The Rudolf Steiner Archive

At the time when materialism—mainly theoretical materialism—was in its prime, in the middle and still to some extent during the last decades of the nineteenth century, when the writings of Buchner and Vogt (‘bulky Vogt’ as he used to be called) had made a deep impression upon people who considered themselves enlightened, one could often hear a way of speaking that is occasionally also heard today, because stragglers from that epoch of theoretical materialism are still to be found in certain circles. When people do not flatly deny the possibility of a life after death, or even here and there admit it, they are wont to say: Well, there may be a life after death but why should we trouble about it during life on Earth? When death has taken place we shall discover whether there is indeed a future life, and meanwhile if here on Earth we concern ourselves only with the affairs of earthly existence and take no account of what is alleged to come afterwards, we cannot miss anything of importance. For if the life after death has anything to offer we shall then discover what it is!

As I said, this way of speaking could be heard time and time again and this is still the case in wide circles today; in the way the subject is expressed it may often, in a certain respect, almost seem acceptable. And yet it is utterly at variance with what is disclosed to spiritual investigation when the facts connected with the life between death and rebirth are considered in their spiritual aspect. When a man has passed through the gate of death he comes into contact with many and infinitely varied forces and beings. He does not only find himself living amid a multitude of super-sensible facts but he comes into contact with definite forces and Beings—namely, the Beings of the several higher Hierarchies. Let us ask ourselves what this contact signifies for one who is passing through the period of existence between death and the new birth.

We know that when an individual has spent this period of life in the super-sensible world and passes into physical existence again through birth, he becomes in a certain way the moulder of his own bodily constitution, indeed of his whole destiny in the life on Earth. Within certain limits the human being builds and fashions his body, even the very convolutions of his brain, by means of the forces brought with him from the spiritual worlds when he enters again into physical existence through birth. Our whole earthly existence depends upon our physical body possessing organs which enable us to come in touch with the outer physical world, to act and moreover to think in that world.

If, here in the physical world, we do not possess the appropriately formed brain which, on passing through birth we formed for ourselves out of the forces of the super-sensible world, we remain unable to cope with life in this physical world. In the real sense we are fitted for life in the physical world only when we bring with us from the spiritual world forces by means of which we have been able to build a body able to cope with this world and all its demands. The super-sensible forces which man needs in order to fashion his body and also his destiny are received by him from the Beings of the higher Hierarchies with whom he has made contact between death and the new birth. What we need for the shaping of our life must be acquired during the time that has preceded our birth since the last death. Between death and the next birth we must approach, stage by stage, the Beings who can endow us with the forces we need for our physical existence.

In the life between death and rebirth we can pass before the Beings of the higher Hierarchies in two ways. We may recognise them, understand their nature and essential characteristics, be able to receive what they can give us and what we shall need in the following life. We must be able to understand or at least to perceive what is being offered us and what we shall subsequently need. But we might also pass before these Beings in such a way that, figuratively speaking, their hands are offering gifts which we do not receive because it is dark in the higher world in which we then live. Thus we may pass through that world with understanding, with awareness of what these Beings are offering us, or we may pass through it without understanding, unaware of what they wish to bestow. Now the way in which we pass through this spiritual world, which of the two ways we necessarily choose in our life between death and the new birth, is predetermined by the after-effects of the previous life and of earlier lives on Earth. A person whose attitude in his last life on Earth was unresponsive and antagonistic to all thoughts and ideas that may enlighten him about the super-sensible world—such a person passes through the life between death and rebirth as if through a world of darkness. For the light, the spiritual light we need in order to realise how these different Beings approach us and what gifts we may receive from them for our next life on Earth—the light of understanding for what is here coming to pass cannot be acquired in the super-sensible world itself; it must be acquired here, during physical incarnation on Earth. If, at death, we bear with us into the spiritual life no relevant ideas and concepts, we shall pass unknowingly through our super-sensible existence until the next birth, receiving none of the forces needed for the next life. From this we realise how impossible it is to say that we can wait until death itself occurs because we shall then discover what the facts are—whether indeed we shall encounter any reality at all after death. Our relationship to that reality depends upon whether in earthly life we have been receptive or antagonistic in our souls to concepts or ideas of the super-sensible world that have been accessible to us and will be the light through which we must ourselves illumine the path between death and rebirth.

Something further can be gathered from what has been said. The belief that we have, so to say, only to die in order to receive everything that the super-sensible world can give us, even if we have made no preparation for it—this belief is utterly false. Every world has its own special mission. And what a man can acquire during an incarnation on Earth he can acquire in no single one of the other worlds. Between death and the new birth he is able, in all circumstances, to enter into communion with the Beings of the higher Hierarchies. But in order to receive their gifts, to avoid having to grope in darkness through life there or in fearful loneliness, in order to establish contact with those Beings and receive their forces, the ideas and concepts which are the light enabling the higher Hierarchies to be visible to the soul must be acquired in earthly life. And so an individual who in earthly life during the present cycle of time has rejected all spiritual ideas, passes through the life between death and rebirth in fearful loneliness, groping in darkness. In the next incarnation he will fail to bring with him the forces wherewith to build his body efficiently and mould his organs; he can fashion them in an imperfect form only and consequently he will be an inadequate human being in his next life.

We realise from this how Karma works over from one life to the next. In one life a man deliberately scorns to develop in his soul any relationship with the spiritual worlds; in the next life he has no forces wherewith to create even the organs enabling him to think, feel or will the truths of spiritual life. He remains dull and indifferent to spiritual things and spiritual life passes him by as though in dream—as is so frequently the case today. On the Earth such an individual can take no interest in spiritual worlds; and his soul, after passing through the gate of death, is an easy prey for the Luciferic powers. Lucifer makes straight for such souls. Here we have the strange situation that in the next life in the spiritual world, the life that follows the dull, unreceptive one, the deeds and the Beings of the higher Hierarchies are indeed illumined for such an individual but in this case not as a result of what he acquired in earthly life but by the light which Lucifer sends into his soul. It is Lucifer who illumines the higher worlds for him when he passes into the life between death and rebirth. Now, he can, it is true, perceive the higher Hierarchies, recognise when they are offering their gifts to him. But the fact that Lucifer has tainted the light means that all the gifts have a particular colouring and character. The forces of the higher Hierarchies are then not exactly as the human being could otherwise have received them. Their nature then is such that when the human being passes into his next life on Earth he can certainly form and mould his body, but he moulds it then in such a way that although he becomes an individual who is, admittedly, able to cope with the outer world and its demands, in a certain respect he is inwardly inadequate, because his soul is tinged with Lucifer's gifts or at least by gifts that have a Luciferic trend.

When we come across individuals who have worked on their bodies in such a way that they are able to make effective use of their intellect and acquire certain skills which will help them to raise their status in the world, although to their own advantage only, snatching at what is in their own interest, dryly calculating what is beneficial to themselves without any consideration for others—and there are many such people nowadays—in these cases the seer will very often find that their previous history was what has been described. Before they began to display their dry, intellectual, sharp-witted character in life, they had been led through their existence between death and rebirth by Luciferic beings who were able to approach them because in the preceding incarnation they had lived an apathetic, dreamy existence. But these traits themselves had been acquired because such individuals had passed through an earlier existence between death and rebirth groping in darkness. The Spirits of the higher Hierarchies would have bestowed upon them the forces needed for fashioning a new life, but they were unable to receive these forces; and that in turn was because they had deliberately refused to concern themselves with ideas and concepts relating to a spiritual world. That is the karmic connection. Such examples do certainly occur; they appear before the eyes of spirit only too frequently when with the help of powers of spiritual investigation and knowing the conditions of human life, we penetrate into higher worlds.

It is therefore wrong to say that here on Earth we need concern ourselves only with what is around us in earthly existence because what comes later will be revealed in all good time. But the form in which it will be revealed depends entirely upon how we have prepared ourselves for it here.

Another possibility may occur. I am saying these things in order that by understanding the life between death and rebirth, life between birth and death may become more and more intelligible.

When we study life on Earth with discernment, we see many human beings—and in our time they are very numerous—who can, as it were, only ‘half think’, whose logic invariably breaks down when faced with reality. Here is an example: A certain free-thinking cleric, an honourable man in all his endeavours, wrote in the first Freethinkers' Calendar as follows: Children ought not to be taught any ideas about religion for that would be against nature. If children are allowed to grow up without having any ideas about religion pumped into them, we find that they do not of themselves arrive at ideas of God, immortality, and so forth. The inference to be drawn from this is that such ideas are unnatural to the human being and should not be drummed into him; he should work only with what can be drawn from his own soul. As in many other cases, there are thousands and thousands of people nowadays to whom an utterance such as this seems very clever, very subtle. But if only genuine logic were applied the following would be obvious: If we were to take a human being before he has learnt to speak, put him on a lonely island and take care that he can hear no single word of speech, he would never learn to speak. And so anyone who argues against children being taught any ideas about religion would logically have to say that human beings should not have to learn to speak, for speech does not come of itself. So our free-thinking cleric cannot propagate his ideas by means of his logic, for both he and his logic come to a halt when confronted by the facts. His logic can be applied to a small area only, and he does not notice that his idea, assuming one can get hold of it, cancels itself out.

Anyone who is alert to his surroundings will find that this inadequate, pseudo-thinking is very widespread. If with the help of super-sensible research we trace the path of such an individual backwards and come to the regions through which his soul passed between the last death and the last birth, when this illogical mentality was caused, the seer often finds that this type of human being, in his last life between death and rebirth, passed through the spiritual world in such a way that he encountered the spiritual Beings and forces while under the guidance of Ahriman; and that although those Beings would have bestowed upon him what he needed in life, they could not make it possible for him to develop the capacity for sound thinking. Ahriman was his leader and it was Ahriman who contrived that the gifts of the Beings of the higher Hierarchies could only be received by him in a form that would finally result in his thinking coming to a halt when confronting actual facts, and in his inability to make his thinking exhaustive and valid. A large proportion of those human beings—and their number is legion—who are incapable of genuine thinking today owe this to the fact that in their last life between death and rebirth they were obliged to submit to Ahriman's guidance; they had somehow prepared themselves for this in their last earthly life—that is to say, in the incarnation preceding the present one.

And what was the course of that preceding life as viewed by a seer? It is found that these were morose, hypochondriacal individuals, who shied away from facts and people in the world and always found it difficult to establish any relation with their environment. Very often they were intolerable hypochondriacs in their previous life; on medical examination they would have been found to be suffering from the type of illness occurring very frequently in hypochondriacs. And if we were to go still further back, to the life between death and rebirth that preceded the hypochondriacal incarnation, we should find that during that period such human beings were obliged again to forego the right guidance and could not become truly aware of what the gifts of the higher Hierarchies would have been. And how had they prepared themselves for this fate in the life preceding the last two incarnations? We should find that they had developed what it is certainly true to call a religious, pious attitude of soul but an attitude based on sheer egoism. They were people with a pious, even mystical nature emanating from egoism. After all, mysticism very often has its origin in egoism. An individual of this type might say: I seek within myself in order that there I may recognise God. But what he is seeking there is only his own self made into God! In the case of many pious souls it becomes evident that they are pious only in order that after death one or another of their spiritual inclinations may bear fruit. All that they have acquired is an egotistic attitude of soul.

When in the course of spiritual research we trace the sequence of three such earthly lives, we find that in the first, the basic attitude of the soul was that of egotistic mysticism, egotistic religiosity. And when today we observe human beings with this attitude to life, we shall be able, by means of spiritual investigation to trace them back to times when souls without number developed a religious frame of mind out of sheer egoism. They then passed through an existence between death and rebirth without being able to receive from the spiritual Beings the gifts which would have enabled them to shape their next life rightly. In that life they became morose and hypochondriacal, finding everything distasteful. This life again prepared them for the ensuing one when, having passed through the gate of death, Ahriman and his hosts became their leaders and the forces with which they were imbued manifested in the following earthly life as defective logic, as an obtuse, undiscerning kind of thinking.

Here, then, we have another example of three successive incarnations. And we realise again and again what nonsense it is to believe that we can wait until death to establish connection with the super-sensible world. For how this connection is established after death depends upon the inner tendencies of soul acquired here on Earth towards the super-sensible world. Not only are the successive earthly lives connected as causes and effects, but the lives between death and the new birth are also connected in a certain way as causes and effects. This can be seen from the following.

When the seer directs his gaze into the super-sensible world where souls are sojourning after death, he will find among them those who during part of this life between death and rebirth are servants of those Powers whom we may call the Lords of all healthy, budding and burgeoning life on the Earth. (In the very lengthy period between death and rebirth, innumerable experiences are undergone and in accounts of the present kind, parts only can be described.) Among the dead we find souls who for a certain length of time in the super-sensible world co-operate in the wonderful task—for wonderful it is—of pouring, infusing into the physical world everything that can further the health of beings on the Earth, can help them to thrive and blossom. Just as in certain circumstances we can become servants of the evil spirits of illness and misfortune, so too we can become the servants of those spiritual beings who promote health and growth, who send down from the spiritual world into our physical world forces that help life to flourish. It is nothing but a materialistic superstition to believe that physical hygiene and external regulations are the sole means of promoting health. Everything that happens in physical life is directed by the beings and powers of higher worlds who are all the time pouring into the physical world forces which in a certain way work freely, upon human or other beings, either promoting or harming health and growth. Certain specific spiritual powers and beings are responsible for these processes in health and illness. In the life between death and rebirth man co-operates with these powers; and if we have prepared ourselves in the right way we can experience the bliss of co-operating in the task of sending the forces which promote health and growth, from the higher worlds into this physical world. And when the seer enquires into why such souls have deserved this destiny, he becomes aware that in physical life on Earth there are two ways in which human beings can execute and think about what they want to achieve.

Let us take a general look at life. We see numbers of human beings who carry out the work prescribed for them by their profession or office. Even if there is no radical case of any one of these people regarding their work as if they were animals being led to the slaughterhouse, it is at least true to say that they work because they are obliged to. Of course they would never neglect their duty—although of course anything may happen! In a certain sense it cannot be otherwise in the present phase of man's evolution; the only urge such people feel towards their work is that of duty. This does not by any means suggest that such work should be criticised root and branch. It should not be understood in this sense. Earth-evolution is such that this aspect of life will become more and more widespread; nor will things improve in the future. The tasks that men will have to carry out will become increasingly complicated in so far as they are connected with outer life and men will be condemned more and more to think and do only that to which duty drives them. Already there are hosts of human beings who do their work only because duty forces them to it, but on the other hand there will be people who look for a Society such as ours in which they can also achieve something, not simply from a sense of duty as in everyday life but for which they feel enthusiasm and devotion. Thus there are two aspects of a man's work: has it been thought out or done as an outer achievement merely from a sense of duty, or has it been done with enthusiasm and inner devotion, solely out of an inner urge of his own soul? This attitude—to think and act not merely out of a sense of duty, but out of love, inclination and devotion—this prepared the soul to become a server of the beneficent Powers of health and salutary forces sent down from the super-sensible world into our physical world, to become a servant of everything that brings health and to experience the bliss that can accompany these circumstances.

To know this is extremely important for the general well-being of man, for only by acquiring during life the forces that will enable him to co-operate with the Powers in question will he be able to work spiritually for an ever intensifying process of healing and betterment of conditions on the Earth.

We will now consider still another case, of one who makes efforts to adapt himself to his environment and its demands. This by no means applies to everybody. There are some people who take no trouble to adjust themselves to the world and are never at home with the conditions either of spiritual or outer physical life. For example, there are individuals who notice an announcement that here or there an anthroposophical lecture will be given; they go to the place but almost as soon as they get seated, they are already asleep! In such cases the soul cannot adapt itself to the environment is not attuned to it. I have known men who cannot even sew on a button to replace one that has been torn off; that again means that they cannot adapt themselves to physical conditions. Countless cases could be quoted of people who cannot or will not adapt themselves to life. These symptoms are very significant, as I have said. At the moment, however, we will think only of the effects upon the life between death and rebirth.

Everything becomes cause and everything produces effects. A man who makes efforts to adapt himself to his environment, someone, that is to say, who can actually sew on a button or can listen to something with which he is unfamiliar without immediately falling asleep, is preparing himself to become, after death, a helper of those Spirits who further the progress of humanity and send down to the Earth the spiritual forces which promote life as it advances from epoch to epoch. After death we can experience the bliss of looking down upon earthly life and co-operating with the forces that are perpetually being sent to the Earth to further its progress, but this is possible only if we endeavour to adapt ourselves to our environment and its conditions. To be rightly and thoroughly understood Karma must be studied in details, in details which reveal the manifold ways in which causes and effects are connected here in the physical world, in the spiritual world and in existence as a whole.

Here again light is thrown upon the fact that our life in the spiritual worlds depends upon the mode of our life in the physical body. Each world has its own specific mission; no two worlds have an identical mission. The characteristic phenomena and experiences in one world are not the same in another. And if, for example, a being is meant to assimilate certain things on Earth, it is on Earth that he must do so; if he misses this opportunity he cannot acquire them in some other world. This is particularly the case in a matter which we have already considered but of which it will be well to be thoroughly aware. The matter in question concerns the acceptance of certain concepts and ideas needed by man for his life as a whole. Let us take an example that is near at hand. Anthroposophy is a timely and active force in our epoch. People approach and accept Anthroposophy during their life on Earth in the way known to you, but again the belief might arise that it is not necessary to cultivate Anthroposophy on Earth, for one will be in a position after death to know how things are in the spiritual worlds; that moreover the higher Hierarchies will also be there and able to impart to the soul what is necessary.

Now it is a fact that having passed through the phase of development leading to the present cycle of evolution, the human being, with his whole soul, has been prepared to contact on Earth the kind of anthroposophical life that is possible only while he is incarnated in a physical body. Men are predestined for this and if they fail they will be unable to establish relationship with any of the spiritual Beings who might have been their teachers. One cannot simply die and then, after death, find a teacher who might take the place of what here, during physical life on Earth, can come to souls in the form of Anthroposophy. We need not, however, be dejected by the fact that many individuals reject Anthroposophy and it is therefore to be assumed that they will not be able to acquire it between death and the new birth. We need not despair about them for they will be born in a new earthly life and by that time there will be a strong enough stimulus towards Anthroposophy and enough Anthroposophy on the Earth for them to acquire it. In the present age despondency is still out of place, but that should not lead anyone to say: I can acquire Anthroposophy in my next life and so can do without it now. No, what has been neglected here cannot be retrieved later on.

When our German Theosophical Movement was still very young I was once giving a lecture about Nietzsche, during which I said certain things about the spiritual worlds. At that time it was customary to have discussions and on this occasion someone got up and said that such matters must always be put to the test of Kant's philosophy, from which it would be evident that we can have no knowledge of these things here on Earth and can begin to know them only after death. That, quite literally, was what the man said. As I have repeatedly emphasised, it is not the case that one has only to die in order to acquire certain knowledge. When we pass through the gate of death we do not experience anything for which we have not prepared ourselves. Life between death and rebirth is throughout a continuation of the life here, as the examples already given have shown. Therefore as individuals we can acquire from the Beings of the higher Hierarchies only that for which we have prepared ourselves on Earth—perhaps by having become anthroposophists. Our connection with the Earth and our passage through the life on Earth have a significance which nothing else can replace.

A certain form of mediation is, however, possible in this connection and I have already spoken of it. A person may die and during his lifetime have had no knowledge at all of Spiritual Science; but his brother or his wife or a close friend were anthroposophists. The man who has died may have refused to have anything to do with Anthroposophy during his life; perhaps he consistently abused it. Now he has passed through the gate of death and Anthroposophy can be conveyed to him in some way by other personalities on Earth. But there must be someone on Earth who passes on the knowledge to him out of love. Connection with the Earth must be maintained. This is the basis of what I have called ‘reading to the dead’. We can render them great benefit even if previously they would listen to nothing about the spiritual world. We can help them either by putting what we have to say into the form of thoughts, conveying knowledge in this way, or we may take an anthroposophical book, visualise the personality concerned, and read to him from it; then he will learn. We have had a number of striking and beautiful examples in our Movement of how it has been possible in this way to benefit the dead. Many of our friends read to those who have died. I recently had an experience that others too may have had. Someone asked me about a friend who had died very recently and it seemed that he was trying to make himself noticed by means of all kinds of signs, especially at night, creating disturbance in the room, rapping and so on. Such happenings are often indications that the dead person wants something; and in this case it was quite evident. In his lifetime the man had been very erudite but had always rejected any knowledge of the spiritual world that might come his way. It became obvious that he would greatly benefit if a particular Lecture Course containing the subject-matter for which he was craving, were read to him. In this way very effective help can be given beyond death for something left undone on Earth.

The fact that can convince us of the great and significant mission of Anthroposophy is that Anthroposophy can bridge the gulf between the living and the dead, that when human beings die they have not really gone away from us but we remain connected with them and can be active on their behalf. If it is asked whether one can always know whether the dead soul also hears us, it must be said that those who do what has been described with genuine devotion will eventually become aware from the way in which the thoughts which they are sending to the dead live in their own souls that the dead person is hovering around them. But this is an experience, a feeling, of which sensitive souls alone are capable. The most distressing aspect is when something that might be a great service of love is not heeded; in that case it has been done unnecessarily for the person concerned, but it may still have some effect in the general pattern of worlds. In any case one should not grieve excessively about such lack of success. After all, it happens even here that something is read to people who do not listen!

These things may well give a true conception of the seriousness and worth of Anthroposophy. But it must constantly be emphasised that the conditions of our life in the spiritual world after death will depend entirely upon the manner of our life here on Earth. Even our community with others in the spiritual world depends upon the nature of the relationship we sought to establish with them here. If there has been no relationship with a human being here on Earth it cannot be taken for granted that any connection can be established in the other world between death and rebirth. The possibility of being led to him in the spiritual world is as a rule dependent upon the contact established here on Earth—not necessarily in the last incarnation only but in earlier lives as well.

In short, both objective and personal relationships established here on Earth are the decisive factor for the life between death and the new birth. Exceptions do occur but must be recognised as such. What I said here at Christmastime (in Lecture Five) about the Buddha and his present mission on Mars is one such exception. There are numbers of human souls on the Earth who were able to contact the Buddha—even in his previous existence as Bodhisattva—as a result of inspirations received from the Mysteries. But because the Buddha was incarnated for the last time as the son of Suddodana, then worked in his etheric body as I have described¹ and has now transferred his sphere of activity to Mars, at the present time the possibility exists that even if we never previously came in contact with the Buddha, we can establish a relationship with him in the life between death and rebirth; and we can then bring the results of that contact with us into the next incarnation on Earth. But that remains an exceptional case. The general rule is that after death we find those individuals with whom we had actual contacts here on Earth and continue these relationships in that other state of existence.

What has now been said is closely related to the information given during this Winter about the life between death and the new birth, and the aim has been to show that if Anthroposophy remains simply a matter of theory and external science, it is only half of what it ought to be; it fulfils its true function only when it streams through souls as a veritable elixir of life and enables these souls to experience in depth the feelings that arise in a human being when he acquires some knowledge of the higher worlds. Death then ceases to appear as a destroyer of human and personal relationships. The gulf between life here on Earth and the life after death is bridged and many activities carried out with this in mind will develop. The dead will send their influences into life, the living their influences into the realm of the dead.

My wish is that your souls will feel more deeply that life is enriched, becomes fuller and more spiritual when everything is influenced by Anthroposophy. Only those who feel this have the right attitude to Anthroposophy. What is of prime importance is not the knowledge that man consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego, that he passes through many incarnations, that the Earth too has passed through the several incarnations of Old Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon, and so forth. The most important and essential need is to allow Anthroposophy to transform our lives in a way commensurate with the Earth's future. This feeling can never be experienced too deeply, nor can we bestir ourselves too often in this connection. The feelings we bear with us from these meetings and then move through life under the stimulus of the knowledge of the super-sensible worlds acquired here—these feelings are the really important element in anthroposophical life. Merely to have knowledge of Anthroposophy is not enough; knowledge and feeling must be combined. We must realise, however, how false it is to believe that without any understanding of the world we can do it justice. Leonardo da Vinci's saying is true: “Great love is the daughter of great understanding.” He who is not prepared to understand will not learn how to love.

It is in this sense that Anthroposophy should find entry into our souls, in order that from this influence which proceeds from our own being a stream of spirituality may find its way into Earth-evolution, creating harmony between spirit and matter. Life on the Earth will, it is true, continue to be materialistic—indeed outer life will become increasingly so—but as man moves over the Earth he will bear within his soul the realisation of his connection with the higher worlds. Outwardly, earthly life will become more and more materialistic—that is the Earth's karma—but in the same measure, if Earth-evolution is to reach its goal, souls must become inwardly more and more spiritual. My purpose today was to make a small contribution towards understanding this task.

• 1. See Lectures Three, Five and Six of the course, The Gospel of St. Luke

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The lecture presented here was given in Dornach on April 2, 1920, and is the 4th of 17 lectures in the series entitled: Healing of the Social Organism. It appears in the original German in Heilfaktoren Fuer den Sozialen Organismus, Bibliographic Nr.198, Dornach 1961. It is also known as: Easter, Festival of Warning, or Event at Damascus, or New Knowledge of Spirit. The translators are Dorothy S. Osmond, Alan P. Shepherd, and Charles Davy. Edited by, and with additional commentary by Frank Thomas Smith.

Ever since the early days of Christianity it has been the custom to draw a distinction between the festivals of Christmas and of Easter in that the Christmas festival has been made immovable, having been fixed at a point of time a few days after the 21st of December, the winter solstice, whereas the day of the Easter festival is determined by a particular constellation of the stars, a constellation of the stars which unites earth and man with the worlds beyond the earth. To-morrow will be the first full moon of spring and upon this full moon will fall the rays of the springtime sun, for since the 21st of March the sun has been in the sign of spring. When, therefore, men on earth celebrate a Sunday—a day, that is, which should remind them of their connection with the sun-forces—when the Sunday comes that is the first after the full moon of spring, then is the time to keep the Easter festival. Easter is thus a movable festival. In order to determine the time of the Easter festival, note must be taken each year of the constellations in the heavens.

Principles such as these were laid down at a time when traditions of wisdom were still current among mankind, traditions that originated from ancient atavistic clairvoyant faculties and gave man a knowledge far surpassing the knowledge that present-day science can offer. And such traditions were a means for bringing to expression man's connection with the worlds beyond the earth. They always point to something of supreme importance for the evolution [of] mankind.

The rigid point of time fixed for the Christmas festival indicates how closely that festival is bound up with the earthly, for its purpose is to remind us of the birth of the man into whom the Christ Being afterwards entered. The Easter festival, on the other hand, is intended to remind us of an event whose significance lies, not merely within the course of earth-evolution, but within the whole world-order into which man has been placed. Therefore the time of the Easter festival must not be determined by ordinary earthly conditions; it is a time that can be ascertained only when man turns his thoughts to the worlds beyond the earth. And there is deeper meaning still in this plan of a movable time for the Easter festival. It indicates how through the Christ Impulse man is to be set free from the forces of earth-evolution pure and simple. For through knowledge of that which is beyond the earth, man is to become free of the evolution of the earth, and this truth is indicated in the manner of dating the Easter festival. It contains a call to man to lift himself up to the worlds beyond the earth; it contains a promise to man that in the course of world-history it shall be possible for him, through the working of the Christ Impulse, to become free of earthly conditions.

