The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The Evolution of the World in Relation to Human Evolution

[ 1 ] Let us first consciously bring together the reflections that have been made on the world and the human being, and we will come to understand how the human being carries within themselves—albeit in the form of images—the world’s past, and how the human being can gradually bring these images of the world’s past to the surface. In ordinary everyday consciousness, after all, there is nothing of all this but memory, which refers the human being back to the experiences he has had in his earthly life. But when a person then leads this ordinary consciousness along the paths I have described, more and more of the past of world development emerges within them as their spiritual consciousness grows ever brighter. And we have seen, after all, how a person must relive this past of world development between death and a new birth.

[ 2 ] We can say: When, in the imagination, that which remains imperceptible to the senses gradually becomes visible in relation to earthly existence, then the human being is already looking back at all that has taken place in the course of his present earthly life—not merely as images of memory, but as that which has shaped him, that which has formed him from within as forces of growth and nourishment, all of which, however, proceed from the spirit.

[ 3 ] Furthermore, through inspiration, human beings look into pre-earthly existence—but not only into the pre-earthly existence of their own being. We have seen, after all, how they reach out—one might say—from the cosmic island of Earth into the vast cosmic sea of worlds, in which the stars are embedded, but which now become, for them, the dwelling places of spiritual beings.

[ 4 ] And then, when intuition arises, the human being looks back on past earthly lives. But along with these past earthly lives, the entire history of the world in its past also comes into view. Human beings are, in fact, born out of the entire universe, and this entire universe lives within their physical, etheric, and astral bodies—and, during their earthly existence, to the least extent, within the “I.” But all of this is contained within human beings. All of this works and weaves within them. As human beings, we carry within us the entire past of the world’s evolution, at which countless generations of divine spirits have worked. We carry all this work of divine spirit generations in the structure of our organs; we carry it in the forces that interweave and permeate our organs; we carry it within us when the forces of our organs blossom into our sensations and thoughts. We carry within us the workings of the entire evolution of the world, insofar as it belongs to the past.

[ 5 ] Now, having thus—at least in thought—sharpened our gaze toward the past, when we look out into the world that surrounds us here on Earth, we see, in our ordinary consciousness of this world, only what the senses present and what the intellect can process on the basis of sensory observations. But this is, in essence, the very least of it. Behind sensory existence lies the far more extensive spiritual existence—that spiritual existence which is also at work in all the colors that appear in nature, in all the sounds that can be heard in nature, in all perceptions of warmth and cold, and in everything that can affect human beings through natural phenomena.

[ 6 ] In addition to the obvious physical and sensory existence of nature, there is a hidden spiritual existence of nature, a hidden spiritual environment. And this environment—of which we perceive, so to speak, only the surface through our sensory perception—already carries within it, even today, the future development of humankind. Just as we carry within ourselves the entire past in powerful images—and are ourselves the result of these images—so, too, does that which, as it continues to unfold as the evolution of the world, brings us our future, work and weave within hidden nature. We can thus set before us these weighty propositions: Within themselves, human beings carry the world’s past; in the outer world, the future of human beings is carried.

[ 7 ] These are the two principles, the fundamental tenets of the evolution of the world and the evolution of humankind. This is already evident in the individual human existence. There is a vast difference between everything in the human being that tends toward the head and everything that tends toward the rest of the body. To put it somewhat crudely—though the reality is, of course, much more subtle—one could say: From the heart, forces act against the organization of the head, causing the head to take on its distinctive configuration—enclosed by the hard skull and filled with what is, in the world, the greatest marvel of all: the convolutions and interconnections of the human brain and the receptacles of the human senses.

[ 8 ] Everything that lives within these forces, everything that radiates upward from the chest and heart to the human head—that is the result of the past. This could only come about, as it is in human beings, through the fact that, as I said, countless divine generations of spirits have worked their way through the metamorphoses of world bodies and through planetary metamorphoses. And I have, after all, pointed out in my Occult Science how this Earth evolution was preceded by a Saturn evolution, a Sun evolution, and a Moon evolution, and how the Earth evolution within which we live then came about. Within the Earth evolution, the Saturn evolution, the Sun evolution, and the Moon evolution were first repeated. We are now slightly past the midpoint of Earth’s actual evolution in the evolution of humankind on Earth.

