The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Impulses connected with the spiritual world, whatever their direction, can only be understood from the viewpoint of spiritual science. As we have seen, playing into today's events there are impulses which we have traced back to human beings, but only to those who know how to handle spiritual impulses in one way or another.

We must ask ourselves: Why do certain people do the kind of things we have been talking about? Which leads to the next question: Why are we living in an age when untruth—untruthfulness—is working as a dominant force in the world, a force which drives human beings with a veritable passion that could, if only it would turn towards the truth instead, bring about infinitely much in the way of healing?

These things are indeed connected with what are, at the moment, the deepest impulses of humanity. We can gain a closer understanding of them, in a manner appropriate for our time, by including in our considerations the most urgent task of that spiritual-scientific view of the world which we have made our own. Remember that our anthroposophical spiritual science seeks to understand certain spiritual aspects which exist in the world, certain forces which are at work in the world of human beings in so far as they develop not only between birth and death but also between death and a new birth. It is difficult for people today to think about these things in the right way, because they have lost certain faculties which were once present in human evolution; for a while these faculties had to go underground, but now they must light up again through spiritual science.

We know well enough that in olden times the human soul was linked with the spiritual world in a way that was more elementary, more natural; such links did not have to be brought about by active spiritual work but existed of themselves. We called them atavistic. We know, too, that in those days it was impossible for human beings to doubt the existence of life after death. The possibility of such doubt only arose for an interim period which is now to be succeeded by an age in which all shall know about life between death and a new birth.

In those olden times something else—a third condition—came as naturally to the human soul as waking and sleeping do today. In today's state of being awake, human beings are restricted entirely to the physical world which they can perceive with their senses; they live between birth and death in a world which they can experience through their senses and through their understanding which is bounded by the brain. And in sleep they are unconscious. The entities of ego and astral body in which they live between falling asleep and waking up are not yet strong enough to supply them with a comparable consciousness. We know that the astral body has only been developing since the time of ancient Moon and the ego only since the beginning of Earth evolution. Both are young measured against cosmic evolution and they are not yet strong enough to achieve consciousness when left to themselves between going to sleep and waking up.

Dreams, however, with all their manifold pictures, do rise up out of sleep. These dreams can contain a great deal that belongs to the spiritual world. There is a great deal in dreams which belongs to the spiritual world, but the human soul as it is today is not capable of seeing beyond the dreams in order to discover what it is that lives in these dreams. Dreams are deceptive pictures woven out of a veil of maya. When they are rightly interpreted they yield experiences of earlier times or prophetic indications for the future. They also reveal the interplay which takes place between the living and the dead during sleep. Everything can come to us through dreams. But, at the present stage of their evolution, human beings do not understand the strange language of dreams. Dream pictures remain incomprehensible, and this is quite natural. Just as Europeans cannot interpret the sounds spoken by the Chinese, so people today cannot interpret the picture language of dreams.

Thus during this interim period the human being is totally restricted in consciousness to whatever he can discover through those older instruments, the physical body and also the etheric body, which have been developing since the time of ancient Sun and ancient Saturn and are therefore so constituted that they can offer him consciousness as long as he is in them, that is, between waking up and going to sleep.

Now the spiritual science for which we are striving gives us concepts of the super-sensible world working in and behind the sense-perceptible world. The concepts and ideas given to us by spiritual science and which we make our own are related to nothing that can be perceived by the senses. They relate either to what lies between death and a new birth, or to the super-sensible world which lies beyond the world of the senses. Comprehension of these is not, or ought not to be, a mere comprehension of certain theories. We are not concerned with knowing one thing or another but with achieving a certain inner mood of soul when we take in truths relating to the super-sensible world.

It is difficult to describe these things in words because our language has been coined for the external, physical plane, so we have to exert ourselves when applying it to super-sensible conditions. You could say that everything to which we ordinarily apply our understanding lives coarsely, densely in our soul because our brain is always at our disposal and is trained to deal with ideas and concepts relating to the physical plane. But to explain things which do not relate to the physical plane we have to exert our soul to such an extent that, when we study spiritual science, our brain plays an ever-decreasing part. When we experience difficulties in understanding what spiritual science gives us, this is only because our brain impedes our understanding. Our brain is adjusted and adapted to the coarse concepts of the physical plane and we have to exert ourselves to acquire the subtler concepts—subtler only in so far as human comprehension is concerned—of the spiritual world. This exertion is entirely healthy, it is certainly good, because with spiritual science we then live in our soul in a new way, quite different from that required by physical knowledge and understanding and ideas. We transport ourselves into a world of mobile, subtle pictures and ideas, and that is significant.

It is possible for all of you to be aware of the point at which you are sufficiently within the sphere where the etheric body more or less lives on its own, using the brain only in faint vibrations. It is the point at which you begin to feel that you no longer have to exert yourself to think the thoughts given by spiritual science, in the way in which you have to exert yourself to think everyday thoughts. You know very well that you yourself make the thoughts which you think about everyday matters on the physical plane; you develop the concepts in accordance with the daily requirements and conditions of life, in accordance with sympathies and antipathies and with whatever is prepared by your senses and by your brain-bound understanding. With spiritual science, however, once you really enter into it, you will begin to sense: I have not thought all this myself; it has already been thought before I think it; it is floating there as a thought and merely enters into me. When you begin to feel: This is floating in the objective thinking of the universe and merely enters into me—then you will have won a great deal. You will have experienced a relationship to that delicate etheric, floating and weaving world in which your soul lives. After that it is really only a matter of time, though it might be quite a long time, before you gradually enter that sphere which we share with those among the dead with whom we are karmically linked.

I said that in olden times there was no question of discussing whether immortality existed or not. People then had a third condition apart from sleeping and waking, an in-between condition which was not merely a state of dreaming. It was an elementary and natural condition, in which human beings saw their dead spiritually face to face. They were there and they lived together with them. In those earlier times, when people did something, or when something happened to them which was a little out of the ordinary—and this of course happened and still happens all the time, for we are not only creatures of habit—they then felt beside them one or another of those who had gone through death before them, either long, or not so lang, ago. They felt as though the dead person acted with them, or joined in their counsel. So when the soul of a person living on the earth decided to do something, or when something happened to that person, this soul felt that there was one who had died who joined in the action or the suffering. The dead were present. So there was no discussion about immortality or the lack of it. It would have been as pointless as questioning whether someone with whom we are speaking is actually there or not. Whatever we experience is a reality, and in olden times people experienced how the dead shared in all that happened.

We know the reasons why those times had to go into the underground of existence. But they will return, though in a different form. The manner of their return will be brought about by human beings who achieve the mood of soul which can be achieved through spiritual science, through actively living in the pictures of the spiritual world given by spiritual science. This will enable the soul to attain a delicate attuning, and then into this delicate attuning the souls of the so-called dead will enter. Of course they are always present, but what matters now is that we should be aware of how they enter into our soul-sphere. Of course, the dead always surround those of us with whom they were karmically linked during life. But to enable them to enter our consciousness we must go to meet them with the fine attuning I have just described. For you see it is always possible for the dead to gain entry into human souls if these souls lead their life in a mood such as that described just now, where the concepts and ideas formed by these souls live, somehow, in a super-sensible sphere. From the bodily, physical aspect of man the dead have to flee, for at the moment they cannot enter there. Neither can they enter those thoughts which only rise up from the brain after the manner of the physical world. And because today human beings mostly entertain only thoughts that rise up from the brain, it is so very difficult for the dead to make contact with the living.

But if the living go to meet the dead by developing the fine attuning that arises when one concerns oneself a great deal with super-sensible ideas, then the dead can enter that floating and weaving world which extricates itself from the bodily aspect and takes no account of it. Today everything depends on whether human souls will find it possible, in some measure, to tread the path which leads to the dead. For then the dead will come to meet them. There must be a meeting in a common realm.

I have often stressed that what spiritual science has to say about the super-sensible world, the concepts and ideas we develop—all this is there for both the living and the dead. That is why I have recommended the practice of reading to the dead: that is, of unfolding thoughts orientated to them which refer to the super-sensible world. Doing this is a way of offering them a bridge and it is one which can reach not only those who have died recently, but all those who have died, even a very long time ago.

In this way the living have the possibility of approaching the dead. And similarly the dead have the possibility of working into the thoughts of the living. When you have absorbed the spirit of spiritual science you will be able to form from such arguments a fair conception of the fact that in the materialistic age we human beings have lived through for so long the dead can have less and less influence on the course of events here in the physical world where human beings have turned towards more materialistic ideas relating only to the physical plane, ideas which are of no use to the dead. So events in the physical world now run their course without any, or with only very little, influence from those who have passed on. This will have to change. Active communication must once more be established between the living and the dead. Those who have died must become able to work into the physical world, so that what takes place there no longer goes on solely under the influence of conceptions which arise in this physical world.

So our pursuit of spiritual science is indeed intimately bound up with giving the dead an opportunity to work here in the physical world. It must be said that a grave and lofty aim of our work in spiritual science is the creation of a link between the spiritual world, where the dead have their home, and the physical world. Then the dead will no longer have to say to themselves that they are more or less exiles from the physical world owing to the fact that the living, down here, cannot develop thoughts through which the dead might bring their influence to bear in this physical world.

Many, for sure, will say: I have been striving to open myself to the ideas of spiritual science, but I have seen no sign of any influence emanating from the dead. My dear friends, these things demand a good deal of patience. You must take into account the degree to which for centuries the life of mankind on the physical plane has tended towards materialism and against anything that might make it possible for the dead to work here in a suitable way. Amongst all that has been going on for centuries, certain feelings, certain sensations have developed which human beings now entertain quite unconsciously towards the spiritual world. To these feelings and sensations, what comes today from spiritual science frequently appears as no more than abstract theory. One may well be convinced that what spiritual science has to say about the spiritual world is true. And yet it has not thus far entered so fully into one's whole soul life as to enable one to develop those sensations and feelings which do not disturb the delicate and subtle play of what comes over from the dead.

It is not easy to see these things in their proper light. People today are the children, or the grandchildren, or the great-grandchildren, or even the great-great-grandchildren of those who have lived during recent centuries and who have, under the influence of rising materialism, turned their sensations and feelings in certain directions. These directions are now expressed in every detail of these feelings and sensations. We can have the best will in the world to turn in the right way to someone who has died, to remember someone in the right way. But the whole disposition of our feelings and sensations working, perhaps one could say, through our blood which flows down to us from our ancestors, is not suited to placing before our soul in a proper way the delicate and intimate manifestations and revelations which come from the dead. Instead our feelings are like flickering lights, excitable flickering lights which interpose themselves in front of these subtle impulses which are today still so very delicate and intimate.

But though this may be the case we need not be discouraged, but should always cling to the positive aspect. And the positive aspect is that we genuinely strive for that condition which in certain moments of life, as the fruit of studying spiritual science, can give us a peacefulness of soul. What matters is that peacefulness of soul, the fine attuning in that peacefulness of soul, which makes it possible for us to receive these delicate, intimate manifestations and revelations from the kingdom of the dead.

Something else, too, is necessary, and that is the goodwill to resist all that untruthfulness about which we have been speaking in these lectures. All these untruthfulnesses that buzz about in the world enter into what might be called the spiritual aura and generate there a thick fog which the dead find impossible to penetrate. This thick fog contains all that black rubbish which comes, for instance—to name only one source—from today's journalism, in the form of untruths which are printed and repeated, creating an aura of untruthfulness spanning the earth. It is no exaggeration to say that it is exceedingly difficult for the dead to penetrate this black fog. Therefore, with the help of ideas such as those we have been developing concerning the absolutely concrete untruthfulness buzzing about in the world, it is necessary to endeavour to reach clarity, to really make the effort in this field to recognize the purely external truth of the physical plane in so far as this can become accessible to us, in order not to cover our soul with a dense fog through which the spiritual world simply cannot penetrate. You will understand how very necessary this is.

In conjunction with the concepts we have just been discussing, let us now touch on the question: What is the aim of those secret societies which send impulses of the kind we have been describing into the world, impulses which then live in the life of untruthfulness and which have led, out of this untruthfulness, to the painful events of today? What do these secret societies want? Among others—we cannot go into everything—there is one particular thing they want: They want to materialize materialism even further; they want to create even more materialism in the world than would come about as part of the natural evolution of mankind in the fifth post-Atlantean period. They want even more materialism. This is only one aspect of what they are aiming for, but it is the aspect we want at least to touch on here. With this aspect in mind such societies are founded and with this aspect in mind people are persuaded to join them, people who are approached during their lives because they are deemed suitable.

There are the most varied types of such societies. One type, much in evidence in the West and taking all kinds of forms, includes organizations which practise ceremonial magic. Ceremonial magic can, of course, be good magic, but we are speaking now of those societies which do not practise ceremonial magic for the good of mankind in general, but for the good of certain groups of people, or certain specific aims which are not general human aims.

Let us look first at those societies which practise ceremonial magic from this point of view. As we have said, it can be good, but in these societies it is not good. Certain kinds of ceremonial magic have definite effects on the human physical body. Everything physical is, after all, a manifestation of the spirit. Certain spiritual aspects which come into being under the influence of ceremonial magic can have an effect on the human physical body, specifically on the system of ganglia, as I described it the other day, and also on the spinal system. The cerebral system is the most difficult of all to influence by means of ceremonial magic. All this has to be done via the detour of the spiritual element, but it can be done and it can become effective.

Imagine certain secret societies carrying on a form of ceremonial magic directed towards its grey or black aspects. Imagine they influence their members in a way that affects even their physical body, even the delicate vibrations and weavings of their physical body, so that something spiritual flows into this physical body.

What is the consequence? The consequence is that something now comes about which was suitable in earlier periods of human evolution but is no longer permissible today. Such procedures make it possible for the spiritual world to influence those human beings who participate, even though they do not turn towards it along the path I have described. This means that it becomes possible for the dead, as well as other spirits, to influence the members of a circle created by ceremonial magic. In this way today's materialism can be made hyper-materialistic.

Imagine a human being—and there are countless such in the West—who is entirely materialistic, not only in his view of the world but also in all his feelings and sensations. And then imagine this materialistic disposition increasing to a high degree. Such a person must of necessity develop an urge to exercise an influence on the material world, not only while he lives in his physical body but also after he has died. He is bent on the following: When I die I want to have some abode through which I can affect the people I have left behind on the earth, or who are trained in such a way in relation to me. There are indeed certain people today whose materialistic urge is so great that they strive for means by which they can cultivate connections with the physical world even beyond death. And such means, through which a person secures for himself the possibility of affecting the material world from beyond death, are abodes of certain kinds of ceremonial magical practice.

This is something that can have immense consequences. Imagine a number of people brought together to form a certain brotherhood. These people know: Others have gone before us; their urge to exercise their power was so great that their life on earth was not enough for its gratification, so they want to go on gratifying it even after death. For them we are creating an abode, and through the acts of ceremonial magic we perform, they work into our bodies. Because of this we gain greater power than we have; because of this we are enabled to exercise a certain degree of magical power over other, weaker people who stand outside such brotherhoods. When we speak words, when we give a speech, these dead souls work in us because we have been prepared by sharing in these acts of ceremonial magic.

It is one thing if somebody who simply participates honestly in the cultural processes of our time gives a speech in parliament or writes a newspaper article. But it is something entirely different if a person who belongs to a circle of ceremonial magic, and is thus strengthened by the power urges of some who have died, gives a speech in parliament or writes an article for a newspaper. The latter exercises an immensely greater degree of influence in the direction of his wishes than would be the case if he did not have this backing. This is one side of the matter.

The other side is that those who enter the circle of certain societies practising ceremonial magic are securing for themselves a power that reaches beyond death, a kind of ahrimanic immortality. For these people this is their main concern. For them, the society they enter provides a kind of guarantee that certain forces—which should by rights only live in them until the moment of death—will continue to live, even beyond death. More people than you might think are nowadays filled with this idea of guaranteeing for themselves an ahrimanic immortality, which consists in exercising influence not only as an individual human being, but also through the instrument of a society of this kind. Such societies exist in the most varied forms, and individuals who have attained certain degrees of advancement in these societies know: As a member of this society I shall become to some degree immortal because forces which would otherwise come to an end at my death will continue to work beyond death.

What these people then experience through this ceremonial magic makes them quite oblivious to a thought which would concern someone who takes such things truly seriously and in a genuinely dignified way. This is that the more a person gains by way of materialistic immortality, or rather ahrimanic immortality, the more he loses of the consciousness of true, genuine immortality. Yet materialism has taken such a hold on many souls today that they remain unconcerned about this and are tricked into striving for ahrimanic immortality. It could indeed be said that societies exist today which, from a spiritual or occult point of view, could be called ‘insurance companies for ahrimanic immortality’!

It is only a small number of people in each case who understand all these things. For as a rule these societies are organized in such a way that the ceremonial magic they practise influences only those who are unaware of the implications, merely desiring to make contact with the spiritual world by means of symbolic ceremonies. There are many such people. And those who have this desire are by no means necessarily the worst. They are accepted as members of the circle of ceremonial magic among whom there are then a few who simply use the rest of the members as instruments. Therefore one should beware of all secret societies administered by so-called higher grades whose aims are kept hidden from the lower grades. These administrative grades usually comprise those who have been initiated to a stage at which they only have a vague idea of what I have just been explaining to you. They comprise those who are to work positively in connection with certain goals and aims which are then realized by the wider group of those who have been merely inveigled into the circle of ceremonial magic. Everything these people do is done in such a way that it leads in the direction required by the higher grades but is strengthened by the forces which come from ceremonial magic.

Those who know how huge a number of such societies exist in the West can begin to gain an idea of what immensely effective tools such societies of ceremonial magic can be for certain far-reaching plans for the world. As you have seen, the chief aim is to prolong into our time a way of proceeding in which the spiritual world works into the sense-perceptible, physical world in a manner that was right in earlier times. For our times, however, the right procedure is for human beings to go towards the dead and meet them half-way. In the mood we have just been discussing, however, a path is sought which was appropriate in earlier, atavistic times but which today is brought about through the medium of ceremonial magic.

This should give you an idea of the disproportionate lengths to which exaggerated materialism, materialism that is hyper-materialistic, is prepared go in order to cross the border to the spiritual world, a border which today should only be crossed by means of attuning the soul to that mood which can be achieved through contemplating super-sensible concepts. An attitude appropriate for today is one that never accepts things which are given out by many secret societies, and which are not understood, for indeed a great deal that has not been understood is today both given out and accepted. Today it is appropriate to treat what these societies give out as something that is at most a failure to give the spoken word its true value, that is, something that uses words as mere concepts.

In much that today buzzes about in the world by way of untruthfulness and by way of egoism, in much that has even led to the canonization of egoism—not by the Pope, of course—in much that has led to the coining of the phrase sacro egoismo, which has become a new saint, though not canonized by the Pope, in much that today buzzes about in the world by way of egoisms and untruthfulnesses, influences and impulses are at work which gain extra strength from the world of the dead, in the manner described. And by searching for these impulses you will be led on to link up with other impulses about which you may find information in my book The Spiritual Guidance of Man. The lectures on which this book is based were given in 1911 in Copenhagen, for the most varied reasons. You will find there a description of how certain angelic powers remained behind in the third post-Atlantean period, in order today to unfold a force resembling that developed during the ancient Egyptian epoch. In those lectures I said:

‘Anything wonderful can become a tempter and seducer of mankind if people follow it one-sidedly; and then if this one-sidedness starts to take a hold, the great danger arises that all kinds of good endeavours begin to manifest as fanaticism. True though it is that mankind progresses by means of its noble impulses, it is equally true that an over-enthusiastic, fanatical pursuit of these most noble impulses can lead to all that would be worst for their right unfolding.’

The lecture then goes on to describe how certain forces which had their proper place in the third post-Atlantean period are now starting to work in our time. One may now add that just as an individual quite rightly finds a connection with his proper angel, so is it also possible for him to find a connection to those retarded spirits of the Egypto-Chaldean period, those retarded angels, if he seeks those forces and impulses which, in fact, are exaggerated ahrimanic forces coming in the manner described from the realm of the dead. These retarded angels play an important role in the secret societies I have been describing to you. There they are important helpers and leading spirits. A great deal that goes on in such secret societies is aimed at bringing Egypto-Chaldean elements in the old way into the present time. When these matters are no mere tomfoolery but stand fully in occult life, this takes place under the influence of retarded beings from the hierarchy of the angels who become leaders there. These are the beings from the hierarchy next above man who are sought by these societies.

This points to something exceedingly important. When we understand how the living testaments of these societies—not written testaments left over for those still alive, but testaments which are forces going beyond death—when we understand how these work and are preserved, which is something that ought not to happen, then we understand something of the magical power wielded by such societies which often enables them to impress the stamp of truthfulness on to something untrue. And indeed, one of their important magical functions is to spread untruth in the world in such a way that it gives the effect of being the truth. For in this working of the ‘untruth in what is true’ lies one of the mighty strengths of evil. This strength of evil is then put to considerable use in all kinds of quarters.

This I wanted to say today, in order to give you the esoteric background to the more exoteric matters I have been describing. Tomorrow we shall continue with this and endeavour to enter even more deeply into certain aspects.

Let me start by drawing your attention to a number of things which might be of interest to you, beginning with an article in yesterday's issue of Schweizerische Bauzeitung, reporting on the Johannesbau in Dornach, near Basel. This is the result of a recent visit of a group of Swiss engineers and architects. The article is most gratifying and fair. Indeed, it is like an oasis in the midst of other things which have recently appeared in print about our efforts which had their source in our very midst. It is most satisfying to find such a fair discussion that gives the building its due, especially since it comes from specialist, objective quarters outside our own circle. Do read it. Herr Englert, who acted as guide for that group of Swiss engineers and architects who showed such genuine interest in our building from the technical and also the aesthetic point of view, has just reported that the article is also due to be published in French in the Geneva journal Bulletin de technique.

Further, I should like to draw your attention to a book—you will excuse my inability to tell you the title in the original language—just published by our friend Bugaev under his pen-name of Andrei Belyi. The book is in Russian and gives a very detailed account in great depth of the relationship between spiritual science and Goethe's view of the world. In particular it goes into the connections between Goethe's views and what I said in Berlin in the lecture cycle Human and Cosmic Thought about various world views, but it also discusses a good deal that is contained in spiritual science. Its connections to Goethe's views are discussed in depth and in detail and it is much appreciated that our friend Bugaev has published a revelation of our spiritual-scientific view in Russian.

Herr Meebold, too, has just published a book in Munich to which I should also like to draw your attention. The title is The Path to the Spirit. Biography of a Soul. You will find it interesting because Herr Meebold describes in it a number of experiences he had in connection with the Theosophical Society.

These are the oases in the desert of attacks. It seems that another has just appeared, written by one of our long-standing older members. It is said to be particularly scandalous, but I have not yet seen it. These attacks from among our members are particularly unwelcome because we realize that it is precisely these long-standing older members who ought to know better.

Yesterday we spoke about aspects of the human being's connections with the super-sensible world, particularly with regard to the fact that our dead, and indeed all those who have left their bodies and gone through the gate of death, must be thought of as being in that world. In our present context it is particularly important to understand that in the world through which man passes between death and a new birth an evolution, a development is taking place just as much as is the case here on the physical plane.

Here on the physical plane, taking a shorter span to start with, such as the post-Atlantean time, we speak of the Indian, the Persian, the Egypto-Chaldean, the Greco-Latin, the modern period, and so on. And we consider that during the course of these periods an evolutionary process takes place—in other words, that human souls and the manner in which these souls manifest in the world during this sequence of periods differ in characteristic ways.

Similarly, if only one can find sufficiently graphic concepts, one can speak of an evolution that takes place for these periods of time in the sphere through which the dead pass. There, too, an evolution takes place. On all kinds of occasions, where this has been possible, this evolution has been discussed in different ways. But relatively easy though it is to speak of evolution on the physical plane—and as you know it is not all that easy in this materialistic age—it is naturally less easy to do so with regard to the spiritual world, since for that world we lack sufficiently graphic concepts. Our language was created for the physical plane, and we are forced to use all kinds of paraphrases and graphic substitutes in order to describe the spiritual sphere in which the dead are living, especially with regard to evolution.

Naturally, of particular interest now is the fact that life between death and a new birth in our fifth post-Atlantean period is suitably different from what it was in earlier times. While the materialistic cultural period is running its course here on earth, a great deal is also taking place in the spiritual world. Since the dead have a far more intense experience of everything connected with evolution than is the case for people living on the physical plane, their destiny is most intensely dependent on the manner in which a certain evolution takes place in definite periods. The dead react far more intimately, far more subtly, to what lives in evolution than do the living—if we may use these expressions—and this is perhaps more noticeable in our materialistic age than has ever been the case before.

Now, to assist our understanding of a number of things we shall be discussing, I want to introduce into these lectures something that has emerged in relation to this, as a result of careful observation of the actual situation. To do this I shall have to widen our scope somewhat and speak today about various aspects in preparation for the statements towards which our train of thought is leading.

I have already pointed out that the right way to look at the human being in relation to the universe is to consider the individual parts of his being separately. From the spiritual point of view, what exists here on the physical plane is more a kind of image, a manifestation. Thus we may regard as fourfold the physical human being we see before us.

First we see the head. As you know from earlier discussions, the head as it appears in a particular incarnation is supposed to have reached its final stage in that incarnation. The head is the part most strongly exposed to death. For the way our head is formed is, for the most part, the consequence of our life in our previous incarnation. On the other hand, the formation of our next head in our next incarnation is the consequence of the life of our present body. A while ago I expressed this briefly by saying: Our body, apart from our head, metamorphoses itself into our head in our next incarnation, while our next body is growing towards us; whereas our present head is the metamorphosed body of our previous incarnation, the rest of our body has grown towards us more or less—there are varying degrees—out of what we have inherited.

This is how the metamorphosis takes place. Our head, as it were, falls away in one incarnation, having been the outcome of our body in our previous incarnation. And our body transforms itself, metamorphoses itself—as does leaf to petal in Goethe's theory of metamorphosis—into our head in our next incarnation. Now because our head is formed from the earthly body of our previous incarnation, the spiritual world has a great amount of work to do on this head between death and our new birth, for its archetypal form must be fashioned by the spiritual world in accordance with karma. That is why, even in the embryo, the head appears before anything else in its complete form, for more than any other part it has been influenced by the cosmos. The body, on the other hand, is influenced for the most part by the human organism. So this appears later than the head in the embryo. Apart from its physical substance, which has of course been gathered through heredity, our head, in its form, its archetypal form, is indeed shaped by the cosmos, by the sphere of the cosmos. It is not for nothing that your head is more or less spherical in shape, for it is an image of the sphere of the universe; the whole sphere of the universe works to form your head. Thus we can say that our head is formed from the sphere.

Just as here on earth people busily work to construct machines and build up trade and commerce, so in the spiritual world human beings are busy, though not exclusively, developing all the technical requirements, the spiritual technical requirements for building the head for their next incarnation from out of the sphere of the universe, the whole cosmos, in accordance with the karma of their earlier incarnations. We glimpse here a profound mystery of evolution.

