as they are capable of shedding light on the event of death, can at the same time illuminate what takes place in life between a person’s birth and death, what takes place in the physical life in which we find ourselves. I must emphasize again and again that spiritual science must strive not merely to remain at an external, schematic level in its understanding of the human being, but to penetrate ever deeper and deeper into the various aspects of the human being.

[ 2 ] Now let us turn our attention to what we have often called the human etheric body. Already in yesterday’s public lecture, I pointed out that one should not imagine this etheric body merely as a diluted physical body—that would, after all, be a materialistic view—but rather as what it appears to be through an inner experience. And this leads us to the realization that what we call, in the narrower sense, thinking and imagining—as the human being lives here on the physical plane—actually takes place in the etheric body. But for thoughts to form through this thinking and imagining, the physical body is necessary, for the physical body must receive its impressions if thoughts are to be retained as memories here in physical life.

[ 3 ] The process is as follows: When we think, thought naturally originates in the “I,” passes through the astral body, but then takes place primarily in the movements of the etheric body. Whatever we think or imagine takes place in the movements of the etheric body. These movements of the etheric body are literally imprinted upon the physical body. This is a rough way of putting it, since the processes involved are much more subtle than a crude imprinting, but one can describe the matter in this way by way of comparison. And because these movements of the etheric body are imprinted upon the physical body, thoughts unfold in our consciousness, and in this way thoughts are also preserved in memory. In a sense, it is like this: When we have a thought and later recall it from memory, the act of wanting to remember sets our etheric body in motion; it adapts its movements to those of the physical body, and as it enters into the impressions that this etheric body made in the physical body at the time of the corresponding thought, the thought rises again into consciousness. Memory, then, is linked to the fact that the movements of the etheric body can be imprinted upon the physical body. Of course, memory is bound to the etheric body, but the etheric body must have a kind of repository for its movements so that recollection can take place in physical life. And so we live our lives between birth and death, have our experiences, and remember our experiences—that is, our inner life of thought unfolds within us. In the waking state, we always have, to a greater or lesser extent, this inner life of thought taking place within us.

[ 4 ] As human beings in our physical bodies, we have the sense that what takes place in our thinking and in our imaginative life is an inner experience—something that occurs within ourselves, something that belongs to us. And as far as physical life is concerned, this is indeed true at first glance, for outwardly, what takes place internally as a thought experience is not visible to other people. It is therefore our own. But in relation to the spiritual world, what takes place in our life of thought is not our own at all.

[ 5 ] Yes, our inner life has a significance quite different from what we often assume when we speak of it as something that belongs to us. And let’s explore this universal significance of our inner life a little further. To make myself perfectly clear, I must start with an analogy: We physical human beings work here in the physical world. Let’s assume our work consists of making machines. It could, of course, consist of something else, but let’s assume it consists of making machines. To make the machines that are then put to use in the service of human life, we need wood or iron or whatever else the machines are made of. We need the appropriate materials for this, and we must process these materials. The materials must be present in nature. As physical human beings, we cannot create iron or wood; these materials must already exist. We take these materials, shape them, process them, and assemble them into our machines. In doing so, we humans carry out a certain activity. In a sense, we bring about the existence of a realm of machines, but we create this realm of machines on the basis of the materials we extract from the earth.

[ 6 ] Now imagine that we were not dealing with human beings who build machines out of earthly materials—such as iron or wood—but with the beings of the next higher hierarchy, the beings to whom we give the names: Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai. One might now ask: What, exactly, do these beings do? Do they also engage in an activity that could perhaps be compared to the one just described—one that leads to the creation of a realm of machines? Yes, these Angeloi, Archangeloi, and Archai do have their own activity. This activity simply takes place in the spiritual world. And just as we humans must take our iron and our wood from the lower kingdoms—that is, first and foremost from the mineral and plant kingdoms—in order to assemble our machines, so too do the Angeloi, Archangeloi, and Archai need materials to build—well, let’s say—what they are meant to build, although the expression is, of course, very crude. And what are their materials? For much of what the angels, archangels, and archai must accomplish in the spiritual world, the materials are precisely the thoughts that human beings regard as their own. And it is indeed the case that while we go through the world cherishing our thoughts, observing our inner life of thought from within, as it were, and regarding it as our own, the angels, archangels, and archai are working on our thoughts without our knowing it. The very least of what lives in our thoughts comes to our consciousness, for thoughts signify much more than what comes to our consciousness—much more than what lives in our souls. While we think and recall our thoughts, the aforementioned beings of the higher hierarchy—the next hierarchy—work, as it were, from the outside in their own way, just as they may need our thoughts. So imagine every human being in such a way that what takes place in their consciousness is only one aspect of their inner life of thought. While they think, the beings of the aforementioned hierarchies constantly hover around them and work with the aid of their thoughts. These are their materials. And what they create in this way is part of what is needed so that Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan may one day emerge from the Earth. This is part of what brings about progress in the evolution of the universe. And throughout our entire life, right up to death, the beings of the higher hierarchies mentioned above work on our thoughts from the outside, insofar as these thoughts are, as it were, encompassed by our being.

