The Rudolf Steiner Archive

This lecture is number six of eighteen lectures from the lecture series entitled, Man's Responsibility for World Evolution through His Spiritual Connection with the Planet Earth and with the Stars Above. It is also known as, Spiritual Science in the Light of Today.

My dear friends,

On the basis of those things which we discussed here in the last lecture, I should now like to bring forward various details which may perhaps be of use to you as members of the Anthroposophical Movement for purposes of defence, whenever from some corner or other, attacks are made against our Anthroposophical Movement, and what must now appear in its train. In recent times, one sees these attacks appearing everywhere. To-day I will confine myself simply to attacks of a certain kind, but at the present moment attacks are being specially directed against our practical undertaking, against which has to come forth as such from the Anthroposophical Movement. Far and wide one can hear it said:—“Well, these people are now founding a ‘Kommende Tag,’ a ‘Futurum’;—what do they mean to do with these things? They only want to establish such practical things for the use of those who confess themselves as belonging to the Anthroposophical view of the world. Economic undertakings are therefore set on foot, in order that those who confess to an Anthroposophical world view may acquire a certain power, and in the first place an economic power.”

If those who make this reproach were to enter more closely into what lies at the basis of such undertakings and see how they proceed out of the whole spirit of the Anthroposophical Movement, such a reproach could not be made; but, on the other hand, one cannot deny that, even amongst those human beings who stand within our Anthroposophical movement, often things are said which contribute richly to the arising of such misunderstandings. It is quite impossible, according to the whole ways and methods by means of which what is here called Anthroposophy seeks to relate itself to the world, it is absolutely impossible that such a judgment can be in any way justified, but that will only be clear to those who can grasp the spirit of our whole Anthroposophical Movement. This Anthroposophical Movement reckons with all the forces present in the evolution of humanity. How often has it been emphasised that the development of humanity has to undergo certain points of transition, and that these turning points should be observed. I should just like to point to one such turning point, in order to show how little justified is the opinion that we may have any definite dogma or theory which we seek to bring to humanity.

It may of course, occur, as a kind of anomaly, a kind of out-growth of fanaticism amongst a few members, that they should think they have to advocate a definite dogma; and indeed, this may be considered right by many, but it does not lie in the spirit of the Anthroposophical Movement. For if, in the spirit of this Movement, we look back into human evolution, then we find that in olden times, those ancient times in which an instinctive clairvoyance was prevalent, the whole disposition of Man's soul was different; man assumed a quite different place in the world. What was striven for in those places which we often designate as the Mysteries, in those ancient epochs of human evolution? Let us for the present leave all details aside, and just try to grasp the meaning of the Mysteries.

Those who wore considered ripe and were found suitable for being received into the Mysteries during their earth-life—that means in the time between birth and death—participated in a certain instruction given them by the Guides in those Mysteries, and that instruction came from what the Leaders of the Mysteries had to impart concerning the super-sensible worlds. No Mystery-Leader made any secret of the fact that, in his opinion, the teachings in the Mysteries did not proceed only from human beings, but that, through the special rites carried on in those Mysteries, super-sensible beings, Divine Spiritual Beings were present during the celebration of the Mysteries, and with the assistance of those Gods present therein everything connected with it was given out. The essential point was this:—all the arrangements made in the Mysteries were of such a nature that they attracted, so to speak Divine Spiritual Beings, who, through the mouths of those who were the Leaders of the Mysteries, gave instruction to those who were the pupils therein.

In those olden times, everything was so organised socially, that not only were the arrangements made accepted by the Guides and Pupils of the Mysteries, but even by those who stood outside the Mysteries and who were not able to share in the life of the Mysteries. The whole arrangements made as social arrangements for humanity, were thus accepted.

One need merely think of old Egypt, and of how those who were the Leaders in the State received their directions from the Mysteries. The Mysteries were regarded as the self-understood place of direction for everything which had to occur within the social life.

To-day, my dear friends, one can also impart instruction, esoteric instruction, which can run in forms similar to those old Mystery-arrangements; but all that has quite another meaning to-day. That is because between our epoch and that ancient epoch, in reference to such things, a significant turning-point has occurred in the development of mankind. In those ancient times man was, as it were, destined to receive the instruction given through the Mysteries and through which he approached those Divine Spiritual Beings, during his life here,—between birth and death. Now things are different. We are living after that turning-point in human evolution, between birth and death. When these things altered, that which man then had to learn through the Mysteries between birth and death;—that, my dear friends, he now learns to-day, before he descends through conception or through birth into a physical body. He learns it according to his Karma, and according to the preparations he had gone through in a former life on earth. What man undergoes now in the Spiritual world, between the great Midnight Hour of existence and his next birth, is something which also includes that Spiritual instruction.

You will find what had to be said in another connection concerning these things, in a cycle which I gave in Vienna in 1914, on the life between Death and a New Birth; but that was only indicated there, was only touched upon with a few strokes. I will now try to characterise it more closely.

Man to-day experiences something akin to the old Mystery instruction, before he descends from the pre-existence condition into his physical body. That is a factor with which anyone must reckon, who through Spiritual knowledge, stands in reality to-day. We must not think of a man born to-day as he was thought of in olden times. In olden times he was so considered that one could say: “He descends on to the Earth and is destined to be initiated through the Mysteries into the knowledge of what he really is as a human being.”

The case is not like that to-day. That arrangement was made for human beings who had gone through a smaller number of earthly lives than has the man of to-day, who has, of course, taken far more into his soul in his many incarnations which made it possible for him to receive certain instruction on the part of the Divine Spiritual Beings in his pre-existent condition.

My dear friends, we have to pre-suppose something of this nature to-day, when we see a child. When we meet a child to-day, we must realise that we no longer have the task of pouring into that child that which had to be poured in, in olden times. To-day it is our task to say: “This child has been taught, he has only laid a physical body around his already-instructed-soul; that which was his pre-birthly instruction from the Gods must make its way through the veils around that soul, it must be brought out.” That is how we should think to-day in the sense of pedagogy, if we are to think in the sense of true Anthroposophical Spiritual Science. It will then be clear to us that, fundamentally, all our instruction shall tend to remove those hindrances which lie around that which the child brings with him into this world from his pre-birthly existence. It is for that reason that, in our Waldorf Teaching, such significance is laid on the fact that the teacher should really regard the child before him as something like a riddle that he has to solve,—in whom he must seek that which the child is concealing in himself; he must not lay the chief importance on anything which he has undertaken to put into the child. He must never proceed in any dogmatic way, but all the time he has to consider the child itself as his teacher, and see how the child through its special behaviour, betrays the very way in which those veils are to be broken through; so that, from out of the child itself, that Divine instruction can come forth. So the Waldorf pedagogy and didactic consist in eliminating those veils which are around the child, so that the child can come to itself, and discover within itself its own Divine instruction. Therefore, we say we have no need to inoculate into the child anything we have conceived as a theory—no matter how beautifully it may be put in our books; we leave that to those who are still rooted in the ancient traditional religious Confessions. We leave that to those who want to make children Catholics or Evangelists or to those who want to make them Jews. That is not our way,—we do not even want to inoculate Anthroposophical pedagogy into the children. We simply want to use what we have learned as Anthroposophy, to make ourselves capable of evoking into being that living spirit which lives in the child from its pre-existence. We want through Anthroposophy to acquire a dexterity in teaching, and not a number of dogmas, which we teach the children. We want to become more dexterous ourselves; we want to evolve a didactic art, so as to make of the child what it has to become. We ourselves are quite clear that all the other knowledge which is to-day brought from the most diverse sides, may indeed instruct the head, but cannot make a person an artist in pedagogy; it does not affect the whole man, but simply the head. Anthroposophy grasps the whole human being and makes him a manipulator of that artistic dexterity, (as I might call it) which should be displayed to the pupils. Therefore, we use Anthroposophy in order to become more dexterous teachers, but not to bring it to the child. We are quite clear as to this:—the spirit does not consist of a number of ideas, of concepts; it is a living thing, and it appears in each individual child in a quite special and individual way, if only we ourselves are able to bring to its consciousness what each child brings to the Earth with its birth here. My dear friends, we would impoverish this Earth, if we only sought to bring to the children things which can be comprised in a sum of dogmas; while on the contrary we make the Earth richer if we cultivate and cherish that which the Gods have given to the child and which it brings with it to the Earth. That which is the living spirit then appears in ever so many human individualities;—not that which some wish to bring as Anthroposophy to these human children in order to make them uniform, but that which brings to life that living spirit which dwells in them. That is our object, and for that reason we have absolutely no interest in bringing Anthroposophical dogma to the children. That is one of the practical outcomes of Anthroposophical Spiritual Science.

This special didactic, this special pedagogic art, is quite different from anything which human beings have thought of till now, for they have only been able to think, for instance “I believe in a certain dogma; that therefore is the best which we can give to our children.” It does not interest us at all to bring any dogmas to the children, for we know that each child brings his own message when he appears on the Earth through the Gate of Birth, and we should destroy that message if we tried to meet it with dogma of any kind. The spirit does not need to be cultivated in an abstract way; when one is able to get it free and bring it to life, the living spirit itself is then there, instead of a series of dogmas.

All our “opinions” are only there as a means of awakening the living spirit in humanity and to keep it quite in a state of continual development; that is why it is quite a wrong idea spread abroad that in the Waldorf School or in anything else which we cultivate pedagogically, we wish to carry on Anthroposophy in a dogmatic way. We do not wish to do so in the Waldorf School, nor do we want to impress Anthroposophy dogmatically on any Science. On the contrary, in every single Science we want to bring out the individual nature of that Science. We are quite convinced that it is essential to create something in the world through Anthroposophy which will extinguish all dogma and bring out the individual nature of each particular sphere. From this point of view, it was needful that those attacks springing up from all corners should be repelled, whenever they turn on our bringing Anthroposophy as Dogma into any Science, or pedagogy.

And now, in what concerns our practical undertakings we find people saying, with remarkable unanimity during the last few weeks in Germany, as also in Switzerland and many other places,—because of the recent publications of the “Kommenden Tag” and the “Futurum,”—“Well, these undertakings are all conducted by Anthroposophists combining together so that they can have their own economic undertakings, and so on. Other people perhaps nay be admitted to these undertakings and concerns, but they will certainly have no voice in the administration,” and so on and so on. Now if we wanted to do things of this kind, it would contradict the very principle on which we stand, i.e. we have to keep the development of humanity in all its details clearly before our minds, and not ask for something absolutely complete and correct, but just ask ourselves: “What ought to take place to-day?” Then we must pay attention to the second turning-point in the evolution of humanity. To-day various affairs, but especially economic affairs are developed amongst humanity from a certain principle of inertia. Formerly these arrangements were born in a tiny circle, usually in a tiny territory. To-day, because they are as a rule State economic concerns, we find, in the place of the individual undertakings of the past, that we have imperial concerns, which have consequently become gigantic, although we find them now springing up from inertia. To-day one speaks of National Economy, thereby welding two things together, the peculiar Group-Spirit which holds a race together, a Group-Spirit is externally, I might say, embodied in the blood. Now the world-relationships have for a long time been of such a nature that, with every kind of Group-Community which expresses itself in the blood, modern economics can have nothing whatever to do,—that is, if they are to be based on sound relationships. So to-day, something is strongly expressed in an economic relationship when the Rhine boundaries are discussed, because it is desired to have on one side of the Rhine a different economic arrangement to what exists on the other side, because of the different racial and national considerations. These national considerations have all arisen from different forces, and to-day have nothing whatever to do with that which constitutes world-economy (Weltwirtschaft). These things have reached a certain crisis in the course of the last third of the 19th Century. Then only did these turning-points in evolution, in the evolution of humanity, become so obvious.

As we have just tried to explain, in olden times man entered physical existence uninstructed by the Gods, and he had to be taught through the Mysteries. To-day he enters already taught, and that which is in his soul has only to be brought to his consciousness. In ancient times, as regards the social and economic life of mankind, things were so arranged that a man was born into a definite social connection, into a certain group, according to just those forces which worked in him before his birth. It was not only the principle of physical heredity which lay at the basis of the oldest forms of inequality, which we find, for instance, in the oldest caste divisions;—in the old caste division the Leaders of the social orderings operated things according to the way in which man, before his birth or conception was destined for a certain Group of his fellow-human beings. In those times when fewer earthly incarnations lay behind the earthly soul, then, because of his fewer earthly incarnations on Earth, a man was born into a quite definite Group, and in that one definite Group alone could he develop socially. A man who, for instance, belonged to a certain caste in Old India, belonged to it because of what his soul had gone through in the Spiritual world; and, because of the small number of his incarnations, if he had been transferred to another caste he would have degenerated in his soul. It was not only the blood-inheritance which lay at the basis of the Caste system, but something which I must call Spiritual pre-determination. Man has long grown out of that. Between our Age and that old epoch there is in this respect another turning-point. People to-day still bear within them marks of a Group-nature, but that if simply a phantom-image. People are born into certain nations, and also into a certain class of society, but in the great number of people growing up in a certain epoch one can already see, even in childhood, that such a predetermination from a pre-earthly existence no longer prevails to-day. To-day human beings are instructed by the Gods in their pre-natal existence, and the stamp of a definite Group is no longer impressed upon them. The last relic of this still lingers in physical heredity. In a sense, one might say that to belong with one's consciousness to a Nationality is a piece of inherited sin and is something which should no longer play a, part in the soul of man.

On the other hand, there is the fact, which does play a definite role in our modern epoch, that man, as he grows up, grows away from all the Group-forms; yet within the economic life he cannot remain without a Group-education, because, with reference to the economic life, the individual can never be dominant. That which constitutes the Spiritual life, springs from the deepest part of man's inner being, within which he can acquire, not only a certain harmony of his capacities, but should perfect and maintain them through a certain schooling. But that which constitutes a judgement in the sphere of economics can never proceed from a single human being. I have given you instances of this, and I have shown you how an economic judgment suet always fall into error when it proceeds from one single man. I will give another example, taken from the second half of the 19th Century.

I have told you that at a definite time, in the middle and second half of the 19th Century, in Parliaments and other corporate bodies the discussions everywhere centered round the Gold Standard. Those speakers who at that time spoke in favour of a Gold Standard—you could have heard them everywhere,—were really clever people. I do a not say that ironically, because the people who at that time appeared as practical and Theoretical speakers in Parliaments and other assemblies really were very clever, and what they said really belongs to the best utterances of Parliament concerning the Gold Standard in the various Countries. But almost everywhere they pointed to one thing with great sagacity,—to the fact that the Gold Standard will set Free-Trade on its feet again, and do away with all Customs Duties. If one reads to-day what was then said about the beneficial effects of the Gold standard on Free-Trade, one has real joy in seeing how clever those people were; but, my dear friends, the very opposite appeared of what all the cleverest people said. As a consequence of the Gold Standard, prohibitive tariffs appeared everywhere. You see that the cleverness in the economic life which proceeded out of single personalities, was not able to help man. That could be proved in the most diverse spheres; because the fact is, that although what a man knows about nature or about another man makes him competent to judge as a single individual, no man is competent to judge as a single individual when it comes to the sphere of economics. A man cannot have a judgment on economic things in the concrete, as a single individual. An economic judgment can only arise when human beings unite together, associate together, and support each other mutually, when there is co-operation in their associations. It is not possible for a single man to have a sound judgment which can pass into economic activity.

Just the contrary happens when a man has a scientific judgment. In a scientific judgment, if it proceeds out of the whole man, he can give a comprehensive judgment; but in concrete economics and in economic trade the point is that one man knows one part, the second knows another part, the third knows something else. The producer in one department knows something, the consumer in the same department knows something else; what they each know must flow together, and then can arise a Group-judgment in the sphere of Economics. In other words, the old Forms are done away with, and a Group-judgment, a collective judgment must arise. Human beings must form themselves into Groups of their own accord, and these must comprise associations of the economic life. From the understanding of a necessary evolving force in evolution it comes about, that this associative life of economics must be taken up by humanity, and take the place of the old group-connections which are still propagated to-day in humanity as an inherited sin. When we consider this; we must indeed say:—As regards knowledge, in ancient times humanity came untaught to Earth, but in the Mysteries, they then received their wisdom. Now human beings descend to Earth instructed, and we have so to arrange our didactics that we can draw out of them that which the Gods have taught them.

In reference to the economic arrangements, formerly human beings were pre-determined, as it were; a stamp from the Gods was imprinted on them, and so they were born into a certain Caste, or into one Group or another. That is also past. To-day human beings are born without that stamp; they are in a sense put as single isolated individuals into humanity, and now they must bring ahout their own Group- forms by means of their Spirituality. It is really not a case of bringing such human beings as profess Anthroposophy; that simply depends upon what the Gods have taught them before their birth, and whether in their former incarnations they have been found ripe for that Divine instruction so that now we can draw forth Anthroposophy from them,—Anthroposophy is in far more people to-day than one thinks, but so many are too lazy to draw forth from themselves that which is in them, or perhaps their school instruction was so organised that the veils cannot be dissolved, and so they cannot attain their consciousness.

In the practical sphere, and especially in the economic sphere, it would be absurd to bring human beings together simply because they are Anthroposophists. We study Anthroposophy in order to obtain insight into the way in which human beings are seeking, from out of their group consciousness, the group-formation which they must seek as a result of their former incarnations. They must be given the opportunity of forming Groups and of carrying out what lies in germ in the development of humanity. So you see it can never be a question of grouping together human beings because they live in a definite dogma, but those human beings who, through their previous life on earth are called upon to find themselves in groups, to those should be given the possibility of associating themselves in these groups. In these things, as soon as we pass from the abstract into the concrete, we find an extraordinary number of riddles,—I might almost say mysterious things; because, whether a man belongs to one group or another, is by no means a simple matter. The longing people now have for simplicity, shows itself in extraordinary ways. I have been informed of something concerning a lecture which the worthy Frohmeyer has just held, “Theosophy and Anthroposophy” in which he says at the end,—“his own personal relationship to Christianity reminds him of the well-known fact that it unfortunately always annoys these people that what is so great can yet he so simple.”

He means apparently that the Anthroposophists are annoyed that the great is so simple. That is, as simple as the laziness of the Rev. Frohmeyer would like to have it, for he will not endeavour to realise the greatness in all its differentiation. One always has to translate these things into their proper language. That is something which is our especial task; we must translate things into their true-speech.

Of course, there can be no question of throwing at anyone's head this doctrine of the instruction of man before his birth, of his being born into Groups in ancient times and no longer being born into Groups now-a-days; but we can permeate ourselves with these truths, and we shall then find a possibility of showing our methods as time goes on, of showing how far removed we are from introducing any dogma into our schools, or of bringing people into economic associations because they admit amongst themselves the truth of certain dogmas.

How strongly that is made a point of in our Waldorf school at Stuttgart, you can see from the simple fact that we have no interest in bringing Anthroposophy to the children. We want to have a method of instruction which can only be gained through Anthroposophy; but that is a purely objective affair. Those children, or rather their parents, who wish them to have instruction from a Catholic Priest in the Catholic religion—for them a Catholic priest can come to the Waldorf school;—and for those who want to he taught the Evangelical religious instruction, the Evangelical minister can come to the school. We place no hindrance whatever in the way of these men. But it became necessary in recent times, when so many parents, especially those from the proletariat, do not want their children instructed either in the Catholic or Evangelical views, to ask whether they perhaps would like their children to have a free religious instruction born of an Anthroposophical education. It then at once became evident that those who would otherwise have been educated without any religion whatever, and would not have entered any religious confession, were very numerous; but these came to a so-called Anthroposophical religious class which did not teach Anthroposophy, but was simply born of Anthroposophy. These children proved to be more industrious in their religious instruction than was the case with the others taught by the Catholic or Evangelistical clergy; but that we could not help, that was the business of the Catholic or Evangelical Priests. Gradually a number of children passed over from the one religious instruction to the other. I believe it was the Evangelical teacher who finally said:—“In the near future I shall have no one left in my class, they are all running away from me!” But that again was most certainly not our fault; there was never any question of teaching dogma of any kind to those children. We have no interest in doing that. We knew that if our method succeeded in removing the veils around the children, they would then have the best instruction,—that which was given to them in the Spiritual world before their descent on to the Earth. Of course, certain confessions are strongly interested in darkening this instruction, not to let it appear. Whoever e.g. can compare the extraordinary relation between what stands in the Papal Encyclical and what transpires in the Spiritual world knows that the Divine religious instruction which children enjoy before their descent is absolutely not what many religious confessions would like them to have to-day. This is especially to be noticed in the Catholic Church; because the Catholic Church, as compared with the Evangelical, has always preserved a more super-sensible influence through its ritual and Ceremonies. But super-sensible influence can appear in various ways, and one can say: it may be an error when it deviates from the truth, it may also be an error when it is the direct opposite of the truth.

Regarding now what concerns the practical undertakings,—naturally I cannot betray here what is discussed in our business meetings, which often last till 3:30. but I can give you the assurance, that in the meetings of the Futurum and Kommenden Tag, Anthroposophy is not discussed, but things of quite another nature. There are things which must be treated only in the most practical manner; how one should manage things in this or that sphere, etc. Here theoretic Anthroposophy plays no role, except that what is discussed should grasp the economic life in as clever a manner as one does when one makes ones thoughts mobile so that they can contact the reality, as happens through a living grasp of the Spirit of Anthroposophy.

One need therefore merely point out, that neither in the Statutes of the “Kommenden Tag” nor of the “Futurum,” are there any Anthroposophical dogmas,—merely economic things; the only question is how to make these undertakings better than similar undertakings to-day. That is one of the points which must be defended, because it is one of the attacks which now crop up from every corner, and will do, do so more and more, unless we put our affairs clearly and energetically before the world. What I have to say recently in Stuttgart is true; it has not yet been learnt in the Anthroposophical Movement how to be attentive to realities. Our opponents are different. They organise and will prove their organisation. We must unconditionally fail unless we are conscious of this, and can make as strong efforts for the good as are now being made for the bad.

Thus to-day I wanted to bring up one of the points in reference to which you will hear definite attacks against our practical undertakings. If you open your ears, and this is necessary (figuratively I mean), you will hear: and many things will have to be defended in this direction. I wanted to-day to say what could enthuse the soul when it becomes necessary to defend in this direction. This enthusing-of-the-soul can come, when we know what it meant in olden times that man came to Earth uninstructed by the Gods; he now comes instructed before birth and his whole life must be ordered thereto. Also what it means that man was formerly determined by the will of the Gods into Castes, Classes, Peoples, Tribes, etc. That disappeared after the turning-point which lies behind us. Man is now destined from Economic necessities to form Groups in Earth-life. That happens in Economic Associations. A right knowledge of the Earth-development of the Spiritual evolution of man and their connections, shows how what we call the “Three-fold Commonwealth” is not merely a political programme, but the result of what flows from a real knowledge of human evolution as a Necessity for the Present and the immediate Future.

Of these things, more tomorrow.

I have taken on to still give this lecture before the approaching lengthy voyage regarding what relates to important tasks of the Anthroposophical movement—at least with the intention that important tasks need to be spoken about. Through some aphorisms I want to bring things to your attention today. We have every reason to examine the historic development of the Anthroposophical movement again, and will again because this Anthroposophical movement depends on those who want to be its bearers and that they this up and understand it in the right way. We should continuously bear in mind the circumstances out of which, through its own nature, through its entire being, this Anthroposophical movement grew at a stage which enabled it to find its existence to a certain extent unnoticed by the world. This fact we dare never overlook, for it is one of the most important facts in the development of the Anthroposophical movement. We need to be very clear how the Anthroposophical movement had begun and actually had to come into being, because one can only create true relationships out of something real, where small groups came together and work was done by these small cooperating groups. These small groups however multiplied, this we can't deny, contributing something scrupulously sectarian out of the old Theosophic movement. From different sides it was adopted, one could say, like a working habit by some of our members; but then again there were those to whom the content of what is meant in this anthroposophic spiritual science was such that from the beginning, it was impossible to fit any kind of sectarian behaviour into it. It clearly entered everyone strongly and was visible in each individual in the way it was encountered when the Goetheanum Building had been started in Dornach. It was considered possible by many of those in the member's circles that such a building could be created in the world by still retaining old sectarian customs. Such sectarian traditions are all too understandable, they are usually in all Theosophical Societies and in orders where most of them work in a manner which could be called obscure, where things are thoroughly avoided which should in fact be examined if a movement strives to uphold a generally humane character.

The work habits in certain orders and in the Theosophical movement can therefore not be applied to the content which is worked through in the Anthroposophical movement, because this Anthroposophical movement, despite speaking to the hearts and minds of every single person, at the same time was fully developed in all scientific challenges from the start, but could only be as it were presented in the present time. The latter is a fact which has not been taken seriously from many sides amongst the membership. It is characteristic that people prefer to remain completely stuck within a habit originating from tradition or from the course of life. Within the course of life it presents a certain isolated territory for you. This is not in agreement with what your religious tradition has brought you, it is in agreement with what the popular spreading of a world view offers you and now you feel a certain satisfaction when something is offered which surpasses that, which is equally from religious tradition as also from the general, wide, popular point of view of the modern materialistic thought processes which are able to come out of a newer time. However, you still prefer to a certain extent what is a given, because you allow yourself, I want to say, in a kind of Sunday pleasure, something which exists but doesn't intervene in a disruptive manner with ordinary life.

A movement such as the Anthroposophical one which reckons with the life forces of the present, naturally can't do this. Such a movement seizes the entire human being, involves every single detail of life. You can't consider it as something on the side. You may well enter into certain conflicting details because these things are absolutely unavoidable, and it doesn't allow living within the present lifetime habits in the various areas, through submitting on the one side to what life has presented and act as a courageous philistine, and on the other side, continue with your reading of Anthroposophy, accepting through your heart and mind the Anthroposophical life. You see, this would be the most comfortable way, but it denies the content of vital human evolutionary forces which Anthroposophically orientated spiritual science singles out in the present. Just as little as the Anthroposophically orientated spiritual science which necessitates a wide view and a truthful gaze on what moves within mankind and worldly life, can it be united with what is loved in the trade of some circles, which intend, out of a soul lust, the creation of small, inaccessible, obscure circles which demonstrate all kinds of illusions, carry out all kinds of obscure mysticism and so on. Such things are completely unable to be unified into the anthroposophic, wide world view of all life's relationships regarded through spiritual science. It is already necessary that these things appear in all clarity to the souls of our members, who need to break off all sectarian usages, because today the Anthroposophically orientated spiritual science stands in such a situation in the world that it can be attacked from all sides, and be besmirched from all sides. Usually this doesn't happen to some kind of obscure movement. I can let you anticipate a symptom right now which you can find if you take the February edition of the monthly “Die Tat.” Later on I want to speak in greater depth about what makes this “Tat” issue so symptomatic. It appears to actually orientate the entire issue to the Anthroposophical movement which is treated, in this case by a completely untalented author, in what I might call a brutal clarity.

Here you have an article—the whole thing is an article—from the start to the end of the issue, regarding Anthroposophy—which deals with “Anthroposophy and Christianity,” and only stems from a particularly untalented creator. In this article you will find, I may say, pointed out with awkward fingers, the basis, why at this time, seen from the outside, so many discussions are taking place regarding what the orientation is of spiritual science. The man says: “As long as Anthroposophy is esoterically maintained in circles, it can be left to their own devices, like in so many other side streams of spiritual histories. However, if one comes to the fore with a claim which is to renew the viable basis of social renewal as well as public, political and social life on the basis of thought and its second- and third-hand budding `truths,' then it is time to see through this cultural and spiritually favoured `esoteric lore' and duly reject their borders in order that truthful powers of renewal do not become forerunners blamed of false evidence.

