The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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.

If we turn our attention to what we have often taken as the object of esoteric study, to what is described in my books, “Theosophy,” “Occult Science,” and others, as the principles of the human being, and if we consider this somewhat generally and. externally, we can look on the one hand towards all that can be called the forces, the faculties, of the human intellect. To be sure, what we comprise under the faculties of the intellect includes something entirely different from what we have described as the principles of man. But precisely through such studies as call our attention to various concepts and ideas from other points of view, we shall advance in our studies. Thus we see on the one hand activities of a more intellectual order of the human soul and spirit life, and we see on the other hand the activities of the soul and spirit life which are more applied to the appetitive faculties, to the will. Today we will turn our attention to these faculties with reference to mankind in general, that is, we will ask ourselves: what significance have the more intellectual forces, and what significance have the forces of a will nature in the life of humanity as a whole? If such a method of study is undertaken, it can only be fruitful if one does not dissociate man and mankind from the earth, but when one regards man as a member of the whole earth planet. The justification for this you will discover through statements which you find, for instance, in “Occult Science” concerning the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions of our Earth.

When you remember what has been said there about the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions you will see that the views there differ from those of the modern geologist and natural scientist, who consider the earth on the one hand geologically, as if man had no connection with it at all, and then again, mankind by itself in a kind of self-enclosed anthropology, as if this mankind walked about on a soil quite foreign to it. This is quite impossible as a really fruitful method of study. When you follow what was said about the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolution, you will see that in these evolutions the forces which worked in humanity itself and the forces which worked in the rest of the planet were not at all to be thought of as separate. The fact that humanity has reached a certain independence on the earth and walks about free of the planet, as it were upon its surface, is a phase of evolution, it must not be considered as a final standard. We must consider mankind in connection with the whole of earthly evolution. And, therefore, in the first place we must say to ourselves: if we turn our attention to the intellectual faculties and remember what has been said about the earlier metamorphoses, about the Saturn, Sun and Moon metamorphoses of the Earth's evolution then we arrive at the fact that this inner development of the intellect, which man has today, was not in existence in former stages of the Earth's development. What is today localised to some extent in our head as intellect was spread over the whole Earth planet as a universal intelligence, as an intelligence working according to law, penetrating everything. One could say that intelligence worked in the facts of the whole Earth evolution. The human being himself on the Moon, to say nothing of Saturn and Sun, had not yet, as we know, a reasoning consciousness, but instead a kind of dreamlike consciousness. This dreamlike consciousness looked out into the cosmic phenomena and man did not say to himself, “Out there the cosmic phenomena take place and I grasp them with my reason,” but man dreamed in pictures. What we find today localised in our head as intellect he saw as something which interpenetrated external facts and objects. We differentiate between the laws of nature and that which in us comprehends these laws of nature, and this latter we call our intelligence. The human being of earlier times, and that applies also to the earlier parts of our Earth evolution, lived in a soul-consciousness of pictures and he did not distinguish the laws of nature by his intelligence, but Nature herself had intelligence, Nature herself gave herself laws. There outside worked intelligence. It is an evolutionary phase of our humanity, now become independent, that we bear intelligence within us and there, outside, are the laws of nature. The sum total of these natural laws was the intelligence for the man of antiquity.

Now, as Earth humanity we have, as you know, already developed consciousness to a certain degree, so that intelligence is within us and outside exist natural laws which we only grasp with our intelligence. In pointing to these facts, we are touching upon an important evolutionary impulse of mankind. But we must be aware that this evolutionary impulse must be more and more laid hold of and perfected. Today indeed it is not yet fully perfected. We certainly say to ourselves that we have intellect within us, and there, without, the laws of nature hold sway, but we have not yet fully made intelligence our own. As humanity we have remained half-way as regards this receiving of intelligence, reason, natural law, into ourselves. And these facts which I have been touching upon are amongst those which above all must be examined from the standpoint of Spiritual Science precisely in our times. Nowadays we are still extraordinarily proud when we possess something of an intellectual nature, something pertaining to human knowledge in common with other people. Something still holds good today which is cutting very deeply into the whole development of human nature, namely, that science should be cultivated as something universal, hovering over humanity, as it were, and that when men devote themselves to science they should bring their individuality as a sacrifice, that they should think—well, as “everyone” thinks. It is an ideal, for instance, in our public educational institutions, to cultivate a science which is quite impersonal, quite un-individual, to make this science into something in respect of which one says “I” as little as possible, and says “one” as much as possible. “One” has discovered this or that, “one” must accept this or that as true. And the ideal of the official representative of science today would be just this—that one should not really be able to distinguish the separate professors very well—least of all as regards temperament—when one arrives at a college from another college far distant. It would be an ideal, if one—shall we say?—could listen to a lecture on botany somewhere in the north, then fly with a balloon towards the south and could there hear the continuation of this lecture, and if the continuation should correspond with what “one” really knows in Botany! Something quite impersonal, unindividual, it is this which people consider to be the right thing, and they have a horrible dread lest somehow or other anything personal should enter into this knowledge, into this working of the human intellect. It is just in this sphere that the levelling down of the whole of human culture is considered as of chief importance. It is a source of pride if one does not deviate from what has been formulated once and for all in a certain method. Thus, people would like to sunder science from man. It is separated from man also in still many other relations, as we know. Examples could be given of this. Just think how most men today who are connected in an official way with science write their dissertations, their professorial candidature treatises and so on. They put themselves into them as little as possible, and least of all they reckon with the fact that these books will be quite generally read. They are written; but they are scarcely read by those who have to test them in the college in question; at the most someone reads them who is obliged to do so, and then he tells the others what is contained in them. For science is something about which “one” thinks, not oneself personally. And then they are stored away in libraries. When someday someone or other writes a similar book he looks in the library catalogue and sees where he can find anything he must pay attention to and then that is stored away again, end enters least of all into the individual-personal. All of that is cut off. Yes, my dear friends, countless books abound in the libraries which have no personal interest at all. This is after all a dreadful situation. But what is worse, people have not the least idea of it, and feel quite satisfied, believing that they themselves do not need to know anything at all, for in the libraries you can find everything, if you only get the right catchword in the catalogue. There things rest. But men are withering away beside a science which is so unindividual. Science would have to be looked at differently if people wanted to keep it in their heads instead of on the library shelves.

This gives one through a few holes—so to say—for one could bring forward many things along these lines, an indication of how the ordinary intellectual culture in modern men is still unindividual, impersonal, how they would like to have it as something which carries on a sort of cloud existence above them. But what is brought about by man belongs not only to man, but to the cosmos. I have therefore said that in order to come to fruitful reflections, we must regard man in connection with the planet, and then again, the planet in connection with the whole universe.

What man brings about, therefore, by using his intellect he can deal with in two directions. He can exert it by developing sciences which all end in “one” thinks, “one” knows, “one” has attained these or those improvements. Then one writes it down in books and stores it away, then that is science, which the generations outgrow, and men can wither away with such a cultivation of the intellect. People can take the line of looking to many other things for their real interests but certainly not to what is an unreality, objective, with no personal touch, preserved in libraries—this they do not meddle with. One has known of learned assemblies who had a phrase, “one who is fond of talking shop” (Fachsimpeln). To gather in small circles and discuss scientific matters when there was an official assembly was considered as of far the least importance. Oh, no, one spoke there of all sorts of trivialities, lying far removed from anything that was really a matter of science. And those who had the weakness of being somewhat enthusiastic about their science and who then—shall we say?—when tea or black coffee was being drunk, began perhaps to speak of this or that philosophical subject, those were people who talked “shop,” whom one couldn't take quite seriously—who had not the mind of a man of the world.

I once encountered this lack of the personal in science in a very singular way. I attended an assembly where Helmholtz was giving a. lecture. At this lecture, which was read aloud word for word by Helmholtz and which had already been in print for some time, the audience listened to its being read—well, as one does listen to such a lecture. After the lecture, a journalist came up to me and said—“Why exactly that? One does not need that at all. Anyone can read such a lecture, who wants to, when it has been printed, why should it be read aloud to us as well? It would have been far more sensible if Helmholtz had simply walked about in the auditorium and given his hand to everyone. That would have done much more good.” That is a very true example of how estranged people are from what is flying about so impersonally as science. Naturally people are being dried up by it. This, then, is one way in which intellectual culture can be grasped.

The other method is this; to interest oneself in every single thing, so that one's mind catches fire and brings new life into science and the details are recast into living concepts, so to grasp everything that it is received from the first moment with the inner life of feeling. Thus, one can really imbue with an inner fire all that is given by science. By taking the various sciences one can gradually penetrate into the whole world existence, one can create something which becomes an innately personal concern of every human being who pursues it. That is the other method. On the one side impersonal, all that is carried on being cut off from humanity—in fact people would greatly prefer to find automatons for the pursuit of science. Then they would have nothing more to reflect upon with their own heads, for perhaps they would be productive without them. But all that happens in this way, or all that may happen from a fully heartfelt pursuit of science, is indeed not merely the concern of mankind, it is the concern of the whole planet and therewith of the whole universe. For what a man does, inasmuch as he cultivates something of an intellectual nature with his head, is just as much an event as when the water of a spring flows under the stream to the sea, or as when evaporation takes place, or it rains. What happens when plants sprout and so on, those are events of the one sort. What happens through the agency of man is an event of another sort. It is not merely a human concern, it is a concern of the whole planet. And this is precisely the task of man in his evolution on the earth—for the intelligence which formerly was poured out in common with the whole planet, to be drawn within by man, to be united with himself. Thus it is an evolutionary impulse of man to make knowledge his own personal concern, so that he can imbue it with enthusiasm, so that it can pass over into him and be seized by the fire of his heart. And if he does not do the latter, if he stores up knowledge in impersonal ways, then something does not happen which ought to happen in the sense of the Earth's evolution. The feeling nature of nan is not seized by the culture of the intellect» The intellectual culture only develops in the head, as it were, and hovers too far away from the surface of the earth, merely in our heads. It makes no difference if many people are short, and their heads only reach about to the hearts of others, it develops only in the heads, and it ought to sink down to the hearts. But lying in wait for what is thus not taken in by the heart, what is not seized by the feeling nature of man, are the Luciferic spirits. And this for which the Luciferic spirits are thus waiting can be received by them when it hovers thus impersonally above the earth. For the only possibility of wresting the world of intellect away from the Luciferic spirits is to imbue it with feeling and make it a personal affair. And what is happening in our age, and what has happened for a long time and must become different, is that we are letting earthly existence become the prey of the Luciferic world, by our cold, empty, dried-up intellect. In this way the Earth is checked in her evolution, and is held back at an earlier stage. She will not arrive at her goal. And if man continues for a long time the impersonality of so-called science, the consequence will be the loss of the soul-nature altogether. This impersonal science is the murderer of the human soul and spirit nature. It dries men up, it withers them. Finally, it makes of the Earth something that one can call a dead planet with automatic men on it, who have lost their spirit and soul by these means. Here too one must say: things must even now be taken in earnest; we must not look on at this cosmic murder by the abstract impersonal pursuit of knowledge on earth. That is one thing.

The other is the human desire-nature, which is connected with the will in man. What is connected with man's will-nature can again take two directions. The one path is for this will-nature to subordinate itself as much as possible to regulations or state decrees, and to unite itself with what is a kind of general law, so that this general law exists, and in addition there are only man's purely instinctive desires.

The other path is that what is reflected in man as desire, what is present as will should gradually raise itself to pure thought, expend itself in individual freedom so that it flows into the social life as love. It is the method of transmuting the forces of will and desire that I have described in the “Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.” There I have shown how the common law of humanity must proceed from each human individuality. I have described there how the social order arises through the harmony of men's acts, when what proceeds from the human individual is raised to pure thought. Men are afraid of a social order which is formed by every person giving himself his direction out of his own individuality. People like to organise what men should want. They like to establish categorical commands in the place of the love working out of each human being. Through the existence, however, of such abstract injunctions, whether they are commands on the pattern of the Decalogue, or laws of any individual State, then from out the individuality of man only instinctive desires have a value, those desires which we are seeing revive today especially, and which have become, as a matter of fact, the sole social ingredient of the present time. Again, that which happens in man when he does not make his will individual, does not raise it to pure thinking, that is not something affecting man alone, but it affects the whole planet and therewith the cosmos. And what occurs when the human will cannot become individual, this the Ahrimanic spirits are greedily awaiting. They make it their own, these Ahrimanic spirits, and they appropriate everything which lives in man of a will-nature, by way of desires not unfolded to love, and carry it over to individual demonic beings. Just as something of a more universal nature arises through that which is hovering over mankind as the intellectual faculty, so do quite individually formed demonic beings arise out of the human appetitive faculties not transformed into love.

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All this is, however, something which must be regarded today not with mere sympathy and antipathy alone, but with that sight which looks through world events, which can observe what is happening among men in connection with cosmic events. When one sees things thus, one will say to oneself: it is given to man to bring forward the planet wisely in its evolution. The particular kind of existence which has been indicated today is threatening humanity if men do not try to convert knowledge into wisdom. And that can only come about if a man personally applies himself to knowledge, if he takes it personally into himself and binds it again to what, out of the desire nature transmuted by love, becomes the common concern of humanity. One can receive these things through Spiritual Science with a strong impulse of inner understanding.

As a matter of fact, it is shown in what has remained behind in the Moon as a cosmic symbol. When we sec the Moon in its first or last quarter, in what it shows us as its sickle form we have a. picture of what the Earth could become. In the dark part, it shows to one who can see the supersensible these little demoniacal forms moving about in ghastly fashion, where the curve of the sickle bends inwards. So that one is speaking quite correctly in saying: man must preserve the Earth from the Moon existence through all that I have now explained. The Moon shows in a cosmic picture placed before us what the Earth could become. And so we must accustom ourselves to penetrate in this way with inner feeling into that too which we see outside in the cosmos. We must so look upon the Moon that we can say: it shows us something set up through cosmic evolution as a caricature of the Earth existence, as what the Earth existence can become if man does not learn to understand how to make impersonal knowledge into his personal concern, if he does not learn how, through warmth, to change individual desires into love, through which they can develop into an associated social life that is a common concern of the whole of mankind. One can understand better what happens in the cosmos if one looks into what is being accomplished in man, and conversely one can see in the right way the tasks of mankind if one is able consciously to look into the conditions of the cosmos. For they are applicable also to that which should live in humanity as morality, as ethics.

The facts that are stated concerning Lucifer and Ahriman are not meant to be taken in such a way that one should theorise about them, that one should only say Ahriman is this, and Lucifer is that. But one should so take up these ideas into oneself that really one should see in all around the activity of the Luciferic spirits who want to hold back the Earth in earlier conditions. So too in all that is Ahriman one should see something which would hold back the Earth so that it does not advance to future stages. But one must penetrate those things in detail. One must be able to value the moral in relation to the laws of nature, and the laws of nature morally. When that happens then the great bridge will be thrown across between the moral world-concept and the theoretic world-concept, of which bridge I have, as you know, often spoken from this place.

Things which happen today must also he viewed from this standpoint. For only when the free-will of man invades these cosmic events can what has been indicated to you he turned to good service. The further evolution of the world is in fact entirely the task of man and of humanity. This must not be overlooked. And one who only wants to theorise, who, for instance, only wants to see and hears after so and so many centuries or millennia this or that will happen—does not consider that we are already living in a time when it is given over to mankind to co-operate in the metamorphosis of the earthly evolution; he does not consider that there must be received into man's soul that which is the general world-intelligence, nor that what lives individually in man as the forces of desire must flow out from mankind in the form of a universal love, which, however, is only attained through the pure freedom of thought.

Herewith I have set before your mind's eye two streams of culture, which are immensely important, and have sought in so doing to show again from a certain aspect what is the task of Spiritual Science when taken earnestly. The task lies in this direction. It does not really lie in a few persons having a feeling of well-being in the knowledge of this and that, but it lies in so grasping human evolution that world events come to pass in the true way out of humanity itself.

Our lectures, in that period of time before I had to go away some weeks ago, all tended to show how that which we call Spiritual Science can pass over into real life. They tended to show how that which we call the Cosmos stands in a certain inner connection with what we ourselves inwardly experience in man. And if you just survey the lectures given upon this very theme, I beg you once in a way, radically to ask yourselves this question:—What would it signify for the sum total of the evolution of humanity if these most penetrating, most significant results of Anthroposophical Spiritual Science would only penetrate into the life of those human beings working and living in a social relation with each other. They would know that man, while he attains his consciousness in a physical body, is all the time preserving something in this physical body which points to the period of time before his birth, or rather before his conception, when he was in a condition in which he was filled with a longing once again to have the life between birth and death. He carried within him then the feeling that the soul that has lived for a long time in the Spiritual world again needs the perception of the world obtainable through the bodily senses in order to progress further, and also needs actions performed in a physical body. This conscious contemplation of the pre-existence of the soul, if really understood in the right way, would not remain a mere theoretical view, but would lay hold of one's Feeling and Will, and thereby become a direct force in life.

We can see this my dear friends, in the humanity of the present- age.—They all show something of a lack of initiative, in its broad outlines. This lack of initiative, which broadly speaking, works in a weakening way on all these forces which are necessary in order to turn our decaying life once again into an ascending one, can only be bettered when man becomes conscious of his community with the Spiritual world. That however cannot be brought into the human soul through any theoretical considerations, but only through the living perception of what man was before he descended into the physical world.

Again, if that which looks beyond the time which we pass here as human beings between birth and death, is not the object simply of a vague belief but of a clear cognition, it does not work so abstractly in man as do the religious confessions of to-day, but works concretely, as a direct force of life, Man then works in such a way that what lies in his labour extends beyond his death; and because a man can take up such ideas into himself, life is thereby poured into everything which as a rule man only knows.

Just think for a moment. To-day we have a widely-extended Science of Nature; and as regards this external Science, we must say that man has progressed enormously; but the last few years have shown that this progress has not improved humanity in any moral respect. Such persons as Wallace and others, to whom I have often pointed when I wanted to emphasise that years ago, they were quite right when they said, “We have indeed made immense progress with respect to our knowledge of the outer world, but as regards our moral nature, humanity compared with primeval times, has not progressed.”

This progress must come to-day, in this historic Age, because human beings cannot remain as they are now, in their present disposition of soul. But how can this change be brought about? How can the more theoretical view of the world be animated? Let us take an apparently coarse example. In our human life, we make use of coal. We know that this coal is a relic of old forests, and so fundamentally it is a plant-substance. But now, how is this plant-substance, how is the whole world of plants connected with man as such? Just reckon over a few thousand years and see how much carbon dioxide, carbonic-acid the air would then contain,—because we breathe out carbon dioxide into the air with each expiration,—and you will find that it is a large quantity.

In the course of a few thousand years it would be an enormous quantity. In the course of a few thousand years, it would cause man to disappear; it would extinguish life. But now the plants absorb this carbon dioxide, and excrete the carbon; they form their body out of that which they absorb from man's cast-off produce; and these plants which once covered the Earth, now compose our layers of coal, our coal strata.

You see, that is an extraordinary transformation. At first it is more the qualitative aspect which comes into consideration; because naturally that coal was not formed by our breath but by other beings; but this qualitative aspect has to be considered. That which in a sense we excrete from ourselves, furnishes the basis for what we again use from the Earth. Thus far one can think, according to the theoretical results arrived at by Science.

Spiritual Science leads us further, I must remind you of what I have told you. It is true that man lays aside his physical body when he goes with his soul and spirit into the Spiritual worlds; but I also told you that the physical body, which is laid aside, signifies just that which builds up the Earth again.

As in our expiration we give carbon to the plant-world, so we give our body to the entire Earth. And what we see around us, my dear friends, is simply the product of such beings as ourselves, beings who, during the Moon, Sun and Saturn epochs were our predecessors, and who gave to the Earth that which composes the Earth to-day. When future worlds come, there will live in them that which we now excrete as our bodily substance. That is a thought of infinite scope, if one follows it out, because from our knowledge of nature (which is but a half-knowledge), we can get the connection of man with the entire world, and it is important that we should get that, extremely important; for if we bring together all that has been laid down as a foundation in our earlier lectures, we must say; that in our entire human nature, not merely in our thinking but in our entire nature, even as far as our external body, lives what we have worked upon in ourselves as our moral ideals. That dualistic philosophy, which can build no bridge between the natural world and the moral sphere, cannot imagine how what we have in our moral ideals can be connected with the very processes in our muscles; but if one can look at the world as we have tried to do in our recent lectures, one sees how what we think in our moral ideals incorporates itself into the very processes of our body. One sees that the Spiritual and bodily processes are interwoven and form a unity.

This method of looking at things ought to become general. If only it were taken up as part of the education of children, human beings would grow up who would not look on one side to a world developed from a nebulous condition, out of which, the Sun, the Stars and the Planets have condensed, and from which too, through the welding-together of matter void of morale or being, humanity has developed in order finally to return back into a purely natural condition. That which springs up in our souls as moral Ideals would then again be one with what stood at the starting point of our Cosmic evolution in its purely natural existence. We human beings would then realise that we are called upon to incorporate into the life of nature, what we experience as moral ideals. And then, in future worlds, we should know that what we now experience morally will re-appear as the Laws of Nature.

If only children could grow up to-day under the influence of such a perception, they would be able to take their place in the world in such a way that they would feel themselves as part of the Cosmos, and would thereby have a feeling for life drawn from these very forces which they would absorb into themselves with their knowledge of the Cosmos. Indeed, being educated to action, they would then know that whatever they do is to be imprinted in the entire Cosmos. If only that were the prevailing feeling, how differently human beings would live; whereas to-day man asks himself: “What am I really in this world?” He sees himself standing alone, sprung forth from indefinite Nature-forces, and permeated with moral ideals like soap bubbles. Such a man can be crippled in his very feeling for life. When he looks up to the stars he sees them passing through Cosmic space, but he feels he has no connection with them. They themselves have only arisen in a natural way. They are perishable worlds, falling to pieces, serving no purpose, and having no inner Spirituality.

We must bear in mind what a life-force for humanity might be developed from a Spiritual method of looking at things. That must be pointed out again and again, because that is just what human beings to-day understand least of all. They say that a Spiritual view makes a man live apart from the world; but my dear friends, it is the present modern view which makes one avoid the world. Why is this so? Because it works with the dogmas of the past, which in the past served a good purpose, because they then arose from a certain instinctive clairvoyance. But this instinctive clairvoyance has now disappeared, and human beings have no longer any relationship to it. The dogmas still retained are no longer understood. It is not a question of their falsity, but of modern humanity having no longer a living relationship with them. And outside of the dogmas still maintained, humanity to-day only has a nature science devoid of spirit. Anthroposophy will give a spirit-filled Science of nature, a science able to animate man, and that which trickles, as a knowledge of the spirit, into nature, will then transform itself in man in the same way as do the food-substances in a physical respect. That knowledge is transformed in man into Social Force, and one would experience it if one earnestly realised that Spiritual knowledge is nourishment for the soul, and can be absorbed and digested—if I can use that expression—it can be digested and re-appear as a force working socially. We can get social impulses in no other way than by taking up Spiritual cognition from surrounding Nature. Anyone who thinks he can carry out social reforms from any other impulse, thinks about the things of this world as one who meditates about man and wishing to explain him as clearly as possible, and in order to explain him to himself, forbids him food. Whoever speaks to-day of social forms without having Spiritual knowledge, does the same thing with reference to the social order of humanity as a man who wishes to explain man and prescribes for him a hunger cure. That is just what stands as a deep absurdity in the modern views of humanity, and which it cannot see through.

When we enter this life between Birth and Death, what we carry with us from the Spiritual worlds is only like an image, and fundamentally the whole of our soul-life is a life of images, pictures. But in former Ages this picture-life was animated by what then already existed in the natural perception as spirit. In ancient times there existed no concept of nature which was not filled with spirit. People to-day can read older views, but they read nothing there of a Natural Science, that is, of a natural Science devoid of spirit. Whoever goes back, even into the 13th or 14th Centuries, and reads the things written and spoken of nature there, may mock at the childishness, the superstition then existing; but the essential is, that all the things described then were described as permeated by spirit. To-day, on the other hand, we try as far as possible to see the phenomena of nature without spirit. Indeed, we regard it as the very perfection of our scientific observations to see them without spirit.