[ 7 ] And when we pass through the gate of death, then—as we already hinted at during my previous visit—some time after we have passed through the gate of death, our etheric body is taken from us and woven into the universal world ether. It is not only what we see last—by looking at one side of our thought-fabric—that is woven into it, but also what the aforementioned beings have worked out is woven into the universal world ether. While they work, so to speak, on our individual thought-fabrics during our lives, they then assemble the individual thought-fabrics of one person, another, and a third, as they see fit, so that something new may arise in the course of the world’s further development. What they are able to acquire through the interweaving of the individual etheric bodies of the human beings they have worked with during their physical lives must be woven into the general world ether.

[ 8 ] You can see from this just how serious our inner mental life really is. It is quite serious, in fact. Depending on how we think, we are deemed useful for the general course of world development. The person who has spent his entire life striving only to think foolish thoughts, or striving only to think of things that are mere reflections of the physical world, will not provide very good building materials for what is to be woven from his etheric body into the general world ether. It is a serious matter concerning the inner life, the inner life of thought, which appears to us as our own property during the life between birth and death. In the manner described, it actually belongs to the whole world. And just as we humans could not build machines without wood and iron, so too could the higher beings not continue working on the course of world development if they did not find their building materials in what we can give them in the form of thoughts during our physical lives. For them, we are the soil from which they draw their wood, their iron, and so on—that is, the fabric of our thoughts. They carry out their sublime work with these materials through their wisdom, which transcends the human being; but the materials must be supplied by what lies within us.

[ 9 ] What we are able to give to these beings—the Angeloi, Archangeloi, and Archai—forms, for the entire time we then live between death and a new birth, something we can contemplate, something toward which we can look. We know, of course, that it is taken from us just a few days after we have passed through the gate of death. But as we continue to live between death and a new birth, our soul’s gaze is constantly directed toward what we were able to contribute to the general fabric of the world-ether. And just as we ourselves must now once again cooperate in the creation of that which will then unite with physical matter to give us a new incarnation, so the vision of what we have thus given to the great world influences our work. In short, whether we have something to look to—from which we can draw new impulses for a future incarnation within this web of thought interwoven with the world-ether—or whether we cannot, much will depend on this with regard to the way in which we will be able to prepare for our new incarnation.

[ 10 ] Thus, our thoughts are bound to our physicality before we pass through the gate of death. Then they are, in a certain sense, taken from us, and they are woven into the general world ether in the form that the aforementioned entities have fashioned from them, so that they no longer exist within us but rather exist outside of us. Therefore, in spiritual science, to always keep this process in mind—to have it before us, as it were, for meditation—we can describe it with the words: “The inner becomes the outer.” For just as we here see mountains, rivers, clouds, and stars with our physical eyes, so after death we look upon what has been woven from our thinking as the external world—that which has been taken from us and woven into the general world ether. It is now the external world—an external world that uplifts or saddens us, strengthens or weakens us. The inner has become the outer.

