The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In the short lecture I gave this afternoon before the eurythmy performance, I pointed out how we can see from the relationship that modern humanity has to the festivals of the year how we are entering into materialism. However, one must then grasp the concept of materialism much more deeply than is usually the case. The most dangerous characteristic of the present time is not that people are infected with materialism, but the much more dangerous characteristic is the superficiality of our age.

This superficiality is not only present in relation to spiritual worldviews, but it is also present in relation to materialism itself. It is taken for granted in superficial appearances. This afternoon, for example, I pointed out how, in different times of the year, something like the moods to which people in older times still yielded also came to expression in the festive events of those older times. Various moods were incorporated into the winter solstice festival, the spring festival, the St. John's festival, the Michaelmas festival, those very specific, cult-like or at least cult-like events, which must overcome people when they consciously experience the course of the year.

In this way, the human soul received nourishment, whereas today we only nourish the body. We still take part in the course of the day. When the sun sends forth its morning gold in its own revelation as dawn, we eat our breakfast. When the sun is at its zenith, when it pours its warmth and light particularly lovingly over the human race on earth, we devote ourselves to our midday meal, and so on through five o'clock tea and supper. In these festive events of the day, we join in the course of the day with the sun, by inwardly experiencing this fiery ride of the sun around the world. We experience what the sun performs in its fiery ride around the world by completing hunger and satiation. And so the mood for the human physical organism is there in a very distinct way at certain times of the day. We could call breakfast, lunch, tea and supper the festivals of the day. The human physical organism participates in what takes place in the relationship between the earth and the cosmos.

In a similar way, in older times, when the soul life was felt more intensely from the old instinctive states of clairvoyance, the course of the year was experienced. Certain things even played into the other from one sphere. You only need to remember what remains of these things: Easter eggs, St. Martin's geese and so on. In this way the lower, bodily region plays into the soul region, which must also experience the course of the year in a soul-like way. Now, a materialistic age would still be most likely, I do not want to say for Easter eggs, but for St. Martin's geese and the like, one would also be in favor of the course of the year.

But in olden times these things were not meant with reference to the actual festive mood, but they were attuned to the hunger and satiation of the soul. The human soul needed something different at Christmas time, something different at Easter time, at Midsummer time and at Michaelmas time. And one can really compare what was in the events of the festivities with a kind of consideration for the hunger of the soul precisely in the seasons that occur and with a satiation of the soul in these seasons.

Now we can say: If we look at the course of the sun during the day, we can apply to it that which is good for our body. If we look at the course of the sun during the year, we can apply to it that which is good for our soul.

If festivals are to be revived, then this must naturally happen out of a much more conscious state: out of such an awakening of the soul as is striven for through the anthroposophical world view. We cannot merely restore the old festival seasons historically; we must find them again out of our own soul nature through the newer insights and views of the world. But we distinguish not only between body and soul in man, but also between spirit.

Now it is already difficult for modern man to surrender to certain ideas when speaking of soul. The story becomes blurred and indefinite. Not only that one has experienced how in the 19th century people began to speak of a psychology, a doctrine of the soul without a soul. Fritz Mauthner, the great critic of language, even said: Soul is something so indeterminate that we do not really know any soul, we only know certain thoughts, sensations, feelings that are experienced in us, but we do not know a unified soul in it. We should therefore no longer use the word “soul” at all in the future. We should speak of this indeterminate inner wiggling and no longer say soul, but “soul”. Thus Fritz Mauthner advises that a future Klopstock who writes a “Messiade” should no longer say: “Sing, unsterbliche Seele, der sündigen Menschen Erlösung...”, but rather: “Sing, unsterbliches Geseel, der sündigen Menschen Erlösung...”, if that still makes sense at all within this Geseellehre! So in the future we would not have a psychology, but a soul science.

Now we can really say: the modern man no longer knows anything about the connection between his soul and the course of the sun throughout the year. He has become a materialist in this respect too. He adheres to the feasts of the body, which follow the course of the sun throughout the day. The festivals are celebrated out of traditional custom, but they are not felt to be alive. And we have, in addition to having a body and a soul - or, in the sense of Fritz Mauthner, a Geseel - we also have spirit.

Now, in the course of the world, there are also historical epochs. The human spirit also lives through these historical epochs, which extend beyond the course of a year and span centuries, if it feels them with feeling. In the old days, people experienced them very well. Anyone who is able to enter in the right way, borne by the spirit, in the way that people in older times thought their way into the course of time, knows, as has been said everywhere: At this or that turning point in time, some personality appeared who in turn revealed something spiritual from the heights of the world. And then this spiritual essence has become established, just as sunlight becomes established in the physical world. When such an epoch then entered its twilight, something new emerged.

These historical epochs are related to the development of the spirit of humanity just as the course of the year is related to the development of the soul. Of course, precisely when the development of the spirit must be grasped in a living way, it must be done by learning to understand how changes and metamorphoses occur in the development of humanity through conscious spiritual knowledge. Today, people would rather overlook these metamorphoses altogether. They are somehow outwardly affected by the effects, but inwardly they do not want to deal with the changes that come from the spirit and express themselves in external world events.

One should only look at how a certain way of thinking, feeling and feeling arises in our time among children and young people, which was still foreign to the earlier generation; how great changes occur, which, if one looks at the right elements, are entirely comparable to the development of the year in the development of humanity. Therefore, we should listen to what each age proclaims as its needs, and pay attention when a new age is dawning and demanding something different from people than previous ages have demanded. But for that, people today have only a limited organ.

The great interconnections of life can come to us when we approach the festive mood in the right way from our present consciousness, when, for example, we really let something like the St. John's mood into our soul, and if we try to gain from the St. John's mood that which will help our soul to develop, that which supports our engagement by the cosmos coming to our aid.

Certainly, modern humanity has become more or less indifferent to the things that are connected with the greatness of world development. Today, people no longer have a heart for the insights of the great world connections. The spirit of pettiness has made its way in, I would say the spirit of microscopy and atomization in phenomena that, when you talk about them today as I have to do here, naturally give the impression of the paradoxical.

I would like to point out a particular phenomenon in connection with the St. John's mood. The connection will be somewhat remote, but I would like to point it out. Even if one does not have a very developed sense of the course of the year, what is more natural than to have the impression from the growth of plants, from the growth of trees, that When spring comes, the green sprouts and shoots, and more and more growth, sprouting and blossoming occurs. The whole process of active growth, which gives the impression that the cosmos, with the effects of the sun, is calling upon the earth to open up to the universe, all of this then enters into the time around St. John's Day.

Then the sprouting and budding begins to recede again. We are approaching the time when the earth draws its forces of growth back into itself, when the earth withdraws from the cosmos. How natural it is that from the impression one receives from the course of the year, one forms the idea that the snow cover belongs to winter, that it belongs to winter that the plants, so to speak, creep into the soil of the earth with their being, that it belongs to summer that the plants come out, grow towards the cosmos. What could be more natural than to develop the idea – even if in a deeper sense it is actually correct to have the opposite idea – that the plants are dormant in winter and awake in summer?

I do not want to speak now about this sleeping and waking in terms of right and wrong ideas. I just want to speak about the impressions that one gets, so that people have the idea that summer belongs to the development of vegetation, winter to the withdrawal and creeping away of vegetation. After all, a kind of world feeling develops for the human being. One gets into the feeling of a connection with the warming and illuminating power of the sun when one sees this warming and illuminating power of the sun again in the green and flowering plant cover of the earth, and you get into a feeling as if you were an earth hermit in winter, when the plant cover is not there and the snow coat closes the earth from the cosmos, calling for inner activity. In short, by feeling and sensing in this way, you tear yourself away from your earthly existence with your earthly consciousness, so to speak. You place yourself in the greater context of the universe.

But now comes modern research, which I am not criticizing here – what I am going to say now is not meant as a scolding, but as a praise, even in relation to research itself – now comes modern research and shrugs its shoulders when it comes to the great cosmic connections. Why should one feel uplifted by the divinely illuminating, warming power of the sun when the trees bud, turn green, and the earth is covered with a blanket of plants? Why should one feel a connection with the universe through these plants growing out of the earth? It disturbs one. Cosmic feelings disturb one. It is no longer possible to reconcile having such feelings with one's materialistic consciousness. The plant is a plant, after all. It is as if the plant has a mind of its own when it blossoms only in spring and agrees to bear fruit in summer. How does that happen? You are dealing not only with a plant, but with the whole world! If you are supposed to feel, sense or recognize these things, you are dealing with the whole world, not just with the plant! It's not appropriate! You are already trying not to deal with the substances that are available in powder or crystal form, but with the atomic structures, with the atomic nucleus, with the electromagnetic atmosphere and so on! So you are trying to deal with something that is complete, not with something that points to many things. You should now admit to the plant that you need a sensation that reaches out into the cosmos! It is a terrible thing not to be able to narrow one's field of vision to the mere individual object! We are so accustomed to it: when we look through the microscope, everything around is closed off, there is only the small field of vision; everything happens in such a small, closed way. One must also be able to look at the plant by itself, not in connection with the cosmos!

And lo and behold, at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, researchers achieved something extraordinary in precisely this area. It was certainly already known from individual plants in relation to hot houses, 'green houses and so on, that one can overcome the summer and winter, but on the whole, at this turn of the 19th to the 20th century, not enough had been achieved to overcome the fact that plants do need a certain winter rest. Discussions were held during this time about the situation of tropical plants. Those researchers who no longer wanted to know anything about the connection with the cosmos claimed that tropical plants grow all year round. The others, who still held on to the old conservative view, said: Yes, when you come to the lush green world of the tropics, you only think that because the plants go dormant at different times, some only for up to eight days. So you don't see it when a particular species is dormant. There were extensive discussions about the behavior of tropical plants. In short, there was a sense of tremendous unease about this connection between the plant world and the cosmos.

Now, just at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, the most interesting and ingenious attempts have been made in this direction, and a whole range of plants, not just annuals but also trees, which are much stronger, have actually been successfully weaned from their stubbornness, their cosmic stubbornness. We have succeeded in overcoming the dependency on cosmic conditions by creating certain conditions that make plants that were thought to be annuals become perennial. In the case of the majority of our forest trees growing in temperate climates, we have actually succeeded in creating conditions that cause trees that were thought to have to have this winter time, to lose their leaves in winter and stand there withered, to become evergreen. For that was the premise of certain materialistic explanations. In this respect, an extraordinarily ingenious achievement has been made.

It was discovered that the cosmic can be driven out of the trees if the trees are brought into closed rooms and the soil is properly nourished with nutrient salts, so that the plants, which would otherwise find nothing in the wintertime when the soil is so low in nutrient salts, now also find their nutrient salts there. If you provide sufficient moisture, enough warmth and enough light, the trees will grow.

Only one tree in Central Europe resisted this research drive at the beginning of the 20th century. It was the beech, the copper beech. It was hounded from all sides, and now it was said to be willing to be locked up in closed rooms! It was provided with the necessary nutrients, with the necessary moisture and warmth – but it remained stubborn and continued to demand its winter rest. But she was all alone.

And now, in this 20th century, in 1914, we have to note - I do not want to talk about the outcome of the world war, but about another great historical event - the great, powerful event that Klebs, a researcher who was extraordinarily favored by research in this field, succeeded in exorcising the beech's cosmic stubbornness. He simply succeeded in growing beech trees in closed rooms, providing them with the necessary conditions in closed rooms: the appropriate sunlight, which could be measured. And lo and behold, the beech did not resist; it also yielded to what the researchers wanted.

I am not referring to a phenomenon that I have reason to criticize, because who could not admire such tremendous research effort. Besides, it would of course be madness to want to refute the facts. They are there, they are like that, they are absolutely like that. So it is not a matter of agreement or refutation, but something else.

Why should it not be possible to create hair growth outside of humans and animals if the necessary conditions for hair growth could be found somewhere on neutral ground? Why not? The appropriate conditions just need to be somehow produced. I know that there are some people in our time who would prefer their hair to grow on their heads rather than be produced externally by some kind of cultivation! But we could imagine that this would also succeed. Then we would seemingly no longer need to somehow connect what happens on earth with the cosmos.

Of course, one can have all due respect for research, but one must nevertheless see deeper into these things. Apart from what I developed here some time ago about the nature of the elements, I would like to say the following today. It must be clear that, for example, the following is the case. We know that once upon a time the Earth and the Sun were one body. That was a long, long time ago, in the Saturn era, the Sun era. Then there was a brief repetition of this state during the Earth era. But something remained behind in the earth that belongs there. Today we are bringing it out again. And we are not only bringing it out of the repetition that occurred during our time on earth by heating our rooms with coal, but we are bringing it out by using electricity. For from those times when, according to the old Saturn time, in the solar time, the sun and the earth were one, the foundation was laid for us to have electricity on earth. With electricity, we have a force that has been connected to the earth since ancient times, which is solar power, solar power hidden in the earth.

Why should not the stubborn beech tree, if only we tackle it hard enough, make use of the solar energy flowing in from the cosmos, instead of using the solar luminosity obtained from the earth in the form of electricity!

But it is precisely when we consider these things that we realize how much we need a deepening of our whole knowledge. As long as people could believe that solar energy came only from the cosmos, they came from the immediate present observation of each year to an awareness of their cosmic connection in plant growth. In the present age, when materialistic considerations would sever that part of the Cosmos which can be so easily seen as a cosmic effect, we must, when we look at the apparent autonomy of the plant, have a science that remembers that the cosmic connection between earth and sun existed in older times, but in a different form. We need, precisely, on the one hand, to be restricted as if under a microscope, but on the other hand, we need an all the more intensive breadth of vision, and it is precisely in the details that it becomes clear how we need this breadth of vision.

It is not at all a matter of us on anthroposophical ground revolting in an amateurish way against the progress of research. But since the progress of research, by its very nature, must increasingly lead us to that earthworm nature of which I have often spoken here, so that we have no free view into the distance, we must gain the broader view, the great cosmic We need the counter-pole everywhere. Not antagonism towards research, but we need the spiritual, the spiritual counter-pole. That is the right point of view for us to take. And I would like to say that it is also a St. John's mood when we inscribe this in our minds, when we realize how we must now live in a world-historical St. John's mood, how we must turn our gaze out into the vastness of the cosmos. We need this. We need this especially in our spiritual knowledge. Today, mere talk of the spiritual is not enough; what is needed is a real penetration into the concrete phenomena of the spiritual world. What is brought out of the cosmic development of the Earth, by drawing attention to the development of Saturn, the Sun, the Moon, the Earth, and so on, has enormous implications in terms of knowledge, including knowledge of history.

When, on the one hand, materialistic science, in such brilliant research results as those of Klebs, draws our attention to the fact that even the stubborn beech tree can be made to do without sunlight and light, as it otherwise only does under the influence of sunlight, then this leads us, if we have no spiritual knowledge, to crumbling everything in the world and narrow our field of vision. There is the beech tree in front of us, the electric light promotes its growth, but we know nothing but this, which arises in the narrowest field.

If we are endowed with spiritual insight, we say something different. Then we say to ourselves: If the beech's Klebs withdraws the present sunlight, then it must give it to it in the form of electricity, the ancient sunlight. Then our vision will not be narrowed, but on the contrary, our vision will be expanded into the vastness. Oh well, say the people who do not want to know anything more about the spiritual course of the year, one day is like the other: breakfast, lunch, tea time, supper time; it's good if there is something better at Christmas, but basically it goes on like this day after day throughout the year. We only look at the day, that is, at the outward material of the human being: Oh well, cosmic connections! Let us emancipate ourselves from such a world view! Let us realize that even the wayward beech no longer needs the cosmos. If we lock it in a closed prison, we only need to provide it with electric light of sufficient strength, and it will grow without the sun! — No, it just does not grow without the sun. We just have to know how to seek out the sun in the right way when we do something like that. But then we must also be clear about the fact that it is something different, a different relationship. When we look with a broad view, it turns out that it is something different whether we let the beech thrive in the cosmic sunlight, or whether we give it the light that has become Ahrimanic, originating from ancient times. And we recall what we have often said about the normal developmental process and the Luciferic on the one hand, and the Ahrimanic on the other.

If we have a sufficient insight into this, then we will not lick our fingers out of sheer cleverness that we have now overcome the cosmic obstinacy of the beech, but we will go much further. We will now proceed to the juices of the beech and examine the effect on the human organism, we will examine the effect on the human organism of the beech that we have left to its own devices and of the beech that we have removed its stubbornness with the electric light, and we will perhaps learn something very special about the healing properties of one beech and the other. Then we have to go into the spiritual!

But how do you deal with these things today? You have an admirable interest in research. You sit in a classroom, you are an experimental psychologist, you write down all sorts of words that have to be memorized, you test memory, you experiment on children, and you discover something tremendously interesting. Once you have awakened an interest in something, then of course all things in the world are interesting; it depends only on the subjective point of view. Why should one not be able to make it so that a stamp collection is much more interesting than a botanical collection? Since that can be the case, why should it not be possible for something like that to happen in another area? Why should one not be able to gain some interest from the tortures to which children are subjected when they are experimented on? But everywhere one wonders whether there are not higher obligations, whether it is at all advisable to experiment with children in this way at a certain age. The question arises as to what one is corrupting there. And the even stronger question arises as to what is spoiled in the teachers when, instead of demanding a lively, warm relationship from them, an experimental interest is demanded from the results of experimental psychology. So it really depends on whether, when one puts oneself in the right relationship to the sensory world with such research, one also puts oneself in the right relationship to the supersensible world.

Now, of course, it will be able to roar with joy to certain people who speak of the necessary objectivity of research: So he wants to claim that there are some spirits who find it immoral when the beechwood glue takes its stubbornness in this way! — That doesn't occur to me at all. It doesn't occur to me in my dreams. Everything that is done should be done, but you have to have the counterweight to it. And in an age in which we have emancipated ourselves from cosmic perception regarding the growth of beech trees, there must also be a perception on the other hand, in a civilization that absorbs such things, of how spiritual progress occurs in the evolution of humanity. In an age such as our own, a sense of the times is essential. I do not wish to restrict research, but it must be felt that something else must be set against it. There must be an open heart for the fact that at certain times, these and those things from the spiritual world always reveal themselves. If, on the one hand, materialism becomes overgrown and leads to strong and great results, then those who have an interest in such results should also have an interest in the research results about the spiritual world.

But this lies at the very heart of Christianity. A correct view of Christianity, after the Mystery of Golgotha and in the continuing effect of Christ's earthly existence, sees in the nature of Christ the Christ-power, the Christ-impulse. And that means that when the autumn mood sets in, when everything becomes arid and barren, when the sprouting and budding in the nature of the senses ceases, then one perceives precisely the sprouting and budding of the spirit, when one can feel the glistening and glowing of the spirits in the tree as it sheds its leaves, and these spirits now accompany man through the winter.

But in the same way, we must learn to feel how, in an age that, from a certain point of view, rightly sets about understanding the details, narrowing our view of the details, our view must also fall on the big, the comprehensive. That is the St. John's mood in relation to Christianity. We must understand intuitively that the St. John's mood is the starting point for the event that lies in the words: “He must increase, but I must decrease.”

That means that the impression on man of all that is conquered by sense research must decrease. And precisely by penetrating more and more into the individual senses, the impression of the spiritual must become ever stronger and stronger. The sun of the spirit must shine ever more brightly into the human heart, the more the sun that works in the sense world diminishes.

We must feel the St. John's mood as the entrance into spiritual impulses and as the exit from sensual impulses. We must learn to feel the St. John's mood as something in which it weaves and blows, spiritually and demonically blows from the sensual into the spiritual, from the spiritual into the sensual. And we must learn to shape our spirit lightly through the St. John's mood, so that it does not just stick like pitch to the fixed contours of ideas, but that it finds its way into weaving, blowing, living ideas. We must be able to notice the glowing of the sensual, the dying away of the sensual, the glowing of the spiritual in the dying away of the sensual. We must feel the symbol of the illumination of the St. John's night moth as something that also has its meaning in the dimming of the lighting.

The St. John's night moth glows, the St. John's night moth dims again. But by glowing, it leaves alive in us the life and weaving of the spiritual in the twilight of the senses. And when we see the little spiritual ripples everywhere in nature, just as we see symbolically in the sensual the glowing and damping of the Johanniswürmchen, then we will, when we can do this with full, bright, clear consciousness, find the right Johannis mood for our age. And we need this right Midsummer mood, for we must go through our time in such a way that the spirit learns to become fervently alive, and that we learn to follow meaningfully the fervently alive spiritual.

St. John's mood - towards the future of humanity and the earth! No longer the old mood, which only understands the sprouting and sprouting of the external, which is glad when it can also imprison this sprouting and sprouting, can put under electric light that which otherwise thrived happily in sunlight. We must learn to recognize the flashing and blossoming of the spirit, so that electric light becomes less important to us than it is in the present; but that we may thereby sharpen our view, the Johannic view, for that ancient sunlight that appears to us when we open up the great spiritual horizon, not only the narrow earthly horizon, but the great horizon from Saturn to Vulcan.

If we allow the light that appears to us on this great horizon to have the right effect on us, then all the trivialities of our age will be able to appear to us in this light, and we will move forward and upward. Otherwise, if we do not make up our minds to do so, we will move backward and downward.

Today, it is all about human freedom, about human will. Today, it is all about the independent human decision between forward or backward, between upward or downward.

In our time, outside the circles of the anthroposophical movement, there is little understanding of how to arrive at a true view of the soul. I am saying something that may sound incomprehensible to some people, because it is often assumed that one knows what soul is, what one is dealing with when one speaks of the soul, and so on. And on the other hand, such a statement can in many cases be taken for granted in the sense that centuries- and even millennia-old views of the human soul have finally run their course and that a view of the human soul must wait until scientific research is so advanced that it is able to provide information about the soul.