To understand all that is implied in this manner of dating the Easter festival, it will be helpful to turn our minds to early secrets of the beginnings of Christianity, to some of those early mysteries which during a certain period of earthly evolution have become more and more veiled and hidden from the materialistic view of the world which arose at the beginning of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch and must now be vanquished and superseded. In order to see the whole matter in a true light it will be necessary first of all to consider the part played by the figure of St. Paul in the evolution of the Christ Impulse within the whole history of mankind.

We should indeed remind ourselves again and again what a great event in the evolution of Christianity was the appearance of the figure of St. Paul Paul had had abundant opportunity to inform himself, by external observation, of the events in Palestine that were associated with the personality of Jesus. All that came to his notice in this way in the physical world left Paul unconvinced; when these events in Palestine had come to an end in the physical sense, Paul was still an antagonist of Christianity. He became the Apostle of the Christians only after the event at Damascus, after he had experienced the very Being of the Christ in an extra-earthly, super-sensible manner. Thus Paul was a man who could not be persuaded of the meaning of the Christ Impulse by evidence of the physical senses, but who could be convinced only by a super-sensible experience. And the super-sensible experience that came to him cut deeply into his life—so deeply indeed, that from that moment he became another man. Nay, more: he became an initiate.

Paul was well prepared for such an experience. He was thoroughly acquainted with the secrets of the religion of the Jews; he was familiar with their knowledge and their conception of the world. He was thus well equipped to judge of the nature of the event that befell him at Damascus and to have a right view and understanding of it. The writings of Paul, as we know them, convey only a weak reflection of all that he experienced inwardly. But even so, when he speaks of the event of Damascus we can discern that he speaks as one who through this event attained knowledge of cosmic happenings lying behind the veil of the world of sense. From the very manner in which he speaks it is plain that he is fully able to understand the difference between the super-sensible world and the world of sense.

When, even externally, we compare the life of Paul with the earthly experience of Christ Jesus, we discover a strange and astounding fact which becomes intelligible to us only when with the help of spiritual science. We are able to survey the whole evolution of mankind. I have often drawn attention to the great difference in the development of the human soul in the several epochs. I have shown you how man has changed in the course of evolution through the Indian, Persian, Egypto-Chaldean, Greco-Latin epochs, on to our own time. When we look back into the ancient past we find that man remained capable of organic physical development until an advanced age. The parallelism between the development of the soul and the development of the body continued until an advanced age; it is a parallelism that we can recognise now only in the three stages marked by the change of teeth, puberty and the beginning of the twenties. As far as outward appearance goes, mankind has lost the experience of such transitions in later life. In very ancient Indian times, however, men experienced a parallelism between the development of soul and of body up to the fiftieth year of life, in Persian and Egyptian times up to the fortieth year, and in Greco-Latin times up to the thirty-fifth year. In ordinary consciousness, we experience a like parallelism only up to the twenty-seventh year and it is not easy to detect even for so long as that. Now the Christ Impulse entered into the evolution of mankind at a time when men—especially those of the Greek and Latin races—experienced this parallelism as late as into the thirtieth year. And Christ Jesus lived His days of physical earthly life for just so long as the duration of the span of life which ran in a parallelism between the physical organisation and the organisation of soul and spirit. Then, in relation to earthly life, He passed through the gate of death.What this passage through the gate of death means can be understood only from the point of view of spiritual science; it can be understood only when we are able to look into super-sensible worlds. For the passage through the gate of death is not an event that can be grasped by any thinking concerned entirely with the world of sense.

As physical man, Paul was of about the same age as Christ Jesus Himself. The time that Christ Jesus spent in His work on earth, Paul spent as an anti-Christian. And the second half of his life was determined entirely by what came to him from super-sensible experiences. In this second half of his life he had super-sensible experience of what men at that time could no longer receive in the second half of life through sense-experience, because the parallelism between soul-and-spirit development and physical development was not experienced beyond the thirty-fifth year of life. And the Event of Golgotha came before Paul in such a way that he received, by direct illumination, the understanding once possessed by men in an atavistic way through primeval wisdom, and which they can now again acquire through spiritual science. This understanding came to Paul in order that he might be the one to arouse in men a realisation of what had happened for mankind through the working of the Christ Impulse.

For about the same length of time that Christ had walked the earth, did Paul continue to live upon earth—that is, until about his sixty-seventh or sixty-eighth year. This time was spent in carrying the teaching of Christianity into earth-evolution. The parallelism between the life of Christ Jesus and the life of Paul is a remarkable one. The life of Christ Jesus was completely filled with the presence and Being of the Christ. Paul had such a strong after-experience (acquired through Initiation) of this event, that he was able to be the one to bring to mankind true and fitting ideas about Christianity—and to do so for a period of time corresponding very nearly to that of the life of Christ Jesus on earth. There is a great deal to be learned from a study of the connection between the life lived by Christ Jesus for the sake of the earthly evolution of mankind, and the teaching given by Paul concerning the Christ Being. To see this connection aright would mean a very great deal for us; only it is necessary to realise that the connection is a direct result of the super-sensible experience undergone by Paul. [Rudolf Steiner here considers the "Christ Being" to be the spiritual being who entered the body of Jesus of Nazareth during the Baptism in the Jordan; and "Christ Jesus" to be Jesus of Nazareth plus the Christ Being. Ed.]

When modern theology goes so far as to explain the event at Damascus as a kind of illusion, as a kind of hallucination, then it is only a proof that in our day even theology has succumbed to materialism. Even theology has no longer any knowledge of the nature of the super-sensible world, and entirely fails to recognise man's need to understand the super-sensible world before he can have any true comprehension of Christianity.

It is good that we should confess today, in all sincerity, how difficult it is to find our way into the ideas presented in the Gospels and in the Epistles of Paul—ideas that are so totally different from those to which we are accustomed. For the most part we have ceased to concern ourselves at all with such ideas. But it is a fact that a person who is completely given up to the habits and ways of thought of the present day, is far from being able to form the right ideas when he reads the words of Paul. Many present-day theologians put a materialistic interpretation upon the event of Damascus, even trying to disprove and deny the actual Resurrection of Christ Jesus—while professing at the same time to be true Christians. Such persons themselves bear testimony that they have no intention of applying knowledge of the super-sensible to the essence of Christianity or to the event of the appearance of Christ Jesus in earthly evolution. The very fact that the figure of Paul stands at the summit of Christian tradition, the figure, that is, of one who acquired an understanding of Christianity through super-sensible experience, is like a challenge to man to possess himself of super-sensible knowledge. It is like a declaration that Christianity cannot possibly be comprehended without having recourse to knowledge that has its source in the super-sensible. It is essential that we should see in Paul a man who had been initiated into super-sensible, cosmic happenings; it is essential to see in this light what he laboured so hard to bring to mankind. Let us try in the language of the present day to place before our minds one of the things that seemed to Paul, as an initiate, to be of particular significance.

Paul regarded it of supreme importance to make clear to men how through the Christ Impulse an entirely new way of relating themselves to cosmic evolution had come to them. He felt it essential to declare: that that period of the evolution of the world which carried within it the experiences of the heathen of older times, had run its course; it was finished for man. New experiences were now here for the human soul; they needed only to be perceived.

When Paul spoke in this way, he was pointing to the mighty Event which made such a deep incision into the evolution of man on earth; and indeed if we would understand history as it truly is, we must come back again and again to this Event. If we look back into pre-Christian times, and especially into those times which possess to a striking degree the characteristic qualities of pre-Christian life, we can feel how different was the whole outlook of men in those days. Not that a complete change took place in a single moment; nevertheless the Event of Golgotha did bring about an absolute separation of one phase in the evolution of mankind from another. The Event of Golgotha came at the end of a period of evolution during which men beheld, together with the world of the senses, also the spiritual. Incredible as it may appear to modern man it is a fact that in pre-Christian times men saw, together with the sense-perceptible, a spiritual reality. They did not see merely trees, or merely plants, but together with the trees, and together with the plants they saw something spiritual. But as the time of the Event of Golgotha drew near, the civilisation that bore within it this power of vision was coming to an end. Something completely new was now to enter into the evolution of mankind. As long as man beholds the spiritual in the physical things all around him, he cannot have a consciousness which allows the impulse of freedom to quicken within it. The birth of the impulse of freedom is necessarily accompanied by a loss of this vision; man has to find himself deserted by the divine and spiritual when he looks out upon the external world. The impulse of freedom inevitably implies that, if man would again have vision of the spiritual, he must exert himself inwardly and draw it forth from the depths of his own soul.

This is what Paul wanted to reveal. He told how in ancient times, when men were only the race of Adam, they had no need to draw forth an active experience from the depths of their own being before they could behold the divine and spiritual. The divine and spiritual came to them in elemental form, with everything that lived in the air and on earth. But mankind had gradually to lose this living communion with the divine and spiritual in all the phenomena of the world of sense. A time had to come when man must perforce lift himself up to the divine and spiritual by an active strengthening of his own inner life. He had to learn to understand the words: “My kingdom is not of this world.” He was not to be allowed to go on receiving a divine and spiritual reality that came forth to meet him from all sense-phenomena He had to find the way to a divine and spiritual kingdom that could be reached only by inward struggle and inward development.

People interpret Paul today in such a trivial manner! Again and again they show an inclination to translate what he said into the language of this materialistic age. So trivial is their interpretation of him that one is liable to be dubbed fantastic when one puts forward such a view as the following concerning the content of his message. And yet it is absolutely true.

Paul saw what a great crisis it was for the world that the ancient vision, which was at one and the same time a sense-vision and a spiritual vision, was fading away and disappearing, and that another vision of the spiritual was now to dawn for man in a new kingdom of light, [Romans 13:12] a vision which he must acquire for himself by his own inner initiative, and which is not immediately present for him in the vision of the senses. Paul knew from his own super-sensible experience in initiation that ever since the Resurrection Christ Jesus has been united with earth-evolution. But he also knew that, although Christ Jesus is present, He can be found by man only through the awakening of an inner power of vision, not through any mere beholding with the senses. Should anyone think he can reach the Christ with the mere vision of the senses, Paul knew that he must be giving himself up to delusions, he must be mistaking some demon for the Christ.

This was what Paul was continually emphasising to those of his hearers who were able to understand it: that the old spiritual vision brings no approach to Christ, that with this old vision one can only mistake some elemental being for the Christ. Therefore Paul exerted all his power to bring men out of the habit of looking to the spirits of air and of earth. [Gal. 4:3,9] In earlier times men had been familiar with elemental spirits, and necessarily so, for in those times they still possessed atavistic faculties with which to behold them. But now these faculties could not rightly be possessed by man. On the other hand, Paul never wearied of exhorting people to develop within themselves a force whereby they might learn to understand what it was that had taken place, namely, an entirely new impulse, an entirely new Being had entered earth-evolution. “Christ will come again to you,” he said, “if you will only find the way out of your purely physical vision of the earth. Christ will come again to you, for He is here. Through the working of the Event of Golgotha, He is here. But you must find Him; He must come again for you.”

This is what Paul proclaimed, and in a language which at the time had quite another spiritual ring than has the mere echo left us in our translation. It sounded quite different then. Paul sought continually to awaken in man the conviction that if he would understand Christ, he must develop a new kind of vision; the vision that suffices for the world of sense is not enough. today, mankind has only come so far as to speak of the contrast between an external, sense-derived science, and faith. Modern theology is ready to admit of the former that it is complicated, that it is real and objective, that it requires to be learned; of faith it will allow no such thing. It is repeatedly emphasised that faith ought to make appeal to what is utterly childlike in man, to that in man which does not need to be learned.

Such is the attitude of mind which rejects the event of Damascus as unreal, preferring to regard it as a kind of hallucination that befell Paul. If, however, the event of Damascus was a mere hallucination—or I might just as well say, if the event of Damascus was what a great number of modern theologians would have it to be—then we ought also to have the courage to say: Away with Christianity! For Christianity has brought with it a belief that is absurd and senseless.

This would be the necessary outcome of the teaching of modern theology, if only people took it—first of all, seriously, and secondly, with courage. As a matter of fact they do neither. They shrink from having nothing but a merely external, sense-given science, and yet at the same time they deny the real, inner impulse of the event of Damascus, while still professing to hold fast to Christianity! It is precisely in such things that the soul-and-spirit sickness of our age comes to clearest expression; for a deep inner lack of truth is here laid bare. Truth would be obliged to confess: Either the event of Damascus was a reality, an event that can be placed in the realm of reality, then Christianity has meaning; or it was what it is asserted to be by modern theology, which wants always to associate itself with modern science; then Christianity has no meaning. It is important that people should face such conclusions, for there is no doubt we live in an age of severe testing. Through man's becoming inwardly untrue in regard to the very matters that are most sacred for him—for he ought no longer to call what he has, ‘Christianity’—through this, a tendency to untruth, often unconscious but no less destructive on that account, has taken hold of mankind. That is the real reason for the existence of this tendency. That is why this tendency to untruth is so closely interwoven with the events that will inevitably lead to decadence in the whole cultural life of Europe, unless people rethink these things in time and turn to spiritual knowledge.

And if we would turn to spiritual knowledge, it is emphatically not enough to rest content with looking at life in any superficial way; it is absolutely essential for us to take things in all their depth of meaning and to be ready to contemplate the necessity of mighty changes in our own time.

Again and again we must ask: What is a festival such as that of Easter for the greater part of mankind? It may be said of very many people that when they are in the circle of their friends who still want to gather together to keep the festival, all their thinking about Easter runs along the lines of old habits of thought; they use the old words, they go on uttering them more or less automatically, they make the same renunciation in the same formula to which they have long been accustomed. But have we any right today to utter this renunciation, when we can observe on every hand a distinct unwillingness to take part in the great change that is so necessary in our own time? Are we justified in using the words of Paul: “Not I, but Christ in me!” when we show so little inclination to examine into what it is that has brought such great unhappiness to mankind in the modern age? Should it not go together with the Easter festival that we set out to gain a clear idea of the destiny that has befallen mankind and of what it is that alone can lead us out of the catastrophe—namely, super-sensible knowledge? If the Easter festival, whose whole significance depends upon super-sensible knowledge—for knowledge of the senses can never explain the Resurrection of Christ Jesus—if this Easter festival is to be taken seriously, is it not essential that people should consider how a super-sensible character can be brought again into the human faculty of knowledge? Should not this be the thought that rises up in our minds today: All the lying and deception in modern culture is due to the fact that we ourselves are no longer in earnest about what we recognise as the sacred festivals of the year?

We keep Easter, the festival of Resurrection, but in our materialistic outlook we have long ago ceased caring whether or not we have a real understanding of the Resurrection. We set ourselves at enmity with the truth and we try to find all manner of ingenious ways of accepting the cosmic jest—for indeed it would be, or rather it is a jest that man should keep the festival of the Resurrection and at the same time put his whole faith in modern science which obviously can never make appeal to such a Resurrection. Materialism and the keeping of Easter—these are two things that cannot possibly belong together; they cannot possibly exist side by side. And the materialism of modern theology—that too is incompatible with the Easter festival. In our own time a book entitled “The Essence of Christianity” has been written by an eminent theologian of Central Europe, and is accounted of outstanding importance. Yet throughout this work we find evidence of a desire not to take seriously the fact of the Resurrection of Christ Jesus. There you have a true symptom of the times!

People must learn to feel these things deeply in their hearts. We shall never find a way out of our present troubles unless we develop understanding of the enmity cherished by the modern materialistically minded man towards the truth, unless we learn to see through things like this, for they are of very great significance in life today.

During the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch a new tendency has been at work, a tendency towards a scientific knowledge that is adapted to the power of human reason and judgment; and now it is time that this should go further and develop into a knowledge of the super-sensible world. For the Event of Golgotha is an event that falls absolutely within the super-sensible world. And the event of Damascus, as Paul experienced it, is an event that can be understood only out of super-sensible ideas. On the understanding of this event depends whether one can in very truth feel something of the Christ Impulse, or whether one cannot. The man of the present day is faced with a severe test when he asks himself: In the time that has been christened ‘Easter,’ how do I stand to super-sensible knowledge? For Easter should remind him, by the very way its date is determined, to look up from the earthly to what is beyond the earth. The man of modern times has left himself no more insight into what is beyond the earth than at most that which is given him in mathematics and mechanics, and now in spectro-analysis. These sciences are the groundwork upon which he tries to build up his knowledge concerning all that is beyond the earth. He no longer feels that he is himself united with those worlds, and that the Christ descended thence when He entered into the personality of Jesus.

Let me beg you to give these thoughts, which are so pertinent to our present problems, your full and earnest attention. I have often pointed out what a fine spiritual nature such as Herman Grimm must needs think of the Kant-Laplace theory. It is true, the theory has undergone some modification in our day, nevertheless in all essentials it is still the prevailing theory of the universe. It is said that the solar system has come out of a primeval nebula, and in course of mighty changes undergone by the nebula and its densifications, plants, animals and also man have come into being. And carrying the theory further, a time will come when everything on the earth will have found its grave and when ideals and works of culture will no longer send their voice out into the universe, when the earth itself will fall like a bit of slag into the sun; and then, in a still later time, the sun will burn itself out and be scattered in the All, not merely burying, but annihilating everything that is now being made and done by man.

Such a view of the ordering of the world must inevitably arise in a time when man wants to grasp that which is beyond the earth with mathematical and mechanical knowledge alone. In a world in which he merely calculates or investigates qualities of the sun with the spectroscope—in such a world we shall never find the realm whence Christ came down to unite Himself with the life of the earth! There are people today who, because they cannot get clarity into their thoughts, prefer not to let themselves be troubled with thinking at all, and go on repeating the words they have learned from the Gospels and from the Epistles of St. Paul, simply repeating by rote what they have learned, never stopping to think whether it is compatible with the view of the evolution of the earth and man that they acquire elsewhere. But that is the deep inward untruth of our time: men slink away into some comfortable dark corner instead of bringing together in their thought the things that essentially belong together. They want to raise a mist before their eyes so that they may not need to ‘think together’ the things that belong together. They raise a mist before their eyes when they keep a festival like Easter and are at the same time very far indeed from forming any true idea of the Resurrection of which they speak; for a true idea of it can only be formed with spiritual and super-sensible knowledge.

The only possible way in these days for man to unite a right feeling with Easter is for him to direct his thought in this connection to the world-catastrophe of his own time. For in very deed a world-catastrophe is upon us. I do not mean merely the catastrophe that happened in the recent years of the war, but I refer to that world-catastrophe which consists in the fact that men have lost all idea of the connection of the earthly with that which is beyond the earth. The time has come when man must realise with full and clear consciousness that super-sensible knowledge has now to arise out of the grave of the materialistic outlook. For together with super-sensible knowledge will arise the knowledge of Christ Jesus. In point of fact, man has no other symbol that fits the Easter festival than this—that mankind has brought upon itself the doom of being crucified upon the cross of its own materialism. But man must do something himself before there arises from the grave of human materialism all that can come from super-sensible knowledge.

The very striving after super-sensible knowledge is itself an Easter deed, it is something which gives man the right once more to keep Easter. Look up to the full moon and feel how the full moon is connected with man in its phenomena, and how the reflection of the sun is connected with the moon, and then meditate on the need today to go in search of a true self-knowledge which can show forth man as a reflection of the super-sensible. If man knows himself to be a reflection of the super-sensible, if he recognises how he is formed and constituted out of the super-sensible, then he will also find the way to come to the super-sensible. At bottom, it is arrogance and pride that find expression in the materialistic view of the world. It is human pride, manifesting in a strange way! Man does not want to be a reflection of the divine and spiritual, he wants to be merely the highest of the animals. There he is the highest. But the point is, among what sort of beings is he the highest? This pride leads man to recognise nothing beyond himself. If the natural scientific outlook on the world were to be true to itself, it would have the mission of impressing this fact again and again upon man: You are the highest of all the beings of which you can form an idea. The ultimate consequences of the point of view that sets out to be strictly scientific, are such as to make a man turn pale when they show him on what kind of moral groundwork they are based—all unconscious though he may be of it. The truth is, we are today living in a time when Christ Jesus is being crucified in a very special sense. He is being put to death in the field of knowledge. And until men come to see how the present way of knowledge, clinging as it does to the senses and to them alone, is nothing but a grave of knowledge out of which a resurrection must take place—until they see this, they will not be able to lift themselves up to experiences in thought and feeling that partake of a true Easter character.

This is the thought that we should carry in our hearts and minds today. We still have with us the tradition of an Easter festival that is supposed to be celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon of spring. The tradition we have, but the right to celebrate such a festival—that we have not, who live in present-day civilisation.

How can we acquire this right again? We must take the thought of Christ Jesus lying in the grave, of Christ Jesus Who at Easter time vanquishes the stone that has been rolled over His grave—we must take this thought and unite it with the other thought which I have indicated. For the soul of man should feel the purely external, mechanistic knowledge like a tombstone rolled upon him; and he must exert himself to overcome the pressure of this knowledge, he must find the possibility, not to make confession of his faith in the words: “Not I, but the fully developed animal in me,” but to have the right to say: “Not I, but Christ in me.”

It is related of a learned English scientist [T.H. Huxley] that he said he would rather believe that he had by his own power worked his way up little by little from the ape stage to his present height as man, than that he had descended from a once ‘divine’ height, as his opponent, who could not give credence to the ideas of natural science, appeared to have done.

Such things only serve to show how urgent it is to find the way from the confession of faith: “Not I, but the fully developed animal in me,” to that other confession of faith: “Not I, but Christ in me.” We must strive to understand this words of Paul. Not until then will it be possible for the true Easter message to rise up from the depths of our hearts and souls and enter into our consciousness.

Among the concepts of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science that must work toward the future development of man's soul being in the most fruitful, the most intensive, indeed the most necessary way, will be the concept of man's prenatal existence. Let us consider for a moment what will be added in this direction to those concepts and feelings that have for so long held sway in Western humanity. When anyone professing a faith, regardless of what religious denomination, speaks today of eternity, of the immortality of the human soul, he thinks mainly of nothing but living on after death, the continued existence of the human soul. In the future, when the viewpoints of spiritual science will have taken hold of a sufficiently large number of people, one will, above all, speak of the human soul's existence before birth. One will speak of the human soul's sojourn in spiritual worlds before it descended to physical earth existence. Mainly, one will speak of what takes place before birth or before conception, just as one speaks of what happens to the human soul after death. Today, one does not sufficiently realize the significance that such mention of prenatal existence will have for the whole of human life, not only for the inner but also external life.

Let us consider for a moment what this means when we look at the growing child; when we see how, from day to day, from week to week, from month to month, the physiognomy of the face assumes its outward form from within, how various features appear, smooth themselves out or recede, and so on. As yet, we really do not realize what secrets of existence we are looking into when watching such a developing human being. How great will be the intimate ardor with which such a developing human being will be viewed when one has the underlying awareness: Before this human being was conceived and born, its soul-spiritual entity was above in soul-spiritual worlds. There, it had experiences by means of soul-Spirit organs, just as man during physical existence has experiences through his physical organs.

We can go a step further into the inner nature of the human soul and, from that standpoint, get some idea of the change of views in this regard. Take the various religious denominations that speak to people today in sermons and doctrine about eternity and the immortality of the soul based on their century-old traditions. One should not speak about these matters from a theoretical standpoint; one should speak from the standpoint of life itself. One should follow the nuances of feeling out of which flow most sermons and theological doctrines about the human soul's claim to eternity. I am not speaking about the content so much as the motives, intentions, and feelings that underlie what is being said in sermons and theological doctrine. It is a fact that, quite aside from what is true, a person can have the feeling, springing from an inner egotism of the soul, that the soul ought not to be destroyed along with the body! It is really an element of soul egotism that desires not to be destroyed. One cannot bear the event of dissolution; one thirsts for a continued existence of the human soul after death. It is this feeling of thirsting for immortality to which sermons and theological doctrines appeal. This gives the basis for what is spoken to people of various religious denominations about the eternity of the soul. One finds believers by making concessions to their hidden inner soul egotism. Actually, one tells such people something for which they thirst, the opposite of which they certainly do not wish to hear. By telling them of the continuation of life after death, one discovers the access to human faith. In no other way would one find this access to faith, if the human soul were not thirsting out of egotism for the soul's indestructibility after death.

Now we know from spiritual science that the human soul does, in fact, retain its existence after death. From the many descriptions that have been given in the course of the work in this movement, we could also see that one can speak with precision about the experiences after death based on the science of initiation.

To begin with, we will not speak about what really lies beyond death, only about the motives that underlie the preaching of the doctrine of immortality. Spiritual science cannot appeal to these motives. In fact, spiritual science will not make any appeal when it is supposed to speak of the human soul's existence prior to birth or conception, for it actually has nothing to do with the soul's egotism. As a rule, people give little thought to how they fared prior to birth or conception, as to what their experiences were before they descended into an earthly body. This leaves them more or less indifferent, and does not stimulate the same longing as does the question of life after death. An interest in this area will only be found in those in whom the desire is aroused to comprehend the human being in general, in whom exists a longing to discover that force in the human soul which, as an immortal force, actually lies at the basis of what we are in the outer physical world owing to our body. In our Western civilization, which is doomed to decline unless new forces are injected into it, we find little inclination and few concepts to which one might turn if one were to speak about this life of the human soul before birth. As you know, the churches view this teaching as heresy; they do not realize that in this they are not really teaching Christianity but Aristotelian philosophy. For when Aristotle's philosophy was included in the Church's philosophy in the Middle Ages, the doctrine of the origin, of the creation, of each individual human soul at birth, or, respectively, with the development of the human embryo in the mother's womb, gained ground increasingly in the philosophy of the Church. Thus, gradually, the belief arose that this denial of the human soul's preexistence was part of the true doctrine of the Church, of Christianity. It was not part of it. To the real practical teaching of Christianity belongs the penetration of the spiritual worlds. Penetration into the spiritual worlds cannot exist without the insight into the preexistence of the human soul.

Western civilization, however, is infected by the various creeds. Things have gone so far that we do not even have the means in our language to express what is the truth in this area. If we still adhere to a religious world concept, or to some kind of rational philosophical world view, we speak of the immortality of the human soul. In that we have this word "immortality" of the human soul, we point to the fact that with this word we actually negate only dying, not birth; for what word could we use with which we could indicate preexistence in the same way that the word "“immortality” points to postexistence? Why should we not use a word like “unbornness” which, in the face of true spiritual knowledge, has as much justification as does the word “immortality?” This can be your best evidence of what has been lost in the West directly through the activities of the various religious denominations: the truth about the being of man. This truth has been lost even in regard to language. And even insofar as language is concerned, we must bring about the awareness that the human soul is eternal, that it exists before birth as much as it exists after death. We need a word for the condition of "unbornness" just as much as for “immortality.” Now, however, when you think of an existence before birth, and turn to really sound logic, logic that makes you capable of thinking something through to its conclusion, ask yourself if you are then still capable of not speaking of repeated earth lives. Of course, if you speak only of immortality, of postexistence, you can believe: Here is one earth life, then follows an eternity of a totally different kind! Logically, you will no longer be able to do that when you speak of preexistence. For, otherwise, you would have to ask yourself: Well, how is it that I now find that the soul is not created at birth? Why should it be created somewhere along the way before birth? In short, you absolutely arrive at repeated earth lives when you speak of preexistence. It is a fundamental fact that never in earthly civilization has one come to the view of preexistence without also speaking of repeated earth lives.