“Our generation however, who turns towards Anthroposophy in great crowds, create a symbol like the moving scene in the First Book of Samuel, when Saul, renounced by God before the day of his death, prove the augury true.”

You see what gives people the reason to run down Anthroposophy? It is clearly here where the cumbersome fingers indicated express it in the sentence: “Our generation however, who turn towards Anthroposophy in great crowds ...” It is this, that Anthroposophy also contains certain effective origins within itself, from which one could say that people—forgive me when I repeat the expression, it is tasteless enough even if one can't imagine it, what “great crowds” can be—that people turn to Anthroposophy in “great crowds.” However it is this which causes the attacks and people would certainly leave us in peace if we would have been active for instance, let's say, in the years 1900 to 1907 or 1909. I personally would also not have been left in peace in those days, but anyway the attacks came, I could say, from a more restrictive corner and were not as wilfully destructive as they are now.

What appears to be thoroughly difficult to understand to those close to our movement, is the necessity to extract ourselves from sectarianism. You see one can renounce all the rest—many self-explanatory things can be stated—but one can't refer to such a building as the Dornach Building and still support certain obscure sectarian usages, which are being maintained by many of our members in the Anthroposophical movement. One can't do it any other way. One can't without a certain sophisticated sense, without a broader view of the world do what we do: regarding the way in which we do it. One could sit together in small circles, whether six or forty people, it's the same thing, and somehow make someone broadcast, on my account, something regarding the reincarnation of the holy Magdalene or Christ, or whatever. If it doesn't originate from closer circles one can do it and indulge ecstatically in soul experiences. One can't for instance publically present something like our Eurythmy without having a certain sense about the world. It is assumed that those who participate in such a movement, will have no peeved or no narrow-minded sense but a sense of the world, that one doesn't have some kind of sectarian airs and graces nor such affectations leading to only feeling comfortable in small circles, but it is assumed that one brings together everything connected to the world into what such a movement itself should be, which is not merely a movement of a world view, but includes everything spiritual and actually human life as well. Therefore it is by now necessary for discussions to take place about various spiritual or other movements existing in the world today. Sectarianism has the peculiarity of frequently being haughty and disdainful about everything which is outside its framework and does not understand what is on the outside and want to be cut off and be isolated. With us this can't at all be sustained in the long term. If our movement wants to be taken seriously it is certainly necessary that this or that is not continuously chattered about as it is often done, but it is necessary that we should—I must ever and again use this expression—acquire a certain world sense which enables understanding for what is going on, resulting in a point of view taken from Anthroposophical spiritual science, in order to clarify and treat these things. This is necessary in all areas. Certainly, one may say, someone or other doesn't have the possibility to do this or that. Indeed, one can't expect someone or other to do this or that if the person doesn't get the opportunity. We have actually been able to have extensive experiences of this during the last weeks when certain individuals in our movement have now also decided to act. As a result something quite terrible has come to the fore. It must be added that it is perhaps not absolutely necessary to expect anyone to do what he or she doesn't find suitable. Something is absolutely necessary, namely to abstain from certain things, because certain things, which are not carried out, work further in the most fruitful way.

My dear friends, I don't mean it in such a way that one could say: We are therefore encouraged not to participate in any way.—No, I don't mean this; I mean refraining from certain things which we can already see is of a gossipy or unreasonable nature. It is so, to take only one example, that folly refrained from being expressed in gatherings, finds a way to expresses itself in the opposition members of our movement.

These things are of course difficult to discuss because as soon as something is presented in some false way to the world one can say it becomes a blind act of will attracting blind supporters. That is absolutely not the case, but it is about those things which as a result of unrefined tactlessness, in turn in the most terrible way prevent things from working. Hence, when a saying is continuously repeated by our members, for example from something I have refrained from doing or saying, then we will naturally as an Anthroposophical movement not make any progress. I want to again mention the example, which is found in this “Tat” publication.

You see, it is really out of our membership's requests that such things come about, like cycles (of lectures) simply being printed as they were copied, while the work of the Anthroposophical movement is not given the time to do things in the way they should actually be done. The demand for printing the cycles has indeed originated from members, but normally something like this arises without anyone developing a feeling of responsibility for such a thing. It is natural that something like this arises from the members but a sense of responsibility must develop to not allow a distortion of it. This appears in the most harsh way in the February edition of the “Tat,” where it is said: “I don't want to spend time regarding Steiner who has left some of his disciples to edit the shorthand notes of a part of his esoteric lectures, for example the Evangelists, without taking on the responsibility to bother himself with it any further (as it is strictly assured on the title-page).”

These things should not be propagated further because of my needs, but because the Anthroposophical society needs it; it requires however at the same time that this Anthroposophical society develops a sense of responsibility for that which is necessary for its own sake, not for my sake, not always striking back on me personally because as a result it restricts me representing Anthroposophy as such in the appropriate way towards the world. It is quite necessary that this must be clearly understood otherwise what the Anthroposophical society really presents will in the widest sense prohibit the actual spreading of the Anthroposophic way. I should naturally become much more strict as we face a more serious situation here, than what has merely happened up to now through goodwill amongst the members. Besides, what is to be said in this area nevertheless has to be said. In this context I want to stress once again that it is not enough to merely disprove opposition as it has frequently happened in this way, when from this or that side the opposition turns against us—I have mentioned this already the day before yesterday. Such dismissals which have to be made now and then out of necessity, are worthless, supports nothing really, because today there are definite categories or groups of people who are active in a spiritual or other life, who have nothing to do with people who represent a rebuff and with whom it somehow comes down to a defence, a rebuff, but here we have people who do not care to spread the truth but with whom it finally comes down to spreading untruths.

Thus it is very necessary in such a strong and thoroughly spiritual movement which the Anthroposophical movement is, to point out interrelationships. One can't skip certain events because they become repetitive. For instance, I recently received a letter in which it was written that the writer had turned to the famous Max Dessoir, to this Max Dessoir who has been characterised as adequate among Anthroposophists for his moral and intellectual qualities. Now the relevant person wrote to me that he had a conversation with this Max Dessoir. Obviously such a person as Dessoir can't be converted by a conversation, that we must spare him—because firstly he doesn't want it and secondly it appears stupid to him to have to understand something Anthroposophically. So it makes no sense to try some way or another to continue a discussion with such an individual.

During conversations it also came out that Max Dessoir soon would write a piercing statement against me and my letter writer declared himself available to first read through this work and correct any mistakes so that Max Dessoir at least would not make errors! Now, one can hardly believe that such things, often through celebrities, can actually be done. And what are the results? When one complains and reproaches the person concerned, he would possibly say: “If something like this is not done then it means Anthroposophy doesn't allow itself to argue with scientific people.” Yes, my dear friends, we should not think like this. We should not immediately generalize abstractly, because it concerns the separate, specific moral and intellectual inability of the characterised individual Max Dessoir, and one can't do Max Dessoir the honour by saying we seriously consider him scientific and that we can't get involved in a discussion due to a certain inner spiritual cleanliness. These things must actually be grasped and individually actually followed through and thought through or otherwise we would really experience that writings by the opposition could possibly work well and that no “errors” would appear because these would have been corrected by our members. It is quite necessary to discuss these things because we have arrived at a serious time in our Anthroposophical movement. Much is done this way so one can say, things come about because we crush them, perhaps sometimes, as in this case also, quite out of goodwill; but the best will can turn out quite evil when it is not seriously—here I must use this word again—enlivened by a World sense and thought through. This is something which quite unbelievably often comes from our present Anthroposophical movement.

You see, it doesn't come down to being merely defensive today. Yet if nothing is said in defence, due to the fact that I have something against defending, it is obvious something must be done and it calls for the actual characterisation of the movement as such. In a person such as Frohnmeyer it doesn't merely concern a bare opponent and aggressor of Anthroposophy. It is much more important to establish the manner in which it is done and what kind of sense of truth controls him. It is far more important to know that this priest, Frohnmeyer, has developed out of quite a wide mass of people who are also similar. He is only somewhat freer than the mass; he represents a type of person within these groups which are as such really quite large in the world. Today we can't hope that people who argue from such a basis can't somehow be converted. It is complete nonsense that they do not wish to be converted. We do them the greatest favour when we don't present an opposing truth but stupidities, because then their values are better challenged. So it doesn't come down to mere defence against such people. This would result in an endless discourse of statement and counter-statement. What it boils down to is to characterize out of what spiritual ground and basis this originates and what it means for the entire dampening and degeneration of our present spiritual life. From this general sophisticated viewpoint things must at all costs be lifted because one can hardly remain stuck at mere defensive nagging and counter nagging. This is really what doesn't concern us because for us the concern is about the all-inclusive characteristics of these spiritual endeavours which need to be conquered today. Only through doing this can we effectively counter the Frohnmeyers, Gogartens, Bruhns and Leeses. It's not so tremendously important that someone within such a movement has the time to sit down and write a book; this anyone with a little learning can do, but it depends out of which spiritual foundation these things are presented to the world. One must be completely clear that people like Frohnmeyer can't criticize Anthroposophy differently than the way they do it. One should refrain from the personal. For me it never depends upon the personal. I never want to defend or attack a Frohnmeyer or Bruhns or Heinselmann or whoever they are all called, but I want to characterize this existing spiritual stream out of which these people develop. Individually these people according to today's sense of the word could be honourable men—honourable men they all are when I remind myself of Shakespeare's dramas—but this is irrelevant. I don't want to attach anything to these people personally. For example it doesn't include someone like the priest Kully who actually is the product of certain streams within the Catholic Church.

This is how things must be considered at all costs in today's serious time in which we stand. This is what we must consider under all circumstances. We must develop a spiritual eye, above all, for every decadent spiritual movement, which needs to be identified, characterized. We need clarity regarding today's world situation: amongst quite a large number of people it is simply the case that spiritual science is seen for itself and everything within the content of their lives is made to come out of spiritual science. Above all, when you could search and find proof of what is growing within today's youth then you'll have to say to yourself: these youths inherently have definite inclinations and abilities for which spiritual science is allowed to appear as something natural. On the other hand is the curiosity that there are still enough forces to hold down what actually wants to rise to the surface of existence just as we see it in politics.

Do you believe for instance that in the defeated or conqueror's countries there aren't innumerable individuals who, if they somehow could be brought to act, they wouldn't be able to do something sensible? There are certainly many such people but you don't encounter them because those connected to all old, degenerating world and life attitudes (Weltanschauungen) and who have caused this misfortune, are repeatedly thrown back with an iron fist to the surface. As long as one doesn't get the insight that it is quite impossible to do something with people who come out of old spiritual streams, even when they are in radical parties of the present, as long as one deals with those who have grown out of feeble minded and old spiritual structures, one will get no further. We need to maintain actual new forces, and those who are running the show are holding these forces back.

This is generally happening in spiritual life. We must draw a thick line between what wants to be worked at into today's youth out of the world, and whoever occupied the professorial chair and given the stamp of approval in the exam. This causes terrible pressure. Insight must develop for the content held by the examiner and the learned chair-person for what is involved here, because no lucid insight can arise for what is absolutely needed today. Pessimism says something, the forces are simply not there, it is not permitted. Only once we allow something to happen can we make it possible to get out of degeneration. Is it any use then that we conduct such a beautiful university course? Certainly, we can inspire several young individuals—that actually happened and will happen many times in the future. These young people are inspired for a time but they grow up in an environment of exams and philistinism and of course need to earn their daily bread because they will not manage otherwise and thus their development is of course weighed down and prevented from real striving and creativity in future. These things must be inspected thoroughly and on this track something must be done in order to overcome these things. We can't do this if today, during these earnest times of development, mankind as well as also our Anthroposophical movement refrain from reflecting that these things are present. This kind of thing is aptly depicted in this “Tat” publication.

You see we need to give attention to how these things which grow out of the basis of spiritual science come from thoughts of broad reality. For everything, when it comes down to it, is the main thread found in a far wider line of argument. In my book “Riddles of the Soul” I point out these Dessoir talents: Dessoir relates a very naive and quite beautiful example of his extraordinary spiritual predisposition in his “Schandbuch” (Book of Shame?) which he wrote and which has found much recognition in the world, that it can happen to him while in the middle of lecturing and immersed within his thoughts, he suddenly is unable to continue. Now, I find this a quite extraordinarily characteristic for such thought, that it can be thought and thought and suddenly can't continue. Yes indeed! I find this extraordinarily characteristic ... (Gap in short-hand notes). It is even a precondition that one can't regard him as a serious scholar, is that not so; one comes across such people today, who create something like the “Tat.”

The publisher of the “Tat” is the former Eugen Diederichs. I once came across a collection which Diederichs held to former students, where the discussion was led by Max Scheler as main speaker. Some time before that Diederichs had written to me with the request of wanting to publish one of my books. It was either in 1902 or 1903. The one he wanted was “Christianity as Mystical Fact” which had been published before already. In front of the word “Theosophy” he winced. The next day he wanted to speak to me. This conversation dealt with a publisher's concern out of which nothing came because obviously, nothing could come out of Diederichs ... (Gap in short-hand notes). He said—the mystical writing of Plotin, as well as other mystics should much rather be fostered because, regarding the general wellbeing of mankind, these make such a particularly good impression. It is just like when one drinks sweet wine or something similar and it runs in such a soulful manner through the entire human organism.—And one can hardly abstain from having the thought of him sitting there with rather a full little belly trying to digest the mystical by slapping his full belly with his flat hands!

Later every Mister Mystic supported the “Tat,” and the second publication in 1921 contained nothing other than an article on Anthroposophy, firstly one which was actually written by someone who had been elected by certain communities for the particular battle against Anthroposophy. What he wrote is combined out of pure impertinence and nonsense: I.W. Hauer: “Anthroposophy as the way to the Spirit.”—As second article appeared a refutation of the first from Walter Johannes Stein, “Anthroposophy as monism and as theosophy,” because Diederichs wanted to illustrate his objectivity. Of course he also invited supporters because they were within it all, they were people who read it and obviously were immediately convinced that Diederichs was an objective man, who allows both opponents and supporters to have their say. The distinction is that among the supporter articles a really well written one came from a man, Wil Salewski, “The Goetheanum in Dornach near Basel and the Anthroposophical High School course in Autumn 1920.” Certainly some good articles appeared in it but particularly those written by opponents show a grand stupidity, an absolute misunderstanding for what really should work through Anthroposophy, what it means and so on.

Quite tragic-comic, even joking, I might say, however is a discussion which the publisher Eugen Diederichs presents, entitled: “Towards an Anthroposophic Special Edition.” Permit me to quote the slime: “This booklet is the research from fruitful, striving discussions of religious men who preside over the non-confessional, within the circles of anthroposophic thought, and the director of this movement, Dr Rudolf Steiner. How such an attempt comes across depends on the personality traits found amongst members. I must confess, despite all efforts I was not successful in attracting the Steiner followers into a stronger collaboration.”

I wanted, but they didn't fall for it, not for Diederichs to compliment his “Tat” with something which comes right out of our circles.

“One could say, it is based perhaps on their relation lacking `humility' in the sense of Mennickes, yet as publisher I feel it my duty to be quite impartial and state facts. I hope however that later, another anthroposophist from the priest's rank, Rittelmeyer, will contrast his own serious Christ experience in opposition to those of Michel, Gogarten and Mennicke.

“As private person I can only admit that up to now I have not succeeded to acquire an affirming position regarding Anthroposophy.”

It doesn't appear to taste like sweet wine and thus can only be run down!

“I personally stand completely with Mennikes' point of view that Anthroposophy is the end point of materialism as well as rationalism and as a result this end point indicates no new developments. This doesn't exclude that it can be a transformative constructive phenomenon with new construction and that it therefore contains all kinds of worth, like constructive eclecticism built on values of the past. Anthroposophy doesn't appear to me as coming directly ....”—what is `direct' in this case is at most working from an inaccurately active gastric acid—“and therefore also doesn't give any evidence—despite all the talk about intuition, creativity and Goethe's observation. I know the Theosophists claim this assertion as their highest lack of understanding nevertheless it is spoken out in a singular attitude of secret subconscious powers.”

Regarding this `attitude', I've already spoken to you about it! “So I see from this personal attitude (which should absolutely not be an attack on Anthroposophy, but only a confession).”

Really, it is not very nice, because now someone who is smart enough will say: `He isn't attacking Anthroposophy.'—He is apparently indifferent whether he attacks it or not. Thus he says: “So I see ... it is a danger for the mental investment of the upcoming Germany, and is urgently necessary, not only for the readership of the `Tat,' but above all for the youth with Rudolf Steiner and with those of his spreading movement that it is intellectually dealt with. Because today it has become so close that we need to save ourselves from the chaos of our new development in a safe tower.”

Governments have sometimes saved themselves in “safe towers” during revolutions and riots; something can be said about that! Now however the publisher ends with: “My colleague Ernst Michel, well known to readers of this newspaper through his Goethean sayings and books, in this issue about Anthroposophy is faced with Catholic God- and World-feelings.”

Now, I ask you to listen even more carefully, because then you will notice what I have already characterized for you out of the most varied backgrounds the experience of Catholicism in an apparent rejuvenated gesture becoming a kind of Catholic-Dadaism, finding shelter under Eugen Diederichs in the “Tat.” “His article forms a prelude to the April edition which will connect with the Sonderheft of the Catholic youth movement.”

So this is what I mean when I call it the Catholic-Dadaistic movement. I don't say this without foundation because I immediately want to introduce you to something from Ernst Michel's article: “Anthroposophy and Christianity” and through this have the opportunity to familiarize you with a representative of religious Dadaism.

“It gives me particular satisfaction to have the opportunity to take the Catholic publication with its predominantly Protestant readers of the `Tat' and measure the Protestant individualism against the Roman Catholic community spirit. I hope that out of all the intellectual discussions the basic idea of the `Tat' gets support: the strengthening of its feeling for responsibility for its own development and as a result for the nation as a whole.”

These are the words of Mr Eugen Diederichs. Here, therefore, is a statement of the young catholic movement, which was given out of the prelude of Ernst Michel's article: “Anthroposophy and Christianity.” I have often indicated, also in the last two studies pointed out with great energy, what actually threatens the modern spiritual life from this side. However, now this article of Ernst Michel in the “Tat,” entitled “Anthroposophy and Christianity” is actually total religious Dadaism. The oldest catholic branch of Roman Catholic Christianity is here puffed out to its readers in bombastic words. Extraordinarily interesting discoveries can actually be made regarding this religious Dadaism. For example Ernst Michel noticed a basic truth of Christianity: “It is a basic Christian truth that a person with original sin against God, inherited through blood and essentially enraptured by conditions of sanctification, is unable to extricate himself through his own forces: that he has the independent inclination of wanting to rise to a higher stage of humanity; that the break through from one condition to the next, despite the original cause, appear as real procreative acts of God to this willing creature.”

So many words, so many sentences!—Each sentence can be sifted through and a childish confession found towards a `catholic catechism'. It's interesting that according to Ernst Michel it isn't up to single individuals to discover a final spiritual truth. You have just heard how it depends on `successful outcomes' and so it `breaks through'. A person receives this through grace and then breaks through. One needs to submit to this. A person should not out of his own kind of higher truth strive by claiming: “There is no spiritual development; there is only development and a successful outcome, a break-through.”

It is exceptionally nice how Ernst Michel from this standpoint of Dadaistic catechism says: yes, with dogmas there is something else, they have to be believed as truths!—“Dogmas are not formulated by a person or the community as their basic religious experience (as in `addressing God') but God, the head of the church, speaks as Holy Ghost directly and immediately through the visible church ...”

Thus the fathers of the councils, who are united, or even the Pope who speaks ex cathedra, is not a single person, not so? Now to go into excess, invoke the Dadaism of religion on top of holy Paul who had also said that the single human being dare not research the final truths: “At this point we can listen to the words of St Paul to the Corinthians without the fear of Gnostic interpretation: What we are talking about is God's secret wisdom, that which is hidden, which God prescribed for all times for our glory, which none of the rulers if this world has acknowledged ... to us however God is revealed through the spirit because the spirit explores all things, even God's depths. Speaking of people—who of you know the inner being of someone according to how the spirit lives in him? Just so nobody has ever fathomed the depth of God as the spirit of God. Yet we haven't received the spirit of the world but the spirit which comes out of God, in order for us to understand what gift God has given us ...” and so on.

Now you see, when these words of Paul are stated in the way of Anthroposophy, it all appears to agree. When however one is forbidden to somehow come to the truth through the spirit and then quote these words, one must be a religious Dadaist. It is the same with the description of the Christ experience and so on. In such minds it naturally will not be considered. In worldly minds it may be considered but of course what Anthroposophy has to say about Christ will not enter into such minds. This is where the circulating nonsense comes from which covers the Christ problem in relation to what Anthroposophy has to say about it. Of course one finds the Ernst Michel type who has to say one should have a religious relationship and out of this relationship so to say comes even such expressions as the “great crowds” which I quoted to you before. It's true, this is a particular style of expression.

On the contrary this article of Dadaistic aspects in religious affairs indulges particularly in scolding my style. This is exactly characteristic of such plump, grimy fingers which just don't manage to arrive at what is really necessary—to state spiritual truths. For this it is necessary to have a certain uncomfortable style. It is necessary to exit from such Dadaistic bombast as Ernst Michel depicts. Understandably my mysteries mean nothing to Ernst Michel. He understands absolutely nothing about it. He says for example: “Mystery certainly doesn't come from the naked-extrasensory: whoever looks for it there is a materialist, just as much as someone who looks for it in matter. No mystery is created by taking ideas of ghosts or magical wonders, dressing them in conceptual clothing and presenting them on stage under the theme of `Reality'. No indeed, the secret lies in the creative combination of nature and spirit into an indescribable gesture ...”

Now, just imagine such “indescribable gestures” and then say to yourself: “in the unity of matter and form, from power and direction” in the “emerging form, the living develops itself,” this is of course a quote from Goethe! Now comes the sentence—and you must retain the relevant Dadaistic-religious correlation here in order to tolerate it at all, and not only allow this to be considered as slimy when it must be rolled on the tongue or give it an even stronger instigation—“Speech is the mystery,” yes, it is stated thus in one sentence: “Speech is the mystery, the Son of Man Jesus Christ is the mystery.” You see, you can well understand that the style in which Anthroposophical literature is presented throughout isn't created in this style and it then becomes obvious in copied lectures which have not been corrected by me, that something else can be expressed. It doesn't matter that this is pointed out, how it is in fact quite a strong piece when Diederichs presents the entire nation with such things as a “sense of responsibility,” and as a result transfer the necessity to have a good look at what is transferred by not analysing it a bit more finely. It is really extraordinary when such a Dadaist of religions claims, that such a transfer of inner reality in sound and rhythm in the element of speech, was not connected with me. He then refers to two people where such a transfer has taken place; Nietzsche and Hölderlin. Typical of such a gossipmonger who has no feeling for the spiritual life, when confronted with difficult spiritual content and is challenged by his life's hindrances, he changes his style to that of Nietzsche and Hölderlin, and in this style tragic elements emerge just as they do in Nietzsche and Hölderlin today. The entire wicked thoughtlessness of this contemporary bunch appears precisely at such a point; they have neither any feeling for the tragedy of a Hölderlin or Nietzsche, nor for the necessity of an objective style, which is necessary in bringing to expression spiritual truths and spiritual facts. It is necessary today to point out that once one has shifted into a position to examine such Diederichs-gossipmongers, it must be done in an energetic way. One must see out of which sewers such Dadaism springs today which appears as the Anthroposophical opposition cloaked in the mantel of objectivity and from where it gets its spiritual nourishment.

These things can't be expressed in a different way than this, in these present serious times, because it should not appear in the attitude amongst Anthroposophist that such “objectivity” is different to a refinement in what Anthroposophy is and what lives in her, sunk in her very ground and soil. People like Ernst Michel and their religious Dadaism as well as a Eugen Diederichs and his stomach-mysticism obviously don't have the slightest inkling. This is what we must be aware of and what we need to examine. Today it is necessary to give rise to a serious attitude towards language and not be pulled into something which presents itself to the world in this way. It must be said and must appear in all forms in the world that exactly through what is presented in this way as spiritual striving, mankind becomes gradually increasingly drawn into degeneration, into the morass, and that it is necessary for Anthroposophy to remain standing in work which is pure and not be familiar with something which flourishes in a decaying society.

It fails to interest me when something praiseworthy appears because I give neither praise nor reproach from something incompetent—while the will is incompetent but not the mind—which Anthroposophy wants to heal in mankind. This religious Dadaism of course can't do otherwise than come up with such sentences as: “The power in which people grow up as the foundation of the mystery of faith is also not first in the line of knowledge but in the show of the continued and ever deeper show of introduced love.”

With that nothing other is meant but soulful sensuality which these people keep in mind and which is not supported by what appears in pure spiritual creativity today, where there is no place for these soul-spiritual distortions into religious sexual Dadaism, which, when it also appears under all possible guises, is nothing other than the shameless living of soul sensuality which a good many disguise as religious, but which is nothing other than the shameless living in soulful sensuality.

Against this we must evermore be clear that for once in our time something, when it is allowed to come through, can unfold despite all these oppositions, and can penetrate into the real understanding of spiritual life which is creatively active in material life. We must evermore be clear that we need care in the present for existing abilities in people; we must thoroughly, with every fibre of our soul dedicate this care and that no nuance of seriousness is strong enough to describe the devoted energy required in order to make progress on this path. Here no compromises can be chosen. Duty must be done. Obviously everywhere where Anthroposophy wants to be heard, Anthroposophy must be heard: our duty must be done. We must not allow the slightest illusion to come about in any way. It is necessary to work out of things themselves without compromise. Every one of us has the obligation, as far as possible, to work out of ourselves towards the recovery of the Anthroposophical movement, that it may extract itself from every kind of outsider tendency, from every pettiness, and that it leaves behind any emotional, sensual mysticism, that it really penetrates through to a free contemporary well-informed understanding of existential mysteries. Because only then, when we have seized the mysteries of existence in this way, can it be worked through the soul into practical life which still has to be mastered in order not to become a hindrance towards further progressive development of mankind. Exactly in this last arena the human being is misunderstood in some way. What doesn't all have to happen to distort things most shamelessly! In the well known “Berlin Daily Newspaper” an article was fabricated regarding all sorts of sewer-like stuff which in Berlin is claimed as fortune telling and predictions of the most idiotic manner and in the middle of it all is a reference to Anthroposophy and myself. This article has been sent out into the world. It appears in both English and Swiss publications. In the most infamous, shameless manner this fabricated article is working towards the destruction of the Anthroposophical point of view. It is precisely this that must be seen through, for by merely presenting some opposition will not suffice; the culprits themselves must be characterized. Obviously it would not be so difficult to get through this if the very basis out of which all this stuff is rising is characterized and a mirror held up so they can see their own identity. This is essentially what is necessary and what becomes increasingly necessary. We can't restrict ourselves by placing a kind of anthroposophic dogma on the one side and raise a defence on the other when opposition comes along, but we need to examine everything which is active in the stupefaction and degeneration directed at humanity. This appears very, very often. We need to reiterate this to ourselves every morning in some way, expressed in truth and without fanaticism. I have not in fact spoken about these thing exactly in this way, and I seldom reason, and previously seldom reasoned about these things, but now it has become more frequent because actually your gaze must be directed towards such childish prattle which flows out of the entire decadence of our time, like this fabricated article in Berlin, which is now doing the rounds in the world, like other things also do the rounds, and we really have unbelievable much to do if we want to oppose these things. We could in fact work for twenty four hours against this shameful witnessing. Then the Frohnmeyers come along and say that what they had written was never presented as disapproval. Dr Boos disproved it, had written to the relevant editor, and the editor actually didn't accept the refutation and thus Frohnmeyer had afterwards removed some of it out of the publication which the relevant priest who had been there had seen, and had told a lie; so the reply had simply never been accepted. Consequently, I believe, further correspondence took place in which no mention was made of it, that this reply was made and no comment given. We will really have to be very active if we want to oppose all these things. It is a comfort to a Frohnmeyer or Heinzelmann to focus on something or other they wish to say which doesn't correlate in any way to reality, the relevant item borrowed, letting one believe that it is the truth. Whoever writes something has the duty to do research, to investigate the source.