That which we take up out of nature without spirit, can however no longer work animatingly in the pictorial existence of our soul. We remain at a standstill in this respect and will not admit that it is merely an image. But this image, which is really the image of a past life, will not be fructified by the present life around us. This present life should be fructified by the past life, so that it can then be carried through the Gate of Death into the Spiritual worlds. It is only Spiritual Science livingly beheld which can give man that which it has to give him.

Just take, for instance, the dogmas of the old books of religion. Many men to-day fight against these because they find and consider them nonsensical; but they are in no wise nonsensical. Even such a dogma as that of the Trinity has a most profound sense. It was read by human beings from nature itself by means of the old instinctive clairvoyance, and for thousands of years in the evolution of humanity that dogma gave man an infinite amount. The external Churches have preserved such dogmas, but to-day they hardly exist except as a certain vocal sound. Men to-day feel no need to develop a relationship with what was an object of an ancient clairvoyance, and so it remains something which has no relationship to man to-day, because of his modern nature, although at one time it was a living soul-nourishment. And again, apart from these dogmas, we have our external Science of Nature, in a state of utter deprivation, which kills the soul unless it is permeated by the spirit.

These are the two basic evils which Spiritual Science as studied here, has to keep in mind: in order once more to give to the soul something which will animate it, and give it force, so that it can feel itself directly as a member of the entire Cosmos, and feel that responsibility in its social work which proceeds from knowing that as single individuals, even our tiniest action has a Cosmic significance for the whole evolution of the future. We have to look beyond that narrow circuit in which we are enclosed by reason of our lack of education; for that narrowing which man has himself brought about will increase more and more. That is why Spiritual Science meets with so much difficulty, because fundamentally that which it seeks to be, does not consist merely of words, nor thoughts, not merely ideas, but that which can permeate all those thoughts, flow through the words as the very Spiritual blood of life, and then trickle directly into each human soul. It is for that reason that, in any advocating of Spiritual Science, it is far more a question of how we speak than of what we say. We see to-day the most violent conflict between Materialism and Spiritualism. This conflict simply rests on the fact that human beings simply will not see what deep foundations this utterance has:—The truth always lies midway between two directly opposite associations.

My dear friends, is it true that God is within us? Is it true then that we are in God? It is true that we are in God. These two assertions are direct opposites. Both are true. God is in us, and we are in God; but the two assertions are polar opposites. The real truth, the whole truth lies between the two. The nature of all the conflict of ideas in the world rests on this—that human beings always tend to a one-sidedness, which is true, but only a one-sided truth; whereas the real truth lies between two opposite assertions. We must know both in order to get at the reality. For instance, to-day, in the present state of the evolution of the world, one must have the most earnest will to learn all we can of material existence above all, and not propagate the desire of those people who say: “We will only occupy ourselves with the Spirit: we do not want to know Matter.” To learn as much as possible of Matter is one side of human cognition, one thing for which the Will of man, must strive. On the other hand one must learn to know the Spirit, because between those two, lies what we are, and ought really to strive for. Both are wrong.—those who say the world is only Matter and those who say the world is only Spirit are wrong—For what is matter? Matter as human beings know it, is that which has remained behind from the Spirit, after the Spirit has become Spirit. Your own human form, my dear friends, is only what was once a thought of the Gods, which I here draw in red—the Divine workings of thought.

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Just think; even as water that freezes gets a solid form, so this Divine thought gets a form and becomes the sheaths of man, (Blue). Then a new thought of God makes itself valid in the inner being of man, and then goes out again, (Red) and this Divine thought (left) was once transformed from a form which in still older times was also a thought of the Gods. Whatever we see as matter is nothing else than spirit which has become a firm form, and that which we perceive as the human spirit is simply a young form, a form engaged in the process of becoming. These two—Spirit and Matter—are only different because of their ages in the world—they only are of a different age. The mistake made about them does not consist in our applying ourselves either to Matter or to Spirit, but in wanting to maintain in the Present what we should so maintain in Life, which we should so fructify, that it may become something for the future.

Now just think. We bring something over into the present from our pre-existence in the Spiritual world; we bring that over as a Spiritual psychic life. But if we permeate that with a barren external spiritless Science of Nature, we harden it, we do not keep it germinal, we do not allow it to grow up for future worlds. We Ahrimanise it.

And if we try and grasp that which is already form, which is Divinity itself grown old and crystallised itself in form if we seek to grasp that in a nebulous way, through a nebulous mysticism into which we dream all kinds of things, we do not support ourselves on that which is given us by the Gods as our bodily support. And thus we Luciferise Matter. What is nebulous mysticism? Man should look into himself. He should recognise from out of the Cosmos that which he is in his own physical organism in his life between birth and death. Instead of that he cherishes the fantasy that he has a God within him. He has indeed a God within him, but he does not attain that through mystical fantasy, for he thus Luciferises what he should see in the later form of his own bodily sheaths. These are false views of Matter and Spirit, about which human beings come into strife with one another, for Matter and Spirit are one and the same, but at different ages of life.

That is something which it is very necessary our present Age should perceive; otherwise it can never come to an understanding of the social life. The attempt must be made to-day really to enter with one's thoughts into the true reality; but human beings do not want to do this,—they prefer to remain on the surface of things. A pretty little story was told to me a few days ago, which occurred a few weeks back in Zurich. Probably it has already been related to some of you here. One of our friends spoke at a University Celebration in Zurich about the scientific significance of Anthroposophy. A socialistic thinker in reply, got up and said: “One should not educate man to-day to such mystic phantasy, but to exact Science, for did not Goethe say: Into the inner being of nature no creative spirit can penetrate.”

You see, what this Swiss delegate brought forward rests simply on a superficial knowledge of what Goethe did say, For Goethe, quoting the above utterance of Halley said: “I have heard this repeated for 60 years and have sworn at it the whole time.” That is how the Spiritual Life is carried on to-day. That represents the accuracy with which men know things, and thus in a certain degree do they become authorities. Thus, do men strive to learn to know the world. Whether one man believes Goethe himself uttered what he swore at for 60 years, or whether as National Economists do they perform things such as I will characterise now, is really a matter of indifference. A very learned National Economist wrote a book about the free and the fixed formation of prices. He had to investigate a good deal as to the way in which, as I might say National Economy could be made social. Amongst the many things he discussed, is also the following. He says: Even George Brandes (who was himself no deep thinker) said: The people in their economic and social deeds are not guided by reason but by instinct.” Therefore, things should be explained to the people. That is what this National Economist is advocating. One must bring enlightenment to the people.

Now, my dear friends to this one could reply: In our many Universities, there are a great number of these National Economists, they are all enlightened, but when they arrange things amongst themselves, they are working exactly under the same institute instincts as the others,—neither more nor less. And so, as things are fashioned, especially to-day by our highly developed intelligence, as regards social life these same instincts remain, and are working. But now we must go further, we must now ask ourselves: How can we bring light into this working of the instincts, for that alone can be of social significance. It is simply nonsense to suppose that the majority of human beings can be guided by this; they cannot. Something must come in which can enter and transform these instincts. Reason cannot enter into them. We have here to remind ourselves of that ancient instinctive perception, (See Diagram) which has developed into our intellectuality; but this intellect lives only in the inner Spiritual life of man. On the other hand, the external forces working socially are permeated by instinct. Into this instinct something must penetrate which is related to the old instinctive vision, but which has an impulse from Spirituality. That is Imagination. Imagination must enter. (See Diagram) Imaginations as we call them in Spiritual Science, can alone give the force which can bring light to those instincts.

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That which enables us to understand things to-day scientifically and externally; Botany, Zoology, Mathematics,—can be furnished by the intellect, but not that which implies human co-operation. There must enter what we have called Imagination. Imaginations must permeate the social life—that is the essential thing. In all social life which has developed from olden times up to recent times, there have lived the human instincts. It is actually only since the 2nd, and last third of the 19th Century that man has entered that age which no longer requires the old instincts. You can prove this exactly. Even at the turn of the 18th and 19th Century there still lived these ancient instincts in the social life of man. The uncertainty of man's instincts first appeared in that Age when intellect developed in its most shining form. Then tradition alone remained.

Just think, my dear friends, what gigantic efforts were made in the 19th Century, in order still to have moral views. Men had to preserve in the most abstract way what was still maintained from ancient times; and of necessity the old moral ideals were still propagated, though they were then petrified. We need to-day a rebirth of morality for that alone can produce what is social, that cannot come from the intellect, but simply and solely from moral intuition. Moral fantasy must raise itself to the Spiritual world, in order to fructify itself out of that world. That is now the essential, otherwise man faces the loss of moral impulses.

Those abstract Confessions which tend to belief alone cannot find in their faith the necessary strength for life to-day. Faith can give one something for the egoism of one's own soul; but with that egoism alone, at most one can live as an individual, separate being. If we want to enter into action, and that means social action, it is then necessary that we should be permeated with a Spiritual-psychic life-blood, and that can only come from a concrete Spiritual life. This consciousness of the Life-Force must flow through the Anthroposophical Movement into the Anthroposophical view of life. Especially from this point of view must one make oneself acquainted with these important concepts which to-day need a justification and defence.

Pantheism is a very favourite reproach against Anthroposophy, Pantheism, i.e., giving reverence to the things around us, for God lives in those things. That is heresy to the modern Confessions; and why? Why is it that the modern Confessions call our Anthroposophy a heresy? Because these Confessions are permeated through and through with materialism.—If the Jesuit regards the world around him simply as Matter, it is of course blasphemy to say that this Matter is Divine, is God. But can Anthroposophy help it if the Jesuits regard the world around them simply as Matter? It is not Matter, it is Spirit; and that which the Jesuits perceives as Matter in the world, that Anthroposophy has to show as illusion. We do not explain as Divine the world which we assert—is an illusion;—of course not, we do not claim that for Divine existence. Of course it is quite different to take what is around us and explain that as Divine, at the same time realising external sense-phenomena as illusion, than to regard it as mere Matter and then explain that the grossest Matter is Divine.

You see how far asunder these things are, and we must not grow weary of really trying to make these things valid before the world. Otherwise there may be a repetition of what happened lately, when something was printed in a Swiss Newspaper by way of objection to my methods of attaining Spiritual knowledge. There it was asserted that I said that one can see the Spirit; but that cannot be, because the Spirit is not sensible, and only the things of sense can be perceived. One cannot grasp the Spirit, and therefore one cannot see it.

You see, what a hopeless way this is; the writer maintains nothing else but that—he cannot see the Spirit, and therefore no one can see the Spirit. One can know nothing of the Spirit because one cannot grasp it. And in such variations, the thoughts of a whole Newspaper goes on. What works so terribly destructively to-day, is the fact that people have not the consciousness that they should read such things to the end. “Into the inner being of nature no creative Spirit can penetrate”—thus ran the first two lines; but the person reading them stopped there, and did not notice that Goethe added; “I have heard this said for 60 years, and have cursed it all the time.”

What we must look for everywhere to-day is the prevailing superficiality. I have often pointed this out, but it cannot be done too often. We must trace everywhere this terrible clinging to superficiality. It can be chiefly seen where it works so terribly to-day externally, i.e. in the sphere of Social Economics; There people will not dive down into that which lies in the very essence of things. For instance, I have been told to-day, that people are constantly saying that “The Threefold State” (book) is so difficult to understand,—well, that they want something which they can understand much more easily. But, my dear friends, if, with these things that can easily be understood, nothing is done in social life, but men have simply bungled, it is necessary to grasp what is a little difficult, which requires effort. It is strange to demand that a thing be made more comprehensible, for it is really necessary for our modern social thinking that we should make an effort. Things one can easily understand have worked so abstractly, so ruinously to-day. To demand that such things should be made more comprehensible, is simply frivolous. It really is. Indeed, it is not a question that one should not cultivate such inwardly frivolous thoughts as “This is difficult”—for if it were given in any such form as is desired, it would simply give people something else with which they could bungle. For really objective work this apparent difficulty simply must be overcome, it simply urges us to make a study of that book. That is the essential. In this earnest way should one try to enter into these things, in such serious times as these.

I should like to-day to add various things to the considerations of Cosmic and human truths, which we have been studying of late, and I shall want to add several things concerning the sort of truths we discussed in the last lecture, truths connected with the development of mankind in our own age.

How, in order to amplify those things from one side, and another, it will be necessary to-day to insert here and there an observation which may strike you as being personal; but you know that I only make personal observations on the rarest occasions, and when I do, it is always, as to-day, to explain something strongly objective.

We are living at present in an epoch which demands something quite definite from human beings. It demands from everyone what must be called a decision arising from the innermost depths of human nature. It must be considered, and clearly seen that we have now really entered for the first time on the age of human freedom, and the upheavals in intellectual, moral or social spheres, are, after all, nothing but the expression of man being brought into the region of freedom through the deeper forces connected with human development. We have merely to consider the life of individual man or the life of Nations, and to look at them in a quite unprejudiced way, to see what occurs; and then we can say to ourselves that there are to-day innumerable factors, through which each single individual, or whole races, communities and Groups of mankind, are deteriorated either from without or within, factors which leave them unfree. This being carried along by the relationships and events around then, is something which fundamentally lay in the real evolution of humanity; but now man has to emerge from this stage. The future of the Earth will consist in man developing more and more what we have just characterised by saying that, to-day, for the first time, man is faced with such significant decisions.

The fact that man is thus placed before such significant decisions, my dear friends, decisions which have to be made from the innermost depths of man's heart and soul, is expressed in the external course of events. As a rule, however, the great changes which have occurred in all the spheres of political, social, Spiritual and scientific life in the course of the second half of the 19th Century, have been too little observed.

One can notice signs of this transition, both in great and in small things everywhere to-day. Let us take one instance which lies very close to us. You know that amongst the many enemies of our Anthroposophical Movement to-day, are also to be found the Clergy of this Country (Switzerland), and they show quite clearly that behind them stands the power of the Jesuits, and that power appears to have a certain validity just in Switzerland. One has merely to keep in mind what reveals itself to-day in various spheres, to see how this Jesuitical power is amalgamated, for many people, with what they call the external religious education and so on. As regards this Country it may be interesting to bring before our souls an extraordinary document which, because it is so interesting, I have had photographed. This document originated in Switzerland and was produced there in 1847. I will read it to you:—

“Dedicated to the contemporary Army and their brave leaders as a permanent monument, in memory of the 24th November 1847, when the Dominion of the Jesuits passed away from Switzerland. The Almighty has given victory to the just cause. Those days, from the 12th to the 30th November 1847 are therefore unforgettable to every Confederate soldier—those days during which in consequence of resolutions passed on the 20th July and 4th November 1847, the seven Catholic separated States—Lucerne, Uri, Schweiz, Zug, Freiburg, and the Valais, were infested with war, but because of our Army under the command of Heinrich Du-four of Geneva, they had one after another to capitulate. To these days belong some of the most note-worthy events which Swiss history offers. With a relatively slight sacrifice of dead and wounded our clever and war-experienced leader, by his strategical arrangements, was successful, after many conflicts, in freeing those people who were slaves to the tyranny and power of a hypocritical Clergy full of fanaticism; and the inhabitants blinded by their Catholicism, who as enemies faced the Confederate army including the Militia over 80,000 strong. After a few days were entirely conquered, which made it possible to dissolve that Sonderbund and to drive the Jesuits out of Switzerland”

The concluding sentence, which is especially interesting in my opinion runs: “May God's Fatherly protection rule over our Army.”

You see under whose protection at that time the expulsion of the Jesuits was undertaken, and how “God's Fatherly protection” was similarly evoked for the future, that it might always continue to rule over the Swiss people as at the time, when General du-four was successful in ridding Switzerland from the Jesuits. That occurred in 1847.

Now, my dear friends, not these things alone, but many others, have undergone radical transformations in the course of the last half Century, transformations of quite a definite character. Their characteristic is that anyone who gives himself over merely to the sequence of external events, such as have transpired during this epoch, must of necessity come into confusion. The very best way to come into confusion, and to be unable to find a way out of certain knots and tangles, is just to let the external events of the last half- or two-thirds of the last Century work upon us. If a person to-day wishes to find his way aright, a certain orientation which comes entirely from within, a certain impulse, is absolutely necessary. In that chaos, which is the basis of all the confusion into which we fall if we rely solely on external things, all the best strivings of recent times have been entangled. It cannot of course be denied, that our newer age has accomplished many things in various spheres of life; especially in the sphere of technique and the science which is connected with technique, great significant progress has been made. Triumphs have been celebrated, and this praise is thoroughly justified. But if you take the best results, the best scientific and technical conquests of our civilisation, although you will find many things of use, many illuminating things, many things which bring man on materially, you will find nothing either in science or in technique or in any other sphere, or even in that sphere which has brought good to man, nothing which can shine from the outer world into man's soul so that he can get a guiding impulse from those things coming from that external world. Therefore, Spiritual Science had to come, just at this very time, because out of Spiritual Science something must come which is drawn from no external world, but simply from the Spiritual world; and which is so taken up that when it flows into the outer world it represents an impulse which has nothing to do with anything drawn from that outer world itself. It is an impulse carried into the outer world from Spiritual worlds,—and that is what is sought to be given through our Anthroposophical Spiritual Science. In this connection, we are radically misunderstood to-day, and my yesterday's remarks were a kind of explanation of this from a certain aspect. I wanted especially to show that it must not be said of our School-Impulse (which of course is born out of Spiritual Science), or of our practical undertakings, that we carry into them anything of a theoretical view of the world. I tried to show yesterday how far such a statement is from reality. But neither may one say the opposite, and this too is connected with a right understanding of our Anthroposophical Spiritual Science. One may not say the reverse, that, as people usually imagine to-day, any external activity is the result of a theory, of a programme; one must not imagine that what we accomplish—whether in the sphere of pedagogy or practical life—proceeds from any programme such as is usually imagined to-day.

A few days ago, for instance, someone said:—“Well, this peculiar idea regarding the Threefold State, would not have arisen if this Threefold idea had not sprung from Anthroposophy,” and I had to correct such an utterance radically. And here I must add a few personal things, which are meant quite objectively, and have a good deal to do with these matters. I had to say:—“It is really the case that what meets you and others to-day as the Threefold Division of the Social Organism, in so far as it was conceived by me, sprang from no abstract thought, nor from meditating on how the social life could be so arranged that something could come into it of that Utopian character one finds in many writings to-day. It did not arise in this way.” That came to me as the perception of a Spiritual stream, which flowed together naturally in life with other streams, especially with the economic stream. The economic perception arose from its own soil, on the basis of its own life.

A few years ago, I had to explain how this perception of the economic life of our recent times, of the economic necessities arose I had to object then, when I was told that the Drei-Gliederung (Three- foldness) proceeded out of Anthroposophy, just as one can take something out of a programme to-day and put it forward as an impulse. I said:—My boyhood was spent as the son of a railway official. That was in the 60's and 70's, when railways had only half evolved from their embryonic life. The great traffic only came gradually and later, but I shared in just those measures which were taken under the very first arrangements made for railways. I was thus absolutely under the impression of this life of commerce which was then arising, and it was the perception which I got from that, which of course, was later united with something else, that led to my presenting the social life as I had to do, in the sense of the three-fold Social Order.

We have to consider that in the 70's of the last Century, the essential, basic element of the newer evolution, was the transformation of traffic. International commerce developed in this epoch. I myself, in the last years of this inter-national commercial evolution, was under the daily and hourly influence of the details that developed in connection with that world-traffic, and then, in the last third of the 19th Century, or rather in the last quarter of it, came that great turnover, the great transformation, which led from world-intercourse, to world-trading, and economics.

My dear friends, those are two quite different things. It was world-commerce which first led to world-economics. World-trade is but the latest phase of the development of National economics. That which is, in its essentials, prepared in single Countries, has been spread abroad through the world-trade and been carried into other Countries. But nevertheless, there exists a certain individuality as regards the productions of each Country. All this, under the influence of the developing traffic, became different,—the world passed over from world trade to world economics. World-economics can only exist when the raw product is purchased in one Country and then sent to another where it is worked over industrially; so that not only through the trading, but through the economics itself, one Country or land became dependent on another, and thereby economics were spread over many different Countries. This spreading of trade, of commerce, this—what I must call a welding of the world into a common world- sphere in economics, came about for the most part in the last decades of the 19th Century;—and this arose perhaps in its most permeating, penetrating form, in the arrangements made in the European Textile Industries in connection with the Indian and American cotton. In the cotton industry, one could especially experience the transformation of ordinary trade into world- economics. Just at the time when it could be seen how these things were going on, I was for eight years tutor in a house dealing in cotton brought from India and America to Europe, and in this house Cotton-Agents—which means also the manufacturers of such goods,—congregated together. Those people too traded in cotton, and so at that time I was in the midst of the interests connected with these things.

I lived entirely in that centre, never having been one of those who regarded external things as trivial, considering that one should withdraw from external things into a mystic twilight, I was deeply interested, especially when despatches came, which had to be deciphered with a Code. Once there came a dispatch which included the word “wire-puller,” and one had to look up this word, which meant, “such and such a firm wants so many bales of cotton at this or that price.” With the word “wire-puller” one could draw forth things which might have a very significant business importance.

You see, during this epoch I was greatly interested in those patterns which came, samples of American and Indian cotton, cotton piled high up in the office, each with its own little specification, labels on which were written quite interesting things. While I was studying these carefully, (pardon these personal observations, but they are connected with the objective side), I also studied Goethe's “Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily,” and those two things were carried on absolutely side by side, and fundamentally it was from that which flowed to me then out of my study of the “Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily,” that twenty one years later, 3x7 years after, there flowed that which led to my first Mystery Play, “The Portal of Initiation.” I just wanted to bring forward this couple of instances—which I could multiply many times; but you see, I had to explain to that man who came to me saying that my ideas of economic life came from an abstract Anthroposophy, that it was not abstract. Anthroposophy is not abstract, although people say think so. I had to tell that man that I had taken part in the life of commerce. I even wrote hills of lading; even if in addition to the signs which I had to write on the bills of lading, I made many blots, nevertheless I wrote them. I grew up in the middle of that cotton industry and trade, and it was in connection with these things which are in connection with the whole feeling of our present time, out of my perceptions of these, then that my economic ideas arose. They are not mere theories, but are in reality drawn from life itself. I feel that one can only draw such things out of life if one has the good-will really to look at life itself. One must also, of course look at life just where many despise it, if one wishes to get at those things which can be made practical in life and prove themselves as such. Just out of what resulted from the practise of life and from being in the very midst of it, and seeing the confused tangle and knots in it, those things arose later; for among the men I met at that time were some whose destiny still caused them to find the aftereffects of the great crisis in 1873. At this time, one could clearly see their remarkable connections between the World-views and the economic life, which must now be overcome by our mode of thought. The Director of that railway on which my father worked, was at that time a man named Pontout, who was regarded as a small demi-god by the neighbourhood in which I then lived,—Frau Pontout, for what reason I do not know, was always called the Baroness; she was considered an extremely pious woman. They were both really, from a certain point of view, extremely religious people. Pontout then resigned the post of General Director of the Southern Railway and entered a great business undertaking, which stretched its tentacles from France to Serbia; and, because of his piety he was able to carry out a gigantic business in the service, not of course of a World-power, but of those powers in whose service he placed himself, whenever he took the Prayer-book in his hand. Then the whole business smashed, and there arose that famous Pontout-crash, from which at the right moment, a certain clerical community withdrew their fingers, leaving Pontout alone in it. But even at that time one could see a certain philosophy or let us say a certain order of ideas, being carried into financial undertakings; and one could very well learn from that what one ought not to do. Of course, many people could not believe that I thus learned the right way, and that this led to my thinking in a very different way of the connection between Anthroposophy and the “Kommenden Tag” and “Futurum,” than did Pontout of the connection between the Catholic Church and the Serbian bank.

These things are all taken from life, my dear friends, and the fact that one can read them from life, that we do not approach life with theoretical dogmas, is just what should come from Anthroposophy, if it be rightly understood. Anthroposophy is distinguished, or should make itself distinct from other World-views, in that it can be selfless; that means that it does not trumpet its dogmas abroad, but simply provides an introduction, by which one can learn to know life itself in all its fullness and breadth. Only in this way can Anthroposophy satisfy the most weighty and important demands and necessities of man's present evolution.

