The Rudolf Steiner Archive

We are now cultivating studies that I have associated with a striving for knowledge that is streaming in, without there yet being the adequate methods to achieve this knowledge. This has led us to distant historical perspectives, in relation to which I beg you to consider the following. With these things—as was also the case in what I said in my last visit with the same intention, from the same impulse—we are dealing with reports of actual events, not with some theory or system of ideas but with reports of facts. It is just this point that we must bear in mind, because otherwise it will be difficult to reach understanding of these things. It is not a matter of my developing historical laws or ideas for you but of presenting facts that relate to the intentions and purposes of certain personalities who are allied in brotherhoods. They are also allied with other beings who influence such brotherhoods, whose influence is sought by these brotherhoods. These beings are not human beings incarnated in the flesh but are beings that incarnate themselves in the spiritual world. It is necessary to bear this in mind, especially regarding such information as I gave yesterday, because with these brotherhoods we are dealing to a certain extent with different factions. You could recognize this already in last year's discussion. At that time I drew your attention to the fact that within such brotherhoods we are dealing with a faction that insists on absolute secrecy regarding certain higher truths. Opposed to them, with various shadings in between, are members of other brotherhoods who contend that, particularly since the middle of the nineteenth century, certain truths must be revealed to humanity, carefully and appropriately, even if to begin with only those truths whose revelation is most necessary. In addition to these main factions there are other groups with different nuances. From this you can see that what is intended, what is planted by such brotherhoods as an impulse into the evolution of humanity, often becomes subject to compromise.

These brotherhoods, who were familiar with the spiritual impulses effective in humanity's evolution, saw the approach of a significant event at the beginning of the 1840s, that is, in the middle of the nineteenth century. This event was the struggle between certain spirits and higher spirits, the struggle that culminated in 1879 when certain angelic spirits, spirits of darkness, fell prey to the event that is represented symbolically by Michael conquering the dragon. When the brotherhoods felt the approach of this event, they had to take a stand, they had to ask themselves what could be done. Those members of the brotherhoods who wished above all to take into account the demands of the time were, to some degree, filled with the best intentions. It was they who undertook the erroneous impulse that wished to take into account the materialism of the time. It was they who thought it preferable to bring to the human beings who wished to know things only on the physical path something of the spiritual world; this would be communicated directly in the materialistic way of this physical path. The intentions were thus good when spiritism was thrust by them into the world in the 1840s.

At the time of this struggle, a time in which, as I have indicated, the spirit of criticism was to reign on earth—the intellect directed purely to the outer world—it was necessary to instill into the human being at least an experience, a feeling, that there is a spiritual world surrounding man. As compromises arise, so this compromise also arose. Members of these brotherhoods who maintained an attitude that totally rejected the revelation of certain spiritual truths to humanity saw themselves as being beaten by the majority, as it were, and had to consent to it. Wherever one is dealing with a group, and the will of the group prevails, one has to do with compromises. As is natural in outer life, however, if something is decided within a group, something is expected from the decision not only by those who have set things in motion for their own purposes; those who originally opposed the decision also expect this or that once the decision is made.

Well-meaning, spiritual members of the brotherhood thus held the erroneous attitude that by the use of mediums people could be convinced of the existence of a spiritual world around them. It would then be possible, they believed, to impart to man higher truths on the basis of this conviction. This might have occurred if what these well-meaning members of the brotherhood had surmised would occur had actually taken place, if what these mediums had brought to light had been presented as though one were dealing with the spiritual world around us. Something completely different took place, as I pointed out yesterday. What came to light through the mediums was interpreted by the people who took part in the seances as coming from the dead. What was revealed through spiritism was therefore essentially a disappointment for all. Those who had allowed themselves to be overruled were naturally most distressed that in the seances, at times rightfully, there could be talk about manifestations of the spirits of the departed. The well-meaning, progressive initiates did not at all expect that there would be talk about the dead. They expected that the universal elementary world would be mentioned. They were therefore also disappointed.

Such things are carefully followed by those who are initiated in a certain way. We have, in addition to the aforementioned members of brotherhoods, members of other brotherhoods, or at times portions of the same brotherhood in which minorities—and sometimes also majorities—could form.

We must take heed of other initiates, those who are called within the brotherhoods the “brothers of the left,” that is, those who exploit everything that is embodied as an impulse in human evolution as a means for power. It is self-evident that these brothers of the left also expected all sorts of things to come to light through spiritism. I explained yesterday that it was mostly such brothers of the left who made the arrangements for the use of the souls of dead human beings. For them it was of compelling interest what would come out of these seances. They gradually took over the whole field. The well-meaning initiates gradually lost all interest in spiritism; they felt in a certain way ashamed, because those who had been against the spiritism from the beginning told them it could have been known from the beginning that nothing could come out of spiritism now. Through this, spiritism came into the sphere of power, so to speak, of the brothers of the left. I spoke yesterday about such brothers of the left, who felt disappointed because they saw that, through the spiritism that they themselves had set into motion, could be revealed what they wished above all things would not emerge. Since the participants believed themselves influenced by the dead, it was possible in the seances to reveal through messages from the dead what certain brothers of the left were doing with the souls of the departed. In these seances, exactly those souls could manifest themselves who had been misused to a certain degree by the brothers of the left.

You must take into consideration that with these messages we are not dealing with theories but are relating facts that can be traced to individualities. When these individualities are united in brotherhoods, one individuality can expect one thing, while another expects something different from one and the same matter. It is not possible to speak about actualities in the spiritual world; it is impossible to seek there anything but a working out of the impulses of the individualities. What one does and what another does contradicts itself even as in life. When theories are spoken of, the ground for contradiction may not be broken. When one speaks of facts, however, then just because facts are spoken of, it will frequently be shown that these facts agree just as little in the spiritual world as the actions of human beings do here on the physical plane. I therefore beg you always to consider that it is impossible, when one speaks about these things, to speak about realities if one does not speak about individual facts. It is these with which we are concerned. It thus becomes necessary to keep the individual streams apart, to peel them apart.

This is connected, however, with a very significant matter that one must bring above all to one's consciousness if one wishes in the present to arrive at some sort of satisfying world conception. What I am saying is of prime importance, and although it is something abstract, we must lead this fact once before our souls.

If man wishes to build for himself a world conception, he rightly strives toward harmonizing the individual parts. This he does out of a certain habit, out of a habit that is most justified, because it is related to all that through many centuries has been humanity's dearest treasure of soul and spirit, to monotheism. What is encountered in the world as experience one wishes to lead back to an undivided foundation of the world. This is well justified, though not in the way that we usually believe it to be justified. It is justified in a completely different way, about which we will speak next time. Today I would like to lead before your soul only what is of principal importance.

One who approaches the world with the expectation that everything must explain itself without contradiction, as if it arose from an undivided foundation of the world, will experience many disappointments when he faces the world and its experiences in an unprejudiced way. It is traditional for the human being to treat all that he perceives in the world according to a pastoral world conception, in which everything is led back to the undivided, divine, primordial foundation; everything stems from God and therefore must be understandable as a unity.

This is not the case now, however. What surrounds us in the world as experience does not stem from the undivided primordial foundation. Rather it stems from spiritual individualities different from one another. Different individualities work together in all that surrounds us in the world as experience. This is how it is above all. We will speak next time about other ways of justifying monotheism, but this is how it is above all. We must think of individualities as being to a certain degree—actually to a high degree—independent of one another as soon as we cross the threshold of the spiritual world. One cannot then require that what appears be accountable by an undivided principle. Imagine that this, schematically represented, is some experience (as far as I am concerned it could be the experiences from 1913–1918).

Diagram 7 Click image for large view

The experiences of human beings continue naturally in both directions. The historian is always tempted to assume an undivided principle in this whole process. This is not the case, however. As soon as we cross the threshold to the spiritual world—which can be crossed from either above or below (see drawing, red), it is one and the same—various individualities work together in influencing these events that are relatively independent of each other (see drawing, arrows). If you do not take this into consideration, if you assume everywhere an undivided foundation of the world, you will never understand these events. Only when you take into consideration what is to a certain degree the ebb and flow of events, the varied individualities who work with or against one another, only then will you understand these things in the right way.

This matter is indeed connected with the deepest mysteries of human evolution. Only the monotheistic feeling has veiled this fact for centuries or millennia, but one must consider it. If one wishes to progress today, therefore, with questions of a world conception, above all one must not confuse logic with an abstract lack of contradiction. An abstract lack of contradiction cannot exist in a world in which individualities are working together independently of one another. A striving for conformity will therefore always lead to an impoverishment of concepts; the concepts will no longer be able to encompass the full reality. Only when these concepts are able to take hold of this world full of contradictions, which is the true reality, will they be able to encompass the full reality.

What man has before him as a realm of nature materializes in a remarkable way. Different individualities also work together in all that man calls nature and includes in natural science on the one hand and nature worship, aesthetics of nature, etc., on the other hand. In the present evolutionary cycle of humanity, however, a fortunate arrangement has been found for human beings through the wisdom-filled guidance of the world: man can grasp nature with concepts that relate him to an undivided guidance, because only what is dependent upon an undivided guidance can approach the human being as experience from nature through sense perception. Behind the tapestry of nature lies something quite different, which is influenced from a totally different direction. This is blocked out, however, when man perceives nature. What man calls nature is consequently an undivided system, but only because it has been sifted. When we perceive through our senses, nature is, as it were, sifted for us. Everything that is contradictory in it is sifted out, and nature is transmitted to us as an undivided system. At the moment when we cross the threshold, however, and perceive the reality, bringing clarification into nature—the elemental spirits or influences upon human souls that could also be regulated by nature—one is no longer in a position to speak about nature as an undivided system. Rather one must become clear that we are dealing with influences of individualities who are either struggling with one another or supporting and strengthening one another.

In the elementary world we find spirits of earth, gnome-like beings; spirits of water, undine-like beings; spirits of air, sylph-like beings; and spirits of fire, salamander-like beings. They are all there. They are not there, however, to form a unified regiment. It is not like that. These various realms—gnomes, undines, sylphs, salamanders—are in a certain way independent. They do not work only as the rank and file from a single system, but they fight with one another. Their intentions have nothing to do with each other to begin with, but what then arises evolves through the most diverse working together of intentions. If one is familiar with the intentions one can see in what appears before us perhaps a working together of fire spirits and undines. One must never believe, however, that behind these beings stands someone who gives them a certain command. This is not the case. This idea is widespread today, and philosophers such as Wilhelm Wundt (about whom Fritz Mauthner unjustifiably said, “Authority by his publisher's grace,” though he was the authority for almost the whole world before the war) aim to gather together as a unity all that lives in the human soul, the life of thinking, life of feeling, and life of willing. They say that the soul is a unity and therefore everything must belong to a unity, to a common system. This is not so, however, and those strong contradictions so full of significance in human life, which analytical psychology has discovered, would not emerge unless our life of thinking beyond the threshold were not to lead us back to quite different regions where other individualities influence our life of thinking, our life of feeling, and our life of willing.

It is so curious! You see, if this is the human being (see drawing) and we have within the human being the life of thinking, life of feeling, and life of willing (see drawing, T, F, W), a systematizer like Wundt would not picture anything but that it is all a system. Meanwhile the life of thinking leads to one world (W1), the life of feeling leads into another world (W2), and the life of willing into yet another world (W3).

Diagram 8 Click image for large view

The human soul is there exactly for the purpose of forming a unity of what in the pre-human, momentarily pre-human world, was a three-foldness.

All these things must be taken into account as soon as we concern ourselves with the impulses for the historic evolution of humanity, these impulses that will be embodied in this historic evolution.

I have mentioned in the course of these studies that every era in the post-Atlantean age has its particular task. I have characterized in general the task of the fifth post-Atlantean period, indicating that it is humanity's task in this period to come to grips with evil as an impulse in the evolution of the world. We have frequently discussed what this means. It cannot be otherwise than that forces that appear at the wrong place appear as evil. They can be conquered for humanity, however, through the exertions of human beings in the fifth post-Atlantean period, so that with these forces of evil something good for the future of the evolution of the whole world is in the position to unfold. For this reason, the task for the fifth post-Atlantean period is a particularly difficult one. As you see, a great many temptations face humanity. When the powers of evil gradually appear, it is natural that man is more likely under the circumstances to give in to this evil in all realms, rather than taking up the struggle to allow what appears to him as evil to be put in the service of the good in world evolution. Yet this must happen: the evil must to a certain degree be placed at the service of the good in world evolution. Without this, it would be impossible to enter the sixth post-Atlantean period, which will have a completely different task. It will have the task of allowing humanity to live above all in a continuous contemplation of the spiritual world, of spiritual impulses, in spite of the fact that it is still connected with the earth. Just this task in the fifth post-Atlantean period, that of opposing evil, is connected with the new possibility of a certain kind of personal darkening for humanity.

We know that since the year 1879 the spirits of darkness who are closest to human beings, the spirits belonging to the kingdom of the angeloi, wander about within the human kingdom, because they were thrown out of the spiritual world into the human kingdom and now exist within human impulses, are working through human impulses. I have said that, exactly because of this, beings that are close to man work in an invisible way among human beings, and man is held back from recognizing the spiritual with the intellect through the play of forces of evil. This is again bound up with the task of the fifth post-Atlantean period, because precisely through this many opportunities are given to the fifth post-Atlantean period to lend itself to dark illusions and the like. Man must accustom himself to a certain extent in this period to grasping the spiritual with his intellect. The spiritual will already have been revealed. Because the spirits of darkness were overcome in 1879, more and more spiritual wisdom can flow down from the spiritual worlds. Only if the spirits of darkness had remained above in the spiritual kingdom would they have become a hindrance to this flow. This flow of spiritual wisdom they henceforth cannot hinder, but they can cause confusion and could darken souls. We have often described which opportunities for darkening are exploited. We have already mentioned what arrangements are made to prevent the human being from receiving the spiritual life.

Naturally, all of this cannot give rise to wailing or something of that sort but should strengthen the force and energy of the human soul to approach the spiritual. If in this fifth post-Atlantean period man can achieve what can be achieved through embodying the forces of evil in a good sense, then at the same time something tremendous will be achieved; then this fifth post-Atlantean period will know something for human evolution out of greater ideas than any other post-Atlantean period, yes, than any other period of earthly evolution. Christ appeared, for example, in the fourth post-Atlantean period through the Mystery of Golgotha. Only the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, however, can make this mystery its own through the human intellect. In the fourth post-Atlantean period, human beings could grasp that they possessed something in the Christ impulse that would lead them as souls beyond death. This became sufficiently clear through Pauline Christianity.

Something still more significant, however, will enter the evolution of the fifth post-Atlantean period, in which human souls will recognize that they have in Christ the helper to transform the forces of evil into good. One thing is bound up with this characteristic of the fifth post-Atlantean period, however, one thing that one should inscribe anew every day within the soul. It should never be forgotten, although man is especially inclined to forget this, that man must be a fighter for the spiritual in this fifth post-Atlantean time. He must experience that his forces will weaken if he does not continually hold them in check for the conquest of the spiritual world. Man is given his freedom to the highest degree in this fifth post-Atlantean period! He must endure this. To a certain extent the idea of human freedom must be the testing ground for all that meets man in the fifth post-Atlantean period. If the forces of man should weaken, everything could take a turn for the worse. Man is not in the position in this period to be led like a child. There are certain brotherhoods, however, which hold as their ideal to lead human beings like children as they were still being led in the third post-Atlantean period and in the fourth. These brotherhoods are therefore not doing what is right—they are not doing at all what should be done for the evolution of humanity: to direct human beings toward the spiritual world in such a way that acceptance or rejection of the spiritual world is left to the freedom of the human being.

This must be kept in mind continually by anyone who speaks of the spiritual world in this fifth post-Atlantean period. For this reason certain things in this period can only be said, but the saying is just as important as something else was important in another era. I will give you an example. In our time the communication of truths or, if I may express it trivially, the lecturing about truths, is most important. After that, people should find their direction in freedom. One should not go any further than the lecture, the communication of truths; the rest should follow in free resolve, follow as things follow that one makes as resolves from the impulses of the physical plane. This relates also to things that to a certain extent can only be directed and guided from the spiritual world. We shall understand this better if we enter into individual examples. In the fourth post-Atlantean period it was still so that other things came into consideration than the mere word, the mere communication. What came into consideration? Let us take a definite case: the island Ireland, as we call it today, has particular characteristics. This island distinguishes itself from the rest of the earth in certain ways. Each realm of the earth differs from the others through certain characteristics; that is nothing special. I will emphasize today only the relatively strong distinction between Ireland and the other regions of the earth. In the evolution of the earth, as we have seen in my book, An Outline Of Occult Science, (see Note 3) one can go back in time, and various influences, various occurrences, confirm what can be gathered as facts from the spiritual world. You know from Occult Science what things existed when we refer back to what was called the Lemurian time, what has developed since the Lemurian time, how the various things have evolved. I called your attention yesterday to the fact that the whole earth must essentially be regarded as an organism from within which stream different forces upon the inhabitants of different territories. This out-streaming has a special influence upon the double, to which I called your attention yesterday. In past times, the human beings who were familiar with Ireland brought the particular characteristics of Ireland to expression in fairy tales and legends. I would like to point out that an esoteric legend was known that expressed the essence of Ireland in relation to the earthly organism. It was said that humanity was once cast out of paradise because in paradise Lucifer had misled humanity, which was then scattered across the rest of the world. The rest of the world, however, had already been there at the time when humanity was cast out of paradise. One therefore distinguishes—so it is said in this fairy tale, in this legendary representation—between the paradise with Lucifer in it and the rest of the earth into which humanity was expelled. It is different with Ireland, however; it does not belong in the same sense to the rest of the earth, because before Lucifer had set foot in paradise a likeness of paradise had formed itself upon the earth, and this likeness has become Ireland.

You should well understand that Ireland is therefore that bit of earth that had no part of Lucifer, to which Lucifer had no relationship. That which had to be separated from paradise so that the earthly likeness of paradise could arise would have hindered Lucifer from entering paradise. Ireland thus was conceived according to this legend as a separation of those portions of paradise that would have hindered Lucifer from entering paradise. Only after Ireland had been separated from paradise could Lucifer enter paradise.

This esoteric legend that I have presented in a very incomplete way is something very beautiful. It was for many people an explanation for the unique task of Ireland throughout the centuries. In the first Mystery Drama that I have written, you find what is so often told, how the Christianizing of Europe originated with the Irish monks. When St. Patrick introduced Christianity into Ireland the situation was such that Christianity led there to the highest devoutness. It gives new meaning to the legend about which I just spoke that Ireland—called Ierne by the Greeks and Ivernia by the Romans—was called the Isle of the Saints in those times in which the forces of European Christianity originated in their best impulses directly from Ireland, from Irish people who had been lovingly initiated into Christianity. It was called this because of the great devoutness that reigned within their Christian cloisters. This is connected with the fact that these territorial forces, about which I have spoken, ascending from the earth and taking hold of the human double, are at their very best on the island of Ireland.

You will say that in that case the best human beings must be in Ireland. Yes, this is so, but not in the world. Into every region other people wander and have descendants, etc. It is not so, therefore, that man is merely the product of the bit of earth on which he stands. It can very well be that the forces ascending from the earth oppose the character of the human beings there. One must not confuse what really develops within the human being with the characteristics of the earthly organism in a definite territory. Then one would simply open oneself again to the world of illusion.

What I have just suggested, however, that Ireland is a special land, we are able to say today. From this should emerge a factor, among many factors, that could lead today in a fruitful way to social and political ideas. One must take such factors into account. What I have just said about Ireland is a factor, and one must reckon with such factors. One must gather everything together, to be created into a science of the forming of human conditions on earth. Until this comes about no true healing can come into the arrangement of public affairs. What can be communicated from the spiritual world must flow into the regulations that one encounters. For this reason I have said in public lectures that it is important that everyone concerned with public affairs—statesmen and so on—should acquaint himself with these things. Through this alone can public servants master reality. They will not do it, or at least they have not done so up to now, but it is a necessity nevertheless.

In accordance with the tasks of the fifth post-Atlantean period, emphasis must be put today on speaking out, on communication, because before what has been said can become deed, resolves must be made as they are determined by the impulses of the physical plane. This was different in former times; then one could act differently.

At a definite moment in time in the third post-Atlantean era a certain brotherhood made arrangements to send a large number of colonists from Asia Minor to the island of Ireland. At that time colonists settled there from the same realm in Asia from which later the philosopher Thales originated. You may read in my Riddles of Philosophy (see Note 9) about the philosophy of Thales. Thales came from the same region, although later; he was born, of course, only in the fourth post-Atlantean period. Earlier, however, out of the same milieu, out of the whole spiritual substance from which later the philosopher Thales originated, the initiates had sent colonists to Ireland. Why? Because they were familiar with the characteristics of a realm of the earth such as Ireland. They knew what was indicated in the esoteric legend about which I have spoken to you. They knew that the forces ascending from the earth through the soil of the Irish island worked in such a way upon human beings that man was influenced little in the direction of intellectualism, little in the direction of egoism, little in the direction of the capacity to make resolves. The initiates who sent colonists there knew this full well, and they selected people who, through their particular karmic predisposition, seemed suited to be exposed to just these influences of Ireland. Today there are still descendants in Ireland of that old population who were at that time transplanted from Asia Minor and who were to develop in such a way that not the least intellectuality, not the least intellect, not the least capacity for making resolves, should develop but instead special qualities of the feeling (Gemuet) soul.

Through this was prepared far in advance what took place in Ireland as that glorious evolution of Christianity, the peaceful spreading of Christianity from which streamed the Christianizing of Europe. This was prepared far in advance. The countrymen of the later Thales sent people there who proved themselves equipped to become monks and who could work there in the way I indicated. Such things were often done in ancient times, and when you find historic colonizations described in exoteric history by today's unintelligent historians (who have, however, much intelligence—intelligence can be found in the streets today) you must always understand that in such colonizations lay a deep-seated wisdom that was directed and guided by considering always what was to take place in the future, by taking into account at that time the characteristics of earthly evolution.

This was another way of bringing spiritual wisdom into the world. This should not be done today, however, by just anyone who takes the proper path; it would be wrong simply to prescribe something for people against their will in order to partition the earth; rather one should proceed in such a way that people are told the truth so that they may guide themselves accordingly.

You see, therefore, that this was an essential progression from the third, fourth, to the fifth post-Atlantean period. One should keep this matter clearly in view and recognize how this impulse toward freedom must pull itself through all that rules over the fifth post-Atlantean period. It is exactly against the freedom of human feeling (Gemuet) that the antagonist conspires, the antagonist who, as I told you, is like a double accompanying man from some time before birth to death but who must abandon man just before he dies. If one is under this influence that works directly with the double, all sorts of things might emerge that can appear already in the fifth post-Atlantean period. It is not suitable for this period, however, to give man the full possibility of achieving his task. This task consists in the struggle against evil, of transforming evil into good.

Just think what lies behind all the things into which man in the fifth post-Atlantean period has been placed. The individual facts must be illuminated in the right way. They must be understood, for wherever the double works intensely, one works against the essential tendencies of the fifth post-Atlantean period. In this fifth post-Atlantean period, humanity has not come far enough to evaluate the facts correctly. Especially during these past three sad years, humanity has not been at all ready to assess the facts in a correct way.

Let us take a fact, however, that is seemingly far afield from what I have discussed today. This is the fact that I wish to present to you: in a large iron factory, 10,000 tons of molten iron are to be loaded onto trains. For this work a definite number of workmen naturally would have to be engaged. Seventy-five men must do the work, and it emerged that each one could load twelve and a half tons a day; thus from seventy-five men each, twelve and a half tons per day. There was one man, Taylor, who put more emphasis on the double than on what must be won for humanity in the sense of progress, on what must be won for the human spirit in the fifth post-Atlantean period. This man first asked the factory owners if they did not believe that a single man could load much more than twelve and a half tons per day. The factory owners supposed that a workman could load at most eighteen tons. Then Taylor said, “We shall experiment.” Taylor began to experiment with the workmen. The machine standard was applied through this to human social life. These experiments were to be done on human beings. He tested to see whether it was really so, as the practical factory owners said, that a man could load at most eighteen tons a day. He arranged for rest periods, which he calculated according to physiology; men in these intervals would recoup as many forces as they had exerted. Naturally it turned out that under these conditions the results differed from one workman to another. Then he worked with arithmetic means. You know that it does not matter if one uses arithmetic means in mechanics, but with human beings one cannot employ arithmetic means, because each man has his justification for existence. Taylor employed arithmetic means, however: he selected those workers who recovered completely during these rational pauses and he granted them such pauses. The others, who were unable to regain their forces during these rest periods, were simply discarded. It was discovered by experimenting with people in this way that the selected ones, those selected when they completely recuperated in the pauses, could each load forty-seven and a half tons.

He applied the mechanics of Darwin's theory to the life of workers: away with the unfit, the fit chosen by selection! The fit are those who, fully exploiting the pauses, could load not a maximum of eighteen tons, as had been assumed earlier, but rather forty-seven and a half tons. In this way, the workman could also be satisfied, because immense savings were made and the wages for each workman could be raised by sixty per cent. The chosen ones are thus made, those most fit in the struggle for existence, who have been chosen in this way through selection; one has very satisfied people in addition. The unfit may die of starvation, however!

This is the beginning of a principle! Such matters are observed little, because they are not illuminated with larger perspectives; one must always illuminate such matters with larger perspectives. Today it is only erroneous ideas of natural science that are applied to human life. The impulse remains, however, and the impulse will then be applied to the esoteric truths that will come in the course of the fifth post-Atlantean period. Darwinism contains no esoteric truths, but its application would lead to great monstrosities, this application of the Darwinian view to direct experimentation with human beings. When esoteric truths are added to this, however, as they will have to be revealed in the course of the fifth post-Atlantean era, an unbelievable power over human beings will certainly be gained in this way, through always selecting the fit. It is not only that the fit will be selected, however, but the striving for a certain esoteric invention to make the fit always more fit, through which a tremendous exploitation of power could be achieved, would oppose precisely the good tendencies of the fifth post-Atlantean period.