Now, however, I would like to counter these two objections today with nothing more than the assertion of the recently deceased linguist Fritz Mauthner, whom I have mentioned several times: that people in the present day often believe that they have an insight into this or that, whereas in fact they only have words. And it is for this reason that Mauthner wrote a “critique of language”. He wanted to show that today's civilized humanity in particular has an inherited language. We have expressions for all sorts of things. But if you look more closely at what is behind the words, there is actually nothing there. We have the word, we think we are designating something with the word, but in reality we are not designating anything.

Now, of course, it is nonsense to apply this criticism of language to scientific knowledge. For no one will be of the opinion that, whether one knows much or little, let us say, about a horse, one could be misled about the thing horse by the expression “horse” in some language. Everyone knows perfectly well that you cannot ride on the word horse, but you can ride on the real horse. And that makes it clear from the outset that, with regard to things that exist in nature, a critique of language is rather inconsequential, because one will always know the difference between the word and the thing with regard to external observation. I do not believe that someone who wants to ride out will sit on the word 'white horse' instead of the real white horse.

But it is really different with everything in our present civilization that, on the one hand, refers to the soul, to the life of the soul, to the facts of the life of the soul, and, on the other hand, refers to the ethical, to the moral demands of humanity. Here one must indeed say: there is actually only a belief that realities lie behind the words. Therefore, one can also understand that Mauthner thought deeply: Should one even still use the word “soul”? There is nothing real behind it, as when a person speaks of a horse with the word horse. People no longer have any insights into the life of the soul. Therefore, one should not only omit the soul from the science of the soul, as a 19th-century psychology of the soul did, one should completely eradicate the word soul, and speak of “spiritual phenomena” in such a way as to refer to something indeterminate. If one wants to say that there are three entities, Karl, Fritz, Hans, who are sons of the same father and the same mother, and wants to refer to them superficially and sweepingly, then one says: siblings. Why should one, Mauthner asks, say soul when one only knows so little about mental phenomena? The word soul designates nothing; one should say “Geseel”. If this view were really to gain currency, the delusion would be done away with that in speaking of the soul one had something more or other behind it. For in the future one would no longer say that man has an immortal soul. During his life on earth man has a soul within him, I am touched in my deepest soul, and so on.

Things are indeed extremely serious for those people who are seriously seeking a view of the spirit, much more serious than one usually thinks. In any case, they prove how much people should listen up in the present when it is asserted somewhere that the right means should be sought again to reach the reality of the soul.

Today we say that the soul abilities are mainly thinking, feeling and willing. But people should just honestly realize what they mean by these terms thinking, feeling and willing. It would soon dispel their belief that they are looking at something real. Today I would just like to speak about how anthroposophy can clarify that with ordinary consciousness one is not at all able to look at something fully real in this respect. And what I would like to hint at today in this regard, I will then explain in more detail in the next lecture, because today it is still my duty to point out another aspect.

If a person looks honestly into themselves today, they must admit that what they carry within them in terms of thoughts is mostly taken from the outside world. These thoughts are more or less only mirror images of what makes an impression on the human senses in the external physical-sensual reality. Just try to do the self-observation experiment clearly and ask yourself: How many thoughts are there in this human consciousness that point to something other than the words we have: thinking, feeling, willing, God, immortality and so on, that point to something in the spiritual life of ordinary civilization that is not mirrored from the outside world? People only strive to understand everything in terms of how it can be mirrored by the external world. And if you want to explain the spiritual to many people today, they actually demand visual aids for the spiritual as well, perhaps a film or something similar, because they say: if it is not illustrated to us, if we are not presented with sensory images, then we do not understand anything about the spiritual!

In such moments, when people demand that the spiritual be clothed in sensual images, they are more honest than when they speak as experts on the soul. If we take together much of what I have often discussed here in this house, then we will be able to realize that when we look back on our thinking, we have only one side of this thinking. In this sense one can even speak of a reality — but one can speak of a reality in this way, as when one gets to know a person only from behind. Imagine the grotesque thing: you only know a person from the back! Then you know him, but you do not know his nature. At most, you can sometimes grasp something of his nature. But then cases like that of the student who once came to Heidelberg as a young badger, registered with the famous Professor Kuno Fischer, and now, in his great joy, before going to the lecture hall, rushed to the barber's, had himself dressed up, and because he is so full of the fact that he is going to hear the famous man, also talks to the barber about it. The barber says, “Yes, today Kuno Fischer is writing something on the blackboard!” The student asks him, “How do you know that Kuno Fischer is writing something on the blackboard today?” Yes, when he writes something on the blackboard, he has his hair parted at the back before the lecture; that's when he turns around!

Well, when there are such clear signs that the character is expressed in the parting of the occiput, then one can indeed learn something about the inner personality, even if one only gets to know it from behind. But firstly, it is perhaps not particularly significant, and secondly, it is the case with most people that one does not learn very much.

With regard to our thinking, the most important part of our soul for life on earth, we only perceive, if I may put it this way, the back side. The front side escapes ordinary observation. For when one approaches the observation of human beings with anthroposophy and asks oneself: Is it all about thinking, that one forms abstract ideas about the external things grasped by the senses? — then one comes to the conclusion that this is not all about thinking, but thinking, apart from representing this sum of abstract thoughts, is also still another sum of forces. Thoughts cannot actually do anything, and one actually thinks best when one does nothing, when one sits quietly, when one cultivates calm. Thoughts are powerless, like mirror images are powerless. But if you now follow the human being, from infancy until he has grown taller, and if you later follow the growth processes that are still present in the human being - even if the human being is no longer growing taller, growth processes are still there - if you look at what the forces of growth are in the human being, then these are the same forces, now seen from the other side, that show themselves backwards in abstract thought. Man sends abstract thoughts outwards; inwards they are the forces that shape his brain. In the early childhood years, the brain is formed plastically. The forces that otherwise work as growth forces are the forces of thinking. And just as you have to imagine the front side if you see a person from behind – if you are allowed to imagine that they are a complete person – you have to imagine the concrete, real power of thought that goes into the human being and works on the human being in addition to abstract thinking.

That is the essence of a pedagogy based on healthy anthroposophy: the teacher knows that it is not enough for the child to receive this or that abstract idea from this or that person. There is a big difference between whether the child receives a living, pictorial, active idea or a dead idea. The dead idea has a retarding effect on the growth processes, the living idea has a promoting effect on the growth processes. And so we come to the fact that thinking shows one side, which, powerless, only reflects the outer world, and, when we look inward, we see a living side that permeates the whole organism of the human being and that is only the other side of his growth, the spiritual counter-image of his growth. And if one continues to research, one finds that what is represented by the other side - in relation to the human being it is the rear side, but in relation to thinking it is the front side - is not brought down by dead thinking, which only appears to us from the front, but by living thinking from its pre-earthly existence.

In fact, the transition from the pre-earthly existence to the earthly existence is such that, in the pre-earthly existence, the human being freely develops a system of forces that works in all directions in the spiritual world. Then he descends into the earthly existence. There this thinking, which is active and ruling in the spiritual world, transforms itself into the inner organizing forces of the body, and outwardly it sends, as it were, the reflecting surface onto which the earth projects its images. That is the fact. But now it is indeed the case that after a person has completed the time between death and a new birth in a satisfactory manner, he then has no task for this living thinking in the spiritual world. This living thinking has its great task in the time between death and a new birth. When this task is completed, the phenomenon occurs over there, which I have often described to you: the soul turns to earth life. But then this thinking has a new task: the task of forming the human body. And that is the significance of man's earthly thinking, of man's thinking that comes from the spiritual, that it is directed towards the human body in a formative way. Thus, in our true, in our real thinking, we have an heirloom from the spiritual world, but one that is only something on earth, because in the spiritual world it has lost its purpose. We have to thank this for the fact that our thinking can become so clear on earth. If this thinking still had a task as it had in the spiritual world, it could not become so clear on earth.

But let us turn to the other faculty of the human soul, to feeling. You will all notice - quite apart from what I myself have said about it here in this room: feeling is not as clear as thinking. Feeling is something that occurs in a different form, but in the same way as dreaming. The state of mind during feeling is basically the same as during dreaming, except that feeling occurs in a completely different form. Why is that so? Well, in feeling, just as in thinking, we only have the back side for this earthly life. But the front side is not only directed towards the human body, but, as man descends to earth from the pre-earthly existence, from the existence between death and a new birth, he also retains what lies behind feeling as an heirloom. But that still remains turned towards the spiritual, it does not just have an earthly task. Therefore, every night when a person falls asleep, he does not take his thinking with him into sleep, but he does take his feeling with him. And if you look at dreams in the right way, they are images because logical thoughts do not live on; but feelings live on. With every sleep, a person delves into the whole spiritual world. Man does not take his thoughts with him, but he does take his feelings, and even more so his volitions.

Understandably, during the day there is nothing to be done with the will. I have often said that a person can make a plan, he has a thought. But how the thought slides down into the body, how the will to move the hand continues to work, remains as dark as the state remains dark in sleep. But for that, a person retains the most from the eternal for his will. And again, one can see from the activity of the human being, for if the human being does not move, there is not a will present, but only a desire. Seen from the other side, the will represents something completely eternal. Thinking also represents something eternal, but it has been transformed into an earthly activity. The will, however, remains in the Eternal and is active in man's destiny through repeated earthly lives, in Karma.

I just wanted to give you an introduction to how one penetrates to a real teaching of the soul, so that behind the words thinking, feeling and willing there are realities, so that one points to reality. Just as the word horse refers to the outer physical horse, so when one penetrates anthroposophically into the life of the soul in this way, one can come to reality, to realities. That is the way, and on this way will come at the same time what I emphasized at the end of the last lecture here: that Anthroposophy will never will be understood when it is theory, but only when, in acquiring the anthroposophical, the human being becomes a different being, the human being is truly transformed; when he becomes a different being altogether in ethical and human relationships.

What is being striven for in this way is now confronted with something else. And now I come to what I am obliged to tell you, because Anthroposophy is already in the world and one must be alert to what is happening. We must not always have closed windows, but must also look out, and so it is a spiritual and intellectual duty to speak about these things. For everywhere today, where people believe that they have obtained clear concepts only from science, anthroposophy is dismissed with the assertion: that is fantasy, speculation, that is fantasy. And those people say that they alone have clear thinking. Apart from the fact that when one approaches anthroposophy, one naturally gains inner certainty from the truth by pursuing the anthroposophical, one must sometimes also look at how clear today's thinking actually is! I would like to discuss this with you first of all using an example, for the reason that the anthroposophist should be aware of what is today's culture or civilization. I will take an example that says something. If, let us say, one examines the logic of a person who writes in the newspapers, not much is said by that. But I take a prominent naturalist of the present day and say explicitly that I do not want to say anything malicious or disparaging, because I fully recognize that we are dealing with an important naturalist and with a serious matter that he discusses. And in this regard, I would like to draw your attention to the clarity that prevails in this regard.

In October 1910, the well-known naturalist Max Rubner gave the rector's speech at the University of Berlin, entitled: “Our Goals for the Future”. He talks about the spiritual goals of the future, and it is not just anyone who speaks, but someone who is immersed in research and who must be seen as a serious and diligent researcher from the point of view of today's civilization. At the end of his speech, he also addresses the students and tries – well, in a way that is beautiful in his own way – to make it clear that they should study. But he does this with the “clear” concepts — I mean “clear” in quotation marks — that are possible for such a researcher today, based on today's thinking. I would like to draw attention to a few points. First of all, he says, addressing the students: “We all have to learn; we come into the world with nothing but our instrument for intellectual work, a blank page, the brain, differently predisposed, differently capable of development; we receive everything from the outside world...”

So, an often-encountered view today, which says: Look, if you want to talk about the soul life, look at your brain, which is a blank slate that has to get everything from the impressions of the outside world. So when we are born, we have our brain as a blank slate, we have to expose ourselves to the impressions of the world, then they go into us, then the slate is written on. So, he says to his students, just expose yourselves to the impressions of the world with freshness, courage and vigor, and then the page you brought with you will be written on.

In the next sentence, he tells them how to do it. He says: “No brain wants to grasp everything that its ancestors have experienced and learned, what billions of brains have considered and matured in the course of human history, what our spiritual heroes have helped create...”

So the students should only pay attention to what the spiritual heroes have created. But now the spiritual heroes are suddenly creating, so now the unwritten brains have to oppose the written brains of the spiritual heroes! You see, as soon as you put two sentences together, one on page 23 and the other on page 24, they are no longer correct! For if the heroes of the mind were also blank brains, it would not be possible to speak of their impressions on the blank brains in such a way as to suggest that these brains have created anything, for that is precisely what is being denied: everything must be received from the outside world. But now the outside world is also considered to include what human brains create. One must indeed go into such things.

But then it goes on to say: “What has been learned provides the basic material for productive thinking.” Now, put the two sentences together: “We receive everything from the outside world,” and the second: “What has been learned provides the basic material for productive thinking.” This is not the speech of an ordinary newspaper writer, this is the speech of a truly meritorious researcher of the modern age. You see, it is basically irrelevant if you now want to point out the way in which such a personality characterizes how the brain works. “[...] there is always something refreshing about working in a new, previously untilled field of the brain.” That is why he tells his students to sometimes look around for other subjects that they have not yet looked at: “[...] some areas of the brain only yield results when they are repeatedly plowed, but ultimately bear the same good fruit as others that open up more effortlessly.”

Well, after all, the soil that is plowed does not produce the plow. If you want to dwell on these thoughts, you can no longer grasp any thought at all. But now Rubner finds that this thinking is quite natural.

In order to show you the significance of what he is saying, I would like to say something in advance. When someone does sports, we see him in various movements. If you are particularly interested, you can even take a snapshot of these movements. But if we take an unbiased view of things, we have to admit that if we follow the internal organic processes that take place while someone is doing sports, what happens inside between nerve and muscle as a kind of process of destruction and restoration is, firstly, much more important for what it means to be human, but also infinitely more interesting than what can be captured in a snapshot. I am not saying anything against sport as an external physical exercise. But what the athlete is inwardly is truly much more interesting than what he is outwardly. It is only in what he achieves within the organism that it begins to become interesting.

Now it so happens that the opposite is the case with the movement of the human limbs as it is with thinking. In thinking, what is done, what happens, what the fact is, is the essential, and what lies in the organization is the unessential. In sports, what takes place externally in the facts is the less interesting part; what the organism does internally is the more interesting part. In thinking, what is interesting is what thinking presents itself as, what thinking really is; what the organism does in the process is something more or less simple. Therefore, when you understand things, you can no longer speak of thinking in the same way as of muscle movement.

But if all this becomes superficial, external, what do you say? Then you explain things like this: “Thinking strengthens the brain, and the latter (the brain) increases in performance through exercise, just like another organ, like our muscle strength, through work and sport. Studying is brain sport.

You see, our civilization is caught out in its most important element, in thinking about things, if you grasp it in such a place. You don't wake up to what is actually happening in the present through something else.

Now I would like to introduce you to a personality who, through her way of thinking, which can truly be called ingenious within certain limits, has some excellent negative thoughts about our present civilization, and who understands how to characterize it well: how it is ultimately an impossible formation and shaping of thought that has brought our civilization to decay and ruin. And I must say: the man who wrote the book about the “decay and reconstruction of culture”, Albert Schweitzer, is in a position to judge such things. Anyone who is familiar with Albert Schweitzer's book “The History of the Life-Jesu Research,” published in 1906, for example, and the way in which Schweitzer knows how to address even the most apocalyptic of subjects, so that he is already well ahead of the other theologians, must admit that Schweitzer can have a sound judgment of what contemporary intellectual life is actually worth. Now he has written this book, the first part of which has just been published. The first chapter is entitled: “The Fault of Philosophy in the Decline of Culture.” And truly razor-sharp are the sentences that are intended to characterize our present intellectual life, our life of civilization. The very first sentence is: “We are living in the era of the decline of culture. The war did not create this situation. It itself is only one manifestation of it. What was spiritual has been translated into facts, which in turn react on the spiritual in every respect in a deteriorating way.” A person who has insights into the worthlessness of present-day culture! And further: ”We lost our way in culture because there was no reflection on culture among us... So we crossed the threshold of the century with unshakable illusions about ourselves.” And now he asks himself: Why is this symptom of the decline of culture there? Why are we living in a cultural decline? And he says to himself: If we look back just a short time, to the time when intellectualism was in its first stage of flowering, people still had a “total worldview.” They still spoke of ethical and moral goals in such a way that they lay in the same sources as the laws of nature. They contemplated the laws of nature and then ascended to the sources of morality with the same views, thus having a “total worldview” that encompassed both the moral and the natural.

You will remember how often I have pointed out that the decline of our culture has been caused by the fact that we have a one-sided view of nature, which posits the Kant-Laplace theory or something similar at the beginning of our existence on earth, where everything has formed out of a primeval nebula. Man also formed out of this primeval nebula, then what is called moral ideals arose - illusions - and when the heat death occurs one day, which must occur according to purely physical laws, there will be a large field of corpses, but what emerged as cultural ideals or moral ideals will be buried with them. Thus, our morality is no longer part of the world view. It is no longer part of it; it has become something that can only be captured in abstract thoughts. Schweitzer also knows that basically this has become the case around the middle of the 19th century. He is quite clear about it: “Now it is obvious to everyone that the self-destruction of culture is underway... The Age of Enlightenment” - by this he means the period when intellectualism first flourished - ”and rationalism had established ethical and rational ideals about the development of the individual into true humanity, about his position in society, about its material and spiritual tasks, about the behavior of nations towards each other and their absorption into a humanity united by the highest spiritual goals... But around the middle of the nineteenth century, this engagement of ethical rational ideals with reality began to decline. In the course of the following decades, it came more and more to a standstill. The abdication of culture took place without a fight and without a sound. Its thoughts lagged behind the times, as if they were too exhausted to keep pace with it."

And now Albert Schweitzer wants to make it clear that if people no longer have effective thoughts, culture must perish. Since effective thoughts seem to be contained in philosophy, he attributes the reason for the decline of culture to philosophy. He knows, and expresses it in this book, that although Flege and Kant are read by only a few, their ideas dominate the ideas of thousands, because they pass unnoticed through all possible into the broadest masses of humanity, and one does not exaggerate when one says today: If only the most popular books have begun to be read by the simplest mountain farmers, then Kant is already in them. One only believes that philosophy works on those who read the philosophers. That is just outer Maja.

That is why Schweitzer says: “The decisive factor was the failure of philosophy.” But now he treats this philosophy with some compassion and says to himself: Philosophy should have thought, but since thinking had gone astray, since thinking had been forgotten, one need not be surprised that philosophy could no longer think either. So he treats philosophy a little more mildly. “It did not become clear to philosophy that the energy of the cultural ideas entrusted to it was beginning to be questioned. At the end of one of the most outstanding works on the history of philosophy published at the end of the nineteenth century - the same one that I once discussed here - “this is defined as the process in which ‘step by step, with ever clearer and more certain awareness, reflection on cultural values has taken place, the universal validity of which is the subject of philosophy itself’. In doing so, the author forgot the essential: that in the past, philosophy not only reflected on cultural values, but also allowed them to be transmitted as active ideas in public opinion, while from the second half of the nineteenth century they increasingly became a guarded, unproductive capital for it.

But now he becomes mild. After all, what can the philosopher do if he no longer thinks because everyone else does not think: “That thinking did not manage to create a world view of optimistic-ethical character and to base the ideals that make up culture in such a view was not the fault of philosophy, but a fact that arose in the development of thought. But philosophy was guilty of our world because it did not admit this fact to itself and remained in the illusion that it really maintained a progress of culture."

Schweitzer no longer blames the philosophers for no longer being able to think, since it has become a general habit of people not to think anymore. But he does blame the philosophers for not having noticed this at all. They should have noticed it at least.

"According to its ultimate purpose, philosophy is the leader and guardian of general reason. It would have been its duty to admit to our world that the ethical ideals of reason no longer found support in a total worldview, as they used to, but were for the time being left to their own devices and had to assert themselves in the world through their inner strength alone... Philosophy philosophized so little about culture that it did not even notice how it itself, and the times with it, became more and more cultureless. In the hour of danger, the guard who was supposed to keep us awake slept. So it happened that we did not struggle for our culture.

Well, I think I have already told you many things about this sleeping from a variety of points of view.

In the next chapter, Schweitzer discusses the elements in us that inhibit culture. He comes to some very interesting conclusions. He finds, for example, that man has become unfree as a result of what he has absorbed as culture in recent times. Well, one can sympathize with him on that point, because people have gradually come to really only follow certain bellwethers, to swear by the authority of science, and so on. But now Schweitzer claims that the human being is not collected in his thinking. I don't think we need discuss this much either; Schweitzer is probably right that the power to collect has really declined a lot in our civilization. But then he calls the human being incomplete. Now, people will say, if he already finds us unfree and so unsettled; that we are not even supposed to be whole people, we cannot concede that to him! But he means it this way: What a person learns today, that is a specialty, be he a scholar or be he somehow a different person, so that only certain sides of his abilities are developed, not the total human being. Therefore, we go around as incomplete, not at all as complete people. And then he finds, as a fourth, that humanity has decreased to the highest degree. He cites beautiful examples. But he is generally of the opinion that unfree, uncollected and incomplete people do not develop humanity in their ethical lives either. He also finds a culture-inhibiting element in over-organization, in the eradication of human individuality. How much does the individual still depend on today? It depends only on what is prescribed by any organization. Schweitzer rightly accuses our time of over-organization as a particular tendency.