The second aspect we must consider, if we want to view man as a revelation of the whole universe, comprises all the organs of his breast, centred around lung and heart. Let us look at them without the head. The head is an image of the whole spherical cosmos. Not so, the organs of the breast. These are a revelation of all that comes from the East. They are formed out of what might be called the hemisphere. (See diagram).

Imagine the cosmos like this. Then you can see the head as an image of the cosmos. And the organs of the breast can be seen as an image of what streams in from the East—the hemisphere I am shading green. This hemisphere alone works on the organs of the breast. Or, expressed as a paradox: The breast organs are half a head.

This is the basic form. The head is based on the sphere, the breast organs on part of a circle, a kind of semicircle, only it is bent in various ways so that you can no longer recognize it exactly. You would be able to see that your head really is a sphere had luciferic and ahrimanic forces never worked on man. And you would see that the organs of the breast are really a hemisphere, had these forces never exercised their influence. The direction in relation to the centre—one would have to say for ordinary earthly geometry, the infinitely distant centre—is eastwards. An eastward-facing hemisphere.

Now we come to the third part of the human being, excluding head and breast organs: the abdominal organs and the limbs attached to the abdomen. Although this is not an exact term, I shall call all this the abdominal organs. Everything I comprehensively call the abdominal organs can also be related, like the other parts, to forces which work and organize from without. In this realm they work, of course, on man from the outside via embryological development in the way they do because during pregnancy the mother is dependent on the forces which have to be gathered together to form the abdomen, just as forces have to be collected from the sphere to form the head and from the East, the hemisphere, to form the organs of the breast.

The forces that work on the organs of the abdomen must be imagined as coming from the centre of the earth, but differentiated, with all that this entails, according to the region inhabited by the parents or ancestors. The forces all come from the centre of the earth, but with differentiations depending on whether a person is born in North America, Australia, Asia or Europe. The organs of the abdomen are determined by forces from the centre of the earth with differentiations according to region.

Seen from the occult point of view, the complete human being also has a fourth aspect. You will say that we have already dealt with the whole human being, and this is so, but from the occult point of view a fourth aspect must be considered. We have examined three parts, so now all that is left is the total human being. This totality, too, is a part. Head, chest and abdomen all together form the fourth aspect, the totality, and this totality is in turn formed by certain forces. This totality is formed by forces that come from the whole circumference of the earth. They are not differentiated according to region. The total human being is formed by the total circumference of the earth.

Herewith I have described to you the physical human being as an image of the cosmos, an image of the forces of the cosmos working together. Other aspects, too, might be considered in connection with the cosmos. For this we would have to think of the spiritual cosmos in relation to the human being, not only the physical cosmos. We have just been examining the physical human being, so we were able to remain with the physical cosmos. Once we start to consider the discarnate human being between death and a new birth we cannot remain with the elements of space, for the three-dimensional space that we have—though it determines the measure of the physical human being living between birth and death—does not determine the measure of the spiritual human being living between death and a new birth. We have to realize that those who are dead have at their disposal a world that is different from the one which lives in three dimensions.

To turn now to the discarnate human being, the one we call a dead human being, perhaps we need a different kind of consideration. Our method of consideration must remain more mobile. Also there are various points of view from which we could conduct our considerations, for life between death and a new birth is just as complicated as life between birth and death. So let us start with the relationship between the human being here on earth and the human being who has entered the spiritual world through death.

Once again we have the first part, but it is temporal rather than spatial. We could call it the first phase of a development. The dead human being goes, you might say, out into the spiritual world in a certain way; he leaves the physical world but, especially during the first few days, is still very much connected with it. It is very significant that the dead person leaves the physical world in close connection with the constellation arising for his life from the positions of the planets. For as long as the dead person is still connected with his etheric body, the constellation of planetary forces resounds and vibrates in a wonderful way through this etheric body. Just as the territorial forces of the earth vibrate very strongly with the waters of the womb that contains a growing physical human being, so in a most marked way do the forces of the starry constellations vibrate in the dead person who is still in his etheric body at the moment—which is, of course, karmically determined—when he has just left the physical world.

Investigations are often made—unfortunately not always with the necessary respect and dignity, but out of egoistic reasons—into the starry constellation prevailing at birth. Much less selfish and much more beautiful would be a horoscope, a planetary horoscope made for the moment of death. This is most revealing for the whole soul of the human being, for the entry into death at a particular moment is most revealing in connection with karma.

Those who decide to conduct such investigations—the rules are the same as those applied to the birth horoscope—will make all kinds of interesting discoveries, especially if they have known the people for whom they do this fairly well in life. For several days the dead person bears within himself, in the etheric body he has not yet discarded, an echoing vibration of what comes from the planetary constellation. So the first phase is that of the direction in the starry constellation. It is meaningful as long as the human being remains connected with his etheric body.

The second phase in the relationship of the human being to the cosmos is the direction in which he leaves the physical world when he becomes truly spiritual, after discarding his etheric body. This is the last phase to which terms can be applied in their usual, rather than in a pictorial, meaning to describe what the dead person does, terms which are taken from the physical world. After this phase the terms used must be seen more or less as pictures.

So, in the second phase the human being goes in the direction of whatever is the East as seen from his starting point—here, direction is still used in a physical sense, even though it is away from the physical world. Through whatever is for him an easterly direction the dead person journeys at a certain moment into the purely spiritual world. The direction is to the East. It is important to be aware of this. Indeed, an old saying found in various secret brotherhoods, preserved from the better days of mankind's occult knowledge, still points to this. Various brotherhoods speak of one who has died as having ‘entered into the eternal East’. Such things, when they are not foolish trappings added later, correspond to ancient truths. Just as we had to say that the organs of the breast are formed out of the East, so must we imagine the departure of the dead as going through the East. By stepping out of the physical world through the East into the spiritual world, the dead person achieves the possibility of participating in the forces which operate, not centrifugally as here on earth, but centripetally towards the centre of the earth. He enters into the sphere out of which it is possible to work towards the earth.

The third phase may be described as the transition into the spiritual world; and the fourth as working or having an effect out of the spiritual world, working with the forces from the spiritual world.

Such ideas bring us intimately close to what here binds the human being to the spiritual worlds. The table below shows that the conclusion of number 4 meets up with the beginning of number 1, namely working on the head out of the realm of the sphere. This work is done by the human being himself after he has entered into the spiritual world by way of the East.

In our dealings with the dead we can perceive strongly that those who have died have to leave the physical world in an easterly direction. They are to be found in the world which they reach via the door of the East. They are beyond the door of the East. And in this connection the experiences we undergo now, in the fifth post-Atlantean period, in the sphere of development of materialism are very significant.

For you see, in this fifth post-Atlantean period, the dead now lack a great deal because of the materialistic culture prevalent in the world. Some aspects of this will be clear to you from what we said yesterday. When, by suitable means, we come to know the life of the dead today, we discover that they have a very strong urge to intervene in what human beings do here on earth. But in earlier times, when there was less materialism on the earth than there is today, it was easier for the dead to intervene in what took place on the earth. It was easier for them to influence the sphere of the earth through what those on earth felt and sensed of the after-effects of the dead.

Today it can be experienced very frequently—and this is always surprising in the actual case—that people who have been intensely involved in certain events during their life are unable, in their life after death, to have any interest in the events which take place after their death, because they lack any kind of link. Amongst us, too, there are souls who showed great interest for events on earth while they were here but who now, having gone to the spiritual world, find the events taking place since their death quite foreign to them. This is frequently the case, even with distinguished souls who here on earth were greatly gifted and filled with the liveliest interest.

This has been going on for a long time, indeed it has been on the increase during the whole of the fifth post-Atlantean period, ever since the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Expressed in commonplace terms—which are unfortunately all we have in our language—our experience is that, because they are less and less able to intervene in what human beings do, the dead have instead to intervene in the way people manifest as individual personalities. So we see that since the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the interest and the work of the dead has been concentrated increasingly on individual personalites rather than on the wider contexts concerning mankind. Since I have occupied myself closely with this very aspect, I have reached the conviction that it is connected with a certain phenomenon of modern times that is very noticeable to those who are interested in such things.

In recent history, unlike former times, we have the remarkable phenomenon of people being born with outstanding capacities. In general they work with tremendous idealism and distinguished endeavour but are incapable of gaining a broader view of life or of widening their horizons. In the whole of literature this has been expressing itself for some time. Individual ideas, concepts, and feelings, expressed either in literature or art, or even science, sometimes display strong promise. But an overall view is not achieved. This is also the reason why people find it so difficult to achieve the broader view needed in spiritual science. It happens chiefly because the dead approach individuals and work in them on capacities for which the foundations are laid during childhood and youth. The faculties which enable individuals to gain a broader view when they reach maturity are more or less untouched by the activities of the dead in this materialistic age. Incomplete talents, unfinished torsos—not only in the wide world, but also in individual situations—are therefore very prevalent because the dead can more readily approach individual souls rather than what lives socially in human evolution today. The dead have a strong urge to reach what lives socially in human evolution, but in our fifth post-Atlantean period this is exceedingly difficult for them.

There is another phenomenon today of which it is most important to become aware. There exist today many concepts and ideas which have to be very definite if they are to be of any use. Modern, more mercantile, life demands clearly defined concepts based on calculations. Science has become accustomed to this, but so has art. Think of the development art has undergone in this connection! It is not so long ago that art was concerned with great ideals on a wide scale, when, thank goodness, concepts were insufficient for an easy interpretation of great works which were full of meaning. This is no longer the case to the same extent. Today, art strives for naturalism, and concepts can easily encompass works of art because now they have often arisen merely from concepts instead of from an elemental, all-embracing world of feeling. Mankind is today filled to the brim with commonplace, naturalistic concepts which are determined by the fact that they have been conceived entirely in relation to the physical plane where it is in the nature of things to be sharply defined and individualized.

Now it is significant that the so-called dead do not appreciate such concepts. They do not appreciate sharply-defined concepts which are immobile and lifeless. One can learn some extraordinary things, some very interesting things in this connection—if I may be permitted to use such commonplace and banal expressions for these venerable circumstances. As you know, for we have gone through all this together here, I have recently been endeavouring to discuss, using lantern slides, all kinds of considerations about periods in the history of art. I have been endeavouring to find concepts for all kinds of artistic phenomena. To communicate through speech one has to find concepts. Yet I have constantly felt the need to avoid firm, clearly-defined concepts for artistic matters. Of course, for the lectures I had to attempt to define the concepts as far as possible, for they have to be defined if they are to be put into words. But while I was preparing the lectures and formulating the concepts I must say I had a certain aversion, if I may use this word, to expressing what had to be said in such meagre concepts as have to be used if things are to be expressed in words. Indeed, we shall only understand one another in these realms if you translate what has been expressed in close-textured concepts back into concepts of which the texture is less clearly defined.

If one comes up against this experience at a time when one is also concerned with the world of discarnate souls, the following can happen. One may be attempting to comprehend a phenomenon which gives one the feeling of being far too unintelligent to grasp it in concepts. One looks at the phenomenon but has insufficient understanding with which to bind it properly into concepts. This experience, which is particularly likely when one is contemplating a work of art, can bring one into especially intimate contact with discarnate souls, with the souls of the dead. For these souls prefer concepts which are not sharply defined, concepts which are more mobile and can mingle with the phenomena. Sharply defined concepts, concepts similar to those formed here on the physical plane under the influence of the physical conditions of the sense-perceptible world, give the dead the feeling of being nailed to one particular spot, whereas what they need for their life in the spiritual world is freedom of movement.

Therefore it is important that we occupy ourselves with spiritual science so that we may enter those intimate spheres of experience where, as was said yesterday, the living can encounter the dead; because the concepts of spiritual science cannot be as closely defined as can those of the physical plane. That is why malevolent or narrow-minded people can easily discover contradictions in the concepts of spiritual science. The concepts are alive, and what is alive is mobile, though it does not, in fact, harbour contradictions. We can achieve this by concerning ourselves with spiritual matters, and to do so we have to approach things from various sides. And approaching things from various sides really does bring us close to the spiritual world. That is why the dead feel comfortable when they enter a realm of human concepts which are mobile and not pedantically defined.

Indeed, the dead feel most ill at ease of all when they enter the realm of the most pedantic concepts. These are the ones that have recently come to be defined in relation to the spiritual world for those people who do not want to live in anything spiritual, but who want the concepts for sense-perceptible things to apply to the spiritual world as well. These people conduct spiritualistic experiments in order to imprison spiritual concepts in the world perceptible to the senses. They are, in fact, more materialistic than any others. They seek rigid concepts in order to hold commerce with the dead. Thus they torture the dead most of all, for if they want to approach they force them to enter the very realm most disliked by them. The dead love mobile concepts, not rigid ones.

These are experiences to which the fifth post-Atlantean period seems to be particularly prone, given the two circumstances of materialism here on earth and the peculiar situation of the dead as described. One and the same thing determines materialism here on earth and a certain kind of life in the spiritual world. In the Greco-Latin period the dead most definitely approached the living in a manner which differed from that of today. Nowadays, in the fifth post-Atlantean period, there is what I would like to call a more earthly element—but you must imagine this of course in a more pictorial sense—a more earthly composition in the substantiality of the dead than there used to be. The dead appear in a form that is much more like those of earthly conditions than used to be the case. They are more like human beings, if I may put it this way, than formerly. Because of this they have a somewhat paralysing effect on the living. It is nowadays so difficult to approach the dead because they bring about a numbness in us. Here on earth materialistic thoughts reign supreme. In the spiritual world, as a karmic result, the materialistic consequence reigns supreme, for there the spiritual corporeality of the dead has assumed earthly qualities. It is because the dead are super-strong, if I may put it thus, that they numb us. To overcome this numbness it is necessary to develop the strongest possible feelings for spiritual science. This is the difficulty today, or one of the difficulties, standing in the way of our relationship with the spiritual world.

For the earthly realm seen spiritually—indeed the earthly realm can be seen spiritually—things appear different from what might be assumed when they are not seen spiritually. It is correct to say, as we have done many a time, that we live in the age of materialism. Why? It is because human beings in this materialistic age—human beings in general, rather than those who understand these things—are too spiritual—paradoxical though this may sound. That is why they can be so easily approached by purely spiritual influences such as those of Lucifer and Ahriman. Human beings are too spiritual. Just because of this spirituality they easily become materialistic. It is so, is it not, that what the human being believes and thinks is something quite different from what he is. Those very people who are most spiritual are the ones most open to the whisperings of Ahriman, as a result of which they grow materialistic.

Strongly though one must combat materialistic views and materialistic ways of life, nevertheless one may not maintain that the most unspiritual people belong to the circles of materialists. I have personally met many spiritual people, that is, people who are themselves spiritual, not just in their views, among the monists and suchlike, and equally many coarse materialists especially among the spiritualists. Here, though they may speak of the spirit, are to be found the most coarsely materialistic characters. Haeckel, for instance, is a most spiritual person, regardless of what he often says. He is most spiritual, and just because of this can be approached by an ahrimanic world view. He is a most spiritual person, entirely permeated by the spirit. This once became clearly apparent to me in a cafe in Weimar. I have told this story before, perhaps more than once. Haeckel was sitting at the other end of the table with his beautiful, spiritual blue eyes and his marvellous head. Nearer to me sat the well-known bookseller Herz, a man who has done great service to the German book trade and who knew quite a bit about Haeckel in general. But he did not know that that was Haeckel sitting at the other end of the table. At one point Haeckel laughed heartily. Herz asked: Who is that man laughing so much down there? When I told him it was Haeckel he said: It can't be, evil people can't laugh like that!

Thus the concepts entertained by present-day materialists are so bare of spirituality that they are unable to discern the revelations of the spirit in the material world. So spiritual and material worlds fall apart and the spiritual world becomes no more than a set of concepts. Anyway, the biggest materialistic blockheads are often found today in societies and associations that call themselves spiritualistic. Here are the materialistic blockheads who on occasion have even succeeded in tracing mankind's descent from the apes, even from a particular ape, to the greater glory of the human race. These people were not satisfied with the descent of man from the apes in general, they even traced the lines back to particular apes. For those of you have not heard about this, let me explain. A few years ago a book appeared in which Mrs Besant and Mr Leadbeater described exactly which apes of ancient days they were descended from. They traced their family trees back to particular apes and you can read all about this. Such things are possible, even in much-read books today.

We need the concepts I have elaborated today in order to penetrate more deeply into certain aspects of the theme we are discussing. For our world is definitely dependent on the spiritual world in which the dead live; it is connected with the spiritual world. That is why I have endeavoured to unfold for you certain concepts which relate directly to observations of the immediate present. Everything that takes place here in the physical world has certain effects in the spiritual world. Conversely, the spiritual world with the deeds of the dead shows itself either in what the dead can do for the physical world or in what they cannot do because of the present materialistic age. I also described this present materialistic age in so far as it has been made excessively materialistic by certain secret brotherhoods, as I showed yesterday. The type of materialism that underlies all world events to a high degree today is what we might call the mercantile type.

I ask you to take good note for tomorrow of the concepts I have put before your souls today, concerning the life of the dead. But also please note how little the present age takes certain things for granted which were taken much more for granted in earlier times. We shall see tomorrow how all these things are linked. However, it is characteristic for our time that certain conceptual views are extended to mercantile life which would escape someone who fails to pay attention to such features of our time. We ought not to let them escape us. Mercantilism is all very well as long as it is put in the right light in the way it stands within social life. For this to happen it is necessary for us to have certain yardsticks for everything. Today, however, much conceptual chaos reigns. Yet within this conceptual chaos, concepts are given quite clear definitions, as is our way in the age of materialism in which concepts are fixed to ideas based on what the senses can experience. And when a chaos of concepts then results, as happens in today's materialism, this really does draw the sharpest possible line between the physical world in which human beings live between birth and death, and the super-sensible world in which they live between death and a new birth.

Only consider in this connection the fact that in Central Europe—in contrast to other regions where the inclination to philosophize is less pronounced—there is a tendency to philosophize about the mercantile system even though this is not at home in Central Europe. In Central Europe there is a tendency to make a philosophy of everything. Thus people also philosophize about what aspects of materialism are typical for our time. An interesting book by Jaroslav was published long before the war: Ideal and Business. Certain chapters interested me particularly because of their significance with regard to cultural history. It was not the content that interested me but their relation to cultural history; so, for instance, the chapter entitled ‘Plato and Retail Trade’. This deals with everything to do with commerce, with the mercantile system. Another interesting chapter is ‘The Astrological System Applied to the Price of Pepper’. Not uninteresting is also ‘Wholesale Trade as Described by Cicero’. Another chapter is entitled ‘Holbein's and Liebermann's Portraits of Merchants’. Not uninteresting, too, is the chapter ‘Jakob Böhme and the Problem of Quality’. Very interesting is ‘The Goddess Freya in Germanic Mythology in Relation to Free Competition’. And finally, especially interesting is ‘The Spirit of Commerce as Taught by Jesus’.

As you see, everything is thrown in the pot together. But by this very fact things gain that characteristic which makes for materialism. Let us take all this as a preparation for our considerations tomorrow.

My dear friends, I should like to put together various things today which will give us the possibility of going into some important matters that we will speak of in connection with our present subject.

Let us suppose that here were the surface of the earth—arable land, meadow, or what you will (a drawing was made), and plants, any kind of plants grew in this meadow. And suppose that here were a worm or some little creature, that lives and burrows under the earth and has its home under the earth and never comes above the surface. This little grub or caterpillar, or whatever it is, creeps about inside and learns by its creeping about to know the roots of these plants. Naturally, as this creature never comes out above the surface of the earth, it only learns to know the roots of the plants, it learns to know nothing else; it creeps about and learns to recognise the roots. And what will happen is the following, is it not?

When a certain time comes in this creeping about of the caterpillar, processes are going on up above in the plants, in the whole plant nature; real processes are going on which are dependent on the sunshine, on the sun's giving out a certain warmth. The processes which the plants are undergoing naturally also bring about changes in the roots. When the plant above begins to put out fresh shoots and to bear blossoms, changes occur similarly in the roots. All the roots processes are affected when something occurs above. So we can say: when this worm is creeping about underneath, up above, caused by sun-activities, shoots, leaves, fruits are called forth, and processes are then brought about in the roots. But the caterpillar only crawls about in the earth; it creeps from root to root.

Now let us for once suppose—hypothetically we can accept it—that this caterpillar or grub were a worm-philosopher or a caterpillar-philosopher, and evolved a world-conception. Thus it creeps about there down below the earth and makes itself a world-conception. In the picture that it devises as world-conception, there can naturally never play a role, the fact that the sun comes and the shoots spring forth—for the caterpillar can know nothing of this; it creeps around, this caterpillar, this worm, and studies the changes in the roots, and notices quite clearly that something is going on, that the roots become different, and also that in the part of the earth lying round something is happening, and he now expresses all he knows, this worm. He expresses all of this, but in the picture of the world which he makes for himself, never a word is to be found about the existence of the sun, the coming forth of the plants; this indeed is self-evident. That is to say, a world-conception arisen in this worm-philosopher which will give a proper picture of the condition under the earth, whether it becomes damper, becomes warmer ... To be sure he does not know, this worm, whence this warmth comes ... That it becomes warmer, that all sorts of processes go on in the roots, all that he comprehends. And let us suppose the worm were not an ordinary worm-philosopher but was inspired by some modern philosopher of the opinion so current today, that all depends on cause and effect, everything is subjected to causality, as it is expressed in a scientifically philosophical-technical way. Then this worm will creep about down below and will call one thing a cause and another an effect and say: Now the earth becomes somewhat warmer from above downwards; that causes alterations in the roots. With the further processes he will represent the one as cause and the further processes in the roots as effects, and so on ... and a consistent picture will emerge, which classifies all the processes under the earth as cause and effect. But it would not include that fact that the sun shines, and the plants come out, and through this the processes in the roots are changed. Still, the worm's world-picture would be quite a consistent one. It could be a genuine picture of causality, there need be nothing lacking in the chain of cause and effect.

Now you see, it is quite clear to you, I think, that this worm-philosophy represents a one-sided world-conception which is quite correct ... except that it lacks what man considers the most important of all. That is, that the sun comes with its warmth and light and brings about what the worm actually observes down there below; it is clear, indeed, how in fact his whole causality only depends on the fact that he does not come up above the surface of the earth.

You see, as a matter of fact, such worms are the people who philosophize today on the chain of causality, of causes and effects. The image is completely opposite: men makes researches into what their senses see; and move about in what—well, not in what is shut off spatially from above—but in what is shut off through sense observation, and they simply do not perceive the spiritual extended everywhere, that causes the causes. They do not distinguish the spiritual which is behind cause and effect. It is really an exact analogy.

Now if the worm should suddenly come out and see the sun, he could discover that the cause of all he has puzzled out down below is, as a matter of fact, what other beings up above are seeing, and that his world-conception simply does not hold good. He would have to realize that what he himself underneath has had as perceptions of differences, is up above. It is just the same when one raises oneself from ordinary human sight to spiritual sight, for one notes how then something comes into the sense-world which cannot be perceived under ordinary circumstances.

You also see from this how the much vaunted inner completeness of a world-conception means nothing for its correctness. One who can set himself genuinely with his whole heart and soul into this worm-existence can give the assurance that nothing at all in this worm-conception need rest on a logical error. Hence all logic can be correct and complete in itself, there need be no logical error in it, it can be a world-conception completely tenable inwardly. You will realize from this, however, that it is in no way a question of being able or not able to prove something with the instruments of the world in which man is. I have often referred to this from other aspects. This we are not concerned with, whether or not a man can prove something with the means offered by the world in which he dwells. World-conceptions can have ever such fine proofs in themselves, they still remain—well—let us say: worm-world-conceptions. When we let this really work upon our soul, we see what stands behind of great importance: we note how—when we once guess that there are yet other worlds—a kind of general world -the duty arises of entering into those other worlds. For no matter how complete in itself is a world-conception, it does not follow that it gives one any knowledge of the actual events and processes. And this is truly what one finds with the majority of the philosophies of today and the immediate past; they are worm-conceptions. They are complete in themselves in a really extraordinarily logical way, they have an immense amount of value for the worlds in which man dwells; but they are only constructed with the means of the worlds in which man dwells. You see from this that you cannot rely on so-called proofs, unless you first come to understand where these proofs originate. For our time, it is truly a matter of getting a feeling for the way other worlds permeate our world, for the way other worlds allow themselves to become manifest. Certainly, this is difficult. For truly, conditions for the worm are such that he lives underground; the worm would not endure well up above, if he were forced to go out there; first he would have to adapt himself to the new conditions. Thus it is also difficult for the human being, when he detaches himself as soul from his bodily nature, to adapt himself to the new conditions.

Now you can raise a question, my dear friends, you can say: ‘Fine, you have now compared the world in which the human being lives with his senses to the world under the earth. Show us something, anything at all, that limits, truly limits our ordinary sense-world conception in any such way.’ One can raise this point quite seriously. In the course of the process of consecutive formation of Saturn, Sun and Moon, Time (during the Moon-existence) and Space (during the Earth-existence) first entered into humanity's world conception. When we speak of Saturn, Sun and Moon, and use spatial conceptions to aid is that description, we actually speak only in Imaginations, and we must remain conscious throughout of the fact that when we speak of these three worlds in spatial conceptions, these space-conceptions have only as much to do with what was brought to completion in those worlds as ... well, let us say, as the forms of the letters of the alphabet have to do with the meanings of the words. We must not take contemporary conceptions as they are, but rather as signs, as images of these worlds. For Space only has meaning for that which evolves within the span of Earth-existence, and Time has actually only become meaningful since the separation of the Old Moon from the Sun; that is the strict point in which the Old Moon separated from the Sun. Then for the first time it is possible to speak of events occurring in time, as we speak today.

Since, however, we have our mental concepts in time and space—for everything external that we conceive is in space, everything that we bring to consciousness and let arise within, runs its course in time—we are thereby between birth and death, but only between birth and death, shut in by space and time, as the worm dwells down there in its earth. Space and time are our boundaries, just as the earth substance is the worm's boundary. We are worms of space and worms of time; we are so, truly, in a quite high, in a quite exact sense. For as incarnated men we move about in space; we observe things in space, and that which observes is our soul, which itself lives in the concepts (Vorstellungen). Between birth and death time goes on, from falling asleep to awakening time goes on. The comparison is by no means a bad one, when one sees the reality. Insofar as our soul is enclosed in the body, as regards the world-picture it forms, it is truly a worm, who creeps about in space and who, if it wishes to arrive at realities, must come out of space. Then it must also get accustomed to viewing things not merely under time-conditions, but under conditions, for which that which takes its course in time is nothing but an outer sign, like a letter of the alphabet.

Now after I have called attention to this, I will lead these studies over to the realm of soul and spirit. Just as the coming plant is already actually contained in the seed, so, naturally, there was already contained in an earlier germinal state, what has developed for man today on earth in perceptions of space and time. I have already pointed out here in one connection that rudiments were already contained in Saturn, Sun, Moon. So that when here on earth we assign a certain meaning to what goes on around us, we must as it were see this meaning already present, in the old evolution of the Moon, the Sun, etc. With the forming of time and the forming of space, the meaning of life on earth must in some way have prepared itself. The forming of space and time must have so come about that then the meaning of the earth-life was added to it like a kind of flower. Now we can picture these processes—Saturn, Sun and Moon in the following way. We can say: We have an Old Saturn existence which is surrounded by the cosmos; we have an Old Sun-existence, again surrounded by the cosmos; we have an Old Moon-existence but already developing out of it a sort of neighbouring planet (you may read this in my Occult Science and we have then learnt to know that the Earth separates from the Sun and again from the Moon.