[ 11 ] Then we know that there is a subsequent, very long period during which we must, in a sense, relive in reverse what we have experienced here in our earthly life—but differently than we experienced it in our earthly life. As we know, between death and birth we relive our past life at three times the speed and in reverse order—that is, first what we experienced in the last year, then what we experienced in the year before that, and so on. Thus, we relive our life after death in imaginings, but differently than we lived it here in the physical body. After our etheric body has been separated from us, we relive our life, but in such a way that we no longer experience what we felt or the impulses of our will during our physical existence. Let us take the extreme case: if, during our physical existence, we had hurt or insulted someone, we felt something when we insulted them. But they also felt something. What we felt is what drove us, out of our own feelings, to insult them—and perhaps even what we felt as a certain satisfaction with the act. In short, you can imagine what a person feels—whether in a good or bad sense—when they bring about something on the physical plane. But the other person—the one at whom our actions were directed—feels something else. The one who is insulted feels something different from the one who insults. After death, during this “retrograde journey” that we are now to characterize, we feel the effects that we have wrought in other people—and indeed in other beings—through our actions, our impulses of will, and even our thoughts. So it is not what we already felt while we were in the physical body that we now feel, but rather what we have brought about in other souls, in other beings. What was external—what remained external during our physical life—now becomes internal. Just as the inner becomes external through the separation from the etheric body, so too does the external become internal through this process of reliving the past. Our soul is filled with the effects we have brought about during our physical existence. This now becomes our inner life: the external becomes internal. Thus, the internal becomes external and the external becomes internal. In this way, the human being is, as it were, turned inside out after passing through the gate of death.

[ 12 ] Just as you had to imagine the Angeloi, Archangeloi, and Archai in a certain relationship to the human realm of thought earlier, now imagine the spirits of the higher hierarchies: the spirits of form, the spirits of movement, the spirits of wisdom, and indeed even the spirits of will—the Thrones—imagine them as now also standing in a certain relationship to what I have just described: how a human being acquires a new inner life that is now forged together from the outer world. With their spiritual eye—if I may use that image—the spirits of form, the spirits of movement, the spirits of wisdom, and the spirits of will look down upon that remarkable, significant spectacle that unfolds after a human being, between birth and death, has inwardly experienced this or that through their deeds and impulses of will; what he now experiences after passing through the gate of death, where he gathers up the effects, as it were, to make them into a new inner being—that inner being which can then continue to unfold in karma during the formation of the subsequent incarnation. The spirits mentioned above observe from their spiritual heights how everything that spreads out in the outer world as our effects becomes part of the inner being. And what they thus observe is now material for them to incorporate something other than the aforementioned lower spirits of the ongoing development of the world—above all, to provide assistance so that karma can be brought to fruition, so that what is thus pressed from the outside inward may serve as the foundation in a slow process of formation that, between death and a new birth, unites that fabric which then descends into the physical hereditary substance to connect, as a spiritual element, with what the human being inherits from father and mother. Much is required for what descends from the spiritual heights to come to pass and to unite with the hereditary substance that originates from the ancestors. After a human being has passed through the gate of death, shed their etheric body, and completed that return journey through the soul world of which we have spoken, the work that must be accomplished between death and a new birth already begins, so that the new birth—the new incarnation—may indeed come to pass.

[ 13 ] What is happening there? It is actually incredibly difficult to describe the way in which we are being worked on in the spiritual universe out there. If I were to describe it, I might perhaps do so in the following way, using a schematic sketch. Let us assume that a human being passes through the gate of death. His etheric body is then shed. That which he himself can still perceive remains, in a sense, in the vicinity of the Earth for a relatively long time. I have described such things to you over the course of time. But what the Angeloi, Archangeloi, and Archai have woven extends so far outward—as it becomes interwoven with the general etheric world—that it unfolds into a vast sphere with the Earth at its center. Thus, like a spiritual atmosphere, the world ether surrounds the Earth. And what we have spun from our thoughts becomes interwoven with this world ether. Do not worry about where there might be room for all these fabrics: the spiritual permeates everything, and all these fabrics are contained within this sphere.

[ 14 ] As this process continues, the human being now perceives this fabric—not from within, but from without. And the rest of their life is a kind of expansion, a merging into the universe. And throughout this entire time, while life unfolds between death and a new birth, the human being always looks in from the outside; they see: “That is you”—like an even more powerful, more expansive sphere, and on this sphere, imagine something like a vast map. Of course, this is all figurative and a rough description, but it does reflect the facts. — Work is being done on this map, on this globe, by drawing everything in and incorporating it spiritually: first, that which has been worked out by the human being themselves in their etheric body—which the human being can look upon—and then also that which has now become part of the human inner being in the way I have described. All of this is incorporated there as form spirits, spirits of movement, spirits of wisdom, and spirits of will work on the human being between death and a new birth. And when the time comes for the new incarnation to take place, this fabric is complete. Then there is a mighty sphere. You need not fear, however, that there would be no room for all these spheres; they can all be contained within one another. It is, of course, a metaphor for a spiritual reality. — Then this sphere begins to grow smaller and smaller, and it turns inside out, just as you turn a glove inside out, so that the inside becomes the outside and the outside becomes the inside. What is, so to speak, on the outside all moves inward; it turns completely inside out and becomes so small that it can unite with the human embryo as it develops in the mother’s womb. This, too, is a metaphor.