With these kinds of people who develop constantly out of malice and also a predominant ignorance in their point of view, one finds no end by mere opposition. Essentially it pertains to the spiritual basis which can be found everywhere and really place this in a truthful light.

(Gap in short-hand notes—the closing words follow:)

With reference to these things and not from personal grounds I would like to mention that since April 1919 I have given countless lectures in Stuttgart which contained the most important economic facts and truths as well as giving references to characteristic contemporary spiritual streams which should be exploited. Throughout it is stressed that important material is about to be revealed.—it is “defiled.” Items are printed and sent to members of the tripartite circle and the tripartite unions and are read in small circles. Whatever appears sophisticated is made sectarian. Anyone who is interested in this is wronged because things are not taken up but handled this way.

Basically this is lost work, directed towards something like this—which is actually so far-fetched—if it is not grasped, not laboured further, not worked out in this sense.

Above all else, this is what is really needed today!

It is not only unacceptable that these things are read in a sectarian way in small circles, but these are the things which can be worked through further. Everywhere are growing points for further work! One could ask, why should one work further on something when it simply lies there as printed material, and no one is seriously worrying about it any further? This is what it is about: when it is studied further one can really do extended research into what becomes special within it. This is needed, the further research into the seeds which are given on earth. This is the real active work: by lifting our movement out of any sectarian signs and then taking things simply as they are and allowing them to again enter into sectarianism, we won't make any progress. The content of anthroposophically orientated spiritual science is actually not suitable for some or other sectarian movement; the content is something which can by all means convey the impulse for having an effect in the world.

For this to happen it is absolutely necessary that everyone join forces. Today we are confronted with the necessity that things need practical application. We will not progress if this is not earnestly accepted, if nothing is really comprehended as to how the true spirit also penetrates into actual practical applications.

Then something must be done in such a way which doesn't defile it but instead that it is grasped and actively pursued in a lively way, proving itself.

Now I still want to say this in conclusion: No one, really no one needs to feel affected by these things. Only in a time in which, as I have recently quoted, it is this possible that publications opposing anthroposophical spiritual science as well as opposing its actions can they end by saying: there is enough spiritual sparks and they are necessary because also the actual, physical fire sparks should descend on this Dornach hill—during a time when malice is basically attributed to superficiality, is it a time for serious words by all means.

For this reason I asked you to come here once again. Don't take me amiss when the opportunity came along for me to utter some really earnest words! Before this journey I simply had to bring this to your hearts, to your minds, to your consciousness!

From the whole tendency of these presentations of Anthroposophical Spiritual Science you will see how essential it is to understand that in the various spheres of existence there are different Spiritual beings who have inserted themselves therein, taking part in the work, giving force and direction. It is necessary that humanity in our present age should be permeated with the knowledge that different spheres of existence are guided and directed by different Spiritual beings; for our civilisation has in the course of recent years lost this consciousness of the presence of concrete spirit in life. In general people will willingly talk of the Divine permeating everything, but such talk does not help one to an understanding of the World which can provide a sufficient basis for life. It is, of course, quite true that, in the last resort, everything recognised as spirit must tend towards unity; but if one perceives that unity too soon, one simply loses all real insight into the course of world-happenings; therefore, it is necessary to leave off speaking in general in such an abstract way about the Divine, and learn to know the concrete Spiritual guiding beings in Nature and History, as we have over and over again tried to do. It is from this point of view that I should like to point to-day, to certain really important and significant things at the base of the constitution of our world.

I pointed out in the last lecture that certain Beings find themselves together when it comes to building up and animating man, they find themselves united in opposition in the world. We put the old truth of the opposition coming from the Luciferic and Ahrimanic Spiritual forces before our souls in the last lecture from a certain point of view, and now we will try to understand the matter from another aspect.

Just that, in our newest civilisation, which is now involved in such catastrophic events, and manifests in such decadent forces, just that which is so characteristic in our modern civilisation, is the extension of intellectual thinking throughout the whole of humanity. One must really try to acquire an insight into the quite different mood of soul of civilised Europe before the 7th and 8th centuries. It is just that intellectual thought, which to-day is so prevalent everywhere, which permeates the entire soul-life of man and, from a certain aspect, will still continue to permeate it. The point now is, that one must seek to grasp what is externally comprehensible, and try to unite that with a more psychic concept; for it is well if, from the aspect of the spirit, one really seeks to grasp and permeate external and material existence itself.

That which underlies our organism of thought consists in purely mineral processes occurring within us. Please understand me aright, my dear friends; those processes in us which are processes of our own human nature, and which we have in common with the animal and plant-nature, these are connected only indirectly but not directly, with the fact that we have become intellectual thinking human beings according to the modern idea of the development of man. The fact that we have in us a firmly consolidated mineral constitution gives us the capacity for intellectual thought. When we look at all those Kingdoms of Nature which are outside us in cosmic space, and which are also within us, we must say:—Let us first of all contemplate the sphere of warmth, of the Warmth-ether; we carry the effect of this Warmth-ether in our own blood, and the activity of our blood consists essentially in the fact that our blood, as the carrier of warmth guides these warmth-processes through our entire organism. Now our intellectual thinking does not depend on anything of what transpires in the sphere of warmth, it does not depend upon what transpires in us when we inspire and transmute the air in our organism. Thus, when we consider the warmth-processes in the Cosmos, we can say:—These warmth-processes are continued within the skin of our organism; but that which meets us in the Cosmos as warmth-processes, which specially meets one who regards the Cosmos in the condition when it showed itself exclusively in warmth processes, that which meets us in ourselves as warmth-processes, none of that stimulates us to intellectual thinking. Then if we look to the kingdom of the Air, there too we find events taking place; these processes are continued in our organism through our breathing process; everything we find represented thus is within us through air, but that again has nothing directly to do with our intellectual thinking.

As a third sphere we can look to the phenomenon of water; we see outside in the Cosmos the processes in the fluid-sphere. These too are continued in our digestion in so far as it occurs in the fluids. Outside in nature we see the circulation of Fluids and in ourselves we also see a kind of circulation of fluids. All that transpires in us in that way, has again nothing to do with what is our intellectual thinking. But when we look out into the Cosmos and see how water condenses to ice, how certain mineral substances deposited as sediments, form stones and crystals, in short when we consider the processes of the mineral sphere and their corresponding processes in our own organism, we find that what transpires as mineral processes has to do with all that finally culminates in our intellectual thinking. We therefore as human beings, are incorporated into the Cosmos in these various spheres; but if we only incorporated in these different spheres without being envolved to special degree with the mineral kingdom, with those forces which appear in crystallisation, and in the deposits of salts, and which thus meet us in the external world, we should never have become the thinking beings we have become, especially since the middle of the 15th Century. It is an absolute fact—that since the middle of the I5th Century, it is this working of the mineral forces in the human organism which has become predominant. Previous to that, other forces, those of water, of air, and so on, were dominant to a special degree in man. Hence man's intellectual thinking was not then the most significant element in the works of man.

Now, in everything which surrounds us in the various spheres in which we live, the realm of the solid Earth, of flowing water, of air and warmth, (for a moment we will look away from the higher spheres) in all these are working Divine Spiritual Beings. These spheres do not only consist in what we call material world-forces and entities, but all these spheres are permeated by various Spiritual beings. I will therefore make a diagram to represent an important fact in our connection with the Cosmos.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

Suppose I draw the sphere of the mineral world (see Diagram) as white; I must then characterise the sphere of the water as red, the sphere of the air as blue, and then finally the warmth-ether above as reddish.

Now this is the remarkable characteristic; all those Spiritual beings which the pre-Christian age and especially the pre-Christian Judaism imagined as standing under the guidance of Jahve or Jehovah, and who were regarded by the Hebrew Initiates as belonging to the Realm of Jahve or Jehovah, extended their dominions over the three first Realms—Warmth, Air, Water. And so if I am to draw that sphere in the Cosmos which was under the rulership of Jehovah, I must say; It is this sphere—(the three upper layers). It was really the case that the Jehovah rulership embraced the spheres of Nature as we have them, with the exception of the physical-mineral sphere. It must be quite clear to you that when in the ancient Jewish writings, reference is made to the Divine, this always refers to the Jehovah sphere of Warmth, Air, and Water. That was a deep Initiation-Truth of the pre-Christian age, and is even Spiritually indicated in the story of Creation. It is clearly expressed there, and one has merely to understand the meaning of the Bible words aright to see how this is brought to expression. Jehovah devoted Himself, so to speak, to the Earth, and formed man out of the dust of the Earth. He took that which was not his own sphere, for the forming of external man. The Bible expresses that fact quite clearly. As I have said, in the pre-Christian Jewish Initiation knowledge, it was known as an Initiation-Truth, that Jehovah did not form external man out of His own sphere of power, but turned to the Earth, and from out of the earthly dust which was foreign to Him, He formed that human vessel which could not come from His own kingdom. Then He breathed that which comes from Him, the animal soul, the breath. That it is which He gave forth from Himself, and it came from the three spheres over which He ruled. It is the case that the superficial Bible investigator really does not for the most part, understand what stands in the Bible at all. If one understands the Bible, one sees that it speaks with extraordinary exactitude, one only has to take those sentences quite exactly: “Jehovah formed man out of the dust of the Earth.”—That means out of the mineral sphere foreign to Him, and then He gave to that form from out of His own sphere, the breath of the soul. And so, that which lives in man as the Jehovah Outflow, is what is indicated when it is said that Jehovah breathed the living breath into man.

And so man developed, and while he developed himself further in the mineral kingdom, he developed an element foreign to Jehovah. That kingdom then, in the recent age, since the 5th Post Atlantean epoch, became especially dominant in man, because it formed the basis for his intellectual civilisation. So that we can say: As long as the intellectual civilisation was not predominant in man, so long could a rulership prevail such as that of Jehovah. Then, however, the mineral nature began to make itself felt, from the founding of Christianity up to the beginning of the 5th Post-Atlantean epoch. Humanity had then to be helped from another side. Now you can see how necessary it was for humanity at the time when the mineral Nature became essential, that it should receive the Christ Impulse; because the old Jahve Jehovah-impulse was no longer sufficient.

You must connect what I have just told you with certain definite facts. Just consider the fact that man would not think intellectually, with a fully waking consciousness, if he were merely subject to the Jehovah-influence, which has no influence on the mineral nature. And so, if we wish chiefly to consider the activity of Jehovah in man, we must not look to what is in our external intellectual culture, but simply to what expresses itself in our dreams. That which is dreamt, which does not pass into sharply contoured intellectual concepts which can be grasped by our soul but is dreamt,—that is our Jehovah-life. Everything which moves in the fluidic elements of the more fantastic or imaginative side, everything which can be compared externally with the Moon-influence on man, that is the, Jehovah-nature in man. Opposed to the Jehovah-nature is man's acute thinking; but that he owes to the circumstances that there are salt deposits in him; that there is in man, a mineral activity.

Now just consider the fact that, fundamentally, the old Jehovah religion lost its significance with the Mystery of Golgotha. It had lost its significance because the time had come in the evolution of man, when the mineral nature became predominant in him. But when the Mystery of Golgotha appeared there was still sufficient left of the ancient Dream-Wisdom wherewith to understand it. And those persons who had somewhat transcended the ancient Dream-Wisdom, and who through various kinds of Initiations had, like Saul-Paul, already attained some intellectual culture, for them a special influence was necessary, such as Paul received through the Event of Damascus, in order to grasp the Mystery of Golgotha. It is of a great and deep significance, that in the Christian tradition we are told that, in order to understand the Mystery of Golgotha it was necessary for Saul-Paul, who had in a certain sense been initiated before the Mystery of Golgotha, into the Hebraic Mysteries, for him it was necessary that he should be snatched into that knowledge which did not work in sharp contours, but which expressed itself in the more flowing element of the dream; and thus Paul experienced the certainty that Christ had been present in Jesus through the Mystery of Golgotha. With the old Dream-Wisdom it was still possible to grasp something of the Event of Golgotha, and if, through a special influence such as was the case with Paul, a man was snatched into that Dream-region, he could then understand the Mystery of Golgotha. But now the old Dream Wisdom decreased ever more and more; it only remained in man's dreams, and even there is found in utter decadence. As the I5th Century approached, the culture in Europe was tending more and more to the purely intellectual element; and, under the influence of this intellectual element, our modern natural Science developed.

Now, consider the following:—The old Jewish religion must not be grasped merely with reference to external worlds, that would only be a materialistic religious understanding; we must grasp it in its inner spirit. As an historical phenomenon—the point that strikes us is, that the Jehovah-god was simply the God of one tribe, and outside the limits of the Jewish race Jehovah was no longer the Jehovah-God. That is the essence of the Jehovah Divinity; he did not embrace the whole of humanity, but only one portion of mankind. Fundamentally this feeling of Divinity has passed over to our own age, and in particular one could see it again during the World-War, when every Nation spoke of how Divine Providence or, as many said, the Christ, was helping them! Each Nation wanted so to say, to go forth under the guidance of Christ, against every other Race. But because one utters the Name of `Christ,' that does not mean that one has met, contacted the Christ; for the Christ is only contacted when in one's whole feeling one turns to that Being Who has the Christ Nature. One may say a thousand times over: “We will fight in the name of Christ;” but as long as one is fighting for one Nation alone, one is giving a false name to that being of whom one speaks, one may call him Christ, but it is a false name. In calling that being Christ, one only means the Jehovah-God. In that War-Catastrophe all the Races fell back into a Jehovah-religion, only, there were a great many Jehovahs; every Race worshipped a God who was honoured quite in the character of a Jehovah; Christ completely disappeared from the consciousness of humanity. One could see in those catastrophic events how utterly Christ had disappeared out of the consciousness of man.

We can also see this in other things. A quite modern scientific civilisation has now grown up. Our modern scientific culture, how far does it extend? Fundamentally, it is limited to what is mineral-physical. Just consider how uncomfortable a modern scientist immediately becomes, if one asks him to speak of anything but what is mineral or physical. As soon as the conversation turns to anything else—for instance, to the principle of life, the modern scientist asserts that one can only explain the mineral and chemical processes in the living. He will not enter into the element of life itself and still less into the element of soul. Thus this modern Science has altogether developed within just that sphere which was not included in the Jehovah religion, in an element foreign to Jehovah,—that of the mineral—physical life. This Science, in order that it might become an element of civilisation, had, as it were, to depend on receiving the Divine Spiritual from quite another side.

In the old Jewish religion when man spoke of any sort of cognition, it was always a Dream-cognition. These prophets who had the very highest knowledge, are described as the Dreamers of prophetic dreams. That is all connected with just this very fact. It was through this Dream-Wisdom that men even comprehended the Mystery of Golgotha itself. But this Dream-Wisdom disappeared. The Mystery of Golgotha was indeed transmitted historically and spoken of in the traditional Church Communities, but a true understanding of it could no longer be found. In place of it, Modern Science grew up into an element which knew not Jehovah, a spiritual-less, God-less element; and, because its understanding could not yet expand to the Christ-element, it developed into that physical mineral element, utterly devoid of spirit.

Now this Science, must to its uttermost particle, again be permeated by a Spiritual element. It is spiritless because it can no longer be Jehovistic. External civilisation has attempted to carry on some sort of religious culture, by means of a religious `false coinage,' as when it gave the name of Christ to Jehovah during the War; but this religious element has been carried on through a sort of religious, `false coinage.' But Science has turned entirely away from the Spiritual; it only gives descriptions of the physical-sensible, because man has not yet been able to press forward to an understanding of the Christ, and at most the old Jehovah understanding still prevails, when men storm against each other as they did in the War; but not when they investigate facts of Nature, for then we have a Spiritless Science, and intellectual Science, devoid of spirit. Thus we are surrounded by a sphere in which the Jehovah element still rules. It permeates us; but we are not aware of it, because it permeates us chiefly through those conditions which are our sleeping-conditions. If, when we withdraw into the element of sleep, we could suddenly wake up outside our bodies, we should clearly perceive around us the spirit-nature under the leadership of Jehovah. Then, as it were, on the waves of a Jehovah-Sea, we should see our dreams coming to us out of this Jehovah element.

Again in our Will, of which I have often told you that we are asleep within it, there again the Jehovah Nature rules. In the whole assimilatory system of man, the Jehovah Nature rules, whereas the feelings arise out of the assimilatory system and permeates the rhythmic system, in like manner do certain feelings emerge, coming out of the Jehovah Sea on the waves like our dreams. But, when we live in that sphere which can become comprehensible to us through our understanding and reason, there Jehovah has no share. When the Moon slowly arises in a dream-like light and pours this dream-light over everything, one might say:—“Man has spread a Jehovah character over the fields of the world.” When however, the Sun arises, shining clearly on every stone, spreading itself outwardly on every object and giving it sharp contours, so that we are able to grasp it with our understanding, then the Sun-nature,—which is not a Jehovah-nature, expresses itself, and we can only permeate that with spirit if we can perceive the Christ-Being, if we so look into this world as to see the Christ-Being in it. Modern Science has had no eye for this Christ-Being, and that which is Not Jehovistic but Sun-illumined, and can be grasped in the sharp contours of the intellect, it has taken up and beheld as devoid of spirit.

Now see, that is the deeper connection. What kind of a sphere is it then, which meets man in the mineral? Now, I told you in the last lecture that on the one side within the sphere of Jehovah, because they have remained at an earthly stage of evolution, Luciferic beings appear when we are present in the Jehovah sphere let us say in sleep, then the Luciferic beings make themselves felt in our feelings and impulses of Will. That sphere which we must dominate with our intellect and which is spread out around us as the mineral spheres, that is a sphere foreign to Jehovah and into that those beings have penetrated, who belong to the Ahrimanic sphere. The Ahrimanic beings however, because Jehovah could not, so to speak, keep them away from Him, have penetrated into that mineral sphere. (lower part of Diagram, blue on white) And so, when we turn our gaze to this sphere, we are every moment in danger of being taken by surprise, to our confusion, because of the Ahrimanic beings. These Ahrimanic beings—I have tried to present an image of this in the wooden group which will stand in our Goetheanum—these Ahrimanic beings can in reality only feel at home in the sphere which surrounds us in the mineral world. These Ahrimanic beings are specially intellectually-gifted beings. That Mephistophelian figure which you see below in our wooden group, that Mephistophelian-Ahrimanic figure is extremely clever, utterly and wholly permeated with intellect. But that which is really Jehovistic, and which lives in the human metabolic system, in so far as it is not affected by the salts or altogether mineral,—with all that is of a fluid-nature, which lives in our breathing in our warmth condition, with all that, these Ahrimanic beings have no direct relationship.

Now, these Ahrimanic beings strive to get into man. Man was created of the dust of the Earth. The mineral element is the true sphere of Ahriman, he can enter that sphere, and feel comfortable there; he feels very comfortable whenever he can permeate us through that which is mineral in us. You secrete salts in your body, and thereby you are able to think; through the deposit of salt, through all the mineral processes valid and operative in you,—you become thinking-beings. Ahriman seeks to enter that sphere, but in reality he has only a part in the mineral. Therefore, he is fighting to get a share also in man's blood, in his breathing, and in his assimilation. He can only do this if he can inject certain characteristics into the soul of man; if for instance, he can inject into the human soul a tendency to a dry, barren understanding which seeks an outlet in materialism, and mocks all truths permeated by feeling. If he can permeate man with intellectual pride, then he can approach man's blood, his breath, his assimilation; then he can, as it were creep out of the salts and mineral in man and creep into his blood breathing and digestion.

That is the conflict being fought from the side of Ahriman in the world, through the very being of man. You see, when Jehovah turned to the Earth and created man out of the Earth in order to evolve him further than he could have done within His own body. He had to create man out of an element foreign to Himself, and only to inoculate, to inspire, his own element into him. In so doing, Jehovah had to take something to His aid, something to which these Ahrimanic beings have access; and Jehovah has thereby become involved, as regards earthly evolution, in this conflict with the Ahrimanic element, which with the help of man, seeks to get the world for itself by means of the mineral processes. As a matter of fact, much has been attained by the Ahrimanic beings in this sphere; because, when man is born into physical existence, or is conceived, he descends, he comes down from the Spiritual psychic worlds and surrounds himself with physical matter. But in the present state of our civilisation and according to the customs of all the traditional Churches, man would like to forget his existence in a Spiritual psychic sphere before Birth. He does not wish to admit it. He would like, in a sense, to wipe out of human life any pre-birthly existence. Pre-Existence is being gradually declared heretical in the traditional Confessions. It is wished to limit man to starting with physical birth or conception, and then to link on to that, what follows after death. If this belief in a mere post-mortem condition, in an after-death condition, were to be finally forced on man, the Ahrimanic powers would then win their conflict; because if man only regards what he experiences between birth and death, and does not look to a pre-existence, to a life before birth, the Ahrimanic element would gradually overpower man from out of his mineral processes. Thereby everything of a Jehovistic nature would be thrown out of earthly evolution, everything which has come over from Saturn, Sun, and Moon, would be wiped away. A new creation would thus begin with the Earth, which would deny everything which had preceded it.

For that reason, the perception which denies pre-existence must be fought with all possible energy. Man must realise that he existed before he was born or conceived into physical life. In all veneration and holiness, he must receive that which was allotted to him from Divine Spiritual worlds before his earthly existence. If he adds to the belief of the after-death condition a knowledge of pre-birthly existence, he can thereby prevent his soul from being devoured by Ahriman. It follows therefore, from what I have said, that (it is necessary that we should gradually take into our speech, a certain word which we have not yet got:—Just as we speak of immortality (Deathlessness) when we think of the end of our physical existence, so we must speak of un-bornness (ungeborenheit) for even as we are immortal, so also we, as human beings, are in reality unborn. But just seek everywhere in civilised language for a practicable word for “Birthlessness.” We have the word Immortal, everywhere, but “unborn” we have not got. We need that word;—it must be just as valid a word as the word immortal to-day. It is just in this that the Ahrimanising of our modern civilisation reveals itself; it is one of the most important symptoms of the Ahrimanising of modern civilisation, that we have no word for this “not-being born.” For, just as we do not fall a prey to death when we `die' as it is called neither do we first come into our so-called `birth.' We must have a word which points clearly to pre-existence. One must not undervalue the significance which lays in the word.

You see, my dear friends, no matter how acutely one thinks, there is something in you, something in man, of an intellectual nature, but the moment the thought is expressed in a word, even the moment the word as such in only thought, as in the words of a meditation, that same moment one word is imprinted into the ether of the Cosmos. Thought, as such, does not imprint itself into the ether of the Cosmos, otherwise we could never become free beings in the sphere of pure thought. We are bound the moment something imprints itself. We are not made free through the word, but through pure thought. You can read now about this in my ^“Philosophy of Freedom.” The word imprints itself into the ether.

Now just consider this. The Science of Initiation knows that it is true that in the whole Ether of the Earth, because in the civilised language there is no word for “Un-bornness” (ungeborenheit), this “Birthlessness,” which is so important for humanity, is not imprinted into the Cosmic ether. Now everything which in such important words is imprinted in the Cosmic ether, signifies for the Ahrimanic beings a terrific fear. The word immortality the Ahrimanic beings can very well bear to find inscribed in the World-ether; they are quite pleased, because immortality means that they can start a new creation, with man, and wander forth with humanity. It does not irritate Ahrimanic beings when they shoot through the Cosmic ether, to play their game with man, and they find that from all pulpits immortality is being spoken of; that does not irritate them, it pleases them. But it is a terrible shock for them if they find the word Un-bornness inscribed in the World ether; it extinguishes the light in which these Ahrimanic being move. Then they can go no further, they lose their direction, they feel as though they were falling into an abyss, a bottomless pit. You can see by this that it is an Ahrimanic deed which restrains humanity from speaking of un-bornness. No matter how paradoxical it may appear to modern humanity that one should speak of these things, modern civilization requires that these things should be spoken of. Just as Meteorology describes the Wind, or Geography the Gulf Stream, so one must describe what is going on around us Spiritually, and how these Ahrimanic beings are permeating our environment; and one must describe how well they feel in everything connected; and with dying, even a negation of death itself is not admitted; and how they are filled with a terrible fear of darkness when one speaks of anything connected with the negation of Birth, with growth and thriving. He must learn to speak scientifically of these things, just as that Jehovah-forsaken mineral-sphere can be spoken of scientifically in our modern Science.

You see, this is in reality, neither more nor less than the conflict with the Ahrimanic powers, which we ourselves must take upon us and finally, whether people like to know it or not, that which is so often brought against Anthroposophical Spiritual Science, is at the same time the fight of Ahriman against that which as Spiritual Science, must ever repeat more and more emphatically what is now necessary for modern humanity.

Of course, my dear friends, when one experiences such things as the recent attacks, is it not obvious that these people themselves do not approach Spiritual Science? I have spoken to you recently of the especially ruthless and ugly attack which appeared recently in Germany, in the decent paper, “Frankfurter Zeitung,” in which that paper indeed took up a really disgraceful attitude. It did indeed accept our rejoinder, but only in order to put before it a whole column of its own nonsensical remarks. These things are all part of those which it is either too lazy or not capable of studying.

You see, my dear friends, if you consider such attacks in the light of what I have told you, in connection with these Ahrimanic beings, you will see through them a little. In scientific circles to-day there are a great number of persons who can apparently think quite clearly. And why, my dear friends? Because Ahriman, who permeates the mineral world, permeates them; therefore, you need not be surprised that these people develop a great deal of intellect and power. That is Ahriman within them, it is far more comfortable to allow Ahriman to think in one, than to think for oneself. A man can pass his exams far more easily, he can become a tutor or University Professor with far greater facility if he allows Ahriman to think for him. And because so many people allow Ahriman to think in them, these attacks naturally come from an Ahrimanic side. These things have an inner Spiritual connection, which we must see through. Therefore, people must not be so foolish as to blame us over and over again, if we are forced with sharp words to beat back that which would fain nullify Spiritual Science from its very roots.

To examine the standpoints from which various seekers after the spirit in earlier epochs took their start has a certain importance at the present time. It is important not only because ill-intentioned and dilettante opponents of Spiritual Science maintain that many things have simply been taken over from ancient traditions, but above all because the knowledge of what can be discovered to-day from the original spiritual sources is clarified when we compare it with the faculties possessed by mankind in earlier times, and with the different kinds of quests for knowledge of the spirit in epochs of evolution when men's consciousness was essentially instinctive in character. In order to indicate something in this direction I want to speak to-day of how Christ-Jesus has often been brought into conjunction with one who was His contemporary—Apollonius of Tyana.¹

The two figures have in a certain sense been confused, and endeavours have been made to compare, in a quite unhistorical way, the life of Apollonius of Tyana with that of Christ-Jesus. Such a comparison does, admittedly, bring to light a fairly considerable number of external, biographical details where similarity is shown. We know that in the Gospel narratives of Christ-Jesus there is much that for the modern mind falls within the concept of "miracle", and the biographies of Apollonius of Tyana also tell of all kinds of miraculous deeds performed by him. The way in which such things are expounded today, however, simply shows what superficial ideas prevail about the evolution of humanity. These stories of healing of the sick and similar happenings, called "signs" in the Gospels, are connected with a stage of human evolution altogether different from the one in which we are living to-day. The psychic influence of one man upon another, even man's psychic influence upon the inorganic environment, has waned greatly in the course of time as far as ordinary life is concerned, and when we are told of such happenings at the beginning of the Christian era, one who has inner understanding knows that what men in those times were able to demonstrate was viewed altogether differently from things of a similar nature that may happen to-day. Quite different premises must be the starting-point in our times, premises that must be created through spiritual- scientific knowledge.