But consider what it will mean for the whole approach to this earthly existence if this teaching of repeated earth lives is not to be proclaimed as a mere theory, if this view finds its way into all the feeling life and also the will life of people, if man experiences himself as a being that has descended from spiritual worlds and has embodied himself in a physical body. Then, you know that here on this earth you are a messenger of the divine spiritual world; you know that this life here is a continuation of a spiritual life. Everything that we bear in ourselves as a sense of duty, as abilities, is illuminated and energized by such an awareness, for we know that the gods have sent us down into this physical existence. Only then will this physical existence receive a task not set by itself, but set for it by the heights of heaven. This is what is special about spiritual science—it does not just speak against the intellect, it must speak to the intellect, for these matters must be comprehended. Yet, insofar as we take up the concepts derived from initiation science, these concepts penetrate the whole of our human nature; they penetrate not merely our thoughts; they penetrate feeling, our emotions; they penetrate our will and give us an awareness of the nature of our whole human condition. The manner in which one places oneself in the world in awareness of this preexistence of the human soul will be especially important for the civilization of the future. This manner will penetrate human beings with the light and with the power that is needed to struggle free from the powers of decline that otherwise will, without fail, drive civilization into barbarism at the beginning of the third millennium.

Indeed, all the segments of life take on special form when one has such an underlying view. You have often heard me speak here of the Waldorf School that was founded in Stuttgart. In teaching and education, this school is in a certain sense supposed to make practical use of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. The abstract guidelines that you normally find in pedagogical textbooks, or in teaching regulations approved by the state, are by no means particularly important in the pedagogy of Waldorf School teachers. Instead, the feelings with which a teacher enters the classroom, for instance, are among the especially important things effective there. One of these feelings that is especially effective pedagogically—a feeling that every teacher is permeated with because he has been led into his calling from this aspect—is the reverence for the divine seed that, from day to day, from week to week, from month to month, is blossoming forth from within the entity that has come down from the eternal spiritual world into this physical world. The awareness, possessed by the teacher, that, through the gate of the physical body, he is dealing with a being that has descended to him out of spiritual worlds, is the basis of the deep reverence the teacher has for that human being, which, as a soul-spirit being, increasingly takes on form in the physical body. One may or may not believe it today—a teacher who has this reverence for the developing human being possesses a secret power within himself by means of which he teaches and educates quite differently from a teacher who does not have this reverence, and who believes that the human being comes into existence at the moment his physical body is released from the mother's body. For one teaches and educates not only by means of concepts and ideas. Above all, one educates with the mysterious powers and forces that pass as imponderables from teacher to child.

An example can be cited for this that can be mentioned as an especially important one. As a teacher, one may ponder over how one might give this or that child the idea of immortality. Today, of course, the usual way of thinking is that the teacher is the clever one and the child the dumb one. The clever teacher thinks: How do I teach this dumb child something of the idea of immortality? He might say to the child: Look at the chrysalis of the butterfly! Inside is the butterfly; it emerges and unfolds after the chrysalis bursts open. It is just like this in the case of the immortal soul in your body—the body bursts open. The immortal soul is just not as visible as the butterfly, but it is visible to super-sensible perception, and it flies into spiritual worlds. Certainly, one can think up something like that and teach a child the concept of immortality by means of such a comparison. In my opinion, the child will not gain much this way when the idea of immortality is taught to him by the type of teacher who is clever by today's standards. This is because he does not believe in it himself! He only thought it up. When any one of our Waldorf teachers teaches a child the idea of immortality in this way, it is quite different. For he himself believes in this picture; he is permeated with the truth that the chrysalis and the butterfly that crawls out of it were ordained by the gods to represent the picture of the human soul's immortality. He is permeated by the thought: This is the same phenomenon—the emerging butterfly on a lower level, on a higher level the soul that comes out of the body. I did not make up this picture; it has been placed into nature by the divine-spiritual powers themselves. He believes in it with the same fervor with which the child should believe, and this faith is what matters. If the teacher has this belief, then he can also secure it in the child; if he does not have it, or if he has it only as an abstract idea in himself, this idea will not have a fruitful effect. For it depends upon the feelings that flow into the classroom, upon the feelings that are kindled in our own soul out of the knowledge of preexistence.

Only if one takes seriously all that follows from preexistence will one gain an accurate concept of the connection between the human soul and the human body. If you take any handbook of knowledge concerning the soul—one calls this psychology—you find all kinds of theories on how the soul works upon the body, and so forth. You would not become very knowledgeable through these theories, for they are abstract webs of thought, and when you are finished with them you don't know much more than you did before. For, in psychology, all kinds of hypotheses are merely set forth on how the soul affects the body.

If one knows how the prenatal human being incarnates itself in a physical body, then one follows the developing human being in the child quite differently. We find that there are two stages in the developing human being. The first stage is indicated by the change of teeth around age seven. What does this change of teeth signify? It is a much more powerful change in the whole human organism than one usually believes. Today, however, one only observes these things outwardly. When people eventually accustom themselves to consider these things on the soul level in the way it can be done through spiritual science, what will they realize? They will say: Strange! Until the change of teeth the child does not really form solid, contoured concepts; to be sure, the child remembers a lot but does not retain its memories in concepts; actual intelligence does not yet appear. Just observe a child carefully and notice how, during the time when the teeth change, the faculty of actual intelligence increasingly emerges. Today one has no sense of the difference existing between a seven-year-old and a five-year old regarding the development of intelligence. If one would only observe how the soul gradually emerges after age seven—the Waldorf School teachers must observe it, for their whole teaching and education is based upon it—one would immediately understand in which direction one has to look in order to answer the question: Where was the element of intelligence that emerges after the seventh year? Where was it concealed? It was within the body; it was active in the organism. The same element that emancipates itself at age seven and turns into intelligence was within the body, was forming the body, and the culmination point of its activity of shaping the body is reached when the second teeth appear. The power that thrusts itself into being with the second teeth has been active in the whole organism. It is, however, a power that is active in the body only up to the seventh year. After that it has nothing more to do with the body; it then becomes intelligence. It already was intelligence earlier; as such, however, it was at work in the body. Look at what takes place in the child's body up until the seventh year. Next, look at what the child has as intelligence after age seven. You are looking at the same thing. Through birth, intelligence descended. At first it was not active as intelligence, as soul being; it becomes active in this way gradually after the seventh year. Here you have a concrete view of the working together of the soul with the body. Now you are able to see what was mainly at work in the human body until age seven. You do not have the foolish abstract concepts, fabricated and put into our textbooks and handbooks, concerning the interaction of body and soul. You have the concrete views of what works throughout seven years in blood and nerves, in muscles and bones, and then becomes the child's intelligence.

In this way, when one gradually penetrates into what spiritual science is able to give, one comes to know the human being in the totality of his nature, in his soul and bodily being. Now, man stands before us in a completely different way. It is strange—materialistic science aimed at knowing what matter was, and yet could not know anything, for example, of the nature of the forces that are active in the child's body until the seventh year. Now comes spiritual science and teaches how one really comes to know matter; spiritual science penetrates right into the material element. This is the tragedy of materialism—it becomes more and more abstract and no longer teaches what matter really is. What does the modern physician really know of the liver and kidney, of the stomach and lungs—that is, of the material structures? One day when the insights attained through spiritual science are applied to medicine and natural science, when something of what I tried to show in the course held in Dornach this spring⁹⁷ penetrates modern science, one will see that spirit insight is called upon to throw light even into the essence of matter, while the materialist confronts the whole world like a blind man standing before color. Material existence is just what the materialist never comes to know.

A second stage in the life of the human being is puberty; in the male sex it is marked by the change of voice, in the female by changes in the body that spread over the whole organism, not focusing on one organ as clearly as does man's change of voice. In both sexes the changes fall somewhere around the fourteenth year. Once again, this is an essential change in the organism. What is really happening there? What is different after puberty? The whole life of will of the human being is quite changed! Try to compare a nineteen year-old with a thirteen-year-old, directing your attention to the concrete life of will. The whole life of will becomes quite different; otherwise feelings of love could not enter the life of will. Again, a transformation in the soul life! When through spiritual science we investigate what is going on, we come to the following: We increasingly grow together with the outer world, especially in the time between the change of teeth and puberty; we grasp more and more of this outer world; our will becomes more and more oriented and we learn to bring it into harmony with the things and events of the external world. When one really studies the whole complex confronting us here, one finds that during this time the human being acquires for himself the will element, not from within, but through contact with the outer world. It was out of deep intuition that Goethe said, “A talent is formed in the stillness, a character in the stream of life.”⁹⁸

Talent springs from within. Character, that is, the element of will, is formed in the stream of the world, in the exchange between inner and outer forces. The human being always has to defend himself against all that comes toward him from the outer world; the inner being has to react; it has to resist what comes from the outer world. This will developing element, which approaches man through the alternating communication with the external world, is confronted by an inner force from the opposite direction. This force accumulates in the larynx of the male, in the female in other organs. This accumulation, this collision between the outer element of will and the inner will element, is expressed in the transformation of the larynx or similar organs. Here you even see the spiritual of the outer world working on the human being.

Now bring all this together with the views of spiritual science with which you are already familiar. We know that we descend from the soul-spiritual world into the physical world through conception or birth. We know, on the other hand, that with our astral body and ego we enter a spiritual world every time we go to sleep. The spiritual world, which gives us our soul, works upon the shaping of our form until the seventh year, but after that it becomes our intelligence. Now this intelligence is confronted by the will element—actually, from birth onward, but especially so at puberty, because the interchange between them takes place then. This struggle between the external will element and the inner element of intelligence; between that spirituality we sleep through—passing through it from the moment we fall asleep until we awaken—and the particular realm of the spiritual world that we went through before our birth and conception respectively; the struggle between what we have brought along and what we sleep through each night expresses itself in the development of the larynx, in the development of what occurs in the organism during puberty. A spiritual element works with another spiritual element. We go through a spiritual world between falling asleep and waking up. Concealed in this spiritual world is the will that is communicated to us; concealed in our organism is the intelligence that we bring through birth into physical existence. We can understand the human body when we experience it as an outer revelation of something taking place out of the spiritual domain.

Everywhere we look, and especially when we look upon the human being, we find that spiritual forces are the basis of the world. We only begin to understand man when we actually envision the interchange between these spiritual forces. Mankind will take up all of this in the future. Then, humanity will find it incomprehensible how a certain age could once have come to the point of saying: There is the sense world; in it work atoms, molecules, tiny particles whose collision with each ether is supposed to be brought about through certain movements of light or electricity. No, it is not the effects of atoms and molecules; spiritual forces are at work there! Behind all that is perceived by the senses, spiritual forces are at work. The dramatic reversal will be that man no longer will believe he is walking through a mist of atoms and molecules; he will be aware that with every step he is going through spiritual worlds. It is spirit worlds that dwell in him, and spirit worlds that build him up, that transform him. Just as our materialistic faith, the mere postmortem doctrine, has, in its final consequence, led us into what is now happening in the East of Europe, so the teaching of the spirit will lead us in the future into an existence truly worthy of man. But only this spirit teaching, only this, can lead to a real social reconstruction, and not until mankind comprehends this can things improve; they will only get worse and worse.

Certainly, all of you have often allowed a saying by Christ from the Gospel to pass through your souls: “Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away.”⁹⁹ What does this word of Christ mean? It has no meaning for the person who believes in atoms and molecules because he assumes that, prior to this earth existence with its animals, plants and human beings, there was a nebulous formation, and that out of it, the sun and the planets gradually developed; then, along with the conglobulation and constant rotation, plants, animals and human beings eventually originated. Right-feeling people go along with what the famous historian Hermann Grimm¹⁰⁰ said: “Future ages will have difficulty explaining the nonsense of the Kant-Laplace theory, for a carrion bone being circled by a hungry dog is more appetizing than this theory!” This is what a person with healthy feelings says. For when we look out into the world of the senses, what is behind the colors, what is behind the sounds? Not atoms and molecules, but spiritual forces that collide with our own spiritual forces and so form the carpet of color, the network of sounds, and the sphere of warmth that spread out around us. If, then, this is what is in truth around us—I have already identified it in the eighties of the last century in my introduction to Goethe's natural-scientific writings—namely, metamorphosing sensations and behind them a spiritual world, then we shall experience what one would see if one could travel from earth to a distant star and from there look back at the earth. From there, one would not see what is in our surroundings—trees, clouds, plants and animals—one would only behold what is contained within the human skin. What you see in the star is not what the beings of this other star see, for that has no meaning for a strange star. The light that streams toward you from other stars is not a process in the external world; it is a process within the beings that inhabit these stars, just as what is within your skin becomes visible only when earth is viewed from another star. When you grasp this you will no longer say that the world came into being out of a multitude of atoms that conglobulated. Human beings form ideals; what is to become of such ideals if earth turns again into nothing but a heap of atoms? The whole moral world, all ethical, moral and religious ideas that ever arose, would be lost, forgotten and destroyed, if only matter and energy were everlasting. Energy and matter resolve themselves into sensations. The spirit that we bear within us is eternal, and this spirit also appears physically an another celestial body. What exists outside the human skin is in no way present for that other heavenly body. Therefore we can say that a certain nature surrounds us now; we are born again and again; this nature will no longer be there in the future; it will have been replaced by a different nature. Of everything that is present now, only what dwells within the human skin will still exist in future times. It was therefore out of a profound intuitive knowledge that Christ Jesus said, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away!” He meant, All that you see around outside will pass away, but the words that issue from My mouth will not pass away; they will endure!

Now let us look from this point of view at the lies of today's world. We hear it proclaimed from the pulpits that the human soul is immortal; we hear it proclaimed from the universities that matter and energy are everlasting. Then come the cowardly compromisers who try to fit these two concepts together. It would only be honest if those who believe in the eternity of matter would say that there is no immortality of the soul, and if those who believe in the soul's immortality would deny the eternity of matter. They would then have to confess to the truly Christian saying, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words”—meaning, the content of my soul—“will not pass away!” The two concepts are incompatible; if people had courage, the materialistic university professors would admit that Christianity has no validity for them. Those whose task it is to proclaim Christianity would have to fight against the materialism of the universities for the sake of Christianity. The fact that this is not done, that people try to glue the two viewpoints together—this is the great lie in our time regarding life. Where the attitude of falsehood prevails, its seeds come up; the germ of lying proliferates and creeps into the other aspects of life. It has done so extensively in the course of time because men did not try to appeal along with postexistence to a knowledge that would unconditionally point to preexistence, to a life before birth. All untruthfulness of life, prevalent today in so many areas, springs from the fact that so many wished to speak only of postexistence—something that appeals merely to soul egotism, not to knowledge. The spirit of untruthfulness cannot be halted if it takes hold of the best in us, namely, our innermost conviction.

These matters can only be rightly and fully evaluated, however, in connection with the whole of human life. Throughout the Middle Ages and right into our time, one spoke only of “right” and “wrong.” Everyone, of course, believed he had hit upon the right thing and whatever did not conform with that was wrong. When people spoke of right and wrong they spoke from the standpoint of logic. Logic was the great pride of mankind. It is already hardly the case today. From America, a teaching has come that has already taken hold of philosophy and, in Germany, has assumed an especially grotesque form. This is no longer the logical teaching of true and false; it is the so-called pragmatism, the teaching of what is useful. One believes that something is true, not because one has perceived it logically, but because people like William James¹⁰¹ and others say that true and false are merely other expressions for what is useful or damaging. We notice that something is useful; therefore we say it is right; we note that something is damaging to us; therefore we consider it wrong. In Germany, this has asserted itself as the “as-if” philosophy. There actually exists a thick book on this by a certain university professor, Vaihinger,¹⁰² who taught philosophy for a long time in Halle. This “as-if” philosophy goes something like this: One does not know whether atoms or molecules exist, but it is useful to explain the world as if there were atoms. One does not know whether the good has any everlasting significance, but it is useful to explain the world as if this were so. One does not know if there is a God, but it is useful for humanity—more useful than the opposite—to view the world as if there is a God, and so on. I am only expressing this with a few paradigmatic words. This “as-if” philosophy is the German version of the American teaching that what is useful is true and what is damaging is false.

Beside these viewpoints there existed yet another in all the old cultures. In the late Greek culture, it was already no longer present, but it was still noticeable in more ancient Greek times by those who study this era not in a professorial manner but according to truth. In those times one did not say of a viewpoint in the logical sense that it was “true” or “false”; one said of it that it was “healthy” or “sick.” That signified something! Today we really talk of health or sickness only when we refer to physical man, for in ordinary life we refer to nothing any longer but him. We know that from somewhere in the cosmos come the forces that make us healthy or sick. But when we speak of soul and spirit, we no longer refer to health or sickness; for there we have changed over to abstractions, to mere theory. In the cultures of antiquity, when somebody said something that was correct, one had the feeling that this organized his spirit in a correct sense and he was healthy. When he said something that was awry and what we today abstractly call “false,” people sensed concretely that this came from a sick soul mood. “Healthy” and “sick” were terms that were applicable also to the soul; actually, above all, one felt this way about the soul. Out of this feeling originated a word about which scholars have later written long philological treatises—the word “catharsis” in Greek tragedy, a word that comes out of the Mysteries. According to Aristotle, catharsis takes place in the human soul when it watches a tragedy. Fear and compassion are stimulated in the soul, leading to a kind of crisis, to catharsis, and the human being in turn is purified by fear and pity. Thus, the process that occurs in the human soul when it looks upon a tragedy is described as a healing process occurring in the strengthened soul. There, in aesthetics, in art, you still have the concept of a curative element and of an element that causes an affliction.

We must return to this! We must once more regain the concept that what we now abstractly call “right” comes about because the soul, descending from prenatal existence, gains control over the body and organizes it so that it will submit as malleable substance to the soul forces that make it healthy. This is the truth. It is the sick soul element which comes from a soul that is unable to use its body as an apparatus, a soul that expresses itself obliquely and darkly through its body. We must once again learn to replace the concepts “true” and “false” with “healthy” and “sick.” We must again experience an inner pain that can overcome us when somebody expresses wrong views; we must again sense inner satisfaction over truth. Not until we speak equally of prenatal existence and postmortem existence, however, not until we learn to use a word like “unbornness” just as we use the word immortality, shall we feel that way. The fact that we do not feel this now shows how far we have strayed from the knowledge of that spiritual world from which the human being actually comes.

You will find that those matters I have only briefly summarized today are described in more detail in numerous published cycles of my lectures and books. From such descriptions you can realize what a change it signifies in the whole constitution of the human soul when spiritual science will be the very nerve center of human feeling; when human beings will go about in the world with an awareness of their being such as the one attainable from spiritual science. People today indulge only the egotism of the soul that wishes to cling to a postexistence; they do not want to press onward to a real comprehension of the human soul which had experiences before birth, just as it will have experiences after death. The whole, complete eternity of the human soul is only grasped by one who can not only speak of immortality but, based an insight, of “unbornness,” too. We can believe, because belief always comes from a desire for life after death. We can know of the life before birth and the life after death as two things that are inseparable. Knowledge takes in the total being of the human soul; belief is concerned only with the postmortem existence. Knowledge of the spiritual is what the human being must struggle to acquire, but this is what people today strongly resist. Real knowledge of the spiritual world can only flow out of spiritual science. Out of spiritual science will come a constitution of the human soul that is healthy, not only true, and physical healing will be a necessary consequence of spiritual healing. Then man will not view the earth in the manner of modern geology as a huge mineral globe; he will view it as a spiritual being of which he himself is a member. That is what we must work toward.

This was meant to be the first part of my observations today.¹⁰³

• 97 . Rudolf Steiner: Spiritual Science and Medicine, GA 312 (London, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1948).
• 98 . Goethe: Tasso I, 2.
• 99 . See Note #90
• 100. See Note #24
• 101. William James: 1842–1910. American psychologist and philosopher.
• 102. See Note #36
• 103. The second part is unknown.

I want to speak today OF something that will help to deepen our understanding of truths that must now be given to humankind by anthroposophy. We have often spoken of the two poles of forces of the human being: the pole of will and the pole of intelligence. To understand the nature of the human being we must be constantly mindful of these two poles.

The human is a being of will and a being of intelligence. Between them—at any rate from birth until death—lies the element of feeling, constituting the bridge between the intelligence and the will. You know that these forces separate from each other in a certain sense when people reach what is called the threshold of the spiritual world.

Our study today will be concerned more particularly with the relationship in which humanity stands to the surrounding world, on the one side as a being of intelligence and on the other as a being of will. We shall deal with the latter first.

In the life between birth and death, human beings unfold the force of will as the impulse of their actions and activity. As it comes to expression through the human organism, the force of will is a very intricate, complicated matter. Nevertheless in one aspect, everything of the nature of human will bears a great likeness, amounting almost to identity, with certain forces of nature. It is therefore quite correct to speak of an inner relation between the forces of will in the human being and the forces of nature.

You know from earlier studies that even while people are awake, they are in a condition resembling sleep wherever their will is involved. True, we have in our consciousness the ideas lying behind what we will, but how a particular idea takes effect in the form of will—of that we know nothing. We do not know how the idea, “I move my arm,” is connected with the process leading to the actual movement of the arm. This process lies entirely in the subconscious and it may truly be said that people are no more conscious of the real process of will than they are of what takes place during sleep. But when the question arises as to the connection of human will with the surrounding world, we come to something that will strike the kind of consciousness that has developed in the course of the last three to five centuries as highly paradoxical. It is generally thought that the evolution of the earth would be the same even if human beings had no part in it at all. A typical natural scientist describes the evolution of the earth as a series, let us say, of geological, purely physical processes. And even if scientists do not expressly say so, they have in mind that from the earth's beginning until its hypothetical end, everything would go on just the same even if it were uninhabited by human beings. Why is this view held by natural science today? The reason is that when anything takes place, for example in the mineral kingdom, or the plant kingdom, let us say on November 9, 1919, people believe that its cause lies in what has happened in the mineral kingdom prior to this particular point of time. People think: the mineral kingdom takes its course and what happens at any point is the effect of what went before; the mineral effect is due to a mineral cause.

This is the way people think and you will find evidence of it in any text book of geology. Conditions obtaining at the present time are said to be the effects of the Ice Age, or of some preceding epoch but the causes are attributed entirely to what once took place in the mineral kingdom as such; the fact that humanity inhabits the earth is ignored. The belief is that even were humans not present, everything would run a similar course, that the external reality would be the same—although, in fact, humankind has always been part of this external reality. The truth is that the earth is one whole, humanity itself being one of the active factors in the earth's evolution. I will give you an example.

You know that our present epoch—thinking of it for the moment in the wider sense, as comprising the period since the great Atlantean catastrophe—was preceded by the Atlantean epoch itself, when the continents of Europe, Africa, and America in their present form were not in existence. At that time there was one main continent on the earth—Atlantis as it is called—extending over the area that is now the Atlantic Ocean. You know too that at a certain period in this Atlantean evolution, immorality of a particular kind was rampant throughout the then-Civilized world. Human beings had far greater power over the forces of nature than they later possessed and employed these forces for evil purposes. Thus we can look back to an age of widespread immorality. And then came the great Atlantean catastrophe. The orthodox geologist will naturally trace this catastrophe to processes in the mineral kingdom; indeed it is a fact that one part of the earth subsided and another arose. But it will not occur to those who base their thinking on the principles of modern natural science to say to themselves that the deeds and activities of human beings were among the contributory causes. Yet so it is. In very truth the Atlantean catastrophe was the outcome of the deeds of people on the earth.

Outer, mineral causes are not alone responsible for these great catastrophic events that break in upon earth existence. We must look for causes lying within the sphere of human actions and impulses: Humanity itself belongs to the chain of causative forces in earth existence. Nor does this apply only to an event of such magnitude but to what is happening all the time. Only the connection between what goes on within human beings and cosmic happenings which take effect in tellurian events remains hidden, to begin with. In this respect the whole of our natural science amounts to a great, all-embracing illusion. For if you want to get at the real causes you will not discover them by studying the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms alone.

Let me give you the following illustration of what comes into consideration here. We will approach it, so to speak, from the opposite side. Here (X) is the center of the earth. When something takes place in the mineral kingdom, the plant kingdom, or the animal kingdom, it is a matter of seeking the causes. The causes lie at certain points which are to be found everywhere. You can picture what I mean by thinking of the following. In the region around Naples in Italy, you will find that the earth over a wide area will emit vapor if you take a piece of paper and set it alight. Vapors begin to rise from the ground beneath you. You will say: the force which drives up the vapors lies in the physical process generated by the lighting of the paper. In this case, the physical process is that by lighting the paper you rarify the air and because of the rarification of the air the vapors inside the earth press upward. They are kept down by the normal air-pressure and this is diminished by setting light to the paper. If I merely want to give an example of effects of a purely mineral nature—such as these vapors arising out of the earth—I could say for the sake of illustration that here, and here (points in the diagram), a piece of paper is set alight. This shows you that the causes of the rising of the vapor do not lie below the soil, but above it. Now these points in the diagram a, b, c, d, e, f—do not represent pieces of paper that have been set alight; in this instance they represent something different. Imagine, to begin with, that each point on its own has no significance but that the significance lies in the system of points as a whole. Do not think now of the pieces of lighted paper, but of something else which at the moment I will not specify. Something else is there as an active cause, above the surface of the earth; and these different causes do not work singly, but together. And now imagine that there are not six points only, but, let us say, 1,500 million points¹ all working together, producing a combined effect. These 1,500 million points are actually there. Each of you has within you what may be called the center of gravity of your own physical structure. When people are awake, this center of gravity lies just below the diaphragm; when they are asleep it lies a little lower. There are therefore some 1,500 million of these centers of gravity spread over the earth, producing a combined effect. And what issues from this combined effect is the actual cause of a great deal of what takes place in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms on the earth. It is a scientific fallacy to trace back to mineral causes the forces manifesting in air and water and in the mineral realm; in reality the causes are to be found within the human beings.

This is a truth of which there is scarcely an inkling today. It is known to very, very few that the causes of processes active in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms lie within the human organism. (This does not apply to all the forces working in these kingdoms of nature, but to a large proportion of them.) Within humankind lie the causes for what happens on earth. Therefore mineralogy, botany, zoology, cannot be cultivated truly without anthropology—without the study of the human being. Science tells us of physical, chemical, and mechanical forces. These forces are intimately connected with the human will, with the force of human will that is concentrated in our center of gravity. If we speak of the earth with an eye to the truth of these matters, we must not follow the geologist in speaking of an earth in the abstract, but humanity must be accounted an integral part of the earth. These are the truths that reveal themselves on yonder side of the threshold. Everything that can be known on this side of the threshold belongs to the realm of the illusions of knowledge, not to the realm of truth.

At this point the question arises: What relation is there between the forces of will that areconcentrated in our center of gravity, and the external, physical, and chemical forces? We are speaking, remember, of present-day humanity. In normal life, this relation takes effect in the metabolic processes. When people take into themselves the substances of the outer world, it is their will that actually digests and works upon these substances. And if nothing else were in operation, then what is taken into the organism from outside would simply be destroyed. The human will has the power to dissolve and destroy all extraneous substances and forces; and the relation between the human being and the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms of nature today is such that our will is connected with the forces of dissolution and destruction inherent in our planet.