[ 9 ] All the forces that have gradually developed over long periods of time under the influence of divine spirit generations—all these forces live within the earthly human being himself, in the physical body, and radiate upward from the heart to the head. What you continually carry within yourselves in your physical, etheric, astral, and I-beings—radiating from the middle human being toward the head human—has been prepared and worked upon by generations of gods over immeasurable periods of time. And the final element that lives within these radiating forces—which remains unconscious to modern human beings—is what manifests as their karma, their own “I”-past during their earthly life.

[ 10 ] So one can say: When one delves into these cosmic forces of memory, one first looks at karma, then at the various stages of Earth’s development, and then at the metamorphoses—the planetary transformations—that the Earth underwent before it itself became the Earth. For before the Earth could come into being, a celestial body consisting solely of subtle warmth had to come into being first: Saturn. It had to die and rise again in a new existence as the Sun—the Sun whose final remnant is the Sun we see out there in outer space. This was a celestial body consisting solely of air, which in turn had to die so that a celestial body composed of a more watery substance—the Moon—could come into being. The Moon had to die so that the Earth, appearing in solid, mineral form, could emerge, upon which human beings could finally develop into what they are today as earthly human beings.

[ 11 ] But just as we have these upward-striving forces, we also carry within us downward-striving forces that have a sort of center in the heart; through these two forces, the flow of blood circulation then enters the movements of our limbs (see illustration on p. 265).

[ 12 ] What exists in these forces lives in every movement of your hand when you grasp something, when you carry out any external earthly activity; it lives in every step you take to accomplish your earthly deeds. But these are forces that belong to the hidden realm. They do not belong to the past; they belong to the hidden realm. They will only be absorbed into the bosom of a past—which will, however, be a future past—when a person passes through the gate of death and exchanges their earthly existence for a stellar existence. Within these forces, the future of humankind is being prepared.

[ 13 ] And this future arises through the interaction of these forces with those forces that exist out there in hidden nature. Thus, the human world carries the future within itself as part of its own evolution. And human beings are, in fact, highly differentiated within themselves with regard to these higher forces and these lower forces. The insight that can be gained once one has passed the Guardian of the Threshold reveals just how strongly human beings are actually differentiated with regard to these two directions of force.

[ 14 ] For ordinary consciousness, everything that lies beneath the heart remains unconscious. But just because it is unconscious to the human being does not mean it is any less filled with consciousness—a consciousness, however, that the human being has not yet penetrated, at least not in the present. Therefore, a person’s inner constitution in their experience is different from that in their consciousness. In their consciousness, they experience, so to speak, only what protrudes from the surface like an island amidst all the other experiences they have. This can be seen if one is able to look deeply into a person and recognize how they are endowed with these forces—which, one might say, are still subconscious today.

[ 15 ] There one can see how a person commits this or that act, which brings him pleasure and satisfaction in the immediate earthly moment in which he lives. His mind is satisfied. A person may, for one reason or another, commit a truly evil act: his mind is satisfied. These connections elude ordinary consciousness. But while a person’s mind may be deeply satisfied—the hand that commits the act in question, in the subconscious (which is nonetheless a conscious presence in the world), trembles. And even if that trembling is not always visible outwardly, in the etheric and astral bodies it becomes a quaking. So that one can see inwardly how a person may derive satisfaction in their head from an act they have committed, how this satisfaction becomes a trembling in the subconscious—a trembling either in those astral-etheric organs connected to the arms or in those connected to the legs. In that which brings satisfaction in the head from an evil deed, one might say that consciousness dies; but another consciousness arises in that which trembles within the lower human being over a deed.

[ 16 ] In this trembling, the coming karma is taking shape. For this trembling is the trembling before the forces of hidden nature, of the hidden world. In this trembling, the human being senses in advance what he will experience as the judgment of the stars when he leaves the island of Earth and enters the vast ocean of the stellar realm.