If the man of materialistic thought (I will suppose what is most favourable for our Spiritual Science) could prevail on himself to believe in these developments, he would still have to overcome the next step, which consists fundamentally in the fact that the whole evolution (origin of Saturn, of the Sun, further development to Moon, separation of the Moon, separation of Earth, Sun and Moon) all really occurs in order to make Man possible, as he is on earth. Just as the processes of a plant's root- and leaf-building happen in order to make possible the blossom and the fruit, so do all these processes, these macrocosmic processes, happen in order to make possible our life on earth; they arise so that we may live on earth in the way we do. One could also say: These processes are the roots of our earth-life; this life is there so that we can develop on Earth as we do. Let us be quite clear that we have to do with the separation of the Sun on the one hand, the separation of the Moon on the other hand—that we have to do with separations so that our Earth could come into existence as Earth. That is to say, we were left behind on the Earth planet, and Sun and Moon separated from us and work on the earth from outside. That had to come about, otherwise nothing could have developed in us as it does on earth. For everything to develop on Earth in the way it does it was necessary that once in primeval times Sun and Moon were united with the earth and that then they separated, and now let their activity shine in from outside upon the earth. That is absolutely necessary.

Now I should like to show that our inner soul life has taken on quite distinct configurations through the fact that this has taken place. Among the very varied ideas which we have—I could adduce many as examples—and which play a certain role in the whole state of our earth existence, is the idea of ‘possessing something,’ ‘having something.’ This implies that our own person unites itself with something which is outside the personality. We speak in the rarest cases of possessing our arm and our nose, for most people experience their arm or nose as so much belonging to them that they do not speak of a possession. But what could be separated and then belongs to us we describe purely in the legal sense as a possession, a genuine possession. Now the concept of possessing something which is outside could not be formed in us at all, if there had not arisen the separation of what had formerly belonged to the earth, and the being drawn in again of the Sun and Moon to the earth. Our life was quite different on the Old Sun. There Sun and Moon were united as Sun with what were processes of Earth; they were inwardly united with the whole human existence. There the human being could say: ‘Sun activity in me,’ ‘I Sun activity’ (if he could have said ‘I’ already, as the archangels could) ‘I Sun activity’; not ‘the sun shines on me, Sun activity comes toward me.’ This Planet or Fixed Star Sun had to be separated so that we as earth men could develop this special configuration of the possession-concept.

Now this is connected with something else. Imagine an Archangel on the old Sun-existence; he says: ‘I Sun.’ That we see something rests upon the fact that the sun's rays or other light-rays shine on the object and are thrown back to us. Were the sun to shine from the midst of the earth, we should see nothing of the objects which are upon the earth. We should then say: ‘I Sun,’ ‘I Light,’ but we should not separate the individual objects, we should not see them. Thus something else still is connected with this. In the Earth's evolution from Saturn, Sun, Moon to Earth, we have for the first time, through this macrocosmic constellation, the possibility of seeing and perceiving objects as we do now. Such perceptions were naturally not present during the Sun-existence. Although the first rudiments of our sense-organs had already been prepared on Old Saturn, they were only opened upon the Earth, only there were they made organs of perception. These rudiments on Saturn were blind and unperceiving sense-organs. The sense-organs were first opened by the separation of the Sun and the departure of the Moon from the earth. You see from this that two processes go parallel—the activity of our sense-perceptions and the sight of external objects, and running parallel with this, the possession-concept. For how do we come to the concept of possession? You could not imagine that an Archangel during the Sun-existence wished to possess anything. He does not behold things; he is everything. If all objects and beings of the earth were like this, they would never have the urge to want to possess anything. With this development of the senses develops for the first time the possession-concept, the possession-concept is not separable from the development of the senses; these two things run parallel. The senses were on the one side, and something like the possession-concept on the other side. Other concepts can also be taken.

And when we consider in a more comprehensive sense what stands in the religious records, in the Bible (for in such records as the Bible very many things lie concealed)—then we can say: What is given at the beginning of the Bible about the Luciferic temptation is connected with the promise of Lucifer to man that his senses shall be developed: ‘Your eyes shall be opened.’ He means that all senses shall be opened—the eyes only stand for the senses as a whole. In this way he has guided the senses to external things and at the same time called forth the concept of possession. If we wished to relate somewhat more in detail what Lucifer promised to the woman we should have to say: You will become as gods, your senses will be opened; you will distinguish between what pleases you and does not please you, what you call good and evil, and you will wish to possess all that pleases you, that you call good.—One must connect all this with the Luciferic temptation.

Now we must reflect about something, if we wish to grasp aright such a conception as I have now developed. Here is one of the points where it is necessary in a lecture on Spiritual Science to call upon the reflection and meditation of each individual who wants to assimilate what is given. One must reflect upon something; In developing for you the arising of the senses, the perception of objects, and the evolution of the possession-concept, we have not been obliged to introduce any concept of space or time. To be sure, if a man wants to picture these things to himself, if he sketches them on a board, he avails himself of the assistance of the space and time idea. But in order to grasp what this means: 'the senses are opened' or 'the possession-concept is developed' one does not need the idea of space and time. These things are independent of space and time. You do not need to think you are spatially distant from something when you want to possess it; nor do you need to call on the time-processes. I have said, here one must summon self-reflection, for everyone can object: ‘I cannot do it’ ... But if he makes sufficient effort, he can imagine such things without the aid of space and time concept. Indeed, something else is true: when you try to bring such concepts clearly to consciousness, that is, to meditate them as I have just done with you, you gradually come out beyond the idea of space and time. You come out into a world where space and time really do not-play the eminent role in your experience that they play in everyday life.

Now there exists in the evolution of humanity a peculiar longing. Wherever in history we meet with the human race in its innermost striving, we come upon a certain longing. And that is the longing to have concepts which are independent of space and time, which have nothing to do with space and time. Historical events are transformed into myths, or in the historical presentation there is an indication of the spiritual in order to make it possible to show how historical events take a mythical form. And the further we look back in history, for instance, the more we find as historical traditions, the historical facts veiled in the myth. Only reflect how already in ancient Greek history all is veiled in myth and in regard to earlier mid-European history all is enveloped in myth and legend! The further one goes back the more one is removed from the external, merely physical feeling of facts, and the presentation plunges into symbolism. When you study myths you will remark that in the arising of myths there is clearly to be seen the desire to work oneself out of space and time. Not only that fairy tales—the most elementary myths—often depict how some human being (I am thinking of the Sleeping Beauty) passes out of time and enters the timeless, but when you examine myths you will see that you do not rightly know which facts are meant to be spiritual. Something that lies centuries earlier may be related later. Sometimes, too, facts which lie hundreds of years apart in history are welded together in a myth. The myth seeks to lift itself above space and time. This means that there lives in man's existence the longing to rise above this space-condition which makes us think and visualise in space and time. There is a longing to live in such concepts as depict, free of space and time, those realities which rule as the eternal things in the succession of events in our space and time existence, or, if they have once been formed, remain as the eternal things.

You see, if you take what I have just said together with something which I said last time you will see a wonderful connection. I said that if a Luciferic quality was not active in us, we should see that our world of concepts is really in the Old Moon. But now it follows from this that the Old Moon is actually present, has remained, and that it is only Lucifer who bewitches us into thinking that our concept is now in ourself. Thus time becomes there a means of deception and illusion for Lucifer. The ancient Moon-existence endures and so also do things that arise, endure. Our possession-concepts are enduring. This means that what earthly man develops as social earthly-order, by reason of his possession-concept, this remains, this will also still be in existence when the Jupiter and Venus conditions are one day there. And then if corresponding temptations do not come as Luciferic and Ahrimanic temptations, one will see how social orders were formed on earth through the possession-idea. They will then present something like physical orders. For that is a part of Maya-existence, of illusion—the idea that things pass away; in reality they are enduring, in reality they go on subsisting. And already, if one understands things aright, one finds the enduring behind the actual past. You can grasp it to some extent in what I have just related.

But now, if we truly grasp what I have said, we are really looking into profoundly important foundations of our whole earth-existence. For do we not see how beneath the spatial and temporal earth-existence the eternally enduring earth-existence, or existence in general, is veritably spread out? How we have a spatial, a temporal-spatial condition on the surface, and within, the condition of duration. And now comes our mode of viewing things when it takes its course in space and time, our views and concepts that live in space and time. Just consider, how one can picture that concretely in detail, think for once ... nowadays men no longer grasp this thoroughly ... but somewhere or somehow, think simply 'red.’ In order to think 'red' you need no space and you need no time; you can think 'red' to yourself anywhere; it does not have to be there in time or space, because it is thought of just as quality. (red was put on the board.) It is difficult nowadays for a man to picture it because he wants to give the red a boundary. It was not difficult like this for the angels on the Old Moon for they had no desire to distribute red over separate objects. They had time already, but not space. Actually they pictured, that is they experienced 'red' or 'green' or any other colour as flowing current. Try to conceive this vividly: blue = flowing current; red = flowing current; conceive, too, of the other sense-experiences in the same way—streaming, but only in time, letting no real spatial concept, intermingle ... we can say: at the transition from Moon- to Earth-existence one can feel how the mere time-quality was yoked into the spatial. What then actually determines the essential nature of earth existence, that a 'red' is in this way given a boundary and yoked in? On the Moon it would have been impossible to see an enclosed 'red,’ on Earth it is possible to see red enclosed in a boundary. (A sketch of a flower was drawn.) This, however, is connected, inwardly connected, with the separation of the sun from the earth, and with the falling of the sun's rays from outside upon the earth. So that in a true sense I can say: the sunbeam falls on earth from outside. That already shows you that our present existence is inconceivable without the space-concept. Yes, for our present perception and life, this external position of the sun betokens something real.

Now from what I have brought forward you can easily gather that we can really say: colours are harnesses into space. In ‘Theosophy’ I have called that which lives in man after death ‘flowing sensitivity,’ since there he is not bound to space. I therefore spoke of the first world through which he lives as the ‘world of flowing sensitivity.’ For the sun's must first come in from outside, must harness sense-perceptions into space. With this is connected, as I have explained, the fact that man evolves ideas of possession; for in a world of flowing sensitivity a person can never think of possession -time at most is present there—and he would soon see the futility of it if he were to think of possession. It would be rather like thinking of possessing a piece of water, flowing along in a brook. This only arises inasmuch as the sun, separating from the earth, brings the sense-perceptions into the framework of space.

You see, something like this that I have just expounded must be transformed into an experience, a feeling; one cannot leave it as a mere theoretical concept. One must change it into a feeling, one must really get an inner living sensation how as man, as microcosm, one is placed into the macrocosm, and how this very yearning, i.e. to possess something, is connected with the whole development of the macrocosm, with the course of events through which sense observation has developed. When one feels this rightly, when one begins, so to say, to feel cosmically how, for instance, the simple concept: thou wouldst like to possess what thou seest and what pleases thy sight ... how this is born out of the macrocosm, then for the first time one really gets the truly living idea that the human soul nature is dependent on the whole cosmos. Then one gets a strong and vividly living feeling of how in every concept of ordinary life one is connected with the macrocosm, and how actually in all that we picture and conceive and experience in the soul, the macrocosm lives in us. And there exists a continual longing in man to experience such hidden connections as actually exist in life, and to express the experience. This exists—this longing in the human soul, in the heart of man. And let us imagine that there arose in a human soul a vivid feeling and sensation ( I wish to express the cosmic connection of this single soul experience): ‘My eye falls there on an external object; I want to possess it; I will appropriate it’ ... then from such a feeling, one can experience what I might call—the tragedy of Nature. I say 'the tragedy of the world of nature.’ We really take from a whole world,—extending to the Moon and still present as the basis of our world,—we take from it what we wish to possess. What we desire to possess we take away from this world which rests on the basis of our natural world. That we take away. And this it is which must be consistently felt by a human soul felt by a human soul that is really sensitive to nature: that there, in the background of Nature, lies something which she must continually submit to; namely, that man contests Nature, who will give all to all, and says: ‘This belongs to me!’ And now consider with full human feeling this gainsaying of Nature, who gives all to all: This I will have for myself, and that I will have it for myself is induced by the fact that my senses find it good or less good for me, sympathetic or antipathetic. Here one can enter deeply with one's own soul into natural existence, can feel with Nature how something is taken away from her. And it is taken away because the human being, under the impression of his senses, forms the thought that he wants to have for himself what Nature wishes to give to all.

I once felt in my soul, my dear friends, suddenly and with special profoundness, how one can experience this whole relationship that I have just sought to characterize. How one can learn to feel with Nature when she says: Protect myself as I will, world evolution has gone so far that the human being declares that my things are his things. Yes, in a certain moment years ago, I felt that experience most warmly and intimately in my soul. It was years ago in a society where there was to be a programme of Recitations. And as it happens from time to time, especially in Recitation programmes, that the persons concerned are prevented from coming and excuse themselves; so it happened here too, a lady reciter sent her excuses and at once a substitute had been found. And now one may think as one will about the value of the declamation that followed and about the substitute—I will not go into that now,—but he was of a quite particular kind, namely, there was found ready to recite the programme in place of the actress who had fallen out, one of the purest, noblest Catholic priests that I have ever come to know in the world. And one had then, or could have, a quite specially significant experience, which in effect condensed for me into what I just now expressed to you.

For this grave and earnest priest—with all that Catholicism brings with it for the really true and upright priest—had according to the programme to recite the ‘Heidenröslein’ of Goethe. And in this recitation one could really experience something, for the man was not only a priest in the ordinary sense, but he, was so learned and so purely given up to spiritual studies, that many said: ‘This man (I will not mention his name) knows the whole world ... and in addition, three villages ...’ for they found him so wise and experienced in things one can know. Now although the recitation was not particularly good, there actually lay in the whole mode and manner in which he gave the ‘Heidenröslein,’ something immensely significant, since one could feel that his whole perception of the world was derived, one might say, from a perception that had been turned away from everything of a sense nature. One could feel how, precisely through the fact that a priest came forward instead of an actress, the whole cosmic power, the immense cosmic power and fineness that lies in this unique poem ‘Das Heidenröslein’ (see end of lecture for poem and translation) came into the recitation. This poem has, indeed, what one might call a prelude; it is an old folksong. And I have already said that men have ever the longing to experience what lives cosmically in the subsoil of existence. And precisely in this poem ‘Das Heidenr&öslein’ there enters something of this quite grandly sublime cosmic subsoil in infinitely simple images. Therefore one must count ‘Das Heidenröslein’ among the very finest pearls of poetry that ever have been given to the world. Years ago I have also heard of people who have attributed something or other, I know not what, of everyday human, all-too-human, connexions to ‘Das Heidenröslein’; that merely comes from a perverted condition of mind. If people can do that—interpret anything which is not quite pure into the ‘Heidenröslein,’ this appertains to a mind that from its sense-exhalations likes continually to revel in all sorts of ‘sacred love.’ One can indeed revel continuously in ‘sacred love’ from sensations of sense-exhalations but that which underlies as cosmic foundations such a poem as ‘Das Heidenröslein’ can only be felt with pure, with chaste heart, and every misconstruction would show a complete desolation and emptiness of mind.

For let us take the wonderful thing which this ‘Heidenröslein’ has actually become as it has been given us by Goethe, and through the fact that the folk song passed over into the youthful lyric depths of his art. Something quite remarkable it has become: in every line always the very thing that ought to be there! Consider for a moment that one felt what lies in the activity of sense-perceptions and how they have developed throughout cosmic evolution ... and that one wished to describe this. How could one do it better than by taking the red in an object, eliminating the space-boundary and letting echo: ‘Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot’ ... ‘rot’ (red) echoing in ‘Röslein,Röslein,Röslein rot.’ Immediately there confronts us the whole mystery as it is set before us out of the cosmos. The sense-world stands there: ‘Röslein,Röslein,Röslein rot,’ in the continuous ‘Röslein,Röslein,Röslein rot.’ Now in the first line we are shown at once that we are concerned with this mystery—this being able to look out from the senses,’sah ein Knab' ein Röslein stehn, Röslein auf der Heiden.’ Now already in the next line in a wonderful enhancement, which is rarely so beautiful in poetry, a nuance is brought out that now the little red rose begins to become sympathetic—‘War so Jung undmorgenschön’ ... it thus already becomes something which warrants sympathy with what is revealed from the senses. So the next line is inserted with precisely what belongs to it: ‘lief er schnell, es nah zu sehn’: there you have the whole correspondence of the senses with what is presented to them: he runs to see it close to! And now the next line, again an enhancement, but this time in himself; to begin with, the intensification was outside,—‘Röslein auf der Heiden,’—simply the object; then ‘was so young and morning-fair,’ the enhancement outside, and in him ‘ran he fast, it near to see’ ... inasmuch as he ran fast to see it near, ‘Sah's mit vielen Freuden’ (saw it with much joy). You see how the outer corresponds with the inner. Now comes the refrain, ‘Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot, Röslein auf der Heiden,’ in order to show us quite particularly how the correspondence is between him and that which appears outside as the object ‘red.’ And the mysterious connection with possession: ‘Knabe sprach: ich breche dich.’ He wants to possess it, he wants to pluck the little rose, he wants to take it home with him. There is nothing else in it, but what is in it is of wonderful cosmic depth.‘Knabe sprach: ich breche dich, Röslein auf der Heiden. Röslein sprach: ich steche dich ...’We can see in this sentence, ‘ich steche dich’ (I prick thee) the whole mystery of Nature, who wants to protect herself from man's assertion: ‘I will take thy things home.’ She, Nature, would like to do with all her objects as she would have done with the little rose ‘ leave it for all to see who pass by. For in this ‘Röslein sprach: ich steche dich’ is indeed uniquely contained what I have described as a feeling that shares in the tragedy of Nature. ‘bass du ewig denkst an mich’ (that thou must think of me eternally); he must think of Nature forever, for he transforms her permanence into something fleeting, he brings the possession-relation into what has first arisen in space and time. The human being must atone for his having come out of permanence and must therefore at least think of it eternally, it must be perpetuated, made eternal; the untruth must not persist that it is not perpetuated. Then again: ‘und ich will's nicht leiden’ (and I will not suffer it). The little rose simply stands as the representative of the whole of Nature—every natural object actually says this when one wants to possess it. And again, so that attention may be fully fixed on the real subject, ‘Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot, Röslein auf der Heiden...’ And the next verse again shows a wonderful enhancement: he will not let himself be held back—‘und der wilde Knabe brach's Röslein auf der Heiden’—thus he nevertheless determines to possess it! ‘Röslein wehrte sich und stack’ ’¦ Again as the representative of the whole of Nature. ‘Half ihm dock kein Weh und Ach’—this is the general experience of Nature, and we feel that tragedy which expresses itself like a mood in Nature when man wishes to possess her: ‘Musst' es eben leiden’ (she must after all permit, suffer it.) Infinitely profound are these words ‘musst' es eben leiden!’

But this microcosmic mystery has in fact a macro-cosmic counterpart, and if one now leaves the microcosm for the macrocosm one may say—who then in the macrocosm is the wild boy who plucks the little rose on the heath? It is the sunbeam, which separated from the earth with the Sun and which now falls on earth from outside. It actually calls forth on the one hand the little rose on the heath, but then when it sees it, when it is there, quickly gathers it again, makes it wither and fade.

Thus it is in nature everywhere. Nature still gives us a memory of the ‘Musst’ es eben leiden’: next to the rose the thorns, the shrivelled thorns which are a token that Nature nevertheless remembers how the sunbeam takes from her what she possesses. But when we do not merely observe as the materialist does, but include the whole cosmic feeling, the thorn near the rose is also the expression of the grief of nature in contrast to Nature's great joy; the jubilation of nature when the rosebush stands there with all its roses, the grief when the wild boy, the sun-ray comes and makes the roses wither. That is the Goethe-poem in the macrocosm: and one can only say: if anything is fitted to stimulate esoteric feelings, it is such poems, where there is no need to think and attribute all sorts of dry allegories to them, but where one only needs to remember a great truth:—when the true poet goes beyond nature it is because he seeks to put into words what can be felt behind the surface of facts, and beyond space and time.

And when a poet produces something in such simple incidents as a boy's plucking a rose on the heath, which yet speaks so deeply to our hearts, it is because this heart of ours received its rudiments when we ourselves were not yet united with the earth, when we were still united with the ancient Sun existence—and were able to feel with the whole world. Although through the Luciferic-Ahrimanic illusion we now ascribe our feelings to ourselves as I have shown, yet all the same they arise out of the cosmos, and on this rests the fact that we can so inwardly accompany the true poet although he describes the simplest incident of the plucking of a rose. For into what arises from the human soul in the simplest events, the whole cosmos is placed. And we need not make assertions and think it out, but we feel it, when we let such a marvellously delicate poem as ‘Das Heidenrösslein’ work upon us. We feel that the whole world is secreted in it, world mysteries are laid within it,—so that the secrets of art too gradually reveal themselves to us. They unfold as we ascend from the perception and experiencing of objects in a purely external way to an inward perception, as we ascend from microcosmos to macrocosmos and seek gradually to learn the hidden but active mysteries in our souls.Das Heidenröslein—¹

• 1. ‘rosebud’ is not strictly ‘Röslein,’ but is used for the sake of the metre. (Translator)

My dear friends,

Let us remember that the human being was built up in a long, complicated evolution through the Saturn, Sun, Moon stages and the Earth as far as its development has progressed. We have stressed that the first rudiments of the sense-organs were present in the time of ancient Saturn, and that of course they were not then adapted for making perceptions as the human being makes perceptions today. During the Saturn condition they were still lifeless germinal organisms, which then underwent changes and only through the various processes which have acted on man from the cosmos have become capable of perceptions.¹

The first thing, however, which is revealed with particular clearness, when we regard the whole course of human evolution, is that these sense-organs as such have to do with what we can call physical operations. On Old Saturn the first germ of the sense-organs arose as a purely physical rudiment, for the development of the human sense-organs advances by the incorporation of the physical into whatever else is forming in man, so that the sense-organs are today essentially physical organs. You will easily be able to recognize the eyes, the ears, etc., as physical organs. To be sure, the lower sense are more of a chemical nature, but nevertheless that all has to do with the physical-chemical.

We must grasp the matter thus—the human being thrusts forward into the world as the most external of evolved members; what we can call his physical quality (Physikalisches). This physical nature of the sense-organs can be seen in the fact that during sleep the ears are naturally influenced just as they are during waking life; only the ego and astral body are not concerned with them. If we had our eyes open during sleep, it is obvious that just the same would happen as during waking. We can summarise it by saying: man thrusts out into the world his external faculties of perception.

The diagram I have sketched here is to be understood as the incorporation of the entire sense apparatus in our organism. And if I now include the etheric body, it naturally interpenetrates to some extent the sense apparatuses, else they would not be life apparatuses; but outside the sphere of the etheric something remains which is entirely physical. So the relationship must be drawn in this way, with something left outside the ether-body.

In a similar way I must then draw the relation of the astral body in its activity to the other organs. I must draw it so.

And if I further wished to insert the ego I must do it schematically in the following way. This ego would open itself naturally to the spaces of the whole cosmos.

Naturally, this is drawn schematically and we must be clear that if we did not sketch it as a diagram, but really made a drawing of the human being, it would look far more complicated.

Now you can conclude from this that the sense is, as it were, a thin zone, a thin outer zone of the physical, of what in fact works as the external world. You can indeed follow this with physical cognition: the eye can be looked on as a camera obscura, where the objects from outside create their images as in a photographic apparatus, and what is created within is then seized upon by the etheric body, astral body and ego. Thus we have a physical reciprocal action with the outer world which takes place in our periphery. And it is on this reciprocal action with the outer world that we first build up our soul process, insofar as the process is perception of the outer world and working-over of the perception in the soul.

What I have now depicted is how things would have stood with man if he had developed purely in the way the divine-spiritual beings had planned. But we know that Luciferic-Ahrimanic beings have asserted themselves. And here we can clearly and plainly on one spot seize the Ahrimanic and Luciferic spirits—regularly lay hold of them, one might say.

I might only draw the etheric body as far as here (see sketch).

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This is the etheric body as it has developed from the time of the Sun-existence and through the Moon and Earth-existence. Thus, there remains, as it were, outside this etheric body which has progressed in the normal regular manner, the physical sense-zone. But if this were really to be the case in man (as in the drawing), if he had really only developed in this way, then the human being would always have had to wait for the physical processes to arise in his eye, his ear, etc.; and he would grasp these physical processes with his astral body and ego. He would always have a pictured image: in my eye is a colour, in my ear is a tone; he would not have his sense opened outwards, he would only have perceived what was within him, he would have the feeling: in me is a zone which is entirely interpenetrated with activities of the macrocosm, and I perceive them.

It is interesting that in the first years of childhood the child really has this consciousness, even if it is feeble and dreamlike. It pays no attention to the outer world, but observes the perceptions it has in its own inner being. This gradually comes to an end. Children are primarily interested in their own bodies, do not notice the outer world, but have a dreamy consciousness that they are enclosed as if in a sphere which really brings in the activities of the outer world like pictures. The child really feels its skin as a kind of enclosing sheath and pays attention to what takes place in it as paintings and tones.

We could now ask: why does that not remain so the whole life long? Because the Luciferic influence has entered and because it actually fills out that which has been formed as the normal progress in the etheric body from the time of ancient Sun. This means that Luciferic spirits thrust their influence from outside into the interior (see drawing).

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Whereas man's etheric body works so from the inner periphery outwards, Lucifer works so inwards. And it is even true that something like etheric tentacles from Lucifer project into the physical apparatus of the eyes and the same in the case of the ears, etc. Everywhere Lucifer presses his arms into the senses, thrusting them in from outside. And in our senses there is the meeting between our own etheric activity, life activity, and that of Lucifer who thrusts his tentacles into them. So that we can say: the child's innocence only ceases because Lucifer gradually struggles through, he takes possession of the physical part of our senses, opens the eyes, opens the ears, so that we no longer perceive pictures as the effect of what the Gods give us, but our senses are opened outwards and we see the world itself.

It is extraordinarily important to grasp this. For only when science will one day be real spiritual science and what is now being said is understood, only then will the time have come when it will also be realised that Lucifer was somewhat audacious, when, in addition, he projected his activities behind the senses. There where the nerves terminate in the brain the Luciferic activity meets with the divine-spiritual activity which also moves along the nerve strands. If one wishes to draw the course of a nerve from outside one must so draw it that Lucifer thrusts forward and meets with and interlaces himself with the normal divine-spiritual activities. Thus the direction of the Luciferic working radiates from without inwards.

You see from this that it lay in the original divine-spiritual intention to give man up to himself, and inasmuch as he saw himself through himself, he would have worked upon the world inwardly. Lucifer has caused man in this respect to be torn away from himself and to behold the world round about him and be aware of it. This means: Lucifer has given man to the world, he has established him in earthly existence, he has led him out of himself. Deeply, deep significant are the words in the Bible: ‘Ye shall be as gods, your sense shall be opened ...’ for it was not intended to open them, but so to leave them that man in his thinking would look back to the old Moon-existence, and in this thinking would apprehend what the macrocosm brings about at his periphery, what had been given to it by the Gods.