If we want to understand the Gospels rightly, we must not by any means place the main value upon the stories of the miracles but we must realise that stories of miracles performed by a man of outstanding moral eminence were in those times accepted as a simple matter of course. No difference whatever in this respect was assumed to exist between one such as Jesus of Nazareth, in whom dwelt the Christ, and a man such as Apollonius of Tyana.

Let us understand one another clearly.—What is narrated about such men and is to-day called a "miracle" was taken as a matter of course. Nothing of special importance was meant to be conveyed by such narratives. And when modern theology is at pains to deduce the divine nature of Christ-Jesus from the fact that He performed miracles, this theology only shows that its standpoint is not truly Christian—apart altogether from the fact that such a conception runs counter to historical reality. With Christ-Jesus the essential thing is never the actual performing of the miracle, but always that which is disclosed to us through the stories of the miracles. The important point to emphasise always is that when men of earlier times strove to work wonders, they had recourse to a lower force of the Ego, whereas Christ-Jesus worked out of the force of the Ego itself. We should not rightly understand the Lord's Prayer if we were to explain its existence by saying that, the single sentences are already to be found among earlier peoples and that it is therefore ancient. Anyone who compares these earlier forms of the sentences in the Lord's Prayer with the Lord's Prayer itself, will realise that with the Lord's Prayer the essential thing was that what had formerly been expressed in a way which did not point to the Ego, should now be expressed in a way which did point to the Ego.²

We should not therefore go in search of the similarities with Christ-Jesus recorded in these particular biographical data. It is natural, of course, that similarities should appear in narratives concerned with the performing of miracles—that is to say, happenings that are now called miraculous. Account must be taken of something altogether different if we are to be clear as to how a figure such as Apollonius of Tyana stands in relation to Christ-Jesus. And the first thing to notice is the following:—

Of Apollonius of Tyana it is told how in his childhood and growing years he showed evidence of great gifts; how he participated in the very highest kinds of instruction available in those days, as for example the teachings that had grown out of the Pythagorean School. But then it is further narrated that in order to acquire knowledge, Apollonius of Tyana set out on long journeys; we are told of these journeys, first of those less distant and then of his far journey to the sages of India. We hear how he learnt to admire and venerate these sages, and how through them he pressed forward to certain wellsprings of knowledge. Then we are told how he returned, inspired by what he had witnessed among these Indian sages, and taught in manifold ways again in Southern Europe. It is also said that he went to Egypt, and how, having first absorbed in the North of Egypt all that was accessible there, he found it very insignificant, compared with the wonderful wisdom he had encountered among the Indians. He journeyed up the Nile towards its sources, and also to the centres of the so-called Gymnosophists—the community of wise men who, after the Brahmin sages of India, were the most deeply venerated in those times. But we are told that Apollonius was already so steeped in Indian wisdom that he could distinguish between it and the lesser wisdom possessed by the Gymnosophists of Egypt. He returned from Egypt and went on various other remarkable journeys; in Rome he was persecuted, thrown into prison, and so on.

Now the fact of paramount interest to us is that these great journeys undertaken by Apollonius of Tyana are always associated with the widening and extension of his own wisdom. His wisdom increases all the time through his contact with the wisest men in the world of his day. He travels from place to place, seeking out those who were in possession of the greatest wisdom at that time.

In this he is to be distinguished from Christ Jesus, whose sojourn on earth is spent in a comparatively small area, who utters what He has to say to mankind entirely from the inmost essence of His Being, who has to speak, not of wisdom to be found in the surrounding earthly world, but of what He has brought down to the earth from worlds beyond the earth.

Attempts have actually been made to ascribe journeys to India to Christ-Jesus as well, but that is all sheer dilettantism. The essence of the matter is that two beings stand in contrast to one another in the same epoch: on the one side, Christ-Jesus, who speaks only out of the super-earthly; and on the other, Apollonius of Tyana, who gathers what is actually to be found on the earth, although through his own great gifts he is able to absorb it into his very soul. That is the fundamental and significant difference, and those who do not perceive it fail to understand what the existence of these two personalities signifies for a later age.

Now certain matters associated with the person of Apollonius of Tyana point to features characteristic of very early times. I am speaking now of times long before the Mysteries, times, therefore, of great antiquity in human evolution. Something of these characteristics remained in the days of a later humanity, and we shall see how Apollonius of Tyana comes across what has thus remained, both among the Indian sages, the Brahmins, and among the Gymnosophists in Egypt. But we understand the point in question quite clearly when in spiritual-scientific historical research we go back to very early times, and Apollonius of Tyana himself, according to his biographers, points to it in emphatic words. He asserts that the well-nigh immeasurable wisdom he encountered among the Indian sages is bound up with the influences from beyond the earth which stream down upon men inhabiting a particular-region of the earth. This is an indication that man is not exposed to earthly influences alone.

It is easy to study these earthly influences, although in the case of the human being they are now being thrown into the background by others. There are, however, certain lower organic creatures which take on, purely through metabolism, the colouring of what they consume. In such creatures we can perceive exactly how the products of metabolism give them their colouring and other characteristic qualities. I have spoken to you of how, in the sense of Scholastic philosophy, Vincent Knauer, my old friend from the Benedictine Order—that is to say, he, not I, was in this Order—stressed that what is contained in the spiritual substance of a concept is still a reality vis-à-vis the purely material form of existence, the material object. In line with the Schoolmen, he said: If a wolf could be segregated and fed only with lamb's flesh for a very long period, the wolf would not become a lamb, although he would then consist only of lamb's flesh. For Vincent Knauer this proves that in the wolf, in its form and configuration—that is to say, in what the concept "wolf" embraces—there is something other than matter, for in respect of matter the wolf would be a lamb if he had eaten only lambs. But the wolf does not become a lamb.

In the higher animals, then, things are somewhat different from what they are in the very low organic creatures; even in their colouring these creatures make manifest the influences of their metabolism. The influences of metabolism in man are even less marked than they are in the wolf; if it were otherwise, the people living in districts where a great deal of paprika is consumed would have yellow complexions, and it is common knowledge that, at most conditions resembling jaundice and the like set in when certain substances are eaten. To a high degree man is already independent of the influence of earthly metabolism. But today, in the age of materialism—which in truth has not only a theoretical but an absolutely real basis—he is less open to the influences of the world beyond the earth than was formerly the case. And ancient Indian wisdom has its essential source in—to put it summarily—the particular way in which the rays of the sun stream down upon the land of India. The angle at which the rays stream down is not the same there as it is in other regions. This means that the extra-earthly, the cosmic, influences upon man are different from those elsewhere. And if a man of ancient India had spoken entirely according to his own consciousness, then—if he had had any knowledge at all of what Europe is—he would have said something like this: Over there in Europe the people can never attain to any wisdom, for the sun does not stream down upon them in such a way as to make this possible; they can't help being tied down to what their metabolic processes cook up from earthly substances. Over in Europe there can be no talk of wisdom. The men there are an inferior breed, half-animal, for they have none of the sunlight that is essential if anyone desires to be a wise man.—This, in effect, is what an ancient Indian would have said if he had spoken at all about these things. Because of his special relationship to the downstreaming rays of the sun, he would have spoken about the rabble living in Europe very much as a man of to-day speaks about his domestic animals. Not that he would have had no love for these inferior human beings. A man may greatly love his domestic animals, but he will not regard them as his equal in spiritual capacity.

By this I want only to indicate that the earlier wisdom native to man was dependent upon the earthly locality. This is also connected with something else. In earlier epochs, this condition of dependence was the cause of differentiation in humanity to a far greater extent than was the case later on. Differentiation in the human race arose directly settled peoples left their place of abode, somewhere or other, and went to other regions. Then they changed psychically, even physically. The differentiation in evidence all over the earth is connected with this. And so what came to expression through a man of antiquity was essentially what he received from his earthly surroundings, when he absorbed these influences of the earth into himself. We can therefore say: In olden times man was a true sage only if he lived in a place on the earth where it was possible to become wise. For this reason the men of old were in a certain sense right to seek out such places. If, in a similar way a man were to believe nowadays that wisdom is restricted to somewhere in Asia, this would prove only that he is not living abreast of his times—that is to say, of modern times. True, there are curious people who even to-day are always talking about specially favourable localities on the surface of the earth. In the sense of genuine spiritual knowledge these things are dilettantism, but when we go back to very early times we must think of a man who was truly wise being dependent upon his place of abode.

What kind of man, then, is Apollonius of Tyana? Apollonius of Tyana has the urge to become a wise man on earth, in spite of the fact that his home is not in such places as the region near the sources of the Nile where the Gymnosophists lived; for this was also a place where wisdom could be acquired in great abundance. He had within him the urge to become wise, and therefore he set out on travels—as once upon a time Pythagoras had done, in the same situation.

So we see how Apollonius of Tyana is, in a certain sense, a man who seeks over the earth's expanse for that which satisfies the inner needs of the human being and leads him to the attainment of spirituality. For the times to which what I have just said about man's dependence on an earthly locality very specially applies—these times continued on, more or less in echoes only, into the days of Apollonius of Tyana. Something of what ancient India had once been still survived there, and of this Apollonius of Tyana acquired knowledge. But to men representative of a more modern age he was already an example of one who is obliged to seek in particular localities for what in the highest sense can be human wisdom; he is prompted, however, to seek it by distant journeyings.

The Mystery of Golgotha stands before us here, pointing the way to the new phase in the evolution of humanity. And we can say: Because in Jesus of Nazareth there dwelt the Christ, Jesus of Nazareth was that Being of the earth who has set the standard for this quest—a quest that is no longer dependent upon locality. On this account, Apollonius of Tyana and Christ-Jesus are in utter contrast. Apollonius, as a contemporary of Christ-Jesus, is someone who, in respect of his human makeup, no longer lives in the age of antiquity, but already in a new era. But in this new era human life cannot do without the Christ Impulse. The Christ Impulse comes from Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus of Nazareth and Apollonius of Tyana stand at the two poles of humanity at the beginning of our era.

Here we have an indication, of what it is that has come into humanity through Christ-Jesus. It is important above all for us to grasp what I referred to in the lecture yesterday,³ that what has entered into humanity comes to expression in the Resurrection-thought. The Resurrection-thought affirms that what binds man to the earth need not lead to his perishing, but that when he takes the Christ Impulse into himself he can find something within his being that raises itself out of and above the earthbound. What rends and agonises the heart in the picture of the Man of Sorrows on the Cross is in reality the forces that are inculcated by earth-existence into the human body, and therewith into man's being as a whole. In contemplating the Crucified One, the face drenched in suffering and the body wracked with agony, we find the very deepest expression of what earthly existence can stamp into the human being. But if we look upwards to what should be seen above the Cross, to the Resurrected One, then we become aware of that which can perpetually be resurrected in man, can rise above that which contains the earth-forces only, thus revealing to us that man's nature is cosmic, that the earth impregnates its forces only into one part of his being, but that out of these forces there can rise what is in truth the cosmic element in him.

These are the things that must be realised in connection with the Resurrection-thought, especially in our day when we are striving for the resurrection of spirit-knowledge. The Resurrection-thought must above all help us to grasp that in earlier times there existed an instinctive wisdom, truly great and essentially linked with man's eternal being. But the wisdom in these olden times had always an element of suggestion in it, an influence that came over a man, in which he did not live with the freedom inherent in his real being. In all the ages of antiquity there was relatively little expression of man's own will. But it is paramountly the will that must be developed in the epoch of earth-evolution following the Mystery of Golgotha. In respect of his will, the man of ancient time lived in a state of dullness. But the will must be permeated with wisdom, with the force contained in ideas, with spirituality. Upon this, everything depends. Hence above all things it is necessary that the Christ Impulse shall draw into man's will—only this must be understood in the true sense. From the present time onwards into the future, the unfolding of the will is particularly essential. Man must become more and more conscious in respect of his will. In the general life of civilisation to-day we experience merely the reaction that is generated by convenient adherence to old conceptions, the reaction against the development of the will. At the present time men would do anything rather than develop the will; they have a downright hatred of it.

• 1. The following passage occurs in Lecture III of the Course From Jesus to Christ, given by Rudolf Steiner in Carlsruhe, October, 1911.
  
  "Apollonius of Tyana is an individuality who went through many incarnations, who had acquired lofty powers and who reached a certain climax in his incarnation at the beginning of our era. Note carefully.—The individuality of whom we are speaking, and who in past ages had had many incarnations, is he who lived in the body of Apollonius of Tyana, and had therein his earthly field of action . . . And be-cause we know that a human individuality takes part in the building of his human body, that the latter is not simply a duality but that the human being works upon the form his body takes, we have to say: The body of this individuality was built up by him into a certain form purposely for his own use. This we cannot say in reference to Christ-Jesus. The Christ came in the thirtieth year of the life of Jesus of Nazareth into the physical body, etheric body and astral body; the Christ therefore had not from childhood built up for Himself this body. The relationship is quite different between the Christ-Individuality and the body, and the Apollonius-individuality and his body…"
  
  See inter alia: Emil Bock, The Three Years, chapter I "Apollonius of Tyana and Jesus of Nazareth"; and G. R. S. Mead, Apollonius of Tyana, the philosopher-reformer of the first century A.D.
  
  The only complete Life of Apollonius of Tyana is by Philostratus, an Athenian of the third century A.D. This work is quoted by Emil Bock, and exists in English translation.
• 2. See Lecture IX of the Course The Gospel of St Matthew, pp. 139-44. Dr Steiner quotes from the German translation of the book by J. M. Robertson, Christianity and Mythology, Part III, The Gospel Myths, pp. 415-21, where arguments are adduced in an attempt to show that the sentences contained in the Lord's Prayer were derived from pre-Christian Jewish sources. But these older versions do not contain the sentence: "Thy Will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven"—which implies the activity of the Ego itself. In pre-Christian times, men experienced the Father God as the ground of existence while they were in a state of suppressed consciousness. But with the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven to Earth, the experience was henceforward to take place in full consciousness. "Christ Jesus inaugurated an evolution in human nature based on the retention of the full Ego consciousness. He inaugurated the initiation of the Ego…” p. 144.
  
  The terms used by Owen Barfield in his recent book Saving the Appearances, to depict the evolution of human consciousness, are very illuminating in this connection.—Whereas the old, pre-Christian sentences still assumed "Original Participation", the Gospel version of the Lord's Prayer points to "Final Participation".
• 3. This lecture, entitled Spirit Triumphant, is included in the Easter volume of the series The Festivals and their Meaning, p.62.

In the November number of the Roman Catholic Hochland an article has appeared, entitled “Three Worlds,” bearing the author's name Hei Lung. It is about the civilisation of our present age and its impulses, and is written from the Chinese standpoint. It does not interest us here to inquire how deeply this essay is rooted in Chinese civilisation or what it signifies as regards that civilisation; what must interest us far more is the fact that it appears within our own European world and sets out to consider the civilisation of our present age from a certain point of view. In the first place it deals with a division into three worlds centering round three significant impulses of culture or civilisation in the present age. The first impulse for civilisation which the author distinguishes is the modern Western civilisation, to which he then opposes the second impulse of civilisation, the Eastern, Asiatic culture. About the third impulse we shall have to speak later. He considers our modern European civilisation from an Asiatic point of view, from the point of view innate in a man whose ideas spring from an ancient civilisation of the Earth and are expressed in the feeling of a human being who stands in the midst of what has until to-day been considered as the Asiatic culture, a civilisation having its source in ancient, gigantic, mighty treasures of wisdom which have now fallen into decadence.

There is a great deal in this man's feelings (and it lives there with deep intensity) of what one may call a devastating criticism of modern European civilisation. The Asiatic of to-day (as one can see also, for instance, in Rabindranath Tagore) speaks from a point of view derived from primeval civilisation; and he speaks from that point of view about the civilisation of modern Europe, and criticises, in a purely negative way, all that our modern Europe has to offer. Listen to the following sentences from the essay and you will see at once what a critical spirit finds utterance in that which resounds to us from Asia concerning our modern civilisation.

“Indeed, the modern European learning has something of a wretched spirit of servility. It has assumed something of the plodding nature of a technical age. It pours into the world as a hair-splitting specialisation, clouded and encircled by thousands of quotations, and steel-clad with statistics and trivial experiments. It no longer possesses any depth, any wisdom, or any life! Its results may be highly valuable, judged by its own standard; but no other valuation is permitted, and anyone who wishes for another is in danger of being considered behind the times—even medieval. It is the same in the economic sphere. There the machine has superseded life, and the competition of industry fills all the gaps with new needs and new ways and means to satisfy them; and so the organisation of society drags on a while longer completely disinherited; and in its midst the broad masses of the people appear quite docile. Yes, the age of world-embracing trade, of never-resting machines, of standing armies, of cinematographs, of machine guns, sky-scrapers, gramophones, and cosmic riddles—finds utterances in the breast of man and cries aloud: ‘All this is subject to me.’ But the angry elements and the human ‘atoms’ echo sinisterly, they give out a sinister echo which expresses itself in the wars and revolutions still taking place to-day. In all the restlessness one hears the cry: ‘All this is tending to destruction.’”

That indeed is a sharp criticism of what has arisen within modern human evolution as the European civilisation. Let us attempt for once to put before us the essential characteristics of this European civilisation. In reality it is rooted in what has been produced (and often described in our lectures) in the last three to four centuries, during which the Natural Sciences have emancipated themselves in a certain sense from the historical tradition and from the religious life of former ages. This modern civilisation is also rooted in the world of modern technics, which has united itself with modern Natural Science. Everything which has sprung up and developed out of human depths manifests a certain opposition towards historical tradition. The personalities who stand at the starting point of our modern civilisation are a characteristic of our European life in this sense.

Let us consider, for instance, such a personality as Copernicus, to whom one has to look back for a great part of what lives in this European civilisation in the direction I have characterised. Copernicus was a Roman Catholic priest, and so he lived in the first place with those ideas into which he was educated as a Catholic priest; but he lived in an age in which, side by side with what his education gave him, something was put into his soul which later developed into the mechanical perception of the heavens of modern times. From this same source has also come what has developed into the mechanical world-conceptions of our recent times, and even the mechanical world-ordering in political and also in the economic life.

While all this took possession more and more of the widest circles of civilisation in the West, it developed in such a way that according to Eastern perception it has only a body and no soul. The soul was altogether lacking. It appeared to the oriental as if everything he sees in the European is to be traced to this lack of soul, this passing over into men's thinking of what is purely mechanical. Whenever he faces a man of the West the Oriental feels himself absolutely misunderstood by the European in his whole feeling, and in everything which he calls his wisdom. Characteristic passages could be quoted again from this article to the effect that Japan has assimilated something of the Western European civilisation and, thereby exposed itself, according to the Eastern view, to a certain danger.

“The Japanese people have indeed exposed themselves to the danger of exchanging their deeply-founded patriotism and ancient knightly chivalry for European piracy and spirit of exploration. Nevertheless that ancient ferment will not at once prove ineffective, which helps to preserve the ancient achievements in the East, and joins together the East of Asia with the South in one Great Unity—I mean, the ferment of Buddhism.”

So what the Asiatic perceives in what comes to him from Europe is practical piracy and the spirit of exploitation. The Asiatic regards the matter in such a way that, with a mechanical view of the Cosmos, with all that has poured into the East in opposition to the older tradition the practical spirit, the tendency to exploitation flows in too. The Asiatic holds that the Europeans have gradually forgotten to carry the element of soul into what expresses itself as their culture or civilisation. The Asiatic has the idea that Europeans no longer knows to-day the meaning of soul. The following words, for example, are very characteristic.

“What then has Europe done?” (He means in recent years.) “Where are now their holiest treasures? Buried, forgotten, pushed aside, or piled up in museums, fully docketed.”

What is really fundamentally true is seen by the Asiatic in very sharp outline. He sees how the European has reached the point of taking treasures that were formerly the very life of Europe but which only had influence on man because they were placed in a suitable architectural setting so that men felt the same spiritual influence streaming to them from the paintings on the walls, and speaking to them our of the architecture—the European has taken these treasures and shut the away in museums, where they remain piled up and ticketed, preserved only as antiquities. The Asiatic feels very strongly that that which was the soul of a former civilisation has been labeled in this way because the European fundamentally no longer knows what soul is in the world, in the Eastern sense. And so the Asiatic sees in Europe pre-eminently lack of soul.

“These people of the East, of this second world, had they holy treasures? Could they dare, when smashed down a dozen times by the combined bombardments of Europe, to act independently and indeed spiritually?” That might be dangerous to European civilisation. The Asiatic asks whether it is worth while to learn this—if one wishes to to be human in the full sense of the word, and does not consider the world only from the standpoint of the bodily mechanisation, but from that of the soul—whether it is really worth while to apply one's interest to that which is, above all, so important to the European.

“In full view of the great walls of the Summer Palace on the Hill of Ten Thousand Delights, there rested one afternoon the widowed Empress of China, nearly 70 years of age. Se sat on a throne covered with golden silk, and it was placed in her favourite spot on the wonderfully artistic marble ship afloat on the great lake. In the middle of all the magnificence around her, there were smashed sculptures, paintings, and glass works of art from the pavilions; and turning to a new lady of the Court, the Empress Tzi-Hei said: ‘That was done by the European soldiers (in 1900), and I did not desire to restore those things and so forget what they teach.’ She was thinking of all those bitter experiences and of how, almost 40 years ago, a faithful State Councillor had described to her the spirit of the Europeans in these words: ‘They have concluded some twenty treaties with China which contain at least 10,000 written characters. Is there in any one of them even a single word referring to respect for parents of to fulfillment of one's duties, a single word which has any reference to the right observing of ceremonies, of duties, of purity, of the development of a right feeling of modesty—which are the four basic sentiments on which our race rests. No, and again no. Everything of which they speak concerns material advancement.’ (Wu Ko Tzu Hei, 1873.) That Empress therefore could not possibly have any respect for the ‘ideal’ side of that European explanation, which was the Christian Missionary's; because as the leader of a State, all her life long, she had heard only of the material advantages which those European powers acquired by their protection of the Missionaries. She had a sharp eye for the whole spiritual backwardness and encroachment of those Europeans who forced themselves on her, although towards the end of her life she learned to value their technical methods, their railways, their mines, their armies and navies; but only as a means to an end. Although often calumniated, she was really a great personality. Every day she devoted the morning hours to her Executive Ministers, listening to advice, asking questions and hearing reports from the vice-regents, examiners and censors and frequently she listened to a very freely spoken and at times uncomfortable judgment.”

Now, that is an Asiatic criticism, and a criticism which would always be given in like manner if we heard it from the mouth of any person who stands to-day in what has remained in Asia as the relics of the old Wisdom. Every Asiatic would naturally contrast the world he sees in Europe with the second world, which is the world he himself possesses and to which he still looks,—not seeing that it is a world which has fallen into decadence; for it is indeed a world which had its starting-point in an Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition incomprehensible to the European, but which has now fallen into decadence. The Asiatic who is an educated man in our sense of the word, always speaks—as Asiatic—in such a way as to make it plain that his feeling is like this: The Earth is the dwelling place of mankind; on this Earth there once dwelt higher beings than those we call man, and they founded a civilisation which human beings took over and lived in. And the Asiatic believes he is still living in that divine civilisation. The Earth has taken over, as it were, the inheritance of a primeval treasure of wisdom which spoke to the whole man, not merely to the intellect, as the Modern European mechanistic culture does. The Asiatic has no interest in what might come of the Earth, apart from the fact that it is the bearer of what has remained as an ancient inherited treasure of wisdom.

Now my dear friends, it must be admitted, the modern European is absolutely lacking in understanding for this whole method of thinking and feeling; that must be admitted.

The modern European reads his Homer and his Aeschylus, and values them in a certain sense; but he cannot take even the very opening words in earnest. He cannot do this, because he is the outcome of our modern civilisation. How can the European of to-day take seriously what resounds from ancient European times? He reads his Homer, and in the very first lines he finds these words: “Sing to me, O Muse, of the wrath of Achilles!” Homer does not say he is relating the story, but the Muse, which means that a Spiritual Being in his own inner being is relating it. The Europeans does not take this very first line seriously, he takes it as a phrase. He regards it, well, just as something that is said. He has no real feeling of how the Greek knew his soul to be used by Divine Beings, who really spoke in his soul; so that when his mouth spoke, it uttered not what his intellect imprinted on his mind, but what a Divine Being was speaking within him. Who is there to-day who understands deeply and earnestly that the Greek, when he sang, felt himself to be the vessel of a Divine Being? How then did the Greek feel? He saw in that Divine Being something which once upon a time fashioned on the Earth a civilisation, formed for beings one has to call men, though of course they were not human in the sense of to-day. The Greek believed that that Divine Spiritual Being still lives amongst mankind and is able to inspire men; but it must not be supposed that it is only a voice in the inner being. Hence that deep opposition that meets us to-day whenever we compare Homer with Aeschylus. Homer sings while letting the Muse sing, Homer sings as the composer of Epic; he sings as a narrating poet. That is connected with the perception that ancient Beings, who once descended from spiritual worlds to the Earth, were still active in man and could sing of what had been and of that whence the Earth proceeded and whence developed everything within which we live. If one is to relate in this very way in narrative form, describing what has produced our present civilisation, one must go back to those divine Spiritual Beings who once descended from higher spiritual worlds and can still inspire men. Herein for the Greek lay the nature of the Epic &mdash the Epic was uttered by Beings who had come over to this Earth from previous incarnations of the Earth.

On the other hand, the Greek felt that something else lived in man, which would only find its real development in the future, something which is, at yet sub-human in man. This the Greek felt to be Dionysian, and through those forms of the Gods he introduced, however lightly, in the Dionysian something of the animal characteristics. That which spoke from the depths of the impulses of human emotion, of human will-power, was felt by the Greek as something which is still chaotic in man; only in future worlds in which the Earth will incarnate, will there be found as tranquil an expression for its being as man now has in his epic, where he can relate in quiet contemplation and observation.

Now that which is the Dionysian element and still forces itself out of man in and animal way,—that the Greek inscribes in his Drama. Therefore we see shining in Aeschylus the God Dionysus, who in a primeval dream of Greece was at first the chief person there;—and round him the chorus developed and sang of all that related to Dionysus. When the Greek looked within himself he could say: “In me there lives something higher than man, something which has come from primeval worlds to the Earth. If I give myself to that, I give myself to something superhuman and I say: ‘Sing to me, O Muse, of the wrath of Achilles.’” Then the Greek turned to the spiritual past from which man has come, and wrote Epics. Then the Greek turned to the future, he saw that which would only develop into man in the future, when the Earth shall be, as it were, superseded by other worlds; he saw that in the Dionysian animal-spiritual form, and he saw it in a state of dramatic agitation and dramatic movement. When he looked at man from outside, he did not speak of the Muse, but of Dionysus, and then he became not epic but dramatic. The really human element the Greek only perceived in Poetry, the superhuman he saw in the Epic, and the sub-human in the Drama, creating the germ for the future. That which was really the human element, rhythmically ebbing to and fro in human nature itself,—that the Greek saw in Poetry. Such was the position assumed by the Greek in this spiritual-physical world, thus did he feel himself related to his spiritual-physical world. On the one hand, the invocation to the Muse must be taken seriously if we really desire to present the thought-life of the Greeks. On the other hand the fact that their original drama did not actually present human events, but the working of Dionysus in man—that again we must take in all earnestness; for we must point out that the Greek spoke somewhat as follows: “If one wishes to regard man not inwardly, but only from without, one must meet the form of Dionysus. Apollo and Dionysus—Apollo the leader of the Muses, the preserver of that which incorporates itself from the past into the present of the Earth; and Dionysus, the agitating desolating germ, which will only attain to clarity in the future.” Those are the two great opposites—Apollo and Dionysus. And between them in the middle the lyric element of the Greeks.