We could not live were this destruction not to take place—but for all that it is destruction. This must never be forgotten. And what are often described as unlawful magical practices are based essentially on the fact that certain human beings learn to employ their will wrongfully, in such a way that they do not confine the destructive forces to their normal operations within the organism but extend them over other human beings, deliberately and consciously applying the forces of destruction that are anchored in their will. That, quite obviously, is a practice that is never, under any circumstances, permissible.

Through our will we are connected with the earth's forces of decline. And if as human beings we had only our forces of will, the earth would be condemned through us, through humankind, to sheer destruction. The prospect of the future would then be far from inspiring; it would be a vista of the gradual dissolution of the earth and its ultimate dispersal in cosmic space. So much for the one pole in the human constitution.

But the human is a twofold being. One pole is, as we have seen, connected with the destructive forces of our planet; the other pole—that of intelligence—is connected with the will by the bridge of feeling. But in waking life, human intelligence is of little account as far as the planet earth is concerned. During waking life we cannot really establish a true relationship to earth existence through our intelligence. What I have told you in regard to the will happens while we are awake, although we are not conscious of it. If you see a rock crumbling away and ask where the actual causes of the crumbling lie, then you must look into the inner, organic nature of the human being. Strange as this will seem to the modern mind, it is indeed so. But as I said, the earth would face a sorry future if the other pole of human nature were not there—the pole of the up-building forces. Just as the causes of all destruction lie in the will that is concentrated in our center of gravity, so the up-building forces lie in the sphere into which we pass during sleep. From the time of falling asleep until that of waking, we are in a condition figuratively described by saying that with our “I” and astral body we are outside the physical body. But then we are entirely beings of soul and spirit, unfolding the forces that are in operation between falling asleep and waking. During this time we are connected, through these forces, with everything that builds up the earth planet, everything that adds to the forces of destruction the constructive, up-building forces. If you did not go about the earth, the destructive forces actually proceeding from your will would not be working in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms. If you never went to sleep, the forces whereby the earth is continually up-built would not stream out of your intelligence. The constructive, up-building forces of the planet earth also lie in humanity itself. I do not say: in the individual human being—for I have expressly said that all these single causes form a collective whole. The up-building forces lie in humankind as a whole, actually in the pole of intelligence in our being but not in our waking intelligence. Waking intelligence is really like a lifeless entity thrusting itself into earth evolution. The intelligence that works, unconsciously, during our sleep—that is what builds up the earth planet. By this I am only trying to explain that it is a fallacy to look outside the human being for the destructive and the constructive forces of our earth; you must look for them within the human being. Once you grasp this, what I am now going to say will not be unintelligible.

You look up to the stars, saying that something is streaming from them that can be perceived by human sense organs here on earth. But what you behold when you gaze at the stars is not of the same nature as what you perceive on the earth in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms. In reality it proceeds from beings of intelligence and will whose life is bound up with those stars. The effects appear to be physical because the stars are at a distance. They are not in reality physical at all. What you actually see are the inner activities of beings of will and intelligence in the stars. I have already spoken to you of the ingenious description of the sun given by astrophysicists. But if it were possible to journey to the sun by some means of transport invented by a Jules Verne, it would be found with amazement that nothing of what was to be expected from these physical descriptions exists. The descriptions are merely a composite picture of solar phenomena. What we see is in reality the working of will and intelligence which at a distance appears as light. If inhabitants of the moon—supposing in this sense there were such beings—were to look at the earth, they would not detect its grassy or mineral surfaces but—also perceiving it as a light effect or something similar—they would detect what takes place around the centers of gravity of human bodies and also the effects of the conditions in which human beings live between going to sleep and waking. That is what would actually be seen from the universe. Even the most perfect instrument would not enable the chairs, for instance, on which you are now sitting, to be seen; what would be seen is all that is taking place in the region of your centers of gravity and what would happen if you were suddenly to fall asleep—it is to be hoped that this would not happen in every case! But wherever it did happen, it would be perceived out in the universe.

So that to the outer universe, what takes place through human beings is the perceptible reality—not what surrounds us in earthly existence. A very common saying is that everything perceived with the senses is maya—the great illusion—no reality but simply appearance. Such an abstraction is of little account. It has meaning only when one enters into the concrete, as we have now been doing. To say glibly that the animal, plant, and mineral worlds are maya means nothing: What is of value is the realization that what you perceive outwardly depends fundamentally upon yourselves and that—not of course at each moment but in the course of human evolution—you make yourselves an integral part of the chain of causes and effects.

Even when such a shattering truth is uttered—and I think it may well be shattering—it is not always seen in the aspect where it becomes of importance in life. Such a truth assumes importance only when we perceive its consequences. We are not physical beings only; we are moral—or maybe immoral—beings in earthly existence. What we do is determined by impulses of a moral nature.

Now just think with what bitter doubt modern thought is assailed in this domain. Natural science provides a knowledge of the earthly that is confined to the connection between purely external causes and effects; and in this cycle of natural causes and effects, the human being too is involved. So it is alleged by external, abstract science which takes account of one aspect only of earthly existence.

The fact that moral impulses also light up in people is admitted but nothing is known about the connection between these moral impulses and what comes to pass in the round of external nature. Indeed the dilemma of modern philosophy is that the philosophers hear on the one hand from the scientists that everything is involved in a chain of natural causes and effects—and on the other hand have to admit that moral impulses light up in people. That is the reason why Kant wrote two “Critiques”: the Critique of Pure Reason, concerned with the relation of the human being to a purely natural course of things, and the Critique of Practical Reason where he puts forward his moral postulates—which in truth, if I may speak figuratively, hover in the air, come out of the blue and have no a priori relation with natural causes.

As long as we believe that what takes place in the external manifestations of nature can be traced only to similar manifestations, as long as we cling to this illusion, the intervention of moral impulses is something that remains separate and apart from the course of nature. Nearly everything that is discussed today lies under the shadow of this breach. In their thinking people cannot use the earthly round as such with the moral life of humanity. But as soon as you grasp something of what I have tried briefly to outline, you will be able to say: Yes, as a human being I am a unity, and moral impulses are alive within me. They live in what I am as a physical being. But as a physical human being I am fundamentally the cause—together with all humankind—of every physical happening. The moral conduct and achievements of human beings on the earth are the real causes of what comes to pass in the course of earth existence.

Natural history and natural science describe the earth in the way we find in text books of geology, botany, and so forth. What is said there seems entirely satisfactory according to the premises formed through modern education. But let us suppose that an inhabitant of Mars were to come down to the earth and observe it in the light of Martian premises. I am not saying that such a thing could happen but merely trying to illustrate what I mean. Suppose a being from Mars, having wandered dumbly about the earth were then to learn some human language, read some geology, and thus discover what kind of ideas prevail concerning the processes and happenings on the earth. This being would say: But that is not all. By far the most important factor is ignored. For example, I have noticed crowds of students loitering about in their beer houses, drinking and indulging their passions. Something is happening there: the human will is working in the metabolism. These are processes of which no mention is made in your books on physics and geology; they contain no reference to the fact that the course of earth existence is also affected by whether the students drink or do not drink. That is what a being not entirely immersed in earthly ideas and prejudices would find lacking in the descriptions given by human beings themselves of happenings on earth. For a being from Mars there would be no question but that moral impulses, pervading human deeds and the whole of human life, are part and parcel of the course of nature. According to modern preconceptions there is something inexorable in the play of nature, indeed pleasantly inexorable for materialistic thinkers. They imagine that the earth's course would be exactly the same were no human beings in existence; that whether they behave decently or not makes no fundamental difference or really alters anything. But that is not the case! The all-essential causes of what happens on the earth do not lie outside the human being; they lie within humankind. And if earthly consciousness is to expand to cosmic consciousness, humanity must realize that the earth—not over short but over long stretches of time—is made in its own likeness, in the likeness of humanity itself. There is no better means of lulling people to sleep than to impress upon them that they have no share in the course taken by earth existence. This narrows down human responsibility to the single individual, the single personality.

The truth is that the responsibility for the course of earth existence through ages of cosmic time, lies with humanity. Everyone must feel themselves to be a member of humanity, the earth itself being the body for that humanity.

Someone may say: For ten years I have given way to my passions, indulged my fancies and have thereby ruined my body. With equal conviction such a person should be able to say: If earthly humanity follows impure moral impulses, then the body of the earth will be different from what it would be were the moral impulses pure. The day-fly, because it lives for twenty-four hours only, has a view of the world differing entirely from that of human beings. The range of our vision is not wide enough to perceive that what happens externally in the course of nature is not dependent upon purely natural causes. In regard to the present configuration of Europe, it is far more important to ask what manner of life prevailed among human beings in the civilized world two thousand years ago than to investigate the external mineral and plant structure of the earth. The destiny of our physical earth planet in another two thousand years will not depend upon the present constitution of our mineral world, but upon what we do and allow to be done. With world consciousness, human responsibility widens into world responsibility. With such consciousness we feel as we look up to the starry heavens that we are responsible to this cosmic expanse, permeated and pervaded as it is by spirit—that we are responsible to this world for how we conduct the earth. We grow together with the cosmos in concrete reality when behind the phenomena we seek for the truth.

I so often tell you that we must learn to perceive the concrete realities of things for the most part taught as abstractions today. Nothing much is accomplished by adopting oriental traditions such as: the external world of the senses is maya. We must go much deeper if we are to arrive at the truth. Such abstractions do not carry us far, because in the form in which they have been handed down they are nothing but the sediment of a primeval wisdom that did not hover in abstractions but teemed with concrete realities which must be brought to light again through spiritual intuition and research. When you read in oriental literature of maya and of truth as its antithesis, do not imagine that what you read there today can be really intelligible to you. It is only a much later compilation of matters that were concrete realities to the ancient wisdom. We must get back to these concrete realities. People think today that they have some understanding of cosmic processes when they assert that the external world of sense is maya. But nothing can be understood unless one presses on to the underlying realities. The moment it is realized: we have not to ask how the present mineral world has developed out of the mineral processes of another age; we have rather to ask about what has been going on in humankind—at that moment the real meaning of the saying, “the outer world is maya,” becomes clear. Then we begin to perceive in the human being a reality far greater than is usually perceived. And then the feeling of responsibility for earth existence begins.

If you will try to get to the inner core of these things—and it must be by inward contemplation, not by means of the kind of intelligence employed in natural science—you will gradually find your way to the realization that humankind is composed of free human beings. Nature does not, in truth, counteract our freedom, for as human beings we ourselves fashion the nature immediately surrounding us. It is only in its partial manifestations that nature counteracts our freedom. Nature counteracts our freedom to an extent no greater than if—to give an example—you are stretching out your hand and someone else takes hold of it and checks the movement. You will not deny freedom of will simply because someone else checks a movement. As people of the present day we are checked in many respects because of some action of our predecessors that is only now taking effect. But at all events it was an action of human beings.—What human beings? Not anyone against whom we can turn with reproach, for we ourselves were the ones who, in earlier earthly lives, brought about the conditions obtaining today.

We must not confine ourselves to the mere mention of repeated earthly lives but think of the connection between them in such a way that even in external nature we perceive the effects of causes we ourselves laid down in earlier lives. Naturally, in reference to the single, individual human being, we must speak of contributory causes only, for in all these things, as I have said, it is a matter of the collective inter-working of human beings on the earth. None of us should, for that reason, exclude ourselves as individuals, for each of us has a share in what is brought about by humanity as a whole and then comes to expression in what constitutes the body for the whole of earthly humanity in its on-flowing life.

I have been endeavoring to give you an idea of how a spiritual scientist must regard the statements made in ordinary scientific text-books. Suppose I were to draw a series of figures:

And now suppose some creature who had never lived in our world were to crawl out of the earth and, having some rudiments of arithmetical knowledge, were to look at the figures and say: First figure, second figure, third figure. The third is the effect of the second, and the second the effect of the first. Effect of the first figure—a triangle; effect of the second circle. This creature would then be combining cause and effect. But it would be a fallacy, for I have drawn each figure separately. In reality the one is independent of the other. It only appears to be dependent to this creature who associates what comes first with what follows, as if the one were the outcome of the other. This, approximately, is how the geologist describes the process of the earth: Diluvial epoch, Tertiary epoch, Quaternary epoch, and so on. But this is no more true than the statement that the circle is the outcome, the effect of the triangle, or the triangle the effect of the rectangular figure. The configurations of the earth are brought about autonomously—through the deeds of earthly humanity, including the mysterious workings of the intelligence during the periods of sleep when human beings are outside their physical bodies.

This shows you that the descriptions given by external science are very largely illusion—maya. But merely to speak about maya is of little account. To the assertion that the external world is maya we must be able to reply by stating where the actual causes lie. These causes are hidden to a great extent from our powers of cognition. The part played by humankind in shaping earth existence cannot be fathomed by means of external science but only by an inner science. My book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment speaks of the human being's inner activity between the time of going to sleep and waking. This can be revealed by knowledge that reaches down to the sphere of the will Human beings know nothing of the connection between the will and the outer world for the processes of the will are hidden and concealed. We do not know what is really going on when by lifting our hand we set in operation a process of will; nor do we know that this process continues and has an effect in the whole course of earth existence.

This is indicated in the scene in my mystery play, The Portal of Initiation, where the actions of Capesius and Strader have their outcome in cosmic manifestations—in thunder and lightning. It is, of course, a pictorial representation, but the picture contains a deeper truth; it is not fantasy but actual truth. For a fairly long period in evolution, truths of this kind have been voiced only by true poets whose fantasy must always be perception of super-sensible processes.

This is very little understood by modern people who like to relegate poetry, indeed all art, to a place separate and apart from external reality. They feel relieved not to be asked to see in poetry anything more than fantasy. True poetry, true art, is of course, no more than a reflection of super-sensible truth—but a reflection it is. Even if poets are not themselves conscious of the super-sensible happenings, if their soul is linked with the cosmos, if they have not been torn away from the cosmos by materialistic education, they give utterances to super-sensible truths, in spite of having to express them in pictures drawn from the world of sense.

Many examples of this are contained in the second part of Goethe's Faust, where as I have shown in the case of particular passages, the imagery has a direct relation with super-sensible processes.² The development of art in recent centuries affords evidence of what I have been saying. Take any picture painted by no means very long ago, and you will find that as a rule, landscape is given very secondary importance. The painting of landscape has come into prominence only since the last three to five centuries. Earlier than that you will find that landscape takes second place; it is the human world that is brought to the forefront because the consciousness still survived that in regard to objective processes of earth existence the human world is much more important than the landscape—which is but the effect of the human world. In the very birth of preference for landscape there lies, in the sphere of art, the parallel phenomenon of the birth of the materialistic trend of mind—consisting in the belief that landscape and what it represents has an existence of its own, entirely apart from humanity. But the truth is quite the reverse. Were some inhabitant of Mars to come down to the earth he would certainly be able to see meaning in Leonardo da Vinci's “Last Supper,” but not in paintings of landscapes. He would see landscapes—including painted landscapes—and the whole configuration of the earth quite differently and with his particular organ of sense could not fathom their meaning. Please remember that I am saying these things merely in order to illustrate hypothetically what I want to convey.

So you see, the saying: “the external world is maya” cannot be fully understood without entering into the concrete realities. But to do this we must relate ourselves intimately with earth existence as a whole, know ourselves to be an integral part of it. And then we must grasp the thought that there can be external and apparent realities which are not the truth, not the true realities. If you have a rose in your room, it is an apparent reality only, for the rose as it is in front of you there cannot be the reality. It can be true reality only while it is growing on the rose tree, united with the roots which in turn are united with the earth. The earth as described by the geologists is as little a true reality as a plucked rose is a reality.

Spiritual science endeavors never to halt at the untrue reality, but always to seek what must be added, in order to have the whole, true reality. The meager sense of reality prevailing in our present civilization expresses itself in the very fact that every external manifestation is taken as reality. But there is reality only in what lies before one as an integrated whole. The earth by itself, without human beings, is no more a true reality than the rose plucked from the rose tree. These things must be pondered and worked upon; they must not remain theories but pass over into our feelings. We must feel ourselves members of the whole earth. It is of importance again and again to call up the thoughts: this finger on my hand has true reality only as long as it is part of my organism; if it is cut off it no longer has true reality. Similarly, the human being has no true reality apart from the earth, nor has the earth without humankind. It is an unreal concept when modern scientific investigators think, according to their premises, that earth evolution would run the same course if humanity were not there. I recently showed you that it would not be so, by telling you that the bodies laid aside by human beings at death become a leaven in earth evolution and that if no human bodies—either by burial or cremation—became part of the earth, the whole course of physical happenings would be other than it is in consequence of these bodies having been received into the earth.

In the lecture today I wanted to speak in greater detail of the connection between the two poles of will and intelligence in human beings and their cosmic environment.

• 1. Representing, approximately, the total population of the earth.
• 2. Twenty-eight lectures given in the year 1915. Geisteswissenschaftliche Erlauterungen zu Goethe's Faust.

I want to speak to-day of something that will help to deepen our understanding of truths that must now be given to mankind by Anthroposophy. We have often spoken of the two poles of forces in man: the pole of will and the pole of intelligence. To understand the nature of man we must be constantly mindful of these two poles.

Man is a being of will and a being of intelligence. Between them—at any rate from birth until death—lies the element of feeling, constituting the bridge between the intelligence and the will. You know that these forces separate from each other in a certain sense when man reaches what is called the Threshold of the Spiritual World.

Our study to-day will be concerned more particularly with the relationship in which man stands to the surrounding world, on the one side as a being of intelligence and on the other as a being of will. We shall deal with the latter first.

In his life between birth and death, man unfolds the force of will as the impulse of his actions and activity. As it comes to expression through the human organism, this force of will is a very intricate, complicated matter. Nevertheless in one aspect, everything of the nature of will in man bears a great likeness, amounting almost to identity, with certain forces of nature. It is therefore quite correct to speak of an inner relation between the forces of will in the human being and the forces of nature.

You know from earlier studies that even while man is awake, he is in a condition resembling sleep wherever his will is involved. True, he has in his consciousness the ideas lying behind what he wills, but how a particular idea takes effect in the form of will—of that he knows nothing. He does not know how the idea, “I move my arm”, is connected with the process leading to the actual movement of the arm. This process lies entirely in the subconsciousness and it may truly be said that man is no more conscious of the real process of will than he is of what takes place during sleep. But when the question arises as to the connection of man's will with the surrounding world, we come to something that will strike the kind of consciousness that has developed in the course of the last three to five centuries as highly paradoxical. It is generally thought that the evolution of the earth would be the same even if human beings had no part in it at all. A typical natural scientist describes the evolution of the earth as a series, let us say, of geological, purely physical processes. And even if he does not expressly say so, he has in mind that from the earth's beginning until its hypothetical end, everything would go on just the same even if it were uninhabited by human beings. Why is this view held by natural science to-day? The reason is that when anything takes place, for example in the mineral kingdom, or the plant kingdom, let us say on November 9th, 1919, people believe that its cause lies in what has happened in the mineral kingdom prior to this particular point of time. Men think: the mineral kingdom takes its course and what happens at any point is the effect of what went before; the mineral effect is due to a mineral cause.

This is the way men think and you will find evidence of it in any text-book of geology. Conditions obtaining at the present time are said to be the effects of the Ice Age, or of some preceding epoch—but the causes are attributed entirely to what once took place in the mineral kingdom as such; the fact that man inhabits the earth is ignored. The belief is that even were man not present, everything would run a similar course, that the external reality would be the same—although, in fact, man has always been part of this external reality. The truth is that the earth is one whole, man himself being one of the active factors in the earth's evolution.—I will give you an example.

You know that our present epoch—thinking of it for the moment in the wider sense, as comprising the period since the great Atlantean catastrophe—was preceded by the Atlantean epoch itself, when the continents of Europe, Africa and America in their present form were not in existence. At that time there was one main continent on the earth—Atlantis as it is called—extending over the area that is now the Atlantic Ocean. You know too that at a certain period in this Atlantean evolution, immorality of a particular kind was rampant throughout the then civilised world. Human beings had far greater power over the forces of nature than they later possessed and employed these forces for evil purposes. Thus we can look back to an age of widespread immorality. And then came the great Atlantean catastrophe. The orthodox geologist will naturally trace this catastrophe to processes in the mineral kingdom; indeed it is a fact that one part of the earth subsided and another arose. But it will not occur to those who base their thinking on the principles of modern natural science to say to themselves that the deeds and activities of men were among the contributory causes.—Yet so it is.—In very truth the Atlantean catastrophe was the outcome of the deeds of men on the earth.

Outer, mineral causes are not alone responsible for these great catastrophic events that break in upon earth-existence. We must look for causes lying within the sphere of human actions and impulses. Man himself belongs to the chain of causative forces in earth-existence. Nor does this apply only to events of such magnitude but to what is happening all the time. Only the connection between what goes on within man and cosmic happenings which take effect in tellurian events, remains hidden, to begin with. In this respect the whole of our natural science amounts to a great, all-embracing illusion. For if you want to get at the real causes you will not discover them by studying the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms alone.

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Let me give you the following illustration of what comes into consideration here. We will approach it, so to speak, from the opposite side.—Here (X) is the centre of the earth.—When something takes place in the mineral kingdom, the plant kingdom or the animal kingdom, it is a matter of seeking the causes. The causes lie at certain points which are to be found everywhere. You can picture what I mean by thinking of the following.—In the region around Naples in Italy, you will find that the earth over a wide area will emit vapour if you take a piece of paper and set it alight. Vapours begin to rise from the ground beneath you. You will say: the force which drives up the vapours lies in the physical process generated by the lighting of the paper. In this case, the physical process is that by lighting the paper you rarify the air and because of the rarification of the air the vapours inside the earth press upwards. They are kept down by the normal air-pressure and this is diminished by setting light to the paper. If I merely want to give an example of effects of a purely mineral nature—such as these vapours arising out of the earth—I could say for the sake of illustration that here, and here (points in the diagram), a piece of paper is set alight. This shows you that the causes of the rising of the vapour do not lie below the soil, but above it. Now these points in the diagram—a, b, c, d, e, f do not represent pieces of paper that have been set alight; in this instance they represent something different. Imagine, to begin with, that each point on its own has no significance but that the significance lies in the system of points as a whole.—Do not think now of the pieces of lighted paper, but of something else which at the moment I will not specify. Something else is there as an active cause, above the surface of the earth; and these different causes do not work singly, but together. And now imagine that there are not six points only, but, let us say 1,500 million points [Note 1] all working together, producing a combined effect. These 1,500 million points are actually there. Each of you has within you what may be called the centre of gravity of your own physical structure. When man is awake, this centre of gravity lies just below the diaphragm; when he is asleep it lies a little lower. There are therefore some 1,500 million of these centres of gravity spread over the earth, producing a combined effect. And what issues from this combined effect is the actual cause of a great deal of what takes place in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms on the earth. It is a scientific fallacy to trace back to mineral causes the forces manifesting in air and water and in the mineral realm; in reality the causes are to be found within man.

This is a truth of which there is scarcely an inkling to-day. It is known to very, very few that the causes of processes active in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms lie within the organism of man. (This does not apply to all the forces working in these kingdoms of nature, but to a large proportion of them.) Within mankind lie the causes for what happens on earth. Therefore mineralogy, botany, zoology, cannot be cultivated truly without anthropology—without the study of man. Science tells us of physical, chemical and mechanical forces. These forces are intimately connected with the human will, with the force of human will that is concentrated in man's centre of gravity. If we speak of the earth with an eye to the truth of these matters, we must not follow the geologists in speaking of an earth in the abstract, but humanity must be accounted an integral part of the earth. These are the truths that reveal themselves on yonder side of the Threshold. Everything that can be known on this side of the Threshold belongs to the realm of the illusions of knowledge, not to the realm of truth.

At this point the question arises: What relation is there between the forces of will that are concentrated in man's centre of gravity, and the external, physical and chemical forces?—We are speaking, remember, of present-day humanity.—In normal life, this relation takes effect in the metabolic processes. When man takes into himself the substances of the outer world, it is his will that actually digests and works upon these substances. And if nothing else were in operation, then what is taken into the organism from outside would simply be destroyed. The human will has the power to dissolve and destroy all extraneous substances and forces; and the relation between man and the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms of nature to-day is such that his will is connected with the forces of dissolution and destruction inherent in our planet.

We could not live were this destruction not to take place—but for all that it is destruction. This must never be forgotten. And what are often described as unlawful magical practices are based essentially on the fact that certain human beings learn to employ their will wrongfully, in such a way that they do not confine the destructive forces to their normal operations within the organism but extend them over other human beings, deliberately and consciously applying the forces of destruction that are anchored in their will. That, quite obviously, is a practice that is never, under any circumstances, permissible.

Through our will we are connected with the earth's forces of decline. And if as human beings had only our forces of will, the earth would be condemned through us, through mankind, to sheer destruction. The prospect of the future would then be far from inspiring; it would be a vista of the gradual dissolution of the earth and its ultimate dispersal in cosmic space.—So much for the one pole in man's constitution.

But man is a twofold being. One pole is, as we have seen, connected with the destructive forces of our planet; the other pole—that of intelligence—is connected with the will by the bridge of feeling. But in his waking life, man's intelligence is of little account as far as the planet earth is concerned. During waking life we cannot really establish a true relationship to earth-existence through our intelligence. What I have told you in regard to the will happens while man is awake, although he is not conscious of it. If you see a rock crumbling away and ask where the actual causes of the crumbling lie, then you must look into the inner, organic nature of man himself. Strange as this will seem to the modern mind, it is indeed so. But as I said, the earth would face a sorry future if the other pole of man's nature were not there—the pole of the upbuilding forces. Just as the causes of all destruction lie in the will that is concentrated in man's centre of gravity, so the upbuilding forces lie in the sphere into which men pass during their sleep. From the time of falling asleep until that of waking, man is in a condition figuratively described by saying that with his “I” and astral body he is outside the physical body. But then he is entirely a being of soul-and-spirit, unfolding the forces that are in operation between falling asleep and waking. During this time he is connected, through these forces, with everything that builds up the earth-planet, everything that adds to the forces of destruction the constructive, upbuilding forces. If you did not go about the earth, the destructive forces actually proceeding from your will would not be working in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms. If you never went to sleep, the forces whereby the earth is continually upbuilt would not stream out of your intelligence. The constructive, upbuilding forces of the planet earth also lie in humanity itself: I do not say: in the individual human being—for I have expressly said that all these single causes form a collective whole. The upbuilding forces lie in mankind as a whole, actually in the pole of intelligence in man's being but not in his waking intelligence. Waking intelligence is really like a lifeless entity thrusting itself into earth-evolution. The intelligence that works, unconsciously to man, during his sleep—that is what builds up the earth-planet. By this I am only trying to explain that it is a fallacy to look outside the human being for the destructive and the constructive forces of our earth; you must look for them within the human being. Once you grasp this, what I am now going to say will not be unintelligible.