Regarding the relationships that I have just presented to you, I wished to show only the beginnings of intentions that encompass the future and to show the need to have these things illuminated from higher perspectives. Next time it will be our task to point to the three or four great truths to which the fifth post-Atlantean period must arrive. It will then be shown how these truths can be misused if they are not applied in the sense of the good tendencies of the fifth post-Atlantean period but when instead the demands of the double are fulfilled. It is these demands of the double that are supported by the brotherhoods that wish to set another being in the place of the Christ.

Today I would like to connect and amplify individual observations that we have made in the course of our studies with this or that detail. If you follow the times attentively, you will have been able to notice here and there that, in the thoughts, experiences, and impulses that in the past man felt had “brought him so wonderfully far,” he can no longer find what can help him reach into the future. Yesterday, one of our members pressed into my hands last week's issue of the Frankfurter Zeitung, dated November 21, 1917. In that journal is an article by a very learned gentleman—it must have been a very learned gentleman, because he had in front of his name not only the title Doctor of Philosophy but also the title Doctor of Theology, and in addition there is also Professor. He is thus Professor, Doctor of Theology, and Doctor of Philosophy. He is therefore, of course, a very clever man! He has written an article that deals with all sorts of contemporary spiritual needs. In the course of this article there is a section that is expressed in the following way: “The experience of being that lies behind things has no need of pious consecration or religious estimation, because it is in itself religion. Here it is not a matter of the feeling and comprehension of one's own individual values but of the great Irrational that is hidden behind all existence. He who touches it so that the divine spark leaps across undergoes an experience that has primary character, the ‘primeval experience.’ To experience this, along with all that is moved by the same stream of life, endows him with, to use a word beloved in modern times, a cosmic feeling for life.”

Forgive me, dear friends. I am not reading this to arouse within you some particularly lofty mental pictures to correspond with these washed-out sentences but rather to lead before you a symbol of our time. “A cosmic religiosity is in the process of growing among us, and the extent of the longing for it is shown by the perceptible growth of the theosophical movement that undertakes to discover and unveil the circulation of life behind the senses.” It is indeed difficult to stagger over all these washed-out concepts, but is it not nevertheless true that as a symbol of our time this is quite peculiar? Further on he says, “In this cosmic piety, it is not a question of mysticism that begins with rejection of the world . . .” etc.

One cannot conceive of anything clever in these sentences! Since the Professor, Doctor of Theology, and Doctor of Philosophy represents it, however, one must naturally consider it as something clever. Otherwise one would perceive it as something that is brought falteringly to expression in an unclear tirade, reminding one of the learned gentleman who can no longer continue on the path on which he has traveled and who feels obliged to point to something that is there, something that apparently seems to him not completely hopeless. One should not be at all delighted with these utterances; such things must not lull us into slumber just because we notice that from some direction someone has again observed that something lies behind the spiritual scientific movement. That would indeed be very harmful, because those who make these remarks are often the same ones who feel satisfied with such utterances, who do not go further. They even point with these washed-out things to an event that will enter the world, and this would thereby belong precisely to those who are altogether too comfortable to become involved in something that requires earnest study of spiritual science. This event must really break in and take hold of human feeling (Gemuet) if what is bound up with reality is to flow into the time-stream of evolution so that healing forces are able to rise from it. It is naturally easier to speak of the “surging waves” and of “cosmic feelings” than to enter seriously into the things that are demanded by the signs of the time and that must be made known to humanity. For this reason it seems to me necessary to say things here that have been stated previously in public lectures but that will be spoken of further, now with a strong emphasis on the difference between what is worn out, what is no longer capable of life, which has led to these catastrophic times, and what must really take hold of the human soul if any progress is to be made.

With the old wisdom by which human beings have reached the present, thousands of congresses can be held—world congresses and national congresses, and whatever—thousands of societies can be founded, but one must be clear that these thousands of congresses, thousands of societies, will not be effective unless the spiritual life-blood of the science of the spirit flows through them. What man is lacking today is the courage to enter into the real exploration of the spiritual world. It sounds strange, but it must be said that all that is needed to begin with is to circulate to a broad public, for example, the small brochure, Human Life in the Light of Spiritual Science. Something new would be achieved through this in calling forth knowledge of man's connection with the cosmic order. Attention is drawn precisely to such knowledge in this brochure. Concrete attention is drawn to the way in which the earth annually alters its conditions of consciousness and the like. What is said in this lecture and in this brochure is said with particularly full consideration of the needs of our time. To receive this would be of greater significance than all the wishy-washy talk of “cosmic feeling” and of entering some sort of “surging waves,” or what have you. I have only quoted these things to you, because to reword them is impossible for me, as they are too senseless in their formulation.

One is not hindered, of course, by being attentive to these things, because they are important and essential. What I wish to draw to your attention is that we must not “mystify” ourselves, that we must be clear. Utter clarity is necessary if we wish to work for an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

I wish to point out once again that what is essential for humanity in this fifth post-Atlantean period is to enter into a special treatment of great issues of life that have been obscured in a certain way through the wisdom of the past. I have already pointed this out to you. One great issue of life can be characterized in the following way: an attempt will have to be made to place the spiritual etheric in the service of outer practical life. I have brought to your attention that the fifth post-Atlantean period will have to solve the problem of how human moods, the motions of human moods, allow themselves to be translated into wave motions on machines, how man must be brought into connection with what must become more and more mechanical. For that reason I called your attention a week ago to how superficially this mechanizing will be accepted by a certain portion of the surface of the earth. I presented an example to show how, following the American way of thinking, an attempt was made to extend the mechanical over human life itself. I presented the example of the pauses that were to be exploited so that, instead of far fewer tons, up to fifty tons could be loaded by a number of workmen. For this one need only carry the Darwinian principle of selection actually into life.

In such situations the will is there to harness human energy to mechanical energy. These things should not be treated by fighting against them. That is a completely false view. These things will not fail to appear; they will come. What we are concerned with is whether, in the course of world history, they are entrusted to people who are familiar in a selfless way with the great aims of earthly evolution and who structure these things for the health of human beings or whether they are enacted by groups of human beings who exploit these things in an egotistical or in a group-egotistical sense. That is what matters. It is not a question of the what in this case; the what is sure to come. It is a question of the how, how one tackles these situations. The what lies simply in the meaning of earthly evolution. The welding together of the human nature with the mechanical nature will be a problem of great significance for the remainder of earthly evolution.

I have deliberately drawn attention often, even in public lectures, to the fact that the consciousness of the human being is connected with the forces of disintegration. On two occasions I have said in public lectures in Basel that within our nervous system we are dying. These forces, these forces of dying away, will become more and more powerful. The bond will be established between these forces dying within man, which are related to the electric, magnetic forces, and the outer mechanical forces. Man will to a certain extent become his intentions, he will be able to direct his thoughts into the mechanical forces. Hitherto undiscovered forces within human nature will be discovered, forces that will work on outer electric and magnetic forces. The first problem is to bring together human beings with the mechanical, which will have to prevail increasingly in the future. The second problem consists in calling upon the help of the spiritual circumstances. This can only be done, however, when the time is ripe and when a sufficient number of people are prepared for it in the right way. The time must come, however, when the spiritual forces are made mobile enough to master life in relation to illness and death. Medicine will become spiritualized, intensely spiritualized. Of all these things, caricatures are being made from certain directions, but these caricatures show only what really must come.

Again it is a question of whether this problem is attacked from the same direction to which I pointed regarding the other problem, in an outer egotistical or group-egotistical way.

The third problem is to introduce human thoughts into the actual evolution of the human species, in birth and education. I have pointed out that conferences have already been held on how in the future a materialistic science would be founded regarding conception and the relationships between man and woman. All these things indicate to us that something most significant is in the process of evolving. It is still easy today to say, “Why is it that people who know about these things in the right sense do not apply them?” In the future it will become clear just what is involved in this application and which forces are still actively hindering the foundation of large-scale spiritualized medicine or spiritualized national economy. No more can be accomplished today than to talk about these things, until people have enough understanding of them, people who are inclined to accept them in a selfless way. Today many people believe that they are able to do this, but many circumstances of life hinder what they are able to do. These life circumstances can be overcome in the right way only when a deeper and deeper understanding gains ground and when there is willingness to renounce, at least for a time, the immediate, practical application of these things on a larger scale.

These things have all developed in such a way that one can say that little has been retained of what was once hidden behind the ancient, atavistic strivings until the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. There is much talk today about the ancient alchemy. The proceedings of the procreation of Homunculus are also recalled at times, and so on, but what is spoken of here is for the most part groundless. If one once understood what can be said in connection with the Homunculus scene in Goethe's Faust, one would be better informed about these things, because what is essential is that, from the sixteenth century on, a fog has been spread over these things; they have receded in human consciousness.

The law that governs these things is the same as the law that regulates within the human being the rhythmical alternation of waking and sleeping. Just as man cannot rise above sleep, so, in regard to spiritual evolution, he cannot disregard the sleeping of spiritual science that has marked the centuries since the sixteenth century. It was necessary for humanity to sleep through the spiritual for a time in order that it could appear again in another form. One must comprehend such necessities, but one must also not allow oneself to be depressed by them. For this reason one must be very clear that the time of awakening has come and that one must take an active part in this awakening, that events often hurry ahead of knowledge and one will not understand the events that take place around us unless one accustoms oneself to knowledge.

I have repeatedly pointed out to you that certain egotistical groups are striving esoterically, and their influence is active in the ways that I have often indicated in these studies. First of all, it was necessary that a certain knowledge should recede within humanity, a knowledge that is designated today with such misunderstood words as alchemy, astrology, and so on. This knowledge had to recede, fall into a sleep, so that man would no longer have the possibility of drawing what pertains to the soul out of observation of nature but would have to become more dependent on himself. Through this he would awaken the forces within him, for it was necessary that certain things appear first in abstract form and later take on again concrete, spiritual form.

Three ideas have gradually arisen in the course of evolving during the last centuries, ideas which, in the way they have entered human life, are essentially abstract. Kant has named them falsely, while Goethe has named them correctly. These three ideas Kant called God, freedom, and immortality; Goethe called them correctly God, virtue, and immortality. When one sees the things that are hidden behind these three words, it is clear that they are exactly the same as what modern man views more abstractly but that were viewed more concretely until the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In the ancient atavistic sense they were also viewed more materially. They experimented in the ancient way, indeed, they sought at that time with alchemical experiments to observe the processes that showed the working of God in process. They tried to produce the Philosopher's Stone.

Behind all these things is hidden something concrete. This Philosopher's Stone was to present human beings with the possibility of becoming virtuous, but it was thought of more materially. It was to lead human beings to experience immortality, to put them into a certain relationship to the universe, through which they would experience within themselves what goes beyond birth and death. All these washed out ideas with which one seeks today to grasp the ancient things no longer coincide with what was intended at that time. These things have become simply abstract, and modern humanity speaks from abstract ideas. They have wished to understand God through abstract theology; virtue is also regarded as something purely abstract. The more abstract the idea, the better modern humanity likes to use it in speaking about these things, even immortality. One speculates about what could be immortal in man. I spoke about this in my first Basel lecture, saying that the science that occupies itself today philosophically with questions about immortality is a starved science, an undernourished science. This is only another form of expression for abstract thinking in which such matters are pursued.

Certain brotherhoods in the West, however, have still preserved a relationship to the old traditions and have tried to apply them in a corresponding way, to place them in the service of a certain group egoism. It is really necessary for these things to be pointed out. Naturally, when these things are spoken of in public, from this comer of the West, in exoteric literature, then God, virtue or freedom, and immortality are also talked about in an abstract way. It is only in the circle of the initiates that it is known that all of this is only speculation, that these are all abstractions. For themselves, they seek what is being striven for in the abstract formulas of God, virtue, and immortality in something much more concrete, and for this reason, these words are translated for the initiates in their respective schools. God is translated as gold, and one seeks behind the mystery to come to what can be described as the mystery of gold. Gold, representing what is sun-like within the earth's crust, is indeed something within which is imbedded a most significant mystery. In fact, gold stands materially in the same relationship to other substances as within thinking the thought of God stands to other thoughts. It only matters in which way this mystery is understood.

This relates to the egotistical group exploitation of the mystery of birth. One is striving to wrestle here with real cosmic understanding. Modern man has completely replaced this cosmic understanding with a terrestrial understanding. When man today wishes to examine, for example, how the embryo in animals and man develops, he examines with a microscope what exists precisely in the place on earth onto which he has cast his microscopic eye; he regards this as what is to be examined. It cannot be a matter only of this, however. It will be discovered—and certain circles are coming close to this in their discoveries—that the active forces are not in what one meets with the microscopic eye but are rather within what streams in from the cosmos, from the constellations in the cosmos. When an embryo arises, it arises because into the living being in which the embryo is being formed are working forces from all directions of the cosmos, cosmic forces. When a fertilization takes place, what will develop out of the fertilization is dependent upon which cosmic forces are active.

Diagram 9 Click image for large view

There is one thing that will come to be understood today that is not yet understood. Today one looks at some living being, let us say a chicken. When in this living being a new embryo arises, the biologist examines how, so to speak, out of this chicken the egg grows. He examines the forces that are supposed to allow the egg to grow out of the chicken. This is a piece of nonsense. The egg does not at all grow out of the hen; the hen is only the foundation; the forces work out of the cosmos, forces that produce the egg on the ground that has been prepared within the hen. When the biologist today works with his microscope, he believes that what he sees in the microscopic field also includes the forces on which what he sees depends. What he sees there, however, is subject to the forces of the stars that work together in a certain constellation, and when one discovers the cosmic here, one will discover the truth, the reality: it is the universe that conjures the egg from the hen.

All of this, however, is connected above all with the mystery of the sun and, observed from the earth, with the mystery of gold. Today I am offering a kind of programmatic indication; in the course of time these things will become clearer.

In the same schools about which we are speaking, virtue is not called virtue but is simply called health, and one endeavors to acquaint oneself with those cosmic constellations that have a connection with the health and illness of human beings. Through acquainting oneself with the cosmic constellations, however, one learns to know the individual substances that lie on the surface of the earth, the juices and so on, that are connected with health and illness. From certain directions, a more material form of the science of health is increasingly being developed, one that rests, however, on a spiritual foundation.

The notion will also spread from this direction that man becomes good not by learning all sorts of ethical principles, through which man can become good, but rather by, let us say, taking copper under a certain constellation of stars or arsenic under another. You can imagine how these things could be exploited for power by groups of egotistically inclined people. It is only necessary to withhold this knowledge from others who are then unable to participate, and one has the best method of ruling over great masses of people. One does not need to speak about these things at all; one need only introduce, for example, some new delicacy. Then one can seek a market for this new delicacy, which has been tinged appropriately, and thus bring about what is necessary, if these things are comprehended materialistically. One must be clear that in all matter there are hidden spiritual workings. Only one who knows in the true sense that there is nothing really material but only the spiritual will penetrate beyond the mysteries of life.

Likewise, the attempt will be made from this direction to bring the problem of immortality into materialistic channels. This problem of immortality can be led into materialistic channels in the same way, by exploitation of cosmic constellations. One does not, of course, attain through this what is often speculated as being immortality, but one attains a different immortality. One prepares oneself—so long as it is impossible to influence the physical body to prolong life artificially—to undergo soul experiences that will enable one to remain in the lodge of a brotherhood even after death, to help there with the forces that one has at one's disposal. Immortality is simply called prolonging life in these circles.

You can see outer signs of all these things. I do not know whether some of you have noticed the book that for a time provoked a sensation, a book that also came from the West bearing the title, The Disturbance of Dying (Der Unfug des Sterbens). These things all move in this direction. They are only the beginning. What has gone further than the beginning is carefully preserved for the group egotism, is kept very esoteric. These things are actually possible, however, if one brings them into materialistic channels, if one makes the abstract ideas of God, virtue, and immortality into concrete ideas of gold, health, and prolonging life, if one exploits in a group-egotistical sense what I presented to you as the great problems of the fifth post-Atlantean times. What is called in a washed-out way “cosmic feeling” by Professor, Doctor of Theology, Doctor of Philosophy, is presented by many—and unfortunately by many in an egotistical sense—as cosmic knowledge. While science for centuries has beheld only processes occurring on earth, has rejected all study of what is approaching as the most important extraterrestrial occurrence, it will be precisely in the fifth post-Atlantean time that exploitation will be considered of the forces penetrating in from the cosmos. Just as it is now of special importance for the regular professor of biology possibly to have a much-enlarged microscope, possibly to use much more exact laboratory methods, so in the future, when science has become spiritualized, what will matter will be whether one carries out a certain process in the morning, evening, or at noon, or whether one allows what one did in the morning to be somehow further influenced by active factors of the evening, or whether the cosmic influence from morning until evening is excluded, paralyzed. In the future such processes will prove themselves to be necessary; they also will take place. Naturally much water will run over the dam until the materialistically oriented university chairs, laboratories, and so on, are handed over to the spiritual scientists, but this exchange must take place if humanity is not to come completely into decadence. This laboratory work will have to be replaced by work in which, for example—when it is a matter of the good that is to be attained in the future—certain processes take place in the morning and are interrupted during the day; the cosmic stream passes through them again in the evening, and this is preserved rhythmically until it is morning again. The processes are conducted in such a manner that certain cosmic workings are always interrupted during the day, and the cosmic processes of morning and evening are studied. To achieve this, manifold arrangements will be necessary.

You can gather from this that when one is not in a position to participate publicly in what happens, one can only talk about these things. From the same direction that wishes to put gold, health, and prolonging life in place of God, virtue, and immortality, the effort is made not to work with the processes of morning and evening but with something totally different. I called to your attention last time that the impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha was to be eliminated from the world by introducing another impulse from the West, a kind of Antichrist; from the direction of the East, the Christ impulse, as it appears in the twentieth century, is to be paralyzed by directing the attention, the interest, away from Christ appearing in the etheric.

Those concerned with introducing the Antichrist instead of the Christ have endeavored to exploit what could work especially through the most materialistic forces, yet working spiritually with these materialistic forces. Above all they strive to exploit electricity and especially the earth's magnetism to have influence over the entire earth. I have shown you how, in what I have called the human double, earthly forces arise. This mystery will be penetrated. It will be an American mystery to make use of the magnetism of the earth in its “doubleness,” to make use of the magnetism in North and South to send guiding forces that work spiritually across the earth. Look at the magnetic map of the earth and compare it with what I am now saying. Observe the course of the line where the magnetic needle swings to East and West and where it does not swing at all. (I can only give indications at this time.) From a certain celestial direction, spiritual beings are constantly at work. One need only put these spiritual beings at the service of earthly existence and, because these spiritual beings working in from the cosmos are able to transmit the mystery of the earth's magnetism, one can penetrate the mystery of the earth's magnetism and can bring about something very significant of a group-egotistical nature in relation to the three things, gold, health, and prolonging life. It will simply be a matter of mustering the doubtful courage for these things. This will certainly be done within certain circles!

From the direction of the East, it is a matter of strengthening what I have already explained: the in-streaming and actively working beings from the opposing sides of the cosmos are placed at the service of earthly existence. A great struggle will arise in the future. Human science will move toward the cosmic. Human science will attempt to move toward the cosmic but in different ways. It will be the task of the good, healing science to find certain cosmic forces that, through the working together of two cosmic streams, are able to arise on the earth. These two cosmic streams will be those of Pisces and Virgo. It will be most important to discover the mystery of how what works out of the cosmos in the direction of Pisces as a force of the sun combines with what works in the direction of Virgo. The good will be that one will discover how, from the two directions of the cosmos, morning and evening forces can be placed at the service of humanity: on the one side from the direction of Pisces and on the other side from the direction of Virgo.

Diagram 10 Click image for large view

Those who seek to achieve everything through the dualism of polarity, through positive and negative forces, will not concern themselves with these forces. The spiritual mysteries that allow the spirituality to stream forth from the cosmos—with help from the twofold forces of magnetism, from the positive and negative—emerge in the universe from Gemini; these are the forces of midday. It was known already in antiquity that this had something to do with the cosmos, and it is known even today by exoteric scientists that, behind Gemini in the Zodiac, positive and negative magnetism are hidden in some way. An attempt will be made to paralyze what is to be won through the revelation of the duality in the cosmos, to paralyze it in a materialistic, egotistical way through the forces that stream toward humanity especially from Gemini and can be put completely at the service of the double. With other brotherhoods, which above all wish to bypass the Mystery of Golgotha, it is a matter of exploiting the twofold nature of the human being. This twofold nature of the human being, which has entered the fifth post-Atlantean period just as man did, contains the human being but also, within the human being, the lower animal nature. Man is to a certain extent really a centaur; he contains this lower, bestial, astral nature. His humanity is somehow mounted upon this astral beast. Through this cooperation of the twofold nature within the human being there is also a dualism of forces. It is this dualism of forces that will be used more by the egotistical brotherhoods of the Eastern, Indian stream in order also to mislead Eastern Europe, which has the task of preparing the sixth post-Atlantean period. For this, forces from Sagittarius are put to use.

The question standing before humanity is whether to master for itself the forces of the cosmos in a doubly wrong way or simply to master them in the right way. This will give a real renewal to astrology, which was atavistic in its ancient form and would not be able to continue in this form. There will be a struggle among the knowledgeable ones in the cosmos. Some will bring about the use of the morning and evening processes, as I indicated; in the West, the midday process will be preferable, excluding the morning and evening processes; and in the East the midnight processes will be used. Substances will no longer be prepared according to forces of chemical attraction and repulsion; it will be known that different substances will be produced depending upon whether they are prepared with morning and evening processes or with midday or midnight processes. It will be known that such substances work in a totally different way upon the three-foldness of God, virtue, and immortality—gold, health, and prolonging life. From the cooperation of what comes from Pisces and Virgo one will not be able to bring about anything harmful. Through this one will achieve what in a certain sense loosens the mechanism of life from the human being but will in no way found any form of rulership and power of one group over another. The cosmic forces that are called forth from this direction will beget strange machines but only ones that will relieve the human being from work, because they will have within them a certain force of intelligence. A cosmically oriented spiritual science will have to concern itself so that all the great temptations that will emanate from these mechanized beasts, which man creates himself, will not exert a harmful influence upon the human being.

To all of this the following must be added: it is necessary for human beings to prepare themselves by not taking realities for illusions, really entering into a spiritual conception of the world, into a spiritual comprehension of the world. What is important is to see things as they are. One can only see things as they are, however, when one is in the position of applying to reality the concepts, the ideas, that emerge from an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. The dead will actively participate for the remainder of earthly existence. How they will participate is what matters. Here, above all, the great distinction will appear. Through man's conduct on earth, the participation of the dead will be guided from a good direction in such a way that the impulses of the dead to work will be able to originate from themselves, impulses taken from the spiritual world that the dead are experiencing after death.

Opposing this will be many endeavors to lead the dead in an artificial way into human existence. By the circuitous route through Gemini, the dead will be led into human life in such a way that human vibrations will reverberate in a definite way, will continue to vibrate within the mechanical performance of the machine. The cosmos will bring motion to the machines through the circuitous route that I have just indicated.

For that reason, it is important that nothing inappropriate be applied when these problems appear; only elementary forces that are part of nature should be applied. One will have to renounce introducing inappropriate forces into mechanical life. From the occult sphere one must refuse to harness human beings themselves into mechanical factory work, a practice through which the Darwinian theory of selection is used for the determination of the work force, as I presented to you as an example last time.

I make all these suggestions, which naturally cannot exhaust the subject in such a short time, because I think that you will meditate further upon these things, that you will seek to build a bridge between your own life experiences and these things, above all those life experiences that can be won today in these difficult times. You will see how many things will become clear to you when you observe them in the light that can come to you through such ideas. In our time, we are not really concerned with forces and constellations of forces confronting one another, the sorts of things about which one is constantly speaking in outer, exoteric life, but with entirely different things. Some intend actually to cast a kind of veil over the true impulses that are involved. There are bound to be certain human forces at work to save something for themselves. What is there to be saved? Certain human forces are at work to defend impulses that were justified until the French Revolution and were even defended by certain esoteric schools; they are being defended now in the form of an Ahrimanic/Luciferic retardation, being defended so as to maintain a social order that humanity believes has been overcome since the end of the eighteenth century.

There are mainly two powers that stand in opposition to each other: the representatives of the principle that was overcome at the end of the eighteenth century and the representatives of the new age. It is quite clear that a large number of people instinctively are representatives of the impulses of the new era. The representatives of the old impulses—still of the eighteenth, seventeenth, sixteenth centuries—must therefore be harnessed to these forces by artificial means, to forces emanating from certain group-egotistical brotherhoods. The most effective principle in the new age to extend power over as many people as one needs is the economic principle, the principle of economic dependency. That is only the tool, however. What is involved here is something entirely different. What is involved is something that you can deduce from all my suggestions. The economic principle is bound up with all that is involved in making a large number of human beings from all over the earth into an army for these principles.

These are the things that oppose each other. The one points essentially to what is fighting at present in the world: in the West, a rigid, ironclad principle of the eighteenth, seventeenth, sixteenth centuries, which makes itself noticeable by clothing itself in the phrases of revolution, the phrases of democracy, a principle that assumes a mask and has the urge to gain in this way as much power as possible. It helps this endeavor when as few people as possible exert themselves to see things as they are, when they allow themselves to be lulled to sleep again and again in this realm by maya, by the maya that one can express with these words: there is a war today between the Entente and the Central Powers. There is nothing at all like this in reality. We are concerned here with entirely different things that exist behind this maya as the true realities. The struggle between the Entente and the Central Powers is only maya, is only illusion. One can see what stands side by side in the struggle if one looks behind these things, illuminating them in the way that I, for certain reasons, have only suggested. One must at least endeavor not to accept illusions for realities, because then the illusion will gradually dissolve, in so far as it must be dissolved. One must endeavor today above all to consider the things as they present themselves to truly unprejudiced thinking.

If you consider in a coherent way all that I have developed here, then a seemingly incidental remark that I made in the course of these lectures will not seem to you to be merely incidental. When I quoted a certain remark that Mephistopheles made in confronting Faust, “I see that you know the devil”—he would definitely not have said this about Woodrow Wilson—it was no incidental remark. It is something that should illuminate the situation! One must really study these things without antipathy and sympathy; one must be able to study them objectively. One must be able above all to reflect today about the significance of constellations in something that is at work and the significance of individual strength, because behind individual strength often lies something completely different from what lies behind the mere constellation. Think for a moment upon the problem, “How much would Woodrow Wilson's brain be worth if this brain were not sitting in the Presidential chair of the United States?” Assume that this brain were in a different constellation: there it would show its individual strength! It all depends upon the constellation.