Now the human being is, however, also set into the world as an ethical-moral being; for there is much we could not experience as human beings if we had not this projection into us of Lucifer's activity. We should never be angry, for instance, or frightened, we should never hate, never believe ourselves persecuted, develop no antipathy against anyone—none of this should we be able to do. If Lucifer had not previously worked upon him, man would never have arrived at incorporation in the language any abusive word or a word injuring another. Only through the working of Lucifer is it possible for us to be angry, anxious, develop hatred or injurious feeling toward another, or for us to insult him, etc., etc.

And one must not give oneself up to the slightest illusion in this respect. He who believes when he hates someone, that it is justified—may say so, it may be justified, but all the same Lucifer stands at the side. There is no other cause of anger, hatred or antipathy, than the Luciferic influence.

And now, through this having been possible, something else has become possible. It is only because Lucifer thus projects his tentacles in from outside, for instance, that it has become possible for the normally progressive gods to admit Ahriman from the other side, so that he takes hold from the other side. He penetrates not only speech but thinking, and out of this intermingling arises what has become hypocrisy, intentional or unintentional untruthfulness. We must never flatter ourselves that when we are hypocritical towards someone it is to be traced to anything but the alliance of Lucifer and Ahriman.

People are inclined, however, to skim over such things very lightly. For how often a man says: ‘I do this or that not for my own sake, but in the service of the world.’ I have often related the anecdote of the ‘Society for Selflessness.’ There was an esoteric section in which everyone was to think quite objectively, never in a relation to himself. The consequence was that once a member ...² came to another member and said: ‘I dare not, as you know, speak of myself, for that would be personal and against the rules of our Society. But I may speak about others; for I am quite selfless when I tell you what the others are like and all the bad things they are doing!’ ... and then he let himself go about the others. It is not a question as to whether a matter is personal or impersonal if someone believes he is selfless and then only unburdens his subjective opinions onto other people. Since the members of this Society might not speak of themselves, they always spoke about others, and what the others did to them. They did not become more selfless through this.

I desire by this example to say that it is not the point what one believes. A man can believe that he is employing every means in order to escape Lucifer and Ahriman: he is then only in the position of being somewhat more untruthful through this endeavour than he was before. At least, he did not say before that he wished to do the best, etc.; afterwards he expresses it all the same, inasmuch as he deceives himself as to the true situation in which he is.

We shall be clear about all these things, my dear friends, if we regard the true facts of the case, if we are clear that Lucifer and Ahriman are necessary in our earth-existence. One cannot escape them but can only come to the point of controlling them, of having them in full control.

One must be clear that with regard to the cooperation of Lucifer and Ahriman, precisely when one advances in spiritual science, the most varied complications are possible. A case which frequently occurs is the following. Someone has an antipathy to another person. It can be that the anger against this man, which is in the subconscious, presses up into the upper consciousness, presses outwards, and the consequence of this is that, whereas one has a subconscious ground for the antipathy, the anger alone becomes conscious. The hatred or antipathy presses outwards, presses into the sphere of Lucifer, and there, in Lucifer's sphere, arise the most vivid visions and imaginations of every possible thing this man is doing to one. And now in the subconscious the anger can press out and there then arise all sorts of imagined things that could proceed from the hated person. And the true causes of the antipathy are hidden behind what the man alleges he has undergone.

It is obvious that in face of such facts of the spiritual world, it can be asked: how does one protect oneself from such things? The answer could only be given by referring the questioner to a gradual working himself out of the illusions of life in which he is only too deeply held. The grounds of self-deception are above all present when a man thinks he does not in the least deceive himself but only looks at facts. Only the good will, therefore, to undertake one's self-development from this standpoint, only this helps one to escape from these things. One thing above all, my dear friends, is necessary: to understand how the impulses of spiritual science work when we strive for self-perfecting, but how much we are inclined to attribute far more selflessness to ourselves than we are really entitled to do. By saying this I wish to give you a golden rule.

Above all things we must be quite clear that as we advance in the spiritual scientific self-training, we must in the first place thoroughly work ourselves out of our dependence on the outer world. Lucifer has placed us in the outer world. We do not make progress if we let Ahriman transform for us something that we are really desiring, inasmuch as we say, ‘We will now carry out missions,’ and so on. The next step that we must take is a diverting of the world from us. We thereby confront the danger of being really more egotistic than we were before and this danger is not a slight one. One is, of course, not to let oneself be held back through this from making the way into the spiritual world, but the temptation to egotism is there. And as regards those people who, one must say, unhappily cannot yet see that the spiritual scientific world conception is necessary for our time and who, standing outside, say: these spiritual scientists certainly do not appear very agreeable (liebevoll). ... as regards these people we should not at once be arrogant and pooh-pooh this reproach, but should see its justification, its relative justification.

I do not know, my dear friends, if the man was right who lately asserted that, through his enhancement of egotism in a spiritual scientific movement, it was to be proved as a fact that there are people in spiritual scientific movements who after they have been there a short time quarrel far more than they did before. It may be softly whispered that discrepancies in such societies will most certainly not cease without further ado! But how much it would bring us forward if the following picture could be shown—that outside the contesting that surrounds this circle, Lucifer and his hosts were assuredly lurking—but could not get right in!

When, therefore, a man is in his ordinary waking state, there meet together in the periphery of his sense, the etheric of his own being and the etheric of the Lucifer-being. This is what underlies the words ‘Your eyes shall be opened’ ... Very special reference has always been made by all occult schools to this fundamental truth.

Cognition is, to be sure, on the one hand something that is to bring quite accurately to our consciousness what lies before us,—on the other hand, however, it is to guide us to accept things as they are. As long as we cannot take these things into our thoughts they remain in the sphere of sympathy and antipathy, and there they burrow. They are not somehow not there, if we know nothing of them: they are always there. And in this particular age mankind has reached the point of its evolution where such things must be known.

So we have furnished ourselves with a few items of more exact knowledge regarding our sense-periphery. Yesterday we spoke of how desire enters into sense-perception; now we have the actual reason for it. For Lucifer draws near and does not allow sense impressions to approach us as neutral objective happenings, but mixes his nature into them.

And if we pass inwards from the sense-periphery, my dear friends, we come to thinking, to the conceptual life. (Vorstellungsleben) We know that this conceptual life through Lucifer's influence seems to belong to us, whereas in reality we must perceive what we think in the sphere of the Old Moon which still endures. This gives us the whole meaning of the separation of the Old Moon from the Sun-Earth existence. For the fact that man today can at any time bring thoughts into his soul, is connected with the separation of the Old Moon from the Sun. The thought nature, as we men can grasp it, comes from the fact that something separated itself, as Old Moon, from the progressive Saturn-Sun-Moon existence. But how is it with what happened there, with what separated itself?

We men as physically incarnated beings can only understand this through spiritual science. The question is how these thoughts work upon that which separated, upon what lies outside thought. Our thought is stimulated by our astral body, but it works down into the etheric body. Now, one can observe: if this is a part of our etheric body to which one directs the trained eye of the spirit, one finds that when thoughts are stimulated in the astral body they then stream down as it were into the etheric body. (See diagram—MISSING). You must not imagine this spatially, but as forces: then one sees that these thoughts call forth movements, activities in the etheric body. The thoughts dissolve, as it were, and movement appears in the etheric body. It is as if the thought flows into the etheric substance out of the astral body and produces movement. Let us suppose that someone says, ‘I will now go away’ ... then the clairvoyant would perceive how the thought stream into the etheric body and calls forth movements, inner movements there, at first only such as these (see lower diagram). Thereby the etheric body can work in its turn on the physical body. And this working upon the physical body is now so that ... now just imagine for a moment: here this movement gets more and more active, and hence the etheric substance to some extent withdraws from the surroundings, it draws itself together ... there that will be very active, that is taken out of the surrounding ether.

Thus the thought streams in, calls up movement in the ether-substance, and the etheric substance calls forth hollowness here in its surroundings. For what the etheric substance requires it takes from its surroundings, and hollow spaces ensue. And these hollow spaces ensue when man thinks, or when the higher beings, Angels, Archangels, let their thoughts flow into him ... which indeed occurs continuously.

This means, we stand there, we see the etheric agitated through the thought activity, and in between are hollow spaces: and these hollow spaces are actually, fundamentally, the physical body. It is truly the case that the Real exists everywhere that the physical is not, and the physical, that is really nothing, it is a hollowness in the world.

What the ordinary materialistic physiologist studies by way of our head, my dear friends, is naturally not the thought in the astral body, nor the thought motion in the etheric body, but it is in reality the hollow head. And the reason why one cannot penetrate into this hollow space is because one can only advance as far as the real extends and there one comes up against the hollow space. So one cannot enter the hollow spaces. It is exactly as if you picture a column of Seltzer-water and there are bubbles of air in it: the thinner elements appear to the being who lives in the denser element as frightfully hard. So too we cannot penetrate into the actual hollow spaces, but only because there is nothing there, because it is a hollow. Thus if one would draw the human head occultly, one must not draw it so, but in the negative, and what remains inside as empty, that would be the human being (see diagram p.l2a). This means that where the painter generally lays on the colours and thinks he is painting man, he ought really to leave it empty: then one would be painting spiritually-realistically, for otherwise one paints where there is nothing and leaves free the part where there is something.

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But this one already does in quite ordinary human sense perception, for human sense perception follows no other course than this. You see how we must take in hand an alteration in our ideas, if we wish to press forward to realities.

• 1. This important lecture was unfortunately only available in a much abbreviated transcript.
• 2. The rest was not incorporated in the notes. The contents are briefly given.

My task today will be to discuss how hard it is for people to keep to the truth of a situation in their ordinary trains of thought. I want to convey to you how far from easy it is in thinking to keep all the factors involved so before us that the course of our thoughts doesn't go astray from reality, that we follow the thread of reality.

The theme proposed for us today is certainly more difficult than others we might choose. But there is inner moral value to be derived from the realization that truth is hard to get at and that it is very easy to go astray as we forge ahead in a train of thought in the attempt to arrive at the truth by means of strict logical reasoning.

You will find that what I am going to tell you today will make it easier to understand certain matters that will occupy us in the next lecture. I will be speaking then about the important concepts chance, necessity, and providence. And I want to begin today with an introduction that, though it has its difficulties, will nevertheless contribute something vital and significant, not only to our theoretical understanding, but to the feeling we will then be able to develop for the way to seek truth.

I have often had occasion to mention the fact that there is a contemporary philosopher by the name of Fritz Mauthner who has written a Critique of Language.¹ This Critique of Language was intended to provide our period with something better suited to it than Kant provided for his time with his Critique of Pure Reason.² For Mauthner no longer believes—if that expresses it—that people seek knowledge in the form of concepts. It is rather his conviction that it is fundamentally just language to which people attach their insights. He believes that they don't really have true concepts when they are thinking, but merely have what words convey, and that words simply suggest this or that to them. He pictures people as having certain inner experiences in connection with words, putting their faith in words, jumbling them up, putting them together, and deriving insights from these processes. This is a total misconception of the entire cognitive process, but one that was bound to emerge eventually in an age working its way through to the worst consequences of materialism.

I want to convey just a sense of how Mauthner came to hold this view by quoting a passage from his Dictionary of Philosophy, written after his Critique of Language.³ Since we will be concerning ourselves with chance, necessity and providence, I will quote a passage from his article on the word “chance.” As I read it you will see that the materialistic age has gradually learned to talk about certain things. I am not so much interested in touching on any theoretical aspects involved in what I'll be reading you as I am in getting you to examine your feelings as you are exposed to what a materialistic philosopher of the present has to say on such a subject. I'd like to have you try to sense the way he speaks. He says of chance in his treatise on it “And it would be like going back to childhood and taking out of a magic package the surprises some kindly merchant has concealed in it.” He believes that looking at all the things that happen by chance is like becoming a child again and taking out of a magic package all the surprises put into it by a kindly merchant! “As though one were to keep on making God responsible, as Spinoza, Hume, Kant, and Schopenhauer did ...” is his sense of it. Trying to explain the world by ascribing everything to a kindly God would, in his opinion, be to regress to the state of a child gradually discovering what some kind merchant has hidden in a surprise packet. The child explores its content and comes upon one lovely thing after another. That is how Mauthner sees anyone who, attempting to find a wise explanation of the phenomena of the world, makes God responsible by regarding Him as the world's Creator. And he goes on to say, “... if one wanted to follow the example of Spinoza, Hume, Kant, and Schopenhauer in making Schopenhauer's elderly Jew” (he calls Him that because the term “God of the Christians” strikes him as unsuitable) “responsible for unscrambling this confusion of chance and purpose.”

You see the type of expression into which a materialist lapses if he takes himself seriously. Of course it is true that many people do not take materialism (which inevitably is also atheism) any more seriously than did the man who exclaimed “As surely as God is in heaven I am an atheist!” But anyone who takes it seriously today has to ridicule providence and similar matters; there is really no other possibility for those who have adopted materialism.

Though Fritz Mauthner is bound to give deep offense to our feelings and our sense of the fitness of things, I have brought him up because he is an honest, upright seeker after truth in the current materialistic sense. It is not my intention to do battle with individuals who are philosophers by profession, but rather with someone who comes to philosophy out of inner necessity from a quite different professional background and attains a certain degree of competency in it. For what one misses so greatly today in the way world views are evolved is a really serious coming to grips with what the various branches of science have brought forth up to the present. Fritz Mauthner has really grown into a learned gentleman, enabling me, as I take him for my point of departure and describe the difficulties inherent in the search for truth, to base my commentary on the thoughts developed by a very learned, very brilliant man. I am not basing it on what just any person thinks, but on the thinking of a very scholarly, clever man.

To begin with, I must take a very simple concept to show you at hand of a very special example from Mauthner's work how hard the search for truth is. You all know that there has long been what is called in mathematics the calculus of probability. It's quite easy to grasp the principle involved. Let's assume, for example, that you have some dice. I don't want to lead you astray into gambling with them, but let us say you have some dice. You know that they are so arranged that there is a single dot on one side, two on another, and so on, up to six dots on one of the six sides. If you roll these dice, they can turn up any one of the six sides; there are six possibilities. Now we can ask what the chances are of turning up a 6. You might really want to know what the chances are of getting a 6 when you shake the dice cup and throw the dice. The mathematician makes his calculation and says there are six possibilities; there is thus one-sixth of a chance of turning up a 6 on a single throw. You see how unlikely this possibility is. You would have to run through all six possibilities to be certain of a particular outcome. The numerator and the denominator would have to be identical, since certainty would equal 1 (6/6 = 1). Probability is therefore six times smaller than certainty in throwing dice.

Now we can pursue the matter further and ask what the chance is of throwing two sixes if two dice are thrown. This can also be calculated. You will get one divided by thirty-six if you calculate as follows: Throwing a 2 with one dice, you can get anything from a I to a 6 with the second. Getting a 2 with the first throw, you can also get anything from a 2 to a 6 with the second, and so on, until you have counted thirty-six different possible throws. The probability of getting any particular outcome is thus 1 in 36, or 1/36. If you wanted to calculate probability with 3 dice, you would get 1/6 x 1/6 x 1/6, or 1/216, a very unlikely event indeed. The probability gets smaller and smaller the more dice are involved. The more possibilities there are, the less probable is any particular outcome.

You see, then, that it is possible to express in mathematical formulas the degree of probability of any particular outcome, and calculations of this kind can be applied to all sorts of cases. But I don't need to explain more than this principle to you; you see that it is possible to express in mathematical formulas what one feels. One can always feel that there is a certain degree of improbability that a 6 will be thrown, but the actual probability is 1/6, with two dice 1/36, and so on. Such feelings can, in a sense, be expressed in mathematical terms.

Now there is a certain way of thinking about divine providence. Materialists say something like this about it: We want to examine the reasoning of those who believe in God and providence; what are their thoughts? Believers in providence say, Let us take a work like Goethe's Faust or Homer's epics. What is Goethe's Faust in the last analysis? If we think as the materialists do, picturing the world as composed of atoms or molecules, we would really have to conceive Faust in its entirety as composed of letters, of single letters, unless we wished to go deeper. People who believe in providence and also believe in atoms and molecules formulate the situation more or less like this: Let's imagine that we have a container of type and in it all the letters that make up Faust, and some machinery—not some intelligence—spreads out these letters. The believers in providence could now ask how great the probability is of Goethe's Faust emerging from a typesetting machine that simply put the letters one after the other as they happened to fall on being thrown out of the container. They ask the question, perhaps, but have to admit that the probability of such a thing happening is so slight as to be nonexistent. One cannot assume that a haphazard scattering of type could possibly result in a chance (Voltaire's “His Majesty, Chance”) printing of Goethe's Faust. Since that can't be the case with Goethe's Faust, we can scarcely think that this world, which is much, much more gloriously put together, could have been flung down so thoughtlessly and simply.

This is approximately how a person with the current atomistic outlook would think if he could not avoid accepting providence as necessary in the scheme of things because of the impossibility of the world's having put itself together out of chaos.

Now Fritz Mauthner is a thorough gentleman, so he has let himself in not just for producing this train of thought but for correctly calculating how improbable it is that, for example, Goethe's Faust could have originated from a mere scattering of the letters it consists of. He has really figured it out, and I want to show you how he did it. He makes a fairly thorough job of it. He says,

God's existence is proved by the fact that the world's beauty and order are just as improbably the product of pure chance, achieved without purpose on the part of a creator, as we would regard the production of Faust as a consequence of upsetting a huge container of type and an accidental arranging of the letters and punctuation in the sequence found in Faust. The improbability of such a production is truly vast, beyond anything fantasy could conjure up, even if one disregards the utterly nonsensical assumption that letters could arrange themselves into sentences, and assumes the probability of an immeasurably favorable special case—something, say, along the lines of a German typewriter or typesetting machine getting into the hands of a Chinaman who, totally unfamiliar with the German language and letter-symbols, nevertheless experiments tirelessly with the keys for weeks or months, handling the machine correctly, with the result of this mere experimenting producing Faust!

Mauthner goes on to say:

I entertained myself working out an approximate calculation of the probability of a chance emergence of Goethe's Faust from this experiment. There was no need to bother about a few decimal places in the decimal part of the logarithm, and I magnanimously upped the probability by allowing for one hundred typographical errors and still recognizing the product as genuinely Faust, thus giving it a more than generous benefit of the doubt. Faust contains approximately 300,000 letters. Now the probability of striking the right key at every touch is not exactly small; it is almost 1 out of 100, since there are about 100 different symbols.

So one can light upon 100 symbols. Blindly tapping away, the probability of getting the right one is 1 in 100, according to the principle explained at hand of the dice. Thus the probability of the Chinaman totally ignorant of the language in which Faust is written striking the right key is 1/100. “But since, according to elementary rules, the chance of accidentally producing the whole of Faust with its 300,000 letters equals the product of 300,000 partial probabilities, the probability of an accidental production of Faust must be calculated as (1/200)300,000.”

You see, the probability of Faust coming into existence in the above way is not 1/6 or 1/36, and so on, but equals the fraction obtained by dividing 1 by 100x100x100, and so on, until we have done it 300,000 times. That is a fraction with a gigantic denominator, as you can see; in other words, the probability is exceedingly tiny. Mauthner continues, “We have here a fraction whose numerator is 1, whose denominator consists of 600,000 digits. Even the conceptual power of the Indians,” (which Mauthner rates very highly), “even the mathematical genius of Archimedes is not up to grasping so vast a denominator. There is not even a name for such a number. The Greeks and the Romans were right, then, when they considered the chance production of any organized whole as extremely improbable. Here we reach the limits of the possible”—but only for human conceiving, he means. One cannot obtain Faust this way.

And the Greeks and Romans would also have concluded that the meaningful production of a Faust on the part of a creator could most probably—or even quite certainly—equally prove the existence of a world-creator if the whole proof or metaphor or line of reasoning were not so unspeakably foolish. I could never even bring myself to believe that the marvelous build of a mosquito could be the product of chance in a materialistic sense. The chance material production of a mosquito is just as improbable as that of Faust. Darwinism has not really lessened the incomprehensibilities. But the headwork on the part of a God Who would have had to organize not merely 3 times 100,000 elements or letters (with repetitions) but all the elements that make up the cosmos an endless number of times (with repetitions) is, if possible, even more improbable for human conceiving (and we really have no other!) than a chance production of Faust. I have no wish to extend my calculations to figuring out the degree of the improbability of a world- dominion and providence.

You see what tremendously learned reflections one can engage in. You will have thought them quite learned enough to arrive at the logical conclusion: what must God not have had to keep in mind, if He wanted to put the world together out of all its elements, if producing Faust out of an upset typecase or the chance striking of typewriter keys represents such an improbability as to be practically out of the question? Therefore, says Mauthner, both the concept of chance and that of divine providence are inconceivable. For if the degree of probability in the case of Faust is so minuscule, one can certainly not presuppose in the world's case that it could have been the chance creation of an upsetting of a cosmic typecase, so to speak. But then, one can just as little presuppose God—for what wisdom would He not have had to possess to have built the world out of all its elements!

So one can take neither God nor “His Majesty, Chance” for granted. Mauthner therefore maintains that neither has validity, that all that is involved here is just concepts in language, and people deal with them as they do with languages themselves and with translations. And he calls this a Critique of Language! We have here a truly incisive train of thought indeed, pursued with a great deal of effort. It leads to two alternatives: one has either to presuppose that the world came into being by chance—an exceedingly tiny probability, of course—or, still less credibly, to conceive of a kind God with a head so full of wisdom that He could use it to build a world out of chaos.

Now, since we are concerned in spiritual science not only with getting to know things but with thinking correctly, taking into account all the factors involved in developing a sound train of thought, let us examine this particular train of thought in a way commensurate with the serious approach of spiritual science. Let us review again the proposition that the probability of Goethe's Faust resulting from a jumbling up of the contents of a typecase is so infinitesimal as to be represented by a fraction with a numerator of 1 over a denominator consisting of 600,000 digits. The probability of the world's coming into being as the result of a similar accident would, of course, be infinitely smaller. But the fact is that Faust did come into being in its entirety! Now did this happen because the good Goethe—not the good God in this case—had in his head the laws whereby, according to the principles of typesetting, 300,000 letters taken from the typecase could be set in soldierly rows to eventuate in Faust? Was Goethe thinking of the right way to reach into that container to get hold of the right letters?

Certainly not! When we think of the origin of Faust, we don't picture it as having anything to do with selecting type. The creator of Faust proceeded quite differently. It would never have occurred to him that Faust could have resulted from the placement of 300,000 letters. It was totally unnecessary for Goethe to know that Faust could be composed of 300,000 letters, and yet he composed it! We might, on the one hand—and indeed we even must—picture a chaos, with things in a state of utter disorder, but conceive on the other of a good God with all the various laws in mind according to which He would arrange the world, exactly as Goethe would have done if he had been set before a typecase to bring forth his Faust. But neither God nor Goethe went to work in this fashion. What we have to picture going on in God's soul has nothing whatever to do with the whole train of thought about composition, any more than such an incredibly cleverly conceived composition applies in the case of the creation of Goethe's Faust. In other words, this whole train of thought leads to absurdity. It is brilliant, it is well reasoned, it is conscientious—all these things; yet it ends in absurdity. That comes of a conscientious person engaging in a train of thought and pursuing it, but losing sight of the actual factors that could have led to a sound conclusion.

This is a much more important matter than we might suppose, for it demonstrates how extraordinarily difficult it can be, no matter how scientifically one proceeds, to avoid losing sight of reality as we pursue a train of thought. We must imbue our feelings with this realization and learn a great deal from just such an example. Two things are required as we mull it over. One is that we educate ourselves through an outstanding example of this kind to an awareness that the search for truth is far from easy, and that we badly need to develop a feeling for the fact that not just any thought sequence that strikes us at first glance as correct is actually a sound one. The more we can imbue ourselves with the feeling that we could err, that even at our most conscientious we might be wrong, the more easily will we avoid a rigid clinging to our own opinions, to a stubborn belief in the correctness of our views.

It is a very common thing, these days, to encounter people who declare that they think this or that to be a fact. The typical reaction one has in such encounters is how fortunate and at the same time how simple-minded such people are—fortunate, because they have no idea what it really means to believe in something they have figured out, and simple-minded because they don t have a glimmering of how far removed from reality their thoughts may be. But we should be aware that we mustn't allow this realization to depress us. It will make us very modest indeed, but not to the point of driving us into melancholia, to a sense of despair about human life because of the great difficulty of achieving truth. For we know that the life of the human soul is unending and must be a quest, that it may even be due to a wise ordaining that the quest for truth is so difficult. And we will find that life rests upon this fact.

It would be the death of our souls if the quest for truth were easy, if those people who say they have found out how to arrange things in a way to make the whole world happy were right. If, confronted by the world's complexity, it were such a simple matter to discover truth as most individuals believe it to be, that would mean the death of the soul. For the soul's life depends on our inability to find any access to the totality of truth; it requires a long slow search for truth, and the preservation of a profound degree of modesty as one progresses in it, step by step. Error is the more likely the more comprehensive the truth we seek. So it was natural for even one of the most learned men to fall into childish error such as that demonstrated in connection with solving the cosmic problem of chance and providence.

But dismay and depression over the fact that truth can be discovered only with such difficulty cannot touch us if we bear in mind that life derives from our having to seek truth. The quest is what matters. You might say, Well, if it were to mean the death of the soul not to have to search for truth, that fate is surely going to claim us now, for we have currently reached a high point in human evolution in the lack of feeling for a true quest for truth. In the whole course of history there have never been more people with programs, more individuals who believe that they can solve the whole cosmic riddle with a word or two. So we do have the very outlook right now that can be described as leading to the death of the soul. And it would indeed mean the death of the soul if what these program-people think were true. But it is not true, fortunately!

The thinking of people like Fritz Mauthner is more typical than one might assume, and there are many of them. The volumes of his Philosophical Dictionary are a perfect example of the current outlook. They really reflect the way most people think who aren't interested enough in freeing themselves from the trend of contemporary thought to move in a direction such as spiritual science has taken. People like Mauthner say, We come, on the one hand, to the untenable concept of a world that has come into being by chance (for this has the degree of improbability I have been demonstrating). But the alternative concept of an all-wise God is just as untenable since our human minds find it impossible to credit the existence of a god, a good God, who created in His head everything He needed to assemble out of initial chaos the various “letters” that compose the universe. Mauthner believes that people used to make do with concepts like chance and providence, but that we have now advanced beyond them since we realize today that they have no cosmic significance, no objective meaning; as mere figments of our human minds they hold meaning for ourselves alone. They are judged entirely on the basis of whether they are presently applicable to the world at large. People like this always say, Look how childish people used to be! They talked on the one hand of “divine providence and on the other of the concept “chance.” We must recognize the fact that both concepts exist only in the thoughts of human beings and are not even remotely applicable to the world.