But now he also wants to move on to answering the question of how to achieve culture again. What must be done to achieve culture again? He then asks: What must the culture we achieve be like? — And he says: It must be ethical and optimistic. Now, imagine you want to build a house for yourself. You go to a builder who says: You have to describe to me what the house should be like so that I can make the plans for you. — So you tell him: The house should be solid, weatherproof, beautiful, and so that you can live comfortably in it. — Well, you can't make plans with that, but you think you have said something when you say: The house must be solid, weatherproof, beautiful and so that you can live comfortably in it. But you can't do anything with these statements. Nor can you do anything with the statement: A worldview must be ethical and optimistic. It's the same, exactly the same.

Once, when I was a little boy, there was a court case in a village where I lived. Some chickens had been stolen from a prominent member of the community. The judge wanted to know what the sentence should be and needed a description of the chickens. So he asked the man concerned what the chickens were like. “Well, they were beautiful chickens.” Yes, that's not enough. You have to tell us something so that we can get an idea of what the chickens might have been worth. Well, they were really quite beautiful chickens. Yes, but, you have to know whether the chickens were skinny or fat... – Well, they really were quite beautiful chickens. – And so it went on, nothing at all could be elicited from the man except that they were quite beautiful chickens. |

Now here we have a quite outstanding spirit who trenchantly characterizes the decline of culture in an extraordinarily fine and apt way, who even knows a great deal that people today do not even want to admit to themselves. For example, he knows the following – it is good that it is also said by someone other than just the anthroposophist: 'The summary of knowledge and the assertion of its consequences for the world view is not his concern. In the past every scientist was also a thinker who had a certain significance in the general spiritual life of his generation. Our time has arrived at the ability to distinguish between science and thinking. Therefore we still have freedom of science, but hardly any thinking science at all.” It is indeed good to hear it from someone else for a change. But you see, despite all this insight, he does not get any further than the beautiful chickens. Extremely characteristic! Something that reappears as a truly fruitful worldview must be ethical, optimistic, firm, weatherproof, beautiful, and such that one can comfortably live in it!

Yes, he gets very far in this negative characterization. He notices that there are people who have already felt that this thinking, this brain sport, does not lead to the sources of existence. Therefore they said: Well, let us give up all this thinking and arrive at the truth by way of feeling or belief, by a mystical path. He sees that, and being a keen thinker himself, to a certain extent, he asks a remarkable question. The question is: “Philosophical, historical and scientific questions, which he was not able to answer, overwhelmed his earlier rationalism like an avalanche and buried him on the way. The new thinking world view must work its way out of this chaos. Let everything that actually is take effect on itself, passing through all kinds of reflection and recognition” - yes, if only he went through a little recognition and reflection now: the house should be beautiful and weatherproof - ”it strives towards the ultimate meaning of being and life, whether some of it can be unraveled,

The final knowledge, in which man comprehends his own existence in universal existence, is said to be mystical in nature. By this is meant that it no longer comes about through ordinary reflection, but is somehow experienced.

But why assume, he says, that the path of thinking ends at mysticism? Reasoning, as practiced up to now, has always stopped when it came close to mysticism...

Now one asks oneself: What does Anthroposophy want? To start from clear, mathematically clear thinking, not to stop at mysticism, but to penetrate, thinking, into the regions that are to be opened up for the eternal. Even then people still say that the house should be solid, weatherproof and comfortable to live in – when it is already standing in front of their noses, but they cannot find their way into it. This can be said without any modesty, but these are not the worst, these are the best, these are the sharp thinkers! We must not close our eyes to such things. We must not keep beating about the bush, saying that we must make this or that person understand what anthroposophy is, when people talk like this.

But further: “Thought carried to its conclusion thus leads somewhere and somehow to a living mysticism that is necessary for all human beings to think...” Right building leads to the good house, the way I want it! Now, he finds that people are unfocused, and so he wants to make it clear what people should do to get beyond this terrible state that culture has fallen into: “In itself, reflecting on the meaning of life has a meaning. If such reflection arises again among us, the ideals of vanity and passion, which now proliferate like evil weeds in the convictions of the masses, will wither away without hope. How much would be gained for today's conditions if we all just spent three minutes each evening looking up thoughtfully at the infinite worlds of the starry sky...' It does not say in the footnote: 'The details can be found in “How to Know Higher Worlds”, oh no, but it says that somehow we have to get to the point that there are people who take three minutes to collect their thoughts - “..look up thoughtfully to the infinite worlds of the starry sky and, when attending a funeral, would devote themselves to the mystery of death and life instead of walking behind the coffin in thoughtless conversation...”

It then concludes with the following, after first drawing attention to the fact: But something, which is now a world view, should not actually be said to people; we do need such a world view - I just want to know what we need it for if we are not supposed to say it to people! “The great revision of the convictions and ideals in which and for which we live cannot take place by talking into the people of our time different, better thoughts than those they have..."

It is not right that one should speak better thoughts into the minds of people than they have, but rather one must leave them to themselves! Reflect, think of other things when you walk behind a coffin, reflect! - Yes, then people will just continue to do what they have been doing so far: they will not know what to reflect on in the three minutes and so on.

"Previous thinking sought to understand the meaning of life from the meaning of the world. It may be that we have to resign ourselves to leaving the meaning of the world open to question and to give our lives a meaning from the will to live, as it is in us... “It may be! - “Even if the paths by which we have to strive towards the goal still lie in darkness, the direction in which we must go is clear. Together we have to think about the meaning of life, to struggle to arrive at a world- and life-affirming worldview in which our drive, which we experience as necessary and valuable, finds justification, orientation, clarification, deepening, moralization and strengthening, and then becomes capable of setting up and realizing definitive cultural ideals inspired by the spirit of true humanity. — They'll be beautiful chickens!

No one will be able to say that I want to practice caustic, deliberately negative criticism. I chose the first example of Professor Rubner because I wanted to choose a personality whose scientific achievements would be recognized. I chose the second example so that I could say that I regard the person who wrote this book as one of the sharpest thinkers, as a personality who is most justified in speaking in this way. I do not want to criticize adversely, that is far from me. One must endeavor to point out characteristically what is. But when Albert Schweitzer says: Philosophy should have been on guard, but it was asleep, then we can't help but say: He continues to sleep.

Let's wait and see what the second part is like, but the first part promises that the second part will not be much different. He continues to sleep, only dreaming out of his sleep. They are desires, they are not realities. Our striving must be to go beyond mere illusions, beyond phrases, to arrive at realities. You see how the words of our language have been squeezed dry. So we have to proceed as we started this evening, by talking about the soul, then we will put content back into the words. Otherwise, as Schweitzer says: philosophy is not to blame for the decline of culture, but it is to blame for not having noticed it. Well, of course Albert Schweitzer is not to blame either for the fact that our words have been so squeezed out that they no longer contain any concepts or realities. But he is to blame for not noticing this at all. He does not notice that he is talking in completely squeezed-out words.

I felt obliged to draw attention to the cultural decline in such a cutting way in response to Albert Schweitzer's recently published cultural act – I don't mean this maliciously, I mean it quite seriously. I was obliged to point out what the situation must actually be like in order to gain a real judgment of what is not happening on the one hand and should be happening on the other. After we have gone through this episode, we want to continue talking about specific topics of anthroposophy.

Let us start from the fact that the human being is a many-part, a multi-part being, that is, from a fact that is quite familiar to us. We want to assume that within the anthroposophical movement there is always an effort to understand how the human being is composed of members, each of which requires a certain understanding, so that the understanding of the whole human being is only possible if one is able to unite the understanding that one has brought to the individual members into a whole. If we disregard everything else for the moment, we know that this human being is divided into the physical body, the etheric body or formative forces, the astral body and that which we call the I. Now this is not — or at least should not be — a mere classification of the human being and his essence, but what is listed as the four members of the human being actually comes from very different worlds and can only be understood from the inner conditions of these worlds. And only when one has understood how the physical body, the etheric body, the body of formative forces, the astral body and the I are formed out of their corresponding worlds, then one is able to gain an understanding of the entire human being from the resonance of the understanding of these individual human limbs. The human being's physical body must be understood from the standpoint of the physical world, but the etheric body or formative forces must be understood from the standpoint of the etheric world, and so on. If we are not extremely precise in this area, if we do not accept that things are exactly as I have just indicated, then we cannot come to an understanding of the human being as a whole.

Let us turn our attention away from the physical body of the human being. We can do this because all of today's education and science is based on understanding the physical body of the human being. But today there is no similar endeavor to understand the etheric body or the body of formative forces. At most, it is imagined that this etheric body or body of formative forces perhaps consists of a finer substance than the dense physical body and that this finer etheric substance is mixed with the physical body. But things are not like that; the situation is essentially different. Someone who has grasped everything that can be grasped from the standpoint of physical science in order to form an idea about the workings of the physical body could completely ignorant about the etheric or formative forces, because when we look at the human being, it is impossible to find the laws of the etheric or formative forces near the earth. We cannot look for the laws of the etheric or formative body in the vicinity of the earth itself. Just as we say, when a stone falls in a vertical direction: gravity is at work, the stone moves in the direction of the center of the earth - just as we look for the causes of the stone's fall in the vicinity of the earth or in the earth look for the causes of the stone's fall, we proceed correctly when we remain close to the earth, we proceed wrongly when we ask about the causes of the event in the etheric or formative forces. Rather, we must look for that which is at work in our etheric or formative body not on earth at all, but in the vastness of the universe, in a sphere that is, an indeterminate distance away from us. There the forces are at work from all sides. Just as physical forces work out from the center of the earth, so the forces from all sides work in and condition our etheric body.

Recall what I told you about the transition of a person from his pre-earthly existence to his earthly existence. He comes down and has already sent the laws for his physical body to earth. Then, I said, he collects his etheric body from the vastness of the cosmic ether. So there he is, before he moves into what he has sent ahead: his physical body, I, astral body and etheric body. But the ether body is not formed by the earth in terms of its laws, but, as we say, representatively: from the four quarters of the world; but this only means that it is drawn together from all sides. So the laws are effective from all sides of the world periphery, the surrounding area, when the human ether body is formed.

What we are now going to discuss may come as something of a shock to the modern reader, and will be extremely surprising. You will agree with me when I say that if we light a flame, however strong, the intensity of the light will mean less and less to us the further we move away from the source of the light. Eventually, at a certain distance, where this light source is hardly taken into account, where it has become so weak that we can no longer read; where, if there is a light somewhere in the distance, we can say for all practical purposes that there is no light. Everyone will admit that. Likewise, today's science admits that the force of gravity decreases with the square of the distance, becoming weaker and weaker the further you get into the surrounding area. But what people today do not consider at all is the following. We on earth express in our words the laws that apply on earth. The law that we express as earthlings also decreases, becomes weaker and weaker and is finally practically no longer there for a certain distance. No matter how cleverly you formulate natural laws for earthly conditions, no matter how cleverly you formulate historical sentences for what happens on earth, these laws, the laws of nature and historical laws, are no longer valid in a certain radius, just as the strength of gravity or the intensity of light has no further significance. Therefore, it is naive if someone were to claim that the same natural laws apply to a star that is so many light-years away as they do to us. For the validity of our natural laws exists only for earthly conditions and ceases when we venture out into space. But the laws of the ether come from the vastness of space. If we expect the same laws from them as the natural laws of the earth are, then we will never understand the etheric existence. Even as we speak of the etheric body of man, we must speak of something that follows quite different laws from the natural laws of the earth.

There lies that which is astonishing and shocking for today's humanity, but which must be gradually grasped. Otherwise, today's humanity will simply spin itself into earthly conditions and not get beyond these earthly conditions with its soul condition. I will now tell you this in a form in which one can say it – or at least should be able to say it – after having discussed anthroposophical truths within a circle for some time. For if one were to say what is about to be said today in front of an otherwise different circle, people would think one was not quite of sound mind. But that is not a criticism at all. Because as long as one is of sound mind, one retains the spiritual science. So basically, because the genius of language works quite correctly, one must be able to take it seriously with such things. At most, one should reproach someone who presents spiritual science for not being of sound mind. That is not a reproach at all! He is not of sound mind. One must only be with spirit with full consciousness, that is what matters. But if one says that one only has a justified consciousness when one is of sound mind, then one must renounce spiritual science.

People everywhere are declaiming: There are certain tremendously simple laws that one comes upon last. — People call them axioms or something, it does not depend on the names. I will call such axioms. The first axiom is: The whole is always greater than one of its parts. That is a matter of course, people say, and whoever sins against such axioms is not quite of sound mind, because the whole is greater than one of its parts. Or: The straight line is the shortest path between two points. For earthly conditions and for the world of the senses, this applies to the fullest extent. If we go to the most extreme abstractions, we come to such sentences: the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts, and: the straight line is the shortest way between two points.

But if you sail into the ether, then you really have to break through from the sensory world into another world, where precisely the most trivial laws of the sensory world no longer apply. As soon as you enter the etheric world, the law no longer applies that the whole is greater than one of its parts. Because in the etheric world, for example, it is like this for a human being: If you look at what is etherically behind the part of the whole human being, you look at the liver, lungs and search for their etheric correlates, then each individual part of the human being is considerably greater than the whole human being on earth. And if you ever believed that a person is greater than his liver, you would never be able to penetrate into the spiritual. For in the spiritual, a whole is created by the larger parts working together to form a smaller one, by the whole being created precisely through the interaction of the larger parts.

This may become even clearer to you for the other example, that a straight line is the shortest way between two points. Yes, that applies in the physical world. If you have one point here and a second point there, the straight line is the shortest. But if you enter the ether world, then every path that is taken is easy, every crooked one, every winding one, and if you want to take the straight path, it will get in the way. It forks at every point, it is just the longest way to get from one point to another. Therefore, in relation to the ether world, such a sentence: the straight line is the shortest way between two points - a sentence that spins you into the physical, that makes you not get out of the crust in which you are locked at all. As long as one does not take seriously the fact that even in the world of ether everything is different and even opposite to that in the physical world, one does not come to an understanding of the spiritual world.

People would like to know the members of the human nature: physical body, etheric body, astral body, I. But now they would like to have it so that they apply the same kind of thinking to the etheric body that they have applied to the physical body. But that is precisely what cannot be done, because to the same extent that one moves away from the physical world - but this is identical with the earthly world - the validity of natural laws diminishes, and quite different laws take their place. I am merely pointing out to you all how, when one comes to this second link in human nature, the necessity arises to engage in a completely different way of thinking.

But as soon as you enter this other thinking, you have to take this other thinking very seriously. You can go around in the physical world as much as you like and find all kinds of things, not atoms, but you can find cells and the like. But it would never occur to anyone to think that they would find thoughts under a microscope or in a telescope. They must be found in some other way. You can examine the brain under the microscope until the end of time, but you will not find thoughts in it, they do not go into the microscope. But that is precisely the proof that you only find the physical world in the microscope and in general in the whole view, because the ether world consists of nothing but thoughts. The etheric world is the activity of thoughts as forces. And as soon as one penetrates from the physical body to the etheric body in the case of man, this etheric body consists of thoughts throughout, but thoughts work as forces. We are completely permeated by thoughts, interwoven with thoughts everywhere, but thoughts work as forces.

This now has a very important consequence for the view of the human being. Because now imagine you are going to sleep. There in bed lies the physical body and the etheric body. The etheric body is full of thoughts. It is a kind of excerpt, a kind of extract from the ether of the world, and the ether of the world is an active world of thought. And therefore it is true that the etheric body of a person is something extraordinarily clever, if I may express it that way, full of thoughts full of light and without contradictions. And when a person leaves his physical body and etheric body with his I and his astral body, he actually leaves a very clever entity. The only thing that is fatal is that when a person sleeps, he is not aware of how clever he is, while he remains in bed. The fact that we are not so clever during the day is because during the day we and our astral body submerge into the very clever etheric body and constantly dull it. The fact that we are imperfect as human beings stems from our ego and our astral body. Our astral body and our ego are incapable of rising to the inner solidity, clarity and worldliness of the etheric body. If only we could make the etheric body speak and then write down in shorthand, just as faithfully or unfaithfully, what it has to say all night about the secrets of the universe, then it would be something tremendously clever, even more clever than what is written here.

So, world thoughts as forces work in this ethereal body of man, and we are only ever able to use something - it is always very little - of what is spread out in our ethereal body, in proportion to what we have in our astral body.

And yet, what are we as physical and etheric bodies when we remain in bed when we sleep and have withdrawn our ego and our astral body? We are then in bed a being of physical body and etheric body, and thus we carry within us only the laws of the plant kingdom. And the same thing that we can observe in ourselves, when we look back, as it were, and see the wisdom of the whole world radiating from our sleeping etheric body, in what we could observe in a backward glance in a human being, we basically have before us on a small scale everything that we also have before us when we look at the earth, in that it exists as a physical sphere, but out of itself lets the plant world sprout and has sprouted, and this plant world is ethereally stimulated on all sides by the world thoughts that are weaving in the world ether. This is the infinitely sublime image of the cosmos; of the cosmos that lies before us when we are only able to look at everything that springs from every single plant on our earth as if, I would like to say, from spiritual flames of fire, drawing lines and waves into the farthest reaches of space. So that we actually have before us the globe, the forces that bring vegetation out of the earth, sprouting from the farthest point in space and repeating this earth formation in every single sleeping human being.

When we visualize this image, we have to exclude everything that is in our ego and in our astral body, and we have to think of the image of animals with their astral body instead of the cosmic image. That which is in our astral body does not belong to that which is earthly on the one hand or etheric on the other, but rather belongs to a completely different world altogether. However, we do not seek this world in the same way that we seek the ether. If one describes it pictorially, and these things can only be described pictorially, because otherwise one comes into earthly ideas, one would have to say: How does one get an idea of the world ether? One comes to an idea of the world ether when one simply follows that which is here on earth outwards, when one swings further and further outwards - one must do this spiritually, of course. Here on earth, the effect of the ether is actually hardly noticeable, because it is weakest there. Just as the earthly effects of illumination, for example, are weakest far out in space, so the effect of the cosmic ether is weakest in the vicinity of the earth. As soon as we go out into the far reaches of the world, the actual nature of the etheric effect becomes more and more apparent. When we go out into the wide world, we begin to see how the physical of the earth is woven into the etheric according to very different laws than those found on the earth. But if one could go all the way out to the boundaries where the ether sprays in its effects from the outside, one would experience something curious. The superficial physical thinkers say: If you move out from the earth in a radial manner into the world, then you can go away into infinity. At most, those who know a little newer geometry will say: If you go out into infinity, you will come back on the other side, it will just take a little while. But that is what they think; in reality it is not so. In reality, you really do come to an end, even if the path can be called infinite by earthly standards, superficially speaking. The world has a transition from earthly lawfulness to cosmic lawfulness, which radiates in. The world is a closed whole, and if you come to the end - you only have to imagine it figuratively - then you will encounter the inside of a spherical surface everywhere. The astral then radiates inwards. The astral begins to work in from the outside by taking possession of the etheric.

But you still do not come to something that is the I. If you follow the world, you first come to nature, to physical nature, to earthly nature, from there to the etheric, and at the end of the etheric to the astral. But you do not yet enter the world to which the human ego belongs. It is initially not present at all in this area of the cosmos, which can be found even for the astral senses, but the ego still belongs to a further world, which in turn has its own laws. So when speaking of the human being, one must be clear about the fact that the different members belong to completely different worlds. We are not dealing with a mere classification, but with the presentation of the fact that the human beingness is a confluence of the beingnesses of radically different worlds. And now, at the moment when you want to think at all about the differentiation between waking and sleeping, you must also think about this differentiation of the different worlds. Because what we actually have in our I and in our astral body does not belong to the same world as the two members of human nature that lie in bed. What we left in bed, we have conveyed to the mineral and plant world for the time of sleep. What we carry with us as I and astral body, we have taken out of the plant and mineral world, we have raised it up into another world, which is not the plant and not the mineral world.

And what happens now while we sleep? While we sleep, exactly the same thing happens in what lies in bed as goes on outside in the world in the mineral and plant kingdoms, as long as the plants are not eaten by animals. For then the astral world of the animal world comes into play. But if we disregard humans and animals and consider only the earth with the plants, we have the world to which we surrender our physical and etheric bodies during sleep, and everything that happens in the mineral and plant kingdoms then also happens in our physical and etheric bodies.

Let us assume that we could not sleep. I have said before that people sometimes claim that they cannot sleep, but they do sleep, even if they interrupt their sleep and often wake up. Because the time that some people claim they have not slept is so great that they would have been dead long ago if it were true. So sleeping is necessary for the entire being of a person. But if we did not sleep – let us assume that – then we would continually work in our physical and etheric bodies with our astral body and our ego. But the physical body and etheric body cannot stand that at all. The physical body follows the laws of the earth. The astral body does not belong to the earth at all, it continually works on the physical body in opposition to the laws of the earth. The physical body would become quite unsuitable if a person could not sleep, because it is constantly being worked on by extraterrestrial laws. Just as if someone were to continually work a field of the mineral kingdom with hoes and spades and thereby pulverize it completely, so our astral body begins to work on the physical body. The physical body must again assert the earthly laws within itself so that it is strengthened in a certain way. And the etheric body is dulled by the astral body. I do not mean it is so bad, there are also clever people, one need not always reproach people for being clever; but in fact, seen cosmically, it has this effect. Then the etheric body must once again be exposed to the cosmos, so that it gets rid of this dulling influence for a while. And so the human being must become mineral and vegetable cosmos, so that that which is in him can flourish, so that a certain state is established when we wake up. I am now talking about normal life. In the case of abnormal phenomena, the human being naturally sleeps and wakes as well.