I will now speak abstractly and radically—I will not, of course, characterize the aforementioned case; it would never occur to me to do that in such a neutral country—but independent of that there is a very important insight in relation to the question, for example, about the brain. Does it have value because it is actually illuminated and made active by a particular spiritual soul force—does it thereby have a spiritual weight in the sense that I have spoken in these studies of spiritual weight—or does this brain actually have no more value than would show if one laid it on a scale and on the other side placed a weight? In the moment in which one penetrates beyond the mysteries I presented to you last time concerning the double, one arrives at the point (and I am not speaking of something unreal) of bringing value to the brain, which before had value only as a mass on the scale, because one is capable, if the brain is to be revived, of allowing it to be revived merely by the double.

All these things strike human beings today as being grotesque. What seems to them grotesque, however, must come to be something self-evident if these things are to flow into a healthy stream from an unhealthy one. And what use is it if one only chatters about them constantly? You must accept the idea that all this wishy-washy talk about “cosmic religiosity” or “the extent of the longing for it” or “the movement that undertakes to discover and unveil the circulation of life behind the senses,” and so on, does nothing but spread a fog over things that must come into the world only in clarity. They can be effective only in clarity, and they must be carried in clarity above all as practical, moral-ethical impulses in humanity.

I can only make single suggestions. I leave it to your own meditation to build on these realms further. These things are in many respects aphoristic, but you will have the possibility of gathering a great deal from such a summary as this picture of the Zodiac if you truly use it as the substance of meditation.

Today I want to bring up a theme which may seem somewhat remote, but it will be important for the further development of subjects we are studying. We have been able to gather together many essential details for a knowledge of the human being. On the one side, we are gradually discovering its place in the life of the cosmos, and on the other, its place in the social life. But it will be necessary today to consider certain matters which make for a better understanding of the human being and nature.

When the human being is studied by modern scientific thinking, generally only one part of the being is taken into consideration. No account whatever is taken of the fact that in addition to the physical body, there are also higher members. We will leave this aside today and consider something that is more or less recognized in science and has also made its way into the general consciousness.

In studying the human being, only those elements which can be pictured as solid, or solid-fluidic, are regarded as belonging to his organism. It is, of course, acknowledged that the fluid and the airy elements pass into and out of the human being, but these are not in themselves considered to be integral members of the organism. The warmth of the organism which is greater than that of the environment is regarded as a state or condition of the organism, but not as an actual component. We shall see what I mean by saying this. I have already drawn attention to the fact that when we study the rising and falling of the cerebral fluid through the spinal canal, we can observe a regular up-and-down oscillatory movement caused by inhalation and exhalation; when we breathe in, the cerebral fluid is driven upwards and strikes, as it were, against the brain; when we breathe out, the fluid descends. These processes in the purely liquid components of the human organism are not considered to be part and parcel of the organism itself. The general idea is that, as a physical structure, the human organism consists of the more or less solid, or at most, solid-fluid substances found in it. It is generally pictured as a structure built up from these more or less solid substances (Illustration I).

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The other elements, the fluid element, as I have shown by the example of the cerebral fluid, and the airy element, are not regarded by anatomy and physiology as belonging to the human organism as such. It is said: Yes, the human being draws in the air which follows certain paths in his body and also has certain definite functions. The air is breathed out again.—Then people speak of the warmth-condition of the body, but in reality they regard the solid element as the only organizing factor and do not realize that in addition to this solid structure they should also see the whole organism as a column of fluid (blue), as being permeated with air (red) and as having a definite degree of warmth (yellow).(Illustration II) More exact study shows that just as the solid or solid-fluid constituents are an integral component of the organism, so the fluid should not be thought of as so much uniform fluid, but differentiated and organized—though the process here is a more fluctuating one—and having its own particular significance.

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In addition to the solid components, therefore, we must bear in mind the 'fluid' and also the 'air'. For the air that is within us, in regard to its organization and its differentiations, is an organism in the same sense as the solid organism, only it is gaseous, airy, and in motion. And finally, the warmth in us is not a uniform warmth extending over the whole human being, but is also delicately organized. As soon, however, as we begin to speak of the fluid organism which fills the same space that is occupied by the solid organism, we realize immediately that we cannot speak of this fluid organism in the earthly human without speaking of the etheric body which permeates this fluid organism and fills it with forces. The physical organism exists for itself, as it were; it is the physical body; in so far as we consider it in its entirety, we regard it, to begin with, as a solid organism. (blue) This is the physical body.

We then come to consider the fluid organism, which cannot, of course, be investigated in the same way as the solid organism, by dissection, but which must be conceived as an inwardly mobile, fluidic organism. It cannot be studied unless we think of it as permeated by the etheric body.

Third, there is the airy organism which again cannot be studied unless we think of it as permeated with forces by the astral body.

Fourth, there is the warmth organism with all its inner differentiation. It is permeated by the forces of the Ego.—That is how the human as earthly being today is constituted.

Physical organism: Physical body

Regarded in a different way

1) Solid organism	Physical body
2) Fluid organism	Etheric body
3) Airy organism	Astral body
4) Warmth organism	Ego

Let us think, for example, of the blood. Inasmuch as it is mainly fluid, inasmuch as this blood belongs to the fluid organism, we find in the blood the etheric body which permeates it with its forces. But in the blood there is also present what is generally called the warmth-condition. But that ‘organism’ is by no means identical with the organism of the fluid blood as such. If we were to investigate this—it can also be done with physical methods of investigation—we would find in registering the warmth in the different parts of the human organism that the warmth cannot be identified with the fluid or with any other organism.

As soon as we reflect in this way we find that it is impossible for our thought to come to a standstill within the limits of the human organism itself. We can remain within these limits only if we are thinking merely of the solid organism which is shut off by the skin from the outside. Even this, however, is only apparently so. The solid structure is generally regarded as if it were a firm, self-enclosed block; but it is also inwardly differentiated and is related in manifold ways to the solid earth as a whole. This is obvious from the fact that the different solid substances have, for example, different weights; this alone shows that the solids within the human organism are differentiated, have different specific weights. In regard to the physical organism, therefore, the human being is related to the earth as a whole. Nevertheless it is possible, according at least to external evidence, to place spatial limits around the physical organism.

It is different when we come to the second, the fluid organism that is permeated by the etheric body. This fluid organism cannot be strictly demarcated from the environment. Whatever is fluid in any area of space adjoins the fluid element in the environment. Although the fluid element as such is present in the world outside us in a rarefied state, we cannot make such a definite demarcation between the fluid element within and the fluid element outside the human organism, as in the case of the solid organism. The boundary between the inner fluid organism and the fluid element in the external world must therefore be left indefinite.

This is even more emphatically the case when we come to consider the airy organism which is permeated by the forces of the astral body. The air within us at a certain moment was outside us a moment before, and it will soon be outside again. We are drawing in and giving out the airy element all the time. We can really think of the air which surrounds our earth, and say: it penetrates into our organism and withdraws again; but by penetrating into our organism it becomes an integral part of it. In our airy organism we actually have something that constantly builds itself up out of the whole atmosphere and then withdraws again into the atmosphere. Whenever we breathe in, something is built up within us, or, at the very least, each indrawn breath causes a change, a modification, in an upbuilding process within us. Similarly, a destructive, partially destructive, process takes place whenever we breathe out. Our airy organism undergoes a certain change with every indrawn breath; it is not exactly newly born, but it undergoes a change, both when we breathe in and when we breathe out. When we breathe out, the airy organism does not, of course, die; it merely undergoes a change; but there is constant interaction between the airy organism within us and the air outside. The usual trivial conceptions of the human organism can only be due to the failure to realize that there is but a slight degree of difference between the airy organism and the solid organism.

And now we come to the warmth organism. It is of course quite in keeping with materialistic-mechanistic thought to study only the solid organism and to ignore the fluid organism, the airy organism, and the warmth organism. But no real knowledge of the human organism can be acquired unless we are willing to acknowledge this membering into a warmth organism, an airy organism, a fluid organism, and an earth organism (solid).

The warmth organism is paramountly the field of the Ego. The Ego itself is that spirit-organization which imbues with its own forces the warmth that is within us, and governs and gives it configuration, not only externally but also inwardly. We cannot understand the life and activity of the soul unless we remember that the Ego works directly upon the warmth. It is primarily the Ego in man which activates the will, generates impulses of will.—How does the Ego generate impulses of will? From a different point of view we have spoken of how impulses of will are connected with the earthly sphere, in contrast to the impulses of thought and ideation which are connected with forces outside and beyond the earthly sphere. But how does the Ego, which holds together the impulses of will, send these impulses into the organism? This is achieved through the fact that the will works primarily in the warmth organism. An impulse of will proceeding from the Ego works upon the warmth organism. Under present earthly conditions it is not possible for what I shall now describe to you to be there as a concrete reality. Nevertheless it can be envisaged if we disregard the physical organization within the space bounded by the human skin, if we disregard also the fluid organism, and the airy organism. The space then remains filled with nothing but warmth which is, of course, in communication with the warmth outside. But what is active in this warmth, what stirs it into movement, makes it into an organism—is the Ego.

The astral body contains the forces of feeling; it brings these forces of feeling into physical operation in the human airy organism.

The constitution of the human as earthly being is such that, by way of the warmth organism, the Ego gives rise to what comes to expression when we act in the world as a being of will. The feelings experienced in the astral body and coming to expression in the earthly organization manifest in the airy organism. And when we come to the etheric body, we find within it the conceptual process, insofar as this has a pictorial character—more strongly pictorial than we are consciously aware of to begin with, for the physical body still intrudes and tones down the pictures into mental concepts. This process works upon the fluid organism.

This shows us that by taking these different organisms into account we come nearer to the life of soul. Materialistic observation, which stops short at the solid structure and insists that in the very nature of things water cannot become an organism, is bound to confront the life of soul with complete lack of understanding; for it is precisely in these other organisms that the life of soul comes to immediate expression. The solid organism itself is, in reality, only that which provides support for the other organisms. The solid organism stands there as a supporting structure composed of bones, muscles, and so forth. Into this supporting structure is membered the fluid organism with its own inner differentiation and configuration; in this fluid organism vibrates the etheric body, and within this fluid organism the thoughts are produced.

How are the thoughts produced? Through the fact that within the fluid organism something asserts itself in a particular metamorphosis—namely, what we know in the external world as tone. Tone is, in reality, something that leads the ordinary mode of observation very much astray. As earthly human beings we perceive the tone as being borne to us by the air. But in point of fact the air is only the transmitter of the tone, which actually weaves in the air. And anyone who assumes that the tone in its essence is merely a matter of air-vibrations is like a person who says: Man has only his physical organism, and there is no soul in it. If the air-vibrations are thought to constitute the essence of the tone, whereas they are in truth merely its external expression, this is the same as seeing only the physical organism with no soul in it. The tone which lives in the air is essentially an etheric reality. And the tone we hear by way of the air arises through the fact that the air is permeated by the Tone Ether (see diagram III) which is the same as the Chemical Ether. In permeating the air, this Chemical Ether imparts what lives within it to the air, and we become aware of what we call the tone.

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This Tone Ether or Chemical Ether is essentially active in our fluid organism. We can therefore make the following distinction: In our fluid organism lives our own etheric body; but in addition there penetrates into it (the fluid organism) from every direction the Tone Ether which underlies the tone. Please distinguish carefully here. We have within us our etheric body; it works and is active by giving rise to thoughts in our fluid organism. But what may be called the Chemical Ether continually streams in and out of our fluid organism. Thus we have an etheric organism complete in itself, consisting of Chemical Ether, Warmth Ether, Light Ether, Life Ether, and in addition we find in it, in a very special sense, the Chemical Ether which streams in and out by way of the fluid organism.

The astral body which comes to expression in feeling operates through the air organism. But—still another kind of Ether by which the air is permeated is connected especially with the air organism. It is the Light Ether. Earlier conceptions of the world always emphasized this affinity of the outspreading physical air with the Light Ether which permeates it. This Light Ether that is borne, as it were, by the air and is related to the air even more intimately than tone, also penetrates into our air organism and it underlies what there passes into and out of it. Thus we have our astral body which is the bearer of feeling, which is especially active in the air organism, and is in constant contact there with the Light Ether.

And now we come to the Ego. This human Ego, which by way of the will is active in the warmth organism, is again connected with the outer warmth, with the instreaming and outstreaming Warmth Ether.

Thus we obtain the following relations:

Ego—Will—Warmth organism—Warmth Ether.
Astral body—Feeling—Air Organism—Light Ether.
Etheric body—Thinking—Fluid Organism—Chemical Ether.

Now consider the following. The etheric body remains in us also during sleep, from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking; therefore the interworking of the Chemical Ether and the etheric body continues within our being, via the fluid organism, also while we are asleep. It is different in the case of the astral body and feeling. From the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking, the astral body is outside the human organism; then the astral body and feeling do not then work upon the air organism, but the air organism—connected as it is with the whole surrounding world—is sustained from outside during sleep. And the human being, with astral body and feeling, goes out of the body and passes into a world with which it is related primarily through the Light Ether. While asleep we live directly in an element that is transmitted to our astral body by the air organism during waking life. We can speak in a similar way of the Ego and the warmth organism.

It is obvious from this that an understanding of our connection with the surrounding universe is possible only as the result of thorough study of these members of being, of which ordinary, mechanistic thinking takes no account at all. But everything in us interpenetrates, and because the Ego is in the warmth organism it also permeates the air organism, the fluid organism, and the solid organism; it permeates them with the warmth which is all-pervading. Thus the warmth organism lives within the air organism; the warmth organism, permeated as it is with the forces of the Ego, also works in the fluid organism.

This indicates how, for example, we should look for the way in which the Ego works in the circulating blood. It works in the circulating blood by way of the warmth organism—works as the spiritual entity which, as it were, sends down the will out of the warmth, via the air, into the fluid organism. Thus everything in the human organism works upon everything else. But we will get nowhere if we have only general abstract ideas of this interpenetration; we will reach a result only if we can evolve a concrete idea of our constitution and of how everything that is around us participates in our make-up.

The condition of sleep, too, can be understood only if we go much more closely into these matters. During sleep it is only the physical body and the etheric body that remain as they are during the waking state; the Ego and the astral body are outside. But in the sleeping human being the forces that are within the physical and etheric bodies are then also active on the airy organism and the warmth organism as well.

When we turn to consider waking life, from what has been said we shall understand the connection of the Ego with the astral body and with the whole organism. During sleep, when the Ego and the astral body are outside, the four elements are nevertheless within the human organism: the solid supporting structure, the fluid organism, but also the air organism in which the astral body otherwise works, and the warmth organism in which the Ego otherwise works. These elements are within the human organism and they work in just as regularly organized a way during sleep as during the waking state, when the Ego and the astral body are active within them.

During the sleeping state we have within us, instead of the Ego—which is now outside—the spirit which permeates the cosmos and which in waking life we have driven out through our Ego which is part of that spirit. During sleep our warmth-body is permeated by cosmic spirituality, our air organism by what may be called cosmic astrality (or world-soul), which we also drive out while we are awake.

Waking life and sleeping life may therefore also be studied from this point of view. When we are asleep our warmth organism is permeated by the cosmic spirituality which on waking we drive out through our Ego, for in waking life it is the Ego that brings about in the warmth organism what is otherwise brought about by the cosmic spirituality. It is the same with the cosmic astrality; we drive it out when we wake up and readmit it into our organism when we fall asleep. Thus we can say: By leaving our body during sleep, we allow the cosmic spirit to draw into our warmth organism, and the world-soul, or the cosmic astrality, into our airy organism.

If we study the human being without preconceived ideas, we acquire understanding not only of our relation to the surrounding physical world, but also of our relation to the cosmic spirituality and to the cosmic astrality.

This is one aspect of the subject. We can now consider it also from the aspect of knowledge, of cognition, and you will see how the two aspects tally with each other. It is customary to call 'knowledge' only what one experiences through perception and the intellectual elaboration of perceptions from the moment of waking to that of falling asleep. But thereby we come to know our physical environment only. If we adhere to the principles of spiritual-scientific thinking and do not indulge in fantasy, we shall not, of course, regard the pictures of dream-life as immediate realities in themselves, neither shall we seek in dreams for knowledge as we seek it in waking mental activity and perception. Nevertheless at a certain lower level, dreaming is a form of knowledge. It is a particular form of physical self-knowledge. Roughly, it can be obvious that a man has been 'dreaming' inner conditions when, let us say, he wakes up with the dream of having endured the heat of an intensely hot stove and then, on waking, finds that he is feverish or is suffering from some kind of inflammatory condition. In other ways too, dreams assume definite configuration. Another person may dream of coiling snakes when something is out of order in the intestines; or she may dream of caves into which she is obliged to creep, and then wakes up with a headache, and so on. Obscurely and dimly, dreams point to our inner organic life, and we can certainly speak of a kind of lower knowledge as being present in dreams. There is merely an enhancement of this when the dreams of particularly sensitive people present very exact reflections of the organism.

It is generally believed that deep, dreamless sleep contributes nothing at all in the way of knowledge, that dreamless sleep is quite worthless as far as knowledge is concerned. But this is not the case. Dreamless sleep has its definite task to perform for knowledge—knowledge that has an individualpersonal bearing. If we did not sleep, if our life were not continually interrupted by periods of sleep, we would be incapable of reaching a clear concept of the ‘I’, the Ego; we could have no clear realization of our identity. We would experience nothing except the world outside and lose ourselves entirely in it. Insufficient attention is paid to this, because people are not in the habit of thinking in a really unprejudiced way about what is experienced in the life of soul and in the bodily life.

We look back over our life, at the series of images of our experiences to the point to which memory extends. But this whole stream of remembrances is interrupted every night by sleep. In the backward survey of our life the intervals of sleep are ignored. It does not occur to us that the stream of memories is ever and again interrupted by periods of sleep. The fact that it is so interrupted means that, without being conscious of it, we look into a void, a nothingness, as well as into a sphere that is filled with content.

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If here we have a white sphere with a black area in the middle, we see the white and in the middle the black, which, compared with the white, is a void, a nothingness. (This is not absolutely accurate but we need not think of that at the moment.) We see the black area, we see that in the white sphere something has been left free, but this is equally a positive impression although not identical with the impressions of the white sphere. The black area also gives a positive impression. In the same way the experience is a positive one when we are looking back over our life and nothing flows into this retrospective survey from the periods of sleep. What we slept through is actually included in the retrospective survey, although we are not directly conscious of it because consciousness is focused entirely on the pictures left by waking life. But this consciousness is inwardly strengthened through the fact that in the field of retrospective vision there are also empty places; this constitutes the source of our consciousness insofar as it is inward consciousness. We would lose ourselves entirely in the external world if we were always awake, if this waking state were not continually interrupted by sleep. But whereas dream-filled sleep mirrors back to us in chaotic pictures certain fragments of our inner, organic conditions, dreamless sleep imparts to us the consciousness of our organization as human—again, therefore, knowledge. Through waking consciousness we perceive the external world. Through dreams we perceive—but dimly and without firm definition—fragments of our inner, organic conditions. Through dreamless sleep we come to know our organization in its totality, although dimly and obscurely. Thus we have already considered three stages of knowledge: dreamless sleep, dream-filled sleep, the waking state.

Then we come to the three higher forms of knowledge: Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition. These are the stages which lie above ordinary waking consciousness and as states of consciousness become ever clearer, yielding more and more data of knowledge; whereas below the ordinary consciousness we come to those chaotic fragments of knowledge which are nevertheless necessary for ordinary forms of experience.

This is how we must think of the field of consciousness. We should not speak of having only the ordinary waking consciousness any more than we should speak of having only the familiar solid organism. We must speak to the effect that the solid organism is something that exists within a clearly demarcated space, so that if we think in an entirely materialistic way, we shall take this to be the human organism itself. We must remember that ordinary consciousness is actually present, that its ideas and mental pictures come to us in definite outlines. But we should neither think that we have the solid body only, nor that we have this day-consciousness only. For the solid body is permeated by the fluid body which has an inwardly fluctuating organization, and again the clear day-consciousness is permeated by the dream-consciousness, yielding pictures which have no sharp outlines but fluctuating outlines, for consciousness here itself becomes 'fluid' in a certain sense. And as well as the fluid organism we have the air organism, which during the sleeping state is sustained by something that is not ourselves, and hence is not entirely, but only partially and transiently, connected with our own life of soul—namely in waking life only; nevertheless we have it within us as an actual organism.

We have also a third state of consciousness, the dark consciousness of dreamless sleep, in which ideas and thought-pictures become not only hazy but dulled to the degree of inner darkness; in dreamless sleep we cease altogether to experience consciousness itself, just as under certain circumstances, while we are asleep, we cease to experience the airy body.

So you see, no matter whether we study the human being from the inner or the outer aspect, we reach an ever fuller and wider conception of its nature, and constitution. Passing from the solid body to the fluid body to the air body to the warmth body, we come to the life of soul. Passing from the clear day-consciousness to the dream-consciousness, we come to the body. And we come to the body in a still deeper sense through the knowledge of being within it through dreamless sleep. When we carry the waking consciousness right down into the consciousness of dreamless sleep and observe the human being in the members of its consciousness, we come to the bodily constitution. When we consider the bodily constitution itself, from its solid state up to its warmth-state, we pass out of the bodily constitution.

This shows you how necessary it is not simply to accept what is presented to biased, external observation. There, on the one side, is the solid body, to which materialistic-mechanistic thought is anchored; and on the other side there is the life of soul which to modern consciousness appears endowed with content only in the form of experiences belonging to the clear day-consciousness. Thought based on external observation alone does not go downwards from this state of consciousness. (See diagram I: Ego), for if it did it would come to the body. It does not go downwards from the spiritual body (warmth-body), for if it did it would be led to the solid body. This kind of thinking studies the solid body without either the fluid body, the air body or the warmth body, and the day-consciousness without that which in reality reflects the inner bodily nature—without the dream-consciousness and the consciousness of dreamless sleep.

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On the basis of academic psychology, the question is asked: How does the soul and spirit live in the physical body?—In reality we have the solid body, the fluid body, the air body and the warmth body. (Diagram V.) By way of the warmth body the Ego unfolds the clear day-consciousness. But coming downwards we have the dream-consciousness, and still farther downwards the consciousness of dreamless sleep. Descending even farther (diagram V, horizontal shading), we come—as you know from the book Occult Science—to still another state of consciousness which we need not consider now. If we ask how what is here on the right (diagram V) is related to what is on the left, we shall find that they harmonize, for here (arrow at left side), ascending from below upwards, we come to the soul-realm; and here (arrow at right side) we come to the bodily constitution: the right and the left harmonize.

The externalized thinking of today takes account only of the solid body, and again only of this state of consciousness (Ego). The Ego hovers in the clouds and the solid body stands on the ground—and no relation is found between the two. If you read the literature of modern psychology you will find the most incredible hypotheses of how the soul works upon the body. But this is all due to the fact that only one part of the warmth body is taken into account, and then something that is entirely separated from it—one part of the soul. (Diagram VI, oblique shading.)

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That Spiritual Science aims everywhere for wholeness of view, that it must build the bridge between the bodily constitution on the one side and the life of soul on the other, that it draws attention to states of being where the soul element becomes a bodily element, the bodily element a soul element—all this riles our contemporaries, who insist upon not going beyond what presents itself to external, prejudiced contemplation.

I tried yesterday to give certain indications about the constitution of the human being, and at the end it was possible to show that a really penetrating study of human nature is able to build a bridge between the external constitution, and what it unfolds through self-consciousness, and the inner life. As a rule no such bridge is built, or only very inadequately built, particularly in the science current today. It became clear to us that in order to build this bridge we must know how the human constitution is to be regarded. We saw that the solid or solid-fluid organism—which is the sole object of study today and is alone recognized by modern science as organic in the real sense—we saw that this must be regarded as only one of the organisms in the human constitution; that the existence of a fluid organism, an airy organism, and a warmth organism must also be recognized. Naturally, up to the warmth organism itself, everything is to be conceived as physical body. But it is paramountly the etheric body that takes hold of the fluid body, of everything that is fluid in the human organism; in everything airy, the astral body is paramountly active, and in the warmth organism, the Ego. By recognizing this we can, as it were, remain in the physical but at the same time reach up to the spiritual.

We also studied consciousness at its different levels. As I said yesterday, it is usual to take account only of the consciousness known to us in waking life from the moment of waking to the moment of falling asleep. We perceive the objects around us and reason about these perceptions with our intellect; we also have feelings in connection with these perceptions, and we have our will impulses. But we experience this whole nexus of consciousness as something which, in its qualities, differs completely from the physical which alone is taken account of by ordinary science.

It is not possible, without further ado, to build a bridge from these imponderable, incorporeal experiences in the domain of consciousness to the other objects of perception studied in physiology or physical anatomy. In regard to consciousness too, we know from ordinary life that in addition to the waking consciousness, there is dream consciousness, and we heard yesterday that dreams are essentially pictures or symbols of inner organic processes. Something is going on within us all the time, and in our dreams it comes to expression in pictures. I said that we may dream of coiling snakes when we have some intestinal disorder, or we may dream of an excessively hot stove and wake up with palpitations of the heart. The overheated stove symbolized irregular beating of the heart, the snakes symbolized the intestines, and so forth. Dreams point us to our organism. The consciousness of dreamless sleep is, as it were, an experience of nullity, of the void. But I explained that this experience of the void is necessary in order that we feel ourselves connected with our bodily nature. As an Ego we would feel no connection with our body if we did not leave it during sleep and seek for it again on waking. It is through the deprivation undergone between falling asleep and waking that we are able to feel ourselves united with the body. So from the ordinary consciousness which has really nothing to do with our own essential being beyond the fact that it enables us to have perceptions and ideas, we are led to the dream-consciousness which has to do with actual bodily processes. We are therefore led to the body. We are led to the body even more strongly when we pass into the consciousness of dreamless sleep.