[ 17 ] Thus we can say: The past of the world and the future of the world live within the human being in various ways. But this past of the world and this future of the world also live within the outer form of the physical body itself. That which human beings carry within themselves as the organization of the head—which is the most wondrous and most perfect aspect to emerge from the evolution of the world—is largely shattered when human beings pass through the gate of death, even in its spiritual-inner content. In contrast, what a human being possesses in their lower organization—even if you view it merely from a physical perspective—reveals to you, in the physical realm, the image of what lives there as spiritual and soul-related forces in the arms, in the hands, and in the entire metabolic organization of the limbs. For it is not only what one sees as flesh and blood that lives within this metabolic organization of the limbs; forces live within it. And behind much of what you see there as flesh and blood—formed into arms and hands of a physical nature—spiritual forces live. These spiritual forces are currently flowing through your arms and through your legs. In your future earthly life, they will flow through those organs that move the jaws up and down, extending the upper and lower jaws backward. The bones of the head, in their sculptural form in the next earthly life, will be the transformed arm and leg bones—naturally, the spiritual part of them; the physical aspect will be shed. What you carry today as arms and legs, you will carry within you in the next earthly incarnation as the configurations of the head, in terms of forces and dynamics. Thus, even the physical organization reflects how a human being progresses through their earthly lives. Anyone who correctly observes the artistic form of the human head in this present earthly life will see in it the forms that the human being has shaped through what they did in ordinary life—in their interactions with other people and the earthly world through their arms and hands—during their previous earthly life. The actions of the arms and legs in one earthly incarnation live on in the shaping of the head in the next earthly incarnation. Conventional phrenology is amateurish in this regard, for it offers all manner of intellectual interpretations of the shape of the head. But behind this lies a profound occult phrenology, which is unique to each individual and therefore cannot be learned through general rules; yet, through intuition, one can decipher from the shapes of the head what the person has prepared themselves for through what they accomplished in their walking, actions, and deeds during a previous earthly life.

[ 18 ] This is how the past and the future are interconnected in the development of the world and in human development.

---

[ 19 ] Thus, in his present earthly existence, the human being stands before us, before himself, and in what he has become, he reveals the work of divine generations of spirits that have been at work throughout immeasurable periods of time. Of course, one can only ever—I would say—sketch out how the images revealed by present-day human existence point to what these generations of gods have shaped through the metamorphosis of Earth’s evolution—Saturn, Sun, Moon—for the formation of the human being and for the entirety of human life. Let us first consider three significant impulses in human life on Earth that we wish to highlight as particularly characteristic of the human being. If one looks with ordinary consciousness at the wonder that is revealed as a human being unfolds further and further from the very first days of its existence—if one has an eye for it, then one can at least sense the immense depths from which a soul-spiritual force struggles to emerge, shaping the child’s indeterminate form in the first days and weeks into an ever more defined one, and later transforming the chaotic movements of the arms and legs into orderly movements. We sense how something is revealing itself there—something that lies within the infinite depths of hidden natural existence as a spiritual essence that expresses itself in the body. One might say: There is indeed nothing more wondrous to behold on earth than this unfolding of the inner human being within the outer human being, as a child develops in the very first years of its life. If one knows how to penetrate this sight with a truly artistic-religious sensibility—with the humility one can feel in the face of the spiritual that is revealing itself there—then what one observes there transcends all artistic, scientific, or religious impressions that one can receive from the external world.

[ 20 ] Let us, however, single out three things from this childlike development, this childlike unfolding. In everyday life, we say: “The child learns to walk.” That is indeed something wonderful. But in this—“the child learns to walk”—there is, in fact, an extraordinary amount of movement involved. Using all its limbs, the child aligns itself—with its spine—from a position parallel to the Earth’s surface toward an upright posture. In this moment—which we perceive simply by pointing out the most striking, the most obvious aspect, by saying, “The child learns to walk”—at this stage of its life, the child learns to direct all its forces toward the Earth in a different way. The child learns to position itself within the entire cosmos through its own inner balance and the equilibrium of its forces. But at the same time, we see in what is revealed to us how the human being transcends the animal world. For the animal cannot do this; it does not experience this moment in life. Essentially, the animal’s spine remains parallel to the earth, or if it stands upright, as the monkey does, this upright posture is at odds with its organization.