What is the condition that is brought about when we wake up? The condition that is brought about is that our soul, namely the astral body and the ego, cannot initially enter the physical body and etheric body completely. They can never enter completely. Oh, how clever we would be if we could enter our etheric body completely. But that would also exhaust us, we could not bear it. It is really true, this astral body is basically terribly selfish. The etheric body, which is actually identical in nature to the cosmos, is not selfish. It is also not envious, it has no need of it. But the astral body is subconsciously terribly envious of the etheric body, which is so wise, which contains the thoughts of the whole world in itself, - is terribly envious. And now it is already ensured that the senses remain independent, the I and the astral body remain independent during the day. Then gradually the I and the astral body are increasingly able to sink deeper into the physical body and the etheric body. But this only makes them imbued with the longing to go out again. They then want to sleep, and so the I and the astral body become tired. For the human being is only able to prove himself as an independent being because he is not absorbed by the physical and etheric bodies during waking. If the human being were absorbed by the ego and the astral body, then we would know nothing of ourselves and of the world, but we would find ourselves in the interior of our physical organism, which would go up to the skin, would follow the processes in our physical physical organism, would only know something about our inner being, and then we would still know that magnificent thoughts imbued with wisdom are sprayed into our inner being, but we would not go beyond these thoughts either. We would know nothing at all about any other human being, about animals on earth, about other beings on earth, if we were completely absorbed in our physical and etheric bodies. If we did not retain our independence, so that we did not enter completely into our physical body and etheric body, we could never establish relationships with the world, we could only know something of our physical body and our own etheric body.

People reflect on this: how is it that one says the table is outside of us? — One would not arrive at this statement: the table is outside of us — if we were to completely immerse ourselves in our physical and etheric bodies. We would never come to the realization that the table is outside of us — we would only experience what is within us, namely within the skin of our body. And there would shine in an internally closed universe, which is etheric, full of wisdom. But the idea that there is something outside of us comes from the fact that we ourselves are outside of ourselves when we are asleep. When the I is outside of the physical body, it gets used to being outside of the physical body. When the I slips back into it, it has an understanding of the outside world. We can thank the fact that we can sleep for the possibility of accepting things outside of us. We become accustomed to being outside of ourselves by placing ourselves outside of ourselves in our sleep.

Philosophers reflect on what guarantees existence; on why I say at all: something is – or: I am. If I were completely absorbed by my physical and etheric bodies, I would never come to say: I am. But by being able to make myself independent of the physical and etheric bodies between falling asleep and waking up, I get into the habit of living with the outside world as well. Just as one consciously has a memory, as I consciously remember yesterday when I saw someone today and ascribe a reality to this memory, so out of habit I ascribe an external reality to what is outside of me, because I am also sometimes outside myself when I sleep.

We must therefore think about things from completely different angles than we do today. But then we will really come to understand how much depends on the human being not being absorbed by his physical and etheric bodies. Only then can one really understand how the sense of freedom is essentially conditioned by the fact that one can also be outside one's physical and etheric body. People as naturalists, who do not reflect at all on the independence of an ego and an astral body in sleep, can never come to an understanding of freedom, because man would not be free if he were united all the time only with his physical and his ether body. How could they know about freedom if they know nothing of the times when man makes his astral body and his ego independent of his physical and ether bodies! If we could not sleep, we could not be free. Only what we bring with us from sleep into wakefulness makes us free.

Modern man has no conception at all of the world in which the I and the astral body find themselves during sleep. But if we know that everything that modern man can imagine lies in the realm of the mineral and the vegetable, then we know that modern science actually has only to decide about the sleeping person and not about the waking one; and about the sleeping person only if one has such ideas about the ether as I have mentioned today. If one knows this, then one will say to oneself: Now, however, I must also be able to arrive at ideas about the ego and the astral body. Today, as I already indicated the other day, one only has words from these things.

How can we get an idea of the ego and the astral body? Let me use a trivial example. Firstly, your thoughts can rest a little during the trivial comparison and secondly, we will understand each other better if I use this example. Imagine that some being, a human being or any other being that needs food, does not feed itself but completely refuses food. It becomes increasingly emaciated, until it is nothing but skin and bones. This is beautifully symbolized in a story: there was a farmer who had decided to wean his ox from eating. And now he had come quite a way with this weaning cure. He gave him less and less every day and was confident that he would be able to get to the point of giving him just a straw a day. He would have succeeded, but the ox died first, so he could not carry the experiment to the end. In the end, the being simply stops needing the extra nourishment.

But that is what has happened to the human soul in the course of historical development - or as we call the soul: I and the astral body. Gradually, people have lost any concepts that they can apply to the soul. Thus, the soul has become a mere word. I already told you last time: Mauthner, who wrote the “Criticism of Language,” no longer wanted to use the word soul at all. He wanted to say “Geseel” (to nourish the soul).

Now we recall times when there was still a living awareness that the concept of the soul needs nourishment if it is to be present; that for the soul one needs something to give to it, just as one needs nourishment for a living being. The concept of the soul has indeed died altogether, because in the end there was no more nourishment in the content of people's concepts. Let us look back at such times. I recall to you a saying of St. Paul's that is familiar to everyone: “If Christ is not risen, our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain,” because people - and this is the basis - would have to die spiritually if the power that lies in the resurrection of Christ had not come into the world. But this power is a spiritual power that is given to the souls. And if one comes from such ideas, one will say: What then should the concept of the soul be, in order for it to become a living concept, so to speak, as food? It must be given that on earth which is not earthly, the ethical-religious content, the moral content. These are what keeps the soul alive, just as the body receives nourishment.

How far is today's humanity from saying to itself: If the soul does not receive spiritual nourishment, it dies with the body! In Paul's time, there was still a vivid idea that not receiving spiritual nourishment means death for the soul. This must come to the world again through anthroposophy. For you can believe that if someone today is looking for proof of the immortality of the soul, he is looking for it in a similar way to the way science does. It does not occur to him to say: In the course of earthly life, the soul becomes more and more similar to the physical and etheric bodies; in order for it to sustain itself, it must receive spiritual nourishment, that is, moral and religious content, then it conquers the transience of the physical and etheric bodies. That the spiritual, the moral and religious in the spiritual has something to do with the life of the soul must first be understood by mankind. Then one also comes to attach reality and reality to the moral and religious.

You can see from this what the age of intellectualism has actually done. What has the age of intellectualism done? You see, before the age of intellectualism, people still immersed themselves a little in their physical and etheric bodies. The fact that people no longer immerse themselves at all is only an achievement of the intellectual age. Since that time, they have only had reflections in their thoughts. The nature of abstract, intellectual thought is that it contains nothing in itself, because it is a reflection. People's earlier thoughts still had power. That is when people developed myth. The myth still penetrated down into reality. With abstract, intellectualistic thinking, one can think everything exactly, but it does not acquire any content; it is merely a drawing of the world, which one has with intellectualistic thinking. So it is that the intellectualistic age has brought man completely out of himself, leaving him to experience only mirror images of reality. The moral-religious world is not experienced at all if one wants to experience it intellectually, because the moral-religious things must indeed be done by man. No mirror images are experienced if they are not done, the moral-religious things. So it is a matter of the human being having to rise above the intellectualistic in order to experience the reality of the moral-religious in reality, to a real inner experience. This can only be done if one faces the will of spiritual science with full clarity.

What I have already been obliged to say elsewhere, I would also like to repeat here. In certain areas of the world, people are finally realizing that there is a difference between today and a hundred years ago. People talk about Goethe as he lived, say, in 1823, without emphasizing one thing that is only now beginning to emerge as an inkling in America, where it is even more pronounced than in Europe. Do you think that in the Weimar where Goethe walked around – or anywhere else, for that matter, where Goethe walked around – there were no telegraph wires, no telephone lines and so on? The air was not permeated by telegraph lines, by electrical lines. Now just imagine how fine the instruments are, where the effect of electricity is sent. But man has nothing but such devices before and around him. People over there in America are beginning to suspect that this has an influence on the physical human being, that he is surrounded by electrical lines and the like. Goethe walked the world without his body having induction currents in it. Today you can go far enough anywhere and the electrical lines will follow. This continuously induces currents in us. Goethe was not in such currents. All this takes away the physical body from humanity, makes the physical body so that the soul cannot enter it at all. We must be clear about this: in the time when there were no electric currents, when the air was not buzzing with electrical lines, it was easier to be human. Because there were not constantly these ahrimanic forces present, which take away one's body even when one is watching. It was also not necessary for people to exert themselves so much to come to the spirit. Because when we enter into ourselves, we actually only come to the spirit. Therefore, it is necessary today to apply much greater spiritual capacity to be human at all than it was a hundred years ago.

It does not occur to me to be reactionary and say, “So get rid of all that stuff, the modern cultural achievements!” That is not the intention. But modern man needs this direct access to the spirit, as spiritual science gives it to him, so that through this strong experience of the spirit he may indeed be the stronger in the face of those forces that are emerging with modern culture to solidify our physical body and take it away from us. Otherwise it will come to the point that people, I would say, miss the boat in the evolution of humanity.

This intellectual age has emerged for the benefit of humanity at a time when people could still immerse themselves somewhat in their physical body. If we had remained as people were in the 13th or 14th century, with the state of mind of those people, we would not be able to grasp intellectual thoughts at all. Then we would no longer have the older, but we would not even come to abstract intellectual thoughts; they would evaporate. The old would be alienated from us, we would not be able to think, and so we would go around as dreaming beings in the world, so reeling in the face of the most important world affairs. We would go around like reeling dreamers. But that is also what would happen to humanity if it does not sharpen and strengthen its inner spiritual abilities. Humanity would suffer so much from progress that it would be like hurting a person if they were to think. In the 16th century, people were still inwardly robust enough to think sharply in an intellectual way. They still took great pleasure in thinking intellectually. Today, we are already very close to people saying: Oh, thinking is so hard, film the whole story for me so that I don't have to think and can watch it in its various stages! — Strange things could come of that. I don't mean that in a humorous way. This is something, as you will see in a moment, that is very much within the realm of possibility. Just imagine if you could film the whole multiplication table, then a person could always carry a camera in front of him and, by making the calculation, the correct answer would be triggered by the specific sound, and he would have the whole story filmed in front of him. Gradually, man no longer wants to think because it starts to become unpleasant. Thinking becomes unpleasant. Man much prefers dreaming to thinking. And if those outer things, the outer cultural development, were to continue forever and a strong inner spiritual element were not to arise in the development, then it would actually be the case that all people would become reeling dreamers. This is meant very seriously; such a thing is in store for humanity. And this can only be counteracted by really getting involved in it, courageously and boldly tackling the spiritual world in the way spiritual science wants it and can do it. Today it is still quite possible for us to pull ourselves together so strongly inwardly as humanity, that we can achieve inner activity. But all those who understand this must work in earnest with all means at their disposal.

Please do not take the things I say in a negative sense negatively. I do not want to take anything away from modern culture. The more things are developed, the more I am enthusiastic about them. I do not want to abolish the telegraph or the film, that does not occur to me at all. But it is really necessary in the world to take into account that everywhere two things are juxtaposed. The world is completely dominated by externalization. The counterbalance: just as one must dry oneself after bathing, so one must delve inward in spirit, when on the other hand the culture of external observation is becoming ever greater and greater. This in particular calls upon us to become inwardly more and more active when we are outwardly absorbed in that which no longer works through us but works on us, so that we literally switch off as soul and spirit.

We can best find these thoughts, which we need, by realizing that This human being is such a complicated creature because the entities of the most diverse worlds flow together in him to form a total being. When I had written my “Outline of Esoteric Science”, a quite important contemporary philosopher sent me – I have already mentioned this – a long treatise about this “esoteric science”. And when I began to read it, I came across clever things like: Yes, that is an abstract division of the human being into physical body, etheric body, astral body and so on. Now that is just as clever as saying: It is abstract to say that water consists of hydrogen and oxygen. One need not be surprised if one has to say: It is impossible to discuss with someone like that. We must always distinguish between the impossibility of discussing the subject matter with our contemporaries. Such discussions are fruitless discussions. They are, of course, also the rarer ones. The more frequent cases are where opponents come forward with personal slander and lies. In such cases, the lie must be exposed as a lie, the slander as slander, before the world. But discussions alone achieve very little. For it is precisely the nature of anthroposophy and the nature of what its opponents have to present that they somehow want to discuss: that no bridge can be built; that anthroposophy must emerge through its own efforts in all areas. We must be just as vigilant in repudiating calumny and falsehood as we must realize that Anthroposophy can only make its way in the world by working with all the intensity that its inner strength can give it. So, dealing with opponents means: be vigilant where the fight is being waged with dishonest means. On the other hand, it may certainly be necessary for reasons of expediency to point out how justified one or the other is; one can do that when one is merely dealing with a fictitious opponent. Some people have liked to copy the refutations that are in my writings and have left out only what was positive. So it is indeed the case that one can extract factual refutations from my writings oneself. It is necessary to see clearly in these matters and not to start dreaming in this area.

Please forgive me for having to end almost every reflection with such a request, even if it attempts to introduce more remote areas. The most harmful thing for the Anthroposophical Society to do is to develop too great an inclination to sleep; it must be awake. Man becomes a plant when he sleeps. But the Anthroposophical Society also takes on a plant-like existence when its actual affairs are neglected. Just as a human being cannot always be a plant, cannot sleep through his whole life, so the Anthroposophical Society cannot always be asleep. Vigilance must also be developed. And I would like to recommend this to both the Anthroposophical Society and the Free Anthroposophical Society without distinction. Otherwise it could come about that the two societies developed only alongside each other because, if they had remained together, the members of one or the other would have disturbed each other's sleep too much. But when one is independent, the others disturb one's sleep less, and one can sleep all the better.

It is therefore important that both societies come to realize that both are now awake and not happy due to their own internal forces, and that the other should no longer disturb their sleep. Of course, I do not want to be insinuating, but sometimes one has to say such things and even has to say them to the Free Anthroposophical Society. If neither is to be the pet project of the other, then both should be treated quite humanely. So I would like this to be taken into account a little. I think one or the other already knows what I actually mean. People often say they don't know what I mean, but I still believe that if you want to, you can know what I mean, and even when I call for awakening, you can know what I mean, even if it sounds unpleasant.

So, my dear friends, send your delegates to the General Assembly of the Anthroposophical Society in Dornach from July 20 to 22. Send them well awake. Because we need wakefulness in the future, full wakefulness in the whole Anthroposophical Society.

Lecture 1 of 11 from the volume The Human Soul in its Connection with Godly-Spiritual Individualities.

My Dear Friends,

We will consider a certain theme today which may serve as an elaboration of the public lecture given yesterday.¹ I want to speak in greater detail of how the human being is placed within the sphere of the World Order that is connected with his destiny, with what we are accustomed to call Karma. How does the shaping of destiny proceed? In order to answer this question, not theoretically, but concretely in a vital and practical manner, it is necessary to study the being of man a little more closely.

Human life is often said to be divided into two different states of consciousness: waking life and sleep. The conception of sleep in most people's minds amounts to nothing more than this, that the human being rests during sleep. The scientific view indeed assumes that the activity of consciousness ceases when a man falls asleep and begins again when he wakes; in other words, so far as the organism is concerned, sleep is nothing but repose, a state in which human activity is at rest. But sleep is by no means merely rest; we must realise that from the time of falling asleep to the moment of waking, both the astral body and the Ego are present outside the physical and etheric bodies as active realities.

At the present stage of evolution reached by man in earthly life, it is not possible for him to have direct consciousness of what the Ego and astral body are doing during sleep; none the less their activities are, to say the least, as significant as those of waking life. The reason why the Ego and astral body cannot unfold consciousness of all the complicated circumstances in which they are immersed during sleep is that, at the present stage of the Earth's evolution, Ego and astral body have no organs wherewith to become aware of the happenings in which they are involved. Nevertheless these experiences are undergone by the Ego and astral body during sleep and they work on into the life of day, into man's conscious life.

We can most easily form an accurate conception of the way in which the experiences of Ego and astral body work into the life of day, by thinking of the beginning of man's life. During the very earliest period, as a tiny child, the human being as it were sleeps his way into the earthly life. You must not think here only of the times when a child is actually and obviously asleep, but of the whole period which cannot, in later life, be remembered by ordinary consciousness. To external observation the child may give the impression of being awake during this period, but what is going on in the child's consciousness does not take a form which can be remembered in later life. When we speak of all that is experienced by the child without his having subsequent memory of it, we are referring to this period during which the human being is ‘sleeping’ his way into earthly life.

But now, what develops out of this sleeping state at the beginning of man's life on Earth? Three things must be considered if we are to understand the workings of all that the human being brings from his pre-earthly life and proceeds to weave, in the dim consciousness of sleep, into his physical existence. There are three faculties which the human being has to acquire, differently from the animals. Animals either do not have them at all, or already possess them—in greater or lesser degree of development—when they come into the world.

Of the development of these three faculties people have usually quite a one-sided and inadequate conception. Very little of the whole process receives consideration. The first faculty is learning to walk. Man enters the world, the earthly world, as a being who cannot walk, who has to acquire this faculty. The second is speaking, and the third, thinking. One faculty may take precedence in a particular child, but in general it can be said that the human being learns to walk, to speak and to think. The faculty of thinking follows that of speaking; the faculty to grasp also in thought what is expressed in words develops, gradually, out of speaking. It is some considerable time before one can truly say that a child thinks.

The ordinary conception of walking is extremely inadequate. Walking does not merely consist in the child's learning to stand upright and propel his legs, it involves acquiring equilibrium, gaining complete mastery of the balance man has in the world. This means the child can move freely in any direction without falling over. Thus he learns to place his body into the world; he learns to control his muscles and limbs in such a way that the centre of gravity in the body, whether standing or walking, lies at the correct point. Current ideas about this faculty are, as I said, totally inadequate, for in reality something else of tremendous significance comes to pass with the learning to walk, namely differentiation of the functions of legs and arms. As a rule—and where modifications occur there is a sound explanation for them—animals make uniform use of their four limbs, whereas in the human being there is differentiation. For the purposes of equilibrium and of walking, man uses his legs, whereas his arms and hands are wonderful instruments for the expression of his life of soul, vehicles of the work he is to accomplish in the world. This differentiation between feet and hands, arms and legs, is one of the features that are ignored in the usual one-sided conception of the faculty of learning to walk. The differentiation testifies, in the physical world, to the fact that the human being has to acquire certain faculties during his physical life on Earth.

The second faculty, that of speaking, is also acquired by imitation; the little child tries to imitate—just as he does with walking, standing, equilibration, differentiation between hands and feet. It can be said with truth, that speaking is not unconnected with walking,—above all, with the use of the hand in its differentiation. It is well known that speaking is connected with the specific development of an organ situated at the left side of the brain. This however only applies to people who use their right hand for the most important activities of life; in left-handed people the organ of speech lies at the right side of the brain. These facts indicate that what comes to expression in speech is connected with the search for equilibrium. Then, out of speaking, thinking develops. A person who is born dumb can only be brought to think by artificial means; in all those who are not born dumb, thinking is a faculty that develops out of speech.

Now, the characteristic development I have just described is not really to be understood until we can follow how, in later life, the human being passes over from the waking to the sleeping state. During sleep, the physical and etheric bodies lie resting in the physical sense; the Ego and astral body have separated, in essentials, from the physical and etheric bodies. But if, with the methods of spiritual Science, we examine the astral body of man which has separated from the physical and etheric bodies during sleep, we find that this astral body contains within it the forces that are connected with learning to speak. It is extraordinarily interesting to watch the human being falling asleep and waking, during the time when, as a child, he is learning to speak; and it is also very interesting, in the case of some grown-up person who is learning to speak for the first time, to observe the intensity with which the astral body participates in the process. For when the human being is learning to speak, and even later on, too, when he is using speech in everyday life, the astral body carries with it, out of the physical and etheric bodies, the element of soul and spirit that is inherent in words and in speech.

If you can perceive how a human being speaks, how he forms his words, how he imparts to the words his own characteristic tone of voice, how he pours into words the force of his inner convictions, the experiences of his own soul—then you can also perceive how, when he falls asleep, the astral body carries this element of soul and spirit out of the physical and etheric bodies and during the period of sleep holds within itself, in the world of soul and spirit, as a kind of echoing wave, the after-workings of the psycho-spiritual qualities of speech. The forming of the words, the nuances of tone, the force of conviction which a man is able to bring into his words—all this can be perceived in the astral body during the sleeping state. There is, of course, no force of vibration such as is communicated to the physical air, and thus naturally no physical tone of voice is produced. The element of spirit and soul however, that proceeds from the human mouth on the waves of the words and is heard by the human ear, what the soul communicates in the flow of speech—all this is carried forth into the spiritual world by the astral body while the human being sleeps. It can be perceived more clearly when a child, or even a grown-up, is exerting himself to learn to speak a language. But through the whole of life, the element of spirit and soul inherent in speech during the day is taken out into the spiritual world by the astral body during the night. Thus we can say: the nuances of feeling in the spoken word—these it is above all that are carried out of the human being by the astral body during the night. This is a characteristic function of the astral body.

And now let us consider the Ego during the hours of sleep. The Ego is related, as it were, by nature to the limb-system. Just as the astral body is connected with the breast from which speech proceeds, so is the Ego involved in what the human being performs with his limbs, what he does between waking and falling asleep as he walks about or uses his arms and hands. The astral body flows into every word, carries forth the soul-quality of the word during sleep; the Ego is bound up with every movement we make as we go about the world in waking consciousness. The Ego is involved in every movement of the hands, in every act of grasping an object. Whereas, in connection with the astral body, too little attention is paid to the specific soul-element that pours into speech (speech being in itself so obviously a matter of the life of soul), when we come to the connection between the Ego and the limbs, we find an inclination to ignore altogether the working of the soul and spirit. Walking, grasping with the hands, are regarded as processes which happen entirely within a kind of physical mechanism,—for such the human organism is thought to be. But it is by no means so.