And on what do they base this judgment? They say, When we survey the whole range of philosophical thought, the philosophical procedure followed by many philosophers (and Mauthner has really sat down and studied the world's philosophers and is as familiar with all of them as anyone can be in a single lifetime), we see what trouble they took to arrive at concepts. But all these are just human concepts; they can't be applied to reality. There is no reality in the concept of divine providence. And Mauthner's article on chance ends with the statement that divine providence, the cosmic order, cosmic harmony, and the beauty of the world used to be looked upon as concepts in the following context: “Yes, there are elements of chance in the world, but the world is also endowed with order and beauty.” And Mauthner ends: “But we realize that the concept of chance is man-made, and so are the concepts of beauty and order, of God, of causality.” We know, in other words, that they are all of human origin and lack objective applicability. “Thus it is the height of literal-mindedness even to ask the question whether chance or God is the origin of universal order and beauty, and worse to try to answer it with a childish simile.”

Now what have Mauthner and all the other philosophers who agree with him done to arrive at the insight that the concepts of God and chance and order are human products, and that neither order nor beauty and so on really exist outside us? You needn't believe me, but they have demonstrated with all possible philosophical incisiveness how profoundly human reason goes to work to produce such concepts and how true it is that they are human products. They have demonstrated this. He has offered proof when he says, “But we know ...” etc. He has proved it! But if we look at how he proved it, we have to say, Yes, dear Mr. Mauthner, you are right. But we are familiar with the fact that the concepts of chance, beauty, God, and the June bug are all the work of man. That is true, looked at in the right light. Now you would have to spend years making a really thorough study of it, but if you were to examine the penetrating thinking that has gone into demonstrating how all the concepts mentioned above are the fruits of human thinking, you would find trains of thought that can very properly be applied to the assertion that the June bug concept is also man-made. That is certainly true, but does that say anything about whether June bugs can fly around outside there and are real? What is childish is to say that the concept of the June bug is just a human product. One can think really penetratingly and be totally convinced of the correctness of one's conclusions, and yet have lost the thread on which the true facts are strung. All the proofs adduced in support of the finding that the above concepts are simply fruits of human thinking do not say anything about the objective existence of these things; just as calling the June bug concept a human product does not help us when its objective existence is in question.

You see what tremendous certainty the modern scientific way of thinking generates. It is reflected in such a statement as “We know that the concepts of chance, beauty, order, God, and causality are all man-made. So it seems to us to be the very height of literal-mindedness even to ask the question whether chance or God is the origin of universal order and beauty.”

Well, then, one must comment, you believe—since you can prove that the June bug concept is man-made—that it is being childish, being a victim of literal-mindedness to apply the June bug concept to an insect flying around there outside the window? It is all exactly the same thing, you simply don't notice the similarity.

What is the point of bringing up such matters? Why, to call attention to how difficult it is to get at truth by stringing logical concepts together; to show what the outcome can be, no matter how penetratingly one proceeds; to illustrate how thoroughly we must imbue ourselves with a sense of the difficulty of the quest for truth, both in great and small concerns. The more you develop a feeling for this as a result of what has been discussed today, the better it will be.

On Hegel's birthday, August 27, we will build on the foundation laid today in a spiritual scientific approach to the concepts chance, necessity, and providence.

• 1. Fritz Mauthner, 1849–1923, German philosopher and writer. Critique of Language, 1901.
• 2. Immanuel Kant, 1724–1804, German philosopher of the Enlightenment, Published Critique of Pure Reason in 1781.
• 3. Fritz Mauthner, Dictionary of Philosophy, 1909.

In the preceding lectures, I have been calling attention to the fact that there will still be a great deal to say about a certain problem or question, even though it has already been the subject of discussion here from a great variety of viewpoints. That is the question of the alternating states of waking and sleeping in human beings. I have repeatedly spoken in public lectures of how this problem of sleep has occupied a more materialistically oriented science also, and how it is being handled. On several occasions I have referred to some of the various attempts that have been made to solve it. There is the so-called exhaustion theory, which is only one of the many that have been advanced in recent decades. This theory holds that we secrete substances resulting from the wear and tear of work and of our other activities during waking life, and that the sleeping state somehow eliminates these exhaustion products, which are then formed anew in the following period of waking consciousness.

Now we must always take the position that such a theory—I mean, what it describes—does not have to be wrong from the standpoint of spiritual science just because of its purely materialistic origin. The materialistic rightness of this particular theory need not now be gone into at any further length; other theories have been advanced in the same matter, as I have just mentioned. But from the standpoint of spiritual science no question will be raised as to whether such a process can take place, whether exhaustion products are really secreted during day-waking consciousness and destroyed again at night. This actual process will not be brought into question or further discussed. It must be a main concern of spiritual science to examine a problem, to study life's riddles, in a way that really relates the standpoint from which they are studied to the insights that can be gained in a particular age. That will provide the right basis for bringing the right light to bear on facts such as the secretion of exhaustion products. In most of life's problems—indeed, in all of them—the point is to know what questions to ask, to avoid pursuing a mistaken line of questioning.

In the case of the alternation between sleeping and waking the development of a viewpoint from which to study these two human states is all-important. And the proper light can be brought to bear upon certain phenomena of human life only if matters introduced in a very early phase of our spiritual scientific efforts are kept in mind. In the very early days I called attention to the fact that if we want to get an overview of world evolution we have mainly to consider seven stages of consciousness, seven life-conditions and seven form- states. Certain life-questions can be answered simply by considering changes in form; other questions can be illuminated by studying life-metamorphoses. But certain phenomena in life, certain facts of life cannot be illuminated any other way than by rising to a consideration of the various states of consciousness involved.

It is quite natural, in considering the problem of waking and sleeping, to concern ourselves with questions of the difference involved in the two states of consciousness. For we have certainly learned from a great variety of studies that we are here dealing with different states of consciousness, so that the question of consciousness is the all-important one here. We must realize that our most important concern in dealing with this question is to base it on the matter of consciousness. We will have to ask ourselves what the real difference is between the waking and the sleeping states.

And this is what we find: When we are awake—we need only to register what each one of us is conscious of—we look at the world around us and perceive it. And we will be able to say that when we are in the day- waking state, we cannot observe our own inner life as we do our surroundings. I have often called your attention to the fact of what a crude illusion it would be if we were to conceive of the study of anatomy as leading to observation of the inner man. Only what is external in us, though it lies beneath our skin, can be studied by material anatomy; our inner aspect cannot be studied during ordinary waking consciousness. Even what a person comes to know of himself while he is awake is the world's outer aspect, or, more exactly, that aspect of him that belongs to the external world.

But if we now observe the human being from the contrasting aspect of the sleeping state, its essential characteristic, as you can see from the various discussions that have previously taken place here, is that he is observing himself. While we are in that condition, the object of our attention is the human being; our consciousness is occupied with ourselves. If you examine some of the most commonplace phenomena from this standpoint, you will find them readily comprehensible.

Now if what materialistic science states on the subject of sleeping and waking were all that could be said about it, it would seem to contradict an observation I once made here, namely, that an independently wealthy person who hasn't made any particular effort is more often seen to fall asleep at lectures than someone who has been exerting himself at work. This observation would have to be wrong if tiredness were the real cause of sleep. What we have to consider here is that the coupon clipper who listens to a lecture is not focusing his day- waking interest on it, is perhaps not particularly interested in it, may even find it impossible to take an interest in it because he doesn't understand it and is therefore justified in his apathy. He is much more interested in himself. So he withdraws his attention from the lecture to concentrate upon himself. One could, of course, ask: why particularly upon himself? That too can easily be explained. There are certain reasons why the lecture doesn't interest him, and they are usually that he is more interested in other aspects of life than in those under discussion in the lecture, or, at least, in their relevance. But the lecture keeps him from occupying himself with what would otherwise be interesting him. A person who has no interest in hearing a lecture might conceivably prefer to spend the time eating oysters instead of attending the lecture. Perhaps he is more interested in the experience of eating oysters than in that provided by the lecture. But the lecture disturbs him; there is no way for him to eat oysters if he attends it. He behaves as though he wanted to hear it, but it keeps him from eating oysters. Since he can't be eating them, he settles for the only thing available besides the lecture that is disturbing him. The hour ahead is taken up with something that he can only hear, something without interest for him. So he turns his attention to the only other available interest: his own inner being, and enjoys himself! For his falling asleep is self-enjoyment.

You can gather from what we have studied that sleeping consciousness is still at the stage that prevailed in man during the ancient sun period. It is the same consciousness we share with plants. We know both these facts from previous lectures.

Now our sleeping man at the lecture is not in the same state of consciousness in which we would find him if he were enjoying the external world. He is working his way back into sub-consciousness as it were. But that doesn't matter; he enjoys himself anyhow. And his enjoyment comes from his interest in himself. So we must find it understandable that sleep takes over, not as a result of inner weariness but because his interest moves away from the outer scene, the lecture or the concert or whatever, to what does interest him. This is always the fact of the matter if one studies the alternation between sleeping and waking with thoroughness, and in its inner aspect.

When we are awake, we may look upon our condition as one in which we turn our attention outward, to the world around us. We withdraw our interest from our inner life.

The opposite is true of the sleeping state. Attention is directed inward to the self and withdrawn from what lies outside it. Since we have left our bodies during sleep, we actually see them from outside.

We can, as you see, trace the alternation between sleeping and waking to another cause, and say that we live in successive cycles, in one of which our interest is awake to the world outside us, and in the other to our inner world. This alternation between outer and inner is one that belongs every bit as much to our life as the fact that the sun shines on the earth and then goes down, leaving it in darkness, belongs to the earth's life. In the latter case the spatial constellation is the factor involved in the alternation between light and darkness, bringing about the cycle of daytime and nighttime.

Now you can easily see how mistaken it would be to say that the day is the cause of the night, and the night of the day. That would be what I have described to you in preceding lectures as a worm's philosophy. It is simply nonsense to call the day the cause of the night and vice versa; both result from the regular alternation in the spatial relationship between sun and earth. It makes just as little sense to say that sleep is the cause of waking, and waking the cause of sleep. Just as in the earth's case the only thing that makes sense is to say that it undergoes an alternation between day and night because of its position in space, so human life undergoes an alternation between interest for the inner and interest for the outer scene. These conditions have to succeed each other; anything else is out of the question. Life decrees that human beings must focus their attention on their surroundings for awhile, and then turn it inward, just as the sun, descending in the west, has no choice about what its further course will be.

But we enter a realm here where the following must always be kept in mind: The sun has to make a certain period of hours into daytime, and another period into night. But human beings are in a position to vary things and upset routines, like the coupon clipper who sleeps even though he isn't tired, voluntarily turning his attention inward, enjoying himself, really enjoying his body, or like a student cramming for examinations who, to some extent, overcomes his need for normal sleep. Many students sleep very little before examinations. But this brings up the big questions we will be concerning ourselves with, questions about necessity in outer nature, questions about the frequently discussed subject of chance, both in nature and in human life, questions about providence that apply to the entire universe.

As soon as we touch on the sphere of human life we come upon an element that belongs in the field of necessity, something necessary to man if he is to live and have his being in the world. There is much that we will be discussing in regard to this.

What I've been telling you has been said not only—and please note the “not only” as well as a “partly”—to call your attention to the fact that we must try to get a proper perspective on the alternation between sleeping and waking. This means asking what sort of consciousness we have when we are awake. The answer is that the outer world rather than the human being is its object, that we forget ourselves and turn our attention to the surrounding world. Conversely, consciousness in sleep is such that we forget the world outside us and observe ourselves. But we return first to the state of consciousness we had on the sun; the fact that we enjoy ourselves is of secondary importance.

But that is not the only reason why I have referred to this perspective; it was also to call attention to the importance of noting the ways consciousness is related to the world and to the fact that we can come to know the essential nature of certain things only by inquiring into the kind of consciousness involved. It is, for example, quite impossible to know anything of importance about the structure of the hierarchical order of higher spiritual beings unless we concern ourselves with their consciousness. If you go through the various lecture cycles, you will see what trouble was taken to characterize the consciousness of angels, archangels, and so on. For it is essential in any study to give careful thought to what constitutes the right approach. A person might say that he is quite familiar with the hierarchical order: first comes the human being, then the higher rank of angels, then the still higher archangels, then the archai, and so on. He writes them down in ascending order and claims to understand: each hierarchy is one step above the one before it. But if that were all one knew about these beings, one would know as little about the hierarchical order as one knows about the levels of a house from the fact that each higher story is superimposed upon the one below it; one could make a drawing that would fit both cases. What really matters is to note the salient facts in the case under study. We only know something about these higher beings if we are familiar with the state of consciousness in which the various hierarchies live and if we can describe it. This must form the basis of a study of them.

The same thing holds true in the study of human beings. We know very little indeed about our inner being if we can say nothing further on the subject of the sleeping state than that our ego and astral body are outside our physical and etheric bodies. Though that is true, it is a totally abstract pronouncement, since it conveys no more information about the difference between sleeping and waking than one possesses in the case of a full and an empty beer glass; in the one case there is beer in it, and in the other the beer is elsewhere. It is true enough that the ego and the astral body have left the physical and etheric bodies of a sleeping person, but we must be of a will to go on to ever further and more inclusive concrete insights. We try to do this, for example, when we describe the alternation of interest in the two states of consciousness.

I once made you a light red drawing of man, and then a blue one in illustration of my statements to the effect that, for the clairvoyant, the human being is in the hollow part shown in the drawings. If a person falls asleep and possesses a higher consciousness (it can be just the beginning of it; but even then we can really perceive, for we begin by observing ourselves), he sees this hollow part. At such moments we see clearly how mistaken the belief is that we are made of compact matter, that what seems to day-waking consciousness to be substantial is actually empty space. Of course, we must keep in mind that human beings are really outside their bodies during sleep. So they see the empty space surrounded by this aura. They are not in their bodies; they are looking on from outside them, so they see the empty space within the aura. It is a shaped yet hollow space. Looked at from outside, other kinds of spaces are of course filled with something. Therefore a person naturally appears in the shape he has when looked at with day-waking consciousness, but he is seen surrounded by what might be described as an auric cloud, an aura. We don't see him entirely clearly at first, but rather in an auric cloud that we must first penetrate: we see an auric cloud, outlining a shadowy form. It is as though we see the person in a more or less brilliant aura; viewed from outside, the space occupied by his physical form is left empty. I will resort to a trivial comparison to convey an adequate impression of this phenomenon, perceived when we become conscious during sleep. We have all had the experience of going about in a city when it is foggy or misty and have seen how the lights there appeared as though in a rainbow aura, without sharp outlines. This impression of lights like empty spaces in the surrounding fog is an experience everyone has had, and it is very similar to what I have been describing. The area imaginatively perceived is seen as though in a fog or mist, and the physical human beings are the empty dark spaces there inside it.

We may say, then, that we see human beings through an aura when we attain to clairvoyance in our sleep. We became materialists when we learned to look directly at our fellow human beings instead of seeing their auras. That was brought about as a result of luciferic developments that made it possible to begin to see ourselves with day-waking consciousness. And this helps us to understand an important passage in the Old Testament, the one that says that people went about naked prior to the seduction by Lucifer. This is not to be taken as meaning that their state of awareness in their nakedness at all resembled what yours would be if you were to do the same thing now; it means that they previously saw the surrounding aura. So they had no such awareness of the human being as we would have now if people were to run about in the nude, for they perceived human beings spiritually clothed; the aura was the clothing. And when that innocence was lost and human beings were condemned to a materialistic way of life, meaning that they could no longer perceive auras, they saw what they had not seen while the aura was still perceptible, and they began to replace auras with clothing. That is the origin of clothing; garments replaced auras.

And it is actually a good thing in our materialistic age to know that people clothed themselves for no other reason than to emulate their aura with what they wore. That is especially the case with rituals, for everything that is worn on such occasions represents some part of the aura. You can see for yourselves, too, that Mary and Joseph and Mary Magdalene wear quite different garments. One wears a rose-colored dress with a blue mantle, the other a blue robe with a red mantle. Mary Magdalene is often portrayed in a yellow garment by those who were still familiar with the old tradition or who still retained remnants of clairvoyance. An attempt was always made to reproduce the aura of the individual in question, for people were aware that the aura ought to be indicated, ought to find expression in the clothing worn.

An aberration typical of our materialistic age afflicts certain circles who see an ideal in doing away with clothing and who regard the so-called nudity cult as extremely wholesome; materialism can always be counted upon to draw the practical conclusions of its thinking. There is actually a magazine devoted to this cause that calls itself Beauty. A misunderstanding is at the root of this; the magazine believes itself to be serving something other than the crassest, coarsest materialism. But that is all that can be served when reality is seen exclusively in what external, sense-perceptible nature has brought forth.

The wearing of clothes originated as a means of preserving in ordinary life the state of consciousness that sees human beings surrounded by an aura. We should therefore find out where the contemporary tendency to do away with clothing comes from. It comes from a total absence of any imagination in clothing ourselves. No idealism is involved, but rather a lack of any imagination where beauty is concerned. For clothes are intended to beautify the wearer, and to see beauty only in unclothed human beings would, for our time, reveal an instinct for materialism. I intend at a later date to contrast this with the situation existing in Greek civilization. That civilization provides us with the best means of studying this matter in the light of what has just been said.

Now it becomes more and more important for people to learn how various conditions of consciousness provide insights for a study of life. Sleeping and waking are alternations in states of consciousness. But while sleeping and waking bring about sharply marked changes in our state of consciousness, smaller changes occur as well. Day-waking consciousness also has its nuances, some of which tend more toward sleep, others more toward the waking state. We are all aware that there are individuals given to spending a large part of their lives not actually asleep, but drowsing. We say of them that they are “asleep,” meaning that they go through life as though in a dream. You can tell them something, and in no time at all they have forgotten it. We can't call it real dreaming, but things flit by them as though in a dream and are instantly forgotten. This drowsiness is a nuance of consciousness bordering on sleep. But if somebody beats another up, that is a nuance that goes beyond the state of ordinary sleep and doesn't remain just a mental image. Life presents a variety of nuances of consciousness; we could set up a whole scale of them. But they all have their own rightness.

A lot depends on our developing a feeling for these nuances. A person occasionally has such a sense if he is born healthy and grows up in a healthy state. It is important to have a certain sensitivity for how seriously to take this or that in life, how much or how little attention to pay to it, what matters to take a stand on and what to keep to oneself. All this has to do with the asserting of consciousness, and such nuances do indeed exist. And it is very important to know, as we go through life, that life can develop in us the delicate sensitivity that tells us how much consciousness to focus on any particular matter, how strongly to stress something. We really make important progress both in leading a healthy life and in the possibility of contributing to orderly conditions in our environment if we pay attention to how strongly we should focus our consciousness on this or that. The state of consciousness we are in when we are among people and talking with them in an ordinary way about various matters is different from the state of consciousness in which a sense of delicacy forbids our discussing certain other subjects. These are two distinctly differing nuances of consciousness. But the presence of a sense of the fitness of things is simply another state of consciousness, and it is endlessly important in life to have an awareness of such considerations. I'd like to show you at hand of an example that there are indeed individuals who possess understanding for such nuances of consciousness.

Today is the 27th of August, Hegel's birthday, and tomorrow, the 28th, is Goethe's; they follow on one another's heels. Now Hegel wrote an Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences among other works, and a first edition of it was published.^1: This book is noteworthy in a certain respect. There would be absolutely no point in opening it at random and reading this or that page; you could make exactly as much sense out of it as out of Chinese. A statement taken at random from a page of Hegel would convey nothing whatsoever. In a lecture in Berlin last winter I explained how little sense it made to divorce one of Hegel's sentences from its context. For sentences in Hegel's encyclopedia make sense only when one has skipped over everything that poses riddles for the human mind and arrived at the place where Hegel says, “Considered in and of itself, being is the concept,” and so on. If one begins there and exposes oneself to all the rest of it, then and only then does every sentence make sense at the place where it stands; each sentence owes its meaning to its place in the whole.

Well, so Hegel had his encyclopedia published. In the preface to the first edition he explained why he arranged it as he did. When there had to be a second edition, Hegel wrote a preface to that. Now an author can sometimes have quite an experience of life between two editions of a book. For even if one has already become acquainted with one's fellow men, one feels oneself duty bound not to see them entirely in the light in which they sometimes reveal themselves; and besides, one can tell quite a bit about them from the reception the book is given. That was true in Hegel's case also. So then he wrote a preface to the second edition, and there are important passages in it. I am going to read you two such, one the very first sentence; the second, sentences from the second page. The preface to the second edition begins as follows: “The well-disposed reader will find that several sections have been revised and developed in sharper definition. I have taken pains therein to make my presentation a less formal one and to bring abstract concepts closer to the layman's understanding, making them more concrete by using more extensive exoteric annotations.” He was concerned, you see, to explain esoteric matters exoterically. The book continues:

The extreme brevity necessitated by a summarization of material quite sufficiently abstruse to begin with nevertheless leaves this second edition with the same goal as the first, namely, to serve as a preliminary text requiring further exegesis in the form of lectures. The title “encyclopedia” usually presupposes a less rigid adherence to scientific method and a more general structuring. But it lies in the nature of the subject matter that logical aspects must remain the basis of the presentation.

There were all too many occasions and provocations that seemed to require me to clarify my philosophical position with respect to the spiritual and the insipid concerns of contemporary culture, a thing to be undertaken only exoterically and only in a preface; for even if these concerns claim a relationship to philosophy, they do not do so scientifically, which means not at all; they approach it from without, and remain outside it. It is uncongenial and mistaken to involve oneself in a situation so alien to science. All the clarifying and explaining one might do fails to further that insight which can alone form the object of true knowledge. But it may be useful or necessary to comment on various phenomena.

This is proof that Hegel tried to shape the first edition in what was for him an esoteric manner, and that it was only in the second edition that he added what seemed to him exoteric aspects. Our time often possesses no understanding for these exoteric and esoteric elements; it doesn't so easily embark on the course Hegel travelled, who wanted to keep to himself everything originating in his own subjective view of a matter. And it was only after he had built up a complete organismic structure and freed it from any subjective aspects that he was willing to present this objective material in his book; he remained of the opinion that one's own path in achieving an insight was something that should be kept a private matter. In this, he evidenced sensitive feeling for the difference between two states of consciousness: that into which he wanted to enter when addressing the public, and that other developed for communing with himself. And then the world urged him, as the world so often does, in creating undesirable outcomes, to overcome this embarrassment of his for a certain period. For what lay at the bottom of his feeling was embarrassment, impelling him to silence about the way he had arrived at his concepts. As you know, embarrassment usually makes people blush. We would have to say, meaning something spiritual thereby, that Hegel blushed spiritually when he had to write a thing like his preface to the second edition. Here you see one of those nuances of consciousness over which embarrassment extends.

I wanted to demonstrate with an example how nuances of consciousness show up in life, including nuances in actions of the will and in what we do. We need to become ever more fully aware that life really must consist of such nuances, that we have to relate differences in states of consciousness to everything we do. Sleeping and waking involve very marked differences. But there can also be a nuance of consciousness in which we are aware that a matter concerns not just ourselves but the surrounding world as well; another, in which we confront the world with awareness that we must tread gently; and still another in which we know that what we do must be done with ourselves alone, or only in the most intimate circle.

The concepts and ideas we garner from spiritual science really make a difference in life. They teach us to recognize subtle subjective differences, provided we aren't disposed to know them only from the usual standpoint, realizing instead that a serious concern with spiritual science makes us a gift of this capacity for practical tact. But that serious concern with spiritual science must be present. It is of course absent if we project into spiritual science the sensations, desires, and instincts that ordinarily prevail. If that is the case, what is derived from spiritual science amounts to little more than can be garnered from any other indifferent source of learning. I've been speaking of nuances of consciousness and saying that there are nuances within the waking states very close to sleep. But it can happen that a person lacks the inclination to concern himself with certain details and subtleties, as in the case of the coupon clipper in yesterday's lecture. One may enjoy reading books or lecture cycles, but experience a dwindling consciousness at certain places in the text, and drowsiness sets in; the conscientiousness required to overcome such a condition is simply not there to call upon.

That is why I have continued to stress that things should not be made too easy for people desiring to involve themselves with spiritual science. We hear again and again that books should be written in a popular style, that Theosophy is not popular enough.^2: I discern behind such comments a wish for books that people could drowse through in a way they can't with Theosophy. It is vitally necessary to have sufficient interest for objective facts to rid ourselves of certain feelings and sensations we have had in the past; if we allow ourselves to drowse as we confront this or that theme in spiritual science that ought to engage our interest, we would stay awake only in the case of those matters most easily absorbed. And such a lack of objective interest leads to an inevitable development. The coupon cutter feels obligated to listen to the lecture, for lecture-going is part of a proper lifestyle, but he suffers tortures because of his total lack of interest. But he is gradually relieved; he enjoys himself, and sometimes even falls soundly asleep, a condition he doesn't have to guard against unless he starts snoring. All of this is a perfectly natural development.

Now let us picture this process transferred to another kind of consciousness. Let us imagine a person who lacks the needed full interest in the concrete details of spiritual science. He feels that he is listening best when he is not paying attention to details. I have even heard the comment, “Oh, what he is saying isn't the important thing; it's the ‘vibrations,’ ‘the way it's said.’” The lecturer can often discern this type of drowsy listening in the listener's appearance. This is exactly the same situation on the soul level as that of the coupon clipper in external life. For if attention is being given to “vibrations” instead of to what spiritual science is offering, it turns the hearer's interest inward, as happens when the coupon clipper is enjoying himself. It may be that such a person describes himself between lectures as taking an interest in what the lecture offered, and claims interest in this or that theme. But he is really gossiping about his or someone else's previous incarnations. He has, in other words, shifted everything to an interest in himself in an identical internalizing process. We really see the same process here that goes on in the external life of the coupon clipper, who falls asleep at every lecture, in the case of those who feel that details are not important, but who claim an interest in spiritual science they really lack. So they fall asleep as to details, and their interest is transferred to their own personalities.

Things of this sort have to be made clear. If we were to see them clearly, much that happens would not occur.

I would like to see you make a study of the nuance levels of consciousness as I have tried to describe them. The last example given should perhaps not be taken amiss now or at any other time. There is no question that the movement of spiritual science is met with a good deal of sleepiness, while a strong tendency to self-enjoyment gets the upper hand, with the result that spiritual science is used only as a means of indulging in self-enjoyment. But we want to concentrate on nuances of consciousness, for unless we do so we will not be able to achieve an understanding of necessity, chance, and providence.

• 1:. Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, 1770–1831, German philosopher. Published Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in 1817.
• 2:. Rudolf Steiner, Theosophy: An Introduction to the Supersensible Knowledge of the World and the Destination of Man, (Hudson, N.Y.: Anthroposophic Press, 1986).

I want, as I've said, to use these days to lay the foundation we will need to bring the right light to bear on the concepts chance, necessity, and providence. But today that will require me to introduce certain preparatory concepts, abstract counterparts, as it were, of the beautiful concrete images we have been considering.¹ And to do the job as thoroughly as we must, a lecture will have to be added on Monday. That will give us today, tomorrow (after the eurythmy performance), and Monday at seven. The performance tomorrow will be at three o'clock, and a further lecture will follow immediately.

For contemporary consciousness as it has come into being and gradually evolved up to the present under the influence of materialistic thought the concepts necessity and chance are indistinguishable. What I am saying is that many a person whose consciousness and mentality have been affected by a materialistic outlook can no longer tell necessity and chance apart.