We must therefore, my dear friends, look back to such conditions of the primeval culture of Europe if we are to unite the right feeling with what we see around us to-day, when this feeling of self in the Cosmos contrasts with the Gods of the Past and the Gods of the Future; we must set over against each other this ancient epoch of European civilisation with what lives to-day as the mechanical view of the Cosmos, which the Asiatic so sharply criticises. We must have a feeling for how much such a modern as Goethe was placed, not of course in such a mechanism as we live in now, but in an age nevertheless in which the germ of this mechanism was already developing. We see how Goethe, with every fibre of his soul, longs to turn from this European life to what European civilisation once was. That is what lay in the feeling of Goethe when, in the 80's of the 18th century, he longed for Italy and for what was still there in Italy although in decadence, in order to have a feeling for that out of which European civilisation had sprung.

We must quite clearly realise that although the Asiatic lives in the decadence of that ancient civilisation, yet in spite of the decadence of his own civiisation, he has a clear feeling for what it once was and what it has become. Hence his sharp criticism which works with such intensive shadows; all the time exalting those lights which, according to his view, are still to be seen in the East; for even if they are externally clouded, yet, according to his view, they still have soul. And when he turns to his own soul he feels no need for interests which spring from an admiration of railways, steamboats, cinemas, gramophones, Haeckel's Riddle of the Universe, and so on. No, such thinking about World Riddles is absolutely foreign to the Asiatic, because it all rests simply on the combining of what one's sense organs perceive, whereas the Asiatic still knows as a reality that humanity once received from mighty Spirits that which lived in the soul and made man a human being.

In this connection, my dear friends, man has become very trivial to-day; for it is trivial to believe that what lived earlier in European civilisation was part of an age of childhood, and that that alone is great which European humanity has produced in recent times, especially in the 19th century. To-day when we are living in the age of great decisions, people really ought to transcend that triviality, and raise themselves to the possibility of seeing that it means something that over there in the East, there still are human beings who have in their soul something of the consciousness of Spirit and Soul, and who with a destructive, sharp, biting criticism, look at all those things which to the European comprise his greatness. We ought to realise that this is of significance, as we ought to say: That which lives thus in the Asiatic souls will one day be capable of leading to a European catastrophe,—for, my dear friends, it has a strong impulse for souls. It possesses a strong fascination for souls, because they have been devastated in a mechanical civilisation and cannot raise themselves up to construct something themselves out of the soul and spirit. Those human beings who feel the desolation of the European mechanical life to-day—rather than look to that which could be built up here, they would much prefer to take over from the decadent East the spirituality which has again become necessary to them. Hence they do not want to listen when the words ring across to us from Asia: “What has Europe done? What has become of its old holy treasures? Buried, forgotten, pushed aside, or labeled and piled up in museums. As far as the eye can reach, the Asiatic can only see bad taste in the West. And when Europe recovers and pulls itself together again out of the desert of hate and destruction, and the desert of force that leads to distress and privation, it will probably go on manufacturing, striking, colonising, militarising, gaining more andmore of the entire world, but losing more and more of its own soul.”

And now he goes on to point to something which a European has said. The European who is quoted only carries what he has to say to what I must call a very lazy criticism. Let us hear further: “Or must we expect a new salvation from America? Such a qualified judge as Kühnmann comes to the following conclusion (Germany and America. Chapter 8.) ‘Before 1914 no one knew what America really is, now at last we know. American signifies no progress and no teaching for the moral world. It gives us no new thought of any higher humanity. On the contrary, those sins which cling to modern Europe civilisation appear nowhere so terribly naked and unbounded as in America. That consciousless, blind, self-seeking of gold is the dominating thought. Nowhere does it wear more openly and destructively the garment of hatred, in the hypocrisy which talks of the service of humanity, when all the time what thinks and acts is the cold sense for self-seeking.’”

That was what the Asiatic quoted; nevertheless it is something which—when one feels it, one must say it—springs fundamentally from the triviality of his understanding. Here I must speak sharply. It is simply a bit of professional barking at something which, of course, lies obvious on the surface. Of course it is absolutely justified. It is justified ten times over. But behind his barking there is not that spiritual background which lies behind the Asiatic criticism of modern Europe. That which stands behind the Asiatic criticism of modern civilisation is something which speaks now in just the same way as once Homer spoke of the Muse. It is, moreover, something which gives a power such as once upon a time the Greek dramatist had when, on looking at man from outside, he dramatised his Dionysian emotions. When the Asiatic criticises European civilisation, something from out of the Cosmos speaks in him

That, my dear friends, is what a European should say for himself to-day; and with great intensity he ought to put that contrast before him, which we should be able to feel to-day if we take what lives in our literature, writings, and so-called education, and compare it with an age which believed that earthly-cosmic relationships are declared and related by divine spiritual souls.

And now we can turn to many people who begin, from the spirit of our modern European civiisation, to feel something of what lies within this civiisation. In the same number of this periodical, a number which is composed in a masterly way with reference to what is intended, with reference to something which most human beings cannot as yet see to-day, but which is nonetheless being put into practice by small and mostly demonical coteries, in this same number which, as regards this point, is composed in a masterly fashion, there is also to be found the discussion of a book by Hans Ehrenberg. The essay discussing this book is called Ways and Wrong Ways to Rome. We can see that Hans Ehrenberg in his book The Homecoming of the Heretic: A Guide by Hans Ehrenberg, being a University teacher of the present day, it is in a certain sense a representative personality, and possesses all the characteristics of a University Professor. I myself have learned that, through my own experience of him. Here we see how indignant he became with the desolating barrenness which lives in modern science and modern education. He sees the hopelessness, the unredeemedness of modern science and education. He sharply rejects everything which has appeared in the last of the whole of modern civilisation, and he would like a really religious spirit again to enter into that which comprises our modern civiisation; and he points out the path to Rome. He draws attention to the fact that besides the Epistle of St. Peter, there is the Epistle of St. John, and that to St. John is ascribed the words: “Little children, love one another.” It is very characteristic that the writer who is criticising the book puts by the side of “Little children, live one another” another saying of St. John. He says to Ehrenberg: I know another quotation from St. John: “If there come any unto you and bring not this doctrine, receive him not into your house, neither bid him God speed.” There you have a learned man, who is deeply and religiously in Roman Catholicism; and he speaks entirely our of the spirit of Rome, whereas Ehrenberg merely trifles with the Roman spirit. The man who adds the above words to St. John's words “Little children, love one another,”—here I must express myself allegorically—knows that man needs muscles and bones, that he needs not merely muscles and sinews and tendons, but bones. And so, not now speaking allegorically, but in truth, man needs a doctrine, a teaching, a life of ideation which can support him and, on the basis of this life of ideation and of thought—as it were, attached to this life of thought just as muscles and sinews are attached to the bones—he needs love. Love must be attached to that which is the bony skeleton in man's spiritual life, namely the doctrine, the content. It is characteristic of many modern people of the type of Hans Ehrenberg, that they say: “Science contains nothing, science dries us up, it is unredeemed, science leaves our souls cold and dry; what we must cultivate is love.” But, my dear friends, that would mean: We must not look in the human organism for a healthy bony formation, for we cannot see why man needs bones; he would be far softer, more pliable, more adaptable in all relationships if he were rickety. Thus, on the one side we see the mechanism, and on the other that which tries with a certain justice to transcend this mechanism, but which strives for a “rickety” education. For love remains a mere phrase if it wishes to stand in this way, without the background of a spiritual doctrine. In that case it simply springs from the despair of those who, not having the courage for bony system of our civilisation, wish to remain stationary in a rickety civilisation.

In such spirits as the European who longs for the rickets of culture, and the Asiatic in whom still lives something of the strong skeleton of old oriental Wisdom, we can see nothing certain for the future.

The Asiatic looks towards Europe. On the one hand he finds there a mechanical culture, the ethical expression of which, for him, is piracy and exploitation; and on the other hand he finds an expression of what has to link itself on to this, just as the muscles have to be linked on to the solid bones.

When the Asiatic contemplates that, he comes to an extraordinary conclusion, which however in certain circles is propagated with great joy, because—and I must lay stress on this—these circles know what they want. At this point, where I want you to see the tendency towards which all these instructions are running. I prefer to read it word for word. The essay, The Three Worlds, which is written from the Asiatic Chinese standpoint, characterises, as I have explained, the world of the newer European civilisation, the world of the Asiatic civilisation, and it then puts a third world there, which is characterised in the following way,—looking, and calling out, as it were, to Europe what the Asiatic thinks, and what still lives for the future outside Europe. “If Europe is not to die, what must it do?” That is what the Asiatic is asking; and he answers it as follows.

“In reality the synthesis must be the third thing, a third world; and this third world places itself above and between the others, indeed right in the middle of the others without losing its own characteristics, or at least without losing its power for education. It is itself the very oldest, coming from the super-nature of the inspired spiritual world, which has maintained itself for thousands of years in the tiny kingdom of a special people often in bondage, in the midst of a gigantic civilisation, and then as a Christian leaven, transforming antiquity and growing as a mighty tree under which the peoples dwell. That is the world of the Roman Catholic Church, in which that magnificent medieval human being was developed who, in reality, is the one and only harmonious European. The Catholic Church it is which has maintained herself in spite of all attacks; her voice has never been dumb even in the tumult of modern decay, and, as a matter of fact, it resounded as the one and only noble human voice in our age even as the deep tones of the bells resound over the noise and lewdness of the great cities. Where else is to be found the much-questioned judge of world-history? Where else is to be found the world-conscience, where else the guardian of morality? This world alone, the third world—that of the Roman Catholic Church—has seen everything come and go; she alone is the world of authority. Against the world of the East she will take again the conquering path of Francis Xavier and his disciples, which leads to salvation. In defiance of everything modern, she shows that there is more force and self-determination in humility than in all the consciousness of rulers. She knows how to clothe the beggar with kingly worth! She is the religion of magnificence and renunciation, of the harmony of affirmation and denial, of freedom in piety and of bondage in dogma, of Philosophia Perennis, of strict rites, of ceremonies and discipline, combined with a large-hearted understanding of adaptation, the religion that takes care for the social order, the religion of art, the religion of depths of feeling.” Should this world (the third world of catholicism) be anxious as to how it can maintain itself in the modern world? Even children of this Church have been afraid and ask with each Non possumus of Authority: “How can we go on?” “Oh ye of little faith! Have trust, for I have overcome the world!”—not “I have made an agreement with the world.” The harmony is to be sought higher, beyond the first and second world, in the supernatural, in the true super-human of the Divine Son and His Kingdom.

“The less vague the tones, the purer and more liberating will be finally the music of the song, after all dissonaces have come to an end. Oh Felix Culpa! Therefore it is well to work out sharply Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis. A full and rich humanity will then result. In life, everything is interwoven, and all these three worlds exist together.”

Thus, my dear friends, what this Asiatic puts forward from the Chinese standpoint as the one and only hope for Europe is the Roman Catholic Church; and in a periodical which, as I have said, is composed in a masterly fashion and springs from people who well know the trend of present tendencies, we find this view advocated,—a fact which of course interests us far more than the actual content as such. We find it said that there exist three worlds in modern times. First there is the world of modern European civilisation which contains no soul. Then there is the old Asiatic civilisation. Europe as it is to-day cannot receive that because these two worlds do not understand each other. But in Europe there also lives the third thing; and that, we are told, is Rome, the Eternal Catholic Church. On that we must build, and to-day one can see many, many Europeans moving towards that goal.

What stands behind all these things is simply not seen by a great number of human beings, because these people are not ready to take their part in what is really working and weaving in our modern world. On the one hand they do not see the demand put upon them by a modern mechanical civilisation that is void of soul. On the other hand they do not see what a gigantic force of destruction streams out of what makes itself felt in Asia, and with what infinite power Rome works at the present times; they do not see with what purposeful forces both these are working. They do not want to see it, because it is too uncomfortable, and because, if they really see the matter clearly it will become necessary to adopt a certain point of view and then to work energetically with body, soul and spirit, in this sphere

We will speak of this tomorrow.

In yesterday's lecture I pointed out to your how modern European civilisation presents itself to an Oriental judgment, and at the conclusion I pointed to the three worlds which were seen there, namely, the world of modern European civilisation, the world which forms the old Asiatic civilisation, and lastly, Roman Catholicism. We should not—in reality no thinking person should—pass by such a pronouncement without giving it attention, because it is connected with something which is of extraordinarily deep significance in the stream of civilisation of the present day, perhaps we shall best come to the heart of the matter when I remind you of what I said from a certain point of view concerning our present civilisation in the public lecture given in Basel last Tuesday. According to the custom which I follow in our Anthroposophical circles here, I should like just to run over that briefly.

I pointed out how in ancient civilisation—and in the Greek civilisation to which I referred yesterday a full consciousness of these facts existed—in those ancient civilisations attention was everywhere given to what we call the Threshold and the Dweller on the Threshold. I wished once again to state that publicly—that it was recognised how, given the preparatory conditions of human knowledge, something could be learned about the Cosmos, something could be learned about man, but that unless a man was prepared the right way, he should not press beyond what was called the Threshold.

Behind the Threshold—it was assumed that there were certain things which, in those ancient epochs of time, should not be received by the human soul in an unprepared state; because human beings were then afraid that, if they entered unprepared into that sphere of knowledge, they would have to lose their self-consciousness, they would have to lose the degree of self-consciousness which they had in those times. They would, so to speak, fall into a state of powerlessness. Therefore a certain training and culture of the will was demanded from those who sought to become pupils of the Wisdom of the Mysteries. Through this training of the will their self-consciousness was strengthened, so that the pupils could cross the Threshold and pass the Dweller of the Threshold. Then they came to a region where, if they had entered it in their ordinary mood of soul, they would have been overtaken by a paralysis of the soul, their self-consciousness would have been taken from them.

It must be pointed out that through the whole progress of human evolution it has come about that what constitutes to-day the general popular consciousness of man is filled with what at that time was realised as being on the other side of the Threshold. In my public lecture I pointed out that those ancient people had, for instance, in their Schools of Initiation the so-called Heliocentric view of the world, in which the Sun is seen as the central point of our planetary system. But the teaching was kept secret, and only certain individuals, who in a sense did not want to preserve it, published something of it—for instance, Aristarchus of Samos. People were afraid of such teachings, because they worked on their souls in such a way that human beings lost the very ground under their feet. What everyone knows to-day was just what in those ancient times would not have been allowed to come to unprepared human souls, for what was said with reference to the Heliocentric view of the world might also be said with reference to many other things which to-day are quite common human opinions. What to-day under the influence of a natural-scientific age has become popular ideas, in those ancient times was kept beyond the Threshold; and traditional creeds which have retained the opinions of those ancient epochs have on this account always opposed the spread of modern natural science. That was the reason for the persecution of Galileo and it accounts also for the fact that up until the year 1827 it was forbidden to Catholic believers to acknowledge of spread the teaching of Copernicus. The old view about these things was retained, and therefore the believers could not of course keep pace with human evolution. Humanity has progressed from another side into a region which was at that time designated as lying beyond the Threshold.

Why is it that humanity should later progress into that sphere without falling into a paralysis of the soul, whereas the ancient people with their mood of soul would doubtless have done so? Humanity has been able to enter since then into that sphere, because, as you can see from my book Riddles of Philosophy, it has reached through special development of the world of thought, a kind of self-consciousness into which paralysis can no longer enter. Human beings to-day can accept without falling into a paralysis of the soul not only the Copernican view of the world but also other ideas which lie in the same direction.

Let us keep that quite clearly before out minds, my dear friends. What to-day is popular idea, for the ancients (and up to the 14th century) lay on the other side of the Threshold. The Dweller of the Threshold was more than a Personification. He was a real being and He was designated as that Power whom man had to pass if he wanted actually to enter the sphere with which modern natural science is concerned. Modern human beings do not lose their self-consciousness, nor fall into powerlessness of soul; nevertheless they do lose something. There is something which humanity has to speak lost since it attained that sphere which the ancients described as being on the other side of the Threshold. Human beings to-day, although they have not lost their self-consciousness, have lost their world-consciousness. They have acquired a knowledge of countless details concerning sense-existence. Through combining things intellectually they have found and assimilated all sorts of laws concerning the relationships in sense-existence, but they have not reached the possibility of realising a spiritual content in all the vast sphere of their different Sciences which have to-day become so popular. They have not been able to grasp the spiritual content which lies at the basis of the sense phenomena that are all around man and that he observes and collates in his Natural Science. While man has been approaching the newer phases of his evolution in recent times, he has, as it were, entered the sphere on the other side of the Threshold without having the consciousness that the world is permeated by Spirit. He has not been obliged to lose himself, but he has had to lose the Spirit of the Universe; the Spirit of the Universe has been lost.

That Church whose endeavour it was not to allow people to cross the Threshold but to make them remain on this side of it, has always enclosed the path of humanity within those spheres in which men stand to-day. It has sought to hem humanity in, and as is well known to you in the year 869 at the Eighth Œcumenical Council in Constatinople, went so far as to exclude the Spirit as such from the forces which Man should recognise in himself. There it became dogma to recognise as the constituents of man, Body and Soul, and simply to endow the soul with a few spiritual qualities. But it was forbidden to speak of man as consisting of Body, Soul, and Spirit. That was an attack made to dam up the in-streaming of spiritual knowledge. The result was that man entered the sphere on the other side of the Threshold, without having consciousness of the spirituality of the world. He entered a sphere which was regarded by the ancients as a sphere that could not be entered without due preparation; knowledge of it was only transmitted to those pupils of the Mysteries who had undergone a strong training of the will. That sphere has now been entered by man in such a way that he does not lose his self-consciousness, but loses the world-consciousness of the Spirit. Therefore it is a question to-day of that Threshold which modern man must come to know—the Threshold which must now be crossed by transcending the limits of external sense-observation and intellectual combination, and entering the sphere of the Spirit which man can find beyond the sphere of the senses.

These things lie at the basis of all that is given in our Anthroposophical Spiritual Science, and they make the radical distinction between Anthroposophy and what has appeared as Theosophical teachings. All the Theosophical doctrines are merely a warming up of the old. When they speak of the Dweller on the Threshold, they speak just as the ancients spoke of Him. But if you read how the Dweller is spoken of in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds you will find there a modern presentation, created directly out of the consciousness of to-day. And if people who venture to judge of Anthroposophy to-day, would take the trouble to observe these things, they would not fall into the calumny of confusing Anthroposophy with what is really only a dishing up of ancient Gnosticism, or similar things.

Such things must be kept clearly in mind to-day, because they reveal to us how the deep foundations of modern civilisation have developed; and then with the right preparation we can approach such a pronouncement as that which I quoted yesterday at the conclusion of the lecture, which shows how an Oriental recognises in Roman Catholicism the one power within the decadent modern Western civilisation which still really has something of the Spirit in it. We must understand such a thing on the one hand, my dear friends, and on the other we must also see clearly that dangers that lie in the efforts that are being made by those who hold such views. We must be quite clear, for instance, as to the following. If Roman Catholicism is considered to-day in its totality—not as the various individual priests take it, for they as a rule are very poorly educated, but if it is taken in its totality, as it can be advocated, Catholicism is a world-conception which is all-embracing and full of content. That is just the grand thing about the Catholic teaching as it meets us in the Middle Ages in Scholasticism. There it is a world-conception that is enclosed on all sides, but developed in detail logically as well as ontologically and worked out in a wonderful way. The world-conception which meets us there has been preserved from olden times, and still holds within it the concept of the Father and of the Son and of the Spirit; a world-conception which was a world-embracing dogmatic teaching about the Trinity, a world-conception which, in the philosophy of St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, can of itself bring forth ideas for that social ordering of mankind. It is a thought structure that is all-inclusive, and above all it is a structure which requires careful study in order to penetrate it. In reality, in order to understand the Catholic system, the Catholic theory—the Catholic dogma, if one wishes to call it so, one must be able to work in the most accurate way with concepts. One must have clear and distinct ideas, and be able to work with these ideas in a way that modern philosophy would find extremely uncomfortable—ad more especially our modern Protestant Theologians. That is something which really should be known, because Catholicism contains connected teachings about all that man longs for in his knowledge, even if for the higher spheres they are revelations and matters of belief. Catholicism will never fall into that mistake which I characterised yesterday as the rickety conception of the world, because Catholicism has within it that firmly incorporated, strong skeleton-structure of belief, which starts from the principles of nature and works up to that stage where even the higher spheres can be recognised through its truths of revelation. Nevertheless it works up from below to this all-embracing world-conception, and it is one that a man can unite with his soul. But what Catholicism bears within it is fundamentally nothing but the last relics of those old world views which were founded on the idea that humanity must not cross the Threshold of the sphere in which modern mankind is actually now standing! That is the great opposition between Roman Catholicism and modern civilisation. Roman Catholic has, in course of time, worked in the most manifold ways. It has of course undergone development by means of its Councils and in other ways, through dogmatic assertions and so on. All the same, it is still only an echo of those ancient doctrines inasmuch as it brings together what those man of old had grasped without being prepared to cross the Threshold. And so Roman Catholicism stands there as a magnificent architectural structure, which however comes from olden times when men did not yet reckon with what had to come into evolution of man with modern Natural Science, with the modern world of concepts and with what has still to come through Natural Science in our modern social concepts.

You see, my dear friends, if Catholicism were to be the only teaching to spread over humanity to-day, the Earth could stop “right now” in its development. From a true point of view, what comes from Catholicism as a system, what lies at its basis, human souls have already been able to receive in former incarnations; and if Catholicism presented itself as the one teaching for all mankind the Earth might now have reached its end. For Catholicism only reckons with that which was a feature of human evolution up to the 14th ad 15th centuries. But after that came times in which modern Natural Science had to take its place, times in which man, in devoting himself externally to the world, received only that which did not lead him to the Spirit. Times had to come when man, while he gave himself up to the most intellectual clearly-defined knowledge, was as regards the real world walking over a fiend of the dead. For that which we grasp with our modern scientific ideas is dead, remains dead; it is but a field of corpses, no matter whether we acquire our physiological and anatomical knowledge in the dissecting room or whether we experiment in chemical laboratories.

When we work in the dissecting room to acquire physical, anatomical knowledge, we are simply creating for ourselves ideas of a human body, whose soul is not there. When we experiment in chemical laboratories, we are experimenting with the forces of nature, and the Spirit is not there. Everywhere we face a world that is not alive, a world of corpses, and that harmonises with the demands which have been made upon modern humanity. Humanity has been set this task. When man looks out into the world around him, he can arm himself with a telescope, a microscope, and X-Ray apparatus, a spectroscope, and so on; and the closer he looks into and the further he investigates the surrounding world in all its minute detail, the further he gets away from the Spirit. Man must bring from within that which is Spirit and he must add that to what he can acquire from without. He must have a new Spiritual Science. He must, as it were, walk over that field of corpses which shows him nothing but dead matter, or at most the shadows in museums of what once was Spirit. He must make his way through those meadows and find in himself the capacity to travel across that dead field of modern science and carry into it that which a new spiritual revelation, a new Spiritual Science has to offer—the Anthroposophy that can really spring forth from man. Only so does man attain his full power. He must not lose his self-consciousness; but, as he passes beyond that which the ancients designated as the Threshold, he must not only maintain his self-consciousness, he must strengthen it by a knowledge of the spiritual world which can spring up out of that self-consciousness. When he dies this, then in the external sense-world he an find the true reality. That again is something with which the human beings of our modern civilisation are faced. Humanity must be conscious that it is standing before the Threshold, and that this Threshold must be crossed. We have not to attack nor to extinguish, what science has produced; we have not to reject from any feeling of comfort what this modern view of nature transmits; we have to carry into the new knowledge of nature an entirely new knowledge of the Spirit, because thereby that which has gone before in earthly evolution can join on to that which has still to come, so that the earth can attain its goal. Never can Catholicism bring human beings further than they already are. For the last three or four centuries humanity has progressed as regards external cognition. Men have progressed in the external knowledge of the world. But they must not go on further in this way in modern civilisation, they must mow carry into this civilisation a spiritual life.

That is just what an Eastern judgment to-day fails to recognise in our modern civilisation. He sees in it only the corpses. That is the outcome of what I read to you yesterday as criticism from an Oriental point of view. The Eastern judgment does not yet know—because it only knows an inherited divine teaching—that man, when he faces a field of death in our modern civilisation, can find in himself the force to bring the Spirit out of himself, a purely human spirit, one united quite intimately with his own being, and which then can spread light over the whole Cosmos.

Now you see, it is just here these variou points of view divide. We can look at what Catholicism has produced. In recent times it has brought forth Jesuitism; not Christ-ism—Jesuitism. It has developed that dogmatic view in Jesuitism which points to Jesus as an Emperor, a Conqueror—even as it declares the soul of man to have certain spiritual qualities or attributes. Christ has in reality not yet become part of the inner consciousness of modern man. Christ, as a super-earthly supersensible Being, must be recognised by Anthroposophical Spiritual Science. He has to be recognised as that Being Who has united Himself from super-earthly spheres with earthly evolution, because earthly evolution requires something which formerly was not there. In reality Catholicism does not treat of the Christ, it only treats of Jesus; and the modern Evangelical Confessions have in this respect simply followed Catholicism. A Christology, a real Christology, has not yet arisen outside of Anthroposophical Spiritual Science. And this real Christology depends on man finding the spirit in spite of his progress over a dead field in his Natural Science. A fiend which everywhere shows him, and must show him, that which is devoid of spirit.

Eastern consciousness does not perceive that. Eastern consciousness does not yet see that just because man loses his world-consciousness in this scientific technical age and loses even his artistic intercourse with the outer world, therefore it is demanded of him with the more urgency to find from his own inner power such a spiritual consciousness of the world.

As a matter of fact it is there; this world-consciousness is there, it is present in the germ. We can feel it in Goetheanism, in that which was striven for at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. And there is a straight path leading from Goetheanism to modern Spiritual Science. It is only a question of becoming able to grasp the living spirit, able to recognise how in modern Spiritual Science we are not merely given an Idealogy, consisting of ideas about the Spirit, but in Spiritual Science we are given ideas which the Spirit itself sends forth into the world. It must be recognised that in modern abstract teachings we are ony give ideas about something, but that in Spiritual Science ideas are given which spring from the very Spirit itself as a kind of spiritual original revelation—that, as it were, the Spirit itself is speaking to the world in Spiritual Science. In Spiritual Science we hav again a living Spirit.

But now, my dear friends, we must understand that many trivialities will have to be overcome in our modern civilised life, if we want to see the truth in regard to these great matters. People are going over in hosts, in great armies to-day to Catholicism, and Catholicism has an inner feeling of triumph when it tries to kill the new spiritual strivings, because all the signs are in its favour. It seems to succeed when it tries to extinguish what is now coming in as the beginning of a new spiritual effort, when it tries to wipe away everything which must now come in as something new in earthly evolution. The will to extinguish certainly does exist.