I told you that anyone able to look with open eyes at what happens could see confusion everywhere, that even in what was good there was confusion, and that a person could not help going astray if he simply swam on in what the external world offered. Into that an impulse had to flow from spirit-lands, an impulse which coming from quite a different source, was called upon to give a direction which could not be got from the external world, even though there may be good in it. It is just that which Anthroposophy should bring to expression; just consider what an impulse lies in this age, where in external events everywhere whether in scientific or any other branch of cultural life, or in outer life, these insoluble-knots were being formed. It was just then, that coming out of Spiritual depths, something had to find its way into the world which could give it the right direction.

You must consider how, on the other hand, something else came to humanity. That is the following:—Whenever a person gives himself up to the stream of those insoluble knots, he is tempted not to care to seek for guidance for his own soul, but to give himself over to the confusion of external life, and is then only carried along by the river of confusing external events. I could see to my great sorrow, that human beings under this influence, become less and less independent. On the one hand, they were driven to form an independent judgment of things, but their independent judgment could only form that which then forced itself out of that sphere of chaotic external events, urging them into paths unknown to them. These people wanted to be free, they wanted to be independent, for the demand for freedom lives in the subconscious nature of man. People imagine they are free, but all the time, because freedom means a strong shaking up in one's inner soul, and because they did not want to be shaken up, they gave themselves over to that stream which runs its course in the way I have described. In this way, they come under Ahrimanic influence, which strives for the Spiritual with all kinds of beautiful and well-chosen words which have their roots simply in personal egotism, and a longing to allow this personal egoism to carry them into the social life around them.

It is one of the most important characteristics of the age, that human beings are full of this egotism, so that when they speak of social demands they really mean; how can their egoism best be carried along by social life? They speak of the demands of social life, but all the time they mean egoistic life; they want a social life of such a kind that Egoism can thrive best in it.

Of course, the Three-fold Social-Order could not speak in this way, it cannot speak of a Paradise! It must leave that to the Lenins and Trotzkis etc. The Three-fold-Order can only speak of what is organically possible in the social body, of that which is capable of life, of that which can fulfill itself. To that we must attain; for if we simply picture and strive for illusion we shall certainly not get very far.

We must accustom ourselves, my dear friends, not to consider life from any abstract principle, but to live our life, regarding the details of life with full consciousness, whether they belong apparently to Spiritual or material things. A great transformation has taken place, in that the economic life of the whole world has become a single body, but humanity is not able to understand it, could not bear it. It has been proclaimed, but not inwardly understood. Many things have appeared concerning “World Economics,” but they are all mere phrases, for this perception of the whole economic life as one body has not been inwardly digested. And so it has come about that humanity has been driven into a World-trade, but it has not understood how to adapt life to it, and so has now come to live in such a World where barriers on barriers have been set up to preserve all sorts of impossible national commerces, hemmed in by all kinds of customs, duties, passports and other limitations, by which they hope to preserve in a most terrible way, something for which the time is long past.

All that we experience today is nothing but this result of the misunderstanding of what has arisen because the last third of the 19th and the first two decades of the 20th Century, presented a state of chaos, of the confusing tangles to which one ought not to give oneself up externally, for that is also something which shows itself in the inimical attacks made now on Anthroposophy. These attacks which appear to-day, (both extensively and intensively) are now assuming the most incredible dimensions; and we may say, if we take these things externally, that we can see in the very way these attacks are expressing themselves, the spirit by which they are inspired. For instance, the following has been said of “Steiner's Goetheanum in Dornach”—“We should like anyone who wants to form his own judgment of Dr Steiner's views, to visit that Temple, that image of his spirit, and to see it with their own eyes. For what does this man take himself and others, for whom he chooses to pour the hallucinations, the feverish dream of his brain into concrete, to carve them in wood, and in glass, and to have them painted on the wall?”

Finally, my dear friends, another very extraordinary party has joined the various people, the Chauvinists the extreme Socialists, and especially the leaders of Socialism, and so on. They are not of recent date, one heard of their activities in 1912, 1913, They add quite extraordinary sentences to what I have just read to you:—Somebody writes: “these are only tiny samples of attacks, appearing at present under the Uranus-influence.”

You see that mockery is not lacking, especially shown in the indignation of an opponent filled with hate, from which I will quote. The odd people who now are uniting with those others, are especially Astrologers; and behind these lies a special ruthlessness, (of which many of them are unconscious,) because in this astrology there is something attractive, and one can do much with such things. Some of these are very extraordinary if one brings them into connection. For instance, here is another attack which contains these words:—

“We hold it very necessary to keep an open eye on Rudolf Steiner, that man who supports himself on Judaism, on the most distorted Communistic and idealistic ideas, and who wanted to become the Minister for Culture in Wurttemberg during the revolution.”

Here you see, a man is speaking of my relationship with the Jews and Communists. Let us quote another attack, from the other side. It is good to compare these things, because in the comparison many details come to light. “None of the former religious founders, such as Christ and Buddha, none of the wise men and prophets” (I do not think that I have ever in the remotest degree taken upon myself such a title but the opponents do, as it seems here) “have ever paid such heed to the external; to earthly treasures, palaces, temples. On the contrary, they remained without much property, they instructed human beings without reward, they led them higher Spiritually, and taught them to pray in their own quiet chambers. They perieated and spread their Spiritual ideas and wise teachings without needing the material help of rich financiers.”

Here you see, on the one hand, my relationship with the Catholics and Jesuits; and on the other, with rich financiers. Only one thing is lacking, and that is my relationship with prominent generals. But my dear friends, I know that no one can take it amiss if I emphasise quite especially,—it must be emphasised once, for this must be said—I say it quite expressly, it must be sooner or later investigated whether I have used anybody, whether Communists, financiers or generals, for my own purpose; for I could have dispensed with those people. It must be ascertained whether I came to them or they to me; that is something which must be kept in mind, my dear friends, for a great deal depends on it.

There is another point; when on the one hand we must meet with the statement that “he can only support himself on the basis of the Communists” and so on, and on the other it is asserted that the wise men of old managed to spread their Spiritual teachings without the material help of rich financiers, one can say that rounds very much like the calumnies which appeared in 1909, when it was said that I was an especially dangerous 'Freemason.' That assertion came from the side of the Jesuits; but from the other side the Calumny arose, that I was myself a Jesuit! You see how well these people know me! One ought to reflect whether perhaps, that which it is most necessary of all to keep in mind, whether in the Jew or Communist, or even in the rich financier, “Man” himself has not been overlooked; for to-day it is a question of man and what must be sought in the human in every form; for in the last resort, my dear friends, neither the old party-strata, e.g. Communists “nor the old racial connections such as the Jews, nor even the old ranks of financial advisers signify a great deal to-day, because to-day we must with all our power enter into what is universally human.”

But it would seem, my dear friends, that those who are in Spiritual relation with all kinds of movements except with that which is really able to bring a Spiritual impulse into the present confused state of human evolution, are quite specially filled with Ahrimanic influence, so we may calmly listen to what they say, which runs as follows:

“The starry influence of 1921 will bring on Dr. Rudolf Steiner, as on all other men with similar horoscopes either psychic upheavals, or shatterings! will lead to a deepening of Spiritual effort; or, if the astral influences are not appreciated Spiritually, thy will bring about severe material losses, harm or bodily diseases. And many another person born in February in such critical years may also be even in personal danger, which, of course is clearly visible if one looks into each particular horoscope.”

Now my dear friends, it is not in the least necessary that such things should be said of the Uranus and Saturn-influences;—that it is necessary to master the life of Self, and so on. I have tried to describe to you, for instance, from what depths the Threefold Order of the Social Organism of the “Portal of Initiation” came about, and I myself can remain quite unmoved as regards what comes from the Uranus and Saturn-influences. These are not the things that worry me. The things that worry me are of quite a different nature, and as long as such things as the following play a part, there is good cause for anxiety; although the things connected with it must be seen in quite a different light.

A certain enemy filled with hatred is here quoted as having said the following:—“Spiritual flashes of light, like lightning-flashes are darting towards that wooden mousetrap, such flashes are plentiful; and it will need a certain cleverness and cunning on the part of Steiner, so to work that one day a real flash of light does not strike that Dornach magnificence, and bring it to an untimely end.” Now my dear friends, you see, there is something clearly indicated here, which people want to see occurring on the top of the Dornach Hill, and they could then search for the reason of such threats, in the fact of Uranus being near the Sun. You see, not only are these attacks very numerous, but they are filled with a striking intensity; and above all my dear friends, as far as I am concerned, I must say that where such Uranus influences express themselves, they show that they come from no good side, for in their way of appearing they show whose Spiritual child they really are.

On the other hand, we must be quite clear that if we look beyond the Spiritual flames of fire of which it is said that enough exist already, and turn to the physical flames, then, my dear friends, a waking-anxiety is necessary on the part of those who cling, perhaps with a certain love, to what has come to expression here, and all that is connected with it. It is really necessary to feel anxiety about this, in order to preserve that work which is really carried out here with sacrifice. For, those people who look at this work filled with hate, with a will tending to such a ruthless deed, are to-day sufficiently numerous.

You might say I ought not to read out such things to you; but, my dear friends there can be no question as to that, for these things are well-known amongst other peoples in the world, they take care of that. But that such things should be known to you who feel perhaps differently, at least most of you, the fact that you must be told about such things, I take on myself. For, through that custom which has been widely prevalent in this room, these things might be concealed from you. Unfortunately, many things have thus been concealed. And so a certain wakefulness must flash in on our friends, as to those who are filled with hatred for our Anthroposophical Spiritual Science.

It was not simply by way of a joke yesterday that I said:—“Our enemies are in many respects very different people”;—they will yet show themselves quite different people unless we make an effort to be awake, and guardians of that which has been accomplished, with so much sacrifice and such hard work; because if, as is the case at present, where evil is, there ever so many are awake, it should also be possible that where what we regard as good exists, there also we should be awake. You see, my dear friends it will be ever more important to be true Watchers of that Spiritual treasure of which we must say again to-day in a certain connection, that it is not brought into the world through any subjective idea, but from the observation of life itself; out of the perception of those demands which are taken from the most important human things of our age, and which will become more and more important as we advance into the near future. I want you to pay attention to those people whose Will it is, to destroy what is necessary for man-kind. That Will for destruction is very, very strong in many to-day. May you yourselves then be strong, for that which lies in this Spiritual Movement, and which has brought this Goetheanum into expression has not arisen out of the chaos around us. It is an impulse which has been brought into the chaos. That Bau, whenever one comes near it, will make us feel that it gives strength, and life. Be you therefore true Watchers of what you have apparently chosen as your very own, when you joined this Anthroposophical Spiritual Movement.

From the different considerations we have brought forward, you can see—even though this, may not be externally noticeable—that an inner connection exists between the chief beings who dwell in a planetary-cosmic body at a given time, and that cosmic body itself. From the most diverse points of view this connection between man and the entire earth life can be studied, with all that belongs to it. We will keep this in mind to-day from one particular point of view, and from that form certain ideas concerning the real being of man.

We know that man has passed his life on earth in a succession of incarnations. These successive incarnations bring him to a far more inward connection with his own planet, as such, than do the epochs of time which lie between his death and re-birth. The times which man passes between death and re-birth are for him times of a more Spiritual existence, and during such times he is himself more withdrawn from the Earth than the times between birth and death.

To be withdrawn from the Earth or to stand in a more intimate connection with the Earth, signifies also certain relationships with other beings, because, my dear friends, that which we call the external, sensible, perceptible sphere of the Cosmos is finally merely the expression of certain relationships between Spiritual beings. Although to physical vision the Earth appears as it presents itself to the Geologists, in such a way that they regard it simply as a stony mass surrounded by an atmosphere, that fundamentally is simply an external illusion. What appears thus as this stony mass is simply the body for certain Spiritual beings. And again, that which appears to us as being outside the Earth, that which shines down on to our Earth as the world of the Stars, even that, as it appears to our external sense perception, is merely the external sensible expression of a certain relationship of Spiritual Beings, of the Hierarchies. What appears to us as the Earth filled with gravity,—that which approaches us very closely because it forms the firm basis on which we develop our life between birth and death,—through what is presented to us as the external physical Earth we develop especially our life between birth and death. Through everything which shines down to us from cosmic space, and with which we seem to have far less connection, with that which shines down to us from the world of Stars, with that we are more closely related between death and re-birth. We can even say it is more than a picture, it is a reality of the deepest significance when one says:—that man descends out of the starry worlds to physical birth in order to fulfil his existence between birth and death. Only we must not imagine that the reflection of the Universe which we see when we speak of the starry world from the earthly point of view, is also the view presented to our super-sensible perception between death and re-birth. That which appears simply externally to us here on Earth as the starry world, then reveals itself in its inner nature, in its Spiritual being. We have then to do with the inner aspect of what, while we are on Earth, simply reveals its external aspect. Indeed we must admit that both when we look down on the Earth as well as when we look up to the Cosmos, in so far as we are dealing with a sense-impression we always have a sort of illusion before us; and we only come to the truth when we can penetrate to those Beings who lie at the bottom of this illusion, with their various degrees of Cosmic self-consciousness.

Whether man looks up or down, I must therefore call it illusion; the truth, the Being, lies behind this illusion. That illusion which reveals itself both above and below is connected with the fact that on the one hand our life between birth and death and on the other our life between death and re-birth, is subject to the possibility of being drawn out of the path of complete human development. Here on Earth between birth and death we may become too allied to the Earth; we can, as it were, develop in ourselves the instinct, the impulse to become too much related to the earthly powers, just as in the life between death and re-birth we can also develop too strongly the impulse to become too closely related to the Cosmic powers outside the Earth. Here on Earth we stand too close to the external, pictorial expression of certain Beings that veil themselves in sensible materialities, here we are in a sense too far removed from the inner Spirituality. When we develop between death and re-birth, we are fully in Spirituality, we share the life of spirit, and then the possibility again threatens us of drowning ourselves, of dissolving in this Spirituality. And so whereas here on Earth the possibility threatens us of hardening in Physical existence, when we are living between death and re-birth the possibility threatens us of being drowned in Spiritual existence.

Both these possibilities depend on the fact that besides those powers which one has in mind when one speaks of the normal Hierarchies, such as the elementary Beings in the three kingdoms of nature, or man himself, or the Hierarchies next to him, when one speaks in the sense of true Spiritual Science of these who are in their right cosmic ages, besides these, there are other Beings, who seek to develop their nature at the wrong time, inopportunely. These are the Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings of whom we have often spoken and of whom you will already have formed the idea that the Luciferic beings as such, present themselves as they do because they now reveal themselves as they should have revealed themselves in an earlier Cosmic age; and the Ahrimanic beings are those as such who ought not to have revealed themselves as they now reveal themselves until a later Cosmic epoch. The Luciferic beings are backward, retarded cosmic spirits; the Ahrimanic beings are the opposite;—they are premature cosmic beings. The Luciferic beings are those who rebelled in a sense against sharing all the time allotted them for their evolution; they did not evolve so far, because they rebelled against fully sharing that evolution. So when they reveal themselves to-day, they appear at an earlier stage of existence.

The Ahrimanic beings, on the other hand, if we may so express it, could not wait for a later age to become that which they were intended to become, they could not wait for the development of what was laid down in them. They want to be that now. Therefore, they harden themselves in present existence, and show themselves now in that form which they should rightly attain only in a later development of cosmic life.

We look out into the space of the Cosmos at the “tout ensemble” of the Stars;—what is their appearance? Why have they this appearance?—We only have that special vision of the Stars, of the Milky Way, of the Heavens bedecked with the Stars, because it is the revelation of the Luciferic nature of the Cosmos. That which shines down to us, which surrounds us so radiantly, is the revelation of the Luciferic nature of the Cosmos. It is that which is as it now is because it has remained behind at an earlier stage of its being, and when we turn away from the Cosmos to the earthly soil upon which we walk, this soil is rigid and hard because, rolled up together within it, as it were—are the Ahrimanic beings, those beings who now reveal artificially the stage which they ought only to show at a later stage of their development. Hence, we are confronted with the possibility, that whenever we give ourselves to the sense world, then, through our vision of the heavens, we make ourselves more and more Luciferic. Thus if, in the life between birth and death, we have a special inclination to give ourselves up to the vision of the heavens that signifies nothing immediate or direct, but simply something which remains to us as an instinct belonging to the time we pass before our physical birth or conception. It is an instinct remaining to us from the time we passed through in the Spiritual world, when we lived with the Stars between death and rebirth. We then entered into too close a cosmic relationship with cosmic worlds, we became too similar to them, and from those worlds there has remained to us that inclination which indeed does not express itself as any very strong inclination in humanity, but simply as a desire which has remained, to give ourselves utterly up to that sense-vision of the starry world. We develop that inclination if, through our karma which we fulfil here between birth and death, we develop such a tendency that between death and rebirth we sleep too strongly, if, in the Spiritual world we develop too little inclination to have a full consciousness there.

Now on the other hand, being entirely devoted to the life on Earth, is a state which we directly develop here between birth and death. That is the real Ahrimanic possibility in the life of humanity. The Luciferic possibility is connected with what we prepare in ourselves through too close a relationship with the Spiritual world of vision, and the Ahrimanic relationship we assimilate here on Earth, if between birth and death we develop too strong an inclination for what surrounds us as the external world of sense.

If we grow too strongly into the Earth, if, as it were we grow so strongly into the Earth that we have no tendency to guide our soul towards the super-sensible, then we enter into an Ahrimanic relationship.

Now all this has a deeper significance for the entire evolution of the human being. For as between death and rebirth we can sink, drown in the Spiritual World, and thus become something which here on Earth can no longer find the right equilibrium between the Spiritual and material world, and because we can develop too strong a relationship to this super-Earth, thereby as these things increase in number more and more in our soul, we can become foreign to our Earthly existence. We are now approaching that epoch of time when such things are lying within the sphere of man's own decision, and already, under certain circumstances in our next incarnation, unless we can find the right equilibrium between the Spiritual and material world, we can come in to an incarnation in which we cannot grow up, cannot grow old. That is even now a possibility which stands before us as a certain danger,—that we may be unable to grow old. We may be re-born but the Luciferic beings can hold us back at the childhood stage. They can suspend something over us, so that we cannot mature. Those human beings who give themselves up so willingly to a nebulous mysticism, who have such a horror of sharp clearly defined thinking, who rebel against forming clear concepts of the world, and those persons also who rebel against developing their inner soul-powers, the inner activity of their soul, who want more or less to dream through life, those persons in their next incarnation will be exposed to the danger of not being able to grow up, of remaining childish in the evil sense of the word. That is a Luciferic impulse which will come to mankind in this way. That means, of course that these human beings will not be able in their next incarnation to enter fully into the life on Earth; they will, as it were, not be able sufficiently to draw themselves out of the Spiritual world to enter properly on the Earth. The Luciferic powers, who once entered into a union with our Earth, endeavour to find such instincts in man that his development on Earth will reach such a stage that human beings will remain children, and will not be able to age. The Luciferic powers would like to bring it to pass that at a certain stage in the future, there shall be no old people on the Earth, but only human beings who pass through life in a certain delusion of youth. In this way, the Luciferic powers would be able to bring the entire Earth into ONE body as it were, one body having a common soul, in which all the individual souls of humanity will be dissolved. One common soul-element of the Earth, united with one common body of the Earth; that is what Lucifer is striving for in the evolution of mankind; to make the Earth a great organic being endowed with one common soul, in which the separate souls of humanity lose their individuality.

If you remember, my dear friends, I have often told you that the important thing in earthly development does not lie in the mineral, plant, or animal kingdoms. All those are simply “wind-falls” of evolution; they are not the essential point of evolution, for that plays its part within the limits of the human skin. There are forces in the organisation of man himself which are the forces of development of our planet. If you recollect this, you will understand that what is finally to become of our Earth is not to be grasped by physical conceptions; our physical conceptions have but a limited interest. We only gain ideas concerning what the Earth is to become, when we know the human being himself. But this human being can enter into a union with those Luciferic powers which have united themselves with the Earth, and this brings it about that the Earth, as it were, carries beings who are too little individualised. It may thus become a common being, an indefinite communal being, with a common soul-quality. That is what the Luciferic powers are striving for, and if you take that picture which so many nebulous mystics regard as the most desirable future, which they always describe as a merging oneself into universal being, a kind of longing to disappear into a pantheistic whole, in such things you can perceive what already lives as a Luciferic tendency in many a human soul.

On the other hand, the Ahrimanic beings have also united themselves with the Earth; but they have the opposite tendency. They work above all through those forces which can draw our organism to themselves between birth and death, and permeate our organism through and through with cleverness, with intellectuality, fill us more and more with understanding; for our waking-intelligence depends upon the union of the soul with the physical body, and if that intelligence hypertrophies and becomes too strong, we become too closely related to physical existence, and then too, we lose our equilibrium. Then appears the inclination in man which hinders him from oscillating in the right way in the future between Earthly life and Spiritual life, between death and rebirth.

What lies in the striving of Ahriman is, to hold man back in such a way that he cannot in his next incarnation pass in the right way through earthly life and super-earthly life, Ahriman wants to keep humanity back from undergoing any future incarnations. He wants to make man of such a nature in this incarnation that he already experiences everything which he can possibly experience on earth. That can only be done intellectually—one cannot do it with one's full humanity. But it is absolutely possible for man to become so clever that in his cleverness he can form ideas for himself of everything which can possibly exist on the Earth. That is the ideal of many human beings» to get into their minds an idea of everything which can possibly be on the Earth, but one cannot have those experiences which one will only have in future lives; one cannot get those beforehand. One can only, in this life get the images intellectually, pictures which then harden in the physical body and then one also gets a deep disinclination to undergo future incarnations, it seems a kind of bliss not to desire to appear again on the Earth.

In this decadent life in the East (I have often told you how this Eastern civilisation came to its decadence)—in this decadent life in the East Ahriman can especially produce this confusion. In the East, the people are more ruled inwardly by the Luciferic powers, therefore Ahriman can attack their being from outside; and just because they are inwardly governed by Lucifer, therefore Ahriman can fill them with a desire to conclude their life on Earth in a particular nation, no longer wanting to appear within a physical body. That can be put forward as an ideal by certain teachers of humanity—of course, those who work in the service of Ahriman—the ideal that man should strive to finish with the Earth in one incarnation, before the Earth has attained its goal, and from that time no longer have to appear again in physical existence.

You know, my dear friends, that amongst all the Theosophical teachings which have been slavishly borrowed from the modern decadent life of the East, something appears which has never been taken over into our Anthroposophical view—i.e. to regard it as a special grade of perfection in a man when he no longer wants to appear in life on Earth. That is an Ahrimanic application, and through this something terrible is produced. Through this Ahrimanic idea, the Earth might become,—no longer one great organism with a unified common soul, (which Lucifer desires to bring about), but will follow the opposite path, by becoming super-individualised: Human beings would then reach such a stage of Ahrimanic evolution that, although they would indeed die, yet the terrible thing would occur that after death they would be like the Earth, they would cling to the Earth, and the Earth itself would simply be an expression of these single individual human beings. The Earth would be a colony of these separate individual human souls.

That is what Ahriman is striving for with the Earth—to make it simply an expression of this intellectuality, to completely intellectualise the Earth. Humanity must begin to recognise to- day that the fate of the Earth itself depends on the will of the human beings. The Earth will become that which man himself makes of it, not that which the physical forces are making of it. Those physical forces will fall away and be of no significance for the future of the Earth; but the Earth itself will simply be what man himself makes of it.

We are now living in that decisive hour of human evolution in which man can undertake one of three things:—One, to pass his life in a nebulous mysticism, in dreaming, he can be ensnared by physical existence in a brooding inner life, (and what is the life of sense but such a brooding). He can live in a nebulous mysticism, in a dream-condition, in which he can no longer form clear concepts of life. That is one thing which may become the inclination of humanity.

The second possible inclination of man is, to permeate himself utterly with intellect and understanding, to scrape together everything which the intellect can accumulate, to despise everything which poetry or fantasy pours over Earth-existence, and simply to turn to what is mechanical and pedantic. Human beings are now faced with the decision—either to become Spiritual voluptuaries entirely absorbed in their own existence, (Because, my dear friends, whether one spends their existence in a nebulous mysticism or in sensible lusts, these are simply two sides of one and the same thing); or, on the other hand, to absorb themselves in dry, barren thinking; dividing and separating everything up according to rule. These are two possibilities.