In every movement of the fingers that we make during the day, in every step we take as we go about, spirit and soul are contained, just as truly as they are contained in words. What is connected with our limbs and our movements is taken by the Ego out of our physical and etheric bodies into the spiritual world when we fall asleep; and in the process inheres a psycho-spiritual element of a very special nature. At every moment during the period of sleep, the Ego is unconsciously satisfied or dissatisfied. (You will understand this better presently, when I have explained it more fully). Although the words sound trivial, the Ego is satisfied with the legs having moved towards some place or other, or with something that has been accomplished by the arms. Not only is an aftermath of leg and arm movements carried out into sleep, but satisfaction or dissatisfaction as well. Part of the experience of the Ego during the hours of sleep is as follows: You should really not have gone to such and such a place! Or: It was very good to go there! It was good, too, that some particular thing was done with the arms! Or again: Such and such an action was not good! This is an expression of the element of soul and spirit that is added by the Ego to what it bears outwards from the limbs of man into sleep.

What underlies this? In accordance with the World Order the astral body of man is destined to come into inner contact between sleeping and waking with the Beings described in the book Occult Science as belonging to the Hierarchy of the Archangeloi—the Archangels. The Archangel Beings feel an affinity with what is carried out into sleep as an echo sounding on from human speech. It is something they need, something they long to experience.

I will put it like this.—Just as human beings in their physical life on Earth have to breathe, have to be surrounded with oxygen, and consequently feel oxygen to be something beneficial, so do the Archangeloi, who are connected with the inner nature of the Earth, experience a need that the souls of men who are asleep shall bring to them the echo of what is contained in their speech.

Human speech is in this way connected, inherently and fundamentally, via the sleeping state, with the Hierarchy of the Archangeloi. You will remember what I have said in earlier lecture courses, namely, that the Archangeloi are the Leaders, the Guiding Spirits, of the folk-languages. This is connected with what has now been given. The Archangeloi are the Guiding Spirits of folk-languages because they breathe in what the human being, as he sleeps, brings to them from his speech. And a certain human failing is revealed—it is one that is particularly observable in modern cultural life—when, with his speech, a man does not carry out into sleep the right quality.

There is in the culture of the present day very little of what we call idealism. Our words relate entirely to things of the outer, material world. The voicing of ideals—which presupposes belief in the spiritual, for the ideal is a spiritual thing—is becoming rarer and rarer. Since in their waking life men do not unfold inner enthusiasm for ideals, they speak, in reality, of nothing but what is actually present in the physical world. More and more do their words apply and refer only to things of the physical world.

In our days it is often so that people who claim to believe fanatically in the Spirit are the very ones who refute the Spirit. I refer to such as engage in spiritualistic experiments with the object of producing manifestations of the Spirit. This is because, fundamentally, they are only willing to believe in a Spirit which can manifest in the material world. But it is no Spirit that reveals itself in glimmering material light and other such phenomena! Spiritualism is veritably the most extreme form of materialism. It is really an attempt to deny the Spirit, inasmuch as these people will only acknowledge as Spirit that which enters into the world of matter. We are living in an age when words, as they emerge from the soul, lack the wings of idealism. But if this quality is absent, if, in other words, man is unable in waking life to speak of his ideals as well as of physical things, unable to turn to the ideal which imparts real aim to life and transcends physical existence, if in his daily speech he produces no words to express ideals, so that language itself lacks idealism, then it is exceedingly difficult, during sleep, for the connection—which is so necessary for the human being—to be made with the Archangeloi; in such circumstances no order prevails during sleep in the intercourse which should be established between the human soul and the Hierarchy of the Archangeloi. Yes, it is indeed the case that every night man loses the opportunity, if I may so express it, of union with the Archangel Beings. And it is difficult for him, then, to have the inner connection with the spiritual world which enables his life between death and a new birth to be full of strong and vital experiences. The life of a man between death and a new birth is weakened when no idealism is expressed in his speech.

To understand these things constitutes an integral part of the knowledge of life. Those who realise what lack of idealism in speech signifies will ultimately develop the power to make it once again an integral quality of human speech. Even during earthly life it can be observed that a man who, during sleep, fails to draw the right power from the Archangel, does not unfold the strength he should really possess. With regard to what speech should accomplish during sleep for the human being, we can therefore say: In order that speech may produce something that is beneficial to life, we must make a real effort to develop idealism of such a kind that our words do not merely voice an understanding of everyday affairs, but are also imbued with the Spiritual, in the form of idealism.

We are confronted with something even more striking when we observe the Ego in the sleeping state. The Ego carries out into sleep satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the activities of the limbs. Just as the astral body, as a result of the after-working of speech, is carried towards the Hierarchy of the Archangeloi, so is the Ego carried towards the Hierarchy of the Archai—the Powers of the Primal Beginnings—by virtue of what it takes out into the sleeping state as an echo of what has been performed by arms and legs in the daily round of life. From these Archai, the power flows to us, firstly, so to permeate the physical body that we do not only desire the Good, but are also able to exercise upon the urges and instincts of the physical body the measure of control which ensures that the physical body shall present no insuperable obstacle to the fulfilment of the duty or aim we have set ourselves in freedom of thought. In our thoughts we are free beings; but the power to use the freedom in actual life arises only when we carry out into sleep the basis for a true connection with the Archai. How can this be done? Idealism brings the astral body into right connection with the Archangeloi. And what enables the Ego to be united with the Archai? Although we ourselves, to begin with, are unconscious during sleep, the Being from the Hierarchy of the Archai is fully conscious, receives what is unconscious in us and elaborates it into a definite thought of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with what we have done during the day. But what is it that enables us to be connected rightly with these Archai, in the same way as idealism in speech leads us into right connection with Archangeloi?

One quality alone brings the Ego, during sleep, into right connection with the Archai, namely true human love, universal and unselfish love for human beings, sincere interest in every fellow man with whom life brings us into contact. I do not mean sympathy or antipathy, which are merely the outcome of something we are not willing to overcome. True and genuine love for human beings during the waking state leads us, during sleep, to the bosom of the Archai. And there, while the Ego is resting in the bosom of these Beings, karma or destiny is shaped. A verdict is passed: ‘I am satisfied with what I have performed with my arms and legs.’ And out of the satisfaction or dissatisfaction is born a power that not only plays a part in the period immediately following death, but continues on to the next earthly life—the power to shape destiny aright, so that true balance and adjustment are brought about in all those things which in one earthly life we have experienced in the Ego during sleep, in communion with the Archai.

Reflection on these things will develop insight into the mysterious connection between the Ego and the karma, or destiny. Just as the astral body of a man who is an idealist can hand over his speech to the Archangeloi as an offering that then enables the Archangeloi to guide him aright between death and a new birth, so does the Ego weave and work at the texture of destiny. Karma is elaborated in conjunction with the Archai. It is moreover in the power of the Archai to bestow upon us what we need in order that we may not only live through the period between death and a new birth, but, at our next descent to the earthly world, possess already a power which in earliest childhood, enables us, each in his own way, to learn to walk, to find equilibrium, to differentiate the functions of feet and hands, arms and legs.

It is wonderful to be able to perceive how the efforts made by a child when it stops crawling and begins to walk, when it first learns to achieve equilibrium—how these efforts represent the after-effects of the way in which, during the previous earth-life, the Ego was able, because of a universal love for human beings, to make a connection, during sleep, with the Archai. This fact manifests now in the process of learning to walk and can be observed in the very details of the process.

Suppose, for instance, a little child continually stumbles and falls. This means that in a previous life feelings of strong antipathy or even hatred were harboured. No more than an approach was made to the Archai and the effect of the absence of any real connection is expressed in the constant falls during the process of learning to walk. One who develops insight into such matters and sets himself the aim, let us say, of fitting himself to be an educator in the true sense by making close and careful observations of the way in which little children learn to walk, can indeed come to realise what a great and far-reaching task lies before him in the karmic adjustment of something brought over into the present life through the fact that in the previous life there was too little human love, or perhaps enough, but of a misdirected kind.

We have here an example of how the materialistic outlook remains altogether within the realm of the physical. It describes how the human organism raises itself like a machine to the upright position, how it learns to walk, and so on: but behind every physical phenomenon is something spiritual and those who can survey the whole process learn to recognise that the previous earthly life works over into learning to walk. For learning to walk is one expression of how the human being, at the beginning of a new earthly life, learns to control his physical body. Those who understand it fully, know that there is a great deal more in the process of learning to walk than the capacity to lift the legs and raise the body upright; they know that, in truth, this phenomenon is connected also with deeply inward processes, it has to do with the whole manner in which the human being is becoming master of his glandular activity and the like. For when a child is learning to walk, and even before, it is not a matter only of walking, but of gaining—or failing to gain—control of the glandular activities, a factor in the process being whether the child's temperament is phlegmatic or choleric, or whether certain emotions in him are too intense. This, again, is connected with the relationship established with the Archai during sleep in a previous earthly life, as the outcome of universal human love, or lack of it. Materialistic thought says that the human being rests during sleep. But he is not merely resting. When the right kind of idealism is present in a man's waking life, then the astral body will be enabled, while he sleeps, to rise to the Hierarchy of the Archangeloi, that is to say, to be connected with the spiritual world during sleep in such a way that the period leading over from death to a new birth can be lived through in the right manner. If this period is not rightly spent, it means that weaknesses are carried over into another earthly life. How the next life is framed and built, depends upon the nature of the connection established with the Archai. Universal human love carries with it creative power. To have strength to place the body wholly in the service of the soul, to have mastery and control of the physical body—upon what does this depend? It depends upon whether the human being, in the previous life, unfolded love for his fellow men—a faculty that belongs entirely to the soul.

You will remember what I have said in previous lectures: The soul-element of one earthly incarnation manifests in the physical in the next; the spiritual of one incarnation in the soul of the next. These connections are as I have just described them.

It will not do to generalise, saying merely that destiny and karma exist. What can be said, and with truth, is that we behold how the human being works at the formation of his own karma. He weaves it during sleep; but it is during waking life that he gathers what he needs for its texture. He weaves the threads that are formed out of universal human love—or he weaves threads which perpetually tear asunder and make bad karma for the next life, threads that are woven out of feelings of hatred for our fellowmen. Love and hatred—these are creative forces in the forming and shaping of karma.

Such truths must be viewed in their true light. It is but a slip-shod and easy-going conception of karma which prompts us to say: ‘I am ill—it is my karma!’ ‘A misfortune has befallen me—it is my karma.’ To make karma responsible for everything in this fatalistic way does not, it is true, afford any real peace of mind, it is merely a convenient theoretical conception; it is, however, quite incorrect.

Imagine you are considering, not this present life, but the third subsequent life, then in that life you will be able to look back to the present one, and when you say: ‘It is my karma,’ your karma, as it will be then, is to be traced back to this present earthly life where it was actually born. In other words, karma is all the time coming into being.

It is not right to throw everything back to the past. The right attitude to karma leads us to say: An illness which befalls me now, need not necessarily be the consequence of earlier weaknesses of soul; it is possible that an illness may constitute a first beginning. Karma holds good, nevertheless. If an illness, a misfortune befalls me in this present earthly life, the compensation will quite surely come,—or again the illness, the misfortune, may itself be the compensation.

In other words: the future, too, must be reckoned with, when we are speaking about karma. The right attitude towards karma is to have an unshakable conviction of justice reigning through all the worlds, a knowledge that for everything there is compensation. But the present earthly life must not be considered as breaking the on-flowing sequence of incarnations so that we relegate everything to the past. The healthy and positive attitude to the karmic flow of life's happenings rests on the sure knowledge that there is justice. What really matters most of all is the mood of soul that is born from this understanding of karma.

The whole feeling and attitude of soul that must emerge from a true understanding of karma, is one which makes us realise when, perhaps some misfortune befalls us as consequence of an earlier weakness in the life of soul—that if this misfortune had not come about, the weakness would have persisted. Looking into the depths of our soul, we must realise: It is good and right that this misfortune has come upon me, because it has enabled a weakness to be eliminated.

A man who bewails a misfortune which is really the consequence of a preceding weakness or failing, is not adopting the standpoint of true manhood, for the inference is that it matters not to him whether he remains weak or achieves some measure of strength. That man alone faces misfortune aright who says to himself: ‘If it has occurred because of an earlier weakness, it is to be welcomed, for it will make me conscious of the weakness (which expressed itself perhaps in some definite failing); I will now eradicate the weakness, I will be strong again.’

In a case, on the other hand, where a misfortune befalls one as the first step in karma, the right attitude is to say to oneself: If we were always only to encounter what we wish for ourselves, such a life would make us out and out weaklings! One or two earthly lives might continue to be comfortable and easy through the fact that only that would befall us that we desired for ourselves—but in the third or fourth life a kind of paralysis of soul and spirit would supervene, and no effort to overcome obstacles would arise in us. For, after all, obstacles would not be there for us to overcome unless the unhoped-for, the undesired came upon us. But if the right kind of strength is developed vis-à-vis the obstacles, if enough human love is carried over into sleep, then the karma that is woven by the Ego in communion with the Archai is such that the true compensation takes place in the next earthly life.

The truths of Anthroposophy need not remain in the realm of cognition; their very nature is such that they affect a man's attitude and temper of mind and heart. A man who is not thus affected has not grasped them fully; for him indeed they remain abstract and theoretical. The effect which a true understanding of karma has upon a man is to make him more sensitive to happiness and misfortune than he would otherwise be; happiness and misfortune are experienced with great intensity; but he is also able to induce in his soul an attitude to the spiritual world which arises, not out of any belief or creed but out of a perception of what the Ego and astral body are doing while they are withdrawn from the bodily life of day. Recognition of this promotes an unshakable conviction of world-justice. Understanding of karma means that a man has a true perception of world-justice. It does not mean that he becomes phlegmatic towards happiness or unhappiness, joy or pain; it means that joy and pain, happiness and misfortune are for him allotted to their proper place in life.

Observing the human being during the life of day, we can see how the Ego and astral body are working in the physical body. This means that we know something of their activity in the physical body. But we know nothing about the workings of the soul and spirit within the Ego and astral body. If, as a materialist, I am speaking to a human being, listening to his words, I say to myself: Lungs, larynx are at work as he speaks; vibrations are set up in the air and they strike on my ear. But if I see the process truly, I perceive in the words and speech the man's astral body in which his kinship with the Divine-Spiritual world is expressed. I say to myself: When, during the life of day, the astral body is within the physical body, it conceals itself in the man's speech and similar activities; during the night, however, the astral body participates in the life of the higher Hierarchies. And it is the same with the Ego.

When the human being sleeps he is not merely resting from the fatigues of his daily life. Here in the physical world, man sleeps, works and speaks with his physical body; but he is active too in the spiritual world, while he is asleep. Since materialism denies that Ego and astral body exist and operate in full reality of being during sleep, materialism cannot possibly understand the world in its entirety. What is the ‘moral world’ to materialism? To materialism the ‘moral world’ is something the human being formulates in thought—something that has nothing to do with the actively creative powers of the world. But those who have true and penetrating perception of human life know that man lives within the moral world-order during sleep just as truly as during waking life he lives in air and light. This again leads us to something more that it is essential we should understand.

The workings of speech (and the same holds good for karma, too) accompany us when we die. Through the course of our life we have been connected—rightly, or perhaps inadequately—with the world of the Archangeloi. This relationship has repeated itself in every period of sleep, and we bear with us through the Gate of Death into the spiritual world what has been given us by the Archangeloi during sleep. We can then find the way rightly into the spiritual world which is, indeed, the Logos, the world consisting of cosmic principles which have their images in the words of speech; we can find our way into the spiritual world to live out there our life between death and a new birth.

But the matter is not so simple. After death we have no physical body; we are able to turn to good account what the Archangeloi have conferred upon us from our periods of sleep. But when as physical human beings on the Earth, we wake from sleep, we have again to descend into a physical body. The Archangeloi cannot bestow upon us the power to do this. Still higher Hierarchies must add their work, namely, the Beings designated in Occult Science the Exusiai and the Kyriotetes. Into the urges, instincts and desires of the physical body—which offer resistance to us—these higher Beings must introduce the fruits of what we have achieved in communion with the Archangeloi through the spirituality of speech; and this now flames up within us, as the voice of conscience. When that which we bring out of sleep into the body lights up as the voice of conscience, there is working, in this voice, all that has been bestowed by the Hierarchy of the Exusiai and Kyriotetes—a Hierarchy more sublime than that of the Archangeloi.

Thus when we discover in the physical world a man whose conscience is so strong that instincts of a higher order arise in his physical body, we realise that as a result of idealism in his speech, Kyriotetes and Exusiai have worked upon him.

Again, when through universal human love a man forms a real link with the Archai, the results of the work that he himself does on his karma appear in the body of the next earth-life when, in early childhood, while he is sleeping his way into life, he learns to walk, acquires balance, skill in the use of his arms, control of the glandular system, and so on. All this is possible because he has been able, between death and a new birth, to work in communion with the Archai. But in order that in his life on Earth a man may develop delicate sensitivity, a quick and clear consciousness in regard to his own deeds, it is necessary for the still higher Beings referred to in the book Occult Science as the Dynamis to work together with the Archai.

When a man lacks wide-hearted love for his fellowmen, lacks interest in his human environment, he does not find a true link with the Archai. The result is that he prevents himself from weaving his karma rightly for the next earth-life, and the compensation has to wait for later incarnations. In the present earth-life such a man suffers from increasing lack of power to carry into the physical body the judgments that he forms—satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the actions performed by legs and hands. This cannot be achieved by ourselves alone; through intensified human love we need to have entered into a true relationship with the Dynamis. These Beings then bear into our physical body the requisite power; otherwise we come to grief, although we may perceive quite clearly what is right.

In thought we can be free. But in order to use this freedom aright in the physical body, the proper equilibrium must be established in waking and sleeping life because we must be united not only with the Archai but also with the Dynamis.

The highest Hierarchy of all—Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones—bear our deeds out into the universe. From out of sleep, Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes bear as moral power into our bodily nature what we grasp in thoughts: Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones bear this out into the universe, so that our own moral forces become world-creative forces.

When the time comes for the Earth to pass over to the Jupiter condition and for our moral forces to perform their true functions in this great process of transformation, Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones can only play their part if we are able to offer them the necessary foundations. If, because of feebleness, we have only forces of destruction to offer them, then we are working for the destruction of the Earth, not for the upbuilding of Jupiter.

When Anthroposophy speaks of the manifoldness of the spiritual world, this is by no means a mere naming of particular stages, but we are enabled gradually to behold the whole warp and woof of the world and to perceive the connection of the human being with the spiritual world as clearly as we perceive his connections with the physical world. The power to promote and upbuild life arises in men who acquire in this way a true insight into their connection with the spiritual world, who realise that the purpose of sleep is not merely repose but that the after-workings of the physical body may bring the human being into a right connection with the spiritual world.

It is quite possible for a man to deny the spiritual and moral world because, to begin with, at his present stage of Earth evolution, he is not aware of its reality. He is asleep in this respect. A true science must evoke into the realm of consciousness, realisation of the heavenly existence which reaches into earthly life. Sleep comes over man for this very purpose—that he may, himself, draw out of the spiritual world the power he needs for his physical life.

And now, from this point of view, study the connection of what I have sketched today in outline with my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. As I have stated with emphasis there, it is not a matter of establishing the theory that the will must be free, but that the thought must be free. The thought must control the will if man is to be a free being. But a man's life must be suitably directed and ordered if the will is not to present insuperable hindrance to the thought that is free. As men in the physical world we can make our thought free. Feeling² becomes free only when we have established a true relationship with the Archangeloi; will becomes free when we have established a true relationship with the Archai.

The living content of speech, as well as all that lives in our limbs, passes out, during sleep, together with the soul and spirit. Astral body and Ego go forth, but the ether-body remains with the physical body. The thinking that is bound up with the ether body continues within the ether-body; but we know nothing in ordinary consciousness of how this ether body thinks from the time of falling asleep to that of waking, because we are outside it. It is not true that thinking ceases during sleep; we think from the moment of falling asleep until we wake. Man's thoughts are in perpetual flow in his ether-body, only he is unaware of it. Not until the moment when he returns to the body do the thoughts light up in his consciousness. Man can become free in his life of thought because his thoughts are bound, through the ether-body, with the physical life of Earth; for he has been placed upon the Earth in order that he may become free. From the spiritual world alone can he draw the power of freedom—the power that leads to freedom in feeling and in will.

It will be clear that throughout the whole of his life on Earth the human being retains the real foundation for his thinking—the ether-body. Astral body and Ego pass out into a cosmic world during earthly life; not so, the ether-body. The ether-body emerges only at death. Then comes the backward review, lasting one, two, three days, of the life that has just ended; the human being sees his whole life as a panorama. Always, without exception, the human being looks back, after death, upon his earthly life which has now run its course. The whole ocean of the thoughts that have arisen in him between birth and death, both in sleeping and waking life—a great sea of inter-weaving thoughts—is present before him during these three days after death, but immediately thereafter the thoughts are claimed by the Cosmos; the thoughts dissolve, and after two or three days the whole panorama has passed away—into the Cosmos. We are accustomed to say that the ether-body has been detached and has dispersed, but in actual fact the Cosmos has absorbed it into itself. The ether-body has continued to expand, until finally it is completely absorbed into the Cosmos. Then, as Ego and astral body, the human being is received into the bosom of the Higher Hierarchies. Only when an ether-body is again bestowed upon him, can he descend to a new earthly life and continue the work which will make him a free human being. For it is the goal of earthly life that man shall become free. The foundation for freedom lies in the activity of pure thinking—a faculty that is bestowed upon man on Earth. Therefore is the ether-body bound to the physical body for the whole course of earthly life, releasing itself only at death in worlds where freedom is not to be acquired. Freedom is acquired during life on Earth, and moreover, as you know, during certain epochs only of Earth life.