In recent times there has arisen among men a terrible agnosticism of the soul which is connected with what I called the rickety method of striving towards a philosophy of the world. People want to have a consciousness in their soul that they stand in relation to the spiritual world; but they will not exert their will. They will not use their free-will to approach that which, of course, demands in the very first place and inner activity, a grasping of the Spirit through Spiritual Science. They want to unite their souls in a passive way with the Spirit, they do not want to work their way through the difficulties one has to encounter in any inner grasping of what is spiritual. Lazy souls, who nevertheless want to develop their longings for eternity, seek the path back to the old world conceptions, because they do not feel within them the power or activity to take the Divine into themselves. Human beings everywhere to-day have a great tendency to avoid forming an opinion of their own, and only to see that which is offered them—as it were, presented to them on a plate! They want to form their political and social judgments from that which lies open before them, and they are so permeated by egoism that they do not pay any heed when an opinion comes to them from the other side which endeavors to build on the basis of a richer knowledge. That is what gives one so much pain in our decadent civilisation to-day—people are so confused in their judgments. In order to bring it home to you, I should like to quote an instance which is altogether remote from the considerations we have here brought together many things—not in order to spread dogmatic ideas about an anticipation of ultimate catastrophe to modern civilisation, but simply to furnish a basis for your own independent judgments. The attempt is continually being made here to help you have as wide an outlook as possible in forming your judgments and to help you to guide your own opinions in a right direction.

How many people to-day are completely satisfied if they have a few opinions derived from ordinary newspapers, or acquired by any of the other ways prevalent in our time! For instance, take the question of the origin of the catastrophe of the Great War which has claimed so many human lives in the last few years. One can hear statesmen speak on the subject, and so forth. People generally accept the things that are said because the feeling has died out that on the general battlefield of modern views truth itself can appear more strongly at one place than another, and that one must learn to distinguish between one place and another. It seems to me that, in order to be able to judge of European civilisation there is one factor that is far more important than many others which people have accepted of late, it comes to light in something which has appeared quite recently. A French Ambassador, Paléologue, who in the year 1914 was at the Court of St. Petersburg, has like many other people written his Memoirs; they all write Memoirs nowadays—some a little more untruthful , others a little more gossipy, than the rest. This French Ambassador, writing in quite a senile, gossipy style, informs us, with a great amount of chatter, of what he experienced in St. Petersburg. Poincaré, the president of the French Republic, was there at the time, and great banquets are given. The evening before one of these banquets, two evil-minded women, Anastasia and Milizza, daughter of King Nicholas of Montenegro, opened their hearts to the French Ambassador. This was on the 22nd of July, 1914; and the French Ambassador wrote down word for word what they said. On this 22nd July these woman said to the French Ambassador: “We are living through historical days. Tomorrow at the Military Chapel the ‘March Lorraine’ and the ‘Sambre House’ will be played. Our father Nicholas has sent us a telegram in cipher. He tells us that before the end of the month we shall have War. What a hero, our father! Nothing will be left of Austria, and you will again have Alsace-Lorraine. Our armies will meet in Berlin!” Now, my dear friends, it is to such things that we must look if we wish to judge the situation of the present time. There cannot be the excuse that one did not know these things, especially amongst those who work not to form dogmatic opinions, but to create a basis on which opinions may be formed. I am only giving you this as an instance, my dear friends. You can find many other interesting things in these Memoirs of Paléologue, because he chatters on in a senile kind of way, and says the most extraordinary things. I have not brought this forward in order to speak about the origin of the war, but as something that is necessary for modern humanity to know. One hears so many things in the world, and one has to cultivate the right perception and know that there something true is to be found, while there nothing true can be found! The world does not express itself in such a way that one can ever be satisfied with hasty judgments, it expresses itself in such a way that one must feel for oneself where the actual truth is to be found. The external sense-world is a maya, an illusion, so much is it an illusion what even in the sphere of what is moral-ethical and political, far more important—under certain circumstances—than all the judgments of the Ambassadors and Ministers, may be the opinion of two such civil-minded women as Anastasia and Milizza; for, after all, that which the Ambassadors and Ministers in the year 1914 “Knew,” did not happen; but when Anastasia and Milizza said: “Before the end of the month we shall have war. What a hero, our father! Nothing will be left of Austria and you will again have Alsace-Lorraine.”—these fiendish women were prophetesses, for what they said has taken place, and not what the Ministers and Generals said! The world is a complicated structure! How complicated is that which meets us in the world of maya he alone can understand who has a goodwill for the truth and for the investigation of the truth. In modern science we have learned only to look at the truth superficially, and that has brought bitter consequences in modern life. That is something that must be kept well in mind in our own circles, because, unless we are able to awaken out of that morass of judgment in which people find themselves to-day, unless we attain the point of view that is able to rise above all the littlenesses in life, we too shall not find the way aright. We too shall not be able to distinguish the modern Dweller on the Threshold from the old Dweller on the Threshold, so as to know what really brings man forward. We must be quite clear that there are people who have a living longing for the eternal, but nevertheless often show themselves to be egoistic souls, who run in great hosts to where something has been preserved from ancient times and avoid rousing themselves to co-operate in the receiving of the Divine Spirit into the will of man. The Hour of Decision is with us to-day—that difficult hour of decision as to whether, within our modern civilisation, there is the power to find the Spirit on the corpse-field of modern Natural Science, or whether, as so many still prefer, men will simply give themselves up, so far as can be, to seeking the eternal in what is already there from the past. No matter how many Oriental critics come, they will only meet what is decadent in our European civilisation, and will not see that which is fruitful and capable of evolution, but which has to be actively worked at by man.

The Hour of Decision is all the more significance because the old Oriental civilisation still has spirituality, and finds in Roman Catholicism a spirituality related to its own. If modern civilisation does not find spirituality, Orientalism and Romanism will most assuredly flood the world. If modern civilisation does evolve spirituality out of itself, these others will be able to do nothing; because that spirituality will belong rightly to the most modern stage of our Earth-evolution. But the great Hour of Decision is with us; and he alone knows what is happening to-day, who realises what things are essential in this Hour of Decision, and resolves to take these things in downright earnest.

For this it is of course necessary that men should acquire a deep and earnest feeling for truth. Anthroposophical Science does not deny what exists as spiritual content in the old streams, but it knows the danger that lies in the fact that an Oriental Chinese element finds a European Chinese element in close relation to itself; and it will therefore understand how the intellectuals in Europe run over in hosts to-day to that European Chinese element, for there they find, merely by remaining passive, that which can unite their souls with the Eternal. But they only find it in a Luciferic way, because they remain behind in epochs of earthly evolutions which are in reality past. The Earth would be arrested in its development, if that were to happen. One need not be blind to the greatness of the Catholic doctrine of Belief; but it is just when one is not blind, but realises it fully, that one also realises its connection with what man has already passed through and realises also the necessity that something new should come in.

Now however the question might arise: How is it then, finally, that this more Oriental striving for Spirit which has come over from ancient times, does not see what is pressing up out of modern European civilisation, and which in its spiritual relationship, in its connection with the Spirit, might nevertheless also be perceived by the Orientals?

Well, my dear friends, people—even Orientals—still cling to what meets them externally; and what do we see meeting people externally? Certainly Anthroposophy will become more and more known; but just observe how Anthroposophy is becoming known. That is a chapter concerning which one must speak again and again to those who belong to this Anthroposophical Spiritual Science; for it is necessary that you should be acquainted with these things.

You will have observed from our various studies that a connection exists, even though an inner connection, between a principal being inhabiting a planetary body at a certain period and this celestial body itself. One can consider this link between the human being and all that belongs to the whole earth from most varied aspects. We will study the subject today from a single aspect and thence again form ideas about the actual being of man.

We know, of course, that man goes through his earthly life in successive incarnations, and that these bring him into a more intimate relation with the actual planet Earth than the periods which lie between death and a new birth. The periods that man lives through between death and a new birth represent for him more of a spiritual existence; at such times, he is more withdrawn from the Earth itself than in the time between birth and death.

To be more withdrawn from the Earth or to be more closely connected with it, means, however, from time to time to stand in a certain relationship to other beings. For what we call the regions of the world outwardly perceptible to the senses is, after all, only the expression for certain connections between spiritual beings. Though our Earth may look to physical sight what the geologists imagine, may seem to be only a mineral mass surrounded by a sheath of air, yet in the last resort that is only the outer semblance. What actually appears as this mineral mass is nevertheless the bodily nature of certain spiritual beings. And again what we behold beyond the Earth, shining down as the world of stars, that too as we see it is only the outer sense expression for a certain association of Spiritual Beings, of Hierarchies. It is by virtue of the solid Earth, the firm ground upon which we live between birth and death, this physical external earth, it is through this that in the main we develop our life between birth and death. Through all that shines down to us from cosmic space, that sparkles to us as the star-world and that seems to concern us so little, with this we have a greater connection between death and a new birth. It is more than a picture, it is a reality of deepest significance if one says: Man descends from star- worlds to physical birth that he may pass through his existence between birth and death. We must not think, however, that the appearance of the universe which we have here on earth when we talk of the star-world is the same as what meets our spiritual vision in the period between death and a new birth. That which appears externally to man living upon earth as the star-world is then displayed in its inner being, its spirit-nature. There we have to do with the inner nature of what is outer nature for our earthly existence here. In fact we must say to ourselves: Whether we look down to the earth or up to the cosmos, what meets our sense-perception is always but a kind of illusory picture, and we only reach the truth if we go back to the Beings who underlie this semblance with the different grades of cosmic self-consciousness.

Thus it is semblance, illusion, whether one looks upwards or down: the truth, the essentiality, lies behind the semblance. That illusion meets us above end beneath is connected with the fact that our life between birth and death, on the one hand, and between death and a new birth, on the other hand, is always threatened with the possibility of leaving the path of full humanity. Here on earth between birth and death we can become too closely related to the earth, can unfold an urge to find too great an affinity with the earthly powers. And likewise between death and a new birth we can develop an urge to become too closely allied to the cosmic powers outside the earth. For here on earth we stand too near the external symbolic expression, to what is clothed in physical materiality, we stand here, as it were, estranged from the inner spirituality. When we evolve between death and a new birth we stand fully within the spirituality, we live with it, and again we are threatened with the possibility of being swallowed up, of being dissolved in it. Whereas here on earth we are exposed to the threat of growing hardened in physical existence, between death and a new birth we are exposed to the possibility of drowning in spiritual existence.

These two possibilities are due to the fact that besides those powers that are meant when speaking of the normal orders of the Hierarchies, other beings are also in existence. Just as the elemental beings are to be found in the three kingdoms of nature, just as man exists, as the nearer hierarchies exist of whom a genuine spiritual science says that they are there “according to their cosmic time,” so there exist other beings, who, as it were, unfold their nature at the wrong time. They are the Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings of whom we have often spoken. You will have already realised that the Luciferic beings are essentially those who as they now present themselves should have lived in an earlier cosmic epoch. On the other hand, the Ahrimanic beings as they now present themselves should live in a later cosmic epoch. Retarded cosmic beings are the Luciferic beings, premature cosmic beings are the Ahrimanic beings. The Luciferic beings disdained to take part with others in the age that was appointed to them; they are retarded, because they scorned to take full part in evolution. When they manifest themselves today, therefore, they are revealed as having stayed behind at earlier stages of existence.

The Ahrimanic beings cannot, so to say, wait till a later age in cosmic evolution to develop the qualities implanted in them. They want to forestall the time. And so they harden in their present existence and reveal themselves to us now in the form they should reach only in a later development of cosmic life.

When we look out into cosmic space and behold the totality of the stars—what is this sight? Why do we have this view? We have this special sight, the appearance of the Milky Way, the appearance of the rest of the star-strewn heavens, because it is the manifestation of the Luciferic nature of the world. All that surrounds us shining and radiating is the manifestation of the Luciferic nature of the world, it appears as it does because it has remained behind at an earlier stage of its existence. And when we walk over the solid ground of the earth it is hard and solid because conglomerated within it are the Ahrimanic beings, beings which should only possess at a later time of their evolution the stage that they now provide for themselves artificially.

Thus it is possible that if we surrender ourselves to the sense world by gazing at the aspect of the sky, we make ourselves more and more Luciferic. When in the life between birth and death we have this inclination to gaze upon the heaven, this means nothing actually immediate and direct; it means a sort of instinct that has remained in us from the time before birth or conception when we were in the spiritual world and lived with the stars. We have entered then into too close a relationship with the cosmic worlds and we have retained this inclination—though indeed to surrender oneself to gazing at the physical star-world is not a particularly noticeable tendency of mankind. We develop this tendency when through our karma—which we always draw to us between birth and death—we have too deeply slept away the time between death and a new birth, when we have developed too little inclination to live there in full consciousness.

If we immerse ourselves in the earthly life, on the other hand, that is directly developed here between birth and death. That is the actual Ahrimanic possibility in man's life. The Luciferic possibility is connected with what we acquire through our relationship to the illusory spirit-world; the Ahrimanic relationship which we form is due to our developing too great an inclination between birth and death towards the surrounding physical external world.

If we grow too strongly into a connection with the earth, so strongly that we never turn our thoughts to the super-sensible that lies beyond the merely terrestrial, then the Ahrimanic affinity appears in us.

Now all this has a deeper significance for the whole development of man's being. If between death and a new birth we are swallowed up, as it were, in the spiritual world and then later do not find the right balance between the spiritual and the material world, evolving with too strong an affinity to the extra-earthly, we can gradually come to an earth existence—can come even in the next incarnation to an existence in which we cannot grow old. Such things are now, in this age, reaching a critical point. That is the one possibility that confronts us as a danger—the not being able to age. We can be reborn and the Luciferic powers con hold us back at the stage of childhood, they can condemn us in some way not to become mature. Those people who give themselves up all too easily to an ardent enthusiasm, a nebulous mysticism, who have a disinclination for severely contoured thinking and scorn to form clear concepts of the world, those people, that is to say, who scorn to develop inner activity of soul and go through life more or less in dream—they are exposing themselves to the danger in their next incarnation of not being able to grow old, of remaining childish in the bad sense of the word. It is a Luciferic attack that will break into humanity in this way.

Such human beings would then not descend rightly into earthly life in the next incarnation, they would not leave the spiritual world sufficiently in order to enter earthly life. The Luciferic powers, who at one time formed a connection with our earth, endeavour to unfold instincts in man that would make his earthly evolution come to a stage where men remain children, where they do not grow old. The Luciferic powers would like to bring about a condition where no aged people walked about on earth but only those who spent their life in a sort of illusory youth. In this way, the Luciferic powers would gradually bring the earth planet to the point of becoming one body with one common soul, in which the separate souls, so to say, were swimming. A common soul-nature of the earth, and a common bodily-nature of the earth, that is Lucifer's aim for humanity's evolution. He would make of the earth a great organic being with a common soul in which the single souls would lose their individuality,

I have often explained that the course of earthly evolution does not depend on the mineral, plant, animal kingdoms, which are all, in fact, waste products of evolution, but on what takes place within the boundary of the human skin. The evolutionary forces of our planet lie within the organisation of man. If you remember this you will understand that what finally becomes of the earth cannot be learnt by forming physical concepts, such concepts have only a narrow, limited interest for us. In order to realise what will become of the earth we must know the human being itself. But the human being can enter into a union, a relation of forces with the Luciferic power that has united itself with the earth, and then the earth can carry too few individualised beings; it can become a collective being with a common soul-nature. That is what the Luciferic powers are striving for. If you take the picture that many nebulous mystics describe ns a desirable future state, where they want to merge into the ALL, to vanish in some kind of pantheistic Whole, you will be able to see how this Luciferic tendency is already living in many human souls.

On the other hand, the Ahrimanic beings have also entered into a connection with our earth. They have the opposite tendency. They act above all through the forces that drew our organism, into itself between birth and death, that permeate our organism through and through with spirituality, that is, make us more and more intellectual, imbue us increasingly with reasoning and intelligence. Our waking intelligence depends on the connection of the soul with the physical body, and when this is exaggerated and becomes too strong, then we become too similar to physical existence and likewise lose the balance. The inclination then arises which hinders man in future from alternating in the right way between earthly life and the spiritual life that lies between death and a new birth.

That is the goal for which Ahriman strives; he would hold men back in the coming earthly age from passing in the right way through earthly life and super-earthly life. Ahriman wishes to hold man back from going through future incarnations. He would like even now, in this incarnation, to cause man to live through everything that he can live through on earth. But that can only be done intellectually, one cannot do that in full humanity. It is, however, possible for man to become so clever that in his cleverness he can conceive of all that still may be on earth. In fact, many men have just such an ideal, that is, to form an intellectual concept of all that may yet come about on earth, But one cannot acquire the experiences that are still to be passed through in future lives. In this life, one can only acquire the pictures, the intellectual pictures, and these then become hardened in the physical body. And then man reaches a profound disinclination to go through future incarnations. He positively sees a sort of blessedness in not wanting to appear on earth again.

I have often pointed out that oriental culture has fallen into decadence and Ahriman is particularly able to create this deviation in the decadent East. While the Orientals are inwardly under the influence of Lucifer, Ahriman can approach their nature and implant in them the inclination in a definite incarnation to wish to have done with earth existence and not appear again in a physical body. The Ahrimanic approach is the more easily accomplished since the Oriental is already under the power of Lucifer. It can then even be placed before men as an ideal by certain teachers, who are in the service of Ahriman, that in a certain incarnation, before the earth itself has reached its goal, they should have finished with physical existence on earth.

Certain theosophical teachings have slavishly borrowed various things from the modern decadent Orient. Among these tenets appears one which has never in any way been taken over into our anthroposophical conception, namely, that it even denotes a special grade of perfection for a human being to appear no more in an earthly life. That is an Ahrimanic impulse and one in fact, that can also bring about something of a terrible nature. The earth could reach the point not, as desired by Lucifer of becoming a great unitary organisation with a unitary soul-nature, but of becoming over-individualised. Men would someday reach a stage of Ahrimanic development where they would. certainly die, but the terrible part would be that, after they had died, they would become as like the earth as possible, would continue to cling to the earth, so that the earth itself would become merely an expression of separate individual human beings. The earth would become a sort of colony of the single individual human souls.

This is what Ahriman strives to do with the earth: to make it entirely an expression of intellectuality, to intellectualise it completely. It is absolutely essential for mankind to realise today that earthly destiny depends on man's own will. The Earth will become what the human being makes of it. It will not be what physical forces make of it. These physical forces will die out and have no significance for the Earth's future. The Earth will be what man makes of it.

We are living in a decisive hour of earthly evolution in which humanity can choose one of three paths. One can live in nebulous mysticism, in dreaming, in an infatuation for things of the physical, senses, that is, in going along in a muse—for life in material nature is indeed only musing and brooding—in a sleep condition in which one passes through life without clear ideas. That is one of the tendencies to which man may incline.

A second tendency would be for men to permeate themselves entirely with intellect and intelligence, to gather together as it were everything that intellect can gather together, to scorn all that poetry and phantasy can spread over earthly existence, to turn everywhere to the mechanical and to dried-up pedantry. Men stand today before the decision either to become spiritual voluptuaries entirely sunk in their own existence—for whether one submerges in one's own existence through nebulous mysticism or material desolation is ultimately only two sides of the same thing—or else to consider everything prosaically, to bring everything into a routine scheme, to classify and correlate everything. Those are two of the possibilities.

The third possibility is to seek for the balance, the equilibrium between the two. One cannot speak of the equilibrium in so definite a way as of the two extremes. One must strive for equilibrium by not being too strongly attracted by either, but pass through the two in a proper balance of life, letting the one be regulated and ordered by the other.

This cosmic hour of decision stands before the human soul today. Man can decide to follow the Luciferic temptation and not let the earth complete its evolution, to let the earth resemble the Old Moon, or rather make it a caricature of the Old Moon, a great organism with an individualised dreamy soul, in which the human beings are contained as in a common Nirvana. Or man can become over-intellectualised, give up the common possession of the earth, desire to have nothing in common, but ossify the body and make it sclerotic by permeating it with too much intellect. Man can decide whether to make the body a sponge through nebulous mysticism and sensuality, or make it a stone through over-intellectuality, over-self-sufficiency. And modern humanity looks as if it did not desire the balance between the two alternatives, but wanted the one or the other.

We see on the one hand an ever-increasing expansion of the Western instincts which aim at intellectuality, self-sufficiency, pedantry, and form opinions in such a way that intellectualism is pressed too strongly into the body. On the other hand, we see the danger threaten from the East that men burn up and consume the body. We see it in the conceptions of the decadent Orient and we see it—only another aspect—in the frightful social developments arising in Eastern Europe. The hour of decision has already arrived. Mankind must decide today to find the equilibrium. And the actual task set before man can only be recognised from the depths of spiritual-scientific knowledge. One must study those ideas that can show what possibilities of evolution lie before mankind in two directions, On the one hand we have the merging in Nirvana which has in fact become a “sacred doctrine of the Orient”—though far removed from the ancient conception of Nirvana which meant a striving for equilibrium out of the old clairvoyance. The Nirvana as now conceived by the decadent Oriental is the world of Lucifer. On the other hand, what the modern Western civilisation is striving for—in so far as it does not fill itself with the knowledge of Spiritual Science—is the mechanising of the world, a continuous striving to make the processes of human existence mechanical. Ahrimanising on the one hand—Luciferising on the other hand.

I described lately from a certain aspect the chaotic, unorientated life of recent times and if this should continue then undoubtedly humanity would become Ahrimanised. This process can only be checked if the conception of the spiritual world is brought into the over-intellectual life, the over-individualised human existence completely saturated with egoism. This concept of the spiritual world is needed everywhere, but above all it is necessary for a spiritual impulse to enter the different sciences. Otherwise it will gradually come to the point where the various sciences rule mankind like some abstract authority. Humanity will become totally Ahrimanised by these different sciences which encircle man with authoritative power. It is especially important at the present day when social life problems are so thrusting at human evolution to lift up the gaze to the connection of man with his planetary life.

Within the old religious Faiths man's conception of this connection with the spiritual world is outworn and stunted. It is stunted to a merely abstract intellectual acknowledgment as, for instance, the evangelical Confession threatens to become, or stunted to an external power-principle as the Roman Faith. Those are in fact only other expressions for what is drawing near man to seduce him. It is essential, however, for man to find his inner orientation and to acquire an inner impulse so that the view may be unimpeded of what links him to his planet and through his planet to the whole cosmos. Men must feel again that Geology is not knowledge of the earth. A colossal mineral mass on which are watery oceans and which is surrounded by air is not the earth, and what surrounds us as Milky Way and suns, that is not the universe, The universe is Ahrimanic beings beneath, Luciferic beings above, which appear through the outer sense-illusion, and Beings of the normal Hierarchies to whom man raises himself when through both sense-illusions he comes to the truth; for the actual Beings do not appear in the external sense-illusion, they only manifest themselves through it.

The man of today must recognise this: I can consider the earth. If I am able to interpret what appears on the earth below as the emanation of Spiritual Beings then I perceive what lives in Cherubim, Seraphim, Thrones. But if I am unable to form a spiritual picture of what lives on the earth, if I surrender myself to the illusion of its material appearance, then I remain geologist. I cannot swing myself up to geosophist, then my being becomes Ahrimanised. And if I gaze up to the star-worlds and only form concepts of what I see physically, then I make myself Luciferic. If I am able to read the Spirit in what appears to me in outer semblance. if I can say to myself: Yes, I behold stars, I behold a Milky Way and suns, they inform me of Kyriotetes, Exusiai, Dynamis—Spirits of Wisdom. Powers, Mights—then I find the equilibrium.

It is not a question of talking of cosmic beings as superior to earthly beings, the point is everywhere to penetrate the sense-appearance to the genuine essentiality, to that essentiality with which we as men are really connected. Sense-appearance of itself does not deceive us. If we interpret sense-appearance in the right way, then the Spiritual Beings are there, then we have them. Sense-appearance as such is not deceptive, it is our concept of it that can be deceptive, through our too close relationship with the earthly between birth and death on the one hand, through our too close relationship on the other hand with the extra-earthly while we dwell there between death and new birth.

If man confines himself to what has gradually formed within our civilisation he experiences hardly anything of such views. And our civilisation has totally forgotten that it was once different. People read today even with a certain eagerness what was written about Nature in the twelfth, thirteenth centuries but they do not read it with enough discernment. If they read with discernment they would realise that the time in which man thinks as he does now is only a few centuries old. They would see that people thought differently about things of the outer world in the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth centuries, even in the fourteenth century; that in the stone, in the earth, they did not see stone, earth, but the body of the divine-spiritual. And in the stars they certainly did not see what one sees today but the revelation of the divine-spiritual. It is only in recent centuries that man has merely a geology and a cosmology but not a geosophy and a cosmosophy! Under the cosmology he would become Luciferised, under the geology he would become Ahrimanised, unless he saved himself by finding the equilibrium through a geosophy and a cosmosophy, And, in fact, since man is born out of the whole universe all this together is needed to give Anthroposophy. Anthroposophy consists of these different “sophies,” cosmosophy, geosophy, and so on. We only understand man aright when we know how to bring him into a spiritual connection with the universe. Then we shall not look for him in a one-sided way in his relationship with light, levity, which would mean servitude to Lucifer, nor one-sidedly in his relationship with gravity, a servitude to the Ahrimanic powers, but endeavour to pour into his will the impulse to find the equilibrium between levity and gravity, between inclining to the earthly and inclining to the Luciferic. Man must reach this balance and he can do so only by again acquiring the super-sensible in addition to his sense-concepts.

Now, still something of a complete paradox: Bring before your soul what has just been said, and how man must know of it so that he can come to a decision in this world-age; assume that one must actually speak of a possible Ahrimanising and Luciferising of the world. Bring this before your soul as a weighty matter for humanity. Then take what you read today in popular literature, what reaches your mind from lecture rooms and other educational institutions, and observe the immense disparity, then you will see what is required if men are to come out of the present decadent life to what is of urgent importance. Serious work in spiritual fields is urgently necessary and this can only be accomplished if one resolves to take earnestly such ideas as we have again discussed today.

Tomorrow we will continue further.

The ideas which we have drawn from various sources concerning man's inclination to the Luciferic nature on the one hand, and to the Ahrimanic on the other hand, have shown us how essential it is for him to find a balance between them. Both tendencies, the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic, are false paths and man must find the equilibrium. Now a question may arise which is a difficult problem of knowledge and conscience for modern humanity. The question is this: how does one find this equilibrium, this state of balance, so that one need not succumb to the Luciferic danger or to the Ahrimanic?

The answer to this question must be given in different ways for the differing periods of human evolution; for we must know how in a particular epoch men are drawn more to the one or the other side. We have a general idea of what attracts man to the Luciferic tendency or the Ahrimanic, but we must bring it once more definitely to mind in relation to our own age.

Since the beginning of the Fifth post-Atlantean period, that is, since the fifteenth century, both the intellectual life and the social life among civilised peoples have essentially changed in comparison with earlier times. Intellectual life has increasingly acquired a character where the human being himself is definitely excluded from a world-conception. Man examines nature, and the greatest progress has been made by modern mankind in natural science. But the characteristic element is this, namely, that the actual knowledge of the human being has not only made no advance through the knowledge of nature, but has in a certain sense been cast out of human knowledge. Man has an excellent knowledge of everything else in the world, but he no longer knows himself. He has studied the stages in the animal kingdom, has founded his evolutionary theory on this, and believes that he understands how the different orders have evolved from the most elementary to the more perfect. He then adds man to the sequence, applying to the human being all that he has learnt about the animals. People arrive at nothing new that would explain the being of man, they seek the elements of explanation within the animal world and simply say: Man is just the highest stage. Nothing particular is said about the human being; he is just the highest stage. And this includes all human characteristics and is said with an instinctive obviousness. The result is that there is absolutely no real knowledge of man.

This particular sort of knowledge prevails not only in the various sciences but has already become accepted in the widest circles throughout the world. It has become something that the man of today absorbs with his newspaper reading. And if he does not absorb it with his newspaper, then in some other way, for in fact it is already inoculated into children at school. This character of modern science has more and more become general property and it fills people with ideas and concepts that constitute their general state of mind. Man reaches a certain consciousness of the world but in this consciousness he himself is omitted, That is the one thing.