Now there are a number of facts in relation to which even minds muddled by materialism can still accept the concept of necessity, in a somewhat narrow sense at least. Even individuals limited by materialism still agree that the sun will rise tomorrow out of a certain necessity. In their view, the probability that the sun will rise tomorrow is great enough to be tantamount to necessity. Facts of this kind occurring in the relatively great expanse of nature and natural happenings on our planet are allowed by such people to pass as valid cases of Necessity. Conversely, their concepts of necessity narrow when they are confronted with what may be called historical events. And an outstanding example is Fritz Mauthner, whose name has often been mentioned here; he is the author of Critique of Language, written for the purpose of out-Kanting Kant, as well as of a Philosophical Dictionary. An article on history appears in the latter. It is extremely interesting to see how he tries there to figure out what history is. He says, “When the sun rises, I am confronted with a fact.” To take an example, we have been able today, the 28th of August 1915, to witness the fact that the sun has risen. That is a fact. And now he concludes that we can ascribe this rising of the sun to a law, to necessity, only because it happened yesterday and the day before yesterday, and so on, as long as people have been observing the sun. It was not just a case of a single fact, but of a whole sequence of identical or similar facts in outer nature that brought about this recognition of necessity.

But when it comes to history, says Mauthner, Caesar, for example, was here only once, so we can't speak of necessity in his case. It would be possible to speak of necessity in his existence only if such a fact were to be repeated. But historical facts are not repeated, so we can't talk of necessity in relation to them. In other words, all of history has to be looked upon as chance. And Mauthner, as I've said, is an honest man, a really honest man. Unlike other less honest individuals, he is a man who draws the conclusions of his assumptions. So he says of historical “necessity,” for example, “That Napoleon outdid himself and marched to Russia or that I smoked one cigar more than usual in the past hour are two facts that really happened, both necessary, both—as we rightly expect in the case of the most grandiose as well as the most absurdly insignificant historical facts—not without consequences.” To his honest feeling, something that may be termed historical fact, like Napoleon's campaign against Russia (though it could equally well be some other happening) and the reported fact that he smoked an extra cigar, are both necessary facts if we apply the term “necessity” to historical facts at all.

You will be amazed at my citing this particular sentence from Mauthner's article on history. I cite it because we have here an honest man straightforwardly admitting something that his less honest fellows with a modern scientific background refuse to admit. He is admitting that the fact that Caesar lived cannot be distinguished from the fact of Mauthner himself having smoked an extra cigar by calling upon the means available to us and considered valid by contemporary science. No difference can be ascertained by the methods modern science recognizes! Now he takes a positive stand, declaring his refusal to recognize a valid difference, to be so foolish as to represent history as science, when, according to the hypotheses of present-day science, history cannot qualify as a science.

He is really honest; he says with some justification, for example, that Wundt set up a systematic arrangement of the sciences.² History was, of course, listed among them. But no more objective reason for Wundt's doing this can really be discovered than that it had become customary, or, in other words, it happens to be a fact that universities set up history faculties. If a regular faculty were provided to teach the art of riding, asserts Mauthner—and from his standpoint rightly—professors like Wundt would include the art of riding in their system of the sciences, not from any necessity recognized by current scientific insight, but for quite other reasons.

We really have to say that the present has parted ways to a very considerable extent with what we encounter in Goethe's Faust: this can be quite shattering if we take it seriously enough.³ There is much, very much in Faust that points to the profoundest riddles in the human soul. We simply don't take things sufficiently seriously these days. What does Faust say right at the beginning, after he has spoken of how little philosophy, jurisprudence, medicine, and theology were able to give him as a student, after expressing himself about these four fields of learning? What science and life in general have given him as nourishment for his soul has brought him to the following conviction:

No dog would endure such a curst existence!
Wherefore, from Magic I seek assistance,
That many a secret perchance I reach
Through spirit-power and spirit-speech,
And thus the bitter task forego
Of saying things I do not know,—
That I may detect the inmost force
Which binds the world and guides its course;
Its germs, productive powers explore,
And rummage in empty words no more
(Bayard Taylor translation)

What is it Faust wants to know, then? “Germs and productive powers”! Here, the human heart too senses in its depths a questioning about chance and necessity in life.

Necessity! Let us picture a person like Faust confronting the question of necessity in the history of the human race. Such an individual asks, Why am I present at this point in evolution? What brought me here? What necessity, running its course through what we call history, introduced me into historical evolution at just this moment? Faust asks these questions out of the very depths of his soul. And he believes that they can be answered only if he understands “productive powers and germs,” understands, in other words, how outer experience contains a hidden clue to the way the thread of necessity runs through everything that happens.

Now let us imagine a personality like Faust's having, for some reason or other, to make an admission similar to Fritz Mauthner's. Mauthner is, of course, not sufficiently Faustian to sense the consequences Faust would experience if he had to admit one day that he could distinguish no difference between the fact that Caesar occupied his place in history and the fact of having smoked an extra cigar in the past hour. Just imagine transferring into the mind of Faust the reflection on the nature of historical evolution voiced by Mauthner from his particular standpoint. Faust would have had to say, I am as necessary in ongoing world evolution as smoking an extra cigar once was to Fritz Mauthner. Things are simply not given their due weight. If they were, we would realize how significant it is for human life that an individual who embraces the entire scientific conscience of the present admits the impossibility of distinguishing, with the means currently available to science, between the fact that Caesar lived and the fact that Mauthner smoked an extra cigar, in other words, admits that the necessity in the one case is indistinguishable from the necessity in the other.

When the time comes that people sense this with a truly Faustian intensity, they will be mature enough to understand how essential it is to grasp the element of necessity in historical facts, in the way we have tried to do with the aid of spiritual science in the case of many a historical fact. For spiritual science has shown us how the facts relative to the successive historical epochs have been injected, as it were, into the sphere of external reality by advancing spiritual evolution. And what we might state about the necessity of this or that happening at some particular time differs very sharply indeed from the fact of Fritz Mauthner smoking his extra cigar. We have stressed the connection between the Old and the New Testaments, between the time preceding and the time following the Mystery of Golgotha, and stressed too how the various cultures succeeded one another in the post-Atlantean epoch and how the various facts occurring during these cultural periods sprang from spiritual causes.

The angle from which we view things is tremendously important. We should be aware of the consequences of the assumptions presently held to have sole scientific validity.

Days like yesterday, which was Hegel's birthday, and today, which is Goethe's, should be festive occasions for realizing how necessary it is to recall the great will-impulses of earlier times, to recall Hegel's and Goethe's impulses of will, in order to perceive how deeply humanity has become implicated in materialism. There have always been superficial people. The difference between our time and Goethe's and Hegel's is not that there were no superficial people then, but rather that in those days the superficial people could not manage to get their outlook recognized as the only valid one. There was that slight difference in the situation.

Yesterday was Hegel's birthday; he was born in Stuttgart on August 27, 1770. Since it was impossible for him, living at that time, to penetrate into truly spiritual life as we do today with the aid of spiritual science, he sought in his way to lay hold on the spiritual element in ideas and concepts; he made these his spiritual foothold. When we look at the phenomena surrounding us, we seek the spiritual life, the truly living life of the spirit that underlies them, whereas Hegel, since he could go no further, sought the invisible idea, the fabric of ideas, first the fabric of ideas in pure logic, then that behind nature, and finally that underlying everything that happens as a spiritual element. And he approached history too in such a way that he really accomplished much of significance in his historical studies, even if in the abstract form of ideas rather than in the concrete form of the spiritual.

Now what does a person who honestly adopts Fritz Mauthner's standpoint do if, let us say, he sets about describing the evolution of art from Egyptian and Grecian times up to the present? He examines the documented findings, registers them, and then considers himself the more genuinely scientific the less ideas play into the proceedings and the more he keeps—objectively, as he thinks—to the purely external, factual evidence. Hegel based his attempt to write the history of art on a different approach. And he said something, among other things, that we are of course able to express more spiritually today: If we conceive, behind the outer development of art, the flowing, evolving world of the ideal, then and then only will the idea that has, so to speak, been hiding itself, try to issue forth in the material element, to reveal itself mysteriously in the material medium. In other words, the idea will not at first have wholly mastered matter, but expresses itself symbolically in it, a sphinx to be deciphered, as Hegel sees it. Then, in its further development, the idea gains a further mastery over matter, and harmony then exists between the mastering idea and its external, material expression. That is its classic form. When, finally, the idea has worked its way through the material and mastered it completely, the time will come when the overflowing fullness of the world of ideas will run over out of matter, so to speak; the ideal will be paramount.

At the merely symbolic level, the idea cannot as yet wholly take over the material. At the classic stage, it has reached the point of union with matter. When it has achieved romantic expression, it is as though the idea overflowed in its fullness. And now Hegel says that we should look in the surrounding world to see where these concepts are exemplified: the symbolic, sphinx-like form of art in Egypt, the classic form in Greece, the romantic form in modern times. Hegel thus bases his approach on the unity of the human spirit with the spirit of the world. The world spirit must allow us thoughts about the course of art's evolution. Then we must rediscover in the outer world what the world spirit first gave to us in thought form.

This, says Hegel, is the way external history too is “constructed.” He looks first for the progressive evolution of ideas, and then confirms it at hand of external events. That is what the Philistines, the superficial people, have never been able to grasp, and it is their reason for reproaching Hegel so bitterly. A person who is superficial despite his belonging to a spiritual scientific movement wants above all to know about his own incarnation, and there were of course people in Hegel's time too who were superficial in their own way. You can see from one of Hegel's remarks that there was one such. As you've seen, Hegel followed the principle of first lifting himself into the world of ideas and then rediscovering in the world around him what he had come to know in the ideal world.

Now the superficial critics had of course risen up in arms against this, and Hegel had to make the following comment: “In his many-sided naivete Herr Krug has challenged natural philosophy to perform the sleight of hand of deducing his pen only.” “Deducing” was the term used to denote a rediscovering in the outer world of everything that had first been discovered in the inner world. The person referred to in this remark was Wilhelm Traugott Krug, who was teaching at Leipzig at that time.⁴ Oddly enough, Krug was the predecessor of Mauthner in having written a philosophical dictionary, though he did not succeed in becoming a leading authority in his day. But he said, “If individuals like Hegel search for reality in ideas and then want to show, from the idea's necessity, how external reality coincides with it, then someone like Hegel had better come and demonstrate that he first encountered my pen as an idea.” Krug remarks that Hegel with his “idea” is not convincing in his assertions about the development of art from Egyptian to Greek to modern times, but if Hegel could “deduce” Krug's pen from his idea of it, that would impress him.

Hegel comments in the passage mentioned above, “It would have been possible to give him the hope of seeing this deed accomplished and his pen glorified if science had progressed so far and so cleared up everything of importance in heaven and on earth in the past and present as to leave nothing of greater importance in doubt” than Herr Krug's pen. But in today's world the mentality characteristic of superficial people is really dominant. And Fritz Mauthner would have to say honestly that there is no possibility of distinguishing between the necessity of Greek art coming into being at a certain time and the necessity involving Herr Krug's pen or his own extra cigar.

Now I have already called your attention to the prime importance of finding the proper angle from which to illuminate these lofty concepts of human life. We need to find the right angles from which to study necessity, chance, and providence.

I suggested that you picture Faust in such relation to the world that he would have to despair of the possibility of discovering any element of necessity. But now let's imagine just the opposite and picture Faust conceiving of himself in relation to a world where nothing but necessity exists, a world where he would have to regard every least thing he did as conditioned by necessity. Then he would indeed have to say that if there were no chance happenings, if everything had to be ruled by necessity, “no dog would endure such a curst existence,” and this not because of what he had been learning but because of the way the world had been arranged. And what would a person amount to if there were truth in Spinoza's dictum that everything we do and experience is every bit as necessitated as the path of a billiard ball which, struck by another, has no choice but to move in a way determined by the particular laws involved?⁵ If that were true, nobody could endure such a world order, and it would be even less bearable for natures aware of “productive powers and germs!”

Necessity and chance exist in the universe in such a way that they correspond to a certain human yearning. We feel that we couldn't get along without both of them. But they have to be properly understood, to be judged from the right angle. To do that in the case of the concept of chance naturally requires abandoning any prejudices or preconceptions we may have on the subject. We will have to examine the concept very closely so that we can replace the cliche that this or that “chanced” to happen—as we are often forced to say—with something more suitable. We will have to search out the fitting angle. And we will find it only if we go a bit further in the study we began yesterday.

You are familiar with the alternating states of sleeping and waking. But we recognize that waking consciousness too has its nuances, and that it is possible to distinguish between varying degrees of awakeness. But we can go further in a study of that state. It is basically true that from the moment we awaken until we fall asleep again, our waking consciousness takes in nothing but objects in the world around us, senses their action, and produces our own images, concepts, and ideas. Sleeping consciousness, which has remained at the level of plant consciousness, then lets us behold ourselves as described yesterday, and, since our consciousness in this state is plantlike, this is a pleasurable absorption in ourselves.

Now if we penetrate fully into the nature of human soul life, we come upon something that fits neither day nor night consciousness. I am referring to distinct memories of past experiences. Consider the fact that sleeping consciousness doesn't involve remembering anything. If you were to sleep continuously, you wouldn't need to remember previous experiences; there would be no such necessity, in any case. We do remember to some extent when we are dreaming, but in the plant consciousness of sleep we remember nothing of the past. It is certainly clear that memory plays no special part in sleep. In the case of ordinary day-waking consciousness we must say that we experience what is around us, but experiencing what we have gone through in the past represents a heightening of waking consciousness. In addition to experience of our present surroundings we experience the past, but now in its reflection in ourselves. So if I draw a horizontal line (see drawing) to represent the level of human consciousness, we may say that we look into ourselves in sleep.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

I will write “Looking into ourselves” here; we can call it a subconscious looking. Day-waking consciousness can be set down as “Looking out consciously into the world.” Then a third kind of inner experiencing that doesn't coincide with looking into the world is the conscious “Looking into ourselves in memory.” So we have

The fact is, then, that we have not just two sharply different states of consciousness, but three of them. Remembering is actually a deepened and more concentrated form of waking consciousness. The important thing about remembering is more than just being aware of something; we recapitulate awareness of it. Remembering makes sense only if we are aware of something all over again. Think a moment: if I encounter one of you whom I have seen before, but merely see him without recognizing him, memory isn't really involved. Memory, then, is recognition. And spiritual science teaches us too that whereas our ordinary day-waking consciousness, our consciousness of the world outside us, has reached the very peak of perfection, our remembering is actually only just beginning its evolution; it must go on and on developing. Metaphorically speaking, memory is still a very sleepy attribute of human consciousness. When it has undergone further evolution, another element of experience will be added to our present capacity, namely, the inner experiencing of past incarnations. That experiencing rests upon a heightening of our ability to remember, for no matter what else is involved, we are dealing here with recognition, and it must first travel the path of interiorization. Memory is a soul force just beginning its development./

Now let us ask, “What is the nature of this soul-force, this capacity to remember? What really happens in the remembering process?” Another question must be answered first, and that is, “How do we arrive, at this point in time, at correct concepts?”

You get an idea of what a correct concept is if you are not satisfied with a meager picturing of it; in most cases people have their own opinion of things rather than genuine concepts. Most individuals think they know what a circle is. If someone asks, Well, what is it? they answer, Something like this, and draw a circle. That may be a representation of a circle, but that is not what matters. A person who only knows that this drawing approximates a circle and remains satisfied with that has no concept of what a circle is. Only someone who knows enough to say that a circle is a curved line every point of which is equidistant from the center has a correct concept of a circle. An endless number of points is of course involved, but the circle is inwardly present in conceptual form. That is what Hegel was pointing out: that we must get down to the concept underlying external facts, and then recognize what we are dealing with in outer reality on the basis of our familiarity with the concept.

Let us explore what the difference is between the “half-asleep” status of the mere mental images with which most people are satisfied and the active possession of a concept. A concept is always in a process of inner growth, of inner activity. To have nothing more than the mental image of a table is not to have a concept of it. We have the concept “table” if we can say that it is a supported surface upon which other objects can be supported. Concepts are a form of inner liveliness and activity that can be translated into outer reality.

Nowadays one is tempted to resort to some lively movement to explain matters of this sort to one's contemporaries. One really has an impulse to jump about for the sake of demonstrating how a true concept differs from the sleepy holding onto a mental image. One is strongly prompted to go chasing after concepts as a means of bringing people slightly into motion and enlivening the dreadfully lazy modern holding of mental images that now prevails; one wants to devote one's energies to clarifying the distinction between entertaining ordinary mental images and working one's way into the real heart of a matter. And why is one thus prompted? Because we know from spiritual science that the moment something reaches the level of the concept, the etheric body has to carry out this movement; it is involved in this movement. So we really must not shy away from rousing the etheric body if we intend to construct concepts.

What, then, is memory? What is remembering? If I have learned that a circle is a curved line every point of which is equidistant from the center, and am now to recall this concept, I must again carry out this movement in my etheric body. From the aspect of the etheric body, something becomes a memory when carrying out the movement in question has become habitual there. Memory is habit in the etheric body; we remember a thing when our etheric body has become used to carrying out the corresponding movement. We remember nothing except what the etheric body has taken on in the form of habits. Our etheric bodies must take it upon themselves, under the stimulus of re-approaching an object, being repeatedly brought into motion by us and thus given the opportunity of remembering, to repeat the motion they carried out in first approaching that object. And the more often the experience is repeated, the firmer and more ingrained does the habit become, so that memory gradually strengthens.

Now if we are really thinking instead of merely forming mental images, our etheric bodies take on all sorts of habits. But these etheric bodies are what the physical body is based on. You will notice that a person who wants to clarify a concept often tries to make illustrative gestures, even as he is talking about it. Of course we all have our own individual gestures anyway. Differences between people are seen in their characteristic gestures, that is, if we conceive the term “gesture” broadly enough. A person with a feeling for gesture learns a good deal about others from observing their gestures and seeing, for example, how they set their feet down as they walk. And the way we think when remembering something is thus really a habit of the etheric body. This etheric body is a lifelong trainer of the physical body—or perhaps I had better say that it tries to train the latter, but not entirely successfully. We can say, then, that the physical body, for example, the hand, is here:

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When we think, we constantly try to send into the etheric body what then becomes habit there. But the physical body presents a barrier. Our etheric bodies can't manage to get everything into the physical body, and they therefore save up the forces thus prevented from entering the physical body. They are saved up and carried through the entire period of life between death and rebirth. The way we think and the way we imprint our memories upon the etheric body then comes to the fore in our next incarnation as our instinctive play of gesture. And when we see a person exhibiting habitual gestures from childhood on, we can attribute them to the fact that in his previous incarnation his thinking imprinted certain quite distinct mannerisms on his etheric body. If, in other words, I study a person's inborn gestures, they can become clues to the way he managed his thinking in past incarnations. But just think what this means! It means that thoughts so impress themselves upon us that they resurface as the next incarnation's gestures. We get an insight here into the way the thinking element evolves into external manifestation: what began as the inwardness of thought becomes the outwardness of gesture.

Modern science, in its ignorance of what distinguishes necessity from chance, looks upon history as happenstance. In a list of words dating back to 1482, which Mauthner refers to, we read the words, “geschicht oder geschehcn ding, historia res gesta.” “Res gesta” is what history used to be called. All that is left of this today is the abstract remnant “regeste.” When notes are taken on some happening, they are called the “register.” Why is this? The word is based on the same root as “gesture.” The genius of speech responsible for the creation of these words was still aware that we have to see something brought over from the past in historical events. If what we observe in individual gesture is to be understood as the residue of past lives on earth, born with the individual into an incarnation, surely it is not complete nonsense to assume something like gestures in what we encounter in the facts of history. A series of facts surfaces in the way we walk, and these are the gestures of our thinking in past incarnations.

Where, then, must we look for the facts underlying history? That is the question now confronting us. In the case of individual lives we have to look for the thoughts underlying gesture. If we regard historical events as gestures, where must we look for the thoughts behind them? We will take up the study of this matter tomorrow.

• 1. This lecture was preceded by a eurythmy performance of the final scenes of Goethe's Faust, II.
• 2. Wilhelm Wundt, 1832–1907, German philosopher and philologist. See also Mauthner's article “History” in his Dictionary of Philosophy.
• 3. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749–1832, German poet, playwright, and novelist. Faust, dramatic poem. The quotations from Faust in this book are all taken from the translation by Bayard Taylor.
• 4. Wilhelm Traugott Krug, 1770–1842, German philosopher, influenced by Kant.
• 5. Baruch Spinoza, 1632–1677, Dutch philosopher.

If you look at works such as that of Fritz Mauthner, to whom I have repeatedly referred, you will see what consequences necessarily result from taking the prevailing modern outlook seriously. Mauthner arrives at all sorts of very strange conclusions. One example is the way he links the concept “supply” with that of a “supply of words,” for he is a philologist. He divides the word “supply” into two categories of “illusory” and “useful” concepts. The real purpose of his philosophical dictionary is to demonstrate that most philosophical concepts belong in the useless category. Those who give a thorough reading to his comments on a concept or word in his Dictionary of Philosophy always end up with the admittedly subjective feeling of whirling around like a Chinaman trying to grab his own pigtail. You have the feeling as you finish one of his articles that you have been trying all the way through it to get hold of your pigtail, which a Chinaman wears hanging down behind him. But at the end there it is, still behind you; no amount of twirling results in catching up with it. There are, I must say, some very, very upsetting things for healthy minds to endure as they read an article such as the one on “Christianity.” But that is true of almost all the articles Mauthner has written.

Now he takes great pains to eliminate all illusory concepts, admitting some of them into his dictionary for the sole purpose of denouncing them. I'll read a few very characteristic sentences from his introduction by way of illustration:

What is an illusory concept? This dictionary will denounce as illusory many concepts held in general esteem. I am not at a loss, you see, for examples. Nevertheless, it is not an easy matter to describe in general terms what distinguishes a useful from an illusory concept, a true one from a false one, a living concept from a dead one.

These opposite characteristics already point to some sources of the difficulty. The mere appearance of usefulness cannot always be attributed to the same source, and it is not in every case a simple matter to determine a concept's falsity or deadness. It may be that the falsity was inherent, or else became attached to the concept as language underwent changes over a period of time and did not need to wait for a scientifically and critically advanced generation to discover it. A concept could also have been dead to begin with, or death can have overtaken it unnoticed in popular usage after a shorter or longer life. The boundaries cannot be sharply drawn because all these concepts are relative. The concepts absolute and phlogiston were false from the start; exact scrutiny could all along have discovered that they contradicted the facts of experience.

Now wouldn't you agree that this is quite nice? Humanity took many millennia, not just centuries, to replace phlogiston with another concept, and Lavoisier's replacement of phlogiston with evidence of the true nature of combustion was considered a most significant deed.¹ But Mauthner finds it possible to comment that “the concept was false from the start because exact scrutiny could have discovered all along that it contradicted the facts of experience.”

It really sounds as though if Fritz Mauthner had been born early enough, he would have seen to it that people didn't have to suffer for so long a time from the false concept phlogiston. He goes on to say, “The concept which only became a false one when the concept devil fell by the wayside, and the godless female could therefore no longer enter into fleshly commerce with the illusory concept devil. The concept devil too lived a sufficiently lengthy span and died out only when human learning became convinced that neither the devil nor any of his works were observable in the sphere of reality.”

We could be tempted to repeat that
Not if he had them by the neck, I vow,
Would e'er these people scent the devil.

One can't help thinking of this on hearing such a statement. A lot depends today on the decisions people make about searching out viewpoints able to shed light and guide them.

Yesterday we discussed how a deepening of our soul nature must be accompanied by a profounder grasp of concepts such as necessity. It was pointed out how decisive an influence on destiny a sense of the necessity in everything in existence, and the submersion of the individual in that necessity, could have for a person like Faust. But Mauthner says, “Necessity—What is it? Just a way of looking at things.” He finds no reason to think of the element of necessity as existing objectively in things. In his opinion the stream of cosmic events bypasses human beings. People say that “the sun rose today, it rose yesterday and it rose the day before yesterday, so we assume that it will rise tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, and so on.” They form the concept of necessity from these external thoughts about the regular succession of events, saying that the sun necessarily rises. But this necessity of theirs is subjective, just a human concept.

And Mauthner makes the nice rejoinder to the philosopher Husserl,² an exponent of the view that necessity is inherent in the nature of things, “If I only knew how necessity, a human way of regarding reality, could be made objective reality!” “If I only knew,” is Mauthner's reaction. Mauthner, you see, lacks any possibility of understanding how something subjective could turn into objective reality. He's a queer kind of eurythmist, this Mauthner; he can never dance his way from the subjective into the objective because he has totally lost the capacity to involve himself in the inner choreography that leads from the subjective into the objective. And the reason for that is that we are not in a position to look for essential being at the characteristic place where the subjective element actually passes over into the objective realm.

Let us seek out such a place and examine it from a spiritual standpoint. When the human soul raises a question, it seeks an answer to it, and proceeds subjectively to set in motion all those processes, those inner or external actions, that might serve to supply it. You know, of course, that the putting of questions and finding of answers is indeed a subjective process, so subjective that one person engages in it with finesse and another clumsily; all possible nuances exist. It is really an inner activity. But now let us assume the following: Let us picture a person on fire with a desire to know, filled to the brim with a longing for insight, who therefore raises a question in his soul. But he finds no answer to it. The situation thus far is subjective. But now let us imagine time passing and the person continuing to live. What has happened subjectively is that this person has experienced the question and the lack of an answer to it, and he goes on living. He can remember the question later on, and the fact that he has not found an answer. But it could turn out entirely differently: his question can have been totally forgotten. But that doesn't mean that the question and the lack of an answer are completely unreal within him; it just means that he hasn't found the answer.

Someone able to see into the situation may find that what began as a purely subjective element later makes its appearance in the person concerned in the uncertain way he behaves in life. A sensitive observer will be able to say that such a person has a curiously uncertain way of gesturing and glancing. These are very delicate matters when it comes to individual cases, but such situations do exist, and it can be discovered that many an uncertain look and gesture or the like that shows up in later years can be traced back to an unanswered question or complex of questions. The presence of this uncertainty in look and gesture is an objective, an entirely objective fact. An objective situation has actually been created and emerged from a subjective one. We can rediscover years later in the objective processes in us what we experienced at first subjectively.

If you follow up such leads, you will find that they open up a reliable route to answering questions that Mauthner in his incapacity cannot answer. That is why he says, “If I only knew how necessity, a human way of regarding reality, could be made objective reality!” The subjective can indeed become objective! This becomes clear to us particularly when we take fully into account what I pointed out yesterday: that memory is a distinct state of consciousness in addition to sleeping and waking. Remembering is still in its infancy; however, it will play a much larger role when humanity has advanced to the next planetary stage, and it will find expression in the recognition of earlier experiences. This recognition will bring these experiences before us in a form quite different from their previous appearance. Subjective experiences we may have had recur much later in a mild form in our individual lives. They will appear in the next incarnation in a much more significant form. What was once a subjective experience then resurfaces in our external aspect as a characteristic objective element. And if we ask what has become of much that we have forgotten, we would discover it if we were to concern ourselves really seriously with what spiritual science gives us; we would find it in our lives. What has sunk into our souls' depths and no longer remains in the subjective sphere lives and moves down below in our subconsciousness. The subjective invariably becomes objective.