We can thus understand that there is a true relationship between freedom and karma, for freedom is connected with those members of man's being (physical body and ether-body) which remain behind during sleep. Karma is woven by the Ego during the period of sleep,—that is to say, in a realm beyond and apart from those members wherein freedom has its foundations. Karma does not weave the texture of free or unfree thoughts; karma weaves at feeling and will. Karma emerges from the depths of human nature, out of the ‘dreaming’ feeling and the ‘sleeping’ will. Into this we can pour, or rather over against this we can place, the power that lives in the free activity of thoughts, in pure thinking, in the ethical and moral impulses as I described them in the book Philosophy of Spiritual Activity for these impulses must have their root in pure thinking.

Everything, you see, fits into a whole. It is essential to realise that the further we progress in Anthroposophy, the more completely do we find the details uniting and forming one whole. Contradictions may well be found in what is said concerning one particular domain or another; this is inevitable, because before arriving at any real insight in one domain we need, in reality, to study this domain in connection with the whole. Otherwise our conclusions are like that of a man who makes statements about a planet and is unable to understand the causes of its specific movements. In such a case it is of course necessary to reckon with the whole planetary system. Thus, if we wish really to know something about the world and about life, we must try to fathom all the connections, all the details of actual realities, both in the physical world and in the worlds of soul and spirit.

This was what I wanted to say to you today, my dear friends, when it has been possible for us to be together again in a Group Meeting. My desire has been to help you to develop that attitude to karma—that is, to universal justice—which arises in a man when he finds his true bearings in Anthroposophy. More important than the mere comprehension of theories is the feeling, the attitude of soul which we carry over into life itself. May you succeed, in ever greater and greater measure, in making the gifts of Anthroposophy the very substance of your soul, receiving them verily not into your thoughts alone, but into your heart and soul. The more Anthroposophy becomes the heart-substance of those who desire to understand it truly, the more will it be possible to introduce Anthroposophy into cultural spiritual life in the wide sense. This is a deep and urgent need, for with antiquated traditions mankind will be incapable of progress. Try to tread the path of Anthroposophy which leads from the head to the heart, for in your hearts Anthroposophy will be secure.

• 1. The Aim of the Goetheanum and the Task of Anthroposophy, Berne, 5th April, 1923
• 2. The German word here is ‘Gemut’—a word that means more than “feeling,” for it includes also the perception and understanding that belong to the heart.

Also known as: Archangels and the Living Source of Speech Lecture 2 of 13 from the lecture series: The Human Soul in its Connection with Godly-Spiritual Individualities.

If you will remind yourselves of some of the things I have said in recent lectures, you will, I think, be able to call up a picture of the relationship of man's faculty of speech to those Beings in the spiritual world whom we are accustomed to assign to the Hierarchy of the Archangels. You will remember I explained to you the difference it makes to man whether the words he speaks are formed in such a way as to refer only to material things, in which case speech assumes a materialistic character, or whether in his speaking he unfolds a certain idealism, so that every time he utters a word, the feeling is present in him that he belongs to a spiritual world and that the words that ring in his speaking, coming as they do from the soul, must have some relation to Spirits. According as the one or the other is true, so does man come, between falling asleep and awakening, into a wrong or right relation with the Archangels. If he allows idealism to disappear altogether from his speaking, then he gradually loses the connection, which is so essential to him, with the Archangels. I am reminding you of this, because I want to speak to-day more particularly of one aspect of this relationship of human speech with the hierarchy of the Archangels. Speech, like everything else in evolution that has to do with man, as we have had full opportunity of realising in our study of his being, has had its history. What I want to bring forward does not refer to any one language in particular. The periods of time we have to take into view when we are studying some deep-seated change in speech are so long that even primitive languages show the same character as civilised ones in respect of such matters as we shall be considering. To-day therefore we shall not concern ourselves with the differences that exist between the several languages, but rather with those metamorphoses which human language in general has undergone in the course of the evolution of mankind on Earth.

If we consider the relationship man has to-day to language, we find that the words he speaks are nearly all of them signs for things that are round about him. As you will know, we have in the course of our studies alluded to a more intimate relationship between word and object. In our day however there is hardly any feeling left for this; words are very little more than mere outward signs for the objects indicated. Who is there who still feels, when the word Blitz (lightning) is uttered, something of the same experience he has when lightning actually flashes through space? To-day we are inclined to look on the word merely as a combination of sounds that is a sign for the phenomenon of the flash of lightning. It was not always so. If we go no farther back than to the earlier part of the Greek civilisation, we find that man's relation to language was not then one of thought, where the word is for him a sign and a symbol. The man of olden time entered with heart and soul into the sounds of his words and into the whole way the sounds were formed and arranged. And in the case of the languages of Northern Europe we do not even need to go back so far before we come to a time when the word Pflug (plough) gave man the same inner experience as did the activity of ploughing. This has been lost, and the word has become no more than a sign. But it is scarcely more than 1500 years or so since words were still felt in this way in the Northern parts of Europe. The feeling a man had when he was ploughing was similar to the feeling he had when he heard the word which in those days designated the plough. When anyone was listening to or speaking a word, it was not so much his thinking that partook in the experience as his feeling.

If now we go back into more remote ages, we find something different again; the will takes an intense and active part in the forming of words. But in order to study the times when man's relationship to external Nature was pre-eminently one of will, we must take our thoughts right back to Atlantis. For we have to reckon with long epochs of time when we are considering the evolution of language.

Within language lives the Genius of language. Language is not dependent for its evolution on the decision of man. In language lives the Genius of language. And the Genius of Language belongs to the hierarchy of the Archangels. When man speaks—when, that is, an atmosphere is prepared around the Earth within which can live man's utterances articulated into speech, then that atmosphere of speech and language is the element of the Archangels. Hence are the Archangels the Spirits of the different peoples—the Folk Spirits as we call them. You will know of this from the lectures I gave on the Mission of the Folk-Souls.

The evolution of language on Earth has thus a deep and intimate connection with the evolution of the Archangels. We can go so far as to say that in the evolution of speech and language we are beholding the evolution of the Archangels themselves. For even when we are studying something that has to do with the Earth, it is by no means impossible in the course of that very study to come to a knowledge of the evolution of higher spiritual Beings. We need only learn how to relate particular facts and phenomena to particular higher spiritual Beings, and we can arrive at a clear perception of how the continuous evolution of the Archangels is expressed and revealed in the changes that are to be observed in man's faculty of speech.

Now in those far-off times when an element of will came to expression in man's speech—that is, in the later part of the Atlantean evolution—it was not the same Beings of the Hierarchy who lived in his language as in more recent times. The whole relationship moreover was different. In those remote times man was not yet so interested in the feelings aroused in him at the sight, for example, of the blossoming of flowers or by changes in weather. These feelings interested him, it is true, in another connection, but not in respect of the faculty whereby the word welled up from the depths of his soul. Whether danger threatened him from this or that fact in Nature, summoning him to defend himself, or whether something else had a kindly and favourable influence and he would fain bring it into the orbit of his life, or again whether another object of perception were good or bad for his health,—in effect, how his will was aroused to activity, what he was induced to do under the influence of some fact or other,—this was the aspect of experience that interested him, and he formed his words accordingly. So that in those older times we find words that express how man reacts, what he finds himself impelled to do under the influence of the world around him. The most ancient language of all consisted almost entirely of expressions of will. How do we account for this? It was due to the fact that the Archangels came to language by way of Intuition. Read the descriptions I have given in my books of the nature of Intuition, and you will have a picture of the activity exercised by the Archangels in the later part of the Atlantean evolution, when they bestowed upon man the language of will.

Later, these Archangels moved forward in their own evolution. In my little book, “The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind,” I spoke about the evolution of the Leaders and Guides of humanity who live in the spiritual world. To-day we will extend this into a realm to which on that occasion we gave little attention,—the realm of speech and language. The advance made by the Archangels in their relation to language may be described in the following way. In the older faculty of Intuition they were standing within the world of still higher Hierarchies, giving themselves up in devotion to these worlds, so that together with speech they received something of the very being of higher Hierarchies than themselves. So long as it all depended upon Intuition, the Archangels surrendered themselves to the next higher Hierarchy,—Kyriotetes, Dynamis, Exusiai. They were within the worlds of this higher Hierarchy, and it was the experience of standing intuitively within this higher Hierarchy that enabled them to put the speech-forming power into human life on Earth.

In the next epoch the Archangels make, as it were, a step forward and then their speech-forming power flows no longer out of Intuition but out of Inspiration. They are not now completely surrendered to the next higher Hierarchy. (What they did still receive through their devotion to this Hierarchy underwent a change; it ceased to be something they could then communicate to man as speech or language). Now they hearken to the Inspirations of the First Hierarchy,—Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim,—and from out of this Inspiration they pour down to Earth the speech-forming power.

If we go back to the earliest times of Post-Atlantean evolution, or even only as far as ancient Egypt and Chaldea, we find in every land that the source from which the Archangels drew, in order to communicate speech to man, is Inspiration. Language itself is metamorphosed. Words become an expression before all else of sympathy and antipathy, of every shade of human feeling. Instead of a language of will, as in former times, we have now a language of feeling. We have come to a stage where this feeling, which is called forth in man by an external process or being is the very same as is experienced when the sounds issuing forth from the depths of his being are uttered by the speech organs and articulated into the word.

We have reached a significant phase in the evolution of mankind. The Hierarchy of the Archangels is at first the receiver of Intuitions; and the language of will, brought down as it were out of these Intuitions, is created by these Beings. The Archangels move on further and become the receivers of Inspiration. And what they receive through the inspiration of Beings of the First Hierarchy, gives rise to the language of feeling.

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It was out of an extraordinarily deep perception that the well-known scholar and writer on the history of Art, Hermann Grimm, drew a clear line of division between the Greeks and the Romans. When we learn history at school or at the university, we are, he said, exhorted to take pains to understand what we learn; but as we go back over the evolution of mankind, we can only understand history as far back as Roman times. Cicero and Caesar we can still understand, for up to a point they are similar to the man of the present day,—although it must be said that the understanding generally brought to a study of Caesar is far from being free and natural. If we were not so thoroughly drilled and trained to it, we would never take much interest in Caesar! We would leave it to the pupils in military schools. Generally speaking, however, it is possible to trace a continuous stream back from our own day to Rome. A certain element of pedantry, which has gradually been creeping into man's life and has to-day reached a kind of culmination, first began to show itself in Rome. But, thinks Hermann Grimm, if we are honest with ourselves, we cannot claim to understand Pericles or Alcibiades. We understand them in the same way as we understand characters in fairy tales. As a matter of fact, it is only through a deeper study of Anthroposophy that one can come again to an understanding of the soul life of such figures; as you know, we have sought here again and again to enter into the whole way in which a Greek thinks and forms his ideas. Hermann Grimm is aware of the distance that lies between the inner life of a Greek and the inner life of a man of the present day. To the Roman we can still feel ourselves near; then comes a great gulf. The way the Greeks are described in the schools to-day is really deplorable! They are made out to be just like ourselves. They were not so at all, their whole life of soul was of a different character altogether. We need to look round for quite other methods to describe the Greeks. You could not have more striking evidence of this than when the learned Wilamowitz undertakes to translate the Greek tragedians. The whole affair is simply a disgrace. I need hardly say, there is nothing of the Greek tragedies left in his translations, not a trace! And yet people are immensely pleased, quite enchanted with them. Their dramatis personae simply do not exist in the tragedies themselves.

Hermann Grimm showed a true and sure instinct, when he said that we come into an entirely different world when we come to Greece—to say nothing of the Orient. It is really no more than a ridiculous mockery for modern man to imagine he can understand anything of the true Orient out of Deussen's translations. The first thing necessary is to be able to comprehend the change that has come about since then in the very being of man's soul.

And now when we come to consider our particular sphere, the sphere of speech or language, then we find that the language of feeling still prevailed in Greece among the philosophers up to the time of Plato. The first philosophical pedant is Aristotle, the great and universal spirit.¹ It will surprise you that I give him these two appellations, one after the other, but we do not understand Aristotle unless we see in him the first philosophical pedant and at the same time the universal spirit. He is great in a certain aspect but he is in another aspect the first pedant philosopher, for he made out of words categories of thought. It would never have occurred to the Greek of an older time to take words and force them, as it were, to yield categories of thought; he still felt the words as something that is inspired into man, still felt the presence of higher Spirits in speech and language.

Well on into the Greek epoch and—for the man in the street, as we say—as late as the Mystery of Golgotha, we can still detect in the speech-forming power of man the element of Inspiration, as it lives in the soul of the Archangel. True, the ordinary person lags behind the philosopher in certain respects; but in spiritual matters he is often less behind, and in the matter of the speech-forming faculty, he retains the Inspirations longer. Dates can of course be no more than approximate. In one region of the earth Inspiration lasts a longer, in another a shorter, time. In one region, men still feel how the word pulsates in them as the blood pulsates in the body; they feel it in the power of the breath. In the power of the breath as it enfills and surges through the body, they feel the presence of the Archangel, who is himself subject to Inspiration.

Then we come into a time when it is no longer so that the Archangel is yielding to Inspiration when he communicates to man the power of speech, but to Imagination. And language becomes the language of thought. Man begins to speak more out of thoughts; language approaches the abstract. And behind this lies a fact of great significance.

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The Archangels, who belong to the Third Hierarchy, received Intuitions from the Second Hierarchy, and Inspirations from Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones—the First Hierarchy. Whence do they receive Imagination? There is no Hierarchy beyond the First! The Imaginations cannot at any rate come to them from any one of the Hierarchies named in the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite. For he tells of no Hierarchy beyond the first. Certain Archangel Beings were therefore obliged to turn to the past for Imaginations, to find in the past the pictures of the speech-forming power,—for that is what the Imaginations are. What came from an earlier time had to be carried on into the future. There was no longer any immediate and present flow of the speech-forming power. And inasmuch as speech now took its source from an earlier stage, into it crept an Ahrimanic element. This is a fact of incalculable significance. And what the Archangels felt above them came to expression in the world of man in a deadening of speech and language. Language became polished and at the same time paralysed, it no longer retained the livingness it had in earlier days.

Try to understand the significance of this change. Something enters into the life of man that in reality requires a higher hierarchy than the First. If we have a right understanding for this event in human development in all its tremendous significance, we shall come to see that a time had arrived when the Gods had to grow out beyond what is contained in the First Hierarchy. There is one thing that up to that time had not yet been achieved by the Gods, and was already present here on Earth in picture. What the Gods had not yet achieved is the passage through Death. You have often heard me speak of this. The Gods who stand above man in the various Hierarchies knew only of changes from one form of life into another. The actual event of death in life had not, up to the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, been an experience of the Gods. Death came as a result of Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences; it came, that is, through the agency of Divine Beings who had either remained behind in evolution or pressed forward too quickly. Death had no place in the life-experience of the higher Hierarchies. It enters into their experience in the moment when the Christ passes through the Mystery of Golgotha—passes, that is, through Death, uniting Himself so deeply with the destiny of Earth Man as to have this also in common with him,—that He passes through Death. The event of Golgotha is accordingly more than an event of the life of Earth, it is an event of the life of the Gods. The actual event that took place in that moment on Earth, and the knowledge of the Event that finds its way into the hearts and minds of men—all this is an image of the infinitely more lofty and sublime and far-reaching Event that took place in the worlds of the Gods themselves. Christ's passing through death on Golgotha is an event whereby the First Hierarchy reached up into a still higher realm. Therefore have I always had to speak to you of the Trinity as standing above the First Hierarchy. In reality It only came there in the course of evolution. Everywhere there is evolution.

And so, if we are speaking of the Hierarchies as described in Dionysius the Areopagite, we have to say that the Archangels lose the possibility of forming Imaginations from above. Consequently Man loses the possibility of continuing to build and fashion his language in a living manner. In the world of the Gods an event takes place of which the Mystery of Golgotha is an earthly reflection. Therefore the Event of Golgotha contains among its many implications also this,—that as men gradually receive into themselves more and more of the Christ Impulse, they receive again through the Christ Impulse the living spring and fountain of language.

We have to-day the various languages that run their course like diverging streams. And if we look at these various languages in a free and unbiassed way, we cannot fail to observe how they carry in them—and more especially, the farther we go Westward—an element of death, how they tend to become mere empty husks. In Asia things have not yet gone so far, but as we go West we find increasingly how the languages show signs of dying.

There is only one way whereby the speech-creating power can be quickened into life,—and that is through men coming to realise the Christ Impulse as a living Impulse. Then the Christ Impulse can become a power in man that can create speech. And among all the facts to be noted if we want to form a true picture of the significance of the Christ Impulse in the whole evolution of mankind, this must also have place, that at the time when man went forward into freedom, he came right out of the Divine and spiritual stream in which he had been steeped hitherto. Had speech remained as it was in the time of ancient Greece, man would not have been able to evolve to freedom. That speech serves the purpose merely of a sign,—this absurdity (for so I must call it) had to come about when the Archangels lost the possibility of forming Imaginations from the present and had to resort to the past. During the time since the Christ first made Himself known to men, during all this time while He has let the Mystery of His Being and His activity be there on record in the Gospels, the knowledge of Christ has not come in its fullness, the knowledge men have had of Him has not been sufficiently spiritual, it has often been merely traditional. But when the word of the Gospel is quickened to life by an understanding of the Christ, an understanding that derives from the Christ Himself as He still works on in the world, continuing to have influence always upon man, then—and only then—will proceed from the Christ Impulse, from the living Christ Impulse, the speech-forming power.

Let us now set down on the blackboard what I have been indicating. Here up above, the Gods grow more and more exalted. Down below an evolution goes on among men. On the one hand they receive more and more of the Christ Impulse, on the other hand they move further and further forward in the direction of freedom.

And when man rises to a higher stage, the higher Hierarchies also reach a higher stage. The Archangels gradually receive more and more of the Christ Impulse, on the other hand they move further and further forward in the direction of freedom. And when man rises to a higher stage, the higher Hierarchies also reach a higher stage. The Archangels gradually receive more and more of the Christ, Who has found His home in the hearts of men on Earth; He enters with His Impulse right into the Imaginations of the Archangels, and these become alive, become quick with immediate present life.

We shall in the future have an altogether different kind of language-forming power. A quite new kind will begin to work. I have spoken of this from other points of view in earlier lectures.

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We can describe the evolution that goes on above in the Heavens at the same time as mankind evolves on the Earth below. And we can also describe its copy or reflection on Earth,—the progress from the language of will to the language of feeling and thence to the language of thought or symbol. And we can know that amidst it all Archangels are ascending—or shall we rather say descending—from Intuition to Inspiration and to Imagination. We behold first the evolution of the Archangels and all that takes place in connection therewith among the higher Hierarchies, and when we turn from that to man in his evolution, it is on the evolution of language and of the word that we have to fix our attention. We will consider one particular stream in the whole history of mankind, into which a divine stream was interwoven. It goes back to the origin of all things, the far beginning of all things. “In the Beginning was the Word” where was the word in those distant ages, when mankind had a language of the will? The Word was with God, it had to be sought there by means of Intuition. “The Word was with God ”.

The Archangels had to transpose themselves by means of Intuition into the Being of the Second Hierarchy. The Being that flowed over into Them was the Word. “And a God was the Word”.

In the Beginning was the Word
And the Word was with God
And a God was the Word.

We see how intimate is the connection of that stream in evolution which finds its culmination in the Mystery of Golgotha with the Logos, the Word. And it is all bound up with the great cosmic event of man's “becoming” and the passage of Christ through death. When those great sentences were uttered: “In the Beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and a God was the Word ”—in those days the Word was felt as moving and weaving in the soul of man. With the Advent of the Mystery of Golgotha came a time when Christ was present in a human body—men beheld Him through the Word. The Word had entered into physical man. “ And the Word became flesh ”.

Deep truths, deep facts of evolution, lie hidden in the ancient writings, but earnest and persistent work is needed to find them again. We must first be able to observe in the spiritual world. Above all, we must approach these ancient writings with reverence, knowing that we shall only be able to deepen our understanding of their content by learning to investigate these sublime matters for ourselves. And as we are able to enter into their deeper meaning we enter also into spiritual life itself.

Well indeed would it be for us in this age, had we a Michael civilisation, a culture and a civilisation fired by what I recently called the Michael thought! This Michael thought should be alive, above all, in the autumn time. The festival of autumn should be filled with it. The leaves have withered and are falling from the branches of the trees, the plants are fading away, life is being mineralised. All the fresh young sprouting life that we saw in the earlier part of the year is receiving death into itself, death and decay, and is fast undergoing mineralisation. Now must the Michael power well up from man's inner being; now must man recognise how, just where the physical and material grows weak and faint and tends to die away,—just there the spiritual enters in! The Autumn Festival of Michaelmas at the end of September should become a festival filled with life and impulse. It has to express how man, while he stands right within the decaying processes of Nature, grows correspondingly active in his soul. When the Michael Festival shall have this character, then all human activity will be fructified from it. And how sore is the need to-day for such fructification! Let me give you an instance.

A short while ago, we heard a great deal about a resolve some people had made to study language. Nothing came of it, nothing at all. All manner of facts about language were collected, but the whole effort was completely lacking in spirituality. It was really so. There you had a group of young people, straight from school. At school of course, they had not yet woken up, but now—they are going to “study language”! They begin to plan it all and think how it will be when they have gone on studying for some time; a dazzling picture floats before their eyes of the fruit of all their labours. Actually all the preliminary steps are there; they could quite well have gone on to a recognition of the great miracle that unfolds before us when we look away from the present-day language of thought, through the language of feeling, to the language of will, and behold there the wonderful working and weaving of the Divine Archangels, behold too how their working and weaving stirs even yet in the language corpses of to-day. Were the life of the First Beginnings to flow again in language, what a sublime greatness were there revealed!