The other is modern social life. You need only study the social life that obtained in times that preceded the fifteenth century. The world was filled, so to say, with judgments that were derived from an ancient and honoured social wisdom, and were the property of all men in common. One did not judge for oneself what was good or bad. Nor had one any doubt about it, for one grew up in a social order that possessed a common judgment on good and bad, whether it had reference to the people or to religion. Man decided whether he should do this or that out of this common judgment, out of something hovering authoritatively over the social order.

Much of what was at one time far more intensely established in the social order of humanity, we have today merely in our language, and since our language has in many respects become phrases we have it in the phrase. Just recollect in how many cases and to what an extent people are accustomed to use the little word “one”—“one” thinks so, “one” does this, “one” says this, and so on, although in most cases it is merely a phrase and means nothing at all. The little pronoun “one” really has meaning only in the speech which still belongs to a people in which the separate member has not become such a strong individuality as in our time, in which the words of a single person express with a certain right a common judgment.

The contents of the human soul which are gradually being given by the character of modern science and which have led man to forget himself in his world-conception, lead to the Ahrimanising of mankind in our age. And in social life that which leads man out of a life in common, which, for example, in industry has led him from the old interdependent life of the Guilds to the modern free economy, this leads to the Luciferising of man. Yet both are entirely necessary; both had to arise in the evolution of humanity. For in the earlier knowledge which man gained and which formed the constitution of his soul, man himself was always contained. In earlier times one could not gain knowledge of nature, for example, without at the same time gaining knowledge of man. One could not gain knowledge about Mars without at the same time getting to know in what way Mars has significance for human life. One could not gain knowledge about gold without gaining certain facts about man.

All that was human at that time has been thrust out. In this way one came to a pure concept of nature, freed from everything pertaining to man. This concept of nature had then to be the foundation for modern technics.

Modern technics can only furnish the great triumphs of recent times when it contains nothing but what a man can survey with his pure intellect. Look at any machine, look at any organisation of modern technical life, apart from the actual social life, and you will see that everything is organised in such a way as to exclude the human being from what is actually involved. Modern technology had therefore to have recourse to the expedient, although not conscious of it, of using merely the corpse of nature.

When we construct a machine, we break up the material that will form it, just as nature breaks up the human being when it makes a corpse out of the still animated organism. Everywhere in our mechanism we have the corpses of nature's existence. But man is not born from this corpse of nature of which our mechanical world consists, the world we have gradually produced as technics. He is born out of the nature that lives, that is alive even to the mineral kingdom. To this nature we have added in modern technics another nature, a corpse of nature, After the geological strata of the earth have been formed (see diagram, blue, orange) we have, as it were, superimposed a topmost geological stratum (green) over them, which consists of our machines and no longer contains anything of living nature. We work in the dead part of nature inasmuch as we have added modern technics to what was formerly there.

This is something that makes a shattering impression on a man who considers it in its full extent, particularly when he realises how detached modern mankind has made life, not only through external mechanical technics, but through the technical mode of thought.

Consider something like the end of the war which took place between China and Japan towards the close of the nineteenth century. What took place after the conclusion of peace as the necessary settlement? The Chinese Minister wrote an immense sum in millions on a cheque. This cheque was taken to a bank. Some subordinate official accepted it and purely through Banking procedure the cheque was the occasion by which the Japanese envoy in China received the vast sum of millions which the Chinese Minister wrote upon the cheque. Something took place there in a corpse-like—externally of course—one might say, in a shadowy corpse-like manner. Nothing else has been brought about by it except that the credit of millions which the Chinese Empire up to then had had at the Bank of England had passed over to Japan through the writing and delivering of the cheque. What would it have meant if one had wanted by old procedure to pay these millions of war-damages which were simply credited to Japan through a cheque from China? I will even take the mildest form—paying in cash. What would it have meant if the whole of this money, supposing Chinese money to be what it is now, or was a short time ago, had had to be sent over from China to Japan? Thus, where one still has to do with realities the simplest form shows one what modern life has become relatively rapidly in the last third of the nineteenth century. Man's whole mode of thinking has been taken hold of by such things and has familiarised itself quite naturally. Intellectualism, which in fact Ahrimanises humanity, has become a matter of course.

On the other hand, man has had to experience in social life what has been experienced. Just as he could not have come to pure natural science without intellectualism, he would not have come to the consciousness of his freedom without what he has gone through in the social life. Man has been hollowed out through the nature of modern science. He no longer knows anything of himself, he cannot understand the being of man. But on the other hand there has arisen in him the greatest strain and tension, the great demand upon his being to act from his own original impulse, for man is to act as a free being.

If one wants a symbol for what has really come about one can only say this: Man has increasingly lost the fulness of his being and become a total cipher, a blank in his own eyes. For modern natural science contains nothing of man. He has become gradually a total cipher and now in the cipher the impulse of freedom must stream out (see diagram).

That is the discord in modern man. He is to be free, that is, find the impulses of his nature and his actions within himself, but when he tries to penetrate to where these impulses are to arise and understand them, he finds a blank, a cipher, he is inwardly hollowed out. It is necessary for this to have come about, but it is also a necessity for modern humanity to come out beyond it again. For in this freedom lies the Luciferic danger unless one finds the equilibrium, and in the modern scientific life lies the Ahrimanic danger if one does not reach the state of balance.

How does one come to the state of balance? Here we must indicate something that might be called “the Golden Rule” of modern Spiritual Science—that is good. Science had to arise in modern evolution, but it must be widened. It needs a knowledge of the human being, and this can alone be brought through Spiritual Science. It is no knowledge of man to dissect him and take the brain and the liver and the stomach and the heart, for then one only gets what is also to be found in the animal kingdom but in a somewhat other form. All that is of no real value for the knowledge of man as such. Only the knowledge of man gained from Spiritual Science has value. The moment one knows that the human being with his actual ego is rooted in the will, that his will-filled ego represents his actual earthly spirituality and that this in the earthly realm makes use of the metabolism, one has an essential fact from which one can proceed to study the human metabolism and its specification throughout the organism. One comes from the spiritual element to an understanding of the human bodily nature. One must learn to know the rhythmic system and how it is expressed in the shaping of the course of the breath, the course of the blood, and one must break with the superstition that the heart is a pump which somehow drives the blood through the organism like a flood. One must learn that the Spirit is at work in the blood-circulation and that therefore rhythm there lays hold of the metabolism, causes the blood-circulation and then, in the course of human development, in the very embryo, plastically moulds the heart out of the blood-circulation, so that the heart is formed out of the blood-circulation, out of the spiritual. If one then learns to know how in the nerves-senses-system the life of concepts breaks down again the metabolic process, if one recognises the nerve as something that is left behind from the conceptual life, then one sees into the human being in a way in which one cannot penetrate the animal, for in the animal all these things are quite different.

The materialist imagines that here is a nerve (see diagram, red) and this nerve produces something as a picture. No, that is not the reality. In reality the conceptual life proceeds, and while it proceeds it destroys the organic matter, creates, as it were, a groove of waste matter within the nerve (black). That is a deposit created by the life of concepts, something excreted from the organism. And the nerve is the excretory organ for the conceptual life.

In the materialistic age people have used a materialistic comparison—that the brain excretes thoughts as the liver excretes gall. That is nonsense, for the reverse is true. The brain is excreted by the thoughts, separated off continually and continually replaced by the metabolic organism. A modern scientific man will not be able to find anything right in such an idea; he will say that it all refers equally to the animal, the animal has a brain and such and such organs, and so on. This shows. however, an ignorance of himself; anyone who speaks like this of man and animal makes the same mistake as a legislator would make if he had all the razors to be found at all the barbers of a town carried to the restaurants, since he connected with a knife solely the idea of eating and concluded that an instrument formed in a certain way could only have one purpose.

The important point is to recognise that the organ in man does not fulfil the same service as in the animal; moreover the whole mode of observation which I have just employed in its most elementary elements has not at all a similar meaning in the case of the animal. It is precisely the knowledge of what man possesses out of the spiritual as material organs that is so immensely important; this concrete self-knowledge is the essential point. All the idle talk and chatter of the various mysticisms of today which proclaim that man must grasp himself inwardly, all this dreaming is nothing; it leads not to a real self-knowledge but only to an inner pleasant feeling of wellbeing. Man must study with patience and industry how his different organs are plastically formed out of the spirit. Genuine science must be based on the spiritual. One must take man as he stands before us and imitatively model him plastically, as it were, out of the spirit. That is the one thing.

While humanity lives today as it does, letting authoritative sciences issue from the various establishments, there exists in the spiritual worlds a sacred decree; external science must be supplemented by the science of the knowledge of man' It will be disastrous for mankind if it receives only external science, The Mysteries existed in ancient times in order not to let anything harmful approach man, but that is not compatible with the modern spirit. Mankind therefore in its conscious members must care for what was formerly cared for by outside powers. Those personalities who have come to understand something of these things must take care that the different sciences cannot cast their shadows, by confronting the shadows, which would darken humanity, with the light of a real, genuine, concrete self- knowledge of man. Sciences without this self-knowledge are harmful, for they Ahrimanise humanity-, Sciences with the counterpart of human self-knowledge are beneficial, for they lead mankind in reality to what it must reach in the immediate future. There should be no science which in one respect or another is not brought back to the human being. There should be no science which is not followed up right into the inmost being of man, where, if it is thus followed up, it first acquires its true meaning.

Thus, through this actually concrete self-knowledge one arrives at the equilibrium that the sciences have destroyed. Present-day man is for the most part not in the least interested in what sort of being he is in the world. If he wants to be particularly profound he lets himself “prattle” about being some sort of little god or the like—without having any real idea of the god. It is of little interest to him, however, how his individual human form is formed out of the whole universe.

The social life becomes Luciferic if it leads purely to the promotion of freedom inside that which has become nil, blank. Man will not be a nil to himself if he comes to a real self-knowledge, for then he will know how the whole structure of the universe creates an image of itself in what is within his skin, how every human being carries inside his skin a product of the whole world, The impulse of freedom is brought to equilibrium in the social life if we learn what underlies the world as spirit, if we get beyond the merely material view of the world which is characteristic of the development of knowledge during recent centuries.

Man has been lost. The outer world has become empty of man. In external astronomy we observe the sun, the planets, the fixed stars, the comets; they seem to pass through space as some kind of objective bodies. We seek their laws of motion. There is nothing there of man. Read my “Occult Science” and bring before your mind the description given there of world evolution. Directly you read of Old Saturn you are reading nothing described by modern astronomy, but at once you read of what appears as the first rudiments of the human being. In the description of Saturn is contained all that existed as the first rudiments of humanity during the Saturn evolution. With the history of world evolution you follow at the same time the whole of human evolution. Nowhere do you find there a world devoid of man. What you yourselves are is to be found described stage for stage in the evolution of the world itself.

What is the consequence? If you go into what modern science gives you about some sort of ancient mist which then conglomerated into a ball from which our present world is supposed to have arisen, but in which the human being cannot be found, you have nothing human in it at all, it all remains purely intellectual. You find something there that can interest your head, but it does not grip your whole nature. Your whole human being can only he gripped by a knowledge which contains this human being. In fact it is only the indolence of modern man, who, when he takes in something, is not at all accustomed to develop feelings and will-impulse as well. If someone reads this evolution of Saturn, Sun, Moon to the Earth and then further reads the perspective for the future, it is indolence if, in spite of its all being given in pure concepts, he does not feel stimulated in his feelings, if he does not feel; There I stand in the world, there I am together with this whole world, there I know myself to be one with this whole world!

This knowledge of oneself as being one with the world distinguishes the knowledge of the world given through Spiritual Science from the view of the world that obtains today. But let that permeate the men of today in whom it is lacking, let men be filled with the consciousness of belonging to the whole world, then a social spirit can emerge that can lead men forward. Whereas what has arisen and could indeed lead to the claiming of freedom, but gives no feeling of responsibility, this has only brought men to the point of producing the chaos in which we are now living. Luciferising can only be prevented if men recognise their position in the cosmos, if they penetrate not only the physical nature of the cosmos, that which is given to the senses, but the spiritual element as well, feel themselves as spirit in the spirit of the universe. This realisation of man's connection with the spiritual world gives rise to real social feeling, it enables man to fructify the social life on earth.

What the feeling of freedom has produced in man's social life has led above all to Luciferising, though modern men may feel nothing of it. But in the spiritual world in which we are all the time rooted, there stands again a sacred decree which proclaims to man: You must not allow the impulse of freedom to remain without a feeling of the cosmos! Just as the knowledge of man must be added to the external sciences, so must cosmic feeling be added to what has evolved as social life in our time.

These two, knowledge of humanity and feeling with the whole universe, give man equilibrium. And this he can find if in the most modern sense he really grasps the Christ-Mystery, grasps it as Spiritual Science can give it to him. For there we speak of the Christ as a cosmic Being Who has descended to earth out of the infinities of the universe. We learn to feel cosmically and must only seek to give this feeling a content. This we can do only through Anthroposophy, otherwise the Christ-concept too is empty for us. The Christ-concept becomes phrase unless it becomes something through which we understand the cosmos itself, humanly.

Just feel how from a universe that contains the Sun described by modern Astronomy and the spectral-analysis described by modern Physics—feel how from such a universe the Christ could not have descended to earth. One who adheres merely to this description of the cosmos as knowledge, can attach no meaning at all to any true, real Christ-Being. Such a Christ remains empty or becomes such as Harnack imagines. To learn to know and to feel the Christ today as Cosmic Being one needs the history of evolution that looks for man through the Saturn, Sun, Moon periods. There, where the human element is within the cosmos, one finds also the knowledge which permits the Christ to come forth from the cosmos. And if one learns to know how man's material part, what lies within his skin, is created out of the spiritual, then one learns to know him in such a way that one learns to know the Mystery of Golgotha, the incarnating of the Cosmic Christ in the individual man. Such a human being as modern science—from mathematics to psychology—can describe would find it impossible to imagine that the Christ had in any way incorporated in him. In order to understand this one must come to real self-knowledge. There is no Christianity today which can be accepted by the modern mind except through the self-knowledge and the cosmic knowledge of man which are given by Spiritual Science.

The nature of these connections can be discovered throughout our anthroposophical literature, and they should be compared with what is essential in our time for the progress of mankind. What people have received up to now in various ways from education and custom, they like to have on the one hand as a sort of shadowy abstract knowledge for Sunday, but would then prefer to regard the rest of life as quite apart from this knowledge—not basing their life on it. Any deeper need of the soul is met by the Sunday pulpit, any external requirements, by the State. Both are accepted traditionally and no thought is given as to where one must come if this traditional acquiescence were to continue.

I have constantly and from very many aspects pointed out the gravity of our time. Today I wished to indicate how the whole course of scientific life must not be pursued further unless every science is illumined by self-knowledge, and how social development must not be tolerated unless a cosmic feeling is introduced, a conception of the universe in which the human being is present in the conception itself. It is characteristic of Anthroposophy that when we study it we perceive the whole universe in the single human being and when we contemplate the world we find that everywhere it contains man.

Such things are no doubt reminiscent of Inspirations and Imaginations which humanity has had in the past, but they are not renewals of an external kind, they are drawn forth from the consciousness to which mankind is actually summoned today out of the spiritual world itself. What man sees around him in this physical world does not simply happen of itself. Man is standing within the spiritual world just as he stands as physical organism within the physical world. And something is happening, something is going on in this spiritual world in which he stands. According to what man is has he a meaning for the events of the spiritual worlds.

Let us suppose that someone only considers what goes on around him in the physical world; at most he pays a certain heed to a traditional faith which, however, has no relation to the world and only talks abstractions, and that this man now engages in traditional science, He can pursue this science, empty as it is of man, he can fill his soul with it as millions and millions today cram themselves with it more or less consciously. In this way, however, men stand likewise in a world of the Spirit, for cramming ourselves full with this science is of significance too for the spiritual world. What significance has it for the spiritual world? If that goes on in the same way then Ahriman reaps his reward. For he is the spirit who slinks eagerly round modern educational establishments and would like to keep them as they are; for that serves his interests. The Ahrimanic being, this cold ossified, bald-pated Ahriman—to speak figuratively—slinks round our modern educational centres and would like them to remain as they are. He will certainly lend his assistance if it is a matter of destroying something like this Goetheanum.

On the other hand, in the social life in which men establish their earthly claims without a feeling of the cosmos, and inasmuch as they only speak of these earthly claims without being penetrated, inflamed and inspired with the cosmic consciousness—here actually the Luciferic beings come into their own. There we see how Lucifer lives. I cannot here use the picture, which is a picture but yet is born actually from genuine Ahrimanic concepts, the picture of the ossified, slinking, bald-pated Ahriman, who slinks round educational institutes and wants to preserve them as they are. This picture would not apply to the nature of Lucifer. But another picture would apply: Let opinions be expressed out of mere egoism, with no feeling of the cosmos, even with good will and well-meant social intentions, then the true nature of Lucifer breaks out from what is being expressed. With the social demands that are promoted in the world without cosmic feeling, man spits out of himself what then becomes the beautiful Lucifer. He lives in men themselves, in their stomachs, ruined through the social mis-instincts—understood spiritually—in their ruined lungs, there lives the Luciferic source. It wrests itself free, man spits it out of his whole being and hence our spiritual atmosphere is filled with this Luciferic nature—filled with social instincts that do not feel the connection of man with the cosmos. The bald Ahriman, lanky, skeleton-like, haggard, slinking round our abstract culture on the one hand, on the other hand that which extricates itself slimily out of man himself and assumes the semblance of beauty by which man is deluded, these are pictures—but they are the realities of our time. And only through self-knowledge and only through a feeling of the connection of man with the cosmos does man find the balance between the ossified and the semblance of beauty, between the bony Being and the slimy Being, between that which slinks round him and that which wants to extricate itself out of him. And this equilibrium must be found. The fruit of the culture, the civilisation of modern times, is, in fact, nothing else than what one could call the marriage between the bony and the slimy. Man is living his life in such a way that civilisation is entering on the Spengler-prophesied downfall. As a matter of fact, Spengler could only describe the world in the way he does, for he has before him the world that has arisen out of the marriage of the bony with the one covered with slime. But man must find the equilibrium.

The times are grave, for man must become man. He must learn how to get rid of the bony as well as the slimy and become man, become man in such a way that the intellect is permeated by the heart and the heart warmed through by the intellect. Then he will find the equilibrium. And then in fact man will neither sink into—speaking spiritually—slimy mysticism nor bald-pated science, but will open himself to what is man, what I perhaps may call, after having characterised it, the Anthroposophical. That stands in the middle, the truly human, the Anthroposophical, it stands really in the midst between these two opposites into which civilisation has gradually come. The Anthropos is in truth when he really manifests his being, neither the ossified nor the slimy; he is the one who holds the balance between the intellect and the heart. That must be sought for.

What must be grasped today out of the very depth of human and cosmic existence, you will understand when you think over the two pictures which I have set before you, purely as pictures. They are meant as pictures, but as pictures that point to true realities.

We will speak further of this.

I should like today to put before you a kind of summary of facts that we already know from one aspect or another. They must, however, be brought to mind again and again if we would form impulses out of the depths of the knowledge of Spiritual Science for what is necessary to human activity in the present day.

I have often spoken to you of the different streams working together to form the whole world in which the human being is placed, and we know the terminology: Luciferic, Ahrimanic, and that which, as it were, is the state of balance between those two and which is best expressed by speaking of the Christ-stream. You know indeed that the central Group of our Building is to bring to expression this very mystery of the trinity of the three aspects—the Luciferic, the Ahrimanic, and that of the Christ.

When we consider man, who is ultimately the confluence of the forces of the cosmos, we can plainly see how these three streams work through him. We know that we have to distinguish what in the main—you know how that is to be understood—is the Head-organisation, the bearer of the nerves-senses system. We must then distinguish the Rhythmic-system which includes, as its most important part, the breathing rhythm and the blood circulation, that is to say, all that takes its course rhythmically. And then as the third principle of external man we must consider the Metabolic-system which is intimately connected with the development of the limb-system. We know moreover that we can conceive this trinity of man from the aspect of the soul. For the nerves-senses organisation is in essentials the bearer of the life of thought, of concepts. The rhythmic organisation is the bearer of the feeling-life, and the metabolic organisation is the bearer of the life of will. Now let us be clear about the following: We only possess a real day-consciousness, a consciousness fully permeated by light, by virtue of our nerves-senses system, and the life of concepts that develops in it. The rhythmic system, or we can also say the breast system, is the bearer of the feeling-life; feelings are developed in the middle part of the soul. And the bodily basis for the feelings is the rhythmic system. We have often shown that the feeling system is not permeated by clear bright consciousness in the same way as the conceptual life. If we examine the soul-life of man without prejudice we can only say that the feeling-life has no greater clearness of consciousness than the dream. Dream-life with its pictures and feeling-life are equally conscious and equally unconscious. They only seem different because the life of feeling is not experienced in pictures but only in the quality of the soul which forms no pictures. Dreams live in pictures and they are thus differentiated; in intensity of consciousness, however, they do not differ from each other.

Completely wrapped in unconsciousness, like man's state between going to sleep and waking, is the will-life with its bodily basis of the metabolic-limb system. In respect of his life of will man is a completely sleeping being, even if wide awake. When he wills he really only sees what is brought about through his will, he has this before him as he has anything else. But what is actually active in the will, the inner soul-experience and willing, that is actually slept through, as the feeling life is dreamt through.

Now let us consider this sleeping will-life, consider it from the bodily aspect, this sleeping metabolic and limb-life. Man in his whole being stands not merely in the surrounding world of physical nature; he stands in a spiritual world as well. He stands with his whole being, no matter to what degree of consciousness this being has advanced, within the spiritual cosmos.

If we now look at the will, we can say something of this sort: If that is the spiritual cosmos (see diagram, circle) which, at the moment I will not characterise further—you know “spiritual cosmos” is very universal, one can always take only a part of it—then this (red) would be a certain part of the spiritual cosmos, namely, that to which our will- life, metabolic-limb-life, mainly belongs.

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If you think of the will-life separated out of man psychically and the metabolic-limb system bodily and ask how that is incorporated into a spiritual cosmos, then this whole relationship to a spiritual cosmos shall be represented to begin with through this diagram. And the question arises: What is this white? We know that the red is man's will regarded from the aspect of the soul, or the metabolic-limb life from the aspect of the body, but what is it to which this life belongs? I should like to express myself in another way. If you consider some member of the human organism, the liver, for instance, then you will say to yourself: this liver belongs to the whole organism and has a significance within the whole organism. In the same way, within a great organism, a world-organism, which is here represented white, we can consider as a member the whole human metabolic-limb system, the will-system. And then the question arises: What is this great cosmic organism in which is embedded, so to say, the human will-life, the metabolic-limb life?

You see, that in which man is embedded with regard to his third member is the cosmic life of those Beings whom the Bible calls the Elohim. Really and truly, just as we live in outer nature which we perceive through our senses, we live in the life of the Elohim with that part of our being whose activity we actually sleep through.

Now we will speak of these things more exactly; I want at first only to characterise them to you. Let us consider the life of the Elohim in the whole cosmic evolution. If you re-read my “Occult Science” you will find that they are the Spirits of Form, and that they ascend from former stages of evolution, If we go back to the earlier evolutionary stage of the cosmic Moon-existence, these Spirits of Form were there Archai, Original Forces, Primal Beginnings. If we go back to the Sun-existence they are there Archangels; and if we go back to the Saturn existence, they were there Angels. Thus they have ascended since that time and have come to the Elohim existence, to the existence of the Spirits of Form.

When we look at our human evolution and say to ourselves: We too are evolving; when shall we reach the height at which these Spirits are now? We shall be at this height when we have gone through the Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan existence and are in that existence which follows after. If you add together what I have described in my “Occult Science,” you have seven successive evolutionary stages, one could say seven successive evolutionary spheres. And the Spirits of Form have entered the eighth evolutionary sphere.

That characterises the position of the Elohim. As the Earth came into being they were at the stage which for us human beings is characterised as the Vulcan existence. They ascended into the eighth sphere. Wow the great question, the great cosmic question, was: How does it stand, or how did it stand within human beings during this Earth-existence? You see, as man was formerly a member in the evolution of the Elohim, he was in the position of remaining such a member. The Elohim evolved during the Saturn, Sun, Moon evolution to the stage which I have now described to you. There they carried in their womb, as it were, the human being as you find him depicted in my “Occult Science.” But all that I described there rested in fact in the womb of the Elohim. It is described in the same way as if I were to describe to you the development of the liver. If it were described in its stages, it rests in fact in the womb of the human being. And the whole development of man, as I have described it, rested in the womb of the Elohim.

Now when the Earth came into existence, there was the question: Will man now remain simply an inseparable member in the great organism which mounts to its eighth sphere, the great organism of the Elohim, or will he develop to freedom and become independent? This question of whether men should become independent was decided through a most definite cosmic act. In respect of our will-system psychically and our metabolic-limb system we are indeed parts of the Elohim, there we are asleep. There we are not separate. We are separated, severed, in respect of our head-system.

What occasioned this severance? It came about through the fact that certain Spiritual Beings who by a normal evolution would also have become Elohim did not become Elohim, they remained behind at the stage of Archai or Archangeloi. We can say, therefore, that they are Beings who, if they had advanced normally, could have been Elohim. But they did not advance normally, they stayed behind. They belong, when we regard them occultly today, to the same sphere to which the Angels, the Archangels, belong; but they are not the same nature as the Angels or Archangels or Archaic They are actually of the same nature as the Elohim, the Spirits of Form, but have remained behind in their evolution and have fallen into the hosts of Angels and Archangels, manifesting themselves in the same sphere. Their activity has had to confine itself; they do not work upon the whole man, nor on what man has pre-eminently acquired upon earth, the metabolic-limb system, but they work upon the head-system of man. I will draw here the head-system (see diagram, rose) as the counter-pole of the will-system, the metabolic-limb system. Here the great cosmic organism of the Elohim is not active, but actively at work are the backward Elohim whom I will draw so (yellow), working in this sphere together with Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai. These Beings, the laggard Elohim, are actually opponents of the other Elohim. The other Elohim have separated man off from themselves, but they would not have been able to give him freedom because they have an influence on the whole man. On the other hand, the laggard Spirits of Form restrict themselves to the head and gave man reason, intellect. They are essentially the Luciferic spirits and as you may see from what has been said, they are givers-of-will on a lower level. The Elohim give will to the whole man; they give will to the head. The head would otherwise be filled only with will-less concepts. Concepts only become rational by being penetrated with will and becoming the power of judgment. That has come about through these spirits.

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You will perhaps realise from what has now been depicted from a certain aspect that one must not apply cut-and-dried ideas when one considers cosmic opposing forces. One must not simply treat the Luciferic spirits with scorn, turn a cold shoulder—if I may express myself so—but one must be clear that these spirits are of an essentially higher order than man himself. In fact, they are not actually opponents of man, they are opponents of the Elohim because they have remained behind in evolution and confine themselves to the human head. That is what we must bear in mind.

If you picture what these Spirits would really attain if they had an entirely free hand with human evolution one comes to the following. When the Earth cane into existence, there were the Elohim risen to their high rank while the others had stayed behind at earlier stages of evolution. These are in this way the bearers of what was pre-eminently imprinted into man from the past, from the Saturn, Sun, Moon existence, the bearers of what is to be implanted into man of the sublime past which we went through in the three former metamorphoses of evolution.