Thus we can say: On the one hand our conception of the life of soul is such that it leads us to the body. And our conception of the bodily constitution, comprising as it does the fluid organism, the airy organism, the warmth organism and thus becoming by degrees more rarefied, leads us to the realm of soul. It is absolutely necessary to take these things into consideration if we are to reach a view of the world that can really satisfy us.

The great question with which we have been concerning ourselves for weeks, the cardinal question in one's conception of the world, is this: How is the moral world order connected with the physical world order? As has been said so often, the prevailing world view—which relies entirely upon natural science for knowledge of the outer physical world—can only resort to earlier religious beliefs when it is a matter of any comprehensive understanding of the life of soul. In modern psychology there really is no longer any such understanding—this world view is unable to build a bridge. There, on the one side, is the physical world; according to contemporary views this is a conglomeration from a primeval nebula and everything will eventually become a kind of slag heap in the universe. This is the picture of the evolutionary process presented to us by the science of today, and it is the one and only picture in which a really honest modern scientist can find reality.

Within this picture there is no room for a moral world order. It is there on its own. One receives the moral impulses into oneself as impulses of soul. But if the assertions of natural science are true, that first everything was astir with life, then finally the human being emerged out of the primeval nebula and only then the moral ideals well up within. And when, as is alleged, the world becomes a slag heap, this will also be the graveyard of all moral ideals. They will have vanished.—No bridge can possibly be built, and what is worse, modern science cannot, without being inconsistent, admit the existence of morality in the world order. Only if modern science is inconsistent can it accept the moral world order as valid. It cannot do so if it is consistent. The root of all this is that the only kind of anatomy in existence is concerned exclusively with the solid organism and no account is taken of the fact that the human being also has a fluid organism, an airy organism, and a warmth organism. If you picture to yourselves that as well as the solid organism with its configuration into bones, muscles, nerve fibers and so forth, you also have a fluid organism and an airy organism—though these are of course fluctuating and inwardly mobile—and a warmth organism, if you picture this you will more easily understand what I shall now have to say on the basis of spiritual-scientific observation.

Think of a person whose soul is fired with enthusiasm for a high moral ideal, for the ideal of generosity, of freedom, of goodness, of love, or whatever it may be. That person may also feel enthusiasm for examples of the practical expression of these ideals. But nobody can conceive that the enthusiasm which fires the soul penetrates into the bones and muscles as described by modern physiology or anatomy. If you really take counsel with yourself, however, you will find it quite possible to conceive that when one has enthusiasm for a high moral ideal, this enthusiasm has an effect upon the warmth organism.—There, you see, we have come from the realm of soul into the physical!

Taking this as an example, we may say: Moral ideals come to expression in an enhancement of warmth in the warmth organism. Not only is one warmed in soul through what is experienced in the way of moral ideals, but one becomes organically warmer as well—though this is not so easy to prove with physical instruments. Moral ideals, then, have a stimulating, invigorating effect upon the warmth organism. You must think of this as a real and concrete happening: enthusiasm for a moral ideal—stimulation of the warmth organism. There is more vigorous activity in the warmth organism when the soul is fired by a moral ideal.

Neither does this remain without effect upon the rest of one's constitution. As well as the warmth organism there is also the air organism. We inhale and exhale the air; but during the inbreathing and outbreathing process the air is within us. It is of course inwardly in movement, in fluctuation, but equally with the warmth organism it is an actual air organism in us. Warmth, quickened by a moral ideal, works in turn upon the air organism, because warmth permeates the whole human organism, permeates every part of it. The effect upon the air organism is not that of warming only, for when the warmth, stimulated in the warmth organism, works upon the air organism, it imparts to it something that I can only call a source of light. Sources of light, as it were, are imparted to the air organism, so that moral ideals which have a stimulating effect upon the warmth organism produce sources of light in the air organism. To external perception and for ordinary consciousness these sources of light are not in themselves luminous, but they manifest in the astral body. To begin with, they are curbed—if I may use this expression—through the air that is within us. They are, so to speak, still dark light, in the sense that the seed of a plant is not yet the developed plant. Nevertheless we have a source of light within us through the fact that we can be fired with enthusiasm for moral ideals, for moral impulses.

We also have within us the fluid organism. Warmth, stimulated in the warmth organism by moral ideals, produces in the air organism what may be called a source of light which remains, to begin with, curbed and hidden. Within the fluid organism—because everything in the human constitution interpenetrates—a process takes place which underlies the outer tone conveyed in the air. I said that the air is only the body of the tone, and anyone who regards the essential reality of tone as a matter of vibrations of the air, speaks of tones just as he would speak of a person as having nothing except the outwardly visible physical body. The air with its vibrating waves is nothing but the outer body of the tone. In the human being this tone, this spiritual tone, is not produced in the air organism through the moral ideal, but in the fluid organism. The sources of tone, therefore, arise in the fluid organism.

We regard the solid organism as the densest of all, as the one that supports and bears all the others. Within it, too, something is produced as in the case of the other organisms. In the solid organism there is produced what we call a seed of life—but it is an etheric, not a physical, seed of life such as issues from the female organism at a birth. This etheric seed which lies in the deepest levels of subconsciousness is actually the primal source of tone and, in a certain sense, even the source of light. This is entirely hidden from ordinary consciousness, but it is there within us.

Think of all the experiences in your life that came from aspiration for moral ideas—be it that they attracted you merely as ideas, or that you saw them coming to expression in others, or that you felt inwardly satisfied by having put such impulses into practice, by letting your deeds be fired by moral ideals—all this goes down into the air organism as a source of light, into the fluid organism as a source of tone, into the solid organism as a source of life.

These processes are withdrawn from the field of our normal consciousness but they are active nevertheless. They become free when we lay aside our physical body at death. What is thus produced in us through moral ideals, or through the loftiest and purest ideas, does not bear immediate fruit. For during the life between birth and death, moral ideas as such become fruitful only insofar as we remain in the life of ideas, and insofar as we feel a certain satisfaction in moral deeds performed. But this is merely a matter of remembrance, and has nothing to do with what actually penetrates down into the different organisms as the result of enthusiasm for moral ideals.

So we see that our whole constitution, beginning with the warmth organism, is, as a matter of fact, permeated by moral ideals. And when at death the etheric body, the astral body, and the Ego emerge from the physical body, these higher members of our human nature are filled with all the impressions we have had. Our Ego was living in the warmth organism when it was quickened by moral ideas. We were living in our air organism, into which were implanted sources of light which now, after death, go forth into the cosmos together with us. In our fluid organism, tone was kindled which now becomes part of the Music of the Spheres, resounding from us into the cosmos. And we bring life with us when we pass out into the cosmos through the portal of death.

You will now begin to have an inkling of what the life that permeates the universe really is. Where are the sources of life? They lie in that which quickens those moral ideals which fire us with enthusiasm. We come to the point of saying to ourselves that if today we allow ourselves to be inspired by moral ideals, these will carry forth life, tone and light into the universe and will become world-creative. We carry out into the universe world-creative power, and the source of this power is the moral element.

So when we study the whole human being we find a bridge between moral ideals and what works as life-giving force in the physical world, even in the chemical sense. For tone works in the chemical sense by assembling substances and dispersing them again. Light in the world has its source in the moral stimuli, in the warmth organisms of human beings. Thus we look into the future—new worlds take shape. And as in the case of the plant we must go back to the seed, so in the case of these future worlds that will come into being, we must go back to the seeds which lie in us as moral ideals.

And now think of theoretical ideas in contrast to moral ideals. In the case of theoretical ideas everything is different, no matter how significant these ideas may be, for theoretical ideas produce the very opposite effect to that of moral ideals They cool down the warmth organism—that is the difference.

Moral ideas, or ideas of a moral-religious character, which fire us with enthusiasm and become impulses for deeds, work as world-creative powers. Theoretical ideas and speculations have a cooling, subduing effect upon the warmth organism. Because this is so, they also have a paralyzing effect upon the air organism and upon the source of light within it; they have a deadening effect upon tone, and an extinguishing effect upon life. In our theoretical ideas the creations of the pre-existing world come to their end. When we formulate theoretical ideas a universe dies in them. Thus do we bear within us the death of a universe and the dawn of a universe.

Here we come to the point where he who is initiated into the secrets of the universe cannot speak, as so many speak today, of the conservation of energy or the conservation of matter. It is simply not true that matter is conserved forever.[1] Matter dies to the point of nullity, to a zero-point. In our own organism, energy dies to the point of nullity through the fact that we formulate theoretical thoughts. But if we did not do so, if the universe did not continually die in us, we should not be human in the true sense. Because the universe dies in us, we are endowed with self-consciousness and are able to think about the universe. But these thoughts are the corpse of the universe. We become conscious of the universe as a corpse only, and it is this that makes us human.

A past world dies within us, down to its very matter and energy. It is only because a new universe at once begins to dawn that we do not notice this dying of matter and its immediate rebirth. Through our theoretical thinking, matter—substantiality—is brought to its end; through our pictorial thinking, matter and cosmic energy are imbued with new life. Thus what goes on inside the boundary of the human skin is connected with the dying and birthing of worlds. This is how the moral order and the natural order are connected. The natural world dies away in man; in the realm of the moral a new natural world comes to birth.

Moral Ideals

stimulate the warmth organism.
producing in the air organism—sources of Light.
producing in the fluid organism—sources of Tone.
producing in the solid organism—seeds of Life. (etheric)

Theoretical thoughts

cool down the warmth organism.
paralyze the sources of Light.
deaden the sources of Tone.
extinguish Life.

Because of unwillingness to consider these things, the ideas of the imperishability of matter and energy were invented. If energy were imperishable and matter were imperishable there would be no moral world-order. But today it is desired to keep this truth concealed and modern thought has every reason to do so, because otherwise it would have to eliminate the moral world-order—which in actual fact it does by speaking of the law of the conservation of matter and energy. If matter is conserved, or energy is conserved, the moral world-order is nothing but an illusion, a mirage. We can understand the course of the world's development only if we grasp how out of this 'illusory' moral world order—for so it is when it is grasped in thoughts—new worlds come into being.

Nothing of this can be grasped if we study only the solid component of man's constitution. To understand it we must pass from the solid organism through the fluid and airy organisms to the warmth organism. Our connection with the universe can be understood only if the physical is traced upwards to that rarefied state wherein the soul can be directly active in the rarefied physical element, as for example in warmth. Then it is possible to find the connection between body and soul.

However many treatises on psychology may be written—if they are based upon what is studied today in anatomy and physiology it will not be possible to find any transition to the life of soul from this solid, or solid-fluid bodily constitution. The life of soul will not be revealed as such. But if the bodily substance is traced back to warmth, a bridge can be built from what exists in the body as warmth to what works from out of the soul into the warmth in the human organism.

There is warmth both outside and inside the human organism. As we have heard, in the human constitution warmth is an organism; the soul, the soul and spirit, takes hold of this warmth organism and by way of the warmth all that becomes active which we inwardly experience as the moral. By the ‘moral’ I do not of course mean what Philistines mean by it, but I mean the moral in its totality, that is to say, all those impulses that come to us, for example when we contemplate the majesty of the universe, when we say to ourselves: We are born out of the cosmos and we are responsible for what goes on in the world.—I mean the impulses that come to us when the knowledge yielded by Spiritual Science inspires us to work for the sake of the future. When we regard Spiritual Science itself as a source of the moral, this, more than anything else, can fill us with enthusiasm for the moral, and this enthusiasm, born of spiritual-scientific knowledge, becomes in itself a source of morality in the higher sense. But what is generally called 'moral' represents no more than a subordinate sphere of the moral in the universal sense.

All the ideas we evolve about the external world, about Nature in her finished array, are theoretical ideas. No matter with what exactitude we envisage a machine in terms of mathematics and the principles of mechanics, or the universe in the sense of the Copernican system—this is nothing but theoretical thinking, and the ideas thus formulated constitute a force of death within us; a corpse of the universe is within us in the form of thoughts, of ideas.

These matters create deeper and deeper insight into the universe in its totality. There are not two orders, a natural order and a moral order in juxtaposition, but the two are one. This is a truth that must be realized by us today. Otherwise we must ever and again be asking ourselves: How can any moral impulses take effect in a world in which a natural order alone prevails?—This indeed was the terrible problem that weighed upon thinkers in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century: How is it possible to conceive of any transition from the natural world into the moral world, from the moral world into the natural world?—The fact is that nothing can help to solve this perplexing, fateful problem except spiritual-scientific insight into Nature on the one side and into the Spirit on the other.

With the premises yielded by this knowledge we shall also be able to get to the root of something that is presented as a branch of science today and has already penetrated into the general consciousness of mankind. Our worldview today is based upon Copernicanism. Until the year 1827 the Copernican conception of the universe which was elaborated by Kepler and then diluted into theory by Newton, was tabooed by the Roman Catholic Church. No orthodox Catholic was allowed to believe it. Since that year the prohibition has been lifted and the Copernican view of the universe has taken root so strongly in the general consciousness that anyone who does not base his own worldview upon it is regarded as a fool.

What is this Copernican picture of the universe?—It is in reality a picture built up purely on the basis of mathematical principles, mathematical-mechanical principles. The rudiments of it began, very gradually, to be unfolded in Greece[2] where, however, echoes of earlier thought—for example in the Ptolemaic view of the universe—still persisted. And in the course of time this developed into the Copernican system that is taught nowadays to every child.

We can look back from this world-conception to ancient times when the prevailing picture of the universe was very different. All that has remained of it are those traditions which in the form in which they exist today—in astrology and the like—are sheer dilettantism. That is what has remained of ancient astronomy, and it has also remained, ossified and immobilized, in the symbols of certain secret societies, Masonic societies and the like. There is usually complete ignorance of the fact that these things are relics of an ancient astronomy. This ancient astronomy was quite different from that of today, for it was based, not upon mathematical principles but upon ancient clairvoyant vision.

Entirely false ideas prevail today of how an earlier humanity acquired its astronomical-astrological knowledge. This was acquired through an instinctive-clairvoyant vision of the universe. The earliest Post-Atlantean peoples saw the heavenly bodies as spirit forms, spirit entities, whereas we today regard them merely as physical structures. When the ancient peoples spoke of the celestial bodies, of the planets or of the fixed stars, they were speaking of spiritual beings. Today, the sun is pictured as a globe of burning gas which radiates light into the universe. But for the people of ancient times the sun was a living Being and they regarded the sun, which their eyes beheld, simply as the outward manifestation of this Spirit Being at the place where the sun stands in the universe; and it was the same in regard to the other heavenly bodies—they were seen as Spirit Beings. We must think of an age which came to an end long before the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, when the sun out yonder in the universe and everything in the stars was conceived of as living spirit reality, living Being.

Then came an intermediary period when people no longer had this vision, when they regarded the planets, at any rate, as physical, but still thought of them as pervaded by living souls. In times when it was no longer known how the physical passes over by stages into what is of the soul, how what is of the soul passes over by stages into the physical, how in reality the two are united, people postulated physical existence on the one side and soul existence on the other. They thought of the correspondences between these two realms just as most psychologists today—if they admit the existence of a soul at all—still think, namely that the soul and the physical nature of the human being are identical. This, of course, leads thought to absurdity; or there is the so-called ‘psycho-physical parallelism’, which again is nothing else than a stupid way of formulating something that is not understood.

Then came the age when the heavenly bodies were regarded as physical structures, circling or stationary, attracting or repelling one another in accordance with mathematical laws. To be sure, in every epoch there existed a knowledge—in earlier times a more instinctive knowledge—of how things are in reality. But in the present age this instinctive knowledge no longer suffices; what in earlier times was known instinctively must now be acquired by conscious effort. And if we inquire how those who were able to view the universe in its totality—that is to say, in its physical, psychical and spiritual aspects—if we inquire how these people pictured the sun, we must say: They pictured it first and foremost as a Spirit-Being. Those who were initiated conceived of this Spirit-Being as the source of the moral. In my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity I have said that 'moral intuitions' are drawn from this source—but drawn from it in the earthly world, for the moral intuitions shine forth from us, from what can live in us as enthusiasm for the moral.

Think of how greatly our responsibility is increased when we realize: If here on the earth there were no soul capable of being fired with enthusiasm for true and genuine morality, for the spiritual moral order in general, nothing could be contributed towards the progress of our world, towards a new creation; our world would be led towards its death.

This force of light that is on the earth (diagram VII) rays out into the universe. This is, to begin with, imperceptible to ordinary vision; we do not perceive how human moral impulses ray out from the earth into the universe. If a grievous age were to dawn over the earth, an age when millions and millions of people would perish through lack of spirituality—spirituality conceived of here as including the moral, which indeed it does—if there were only a dozen people filled with moral enthusiasm, the earth would still ray out a spiritual, sun-like force! This force rays out only to a certain distance. At this point it mirrors itself, as it were, in itself, so that here (diagram VIII) there arises the reflection of what radiates from humans. And in every epoch the initiates regarded this reflection as the sun. For as I have so often said, there is nothing physical here. Where ordinary astronomy speaks of the existence of an incandescent globe of gas, there is merely the reflection of a spiritual reality in physical appearance.

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You see, therefore, how great is the distance separating the Copernican view of the world, and even the old astrology, from what was the inmost secret of Initiation. The best illustration of these things is provided by the fact that in an epoch when great power was vested in the hands of groups of people, who, as they declared, considered that such truths were dangerous for the masses and did not wish them to be communicated, one who was an idealist—the Emperor Julian (called for this reason ‘the Apostate’)—wanted to impart these truths to the world and was then brought to his death by cunning means. There are reasons which induce certain occult societies to withhold vital secrets of world-existence, because by so doing they are able to wield a certain power. If in the days of the Emperor Julian certain occult societies guarded their secrets so strictly that they acquiesced in his murder, it need not surprise us if those who are the custodians of certain secrets today do not reveal them but want to withhold them from the masses in order to enhance their power—it need not surprise us if such people hate to realize that at least the beginnings of such secrets are being unveiled. And now you will understand some of the deeper reasons for the bitter hatred that is leveled against Spiritual Science, against what Spiritual Science feels it a duty to bring to mankind at the present time. But we are living in an age when either earthly civilization will be doomed to perish, or certain secrets will be restored to mankind—truths which hitherto have in a certain way been guarded as secrets, which were once revealed to people through instinctive clairvoyance but must now be reacquired by fully conscious vision, not only of the physical but also of the spiritual that is within the physical.

What was the real aim of Julian the Apostate?—He wished to make clear to the people: You are becoming more and more accustomed to look only at the physical sun; but there is a spiritual Sun of which the physical sun is only the mirror-image! In his own way he wished to communicate the Christ-Secret to the world. But in our age it is desired that the connection of Christ, the spiritual Sun, with the physical sun, shall be kept hidden. That is why certain authorities rage most violently of all when we speak of the Christ Mystery in connection with the Sun Mystery. All kinds of calumnies are then spread abroad.—But Spiritual Science is assuredly a matter of importance in the present age, and those alone who regard it as such view it with the earnestness that is its due.

Notes:

1. The law propounded by Julius Robert Mayer (1814–1878).

2. Particularly by Aristarchos of Samos, the Greek astronomer, circa 250 B.C.

As human beings we stand in the world as thinking, contemplative beings on the one hand, and as doers, as beings of action, on the other; with our feelings we live within both these spheres. With our feelings we respond, on the one side, to what is presented to our observation; on the other side, feelings enter into our actions, our deeds. We need only consider how we may be satisfied or dissatisfied with the success or lack of success of our deeds, how in truth all action is accompanied by impulses of feeling, and we shall see that feeling links the two poles of our being: the pole of thinking and the pole of deed, of action. Only through the fact that we are thinking beings are we human in the truest sense. Consider too, how everything that gives us the consciousness of our essential humanity is connected with the fact that we can inwardly picture the world around us; we live in this world and can contemplate it. To imagine that we cannot contemplate the world would entail forfeiting our essential humanity.

As doers we have our place in social life and everything we accomplish between birth and death has a certain significance in this social life. Insofar as we are contemplative beings, thought operates in us; insofar as we are doers, that is to say, social beings, will operates in us. It is not the case in human nature, nor is it ever so, that things can simply be thought of intellectually side by side; the truth is that whatever is an active factor in life can be characterized from one aspect or another; the forces of the world interpenetrate, flow into each other. Mentally we can picture ourselves as beings of thought and also as beings of will. But even when we are entirely engrossed in contemplation, when the outer world is completely stilled, the will is continually active. And again, when we are performing deeds, thought is active in us. It is inconceivable that anything should proceed from us in the way of actions or deeds—which may also take effect in the realm of social life—without our identifying ourselves in thought with what thus takes place. In everything that is of the nature of will, the element of thought is contained; and in everything that is of the nature of thought, will is present. It is essential to be quite clear about what is involved here if we seriously want to build the bridge between the moral-spiritual world order and natural-physical world order.

Imagine that you are living for a time purely in reflection as usually understood, that you are engaging in no kind of outward activity at all, but are wholly engrossed in thought. You must realize, however, that in this life of thought, will is also active; will is then at work in your inner being, raying out its forces into the realm of thought. When we picture the thinking human being in this way, when we realize that the will is radiating all the time into the thoughts, something will certainly strike us concerning life and its realities. If we review all the thoughts we have formulated, we shall find in every case that they are linked with something in our environment, something that we ourselves have experienced. Between birth and death we have, in a certain respect, no thoughts other than those brought to us by life. If our life has been rich in experiences we have a rich thought content; if our life experiences have been meager, we have a meager thought content. The thought content represents our inner destiny—to a certain extent. But within this life of thought there is something that is inherently our own; what is inherently our own is how we connect thoughts with one another and dissociate them again, how we elaborate them inwardly, how we arrive at judgments and draw conclusions, how we orientate ourselves in the life of thought—all this is inherently our own. The will in our life of thought is our own.

If we study this life of thought in careful self-examination, we shall certainly realize that thoughts, as far as their actual content is concerned, come to us from outside, but that it is we ourselves who elaborate these thoughts. Therefore, in respect to our world of thought we are entirely dependent upon the experiences brought to us by our birth, by our destiny. But through the will, which rays out from the depths of the soul, we carry into what thus comes to us from the outer world, something that is inherently our own. For the fulfillment of what self-knowledge demands of us it is highly important to keep separate in our minds how, on the one side, the thought content comes to us from the surrounding world and how, on the other, the force of the will, coming from within our being, rays into the world of thought.

How, in reality, do we become inwardly more and more spiritual?—Not by taking in as many thoughts as possible from the surrounding world, for these thoughts merely reproduce in pictures this outer world, which is a physical, material world. Constantly to be running in pursuit of sensations does not make us more spiritual. We become more spiritual through the inner, will-permeated work we carry out in our thoughts. This is why meditation, too, consists in not indulging in haphazard thoughts but in holding certain easily envisaged thoughts in the very center of our consciousness, drawing them there with a strong effort of will. And the greater the strength and intensity of this inner radiation of will into the sphere of thinking, the more spiritual we become. When we take in thoughts from the outer material world—and between birth and death we can take in only such thoughts—we become, as you can easily realize, unfree; for we are given over to the concatenations of things and events in the external world; as far as the actual content of the thoughts is concerned, we are obliged to think as the external world prescribes; only when we elaborate the thoughts do we become free in the real sense.

It is possible to attain complete freedom in our inner life if we increasingly efface and exclude the actual thought content, insofar as this comes from outside, and kindle into greater activity the element of will which streams through our thoughts when we form judgments, draw conclusions and the like. Thereby, however, our thinking becomes what I have called in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity ‘pure thinking’. We think, but in our thinking there is nothing but will. I have laid particular emphasis on this in the new edition of the book (1918). What is thus within us lies in the sphere of thinking. But pure thinking may equally be called pure will. Thus from the realm of thinking we reach the realm of will, when we become inwardly free; our thinking attains such maturity that it is entirely irradiated by will; it no longer takes anything in from outside, but its very life is of the nature of will. By progressively strengthening the impulse of will in our thinking we prepare ourselves for what I have called in the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, ‘Moral Imagination’. Moral Imagination rises to the 'Moral Intuitions' which then pervade and illuminate our will that has now become thought, or our thinking that has now become will. In this way we raise ourselves above the sway of the 'necessity' prevailing in the material world, permeate ourselves with the force that is inherently our own, and prepare for Moral Intuition. And everything that can stream into us from the spiritual world has its foundation, primarily, in these Moral Intuitions. Therefore freedom dawns when we enable the will to become an ever mightier and mightier force in our thinking.

Now let us consider the human being from the opposite pole, that of the will. When does the will present itself with particular clarity through what we do? When we sneeze, let us say, we are also doing something, but we cannot, surely, ascribe to ourselves any definite impulse of will when we sneeze! When we speak, we are doing something in which will is undoubtedly contained. But think how, in speaking, deliberate intent and absence of intent, volition and absence of volition, intermingle. You have to learn to speak, and in such a way that you are no longer obliged to formulate each single word by dint of an effort of will; an element of instinct enters into speech. In ordinary life at least, it is so, and it is emphatically so in the case of those who do not strive for spirituality. Garrulous people, who are always opening their mouths in order to say something or other in which very little thought is contained, give others an opportunity of noticing—they themselves, of course, do not notice—how much there is in speech that is instinctive and involuntary. But the more we go out beyond our organic life and pass over to activity that is liberated, as it were, from organic processes, the more do we carry thoughts into our actions and deeds. Sneezing is still entirely a matter of organic life; speaking is largely connected with organic life; walking really very little; what we do with the hands, also very little. And so we come by degrees to actions which are more and more emancipated from our organic life. We accompany such actions with our thoughts, although we do not know how the will streams into these thoughts. If we are not somnambulists and do not go about in this condition, our actions will always be accompanied by our thoughts. We carry our thoughts into our actions, and the more our actions evolve towards perfection, the more are our thoughts being carried into them.

Our inner life is constantly deepened when we send will, our own inherent force, into our thinking, when we permeate our thinking with will. We bring will into thinking and thereby attain freedom. As we gradually perfect our actions we finally succeed in sending thoughts into these actions; we irradiate our actions—which proceed from our will—with thoughts. On the one side (inwards) we live a life of thought; we permeate this with the will and thus find freedom. On the other side (outwards) our actions stream forth from our will, and we permeate them with our thoughts.