You look up to the stars, saying that something is streaming from them that can be perceived by man's sense-organs here on earth.—But what you behold when you gaze at the stars is not of the same nature as what you perceive on the earth in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms. In reality it proceeds from beings of intelligence and will whose life is bound up with those stars. The effects appear to be physical because the stars are at a distance. They are not in reality physical at all. What you actually see are the inter activities of beings of will and intelligence in the stars. I have already spoken to you of the ingenious description of the sun given by astrophysicists. But if it were possible to journey to the sun by some means of transport invented by a Jules Verne, it would be found with amazement that nothing of what was to be expected from these physical descriptions exists. The descriptions are merely a composite picture of solar phenomena. What we see is in reality the working of will and intelligence which at a distance appears as light. If an inhabitant of the Moon—supposing in this sense there were such a being—were to look at the earth, he would not detect its grassy or mineral surfaces but—also perceiving it as a light effect or something similar—he would detect what takes place around the centres of gravity of human bodies and also the effects of the conditions in which man lives between going to sleep and waking. That is what would actually be seen from the universe. Even the most perfect instrument would not enable the chairs, for instance, on which you are now sitting, to be seen; what would be seen is all that is taking place in the region of your centres of gravity and what would happen if you were suddenly to fall asleep—it is to be hoped that this would not happen in every case! But wherever it did happen, it would be perceived out in the universe.

So that to the outer universe, what takes place through human beings is the perceptible reality—not what surrounds man in earthly existence. A very common saying is that everything perceived with the senses is maya—the great illusion—no reality but simply appearance. Such an abstraction is of little account. It has meaning only when one enters into the concrete, as we have now been doing. To say glibly that the animal, plant and mineral worlds are maya means nothing. What is of value is the realisation that what you perceive outwardly depends fundamentally upon yourselves and that—not of course at each moment but in the course of mankind's evolution—you make yourselves an integral part of the chain of causes and effects.

Even when such a shattering truth is uttered—and I think it may well be shattering—it is not always seen in the aspect where it becomes of importance in life. Such a truth assumes importance only when we perceive its consequences. We are not physical beings only; we are moral—or maybe immoral—beings in earthly existence. What we do is determined by impulses of a moral nature.

Now just think with what bitter doubt modern thought is assailed in this domain.—Natural science provides a knowledge of the earthly that is confined to the connection between purely external causes and effects; and in this cycle of natural causes and effects, physical man too is involved. So it is alleged by external, abstract science which takes account of one aspect only of earthly existence.

The fact that moral impulses also light up in man is admitted but nothing is known about the connection between these moral impulses and what comes to pass in the round of external nature. Indeed the dilemma of modern philosophy is that the philosophers hear on the one hand from the scientists that everything is involved in a chain of natural causes and effects—and on the other hand have to admit that moral impulses light up in man. That is the reason why Kant wrote two “Critiques”: the Critique of Pure Reason, concerned with the relation of man to a purely natural course of things, and the Critique of Practical Reason where he puts forward his moral postulates—which in truth—if I may speak figuratively—hover in the air, come out of the blue and have no a priori relation with natural causes.

As long as man believes that what takes place in the external manifestations of nature can be traced only to similar manifestations, as long as he clings to this illusion, the intervention of moral impulses is something that remains separate and apart from the course of nature. Nearly everything that is discussed to-day lies under the shadow of this breach. In their thinking men cannot fuse the earthly round as such with the moral life of humanity. But as soon as you grasp something of what I have tried briefly to outline, you will be able to say: Yes, as man I am a unity, and moral impulses are alive within me. They live in what I am as a physical being. But as a physical human being I am fundamentally the cause—together with all mankind—of every physical happening.—The moral conduct and achievements of human beings on the earth are the real causes of what comes to pass in the course of earth-existence.

Natural history and natural science describe the earth in the way we find in text-books of geology, botany and so forth. What is said there seems entirely satisfactory according to the premises formed through modern education. But let us suppose that an inhabitant of Mars were to come down to the earth and observe it in the light of his premises.—I am not saying that such a thing could happen but merely trying to illustrate what I mean.—Suppose a being from Mars, having wandered dumbly about the earth were then to learn some human language, read some geology and thus discover what kind of ideas prevail concerning the processes and happenings on the earth.—He would say: But that is not all. By far the most important factor is ignored. For example, I have noticed crowds of students loitering about in their beer-houses, drinking and indulging their passions. Something is happening there: the human will is working in the metabolism. These are processes of which no mention is made in your books on physics and geology; they contain no reference to the fact that the course of earth-existence is also affected by whether the students drink or do not drink.—... That is what a being not entirely immersed in earthly ideas and prejudices would find lacking in the descriptions given by man himself of happenings on earth. For a being from Mars there would be no question but that moral impulses, pervading human deeds and the whole of human life, are part and parcel of the course of nature. According to modern preconceptions there is something inexorable in the play of nature, indeed pleasantly inexorable for materialistic thinkers. They imagine that the earth's course would be exactly the same were no human beings in existence; that whether they behave decently or not makes no fundamental difference or really alters anything. But that is not the case! The all-essential causes of what happens on the earth do not lie outside man; they lie within mankind. And if earthly consciousness is to expand to cosmic consciousness, humanity must realise that the earth—not over short but over long stretches of time—is made in its own likeness, in the likeness of humanity itself. There is no better means of lulling man to sleep than to impress upon him that he has no share in the course taken by earth-existence. This narrows down human responsibility to the single individual, the single personality.

The truth is that the responsibility for the course of earth-existence through ages of cosmic time, lies with humanity. Everyone must feel himself to be a member of humanity, the earth itself being the body for that humanity.

An individual may say to himself: For ten years I have given way to my passions, indulged my fancies and have thereby ruined my body.—With equal conviction he should be able to say: If earthly humanity follows impure moral impulses, then the body of the earth will be different from what it would be were the moral impulses pure.—The day-fly, because it lives for twenty-four hours only, has a view of the world differing entirely from that of man. The range of man's vision is not wide enough to perceive that what happens externally in the course of nature is not dependent upon purely natural causes. In regard to the present configuration of Europe, it is far more important to ask what manner of life prevailed among human beings in the civilised world two thousand years ago than to investigate the external mineral and plant structure of the earth. The destiny of our physical earth-planet in another two thousand years will not depend upon the present constitution of our mineral world, but upon what we do and allow to be done. With world-consciousness, human responsibility widens into world-responsibility. With such consciousness we feel as we look up to the starry heavens that we are responsible to this cosmic expanse, permeated and pervaded as it is by spirit—that we are responsible to this world for how we conduct the earth. We grow together with the cosmos in concrete reality when behind the phenomena we seek for the truth.

I so often tell you that we must learn to perceive the concrete realities of things for the most part taught as abstractions to-day. Nothing much is accomplished by adopting oriental traditions such as: the external world of the senses is maya. We must go much deeper if we are to arrive at the truth. Such abstractions do not carry us far, because in the form in which they have been handed down they are nothing but the sediment of a primeval wisdom that did not hover in abstractions but teemed with concrete realities which must be brought to light again through spiritual intuition and research. When you read in oriental literature of maya and of truth as its antithesis,do not imagine that what you read there to-day can be really intelligible to you. It is only a much later compilation of matters that were concrete realities to the ancient wisdom. We must get back to these concrete realities. Men think to-day that they have some understanding of cosmic processes when they assert that the external world of sense is maya.—But nothing can be understood unless one presses on to the underlying realities. The moment it is realised: we have not to ask how the present mineral world has developed out of the mineral processes of another age; we have rather to ask about what has been going on in mankind—at that moment the real meaning of the saying, “the outer world is maya”, becomes clear. Then we begin to perceive in man a reality far greater than is usually perceived.—And then the feeling of responsibility for earth-existence begins.

If you will try to get to the inner core of these things—and it must be by inward contemplation, not by means of the kind of intelligence employed in natural science—you will gradually find your way to the realisation that mankind is composed of free human beings. Nature does not, in truth, counteract our freedom, for as human beings we ourselves fashion the nature immediately surrounding us. It is only in its partial manifestations that nature counteracts our freedom. Nature counteracts our freedom to an extent no greater than if—to give an example—you are stretching out your hand and someone else takes hold of it and checks the movement. You will not deny freedom of will simply because someone else checks a movement. As men of the present day we are checked in many respects because of some action of our predecessors that is only now taking effect. But at all events it was an action of men.—What men? Not anyone against whom we can turn with reproach, for we ourselves were the men who, in earlier earthly lives, brought about the conditions obtaining to-day.

We must not confine ourselves to the mere mention of repeated earthly lives but think of the connection between them in such a way that even in external nature we perceive the effects of causes we ourselves laid down in earlier lives. Naturally, in reference to the single, individual human being, we must speak of contributory causes only, for in all these things, as I have said, it is a matter of the collective interworking of men on the earth. No one should, for that reason, exclude himself as an individual, for each of us has his share in what is brought about by humanity as a whole and then comes to expression in what constitutes the body for the whole of earthly humanity in its onflowing life.

I have been endeavouring to give you an idea of how a spiritual scientist must regard the statements made in ordinary scientific text-books.—Suppose I were to draw a series of figures:

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And now suppose some creature who had never lived in the world of men were to crawl out of the earth and, having some rudiments of arithmetical knowledge were to look at the figures and say: First figure, second figure, third figure. The third is the effect of the second and the second the effect of the first. Effect of the first figure—a triangle; effect of the second—a circle.—This creature would then be combining cause and effect. But it would be a fallacy, for I have drawn each figure separately. In reality the one is independent of the other. It only appears to be dependent to this creature who associates what comes first with what follows, as if the one were the outcome of the other. This, approximately, is how the geologist describes the process of the earth: Diluvial epoch, Tertiary epoch, Quarternary epoch, and so on. But this is no more true than the statement that the circle is the outcome, the effect of the triangle, or the triangle the effect of the rectangular figure. The configurations of the earth are brought about autonomously—through the deeds of earthly humanity, including the mysterious workings of the intelligence during the periods of sleep when man is outside his physical body.

This shows you that the descriptions given by external science are very largely illusion—maya. But merely to speak about maya is of little account. To the assertion that the external world is maya we must be able to reply by stating where the actual causes lie. These causes are hidden to a great extent from man's powers of cognition. The part played by mankind in shaping earth-existence cannot be fathomed by means of external science but only by an inner science. My book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment speaks of man's inner activity between the time of going to sleep and waking. This can be revealed by knowledge that reaches down to the sphere of the will. Man knows nothing of the connection between the will and the outer world for the processes of the will are hidden and concealed. He does not know what is really going on when by lifting his hand he sets in operation a process of will; nor does he know that this process continues and has an effect in the whole course of earth-existence.

This is indicated in the scene in my Mystery Play, The Portal of Initiation, where the actions of Capesius and Strader have their outcome in cosmic manifestations—in thunder and lightning. It is, of course, a pictorial representation, but the picture contains a deeper truth; it is not phantasy but actual truth. For a fairly long period in evolution, truths of this kind have been voiced only by true poets whose phantasy must always be perception of super-sensible processes.

This is very little understood by modern man who likes to relegate poetry, indeed all art, to a place separate and apart from external reality. He feels relieved not to be asked to see in poetry anything more than phantasy. True poetry, true art, is of course, no more than a reflection of super-sensible truth—but a reflection it is. Even if the poet is not himself conscious of the super-sensible happenings, if his soul is linked with the cosmos, if he has not been torn away from the cosmos by materialistic education, he gives utterances to super-sensible truths, in spite of having to express them in pictures drawn from the world of sense.

Many examples of this are contained in the second part of Goethe's Faust, where as I have shown in the case of particular passages, the imagery has a direct relation with super-sensible processes. [Note 2] The development of art in recent centuries affords evidence of what I have been saying.—Take any picture painted by no means very long ago, and you will find that as a rule, landscape is given very secondary importance. The painting of landscape has come into prominence only since the last three to five centuries. Earlier than that you will find that landscape takes second place; it is the world of man that is brought to the forefront because the consciousness still survived that in regard to objective processes of earth-existence the world of man is much more important than the landscape—which is but the effect of the world of man. In the very birth of preference for landscape there lies, in the sphere of art, the parallel phenomenon of the birth of the materialistic trend of mind—consisting in the belief that landscape and what it represents has an existence of its own, entirely apart from man. But the truth is quite the reverse. Were some inhabitant of Mars to come down to the earth he would certainly be able to see meaning in Leonardo da Vinci's “Last Supper”, but not in paintings of landscapes. He would see landscapes—including painted landscapes—and the whole configuration of the earth quite differently and with his particular organ of sense could not fathom their meaning.—Please remember that I am saying these things merely in order to illustrate hypothetically what I want to convey.

So you see, the saying: “the external world is maya” cannot be fully understood without entering into the concrete realities. But to do this we must relate ourselves intimately with earth-existence as a whole, know ourselves to be an integral part of it. And then we must grasp the thought that there can be external and apparent realities which are not the truth, not the true realities. If you have a rose in your room, it is an apparent reality only, for the rose as it is in front of you there, cannot be the reality. It can be true reality only while it is growing on the rose-tree, united with the roots which in turn are united with the earth. The earth as described by the geologists is as little a true reality as a plucked rose is a reality.

Spiritual science endeavours never to halt at the untrue reality, but always to seek what must be added, in order to have the whole, true reality. The meagre sense of reality prevailing in our present civilisation expresses itself in the very fact that every external manifestation is taken as reality. But there is reality only in what lies before one as an integrated whole. The earth by itself, without man, is no more a true reality than the rose plucked from the rose-tree.—These things must be pondered and worked upon; they must not remain theories but pass over into our feelings. We must feel ourselves members of the whole earth. It is of importance again and again to call up the thought: this finger on my hand has true reality only as long as it is part of my organism; if it is cut off it no longer has true reality.—Similarly, man has no true reality apart from the earth, nor has the earth without mankind. It is an unreal concept when the modern scientific investigator thinks, according to his premises, that earth-evolution would run the same course if humanity were not there. I recently showed you that it would not be so, by telling you that the bodies laid aside by human beings at death become a leaven in earth-evolution and that if no human bodies—either by burial or cremation—became part of the earth, the whole course of physical happenings would be other than it is in consequence of these bodies having been received into the earth.

In the lecture to-day I wanted to speak in greater detail of the connection between the two poles of will and intelligence in man and his cosmic environment.

Notes:

Note 1. Representing, approximately, the total population of the earth.

Note 2. Twenty-eight lectures given in the year 1915. Geisteswissenschaftliche Erläuterungen zu Goethe's Faust. [This is a reference to GA#'s 272 and 273: Spiritual Scientific Note on Goethe's Faust, Volumes I (15 lectures) and II (13 lectures), most of which are yet untranslated. – e.Ed.]

We have seen how the study of the conditions of soul of the human being leads us into the spaces, as it were, between physical body, etheric body, astral body, and I; the study of the spiritual conditions in the human being, however, leads us beyond the phenomenon of the human being as he is here in his life between birth and death out into the vast spiritual universe. One might say that insofar as the human being is spirit he stands absolutely in relation to the whole spiritual universe. Hence it is only in this connection with the entire universe that we can study what takes place in the human being as spiritual events. The soul element is, so to speak, man's intimate inner life, taking its course in a threefold form in such a way that the thinking aspect is situated between physical body and etheric body, the feeling aspect between etheric body and astral body, and the aspect of willing between astral body and the I. We therefore remain in our study of the soul element entirely within the human being. As soon as we approach the actual spiritual events, however, we must leave the human being as he usually confronts us as a self-contained being in the world between birth and death.

Now we know—and eight days ago we were speaking of this from another viewpoint—that when we first ascend into the spiritual we come to beings who are arranged above the human being in the same way as the human being has his place above the animal, plant, and mineral realms. As we ascend we therefore have—names add nothing to the matter—the angeloi or angelic beings, the archangeloi or arch-angelic beings, and the archai or primal beings, time spirits. We have already characterized from various points of view these beings who constitute the realm we encounter when we perceive the position of human beings in regard to the spiritual. The beings whom we designate as angeloi or angels are those who have the strongest relationship to the individual, to the single human being. The individual human being actually has a relationship to the hierarchy immediately above him such that he in a way—this is not expressed very exactly, but it can be said in the way that it is commonly expressed—develops a certain relationship to such an angelic being.

Those that then make up the second hierarchy above him are the archangels. We can say of them that among their functions is that which works as folk spirit, that which therefore embraces groups of those belonging together as a people, although here there are all possible gradations.

When finally we ascend higher, to the archai, we have the guiding beings throughout certain epochs of time, beyond the differentiations among peoples. These are certainly not the only functions, let us say, of these beings, but to begin with we receive certain conceptions if we keep to these particular functions that they perform.

Just as we can make man's physical life on earth comprehensible by asking ourselves what kind of relationship the human being has to the animal organization, to the plant organization, and to the mineral organization, so we must also ask ourselves, in order to learn what man is as a spiritual being, what kind of relationship he has to these ascending stages of beings in the spiritual.

For this we must proceed in the following way. Let us picture from certain viewpoints the way in which the human being goes through the portal of death. We know that in this age of earthly evolution that encompasses many years we live as human beings in such a way that there are present in the ordinary consciousness the laws underlying the mineral realm. From birth to death man fills himself, we might say, with everything that makes the mineral realm in a certain sense comprehensible, and he has a feeling that with the concepts and ideas at his disposal he is able to understand the mineral realm.

It is not the same where the plant realm is concerned. You know that science stops short on coming to the plant realm; at best it holds to the ideal that the complicated combination of the plant cells, of living cells generally, will one day be explicable in their structure. As I have explained to you, this is beginning completely at the wrong end, because the structure of the plant, or of living cells generally, is not distinguished by being a particularly complicated structure but by the chemical structure passing into chaos. Man, however, does not get beyond the concepts of the mineral realm. With his mineral concepts he comes still less—if I may venture to say so—to what concerns the animal realm or even to self-knowledge. All this must be given by spiritual-scientific investigations. The human being thus adopts a mineral consciousness, let us call it, that is, a consciousness adapted to the mineral realm. The human being carries the outcome of this consciousness, the weaving of which takes place between birth and death, with him through death. When he therefore goes through the portal of death and lives in the spiritual realm itself, he can journey through his further existence-with what became of this consciousness.

There is essentially something else, however, that pushes up into this consciousness. What penetrates up into this mineral consciousness, in spite of not belonging to it, what colors it, is the moral consciousness. This is what arises out of all the processes of consciousness connected to our will impulses, to our conduct. What we feel as satisfaction about this or that, what we feel as remorse, as reproach and the like, all this gives color, as it were, to our mineral consciousness and is something that the human being takes with him through the portal of death. One can therefore say that the human being goes through the portal of death with a mineral consciousness colored by moral experience; with what becomes of this consciousness, he then lives further in the spiritual realm.

Man not only understands the mineral world through this mineral consciousness, but through this mineral consciousness he develops his relationship to the being from the hierarchy of the angels, therefore to that being to whom he wishes to turn as the nearest to his individual development. When the human being has gone through the portal of death, it is a question of how far, through the consequences of his mineral consciousness, he can preserve intact his relationship to this angel being. He can do this only in accordance with what from the moral side has colored this mineral consciousness, for after death this mineral consciousness strives, as it were, to spread itself out in the world. It strives to become cosmic, to adapt itself to the whole universe; it strives to get beyond what is individual.

We can also say that in life between birth and death man is nearest to the angel being when he is living in the condition out of which dreams arise, which certainly also have something to do with his individual being, and which on the one hand deny and on the other hand hold fast to this mineral-thought being. Man would be unable to find even the subconscious relationship to the hierarchy of the angels were not this mineral consciousness colored by the conditions that in a certain sense he sleeps through but that reach up out of the sleeping condition and live out their life in the world of dreams. The dream itself, though in its outlines it does not adhere to outer sense reality and often actually denies contact with it, is nevertheless woven out of the same substance as the world of thoughts is woven between birth and death. In going through the portal of death, therefore, in order to maintain the relationship to his angel being, the human being takes with him what he has developed in himself within his mineral consciousness.

Now in the way we live today in humanity's present epoch man—especially when he reckons himself to be among the most enlightened—penetrates but little with his moral experience into what he possesses as mineral consciousness. On the contrary, he makes every possible effort to hold this mineral consciousness quite apart from the moral sphere. He would like at least to set up these two worlds; on the one hand he would like to study what ultimately may be comprehended in the realm of mineral nature, and the mineral nature in the plant, animal, and human realms, and would then like to study the moral element as something surging up from his inner being. It is not harmonious with the spirit of the time to think of what lives in nature as being at the same time permeated with moral impulses. There yawns an abyss between what is of a moral and what is of a mineral nature. The human being does not easily find the bridge to incorporate the moral into the mineral nature. I have often drawn attention to how man pictures the evolution of the earth to be a purely mineral affair, from the content of the Kant-Laplace theory up to the mineral nature of modern thinking, and how man eliminates everything in the way of moral feeling. It thus comes about that the human being is able to develop only an extremely slight relationship to the being of the angeloi; in our present age he cannot unite himself intimately with his angel being, to use an ordinary expression.

If the mineral consciousness were completely separated from moral coloring, then at what I call the Midnight Hour of Existence man would face the danger of entirely losing the necessary connection with his angel being. I say he would face the danger. Today only a small number of people face this danger, but if a spiritual deepening of the whole evolution of humanity on earth does not come about, a deepening of human thinking, human feeling, and human willing, then what lives as a danger may be realized. Then there would be countless human beings who, on approaching the Midnight Hour of Existence between death and a new birth, would have to sever the relationship to their angel beings. It is true that the angel being would always keep the relationship on his part, but it would remain one-sided, from his side to the human being. The human being between death and a new birth would not be able to reciprocate adequately. We must be perfectly clear that in our modern civilization, hastening as it is toward materialism, the human being injures his relationship to his angel being, so that this relationship becomes ever looser.

Just when the human being is approaching the Midnight Hour of Existence, however, he must enter into relationship to the archangelic beings through the angel being. Should this relationship be of such a nature—as it may well be when man is living in the spiritual world—that it not only comes from the side of the angel being to humanity but can be reciprocated by the human being, then man must absorb a spiritual content, which means that he must color his moral impulses religiously.

If the present trend of evolution persists, the human being of today faces the danger of his connection with the angel being becoming so slight that he cannot form any inner relationship to the archangelic being. The archangel, however, participates in bringing man back into physical life. This archangelic being is particularly involved in building up the forces that bring man back into the community of a certain people.

When human beings live inwardly unspiritually—as has been the case for centuries—the relationship of the archangel to the human beings develops one-sidedly, and then man does not grow into his people with the inner soul being, but he is inscribed from outside, as it were, by means of the world order, into the people that the archangel is assigned to guide. One does not arrive at an understanding of our present age, which may be characterized by the one-sided way in which the peoples are cultivated, until one knows that this actually may be attributed to the souls who have recently come down to earthly existence having a loose relationship to their angel beings and by reason of this having no inner relationship to the archangelic being—thus growing into their people only from without. The people thus remains in them as an impulse from outside, and it is only through outer impulses that human beings take their place within a people, through all sorts of impulses inclining toward chauvinism. He who stands within his people with soul—and this is the case with very few people today—will be unable to develop in the direction of chauvinism, of one-sided nationalism; he takes up the fruitful forces within the people and develops these, makes these individual. He will not boast of his people in a one-sided way. He will let his people flow into his being as color, as it were, flow into his human manifestations, but will not parade this outwardly, and particularly not in an outwardly hostile attitude toward others.

The fact that today it is exactly this that provides the keynote for world politics—that all relations built on peoples create such difficulties today for human evolution—all this rests entirely on what I have been indicating. If the bond that begins in the-Midnight Hour of Existence—before and after this, throughout long periods—cannot be ensouled by one's taking the appropriate religious inwardness through the portal of death—a religious feeling that is spiritual and not merely a matter of lip service—then the archangel is able to work only on what is plant-like in the cosmos and what as plant-like nature is imparted to the human being. Through very subconscious forces connected with his plant nature, which means with that which is placed in him by his breathing condition and is modified by all that has to do with conditions of language, by everything, therefore, that in language pushes in a plant-like way into the human organism, through all this man can be guided only by his archangel. It then happens that when the human being is born, when he grows as a child, he grows into his language in a more-or-less outer way. Had he been able to find the relationship, the inner relationship of soul, to his archangel through his angel, he would then have grown with his soul into all that had to do with his language, he would have understood the genius of the language, not merely what constitutes the outer mechanical aspect of it.

Today, however, we can see how strongly it is the case that in many respects the human being is an imprint of the mechanical in his language, so that actually he does not bear the element of language as a keynote in his entire being but receives an exact imprint of it. One can see quite clearly how the facial expression itself is an expression of the element of language. What confronts us in the people, what confronts us as their unique, national physiognomy, comes to man from the archangels in a completely outer way.

What takes place outwardly in humanity, insofar as it works into the spiritual of the human being, actually can be explained only through the kind of study we pursue in an anthroposophical spiritual science. All modern anthropology and things of that kind are actually what might be called a mere playing with terminology. In what is written today by anthropologists or their kind about the configuration of humanity on the earth, about the differentiation of humanity, we really in many respects have nothing to orient us, no guiding viewpoint, because what is there understood as concept is merely the classification of outer characteristics. One could just as well redistribute the whole picture. A real content streams into the matter only if it is studied spiritually. Then, however, one must not shrink back if in this study real, concrete spiritual beings arise.

One sees from this that only spiritual deepening can heal the damages of our modern age. The damages of today, insofar as they confront us in public life, are founded on the loose relationship of the human being to his angel and the consequent loose bond with the archangel, who is thus able to have an influence only from outside.

When a human being between death and a new birth undergoes his further evolution, which after the Midnight Hour of Existence leads him once more into physical, earthly life, he enters especially the realm of the archai, of the primal spirits. These archai, these primal spirits, in the present cosmic evolution have to do with leading the human being back into the earthly limits of his being.

When the human being passes through the portal of death his further life takes its course in such a way that he experiences to begin with the consequences of his mineral consciousness with its moral coloring—thereby expanding himself, as it were, over the world. Then, after the Midnight Hour of Existence, he draws himself together again. First he is led over into the plant element, which is incorporated into him. The more nearly he approaches earthly life, the more he draws himself together, so that he is able to be born once more as a being enclosed in his skin.

What must happen to a human being when he enters the realm of the archai is an incorporating, a densification, of the plant element into the animal element. In passing through the Midnight Hour of Existence, a man acquires first the forces—naturally not the organs but first the forces—which determine his breathing and also the differentiated breathing. The concentration of these forces into the actual forces of the organs comes about only after the Midnight Hour of Existence, comes about only in the realm of the archai. Man becomes, so to speak, ever more and more human. The fact is, however, that this cosmic activity exercised upon the human being as forces coming from the archai actually organizes him in such a way that the organs tend toward the animal structure. If we perceive the human being in his relationship to the cosmos we find that while the human being is striving away from the Midnight Hour of Existence toward a new life on earth he is subject to cosmic laws, just as here on earth he is subject to earthly laws. We may say the following: the human being is defined from the immeasurable expanses of the universe, in that he draws himself together more and more. Up to the Midnight Hour of Existence there is, as it were, an expansion of man, by means of his mineral consciousness, into the breadths of the universe (see drawing, arrows), into the immeasurable breadth of the universe. When the Midnight Hour of Existence arrives (see drawing, blue) those forces incorporate themselves into the human being that work in him as plantlike forces. Man returns from this Midnight Hour of Existence in order to confine himself within the appropriate limits for earthly life (arrows going in). This Midnight Hour of Existence is altogether a tremendously significant moment in human evolution.

While after his death a human being lives on into the cosmos, he becomes increasingly one with the world. He hardly distinguishes himself from the world. Expressing myself figuratively—naturally out in the cosmos we cannot speak of physical organs, but you will understand me if I present this to you in images taken from physical existence—I might say: man learns, as it were, how the eye grows together with the light and then no longer distinguishes the eye from the light, or the sound from the ear. By expanding himself out into the cosmic breadths he grows together with the universe.