[ 21 ] Anyone who wishes to judge human beings must be able to view a child’s learning to walk in the proper light. Natural scientists have compared human bones with those of animals and have found that they are modified animal bones, that muscles are modified animal muscles, and so on. The same is true of all organs. But this approach does not reveal the difference between humans and animals; rather, the difference between humans and animals can only be found when one observes humans at the very moment when they rise up from the animalistic traits that cling to them in the earliest stages of life and orient their sense of balance toward the balance of the entire world. Human beings could never have attained this art in their lives if it had not already been prepared in the most ancient of times. This art lay dormant in human beings as a seed even during the Saturn era. (During the following remarks, a diagram is drawn on the blackboard. See diagram on pp. 269 and 271.) During the Saturn epoch, divine spirits planted the seed of what manifests when the child, as we say, learns to walk. There were no animals at all back then; they did not appear until later, during the Sun era. Thus, in terms of its inherent potential, humanity is older than the animal. Everything that lies within these invisible forces—that which enables humans to walk—traces its origins back to the Saturn era.

[ 22 ] The second thing that occurs in the child is that, as a result of its orientation in space, forces push inward. And these forces that push inward manifest themselves in yet another way. I pick up the chalk. A force goes outward. But a counterforce goes inward, discharging itself into the internal organs. This inward-directed force, arising from orientation and moving through the limbs, then manifests itself in the child’s development when the child learns to speak. That is the second thing the child learns: to speak. First, the forces move outward: the child learns to orient itself in space. Then the same forces move inward: the child learns to speak.

[ 23 ] Natural science knows only a small part of this. It knows only that right-handed people have the language center in the left hemisphere of the brain and left-handed people have it in the right hemisphere. But everything in the brain that relates to language development is first worked into the brain by the limbs as the child learns to walk, grasp, move, and comprehend things. These are the inward-directed forces that then pass from the brain to the speech organs.

[ 24 ] Once again, the divine-spiritual beings have, since time immemorial, prepared the human organism so that it can develop into speech in the child. The fact that human beings were able to learn language stems from the fact that the divine-spiritual beings—who had been preparing human beings for walking since the Saturn era—worked on the Sun to bring about language in human beings.

[ 25 ] And the third thing that the child develops from language—which humanity, too, has developed from language, for it was only after humans learned to speak in the course of Earth’s evolution that they then learned to think—what humans develop, what the child develops from language, is thought. And thought—that has been prepared by divine-spiritual beings since the Lunar Age. This is the development of the human being within the past world: divine-spiritual generations have prepared within him the ability to walk, speak, and think—the Saturn, Sun, and Lunar stages of development.

[ 26 ] In the course of world evolution, the animal kingdom emerged during the Sun Age—naturally, in a form different from that of today. Today, animals must eat plants, but they did not need to do so back then; they were simply beings that existed in the air, beings composed of airy matter. During the Moon Age, plants came into being.

[ 27 ] Now the process of development moves on to earthly existence. It is only then that human beings develop that in which the powers of walking, speaking, and thinking visibly live—the form, the figure. The mineral kingdom emerges at the same time as the form. The mineral kingdom is then also integrated into human beings. This characterizes the past of humankind.