But by what means do our actions evolve to greater perfection? How do we achieve greater perfection in our actions? We achieve this by developing in ourselves the force which can only be designated by the words: devotion to the outer world.—The more our devotion to the outer world grows and intensifies, the more does this outer world stir us to action. But it is just through unfolding devotion to the outer world that we succeed in permeating our actions with thoughts. What, in reality, is devotion to the outer world? Devotion to the outer world, which permeates our actions with thoughts, is nothing else than love.

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Just as we attain freedom by irradiating the life of thought with will, so do we attain love by permeating the life of will with thoughts. We unfold love in our actions by letting thoughts radiate into the realm of the will; we develop freedom in our thinking by letting what is of the nature of will radiate into our thoughts. And because, as human beings, we are a unified whole, when we reach the point where we find freedom in the life of thought and love in the life of will, there will be freedom in our actions and love in our thinking. Each irradiates the other: action filled with thought is wrought in love; thinking that is permeated with will gives rise to actions and deeds that are truly free.

Thus you see how in the human being the two great ideals, freedom and love, grow together. Freedom and love are also that which we, standing in the world, can bring to realization in ourselves in such a way that, through us, the one unites with the other for the good of the world.

We must now ask: How is the ideal, the highest ideal, to be attained in the will-permeated life of thought?—If the life of thought were something that represented material processes, the will could never penetrate fully into the realm of the thoughts and increasingly take root there. The will would at most be able to ray into these material processes as an organizing force. Will can take real effect only if the life of thought is devoid of outer, physical reality. What, then, must it be?

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You will be able to envisage what it must be if you take a picture as a starting point. If you have here a mirror and here an object, the object is reflected in the mirror; if you then go behind the mirror, you find nothing. In other words, you have a picture—nothing more. Our thoughts are pictures in this same sense. How is this to be explained?—In a previous lecture I said that the life of thought as such is not a reality of the immediate moment. The life of thought rays in from our existence before birth, or rather, before conception. The life of thought has its reality between death and a new birth. And just as here the object stands before the mirror and what it presents is a picture—only that and nothing more—so what we unfold as the life of thought is lived through in the real sense between death and a new birth, and merely rays into our life since birth. As thinking beings, we have within us a mirror reality only. Because this is so, the other reality which, as you know, rays up from the metabolic process, can permeate the mirror pictures of the life of thought. If, as is very rarely the case today, we make sincere endeavors to develop unbiased thinking, it will be clear to us that the life of thought consists of mirror-pictures if we turn to thinking in its purest form—in mathematics. Mathematical thinking streams up entirely from our inner being, but it has a mirror-existence only. Through mathematics the make-up of external objects can, it is true, be analyzed and determined, but the mathematical thoughts in themselves are only thoughts, they exist merely as pictures. They have not been acquired from any outer reality.

Abstract thinkers such as Kant also employ an abstract expression. They say: mathematical concepts are a priori.—A priori, apriority, means ‘existing in the mind independent of experience’. But why are mathematical concepts a priori? Because they stream in from the existence preceding birth, or rather, preceding conception. It is this that constitutes their ‘apriority’. And the reason why they appear real to our consciousness is because they are irradiated by the will. This is what makes them real. Just think how abstract modern thinking has become when it uses abstract words for something which, in its reality, is not understood! Men such as Kant had a dim inkling that we bring mathematics with us from our existence before birth, and therefore they called the findings of mathematics ‘a priori’. But the term ‘a priori’ really tells us nothing, for it points to no reality, it points to something merely formal.

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In regard to the life of thought, which with its mirror existence must be irradiated by the will in order to become reality, ancient traditions speak of semblance. (Diagram XI, Schein.)

Let us now consider the other pole of man's nature, where the thoughts stream down towards the sphere of will, where deeds are performed in love. Here our consciousness is, so to speak, held at bay; it rebounds from reality. We cannot look into that realm of darkness—a realm of darkness for our consciousness—where the will unfolds whenever we raise an arm or turn the head, unless we take super-sensible conceptions to our aid. We move an arm; but the complicated process in operation there remains just as hidden from ordinary consciousness as what takes place in deep sleep, in dreamless sleep. We perceive our arm; we perceive how our hand grasps some object. This is because we permeate the action with thoughts. But the thoughts that are in our consciousness are still only semblance. We live in what is real, but it does not ray into our ordinary consciousness. Ancient traditions spoke here of Power (Gewalt), because the reality in which we are living is indeed permeated by thought, but thought has nevertheless rebounded from it in a certain sense, during the life between birth and death. (Diagram XI.)

Between these two poles lies the balancing factor that unites the two—unites the will that rays towards the head with the thoughts which, as they flow into deeds wrought with love, are, so to say, felt with the heart. The means of union is the life of feeling, which is able to direct itself towards the will as well as towards the thoughts. In our ordinary consciousness we live in an element by means of which we grasp, on the one side, what comes to expression in our will-permeated thought with its predisposition to freedom, while on the other side, we try to ensure that what passes over into our deeds is filled more and more with thoughts. And what forms the bridge connecting both has since ancient times been called Wisdom. (Diagram XI.)

In his fairy tale, The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, Goethe has given indications of these ancient traditions in the figures of the Golden King, the Silver King, and the Brazen ¹ King. We have already shown from other points of view how these three elements must come to life again, but in an entirely different form—these three elements to which ancient instinctive knowledge pointed and which can come to life again only if we acquire the knowledge yielded by Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition.

But what is it that is actually taking place as we unfold our life of thought?—Reality is becoming semblance! It is very important to be clear about this. We carry about with us our head, which with its hard skull and tendency to ossification, presents, even outwardly, a picture of what is dead, in contrast to the rest of the living organism. Between birth and death we bear in our head that which, from an earlier time when it was reality, comes into us as semblance. From the rest of our organism we permeate this semblance with the element issuing from our metabolic processes; we permeate it with the real element of the will. There we have within us a seed, a germinating entity which, first and foremost, is part of our humanity, but also means something in the cosmos. Think of it—an individual is born in a particular year; before then she was in the spiritual world. When she passes out of the spiritual world, thought which there is reality, becomes semblance, and she leads over into this semblance the forces of her will which come from an entirely different direction, rising up from parts of her organism other than the head. That is how the past, dying away into semblance, is kindled again to become reality of the future.

Let us understand this rightly. What happens when we rise to pure thinking, to thinking that is irradiated by will?—On the foundation of the past that has dissolved into semblance, through fructification by the will which rises up from our egohood, there unfolds within us a new reality leading into the future. We are the bearers of the seed into the future. The thoughts of the past, as realities, are as it were the mother-soil; into this mother-soil is laid that which comes from the individ ual egohood, and the seed is sent on into the future for future life.

On the other side, we evolve by permeating our deeds and actions, our will-nature, with thoughts; deeds are performed in love. Such deeds detach themselves from us. Our deeds do not remain confined to ourselves; they become world happenings. If they are permeated by love, then love goes with them. As far as the cosmos is concerned, an egotistical action is different from an action permeated by love. When, out of semblance, through fructification by the will, we unfold that which proceeds from our inmost being, then what streams forth into the world from our head encounters our thought-permeated deeds. Just as when a plant unfolds it contains in its blossom the seed to which the light of the sun, the air outside, and so on, must come, to which something must be brought from the cosmos in order that it may grow, so what is unfolded through freedom must find an element in which to grow through the love that lives in our deeds.

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Thus do we stand within the great process of world evolution, and what takes place inside the boundary of our skin and flows out beyond our skin in the form of deeds, has significance not only for us but for the world, the universe. We have our place in the arena of cosmic happenings. By reality in earlier times becoming semblance in us, reality is ever and again dissolved, and in that the semblance is quickened again by the will, new reality arises. Here we have—as if spiritually we could put our very finger upon it—what has also been spoken of from other points of view.—There is no eternal conservation of matter! Matter is transformed into semblance and semblance is transformed into reality by the will. The law of the conservation of matter and energy affirmed by physics is a delusion, because account is taken of the natural world only. The truth is that matter is continually passing away in that it is transformed into semblance; and a new creation takes place in that through the human being, who stands before us as the supreme achievement of the cosmos, semblance is again transformed into Being (Sein).

We can also see this if we look at the other pole—only there it is not so easy to perceive. The processes which finally lead to freedom can certainly be grasped by unbiased thinking. But to see rightly in the case of this other pole needs a certain degree of spiritual-scientific development. For here, to begin with, ordinary consciousness rebounds when confronted by what ancient traditions called Power. What is living itself out as Power, as Force, is indeed permeated by thoughts; but the ordinary consciousness does not perceive that just as more and more will, a greater and greater faculty of judgment, comes into the world of thought, so, when we bring thoughts into the will-nature, when we overcome the element of Power more and more completely, we also pervade what is merely Power with the light of thought. At the one pole of man's being we see the overcoming of matter; at the other pole, the new birth of matter.

As I have indicated briefly in my book, Riddles of the Soul (Mercury Press, 1996), the human being is a threefold being: as nerve-and-sense being, the bearer of the life of thought, of perception; as rhythmic being (breathing, circulating blood), the bearer of the life of feeling; as metabolic being, the bearer of the life of will. But how then does the metabolic process operate in us when will is ever more and more unfolded in love? It operates in that, as we perform such deeds, matter is continually overcome. And what is it that unfolds in us when, as a free being, we find our way into pure thinking, which is, however, really of the nature of will?—Matter is born!—We behold the coming-into-being of matter! We bear in ourselves that which brings matter to birth: our head; and we bear in ourselves that which destroys matter, where we can see how matter is destroyed: our metabolic-limb organism.

This is the way in which to study the whole human being. We see how what consciousness conceives of in abstractions is an actual factor in the process of World-Becoming; and we see how that which is contained in this process of World-Becoming and to which the ordinary consciousness clings so firmly that it can do no other than conceive it to be reality—we see how this is dissolved into nothingness. It is reality for the ordinary consciousness, and when it obviously does not tally with outer realities, then recourse has to be taken to the atoms, which are considered to be firmly fixed realities. And because one cannot free oneself in one's thoughts from these firmly fixed realities, one lets them mingle with each other, now in this way, now in that. At one time they mingle to form hydrogen, at another, oxygen; they are merely differently grouped. This is simply because people are incapable of any other belief than that what has once been firmly fixed in thought must also be as firmly fixed in reality.

It is nothing else than feebleness of thought into which one lapses when accepting the existence of fixed, ever-enduring atoms. What reveals itself to us through thinking that is in accordance with reality is that matter is continually dissolved away to nothingness and continually rebuilt out of nothingness. It is only because whenever matter dies away, new matter comes into being, that people speak of the conservation of matter. They fall into the same error into which they would fall, let us say, if a number of documents were carried into a house, copied there, but the originals burned and the copies brought out again, and then they were to believe that what was carried in had been carried out—that it is the same thing. The reality is that the old documents had been burned and new ones written. It is the same with what comes into being in the world, and it is important for our knowledge to advance to this point. For in that realm of the human being, where matter dies away into semblance and new matter arises, there lies the possibility of freedom, and there lies the possibility of love. And freedom and love belong together, as I have already indicated in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.

Those who, on the basis of some particular conception of the world, speak of the imperishability of matter, annul freedom on the one side and the full development of love on the other. For only through the fact that in us the past dies away, becomes semblance, and the future is a new creation in the condition of a seed, does there arise in us the feeling of love, the devotion to something to which we are not coerced by the past, and freedom, action that is not predetermined. Freedom and love are, in reality, comprehensible only to a spiritual-scientific conception of the world, not to any other. Those who are conversant with the picture of the world that has appeared in the course of the last few centuries will be able to assess the difficulties that will have to be overcome before the habits of thought prevailing in modern humanity can be induced to give way to this unbiased, spiritual-scientific thinking. For in the picture of the world existing in natural science there are really no points from which we can go forward to a true understanding of freedom and love.

How the natural-scientific picture of the world on the one side, and on the other, the ancient, traditional picture of the world, are related to a truly progressive, spiritual-scientific development of humanity—of this we will speak on some other occasion.

• 1. i.e. Bronze —SOL

I should like, first of all, to speak to you about certain principles in medical study. Medical study today is based upon a scientific conception of the world, or, better said, upon scientific interpretations, which do not lead to the human being in his reality and which at the present time are not capable of giving a true description of the human being.

And so young physicians approach a sick human being without having any real picture of a healthy human being. For if, after having studied anatomy and physiology, we picture the essence of the human organism to be the organs, systems of organs, bones, muscles, all with their definite contours, and get into the habit of looking at these systems within rigid contours, we have an entirely erroneous view of the human being. All that is drawn and pictured in this way and then becomes the content of knowledge, is in reality involved in a perpetual process of becoming, in a perpetual process of build-up and breakdown (anabolism and catabolism). There is perpetual becoming, perpetual arising, and passing away. If we think deeply about this process of arising and passing away, it is at once apparent that we must pass over from what has contours within the human organism to what is fluid and has, therefore, no contours. We realize that the human being must be pictured as the product of streamings—which persist at certain locations—and that we must add to the solid body (which is, after all, the smallest part of the human being) the fluid man, if I may so express myself, the being who is no longer subject to the laws to which the bodies with definite contours are subject. The conceptions arising from modern anatomy and physiology usually give rise to the opinion that if fluid is taken to quench thirst and then more and more fluid is taken, the fourth or fifth glassful passes through the same process in the organism as does the first. But this is not the case. Up to the point where the thirst is quenched, the first glass of water passes through a complicated process; the second glass of water, when the thirst is no longer so intense, passes through the organism without this process, much more rapidly than the first. It does not go through the complicated ways of the first, and in the case of the second glass of water, what takes place is simply a kind of increased streaming of the fluid man, if I may put it so.

A true knowledge of the human being must, therefore, reckon, to begin with, with the sharply outlined organs but also with what is in flow in the organism. Physiology does, of course, also speak of what is in flow, but the flowing fluids in the human organism are only investigated from the point of view of the laws of dynamics or mechanics. The truth is that the moment the fluid man comes into consideration, we must realize that the so-called etheric body is working in this fluid man.

The drawings to be found in books on anatomy have merely to do with the human physical body. The streaming of the fluids in the organism is left out of account. This streaming of fluids within the organism is not dependent upon earthly forces, fundamentally speaking. It is dependent upon planetary forces. Therefore, we must realize that as long as we are concerned with rigidly outlined organs and systems of organs, earthly forces, pure and simple, come into consideration. The moment we are concerned with what is in circulation, whether it be the circulation of the digestive juice or of the digestive juice that has already been transformed in the blood, the ruling forces are not earthly but planetary. We will go into this more closely. It is merely a question, now, of the principle.

Thus, the physical laws of the physical body apply to the solid man; while the laws of the etheric body rule the fluid Man. But the aeriform, the gaseous, also plays a part in the human organism, a greater part, indeed, than is conjectured. Insofar as the gaseous works within and enlivens the human organism, it is entirely dependent upon the astral body. Human breathing, for instance, in its physical manifestation, is a function of the astral body.

I spoke of the physical man (physical body), of the fluid man (etheric body), of the gaseous man (astral body). So far as the fourth man, the warmth man, is concerned, there is not the slightest doubt that differentiated warmth is present in the space physically occupied by the human being, and even beyond this. If you put a thermometer behind the ear or under the armpit you will find evidence of differentiation in the warmth organism; the degrees of warmth are everywhere different. As the liver has its definite place in the organism, and the intestinal organs have theirs, so do they also have quite different temperatures. The liver temperature is quite different, for the liver has a very special kind of warmth organization. This warmth organization is subject to the ego organization.

Now, and really for the first time, you can picture the human being, insofar as he bears within himself the substances that exist on the earth in the solid, fluid, aeriform, and warmth conditions. The warmth is ruled from the ego organization. When something or other is in a certain condition of warmth, this condition of warmth has an effect upon what it is permeating. And here we come to how things really are as regards the ego organization. What the ego organization does in the human organism is done by way of the warmth organization. Suppose I am walking, simply walking. When I am walking, I take hold of my warmth organization with my ego organization. What the warmth does within the fluids which fill out the solid constituents of the legs is, indirectly, a consequence of the ego organization, but the ego organization only takes direct hold within the warmth organization. In the whole organism, in the solids, fluids, gases, and warmth, therefore, we see the intervention of the ego organization, but the intervention takes place by way of the warmth organization. The astral body also intervenes in the whole organism, but the astral body takes direct hold only in the aeriform organization, and so on. You can work out the rest for yourselves.

This helps you to understand something else. If you take what is presented to you today in physiology and anatomy all that is so beautifully drawn and is regarded as being the whole man, if you take this, you will never be able to pass over from this human being (who in reality does not exist in this form) to the soul, let alone to the spiritual. Just tell me where and how the soul or spirit could possibly be connected with the human being as pictured by physiology or anatomy today? This is the reason why all kinds of apparently well-thought-out theories have arisen concerning the interactions that take place between the soul and spirit and the body. The most ingenious of them—No, I ought to say the most nonsensical—is that of psycho-physical parallelism. It is said that the life of soul and spirit and the bodily life run their courses simultaneously and parallel to each other. No attempt is made to find a bridge. But the moment you pass on to the differentiation of the warmth and see therein the intervention of the ego organization, you realize: Yes, it is conceivable that the ego organization intervenes in the warmth ether, and by way of the warmth organization in the whole human being, down to the sharply outlined physical organization.

The reason why the bridge between the physical nature and the life of soul in the human being could not be found was because no account was taken of the existence of these organizations of which the soul and spirit take hold in successive stages. It is a known fact that the simple psychical condition of fear, for example, affects the bodily warmth. It is inconceivable that the psychical experience of fear should be capable of actually making the legs tremble. The thing is inconceivable, so a theory like that of psycho-physical parallelism has arisen. But it is conceivable that the organization of soul which is anchored in the warmth ether should be affected by fear, and then that the fear should live itself out in the corresponding change of the warmth, the warmth organization communicates itself to the airy organization, the fluid organization, and downwards to the solid body of the human being. Only in this way is it possible to build a bridge from the physical to the life of soul.

Unless you have this insight into the healthy human being you will never get insight into the sick human being. Take, for example, some part of the human organization, such as the liver or kidneys. In the so-called normal state, the liver or kidney receives impulses from the ego organization inasmuch as these impulses of the ego organization take hold, first of all, of the warmth organization and then pass down to the liver or kidney with its definite outlines. If we understand this process, it is possible to conceive that this intervention on the part of the ego by way of the warmth organization may cause the ordinary process of this warmth organization to be inwardly intensified, to deviate from its ordinary process, in such a way that the ego organization works too strongly upon the warmth organization in the liver or the kidneys. A certain state of balance must prevail in the organism in order that the ego organization can work in it. If this balance is upset, the organism may fall ill. But the organism as pictured by modern anatomy and physiology is, in reality, incapable of illness. From whence could the condition of illness possibly proceed? Somewhere or other the possibility of illness must exist in the organism. Now, the ego organization must work in with a certain strength upon the heart, that is to say, by way of the warmth organization upon the heart. Suppose it happens through some circumstance or other, and remember that in the external world, too, warmth can be guided to some other place where it is not desirable—suppose it happens that what ought to work by way of the warmth organization upon the heart works in the kidneys or liver. Something happens that must happen, but here it is out of place, has gone astray—and then the possibility of illness arises.

Only by remembering this principle will you begin to understand the possibility of illness; otherwise you will not understand. You will have to say to yourselves: Everything that goes on in the human organism is a process of nature. Illness is, however, also a process of nature. Where does a healthy process cease? Where does a process of disease begin? These questions are unfortunately unanswerable if you go no further than the teachings of orthodox physiology and anatomy. You can only get a conception of the possibility of illness when you know that what constitutes illness when it takes place in the liver, may be healthy when it takes place in the heart and so on. For if the human organism, working from out of the ego organization, could not bring forth the warmth that must be present in the region of the heart, the organism would, for example, be unable to think, to feel. But if these same forces were to invade the liver or kidneys it becomes necessary to drive them out again, to put them back, as it were, within their original boundaries. Now, in external nature there are substances and activities of substances which can take over, in the case of every organ, the activity of the etheric body, of the astral body, of the ego organization. Suppose the ego organization is taking too strong a hold of the kidneys. By giving equisetum arvense in a certain way, you enable the kidneys to do what the ego organization is doing in this abnormal, pathological condition. In this pathological condition, the ego organization is taking hold of the kidneys but in the way that ought only to happen in the heart, not in the kidneys. Something is going on in the kidneys which ought not to be there but which is there because the ego organization is pouring in its activity too intensely. We only get rid of this condition if we introduce artificially into the kidneys an activity which is an equivalent of this activity of the ego organization. That is what you can introduce into the kidneys if you really succeed in making equisetum arvense active in the kidneys. The kidneys have a great affinity with equisetum arvense. The activity of this substance throws itself into the kidneys, and the ego organization is sent out. And when the ego organization is given back to its own tasks it has a curative influence upon the diseased organ. You can call up the higher bodies, so-called, into health-giving activity when you drive them out of the diseased organ and set them again at their own proper tasks. Then, through a reactionary force which arises, these higher bodies can actually work curatively upon the diseased organ.

If we are to understand such forces and the connection of the human organism with the cosmos and with the three kingdoms of nature around man on the earth, we must cultivate a different kind of natural science from what is cultivated today. I will give you an example.

You all know that formic acid comes from ants. Certain things are known by chemists and pharmaceutical chemists about formic acid, but the following is not known. A forest in which no ants are carrying on their work causes great harm to the earth through the roots that are falling into decay. In the organic fragments that are falling into dust the earth goes to pieces. Just think of wood from which the vegetative process has gone and which has passed over into a kind of mineral condition; it is pulverized, is falling into dust. But when the ants are doing their work, formic acid in an extremely high potency is always present in the soil and in the air within the area of the forest. This formic acid permeates what is falling into dust and the connection of the formic acid with the dust safeguards the development of the earth; the dust is not just scattered away in the universe but can provide material for the earth's further evolution. Substances which seem merely to be the excretions of insects or other forms of animal life are seen, in very truth, to be the saviors of the further evolution of the earth when we know what their true function is.

The way in which the modern chemist investigates substances will never lead to a knowledge of the cosmic tasks of these substances. And without knowledge of the cosmic tasks of substances it is quite impossible to know the tasks of substances that are introduced into the human being. What formic acid does in external nature, quite without being noticed, is going on all the time within the human organism. And so I said in another lecture that the human organism must always have a certain quantity of formic acid in it because the formic acid restores the physical substances that are succumbing to the process of growing old. In certain cases it may be found that the patient has too little formic acid in his organism. It is essential to know that the different organs must each have different quantities of formic acid. When we discover that some organ has too little formic acid, this substance must be introduced into the organism. There will be cases where the introduction of formic acid gives no help, others again where it is a very great help. There may also be a case where the organism strongly resists the direct introduction of formic acid but will be inclined, when its oxalic acid content is increased, to manufacture formic acid itself, out of the oxalic acid. In cases where nothing can be done with formic acid, it is often necessary to apply an oxalic acid cure, because formic acid is produced out of the oxalic acid in the organism. This is only one indication of how necessary it is not only to understand the nature of the organs with definite contours but also the nature of the fluids, the fluid process outside in the cosmos as well as within the human organism. This must be known in all detail.

You see, certain processes outside in nature which are occasioned by man can be observed, but their whole significance cannot be revealed by scientific interpretations. Let me tell you about a very simple phenomena. Fig trees grow in the South. There are fig trees which produce wild figs and specially cultivated trees which produce sweet figs. People are shrewd in the way they produce sweet figs. They do the following: they cause a certain species of wasp to lay eggs in a fig, an ordinary fig. A wasp maggot comes from this germ and passes into the chrysalis stage. This process is interrupted and the young wasp is caused to lay a second lot of eggs in the same season. The result of this second lot of eggs from the wasps which have been generated in the same year is that sweetness is produced in the fig in which the second generation of wasps has laid eggs. In the South, people take figs that are nearly ripe, tie two together with string and hang them on a branch. The wasps come and deposit the eggs in the figs; the ripening process is very much accelerated through the fruit being cut away from the tree and the first generation of wasps develop very quickly; then the wasps go over to other figs that have not been cut, and they become very much sweeter.

This process is very important because here, within the fig substance itself, there takes place, in concentration, the same thing that happens when wasps, or, if you will, bees, take nectar from the flowers into the hive and produce honey. The bees take the nectar from the flowers and then produce honey in the hive. This same process takes place within the fig itself. The people in the South set a honey-producing process going in the fig by way of the young generation of wasps. A honey-producing process is generated in the fig which is inoculated by the young generation of wasps.

Here you have the metamorphosis of two nature processes. The one is spread out, so to say, over nature, when the bee fetches the nectar from the flowers at a distance and produces honey from this nectar in the hive. The other process is concentrated in the same tree on which the two figs are hung. These figs ripen more quickly, and the generation of wasps arises more quickly; other figs are inoculated and these become sweet. We must study such processes of nature for they are the processes which come into consideration in medical work.

There are processes at work within the human being of which modern physiology and anatomy have not the slightest inkling because their observation does not extend to nature processes such as I have now described. We must observe the more delicate processes in nature and then we shall unfold a real knowledge of the human being. For all these things, my dear friends, an inner understanding of nature is required and a comprehensive view of the warmth, the streamings of air, the warming and cooling of the air, the play of the sun's rays in this warming and cooling of air, the water vapor in the atmosphere, the wonderful play of the morning dew over the flowers and plants, the marvelous process which takes place, for example, in a gall apple which is also produced by a wasp's sting and the laying of an egg. A sense for nature is required in all these things. And this sense for nature is certainly not present when, as in the modern way of observation, everything is made dependent on what is seen under the microscope where things are taken right away from nature. There is a dreadful illusion here. What is the aim of looking through the microscope? The aim is to be able to see what cannot be seen by the ordinary eye. When the object is enormously magnified people imagine that its workings will be the same as they are in the minute. But in microscopy we are looking at something that is untrue. Microscopy is only of value if you yourselves have a sufficiently true sense for nature to be able, with your own inner activity, to modify the particular object to the corresponding minuteness. Then the whole thing is different. If you see an object magnified, you must be able to reduce it again, simply through its own inner nature. This is not done in the ordinary way. As a rule, people have no inkling of the fact that the magnitudes of the things of nature are not relative. The theory of relativity is great and fine and in most domains simply incontestable. But when it comes to the human organism, that is another matter altogether. Three years ago I was present at a discussion among certain professors. They simply did not understand when one said to them that the human organism cannot be twice as large, for example, as it actually is, for it could not endure such a size. The size of the human organism is determined by the cosmos; its size is not relative, but absolute. When the size is super-normal, as in a giant, or subnormal as in a dwarf, this immediately brings us to conditions of illness. And so when we see an object under the microscope, we see a lie, to begin with. It is a question of reducing objects back to truth, and this is possible only when we have a sense for nature, a sense for what is really happening outside in nature.