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Having passed the Midnight Hour of Existence, where he begins to draw himself together in order to become once more a being with limits, there dawns in him a kind of objective conception: this is not the world, this is the human being. A consciousness grows more and more intense in the human being—a consciousness that is most intense when the human being returns into earthly life. As here on earth, however, the content of our consciousness is the minerals, the plants, the animals, the mountains, rivers, clouds, the stars, sun, and moon, so on our way back to the earth the being of man is the main conception.

It is really so that if we take the seemingly quite complicated world that lies outside our skin, with all that is within it, if we take the world with its soul and spiritual elements, it is indeed most complicated; what lies within our skin, however, is just as complicated and is different from the world outside only in size, but the size is not important. Between birth and death our world is what lies outside our skin; what is within we cannot really observe except in what during life man certainly is not, namely, the corpse. From the Midnight Hour of Existence, however, until the next life on earth, the human world, the inner being of man, is his body, soul, and spirit (see drawing, right, blue). There man is, as it were, the world. Up to the Midnight Hour of Existence we gradually lose the world as we know it through the mineral consciousness; we lose it by living into the world as though it were our self, our whole, all-embracing self, so that we no longer distinguish between our self and the world. In returning, our world becomes the human being. We do not behold the stars, we behold the membering of the human limbs; we do not behold all that is contained in the universe, let us say, between stars and earth, we behold what is within the human organization, insofar as it is formed out of spirit and soul. We behold the human being, and what we thus behold is what leads us to our renewed existence on earth. We behold the human being receiving his form.

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In the time of the Midnight Hour of Existence we live in the human being who is forming himself in accordance with the plant-like. When we come into the region of the archai we live in what forms the organs of the human being, in the sense of animal forces. I have said that just as between birth and death we are dependent on what works on us from the earth, so we are dependent, in that we are outside in the universe, on what is beyond the earthly—it is no longer a question of space, but naturally we can only present this in spatial terms. The moment we pass through the archai, we can express the laws that work in us in the sense of the universe—in the same way, as during our life here in an earthly community we test the laws of the earth by the laws of modern physics—we can express these laws by relating ourselves to Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, and so on.

By relating the positions of the sun to these stars, to the heaven of the fixed stars in general, in the constellations of the sun with this heaven of fixed stars we have the laws that prevail in the realm of the will of the archai. The will that prevails there, which permeates these laws, is the will of the archai.

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If we were to look outside for natural laws corresponding to our natural laws, as natural laws correspond to us here on earth during earthly existence, we would have to look to these constellations of the stars. We remain a long time in the kingdom where we are dependent on the star constellations—though not more dependent than we are dependent here on earth on natural laws where our will works also, which is something higher than the laws of nature. There too we may not speak of the cosmos in the sense of a cosmic law that works with mechanical necessity. What we find in the constellations of the stars, however, is the expression, as it were, the image, of these laws that work upon us there. As formerly, when we were in the kingdom of the archangeloi, the laws of the plant-like worked upon us, so now there work upon us the laws holding good in the animal realms.

When these things are found again through spiritual science, one comes upon the tremendously significant fact that the people in ancient times who used to acquire knowledge from certain dreamlike visions of the universe, which were then lost, that these people really showed a touch of atavistic genius, one could say, in naming this picture circle, which represented for them the heaven of the fixed stars, the Zodiac (Tierkreis, “animal circle”). I can only think that our new science of the spirit, which shows us these things again, is led from a completely different basis to an understanding of what was once grasped in a dimly sensed knowledge. It is tremendously moving when one finds the teaching about the Zodiac and its influence on the human being preserved from ancient times and when one then—quite apart from what has been preserved—with the means at the disposal of present-day spiritual science, comes once more to connect knowledge with the constellations of the sun, with the zodiacal signs, in other words, with the heaven of the fixed stars.

It is this that links the more recent science of the spirit so closely to the wisdom of the ancients. Between our time, when we wish to make spiritual science our quest, and this period when the wisdom of the ancients held sway, we have an age that was indeed necessary for the striving after human freedom; this age basically, however, was an age of darkness.

We thus come into the realm of the archai and receive and incorporate into us that which is our animal nature. What is our animal nature? Our animal nature is above all what gives us our organs, which even in number are very similar to the organs of the higher animals. Before we approach birth, however, we are stripped—if I may so express it—of the realm of the Zodiac and enter the realm of the planets—Saturn, Jupiter, and so on. In entering the realm of the planets, and thus in coming nearer to the earth, nearer the point of time when we take on the boundaries of our human form, what is incorporated into us out of cosmic law as the animal nature is given its direction, if I may express it in this way. Before we sink down into the planetary system, and therefore into the forces of the planetary system, our vertebral column, for example, has not taken on a direction away from the earth, which would raise the head aloft. We are more subject to the directional forces governing the posture of the animal. Everything, for example, that designs the hands as the organ of our soul element, not only as an organ for grasping or for walking—what makes of them organs that can act freely out of the impulses of the soul element, all this we owe to this planetary influence. All that helps us to be truly human, right into the lowest stages of our animal organization, we have by virtue of the constellations of the moon with the rest of the planets.

We are made human, therefore, as we return through the planetary system. I told you that man himself, man as he forms himself, is the world that is living in our consciousness during our return journey from the Midnight Hour of Existence. We also see how at first everything is present in him that ultimately pulsates in rhythm with the animal forces. We live through this in such a way that we actually experience a kind of decline, a kind of icy process. All this, however, is loosened on our entering the planetary realm, and this first forms the cosmic world, which we see as the human world, the world represented by the earthly human being who Wrests himself away from the animal element, who grows out of the animal element. All this now fills us; it becomes the content of our consciousness. We carry in us as a system of forces that which the cosmos has given us.

Thus we descend soul-spiritually from the spiritual worlds. We have lived through the worlds in which we were in direct touch, stood in connection with, angels, archangels, archai. We descend as man. It is true, however, that if, in the way characterized, we have failed to establish an intimate relationship to our angel being, we have difficulties when penetrating into the planetary region, because we have been unable to make any divine-spiritual connection with the world of the archai. Outwardly we become incorporated into a people. The archai are then obliged to work into us, as it were, only from outside. Through this we are given a definite place on the earth, for all the forces of the archai tend toward that end. The archangels give us our place among a people and our particular place within this people is then determined by the archai. Not imbued with soul and spirit, however, we grow in an outer, mechanical way into this environment.

This is a characterization of our modern age—that the human being no longer has that inner relationship, that intimate inner relationship, that he had to his environment in more ancient times, when he grew into this immediate environment also with his soul. This is still maintained at best in a caricaturish way—as a caricature, I repeat—when today, even if it is already coming to an end, children perhaps grow up in some particular castle after previously having been attracted to their ancestors. Here we will have a relationship that in earlier ages had to do with the soul element. Today a human being is pressed into his environment in such a way that he basically has little inner relationship to the place in which he finds himself, to which his karma takes him in an entirely outer way, so that he feels his whole placement into physical existence as something external to him.

When man's being is formed through education and life in such a way that he is filled with soul, filled with spirit, and comes to a spiritual conception of the world, he will then carry this through life between death and a new birth so that he does not lose the inner connection with his angel, so that through his archangel his soul is carried into his particular people, and so that he is not placed in a merely outer way into his immediate existence by the world of the archai. He should rather be able to absorb once again into his animal organization something that he experiences in such a way that he says: there is a deep significance in the fact that just from this place where my consciousness first gradually awakens, where my education is carried on—that just from this place I am to unfold my activity in the world. This is certainly something that should lead us to bring about reform in education, so that the human being once more feels that from the place where he is educated he takes something with him that gives him his mission in the world. When this is so, a human being grows beyond the merely outer realm of the archai. He will experience the forces directing human beings in a way that is permeated by soul and spirit, and he will grow into his new life in a way different from what is frequently the case today.

What happens, then, when the human being enters a new earthly life? His consciousness is filled with the way in which he is building himself up from within as a human being. He is filled with a world that he beholds, a world of activity, not a mere world of thought. As I have already mentioned, after the Midnight Hour of Existence this world gradually takes on the tendency of the will toward being human, and the human being immerses himself into what is offered him through heredity in the generations, through the substance he receives from his ancestors. Into this he immerses himself. He envelops himself with the physical sheath; he enters the physical world. On observing the human being spiritually, we can actually find out about the content of the soul element when he is immersing himself in a new life in physical existence.

Of all the realms lived through by the human being between death and a new birth it is natural that a human being comes into the closest relationship to the angeloi, archangeloi, archai, but these things stand in further relationship to the higher hierarchies. Between death and a new birth a human being thus pursues his course through a realm in which his relationship to that realm depends on what he carries through the portal of death. The extent to which he has succeeded in permeating with his mineral consciousness that which as spirit wishes to rise out of the depths of his being determines to what extent he can become intimate with his angel being. By being able to be intimate in this way with his angel being, however, he grows into the world of the archangeloi, so that knowing, as it were, experiencing their forces out of himself, he can consciously reciprocate and proceed further, so as to become the individualized being he must gradually become if the world is to move toward its ascent and not its decline.

It is perfectly possible to give from the most varied points of view a deeply significant description of this life between death and a new birth. One point of view is to be found in the lecture course I held in 1914 at Vienna;⁷ today I have been developing another point of view for you. All these points of view are intended to lead to increasing knowledge of the human being from his spiritual aspect. Those who are unwilling to explore a whole spiritual world in this way will never be able to grasp the spiritual in man himself. Just as we must go into the spaces between physical body, etheric body, astral body, and I in order to penetrate the soul element in its objective nature, so we must proceed out of the human being into the spiritual world to study his relationship to this spiritual world. Then we discover what actually weaves and lives in the human being as the spiritual. It is only the love of comfort today that makes man speak of the spirit in general terms. We must become capable of speaking about the spirit in all its particulars, just as we do of nature. Then there will arise a real human knowledge; as man needs it, the primeval saying of truth will be fulfilled, the saying that sheds its light from ancient Greece, the fulfillment of which must continue to be striven for by the human being—the truthful saying, “Know thyself.”

Self-knowledge is knowledge of the world, and world knowledge is knowledge of self, for if we are living between birth and death, the stars, the sun, the moon, mountains, valleys, rivers, and the plants, animals, and minerals are our world, and what lives within our human boundaries is what we are. If we are living between death and a new birth, then we are what is concealed as the spiritual behind sun, moon, and stars, behind mountains and rivers, and our outer world is then the inner being of man. World and man alternate rhythmically, the human being living both physically and spiritually. For the human being here on earth the world is what is outside. For the human being between death and a new birth the world is what is within. Hence it is a question only of alternating through the times for man to be able to say that, in the most real sense, knowledge of man is knowledge of the world; knowledge of the world is knowledge of man.

• 7 . Inneres Wesen des Menschen und Leben zwischen Tod und neuer Geburt, Vienna 1914, Bibl.-Nr. 153.

We have been considering the human being in relation to the cosmos. To people who do not know anything beyond the present-day way of looking at things it must seem rather absurd to hear of a link being made between the essential nature of the human being and the essential nature of the cosmos, and I am certain that the majority of people will consider this to be quite unscientific. Yet when we think of the spiritual streams of today there is an urgent need to draw attention to exactly the kind of thing we have been considering and to do so quite energetically. For these things may fairly be said to be entirely in line with modern thinking. The problem is, modern thinkers are rejecting them with great vehemence, which is doing untold harm to the life of mind and spirit.

To begin with, we’ll sum up what I have been presenting in recent lectures. We have been considering the human form as the outcome of something the causes of which must be looked for among the fixed stars, and particularly the constellations of the zodiac as their representatives. We found that to understand the human form we must first of all look to the zodiac; its twelve constellations make it possible for us to understand the human form in every detail.

To understand the levels of human life we must look to the planetary system for the elements which will enable us to do so.

We then moved on from understanding the levels of life to understanding the soul principle. There we had to go to the human being himself, to the form he has been given and to that which lives in him. We also looked at the thinking, feeling and will aspects of the inner life in relation to the human form and the levels of life. Yesterday we attempted to look for the element of mind and spirit in the inner life. With the soul principle we move from the cosmic periphery to life on earth as such—that is, if we consider the soul principle during life between birth and death. We are able to approach it by considering its true relationship to the human form and to human life.

Yesterday we found that the spirit, which human beings only experience in images, has to be looked for in the sphere of the soul. If I may put it like this, we are coming down to earth from heaven. To consider the human form we have to go as far as the fixed stars; to consider human life, we need to go to the sphere of the planets; to consider the human soul in its relationships between birth and death, we must first of all descend to earth. Thus the human being becomes a whole for us in his relationship to the cosmos.

Now if we really appreciate all this, we shall be able on the basis of it to draw the borderline between animal and human nature. The way it may be done is as follows. If we consider the principle which can be understood in relation to the zodiac and how it is in humans and in animals, a difference emerges. But to see the whole of it we need to consider how the zodiac, the planetary sphere and the earth, with everything presented in yesterday’s lecture, act on human beings and on animals. Outside the human being the physical world does not take the form it does in the human body. We find it in the forms of the mineral world, a world very different from the human physical body. This is because in the human being the physical principle is clothed in an etheric and an astral principle and in I nature, all of which change the physical principle, adapting it to suit their needs. In the physical world outside the human being we see the physical principle as it presents itself when not imbued with etheric, astral and I nature.

The inherent form principle of the mineral is the crystal, a polyhedral form.

To grasp this form we must first of all consider the physical matter which has developed out of the forces which are active in the mineral sphere. We have to visualize that in an elongated mineral specific forces act in this direction to elongate the mineral (see crystal on the right). The forces acting in this direction (horizontal line in the centre) are perhaps less powerful, or we may say they act to make the mineral more slender in this direction, and so on. In short, in order to talk about minerals at all, we have to visualize these forces being at specific angles to each other, acting in specific directions, irrespective of whether they come from inside or outside. And above all we have to visualize these forces as existing in the universe, at least to the point where they take effect in the sphere of the earth.

Being effective, they must also have an effect on the human physical body, which means it, too, must have the inherent tendency to become polyhedral. It does not actually become polyhedral because it still has its ether body and astral body which do not allow the human being to turn into a cube, octahedron, tetrahedron, icosahedron, and so on. The tendency is there, however, and it would be fair to say: In so far as human beings are physical beings, they tend towards becoming polyhedral. So if you are glad that you do not have to walk around as a cube, a tetrahedron or octahedron, the reason is that the powers of the astral and ether bodies act against the forces—octahedral, cubic, or whatever—inside you.

Now we are not only a physical body but also have an ether body. Through it we are in essence at one with the plant world. Through the physical body we represent the mineral, or physical, world around us, through the ether body the plant world around us.

Plants are also part of the physical world and therefore have the tendency to be polyhedral, but they add to it a tendency to be spherical. Circumstances may occasionally cause minerals to occur in spherical form, but this is not their true form. There has to be scree, or something of that kind, if a mineral is to be spherical.

In plants, every single cell seeks to achieve spherical form; in humans only the head goes a little in that direction. We owe this spherical form essentially to plant nature. The fact that not all plants are spherical is in the first place due to their having to fight against polyhedral form, which has its own outcome, and secondly to the plant form having also to fight against a cosmic, astral principle. You will remember from earlier lectures that a cosmic, astral principle presses down on the plant from above. All this modifies the spherical form. You also get spheres imposed on spheres. But the essential plant form is a sphere.

Seeking to achieve spherical form the plant assumes the form of the earth itself. As you know, the earth is a sphere in the cosmos, and so is every drop of water. Only the mineral parts of the earth are polyhedral. As a whole, the earth is spherical. The plant, or the life principle, therefore seeks to attain to the spherical form and in doing so is really trying to recreate the form of the earth.

Let us now go higher and consider what the human being is because of the astral body. Here the human being is something representing the animal nature found in the animal world. In the physical, mineral nature of man we look for the polyhedral form, in human plant nature for the spherical form which reflects the planet earth (Fig. 28). Animal nature can be understood if we do not stop at the spherical form but add something to this form. We have to add pockets, or sacs, to the spherical form, like this:

It is in the nature of the animal form that a pocket element breaks up the sphere, with pocket-like inroads made everywhere. Consider your eye sockets—two pockets coming in from the outside. Consider your nostrils—two pockets. And finally consider the whole of your digestive tract from mouth to stomach. It is possible to arrive at this if you let a pocket develop, starting at the mouth, which goes all the way down.

You always get the pocket form added to the spherical form when the transition has to be made from plant to animal form.

We can come to understand the pocket form if we lift our eyes from the earth to the planetary system. You will find it easy to see that the earth seeks to give its own form to everything that lives on it. But a planet acting from outside counteracts the earth forces and makes pockets in the spherical form given by the earth. The different creatures of the animal kingdom are provided with such sacs, or pockets, in a wide variety of ways. Consider the planets and the different ways in which they act. Saturn makes a different kind of inroad than Jupiter or Mars. The lion is equipped with a different kind of inner sac-nature for the simple reason that the planetary influences on it are different from those on the camel, for instance. So in this case we have sacs being formed.

But in animals—and this means above all in higher animals, for the situation is different with the lower animals—and also in human beings something arises which does not merely come from the planetary realm, so that we are able to say: The essence of both animal and human nature is to have more than just the pocket form. This would be the case if there were only the planets and if the firmament of fixed stars had no influence. Something is added to the pocket form. In many situations people are satisfied when they have not just a pocket but something in it. And it is indeed the case that it is the essence of the animal aspect of human nature to have a pocket with something to fill it. So we have a spherical form with a pocket and the pocket is filled.

You only need to look at the sense organs, the eye. You have first of all a pocket, which is the eye socket, and then something to fill it. And this fulfilment,²⁵ which occurs particularly in the sense organs, relates to the zodiac just as the pocket form relates to the planetary sphere. Human beings have the most complete animal organization in this respect, which is also why they have twelve pockets with their fillings, though this is disguised in all kinds of ways. This is why I had to list twelve sense organs in my Anthroposophy.²⁶

We can now go back and ask: Which cosmic principle relates to the polyhedral quality? You see, if we consider the earth, it has the life form if seen as a whole, and if it consisted entirely of water it would only show this form. But all kinds of disruptions enter into the water. You can observe these disruptions in the tides, for instance. There the water is given configuration. Next, let us look back to earlier stages of configuration for the liquid earth, when it first began to develop solid elements. It is still possible to see today that the tides are connected with the moon, and everything polyhedral which becomes part of the configuration of the earth relates to the moon.

Thus we are able to say: The polyhedral or physical nature of human beings is connected with the moon, their vegetable or etheric nature with the earth, their astral nature, which would produce the pocket form, with the planetary sphere, and the filling of the pocket with the zodiac.

What I have written on the board applies in a different way to humans than it does to animals. You see, with animals it is truly the case that the heavens only have significance as far as the sphere of the zodiac, meaning everything which lies within it. Anything which lies outside it holds no significance for the animal. Ancient wisdom was therefore quite right in calling it the “zodiac”,²⁷ for it was also able to say: Everything outside the zodiac in the universe might just as well not exist, for the animals on earth would still be exactly as they are. Only what lies below the zodiac, together with the earth and the moon, has significance for animals. What lies beyond the zodiac has, however, significance for human beings, for it influences the filling of the pockets.

For the animal we have to say: Everything which lies inside the zodiac influences the filling of the pockets. We therefore have to go into the zodiac itself and then we are able to explain how the filling of the pockets presents itself. With humans, we have to go beyond the zodiac (Fig. 34, brown) if we want to explain what goes on in the sphere of the senses, for example. In this respect, human beings go beyond the zodiac, animals do not.

It is also the case that in animals, the planetary sphere as such has a direct influence on the pockets. As the pockets continue inwards, to form the organs, animal organs are perfect reflections of the principles relating to the planetary sphere. Human beings again go a little further and we are able to say that in human beings, the region closer to the zodiac influences the pockets.

In animals, the earth has a direct effect on everything tending to assume spherical form. This is not possible in human beings, who otherwise would be animals, with a tendency to be spherical. In a sense, animals tend towards the spherical form. Here (Fig. 35) we have the backbone, then the legs. Animals are however prevented from becoming a complete sphere.

The back bone forms part of the sphere. Human beings tend to move away from the earth principle, just as they have moved away from the zodiac, and from the planetary sphere, towards the zodiac. We are able to say that the human spherical form is created by moving towards the planetary sphere. Human beings walk upright, however, and seek to go beyond mere adaptation to earthly principles.

With reference to the polyhedral element we have to say that the moon gives it directly to the animal. Human beings also seek to move out of the influences of the moon, “away from the moon”, as we might say, to receive their polyhedral element from a region between earth and moon. This means, however, that the moon still has an influence. In the fifth place, therefore, we must look to see what the moon, which in animals brings about the polyhedral element, is doing in human beings. It brings about a polyhedral element in humans, but as an image. Animals have the polyhedral element in their configuration; humans lift it out of the organism. Mathematical and geometrical ideas become image, taken out of the living physical body. Today, people primarily visualize and want to understand things in mathematical terms because they are able, under the moon’s influence, to lift their own polyhedral element out of the body, so that it enters into the conscious mind. We are thus able to say that thanks to the moon, we are able to understand the polyhedral element in images.

So you see how by considering the human being’s relationship to the cosmos we not only arrive at the outer form we have been considering in recent years but also understand how human beings gain inner form and structure. We see how they create their nasal cavities, or the stomach, as sacs or pockets. If we were to take this further we would understand the organs altogether and how they take internal form out of the whole cosmos. If we want to understand the human being we must always draw on the cosmos. We have to do so when we ask why we have an organ such as the lung, for instance. Essentially the lung can only be understood if we grasp that initially, in the embryo, a kind of sac forms, going inwards, with physical matter forming a lining. The sac-like form then tears itself free on the outside, and the organ closes itself off as an internal organ. We come to see why there is a lung, or any other organ, inside the human being if we perceive this organ to have originated from a sac, with the inner end of the sac thickening and due to other circumstances taking on a particular configuration. An organ such as the stomach can be seen as a sac extending inwards. An organ such as the lung, the heart or the kidney also starts as a sac, but it thickens here (Fig. 36), tears off here, and you have a closed-off internal organ.

Yet even with these closed-off organs—if we ask ourselves why they are in a particular place in the human organism, or why they have a particular shape or internal structure, we always have to consider the human being in relationship to the whole universe.

If a modern scientist were to hear of anthroposophists wanting to explain the lung, heart, liver, and so on out of the cosmos, he'd say we were quite mad. Members of the medical profession in particular would call this madness. They should not do so, however. It is up to them to realize that anthroposophy is actually trying to meet them half-way as they pursue their course clinging firmly to their accustomed blinkers. Let me give you a small example to prove this.

I have here before me a booklet written by the physician, medical scientist and biologist Moriz Benedikt in 1894.²⁸ I tend to quote this gentleman quite often, though I actually do not much like doing so, for apart from anything else, he shows himself to be terribly conceited, practically on every page he writes. He is also quite inflexible as a Kantian. There is, of course, the mitigating circumstance that he has made up his own Kantian ideas to suit himself, presenting them with some inflexibility. The man is extraordinarily gifted, however. He is not interested in anthroposophical ideas or anything of the kind, but it is fair to say that simply by being involved in medicine and science he has arrived at a reasonably unbiased view as to the value of his scientific outlook. He cannot get out of it; yet in a strange way he peers out. The others are also caught up in their science as if in a prison, but they do not even look at anything outside. He keeps looking at the outside world, and this allows him to arrive at extraordinarily interesting conclusions. His vanity has made him a great many enemies, and he will therefore sometimes say things about enemies who show themselves with their masks off—generally these people are “friends”, maintaining closed ranks. His colleagues have tended to put him down, and he therefore says things about them that are highly typical. He knows nothing about anthroposophy, of course, but still, if we consider anthroposophy in terms of its qualities it would be fair to say that, qualitatively speaking, he is an anti-anthroposophist. However, in the booklet I have before me he says:

The self-righteous ignore or deny anything that does not fit in with their point of view, persecuting not only the teaching, but even more bitterly the teachers. Self-righteousness is a peculiar kettle of fish. It smells sweet to the self-righteous but gives off a sharp, biting odour for others. Self-righteousness is by its very nature closely bound up with the scholars’ trade, so much so that although I hate the self-righteous I often ask myself: How often and in how many instances have you yourself been self-righteous? I’d be most grateful to anyone who would give me an exact answer to the question.

For my part, I am convinced that far from being grateful he would complain like anything if we were to make him aware of his own self-righteousness. Yet in his own peculiar way he has a particularly good eye for self-righteousness in others.

He goes on to speak of his own history, wanting to show that he has become a different kind of medical man from his colleagues. He writes:

Two severe strokes of destiny spelled disaster for my own development and also for the scientific position relative to the subject under discussion.

You’ll immediately be aware of a nice touch of vanity in what follows:

In the first place, I studied mathematics and mechanics before joining the medical profession. In those days we had an eminent mathematician at Vienna University, Professor von Ettingshausen,²⁹ who presented the most difficult problems in the mathematics of physics and caught our interest. I heard him develop the theories of Cauchy³⁰ and Poisson.³¹ Petzval³² taught us to express the problems of mechanics in mathematical formulas. It will be easy to show, however, how disastrous mathematical thinking is for a member of the medical profession, and above all a clinician.

Well, we shall see why it is disastrous, especially if such a person knows something about medicine. Professor Benedikt goes on with his story. You would have thought it to be a good stroke of destiny to be a mathematician, but he calls it a bad one, because it taught him to think. Other clinicians were apparently unable to think, and they hated him for having studied mathematics, for it meant he knew more than they did.

The second stroke of destiny to come in the days of my youth was that I became a student of Skoda.³³ I am still attached to his teachings today. He was the Kant of medical philosophy, and his mind rose to sublime heights not in books but in the discussion of diagnoses, indications for treatment, and particularly in postmortem reviews. Skoda had been a mathematician when young

—clearly another stroke of destiny!—

and had brought the most important and fundamental scientific thinking to medicine, though unfortunately only in isolated instances; the important insight I received from Skoda, having already been firmly convinced of it through my mathematical studies, is that in establishing scientific proof, we must be aware not only of what we know but also of what we do not know.

Benedikt had thus also studied under Skoda. The idea was that when using modern scientific methods—for this was the subject under discussion—we should be aware not only of what we know but also of what we do not yet know. Benedikt really did represent this principle with some degree of fanaticism in numerous treatises. He goes on to say:

This basic rule of medicine is not known to the majority of biologists, and indeed is incomprehensible to them. Some years ago, for example, I sent a manuscript in a foreign language to an anatomist, asking him to correct the language. When it came to the above statement, he wrote in the margin that he did not understand the meaning of it.

Benedikt says here that we should also consider what we do not know, and he wanted the other individual to translate the statement into proper French. The anatomist had written, however, to say he did not understand it.

When I showed the comment written in the margin to a professor at the technical university he smiled. The statement is perfectly clear to anyone involved in the exact sciences.

The man smiled because he understood mathematical thinking; it amused him that members of the medical profession thought they could ignore the things they did not know. An engineer must know what he does not know, for he has studied mathematics.

When I told a famous medical expert in Vienna of the odd reaction from my medical colleague, he said rather naively: Well, how are we to know the unknown?—This historical anecdote casts a sharp light on the method of thinking still prevalent in modern medicine and on the colossal errors made day by day and hour by hour in the medical literature.