You see that if we are really intent upon understanding life, we have to deal seriously and conscientiously with matters like these. We have to try very conscientiously indeed to develop our thinking, noting errors of thought where they occur, for they are intimately bound up with errors in the way our lives are lived. How often one comes upon people who are constantly saying that they are certainly not vain—but the very fact that they emphasize it at every opportunity is due to vanity. They are so frightfully vain that they have to keep saying how free from vanity they are. They simply haven't dwelt sufficiently and realistically enough on the cancelling out that occurs when a Cretan says that all Cretans are liars. If that were true and a Cretan states it, he would be doing so as a liar. So his statement that all Cretans are liars can't be true.

But all such matters have to be translated into living reality. We need to see to it that we make a habit of a certain discrimination in thinking. In this connection I want to call your attention to an error in thinking that crops up in Mauthner's case too, in one of his many characteristic observations. He has an article on necessity in his philosophical dictionary. He is at pains to show that necessity is merely a human idea and that there is no such element inherent in things. There is a very special reason why this article exemplifies the strange experiment of whirling around and trying unsuccessfully to catch hold of his own pigtail. For the only thing he achieves clarity on is that it is not necessary for necessity to inhere in things, that no such necessity exists. But necessity could indeed inhere in things without there being any necessity for its doing so. The fact that Mauthner sees that it isn't necessary for necessity to inhere in things doesn't prove that it doesn't so inhere. It could just be the case that no necessity exists for it to do so. That is what we must always bear in mind.

The question that concerns us, however, is where to look for necessity. We will make a closer study of this tomorrow; for today I just want to try to guide your thoughts in the right direction by citing examples.

Let's consider the following: The subjective content of our thoughts sinks down to become a content of our memory, but is lost sight of down below there and becomes objective. And now we look out into the surrounding world and seek the objective there. We certainly find objective elements in ourselves, in our individual lives, in the form of gestures, facial expressions, and the like. Remember that I spoke yesterday at the close of the lecture about how what begins as a subjective element is encountered later as objective fact. So we will need to ask whether what is thus externally encountered can perhaps be traced back to something that was once subjective. And we would accordingly find in the external world that everything to which we must ascribe necessity was rendered necessary by the fact that it has left the subjective realm and become objective.

Imagine yourselves transposed from earthly existence back to the ancient sun existence. We were involved there with those beings who reigned during the sun period. And we can picture these beings who went through inner, subjective soul experiences and were active during the period of that sun existence as similar to us in our present day thinking, feeling, and willing. What they went through on the sun at that time is now to be found externalized in the world around us; now it confronts us from outside as world-gesture, world-expressiveness, world-physiognomy. It has become objective. Crudely put, a being of the sun period may have sent out rays of will just as subjectively as we allow what we have thought or felt to sink down into our memory and become objective there. Exactly so did this will element, this raying out of the ancient sun beings, sink down and become memory, and we now find it confronting us. Just as we perceive in a person's glance as externalized, objective fact some earlier experience that he has had, we now perceive in the sun's radiating light a decision of will on the part of beings subjectively active on the ancient sun. We behold it. Indeed, if we should encounter an elderly person with a sour-tempered look around the mouth, we can certainly call it a fact objectively perceptible in the outer world, and if we follow it up, we may well be able to trace it back to bitter experiences of a subjective nature suffered in childhood. What was subjective has become objective.

Where mountains tower up today it is possible to trace back this feature of the earth, for example, in the great chain of the Alps. If we go back far enough, perhaps as far back as ancient Saturn, we come across subjective soul and spiritual events experienced during that period that are retained in present-day physical aspects of the earth. But things could have taken a somewhat different course at that period if the gods who had those experiences of soul and spirit had come to different decisions; in that case, of course, the Alps would not have come to be as they are today. But just picture the gods on Saturn deciding on some particular inner action and then going through the sun and moon periods. Then, as the moon developed into the earth, it was no longer possible for them to change their decisions. That is like the difference we experience in trying to learn in later life something we failed to learn before we reached our eighteenth year. We can catch up, but the fact of having to do so creates a situation that would not have existed had we undergone the learning at an earlier age.

You will see from this that although the gods were free to make this or that decision during the Saturn period, once having made it, they were no longer free during the moon evolution to effect a change in the east-west orientation of the Alps. They bound themselves by the terms of their earlier thinking, and the result could no longer be changed. What has been done cannot be undone if we want to stick by the truth. People can try subjectively to wipe out what they experienced subjectively, but what has developed as objective fact cannot be wiped out.

If, for example, I have been guilty of neglect in younger years in failing to educate someone whose education was my responsibility, that corresponded to my subjective state at the time. Twenty years later I can deny that I was neglectful, but that changes nothing in the objective situation that grew out of the subjective one. The individual who went uneducated became what he is as a result of what I neglected to do. The objective outcome of our subjectivity takes on a necessity that cannot be denied, and necessity enters the picture to the degree that the subjective is transformed into the objective.

If the concepts involved here are followed up with strict logic from this point of view, we come upon an intimate relationship between the past and everything that can be termed necessity. And the past resurfaces in everything we encounter in the present; it is present there. There is as much necessity in the present as there is past in it. Life congeals into the past, but the past becomes necessity in the process.

I'd like to put all this before you more pictorially. It is superstition to assume that what is recognized to be an interrelationship based on law in a series of events can be changed by a miracle. Why is this the case? The past that underlies these events determines what must happen in accordance with the laws of necessity. The gods would not be telling the truth if they were to interfere with the lawfulness governing such a relationship. They would be denying what they had previously established. And we can no more change the past inhering in situations as necessity than we can change what happened in the past by some statement about it. What we cannot change in a situation is the part the past played in it. The concept of necessity must coalesce with the concept of the past; that is tremendously important. The past inheres in every object and in every creature, constituting the necessity in them; necessity is present in them to an extent corresponding to their past. The necessity that inheres in things does so because it is the recurring past, and what has taken place cannot be dismissed. We can easily picture anything that has become necessity now, for it goes back to a previous event. It happened in the past and now confronts us in reflected form.

You can no more change that reflection than you can remove in the mirror a wart on your forehead that you see reflected there; you would have to remove it beforehand. It is equally impossible to make any change in what appears as present necessity, since what appears as necessity now really occurred some time ago. It is past, and now merely shows up in its subsequent reflection. Everything of the nature of necessity in us is of the past and is merely bringing about its reflection in us. Only if people bestir themselves to grasp that the events that took place in the ancient moon, sun, and Saturn periods are now reflected in us, and are merely reflections of those ancient events, will they come to understand necessity.

And now think back to our discovery that our conceptual world is of moon origin. On an earlier occasion I described how we are really looking back on a moon panorama when we observe our present-day environment. Here you have the link. It is simply not true that certain things that seem to be going on in us really happen in the present; they are just reflections in a mirror. The reality is that they took place in earlier stages of the earth's development. I have said in earlier lectures that our heads are actually hollow. And why are they hollow? Because what constitutes their content is of earlier origin, and now there is only a reflection there of earlier events in our heads. But if we are incapable of grasping this concept of mirror images, we will always be prone, as we confront the Maya, the illusion of reality around us, to make the mistake that children (and, if you'll excuse me, modern science too) make when they see objects in a mirror and run around behind it to find them. But the objects have vanished when they get there. What was necessity has gone, and the fact that the past is reflected is the reason why there is necessity in the present. The past cannot be changed.

I agree that much effort is involved in grasping these concepts. So we'll stop here for today, and see if we can manage to think them through by tomorrow. We will then go on to study chance and providence and their connection with necessity.

• 1. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, 1743–1794, French chemist. In 1774 he refuted the theory claiming that a substance called phlogiston escapes during the combustion process. In 1777 Lavoisier discovered that combustion consists in the combination of a substance with oxygen. He discovered that breathing is also a combustion or oxidation process.
• 2. Edmund Husserl, 1859–1938, German Phenomenological philosopher.

We have seen that necessity must be thought of in connection with the past, that the world contains as much necessity as it does past. For, as we tried to recognize, the past is reflected in the present. And there was another element involved: we hope to be so strengthened by our striving for clarity about just such concepts as we have been considering that we will be fit to take up the study of the truths of spiritual science. It is disastrous in many respects to have a great longing for what we might term deep spiritual-scientific truths if we shy away from strengthening our minds and thinking by taking in and thoroughly mastering concepts of a demanding nature. They are what disciplines our souls and spirits. And if we take pains to remain inwardly true in the process, no danger can ever threaten us from genuine spiritual-scientific concepts.

I have already mentioned, however, how often many people's longing for spiritual-scientific truths is found to outweigh their longing to work their way through to substantial concepts. Right at the beginning of our efforts in spiritual science there were some individuals who declared that they could not attend my lectures because they sank into a kind of sleep-state as a result of the concepts being discussed. A few especially mediumistic natures even carried things to the point of having to leave the lecture hall in Berlin. And one woman was actually found collapsed in sleep outside the hall, so powerful had been the lulling effect of the search for clear concepts!

The reproach was once made to Goethe that he created “pallid concepts” with his ideas about the metamorphosis of plants and animals and the primal phenomena of color. In his “Prophecies of Bakis,” which I have already had occasion to discuss, he inserted a passage referring to this avoidance of what people were calling “pallid concepts.”¹ As a matter of fact, this quatrain was also greatly misunderstood by those who tried to interpret these “Prophecies of Bakis.” Goethe said, “Pallid dost thou appear to me”—the concept, the idea—“and to the eye dead. How is it that you call forth holy life from founts of inner strength?” Goethe expressed with such accuracy the way people react who don't like to listen to clearly defined concepts, and therefore fall asleep, and who are always wanting to hear grand-sounding words about mysterious matters of the kind that give them something to dream about but never challenge them to think. They say, “Pallid dost thus appear to me, and to the eye dead”; they say it to those who want to speak occasionally on more sharply defined concepts. And they ask them, “How is it that you call forth holy life from founts of inner strength?” Goethe answers them, Passive would be your enjoyment if I could show you perfection.

Only the lack of it lifts you to levels beyond your own self.

In other words, the absence of those perfections that delight the eye or the senses in general proves elevating. Deadness overtakes those who do not attempt to take in and energetically work through what people often refer to as “pallid concepts.” It is therefore necessary, if we are to banish all traces of Baroque mysticism from the spiritual science we are pursuing, to devote ourselves occasionally to a concern with concepts of the utmost precision.

Thus far I have been talking about necessity. The question is now whether all the concepts that we tend, in ordinary life, to lump together with the concept of necessity really all deserve to be so linked. People say that what is necessary happens. But is this actually always the case? I would like to answer with a comparison that will clarify the matter. Let us suppose that we have a river with a gradually rising mountain chain beyond it, and we notice a stream or brook starting to run down from the heights. Let's imagine that something prevents our seeing beyond this point. We study the course of the stream or brook as it conforms to the contours of the mountain range and can state that according to what we are able to see from our vantage point it is a matter of necessity that this brook flows into this river. The mountain's formation conditions this, so that our sentence, “This brook flows into this river,” would unquestionably state a necessary fact. But now let us imagine that somebody decided to regulate the course of this brook, diverting it so that it flows in another direction. That person would have obviated the necessity, which would then not have developed. My comparison is crude, but it is a fact in life and in evolution that necessities don't always have to happen. We have to keep happenings and necessities apart. Two different concepts are involved here.

Now let us return to several previous concerns. First, let us review the insight we arrived at yesterday: that the past affects the present, appearing in reflection in it. But let us recall still another occasion on which mention of mirror images was also in order. We have often made a point of describing what takes place in human perception during ordinary waking consciousness. Human beings are really always outside their bodies and their bodily functions with that part of them that is engaged in the cognitive process; they live inside the things under study, as I've often said. And the fact that a person comes to know something is due to the reflection in his body of this experience he has inside things. So we can say that we are outside our bodies with one part of our perception, and our experience within things is reflected in our bodies.

If we now imagine ourselves looking at the color blue, we experience the blue of a flower, of chicory for example, but we do so unconsciously except for the fact of its reflection in our eyes. Our eyes are a part of our reflecting apparatus. We see the experience that we have in the chicory by allowing it to be reflected in our eyes. And we experience tone similarly. The life we live in tone is experienced unconsciously, and only becomes conscious through being reflected by our hearing organism. Our entire perceptive organism is a reflecting apparatus.

This is what I tried to establish as philosophical fact at the last Congress of Philosophers at Bologna.²

Cognition is thus engendered by reflection from our organism, by a reflecting of what we experience. And as you mull over this concept of reflection, both the reflecting of the past in the present and the reflecting of our present experience through our perceptive organism, you will have to admit that what is thus added to a thing or to an event in the form of reflections is a matter of total indifference to them, something that in neither case has anything directly to do with them. As you observe a mirror image you can quite well imagine that everything in it is as it is whether or not it is under observation. Reflections are therefore elements added to what is reproduced in them. That is especially the case with cognition; whether we develop this or that particular insight is not of the least consequence to the mirror image.

Now imagine yourselves walking through a landscape. Do you believe that the landscape would be any the less beautiful or in any way less whatever it is if you were not passing through it and experiencing it as a series of reflections engendered by your organism? No, those are elements added to the landscape and matters of total indifference to it. But is it a matter of indifference to you? No, it is not. For by walking today through a landscape that is reflected in your inner being and experiencing what is thus reflected, you will have become to some extent a different person in your soul tomorrow. What you experienced—a matter of total indifference to the landscape—signifies for you the beginning of an inner richness that can keep on growing there.

But what does all this really mean? It means, with reference again to the landscape metaphor, that we can say, “This situation was thus and such up to this point.” The fact that you walked through the landscape is a further addition to it. The landscape is reflected in you, becoming a further experience in your soul. Now how did what is continuing to grow there come into being? It did so as the result of something quite new being added to what had previously occurred. Something was really engendered in your soul out of nothingness, for contrasted with what had previously occurred, the reflection is of course a nothingness, a real, absolute nothingness. In other words, you relate to something to which there was no necessity to relate. You are an addition to it. You are added to a necessary happening as a living element that relates to it in a way not conditioned by previous events, since you could have stayed away. In that case, all that you gained from the reflection would not have become a part of the situation.

As you ponder examples of this kind, you become acquainted with the concept of chance; the real concept of it is to be found there. And you also gather from such examples that beings, things endowed with being, have to come up against each other, really to collide, for chance to occur. But we see from this that such a thing as chance can occur in the universe. If that were impossible, the enrichment of soul described above could not take place.

In this sense chance is a thoroughly legitimate concept. It is a real occurrence in cosmic events, and it shows us that new aspects of relationship can be garnered in cosmic evolution as products of reflection. If it were impossible for one participant to be linked with others without bringing about reflection in the cosmic process, then the occurrence of everything comprised in the term chance would be wholly out of the question. If the meadow through which you pass were to act as the agent of your passage, pulling you there with strings, and no reflection were to come about in you as described because of the meadow's total indifference, but the meadow were instead actively to imprint its impression on you, then the outcome could be called law-abiding necessity. But though it is hard to imagine it, there could then be no such thing as a present! There would be no present! And what would come of that? Why, beings who have no desire for such a linking up cannot progress any further if they follow such a course. They have to go back again. That is indeed the law governing devils and ghosts; they have to go out again by the door through which they entered. Goethe's Faust depicts this; they can't introduce any new evolutionary waves, and must return to the place they came from. And it is due to the possibility that new evolutionary waves can be set in motion in the developmental process of the cosmos that freedom exists.

In all our cognitive experiences, except for a certain category of them, no pure reflection takes place; the reflection is imperfect insofar as all kinds of impulses are combined with it. Concepts formed on the basis of past cognitive experience are imperfect. Once we have arrived at a pure concept, we no longer need merely to recall it; we can always create it anew. Though it becomes habitual, it is a habit that has finished with the past, and new reflections are constantly being summoned up with it. The concepts we form are pure reflections, which come to us from the beyond as additions to the things perceived. Therefore, when we form an impulse into concepts, it can be an impulse to freedom. That is what I attempted to develop at greater length in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.³ That is exactly the thought developed there.

But the concept of chance necessarily includes the concept of freedom. We must accustom ourselves to entertaining sharply defined concepts, for these are of immense significance for life. I want to cite an instance that has often been discussed here, but it is especially illuminating in the present context. Let us assume that we are studying illness. We must invariably look at illness from the standpoint of the present, never from the standpoint of the past, i.e., of necessity. This means enlivening the standpoint of the present by giving help to the full extent possible. Only if the illness terminates in death may we bring in the concept of necessity, realizing that necessity was involved. Anything other than this is the living present. We must be rigorous in adopting the standpoint that necessity inheres in the past; life rules the present. This example shows us that if we try to illumine concepts with the help of more fruitful viewpoints, we will acquire a certain knack for dealing with them.

A good deal could certainly be said on the subject of chance, and that will be done as time goes on. But for now I wanted to define the concept of chance and to clarify the extent to which it is valid. The easiest way to regard events after learning a little bit about karma is to say that everything is caused by karmic necessity. If someone has an incarnation at this point in time, then his life after death, and then his next incarnation, he calls something experienced in this second incarnation the consequence of the former life. But it is not absolutely necessary to look at things from the standpoint of the present; the consequence could be looked for further on, in the third incarnation. Something can occur then that we might be expecting to happen in the karma of the present incarnation. But an occurrence in the present incarnation may well be just the start of a karmic sequence, a reality generated by something presently living as a result of the reflection process. And the essential point here is that something is turned into a reality by a living element as a result of a reflection that is itself unreal. That is the way chance develops into necessity; when chance becomes a thing of the past, it is transformed into necessity.

On an occasion of great suffering, Goethe made a most beautiful statement, called by him “the word of a wise man.” He was speaking about the growth process of humanity, and said, “The rational world is to be looked upon as a single immortal individual engaged in a continuous bringing forth of what is necessary.” That is, bringing forth something, and when it has been brought forth, it is interwoven into the past and becomes necessity, “thus making itself the master of the element of chance.” A glorious saying to meditate upon! We can learn something from it too: Goethe wrote this sentence while experiencing great suffering, suffering that focused his entire feeling, his whole soul life, on the growth process of the human race, and caused him to ask what the actual course of this growth was. And there was wrung from his soul the realization that the rational world, the human race, brings forth what is necessary, and thus makes itself master over chance, in other words, incorporates chance forever into necessity.

I want to digress here for a moment. An insight such as I have just cited makes valuable material for meditation; it contains so much that flows into us as we meditate upon it. We shouldn't rest content with a mere abstract grasping of such a sentence, which emerged from Goethe's soul in his extreme old age, in 1828, when he was in the throes of great suffering. A great deal of life is packed into such a saying. And the digression I would like to make is this: our insights are always to be looked upon as grace bestowed upon us. And it is just those individuals who garner knowledge from the spiritual world who are aware what a matter of grace such knowledge is when they have prepared themselves to receive it, when their being reaches out to receive what flows to them from the spiritual world. One can experience over and over again how suitably prepared one must be for the reception of spiritual knowledge, how one must be able to wait for it, for one is not at just any and every moment in a condition to receive a particular insight from the spiritual world.

This fact must be stated in just such situations as ours, for it is only too easy for misconception to be piled upon misconception concerning the conditions under which supersensible insights flourish and can be fruitfully disseminated. Numbers of individuals come to me asking questions out of the blue about this or that, and often requesting information about matters that, at the time of questioning, are remote from my concern. They demand that I give them the most exact information. People are commonly convinced that a person who speaks out of a connection with the spiritual world knows about everything it contains and is always in a position to give out any information desired. And if he can't answer a question immediately, the comment is often made that the questioner is probably not supposed to be given the information, or something of the sort.

What we are dealing with here is too crude a conception of the relationship that exists between the spiritual world and the human soul. We should realize that “readiness for truth” is especially required for a direct reception of truths from the spiritual world. Misconceptions about these things must gradually be eliminated. Of course, people at some remove from the realm of truth in the life of the spirit feel a need to ask all sorts of questions, and answers can be given them from the investigator's store of memory, based on past research. But uninvestigated truths should not be requested out of the blue from spiritual researchers. Instead, it should be realized that the investigator feels requests for information about still unresearched matters to be like knife- cuts in his body, to use a physical analogy.

Definite laws govern everything that can lift human beings into the spiritual world. We need to familiarize ourselves with these laws to lessen misunderstandings about the flowing of spiritual truths into the physical world. Only by freeing ourselves from every trace of egoism—and this includes the desire for information on just any subject—will we create healthy conditions for the sort of movement this should and must be. Certain spiritual truths simply must be incorporated into the world today. But they should not encounter the kind of aspirations brought in from the world we formerly lived in or be pursued according to our erstwhile habits. The spiritual movement should not be undermined by them. In most cases, spiritual movements have been undermined by people's failure to adapt their habitual ways to spiritual truths, instead of bringing their accustomed habits to the reception of those truths. And so it could come about that a society was founded in the eighteenth century based upon what Jacob Boehme introduced into the spiritual life of Europe.⁴ It is now correctly reported that this society had a number of members, but only one—the founder of the society—survived. I certainly hope that more than one will do so in our case! But that was what happened in one attempt to establish a society. It is said, too, that a tremendous number of those who became members turned later on into really peculiar human beings. I don't want to go into all the further details reported about the adherents of that eighteenth century society at this point.

When we familiarize ourselves with the spiritual world, as we do in the process of absorbing spiritual science, we develop an ever growing sense of what it is to participate in it. And we prepare ourselves to make the right kind of understanding ascent into higher worlds by taking in, in the form of sharply defined concepts, the world we live in. Those who are unwilling to think as penetratingly about chance and necessity as we have been attempting to do here will not find it easy to rise to a conception of providence. For you see, we can learn a great deal from the spiritual beings who surround us.

The mental niveau of our time is that of mindlessness. I've tried to give you an idea of it by citing some of Fritz Mauthner's comments. I want to add one of the most curious remarks he has made so that you will see what an honest man is capable of, a man who not only says of the prevailing science of the day that it is the only science in existence and that we have overcome the ignorance of our stupid ancestors, but who honestly accepts the prevailing outlook and then goes on to draw some remarkable conclusions about a certain matter.

I once described Mauthner as “out-Kanting Kant.” He did not just write a Critique of Pure Reason, but a Critique of Language. He really got going on words. He invented a definition for the way a word moves from one category to another. I am deliberately citing an incorrect example from his Dictionary of Philosophy, but it is one that he himself held to be correct. The earlier periods of Latin civilization had a word for truth: veritas. Now Mauthner says that the word veritas was introduced into more recent German use, was simply taken over, to become the German word Wahrheit. He terms words in this category “borrowings” (literally “loan translations”). And he traces words thus borrowed through civilization after civilization with tremendous acuity and conscientiousness, tracking down their wanderings and transformations. He does an incredible amount of rummaging around in words. Nowhere does he share Faust's longing to behold “germs and productive powers”; he simply rummages around in words with utmost zeal.

He made attempts like the following: Let us imagine some people or other with its characteristic views. Mauthner cares only about the words derived from these views, for, to him, thinking consists of words. Now, he says, there are the words, but they can be traced back to another people. The second group, where we now come upon the words, borrowed them from the first group and transformed them. And he actually perpetrates the following: (I must cite the example, as it is really too nice for words to show you the way adherents of the present outlook must think to be faithful to it. It is vitally important not to pass lightly over things of this sort.) Mauthner traces various borrowings, looking for the various transformations that have come about in words. Among them the following:

Kaffee (“coffee”), borrowed from another language and still a foreign word in the sense that in German at least the way it is written and spoken is not homogeneous. “Potato” is an English loan from some Red Indian language; in the German Kartoffel there is either a borrowing or a bastardization based upon a shift in meaning; whereas in Erd-apfel (“earth-apple”) and Grum- or Bodebirn (“ground-pear”) we are dealing with cases of transliteration or of description.

The Romans adopted the Greek custom of crowning victors of a race, or on the occasion of a feast, with a wreath, and wreaths of flowers were also used elsewhere for these purposes. But it was only at the time of the Renaissance that the term “crown” was re-introduced in noun and verb form; there were poets' crowns and crowned poets, with the word “crown” signifying “wreath” as in Latin. The plant species used was native to Greece, and was imported, in historical times at least, both as a plant and as a word. The German Lorbeer (“laurel”) (the shrub, not the berry; “baccalaureus” became in turn the symbol of an academic title, the baccalauriat; in French, bachelier; its meaning twisted again to become the English “bachelor”) became the “vegetable of fame” of Speidel's jesting. And crowned poets from Petrarch to Tennyson were called “poets laureate.” The cheap laurel needed no replacement. The myrtle-wreath, which, as a result of faulty observation, or of a still more mistaken popular etymology, was regarded somewhere in the Orient as the symbol of sexual life and later became a chastity symbol, was more easily acquired in Germany as a weed than as a blossom; German brides therefore wear wreaths or crowns of the genuine leaves and false blossoms. Palms are replaced at Easter by pussy-willows as the only seasonal green plant available. And because palms, which in the Orient are the obvious plants for decorative purposes, have lent their name as a prefix to such terms as Palm Sunday and Palm Week in characterizations of the festival season, the green willow branches substituted for them have been designated “palm branches” and “palm catkins.”

As you see, Mauthner traces borrowed terms and words like these in their transmutations from one national region to another. And then he adds, “In the case of verbs too there is no end to the carry-over from Christianity to western peoples of such actual borrowings. The migration of the real facts of the Christian ritual and of Christian thinking may be studied in this book (cf. the article on Christianity).”

If we open the book to that article we come upon a remarkable sentence; “I want to state and demonstrate one thing only in regard to the development of Christianity as the creation of the Germanic and Germanic-Roman peoples, and to the way it still dominates western civilization, for the time being, in western usage, vocabulary and concerns. That is, that Christianity as a whole represents the most prodigious borrowing, or chain of borrowings, that it is possible to find in a scrutiny of history.”

What, then, is Christianity, according to Mauthner? A collection of borrowings! There were words at the time Christianity began. And if we want to find Christianity in Europe today, we'll have to make a search for borrowed words! What Mauthner is claiming is that Christianity is nothing but a collection of such borrowings. The whole civilization of Europe would have to have developed quite differently if certain words had just not happened to get borrowed! But the important thing to note here is that this finding is the logical consequence of current scientific assumptions. It is a consequence logically and honestly reached, and those who fail to draw it are simply less honest than Mauthner. Those who have adopted today's scientific outlook can only agree that all of Christianity means nothing more to them than a collection of borrowed words.

Somebody might object that Mauthner is only pointing out the fact that “coffee” entered our language as a borrowed word, but not how coffee itself was introduced into Europe. It is true that Mauthner didn't indicate that Christianity had to be introduced into Europe because it was a collection of borrowings. He made no assertion whatever on this score. This objection cannot be made without further ado; instead we have to say that those who think in the style of modern science are simply incapable of judging the matter. They are excluding themselves from any discussion of the issue; that is the point.