[ 28 ] If one wishes to look toward the future of humanity, then—when considering something present on Earth—one must characterize it in terms of age. One must characterize that which, in today’s humanity, is expressed with extraordinary obscurity in the process of aging. While what is revealed in a child’s development—in walking, speaking, and thinking—is evident because it manifests outwardly, what becomes increasingly spiritual in a person as they approach old age is still scarcely visible today unless one looks at the human being with a spiritual gaze. I said that it is the most wondrous thing to see how the soul-spiritual gradually comes to manifestation in the body, and, if one looks at it correctly, it is the deepest religious feeling in the presence of the most significant art that can overcome one there. But it is equally admirable to see how all that a person has experienced in their entire being—through walking, speaking, and thinking during their earthly existence—gradually fades back into the spiritual realm, to then pass through the gate of death—how the thoughts, the words, and everything a person has attained and worked out with their hands vanish into the spiritual realm—and how the person then carries this spiritual essence, which they receive through thinking, speaking, and walking, through the gate of death back into spiritual life. And just as what manifests in the child as walking, speaking, and thinking points us to the preliminary stages of Earth’s evolution—the Moon, the Sun, and Saturn—so too does what a human being experiences in their thoughts point us first to their next earthly lives, and from there into the great epoch of Earth’s evolution.

[ 29 ] From there, however, the evolution and unfolding of the world and of humankind point us toward that state, which can only be experienced once the Earth has died again and been reborn into a new planetary existence—the existence of Jupiter; human thoughts point us in this direction. For these human thoughts themselves will then no longer exist as fluctuating thoughts within human beings, but will themselves be formed. And the formed thought will appear in the form of a human being.

[ 30 ] Today we can hide our thoughts within ourselves, and our countenance may, under certain circumstances, appear utterly innocent, even while we are guilty on the inside. We will not be able to do this during the next metamorphosis of earthly existence—in the Jupiter stage. There we will bear the countenance that our thoughts create. For our human form will not be solid—minerally solid—but will itself be internally malleable, consisting of a very soft substance. And if someone harbors a wrong thought within, that thought will be revealed to their fellow human beings in the instantaneous shaping of their countenance. Everything that is thought will take shape in an instant. And people will walk about as that which is enduring thought, as that which is temperament. One will immediately be able to tell by looking at a person whether they are a villain or whether they possess only animal instincts during the Jupiter existence. This is the first stage of humanity’s future.

[ 31 ] The second stage is the one that human beings can now develop from their speech. After all, speech today is something that emerges from within and reaches the outside world solely through the medium of air. This speech will become a creative force in the future. The spoken word will not simply fade away into the air; rather, the spoken word will continue to exist. Human beings will become creators of form through the word.

[ 32 ] Thus, beginning in the Jupiter era, human beings will shape themselves through thought. Through the word, they will shape their environment during the Venusic era, for then the following will come to pass: If a human being utters an evil word during the Venusic era, then during that era—which will essentially exist in a substance as fine as air—something resembling an ugly plant form will arise in the air. Thus, human beings will be surrounded by the creatures of their own language.

[ 33 ] And that which lives in walking, in the movement of the arms, develops during the Earth’s final metamorphosis, during the volcanic stage. Creative feelings arise, as does creative language, and the feelings that are creative in language arise during the Venus stage.

[ 34 ] Today we go about our deeds; we perform our deeds with our arms. But that does not last. I go there to do something. Of course, it could also be something more complicated—I might have gotten involved in a complicated matter or something similar; I might even have waged a war for my own sake. We leave again. Then there is nothing left in the outer world.

[ 35 ] During volcanic existence, everything will remain. Not only will human beings walk and grasp, but everything they walk and grasp is inscribed within volcanic existence. Their actions are themselves realized within volcanic existence. Thus, within volcanic existence, we have the realized, actualized actions of human beings.

[ 36 ] You can see what a tremendous turning point earthly existence represents between the past and the future of the development of the world and humanity. Everything that has taken place up to the advent of the Earth was accomplished by divine generations of spirits. What is to follow will be accomplished by humankind itself. This marks the entry of freedom into human existence within the cosmos. Humanity has been placed in the world by the gods and has been granted a free existence; humanity has received its ability to walk, speak, and think from the gods, as well as its very form. Through walking, speaking, and thinking, humanity will contribute to the future evolution of the world by bringing into it what humanity itself is. And now humanity is just beginning to settle into the future, emerging from the past. After all, humanity carries a piece of the past in its own karma, and it carries a piece of the future in what it will will for its own karma in the future. In a sense, humanity is now in a period of learning between the past and the future.