[ 15 ] Of course, these things can also be depicted using different imagery. That has already been done here. But today let us imagine the matter in such a way that, in accordance with what a person has given to the beings of the higher hierarchies during their life between birth and death, these spirits of the higher hierarchies work both on the world and on laying the spiritual foundations for the person’s new incarnation. That, I think, is a profound thought when it takes root in our souls on an emotional level, when we become aware of what our life actually means for the entire universe when viewed in this way, and how we are situated within this universe. And it is essential that, from this moment on, more and more people become imbued with the awareness that they are connected to a spiritual world throughout their entire lives.

[ 16 ] Today’s very intelligent people, who oppose the science of the spirit, will say: Human life goes on, even if such knowledge is not disseminated among people, but rather knowledge of a much simpler kind. After all, these would be merely things intended for thought—with which one could burden one’s thinking—but there is no need to burden life with such thoughts. — That is certainly what the very clever people say. And they might even add: People in the past didn’t know such unnecessary wisdom either, and they were still able to make progress. — The people who say such things have absolutely no idea how foolish their words are, because such a claim is made on the assumption that it is actually true that people have always been as ignorant of the spiritual mysteries of existence as they are now. But it wasn’t that long ago that people weren’t so ignorant. This can even be demonstrated everywhere by outward appearances.

[ 17 ] I’d like to give you an example of such an external feature. I’ve never had the opportunity here to visit an art gallery to see if there are similar works here in Stuttgart. But recently we visited an art gallery in Hamburg, and this is what we discovered. You see, when painters today are asked to paint what we recognize as a large, powerful painting—but a painting depicting a truth, as we know, such as the Fall of Man at the beginning of the Old Testament—when painters are asked to depict this Fall based on what they consider correct today, well, they paint a tree, with Eve on one side and Adam on the other. Depending on whether they are Expressionists, Impressionists, or other “-ists,” they will depict these human figures in greater or lesser detail—I mean, they’ll paint them; but in any case, they’ll then paint a serpent on the tree. That’s naturalistic, isn’t it? That’s realistic. But on closer inspection—for those who can truly think—that isn’t realistic at all. For I would like to know the woman—even if she were an Eve—who would allow herself to be seduced by such an ordinary snake with a mere snake’s head into doing what Eve was led to do. I mean, that simply doesn’t exist. Not even an Eve would allow herself to be seduced by such a snake. We know, after all, that this was a seduction by Lucifer. But can Lucifer really be represented by an ordinary snake? At most, it can be an image of him. But we know that Lucifer actually sustained his existence by remaining on the lunar stage. There were no snakes there yet like those that developed during the Earth era. So it is completely unrealistic to paint a pure snake with a gigantic snake’s head. How, then, should one actually paint Lucifer if one wanted to depict him correctly and realistically in the sense of our spiritual science? One would have to paint him in such a way as to express how Lucifer represented a stage of development during the Lunar era that still expressed the imaginative, just as I have described it in the Akashic Records. That is to say, if one looks more closely, one will find that what has now become physical in human beings as the “earthly head”—with its thick, sometimes very thick bony skull—was still thin back then. It could be perceived imaginatively. But what is attached to it—you can see from the skeleton how the human being actually consists of two parts, the brain and the spine—is attached to it only like a very thin strip. The rest is actually the work of the Earth. And what is essentially human—that which is actually the skull—comes from the Moon, while the spinal cord has come over as an appendage. Everything else has been added to it through what we have developed as earthly existence. So what will Lucifer look like to an imaginative, perceptive gaze? He will have had a human skull, and hanging from it something like a serpent’s body—formed at that time as a movable structure, the spine. That is what he will have looked like. If one wanted to paint realistically, one would have to paint the tree, and on the tree the human head with a serpent’s body hanging from it, suggesting the spine. Then one would be painting the truth. But one would then have to know something of the mystery of existence, of the spiritual worlds with which human beings are connected.