The third it to seek the balance between the two. One cannot speak of equilibrium in the same definite way as one can speak of either of those other two extremes. The balance must always be striven for, so that one can look both to the right and the left, without being drawn too strongly towards either; and pass through life holding both in equilibrium, regulating and ordering the one through the other.

This Cosmic Hour of Decision stands to-day before the human soul. Man can decide to follow the Luciferic temptation and not allow the Earth to complete its development, but to let it remain behind like the Old Moon,—to make it what I might call a caricature of the Old Moon, to turn it into a great organism having an individualised dreaming soul, in which human souls are contained, as in a great common Nirvana. Or, on the other hand, men can decide to pass over into that super-intellectual stage, to abandon the community of Earth, to wish to have nothing in common with one another, but to allow their bodies to ossify and harden by pouring too much intellect and understanding into it. A nebulous mysticism and voluptuousness will turn the body into pulp; while super-intellectuality and understanding will turn it into stone. Our modern humanity is tending not to desire equilibrium, but wants either the one or the other of these two.

We can see already on the one hand, how more and more the Western instincts are developing, which run towards intellectualism, understanding and pedantry, which judge everything in such a way that man thereby forces his intellectuality too strongly into his body. On the other hand, from the East we see the other danger threatening for man to kindle and consume his body. We see that in the views of the decadent East; and we can see in developments in Eastern Europe the same things appearing, only in another aspect, in the terrible social struggles now going on there. Already the Hour of Decision has come to humanity, and humanity must resolve to find that equilibrium. You see that what is put before humanity as a task to-day can only be recognised out of the depths of the knowledge of Spiritual Science. We must assimilate those ideas which can draw our attention to the possibilities of human development on one side or the other. On the one side is the dissolution in Nirvana, which has already become a holy doctrine of the East, but which today has grown far away from the ancient idea of Nirvana which then was a striving towards an Equilibrium based on the ancient clairvoyance. That which the decadent Oriental understands to-day by Nirvana is simply the world under the sway of Lucifer. And that which increasingly strives to come about from the efforts made in the West, from those strivings which develop out of our modern civilisation in so far as that is not permeated with Spiritual knowledge, simply means the mechanising of the world; an effort to make the processes of human existence more and more mechanical. An Ahrimanisation on the one side, and a Luciferisation on the other.

If the things described from a certain point of view in the last lecture, as the chaotic life of recent times without any sense of guidance, be continued into the future,—then, without a shadow of doubt, you will see the Ahrimanisation of Mankind. This can only be checked if, into this super-intellectual life, this super-individualised existence of mankind, this existence of man to-day which is being more and more permeated by egoism, there is brought a perception of the Spiritual world. Everywhere we need this perception of the Spiritual world. Above all it is necessary that into different sciences this Spiritual impulse should come, for otherwise, in time to come they will rule as an abstract authority over humanity, and it will be dominated entirely by these various sciences, which would batten them down with authoritative power, and Ahrimanise them. It is especially important in our modern times, when the social riddles of life beat in strongly on human evolution, especially now is it important to elevate one's perception to that which can reveal the connection of man with his planetary life.

The old ideas of man's relationship with a Spiritual world contained in the different creeds, have been crippled in various directions, crippled on the one side and reduced to a merely abstract intellectual understanding such as threatens to happen for instance in the Evangelical Confessions, or, on the other to an external principle of power, as happens in the Roman Confession. These are but different expressions of what threatens man to-day. What is really necessary is, that man should find his inner orientation, that he should attain an inner impulse in order to have a free vision, so that he can look up to that which unites him with his planet, and through his planet with the whole Cosmos. He must feel to-day:—Geology is not knowledge of the Earth; that vision of a stony colossus, on which are oceans of water, and surrounded by air.—that is not the Earth; and what surrounds us as the Milky Way and Suns, is not the Cosmos. The Universe consists of Ahrimanic beings below, and Luciferic beings above, which shine through the external sense illusion. And then we have the beings of the normal Hierarchies, to whom man can elevate himself when he can break through both sense-illusions and come to the truth; for the real beings do not appear in this external sense-illusion, they only reveal themselves, as it were shining through this external sense-appearance.

Man of to-day must recognise: “I can perceive the Earth. If I am able to see that what appears below on the Earth appears as the outflow of Spiritual beings, then I can perceive what lives in the Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones. But if I am not able to present to myself Spiritually what lives on the Earth, I yield to the illusion of what appears to me physically on the Earth. If I remain a Geologist, I cannot raise myself to Geosophy—and then my being is Ahrimanised. If I look up to the world of the Stars and form ideas only about what I can see sensibly, I Luciferise myself. But if I am in a condition to take what appears in the external illusion, and break through that to the spirit, then I can say: `Yes, I can see the Stars, the Milky Way, Suns appear to me. But they announce to me Kyriotetes, Exusiai, Dynamis, Spirits of Wisdom, Motion and Form.' Then only do I find equilibrium.”

There is no question of our speaking of Cosmic beings as better than Earthly beings, it is a question of our being able everywhere to penetrate through that sense-illusion to the true essence, to the real beings behind, with whom we as human beings are actually connected. Sense-appearance as such does not deceive us, for if we can take that sense-appearance in the right way and interpret it, the Spiritual beings are there. Then we have them. Sense-appearance as such, is not deceptive; it is only our interpretation of sense-appearance which can be deceptive; our too strong relation with the Earth on the one side: and the Super-earth, what is outside the earth, on the other, when we traverse it between death and re-birth.

Man to-day, hardly experiences anything of such ideas, if he only turns to what has gradually developed within our civilisation. The fact that all that was once different, has been utterly and entirely forgotten by civilisation to-day. People certainly do read with a certain curiosity what has been written about the things in Nature in the 12th, 13th centuries, but they do not read it with sufficient understanding. If they did, they would see that the time in which men began to think as they think now, is really only a few centuries ago—that in the 11th, 12th, 13th, and even 14th centuries, they thought quite differently about the things of the external world. They did not merely see stone in the stony, and Earth in the earthly, but they saw the Stony and Earthy as the body of Divine Spiritual beings; in the Stars they did not see merely what is seen to-day, but the revelation of the Divine Spiritual. It is only in the last century that man was first reduced, to having Geology and a Cosmology, instead of a Geosophy and a Cosmosophy. Now through his Cosmology man would become Luciferic, through Geology he would become Ahrimanic, unless he can struggle to equilibrium through a Cosmosophy and Geosophy, and Anthroposophy alone combines them because man is fundamentally born of the entire Cosmos. Anthroposophy consists of these two “sophies,” Cosmosophy a wisdom of the Cosmos, and Geosophy, a wisdom of the Earth; and so on. We only understand man aright when we know how to bring him into Spiritual relation with the Universe. Then we shall not seek him one-sidedly only in his relationship with the LIGHT; that would be working for the Luciferic being; nor shall we seek him one-sidedly only in relationship with GRAVITY; that would be working for the Ahrimanic being; But we shall endeavour to pour an impulse into the will, which will give him the power henceforth to find the equilibrium between Light on the one hand and gravity on the other; between the tendency to the Earthly and the tendency to become Luciferic. Man must attain this equilibrium, and he can only do so when he can add the supersensible to his sensible concepts.

Now, my dear friends, in conclusion, something quite paradoxical. Just place before your souls, that of which it has been said that man needs to know it, so that thereby he can face a decision in this Cosmic age. Just consider that we must really speak of a possible Ahrimanising or Luciferising of the world. Place that before your souls, and consider it is an important affair of humanity, and then, my dear friends, take what you can read in the ordinary literature of to-day—that which comes to you as Spiritual life out of the lecture rooms, and the other Educational Institutes. Just consider the great cleft between these, and you will realise what is necessary for man so that he can rise above the decadence of his modern life. What is so urgently necessary is Earnest labour in Spiritual spheres. One can only begin that, if one is resolved to take earnestly such ideas as those we have considered to-day

And of these same things we will speak further in the next lecture.

It was in the middle and second half of the nineteenth century that materialism had its period of greatest development. In today's lecture we will center our interest more on the theoretical side of this materialistic evolution. A great deal of what I shall have to say about the theoretical aspect can also be said in almost the same words of the more practical aspect of materialism. For the moment, however, we will leave that aside and turn our attention more to the materialistic world conception that was prevalent in the civilized world in the middle and second half of the nineteenth century.

We shall find that we are here concerned with a twofold task. First, we have to gain a clear perception of the extent to which this materialistic world view is to be opposed, of how we must be armed with all the concepts and ideas enabling us to refute the materialistic world view as such. But in addition to being armed with the necessary conceptions, we find that from the point of view of spiritual science we are required at the same time to do something more, namely, to understand this materialistic world view. First of all, we must understand it in its content; secondly, we must also understand how it came about that such an extreme materialistic world view was ever able to enter human evolution.

It may sound contradictory to say that it is required of man on the one hand to be able to fight the materialistic world view, and on the other hand to be able to understand it. But those who base themselves on spiritual science will not find any contradiction here; it is merely an apparent one. For the case is rather like this. In the course of the evolution of mankind moments must needs come when human beings are in a sense pulled down, brought below a certain level, in order that they may later by their own efforts lift themselves up again. And it would really be of no help to mankind at all if by some divine decree or the like it could be protected from having to undergo these low levels of existence. In order for human beings to attain to full use of their powers of freedom, it is absolutely necessary that they descend to the low levels in their world conception as well as in their life. The danger does not lie in the fact that something like this appears at the proper time, and for theoretical materialism this was the middle of the nineteenth century. The danger consists in the fact that if something like this has happened in the course of normal evolution, people then continue to adhere to it, so that an experience that was necessary for one particular point in time is carried over into later times. If it is correct to say that in the middle of the nineteenth century materialism was in a certain sense a test mankind had to undergo, it is equally correct to say that the persistent adherence to materialism is bound to work terrible harm now, and that all the catastrophes befalling the world and humanity that we have to experience are due to the fact that a great majority of people still tries to cling to materialism.

What does theoretical materialism really signify? It signifies the view regarding the human being primarily as the sum of the material processes of his physical body. Theoretical materialism has studied all the processes of the physical, sensory body, and although what has been attained in this study is still more or less in its first beginnings, final conclusions have nevertheless already been drawn from it in regard to a world view. Man has been explained as the confluence of these physical forces; his soul nature is declared to be merely something that is produced through the workings of these physical forces. It is theoretical materialism, however, that initiated investigation of the physical nature of the human being, and it is this, the extensive examination of man's physical nature, that must remain. On the other hand, what the nineteenth century drew as a conclusion from this physical research is something that must not be allowed to figure as more than a passing phenomenon in human evolution. And as a passing phenomenon, let us now proceed to understand it.

What is really involved here? When we look back in the evolution of mankind—and with the help of what I have given in Occult Science¹ we are able to look back rather far—we can see that the human being has passed through the greatest variety of different stages. Even if we limit our observation to what has taken place in the course of earth evolution, we are bound to conclude that this human being started with a form that was quite primitive in comparison to its present form, and that this form then underwent gradual change, approaching ever nearer to the form the human being possesses today. As long as we focus on the rough outline of the human form, the differences will not appear to be so great in the course of human history. When we compare with the means at the disposal of external history, the form of an ancient Egyptian or even an ancient Indian with the form of a man of present-day European civilization, we will discover only relatively small differences, as long as we stay with the rough outlines or superficial aspects of observation. For such a rough viewpoint, the great differences in regard to the primitive forms of development emerge only in early man in prehistoric ages.

When we refine our observation, however, when we begin to study what is hidden from outer view, then what I have said no longer holds good. For then we are obliged to admit that a great and significant difference exists between the organism of a civilized man of the present and the organism of an ancient Egyptian, or even an ancient Greek or Roman. And although the change has come about in a much more subtle and delicate manner in historical times, there has most assuredly been such change in regard to all the finer forming and shaping of the human organism. This subtle change reached a certain culmination in the middle of the nineteenth century. Paradoxical as it may sound, it is nevertheless a fact that in regard to his inner structure, in regard to what the human organism can possibly attain, man had reached perfection at about the middle of the nineteenth century. Since then, a kind of decadence has set in. Since that time, the human organism has been involved in retrogression. Therefore, also in the middle of the nineteenth century, the organs that serve as the physical organs of human intellectual activity had reached perfection in their development.

What we call the intellect of man requires, of course, physical organs. In earlier ages, these physical organs were far less developed than they were in the middle of the nineteenth century. It is true that what arouses our admiration when we contemplate the Greek spirit, particularly in such advanced Greeks as Plato and Aristotle, is dependent on the fact that the Greeks did not have such perfect organs of thinking, in the purely physical sense, as had men of the nineteenth century. Depending on one's preference, one might say, “Thank heaven that people in Greek times did not possess thinking organs that were as perfect as those of the people in the nineteenth century!” If on the other hand, one is a pedant like those of the nineteenth century, wishing to cling to this pedantry, then one can say, “Well, the Greeks were just children, they did not have the perfect organs of thought that we have; accordingly, we must look with an indulgent eye upon what we find in the works of Plato and Aristotle.” School teachers often speak in this vein, for in their criticism they feel vastly superior to Plato and Aristotle. You will only fully understand what I have just indicated, however, if you make the acquaintance of people—and there are such!—who have a kind of vision that one may call, in the best sense of the word, a clairvoyant consciousness.

In such people, the presence of clairvoyant consciousness—if there are any in the audience who possess a measure of it, they will please forgive me for telling what is the plain truth—is due to the inadequate development of the organs of intellect. It is quite a common occurrence in our day to meet people who have a measure of clairvoyant consciousness and possess extraordinarily little of what is today called scientific intellect. True as this is, it is equally true that what these clairvoyant people are able to say or write down through their own faculty of perception, may contain thoughts far cleverer than the thoughts of people who show no signs whatever of clairvoyance but function with the best possible organs of intellect. It may easily happen that clairvoyant people who, from the point of view of present- day science are quite stupid—please forgive this expression—produce thoughts cleverer than the thoughts of recognized scientists without being themselves any the cleverer for producing them! This actually occurs. And to what is it due? It comes about because such clairvoyant persons do not need to exercise any organs of thought in order to arrive at the clever thoughts. They create the corresponding images out of the spiritual world, and the images already have within them the thoughts. There they are, ready-made, while other people who are not clairvoyant and can only think have to develop their organs of thought first before they can develop any thoughts. If we were to sketch this, it would be like this. Suppose a clairvoyant person brings something out of the spiritual world in all manner of pictures (see drawing, red). But in it, thoughts are contained, a network of thoughts. The person in question does not think this out, instead, he sees it, bringing it along from the spiritual world. He has no occasion to exercise any organ of thought.

Consider another person who is not gifted with clairvoyance, but who can think. Of all that has been drawn in red below, there is nothing at all present in him. He does not bring any such thing out of the spiritual world. Neither does he bring this thought skeleton with him out of the spiritual world (see drawing on left). He exerts his organs of thinking and through them produces this thought skeleton (see drawing).

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In observing human beings today, one can find among them everywhere examples of all the stages between these two extremes. For one who has not trained his faculty of observation, it is nevertheless most difficult to distinguish whether a person is actually clever, in the sense that he thinks by means of his organs of reason, or whether he does not think with them at all, but instead by some means brings something into his consciousness, so that only the pictorial, imaginative element is developed in him, but so feebly that he himself is not even aware of it. Thus, there are any number of people today who produce most clever thoughts without having to be clever on that account, while others think very clever thoughts but have no special connection to any spiritual world. To learn to apprehend this distinction is one of the important psychological tasks of our age, and it affords the basis for important insight into human beings at the present time. With this explanation you will no longer find it difficult to understand that empirical super-sensible observation shows that the majority of mankind possessed the most perfectly developed organs of thought in the middle of the nineteenth century. At no other time was there so much thinking done with so little cleverness as in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Go back to the twenties of the nineteenth century—only, people do not do this today—or even a little earlier, and read the scientific texts produced then. You will discover that they have an entirely different tone; they do not yet contain the completely abstract thinking of later times which depends on man's physical organs of thought. We need not even mention what came from the pen of people like Herder, Goethe or Schiller; grand conceptions still dwelled in them. It does not matter that people do not believe this today and that commentaries today are written as if this were not the case. For those who write these commentaries and believe that they understand Goethe, Schiller, and Herder simply do not understand them; they do not see what is most important in these men.

It is a fact of great significance that about the middle of the nineteenth century the human organism reached a culmination in respect of its physical form and that since that time it has been regressing; indeed, in regard to a rational comprehension of the world it is regressing rapidly in a certain sense.

This fact is closely connected with the development of materialism in the middle of the nineteenth century. For what is the human organism? The human organism is a faithful copy of man's soul-spiritual nature. It is not surprising that people who are incapable of insight into the soul and spirit of man see in the structure of the human organism an explanation of the whole human being. This is particularly the case when one takes into special consideration the organization of the head, and in the head in turn the organization of the nerves.

In the course of my lectures in Stuttgart,² I mentioned an experience that is really suited to throw light on this point. It happened at the beginning of the twentieth century in a gathering of the Giordano Bruno Society of Berlin.³ First, a man spoke—I would call him a stalwart champion of materialism—who was a most knowledgeable materialist. He knew the structure of the brain as well as anyone can know it today who has studied it conscientiously. He was one of those who see in the analysis of the brain's structure already the full extent of psychology—those who say that one need only know how the brain functions in order to have a grasp on the soul and to be able to describe it. It was interesting; on the blackboard, the man drew the various sections of the brain, the connecting strands, and so on, and thus presented the marvelous picture one obtains when one traces the structure of the human brain. And this speaker firmly believed that by having given this description of the brain he had described psychology. After he had finished speaking, a staunch philosopher, a disciple of Herbart,⁴ rose up and said, “The view propounded by this gentleman, that one can obtain knowledge of the soul merely by explaining the structure of the brain, is one I must naturally object to emphatically. But I have no cause to take exception to the drawing the speaker has made. It fits in quite well with my Herbartian point of view, namely, that ideas form associations with one another, and connecting strands of a psychic character run from one idea to another.” He added that as a Herbartian, he could quite well make the same drawing, only the various circles and so on would for him not indicate sections of the brain but complexes of ideas. But the drawing itself would remain exactly the same!

A most interesting situation! When it is a matter of getting down to the reality of a subject, these two speakers have diametrically opposed views, but when they make drawings of the same thing, they find themselves obliged to come up with identical drawings, even though one is a wholehearted Herbartian philosopher and the other a staunchly materialistic physiologist.

What is the cause of this? It is in fact this: We have the soul-spirit being of man; we bear it within us. This soul-spirit being is the creator of the entire form of man's organism. It is therefore not surprising that here in the most complete and perfect part of the organism, namely the nervous system of the brain, the replica created by the soul-spirit being resembles the latter in every way. It is indeed true that in the place where man is most of all man, so to speak, namely in the structure of his nerves, he is a faithful replica of the soul-spiritual element. Thus, a person who, in the first place, must always have something the senses can perceive and is content with the replica, actually perceives in the copy the very same thing that is seen in the soul-spiritual original. Having no desire for soul and spirit and only concentrating, as it were, on the replica, he stops short at the structure of the brain. Since this structure of the brain presented itself in such remarkable perfection to the observer of the mid-nineteenth century, and considering the predisposition of humanity at that time, it was extraordinarily easy to develop theoretical materialism.

What is really going on in the human being? If you consider the human being as such—I shall draw an outline of him here—and turn to the structure of his brain, you find that first of all man is, as we know, a threefold being: the limb being, the rhythmic man, and the being of nerves and senses. When we now look at the latter, we have before us the most perfect part of the human being, in a sense, the most human part. In it, the external world mirrors itself (see drawing, red). I shall indicate this reflection process by the example of the perception through the eyes. I could just as well sketch the perceptions coming through the ear, and so on. The external world, therefore, reflects itself in the human being in such a way that we have here the structure of man and in him the reflection of the outer world.

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As long as we consider the human being in this way, we cannot help but interpret him in a materialistic manner, even though we may go beyond the often quite coarse conceptions of materialism. For, on the one hand, we have the structure of the human being; we can trace it in all its most delicate tissue structures. The more closely we approach the head organization, the more we discover a faithful replica of the soul-spiritual element. Then we can follow up the reflection of the external world in the human being. That, however, is mere picture. We thus have the reality of man, on the one hand, traceable in all its finer structural details, and on the other hand we have the picture of the world.

Let us keep this well in mind. We have man's reality in the structure of his organs, and we have what is reflected in him. This is really all that offers itself initially to external sensory observation. Thus, for sensory observation, the following conclusion presents itself. When the human being dies, this whole human structure disintegrates in the corpse. In addition, we have the pictures of the outer world. If you shatter the mirror, nothing can mirror itself any longer; hence, the pictures, too, are gone when the human being has passed through death. Since external sense observation cannot ascertain more than what I have just mentioned, is it not natural to have to say that with death the physical structure of the human being disintegrates? Formerly, it reflected the outer world. Human beings bear but a mirror-image in their soul and it passes away. Materialism of the nineteenth century simply presented this as a fact. It could not do otherwise, for it really had no knowledge of anything else.

Now the whole matter changes when we begin to turn our attention to the soul and spirit life of man. There, we enter a region which is inaccessible to physical sensory observation. Take a fact pertaining to the soul that is near at hand, the simple fact that we confront the outer world by observing it. We observe and perceive objects; then we have them within us in the form of percepts. We also have memory, the faculty of recollection. We can bring up in images from the depths of our being what we experience in the outer world. We know how important memory is for the human being.

Let us consider this set of facts some more. Take these two inner experiences: You look through your eyes at the external world, you hear it with your ears, or in some other way you perceive it with your senses. You are then engaged in an immediately present activity of the soul. This then passes over into your conceptual life. What you have experienced today, you can raise up again a few days later out of the depths of your soul in pictures. Something enters into you in some manner and you bring it up again out of your own being. It is not difficult to recognize that what enters into the soul must originate in the external world. I do not wish to consider anything else for the moment except the fact that is clearly obvious, namely, that what we thus remember has to come from the outer world. For if you have seen some red object, you remember the red object afterwards, and what has taken place in you is merely the image of the red object which, in turn, arises again in you. It is therefore something the external world has impressed upon you more deeply than if you occupy yourself only with immediate perceptions in the outer world.

Now picture what happens: You approach some object, you observe it, that is to say, you engage in an immediate and present soul activity in regard to the observed object. Then you go away from it. A few days later, you have reason to call up again from the depths of your being the pictures of the observed object. They are present again, paler, to be sure, but still present in you. What has happened in the interval?

Let me ask you here to keep well in mind what I have just said and compare this singular play of immediate perceptual thoughts and pictures of memory with something that is quite familiar to you, the pictures appearing in dreams. You will easily be able to notice how dreaming is connected with the faculty of memory. As long as the dream images are not too confused, you can easily see how they tie in with the memory images, hence, how a relationship exists between dreams and what passes from living perceptions into memory.

Now consider something else. Human beings must be organically completely healthy if they are to tolerate dreaming properly, so to speak. Dreaming requires that a person has himself fully under control and that at any time a moment can occur when he is certain he has been dreaming. Something is out of order when a person cannot come to the point of perceiving quite clearly: This was a dream! You have met people who dreamed they were beheaded. Suppose they could not distinguish afterwards between such a dream and the actual beheading; suppose they thought they really had been beheaded and yet had to go on living! Just imagine how impossible it would be for such people to sort out the facts without becoming totally confused! They would constantly feel that they had just been beheaded, and if they presumed they had to believe this—one can just about imagine what sort of words would break from their lips!

You can see, therefore, that human beings should be able at any moment to have themselves in hand so well that they can distinguish dreams from the thought life within reality. There are people, however, who cannot do this. They experience all kinds of hallucinations and visions and consider them realities. They cannot distinguish; they do not have themselves well enough in hand. What does this signify? It means that what dwells in dream has an influence on their organization, and that the organization is adapted to the dream picture. Something in their nervous system is not fully developed that should be developed; therefore, the dream is active in them and makes its influence felt.

Thus, if someone is not able to distinguish between his dreams and experienced realities, it means that the power of the dream has an organizing effect on him. If a dream were to possess itself of our whole brain, we would see the whole world as a dream! If you can contemplate such a fact and appreciate its full value, you will gradually learn to apprehend the facts to which ordinary science today does not wish to aspire because it lacks the courage to do so. You will learn to perceive that the very same power that energizes the dream life is present in us as organizing and quickening power, as power of growth. The only reason why the dream does not have the power to tear asunder the structure of our organism is that the latter is too strongly consolidated, that it has so firm a structure as to be able to withstand the effects of the ordinary dream. Thus, the human being can distinguish between the dream experience and that of reality.