[ 37 ] This also means that things cannot simply unfold as precisely as I described them yesterday in the preceding section. I said that these 2,160 years should actually elapse between two incarnations. But human beings by no means absorb everything during their earthly life that they could draw from it. Therefore, in reality, the periods between death and a new birth still turn out quite differently for many people today; for no one, incidentally, do they still last 2,160 years, but are considerably shorter.

[ 38 ] People who have devoted themselves entirely to earthly life, who have something criminal in their nature, have accumulated few inner resources to set sail out onto the ocean of stellar existence; they return very quickly to earthly life after spending a short time between death and a new birth. Others must refine and perfect over a longer period of time what they have already developed as spiritual and soul-related qualities during their earthly life. So one can say: specifically, people with an animalistic disposition, who easily give in to their instincts and passions, return soon. Those who undergo a normal spiritual development return after a longer period of time. But there are also people who, drawing inspiration from their earthly life itself—for example, through a deeper insight into what is being achieved in the present age—can absorb impulses within themselves and possess the willingness to make sacrifices—precisely because they look deeply and spiritually into the world—and return as soon as they can once again contribute to the development of the Earth. For by showing love toward the Spirit even during earthly life, one can accelerate the three to six cycles I described yesterday—through the Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn beings—and make them proceed more quickly. Those who pass through the gate of death while still possessed by lower instincts recoil beforehand, do not complete the cycles, and are repelled, in particular, by the planetoid region. As for how people today enter all manner of circles by surrendering themselves to certain influences of the world—in their personal lives, in national life, and so on—I will speak about that tomorrow.

[ 39 ] A person who successfully reaches the asteroid belt spends, so to speak, seven to eight hundred years between one earthly life and the next. This is normal for people who are not particularly low in character. But through deeper insight and a love for the spiritual world, the period between death and rebirth can also be consciously shortened. Then, precisely those individuals who gain much from this earthly life can reappear relatively soon, so that they may once again work as effectively as possible toward the transformation of Earth’s civilization and culture.

---

[ 40 ] I had to lead you in thought from the earthly world into the world of the stars, into the world of the inhabitants of the stars, in order to guide you—in a manner truly appropriate to the present—out of the world in which people are generally caught up at present, and into that world which they must enter through inner knowledge if they wish to experience their future in the right way.

[ 41 ] In general, however, people today are far from detaching themselves from the material world and seeking the spiritual within the sensory-physical world that immediately surrounds us. It is already a bit late today to point out the obstacles that people face in the present when they wish—as, for example, in psychoanalysis (I will address this tomorrow)—to penetrate at least into the human spiritual world. However, a true path—arising precisely from the direct observation of the physical and sensory realm—will also emerge for those circles that wish to work entirely within the framework of contemporary science, provided they seek to find the spiritual even within the physical and sensory realm. This is possible. And a certain proof that this is possible is provided in the recently published brochure from our Institute of Physiology and Biology in Stuttgart. There, Dr. Kolisko has now published the results of a very fine study under the title: “Physiological and Physical Evidence of the Efficacy of the Smallest Entities.” You know that homeopathy aims to work through strong dilutions of physical matter. By bringing physical matter to such high dilutions—indeed, by going beyond the efficacy of highly diluted matter—one enters the spiritual realm. Now we have succeeded in actually demonstrating that it is possible to determine, through precise methods, how the smallest entities and the highest dilutions work. Dr. Kolisko has carried out the instructions I gave in this regard with the utmost diligence over a long period of time, and we have succeeded in producing dilutions in the ratio of 1:1 trillion.