[ 18 ] At the Hamburg Picture Museum, you will find a painting from the 13th or 14th century by the so-called Master Bertram. The Fall of Man is depicted there exactly as I have just described it to you. It does not depict a mere snake, but rather everything on the tree, just as I have just described to you. What does this mean? It means that it has been at most a few centuries since people ceased to know how they are connected to the spiritual world—and that a spiritual world in the sense described even exists at all. So people have become so foolish that they believe that the way people now view the world—using only their physical senses and their intellect, which is bound to the brain—is the way it has always been viewed; they were simply a bit more childish and made up all sorts of myths. That is how academic science thinks today. But the whole thing is nonsense, for it has only been a few centuries since humanity lost its living perception of the spiritual world. And in the face of the great tasks of knowledge, contemporary materialistic science is nothing more than a wandering stupidity in relation to the spiritual world. And this dullness is what passes as authority among people today, what is marveled at as great progress. It was bound to come. We know why it had to come: so that people might be protected by their mere physical development and become free. And this must be seen through. And even from such external documents as I have cited for you, people—if they had just a little bit, forgive me for saying so, “grit” in their heads—could see how recently it was that spiritual insight was lost to humanity. But it does not even occur to people today to truly contemplate these things thoughtfully. People prefer to resort to external means of power because it is convenient; because it requires no special learning, but only standing at some laboratory table and having certain methods drummed into them; and then, through external pronouncements of authority, they declare that everything that speaks of the spiritual world is error, nonsense, and fantasy. This is what is currently being presented to people instead of a genuine inclination toward the spiritual world.

[ 19 ] But, my dear friends, at present it is still the case that everything involving inventiveness remains as a legacy from those ancient times when people looked into the spiritual world. Once that is gone, people will no longer make inventions. And if spiritual science were not to rekindle human thought anew, it would not take more than fifty years before everything that operates within mere materialism would become nothing more than talk about external matter, and no one would come up with anything that could enrich art, ideology, or external life in any way. Therefore, the most urgent demand of our time—not merely a preference for some form of spiritual reverie—is that an awareness of humanity’s connection to the spiritual world take hold, so that people may once again look upward. And they can do so, now that the old atavistic clairvoyance has passed, by engaging with spiritual science.

[ 20 ] And in this sense, it is indeed necessary for people to learn how enriching an approach to spiritual science is—not only for knowledge of the spiritual world, but also for proper thinking about life as a whole. Time and again, one sees how people today are actually quite averse to engaging with that somewhat complex inner life of the soul, which must first be developed if one wishes to draw near to the spiritual world. Just imagine: a typical professor of today—of course there may be exceptions; no one is meant to be singled out, and it is all the more praiseworthy if there happens to be one in this circle—a typical university professor who gives lectures today generally won’t even want to listen to these things; they are far too dull for him. For when one speaks of spiritual matters today, one must use general, vague expressions that convey as little as possible—and which, consequently, mean as little as possible for real life.

[ 21 ] When I recently gave the same lecture in Leipzig that I gave here the day before yesterday on a faded note in German intellectual life, two gentlemen approached me after the lecture—two gentlemen of the intelligent sort among the people I mentioned, of course—and one of them said he had actually been surprised that I had spoken that way, for he had expected that, when speaking from a theosophical perspective, one would align more closely with his way of thinking; for he was a pacifist and, as a pacifist in particular, had to view the current war.

[ 22 ] Pacifism is that view which has been promoted for some time now by various people—Bertha von Suttner, for example—but also by that figure in St. Petersburg who is regarded as both Caesar and Pope. Many years ago, in lectures I gave in Berlin, I already said that what is characteristic of these peace efforts is that, ever since they have existed, the greatest and bloodiest wars in world history have been waged. But this movement is precisely one of those that thrive on spreading the most vague phrases possible among humanity—phrases that, however, insinuate themselves into people’s emotional lives, because all one needs to do is spread them, and after all, one is spreading nothing but love and goodness. I took the liberty of saying to the gentleman: “Look, we are now living through the most terrible of all the wars that world history has ever witnessed; we have seen that in June or July 1915, more ammunition was fired in a single day than in the entire Franco-Prussian War!” We have already reached the point where more ammunition has been fired in this war than in all the wars ever waged with this type of ammunition in the world, throughout the course of human development. I said: “Is it not obvious that what has unfolded over the centuries as ‘culture’ has reduced itself to absurdity, that it has become clear where this leads?” — Well, then he objected: “I regard this war as an illness, and it simply must be cured; after all, it is only an illness—it can happen.”