It is very important to study a beehive. The single bee is stupid; it has instincts, but it is stupid by itself. The beehive as a whole, however, is exceedingly wise. Quite recently a very interesting discussion took place with workmen at the Goetheanum to whom, in normal times, I give two lectures a week. We had been speaking of bees and a very interesting question was put. People who keep bees know quite well that when a beekeeper who is loved by the inhabitants of the hive falls ill, or dies, the whole bee population falls into disorder. This actually happens. One of the workmen who has the typically modern way of thinking said that surely a bee cannot see such a thing, it cannot possibly have any picture of the beekeeper. How, then, can such a feeling of interconnection arise? He also brought forward the point that a beekeeper looks after the hive one year but the next year there is quite a different population in the hive; even the queen bee is another insect and all the bees in the hive are young bees. How, therefore, can there be this feeling of interconnection? I answered in the following way: It is well-known that in certain periods all the substances in the human organism are changed. Suppose we make the acquaintance of someone who goes to America and comes back after ten years. The person who comes back is really quite different from the one who went away ten years ago. All the substances in his organism have been exchanged for others. Things are exactly the same as in the beehive, where the bees have changed but the feeling of the interconnection between the hive and the beekeeper remains. This feeling of interconnection is due to the fact that there is tremendous wisdom in the beehive. The hive is not merely a cluster of single bees; the hive has an individual soul, a real soul.

The perception that a beehive has a soul is also something that must form part of our sense for nature. Such perceptions are part of a true sense for nature and can be applied in many other things. We can only begin to understand the human being in health and in disease when our knowledge is reinforced by a sense for nature that is not only microscopic but also macroscopic, if I may use the expression. We shall try to understand health and disease in this way during the lectures, my dear friends, and we shall consider, too, what I will call the moral side of medical studies and medical science.

As we shall be able to make use of the eight hours at our disposal for this course of lectures, I need not hurry, and this will certainly be all to the good.

I want to develop the material given yesterday by speaking of the characteristic qualities of the several members of the human being. I spoke of the physical body which is to be connected with everything that has definite contours in the organism. There is also the fluid organism. This fluid organism is permeated with the forces of the etheric body, forces which are, however, united with the physical body as primary components of it. These are the peripherically working forces. So far as the astral body is concerned, conceptions of space will not help us at all; the astral body cannot be understood from the quantitative aspect, but only from the purely qualitative aspect. We must picture the astral body in a world that is not the world of space, as we know it, but lies outside this spatial world. And this is all the more true when we come to the ego organization.

The easiest way will be to start from the ego organization. What is this ego organization, in reality? In the physical world, it is to be perceived in the form of the physical body. In the physical world, of course, both the inner and the outer form must be included. Looking at the physical body of man as it stands in the physical world, we must realize that it has nothing fundamentally in common with the forces working in the physical world. For the moment a human being passes through the Gate of Death, and the ego organization leaves the physical body, this body begins to be subject to the forces of the external world. This means that the body is no longer built up but is destroyed. If you remember that the physical body is destroyed by the forces that are working in external nature, you will realize at once that the body cannot, in its form, be subject in any way to the forces of the physical world. When the ego organization is forming and shaping the physical body, therefore, this means that it removes the body from the forces that are present in man's earthly environment. In other words, the ego organization is something quite different from all that is to be found in the physical world.

This ego organization is connected with death. What happens in death, all at once, goes on continually throughout the period of earthly life, through the ego organization. The human being is really continually dying, but this process of dying is balanced out. To get a picture of this, think of a modified version of the legend of Penelope. Suppose you were occupied every day in doing away with a heap of earth near your house, and during the night, in your absence, someone were to come and shovel the earth back again. As long as the earth is put back you have to shovel it away again. Your activity only ceases when the heap of earth gradually gets smaller and smaller on account of decrease of activity on the part of the one who puts the earth back again. This, approximately, is a picture of the ego organization in its relation to the physical body. Nourishment of the physical body consists in bringing into it substances from the earthly environment. These substances have their own inner forces, a certain complex of forces which belongs to them, and when, for example, you take common salt as an adjunct to food, this salt, to begin with, because it comes from outside, has the same inner tendency of action which it has, as salt, in the external world. But you begin to take these qualities away from it even when it is in the mouth, and then more and more, so that, finally, if the ego organization is working properly, there is nothing any longer within you of the salt, as it was in the external world. The salt has become something completely different. The activity of the ego organization consists precisely in transforming the in-taken foodstuffs. When it is no longer possible for the physical body to take food, the ego has no more to do, just as you had no more to do when nobody was shoveling the earth heap back again. When the body is no longer capable of taking food, it is impossible for the ego to work from out of the warmth, in the physical body. We can say that death occurs when it is impossible for the ego organization to so transform the external substances that nothing remains of the outer characteristics instead of being totally in the service of the ego organization.

What does the ego organization do with the physical body? It destroys the body all the time. It does the same as death, only the process is continually balanced out by the physical body being able to take external substances as food. Ego organization and the process of nourishment, therefore, are polar opposites. The ego organization betokens for man exactly the same—but in a process of continuous activity—as death betokens, but, in death, the process is concentrated, it happens all at once. Through your ego organization you are dying all the time, that is to say, you are destroying your physical body inwardly, whereas when you die, external nature destroys your physical body outwardly. The physical body is capable of destruction in two different directions and the ego organization is simply the sum total of the destructive forces working inwards. It really seems, at first, as if the ego organization had no other task than to bring about continual death in the human being—a process that is only prevented because there is fresh reinforcement, so that this activity only begins to bring about death. In the qualitative sense, therefore, ego organization is identifiable with death, and the physical organism is identifiable with the process of nourishment. We will speak in greater detail later on.

Ego organization = Death

Physical organism = Nourishment

Between these two polar processes in the human being lie the etheric body and the astral body. Astral body and etheric body lie between the ego organization and the physical organism. The astral body, as you heard, only works directly in the aeriform part of the human organism, from there by way of the etheric body upon the fluid organism and the physical organism or organism of nourishment. In every single organ there is a working together of etheric organism and astral organism.

When the etheric organism works upon an organ, this organ is imbued with budding, sprouting life. The life force in any single organ, or in the organism as a whole, comes from the etheric organism. The astral organism has at every moment the tendency to paralyze this budding, sprouting life—not to kill it, but to damp it down, to lame it. The ego organization strives all the time to kill the organism and the single organs, and in opposition to this there must be the reinforcement from the foodstuffs taken from the external world whereby life is continually poured into the organs. This process is especially active in childhood and youth.

The etheric impulses are opposed by the activity of the astral body which damps down the etheric activity all the time. If there were only etheric activity, budding and sprouting life in your organism, you would never have a life of soul, you would never unfold consciousness and would have to vegetate in a plant existence. No consciousness unfolds in a process that is simply one of growing, budding, sprouting. For consciousness to develop, the etheric, budding and sprouting life must be damped down. Therefore in any organ where the etheric life is damped down or lamed, we have, even in normal human life, the perpetual beginning of illness. There can be no development of consciousness without this perpetual tendency to illness. If you wanted just to be healthy—well, that is possible, but then you would have to lead a vegetative existence. If you want to unfold a life of soul, if you want to have consciousness, the vegetative process must be present, but it must be damped down.

The polar contrast is not so marked between the etheric and astral organizations as it is between physical organism and ego organization, but it exists, nonetheless, in a modified form. The astral organism must continually damp down what is brought about by the etheric organism. In reality, therefore, what the astral organism does day by day in the life of man, amounts to a tendency to illness. The etheric organism brings about rampant healthiness. Just as in abstract language, we can say: Man consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego organization—so we can also say: Man consists of the process of nourishment, of the building, sprouting, health-bringing process, of the perpetually in-working processes of disease, and of a continuous dying that is checked until the death-bringing processes gather together as it were into an integer and death occurs.

Think of this astral organism with its perpetual tendency to make an organ, or the whole man, ill. Genuine observation will show you that this is so. For no feeling could arise in you if this astral organism were not present. Just picture it.

The etheric organism unfolds life and the astral organism damps down the life. In the waking state (I shall yet have to speak of sleep), there must be a continual swinging to and fro in a labile state of equilibrium, between etheric organism and astral organism. This enables a human being to feel. He would feel nothing if this swinging to and fro did not take place. But now suppose the astral activity is not immediately driven back by the etheric activity. When it is driven back, when the astral activity is driven back in statu nascendi by the etheric activity, normal feeling arises. We shall see how this is connected, in the physical, with the activity of the glands. But when the astral organism becomes more powerful, so that the organ cannot work with sufficient strength in its etheric activity, then this organ will be laid hold of too strongly by the astral activity and instead of a swinging to and fro there will arise a deformation of the organ. When the astral body oversteps the mark in this activity of damping down, when it goes beyond the process that is balanced out in statu nascendi—then the cause of illness is located in the astral body. And there is indeed such a close connection between illness and feeling that we can say: The life of feeling in man is simply the reflection, in the life of soul, of the life of illness. If there is a swinging to and fro, there underlies the life of feeling—but always in statu nascendi, in the moment of ‘becoming’—the same process which is a process of illness when the astral organism gets the upper hand.

Now it may also happen that the etheric organism gets the upper hand of the astral, which withdraws. Then there will be rampant growth, which is illness in the other direction. When the astral body gets the upper hand, inflammatory conditions arise; when the etheric activity gets the upper hand, swellings or growths appear. In the entirely normal life of feeling, a delicately poised balance is always maintained between growths and the inflammatory process. The normal life of man needs this possibility of becoming ill, only a continual balancing must take place.

Thus if we are able to perceive truly, we can see in the normal life of feeling a great deal of what is represented by the processes of illness. If we can observe such things truly, we can ascertain the approach of the illness a long time before it can be physically diagnosed, in a wrong functioning of the life of feeling. Illness is only an abnormal life of feeling in the human being.

The life of feeling lies in the realm of the soul, because a continual equalization or balancing takes place in the etheric. When the balancing no longer takes place, the life of feeling strikes down into the physical body, unites with the body. Illness is present, therefore, as soon as the life of feeling shoots down into the organ. If, in the normal way, a person can keep his feeling within the realm of soul, he is healthy. If he cannot do this, if feeling shoots down into some organ, illness arises.

I say this by way of introduction, because you will realize from it how necessary it is for the physician to have a quick and delicate eye for the soul life as well. There can be no aptitude for true diagnosis without a faculty of delicate perception for the life of soul. We will speak of details later on and this will become still more intelligible.

But now, what of the ego organization and the physical organism? Think, first, of the process of nourishment. This process of nourishment is all the time destroying the substances as they are in the external world; the astral organism damps down what the human being is, inwardly, through his etheric organism. An inner balance is established between astral organism and etheric organism. Between the ego and the physical organism there is also a balance—here between outer world and inner world. Salt, as we know it, is outer world. When the salt is taken hold of by the forces of nourishment and by the ego organization, the ego organization must be in a position completely to transform the salt as it is in the external world, to leave nothing of it behind in this form. If anything is left behind, this means that a foreign body is within the organism, but you must not merely think of this ‘foreign body’ in the organism as necessarily having definite contours, for this is least often the case. A foreign body in this sense may also be the external warmth. There should be no warmth in the organism that is not engendered by the ego organization. You must be able to conceive of a person being seized, somewhere or other, by a condition of external warmth upon which he himself does not work—it is just like a piece of wood being seized by some condition of outer warmth. An external condition of warmth may not be only a stimulus to the human being to work up a warmth of his own, but the external warmth (or cold) may begin to work directly, and this outer cold or warmth would also have to be regarded as a foreign body in itself. Thus we can say: The inner balance between illness and health is produced by the astral organism and etheric organism. The balance between the human being and the world is produced by the polar contrast between physical body and the ego organization.

The thing of importance is to get a true perception of the activities of these four members of the human organism. You realize now, surely, that illness is simply not to be understood from the external, physical organism. The process that constitutes illness lies entirely in the super-sensible. Before we can understand illness at all we must have a conception of the astral organism. And you will get this conception if you will consider the following state of things: pain arises in some organ. When the astral body becomes too powerful, the organ is ‘deformed’, and pain arises. If the organ immediately balances the influence of the astral body in statu nascendi, feeling arises. Pain is really feeling, but an enhanced feeling, proceeding from the deformation, so we can understand why illness is accompanied by pain. Without knowing this, it is very easy to ask: What is it that really causes pain in manifestations of illness? It is easy to understand why pain arises when we know that this illness is merely caused by such a strong expression of the life of feeling that this life of feeling is deforming the organ concerned. You will see now that all manifestations of feeling can be judged truly through a thorough and deep study of man's life of soul.

But these things can only be seen in their right light when we say to ourselves: Conditions differ according to which organ in the human being is laid hold of by excessive activity of the astral body. Suppose, for example, it is the liver which is being thus laid hold of by the astral body. The liver behaves quite differently from other organs. The astral body can cause much deformation without pain being produced, without pain arising exactly in the liver itself. The reason why liver diseases are so hidden, so treacherous, is because they do not announce themselves through pain. This is because the liver is an organ which, in its whole make-up, is an enclave in the human organism. There are processes in the liver which, of all processes which arise in the organism, most resemble the processes of the external world. The fact, therefore, is that in the liver, man is least man. In the liver he really ceases to be man. He becomes outer world; he has a piece of the outer world within him. This is very interesting. We have the external world; we have the human being; and within the human being, inside him, we have something like a piece of the external world. It is as if a kind of cavity were hollowed out in the organism and just as it would not hurt if the astral body were to press into this cavity, just as little is there pain when the astral body presses into the liver. The astral body can destroy but cannot cause pain where the liver is concerned, for the liver is an organ where a piece of the external world appears in the organism, as it were, in an enclave.

Without entering into such things, we shall never be able to understand the human organism. In ordinary textbooks of anatomy and physiology you will find all kinds of indications about the liver. You will understand them when you know that the liver is an organ within the human being which is most foreign to him. Why is this?

Think of an eye, or some other sense organ. It lies in a cavity which digs itself into the human being from the external world. There are processes in the human eye which can almost be explained by physics. It is easy for a physicist to speak rationally about the human eye. A physicist makes a sketch with some lines on it which, although it is all really nonsense, gives a picture of the process of the breaking-up of the light and the production of an image by an ordinary lens. The same kind of drawings are made of the eye. People draw a ray of light which passes through a lens, is broken up and then forms a picture in the background of the eye. People have really become physicists in regard to the eye and since the days of Helmholz the ear, too, has almost become a kind of piano. It has become common to apply to the sense organs conceptions that are applicable to external nature. In the sense organs, something is being continued from outside inwards, a piece of the external world is continuing

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on into the inner world. There is even biological proof of this. In certain lower animals the eye is formed through an indentation which is then filled from outside. The eye is built into the organism, as it were; it does not grow out of the organism. The sense organs, therefore, are a piece of the external world within the organism. But they open outwards. In the sense organs the external world passes into the organism like a gulf. The liver is enclosed on all sides, but nonetheless it is a sense organ, a sense organ which, in the unconscious, shows a high degree of sensibility for the value of the different substances we take as foodstuffs. We can only understand what is going on in digestion, in the process of nourishment, when we no longer ascribe to the liver only those physical processes which are ascribed to it today. These processes are the expression of the spirit and soul. We must see the liver as an inner sense organ for the perception of the process of nourishment. For this reason the liver is much more closely related to the substances of the earth than are the familiar sense organs. With the eye we are exposed to the working of the ether, with the ear we are exposed to the air; but the liver is directly exposed to the qualities of the substances in the external world and it has to perceive these qualities.

The heart is a sense organ of a different kind. The perceptive faculty of the liver is exposed to external substances that come into the human being. The heart is a sense organ for perceiving the inner being of man. I have often said that it is nonsense to regard the heart as a kind of pump which drives the blood through the arteries. The movement of the blood is the result of the activity of the ego and astral body, and the heart is merely a sense organ which perceives the circulation, particularly the circulation from the lower to the upper man. The task of the liver is to perceive, in the digestive process, what value a carbohydrate, let us say, has for the human being. The task of the heart is to see how astral body and ego are working on the human being. Therefore the heart is an entirely spiritual sense organ, the liver a wholly material one. This distinction must be made. We must develop a qualitative knowledge of the organs.

What are the methods of the natural science upon which medicine is based today? Some tissue or other—it really does not matter very much which—is taken from some part of the organism, perhaps from the heart or the liver. The outer structure and make-up of this tissue are then examined. But this tells us nothing about the organ as it actually is, within the human organism. Suppose I have, here, a knife, and, there, a knife. I examine them. This is a knife, and that is a knife, only the one, when I examine its form, has a blunt edge on one side and a cutting edge on the other, and the blade is in a handle. The same could be said of the other knife—therefore the net result is, here, a knife; there, a knife. But to find the difference between a table knife and a razor I must go beyond this kind of examination. I must relate the knives to something that is a whole. Regarded externally, a razor might also be a table knife; therefore, merely from the form, I cannot know whether I have to do with a table knife or with a razor. Each thing must be observed in its whole nexus. Out of the kind of observation that is applied today to an organ, one cannot know anything about the significance of this organ in reality. It must always be regarded in the whole nexus of things. Mere examination of the structure and the make-up of an organ leads nowhere. The human being must be studied with quite different methods from those of chemistry which merely examines the chemical affinities and forces. In this respect, people are terribly naive today. In a certain physiological institute, experiments were made to see how mice could be nourished with milk. The result was splendid, for the mice flourished and became fat and big. At the same time, for the purpose of proving that there is something more in milk than its component parts, these components were separated and given to the mice. They perished within three or four days and could not be kept alive. And then people said: Milk does not only contain its known components, but it contains, as well, another substance—the vitamin. They were obliged to affirm the existence of yet another, very fine substance, namely, the vitamin. The point of importance is not the discovery of such a 'substance' but that to take the separate components of the milk is like taking a clock and looking at the brass, the silver, the other metals in it, the glass and so on. Yes, but the brass, the silver, the glass and all the other metals do not make a clock. The clock depends upon what the mind of the mechanic makes out of these substances. And in the case of milk and its components we are thinking with the mind of the mechanic, when we are concerned with the fact that earthly qualities are contained within these components—qualities which they get from the earth. Up to a certain point of time the peripheric forces from the etheric body are still present, as well as the earthly components. People must finally bring themselves to accept these things. It is not so much a question of things being hidden, and then ‘found’. The discovery of vitamins, for example, simply confirms what exists. Quite a different mode of observation must become current.

Suppose you are eating too many potatoes. You will never find out anything with the ordinary methods of investigation. It will be useless to try to ascertain the effect of potatoes in the human organism by computing the quantity of carbohydrates. The other carbohydrates which are present, for example, not in roots but in leaves or in fruits, are worked up in the digestive tract. There is something very remarkable about the potato. The potato passes with its forces so intensely into the human organism, that, what in the case of the bean happens while still within the digestive tract, happens in the case of the potato only in the brain. In the brain, too, processes of nourishment are continually taking place. I am only indicating these things in order to speak in greater detail later on. A person who eats too many potatoes may, under certain circumstances, overwork his brain. He transfers processes which ought to take place below the brain to the brain itself. It will only be possible to get something from medical science for hygiene and for social life in general by learning the relations of the human being to the substances around him, not from their chemical make-up but from their world connections. Whether a substance appears in leaf or in root constitutes a fundamental difference. It is much more important to know from which part of the plant a substance comes than to know whether it contains carbohydrates. Roots are more connected with the head organization of man; flowers and leaves more with the lower man. The chemical make-up really plays no outstanding part. The relations of the human being to the surrounding world must be learned from quite other things if we really want to understand the curative and the disease-producing factors, the disease itself, and its remedy. The heed that is paid to the indications given by abstract chemistry has really, little by little, buried all knowledge of the human being, because knowing the chemical make-up of a substance does not tell us anything about the real relations of man to the surrounding world.

Take another example—the point of view derived from chemistry is that oxygen is necessary in the air but that nitrogen is not necessary to the same extent. From what is commonly thought about oxygen and nitrogen, we might imagine that it does not matter so much to the breathing when there is too little nitrogen in the air, provided there is enough oxygen. But the truth is, that when air contains too little nitrogen, the human being gives off nitrogen in order to replace it in the air around him. The human being is so constituted that there must be a certain relation between his own nitrogen content and the nitrogen content of the surrounding air quite apart from the breathing process.

All these things are exceedingly important for an understanding of the nature of man. But although they are investigated and known, here and there, they remain fruitless for the modern world of science as long as there is no basis for understanding how man is membered into the world around him. We will try to find this basis in order to get insight into the healthy as well as the ill human being.

From tomorrow onwards I want you to think about what questions you would like to ask, and then give these questions to me so that I may remember them as these lectures go on.

Today I want to say something in direct continuation of what was said in the two preceding lectures about the nature of the human being and his relation to the world. In our anthroposophical studies here it is useless to bother about the ‘views’—in reality they are not ‘views’ at all—that are held by modern science in connection with the human being. It would be equally useless to make up our minds to deviate as little as possible from things that have become customary and habitual. For the state of affairs at present is that in certain great and significant directions the truth deviates very considerably from what has become customary. It deviates in an extraordinarily high degree. And so those who are striving after truth today will also need to have the courage to acknowledge many things that modern science would consider quite absurd. On the other hand, if you really want to heal, it will be necessary for you—not here, but in other places—to mix with those who set out to heal today by the methods customary in the external world. You will have to have dealings with science as it is in the modern world. Otherwise, among all the errors of the times, you will feel insecure with the truth you possess.

The current idea today is that there are about seventy to eighty substances on the earth, with certain forces of attraction and repulsion. These forces are supposed to work through certain atomic weights and the like. A number of theoretical laws of nature are then evolved according to which people try to find out how the substances are formed, and then, out of the different forces whose origin is looked for in the substances, a phantasmal picture is built up which is supposed to represent “man.”

But the truth is that neither in his form nor in the forces which maintain his processes of growth and nourishment is the human being subject only to the influences proceeding from the substances of the earth. In speaking of the etheric body, we found that it is entirely under the influence of forces which stream in from the periphery, from the cosmos. Taking these two kinds of forces—those which proceed from the substances of the earth, and those which stream in from the periphery—you will realize that a balancing, a harmonizing of these two kinds of forces, is necessary for each organ in the body. The several systems of organs in the human being differ very considerably in the way in which this balance is established.

Let us now consider the human head from this point of view. To begin with, attention must be called—and I have often done this—to the weight of the human brain which is very largely eliminated because the brain, with its definite outline, floats in the cerebral fluid. The brain floats in the cerebral fluid which circulates through the spinal column. The actual weight of the brain is about thirteen hundred to fifteen hundred grams. But when it is within the human being, it weighs much less—at most, twenty grams. This is because it floats in the cerebral fluid, and, according to the Law of Archimedes, every body, when it floats in fluid, loses as much of its weight as is equivalent to the weight of the volume of fluid displaced. In the fluid, the brain is subject to buoyancy so that only about twenty to twenty-five grams of its weight remains, and this is the weight with which the brain presses downwards. If it were to press downwards with its full weight there could be no blood vessels underneath it; they would be crushed. The earthly quality of heaviness is actually taken away from the brain. It is not the earthly quality of heaviness that enables us to be alive in the brain, but the buoyancy, the force that is in opposition to heaviness. In the case of the brain, this earthly heaviness amounts to, at most, twenty grams. The force of attraction exercised by the earth upon the human head is very little.

We see from this that the earthly characteristic of the brain vanishes—vanishes because of the way man is organized. The human organization is such that the earthly forces vanish. The Law of Archimedes has taught humanity about buoyancy, but it is not always taken account of in technical contrivances. I am not sure whether people realize it, but it is quite obvious that they acknowledge laws which happen to suit them and ignore those which do not. What I have told you about heaviness disappearing applies not only to the human head but to the whole inner structure of the head. Something else happens as a result of the special

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arrangement of the breathing process, of certain static conditions which hold sway between in-breathing and out-breathing. When we draw a breath, a force is exercised, and then comes a counter force when we breathe out again. The relationship between this force and counter force in breathing is similar to the relationship between gravity and buoyancy.

The curious thing is that when we are walking, the head, the brain, remains at rest. On account of buoyancy, the brain is not heavy, and its inner condition of rest, its inner static condition, is not changed when we are walking. Nor is this true only of our walking, but, in a curious manner, it is especially true also of the movement we make together with the earth. We only share in the movement with the rest of the body, not with the brain. The movement is quashed, so far as the brain is concerned. We may move the head itself as rapidly as the rest of the body, but even then the brain remains at rest. It is harder to conceive that something that is momentarily in movement is, in reality, at rest, than to conceive that something that is subject to gravity is, in reality, not heavy. But it is so, nevertheless. Thinking of the inner organization of the human being, we must say that the head remains at rest all the time. All the forces adjust themselves; there is a slight pull of gravity in the downward direction, in a proportion of twenty to fifteen hundred, and in the forward direction there is a very slight propelling force of movement. In essentials, however, the movement is balanced out.