When the little child grows up, becoming taller and taller, a force is at work in it. It is the same force as the one contained in the dream; only in the case of the dream we behold it. When we do not behold it, when it is instead active inside the body, then it, the very same power that is in the dream, makes us grow. We need not even go so far as to consider growth. Every day, for example, when you eat and digest and the effects of digestion spread throughout your organism, this happens by means of the force that dwells in dreams. Therefore, when something is out of order in the organism, it is connected with dreaming that is not as it should be. The force we can, from the outside, observe working in dream life is the same as the one that then works inwardly in the human being, even in the forces of digestion.

Thus, we can say that if we only consider the life of man in the right way, we become aware of the working of the dream force in his organism. When I describe this actively working dream force, I actually enter upon the same paths in this description that I must tread when I describe the human etheric body.

Imagine that someone were able to penetrate with his vision everything that brings about growth in the human being from childhood on, everything that causes digestion in man, everything that sustains his whole organism in its state of activity. Imagine that I could take this whole system of forces, extracting it from the human being and placing it before him, then I would have placed the etheric body before the human being. This etheric body, that is, the body that reveals itself only in irregularities in a dream, was far more highly developed prior to the point in time in the nineteenth century to which I have referred. Gradually it became weaker and weaker in its structure. In turn, the structure of the physical body grew correspondingly stronger. The etheric body can conceive in pictures, it can have dreamlike imaginations, but it cannot think. As soon as this etheric body begins to be especially active in a person of our time, he becomes a bit clairvoyant, but then he can think less, because, for thinking, he particularly needs the physical body.

Therefore, it need not surprise us that when people of the nineteenth century had the feeling that they could think particularly well, they were actually driven to materialism. For what aided them in this thinking the most was the physical body. But this physical thinking was connected with the special form of memory that was developed in the nineteenth century. It is a memory that lacks the pictorial element and, wherever possible, moves in abstractions.

Such a phenomenon is interesting. I have frequently referred to the professor of criminal anthropology Moritz Benedikt.⁵ Today as well, I would like to mention an interesting experience he himself relates in his memoirs. He had to address a meeting of scientists, and he reports that he prepared himself for this speech for twenty-two nights, not having slept day or night. On the last day before giving the address, a journalist who was supposed to publish the speech came to see him. Benedikt dictated it to him. He says that he had not written down the address at all, having merely impressed it onto his memory. He now dictated it to the journalist in his private chamber; the following day he gave this speech at the meeting of scientists. The journalist printed what he had taken down from dictation, and the printed speech agreed word for word with the speech Benedikt delivered at the meeting.

I must confess, such a thing fills me with admiration, for one always admires what one could never find possible to accomplish oneself. This is indeed a most interesting phenomenon! For twenty-two days, the man worked to incorporate, word for word, what he had prepared into his organization, so that in the end he could not possibly have uttered a single sentence out of the sequence impressed onto his system, so firmly was it imbedded!

Such a thing is possible only when a person is able to imprint the whole speech into his physical organism purely out of the gradually developing wording. It is actually a fact that what one thinks out in this way stamps itself onto one's organization as firmly as the force of nature firmly builds up the bone system of man. Then, the whole speech rests like a skeleton in the physical organism. As a rule, memory is tied to the etheric body, but in this case the latter has imbedded itself completely in the physical organism. The entire physical system then contains something in the way it contains the bones, something that stands there like the skeleton of the speech. Then it is possible to do what Professor Benedikt did. But this is only possible when the nerve structure of the physical organism is developed in such a way that it receives without resistance into its plasticity what is brought into it; gradually, of course, for twenty-two days, even nights, it had to be worked in.

It is not surprising that somebody who relies so much on his body acquires the feeling that this physical body is the only thing working in the human being. Human life had indeed taken such a turn that it worked its way completely into the physical body; people therefore arrived at the belief that the physical body is everything in the human organization. I do not think that any other age but ours, which has attached this high value on the physical body, could have come to such a grotesque invention—forgive the expression—as stenography. Obviously, when people did not rely as yet on stenography, they did not attach so great a value to preserving and accurately recording words and the sequence of words such as is the aim in stenography. After all, only the imprint in the physical body can make so fast and firm a record. It is therefore the predilection for imprinting something in the physical body that has brought about the other preference for preserving this imprinted word, but by no means for retaining anything that stands one level higher. For stenography could play no part if we wished to preserve those forms that express themselves in the etheric body. It takes the materialistic tendency to invent something as grotesque as shorthand.

All this, of course, is added only by way of explanation of what I wish to contribute to the problem of understanding the appearance of materialism in the nineteenth century. Humanity had arrived at a certain condition that tended to engrain the soul-spiritual into the physical organism. You must take what I have said as an interpretation, not as a criticism of stenography. I do not favor the immediate abolition of stenography. This is never the tendency underlying such characterizations. We must clearly understand that just because one understands something, this does not imply that one wishes to abolish it right away! There are many things in the world that are necessary for life and that yet cannot serve all purposes—I do not want to go further into this subject—and the need for which still has to be comprehended. But we live in an age, and I have to emphasize this again and again, when it is absolutely necessary to penetrate more deeply into the development of nature as well as into that of culture, to be able to ask ourselves: Where does this or that phenomenon come from? For mere carping and criticizing accomplish nothing. We really have to understand all the things that go on in the world.

I would like to sum up what I presented today in the following way. The evolution of mankind shows that in the middle of the nineteenth century a certain culmination was reached in the process of the structural completion of the physical body. Already now, a decadence has set in. Further, this perfection of the physical body is connected with the rise of theoretical materialism. In the next few days, I shall have to say more about these matters from one or another viewpoint. I wished to place before you today what I have just summed up.

• 1. See Rudolf Steiner, An Outline of Occult Science, Anthroposophic Press, Spring Valley, NY, 1972.
• 2. See lecture of March 21, 1921 (in GA 324), where a more detailed description is given, also in regard to the conclusions.
• 3. Meeting of the Giordano-Bruno Society in Berlin: Date and title of this lecture could not be ascertained. Concerning this society, see Rudolf Steiner, The Course of My Life, chapter XXIX; Anthroposophic Press, NY, 1970.
• 4. Johann Friedrich Herbart, 1776–1841; German philosopher, psychologist and educator.
• 5. Moritz Benedikt, 1835–1920; Criminal psychologist. See Moritz Benedikt, Aus meinem Leben. Erinnerungen and Eroerterungen; Vienna 1906, vol. III, p. 315.

Before I begin, let me emphasize that this lecture does not form part of the sequence of lectures presented in the context of the courses,¹ but in a certain respect is intended to relate to what I have outlined yesterday evening. There, we dealt with studying that particular form of development within humanity's historical evolution that occurred in the middle and also in the second half of the nineteenth century; the evolutionary impulse of materialism. I said that in these considerations our attention should not be turned so much to materialism in general, which calls for other viewpoints, but rather to theoretical materialism, to materialism as a world view. I drew attention to the fact that this materialism must be confronted with a sufficiently critical mind, but that, on the other hand, materialism has been a necessary phase of evolution in the history of mankind.

We cannot simply speak of rejecting it and say that it is an aberration; materialism needs to be understood. For the one does not exclude the other. Particularly in these reflections it is important to extend the sphere of thoughts relating to truth and error further than is ordinarily the case. It is generally said that in the logical life of thoughts it is possible either to err or to find the truth. What is not mentioned is that under certain circumstances the glance we cast upon the external world may discover errors in outer reality. Difficult though it may be for modern thought to admit to errors in the events of nature—something that spiritual science has to do—it is obvious for people today to admit that there are actual errors in the results that arise in the course of the historical development and manifest themselves, so to speak, in the communal, social sphere. These errors cannot be corrected by mere logic, but demand comprehension based on the conditions that gave rise to them.

In thinking, all we have to do is reject error. We have to extricate ourselves from error and, overcoming it, reach truth. But in the case of errors rooted in the factual realm we must always say that they also have a positive aspect and are of value in a certain sense for the development of mankind. Theoretical materialism of the nineteenth century should therefore not merely be condemned in a narrow, one-sided manner; instead, we should grasp its significance in human evolution.

Theoretical materialism consisted in the fact—and what remained of it still consists in this—that man devotes himself to a conscientious and exact investigation of the external material facts, that in a certain sense he loses himself in this world of facts. Then, proceeding from this investigation of facts, he attains to a view of life that tends to the conclusion that there is no other reality except the world of facts, and that everything pertaining to soul and spirit is, after all, merely a product of the material course of events. Even a conception of life such as this was necessary during a certain epoch of time, and the only danger would be a rigid adherence to it so that it could influence the further development of humanity in an age when other contents have to enter human consciousness.

Let us try today and investigate the actual basis of this evolutionary impulse leading to theoretical materialism. We come to it when, from a certain standpoint, we picture once more the threefold nature of the human organism.² I have characterized it on many occasions. I have said: We must distinguish within the whole organization of the human being the part that, in regard to his physical being, may be designated as the organization of the senses and nerves. This is chiefly concentrated in the human head, but in a certain sense it extends over the whole human organism, also penetrating the other parts of it. As a second member we have the rhythmical organization. We encounter it chiefly in the rhythm of breathing and in the circulation of the blood. The third part in a wider sense is the metabolic organization of the human being, including the whole system of the human limbs. The human limb system is a system of movement, and every form of movement is basically an expression of our metabolic processes. One day, when people will investigate more closely what really takes place in the metabolic processes whenever the human being moves, they will discover the intimate connection between the limb system and the metabolic system.

In considering these three systems in the human being, we have, first of all, pointed out the fundamental difference between them. I have already drawn your attention yesterday to the fact that, by means of the same drawing, two men with entirely different world views wanted to clarify matters relating to the human head organization as well as to the processes of human thinking. I pointed out that it so happened that I was once present at a lecture given by an extreme materialist. He wished to describe the life of the soul, but he actually described the human brain, the individual sections of the brain, the connecting fibers, and so on. He arrived at a certain picture, but this picture he drew on the blackboard was, for him, only the expression of what goes on materially and physically in the human brain. At the same time, he saw in it the expression of soul life, particularly the conceptual life. Another man, a philosopher of the school of Herbart, spoke of thoughts, of associations of thoughts, of the effect one thought has upon another, etc., and he said he could make use of the same picture on the blackboard. Here, quite empirically, I should say, we encounter something most interesting. It is this that somebody for whom the observation of the soul life is something quite real, at least in his thoughts—this must always be added in case of Herbartianism—clarifies to himself the activity of the soul life by using the same picture employed by the other lecturer, who depicts the soul life by trying to set forth only the processes in the human brain.

Now, what lies at the foundation of this? The fact is that in its plastic configuration the human brain is indeed an extraordinarily faithful replica of what we know as the life of thought. In the plastic configuration of the human brain, the life of thought really does express itself, we might almost say, in an adequate manner. In order to follow this thought to its conclusion, however, something else is needed. What ordinary psychology and also Herbart's psychology designate as chains of thoughts, as thought associations in the form of judgments, logical conclusions and so on, should not remain a mere idea. At least in our imagination—even if we cannot rise to clairvoyant Imaginations—we should allow it to culminate in a picture; the tapestry of logic, the tapestry presented to us by psychology of the life of thought, the teaching of the soul life, should be allowed to culminate in a picture. If we are in fact able to transform logic and psychology in a picture-like, plastic way into an image, then the human configuration of the brain will emerge. Then we shall have traced a picture, the realization of which is the human brain.

On what is this based? It is based on the fact that the human brain, indeed the whole system of nerves and senses, is a replica of an Imaginative element.³ We completely grasp the wonderful structure of the human brain only when we learn to investigate Imaginatively. Then, the human brain appears as a realized human Imagination. Imaginative perception teaches us to become familiar with the external brain, the brain we come to know through psychology and anatomy, as a realized Imagination. This is significant.

Another fact is no less important. Let us bear in mind that the human brain is an actual human Imagination. We are indeed born with a brain, if not a fully developed one, at least with a brain containing the tendencies of growth. It tries to develop to the point of being a realized Imaginative world, to be the impression of an Imaginative world. This is, as it were, the ready-made aspect of our brain, namely, that it is the replica of an Imaginative world. Into this impression of the Imaginative world we then build the conceptual experiences attained during the time between birth and death. During this period we have conceptual experiences; we conceive, we transform the sense perceptions into thoughts; we judge, we conclude, and so on. We fit this into our brain. What kind of activity is this?

As long as we live in immediate perception, as long as we remain in the interplay with the external world, as long as we open our eyes to the colors and dwell in this relationship with colors, as long as we open our organs of hearing to sounds and live within them, the external world lives on in us by penetrating our organism through the senses as through channels. With our inner life, we encompass this external world. But the moment we cease to have this immediate experience of the outer world—something I already called your attention to yesterday—the moment we turn our eye away from the world of colors, allow our ear to become inattentive to the resounding of the external world, the moment we turn our senses to something else, this concreteness—our interplay with the external world in perceiving—penetrates into the depths of our soul. It may then be drawn to the surface again in the form of pictures by memory. We may say that during our life between birth and death insofar as our thought life is concerned, our interplay with the external world consists of two parts: the immediate experience of the external world in the form of perceptions and the transformed thoughts. We surrender, as it were, completely to the present; our inner activity loses itself in the present. Then, however, this immediate activity continues. To begin with, it is not accessible to our consciousness. It sinks down into the subconscious but may be drawn to the surface again into memory. In what form, then, does it exist in us?

This is a point that can be explained only by a direct view attainable in Imagination. A person who honestly pursues his way in his scientific striving cannot help but admit to himself that the moment the riddle of memory confronts him he cannot advance another step in his research. For due to the fact that the experiences of the immediate present sink down into the subconscious, they become inaccessible to ordinary consciousness; they cannot be traced further.

But when we work in a corresponding way upon the human soul by means of the soul-spiritual exercises that have frequently been discussed in my lectures, we reach a stage where we no longer lose sight of the continuations of our direct life of perceptions and thoughts into conceptions that make memories possible. I have often explained to you that the first result of an ascent to Imaginative thinking is to have before your soul, as a mighty life-tableau, all your experiences since birth. The stream of experience normally flows along in the unconscious, and the single representations, which emerge in memory, rise up from this unconscious or subconscious stream through a half-dreamy activity. Those who have developed Imaginative perception are offered the opportunity to survey the stream of experiences as in one picture. You could say that the time that has elapsed since birth then takes on the appearance of space. What is normally within the subconscious is then beheld in the form of interconnected pictures. When the experiences that otherwise escape into the subconscious are thus raised to direct vision, we are able to observe this continuation of present, immediate perceptual and thought experiences all the way into conceptions that can be remembered. It is possible to trace what happens in us to any sort of experience we have in our mind, from the point in time when we first lose sight of it until the moment we recall it again. After all, between experiencing something and remembering it again something is taking place continuously in the human organism, something that becomes visible to imaginative perception. It is possible to view it in Imaginations, but it is now revealed in a quite special way.

The thoughts that have lost themselves, as it were, in the subconscious region an activity connected with our life-impulses, our impulses of growth; they stimulate an activity in us that is related to our impulse of death. The significant result revealing itself to Imaginative perception in the way I could only allude to today is the following: Human beings do not connect the memory-activity, leading to the renewal of thinking, of thought and perceptual experiences, with what calls us into physical life and maintains digestion in this life, so that substances that have become useless are replaced by usable ones, and so on. The power of memory that descends into the human being is not related to this ascending life system in man. It is linked to something we also bear within us ever since our birth, something we are born with just as we are born with the forces through which we live and grow. It is connected with what then appears to us, concentrated into one moment, in regard to the whole organism in dying.

Death only appears as a great riddle as long as it is not observed within the continuous stream of life from birth to death. Expressing myself paradoxically, I might say that we die not only when we die. In reality, we die at every moment of our physical life. By developing within our organism the activity leading to memory as recollective thinking—and in ordinary physical life every form of cognition is actually linked up with memory—insofar as this cognition is developed, we die continuously. A subtle form of death, proceeding from our head organization, is forever going on within us. By carrying out this activity that continues on into memory, we constantly begin the act of dying. But the forces of growth existing in the other members of the human organism counteract this process of death; they overcome the death forces. Thus we maintain life. If we only depended on our head organization, on the system of nerves and senses, each moment in life would really become a moment of death for us. As human beings we continuously vanquish death, which streams out, as it were, from our head to the remaining organism. The latter counteracts this form of death. Only when the remaining organization becomes weakened, exhausted through age or some kind of damage, thus preventing the counteraction against the death-bearing forces of the human head, only then does death set in for the whole organism.

Indeed, in our modern thinking, in the thinking of today's civilization, we really work with concepts that lie side by side like erratic blocks, without being able to correctly recognize their interrelationship. Light must enter into this chaos of erratic blocks constituting our world of concepts and thoughts. On the one hand, we have human cognition which is so intimately tied to the faculty of memory. We observe this human cognition and have no idea of its kinship to our conception of death. And because we are completely ignorant of this relationship, what could otherwise be deciphered in life remains so enigmatic. We are unable to connect the experiences of everyday life with the great extraordinary moments of experience. The insufficient spiritual view over what lies around as fragmentary blocks in our conceptual world brings it about that despite the splendid achievements of the nineteenth century life has gradually become so obscure.

Let us now consider the second system, the second member of the human organization, the rhythmical organization. It is also present in the human head organization. The interior of the human head breathes together with the breathing organism. This is an external physiological fact. But the breathing process of the human head lies, as it were, more within; it conceals itself from the system of nerves and senses. It is covered over by what constitutes the chief task of the head organization. Still, the human head has its own concealed rhythmical activity. This activity becomes evident mainly in the human chest organization, in those processes of the human organism that are centered in the organs of breathing and in the heart.

When we observe the outward appearance of this organization, unlike in the case of the head organization, we cannot see in it a kind of plastic image for what exists as its counterpart in the soul, namely, the life of feeling. When we observe the soul experiences, our feelings manifest as something more or less undefined. We have sharp contours in our thoughts. We also have clear concepts of thought associations. In the details pertaining to our life of feeling we have no such sharp outlines. There, everything interpenetrates, moves and lives. You will not find an Herbartian who, in making an outline of the life of emotion, would characterize this in a sketch that might resemble one drawn by an anatomist or a physiologist for the lungs or the heart and circulatory system. Here, you find that such a relationship does not exist between the inner soul element and the outer aspects. This is also the reason why Imaginative cognition does not suffice to bring before the soul this relationship between the soul's life of feeling and the rhythmical system. For this we need what I have characterized in my books as Inspiration, Inspirative perception. This special form of perception through Inspiration attains to the insight that our emotional life has a direct link to the rhythmical system. Just as the system of nerves and senses is linked to the conceptual life, so the rhythmical life is linked to the life of feelings.

But, metaphorically speaking, the rhythmical system is not the wax impression of the emotional life in the same way that the brain's configuration is the wax impression of the conceptual life. Consequently we cannot say that our rhythmical system is an Imaginative replica of our life of feeling. We must say instead that what unfolds and lives in us as the rhythmical system has come about through cosmic Inspiration, independently of any human knowledge. It is inspired into us. The activity carried out in the breathing and in the blood circulation is not merely something that lives within us enclosed by our skin; it is a cosmic event, like lightning and thunder. After all, through our rhythmical system, we are connected with the outer world. The air that is now within me was outside before; it will be outside again the next moment. It is an illusion to believe that we only live enclosed within our skin. We live as a member of the world that surrounds us, and the form of our rhythmical system, which is closely connected to our movements, is inspired into us out of this world.

Summing this up, we can say: As the basis of the human head we have, first of all, the realization of an Imaginative world. Then, in a manner of speaking, below what thus realizes itself as an Imaginative world, we have the realm of the rhythmical system, an Inspired world. Concerning our rhythmical system, we can only say: An Inspirative world is realized within it.

How do matters stand in regard to our metabolic system, our limb-system? Metabolism belongs together with the limb-system, as I have pointed out already. Our metabolic processes stand in a direct relationship with our volitional activity. But this relationship reveals itself neither to Imaginative nor to Inspirative perception. It discloses itself only to Intuitive cognition, to what I have described in my books as “Intuitive knowledge.” This explains the difficulty of seeing in the external physical processes of metabolism the realization of a cosmic Intuition. This metabolism, however, is also present in the rhythmical system. The metabolism of the rhythmical system conceals itself behind the life-rhythm, just as the life-rhythm conceals itself behind the activity of nerves and senses in the human head.

In the case of the human head we have a realized Imaginative world; hidden behind it a realized Inspirative world in regard to the rhythm in the head. Still further behind this, there is the metabolism of the head, hence a realized Intuitive element. Thus we can comprehend our head, if we [see] in it the confluence of the realized Imaginative, Inspired, and Intuitive elements. In the human rhythmical system the Imaginative is omitted; there we have only the realization of the Inspired and Intuitive elements. And in the metabolic system Inspiration, too, is omitted; there, we are dealing only with the realization of a cosmic Intuition.

In the threefold human organism, we thus bear within us first the organization of the head, a replica of what we strive for in cognition through Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition. In trying to understand the human head, we should really have to admit to ourselves that with mere external, objective knowledge gained through the observation of the outer sensory world, which is not even Imagination and does not rise up to the Intuitive element, we should stop short of the human head. For the inner being of the human head begins to disclose itself only to Imaginative knowledge; behind this lies something still deeper that reveals itself to Inspiration. In turn, behind this, lies something that makes itself known to Intuitive knowledge. The rhythmical system is not even accessible to Imagination. It reveals itself only to Inspirative cognition, and what is concealed beneath it is the Intuitive element. Within the human organism, we certainly ought to find metabolism incomprehensible. The true standpoint in regard to the human metabolism can be none other than the following. We can only say that we observe the metabolic processes of the external world; we try to penetrate into them with the aid of the laws of objective perception. Thus we attain knowledge of the external metabolism in nature. The instant this outer metabolism is transformed and metamorphosed into out inner metabolism it becomes something quite different; it turns into something in which dwells the element that discloses itself only to Intuition.

We would therefore have to say: In the world that presents itself to us as the sensory realm, the most incomprehensible of all incomprehensible problems is what the substances, with which we become familiar externally through physics and chemistry, accomplish within the human skin. We would have to admit: we must rise up to the highest spiritual comprehension if we want to know what really takes place within the human organism in regard to the substances we know so well in their external aspects in the world outside.

Thus we see that in the structure of our organism there are, to begin with, three different activities. First of all, something that discloses itself to Intuitive knowledge is active in the structure of the human organism, building it up out of the world's substances. In addition something is active in this organism that reveals itself to Inspirative knowledge; it fits the rhythmical system into the metabolic organism. Finally, something is active in the human organism that reveals itself to Imaginative knowledge; it builds in the nervous system. And when this human organism enters through birth into the external physical world, all that is ready-made, as it were, by virtue of its own nature, then evolves further inasmuch as human beings develop objective knowledge between birth and death.

Concerning this objective knowledge we have seen that it is tied to the activity of memory; it is not connected with constructive but with destructive forces. We have seen that this form of knowledge is a slow dying proceeding from the head. We may therefore say that the human organism was built up through what could be comprehended by means of Intuition, Inspiration, and Imagination. This dwells in this human organism in a manner inaccessible to present-day cognition. On the other hand, what is built into our organism between birth and death by means of our objective insights breaks down and destroys this organism. We actually think and form concepts on the basis of this destruction when we unfold our conceptual life, the life of thoughts.

We really cannot be materialists when we comprehend what this knowledge, so intimately linked with the faculty of memory consists of. For if we wanted to be materialists, we would have to imagine that we are built up by forces of growth; that those forces are active that absorb the substances and transmit them to the various organs in order to bring about, in a wider sense, the digestive processes within our organism. We should have to picture this faculty, inherent in growth, digestion, and the constructive forces in general, continuing and culminating somewhere in the conceptual process, in thinking which arrives at objective knowledge. Yet this is not the case. The human organism is built up through something that is accessible to Intuition, to Inspiration, and to Imagination. Our organism is built up when it has absorbed these forces into itself. But then regression begins, the process of decay, and what brings this decay about is ordinary knowledge between birth and death.