[ 23 ] This statement is particularly compelling precisely because it is so self-evident and because, from any perspective, it is obviously correct. But what matters is not whether things are correct, but whether they are more or less superficial—that is what matters. The statement is, of course, correct: it is a disease. But I said to him: If only you would look at the illness more deeply, why does it occur in people? Because something was wrong beforehand! The illness is, after all, merely a reaction to something that was wrong before. So if you would just think a little further from your point of view, you would realize that this is an illness, but one that arose because things were not right beforehand. It’s true that the illness arose precisely because things weren’t right—but people tend to mix up all sorts of correct ideas simply because they’re trivial and taken for granted, and because they’re actually unable to grasp deeper matters. That is the serious issue we must recognize in the present age.

[ 24 ] If you take a fact such as the one I presented the day before yesterday regarding Karl Christian Planck—whose intellectual capacity is evident simply from the fact that in 1880 he accurately foresaw what is happening today—you will realize, from the way he has been valued and recognized, that this culture, which has developed in this way, is perfectly suited to turning the power of the incompetent—which suppresses all genuine striving—into a world power. One should not allow any ambiguity to arise on this point. This is what one must understand in the deepest sense.

[ 25 ] I’d like to tell you a little story. A man once heard that Goethe had written *Faust*, and he said he wanted to find out what this Goethean *Faust* actually contained. So the person he asked decided he had to find the most convenient, easiest way for the other man to learn what this *Faust* actually contains, and he thought deeply: How can I actually teach this man—who has no grasp of even the simplest idea in Goethe’s *Faust*—what it contains? — Then it dawned on him. It occurred to him: a new edition of *Faust* is currently being printed at a certain printing house; I’ll take the guy who wants to know what’s in *Faust* there. And so he said to him: “Look, *Faust* will be printed here in three weeks.” In all those hundreds of type cases lie all sorts of letters, and now pay close attention—you’ll see the typesetter take out this letter and that letter and assemble the individual letters into words. There you’ll see exactly how page after page is set, and how, in the end, *Faust* comes together from the individual letters.” So the other man sat there for weeks and watched as the entire *Faust* came together through human hands and through the letters!

[ 26 ] Yes, you see, I can also tell this story in a slightly different way. The modern era dawned. People wanted to know what actually exists in spiritual and soul life, and they felt a need to understand how ideas, thoughts, impulses of the will, and feelings are interwoven in the human soul, and what they mean for the world as a whole. They asked—the people. Well, then came modern science—this purely naturalistic science—and it said: “Well, we’ll take care of that! We’ll examine, as far as is currently possible, the individual neural pathways, the nerve fibers, the ganglia, and all of that, to see how they’re interwoven. And there we have the life of the soul.” You get exactly the same thing from Goethe’s *Faust* as you do when you get to know it the way that person did who spent three weeks in the printing shop—exactly the same thing! Take all the works produced today by the so-called psychophysiologists; in terms of the world’s spiritual insights, what you have there is exactly what you know about the entire *Faust* when you have watched how *Faust* is produced from the typesetting case. One need only realize this, and then the soul will be overcome by the profound feeling necessary to move forward in the course of human development.

[ 27 ] “You are fine opponents,” the naturalists will now say, “since you denigrate our science—the true science that proceeds strictly in accordance with nature!” — But it would never occur to us to denigrate it. We are merely placing it in its proper context, in the right context of life. If *Faust* is to come into being, the groundwork must of course be laid for the *Faust* edition; but it must be recognized in its proper place in the world.