We can, therefore, say that the human head, as regards its inner existence, is like a person who is sitting quietly in an automobile and not moving at all while the car moves forward. The experience of the human head is just as it would be if it had no weight. Neither does it move when the human being moves and when the earth is moving together with the human being. The head is, therefore, a very special organ, for it excludes itself, exiles itself from what is happening on the earth; the earth only participates to a small extent in the activities of the head. The head is an image of the cosmos. In its essential nature, it has nothing to do with the forces of the earth. The inner structure of the brain is an image of the cosmic forces. Its form cannot be explained from anything of an earthly nature but only from the in-working cosmos. I must speak rather crudely here, but you will understand me. The earth works only to this extent, that it breaks through the cosmic formation and inserts into the human being that which tends towards the earth. You can see this readily by looking at a skeleton. Take away the skull and you have taken away the part of the skeleton that is an image of the cosmos. The arrangement of the ribs is only half cosmic for here the skeleton is already impressed by the earthly forces. In the long bones of the legs and the long

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bones of the arms, you have a purely earthly formation. The spinal vertebrae to which the ribs are connected have arisen from the condition of equilibrium between the cosmic and the earthly. In the head, with its covering skull you have a form in which the cosmos deprives the earthly forces of the possibility of taking shape; this form of the skull is an image of the cosmos. In this way we must study the forms of the human body.

When we study the forms of the human body in this way, knowing that the inner life of the head, the soft substances and fluids of the head remain at rest and in this state of rest are an image of the cosmos, we shall realize that anatomy and physiology, as presented today, cannot really be said to be true because they do not acknowledge the existence of cosmic influences. I have spoken of forces which proceed from the periphery and stream inwards. They stream in from all sides upon the human head. But it makes a difference if these forces are intercepted by the moon, by the sun, or by Saturn. There peripheric forces are modified by the planetary bodies standing in the heavens. The directions from which these forces stream in are, therefore, not without significance. The in-streaming is essentially modified according to the position of the constellation from which it comes.

This is a thought around which there is nothing but dilettantism today, but in olden times it was the basis of great astronomical wisdom. The dreadful treatises that exist on such subjects today give no picture at all of the reality. Understanding of what I have said is essential before we can have insight into the structure and make-up of the human being. For the fact that in his head the human being is subject entirely to the cosmos, and in the long bones of arms and legs entirely to the earthly forces, is an expression, right down into substance, of how the cosmic formative forces behave. You know that human bone contains calcium carbonate. But it also contains calcium phosphate. Both substances are very important for the bones. Through the calcium carbonate the bones become subject to the earth. If the bone substance was not permeated by calcium carbonate, the earth could not approach the bones. The calcium carbonate constitutes the substantial point of contact for the earth which is thereby able to shape the bones in accordance with its formative forces. The thigh bones could not have their extension from above downwards if this was not made possible by the calcium carbonate. But there would be no femoral head without CaPO3. This fact is not changed by the objection which anatomists will raise, that the quantities of CaCO3 and CaPO3 do not essentially differ in the shaft of a long bone and its neck or head. To begin with, this statement is not quite accurate, for minute research will reveal a difference, but something else comes into consideration here. The human organism must have within it both up-building processes and processes of demolition—processes out of which something is built up and processes by means of which what is not used in the up-building is separated off.

A very decided difference between these up-building forces and forces of demolition in substances themselves is shown, for example, by fluorine. The physiologist would say that fluorine plays a part in the up-building of the teeth and is also present in the urine. Fluorine, therefore, exists here and there in the human body. But that is not the point of importance. In the up-building of the teeth, the activity of the fluorine is a positive one. The teeth could not develop without fluorine. In urine, there is fluorine which has been broken down and is excreted. The essential thing is to distinguish between whether a substance is being eliminated at some place in the body or whether it is an absolute necessity in the up-building process. If part of a bone is built in from the cosmos, as it were, CaPO3 has here an up-building activity. In another part of a bone the CaPO3 is being eliminated. In the shafts of the long bones, CaCO3 builds up, but it is being eliminated in that part of the bone which is built in from the cosmos (head of the bone). The essential thing is not the actual presence, here or there, of a substance. The point of importance is what the substance is doing, what significance it has at some particular place in the organism.

I once tried to give a picture of these things by saying the following: Suppose I am going for a walk one morning at nine o'clock and see two men sitting together on a bench. At three o'clock in the afternoon I pass the bench again and the two men are together there again. These two facts in themselves really tell me nothing, because it may be that one of the men had taken his lunch with him and had remained sitting on the bench from nine o'clock until three o'clock, while the other had gone off for a walk and had come back again just before three o'clock. One of them is quite rested, the other terribly tired. In this respect there is an inner difference between them. The point of importance is not the presence of the one person or the other, but what each of them has been doing, how has life brought him to this particular place. Therefore, so far as understanding of the human being is concerned, the presence of some substance in an organ is not really a matter of importance. It is a question of knowing in what kind of process the substance is involved—a process of up-building or a process of demolition.

We shall never find the transition from the quality of a substance that is necessary to the human organism, to a remedy, unless we keep this process in mind. This is the only way which will lead to the realization that the distribution of substances in the cosmos is quite different from what is usually thought. It is a striking fact—a fact to which no thought has been given for five or six centuries—that while certain analytical processes prove the existence of iron in the human organism (it can be said quite certainly that there is iron in the blood), attempts to prove the existence of lead in the human organism will fail, if the organism is in a normal state. Lead is only known in the form of lead ores, or heavy lumps. But just think of it—all metals which exist in the coarse, lumpy form as earthly substances were once present during the epochs of Saturn, Sun and Moon, in the fluid condition, even in the condition of warmth ether. Now, the human being—in a different form of course—was already in existence on Old Saturn. He has been involved in all these processes, among them the process whereby, out of a fluid, delicate etheric condition, iron has become what it is today. Man has been involved in the whole process of the world's evolution.

The strange thing is that the human being has taken iron and also magnesium into his own structure, but not lead. He has united the magnesium process with his own being. But he threw out the lead process. So far as the magnesium is concerned, therefore, we see that there are working, within the human being, the same forces as are working in magnesium in the external world; the human being has to master them inwardly. But before man was enclosed in his skin, when he was still a structure that was involved in a process of metamorphosis and united with the cosmos, he overcame the lead process and still has within him the forces for the elimination of the lead process. He has within him the up-building forces of magnesium and the forces for the elimination of the lead process.

What does this mean, in reality? You need only study what happens to the human organism in lead poisoning. It becomes inwardly brittle, sclerotic. It is therefore correct to say that the organism cannot tolerate lead and when there is lead poisoning there is lead within the organism. The organism begins to fight against the process that is contained in the lead substance—substances are always processes. Lead spreads out within the organic process, and the organism, exerting itself in opposition, tries to drive out the lead. When it succeeds it gets well. If the lead proves itself to be the stronger, the organism does not get well, and the well-known process of decay that is connected with lead poisoning sets in, because the organism can only tolerate those processes which overcome the lead process. It cannot tolerate the formative forces of lead. If we now try to find out what it means to the human being that he will not put up with having lead in his organism, we are led to the following: man is a being of sense. He perceives things around him and then thinks about them. He needs both forms of activity. He must perceive things in order that he may be connected with the world; he must also think about them. He must repress the act of actual perception and then unfold his own, independent activity. If we were only to perceive, we should lose ourselves all the time in acts of external seeing. But by retreating from the things themselves, by thinking about them—thereby, we become a personality, an individuality. We do not lose ourselves in the things. If we study the human etheric body, we find that it has within it a center for the forces which throw out lead. This center, approximately, lies where the hairs grow in a kind of vortex at the back of the crown of the head. That is the center of the forces which overcome lead. They stream into all parts of the organism in order that the formative forces of lead may not get into the organism. The forces which the body has developed for the overcoming of lead have great significance, for they are the same forces which enable me, when I am looking, say, at this piece of chalk, not to be entirely caught up in the simple act of looking at the chalk. Otherwise I should identify myself with the object of perception. But I make myself independent, I dampen down the perception of the object observed by means of those forces which overcome lead. It is due to these forces that the human being can be a self-contained personality; these forces enable the human being to separate himself from the world.

I will now speak of something that is very striking in connection with the forces which overcome lead. Not only have they a physical-etheric significance but also a psychical and moral significance.

The human being takes certain metallic substances into himself, unites them with his own bodily organism; other metallic substances he overcomes and has them within him only in the form of processes of rejection, processes which are master of these substances. Now why is it that in the course of his long evolution from the Saturn period and the Sun period, man has separated off certain external substances and has received others into his organism? In that man has this process of elimination within, he is able to receive into himself independent moral forces. We can imagine that the human organism, as constituted presently, may be unable to make use of lead but contains certain forces which compensate for lead; we can imagine the organism containing lead in the same way as it now contains iron. If this were so the human being would bring into himself semi-moral qualities; for it is so with lead. He would then have a morbid affinity (we should call it a 'morbid' or pathological affinity) to the impurities existing in the outside world. Such a person would always be on the lookout for vile-smelling substances and like to smell them. If we notice that some child has perverted instincts of this kind—and there are children who are partial to everything that smells,—they will sniff petroleum, for instance—then we may be sure that the quality of the blood that rejects lead is not present. And it is then a matter of calling up this lead-rejecting power by clinical methods or even by medicaments. It is possible to do this.

And now let us think of magnesium, a substance which plays a significant role in the human organism. There is something very interesting about magnesium. When speaking about education I have said many times that the first period of life, the period which lasts to the time of the change of teeth, must be sharply differentiated from the following periods. The second period lasts from the change of teeth until puberty. Magnesium, as well as fluorine, is necessary for the development of the teeth. But the process of the development of the teeth is not localized in the upper and lower jaws—the whole organism participates in it. The magnesium process takes place over the whole organism. And this is the most important process of all up to the time of the change of teeth. After the teeth have changed, magnesium has no longer its former significance. For the magnesium forces in the human being harden the organism; they enclose it in itself. This consolidation of the organism, this incorporation of the forces and substances, comes to an end at the second dentition.

Until then, the magnesium forces are exceedingly important for the organism. This organism, so far as its development is concerned, must now be considered a self-contained whole. It must contain and it must enfold the magnesium process, for if this process were absent the organism would lack the necessary forces of consolidation. The organism cannot cease generating the magnesium forces. This goes on after the change of teeth just as it did before. The magnesium forces must be worked upon in the organism, and after the change of teeth the essential thing in regard to magnesium is that it must be overcome, must be thrown out. It enters particularly into the secretion of milk, is excreted with the milk. The secretion of milk is connected with puberty, so you have here a periodic process. Up to the change of teeth magnesium is consumed, as it were, by the organism; after the change of teeth, up to the time of puberty, it is thrown off, separated. And magnesium, now a substance to be secreted, is one of the forces which form the milk. After puberty there is a kind of rebound and the magnesium forces are used for the more delicate consolidation of the muscles.

Substances are only a combination of processes. Lead is only in semblance the heavy, gray substance—with which we are familiar. It is nonsense to say that lead is a piece of coarse substance. In reality, lead is the process that goes on within the boundaries which mark the extent of the spread of lead. Everything is a process. One cannot say, once and for all, that certain 'substance processes' are worked up in the human being, and certain others, like the lead process, for which we must always have the power of elimination, are thrown off. It is not correct to say this because there are other processes, like the magnesium process, in connection with which there is rhythmic alternation; in periods which alternate rhythmically we have to consume the magnesium process, and then again throw it out.

This will show you that it means nothing to say, as the result of mere analysis: the human organism contains magnesium. It means nothing, for in the twelfth year of life these substances have quite a different significance than they have in the fourth or fifth year of life. We unfold a real knowledge of the human being when we know the period during which certain substance processes are important in the human organism. If we want to know how substances outside in nature can work further within the human organism, it is of very little importance to study the chemical composition of these substances. We must study something that is hardly studied at all today. If we trace back the study of substances to the thirteen or fourteenth century, we find the beginnings of modern chemistry. These beginnings are to be found in the alchemical processes which are so often scoffed at nowadays. But alchemy contained something else too, of which there has been no continuation. It is what might be called today the doctrine of signatures. This Doctrine of Signatures was applied especially in the study of plants but also of minerals, and it has not been developed or continued.

The characteristic quality of antimony is its well-known spiky, crystalline formation. If you apply a certain metallurgical treatment to antimony, you get the familiar “antimony mirror” when the volatilizing antimony is precipitated on a cold surface. Antimony has the tendency to develop forms which reveal themselves very clearly as forms of the etheric body. The shapes taken by antimony are very similar to the forms of certain simple plants which have an affinity to the etheric body. When one studies antimony one has the feeling at once that this antimony is very sensitive to etheric forces. It has an affinity with etheric forces. Everyone can confirm this by bringing antimony to the cathode. There will be a series of slight explosions which show the relation of antimony to the etheric forces. This is a striking case, but at one time people had a great faculty for understanding these things. This faculty is now quite lost and no attention or respect is paid to such indications as I have given. And for this reason, certain significant observations leave people in complete perplexity.

Think of diamond, graphite, anthracite, common coal. They are all carbon, but yet so different from each other. Why are they different? If people were capable of not limiting their investigations to the chemical composition but of finding out about the ‘Signature’, as it was called in olden times, they would begin to understand what the difference is between common coal and graphite. Common coal came into being during the Earth evolution, graphite during the preceding Moon evolution. Diamond came into being during the Sun evolution. When you study these things in the cosmic aspect, you realize once again that what is of essential importance is not the substance itself but the conditions and times under which and during which a substance assumed a definite form. Physical reality is subject to the element of time, and time has a definite significance. If you think of what I have said, you will realize: common coal is a child, it has as yet no great age; graphite is a youth, but older than common coal; diamond, though not exactly ancient, is very mature. If you have to set a task which demands the power of maturity, you will not give it to a child. Everything depends on the age. So you will realize that simply because of its cosmic age, coal, in whatever form it appears, has a different task from graphite which is more mature.

Insight into cosmic processes is necessary if we want to understand the relationship of the human being to what is out there in the cosmos. Antimony has a particular connection with the human etheric body, and if you introduce it into the human organism as a medicament, you must understand what antimony is outside the human being before you can know what is stimulated in the etheric body by the use of antimony. You must study the delicate processes in nature if you want to understand how a medicament is to act within the human organism.

In the three previous lectures I have tried to give you an outline of the kind of knowledge that should serve as a foundation for physicians. Owing to the very brief time at our disposal, it has only been the merest sketch. But you will have realized that to speak in detail would need considerable time. The kind of knowledge I have given as a foundation for medicine would constitute, as it were, a first course which would take at least a year and longer still if that were possible. It is impossible for me to do more than give a general description of these things, so I should like you to regard what I have said in the three previous lectures as a sketch of what a physician ought to have as a basis. Let me call it the exoteric side of medical knowledge, and it ought really to be followed by the esoteric side, of which we will speak now.

This esoteric side must be built upon the foundation of the exoteric knowledge. In your medical studies you must not be too proud to master the exoteric side; you must master this with all earnestness. It is difficult at the present time, but, as we shall see, much will be achieved in this direction by the establishment of the Medical Section here at Dornach.

After all, it is possible now to expand the short sketch that has been given by many details contained in my lecture courses and writings. Up to now, very little has been done in this direction and the work will only begin to develop in the real sense of anthroposophical medicine when this work that I am preparing with the help of Frau Dr. Wegman comes to the fore. It will then be apparent that Anthroposophy can give a great stimulus to medicine and medical studies. But you must realize quite clearly that medicine is a very special kind of study, with definite preliminary requirements—a study in which the results of Spiritual Science simply cannot be ignored. There can be no true medicine without the knowledge that results from Spiritual Science. The chaotic conditions prevailing today are due to the fact that the current trend of study and knowledge is utterly unsuited to medicine. We have a science of nature that has found its way even into theology, a science that is suited only to technical purposes and not at all to a real knowledge of the being of man. This science is not able to impart a true knowledge of man's nature. Medical science in the real sense demands something quite special and you will realize that this is so when I come to speak of how the human being really comes into existence.

I spoke yesterday from the exoteric side and will now make the transition to the esoteric aspect: external substances are, in reality, processes. Salt is only a precipitation of processes; the magnesium process, the iron process are processes which exist outside in nature. The lead and mercury processes are processes in external nature which the human being cannot have within his physical organism. For all that, it is only in outward semblance that these processes are not within the human being.

How does the human being come into existence? The physical germ comes into being through fertilization and there must be a union between this physical germ and the etheric body of the human being. But fertilization does not create the etheric body. The etheric body forms around what are, later on, ego organization and astral organization, in order to receive the being of spirit and soul who comes down from the spiritual worlds, the being who has been living in pre-earthly existence. The real kernel of man is of the spirit and soul. It has come firstly, from earlier incarnations, secondly, from the period between death and rebirth, and has been in existence long before any fertilization takes place. This kernel of spirit and soul exists before a connection is made with the physical germ cell which is the result of fertilization. It unites, first, with the etheric body which in turn unites with the physical embryo. Ego, astral organization, etheric organization—this trinity unites with what comes into being through the physical fertilization. You must regard the etheric body as something that is built in from out of the cosmos. Now at the time when the etheric body first unites with the physical organization it contains within itself the forces which are not suitable for the physical organization, namely, the lead forces, the tin forces and so on. It is only in semblance that the human being is not a complete microcosm because certain substances are not within him physically. The substances that are not contained in the physical organism of man are of the greatest importance for the constitution of the etheric body, and in the etheric body, before it unites with the physical body, there are lead processes, tin processes, mercury processes, and so on.

And now the etheric body (and the other members, too, of course) unite with the physical body. All the forces derived by the etheric body from the substances that are not contained within the physical body now pass over to the astral body—this happens to a slight degree during the embryonic period but in a high degree when the real breathing begins at birth. The etheric body then takes on those forces which the physical body works up within itself. Thus the etheric body passes through a very significant metamorphosis. It takes on the content and constitution of the physical body and gives over to the astral body its own constitution, its relationship with the environment of the human being. The astral body is now inwardly linked with what the human being is capable of knowing, and the moment you begin, my dear friends, to acquire not merely a theoretical but a true and inwardly digested medical knowledge—in that moment you make alive within you the knowledge that is already within the astral body. It is there, but it remains unconscious, and it is, in reality, a knowledge of man's relationship with his environment.

Let me take a special case. Think of some district that is depressing—on account of the soil containing gneiss and the mineral known to you as mica. Mica has a very strong influence on the physical constitution of a person who is born in such a district. The physical body is different in a district where there is much mica. The mica forces work upon the physical body from out of the soil. Now you will find that many rhododendrons grow in districts where the soil contains a great deal of mica. This plant grows plentifully in the Alps and in Siberia and so forth. The rhododendron substance is something that is intimately connected with the etheric body before it comes down into the physical body in such regions. This relationship with the rhododendron the ether body gives over to the astral body. And now, suppose that illnesses occur which are due to a preponderating working of the mica by way of the ground water. The etheric body has given over what came to it from the rhododendron, to the astral body. This element is present externally, in the rhododendron plants. This indicates that the rhododendron contains a sap that has a remedial effect upon this illness. In many cases, though not in all, a specific remedy is to be found in regions where particular illnesses occur.

And now suppose you are a physician. Every night when you go to sleep, you pass, in your astral body, into the environment which was once connected with the etheric body but is now connected with the astral body. If you have medical knowledge, if you know what healing forces exist in the environment, that knowledge becomes experience during sleep, and so you have continually the confirmation of what you learn, externally, through dialectics. And this factor must be reckoned with in medical study, because no outer dialectic learning of medical science really helps. It becomes fragmentary and chaotic if there cannot arise during every sleep, within the span of the astral body, the confirmation that is necessary. If medical knowledge is not acquired in such a way that the astral body, in the intercourse with the environment, is able to say “Yes” to what the student has learned, it is just as if he were listening to something that he cannot understand and only confuses him. So you see, medical knowledge is intimately connected with the sleeping state.

Such things convince us that medical knowledge must be acquired by the whole man, by man as a living, feeling being, for together with this ‘nightly’ intercourse with the healing substances, something else grows up, something that can never be acquired through dialectic—I mean, the true desire to help. Without the sincere desire to heal, the feeling of sympathy on the part of the physician with the person he has to cure, without this strong desire to give personal help, no healing in the real sense is possible.

And here I must say something that may seem very strange and paradoxical, but as you want to know in what way things are wrong today and what ought to be done, I must say it, for in Dornach we are working from esoteric impulses. People have often said to me that steps might have to be taken to protect the remedies that are prepared in our pharmaceutical laboratory, so that they shall not be copied by other people. I once replied that I was not so very anxious about this, provided we succeeded in bringing true esoteric impulses into our medical work. Then people will realize that the remedies are made with an esoteric background, and that it is not the same if the remedies are made here, with the esoteric life behind the work, or whether some factory copies them. This may seem very strange, but it is true nevertheless. Much more important than protecting things by business devices is the growth of an attitude which aims at making the remedies effective from out of the Spiritual. This is not superstition—it is something that can be substantiated in Spiritual Science. Therefore, people possessed of understanding will begin to realize that with the taking of remedies that are produced here, a beginning has been made in the right direction.

Such objections as have been made to me are due to the fact that people do not realize in the least how seriously the esoteric, spiritual life must be taken, above all, in medicine. If you once grasp this, you see that a center for medicine must be instituted here as a reality, not as a mere formality.

And now you will understand that a first, exoteric course of medical study should be followed by a second which approaches the human being esoterically, which merges medical knowledge into what becomes a true medical consciousness, a true medical attitude. There have, of course, always been individuals who sought instinctively for this. And in the last third of the nineteenth century, at a time when there was so little that was capable of producing this attitude, one could see, but only in isolated individuals who were then regarded as cranks, sporadic manifestations of this medical consciousness. The basis of the reputation enjoyed by the Viennese School of Medicine at the time when I was growing up was connected with its attitude to therapy, where the actual therapy hardly mattered at all, especially treatment of pneumonia, an illness where one can do very little for the central disease itself. You have all heard of medical nihilism, and this is its origin. The most eminent physicians in Vienna were deliberate advocates of medical nihilism In other words, they held the point of view that no remedy heals. To a certain extent, Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902), too, held this view. His view was: If a hundred patients are said to have been cured, one can assume with fifty percent of them that it did not matter whether they had been given a remedy or not; they would have got well without it; with 30 percent it could be said that the remedy had done actual harm; and with the remainder, chance might have brought it about that the remedy selected had helped. It is not I who make this statement, but Virchow, who had a great reputation in the medical world last century. I know eminent men today, too, who adhere to this view, although they may be advocates of therapy. No true medical consciousness is expressed in this view. Medical consciousness can never be regarded as a merely formal attitude. It must be a reality. Therefore, the second medical course would have to contain the human aspect that is built up on the basis of the exoteric material. There must be that human factor that worked, in a somewhat degenerate form, but, for all that so magnificently and attractively, in a person like Paracelsus.

Certainly, objections to Paracelsus can be made in certain details, but this medical consciousness lived in him, in a splendid way. Whenever he came to a district where the soil was strikingly red, he knew that a number of diseases—especially those that are due to diseases of the blood—were caused by the red sandstone in the soil. {Translator's note: The word in the German is the name of a substance described as a system of sandstone, shale and conglomerates of the lower terrain of Germany.}

The way in which a process of illness develops is very characteristic. We find that the people living in a district where there is this red sandstone soil have accustomed themselves to this soil and have a certain characteristic temperament. They have a very lively activity of the spleen. Coming as a stranger to the district, one does not easily take a liking to them. They are frightfully stubborn, dogmatic, obstinate, and when one considers what they do to be foolish—they just return the ‘compliment!’ But suppose a stranger comes and wants to set up a business or something of the kind. He cannot stand the soil, especially not the water, and he will show certain symptoms of illness. Paracelsus said that illnesses which are contracted in such a district are then passed on to the natives who are born there. He said that something must be present in the etheric body (which he calls the ‘Archaeus’). He said that the ‘Archaeus’ must have undergone something before it entered the embryo. Now in these districts we always find that laburnums are prevalent and in the blossoms, leaves and sometimes also in the roots of the laburnum there is a fluid which can provide a very useful remedy.

What is important is to unfold a quite different perception of nature through this medical consciousness. In my young days I knew a physician whom one often met in the meadows and fields—among the plants and insects and flowers. In the place where he carried on an unpretentious practice, there were three or four very learned men. But the work of this unpretentious physician who had such a love for the wildflowers in the meadows was much more fruitful for the sick people than that of the city physician and the other learned men. Their wisdom came from the schools, but his wisdom and understanding of remedies came from that direct intercourse with nature which leads to a real medical knowledge when we can love nature, in all her details. To look at fragments of nature under the microscope is not to love her. We must love nature. We must all be able to expand her to the macrocosmic. This shows you how necessary it is to call up this subconscious life of the astral body, particularly for medical knowledge, to call it up in reality.

It is not at all my wish to revive the stock-in-trade of ancient medicine, my dear friends, but only to lay before you the results of present-day observation. One is obliged to resort to the terminology of ancient tradition, because neither modern language nor modern medical terminology contain the right expressions. It might even be more favorable for the spreading of our views if we were to devise an altogether new terminology. But that would take years, and as you want to hear about these things now, I shall have to use the old expressions with certain modifications.

It will be a good thing to look, first of all, at the plant world—not because I want to recommend plant remedies for everything, but because much can be learned from the plants, above all for an esoteric deepening.

It is very important to study three things connected with medical tradition, but not to study them in the way that is current in present-day science. When a student has learned something of today, he knows it and he thinks: Well, that's all right, I know it and I can apply it. But a religiously-minded person learns the Lord's Prayer. He, too, knows it, but he does not think that the mere fact of knowing it is sufficient. He says it every day as a prayer. What he knows, he prays, every day. He lets what he knows pass through his soul every day, and that is a very different matter—very different, indeed.

Or think of an Initiate. We presuppose that he knows the elements of occult science. He himself attaches no importance to the mere fact of knowing them, to the fact that he once assimilated them. He knows that it is much more important to let the very first rudiments and then all that follows flow through his soul from time to time so that his soul can always be receiving new forces of inspiration. A person who is fundamentally religious has quite different experiences from one who merely regards nature as something that is there before us in the physical world. We must live in the rhythms of nature again and again if we desire a living and not a dead kind of knowledge. There must be constant, rhythmic repetition of knowledge and the activity of knowledge. That is what I mean when I say that a real medical consciousness must be the basis for medical science. The acquisition of medical knowledge from the nature of the human being and from his environment—that is what is so important, in therapy as well. Again and again you must let the plants really come to life in the soul.