[ 42 ] If you completely dissolve any substance in a glass of water, then pour out half of it, and dissolve what remains in another full glass of water, you have achieved a 1:2 dilution; if you pour out half of that again and dissolve the remainder in another full glass, you have a 1:4 dilution, and so on. Now, at our Biological Institute in Stuttgart, through meticulous and precise methods, we have discovered ways to achieve truly exact dilutions of 1:1 trillion; this is how the so-called higher potencies are obtained. And in this work, you will find what is achieved in this way—let’s say, specifically with antimony, which I have also discussed in recent days during my medical lectures. There you will find that plant growth—for example, the growth of a wheat germ—proceeds most slowly around the 21st potency, whereas it proceeds most rapidly around the 29th and 30th potencies. So, when a substance has been diluted in a liquid to high potencies—as I said, we have produced the potency corresponding to a dilution of 1:1 trillion—one can now observe how lower potencies, or dilutions, cause the plant seed to grow differently, while the highest dilutions cause the plant seed to grow the fastest, that is, they stimulate the life force the most. In this way, it has thus been possible to break down the purely material, so that the truly spiritual comes to the fore within the purely material. For if you do not break down the material into atoms, as the atomist does, but rather bring its functions and forces into play, then you demonstrate the good will—I might say—to imbue matter itself with spirit in order to pass into the spiritual realm.

[ 43 ] Now you can imagine what this means for the precise observation of remedies and their effects on the human organism; after all, one can actually see the effect. You prepare the dilution, place it in a laboratory vial, and allow a wheat germ to germinate in it at that potency, then another wheat germ at the next potency, and so on. You now have these wheat sprouts. In fact, during this precise investigation, entire rooms were filled with sprouts from wheat grains, which demonstrated how the various dilutions influenced the soil from which the wheat grain sprouts. That, you see, is what must be done within modern science in order to drive material knowledge into the spiritual realm. You know, there has always been a certain dispute between homeopathy and allopathy regarding the effect of minute entities at high dilutions. Until now, the whole matter has essentially been more a matter of faith. One side leaned more toward one view, the other more toward the other. Now, the point here is not to take sides in favor of homeopathy, but simply to establish precise scientific facts. It will, of course, be the case in the future that we will know where substances must be applied directly in an allopathic manner, where they must be applied in diluted form so that they may influence the human being—namely, the human etheric body, which represents the life forces—in the proper way, and to what degree they must be diluted. Thus, in the future, it will be possible to draw precise boundaries: here you must proceed allopathically, there you must proceed homeopathically; for just as scientific experiments are otherwise conducted with the utmost precision, so too does this brochure by Dr. Kolisko, “Physiological and Physical Proof of the Efficacy of the Smallest Entities,” proof has been provided—right here in our Stuttgart Biological Laboratory—of how the smallest entities actually work. What until now could have been mere belief has thus truly been elevated to the status of science in an important field. But something else is also becoming apparent.

[ 44 ] Take a look at the precisely plotted curves in this text, which show how the growth forces rise and fall; see how the curves must be drawn for low dilutions and how they are drawn for higher dilutions. Notice how, at certain dilutions, you get minima in growth, and at higher dilutions, maxima. But then it returns to a minimum, then to a maximum again, and so on. Thus, from these extraordinarily meticulously drawn curves, you gain immediate insight into a rhythm at work in all matter—the rhythm that, everywhere in the material world, already expresses the spiritual. In humans, we move from the metabolic system to the rhythmic system. But we can also identify the rhythmic system in nature in a strictly scientific manner. You can see this precisely in this work, which, I believe, could indeed be an important milestone—especially in the medical debate between homeopathy and allopathy, and indeed in terms of our understanding of nature as a whole. In the future, when these research results are properly appreciated, people will no longer seek the laws of nature merely through measurement and weighing—that is, in a purely atomistic way—but will recognize how a rhythm is already evident in all matter, and how, therefore, the rhythm of the cosmos is imprinted in the rhythm of natural phenomena.

[ 45 ] I simply wanted to draw attention to this as a path that must be taken starting from the exact sciences. Tomorrow I will continue to show how, for example in psychoanalysis and similar fields, there exists a kind of theoretical aversion to actually pursuing these paths that lead from the physical-natural to the spiritual.

[ 46 ] But if humanity is to advance—and not regress—in civilization, it must follow the spiritual path.