Through the processes of ordinary perception we do not build anything into the constructive forces; rather, by destroying what has been built up, we create, first of all, the foundations for a continuous element of death in ourselves. Into this continuing element of death we place our knowledge. We do not immerse ourselves in material elements when we think; no, we destroy the material element. We hand it over to the forces of death. We think our way into death, into the destruction of life. Thinking, ordinary perception, is not related to growing, budding life. It is related to death, and when we observe human perception, we do not find an analogy for it in the natural formations including the human brain. We discover an analogy only in the corpse that decays after death. For what the decaying body represents, I might say, intensively, in a certain greatness, must continuously take place within us when we perceive objectively in the ordinary sense of the word.

Look upon death if you wish to comprehend the cognitive process. Do not look upon life in a materialistic manner; look upon what represents the negation, the elimination of life. Then you arrive at a comprehension of thinking. To be sure, what we call death then acquires an entirely different meaning; based on life it attains to a different significance.

Even external phenomena enable us to grasp such things. Yesterday, I said to you that the culmination of the materialistic world view lies in the middle or in the last third of the nineteenth century. This culmination viewed death as something that must absolutely be rejected. In a sense people at that time felt noble by viewing death in this way, as ending life. Life alone they wanted to consider and wished to see it as ending with death. Frequently, one looks back somewhat disdainfully upon the “child-like folk-consciousness.” Take the word “verwesen,” (to decompose) which points to the process of what occurs after death. The prefix “ver” always indicates a movement towards what the word expresses. “Verbruedern” (to become like brothers, to fraternize) means to move in the direction of becoming brothers; “versammeln” (to gather together) indicates moving in the direction of gathering, of meeting. In the vernacular, “verwesen” does not mean decomposing, ceasing to be; it means moving in the direction of Wesen, of being, of life. Such word formations, connected with a spiritual way of grasping the world during the epoch of instinctive knowledge, have become exceedingly rare. In the nineteenth century people materialized everything; they no longer lived in the spiritual essence permeating the word. Many examples could be cited to show that the culmination of materialism became evident even in speech.

We can therefore understand that after the human being had been developed, as I said yesterday, to a point of culmination by forces that disclose themselves to Inspiration, Intuition, and Imagination, he then attained to the highest culmination in the nineteenth century, followed in turn by a decadence. We can understand that the human being distanced himself, as it were, from the power enabling him to comprehend himself inwardly by developing in the strongest measure the forces that, as conceptual forces, are most akin to death, the forces of abstraction. It is from this point that it is possible, proceeding from today's lecture, to advance to what constitutes the actual, essential impulse within what we may call the materialistic impulse of knowledge in human history.

• 1. Reference to lectures of the Second Course of the School for Spiritual Science.
• 2. The threefold human organism was first mentioned by Rudolf Steiner in Von Seelenraetseln, GA 21. (The Case for Anthroposophy)
• 3. Concerning Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition, three forms of higher perception, see Rudolf Steiner, An Outline of Occult Science, chapter: “Knowledge of Higher Worlds”; Anthroposophic Press, Spring Valley, NY, 1972.

This evening, I do not wish to continue directly with the considerations normally carried on here on Saturdays and Sundays. Instead—in order that the friends of our cause,¹ who have gathered here, can take along as much as possible of what is more or less closely connected with the studies undertaken during this week—we shall venture into still more intimate considerations intended to relate to the questions already touched upon.

Even in reference to fructifying philology by means of anthroposophical spiritual science, I have indicated that an original form of sensibility for language has been lost and that in its place a more abstract orientation towards the things of the surrounding world has come about. I have pointed out that a significant developmental force in human history is represented in the fact that through Aristotle, in the fourth century before Christ, there emerged what subsequently was called logic. For it does indeed signify an orientation towards the world in an abstract sense to find one's way consciously into the logical element, which earlier had been present more unconsciously and instinctively in the constitution of the human soul.

I said that an inner concrete process was still experienced in ancient times that is comparable to what we can study in the processes of puberty. What appears in the child when it learns to speak, is a metamorphosis, a more inwardly developing metamorphosis of the process that unfolds later on in the human being in the process of reaching sexual maturity. And what runs its course inwardly in this process of learning to speak, in ancient times had aftereffects for people's whole life. The human being experienced himself as if through the word something were coming to expression in him that lived also in the things outside, something the things do not express, however, because they have, in a sense, become dumb. As the word resounded, something was felt within that corresponds to processes in the outer world. What was experienced then was much more substantial, much more closely connected to human life than what is inwardly experienced today in comprehending the world through abstract concepts. What human beings then experienced through the word was more organic, I would say, more instinctive, more inclined towards the animalistic soul element than what we can now experience through the conceptual, abstract grasp of things. We were brought closer to the spiritual life through this abstract comprehension. Yet, at the same time, we arrived at abstraction. Thus, at precisely the world-historical moment, when human beings were in a sense elevated to the point of gradually grasping the spirit, their mental experience at the same time suffered a dilution into abstractions—I can express these matters only in a more or less pictorial manner since our language has not yet coined words for it.

Naturally, this process did not develop in the same way in all of humanity. It took place earlier in those folk groups that were the foremost bearers of civilization; others remained behind. I was able to point out that in the eleventh century the population settled in central Europe still occupied a standpoint that must be designated as pre-Aristotelian compared to the Greek development of civilization. In central Europe, people advanced much later beyond the point the Greeks passed with Aristotle. Through Aristotelianism, the Greeks anticipated much of what came about for the central European nations and those counted among them because of their culture only in the first third of the fifteenth century.

Now, two things are connected with this development in regard to the comprehension of language and the abstract element. I have already pointed out one. As human soul life was lifted into abstraction through Aristotelianism—which still was only a symptom for a general comprehension of things within the Greek culture—it became estranged from the direct experience of the word, of language. With this, the portal leading to man's unfolding life in the direction of birth was closed. In their everyday experience, human beings no longer found their way back to the point where they could have realized through the process of acquiring speech how the soul-spiritual element holds sway in them just as it does outside in the world. Due to this, they were also diverted from looking back still further. For the next stages would have shown what one might call overall union of the spirit with physical-corporeal matter. They would have yielded comprehension of preexistence, the insight that the human soul-spiritual element leads an existence in supersensory worlds prior to uniting with the corporeal nature that arises within physical matter. It is true that this insight did not exist in earlier times of humanity's evolution in the definitely conscious form in which we try to acquire it today through spiritual science; instead, it was present in a more instinctive manner. The remnants of it appear to us in the Oriental civilization, which consider looking upon the preexistent human soul a matter of course.

If the human being is then in a position of continuing further, something that is even more difficult to discern than preexistence becomes actual knowledge and perception, namely, repeated earth lives. This view existed in earlier ages of human development, though in an instinctive manner. It survived in a more poetic, imaginative form in the civilizations of the Orient when the former had already fallen into decadence, albeit a most significant, even beautiful decadence.

Thus, when we look back to former epochs of human evolution without the prejudices of modern anthropology, we find a mode of perception that, albeit instinctively, penetrated into things. Inasmuch as human beings still understood the processes of acquiring speech, they also grasped something of the soul activity within outer nature; and inasmuch as they understood the incorporation of the soul-spiritual into the physical corporeal element, they understood something of the spirit vibrating and weaving through the world.

To the extent that historical knowledge of the Greeks reaches back, only the sparse remnants of this ancient spirit perception are contained in the traditions of Greek civilization. If we go back beyond Aristotle and Plato to the Ionic philosophers, to around the turn of the fifth and sixth centuries B.C. in Greek development of thought, we find a philosophy, for example in the work of Anaxagoras,² that cannot be comprehended on the basis of today's assumptions. Motivated by a certain healthy insight, the philosophers of the Occident should really admit to themselves that Western philosophy simply lacks the prerequisites to understand Anaxagoras. For what Anaxagoras acknowledges—though already in decadent form—as his nous dates back to those ages I have just spoken of, ages when people still sensed and perceived how the world is infused and woven through by spirit, how, out of spirit, the soul-spiritual being of man descends in order to unite with the physical-corporeal nature. In former times, this was an instinctive, concrete perception. Then it diminished to the knowledge present in the instinctive insight into the process of speech, something that in turn was lost during the Aristotelian age, particularly as far as the most advanced civilizations are concerned.

As I have already explained, when people still had insight into this process of emerging speech, they sensed something in the resounding of the word that was an expression for an objective happening in nature outside. Here, I come to an essential difference: What was conceived as the universal soul by those who can be called “knowledgeable about speech” in the ancient sense, was predominantly thought of as filling space, and human beings experienced themselves as having been formed out of this spirit-soul element filling out space. Yet this was something different from what we discover when we go back further beyond the nous of Anaxagoras. Then we arrive at something leading into the preexistence of human beings; it is something that does not merely deal with the fact that the human soul weaves and exists in the present within the universal spirit and soul. Instead, we find here that this human soul dwells with the universal spirit and soul in time.

We must be familiar with these matters through an inner comprehension, if we wish to gain truly historical insight into a most significant process in the development of civilization in western Asia and Europe. Nowadays, people really have no relevant conception of the state of mind of humanity living in the age when Christendom was established. Certainly, if you consider the general human soul condition of today in its particular configuration, you have to picture the great majority of those people of western Asia and Europe as having been uneducated in comparison to the education of our modern age we are so proud of. Yet, in those times, there were individuals who towered above the great mass of uneducated humanity. I might say, the successors of the ancient initiates stood out because of significant knowledge, knowledge that indeed did not dwell in the soul the same way as does our knowledge, which is permeated everywhere by abstract concepts and has therefore attained to full consciousness. Something instinctive existed even in the highest knowledge of that period. Yet, at the same time, something forceful was inherent in this instinctive knowledge, something that still penetrated into the depths of things.

It is strange that many representatives of present-day traditional confessions have a curious fear of the possibility that somebody might discover that such penetrating knowledge did exist in past times, knowledge that arrived at refined concepts even if these were viewed more through instinctive pictures, as I said, and were expressed in forms of speech, for the comprehension of which there exists little feeling today.

Our anthroposophy is not intended as a renewal of what is called Gnosis, but it is the path that allows us to look into the nature of this Gnosis. In regard to its sources, our anthroposophy has nothing in common with the ancient Indian philosophies. It can nevertheless penetrate into the compelling, magnificent aspects, the outpouring from all things, of the Vedanta, Sankhya, or Yoga philosophies, because it once again attains in a conscious manner to those regions of the world that were then reached instinctively. Likewise, our anthroposophy can penetrate into the essence of the Gnosis. We know that this Gnosis was eradicated by certain sects of the first Christian centuries to the point where very little Gnostic knowledge is still available historically. The Gnosis has actually become known to modern humanity only through the documents of those who tried to disprove it. They included quotes from the recorded texts in their written refutations, whereas the original Gnostic texts themselves were lost. Thus, the Gnosis has really been handed down to posterity only through the documents of its enemies who naturally quoted only what they deemed suitable in conformity with their cleverness.

Just study the quotation skills of our opponents and you will gain an idea of how far one can penetrate into the nature of such a subject. When one has to depend on the documents of the opponents! Insight into the Gnosis has in most cases been dependent on the texts of its opponents—outwardly and historically it depends on them even today. Just imagine, it would certainly be in accordance with the wishes of somebody like Mr. von Gleich,³ if all anthroposophical texts should be burned up—surely, he would like that best—and that anthroposophy would be handed down to posterity only through his own proclamations! We only have to picture things by means of something that can truly call attention to them.

If, for these reasons, we are unable to look into what already existed in those times, we will go astray with all the treatises, be they ever so well meant and scientific that concern something most important in regard to the comprehension of Christianity. One point, where almost everything remains yet to be done because everything done so far by no means leads to what could be designated by an honest striving for knowledge as true insight, is the Logos concept we encounter at the beginning of the Gospel of John. This Logos concept cannot be comprehended if the soul-spiritual development of human beings belonging to the most advanced civilization of that age is not inwardly understood. This is the case particularly if there is no comprehension of the soul-spiritual development that ran its course in Greek culture and shone across into Asia, casting its shadows into what confronts us in the Gospel of John.

We must not approach this Logos concept merely by means of a dictionary or a superficial philological method. It can be approached only if we inwardly study the soul-spiritual development in question here, approximately from the fourth pre-Christian century until the fourth century A.D. No satisfactory history has yet been written about what then took place inwardly in the most advanced part of humanity and its representatives of wisdom. For this is related to the vanishing of any understanding for the process of learning to speak. The other matter, the comprehension of preexistence, was preserved in traditions until the time of Origen;⁴ yet it was lost to inward understanding much earlier than the comprehension of the process of speech, of the resounding of the word in man's inner being.

If we focus on the soul-spiritual condition of the representatives of wisdom in Asia Minor and Europe, we discover that a transition took place. What had existed as a uniform process in perception, namely the resounding of the word and in it the being of the world, became differentiated into an orientation towards abstract concepts, ideas, and a feeling, a dull sensation of what was pushed down more into subconsciousness—the world as such. And what resulted from this? A certain fact came about in regard to the human soul life because of it. The word content and the ideal, conceptual content of consciousness were experienced in an undifferentiated manner by human beings in ancient times. Now, the conceptual content became separated.

Initially, however, it did retain something of what human beings had once possessed in the undifferentiated nature of word, concept, and percept. People spoke of "concepts"; they spoke of “ideas,” but yet it is obvious—for example in Plato's case—that people still experienced the idea spiritually and full of content. As they spoke of the idea, it still contained something of what had earlier been perceived in the undifferentiated word concept. Thus, people already drew closer to the idea that is grasped as a mere concept, but this grasp still retained something of what was comprehended in the ancient resounding of words. As this transition developed, the content of the world grasped spiritually by the human being turned into what was then expressed as the Logos concept. The Logos concept is understood only when it is known that it contains this transition to the idea, but without any remnant of the ancient word concept in grasping this idea. As people spoke of the Logos as the world-creative element, they were not clearly but only dimly aware that this world-creative spirit element has something in its content that was grasped in earlier times through the perception of the word.

We must take into consideration this quite special nuance of the soul's experience of the outer world in the Logos. There existed a very special nuance of soul perception, the Logos perception. Aristotle then worked his way out of it, found his way closer to abstraction and attained from it subjective logic. In Plato, on the other hand, we find the idea as the world-creative principle; in Plato, it is still pervaded by concrete spirituality, because it still contains the remnants of the ancient word concept, being basically the Logos, though in diminished form.

Thus, we can picture that what came with Christ into the man Jesus was to be designated as the world-creative principle out of the views of that age. People had a concept for that, the concept that was indeed retained in the Logos concept. The Logos concept existed. With it, people tried to grasp what had been given to the world in the story of Christ Jesus. the concept, which had developed out of ancient times and had assumed a special form, was utilized to express the starting-point of Christianity; thus, the most sublime wisdom was used to see through this mystery. We must be able to place ourselves completely into that age, not in the sense of an external conception but in inwardly grasping the way people viewed the world at that time.

There is a great break between Plato and Aristotle. On the other hand, the whole style of the Gospel of John is composed in such a way that we see: It came about based on a living comprehension of the world-creative principle and, at the same time, because the one who wrote down the Gospel of John was familiar with the Logos concept that had already been lost. All translation of the Gospel of John is impossible if one cannot penetrate into the origin of the Logos concept. This Logos concept did indeed dwell in all vitality among the wise representatives of the most civilized part of the world between the fourth century B.C. and the fourth century A.D.

When Christianity became a state religion, something from which the later Catholic Church was developed, the era was reached when, in a sense, even the last nuance of the ancient “word,” of the old word concept, was lost from this idea. Fundamentally, Aristotle did nothing but separate subjective logic from the Logos and develop the theory of this subjective logic. Yet, at the time the dominant condition of soul and spirit of mankind paid little heed to what Aristotle had established as subjective logic. On the contrary, Aristotelianism was forgotten, only entering again into the later age by way of the Arabs. It did exist; but aside from being present in this roundabout way through tradition, people still clearly felt that one was dealing on the one hand with subjective logic, on the other with the perception of a world-creative principle in the Logos. In this concept, something was still contained of what one had grasped in the ancient conception of the resounding-of-the-word in man's inner being as the counter-image of the word-become-silent, namely, as the Logos creating nature in this becoming silent.

Then, in the fourth century A.D., this nuance was lost from the Logos concept. It can no longer be discovered; it vanished. It is retained at most in a few secluded thinkers and mystical seekers. It vanished from the general consciousness of even the representative Church Fathers and teachers. What then still appears as a most comprehensive, ideally spiritualized world view in somebody like Scotus Erigena⁵ no longer contains the ancient Logos concept, though that term is used. The former Logos concept is utterly filtered into an abstract thought concept. The world-creative principle is now understood not by means of the ancient Logos concept, but only through the sublimated or filtered thought concept. This is what then appeared in the text by Scotus⁶ concerning the division of nature, but it is something that basically had already completely disappeared from consciousness: this loss of the Logos concept, this transformation of it into the thought concept.

In regard to European humanity, concerning which I said that it retained for itself a more ancient development into a later age, it was considered necessary to go back even beyond the period during which the Logos concept had been active in its full vitality. But people traced it back in an abstract form, and this return in an abstract form was even dogmatized. At the Eighth Ecumenical Council at Constantinople in A.D. 869, it was set down that the world and the human being are not to be conceived of as being membered into body, soul, and spirit, but merely into body and soul, and that the soul possesses a few spiritual qualities.

The other process of evolution I have just mentioned runs parallel to what had been dogmatically set down there. For a person who studies the development of Occidental civilization from the first Christian centuries, where much was still pervaded by Gnostic elements, up to the fourth and fifth centuries of our Christian era, it is an extraordinarily interesting fact to experience this diminishing of the Logos concept. Later, when the Gospels were translated, nothing, of course, could be brought into these translations of any feeling for the Logos concept as it had held sway within pre-Christian humanity in those eight centuries, in the middle of which lies the Mystery of Golgotha. This peculiarity of the period from which Christendom emerged must be studied also by means of such intimate aspects. Nowadays, people prefer to solve even the most difficult problems by means of the threadbare concepts, concepts that are easily acquired. Historical problems such as I have just mentioned, however allow a solution only if we seek the preparation for the solution in the acquisition of certain nuances of the human soul life, if we are willing to proceed from the honest assumption that in the present cultural age we simply do not possess in our soul life the nuance that leads to the Logos concept as it is meant in the Gospel of John. This is why we should not try to comprehend the Gospel of John with the vocabulary and conceptions of the present. If we attempt to understand the Gospel of John with present-day concepts, superficiality will dictate to us from the very outset. This is something that must be discerned with an alert eye of soul and this must be done in regard to history in these areas, for things are in a bad way at the present in regard to this history.

Only recently, I have had to call to mind an extraordinarily important fact in reference to this subject. A letter written by one of the most recognized theologians was brought to my attention—it was not addressed to me.⁷ This esteemed theologian of the present expressed himself on anthroposophists, Irvingites, and similar rabble. He confused everything. In his exposition, one point in particular stands out strangely. He says of himself that he has no sense for the sort of view that points to the super-sensible such as anthroposophy tries to do; he has to limit himself to what is given in human experience.

This is a theologian whose vocation it is to speak on and on about the super-sensible. He has become famous for having written fat historical volumes about the life of the super-sensible in human evolution. He is an authority for countless people of stature at present. Such a modern theologian admits that he has no sense for the super-sensible but, instead, wishes to stick to “human experience!” Yet he talks about the super-sensible and does not say, I wish to remain within human sensory experience; therefore, I negate all theology. Oh no, in our age, he becomes a famous theologian! My dear friends, it is so important for us to be alert to everything that is in a certain sense a determining factor today among our young people, yet at the same time proves itself to be an inner impossibility.

It is necessary to grasp with inner energy how one is to proceed to sincere and honest insight. Perhaps it can be discerned particularly in problems such as the Logos problem, and a person who sees what anthroposophy has to set forth about such a problem should realize from this that anthroposophy is certainly not taking the easy way out. It tries to do research earnestly and honestly and it is only because of this that it comes into conflict with a number of contemporary trends. For today people actually have either hatred or fear of such thoroughness, which must, however, be striven for and is needed in all areas of scientific life. I ask you: does the opposition, which so readily dispenses shallow judgments concerning anthroposophy, even know what anthroposophy occupies itself with? Does it know that this anthroposophy struggles with problems such as the Logos problem, which, after all, is only one detail, albeit an important one? It really would be the duty of those who are leaders in the sciences to at least have a look at what they judge from the outside. But this is the problem, that external life can be made comfortable—and this applies to many people—if one shuns the inconvenience of searching in an earnest manner. To be sure, for all this love of convenience, one is not aware of the strong forces of decline in our present civilization. The attitude of “after us the deluge” powerfully dominates the currently prevalent scientific world.

This is what I wished to illustrate today by means of one important problem of philological and historical research. After all, it is my hope that if particularly the esteemed students will realize more and more how the conscientious attempt is made to focus especially on those problems current research ignores, the young people above all others will come to the realization that such paths have to be pursued. I harbor the hope and I also know: If we work sufficiently in the direction of developing enthusiasm and confessing to the truth, what is needed to achieve again forces of regeneration in human civilization will be attained after all. Perhaps certain forces of darkness can suppress for a while what is being striven for here. In the long run, they will be unable to do so if the reality corresponds to the will, if, in fact, something light-filled is contained in what anthroposophy wills. Indeed, truth has means that only truth can discover and that are undiscoverable for the powers of darkness. Let us unite, old and young, young and old, in order to attain a clear view for discovering such paths to truth!

• 1. The participants of the second course of the School for Spiritual Science.
• 2. Anaxagoras, around 500–428 B.C., Greek philosopher. See Rudolf Steiner, Riddles of Philosophy, Anthroposophic Press, New York, 1973.
• 3. A retired Major General, Gerold von Gleich emerged as an opponent of Rudolf Steiner in 1921/22 with his lectures that also appeared as brochures and contained an abundance of untruths and distortions of facts.
• 4. Origen, around A.D. 185–254, Greek Church writer. Compare also the lecture of June 2, 1921 (Lecture XV in this volume) and note 4 to Lecture XV.
• 5. Scotus Erigena, around A.D. 810–877, Irish philosopher and theologian at the court of Charles the Bald in Paris. See Rudolf Steiner, Riddles of Philosophy.
• 6. De divisione naturae. See the detailed discussion of this work in the lectures of June 2 and June 3, 1921, in this volume (Lectures XV and XVI).
• 7. It could not be ascertained which one among the numerous theologians who were active opponents of Rudolf Steiner at that time was being referred to.

A study I began before our course started will become fully comprehensible only if we go back even further in considering the development of humanity in recent history. Basically, we have only given a few indications concerning the developments in the nineteenth century. It will be our purpose today to follow the spiritual development of mankind further back in time, giving special attention to an extraordinarily important and incisive event in the evolution of Western civilization. It is the turning-point that came about in the fourth century. There emerged at that time a figure still vivid in the memory of Western civilization, namely, Aurelius Augustinus.¹ We find in him a personality who had to fight with the great intensity, on the one hand, against what had come down from ancient times, something attempting during those first Christian centuries to establish Christianity on the basis of a certain ancient wisdom. On the other hand, he had to struggle against another element, the one that eventually was victorious in Western civilization. It rejected the more ancient form and limited itself to comprehending Christianity in a more external, material way, not to penetrate Christianity with ideas of ancient wisdom, but simply to narrate its events factually according to the course it had taken since its establishment, comprehending it intellectually as well as that was possible at that time.

These conflicts between the two directions—I would like to say, between the direction of a wisdom-filled Christianity and a Christianity seemingly tending toward a more or less materialistic view—these conflicts had to be undergone particularly by the souls of the fourth and the early fifth century in the most intense way. And in Augustine, humanity remembers a personality who took part in such conflicts.

In our time, however, we have to understand clearly that the historic documents call forth almost completely false ideas of what existed prior to the fourth century A.D. As clear as the picture may be since the fifth century, as unclear are all the ordinary ideas concerning the preceding centuries. Yet, if we focus on what people in general could know about this period prior to the fourth century A.D., we are referred to two areas. One area is that of knowledge, cultivated in the schools; the other is the area of ritual, of veneration, of the religious element. Something belonging to very ancient times of human civilization still extends into these two areas. Though cloaked in a certain Christian coloring, this ancient element was still more or less present during the first Christian centuries in both the stream of wisdom and that of ritual.