Since they have remained behind and set themselves in opposition, as it were, to what the Elohim purposed for the human beings of the Earth we can say of them: These Beings who are really Spirits of Form but who meet us in the spiritual world among the ranks of the Angels, Archangels and Archai imprint into man all that would like to keep him from descending to a complete earth existence. They would really like to keep him above the mineral kingdom. They would prefer man to experience only what is in the sprouting plant world, what lives in the animal world and in the actually human world. But they do not want him to come down to the dead mineral world. And in particular they desire above all that he should have no contact with our technics. That enrages these Spirits. They would like to keep man in a spiritual sphere and not let him descend to the earth. In this way they are opponents of the Elohim, because the Elohim, who have made man solidly firm in the dust of the earth, as the Bible expresses it, have drawn him down into the mineral kingdom. But freedom, the freedom which man is to experience in the earthly element, actually does not depend on just those Spirits who would keep him free of the earthly,

Now, by means of the Elohim man has been established in the terrestrial mineral world and this has enabled still other spirits to gain access. Note carefully the difference between the Spirits of whom I have just spoken and the Spirits of whom I have still to speak. Those of whom I spoke earlier are in the spheres where the Angels, the Archangels and the Archai are to be found. We find them among the hosts of these Spirits and it is they who bring flexibility, mobile reasoning, into the human head, the activity of phantasy, art, and so on. But because man has been pressed down into the mineral kingdom, because the Elohim have given him an independence which is no full independence, for he experiences it asleep in his will and metabolic system—because of this, other Spirits have secured admittance. They smuggle themselves, as it were, into evolution. The Spirits of whom I spoke before have been present throughout evolution, they have only stayed behind; they were not able to share in it but they are backward Elohim, present in the cosmos with the Elohim, only not willing to let man come quite down to earth. He has, however, come down to earth through the Elohim.

And now from outside came other Spirits. We find them if we direct the occult gaze to the Hosts of the Cherubim, Seraphim, Thrones. Of the Spirits actually belonging to this order some again have remained behind. They have not entered these hosts, they have only become Spirits of Wisdom. One can say of them that they would really like to begin quite a new creation' on the earth, they would like to preserve a thorough earth-man. He has been incorporated in the mineral kingdom through the Elohim and they would like to take this as a beginning and from then on carry evolution further. They would like to wipe out the whole past; “Oh dear, the past,” they say, “that no longer bothers us; man has come down into the mineral kingdom, now let us tear him away from the Elohim, they do not need him, let us tear him away from the Elohim and begin a new evolution. Let him be the original member and then live on and on!”—

Those are the Ahrimanic Beings. They want to expunge the whole of the past and leave man with merely what he has gained directly on the earth.

You see how the Elohim take a middle stand; they would like to link the past with the future. The Spirits whom I described before would like to permeate man through and through with his lofty past. The other Spirits want to wipe out the entire past, take away from the Elohim what man is out of the dust of the earth and make a new beginning, make evolution only begin from the earth onwards, Away with this “balloon” of Saturn, Sun, Moon. None of that is to have any meaning for man. A new evolution is to begin with the Earth; this is to be the new Saturn, then a new Sun comes, and so on. That is the ideal of these Beings. They break into man's unconsciousness, into the will-life, the metabolic-limb-life, that is where they make their attack. They are that race among the Spiritual Beings who want to give man a special interest for the mineral-material, an interest in what is externally mechanistic. They would particularly like to destroy everything that the Earth has brought over from the Old Moon. They would like the animal world to disappear, the physical human world to disappear, the plant world to disappear, and of the mineral world only the physical laws to remain. Above all they would like human beings to be removed from the earth and to form a new Saturn out of machines, a new world purely of machines. In this way, the world should go on; that is actually their ideal. In the domain of external science it is their ideal to reduce everything to matter, to mechanise. In the sphere of religion these two polarities are plainly to be perceived.

In former times, as you know from other lectures that I have given here, men were more exposed to the Spirits of the first kind who work on the head-nature. Even in the time of Plato you find that if one spoke of the eternity of the human soul, it was especially of the pre-natal existence and what one actually remembered of this previous existence. That ceased gradually the further we come Into the Middle Ages, until the Church entirely prohibited a belief in pre-existence. Today this belief is held by the Church to be heresy. Thus on the one hand there is a tendency to the knowledge of pre-existence, on the other hand the Ahrimanised Church which continues man's life only beyond his death and makes his future existence merely the fruit of what he is here on earth.

You have that as an article of faith—what a human being experiences here in physical life he carries with him through death. His soul always looks back to that. The whole succeeding life is actually only the continuation of what was here between his birth and death. That is precisely the same as what the Ahrimanic Spirits want. This is just the important question that lies before mankind today: Shall the Ahrimanic faith go on flourishing as if there were only a life after death, or shall the consciousness of pre-existence re-awaken and shall it then come to a union of pre-existence and post-existence through a centre balance?

That is what Spiritual Science must seek, the Christ-principle, the equilibrium between the Luciferic-Ahrimanic—on the one side pre-existence and post-existence on the other. That is the weighty problem of the present day, namely, that after humanity has succumbed for a time to the Ahrimanic belief in a mere post-existence, we should unite with it the consciousness, the knowledge, of pre-existence, in order to come to a conception of full humanity.

From the whole character of these presentations of anthroposophical Spiritual Science you will see how essential it is to understand that in the various spheres of existence different Spiritual Beings have inserted themselves, taking part in the work of those spheres, giving force and direction. It is necessary that humanity in our present age should be fully alive to the knowledge of this—that different spheres of existence are guided and directed by different spiritual Beings; for our civilisation has in the course of recent years lost this consciousness of the presence of concrete Spirit in life. In general, people will willingly talk of the Divine permeating everything, but such talk does not help to an understanding of the world which can provide a sufficient basis for life. It is, of course, quite true that in the last resort, every recognition of the spiritual must tend towards a unity: but if one perceives that unity too soon, one simply loses all real insight into the course of world-happenings. It is necessary, therefore, to leave off speaking in general in such an abstract way about the Divine, and learn to know the concrete spiritual guiding Beings in Nature and History, as we have done over and over again in the course of time. It is from this point of view that I should like to point today to certain really important and significant things at the basis of the constitution of our world.

I pointed out in the last lecture that certain Beings find themselves together in the world for the purpose of building up and animating man, but that they find themselves in conflict. The old truth of the opposition coming from the Luciferic and Ahrimanic spiritual forces—this we put before our souls in the last lecture from a certain point of view, and now we will look at the matter once more from another aspect.

If we take our modern civilisation, which is now involved in such catastrophic events and manifests in such decadent forces, we shall find that what is essentially characteristic of it is the extension of intellectual thinking throughout the whole of humanity. One must really try to acquire an insight into the quite different constitution of man's soul throughout civilised Europe seven or eight centuries ago. It is intellectual thought which today is so prevalent everywhere, which permeates the entire soul-life of man and, from a certain aspect, will still continue to permeate it. The point now is that one must seek to unite with what is externally comprehensible concepts that belong more to the soul and spirit; for it is well if, from the aspect of the spirit, one really seeks to grasp and permeate external and material existence itself.

That which underlies thought in our organism consists in purely mineral processes that take place within us. Please understand me aright; those processes in us which are specifically of a human character, and those which we have in common with the animal and plant-nature, these are all connected only indirectly, and not directly, with the fact that we have become intellectual thinking human beings according to the modern idea of the development of nan. The fact that we have in us a firmly consolidated mineral constitution gives us the capacity for intellectual thought.

When we look at all those kingdoms of nature which are outside us in cosmic space, and which are also within us, we must say: Let us first of all contemplate the sphere of Warmth, of the warmth-Ether; we carry the effect of this Warmth-Ether in our own blood, and the activity of our blood consists essentially in the fact that our blood, aa the carrier of warmth, guides these warmth-processes through our entire organism. Now our intellectual thinking does not depend in any way upon what happens in the sphere of warmth. Thus, when we consider the warmth-processes in the cosmos, we can say: These warmth-processes are also continued within the skin of our organism; but that which meets us in the cosmos as warmth-processes—and specially meets one who is able to regard the cosmos in the condition when it showed itself exclusively in warmth processes, during the Saturn evolution—none of that stimulates us to intellectual thinking. Then if we look to the kingdom of the Air, there too we find events taking place; these processes are continued in our organism through our breathing process; but that again has nothing directly to do with our intellectual thinking.

As a third sphere we can look to the phenomenon of water; we see outside in the cosmos the processes in the fluid sphere. These too are continued in our metabolism, in so far as it occurs in the fluids. Outside in nature we see the circulation of fluids, and in ourselves too we see a kind of circulation of fluids. All that takes place in us in that way has again nothing to do with what is our intellectual thinking. But when we look out into the cosmos and see how water condenses to ice, how certain mineral substances are deposited as sediments, how stones and crystals take form—in short, when we consider the processes of the mineral sphere and their corresponding processes in our own organism, then we find that the mineral processes in us have to do with all that finally culminates in our intellectual thinking. We, therefore, as human beings, are incorporated into the cosmos in these various spheres; but if we were only incorporated in all these different spheres without being involved in any special degree with the mineral kingdom, with those forces which appear in crystallisation and in the deposits of salts, and which meet us in these manifestations in the external world, we should never have become the thinking beings we have become, especially since the middle of the fifteenth century. It is an absolute fact that since the middle of the fifteenth century, it is this working of the mineral forces in the human organism that has become predominant. Previous to that, other forces, those of water, air and so on, were dominant to a special degree in man. Hence intellectual thinking was not then the most significant element in human activity.

Now, in everything which surrounds us in the various realms in which we live, the realm of solid earth, of flowing water, of air and of warmth—for a moment we will disregard the higher kinds of ether—in all these are working divine spiritual beings. These realms consist not only in what we call material world-forces and entities, but they are all permeated by different spiritual beings. I will therefore make a diagram to represent this important fact in our connection with the cosmos. Suppose I sketch here (see diagram) the realm of the mineral world (black); I will then here characterise the realm of the water (red), the realm of the air here (blue), and then finally the warmth-ether (reddish-violet).

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Now this is the characteristic of all those spiritual beings whom the pre-Christian age—and especially pre-Christian Judaism—conceived as standing under the guidance of Jahve or Jehovah, and who were regarded by the Hebrew initiates as belonging to the Realm of Jahve or Jehovah. They extended their dominion essentially over the three first realms—warmth, air, water. And so if I am to draw that region in the cosmos that was under the rulership of Jehovah, I must say: It is this region (the three upper layers). It was really the case that the Jehovah rulership embraced the realms of Nature as we have enumerated them, with the exception of the physical-mineral realm. You must be quite clear that when in the ancient Jewish writings, reference is made to the Divine, this always refers to the Jehovah realm of warmth-ether, air and water. That was a deep initiation-truth of the pre-Christian age, and is very cleverly indicated in the story of Creation. One has merely to understand the meaning of the Bible words aright to see how this is plainly brought to expression. Jehovah betook himself, so to speak, to the earth, and formed man out of the dust of the earth. He took that which was not his own kingdom, for the forming of external man. The Bible expresses that fact quite clearly. As I have said, in the pre-Christian Jewish initiation, it was known as an initiation-truth that Jehovah did not form external man out of his own sphere of power, but turned to the earth, and from out of the earthly dust, which was foreign to him, he formed the human sheath which could not come from his own kingdom. Then he breathed into it that which comes from him—the animal soul, the Nephesch. That it is which he gave forth from himself and it came from the three realms over which he ruled. The superficial Bible investigators really do not, for the most part, understand what stands in the Bible at all. If one understands the Bible, one sees that it speaks with extraordinary exactitude, one only has to take its sentences quite exactly. “Jehovah formed man out of the dust of the earth,” that means out of the mineral kingdom foreign to him, and then he gave to man out of his own sphere the breath of the soul. Thus, what lives in man as an emanation from Jehovah is indicated when it is said that Jehovah breathed the living Odem into man.

Man developed, and as he evolved further in the mineral kingdom, he developed in an element foreign to Jehovah. And it was that kingdom which then, in more modern times, since the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, became especially dominant in man, because it formed the basis for his intellectual civilisation. We can say, therefore, that as long as the intellectual civilisation was not predominant in man, so long could a rulership prevail such as that of Jehovah. Then, however, the mineral nature began to make itself felt, from the founding of Christianity up to the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. Humanity had then to be helped from another side. Now you can see how necessary it was for man at the time when the mineral nature became so important to him that he should receive the Christ Impulse, because the old Jahve or Jehovah-impulse was no longer sufficient.

You must connect what I have just told you with certain definite facts. Just consider the fact that man would not think intellectually, with a fully waking consciousness, if he were merely subject to the Jehovah influence, which has no influence on his mineral nature. And so, if we wish chiefly to consider the activity of Jehovah in man, we must not look to what is in our external intellectual culture, but to what expresses itself in our dreams. That which is dreamt, which does not pass into sharply contoured intellectual concepts such as can be grasped by the soul but is dreamt—that is our Jehovah-life. Everything which moves in the fluidic elements of the more fantastic or imaginative nature, everything which can be compared externally with the Moon-influence on man, that is his Jehovah-nature. Opposed to the Jehovah-nature is man's clear-cut thinking; but that he owes to the circumstance that there are salt deposits in him, that there is in him a mineral activity.

Now just consider the fact that, fundamentally, the old Jehovah religion lost its significance with the Mystery of Golgotha. It had lost its significance because the time had come in the evolution of man when the mineral nature became predominant in him. But when the Mystery of Golgotha appeared, there was still enough left of the ancient Dream Wisdom through which it could be understood. And those persons who had somewhat transcended the ancient Dream-Wisdom and who through various kinds of initiation had, like Saul (Paul), already attained some intellectual culture—for them a special influence was necessary, such as Paul received through the Event of Damascus, in order to grasp the Mystery of Golgotha. It is of great and deep significance, that in the Christian tradition we are told that in order to understand the Mystery of Golgotha it was necessary for Saul, who had in a certain sense been initiated before the Mystery of Golgotha into the Hebraic Mysteries—it was necessary for him that he should be carried away into that knowledge which did not work in sharp contours, but which expressed itself in the more flowing element of the dream; for it was in this way that Paul experienced the certainty that Christ had been present in Jesus through the Mystery of Golgotha. With the old Dream Wisdom, it was still possible to grasp something of the Event of Golgotha, and if, through a special influence ouch as was the case with Paul, a man was snatched into that Dream region, he could then understand the Mystery of Golgotha. But now the old Dream Wisdom more and more decreased; it only remained in man's dreams, and even there in a completely decadent form. As the fifteenth century approached, the culture of Europe was tending increasingly to the purely intellectual element; and under the influence of this intellectual element our modern natural science has developed.

Now consider the following. The old Jewish religion must not be grasped merely with reference to the external words—that would only be a materialistic understanding of religion; we must grasp it in its inner spirit. As an historical phenomenon the point that strikes us is that the Jehovah-God was simply the God of one people, and outside the borders of the Jewish people Jehovah was no longer the Jehovah-God. That is the essence of the Jehovah Divinity; he did not embrace the whole of humanity, but only one portion of mankind. In fact, this perception of God has passed over to our own age, and in particular one could, see it again during the World War when every nation spoke of how Divine Providence or, as many said, the Christ, was helping them. Each nation wanted, so to say, to go forth under the guidance of Christ against every other. But because one utters the Name of `Christ', that does not mean that one has met, has contacted, the Christ; for the Christ is only contacted when in one's whole feeling one turns to that Being Who has the Christ Nature. One may say a thousand times over: “We will fight in the Name of Christ”; but as long as one is fighting for one nation alone, one is giving a false name to the Being of Whom one speaks; one calls the Being Christ, but one means only the Jehovah-God. In the great catastrophe of the War (1914-1918) all the peoples fell back into a Jehovah religion—only, there were a great many Jehovahs; each people worshipped a God who was honoured entirely in the character of a Jehovah; Christ completely disappeared from the consciousness of humanity. One could see in those catastrophic events how utterly Christ had disappeared out of the consciousness of man.

We can see this also in other things. An altogether scientific civilisation has now grown up. Our modern scientific culture, how far does it extend? Fundamentally, it is limited to what is mineral and physical. Just consider how uncomfortable a modern scientist immediately becomes if one asks him to speak of anything but what is mineral or physical. As soon as the conversation turns to anything else—for instance, to the principle of life—the modern scientist asserts that one can only explain the mineral and chemical processes in the living. He will not enter into the element of life itself, and still less into the element of soul. Thus, this modern science has developed entirely within just that sphere which was not included in the Jehovah religion, in an element foreign to Jehovah—the element of the mineral physical. This science, in order that it might become an element of civilisation had, as it were, to depend on receiving the Divine Spiritual from another side.

When one spoke among the ancient Jews of any sort of knowledge, it was always a dream-knowledge. The Prophets who had the very highest knowledge are described as the Dreamers of prophetic dreams. It is all connected with just this very fact. It was through this Dream-Wisdom that men even comprehended the Mystery of Golgotha itself. But this Dream-Wisdom disappeared. The Mystery of Golgotha was indeed still transmitted historically and spoken of in the traditional Church communities, but a true understanding of it could no longer be found. In place of it, modern science has grown up in the element foreign to Jehovah, a spirit-less, God-less element; and, because its understanding could not yet expand to the Christ-element, it developed entirely within that physical mineral element—utterly devoid of spirit.

Now this science must, to its uttermost particle, again be permeated by a spiritual element. It is empty of spirit because it can no longer be Jehovistic. External civilisation has attempted to carry on some sort of religious culture by means of a religious `false coinage,' as when it gave the name of Christ to Jehovah during the War. But science has turned entirely away from the Spirit, it gives descriptions of the physical-sensible alone, because man has not yet been able to press forward to an understanding of the Christ. At most the old Jehovah understanding still prevails when men storm against each other as they did in the War; but not when they investigate facts of nature, for then we have a spirit-less science, an intellectual science devoid of spirit. Thus we are surrounded by a sphere in which the Jehovah element still rules. It permeates us; but we are not aware of it, because it permeates us chiefly through those conditions which are our sleeping conditions. If, when we withdraw into the element of sleep, we could suddenly wake up outside our body, we should clearly perceive around us a spiritual nature, under the leadership of Jehovah. Then, as it were, on the waves of a Jehovah-Sea, we should see our dreams coming to us out of this Jehovah element.

Again in our Will—I have often told you that we are asleep within it—there again the Jehovah nature rules. In the whole metabolism of man, the Jehovah nature rules. As feelings arise out of the metabolic system and permeate the rhythmic system, so do certain feelings emerge, coming out of the waves of the Jehovah-Sea—like our dreams. But when we live in that realm which can only become comprehensible to us through our intellect, our understanding, there Jehovah has no share. When the Moon rises slowly in a dream-like light and pours this dream-light over everything, one might say: “Man has spread a Jehovah character over the fields of the world.” When the Sun rises, shining clearly on every stone, spreading over every object and giving it sharp contours, so that we are able to grasp it with our understanding, then the Sun-nature—which is not a Jehovah-nature—expresses itself. We can only permeate the world with spirit if we can perceive the Christ-Being, if we so look into this world as to see the Christ-Being in it. Modern science has had no eye for this Christ-Being. That which is not Jehovistic but Sun-illumined and can be grasped in the sharp contours of the intellect—this has been seen by modern science as devoid of spirit. That is the deeper connection.

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What kind of a realm is it, then, which meets man in the mineral? Now, I told you in the last lecture that on the one side, within the realm of Jehovah, because they have remained at an earlier stage of evolution, the Luciferic beings appear. When we are present in the Jehovah sphere, let us say in sleep, then the Luciferic beings make themselves felt in our feelings and impulses of Will. That realm which we must dominate with our intellect is spread out around us as the mineral kingdom. That is a kingdom foreign to Jehovah, and into it those beings have penetrated who belong to the Ahrimanic realm. The Ahrimanic beings, however, because Jehovah could not, so to speak, keep them away, have penetrated into that mineral realm (see diagram—green). And so, when we turn our gaze to this realm, we are every moment in danger of being taken by surprise, to our confusion, because of the Ahrimanic beings. These Ahrimanic beings—I have tried to present an image of this in the carved wooden Group which is to stand in our Goetheanum—these Ahrimanic beings can in reality only feel at home in the realms which surround us in the mineral world. They are predominantly intellectually-gifted beings. The Mephistophelean figure which you see below in our wooden Group, that Mephistophelian-Ahrimanic figure is extremely clever, utterly end wholly permeated with intellect. But with what is really Jehovistic—with what lives in the human metabolic system, in so far as it does not deposit salts or is of a mineral nature but of a fluid nature, consisting in the metabolism of fluids, with all that lives in our breathing and in our warmth condition—with all this the Ahrimanic element has no direct relationship.

These Ahrimanic beings strive, however, to get into man. Man was created out of the dust of the earth. The mineral element is the true sphere of Ahriman, he can enter that sphere, and feel comfortable there; he feels very comfortable whenever he can permeate us through whatever is mineral in us. You secrete salts, and through this you are able to think; through the deposit of salts, through all the mineral processes prevailing in you, you become a thinking being. Ahriman seeks to enter that sphere, but in reality he has a definite relation only to the mineral. Therefore he is fighting to get a share also in man's blood, in his breathing, and in his metabolism. He can only do this if he can inject certain characteristics into man's soul; if, for instance, he can inject into the human soul a special tendency to a dry, barren understanding which seeks an outlet in materialism and mocks all truths permeated by feeling. If he can permeate man with intellectual pride, then he can make the human blood, the breath and metabolism also inclined to him, and then he can, as it were, slip out of the salts and mineral in man and slip into his blood and breathing.

That is the conflict in the world being fought on the part of Ahriman through the very being of man. You see, when Jehovah turned to the earth and created man out of the earth in order to develop him further than he could have done within his own realm, he created man out of an element foreign to himself, and only implanted, breathed, his own element into him. But in so doing, Jehovah had to take something to his aid, something to which these Ahrimanic beings have access. Jehovah has thereby become involved, as regards earthly evolution, in this conflict with the Ahrimanic element which, with the help of man, seeks to get the world for itself by means of the mineral processes.

As a matter of fact, much has been attained by the Ahrimanic beings in this sphere, because when man is born into physical existence, or is conceived, he descends from the worlds of soul and spirit and surrounds himself with physical matter. But in the present state of our civilisation and according to the customs of the traditional Churches, man would like to forget his existence in a sphere of soul and spirit before birth. He does not wish to admit it; he would like, in a sense, to wipe out of human life any prenatal existence. Pre-existence has gradually been declared heretical in the traditional Confessions. It is desired to restrict man to the belief that he begins with physical birth or conception, and then to link on to that what follows after death. If this belief in a mere after-death condition were to be fully and finally forced on to mankind, the Ahrimanic powers would then have won their conflict; because if man regards only what he experiences from his earthly nature between birth and death and does not look to a pre-existence, to a life before birth, but only to a continuance of life after death, the Ahrimanic element in his mineral processes would gradually overpower him. Everything of a Jehovistic nature would be thrown out of earthly evolution, everything which has come over from Saturn, Sun and Moon would be wiped away. A new creation would thus begin with the earth, which would deny everything that had preceded it.

For that reason, the perception which denies pre-existence must be fought with all possible energy. Man must realise that he existed before he was born or conceived into physical life. In all veneration and holiness, he must receive that which was allotted to him from divine spiritual worlds before his earthly existence. If he adds to the belief of the after-death condition a knowledge of pre-birth existence, he can prevent his soul from being devoured by Ahriman. It follows therefore from what I have said that we need gradually to take into our speech a certain word which we have not yet got. Just as we speak of immortality (deathlessness) when we think of the end of our physical existence, so we must learn to speak of un-bornness, for even as we are immortal, so also are we, as human beings, in reality unborn, look where you will in the language of civilised peoples for a practicable word for “birthlessness!” We have the word “immortal” everywhere, but “unborn” we have not got. We need that word; it must be just as valid a word in civilised languages as the word “immortal” is today. It is just in this that the Ahrimanising of our modern civilisation reveals itself; for it is one of the most important symptoms of the Ahrimanising of modern civilisation that we have no word for “not being born.” For as we do not fall a prey to the earth with death, just as little do we first originate with our birth or conception. We must have a word which points clearly to pre-existence.

One must not undervalue the significance which lies in the word. For no matter how much and how clearly one thinks, that is something in yourself, something in man, of an intellectual nature. But the moment the thought is expressed in a word, even the moment the word as such is only thought, as in the words of a meditation, that same moment the word is imprinted into the ether of the cosmos. Thought as such does not imprint itself into the ether of the cosmos, otherwise we could never become free beings in the sphere of pure thought. We are bound, we are no longer free, the moment something imprints itself into the ether. We are not made free through the word, but through pure thought. You can read further about this in my “Philosophy of Spiritual Activity”; the word, however, imprints itself into the ether.

Now consider this. Initiation science knows it to be true that because in civilised languages there is no word for “unbornness,” therefore this “birthlessness,” which is so important for humanity, is not imprinted into the cosmic ether. Now everything which in great significant words is imprinted in the cosmic ether referring to originating, to all that concerns man in his childhood, youth, signifies for the Ahrimanic powers a terrific fear. The word “immortality” the Ahrimanic beings can very well bear to find inscribed in the world ether; they are quite pleased, because immortality means that they can start a new creation with man and carry it forward. It does not irritate the Ahrimanic beings when they shoot through the ether to play their game with man and find that from every pulpit immortality is being spoken of; that thoroughly pleases them. But it is a terrible shock for them if they find the word “unbornness” inscribed in the world ether; it entirely extinguishes the light in which these Ahrimanic beings move. Then they can go no further, they lose their direction, they feel as though they were falling into an abyss, a bottomless pit. You can see by this that it is Ahrimanic action that restrains humanity from speaking of unbornness. No matter how paradoxical it may appear to modern humanity that one should speak of these things, modern civilisation requires that they should be spoken of. Just as meteorology describes the wind, or geography the Gulf Stream, so one must describe what is going on around us spiritually, and how these Ahrimanic beings are moving through our environment; one must describe how well they feel in everything connected with death, even when dying is denied; and how they are filled with a terrible fear of darkness when one speaks of anything connected with being born, connected with growth and thriving. We must learn to speak scientifically of these things, just as that Jehovah-forsaken mineral sphere can be spoken of scientifically in our modern science.

You see, this is in reality nothing less than the conflict with the Ahrimanic powers which we must take upon ourselves. Ultimately, whether people like to know it or not, that which is so often brought against Anthroposophical Spiritual Science is at the same time the fight of Ahriman against what must be repeated ever more emphatically by Spiritual Science as necessary to modern humanity.

When one experiences such things as the recent attacks that have been made upon Spiritual Science, is it not obvious that these people themselves simply do not approach it? I have spoken to you of the especially ruthless and hateful attack which appeared recently in Germany, in the highly respected paper “Frankfurter Zeitung,” when that paper took up a really disgraceful attitude. It did indeed insert our rejoinder, but only in order to put before it a whole column of its own nonsensical remarks. These things are all characteristic of those people who would like the science of Anthroposophy to disappear, who are either too lazy to study or not capable of it. These people seize upon such attacks as the recent one in Germany in order to cast suspicions on what they cannot refute.

When you consider the matter in the light of what I have told you in connection with these Ahrimanic beings, you will see through things a little. In scientific circles today there are a great number of persons who can apparently think quite clearly, and why? Because Ahriman permeates the mineral world; and you therefore need not be surprised that these people develop a great deal of intellect. That is Ahriman within them; it is far more comfortable to allow Ahriman to think in one than to think for oneself. A man can pass his examinations far more easily, he can become a tutor or university professor with far greater facility if he allows Ahriman to think for him. And because so many people allow Ahriman to think in them, these attacks naturally come from an Ahrimanic direction. These things have an inner spiritual connection, which we must see through. Therefore, people must not be so foolish as to blame us over and over again if we are forced to strike back with very cutting remarks at what would fain nullify Spiritual Science from its very roots.