[ 28 ] Everything I am implying here belongs—in the sense I meant yesterday—to the serious, significant tasks that Central Europe still has to face. All of this points to these serious tasks. And it is urgently necessary to bear these things in mind in our serious times today. For it is absolutely essential that a deeper sense of true reality permeate the world than can prevail under the influence of a materialistic, naturalistic, or strictly scientific worldview. There is no need to oppose people learning typesetting so that editions of *Faust* can be produced. There is no need to oppose people studying the brain or the nervous system. All of this should be studied—it is truly very important to study these things today. But one must be resolutely opposed to the emergence of that presumptuous arrogance that is prevalent today precisely in materialistic science, and to the fact that, in such a terrible way, the sense of how seriously and worthily the spiritualization of culture must be achieved—precisely from Central Europe, for Western Europe is dead in regard to these matters—is suffering. I am not saying this merely to make some paradoxical or forceful statement, but out of the necessity that compels the articulation of such things in our time. A time will come when we will have to look at various things truthfully; but today there is still little inclination toward such truthful observation. I could cite thousands upon thousands of examples of the inner insincerity of the current scientific and literary establishment. Let me at least mention one that I would have liked to have cited in yesterday’s public lecture, but time is always too short, and the lectures must, unfortunately, be kept so brief.

[ 29 ] For example, in many of Ernst Haeckel’s books—you know I hold Ernst Haeckel in high regard in the areas where he deserves it—you will find him repeatedly citing Karl Ernst von Baer, the outstanding naturalist whom he calls his teacher. People today, of course, pick up Haeckel’s books, study them, and regard them as a kind of new Bible or at least as a kind of writing by new Church Fathers. For the difference is not that people today trust their own judgment, whereas in the time of the Church Fathers people relied on the Church Fathers; rather, the difference is something entirely different. In the days of Tertullian and Gregory of Nazianzus, they were the Church Fathers, and people swore by them. Today, especially those who found monist societies or associations for eugenic worldviews or similarly lofty causes swear by Saint Darwin, Saint Haeckel, or Saint Helmholtz. It is—albeit in a slightly different field—exactly the same thing! They don’t call it “holy,” but that doesn’t make any difference. So people read Haeckel and, when he quotes Karl Ernst von Baer in this way, come to the conclusion: Well, you can see that this great naturalist, Karl Ernst von Baer, was in complete agreement with Haeckel regarding the rejection of any spiritual world. I’d like to advise some people today—who, after having dipped their toes a bit into Haeckel’s and Darwin’s books—to do a few other things before they set out to found a branch of a monist association: for example, when Haeckel quotes Ernst von Baer, to pick up Karl Ernst von Baer’s own work and read it for themselves. I’d like to read you just one passage from Karl Ernst von Baer, where he discusses the relationship between the spiritual world and the earthly world. Baer says: “The earthly body is merely the seedbed on which the spiritual heritage of humankind flourishes, and the history of nature is nothing but the history of the spiritual’s progressive victories over matter. This is the fundamental idea of creation, for the sake of which—no, in order to achieve which—it causes individuals and generations to fade away and raises the present upon the scaffolding of an immeasurable past.”

[ 30 ] So what does this Baer say? The physical body—the Earth—is the seedbed, and the spiritual seeds are planted there so that they may take on a physical form. — Baer spoke the pure truth at the beginning of the 19th century! Ernst Haeckel picks out only those statements by Baer that suit him. Those who do nothing more than, at best, found monist societies to promote worldly wisdom know nothing of all this other than what Haeckel says about Baer, and continue to live in a lie, without even the slightest inclination to convince themselves of the underlying truth. Our literature today is permeated everywhere by such webs of lies. And everywhere—particularly in our popular scientific literature—there is a manifestation of the trend sweeping across Europe toward the greatest possible vagueness and frivolity—one might even say, of intellectual endeavors—and the greatest possible reluctance to examine these matters and pass judgment with clear, confident human discernment.

[ 31 ] To give you some concrete examples, there are in the West—among the French, the British, and the Italians—all sorts of Masonic orders with high degrees, some with thirty-three degrees, but there are also those with over ninety degrees. It is precisely in such orders that much has been fished in murky waters over the course of the last few centuries. And if one were to examine—with sober, sound judgment—the influence of all manner of unhealthy, foolish, yet—in terms of personal and political intentions—deliberate gamesmanship, and if one studies the influences and currents of Freemasonry as it exists in Western Europe with regard to Italy’s role in this war, only then will one begin to grasp the extent of the ambiguities and murky dealings within our so-called culture! What has taken place, particularly within such Masonic orders since the outbreak of the war, will one day become a curious chapter. The German Freemasons will come off relatively best in this regard, for the only thing that can be said of them is that they were the fools in this whole game. For, insofar as they lived in brotherhood with the others, they noticed nothing. And that is, after all, something that can still—well, yes!—be said in their favor. But one must not believe that what asserts itself from such quarters has no influence on what lives and works around us in so-called culture—and which can only live and work as long as other people do not want their judgment to be clarified and strengthened through insight into the spiritual world.