These are the words of a medical man! But we now come to a most important point. Moriz Benedikt tells us what happens in medical science, where no account is taken of the unknown:

The problems generally arise with reference to the biology of an organ, its function, for instance. The conditions on which the function is based are partly unknown and still have to be found.

He goes on to give an example:

The liver, for instance, secretes bile. The reason for this secretory process lies mainly in the specific biochemical properties of the cells.

Let us ignore the fact that he is referring to the biochemical properties of cells, which does not really make sense. We are taking the point of view he takes in speaking of the liver.

The reason must be found as to how these differentiated properties evolve;...

He wants to find the reason why the liver is different from other organs; he intends to consider the unknown. It is known that the liver secretes bile. But now we come to the unknown, and mark you well, he produces a considerable list:

The reason must be found as to how these differential properties evolve; how the organ develops from its elements; how it comes to be in its particular place; why it relates to surrounding organs in a specific way; how with the aid of specific haemodynamic forces and haemostatic conditions it maintains the specificity of its cells; how with the aid of the central and centrifugal nervous system it is stimulated to function at the right time and with the necessary intensity; what the conditions are for nutrition in general, to maintain function and timing; which conditions impair function, causing short-term or permanent disorders, etc.

All this is not known and has to be considered. Moriz Benedikt then continues:

In science, these questions come up one after the other over long periods of time.

Just the questions come up, therefore!

The literature, on the other hand, considers only what is known at any time, without enquiring into the unknown, and behaves as if the basic problem had already been fully solved.

That is, makes no mention of the unknown. People like Moriz Benedikt are at least able to list all these unknown elements.

This is why only a small part of the theories which prevail at any given time is true, and they contain a colossal percentage of new and inherited errors which will continue on through generations as original sin.

What is this medical man really saying? He says: We have a medical literature but it only deals with the known. Yet the unknown keeps coming up after long intervals of time. What does Benedikt want? He wants people to be aware of what they do not know. What would happen in the case of the liver, for instance? A member of the medical profession taking the opposite view of Benedikt who gave a description of the liver would try to discover the biochemical properties of liver cells and present the fact that the liver secretes bile. He would be satisfied with this, for he does not talk about anything that is not known. Benedikt would say: Alright, the liver secretes bile; this is due to the biochemical constitution of the liver cells. But as a conscientious scientist I must also say everything I do not know about the liver and the bile. He would therefore write in his book:

This we know, but we do not know how the liver comes to be in that particular place; how the statics and dynamics of the blood, or rather the circulation, affect the liver; how the nervous system relates to the liver, both the system as a whole and the individual nerves; and how the liver contributes to nutrition. Benedikt’s books would therefore be different from those of other authors. As a scientist he would in this respect be extremely modest.

But he says this question as to the unknown comes up in the course of centuries; yet because of the way the questions are put, if we go down to fundamentals, then even taking Benedikt’s point of view, we could go on till Judgement Day, always putting down what is known and then what is unknown and the many questions that arise. Benedikt’s books would only differ from those of other authors in that they also list what is not known. Yet he would never accept that something we do not know has to be taken out into the cosmos, that it will continue to be unknown until we explain it out of the cosmos.

You see, a rational medical practitioner here says, speaking in the terms of his discipline, that we cannot explain the human being with the means at our disposal; all we can do is to list the things we do not know. Unfortunately he persists in his refusal to consider something which does provide answers to these questions, questions he says concern the unknown, and of course the answers can only be provided slowly and gradually.

Thus the questions are there in ordinary science. Anthroposophy offers the answers to these questions. This is the truth. It is something we should stress over and over again, quite emphatically.

Moriz Benedikt believes that the bad habits to be found in his particular science are due to the fact that people know nothing of the unknown, offering to humanity what they know on the basis of facts established in the sense-perceptible world only. He gets quite sarcastic as he goes on to say: This scientific ineptitude flourishes today ... not his ineptitude, but that of his colleagues! as much as it did a thousand years ago; indeed it is worse than ever, since production has become so much faster.

He means to say that in earlier times it was not possible to publish one’s misdemeanours so quickly.

Every short-lived notion or undertaking is published so quickly nowadays that medical journalism only needs a “Hot Wire column”, and perhaps we may see the day when telephone booths are set up just to make sure that scientific “ideas" do not lie fallow even for nine minutes.

Publication took more years in the past than it takes hours today.

Oh, and Moriz Benedikt also knows what he thinks of the public, who listen to the medical profession and swear by them! He puts it simply in the following rhyme:

Miller, Brown, Smith and Read join in every heinous deed.

He then starts to reproach his colleagues again—the heinous deeds are theirs, of course—saying:

These unsatisfactory conditions in biology will not improve until a major reform in education starts with the teachers. Anyone unable to show that he has made a serious study of mathematics and mechanics is not fit to be a thinker or a scientist, let alone a teacher. Individual genius has always achieved much; it limps, however, and will go on limping until it has learned to walk first in the school of mathematics.

Not everyone who wants to listen to something sensible will need mathematics, of course. But to work with genuine science one does need to be trained in mathematical thinking. This is why Plato—Moriz Benedikt is very rude about him, by the way—wrote on the doors to his academy: Admittance only for those trained in mathematics. This does not prevent present-day philosophers, who have not been trained in mathematics, to write about Plato, of course. And we may truly say: Most of the people who write about Plato today would not have gained admittance to his academy if it still existed. You will see, from what I have read to you from Moriz Benedikt’s booklet, how modern scientific minds view something they themselves really ought to desire, and how someone who, whilst not an anthroposophist but a rather vain individual who has got into some conflict with his colleagues, has nevertheless had some faint notion of the harm that is done—how such a person judges the situation. Let us be very clear about this: The situation we have today is exactly as an unbiased observer with insight gained in anthroposophy is compelled to describe it. The proofs are to be found everywhere in the world of modern exoteric science, you must merely want to look for them.

What we must do, however, is to learn how to consider the human being in a way which physicists would consider perfectly sensible. I have already given you the analogy: If you study a compass needle and insist on saying it assumes a particular direction out of its own inherent powers, you will never understand why there are north-and south-pointing forces in the compass needle. We must understand that the whole earth has two forces, that the poles of the two forces are determined from outside. In the same way it is utterly wrong to put a human being on the dissecting table and decide to explain the whole of the human being’s nature on the basis of what lies inside the skin. We need the whole world to understand the outer and inner aspects of the human being.

• 25. Steiner is using a slightly unusual term here, which usually translated as “fulfilment”. For the translation I have largely used terms like “filling”, “that which fills them” or “which are filled”, but I felt the note should be sounded just once in this passage.
• 26. Steiner R. Anthroposophy (A Fragment) (GA 45). Tr. C. E. Creeger. New York: Anthroposophic Press 1996.
• 27. From the Greek “ho ton [long “o”] zodion [long “o”s] kyklos” = the circle of the sculptured figures of animals.
• 28. Benedikt, Moriz (1835–1920), Hypnotismus und Suggestion, Leipzig & Wien 1894.
• 29. Ettingshausen, Andreas, Freiherr von (1796–1857), mathematician and physicist.
• 30. Cauchy, August Louis (1789–1857), French mathematician.
• 31. Poisson, Siméon Denis (1781–1840), French mathematician and physicist.
• 32. Petzval, Joseph (1807–1891), Austrian mathematician and physicist.
• 33. Skoda, Joseph (1805–1881), physician; together with Rokitansky established the high reputation of the Viennese School in its heyday.

We will now continue our discussions by speaking of certain matters of method, and here I should like to say that in these few lectures our purpose cannot be to give detailed indications but only general principles. You can also study the Waldorf School Seminar Courses, and with the indications you have received here you will be able to understand them thoroughly. We must get a clear picture of the child between the change of teeth and puberty; we must know that in the years before the change of teeth the inherited characteristics are the determining factors, and that the child receives from his father and mother a “model” body which is completely thrown aside by the time he changes his teeth, for during the first seven-year period it is being replaced by a new body. The change of teeth, indeed, is only the external expression of this replacing of the old body by a new one, upon which the soul and spirit are now at work.

I have already told you that if the spirit-soul is strong, then during the school period from the change of teeth to puberty the child may go through great changes as regards the qualities he formerly possessed. If the individuality is weak, the result will be a body that very closely resembles the inherited characteristics, and with the children of school age we shall still have to take into account deeply-rooted resemblances to the parents or grandparents.

We must be clear in our minds that the independent activity of the etheric body of man only really begins at the change of teeth. The etheric body in the first seven years has to put forward all the independent activity of which it is capable in order to build up the second physical body. So that this etheric body is pre-eminently an inward artist in the child in the first seven years; it is a modeller, a sculptor. And this modelling force, which is applied to the physical body by the etheric body, becomes free, emancipates itself with the change of teeth at the seventh year. Then it can work as an activity of soul.

This is why the child has an impulse to model forms or to paint them. For the first seven years of life the etheric body has been carrying out modelling and painting within the physical body. Now that it has nothing further to do as regards the physical body, or at least not as much as before, it wants to carry its activity outside. If therefore you as teachers have a wide knowledge of the forms that occur in the human organism, and consequently know what kind of forms the child likes to mould out of plastic material or to paint in colour, then you will be able to give him the right guidance. But you yourselves must have a kind of artistic conception of the human organism. It is therefore of real importance for the teacher to try and do some modelling himself, for the teachers' training of today includes nothing of this sort. You will see that however much you have learnt about the lung or the liver, or let us say the complicated ramifications of the vascular system, you will not know as much as if you were to copy the whole thing in wax or plasticine. For then you suddenly begin to have quite a different kind of knowledge of the organs, of the lung for instance. For as you know you must form one half of the lung differently from the other half; the lung is not symmetrical. One half is clearly divided into two segments, the other into three. Before you learn this you are constantly forgetting which is left and which is right. But when you work out these curious asymmetrical forms in wax or plasticine, then you get the feeling that you could not change round left and right any more than you could put the heart on the right hand side of the body. You also get the feeling that the lung has its right place in the organism with its own particular form, and if you mould it rightly you will feel that it is inevitable for the human lung to come gradually into an upright position in standing and walking. If you model the lung forms of animals you will see or you will feel from the touch that the lung of an animal lies horizontally. And so it is with other organs.

You yourselves therefore should really try to learn anatomy by modelling the organs, so that you can then get the children to model or to paint something that is in no way an imitation of the human body but only expresses certain forms. For you will find that the child has an impulse to make forms that are related to the inner human organism. You may get some quite extraordinary experiences in this respect in the course of your lessons.

We have introduced lessons on simple Physiology in the school, and especially in the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh classes, as this is obviously an integral part of the Waldorf School method. Our children paint from the very beginning, and from a certain age they also do carving. Now if you simply let the children work freely it is very interesting to see that when you have explained anything about the human being to them, the lung for instance, then out of themselves they begin to model such forms as the lung or something similar. It is really interesting to see how the child forms things out of his own being. That is why it is essential for you to take up this plastic method, and to find ways and means of making faithful reproductions of the forms of the human organs exactly in wax or plasticine—even, if you like, as our children often do, in mud, for if you have nothing else that is very good material to work with.

This is an inner urge, an inner longing of the etheric body, to be at work in modelling or painting. So you can very easily turn this impulse and longing to account by deriving the letters of the alphabet out of the forms which the child paints or models, for then you will be really moulding your teaching out of a knowledge of man. This is what must be done at this stage.

Now to proceed. Man consists not only of his physical body and etheric body, which latter is emancipated and free at the seventh year, but also of the astral body and ego. What happens to the astral body of the child between the seventh and fourteenth year? It does not really come to its full activity till puberty. Only then is it working completely within the human organism. But whilst the etheric body between birth and the change of teeth is in a certain sense being drawn out of the physical body and becoming independent, the astral body is gradually being drawn inwards between the seventh and fourteenth year, and when it has been drawn right in and is no longer merely loosely connected with the physical and etheric bodies but permeates them completely, then the human being has arrived at the moment of puberty, of sex maturity.

With the boy one can see by the change of voice that the astral body is now quite within the larynx, with the girl one can see by the development of other organs, breast organs and so on, that the astral body has now been completely drawn in. The astral body finds its way slowly into the human body from all sides.

The lines and directions it follows are the nerve fibres. The astral body comes in along the nerve fibres from without inwards. Here it begins to fill out the whole body from the outer environment, from the skin, and gradually draws itself together inside. Before this time it is a kind of loose cloud, in which the child lives. Then it draws itself together, lays firm

hold upon all the organs, and if we may put it somewhat crudely, it unites itself chemically with the organism, with all the tissues of the physical and etheric body.

But something very strange happens here. When the astral body presses inwards from the periphery of the body it makes its way along the nerves which then unite in the spine (see

drawing). Above is the head. It also forces its way slowly through the head nerves, crawls along the nerves towards the central organs, towards the spinal cord, bit by bit, into the head, gradually coming in and filling it all out.

What we must chiefly consider in this connection is how the breathing works in with the whole nervous system. Indeed this working together of the breathing with the whole nervous system is something very special in the human organism. As teacher and educator one should have the very finest feeling for it; only then will one be able to teach rightly. Here then the air enters the body, distributes itself, goes up through the spinal column (see drawing), spreads out in the brain, touches the nerve fibres everywhere, goes down again and pursues paths by which it can then be ejected as carbon dioxide. So we find the nervous system being constantly worked upon by the in-breathed air which distributes itself, goes up through the spinal column, spreads out again, becomes permeated with carbon, goes back again and is breathed out.

It is only in the course of the first school period, between the change of teeth and puberty, that the astral body carries this whole process of breathing, passing along the nerve fibres, right into the physical body. So that during this time when the astral body is gradually finding its way into the physical body with the help of the air breathed in, it is playing upon something that is stretched across like strings of an instrument in the centre of the body, that is, upon the spinal column. Our nerves are really a kind of lyre, a musical instrument, an inner musical instrument that resounds up into the head.

This process begins of course before the change of teeth, but at that time the astral body is only loosely connected with the physical body. It is between the change of teeth and puberty that the astral body really begins to play upon the single nerve fibres with the in-breathed air, like a violin bow on the strings.

You will be fostering all this if you give the child plenty of singing. You must have a feeling that the child is a musical instrument while he is singing, you must stand before your class to whom you are teaching singing or music with the clear feeling: every child is a musical instrument and inwardly feels a kind of well-being in the sound.

For you see, sound is brought about by the particular way the breath is circulated. That is inner music. To begin with, in the first seven years of life, the child learns everything by imitation, but now he should learn to sing out of the inward joy he experiences in building up melodies and rhythms. To show you the kind of inner picture you should have in your mind when you stand before your class in a Singing lesson, I should like to use a comparison which may seem a little crude, but which will make clear to you what I mean. I do not know how many of you, but I hope most, have at some time been able to watch a herd of cows who have fed and are now lying in the meadow digesting their food.

This digestive process of a herd of cows is indeed a marvellous thing. In the cow a kind of image of the whole world is present. The cow digests her food, the digested foodstuffs pass over into the blood vessels and lymphatic vessels, and during this whole process of digestion and nourishment the cow has a sensation of well-being which is at the same time knowledge. During the process of digestion every cow has a wonderful aura in which the whole world is mirrored. It is the most beautiful thing one can see, a herd of cows lying in the meadow digesting their food, and in this process of digestion comprehending the whole world. With us human beings all this has sunk into the subconscious, so that the head can reflect what the body works out and sees revealed as knowledge.

We are really in a bad way, we human beings, because the head does not allow us to experience the lovely things that the cows, for example, experience. We should know much more of the world if we could experience the digestive process, for instance. We should then of course have to experience it with the feeling of knowledge, not with the feeling that man has when he remains in the subconscious in his digestive process. This is simply to make clear what I want to say. I do not wish to imply that we now have to raise the process of digestion into consciousness in our teaching, but I want to show that there is something that should really be present in the child at a higher stage, this feeling of wellbeing at the inward flow of sound. Imagine what would happen if the violin could feel what is going on within it! We only listen to the violin, it is outside us, we are ignorant of the whole origin of the sound and only hear the outward sense picture of it. But if the violin could feel how each string vibrates with the next one it would have the most blissful experiences, provided of course that the music is good. So you must let the child have these little experiences of ecstasy, so that you really call forth a feeling for music in his whole organism, and you must yourself find joy in it.

Of course one must understand something of music. But an essential part of teaching is this artistic element of which I have just spoken.

On this account it is essential, for the inner processes of life between the change of teeth and puberty demand it, to give the children lessons in music right from the very beginning, and at first, as far as possible to accustom them to sing little songs quite empirically without any kind of theory: nothing more than simply singing little songs, but they must be well sung! Then you can use simpler songs from which the children can gradually learn what melody, rhythm and beat are, and so on; but first you must accustom the children to sing little songs as a whole, and to play a little too as far as that is possible. Unless there is clearly no bent at all in this direction every Waldorf child begins to learn some instrument on entering school; as I say, as far as circumstances allow, each child should learn to play an instrument. As early as possible the children should come to feel what it means for their own musical being to flow over into the objective instrument, for which purpose the piano, which should really only be a kind of memorising instrument, is of course the worst possible thing for the child. Another kind of instrument should be chosen, and if possible one that can be blown upon. Here one must of course have a great deal of artistic tact and, I was going to say, a great deal of authority too. If you can, you should choose a wind instrument, as the children will learn most from this and will thereby gradually come to understand music. Admittedly, it can be a hair-raising experience when the children begin to blow. But on the other hand it is a wonderful thing in the child's life when this whole configuration of the air, which otherwise he encloses and holds within him along the nerve-fibres, can now be extended and guided. The human being feels how his whole organism is being enlarged. Processes which are otherwise only within the organism are carried over into the outside world. A similar thing happens when the child learns the violin, when the actual processes, the music that is within him, is directly carried over and he feels how the music in him passes over into the strings through his bow.

But remember, you should begin giving these Music and Singing lessons as early as possible. For it is of very great importance that you not only make all your teaching artistic, but that you also begin teaching the more specifically artistic subjects, Painting, Modelling and Music, as soon as the child comes to school, and that you see to it that he really comes to possess all these things as an inward treasure.

The point of time in the life of the child which falls between the ninth and tenth year must be very specially borne in mind in the teaching of languages. I have characterised for you this turning point between the ninth and tenth year as the time when the child first learns to differentiate between himself and his environment. Up to this time they have been as one. I have already indicated the right method of teaching for the child entering school, but he ought not really to come to school before he begins to change his teeth; one might say that fundamentally any kind of school teaching before this time is wrong; if we are forced to it by law we must do it, but it is not the right thing from the point of view of artistic education. In a true art of education the child should not enter school until the change of teeth. Our first task, as I have shown you, is to begin with something artistic and work out the forms of the letters through art; you should begin with some independent form of art as I have explained to you, and treat everything that has to do with nature in the mood and fashion of fairy tales, legends and myths, in the way I have described. But for the teaching of languages it is specially important to consider this epoch between the ninth and tenth year.

Before this point of time is reached language teaching must under no circumstances be of an intellectual nature; that is to say it must not include any grammar or syntax. Up to the ninth or tenth year the child must learn to speak the foreign language just as he acquires any other habit; he must learn to speak as a matter of habit. It is only when he learns to differentiate himself from his environment that he may begin to examine what he himself is bringing forth in his speech. It is only now that one can begin to speak of noun, adjective, verb and so on, not before. Before this time the child should simply speak and be kept to this speaking.

We have a good opportunity for carrying this out in the Waldorf School, because as soon as the child comes to us at the beginning of his school life he learns two foreign languages besides his mother tongue.

The child comes to school and begins with Main Lessons in periods, as I have already described; he has the Main Lesson for the early part of the morning, and then directly after that the little ones have a lesson which for German children is either English or French. In these language lessons we try not to consider the relationship of one language to the other. Up till the point of time I have described to you between the ninth and tenth year, we disregard the fact that a table for instance is called “ Tisch” in German and “table” in English, that to eat is “ essen” in German and “eat” in English; we connect each language not with the words of another language, but directly with the objects. The child learns to call the ceiling, the lamp, the chair, by their names, whether it is in French or in English. Thus from the seventh to the ninth year we should not attach importance to translation, that is to say rendering a word in one language by a word in another, but the children simply learn to speak in the language, connecting their words with the external objects. So that the child does not need to know or rather does not need to think of the fact that when he says “table” in English it is called “ Tisch” in German, and so on; he does not concern himself with this at all. This does not occur to the children, for they have not been taught to compare the language in any way.

In this manner the child learns every language out of the element from which it stems, namely, the element of feeling. Now a language consists, of course, of sounds, and is either the expression of the soul from within, in which case there is a vowel, or else it is the expression of something external and then there is a consonant. But one must feel this first of all. You will not of course pass on to the children exactly what I am saying here, but in the course of your lesson the child should actually experience the vowel as something connected with feeling, and the consonant as a copy of something in the outside world. He will do this of himself because it lies in human nature, and we must not drive out this impulse but rather lead on from it.

For let us think, what is the vowel A [In these references to A and E the sounds of Ah and Eh should be considered, not the names of the letters.] (ah)? (This does not belong to the lesson, but is only something you ought to know!) What is A? When the sun rises I stand in admiration before it: Ah! A is always the expression of astonishment, wonder. Or again, a fly settles on my forehead; I say: E (Eh). That is the expression of warding off, doing away with: E. The English sounds are somewhat differently connected with our feelings, but in every language, English included, we find that the vowel A expresses astonishment and wonder.

Now let us take a characteristic word: roll—the rolling of a ball, for instance. Here you have the R. Who could help feeling that with the R and the L together, the ball rolls on (see drawing a.). R alone would be like this (see drawing b.):

R. L. goes on. L always implies a flowing on. Here you have an external process imitated in the consonant (see drawing c.).

So the whole language is built up in the vowels out of a feeling of inner astonishment, wonder, self-defence, self-assertion, etc., or out of a feeling of imitation in the case of the consonants. We must not drive these feelings out of the child. He should learn to develop the sound from the external objects and from the way in which his own feelings are related to them. Everything should be derived from the feeling for language. In the word “roll” the child should really fed: r, o, l, l. It is the same thing for every word.

This has been completely lost for modern civilised man. He thinks of the word simply as something written down or something abstract. Man can no longer really feel his way into language. Look how all primitive languages still have feeling within them; the most civilised languages make speech an abstract thing. Look at your own English language, how the second half of the word is simply cast aside, and one skips over the real feeling of the sounds. But the child must dwell in this feeling for language.

This must be cultivated by examining characteristic words in which such a feeling plays. Now in German we call what one has up here “Kopf.” In English it is called “head,” in Italian “testa.” With the abstract kind of relationship to language that people usually have today, what do they say about this? They say, in German the word is “Kopf,” in Italian “testa,” in English “head.” But all this is absolutely untrue. The whole thing is nonsense.

For let us think: “Kopf,” what is that? “Kopf” is what is formed, something that has a rounded form. Theform is expressed when you say “Kopf.” When you say “testa”—you have it in the word “testament” and “testify”—then you are expressing the fact that the head establishes or confirms something. Here you are expressing something quite different. You say of that organ that sits up there: that is the establisher, the testator— testa. Now in English one holds the opinion that the head is the most important part of man, (although you know of course that this opinion is not quite correct). So that in English you say “head,” that is, the most important thing, the goal of all things, the aim and meeting-place of all.

Thus different things are expressed in the different languages. If people wanted to designate the same thing, then the Englishman and the Italian too would say “Kopf.” But they do not designate the same thing. In the primeval human language the same thing was expressed everywhere, so that this primeval language was the same for all. Then people began to separate and to express things differently; that is how the different words came about. When you designate such different things as though they were the same you no longer feel what is contained in them, and it is very important not to drive out this feeling for language. It must be kept alive and for this reason you must not analyse language before the ninth or tenth year.

Only then can you pass on to what a noun, a verb or an adjective is and so on: this should not be done before the ninth or tenth year, otherwise you will be speaking of things which are connected with the child's own being, and this he cannot yet understand because he cannot yet distinguish himself from his environment. It is most important to bear in mind that we must not allow any Grammar or comparison of languages before the ninth or tenth year. Then what the child gets from speaking will be similar to what he gets in his singing.

I have tried to illustrate this inner joy in singing by picturing to you the inner feeling of pleasure that rises up out of the digestive organs of the cows in the meadow when they are digesting their food. There must be present an inner feeling of joy of this kind, or at least some feeling for the thing itself, so that the children feel what is really contained in a word, that they feel the inward “rolling.” Language must be inwardly experienced and not only thought out with the head. Today you mostly find that people only “think” language with their head. Therefore when they want to find the right word in translating from one language into another they take a dictionary. Here the words are so put together that you find “testa” or “Kopf” and people imagine that that is all the same. But it is not all the same. A different conception is expressed in each word, something that can only be expressed out of feeling. We must take this into account in language teaching. And another element comes in here, something which belongs to the spirit. When the human being dies, or before he comes down to earth, he has no possibility of understanding the so-called substantives, for example. Those whom we call the dead know nothing about substantives; they know nothing of the naming of objects, but they still have some knowledge of qualities, and it is therefore possible to communicate with the dead as regards qualities. But in the further course of the life after death that soon ceases also. What lasts longest is an understanding of verbs, words of action, active and passive expressions, and longest of all the expression of sensations: Oh! Ah! I (ee), E (eh); these interjectional expressions are preserved longest of all by the dead.

From this you can see how vital it is that if the human soul is not to become entirely un-spiritual it should have a living experience of interjections. All interjections are actually vowels. And the consonants, which as such are in any case very soon lost after death, and were not present before the descent to earth, are copies of the external world. This we should really experience in our feeling, be aware of it in the child, and see that we do not drive it out by giving lessons on nouns, adjectives and so on too early, but wait with these until the ninth or tenth year is reached.

From the first class of the Waldorf School upwards we have introduced Eurythmy, this visible speech in which, by carrying out certain movements either alone or in groups, man actually reveals himself just as he reveals himself through speech. Now if there is the right treatment in the language lessons, that is to say if the teacher does not ruin the child's feeling for language but rather cherishes it, then the child will feel the transition to Eurythmy to be a perfectly natural one, just as the very little child feels that learning to speak is also a perfectly natural process. You will not have the slightest difficulty in bringing Eurythmy to the children. If they are healthily developed children they will want it. You will always discover something that is pathologically wrong with children who do not wish to do Eurythmy. They want it as a matter of course, just as when they were quite little children they wanted to learn to speak, if all their organs were sound. That is because the child feels a very strong impulse to express his inward experiences as activities of will in his own body. This can be seen in the very early years when he begins to laugh and cry, and in the various ways in which feelings are expressed in the face.

It would have to be a very metaphorical way of speaking if you were to say that a dog or any other animal laughs. In any case it does not laugh in the same way as the human being does, neither does it cry in the same way. Indeed in the animal all gestures and movements which carry over inward experience into the element of will are quite different. There is a great difference between animal and man in this respect.

What is expressed in Eurythmy rests upon laws just as language does. Speaking is not an arbitrary thing. With a word like “water” for instance, you cannot put another vowel in place of the “a,” you cannot say “wuter,” or anything like that. Speech has laws, and so has Eurythmy. In the ordinary movements of the body man is in a sense free, although he also does many things out of a certain instinct. When he is cogitating about something, he puts his finger to his forehead; when he wants to show that something is not true, he shakes his head and his hand, extinguishing it, as it were. But Eurythmy leads inward and outward experiences over into ordered movements, just as speech leads an inward experience over into the sound: this is what Eurythmy is, and the child wants to learn it. For this reason the fact that Eurythmy is not yet taught in modern education proves that there is no thought of drawing forth the human faculties out of the very nature of man himself, for if you do that then you must come to Eurythmy in the natural course of things.