You must understand that the Michael thought is not a thing to be taken easily. You cannot simply say: Let us inaugurate a Michael Festival; it will be wonderful, and we shall then be in the very forefront of progress. The Michael thought has relation to the strongest and deepest impulses of the human will. It must reckon with these innermost impulses, and a Michael Festival cannot be other than a festival which gives a tremendous urge to human life, much as in those olden times, when man had the power to create festivals, the institution of the Christmas Festival or of the Easter Festival gave a new urge and impetus to the whole life of man on Earth.

• 1. Pedant’ seems to be, in this connection, the nearest rendering for ‘Philinter.’ (Note by Translator).

In present-day anthroposophical life we must begin to develop an art which was one of the arts of the old Mysteries—those Mysteries which were based on a quite different kind of knowledge from that of to-day, and yet possessed in their customs, and in their whole way of conducting affairs, a great deal that has been lost, and must be renewed. The art I mean can be described, quite in accordance with the intentions of the old Mysteries, thus: from words there must be drawn Spirit. But when, in the old Mysteries, they spoke of Word, or Logos, they meant something very much more significant than is generally meant to-day. We have to learn to find again a deeper and deeper meaning in the objects and processes of the world—and in this sentence, once more: Spirit must be drawn forth from words.

To speak of the human being as consisting of physical body, etheric body, astral body, Ego, and so on, is really very abstract. For this reason we have tried on many occasions to describe what is really meant by these members of man's being. It is always possible to go further in such descriptions, and so to approach nearer to spiritual reality. To-day we shall consider the human etheric body, describing what is discovered by super-sensible vision about the real being of this human etheric body. We should not stop at the vague conception conveyed by describing how the etheric body is related to the physical body, how it differs in substance, and so on. Such descriptions are only approximate, and only by developing these approximate descriptions very much further do we penetrate to reality.

We know that when, under earthly conditions, the human being goes to sleep, the etheric body remains within the physical body, and that—as we have always described it—the astral body and the Ego leave this physical body and etheric body. The life of the astral body and Ego is still so weak, at the present stage of their cosmic development, that they are not capable of conscious experience between falling asleep and awakening. We have often discussed, up to a point, the subconscious experiences through which the astral body and the Ego pass during this time.

But to-day we shall look back at what is left behind in bed when a human being is asleep, and in particular at the etheric body. In this way we shall treat the term “etheric body” so as to draw out the Spirit from it, by that art of which I said just now that it was cultivated in the ancient Mysteries. Looking at this etheric body, we shall consider its real nature, as it is beheld super-sensibly, when the human being is asleep.

We see the physical body grow still. We see the human being unable to move his limbs—unable also to pour his will through his bodily form, so as to make use of his senses. The relation of the external world to his senses does not change. But the relation of the senses to the external world changes, inasmuch as the human being becomes inwardly still. Just as externally his arms and legs are still, in his organs of perception his will is not active in the delicate movements of response to the external world which are necessary for sense-perception. But it is a complete mistake to believe that the sense-organs themselves, or more exactly the sites of the sense-organs, are not filled by any activity during sleep. Over its whole extent, the physical body rests—but the human etheric body becomes all the more active and inwardly mobile between falling asleep and awakening. This is a characteristic fact: in the same measure as the functions of the physical body come to rest, at and after the moment of falling asleep, a more and more lively activity of the etheric body begins.

This lively activity of the etheric body streams out, in particular, from the senses. If the super-sensible gaze is directed upon the sleeping human being—that is to say upon the part of the human being present in the physical frame—then it is found that from those places where the sense-organs are located, a continual lively activity streams inwards. This is the life of the etheric body, or vital body during sleep.

For example, from the moment of falling asleep there is a particular process which originates from the region of the human eyes. It is as if, through the influence of light during the waking period, the eye had stored up forces for an activity that develops only after sleep begins. And this is in fact an etheric activity. In the same measure as the influence of light and colour from outside upon the eye is darkened, the eyes themselves begin, like two phosphorescent suns, to irradiate the interior of the physical part of the sleeping human being. The interior space of the human being is illumined by a phosphorescent, glimmering light. It is not surprising that this light, which streams into the interior of the human being, cannot be seen in the ordinary way. External, physical eyes do not see what goes on in the interior of man; there is no organ within the physical body which could immediately perceive this phosphorescent glow.

One of the inner activities of the etheric body in the human being during sleep can be described in this way. Into this there flows a further process. What a man can still observe while he is going to sleep—a kind of humming and singing, a changing murmur within his organism—continues during sleep itself as a music, extraordinarily rich in melody and harmony, which also fills the whole interior of man during sleep. From falling asleep to awakening, this musical activity continues. And the Ego and astral body, which are outside the physical and etheric body, receive strong impressions from this—from what they have left behind, the resounding music in the etheric body. And while it resounds in music, the etheric body is at the same time radiant with light. But the impression made upon the Ego and the astral body remains unconscious.

In the same way, etheric streams of warmth flow into the interior of man from the whole surface of the skin. The result—with much else that is more remote from what we perceive in the external world as warmth, light, and sound, and is thus difficult to describe—is an immensely beautiful and impressive living and streaming activity of the human etheric body.

Distinct, like an island, there stand out from the general etheric life of the cosmos this particular music, and radiance, and flooding stream of warmth. They stand out for inner reasons—which are rooted in the very existence and being of man himself. They belong to man's individual etheric body. And this flooding warmth, this phosphorescent glow, this resounding music—it is these that detach themselves, a few days after man's death, as etheric body from the astral body and Ego, and flow out into the general cosmic ether.

Many of you may have noticed how, after attending a concert the previous evening, one may wake up with the feeling that the soul has been listening again to the same music; as if the whole concert had been repeated for the soul during sleep. But this is a more complicated process than for the ordinary consciousness it appears to be. In reality the soul is emerging from the impressions of the cosmic music, which resounds in an individualised form in the human etheric body. But when the human being returns into the etheric body, all that I have described as going on in the etheric body is blotted out for consciousness by the perceptive activity of the physical body. And the human soul translates what is really individualised cosmic music into the recently-experienced earthly sounds. They are in a sense the clothing assumed by the cosmic music at the moment of awakening, because it has something in common with the stream of sound received at the concert. Because in the ordinary consciousness man cannot perceive the cosmic music, it is clothed in the sounds taken from earthly experience that are most nearly comparable to it. This is the real experience behind the phenomenon most of you may have met at some time.

You see what complex processes are embraced in the human etheric body. And if the attempt is made to penetrate further—using the methods with which penetration into such realms is possible—then it can be observed that in reality this flowing warmth, this gentle phosphorescent glow, this living music, are an outer revelation of cosmic beings. All that I have described is the external clothing, the revelation, the glory of mighty cosmic beings. And these beings disclose themselves as those we know from anthroposophical writings as the Exusiai. I have often named these Exusiai Revelations, because they live, in accordance with their inner nature, in the shining stream which during earthly sleep flows from the human sense-organs towards the interior of man. In this stream the weaving life of those beings we name Exusiai is revealed.

And now, with the same methods with which one observes these revelations of the human senses, so active in their etheric substance during sleep, these streams can be followed further along their course into the interior of man's organism. If one is looking at some shining object, one can follow the line from the eye towards this object. It is to be found somewhere on this line that leads outwards, the visual line. In the same way you can follow inwards from the senses the streaming, flooding etheric radiance.

There is not so far to go; very soon something different is reached. The mild phosphorescent glow, proceeding from the eyes; the living music, which comes from the region of the organs of hearing; the streaming warmth, which goes inward from the whole surface of the skin—all these become an organically coherent etheric system. (When one observes the waking human being, one sees the etheric body in activity—the physical body of course as well—and this activity is somewhat different from that I have described for sleep; the activity then extends a little outside the physical body.) Now one sees how all that streams and flows and shines inwards, from the senses and from the whole skin, is formed into a shell-like copy of man, but within him, extending to a certain depth. From the eyes, one sees this phosphorescent glow, inwards, changing into something I will describe in a moment. The streaming warmth goes inwards from the skin, attains a certain thickness like a shell, and then forms a kind of etheric organism which is compounded of the living music, the glowing light, the streaming warmth, intermingled with one another. All these, and much else, flow through one another, influence one another mutually, and form an organism—the etheric organism of man. If one contemplates this etheric organism with spiritual vision, and begins to understand its phenomena, one is bound to describe it as consisting simply of the forms of thoughts, of flowing thoughts. What is flowing within it is everywhere Thought.

If one were to follow this inner activity of the etheric body during sleep, in its continual fluctuation, and then draw it at a particular moment, one would draw of course lines, or coloured forms. But to describe the substance of these lines or coloured forms one could only say: it is as if thoughts were starting to flow. What lives otherwise in the activity of thought becomes an ever-changing flood and flow. It is the thought-process of the Universe individualised. This individualised thought-process of the Universe reveals itself as individualised Logos. One cannot really say: this forming of thoughts, which streams and weaves within man, connected with these movements shining in from the senses, is only thought. For it speaks. It speaks indeed a silent language, but one that can be perceived as belonging to the interior of man. It speaks indeed—as all things through the Logos speak to us—in an individual form, expressing in an inner Word, that can be perceived spiritually, the essential being of Man.

Thus when we proceed further inwards from the senses there appears to us: the human speech that is directed inwards. It can really be said: the Ego and astral body of man, which from falling asleep to awakening are outside the physical and etheric bodies, are unconscious, as far as the ordinary consciousness is concerned. But they do experience what is happening. And just as they experience the etheric activity of the senses during sleep, as an inward streaming and flowing, they experience too during sleep the etheric body as individualised Logos. Speech, which otherwise is directed outwards to the ears of our fellow men, is as if transformed, turned inwards etherically. It is as if we were to repeat inwards everything which we have said during the day, from waking to falling asleep—but in the opposite order, beginning with the evening and ending with the morning. In a silent language we repeat all that we have said from morning to evening—but in a way that reveals the whole nature of our soul. In so far as man's essential being is experienced in what is spoken, from morning to evening, this experience is manifested inwardly, from evening to morning, in the resounding, speaking, individualised Logos. And this resounding, speaking, individualised Logos brings to expression at the same time—writing, as it were, into the time-sequence of the etheric, in that gleaming, gently phosphorescent light—the occult script corresponding to everything that works inwardly during the night, as the other side of what is spoken during the day. (The same thing happens during every sleep, even during a daytime nap, but in a more fragmentary way.)

Looking at this still more closely, using the same methods through which the individualised Logos that weaves within man is revealed—seeking the ultimate reality, behind what is fundamentally only appearance—one finds all those hierarchical beings called in the anthroposophical writings Dynamis, who are above the Exusiai.

Thirdly—in this attempt to exercise the art of seeking the real being behind the words—we find the ultimate reality of what I once described as a kind of opposite vertebral column. Perhaps some of you remember how I described the human etheric body many years ago. In the periodical, Luzifer Gnosis, it is described how the streams that compose the etheric body as a whole work together to form a structure that lies towards the front of man, just as in the physical body the bony structure of the vertebral column, and the vertebral canal, lie towards the back. In the physical body we have this vertebral column and vertebral canal, running vertically. And in the etheric body we have a confluence, a radiating together of what I have just described, into a kind of opposite vertebral column—lying in relation to the physical body towards the front. And just as the nerves proceed from the physical vertebral column, and also the rib-bones, for example—in the same way the rays and the streams in the etheric body flow together into this other column. They do not proceed from it, but flow together and work together, with all that they contain, here in the front of the human etheric body.

The result is an exceptionally beautiful and impressive etheric organ. Particularly during sleep, it is revealed in its gleaming and glowing, its resounding and its manifold effects of warmth, its inner language. And beholding it more closely, one can see that this organ permeates what I once described (because these things must be described in vivid pictures) as the various Lotus-flowers. Thus you can realize how through this organ—which develops in this confluence of the etheric body, and connects with the streams of the astral body, forming the Lotus-flowers—man finds his connection with the external astral and cosmic universe.

This, too, is a manifestation. This, too, can be described as an appearance, and its true inner reality must be sought. This reality is found in the Hierarchy which in anthroposophical writings I have called the Kyriotetes.

You have now drawn out from the word “etheric body” its ultimate reality. It is a working and flowing and weaving together of the Exusiai, Dynamis, and Kyriotetes, who individualize their streaming, flowing, resounding, speaking activity, and form the human etheric body.

When we contemplate all that Kyriotetes, Dynamis, and Exusiai have formed and made individual, which shines and warms and sounds and speaks into the human physical body as the individual human etheric body—we have also reached man's astral body. For in this living activity of the Second Hierarchy, which streams from the Cosmos and is individualized in the human being, there is really contained the human astral body itself. This activity shows itself in the etheric body—it exists in the astral body.

Think of this whole activity, in which man is interwoven during sleep. For during sleep he is interwoven, unconsciously, with the activity of the Second Hierarchy. When he has gone through the gate of death, man needs this whole activity. For he must live on within it, when he has laid aside the etheric body as such; when after some days this sounding, this living music, this gently phosphorescent glow, these streams of warmth, have flowed away. When all this has flowed into the cosmic Universe, when one has observed the glow extending more and more widely, but growing fainter and fainter, and the music growing softer.... Really this should be described differently. When these regions are described it becomes natural to explain a thing by its polar opposite. It would correspond better to the perceptions of one who has died if I were to say: what is at first like a silent resounding—but one that is perceptible within man—becomes louder and louder, spreading outwards. But just because it grows louder this is perceived as a fading away of the inner etheric music; it can no more be perceived by the being of soul and spirit, who for the earth has died. For this being no longer has physical ears—and physical ears would be needed.

It is similar with the other experiences of man in the first days after death. Then he feels himself in his astral body. But again it is only the external side, a word, if one says: Man is now in the Soul-World. I have described it in this way in my book Theosophy, in accordance with the perceptions of the soul-organ most immediately accessible by man. But for the universal, cosmic intelligence, developed in cosmic realms, this region reveals itself as an interwoven activity of the beings of the Second Hierarchy.

Observe what sort of existence it is, at first, within the activity of the Second Hierarchy after death. Between birth and death the human being lives on earth, alternating between waking and sleeping. During waking, although his soul is woven into the activity of Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes, he is compelled to plunge down continually into the forms of the physical body. During sleep he lives with the etheric body, but this, too, imposes an individual quality on the activity of the spiritual beings, in accordance with the forms of the physical body. Thus the work of the Second Hierarchy has to absorb what the human being is, morally—whether he is good or evil, devoted to error or to truth. The activities appropriate to the beings of the Second Hierarchy are individualised according to what man is, as good or evil earthly man, as earthly man living in truth or in error. But account must be taken of what these beings of the Second Hierarchy, according to their own essential nature, purpose to do for the being of man.

Let us assume that a human being has a relation to a particular Being belonging to the Hierarchy of the Dynamis. Through this is developed, with the help of an Archangel as intermediary, the faculty of speech in man's organism. But in the development of this faculty the work of the Dynamis is in a sense dislocated, and distorted into triviality. And when a human being uses his words to say something evil, something filled with hatred, this work of the Second Hierarchy is violently dislocated. And it must be restored again. The human being must not live on after death in those forms which he has given to all I have described through his moral or immoral being. He must strip them off, and find his way into the living work of the Second Hierarchy. This stripping off of the dislocations, of the trivializations—this stripping off of those uses of the work of the Second Hierarchy which distort it into its opposite—this is accomplished by all that I have described as the passage of man through the Soul-World. And then man has ascended to what I spoke of in Theosophy as the World of Spirits, when he can follow with his own Ego-being, with his innermost being of soul and spirit, those activities which correspond to the Being of the Dynamis and Kyriotetes.

You see—in this way, through the art that seeks out the reality in words, the Being of Man can be described once again. We get nearer and nearer to a real picture of this Being. Just as one might indicate on the blackboard the distribution of the figures in a picture by Raphael, say the Sistine Madonna, with a few characteristic strokes—the words physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego are only an indication. The reality is living activity, inwardly full and rich; and in this activity the Beings of the Cosmos, in realm's of body, soul, and spirit, are revealed. In the end one comes always to Beings.

If anything is described as if it were vaguely extended in Space or swimming in Time, or as a Physical World, Etheric World, and so on—it is the manifestation which is being described. It is like describing a swarm of gnats seen in the distance, so that the particular gnats cannot be distinguished, only a grey patch in the air. In the real world, what are at first called etheric body, astral body, are such grey patches. If one looks closely at these grey patches in the physical air, one discovers the particular existing gnats. If one looks closely at these spiritual grey patches, “etheric body”, “astral body”, one always discovers Beings.

To Beings one must come at last in all understanding of the world. For Beings alone are real. Anything comes into existence only through the co-operation of Beings—presenting then an unreal appearance to unclear vision. Just as in the unreal grey cloud the gnats are the real, particular beings—everywhere in the world it is particular Beings that are at work, and the rest is illusion, arising from the co-existence of Beings. Physical matter, too, is an illusion of this kind—something of the nature of a Being underlies everything. Men must understand this again, in order not to speak of something that is not really there: of Matter—or (which is no better) of Spirit in general—in order to learn to speak about beings, individual Beings of the universe.

Once, in the old Mysteries, they knew how to speak about the Beings of the universe. They knew that realities could not be described by talking either of Matter or of what is called Spirit in the ordinary consciousness—a grey spirituality, conceived pantheistically as present in all things. They knew that if one wants realities, one must have particular Beings. But consciousness of these Beings has gradually been lost—to the same degree that in Man himself the equality of individual being has developed more and more. As I have often said, Man has become more and more intellectual ever since the first third of the fifteenth century. What he knows about himself becomes more and more abstract. But behind this abstract life there is a being living more and more within itself; increasingly rich in inner spirituality. Man lost the dreamy consciousness he once possessed of the Beings of the universe, in becoming a self-apprehending being himself. He must realize again that only when we can point to individual Beings in the universe do we grasp realities.

It was the necessary course of human evolution to see Being everywhere in ancient times, but in a dreamy consciousness. Then the time came, when things were felt in the following way. The realities consist of all these Beings, living in the Cosmos: Kyriotetes, Dynamis, Exusiai, Archai, Archangeloi, Angeloi, human Egos, animal group-souls, the cosmic souls of the plants and so on. Not even the animals, as they live on earth, are realities; they too are illusion; the realities are the group-souls. The whole plant world on earth is no reality; the earth-soul is the reality. Plants are only as hair upon the earth organism, like the hair upon our own organism. Men knew that all these Beings I have named existed in the universe, and shine out, manifesting themselves, revealing themselves in speech. They knew that this expression in speech proceeded from their essential being. And that universal resounding, which arises from the confluence of what is spoken by the particular Beings in self-revelation, this is the Logos. But to begin with, the Logos was also only an Appearance. Only because Christ united this appearance, and made it concrete in His own Being, was through the Mystery of Golgotha the apparent Logos born upon earth as real Logos.

We must understand the connection of these things. Then the particular Beings can be described spiritually—how they shine, with gentle phosphorescence, and resound: how they spread streaming warmth, how they speak out their own essence. For each particular Being a full spiritual Form can be found in this way. And these full spiritual Forms are the only real things in the universe. In the old dreamy consciousness they knew a great deal about these realities. But this knowledge has shrunk more and more. Once it was known: Form shines out in this way from a certain Being who is reckoned among the Kyriotetes, in this way from human Egos, in this way from Angels, and so on. All this shrank, and contracted at last into a point, because the realities were seen less and less.

Originally they knew very well how the manifestations of the Exusiai, for example, differ from the manifestations of the human Egos, or these from the manifestations of the group-souls of the animals or of the plant Earth-soul. The differences were known, but gradually they fell into unconsciousness. A time came, when there was only the feeling: Yes, there are such realities, everything else is not real ... Space is not real, Time is not real, Matter is not real, Spirit in vague generality is not real—but cosmic individualities are real. But they could no longer be distinguished. And so they were described with the uniform word Monad. Leibnitz and Giordano Bruno spoke of Monads in this way. These Monads were the Realities I have spoken of, shrivelled up small. And no distinction was made between one Monad and another—or at most by tacking on an attribute to the word: the Monads of the Exusiai, the Monads of men, the Monads of animals, and so on.

And at last men lost the power even to speak about the Monads—to which the great German thinker ascribed a conceptual faculty, because he felt that spirit did indeed live in what had shrunk to the Monad. We have not only to remember that the Monad is something living; if human civilization is not to fall into decay, but develop further, we must not only remember the Monads, but we must understand once more, and now with a clear, enhanced consciousness, that all true reality consists in living, ensouled spirit-beings. And what is sketched first with a few lines—physical body, etheric body, astral body—must be brought to life, in the way we have done today.

And so one reaches the point of seeing man's soul and spirit-nature interwoven with the Beings of the second Hierarchy. One observes how man goes from earthly life to earthly life, and how from life to life a compensating cosmic Justice, a Karma, is at work. And here, too, considering this power at work in the Cosmos, one need not stop at the abstractions “Karma”, or “universal Justice”, or “moral world order”—but can go on to the realities.

Beginning with the etheric body, a description can ascend to the second Hierarchy, and therewith describe the human astral body as well. Just in the same way, one can begin with the astral body, and take hold of Thinking, Feeling, and Willing in the astral body, as they fade away at the moment of falling asleep, and go out with the astral body. If one begins there, and looks for the realities, one finds the following.

In our human Thinking there lives the activity of the Angels. In our human speech, which springs from Feeling, there lives for man as he sleeps during the night the activity of the Archangels. And in what is revealed in waking life through human movement of the limbs, through all that is imbued with Willing—and which also goes on in the astral body—there lives during the night, when the astral body is outside, the world of the Archai.