[ 32 ] In my book *Thoughts During the War*, I drew attention—as much as one can in public literature in order to be understood (and indeed, it has been little understood)—to certain currents that exist everywhere in the East and the West. These currents—let us take, for example, the Eastern Slavophile movement, which I referred to in the aforementioned pamphlet—are, however, rooted much deeper. As early as the end of the 18th century, and particularly at the end of the 19th century—but also decades earlier—the Western Masonic orders, in particular, exerted a major influence on Russian intellectual life; they transplanted, infected, and instilled there what was to emerge. And in many respects, Slavophilism and Pan-Slavism are truly the seeds that have sprouted from what many planted precisely through these Masonic orders. Under the guise, under the cloak of ceremony, people were first, so to speak, befuddled; all sorts of frippery were presented to them so that they might then be inclined toward certain plans. And as for the schemes that have been orchestrated in Eastern Europe by this Western side—humanity will come to realize this once events other than war have taken their place!

[ 33 ] If these places, where we gather in our branches, are the only places where one can speak freely today, then it must at least be discussed here.

[ 34 ] Today I wanted to build on that greatness, sublime aspect of humanity’s connection to entire hierarchies—which can arise before our souls when we consider that what we carry within us in our life of thought and feeling is already woven into our physical shell between birth and death, and then also between death and new birth, as part of a cosmic work at which entire hierarchies labor within the context of the cosmos. What matters is not so much that we know the details, but that we can imbue ourselves with such a sense of the world, and that you, my dear friends, may emerge from such contemplation with a sense of what the human being actually is within the world, and what he should know about this connection of his with the world. That is what matters. That all of this may flow together in your souls, in your hearts, into a sense of the world, and that in this way something may dawn within you of the power that can be kindled by what is to be incorporated into our culture, to the extent that each person is able, according to the place in which they are situated in the world. Official scholars today have not worked on these things; they will not do so. Therefore, people must also come to realize the position that official scholars deserve in the world: that, insofar as they do laboratory work, they are comparable to typesetters, or—in the case of some who do not do laboratory work—merely to people who describe the typesetting process. These are, for the most part, the philosophers who preach at the universities today.

[ 35 ] That this is so should be known in each individual soul. For this is not a critique of the times; it is a characterization. It was only because people in the various ages knew how things stood that they found the strength to advance development—only through this.

[ 36 ] This is what I wanted to place upon your souls, especially in these difficult times—when one cannot always say that we will see each other again—: a measure of insight which, if we perceive it in the right way, can be transformed into a sacred inner duty of the human soul toward the fabric of the world. Death after death surrounds us today in this event, which, on the one hand, is—in the sense indicated—the fruit of previous developments, but which must also serve as a sign of the many things that must happen so that humanity does not advance in the way the typographers would have it, but rather in a way that corresponds to the necessity of the world’s development.

[ 37 ] Certainly, yesterday I quoted the father of all materialism, Lamettrie, who said—and of course, this is also true—that Erasmus would have needed only for a tiny cog in his nervous system to have been different; then he might not have become Erasmus, but a fool. I said that there is no need to refute this. But we, who are perhaps a little better prepared, must also know a little more about it.

[ 38 ] Let us take everything we have considered today, let it become a feeling and a sensation within us, and then let us say to ourselves how true it is that the numerous sacrificial deaths that are currently being offered truly relate to earthly existence in such a way that the etheric bodies taken from human beings at an early age remain connected to earthly existence for a long, long time, and that there must now be people who can become aware of what lives within these unspent etheric bodies—which still contain within themselves all that these people could have utilized in their earthly lives had they lived for decades longer. This is present in the spiritual-etheric realm of the Earth. But there must be people who become aware of this in the time to come, so that earthly culture—and not Ahriman—may reap the fruits of what is contained in these etheric bodies. Let us therefore truly take to heart, in view of the fact that we must prepare ourselves in our souls for what is happening, the words that have often been spoken here:

From the courage of the fighters,
From the blood of the battles,
From the suffering of the forsaken,
From the sacrifices of the people
The fruit of the spirit grows—
Guiding souls, spiritually aware,
Direct their minds toward the spirit realm.