This will not mean any interference with Gymnastics, the teaching of physical exercises. This is something quite different, and the teacher and educator must recognise the difference. Gymnastics as taught today and all kinds of sport are something quite different from Eurythmy. You can quite well have both together. For the conception of space is very often considered in quite an abstract way, and people do not take into account that space is something concrete. For people have become so accustomed to think of the earth as round that when someone who lives in this part of the world makes a jump he says he jumps “up.” But when someone in the Antipodes, who has his legs down here and his head up there, jumps, he jumps “down”—or so we imagine. But this is not anything we can experience. I once read a book on Natural Philosophy where the author tried to ridicule the idea that the sky is above us by saying: Down there in the Antipodes the sky must be below! But the truth is far richer than that. We do not make judgments about the world and about space in such a way that we leave ourselves out of it altogether and simply consider space by itself as something abstract. There are certain philosophers who do this—Hume and Mill and Kant. But this is all untrue. It is really all nonsense. Space is something concrete of which man is sensible. He feels himself within space and he feels the necessity of finding his place in it; when he thus finds his way into the balance of space, into the different conditions of space, then Sport and Gymnastics arise. In these man is trying to find his own relationship to space.

If you do this gymnastic movement (arms outstretched), you have the feeling that you are bringing your two arms into a horizontal direction. If you jump you have the feeling that you are moving your body upwards by its own force. These are gymnastic exercises. But if you feel you are holding within you something which you are experiencing inwardly—the sound EE—and you reflect upon it, then you may make perhaps a similar movement, but in this case, the inner soul quality is expressed in the movement. Man reveals his inward self. That is what he does in Eurythmy, which is thus the revelation of the inner self. In Eurythmy there is expressed what man can experience in breathing and in the circulation of the blood, when they come into the realm of soul. In Gymnastics and in Sport man feels as though space were a framework filled with all sorts of lines and directions into which he springs and which he follows, and he makes his apparatus accordingly. He climbs a ladder or pulls himself up on a rope. Here man is acting in accordance with external space.

That is the difference between Gymnastics and Eurythmy. Eurythmy lets the soul life flow outwards and thereby becomes a real expression of the human being, like language; Eurythmy is visible speech.

By means of Gymnastics and Sport man fits himself into external space, adapts himself to the world, experiments to see whether he fits in with the world in this way or in that. That is not language, that is not a revelation of man, but rather a demand the world makes upon him that he should be fit for the world and be able to find his way into it. This difference must be noticed. It expresses itself in the fact that the Gymnastics teacher makes the children do movements whereby they may adapt themselves to the outside world. The Eurythmy teacher expresses what is in the inner being of man. We must feel this, we must be sensible of it. Then Eurythmy, Gymnastics, and Games too, if you like, will all take their right place in our teaching.

We will speak further of this tomorrow.

Today I would like to add a few words to the lectures I have given here in the last few days. In earlier lectures I often spoke of a genius of language. And you already know from my book 'Theosophy' how, when spiritual essence is spoken of in the anthroposophical context, real spiritual essence is meant, and so also in what is referred to as the genius of language, real spiritual essence for the individual languages is meant, into which man lives and which, as it were, gives him the strength from the spiritual worlds to express his thoughts, which initially exist as a dead inheritance of the spiritual world in him as an earthly being. Therefore, it is particularly appropriate in the anthroposophical context to seek a meaning in what appears as formations in language, a meaning that even comes from the spiritual worlds to a certain extent independently of man.

Now, I have already pointed out the peculiar way in which we describe the actual element of the artistic, of beauty, and its opposite. We speak of the beautiful and speak of its opposite in the individual languages, of the ugly. If we were to describe the beautiful in a way that is entirely appropriate to the ugly, then, since the opposite of hate is love, we would have to speak not of the beautiful, but of the lovely. We would then have to say the lovely, that ugly. But we speak of the beautiful and the ugly and, based on the genius of language, make a significant distinction by designating the one and its opposite in this way. The beautiful, if we take it in the German language for the moment – a similar one would have to be found for other languages – is related as a word to that which shines. That which is beautiful shines, that is, carries its inner being to the surface. That is the essence of beauty: it does not hide, but brings its inner being to the surface, to the outer form. So that what is beautiful is that which reveals its inner being in its outer form, that which shines, that which radiates light, so that the light reveals what radiates out into the world, the essence. If we want to speak of the opposite of beauty in this sense, we have to say: that which hides itself, that which does not shine, that which withholds its essence and does not reveal to the outside world in its outer shell what it is. So when we speak of beauty, we are describing something objectively. If we were to speak just as objectively about the opposite of beauty, we would have to describe it with a word that means “that which hides itself, that which appears outwardly as other than it is.” But here we depart from the objective and approach the subjective, and then we describe our relationship to that which hides itself, and we find that we cannot love that which hides itself, we must hate it. That which shows us a different face than it is is the opposite of beauty. But we do not describe it, so to speak, from the same background of our being; we describe it from our emotion as that which is hateful to us because it hides itself, because it does not reveal itself.

If we listen carefully to language, then the genius of language can reveal itself to us. And we must ask ourselves: What are we actually striving for when we strive for the beautiful, in the broadest sense, through art? What are we actually striving for? The mere fact that we have to choose a word for the beautiful that comes from us, from the genius of language – for the opposite we do not go out of ourselves, we remain within ourselves, remain with our emotions, with hatred – the mere fact that we have to go out of ourselves shows that in the beautiful there is a relationship to the spiritual that is outside of us. For what seems? That which we see with our senses does not need to shine for us, it is there. That which shines for us, that is, which radiates in the sensual and announces its essence in the sensual, is the spiritual. So, when we speak objectively of the beautiful as beautiful, we grasp the artistically beautiful from the outset as a spiritual that reveals itself through art in the world. It is the task of art to grasp what appears, the radiance, the revelation of that which, as spirit, permeates and lives through the world. And all real art seeks the spiritual. Even when art, as it may, wants to depict the ugly, the repulsive, it does not want to depict the sensual repulsive, but the spiritual that announces its essence in the sensual repulsive. The ugly can become beautiful when the spiritual reveals itself in the ugly. But it must be so, the relationship to the spiritual must always be there if an artistic work is to have a beautiful effect.

Now, let us look at a single art form from this point of view, let us say painting. We have considered it in the last few days, in so far as painting reveals the spiritual essence through the color grasped, that is, through the radiance of the color. One may say that in those times when one had a real inner knowledge of color, one also surrendered to the genius of speech in the right way in order to place color in a worldly relationship. If you go back to ancient times, when there was an instinctive clairvoyance for these things, you will find, for example, metals that were felt to reveal their inner essence in their color, but were not named after earthly things. There is a connection between the names of the metals and the planets, because, if I may put it this way, people would have been ashamed to describe what is expressed through color only as an earthly thing. In this sense, color was regarded as a divine-spiritual element that is only conferred on earthly things in the sense in which I explained it here a few days ago. When gold was perceived in the color of gold, then one saw in gold not only an earthly thing, but one saw in the color of gold the sun announcing itself from the cosmos. Thus one saw in advance something going beyond the earth, even when perceiving the color of an earthly thing. Only by going up to the living things, one attributed their own color to the living things, because the living things approach the spirit, so there spiritual is also allowed to shine. And with the animals one felt that they have their own colors, because spiritual-soul in them appears directly.

But now you can go back to older times, when people felt artistically not outwardly but inwardly. You see, you don't get any painting at all. It's almost foolish to say, to paint a tree green, to paint a tree – to paint a tree and paint it green, that is not painting; because it is not painting for the very reason that whatever one accomplishes in imitating nature, nature is always more beautiful, more essential. Nature is always more full of life. There is no reason to imitate what is out there in nature. But then, real painters don't do that either. Real painters use the object to, let's say, make the sun shine on it, or to observe some color reflection from the surroundings, to capture the interweaving and interlacing of light and dark over an object. So the object you paint is actually only ever the reason for doing so. Of course you never paint, say, a flower that is standing in front of the window, but you paint the light that shines in through the window and that you see in the same way as you see it through the flower. So you actually paint the colored light of the sun. You capture that. And the flower is only the reason for capturing that light.

When you approach the human being, you can do it even more spiritually. Taking a human forehead and painting it like a human forehead – as you believe you see a human forehead – is actually nonsense, it is not painting. But how a human forehead is exposed to the sun's rays as they fall, how a dull light appears in the highlight, how the chiaroscuro plays – all that, in other words, that the subject provides the occasion for, that passes in the moment, and that one must now relate to a spiritual, to capture with color and brush, that is the task of the painter.

If you have a sense of painting, when you see an interior, for example, it is not at all about looking at the person kneeling in front of an altar. I once visited an exhibition with someone. We saw a person kneeling in front of an altar. You saw him from behind. The painter had set himself the task of capturing the sunlight streaming in through a window just as it would fall on the man's back. Yes, the man who was with me to look at the picture said: I would prefer to see the man from the front! Yes, that's right, there is only a material, not an artistic interest. He wanted the painter to express what kind of person it is and so on. But you are only entitled to do that if you want to express what can be perceived through color. If I want to depict a person on a hospital bed, in a particular illness, and I study the color of the face in order to capture the appearance of the illness through the senses, then that can be artistic. If I also want to depict, let's say, in totality, to what extent the whole cosmos comes to expression in human incarnate, in human flesh color, that can also be artistic. But if I were to imitate Mr. Lehmann, as he sits there in front of me, firstly I wouldn't succeed, would I, and secondly it's not an artistic task. What is artistic is the way the sun shines on him, how the light is deflected by his bushy eyebrows. So that's what matters, how the whole world affects the being I paint. And the means by which I achieve this is chiaroscuro, is color, is capturing a moment that is actually passing and fixing it in the way I described yesterday.

In times not so far removed from our own, people felt these things very keenly, as they could not imagine representing a Mary, a Mother of God, without a transfigured face, that is, without a face overwhelmed by the light and which emerges from the ordinary human condition through the overwhelming of the light. She could not be depicted in any other way than in a red robe and a blue mantle, because only in this way is the Mother of God placed in the right way in earthly life: in the red robe with all the emotions of the earthly, , the soul in the blue cloak, which envelops her with the spiritual, and in the transfigured face, the spiritualized, which is overwhelmed by the light as the revelation of the spirit. But this is not grasped in a truly artistic way as long as one only feels it as I have just expressed it. I have now, so to speak, translated it into the inartistic. One only feels it artistically in the moment when one creates out of the red and out of the blue and out of the light, by experiencing the light in its relationship to the colors and to the darkness as a world unto itself, so that one actually has nothing but the color, and the color says so much that one can get out of the color and the light-dark the Virgin Mary.

But then you have to know how to live with color, color has to be something you live with. Color has to be something that has emancipated itself from the heavy material. Because the heavy material actually resists color if you want to use it artistically. That is why it goes against the whole idea of painting to work with palette colors. They always become so that they still show a heaviness when you have applied them to the surface. You can't live with the palette color either. You can only live with liquid color. And in the life that develops between the person and the color when he has the color liquid, and in the peculiar relationship that he has when he now applies the liquid color to the surface, a color life develops, one actually grasps from out of the color, the world is grasped out of the color. Only then does the picturesque emerge, when you grasp the radiance, the revelation, the radiance of the color as a living thing, and only then do you actually create the shape on the surface from the radiating life. A world emerges all by itself. Because if you understand color, then you understand an ingredient of the whole world.

You see, Kant once said: Give me matter, and I will create a world out of it. Well, you could have given it to him long ago, the matter, you can be quite sure that he would not have made a world out of it, because no world can be created out of matter. But more can be created out of the undulating tools of colors. A world can be created from them, because every color has its immediate, I would say personal and intimate relationship to some spiritual aspect of the world. And today, with the exception of the primitive beginnings made in Impressionism and so on, and especially in Expressionism, but these are just beginnings, the concept of painting, the activity of painting, has been more or less lost to us in the face of the general materialism of the time. For the most part today, one does not paint, but rather one imitates shapes by means of a kind of drawing and then paints the surface. But these are painted surfaces, they are not painted, they are not born out of color and light and dark.

But one must not misunderstand the matter. If someone goes wild and simply tinkers with the colors next to each other, believing that he is achieving what I have called overcoming drawing, then he is not at all achieving what I meant. For by overcoming the drawing I do not mean having no drawing, but to get the drawing out of the color, to give birth to it out of the color. And the color already gives the drawing, one must only know how to live in the color. This living in the colored then leads the real artist to be able to disregard the rest of the world and give birth to his works of art out of the colored.

You can go back, for example, to Titian's “Assumption of Mary”. There you have a work of art that, I might say, consists of the transgression of the old principles of art. There is no longer the living experience of color that one still has with Raphael, but especially with Leonardo; but there is still a kind of tradition present that prevents one from growing too strongly out of this life in color. Experience this “Assumption of Mary” by Titian. When you look at it, you can see that the green cries out, the red cries out, the blue cries out. Yes, but then look at the individual colors. If you take the interaction of the individual colors even in Titian, you still have an idea of how he lived in the colors and how he really gets all three worlds out of the colors in this case. Just look at the wonderful gradation of the three worlds. Below are the apostles who experience the event of the Assumption of Mary. Look at how he manages to capture them in color. You can see how they are bound to the earth in the colors, but you don't feel the heaviness of the colors; instead, you only feel the darkness of the colors at the bottom of Titian's painting, and in the darkness you experience the apostles' being tied to the earth. In the way Mary is treated in color, you experience the intermediate realm. She is still connected to the earth. If you have the opportunity, look at the picture and see how the dull darkness from below is incorporated as a color in the coloring of Mary, and how then the light predominates, how the uppermost, the third realm already receives in full light, I would like to say, the head of Mary, shining with full light, lifting up the head, while the feet and legs are still bound down by the color. Observe how the lower realm, the intermediate realm and the heavenly realm, this reception of Mary by God the Father, is truly gradated in the inner experience of color. You can say that in order to understand this picture, one must actually forget everything else and look only at the color, because the three-tiered nature of the world is brought out of the color here, not conceptually, not intellectually, but entirely artistically. And one can say: It is really the case that, in order to grasp the world in a painterly way, it is necessary to grasp this world of radiant shine, of radiant revelation in chiaroscuro and in color, in order to emphasize, on the one hand, what is earthly-material, to emphasize the artistic aspect of this earthly-material aspect, and yet, on the other hand, not to let it rise to the spiritual. For if it were allowed to reach the spiritual plane, it would no longer be appearance, but wisdom. But wisdom is no longer artistic; wisdom lifts it up into the uncreated realm of the divine.

One would therefore like to say: In the case of the real artist, who depicts something like Titian in his “Assumption of Mary”, when one looks at this reception of Mary, or rather of Mary's head by God the Father, one has the feeling that one should no longer go further in the treatment of the light. It is a very fine line. The moment you start going further, you fall into intellectualism, which is unartistic. You can no longer add a line, I might say, to what is only hinted at in the light, not in the contour. Because the moment you go too far into the contour, it becomes intellectualized, that is, inartistic. Towards the top, the picture is in fact in danger of being inartistic. Painters after Titian also fell prey to this danger. Look at the angels up to Titian. When we go up to the heavenly region, we come to the angels. Look at how carefully the transition from color is avoided. You can still say that the angels in the pre-Titian period, and in a sense in Titian, are just clouds. If you cannot do that, if you cannot distinguish between being and appearance, even in the uncertainty, when you have already fully arrived at the being, at the being of the spiritual, then it ceases to be artistic.

If you go back to the 17th century, it will be different. There, materialism itself is already having an effect on the representation of the spiritual. There you can already see all the angels, I might say, painted with a certain non-artistic, but routine verve in all possible foreshortenings, to which you can no longer say: Couldn't they also be clouds? Yes, here reflection is already at work, here the artistic aspect already comes to an end.

And again, look at the apostles below, and you will get the feeling that, in fact, only Mary is artistic in the “Ascension of Mary”. Above, there is a danger that it turns into pure wisdom, into the formless. If one really achieves this, holding the formless and making it formless, then, I would say, on one side, towards one pole, there is the perfection of the artistic, because it is boldly artistic, because one ventures to the abyss where art ends, where one lets the colors blur from the light, where, if one wanted to go further, one could only begin to draw. But drawing is not painting. So there, towards the top, one approaches the realm of wisdom. And one is all the greater an artist the more one can still incorporate the wisdom into the sensual, the more one, if I want to express myself in concrete terms again, the more one can still incorporate the wisdom into the sensual, the more one, if I want to express myself in concrete terms again, the more one can still incorporate the possibility that the angels one paints can still be addressed as concentrated clouds that shimmer in the light in such and such a way and the like.

But if we start at the bottom of the picture and go up through the actual beauty, Mary herself, who is really floating up into the realm of wisdom, then Titian is able to depict her beautifully because she has not yet arrived, but is just floating up. It all appears in such a way that one has the feeling that if she swings up a little more, she will have to enter into wisdom. Art has nothing more to say there. But if we go down a little further, we come to the Apostles, and with the Apostles I said to you: the artist seeks to depict the earthly aspect of the Apostles through the use of color. But there he runs into the other danger. If he were to place his Mary even further down, he would not be able to depict her in her inner, self-sustaining beauty. If Mary were down there, for example, one would not understand the purpose. If she were sitting among the apostles, yes, she could not look as she does in the middle between heaven and earth. She could not look at all like that. You see, the apostles are standing below in their brownish coloration, and Mary does not fit in with them. For we cannot really stop at the fact that the apostles below have the heaviness of the earth in them. Something else must happen. This is where the element of drawing begins to intervene strongly. You can see this in Titian's characterized painting, where drawing begins to intervene strongly. Why is that?

Yes, you can no longer depict beauty in the brown, which actually goes beyond color, as you can in the case of Mary; something that no longer falls entirely within beauty must be depicted. And it must be beautiful in that something other than what is actually beautiful is revealed. You see, if Mary were sitting down there or standing among these apostles in the same coloring, it would actually be insulting. It would be terribly insulting. I am speaking only of this picture. I am not saying that Mary standing on the earth must be artistically offensive everywhere, but in this picture it would be a slap in the face for anyone looking at it artistically if Mary were standing down there. Why? You see, if she were painted in the same colors as the apostles, one would have to say that Mary was portrayed by the artist as virtuous. That is indeed how he portrays the apostles. We cannot have any other idea than that the apostles are looking up in their virtue. But we cannot say that about Mary. With her, it is so self-evident that we must not express her virtue. It would be just as if we wanted to depict God as virtuous. Where something is self-evident, where it becomes something that is being itself, it must not be depicted merely in outward appearance. Therefore, Mary must float away, must be in a realm where she is exalted above the virtuous, where one cannot say of her, in what appears in the color, that she is virtuous, any more than one could say of God himself that he is virtuous. At most, he can be virtue itself. But that is already an abstract sentence, that is already philosophy. It has nothing to do with art. But in the apostles below, we have to say that the artist succeeds in depicting the virtuous people through the color treatment itself in the apostles. They are virtuous.

Let us again try to get close to the matter through the genius of language. Virtue, what does it actually mean to be virtuous? To be virtuous is to be useful; because virtue is related to being useful. To be useful, to be useful, to be good for something, that is to be up to something, to be able to do something, to be able to do something, that is to be virtuous. But of course it ultimately depends on what one means in connection with virtuous, as for example Goethe also presented it, who speaks of a trinity: wisdom, appearance and power, that is, in this sense, virtuousness. Appearance = the beautiful, art. Wisdom = that which becomes knowledge, formless knowledge. Virtue, power = that which is truly useful, that which can do something, whose rule means something.

You see, this trinity has been revered since time immemorial. I could understand when a man told me a good many years ago that he was already sick of it when people spoke of the true, the beautiful and the good, because everyone who wants to say a phrase, an idealistic phrase, speaks of the true, the beautiful and the good. — But one can refer back to older times when these things were experienced with all human interest, with all human soul interest. And then, I would like to say, one sees, but in the manner of the beautiful, of the artistic, in the Titian painting above, wisdom, but not just wisdom, but still shining, so that it is still artistic, so that it is painted; in the middle, beauty; and below, virtue, the useful. Now we may ask the useful a little about its inner essence, its meaning. If we follow these things, we come, through the genius of speech, to the depth of the speech soul that creates among human beings. If we approach it only externally, it might occur to us that someone who had once been to church and listened to a sermon, where the preacher explained to his congregation in an outwardly phrase-like way how everything in the world is good and beautiful and purposeful. The adult was waiting at the church door and when the pastor came out, he asked him: “You said that everything in the world is good and beautiful and purposeful according to your idea. Am I also growing well?” The pastor said: “You have grown very well for an adult!” — Well, if you look at things in this external way, you won't get to the depths of them. Our way of looking at things today is in fact so superficial in so many fields. People today fill themselves completely with such external characteristics, namely with such external definitions, and do not even realize how they go around in circles with their ideas. For the virtuous person, it is not about being good at anything at all, but about being good at something spiritual, about placing ourselves in the spiritual world as human beings. The truly virtuous person is the one who is a whole human being because he brings the spiritual within him to realization, not just to manifestation, to realization through the will. But then we enter a region that, although it is human, also enters the religious, but no longer lies in the realm of the artistic, least of all in the realm of the beautiful. Everything in the world is formed in polarity. Therefore, we can say of Titian's painting: at the top he exposes himself to the danger of going beyond the beautiful, where he goes beyond Mary. There he is at the abyss of wisdom. Downwards, he is at the other abyss. For as soon as we depict the virtuous, that which man, as a being of his own essence, is meant to realize out of the spiritual, we in turn come out of the beautiful, out of the artistic. If we try to paint a truly virtuous person, we can only do so by somehow characterizing virtue in outward appearance, for my part by contrasting it with vice. But the artistic portrayal of virtue no longer actually shows any art; in our time it is already a falling out of the artistic.

But where is not everywhere in our time a falling out of the artistic, when, I would like to say, simply life circumstances are reproduced in a raw, naturalistic way, without the relationship to the spiritual really being there. Without this relationship to the spiritual, there is no artistry. Therefore, in our time, this striving in Impressionism and Expressionism is to return to the spiritual. Even if it is often done awkwardly, even if it is often only a beginning, it is still more than that which works with the model in a crude naturalistic way, which is inartistic. And if you grasp the concept of the artistically beautiful in this way, then you will also be able to accommodate tragedy, for example, and grasp tragedy in general in its artistic reach into the world.

A person who lives according to his thoughts, who leads his life in an intellectualistic way, can never become tragic. And a person who lives a completely virtuous life can never truly become tragic either. A person can become tragic if they have some kind of inclination towards the demonic, that is, towards the spiritual. A personality, a person, only begins to become tragic when the demonic is present in him in some way, for better or for worse. Now we are in the age of the freeing of the human being, where the human being as a demonic human being is actually an anachronism. That is the whole meaning of the fifth post-Atlantean period, that the human being grows out of the demonic to become a free human being. But as the human being becomes a free human being, the possibility of the tragic, so to speak, ceases. If you take the old tragic figures, even most of Shakespeare's tragic figures, you have the inner demonic that leads to the tragic. Wherever man is the manifestation of a demonic-spiritual, wherever the demonic-spiritual radiates through him, reveals itself, wherever man becomes, as it were, the medium of the demonic, there the tragic was possible. In this sense, the tragic will have to cease more or less, because humanity, having been set free, must break away from the demonic. Today it does not yet do so. It is falling ever deeper into the demonic.

But this is the great task for our time, the mission of our time, that human beings grow out of the demonic and into freedom.

But if we get rid of the inner demons that shape us into tragic personalities, we will be all the less able to get rid of the external demonic. For the moment man enters into a relationship with the external world, something demonic also begins for the modern human being. Our thoughts must become ever freer and freer. And when, as I have shown in my Philosophy of Freedom, thoughts become the impulses for the will, the will also becomes free. These are the polar opposites that can be set free: free thoughts and free will. But in between lies the rest of humanity, which is connected with karma. And just as the demonic once led to tragedy, so too can the experience of karma lead to a deep inner tragedy, especially in modern man. But tragedy will only be able to flourish when people experience karma. As long as we keep our thoughts to ourselves, we can be free. When we clothe our thoughts in words, the words no longer belong to us. What can become of a word that I have spoken! It is taken up by the other person, who surrounds it with different emotions and different feelings. The word lives on. As the word flies through the people of the present, it becomes a force that originated from a person. That is its karma, through which it is connected to the world, which in turn can be discharged back onto it. The word, which leads its own existence because it does not belong to us, because it belongs to the genius of language, can cause tragedy. Today, in particular, we see humanity, I would say, everywhere in the disposition to tragic situations through the overestimation of language, through the overestimation of the word. The peoples are divided according to language, want to be divided according to language. This is the basis for a huge tragedy that will befall the earth before the century is out. This is the tragedy of karma. If we can speak of the tragedy of the past as a tragedy of demonology, we must speak of the tragedy of the future as the tragedy of karma.

Art is eternal; its forms change. And if you accept that there is a relationship to the spiritual from the artistic point of view, you will understand that the artistic is something through which one can enter the spiritual world, both in creating and in enjoying. A true artist can create his picture in a lonely desert. It makes no difference to him who looks at the picture, or whether anyone looks at it at all, because he has created in a different community, he has created in the divine spiritual community. Gods have looked over his shoulders. He has created in the company of gods. What does it matter to the true artist whether any human being admires his picture or not? That is why one can be an artist in complete solitude. But on the other hand, one cannot be an artist without really placing one's own creature in the world, which one then also regards in terms of its spirituality, so that it lives in it. The creature that one places in the world must live in the spirituality of the world. If one forgets this spiritual connection, then art also changes, but it changes more or less into non-art.

You see, you can only create art if you have the work of art in the context of the world. The old artists were aware of this, who, for example, painted their pictures on the walls of churches, because there these pictures were guides for the believers, for the confessors, there the artists knew that this is in the earthly life, insofar as this earthly life is permeated by the spiritual.

It is hard to imagine something worse than creating for exhibitions instead of for such a purpose. Basically, it is the most terrible thing to walk through a painting exhibition or a sculpture exhibition, for example, where all kinds of things are hung or placed next to each other in a chaotic manner, where they don't belong together at all, where it is actually meaningless that one is next to the other. By painting having found the transition from painting for the church, for the house, to painting, I would like to say, already there, it loses its proper meaning. If you paint something within the frame, you can at least imagine looking out through a window and what you see is outside, but it is no longer anything. But now painting for exhibitions! You can't talk about it anymore. Isn't it true that a time that sees anything at all in exhibitions, sees anything possible, has just lost the connection with art. And you can see simply from what intellectual culture has to happen in order to find the way back to the intellectual-artistic. The exhibition, for example, can certainly be overcome. Of course, individual artists feel disgust for the exhibition, but we live in a time when the individual cannot achieve much unless the judgment of the individual is immersed in a worldview that in turn people in their freedom, in full freedom, as worldviews once permeated people in less free times and led to the emergence of real cultures, while today we have no real cultures.

However, a spiritual worldview must work on the development of real cultures and thus also on the development of real art, and have the highest interest in doing so.