If we look into the sphere of wisdom, we find preserved there a teaching from earlier times. In a certain sense, however, it had already begun to be replaced by what we today call the heliocentric world system—I have spoken of this in earlier lectures here. Nevertheless, it still remained from former astronomical teachings, and might be designated as a form of astronomy, but now not from the standpoint of physical cosmological observation. In very ancient times, people arrived at this astronomy—let us call it etheric in contrast to our physical astronomy—in the following way: People of old were still fully aware of the fact that human beings by nature belong not only to the earth but also to the cosmic surroundings of the earth, the planetary system. Ancient wisdom had quite concrete views concerning this etheric astronomy. It taught that if we turn our attention to what makes up the organization of the upper part of the human being—and here I make use of expressions that are familiar to us today—insofar as we view the etheric body of man, the human being stands in interaction with Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars. People thus considered certain reciprocal effects between the upper part of the human etheric body and Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars. Furthermore, people found that the part of the human being that is of a more astral nature has a sort of interrelationship with Venus, Mercury, and the Moon. The forces that then lead man into his earthly existence and that bring it about that a physical body is fitted into this etheric body, these are the forces of the earth. Those forces, on the other hand, that cause the human being to have a certain perspective leading beyond his earthly life, are the forces of the sun.

Thus it was said in those ancient times that the human being comes out of unknown spiritual worlds he passes through in prenatal life but that it is not as if he merely entered into terrestrial life. Rather, he enters from extraplanetary worlds into planetary life. The planetary life receives him as I have described it, relating him to the sun, moon, earth, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. The orbit of Saturn was considered to be the approximate sphere the human being enters with his etheric body out of extraplanetary into planetary life. Everything that is etheric in the human being was definitely related to this planetary life. Only insofar as the etheric body then expresses itself in the physical body, only to that extent was the physical body related to the Earth. Insofar as the human being in turn raises himself with his ego beyond the etheric and astral body, the ancients related this to the sun.

Thus, one had a form of etheric astronomy. It was certainly still possible for this etheric astronomy not merely to look upon the physical destinies of the human being in the way physical astronomy does. Instead, since people viewed the etheric body, which in turn stands in a more intimate relationship to the spiritual aspect of the human being, in an interplay with the same forces of the planetary system, the following possibility existed. Since the forces of destiny can express themselves out of the planetary system by way of the etheric body, it was possible to speak of the human constitution and to include in the latter the forces of destiny.

In this teaching of antiquity, this etheric astronomy, which was continued even after people already had developed the heliocentric system as a kind of esoteric-physical science, a last wisdom teaching had emerged from ancient instinctive wisdom investigations and had been retained as a tradition. People spoke of the influences of heaven in no other way but by saying, Indeed, these influences of heaven exist; they bear not only the affairs of nature but also the forces of human destiny. Thus, there certainly existed a connection between what we might call a teaching of nature, namely cosmology, and what passed over later into all that people now consider as astrology, something that in ancient times, had a much more exact character and was based on direct observation.

It was thought that when the human being has entered the planetary sphere on his way to a new birth and has been received by it insofar as his etheric body is concerned, he subsequently enters the earth. He is received by the earth. Yet, even here, people did not merely think of the solid earth. Rather, they thought of the earth with its elements. Apart from the fact that the human being is received by the planetary sphere—whereby he would be a super-earthly being, whereby he would be what he is only as a soul—it was said that like a child he is received by the elements of the earth, by fire or warmth, by air, water, and the solid earth. All of these elements were considered the actual earth. Consequently, it was thought, the human being's etheric body is so tinged by these external elements, so saturated, that now the temperaments originate in it. Thus, the temperaments were pictured as closely tied to the etheric body, hence to the life organization of the human being. Therefore, in what is actually physical in man—at least, in what manifests through the physical body—this ancient teaching also saw something spiritual.

The most human aspect of this teaching, I would say, was something that can still be clearly discerned in the medical science period. The remedies and the teaching of medicine were certainly a product of this view of the relationship of the etheric body to the planetary system as well as of the way the etheric human being penetrates, as it were, into the higher spheres, into air, water, warmth, and earth, so that the physical impressions of the etheric soul temperaments found their way into his organization: black gall, white gall, and the other fluids, phlegm, blood, and so on. According to this commonly held view the nature of the human constitution can be known from the body fluids. It was not customary in medicine in those days to study the individual organs, of which drawings could be made. The intermingling of the permeation with fluids was studied, and a particular organ was viewed as a result of a special penetration of fluids. People then thought that in a healthy person the fluids intermingled in a specific manner; an abnormal intermingling of fluids was seen in a sick person. Thus we may say that the medical insight resulting from this teaching was definitely founded on the observation of the fluid human organism. What we call knowledge of the human organism today is based on the solid, earthly organism of man. In regard to the view of the human being, the course taken has led from an earlier insight into the fluid man to a more modern insight into the solid human being with sharply contoured organs.

The direction taken by medicine runs parallel to the transition from the ancient etheric astronomy to modern physical astronomy. The medical teaching of Hippocrates² still corresponds essentially to etheric astronomy, and, actually, the accomplishments of this medical conception concerned with the intermingling of fluids in man remained well into the fourth century A.D. in an exact manner, not only in tradition as it was later. Just as this ancient astronomy was subsequently obscured after the fourth century and physical astronomy took the place of the old etheric astronomy in the fifteenth century, so, too, pathology and the whole view of medicine was then based on the teachings of the solid element, of what is bounded and expressed by sharp contours in the human organism. This is in essence one side of humanity's evolution in the inorganic age.

Now we can also turn our attention to what has remained of those ancient times in cultic practices and religious ceremonies. The religious ceremonies were mainly made available to the masses; what I have just been describing was predominantly considered to be a treasure of wisdom belonging to centers of learning. Those cultic practices that found their way from Asia into Europe and that, insofar as they are religious endeavors, correspond to the view I have just explained, are known as Mithras worship.³ It is a worship we find even as late as the first Christian centuries extending from East to West; we can follow its path through the countries of the Danube as far as the regions of the Rhine and on into France. This Mithras worship, familiar to you as far as its outer forms are concerned, may be briefly characterized by saying that along with the earthly and cosmic context the conqueror of the Mithras-Bull was depicted imaginatively and pictorially in the human being, riding on the bull and vanquishing the bull-forces.

Nowadays, we are easily inclined to think that such images—all cultic pictures, religious symbolizations which, if we may say so, have emerged organically out of the ancient wisdom teachings—are simply the abstract, symbolic product of those teachings. But it would be absolutely false if we were to believe that the ancient sages sat down and said, Now we must figure out a symbol. For ourselves we have the teaching of wisdom; for the ignorant masses we have to think up symbols that can then be employed in their ceremonial rites, and so on. Such assumptions would be totally wrong. An assumption approximately like that is entertained by modern Freemasons; they have similar thoughts about the nature of their own symbolism. But this was certainly not the view of the ancient teachers of wisdom.

I should now like to describe the view of these sages of old by referring in particular to the connections of the Mithra worship to the world view I have just outlined above. A fundamentally important question could still be raised by those who had retained a vivid view of how the human being is received into the planetary world with his etheric body, of how man is subsequently received into the sphere of earthly elements into warmth or fire, air, water, and earth, of how through the effects of these elements on the human etheric being black gall, white gall, phlegm, and blood are formed. They asked themselves a question that can occur now to a person who truly possesses Imaginative perception. In those times, the answer to this question was based on instinctive Imaginative perception, but we can repeat it today in full consciousness. If we develop an Imaginative conception of this entrance of the human being from the spiritual world through the planetary sphere into the terrestrial sphere of fire, air, water, and earth, we arrive at the realization that if something enters from the spheres beyond into the planetary sphere, hence into the earth's sphere, and is received there, this will not become a true human being. If we develop a picture of what is actually evolving there, if we have an Imaginative view of what can be beheld in purely Imaginative perception outside the planetary sphere, then enters into and is received by the planetary sphere and is subsequently taken hold of by the influences emanating from the earth sphere, we see that this does not become a human being. We do not arrive at a view of man; instead we attain to a conception that can be most clearly represented if we picture not a human being but a bull, an ox.

The ancient teachers of wisdom knew that no human beings would exist on earth if there were nothing besides this extraplanetary being that descends into the planetary sphere of evolution. They saw that at first glance one does arrive at the conception of the gradual approach of an entity out of extraplanetary spheres into the planetary and hence the earth sphere. But if one then proceeds from the content of these conceptions and tries to form a vivid Imaginative view, it does not turn into a human being; it becomes a mere bull. And if one comprehends nothing more in the human being but this, one merely comprehends what is bull-like in human beings. The ancient teachers of wisdom formed this conception. Now they said to themselves, In that case, human beings must struggle against this bull-like nature with something still higher. They must overcome the view given by this wisdom. As human beings, they are more than beings that merely come from the extra-planetary sphere, enter into the planetary sphere, and from there are taken hold of by the terrestrial elements. They have something within them that is more than this.

It is possible to say that these teachers of wisdom came as far as this concept. This was the reason they then developed the image of the bull and placed Mithras on top of it, the human being who struggles to overcome the bull, and who says of himself, I must be of far loftier origin than the being that was pictured according to the ancient teaching of wisdom.

Now these sages realized that their ancient teaching of wisdom contained an indication of what is important here. For this teaching did look upon the planetary sphere, upon Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Venus, moon, and so on. It also said that as the human being approaches the earth, he is constantly lifted up by the sun so as not to be submerged completely in the terrestrial elements, so as not to remain merely what proceeds from the etheric body and the mixture of black and white gall, phlegm, and blood when it is received by the planetary sphere and when the astral body is received by the other planetary sphere through Mercury, Venus, moon. What lifts man upward dwells in the sun. Therefore, these sages said, Let us call man's attention to the sun forces dwelling in him; then he will turn into Mithras who is victorious over the bull!

This then was the cultic image. It was not meant to be merely a thought-out symbol but was actually to represent the fact, the cosmological fact. The religious ceremony was more than a mere outer sign; it was something that was extracted, as it were, out of the essence of the cosmos itself.

This cultic form was something that had existed since very ancient times and had been brought across from Asia to Europe. It was, in a sense, Christianity viewed from one side, viewed from the external, astronomical side, for Mithras was the sun force in man. Mithras was the human being who rebelled against the merely planetary and terrestrial aspects.

Now, a certain endeavor arose, traces of which can be observed everywhere when we look back at the first Christian centuries. The tendency arose to connect the historical fact, the Mystery of Golgotha, with the Mithras worship. Great were the numbers of people at that time, especially among the Roman Legions, who brought with them into the lands on the Danube and far into central Europe, indeed even into western Europe, what they had experienced in Asia and the Orient in general. In what they brought across as the Mithras worship there lived feelings that, without reflecting the Mystery of Golgotha, definitely contained Christian views and Christian sentiments. The worship of Mithras was considered as a concrete worship relating to the sun forces in man. The only thing this Mithras worship did not perceive was the fact that in the Mystery of Golgotha this sun force itself had descended as a spiritual entity and had united itself with the human being Jesus of Nazareth.

Now there existed schools of wisdom in the East up until the fourth century A.D. that by and by received reports and became aware of the Mystery of Golgotha, of Christ. The further east we go in our investigations, the clearer this becomes. These schools then attempted to spread a certain teaching throughout the world, and for a time there was a tendency to let flow into the Mithras cult what agrees with the following supersensory perception: The true Mithras is the Christ; Mithras is his predecessor. The Christ force must be poured into those forces in man that vanquish the bull. To turn the Mithras worship into a worship of Christ was something that was intensely alive in the first Christian centuries up until the fourth century. One might say that the stream intending to Christianize this Mithras worship followed after the spreading of the latter. A synthesis between Christendom and the Mithras worship was striven for. An ancient, significant image of man's being—Mithras riding on and vanquishing the bull—was to be brought into relationship with the Christ Being. One might say that a quite glorious endeavor existed in this direction, and in a certain respect it was a powerful one.

Anyone who follows the spread of Eastern Christianity and the spread of Arianism⁴ can see a Mithras element in it, even though in already quite weakened form. Any translation of the Ulfilas-Bible⁵ into modern languages remains imperfect if one is unaware that Mithras elements still play into the terminology of Ulfilas (or Wulfila). But who pays heed nowadays to these deeper relationships in the linguistic element? As late as in the fourth century, there were philosophers in Greece who worked on bringing the ancient etheric astronomy into harmony with Christianity. From this effort then arose the true Gnosis, which was thoroughly eradicated by later Christianity, so that only a few fragments of the literary samples of this Gnosis have remained.

What do people really know today about the Gnosis, of which they say in their ignorance that our anthroposophy is a warmed-over version? Even if this were true, such people would not be able to know about it, for they are familiar only with those parts of the Gnosis that are found in the critical, Occidental-Christian texts dealing with the Gnosis. They know the quotes from Gnostic texts left behind by the opponents of the Gnosis. There is hardly anything left of the Gnosis except what could be described by the following comparison. Imagine that Herr von Gleich would be successful in rooting out the whole of anthroposophical literature and nothing would remain except his quotations. Then, later on, somebody would attempt to reconstruct anthroposophy based on these quotes; then, it would be about the same procedure in the West as that which was applied to the Gnosis. Therefore, if people say that modern anthroposophy imitates the Gnosis, they would not know it even if it were the case, because they are unfamiliar with the Gnosis, knowing of it only through its opponents.

So, particularly in Athens, a school of wisdom existed well into the fourth century, and indeed even longer, that endeavored to bring the ancient etheric astronomy into harmony with Christianity. The last remnants of this view—man's entering from higher worlds through the planetary sphere into the earth sphere—still illuminate the writings of Origen; they even shine through the texts of the Greek Church Fathers. Everywhere one can see it shimmer through. It shines through particularly in the writings of the genuine Dionysius the Areopagite.⁶ This Dionysius left behind a teaching that was a pure synthesis of the etheric astronomy and the element dwelling in Christianity. He taught that the forces localized, as it were, astronomically and cosmically in the sun entered into the earth sphere in Christ through the man Jesus of Nazareth and that thereby a certain previously nonexistent relationship came into being between the earth and all the higher hierarchies, the hierarchies of the Angels, of Wisdom, the hierarchies of the Thrones and the Seraphim, and so on. It was a penetration of this teaching of the hierarchies with etheric astronomy that could be found in the original Dionysius the Areopagite.

Then, in the sixth century, the attempt was made to obliterate the traces even of the more ancient teachings by Dionysius the Areopagite. They were altered in such a way that they now represented merely an abstract teaching of the spirit. In the form in which the teaching of Dionysius the Areopagite has come down to us, it is a spiritual teaching that no longer has much to do with etheric astronomy. This is the reason he is then called the “Pseudo-Dionysius.” In this manner, the decline of the teaching of wisdom was brought about. On the one hand, the teachings of Dionysius were distorted; on the other hand, the truly alive teaching in Athens that had tried to unite etheric astronomy with Christianity was eradicated. Finally, in regard to the cultic aspect, the Mithras worship was exterminated.

In addition, there were contributions by individuals such as Constantine.⁷ His actions were intensified later by the fact that Emperor Justinian⁸ ordered the School of Philosophers in Athens closed. Thus, the last remaining people who had occupied themselves with bringing the old etheric astronomy into harmony with Christianity had to emigrate; they found a place in Persia where they could at least live out their lives. Based on the same program, according to which he had closed the Athenian Academy of Philosophers, Justinian also had Origen declared a heretic. For the same reason, he abolished Roman consulship, though it led only a shadowy existence, people sought in it a kind of power of resistance against the Roman concept of the state, which was reduced to pure jurisprudence. The ancient human element people still associated with the office of consul disappeared in the political imperialism of Rome.

Thus, in the fourth century, we see the diminishing of the cultic worship that could have brought Christianity closer to man. We observe the diminishing of the ancient wisdom teaching of an etheric astronomy that tried to unite with the insight into the significance of the Mystery of Golgotha. And in the West, we see an element take its place that already carried within itself the seeds of the later materialism, which could not become a theory until the fifteenth century when the fifth post-Atlantean epoch began, but which was prepared in the main through taking the spiritual heritage from the Orient and imbuing it with materialistic substance.

We must definitely turn our minds to this course of European civilization. Otherwise, the foundations of European civilization will never become quite clear to us. It will also never become really clear to us how it was possible that, again and again, when people moved to the Orient, they could bring back with them powerful spiritual stimuli from there. Above all else, throughout the first part of the Middle Ages, there was lively commercial traffic from the Orient up the Danube River, following exactly those routes taken by the ancient Mithras worship, which, naturally, had already died away at the beginning of the Middle Ages. The merchants who traveled to the Orient and back again, always found in the East what had preceded Christianity but definitely tended already towards Christianity. We observe, moreover, that when the Crusaders journeyed to the Orient, they received stimuli from the remnants they could still discern there, and they brought treasures of ancient wisdom back to Europe.

I mentioned that the ancient medical knowledge of fluids was connected with this old body of wisdom. Again and again, people who traveled to the Orient, even the Crusaders and those who journeyed with the Crusades, upon their return always brought back with them remnants of this old medicine to Europe. These remnants of an ancient medicine were then transmitted in the form of tradition all over Europe. Certain individuals who at the same time were ahead of their age in their own spiritual evolution then went through remarkable developments, such as the personality we know under the name Basilius Valentinus.⁹

What kind of personality was he? He was somebody who had taken up the tradition of the old medicine of fluids from the people with whom he had spent his youth, at times without understanding it from this or that indication. Until a short time ago—today it is already less often the case—there still existed in the old peasant's sayings remnants of this medical tradition that had been brought over from the Orient by the many travelers. These remnants were in a sense preserved by the peasantry; those who grew up among peasants heard of them; as a rule they were those who then became priests. In particular those who became monks came from the peasantry. There, they had heard this or that of what was in fact distorted treasure of ancient wisdom that had become decadent. These people did undergo an independent educational development. Up until the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the educational development an individual went through by means of Christian theology was something much more liberal than it was later on. Based on their own spirituality, these priests and monks gradually brought a certain amount of order into these matters. They pondered what they had heard; out of their own genius, they connected the various matters. Thus originated the writings that have been preserved as the writings of Basilius Valentinus.

Indeed, these conditions also gave rise to a school of thought from which Paracelsus¹⁰ even Jacob Boehme¹¹ learned. Even these individuals still took up the treasure of ancient medical wisdom that lived, I might say, in the folk group soul. One can notice this primarily in Jacob Boehme, but also in Paracelsus and others, even if one considers their writings only in a superficial way. If you look closely at, for example, Jacob Boehme's text “De Signatura Rerum,” you will find in the manner of his presentation that what I have said is very obvious. It is a form of old folk wisdom that basically contained distorted ancient wisdom. Such old folk wisdom was by no means as abstract as our present-day science; instead, there still existed a sensitivity for the objective element in words. One felt something in the words. Just as one tries to know through concepts today, one felt in the words. One knew that the human being had drawn the words out of the objective essence of the universe itself.

This can become evident in Jacob Boehme's efforts to feel what really lies concealed in the syllable, “sul,” or again in the syllable, “phur” of “sulphur”. See how Jacob Boehme struggles in “De Signatura Rerum,” to draw something out of a word, to draw out an inner word-extract, to draw something out of the word “sulphur” in order to come to an entity. The feeling is definitely present there that when one experiences the extract of words, one arrives at something real. In former times, it was felt, something had settled into the words the human soul absorbed when it moved from spheres beyond through the planetary sphere into earthly existence. But what the soul placed into the words due to its closeness to the intermingling of fluids when the child learned to speak was still something objective. There was still something in speech that was like instruction by the gods, not merely like human instruction. In Jacob Boehme we see this noble striving that can be expressed somewhat as if he had felt, I would like to consider speech as something in which living gods work behind the phenomena into the human organization in order to form speech and, along with speech, a certain treasure of wisdom.

Thus we see that the ancient body of wisdom does indeed continue on into later ages, though already taken up by modern thinking, which, it is true, is yet barely evident in such original and outstanding minds like Jacob Boehme and Paracelsus. Into what has thus been brought forth the purely intellectualistic, theoretical element is now imprinted, the element that is based on man's physical thinking and takes hold only of the physical realm. We see how, on the one hand, purely physical astronomy arises, and how, on the other hand, physiology and anatomy come about, which are directed exclusively upon the clearly defined organs of man—in short, the whole medical adumbration.

Thus, the human being gradually finds himself surrounded by a world that he comprehends only in a physical sense and in which he himself as a cosmic being certainly has no place. Concerning himself, he grasps only what he has become by virtue of the earth; for it is thanks to the earth that he has become this solidly bounded, physical, organic being. He can no longer reconcile what is revealed to him of the universe through physical astronomy with what dwells in his form and points to something else. He turns his attention away from the manner in which the human form indicates something else. He finally loses all awareness of the fact that his striving for erect posture and the special manner and means by which he attains to speech out of his organism cannot originate from the Mithras-Bull, but only from Mithras. He no longer wishes to occupy himself with all this, for he is sailing full force into materialism. He has to sail into materialism, for religious consciousness itself, after all, has absorbed only the external, material phenomenon of Christianity. It has then dogmatized this external, material phenomenon without attempting to perceive through some wisdom how the Mystery of Golgotha took place, but instead trying to determine through stipulations what truth is.

Thus we observe the transition from the ancient Oriental position of thinking based on cosmic insight to the specifically Roman-European form of observation. How were matters "determined" in the Orient, and how could something be “determined” about the Mystery of Golgotha based on Oriental instinctive perception? If we take the insight coming out of the cosmos, looking up at the stars, that insight, though it was an instinctive, elemental insight, should lead to, or was at least supposed to lead to, the meaning of the Mystery of Golgotha. This was the path taken in the Orient. Beginning with the fifth century, there was no longer any sensitivity for this path. By replacing the Asiatic manner of determination more and more with the Egyptian form, earlier Church Councils had already pointed out that the nature of the Mystery of Golgotha should not be determined in this manner, but that the majority of the Fathers gathered at the Councils should decide. The juristic principle was put in the place of the Oriental principle of insight; dogmatism was brought into the juristic element. People no longer had the feeling that truth must be determined out of universal conscience. They began to feel that it was possible to ascertain, based on resolutions of the Councils, whether the divine and the human nature in Christ Jesus was two natures or one, and other such things. We see the Egypto-Roman juristic element pervading the innermost configuration of Occidental civilization, an element that even today is deeply rooted in human beings who are not inclined to permit truth to determine their relationship to it. Instead, they wish to make decisions based on emotional factors; therefore, they have no other measure for determining things except majority rule in some form.

We shall say more about this tomorrow.

• 1 . Aurelius Augustinus, A.D. 354–430, Church Father and philosopher. See Rudolf Steiner, Christianity as Mystical Fact and the Mysteries of Antiquity, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1972.
• 2 . Hippocrates, 460–377 B.C., founder of Greek medicine. Explained illnesses as results of faulty mixture of four body fluids: blood, yellow bile, phlegm, and black bile.
• 3 . Mithras: Persian-Indian cult of Mithras, the god of light and sun, spread through Europe in first century B.C. by Roman troops. Celebrations in underground caves, knew baptism, communion, celebration of birthday of the god on December 25.
• 4 . Arianism, teachings of the presbyter Arius of Alexandria (died A.D. 336), who rejected the idea that Christ's being was identical with the being of God the Father.
• 5 . Ulfilas (Wulfila in Germanic), A.D. 311–383, missionary to the West-Goths in the Balcan region; founder of Arianic-Germanic Christendom, who translated the Bible into Gothic.
• 6 . Dionysius the Areopagite, member of the Areopagus in Athens, around A.D. 500. Converted by Paul (Acts 17:34). Connected Christianity with neo-Platonic philosophy. Also compare with Lecture XV of June 2, 1921, in this volume.
• 7 . Constantine I., the Great, A.D. 286 or 287–337. Roman emperor from 306 to 337, made Christianity the state religion in 324.
• 8 . Justinian I, A.D. 483–565, Byzantine emperor from A.D. 527–565, builder of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. In A.D. 529, he closed the Platonic Academy of Athens.
• 9 . Basilius Valentinus, born around 1394, alchemist of the fifteenth century. His collected writings were first published in Hamburg by W. S. Lange in 1677.
• 10. Theophrastus Bombastus Paracelsus of Hohenheim, 1493–1541. Concerning this great Swiss doctor and philosopher, see Rudolph Steiner: Eleven European Mystics, Rudolf Steiner Publications, New York, 1971.
• 11. Jacob Boehme, 1575–1624, concerning the mysticism of the master shoemaker, see above book.