Three things are of particular significance in the plant. One is the scent that is connected with the oils. The scent, or aromatic element is that which attracts certain elementary spirits who like to come down into plants. The activity (not the substance) which underlies this aromatic nature, is to be found, in its most concentrated form, in the mineral kingdom, in sulfur. This spiritual extract that is active in the aroma of the plants gives rise to a kind of longing in the elementary beings who come down through the scent. In ancient medicine, this element was known as the sulfuric nature of the plants. If we contemplate the sulfuric nature of the plants we can acquire an understanding for their scent, if we know that something spiritual is in play above and below when the plant gives off its scent. That is the first thing.

A second thing that we acquire is an inner feeling-filled understanding of what is growing in the leaf. The form and character of leaves is so manifold; they may be serrated, with pointed or round ends, geniculated, and so forth. We should evolve a delicate perception of this leaf nature of the plants. For those spiritual beings who come down through the scent can draw life from this leaf nature. And streaming from the cosmic periphery inwards, there is everywhere the striving to the drop formation. This can give you a marvelous feeling for the cosmic, form-loving principle that is contained in the leaf. And then, think of the plant covered with glistening drops of dew in the morning. In their essential nature these drops of dew are a reflection of the striving of the cosmic periphery to produce the spherical form, the drop form in the plant kingdom. The principle of drop formation is at the basis of the leaf nature in the plant. If the peripheric, cosmic forces alone were spiritually active in the plant, it would always produce this spherical form. The spherical formation is particularly to the fore when the cosmic forces get the upper hand in the formation of berries, also in the formation of many leaves, but the drop formation here is immediately taken possession of by the earthly forces, and manifold forms arise.

This striving towards drop formation is concentrated, in the mineral world, in quicksilver. Therefore, ancient medicine called this 'striving towards drop formation', the Mercurial principle. In ancient medicine, Mercury was not the substance of quicksilver but the dynamic striving towards the drop formation.

On the earth, quicksilver is the metal which has the drop form because the conditions for this exist. On the earth, quicksilver has the form which silver has on the moon, where it would also have to exist in the drop form. The point is that ancient medicine called everything that had the drop form Mercury. All metals were also 'Mercury' in ancient medicine. This ancient medicine had living, mobile concepts, and we, too, must develop them. We must gradually grow into a frame of mind which makes us say: “When I walk over the fields in the morning and see the silver pearls of dew on the leaves, these pearls of dew reveal to me what is living spiritually in the leaves themselves; it is the striving towards the cosmic form of the sphere.” But this must become a feeling within us, so that we are able to understand the plants. We must understand them in their cosmic, spherical form.

If you get such an insight into the nature of the plants that you understand the forces in them which are striving towards drop formation, and then again think of their scent, you will gradually begin to understand everything that works centrifugally in the human being. There is a centrifugal force at work when the nails are cut. The centrifugal forces working through the human being make the nails grow again. During the first seven years of life particularly, the forces which come to a conclusion with the second dentition, work out centrifugally through the human being. They express themselves strongly in the formation of sweat. The element which in the scent of plants strives upwards and attracts the Nature Spirits is also active in the smell of sweat which works in the centrifugal direction. And so if you want to look for the plant nature in the human being, you must seek it where it strives outwards, and in this way you unfold an intimate knowledge of the connection between what is outside and what is within the human being. For you see, when the etheric body gives over its special features to the astral body, the whole thing is changed. The inclination of the etheric body would be to unfold what it takes from the environment, in the upward direction; inasmuch as this is given over to the astral body, it unfolds in the centrifugal direction. In this respect, too, the human being bears the plant existence within him.

And now think of how the plant sinks into the earth with its root; how with its root it enters into a close connection with the salts in the soil. A process takes place here that is exactly the opposite of the one we know in the material world. Take sodium chloride which, in solution, tastes salty, and now think of the process being exactly reversed, the solution being arrested, a congealment taking place and the smell and the taste become latent. There you have the process which goes on between the soil and the root of a plant. That is what was known as the salt process in ancient medicine. Ancient medicine did not use the word salt in the way we use it today, but meant by salt that element which, in the downward-pointed root of the plant, enters into a connection with the substances of the earth. That is the salt nature.

By directing your attention rhythmically to these wonderful secrets of nature you fill your medical knowledge with life that is capable of practical application. If you try in this way to fill your medical knowledge with life, you will begin to regard nature and the human being in such a way that the capacity to heal will be born of the strong impulse to give help, of which I have spoken. The capacity to heal can only come from this foundation. It must be quickened by keen, diligent, and zealous exoteric learning, for otherwise mere vagueness will be the result. But it is necessary to know that the real foundation of medical knowledge lies in this rhythmic, meditative absorption in the natural environment of the human being, and not in theoretical study.

What I am now going to write on the blackboard is not there in order that you may “learn” it, but in order that it may quicken life in your medical thinking.

You healing Spirits,
You unite
With Sulfur's blessing
In the ethereal fragrance;

You come to life
In upward springing Mercury
Dewdrop
Of growing
And becoming.

You make your halting place
In the Earth Salt
Which nourishes the root
In the soil.

Ihr heilenden Geister
Ihr verbindet euch
Dem Sulphursegen
Des Ätherduftes;

Ihr belebet euch
Im Aufstreben Merkurs
Dem Tautropfen
Des Wachsenden
Des Werdenden.

Ihr machet Halt
In dem Erdensalze
Das die Wurzel
Im Boden ernährt.

This is what the soul receives in looking out into the universe around. The human being answers:

I will unite
The Knowledge of my Soul
With Fire of the flower's fragrance;

I will bestir
The Life of my Soul
On the glistening drop of leafy morning;

I will make strong
The Being of my Soul
With the all hardening Salt
Whereby the Earth with loving care
Nurtures the root.


Ich will mein Seelenwissen
Verbinden dem Feuer
Des Blütenduftes;

Ich will mein Seelenleben
Erregen am glitzernden Tropfen
Des Blättermorgens;

Ich will mein Seelensein
Erstarken an dem Salzerhärtenden
Mit dem die Erde
Sorgsam die Wurzel pflegt.

If over and over again, as the pious are wont to do in prayer, we make this inwardly living, it will quicken in the soul the forces which render us capable of medical work. The ordinary powers that are educated in the schools cannot awaken true medical knowledge, for true medical knowledge must be drawn forth from the soul. And so at the very summit of the esoteric studies which we are to pursue, I always place this thought: that the powers of the soul must first be quickened in order to bring to birth in the soul the faculty that can lead to true medical knowledge.

I have now studied your questions, which are all connected with the matters of which we spoke yesterday. A first category of questions has arisen out of a certain uneasiness. Single questions will find their answer in the course of the lectures: in the case of others which are fundamentally similar, it will not be possible to give theoretical answers—the answers will only emerge as a result of the whole course of lectures. Fundamentally, the trend of all these questions is: How can those who are attending this course develop their medical work in association with Dornach? The true development of the impulse of which I spoke in the esoteric sense yesterday and shall speak of again tomorrow—this true and real development of our work is the foundation of everything, although, naturally, such matters can only be inadequately dealt with in so few lectures. To begin with, I will make certain general remarks in connection with what was said yesterday.

Little is accomplished, my dear friends, if we simply direct a person's general attention, or if he does this himself, from the material world to the spiritual world. In every sphere of life—and most strongly of all in the medical sphere and for the physician—this general indication towards the spiritual does correspond with an innermost need of the soul. But in many respects this need requires much greater definition and clarity and also possibly most important of all—a greater inner strength than that with which it usually arises. It is a striving in you, my dear friends, but a definite path must be taken. The impulse towards this path can, in the first place, be given by me, but having received this impulse you yourselves must continue to work in association with Dornach—definitely those of you who have set yourselves this task.

It is not enough to strive, in a general way, towards the spiritual; this striving towards the spiritual must be concrete and real in every domain of life. We must enter into a real communion with the being of the world, with the being and reality of the external cosmos. Man has no experience of the cosmos today and because he does not experience the cosmos, he does not experience spirituality, for spirituality can only be acquired by way of the cosmos. In its external form, medical science yields no spiritual knowledge concerning existence. It is only by being able to place things in their whole cosmic connection that we learn to see through the veil of nature to the spiritual forces behind her.

For more than twenty years now within the Anthroposophical movement, it has been possible to study and to get a very exact knowledge of the difficulties that may arise in the pursuit of the spiritual life. And it may sound rather trivial when one describes, in a few brief words, in what these difficulties have consisted. They have consisted simply in the fact that those who were striving for esotericism in some domain or other wished to make things too easy, too comfortable for themselves. The esoteric path is either difficult or it is no path at all! Esoteric development is not to be obtained along an easy or comfortable path. We must take in complete and solemn earnestness the general and often repeated statement that it is a matter of overcoming difficulties, of man growing out of and beyond himself. From now onwards, from the time that began with our Dornach Christmas Foundation Meeting, a kind of change must take place in our whole conception of the anthroposophical movement. This change must also take place in the individual sections of the work. And you who are seeking to find your path in the medical sphere, must, from the very beginning, share in this essential change. There can be no question of regarding the esoteric path as a mere adjunct to life; one's path of life must be completely filled with esoteric impulses. The help that can be given will be given in the lectures. But, as I shall say at the end of this lecture, something else must be added as well.

Let us first consider one particular detail. For if you have not the will to enter into details in spiritual studies, you will not be able to find the way to the spiritual. Let it not be imagined that one can really find the spiritual as a dreamer, or as a person who gives himself up to all kinds of vague inspirations and the like. The spiritual must be attained today by the most intensely earnest, inner striving. And it can only be attained through the knowledge that comes from the spiritual world.

I have already said that much can be learned from the world of the plants. And now let us think of a plant. People study plants today by looking at the root, stem, leaves, flowers, pistil, stamens, seed. The seed develops in the ovary, and then people describe what they thus see in the plant more or less as they would describe an armchair, adding that they often sit in one! This, more or less, is the way in which a plant is described. We are told how the roots are set in the soil, how they draw in physical and chemical forces and substances, how the saps rise up through capillary action, or the like. To speak of a spiral arrangement of the leaves is considered an error, an aberration. At any rate, it is not known that this spiral arrangement is connected with the cosmos. So far as the blossoms and flowers are concerned, the most that can be said is that botanists picture some kind of force in connection with the colors and substances of the flowers, or with fertilization. The whole thing is described entirely from the external point of view, just as one describes how a person sits in an armchair. Yes, but the reality that must be grasped simply cannot be grasped by these methods. In studying a plant we must realize that a wonderful mystery is indicated as it stands there with its root sunk in the soil. The stem with the leaves points to another mystery and the processes in the blossom to yet another mystery.

Think of it, my dear friends—the root, sinking into the soil, represents the end of the plant existence in the direction of the solid earth. But this root could receive nothing from the soil if the soil of the earth had not first come under the influence of the cosmic environment. The cosmic environment, not only the warmth and light of the sun but also those forces which proceed from the rest of the planetary system belonging to the earth, influence the earth from the surface a little way inwards. And the forces that are quickened in this way in the earth's substances make it possible for the root to be within the earth.

Now in the human head we find the same forces that play around the roots of plants, but in the human head we find them in quite a different form from that in which they exist around the roots of plants in the soil. Inner perception of these things will never unfold if we go no further than what can be learned today from natural science. Many of your questions speak of this as the chaotic knowledge given you by contemporary natural science. What is necessary is to understand, out of real experience, the nature of what was once called the earthy, the watery, the airy, the fiery. For if you simply go on speaking about hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, phosphorus, in the way modern chemistry speaks, these things will always remain something quite external. You will never be able to think in any other way than that you stand there as a human being and somewhere outside there is oxygen or nitrogen. What modern physiology or chemistry tells you about oxygen or nitrogen is something quite direct. Physiology tells you that nitrogen exists in the organism, but you do not experience nitrogen in the organism. What is necessary is to take one's start from what can be experienced. And things that can be experienced must be deeply united with our whole being, if it is our aim to place ourselves in the service of the shaping of the world. And that is what we are doing when we heal.

Now so far as one of the elements of antiquity is concerned, everyone can know that he experiences it. This element is warmth, warmth as a quality of nature. We experience warmth, for we feel warm, or we feel cold. We are not as external to warmth as we are to oxygen and nitrogen.

It was characteristic of ancient study of nature that it took as its fundamental element something that could actually be experienced, something in which a man can be, not something that he must remain outside of. Let us first take this element of warmth, of fire, because here it is easiest to grasp the factor of actual experience. We know that as human beings we experience warmth. Now what is, for the plant, the earth—the earthy element is, for the human head, warmth.

Suppose you have here the earth, and 'think away' from it what appears to you as the earthy element; also think away the fluid and the airy, but let the warmth remain, so that you have a kind of ‘soil’ of warmth. You can picture this quite easily. Now take the whole thing (See Illustration I on the next page) and turn it round, so that what was formerly below is now above (See Illustration I on the next page)—it is a polar opposite.

You can now say: I behold the root of the plant, it is within the earthy soil; I behold the human head, it is in the 'warmth' soil, but the soil is in the reverse position. That is because what happens here (See Illustration I on the next page) lies four stages further back than this. (See Illustration I on the next page) If you speak of what goes on in the plant root as an earth happening, you must speak of what goes on in the human head, out of the warmth, as a Saturn happening. Between them are Sun and Moon happenings. And now 'think away' from the human head everything that came into it at later stages. Think away the earthy, the watery, the airy, and picture merely the warmth working in the human head, the warmth that provides the rest of the organism with differentiated warmth—and then you have the human head as it is today, a miniature Saturn. In the human head today you have the old Saturn organization. And if you understand the connection, then you say to yourselves: In the cosmos, untold millennia ago, there was a structure that anticipated everything that exists today as warmth in the human head. And the plant root in the earthy element today creates an image of the condition that thus preceded it.

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There you have a connection. You behold ancient Saturn in the warmth organization of the human head. But if this act of beholding is to be true, it must be connected not merely with theoretical ideas but with inner, moral impulses. Looking at the human head must be an experience that moves us inwardly; we feel that the human head is the living, embodied remembrance of a very ancient evolutionary period of the cosmos, of the old Saturn period. Try, for once, to let this feeling permeate you. I am a human being who has reached a certain age. My childhood stands before me; the remembrance of childhood rises up. As one who has grown older, I sink myself into the remembrances of my childhood. This in itself gives rise to a certain inner experience which we can confront with moral power. And now expand this feeling to the point where you say to yourselves: “As a human being I was present during the old Saturn period. If, in this present time I understand my head truly, it is like a living remembrance of a primeval evolutionary period of the cosmos.” All that takes shape through the remembrances of childhood is infinitely multiplied when contemplation of the living head leads us back to the time of Old Saturn.

Such knowledge is only of value when it is steeped in moral feeling, when one can really be filled with awe by the fact that our own activity leads us into a real experience of the cosmos. Meditation, above all for the physician, does not consist in merely brooding over thoughts; meditation consists in actually bringing such interrelationships before the soul and having, in regard to them, manifold feelings through which one may experience all kinds of inner shocks and emotions. Suppose I meet a human being whom I have not seen for, say, forty years. As he comes before me in his present form, the picture of his childhood stands before my soul. I see him before me as a child. This gives rise to certain inner emotion or shock. I look at the root nature of the plant, I acquire the capacity to relate this root nature to the human head, and the human head leads me back to the time of Old Saturn. Meditation must penetrate to the very soul; it must quicken a deep inward life.

This is an indication of how, after the foundation has been laid by a course of exoteric study, everything in the esoteric domain must aim at promoting intuitive experience of the cosmos in connection with the whole being of man. For just as the Old Saturn existence can arise within you when you study the connection between the human head and the root of a plant, so too can the Old Sun existence arise within you when you study the connection between the human heart and the development of the stem and leaves of a plant. The stem and leaf development in the plant is, again, a remembrance that has now become living, of the Old Sun existence.

The flower in which the seed is produced is connected with the human metabolic system, the limb-metabolic system. And when we study what goes on in the flower in connection with the metabolic or limb system in man, a remembrance of the Old Moon period arises. And if you have this inner experience, if in deepest meditation you feel these connections inwardly, then you experience still more.

Something of great significance is experienced. If with this deepened feeling you turn your soul to the root of the plant, you will begin to feel as if no plant root were really still, but as if it were moving. You learn to recognize this movement. I can only give an outline of these things. I can only point to an impulse, to the way in which inner experience must be built up and how knowledge of nature becomes a real wisdom. You will experience this movement in the root of the plant. And contemplating it, you will feel as if, together with the root, you were moving through cosmic space. Through this very experience, in which you seem to be in the chariot which travels with you through the cosmos with the swiftness of the plant root, you will discover that what you are really experiencing is the movement of the planetary system through cosmic space. In the root of the plant you experience the movement of the whole planetary system through cosmic space. And if then, in the same way, you experience the growth of the leaves, again you experience a movement in which you yourselves participate. And this is the true movement, the inwardly experienced movement of the earth.

What the Copernican system has to say about the revolution of the earth around the sun is nothing but a series of constructions. The true movement of the earth becomes an

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inner experience when we deepen ourselves in the connection which exists between stem and leaves. In your contemplation of stem and leaves you move, together with the earth, in the wake of the sun, so that the earth really seems to be doing what the Copernican system describes. But the movement is, in reality, a much more complicated one.

If you contemplate the processes in the blossom around the stamens and the pistil deeply enough, you will experience the movement which the moon carries out around the earth. In experiencing the flower you experience the movement of the moon—a movement that is already separate from the earth. The planetary system as a whole is experienced in the root of the plant, the earth's movement in the stem and leaves; the moon's movement which has been separated off, is experienced in the generation of the seed in the plant.

I say this to you, my dear friends, in the first place, in order that you may learn to have insight into things of which ordinary science takes no account at all, because it considers that such matters are neither knowable nor worth knowing. But they must be known—otherwise nothing of reality can be known. And I tell you all this for yet another reason. I do not think that, in the ordinary way, anybody gets a shock or feels emotion from what he learns about the plants. It causes him no inner concern—he simply assimilates it. And he experiences nothing at all, in reality. But in a second medical course such as that of which we spoke, if you begin to know the planets' movements, the earth's movement, the moon's movement from your contemplation of the plants, the minerals, (though here things are rather different) and also of the human being—then these things will not leave you indifferent.

It is essential for us today, my dear friends, to bring activity of knowledge into these things. The heart feels that these are the ways which knowledge should take. But what is offered to the heart is something that is merely didactic, containing nothing of the realities. People think they have the realities in what is nothing more than a tiny fragment.

What is the attitude of science today? It always seems to me to be rather like this—suppose someone were to go to Dresden and were looking at the Sistine Madonna. A scientist might come up to him and say: This Sistine Madonna is, after all, nothing but an external impression which comes to you from outside. Then he might proceed to take the Madonna out of the frame and break it up into fragments getting smaller and smaller until they were mere atoms. And then he might say: Now you have real knowledge of this Madonna. But this is all wrong. If we want to have a real understanding of the Sistine Madonna we must first be able to enter into the aims of religion, then into all that poured into this Madonna figure from Raphael's spirituality, then into many other things too, but this is the first: we must try to enter into the intentions of the Gods, of the Divine Spiritual Beings behind the physical world. This would have to form part of the second medical course of which I have spoken. Only in such ways is it possible to bring people near to reality.

If you will take what I have just said as a stimulus, you will understand the two meditations which will awaken the power of medical understanding within you. In this meditation you may proceed as follows: First of all you can deepen yourselves in contemplation of the external phenomenon of fire, of fire that gives warmth, realizing in this contemplation that this external manifestation of fire is Maya, semblance, illusion. Behind the fire there is something quite different. Behind the fire there is working, active will.

You may ask: Yes, but how do I get to know that there is active, working will behind the fire? All true esoteric instruction addresses itself to the powers in the pupils themselves. If you will allow what I have said today really to enter into your hearts, there will arise within you the realization that wherever there is fire, there, too, is active working will—just as when you see the form of a human countenance, a human figure, you realize that here there is spirit and soul. Wherever you have fire, even in the tiniest match, there is active, working will. In order that you may also be able to penetrate the other substances of nature, you must reach the point where a burning match is no longer merely the external phenomenon that would be described today, but where you actually see it as active, working will. When you are able in this way to transform your minds and hearts, you will find that your soul learns to experience quite differently, to have quite a different attitude to the environment in which you find yourselves. You will find that your own working, active will is akin to fire. You will live out into the world from your own inner being and you will have a much more subtle and delicate perception of fire than before, because you realize its kinship with your own will. You will find this kinship wherever there is fire. You must learn to realize: I am really within this fire, for it is active, working will; it belongs to me, just as my own finger belongs to me.

Air must be encouraged in you as courage. Wherever wind blows, you will experience it in your own soul as courage. What you see in outer nature as air—this is courage. Courage is air. This must be an experience in your soul.

Water is the outer manifestation of feeling. In feeling there is the same inner activity as is present in the external world, in water. Water is feeling.

Earth, solid earth, is the same as thought. In thought, life freezes.

If you can grasp these four points in meditation; if you can learn to think of fire as active, working will—if you can take the external appearance of fire as manifestations of this active will—if you see in the fire this active will just as you see spirit and soul in the form of a human being—if you can feel that the external form of the fire is maya—if you can feel that the blowing wind and the clouds are phenomena which are a revelation of courage—if you can see water as an expression of feeling, and the earth as something that resembles your own thoughts—then you will discover that this organic process, which arises in your own being as an earthly going out from the head and stretching downwards, is a continuation of the earth formation, the uniting of a substance of earth formation which has weight, and this is the nature of thought.

If you then pass to the breathing and feel how, in the breathing the aeriform nature of the human being is circulating, then you will recognize, in the activity of man's aeriform nature, everything that may be called activity in the human being, that takes him into the outer world, in order that he may assert himself within this outer world. And you will try to learn from the study of many phenomena in outer nature, what it is that happens to the air in the human being.

And you will know that the watery organism of man, the fluid organism with its inner mobility, is the seat of feeling, the feeling that flows in the centrifugal and centripetal directions. You will know that the movement of air is a semicircular movement, from above downwards. You will know that what lives in the fluid nature has a centrifugal and centripetal movement in man and strives everywhere to hold the balance.

Thus, from observation of what exists outside in nature, you will find the transition to what happens with these elements in the human being. The essential point is that we shall not rest content with observation of the ordinary kind, for this makes us earthy ourselves, dried up and rigid, and we lose our mobility.

Much has been given in what I have sketched today. Intermediary stages have been left out because it would take too long to give you every detail. I can only give suggestions. You will have realized from what I have said that the whole method, the whole way of medical study must become different. And now see to it that what I have told you here really bears fruit within you. Many of the questions which you have put with heavy hearts and which I have read with a heavy heart because they point so tellingly to what is needed in our times, will be answered if you always remain in connection with the Goetheanum. If you do this, your medical studies, wherever they may be, will constantly be enriched.

It is, of course, essential that you should realize the necessity of earnest striving, earnest learning. You must work seriously and earnestly. And you must have a second feeling which arises in you in all sincerity—you must decide whether you will follow this feeling, or whether you will not. This feeling must be that the enrichment of medical study is to proceed, in future, from Dornach; in Dornach we shall try to give the enrichment that is so needed today. You must choose the path you are going to take in medicine. For one thing, there will be the problem of karma. In the nature of things, those who want to heal must have an intimate understanding of karma in the world. I shall speak of this again. In healing, one cannot run counter to karma; one can only heal in accordance with karma. But where karma is concerned one cannot say superficially: When someone is ill, it is his karma to remain ill; and when he is well again, his karma has given him health. It is not right to speak thus. The question of how karma works in human life needs a real, fundamental deepening, a cosmic deepening. These things will be taken care of in Dornach for those who seek them.

I have already said that in the future, impulses will be given from esoteric sources, for account must be taken of the realities which exist and which were reckoned with in the foundation of the General Anthroposophical Society at the Christmas Meeting. As I said yesterday, the question of others copying the remedies causes me no anxiety, if in Dornach, it is really understood that esoteric medical study must be carried on in a much deeper connection with Dornach. To this end it will be necessary to carry out this medical work in the same way as other branches of the spiritual life in Dornach.

In the life of the Anthroposophical Society it was always the case that those who wanted to become esotericists did not pay enough heed to the inner conditions of the esoteric life. And so the years went by. It has only been in two spheres that we have been able to achieve what is necessary, namely, in the sphere of General Anthroposophy and in the sphere of Eurythmy and the Art of Speech. But the independent, inner activity that has developed in these spheres must be developed in all the Sections now to be formed. And to this end you must really submit to the conditions that will be made; you must submit to them in full confidence and trust.

One of these conditions is that I shall carry out everything connected with the medical sphere in association with Dr. Wegman, who in the course of years within the anthroposophical movement has prepared herself for medicine and whose place in this medical movement is such that it will be led by her in association with me. And so those who join Dr. Wegman with confidence will get help from Dornach as they go along. An arrangement will have to be made that those who want to remain permanently connected with the Section for the renewal of medicine shall address themselves, with their requests, to Dr. Wegman, in complete confidence.

Periodically—perhaps about every month—we will answer, in a circular letter, the questions of those who, at the end of this lecture course, want to become pupils at the Goetheanum. It will be the same in all the sections. This circular letter will answer the questions put by individuals and all those who are members of the corresponding section will receive the answers. But unless there is inner confidence, there will be no success. A real link will be created by these means, and all your human and medical needs will be satisfied.

This is how things will be arranged to begin with, until we can take further steps. The great failing that has existed in the esoteric life hitherto is that people have been arrogant enough to think that they should always receive their esoteric exercises from me. They all wanted to come to me, not to others. That is where the esotericism has foundered hitherto. For inner, occult reasons, the only possible way is for what lives in the well-spring of esotericism to be led and guided by the personalities who are suited for this work. This leadership by persons who are destined for it by fate—this is part of esotericism. It is a principle that has been rejected because people were immodest. If this principle is not adopted we shall not make progress, even in the newly founded Anthroposophical Society.

Thus I have sketched, and I will still further develop, how the true esotericism must work on into the future. Tomorrow I will try to answer the greater part of the questions which have been put and will all amount to this: How can I find my way into a training that has its center in Dornach? You will be able to find the way, but you must have confidence. It is not a matter of belief in authority but of an intelligent building upon an inner foundation, and an acceptance of conditions that are created by destiny.