Small wonder, then, that a man who, in addition to all that I've had to say about him, is also really quite a clever fellow, says,

I don't go as far as James does (Psychology, p. 297) when he holds it impossible to improve memory.⁵ It would not be impossible to render the organs that serve memory capable of greater achievement by exercising them, as has been shown to be possible in the case of the muscles. It is certainly true that educational psychology, which believes that it can strengthen memory in the young by senseless exercises, is based upon the old associative psychology, which sees in memory the mental picture of a force, just as it does in the case of imagining other such mental pictures which this force learns to play with. If memory is nothing more than activity in the same sense that the soul is nothing more than its experiences, then nothing remains to be strengthened. Iron will that does not permit itself to forget useful knowledge and exerts itself to remember when remembering is required is a facet of character, and an individual's memory is in this sense unalterable, as character is. But quite aside from all such considerations, the pointless drilling that goes on in schools is every bit as senseless as the training of the wrong muscles for some special use of the limbs would be. A person who has learned nothing in his younger years except to walk on his hands can make no use of this capability later unless he intends to become a circus performer.

In Mauthner's opinion, schoolchildren receive training that teaches them a wrong use of their brains, analogous to a person's learning only to walk on his hands, an equally useless ability. But although this is clear to Mauthner, he has absolutely no suggestions as to what should take the place of this schooling. (I have explained to you how, in this respect too, furthering what we are developing in eurythmy is important).

Walking on their hands, with their heads down, is the chief training being given our young people. Bible verses (in the elementary grades), memorizing all the tributaries of some foreign river (in the middle school), tables and professional data presented in reference books (at the university level) form the memory training defended on the basis of an assumed strengthening of memory! On the occasion of my state examinations in the history of jurisprudence, I was required to list the 13 prerogatives of a cardinal in their God-ordained order, not forgetting the prerogative of a pallium woven by a particular group of nuns in a particular convent.

Schools should limit themselves to training character, to training it for the function of finding the easiest and best means of access to useful concepts of the real world.

By now we might expect this gentleman to be suggesting what the substitute for the above should be. People of any intelligence can only agree that the way mental training has been carried on ought not to continue, so they expect to hear what he suggests instead. But the article ends right there! There is nothing more! He has been chasing his pigtail in vain, to use yesterday's metaphor. Almost every article in his dictionary creates the impression that he is unsuccessfully chasing the pigtail hanging down behind him.

If we work our way through the concepts necessity and chance and learn to recognize that the human world is to be regarded as an “immortal individual” continuously bringing necessity about and thus establishing dominion over chance, and then add to this the concept that must be acquired if we are to understand how the spiritual world streams into the human soul, we gradually work our way through to a concept of something elevated above necessity and chance, and that is providence. It is a concept attained by a gradual working up to it.

I have often called your attention to the fact that merely looking at the world conveys nothing as to the effect of activities going on in it. It would be good to cultivate the right feeling for what I've just been saying by concerning ourselves in depth with the genius of language that lives behind words, instead of doing as Mauthner does in his concern with speech. Mauthner's data could even assist such an effort on occasion, for the tremendous zeal with which he has ferreted things out can sometimes bring a person contemplating the activity of the genius of language to significant insights that he might not otherwise become aware of. The genius of language does indeed guide us to a plane elevated above necessity and chance. A great deal we participate in goes on around us as we are speaking, without our having a true knowledge of it because we are incapable of lifting it fully into our consciousness. This is the spiritual world, holding sway around us. And to take just a random example, when we speak, these spiritual worlds speak too. We should make the attempt to be aware of this.

Let us try to make a small beginning with it. We have associated necessity with the past and chance with the immediate present. For if everything were necessity, it would also be of the past, and nothing new could ever come into being. That would mean that there could be no life. So if we involve ourselves and our own lives in the world's evolution, we would be confronted by necessity or the reflected past, and in our current life by what is called chance. These two interact. We have two streams: our present life, which we think of as simply chance, and the reflected past or necessity flowing along underneath it. What is considered real from the ordinary physical standpoint can only be related to the past, to necessity, if reality is taken to mean conformity with what already exists. The real has to belong to the past, to the necessary, while what is in the living process of coming into being always has to be freshly produced. Our life is lived in this, and we have to develop living concepts that flow out of necessity to deal with that life. Here, we cannot be onlookers at something corresponding to the concept; we can only live in it. When our own lives confront the stream of evolution, we can therefore preserve the past in the developing stream of life by now transforming the reflected picture into a present element. And we can make it into an ongoing present.

We can make a human virtue of transforming into ongoing life the past that has become rigid necessity, carrying reflections further, keeping them alive and evolving in ourselves. And what name do we give the virtue that carries the past into further life stages? Loyalty! Loyalty is the virtue related to the past, just as love is the virtue related to the present, to immediate living.

But speaking of these matters brings us to what I want to say about the genius of language that we need to become aware of. Wahrheit, the German word for truth, has no connection whatsoever with the Latin veritas; it suggests the past and necessity and ordinary truth, for it is related to the German bewahren (“to preserve”), to bewähren (“to hold good”), to währen, (“to last”), with all that is carried over into the present from the past. And there is a still stronger suggestion of the same meaning in the English language, which translates both the German wahr (“true”) and the German treu (“loyal”) as “true.” And if we want to describe someone telling the truth and being believed, the old German saying auf Treu und Glauben (“on trust,” “in good faith”) is still in use, with treu rather than wahr. Here we see the genius of language at work, and its work is wiser than what human beings do.

And when we ascend from the concept of loyalty to that of love, and then to what I have described in the past as grace, a state of being we have to wait for, we come to the concept of providence; we enter the world where providence holds sway.

If Fritz Mauthner were to concern himself with providence, he would of course search out the source from which it is borrowed and trace the connection of the German Vorsehung (“providence”) to sehen (“to see”) and vorhersehen (“to foresee”), and so on. But a person concerned with reality searches for the world indicated when the union of chance and necessity plays the dominant role rather than either one alone. And the world referred to is that in which there is no such thing as the past in our sense.

I have often told you that when we look into the spiritual world and see the past, it is as though the past had remained standing; it is still there. Time becomes space. The past ceases to be simply the past. Then the concept of necessity also ceases to have any meaning. There is no longer a past, a present, and a future, but rather a state of duration. Lucifer remained behind during the moon evolution in exactly the same way that someone on a walk with another person may stay behind, either out of laziness or because his feet are sore, while his companion keeps on walking. Lucifer has as little directly to do with our earth existence as a person who stays behind has to do with places eventually reached by his companion. He stayed behind during the moon evolution, and there he still remains. In the spiritual world we cannot speak of past things, but only of a state of duration. Lucifer has remained as he was on the moon. All our concepts of necessity and chance change when we look into the spiritual world; providence holds sway there.

I wanted at least to particularize the realms in which what we call necessity, chance and providence are to be sought. This has been a beginning only, and we will return to these matters after spending some time on others. For we must devote ourselves occasionally to studies of a kind that more “mystically” oriented natures may consider unnecessary in a movement like ours. I must regard them as very necessary, however, because I believe that it is also essential for every genuine mystic to occupy himself with thinking.

• 1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749–1832, German poet, dramatist, and novelist. The quoted quatrain is from his poetry collection entitled The East-West Divan, published in 1819. The poems are influenced by ancient Persian and Arabian poetry.
• 2. Sixth International Congress for Philosophy, Bologna, 1911.
• 3. Rudolf Steiner, Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, (Hudson, N.Y.: Anthroposophic Press, 1986).
• 4. Jacob Boehme, 1575–1624, German pantheist mystic. He was a shoemaker by profession and the first philosopher to write in German rather than in Latin.
• 5. William James, 1842–1910, American psychologist and Pragmatist philosopher. Published Principles of Psychology in 1890

If you think back to the entrance of the Blessed Boys in the final scene of Goethe's Faust, you will recall the verse:

Boys, brought forth in midnights haunted,
Half-unsealed the sense and brain,
For the parents lost when granted,
For the angels sweetest gain!

I've already called your attention to many a profundity in this final scene of Faust, but it contains a great deal more than I was able to point out on that occasion, more indeed than could possibly be brought to light in a limited period of time.

The four lines just quoted are equally fitted to be the leitmotif of the deeper spiritual-scientific expositions with which we will be concerning ourselves today, tomorrow, and next Monday.

I want to point out today by way of introduction that it is possible to delve more deeply, in a truly spiritual-scientific approach, into the statement made here recently when I characterized sleeping and waking and related matters. I spoke of how the whole nature of spiritual science was such as to require finding the correct approach to the facts we encounter in the world. And I showed that this approach is to be found only when we seek it as was done in our study of the alternating states of sleeping and waking. We tried to understand how differently consciousness functions in the waking and the sleeping states. But much else can be learned here by studying the way consciousness works according to whether it is that of human beings or of other beings. The four lines quoted from Faust refer to a human state of consciousness, possessed by the souls of the “boys brought forth in midnights” and “for the parents lost when granted,” in other words, by souls claimed by death immediately after birth. But the verse states expressly that these souls are “for the angels sweetest gain.”

We'll see that the saying that souls of this kind are “gain for the angels” is comprehensible only if we look into the state of consciousness of beings belonging to the hierarchy of angels. But let us first acquire some preliminary concepts of these matters and so prepare ourselves for the deeper understanding of the spiritual world into which they are to lead us.

I'll start from the fact, familiar to us from various spiritual-scientific studies, of how remote from reality the learning, the truth, and our concepts of things in ordinary life all are. People are even glad not to have these add anything to reality as they see it, for in their view the reliability of knowledge and “the unvarnished truth” depend on the fact that our cognitive processes and our soul experiences add nothing to things. Just consider what a point science makes of restricting itself to merely reflecting what goes on in the world and not allowing the soul the least influence on its pronunciamentos. Let us recall what trouble is taken by those who dream up a world view on the basis of all sorts of illusions to show that their fabrications are dictated by some reality or other outside themselves rather than originate within them. This is true all the way up to what is claimed to be valuable “occult knowledge” such as we hear some people touting. Those who desire to have occult insight here on the physical plane are basically concerned with not adding anything to the conceptions they develop. How proud people of this type are when they can report that such and such beings appeared to them, this or that was “dictated” to them, or something else was mysteriously communicated to their spiritual ears! This satisfies them, for then they can have the feeling that the conceptions they have created are reflections of reality, not something they produced. We might say that in their concern for attaining the reliable knowledge they are seeking, they actually make a fifth wheel on the wagon out of it. Knowledge should not add anything to what already exists, for only then do they regard it as something particularly reliable, particularly right.

We can arrive at a true and reliable concept of the relationship of knowledge to reality only if we gradually ascend from ordinary knowledge about physical matters to higher types of insight. We are familiar with the fact that the next level of knowledge is that called imagination. But if imagination is to have any relationship to reality it cannot be attained by living in the physical body; we must make ourselves capable of overcoming all dependence on the physical body to attain genuine imaginative knowledge. We must have progressed beyond using the physical body as our instrument. But we do still use the etheric body when we seek imaginations; we have to make use of our etheric bodies to obtain really objective imaginative experience, exactly as we make use of our physical bodies for perceiving objects in the physical realm.

Now we find that when a person on the path of clairvoyant knowledge has progressed to the point where he has loosened his soul from his physical body and is using his etheric body as his cognitive tool, what is called knowledge in the physical world, the kind of knowledge sought without a wish to add anything to the findings, remains behind on the physical plane. For example, everything that a modern scientist is interested in finding out is left behind on the physical plane by those who leave it to ascend into the imaginative world. Nothing remains of what scientists and natural philosophers think of as a world of whirling atoms, a world, as I have often explained, that is dreamed up and totally lacking in reality; nothing remains but pictures of this world. In other words, on leaving the physical plane we become aware that the conceptions of a world of whirling atoms left behind there were just dreamed up. In the imaginative world into which we have ascended no direct use can be made of any knowledge acquired on the physical plane. Please note the word direct here. We will see the subtleties of what is involved as we progress.

Now in earlier lectures I've already shown that the spiritual energy underlying thinking changes when a clairvoyant seeker frees himself from the instrumentality of his physical body. I've said that it is as though all our thinking comes alive. Instead of living in the passive world of thinking experienced on the physical plane, it is as though all our thinking comes alive and starts to tingle as we enter the imaginative world. Once, in Munich, I used a drastic comparison. I said that upon entering that world the thoughts we were previously accustomed to sending hither and thither and otherwise dispatching them as perfectly passive entities become transformed as though we had stuck our heads into a wasps' nest and our thoughts swirled and whirled about, every thought possessing a life of its own. We have to endure it in the sense that we don't feel unfree as a result of being wrested, as it were, out of ourselves by this independent life of our thoughts.

We gradually make the discovery that the insights, the conceptions we obtain on the physical plane as mere images of external reality fall away from us like a rain that rains back down upon the physical world and doesn't enter the imaginative world; they fall away and stay behind in the physical realm. All that is left of them is a memory. So we can look back on everything we have attained by exerting thinking, but that is now left behind on the physical plane as something we have finished with and no longer have any influence on.

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This is a diagram of how it actually is. This would represent the physical body out of which the individual ascends. Then he immediately perceives his knowledge about physical facts falling like raindrops into the physical world. Knowledge of physical things is then outside him.

This is an extremely interesting and extraordinary process. As we ascend into the first spiritual world, the imaginative world, we see our thoughts dropping away from us. And then we see that these thought-forms become beings, and they make a strange impression on us if we really see them. We have the impression as we look at them that they are something wrested from us, something with significance for the physical world only.

Now it is extraordinarily difficult to get a more exact conception of what is dropping away from us there. It is scarcely possible, on ascending into higher worlds, to acquire correct insights by any other means than the most painstaking comparisons. First of all, it is necessary to discover what these thoughts of the physical plane, which have dropped away, can be compared to. These thoughts become very lively indeed. And the curious thing is that these thoughts we see back there on the physical plane are engaging in all sorts of dances similar to eurythmy. It is almost impossible to find these thoughts keeping really still.

I spoke of their dancing resembling eurythmy—not the eurythmy that is being nurtured here, but regular movements of a sort. These thoughts have an extremely peculiar aspect: they are inwardly alive when they have left us. And this fact makes them valuable in this first stage of true clairvoyance.

When a person says something colossally stupid here in physical existence, he certainly doesn't hold on to it for very long, once he has realized the situation. Most people like to skip lightly over their stupidities, once they've recognized them. A really stupid thought laughs when it gets out! It laughs in proportion to its stupidity. And other thoughts can be seen behaving in a similar manner. They manifest an inner life, these thoughts, a very lively play of expression. They convince us that no stupidity we perpetrate escapes being eternalized.

The only way we can get at the facts about these strange thought-forms which put in such a lively appearance is through a comparison. We will find one only if we are in a position to see our thoughts in the way just described. Then we are also in a position to experience what I am going to describe. We need for purposes of comparison the whole wide world of gnomes, the fairy folk that rules all of external earthly nature. These gnomes, who belong to the external inorganic realm in the way other elemental beings belong to plants, water, air, and fire, and so on, this whole world of gnomes has the same character, the same inner nature as the thought-forms described. I could also say that gnomes belong to the same class as our thought- forms, referring however to those thought-forms based on mental images derived from the physical plane alone.

Now as you see, we have a comparison. And that is why there is an inner relationship of sorts between the gnome world and our thoughts about things on the physical plane. As I've mentioned, people make an effort to be faithful to the facts in their knowledge and perceptions, making these into a fifth wheel on the wagon.

The gnomes have a similar relationship to their realm. Speaking euphemistically of course, but in a way corresponding to the facts, when a person talks with a gnome, he finds the gnome regarding the world to which he belongs with tremendous wistfulness, because he is so extremely uninvolved with it. He has as little influence over it as human beings have over the physical world around them with their knowledge. It is a matter of considerable indifference to the physical world surrounding us how we think about it with thoughts derived from the physical plane. A tree grows neither more nor less slowly because of thoughts derived from the physical plane that we may have about it, or because we go past it without giving it any thought at all. As I mentioned recently, we are the only ones to gain by this; our thoughts about the tree have not the least effect upon it.

The gnomes too have a similar external relationship to the world to which they belong externally. I might say that their world belongs to what we call the terrestrial world, the solid element. But we can just as easily disregard the world of the gnomes when we study the solid element as we can disregard watchmakers in a study of the laws involved in watch-making.

It is extremely important to develop a right understanding of a comparison of this kind, one that I have often resorted to, the comparison of the structure of the universe with the mechanism of a watch. If you want to understand a watch, you must study the laws governing its mechanism, and it would be ridiculous to say, Ah ha! The hands of a watch keep moving; there must be tiny demons pushing them. No such demons are involved. But if someone who understands watches as a result of studying them were to say that a watch has nothing to do with the watchmaker who put it together, he would also be talking nonsense. The fact that the world can be understood from its own make-up and that it is possible for scientists to discover natural laws can just as little be taken as proof of the nonexistence of a spiritual basis for the universe. The laws that govern the functioning of a watch are equally discoverable in the watch itself. So when it is stated that the laws that govern nature are to be found within the natural world and it is therefore unnecessary to look for anything divine in the universe, this reflects the same lack of thought as saying of watches that no watchmaker is needed because they are explainable on the basis of their own construction.

In the world surrounding us that is so entirely explainable on the basis of the laws that govern it, gnomes have a function. They too are somewhat comparable to the fifth wheel on a wagon: they accompany the world to which they belong, but without having any effect upon it. I ask you to consider the inner relationship of the world of gnomes to our physical thought world, for then you will realize that we have to make a start at understanding such a thing as the gnome world by taking a state of consciousness into consideration. Then we will ask ourselves how it is that we come to know about the physical world. We do so by forming the reflections I've been discussing. Just as reflections have no real connection with what they reflect, physical knowledge has nothing to do with what it knows about; it doesn't make anything happen in the physical realm. If we come to see physical knowledge as a matter of a state of consciousness and sense in full awareness how unessential, how superfluous, mirrors are to the objects mirrored, we will understand the soul-mood that envelops the world of gnomes. That is their soul-mood. Gnomes are therefore unable to grasp how there can be anything but an ineffectual relationship with this world.

If a clairvoyant person were to feel pain and sorrow, as they can indeed be felt on many occasions in human life, and were then to perceive gnomes, as clairvoyants do, he would find that they cannot comprehend his pain. They are aware that people can feel a general sadness and depression, but they cannot understand how anyone can be attached to physical existence; they laugh at such feelings. Indeed, we might say that our sense of the value of things on the physical plane is lost in encounters with the world of gnomes, because they heap such ridicule upon us for the value we attach to much that exists on the physical plane.

We understand the mental state of gnomes, then, if we become cognizant of the state of consciousness involved in the relationship of physical knowledge to the world reflected in it.

The beings to whom the name undines has been given and who are inwardly related not to the earthly but to the watery element and to everything liquidly rippling and flowing must be pictured somewhat differently. We cannot form a proper concept of plants just by looking at them and making a one-time image of them analogous to a papier-mâché reproduction. To be aware of nothing more than such a one-time impression is to lack any true conception of a plant, and the same holds true in the case of undines. We picture a plant rightly only if we know it in its various states: first in its root development, then growing a stem, then putting forth leaves, then blossoming, the blossoms wilting, fruits appearing, and so on. Goethe tells us in his beautiful Metamorphosis of Plants that we must study a plant's growth process.¹ And there live in the plant, in addition to what it is in and of itself, mobile elemental beings inwardly related to the shaping, rippling, mobile element of water.

And now we have to realize that the imaginative world into whose life we make our way on evolving beyond the physical plane is an inwardly mobile realm resembling the cloud-world in its metamorphoses, resembling the rippling, flowing element. The imaginative world is itself in flowing motion. And just as we encounter the realm of our own physical thoughts when we first enter the spiritual world, under favorable conditions encountering the elemental world of the gnomes, so do we live in the realm of higher elemental beings as waves live in water; we belong to and are part of its encompassing whole; we live in it.

It is of course difficult to give an impression of such matters, but here too we must picture the state of consciousness involved. It helps us to understand to say that all our thinking begins to come alive, that we are swept up by thoughts that become alive as though the thoughts we produce, thoughts endowed with imagination, were to take on a life of their own. Purely physical thoughts such as we had before are left behind, an abandoned realm. Then we can say that the gnomes live in the world we have abandoned. But now we are living in the realm of the undines, and both for them and for us it is a world of movement.

Let us picture this very exactly. We separate from our physical bodies and become strangers to them. We begin to carry on a life of inner mobility, of continuously changing, rippling motion. Everything takes on inner life as we experience ourselves in our etheric bodies. This is the experience we have also immediately upon dying, except that the tempo is slower.

This experiencing of the imaginative world is what we experienced on the moon, except that it is at a higher level now; there, it was a dream-world of imagination, a realm of pictures. On Jupiter we will experience it in full consciousness. We lift ourselves into it upon leaving our physical bodies behind as described. Try to picture it really vividly. The world of the senses is obliterated; what we saw with our eyes and heard with our ears is no longer perceptible. We cease to feel as well. Thoughts related to the outer world are laid aside in a way that could be described as follows: O gnomes, we give you our physical thoughts to keep you company; occupy yourselves with them for awhile.

Now an inner living and weaving sets in, a sharing in everything on earth that is inwardly alive and streams and ripples in the way the earth's fluid element carries on its rhythmic life. It is a sharing with the earth reminiscent too of the ancient moon period. A strange process starts: In addition to being aware of living in a realm of elemental beings belonging to the plant kingdom and to flowing liquids, we realize something else of a very special nature, something quite strange, namely, that we are becoming part of a rhythm that is involved both in the inner rhythm of the earth and in our breathing rhythm. We acquire the idea that the rhythm of our breathing is inwardly related to the rhythm of the earth. In short, we begin to be aware that we are part of the whole earth-organism. We really begin to sense our belonging to it. The earth-organism claims us.

This can be compared to what Goethe described to Eckermann on April 11, 1827, when he said, “I picture the earth with its vapor mantle as a huge living organism involved in an unceasing in- and out-breathing.”² We feel ourselves involved in this. We share in this unique way in the life of the earth.

I'd like to point out something here that demonstrates again how fruitfully spiritual science illuminates the findings of natural science made by some characteristic scientific figures, and how well they go together. So I remind you of the famous exclamation of the Greek philosopher Archimedes, who as he sat in his bath shouted, “Eureka! I've found it!”³ And what had he found out? He lifted his feet out of the bath water and then put them back in again, finding that they were lighter in the water than outside it. So he discovered the important principle that any body suspended in water loses as much weight as the water it displaces weighs. Balloons rise according to the same principle, losing as much weight as the air they displace. In the case of water, a heavy object lying on the bottom does not lose weight, but it does so when it is suspended in the water. This principle obtains throughout nature, and it is an important one, for it is related to something of the greatest importance in human beings.

You will have heard that the human brain weighs on the average 1350 grams. It is therefore quite heavy, almost 1 1/2 kilos. Very fragile organs occupy the space beneath it, organs that would be crushed by laying anything weighing a single kilo on top of them. Yet it is a fact that we all have a brain heavy enough to crush the organs that lie at its base. But the pressure exerted on them actually amounts at most to 20 grams, rather than to a kilo. How is this accounted for? It is due to the fact that the brain is suspended in a fluid; it loses all but 20 grams of its weight because it is floating in the brain fluid. We are speaking here not of what it actually weighs, but of its 20-gram pressure on the organs at its base. We picture it correctly when we conceive the brain floating in the brain fluid and this fluid extending downward into the spinal column.

Now picture this brain fluid rhythmically rising and falling. This fluid with the brain floating in it is involved in rhythmical movement as the diaphragm contracts and expands with the in- and out-movement of the breath, and it is thus involved in the breathing process. Insofar as the brain is its instrument, the whole thought process thus is connected with the breathing process. The brain is thus an extraordinarily sensitive sense organ for the forces continually playing in the earthly realm. Goethe, in his deep insight into matters of this kind, refused, for example, to accept what the crude meteorological science of his time had to say about the rise and fall of barometric pressure being due to atmospheric lightness or heaviness. He spent an endless amount of time registering barometric readings in various localities. And he tried to determine how regular this rise and fall was over the earth as a whole and showed how it could be compared to an inner terrestrial force, an in- and out-breathing on the part of the earth, which is of course closely related to meteorological regularity and irregularity. We need not be surprised at the barometer's changeableness despite the regularity of the earth's in- and out-breathing; human beings too are prone, despite the regularity of their breathing, to contract colds and other conditions that act like barometers showing that something is amiss.

We perceive this wonderful lawfulness in the earth's gravity, this inner life of the terrestrial, even though we are not conscious of it in physical life. We perceive the mysterious inner processes of the “earth-creature” taking place in the continuous rising and falling of the brain fluid in exactly the same way we gaze out into the world and listen to it. Goethe said of it, “I picture the earth with its vapor mantle as a huge living organism involved in an unceasing in- and out-breathing.” We feel that we share in it, though on an unconscious level. But the moment we use our etheric bodies as perceptive organs we begin to perceive it consciously and to participate in it; we become part of this huge earth-creature.

Our age is really the first to confront such matters entirely without understanding. Kepler, whom even those currently eager to wipe out all spiritual insight regard as a great mind, still spoke of our earth as having a periodic respiratory process which he likened to that of whales, a going-to-sleep and reawakening, dependent upon the sun-rhythm and accompanied by a fulling and ebbing of the ocean.⁴ We have an experience of these processes on an unconscious level, and it finds expression in a physical process of which we are not consciously aware.

It will not surprise you, then, that clairvoyant perception reports that what has now withdrawn into the inner organism, the strange relationship between the external atmosphere and our thought process through the blood and the rising and falling of the brain fluid was once an external element on the ancient moon, where dreamlike clairvoyance prevailed. The circulating air was outside. The human being himself was as yet only a vortex in the moon substance, for there was as yet no earthly matter; the moon was still in a fluid state or, at its most material, a thickened fluid. And in this whirling and perceiving the whirling lived moon human beings, floating as condensations in the fluid element.

What we were as moon humanity remains within us. And if we study the brain in the brain fluid and study the nature of the various functions related to the breathing process, we see that it is indeed true that we have inherited the legacy of the ancient moon, but now withdrawn into our interior make-up. We are still there, as brains floating in fluid, in rhythmically alternating motion.

We see here a reflection of the old moon rhythm that constituted human physical nature on the moon. And our whole physical make-up, which we perceive with our nerves and external senses, has spread out over that nature as an outer covering. Hidden beneath it is what remains as a moon legacy.

There are always and everywhere these interrelationships, marvelously wrought. But we have no inner perception of them as long as our eyes and ears are directed only toward the external. The moment we surrender the use of our senses and leave our thoughts behind as described, however, we feel our unity with the life of the earth. And we know ourselves inwardly to be one with the earthly gravity of our etheric life, that life into which we enter upon leaving our physical bodies in the transformed condition known as death.

• 1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749–1832, German poet and thinker. Published Metamorphosis of Plants in 1790; in this book he shows the leaf as the primeval organ of the plant out of which all other plant organs evolved.
• 2. Johannes Peter Eckermann, 1792–1854. Published Conversations with Goethe, 1823-1832 in 1836.
• 3. Archimedes, 285–212 B.C., Greek physicist and mathematician.
• 4. Johannes Kepler, 1571–1630, German astronomer. Calculated orbits of the planets and discovered the laws of the movement of the planets.