Yesterday I referred to the significant turning point in the development of Occidental civilization in the fourth century A.D. I pointed out that, on the one hand, this was the time when Greek wisdom disappeared from European culture, wisdom through which people had tried to bring to expression the depths of Christianity in a wisdom-imbued way. The time of the outer expression of this disappearance falls somewhat later, namely, when Emperor Justinian declared the writings of Origen heretical, abolished Roman consulship, and closed the Greek Academy of Philosophy at Athens. The guardians of Greek wisdom thus had to flee to the Orient, withdrawing, as it were, from European civilization. The wisdom teaching that had extended from the East as far west as Greece and had assumed its special form there, is one aspect of the picture.

On the other hand, the Mithras worship was supposed to indicate in a significant external ritual how, with their soul-spiritual nature, human beings were to raise themselves above all that could be comprehended through the interplay of beings of the planetary sphere with terrestrial forces, how the human being could sense his full humanity. This was the object of the Mithras cult. This Mithras worship, which was intended to reveal to man his own being, likewise disappeared after it had spread through the regions along the Danube and on into central and western Europe. These two streams, one a cultic stream, the other a stream of wisdom, were replaced in Europe by factual narrations of the events of Palestine. Thus, one has to say that neither a cultic worship, which would have recognized in Christ Jesus the victor over all the human being, was meant to bring under his control in the course of world evolution, nor a wisdom that would have tried to grasp the actual mysteries of Christendom in a wise manner were able to enter Europe. Instead, the superficial narration of the events of Palestine became popular. The concepts that should have been found in these happenings in Palestine were instead steeped in the flood of juristic thinking, which replaced the investigation of cosmic secrets with the determination of dogmas by means of majority resolutions in Church Councils, and so forth.

This very fact indicates that a change of great and far-reaching significance had taken place in the fourth century A.D. in the development of Western civilization, and consequently in the evolution of the whole of mankind. Proceeding from the Orient, all the influences that had laid hold of eastern European civilization were in a sense pushed back again towards the Orient. Only the increasing tendency towards abstract thinking in the Roman world maintained itself in the Occident alongside the comprehension of the external, sensory world of facts.

How alive the conceptions of the Greek gods had been among the Greeks, and how conceptually abstract the ideas were the Romans entertained of their gods! Actually, in the later period, what the Greeks possessed of ideas concerning the super-sensible world was already lifeless, although quite alive as such within itself. Yet, it was a lifeless element in comparison to the living conceptions of the super-sensible worlds present during the ancient Persian and Indian civilizations, which represented a living within these higher worlds. In those times, albeit with a purely instinctive human perception, people lived in communion with the super-sensible worlds just as mankind in the present communes with the sensory world. For human beings in the ancient Orient, the spiritual world was readily accessible. For them, the beings of the spiritual world were present just as other human beings, our fellowmen, live side by side with us. Out of this living, super-sensible world, the Greeks built up their system of concepts. In the ages before Aristotle, up to the fourth century B.C., Greek ideas were not abstract ideas gained through external sensory observation and then lifted up into abstraction. These Greek ideas still originated from the living, super-sensible world; they were born of a primeval power of vision. These living Greek ideas still imbued a person with soul sustenance and warmth; insofar as he could share in them, they bestowed on him the necessary enthusiasm for his form of social order. Certainly, we must never forget that a large part of the Greek people was denied a share in this life of thought; this was the extensive world of the slaves. But the bearers of Greek culture certainly participated in a realm of ideas that was basically a downpouring of super-sensible, spiritual powers into the world of the earthly sphere.

In comparison with this, the Roman world—separated from Greece only by the sea—definitely had a quite abstract appearance. The Romans described their gods in the same prosaic, unimaginative ways as, shall we say, our modern scientists speak of the laws of nature. Although this is an indication of the significant change I have to point out here, we confront this change in a special way if we turn our attention to a factor in the life of soul that found only partial realization in world history and did not develop to its full potential.

Consider for a moment the destiny of the ancient Greek people. It is fraught with a certain tragedy. After its period of great glory, Greek culture pined away and, in essence, vanished from the stage of world history, for what replaced it in that territory cannot be said to have been a true successor. The Greek nation went into decline in a severe, world-historical illness, and from its ancient ideas it produced what, I would say, represents the dawn of all later culture. It brought forth Stoicism and Epicureanism,¹ systems or views of life in which the more abstract mode of thought, characterizing the later Western civilization, already found an early expression. But we can see in Stoicism and Epicureanism, even in the later Greek mysticism, that they express a decline of ancient Greece.

Why was it that this culture of Greece was destined to decline and ultimately to pass away from the stream of world evolution?² One could say that this decline and death of the ancient Greek people indicates a significant mystery in world history. With faculties of vision handed down to them as an echo of the ancient Oriental world view, the ancient Greeks still beheld the soul-spiritual human being in his full light. After all, in the earlier periods of Greek culture, every individual knew himself to be a being of soul and spirit that had descended through conception and birth from the spiritual worlds, that has its home in a super-sensible sphere and is destined for super-sensible spheres. Yet, at the same time, even in its prime, Greece sensed its decline in world history—I have often referred to this. It sensed that human beings cannot fully attain to humanity on earth by merely looking up into super-sensible worlds. It felt itself surrounded and pervaded by the earth's forces. Hence the ancient saying: “Better it is to be a beggar in the sense world than a king in the realm of shades”³ The Greeks of earlier periods had still beheld all the shining glory of the super-sensible world; at the same time, by attaining full humanity in ancient Greece, they sensed that they could not maintain this radiance of the spiritual worlds. They felt they were losing it and that their soul nature was becoming ensnared in the things of the earth. Fear of death arose in them because they realized that life between birth and death can estrange the soul from its spiritual home. Greek culture must definitely be described in accordance with this feeling.

Men like Nietzsche basically had true insight into these matters.⁴ Nietzsche had the right feeling when he designated the period of Greek development preceding the Socratic and Platonic age as the tragic epoch of Greek culture. For already in thinkers such as Thales,⁵ and particularly Anaxagoras⁶ and Heraclitus,⁷ we observe the twilight of a magnificent world view which modern history does not mention at all. We note the fear of becoming estranged from the super-sensible world, of becoming tied to what alone remains from the passage through life between birth and death, namely, of becoming linked to the world of Hades, the world of shades, which basically becomes man's lot. Nevertheless, the Greeks preserved one thing; they saved what appeared at its height in the Platonic idea. There emerged amid the onset of progressive decline this world of Platonic ideas, the last glorious remnant of the ancient Orient, though it, too, was then fated to perish in Aristotelianism.

Yet these Greek ideas did appear, and Greek thinking constantly sensed how the human ego is really something that is becoming lost in human life. This was a fundamental experience of the Greeks. Take the description I gave concerning ego evolution in my book Riddles of Philosophy,⁸ where I described that the ego was then connected with thinking, with external perception. But since the whole ego experience is bound up with thinking, the human being experienced his I not so much within his own corporeality. Rather, he felt it linked to all that lives in the world outside, to the blossoming of the flowers, to lightning and thunder in the sky, to the billowing clouds, to the rising mist and the falling rain. The Greeks experienced the ego connected to all this. They sensed with the forces of the ego, as it were, but without the housing of this ego. Instead, they felt, When I look out upon the world of flowers, there my ego is attached, there it blossoms in the flowers.

It is justifiable to say that this Greek culture could not have continued. What would it have become if it had continued? It was not inherently possible for it to continue on a straight line. What would it have become? Human beings would gradually have come to consider themselves earth beings that are subhuman. The actual soul-spirit being in us would have been experienced as something that really dwells in the clouds, the flowers, the mountains, in rain, and sunshine, a being that occasionally comes to visit us. If the development of Greek culture had continued in the same direction, human beings increasingly would have felt that at night, when they had fallen asleep, they could experience the approach of their own ego in all its radiance and that it paid them a special visit then. But upon waking in the morning and becoming involved in the world of the lower senses, they also would have felt that insofar as they are a being of the earth they are but the outer housing of the ego. A certain estrangement from the ego would have been the consequence of an unbroken development of what can be noticed or sensed as the fundamental keynote or actual basic temperament of Greek nature.

It was necessary that this ego, which was escaping, as it were, into nature and the cosmos, should be firmly anchored in the inner constitution of the human being, an organic being moving about on the earth. A powerful impulse was required for this to happen. It was, after all, the peculiar characteristic of the Oriental world view that while it clearly drew attention to the ego—precisely because of its teaching of repeated earth lives—it also had the inherent tendency to alienate this ego from the human being, to deprive us of the ego. This is how it came about that the Occident, unable to rise to the heights attained by Greece, lacked the inner strength to assimilate the wisdom of Greece in its full strength and allowed it instead to flow back, so to speak, towards the Orient. The West also lacked the strength to take possession of the Mithras cult and allowed it to flow back to the Orient. By dint of the robust, sturdy forces of human earthly nature, the West was capable only of listening to purely factual narrations of the events of Palestine and then of having them affirmed by dogmas laid down in the Councils. At the outset, the Europeans were confronted with a materialistic view of the human personality.

This became most evident in the transition in the fourth century. All knowledge that would have been capable of producing a deeper comprehension of Christianity gradually withdrew back into Asia, all insight that could have brought about a cult in which the Christ Triumphant would have appeared rather than He who is overwhelmed by the burdens of the Cross, whose triumph can only faintly be surmised behind the shadow of the Crucifix. For the Occident, this ebbing away of the wisdom and the ancient ceremonial worship was initially a matter of securing the ego. From the robust force dwelling in the barbaric peoples of the north, the impulse emerged that was intended to supply the power to attach the ego to the earthly human organism.

While this was happening in the regions around the Danube, somewhat south of there, and in southern and western Europe, Arabism was transplanted from the Orient in forms differing from those of the earlier Oriental wisdom. Arabism then made its way as far as Spain, and southwestern Europe became inundated by a fantastic intellectual culture. This was a culture that in the external field of art could not achieve anything more than the arabesque, since it was incapable of permeating the organic realm with soul and spirit. Thus, in regard to the cultic ceremonies, Europe was filled, on the one hand with the narration of purely factual events; on the other hand, it was engrossed in a body of abstract, fantastic wisdom that, entering Europe by way of Spain, turned in filtered form into the culture of pure intellect.

Within this region, where the stories about the events of Palestine referring solely to the external aspects prevailed, where only the fantastic intellectual wisdom from Arabism existed, there a few individuals emerged—after all, a few isolated individuals appear now and again within the totality of mankind—who had an idea of how matters really stood. In their souls a feeling dawned that there is a lofty Christian mystery, the full significance of which is so great that the highest wisdom cannot penetrate it; the most ardent feeling is not strong enough to develop a fitting ceremonial worship for it. Indeed, they felt that something emanated from the Cross on Golgotha that would have to be comprehended by the highest wisdom and the most daring feeling. Such ideas arose in a few individuals. Something like the following profound Imagination arose in them. In the bread of the Last Supper, a synthesis of sorts was contained, a concentration of the force of the outer cosmos that comes down to the earth together with all the streams of forces from the cosmos, penetrating this earth, conjuring forth from it the vegetation. Then, what has thus been entrusted to the earth from out of the cosmos, in turn springs forth from the earth and is synthetically concentrated in the bread and sustains the human body.

Still another element pierced through all the clouds of obscurity that covered the ancient traditions. Something else was passed on to these European sages, something that, it is true, had had its origin in the Orient but penetrated through the cloud cover and was understood by some individuals. This other mystery, which was linked with the mystery of the bread, was the mystery of the holy vessel in which Joseph of Arimathea had caught the blood flowing down from Christ Jesus. This was the other aspect of the cosmic mystery. Just as the bread was regarded a concentrated extract of the cosmos, so the blood was regarded as the extract of the nature and being of man. In bread and blood—of which wine is merely the outer symbol—this extract expressed itself for these European sages. They had truly stepped forth as if out of the hidden places of the mysteries and towered far above the masses of the European population who could only hear the facts of Palestine, and who, if they advanced to scholarliness, found their way only slowly into the abstract fantasy of Arabism. In these wise men, who distinguished themselves by something that was like the overripe fruit of Oriental wisdom and at the same time the ripest fruit of European perception and feeling, there developed what they called the Mystery of the Grail. But, so they told themselves, the Mystery of the Grail is not to be found on earth.

People have grown accustomed to developing the kind of intelligence that found its highest form in Arabism. They are in the habit of not looking for the meaning of external facts, but are satisfied with being told of these outer facts from the aspect of sensory reality. One must penetrate to an understanding of the Mystery of the Bread, which is said to have been broken by Christ Jesus in the same chalice in which Joseph of Arimathea caught His blood. As legend tells it, this chalice was then removed to Europe, but was preserved by angels in a region high above the surface of the earth until the arrival of Titurel⁹ who created for this Grail, this sacred chalice, a temple on Mont Salvat. Through the clouds of abstraction and narrations of mere facts, those who had become European mystery sages in the manner described above wished to behold in a sacred, spiritual temple the Mystery of the Grail, the mystery of the cosmos that had disappeared along with etheric astronomy and the Mystery of the Blood that had vanished along with the ancient view of medicine. For just as the ancient medicine had fallen victim to abstract thinking, the old etheric astronomy, too, had passed over into abstract thought.

At a certain period in time, this whole trend of abstract thinking had reached its prime and had been brought to Spain by the Arabs. It was precisely in Spain where the Mystery of the Grail could not be found outwardly anywhere among people. Only abstract intellectual wisdom prevailed. Among the Christians, there was only narration of bare, external facts; among the Arabs, the Moors, there existed a fantastic development of the intellect. Only in the heights, above this earth, hovered the Holy Grail. This spiritual temple, this Holy Grail, this temple that encompassed the mysteries of bread and wine, could be entered only by those who had been endowed by divine powers with the necessary faculties. It is not by chance that the temple of the Grail was supposed to be found in Spain, where one literally had to move miles away from what earthly actuality presented, where one had to break through brambles in order to penetrate to the spiritual temple that enshrined the Holy Grail.

It was out of such prerequisite feelings that the conception of the Holy Grail developed. The invisible Church, the super-sensible Church, which is nevertheless to be found on earth—this was what concealed itself in the Mystery of the Grail. It was an immediate presence that cannot be discovered, however, by those who turn their mind indifferently to the world. In ancient times, the priests of the mysteries went out into the world, looked around among human beings, and based on seeing their auras, concluded, Here is one we must receive into the mysteries; there is another one we must accept into the mysteries. People did not need to ask; they were chosen. Inner initiative on the part of the individual was not required; one was chosen and bidden to enter the sacred mystery centers. This age was over already around the eleventh, twelfth, and ninth and tenth centuries.

The impulse urging a person to ask, What are the secrets of existence? had to be grounded in the human being through the Christ force, which had moved into European civilization. No one could approach the Grail who passed through the outer world with a drowsy, apathetic mind. It was said that he alone could penetrate into the miracles, that is, the mysteries of the Holy Grail, who in his soul felt the inclination to ask about the secrets of existence, both the cosmic secrets and those of man's inner being. Fundamentally speaking, it has remained so ever since. After the first half of the Middle Ages, however, when human beings had been earnestly directed to pose questions, had been told that they should indeed ask questions, a great reaction set in beginning with the first third of the fourteenth century. By that time, those who asked about the Mysteries of the Holy Grail had become fewer and fewer in number, and inertia was creeping into the souls of men. They turned their attention wholly to the outer forms of human life on earth, to all that may be seen, counted, weighed, measured, and calculated in the cosmos.

Nevertheless, the sacred challenge had already entered European civilization in the early Middle Ages, the sacred challenge remained: To enquire into the mysteries of the cosmos as well as into the inner mysteries of man, namely, the mysteries of the blood. After all, it was in a great variety of phases that humanity has passed through what materialism with all its forces by necessity had to bring into European civilization. Momentous, stirring words were uttered, though in many instances they have died away. We have to consider how great the possibility was for momentous words to be spoken within European civilization. What was destined for a certain age, namely, the factual narration of the events of Palestine, the permeation of these outer facts with Arabism, which was accomplished by scholasticism¹⁰ in the Middle Ages, was indeed of great significance for that particular age. But just as it developed out of an age of greater wisdom and ceremonial practices, both of which had only been pushed back to the East, it also did not understand how to listen to the super-sensible mysteries of Christianity, the mysteries of the Holy Grail. All the truly compelling voices that resounded in the early Middle Ages—and there were more than a few of them—were silenced by Rome's Catholicism, which was becoming more and more engulfed in dogmatism, in the same way as the Gnosis—as I pointed out again yesterday—was eradicated root and branch.

We must not form a negative judgment of the period between the fourth and the twelfth and thirteenth centuries merely on the basis of the fact that of the numerous voices raised, as it were, in holy, overripe sweetness throughout European civilization—which, for the rest was barbaric—only the somewhat awkward voice of one man has remained who could not write, that of Wolfram von Eschenbach.¹¹ For all that, he was still great; he was spared by the dogmatism that had gripped Europe and had basically eradicated the powerful voices that had called amid strife and bitterness for the quest of the Holy Grail. Those who raised this call for the Holy Grail meant to let it resound in the spirit of freedom dawning in the dull souls. They did not wish to deprive the human being of his freedom; they did not mean to push anything on him; he was to be the questioning one. Out of the depths of his own soul he was to ask about the miracles of the Grail.

This spiritual life that later became extinct was truly greater than the spiritual life opposing it, although the latter, too, was not without a certain greatness. When what has been described by the servants of the Holy Grail as a spiritual path was then superseded by the earthly path of the journey to the physical Jerusalem over in the East, namely, when the crusade to the Grail was replaced by the crusades for the terrestrial Jerusalem, when Gottfried of Bouillon¹² set out to establish an external kingdom in Jerusalem in opposition to Rome, letting his cry, “Away from Rome!” ring out, his voice was really less persuasive than that of Peter of Amiens.¹³ His voice sounded like a mighty suggestion to translate into something materialistic what the servants of the Holy Grail had intended as something spiritual.

This, too, was one of the paths that was taken because of materialism. It led to the physical Jerusalem, not to the spiritual Jerusalem, which was said to enshrine in Titurel's temple what had remained of the Mystery of Golgotha as the Holy Grail. Legend held that Titurel had brought this Holy Grail down to the earth's sphere from the clouds, where it had hovered, held by angels during the age of Arabism and the factual narration of the events of Palestine. The age of materialism, however, did not begin to ask about the Holy Grail. Lonely, isolated individuals, people who did not have a share in wisdom but dwelled in a kind of stupor, like Parsifal, were the ones who set out to seek the Holy Grail. But they also did not really understand how to ask the proper, appropriate question. Thus, the path of materialism, which began in the first third of the fourteenth century, was preceded by that other path of materialism already expressed in the turn to the East, the eastward journey to the physical Jerusalem. This tragedy was experienced by modern humanity; human beings had to and still have to undergo this tragedy in order to comprehend themselves inwardly and to turn properly into people asking questions. Modern mankind had to and still has to experience the tragedy that the light that once had approached from the East had not been recognized as spiritual light. The spiritual light had been rejected, and instead people set out to find a physical country, the physical materiality of the Orient. In the Middle Ages, humanity began to seek the physical East after the spiritual East had been rejected at the close of antiquity.

Such, then, was the situation in Europe, and our age today is still a part of it. For if we understand the true, inner call resounding in human hearts, we still are and should be seekers for the Holy Grail. The strivings of humanity that emerged beginning with the crusades still await their metamorphosis into spiritual endeavors. We have yet to arrive at such a comprehension of the cosmic worlds so that we will be able to seek for the origin of Christ in these cosmic worlds. As long as these cosmic worlds are investigated only with the methods of external, physical astronomy, they naturally cannot be conceived of as the home of Christ. From what the modern astronomer teaches as the secret of the heavens, which he describes only by means of geometry, mathematics, and mechanics and observes only with the telescope, the Christ could not have descended to earth in order to incarnate in the human being Jesus of Nazareth. Neither can this incarnation be understood on the basis of knowledge about the physical nature of the human being, knowledge that is obtained by moving from people in actual life to the clinic, where the corpse is dissected for the purposes of research so that views concerning the living human being are arrived at based on the corpse.

People in antiquity possessed an astronomy inbued with life and medical knowledge filled with life. Once again, our quest must be for a living astronomy, a living medicine. Just as a living astronomy will reveal to us a heaven, a cosmos, that is truly pervaded by a spirituality and from where the Christ could descend, so an enlivened medicine will present to us the being of man in a way that enables us to penetrate with insight and understanding to the Mystery of the Blood, to the organic inner sphere where the forces of the etheric body, the astral body, and the ego transform themselves into the physical blood. When a true medical knowledge has grasped the Mystery of the Blood and a spiritualized astronomy has understood the cosmic spheres, we shall comprehend how it was possible for the Christ to descend from these cosmic spheres to the earth, how He could find on earth the human body that could receive Him with its blood. It is the Mystery of the Grail that in all earnestness must be sought in this manner, namely, by setting out on the path to the spiritual Jerusalem with all that we are as human beings, with head and heart. This, indeed, is the task of modern humanity.

It is strange how the essence of what ought to come to pass weaves objectively through the sphere of existence. If it is not perceived in the correct way, it is experienced outwardly, it is superficially materialized. Just as formerly the Christians flocked to Jerusalem, so now large numbers of Jewish people travel to Jerusalem,¹⁴ thus expressing yet another phase of materialism that indicates how something that ought to be understood spiritually by all of modern humanity is interpreted only materialistically. The time must come when the Mystery of the Grail will once again be comprehended in the right way. You know that I have mentioned it in my An Outline of Occult Science.¹⁵ It is, in a manner of speaking, woven into the text that refers to all we must seek to discover along this path of spiritual science. Thus, I indicated what we have to acquire as a kind of picture and Imagination for what must be sought in earnest striving of the spirit and with profound human feeling as the path to the Grail.

Tomorrow, we will discuss this further.

• 1 . Stoicism—philosophy and spiritual view of the Stoa (founded around 300 B.C. by Zeno).
  
  Epicureanism—teaching by Epicurus in the Philosophers' School of Athens, founded by him in 306 B.C.
  
  Both philosophical systems are mainly directed towards practical life, seeking “happiness” in it. The latter is understood to be a rational, moderate striving for self-control and spiritualization without negating nature. (The debauchery of the Epicureans belongs to a later age. )
• 2 . Concerning the reasons for this development, see also Rudolf Steiner, The Mission of the Individual Folk Souls in Relation to Teutonic Mythology, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1970; lecture of June 12, 1910.
• 3 . Homer, Odyssey, Song XI.
• 4 . See Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen, 1874.
• 5 . Thales of Milet, around 625–545 B.C.
• 6 . See Note 2, Lecture III.
• 7 . Heraclitus of Ephesus, around 535–475 B.C., Philosopher of the age preceding Socrates.
• 8 . Rudolf Steiner, Riddles of Philosophy, Anthroposophic Press, New York, 1973.
• 9 . Titurel, founder of the Grail-dynasty (grandfather of Herzeloide and great-grandfather of Parsifal) who erected the Temple of the Grail within 30 years. See Albrecht von Scharffenberg, who, continuing in the manner of Wolfram von Eschenbach, wrote “Juengerer Titurel” between 1270 and 1280.
• 10. Scholasticism: medieval philosophy attempting to justify Christian faith through reason. Based itself on Aristotelian philosophy.
• 11. Wolfram von Eschenbach, around 1170–1220, Medieval epic writer. Poet of Parsifal (1210), a novel in verses, as well as Willehalm and a fragment, Titurel.
• 12. Gottfried of Bouillon, around 1060–1100, leader of the first Crusade in 1096.
• 13. Peter of Amiens, around 1050–1115, Augustine prior who moved through France and summoned people to the Crusade; later, he joined Gottfried of Bouillon.
• 14. See Rudolf Steiner: Gesammelte Aufsaetze zur Kulturgeschichte, Bibl. #31, 1966. Not translated.
• 15. An Outline of Occult Science, chapter VI: “The Present and Future of Cosmic and Human Evolution.”