But what lives outside in this way, these super-sensible activities of Archai, Archangels, and Angels, which are reflected in the waking human being in Willing, Feeling, and Thinking—these must be harmonized with the etheric and physical bodies. The physical body must be formed in such a way that it can become the organ of thought, of speech, and of movement. One sees then how the activity of the Kyriotetes, Dynamis, and Exusiai passes over into a still higher activity: that of the Thrones, who bring human Willing into accord with the physical human organism, the human metabolism and limbs. Then we come to the Hierarchy of Cherubim, who bring the human faculty of speech into accord with its physical basis. In all that serves speech or song in the organism, or anything similar to speech—the Cherubim bring the human life of Feeling into accord with the organs of speech. And now the faculty of Thought must also have its physical organ in the human nerves and senses. It is the Seraphim who bring Thinking into accord with the nerves and senses of man. Speech, and all that is connected with it, is brought into accord with Thinking and Feeling by the Cherubim.

Thus we see, when we have threefold Man before us:—

In the organism of nerves and senses, in the basis of Thinking, the creating Seraphim.

In all that is the rhythmic man, which must as physical organism be brought into harmony with the faculty of speech—in all this we see the creating Cherubim.

In all that is expressed in the movement of the human limbs, in all activities of Will, for which the inner structure of metabolism and limbs must be present in man, harmony is accomplished by the Thrones.

From this we see how the physical human form dissolves into appearance, and behind it there stand as realities: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones. We are always looking into the activity of the Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones, when the human Ego is interwoven with its inner activity, when man in waking life moves, speaks, feels, and thinks.

In this way we can find again a renewed Mystery wisdom for men; a Mystery wisdom which once more exercises the art of releasing Spirit from the word—of finding real Being in what is at first only sketched in a few lines as physical Man, etheric Man, astral Man. Real Being consists always in individual Spirits, who bear in experience within them what is of the nature of Soul, and who create what is outwardly manifest, the physical. Only existent Spirit-individualities are real. Their expression as Soul comes about because these individual Spirits experience themselves inwardly, and each other in mutual stimulus. That a physical world exists is because these Spirits (who have been rendered abstract as Monads and then have disappeared altogether from human observation) reveal themselves in creation, according to their various stages of existence. We can go back from the created world, which is really nothing but the outer Glory of creating Beings, to the world of experience, of Soul—which is the self-experience of the world of individual Spirits. And when we go on to the true reality, we come to the individual Spirits themselves, of whom the Universe is the revelation and the life.

As long as man stands upon Earth, he lives among the revelations of the individual Spirits. Between death and a new birth he must behold and pass through in full reality the individual Spirits in their own immediate forms. And in order to complete his development he must achieve the passage from the beholding of the spiritual realities in their true form to the order of Earth, in which he does not behold the individual Spirits, but in which they show themselves as it were only from outside, in their outer garments.

But if earthly life is not to fall into complete decay, man must learn once more to behold, and to know, and to understand, through the outer garment, the individual Spirits belonging to a higher world. Then man will see how his whole life consists in a struggle and effort among all that is outer garment of the Divine, and in a life within the Being of the Divine. But he can achieve a right existence within the Being of the Divine only if he develops himself more and more in the true beholding of the outer garment. He must learn to penetrate to the Being through the outer garment. He must not stop at the outer description, but press on to the inner life.

When once this is attempted by a considerable number of human beings, there will be the dawn of a future Earth-evolution, and of the metamorphosis of earthly being into the forms of Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan. The Anthroposophical Society must unite human beings who feel themselves today as the nucleus of what must spread to wider and wider circles in human civilisation, that progress in the evolution of mankind may really come about, and that earthly life may not fall into decay.

My dear Friends, what I should like to bring to you now will have to be said—as has everything that I have had to say recently about Anthroposophy—with a certain undertone called forth by the painful event which befell our work and our Society on last New Year's Eve: the Goetheanum in Dornach, for the time being, is no more; it was consumed by flames in the night before the New Year. And all who witnessed the destruction in this one night of the work of ten long years, accomplished by so many of our friends, and performed by them with complete devotion—all who have loved this Goetheanum very much, just because of this work, and because of what the Goetheanum was to us, will of necessity be weighed down by the thought that we no longer have this particular outer sign of Anthroposophical activity. For, even if some other building for our work shall arise on the same site—which should by all means occur—owing to the trying circumstances of the present time it can, of course, never be the old Goetheanum. Therefore, behind all that I have had to say since those days there actually stands in the background the fearful glow of the flames, which in such a heart-rending way interrupted the development of all our work. Since this outer sign has vanished, we must dedicate ourselves all the more to laying hold of the inner forces and inner realities of the Anthroposophical Movement and of what is connected with it for the entire evolution of humanity. Let me begin then with a sort of consideration of the nature of the human being. I have presented very much of this kind here in your midst, and I should like now to consider again one phase from a certain point of view.

I should like to start with a consideration of the human being entering the world, of the human being who has descended from the pre-earthly existence and is, as it were, taking his first steps here in the life on earth. We know, of course, that at the time of this entrance into the earth-life, a condition governs the soul which has a certain similarity to the ever-recurring condition of man's sleep-life. As the ordinary consciousness has no remembrance, upon awaking, of that which the soul-spiritual part of man has experienced between going to sleep and waking up (with the exception of the varicolored multiplicity of dreams, which actually float away, as we know, when we sink into sleep or when we wake, and which for the ordinary consciousness do not result from deep sleep)—as, then, the ordinary consciousness has no remembrance of this condition, so for the entire earth life this same consciousness remembers only back to a certain point of time in childhood. With one person this point of time is somewhat earlier, with another later. What occurs in the earthly life prior to this is really as much concealed from the ordinary consciousness as are the events of the sleep state. Of course, it is true that the child is not actually sleeping; it lives in a sort of dreamy, indefinite inner activity; but from the point of view of the whole later life, this condition is at least not very much removed from dream-filled sleep.

There are three activities, however, which set in at this time, three things. which the child is learning. There is what we ordinarily sum up in the expression learning to walk, then what is connected with learning to speak, and what for the child is connected with learning to think. Now, in the expression “learning to walk”, for the sake of our own convenience we actually characterize something which is extraordinarily complex in an exceedingly brief way. We need only to recall how the child is at first utterly unadapted to life, how it gradually gains the ability to accommodate its own position of balance to the space in which it is to move during the entire life. It is not merely “learning to walk” which we observe in the child, but a seeking for the state of equilibrium in the earthly life. Connected with learning to walk is all use of the limbs. And for anyone who is able to observe such a matter in the right way, the most remarkable and most important of life's riddles actually find expression in this activity of learning to walk; a whole universe comes to expression in the manner in which the child progresses from creeping to the upright position, to the placing of the little feet, but also in addition to holding the head upright and to the use of arms and legs. And then anyone who has a more intimate insight into how one child steps more on the heel, and another is more inclined to step on the toes, will perhaps have an inkling of what I shall now have to tell you with regard to the three activities mentioned and their relation to the spiritual world. Only, I should like first to characterize these three activities as to their outer aspects.

On the basis of this effort to attain equilibrium—or, if I may express myself now somewhat more learnedly, perhaps also somewhat more pompously, this search for a dynamic of life—on the basis of this effort, learning to speak is then developed. For, anyone who is able to observe knows quite well that the normal development of the child proceeds in such a way that learning to speak is developed on the basis of learning to walk and to grasp. With regard to learning to talk it will be noticed at the very first how the firm or gentle tread of the child is expressed in the act of talking, in the accenting of the syllables, in the force of the speech. And it will be noticed further how the modulation of the words, how the forming of the words, has a certain parallel with the way the child learns to bend the fingers or to keep them straight, whether it is skillful or unskillful. But anyone who can then observe the entire inner nature of the human organization will be able to know—what even the present-day teaching of evolution concedes—that “right-handed” people not only have the speech-center in the left third convolution of the forehead, in the so-called Broca convolution, which represents in a quite simple physiological way the characteristic relation between speech and the ability to grasp, the entire ability to handle the arm and the hand, if I may make use of the pleonasm; but we know also how closely the movement of the vocal cords, the whole adjustment of the speech organism, takes on exactly the same character which the movements of walking and grasping assume. But in the normal development of the child, speech which, as you know, is developed in imitation of the environment, cannot develop at all unless the foundation is first laid in the quest of the state of equilibrium in life.

With regard to thinking: Even the more delicate organs of the brain, upon which thinking depends, are developed in turn from the speech organization. No one should suppose that in the normal development of the child thinking could be evolved before speech. Anyone who is able to observe the process will find that with the child speech is not at first an expression of “thinking”—not at all! It would be ridiculous to believe that. But, with the child, speech is an expression of feeling, of sensation, of the soul-life. Hence you will see that at first it is interjections, everything connected with feelings, which the child expresses by means of speech. And when the child says “Mama” or “Papa”, it expresses feelings toward Mama or Papa, not any sort of concept or thought. Thinking is first developed from speech. It is true that among human beings many a thing is disarranged, so that someone says, “This child learned to speak before it walked.” But that is not the normal development, and in the rearing of a child one should by all means see to it that the normal course of development is actually observed: walking—speaking—thinking.

However, the real character of these activities of the child is truly perceived only when we observe the other side of human life: that is to say, if we observe how in later life these activities are related to each other in sleep; for they arise out of sleep, as I have indicated, or at least out of the dreamlike sleep of the child. But what do these activities signify during the later earth life?

In general, it is not possible for the scientific life of the present day to enter into these things. It actually knows only the exterior of the human being; it knows nothing of the inner relationships of the human being with the Cosmic Being, in so far as the Cosmic Being is spiritual. In every realm human civilization, if I may use the expression—or let us say human culture—has been developed to a certain materialism, or naturalism. Do not think that I wish here to upbraid materialism: if materialism had not come into human civilization, human beings would not have become free. Materialism is therefore a necessary epoch in the evolution of humanity. But today we must be very clear as to the way we have to go now—as well as in the future. And we must be clear about this in every realm. In order that what I now have to say may be better illustrated, I should like to make it clear to you by means of an example.

You all know and can learn from my books that earth humanity, before it passed through those cultural epochs which are only partly similar to the present one—the ancient Indian, the ancient Persian, the Egypto-Chaldean, the Greco-Latin, and then our own—passed through the so-called Atlantean catastrophe. And during this Atlantean catastrophe the humanity which is now the European, Asiatic, and American civilized humanity lived chiefly on a continent where there is now sea—namely, the Atlantic Ocean. At that time this area was occupied mostly by land, and for a very long time, humanity had been developing upon this Atlantean continent. You can read in my books and cycles what humanity passed through during those epochs. I will not speak of other human experiences during the ancient Atlantean time, but only of musical experiences.

The entire musical experience of the ancient Atlantean would necessarily appear very curious, even grotesque, to a man of the present time, if he could hear it—which, of course, he cannot do. For what the ancient Atlanteans were in quest of in music was, for example, the chords of the seventh.

These chords of the seventh had the peculiarity of affecting the souls of these ancient people—in whose bodies we were all ensheathed, for in repeated earth lives we passed through that time also—in such a way that they were immediately transported out of their bodies when they lived in their music, this music which took into special consideration the chords of the seventh.

They knew no other frame of mind in music than a state of rapture, of enthusiasm, a state in which they were permeated by the God; and, when their extraordinarily simple instruments sounded—instruments intended only for accompaniment to singing—then such an Atlantean immediately felt himself to be actually weaving and living in the outer spiritual world.

Then came the Atlantean catastrophe. Among all post-Atlanteans there was next developed a preference for a sequence of fifths. You probably know that for a long time thereafter fifths played a most comprehensive role in musical development; for example, in ancient Greece, fifths played a quite extensive role. And this preference for a sequence of fifths had the peculiarity of affecting people in such a way that, when they experienced music, they now no longer felt drawn out of their bodies, to be sure, but they felt themselves to be soul and spirit within their bodies. During the musical experience they completely forgot physical experience; they felt that they were inside their skin, so to speak, but their skin was entirely filled with soul and spirit. That was the effect of the music, and very few people will believe that almost up to the tenth and eleventh Christian century the natural music was as I have described it. For not until then did the aptitude for thirds appear, the aptitude for the major and the minor third, and everything of the nature of major and minor. That came relatively late. But with this late development there was evolved at the same time the inner experience of music. Man now remained within himself in musical experience. Just as the rest of the culture at this time tended downward from the spiritual to the material, so in the musical sphere the tendency was downward, from the experience of the spiritual into which he passed in ancient times when he experienced music at all, to the experience of music within himself—no longer as far outward as to the skin, but entirely within himself. In this way there first appeared also at that time the major and minor moods, which are actually possible only when music is inwardly experienced.

Thus, it can be seen how in every domain man has descended from the spiritual into the material, but also into himself. Therefore, we should not always merely say, in a narrow-minded fashion, that the material is something of minor value, and we must escape from it. The human being would not have become truly human at all, if he had not descended and laid hold upon the material life. Precisely because he apprehended the spiritual in the material, did the human being become a self-conscious, independent Ego-Being. And today, with the help of Anthroposophical spiritual science, we must again find the way back into the spiritual world—in all realms we must find the way. This is the reason it is so painful that the artistic endeavor, made by means of the Goetheanum at Dornach, has been obliterated as is now the case. The way into the spiritual world must be sought in every realm.

Let us next consider one activity which the child learns—namely, speech—with regard to the entire evolution of the human being. It must really be said that what the child learns there is something magnificent. Jean Paul, the German poet, has said that in the first three years of life—that is, the years in which the essential things we learn are to walk, to speak and to think—the human being learns much more than in the three academic years. Meanwhile the “three” academic years have become many, but a man still learns no more in those three years than he learns as a child in the first three years of life.—Let us now consider speech. In speaking there is first the outer physical-physiological factor: that is, the larynx and the rest of our speech organs are set in motion. They move the air, which becomes the medium of tone. Here we have, in a way, the physical-physiological part. But in what we say there is soul also. And the soul permeates and gleams through all that we utter in the sounds. In as far as speech is something physical, man's physical body and his etheric body have a share in it. As a matter f course, these are silent from the time of going to sleep until the time of wakening. That is, the normal human being does not speak between going to sleep and waking; but in as much as the soul and the ego have a share in speech, they—the astral body and ego—take with them the soul power of speech, when they pass out of the physical and etheric bodies at the time of going to sleep—and they actually take with them everything of a soul nature which the person has put into his speech during the whole day. We are really different beings each evening, for we have been busy talking all day long—one more, another less, many all too much, many also too little—but, no matter, we have been occupied with talking throughout the day, and we have put our souls into what we have said. And what we have put into our speech, that we take with us into sleep, and it remains our being between sleeping and waking.

Now it may be that in our present materialistic age the human being no longer has any notion that idealism or spirituality may be expressed in the speech. People today usually have the idea that speech is intended to express only the external, the tangibly-objective. The feeling that ideals may be expressed in the speech has almost entirely disappeared. For this reason, it is also true that people today generally find so “unintelligible” what is said to them about “spirit”. For what do people say to themselves when spirit is mentioned? They admit that “words” are being used, but of these words people know only that they indicate what can be grasped or seen. The idea that words may also signify something else, something supersensible, invisible, people no longer like at all. That may be one way in which people regard speech; but the other may, of course, be that people shall find the way again to idealism even in words, even in language, knowing that a soul-spiritual experience may sound through each word, as it were.

What a person who lives entirely in the materialism of the language, so to speak, carries over in sleep into the spiritual world brings him, strangely enough, into a difficult relation with the world of the Archangels, the Archangeloi, into which he should enter each night between going to sleep and waking; while the one who preserves for himself the idealism of speech, and who knows how the genius of the language lives in it, comes into the necessary relation to the Hierarchy of the Archangeloi, especially to that Archangel to whom he himself belongs in the world between sleeping and waking. Indeed, this is expressed even in outer world phenomena. Why do people today seek so frantically for an outer relation to the national languages? Why did this frightful misfortune come upon Europe, which Woodrow Wilson has considered good fortune?—but he was a curious illusionist.—Why then did this great misfortune come upon Europe, that freedom is bound up with the convulsive desire to make use of the national languages, even of the smallest nations? Because in reality the people are frantically seeking externally a relationship which they no longer have in spirit: for in going to sleep they no longer have the natural relation to the language—and also, therefore, not to the Hierarchy of the Archangeloi! And humanity will have to find the way back again to the permeation of all that pertains to language with idealism, if they do not wish to lose the way into the spiritual world.

How does humanity today regard what takes place for the individual human being between going to sleep and waking? People do not take account of this sleep condition at all. If we recollect our past life, we seem to have before us a complete life picture. That is not the case; the time spent in sleep has regularly dropped out; the whole picture is continuously interrupted. We always connect the morning with the previous evening, but between them is the night. And what has occurred during sleep in the night constitutes outwardly, in the first place, at least a third of the human life (at all events, among “respectable” people it is so); and, secondly, it is much more important for the inner man than the outer activity during the whole day. To be sure, the outer activity is more important for external civilization; but our inner development during life is brought about by our coming into relation with the spiritual world in the right way while we sleep during the night.

And the same is true regarding what forms the basis of the other activities; that is to say, if the human being in his actions—that is, what he does throughout the entire realm of the movements which he first learns upon entrance into the earth life—if he puts idealism into the whole realm of his actions, that is, if his life contains idealism in its realization, then the human being finds again the right relation with the Hierarchy of the Archai. And if the thoughts contain idealism, if they are not materialistic, the human being finds during sleep the relation with the Hierarchy of the Angels. This is what we discover if, with the help of Anthroposophical spiritual science, we inquire into the relation to the sleep state of these three activities acquired during childhood.

But this relation may be revealed in a much more comprehensive degree, if we observe the entire life of the human being in the cosmos. You are acquainted with the description in my book Theosophy. When the human being passes through the gate of death, he first experiences for some days the condition which consists in the dissipation of the thoughts, of the concepts. We may express it by saying that the etheric body expands into the distances of the cosmos, the human being “loses” his etheric body. But that is the same as if I say that man's concepts and thoughts are dissipated. But what does that actually mean: that the concepts and thoughts are dissipated? It really means very much. It means, namely, that our entire waking life departs from us. Our entire waking life departs from us in the course of two or three days, and nothing at all would be left of our life, if we did not then live through that of which we remain unconscious during the earth life; that is, if we did not then begin to live through in full consciousness what we have experienced during our sleep life. This sleep life is spiritually infinitely richer, more intense, than the waking life. Whether the sleep be short or long, the sleep-life is each time a reversed repetition of the day life, but with a spiritual impulse: What you have accomplished as actions during the day brings you at night into a relation to the Archai, to the Primal Powers; what you have said in the daytime brings you at night into a relation to the Archangeloi, the Archangels; and your thinking brings you in the same way into a relation to your Angel-being, to the Angeloi.

And what man experiences during sleep is independent of time. It is unnecessary to say: “Very well, but the following is possible: At night I go to sleep; something makes a noise; something awakens me; in this case I certainly cannot complete my going back over the day in retrospect.” Even so it is completed, because the time relations are entirely different; that can be experienced in a moment which otherwise might continue for hours if the sleep were undisturbed. During sleep the time relations are quite different from those of the day. Therefore, it can be stated positively, and must so be stated, that each time a person sleeps he once again experiences in retrospect what he has lived through here in the physical world since the last waking, but this time in spiritual manner and substance. And when the waking life of concepts is dissipated into the cosmos, a few days after death, then the human being lives through the very experiences which he had during the third of life spent in sleep. I have, therefore, always had to describe how man requires a third of his earth-life in order then to live through what he has experienced during the nights of his life. Naturally, it is essentially like the day life, but it is experienced in a different way. And at that time, as the second condition after death, he lives through this retrogression, when he actually experiences once again, in a third of the time, the entire life back to birth. Then when he has again arrived at his birth, he enters into that condition which I have already described to you here in another connection; that is, he enters into that condition in which every conception of the world is essentially altered for him.

You see, here on earth we are in a definite place; the world is around us. We know ourselves very little, indeed, with the ordinary consciousness. The world we observe with the outer senses; that we know. Perhaps, you will say that the anatomists know the inner part of the human being very well. Not at all; they know only the outer aspect of the inner being. The real inner part is something entirely different.—If you call to mind today something which you experienced ten years ago, then you have in the memory something which is in your soul, do you not? It is condensed, a brief remembrance of, perhaps, a very, very extended experience. But it is merely a soul picture of something which you have passed through in the earth life. But now enter into yourself—not now into your memories, but into your physical organism, that is, the apparently physical organism—and observe the wonderful construction of your brain, of your lungs, and so forth. Within you there, rolled up as it were, are—not the experiences of this earth life, but rolled together there is the whole cosmos, the entire universe. Man is really a small universe, a microcosmos. In his organs the whole universe is rolled together. But the human being does not know this with the ordinary consciousness. When he is on earth, he has the memory of his experiences. He does not know that he himself in his physical nature is, as it were, the embodied memory of the whole cosmos.—When, therefore, the backward journey through the life, which I have just indicated, has been completed, then, between death and a new birth, we enter into a cosmic life, where we are not, as now, surrounded by the world with its mountains, clouds, stars, seas, and so on, but where our environment consists of the riddles of the inner human being, where everything concerning the mysteries of the inner human being of which we are deprived in the earth life, now constitutes our environment. Here on the earth, as you know, we live within our skin, and we know about the stars, clouds, mountains, rocks, animals, and plants. Between death and a new birth we know about the human being. All the mysteries of the human being are our environment. And do not suppose that it is a less interesting environment than that of the earth! To be sure, the starry heavens are magnificent, the mountains and the seas are grand; but what the inner being of man contains in a single small vessel is grander and mightier than our earth environment, when between death and a new birth we are surrounded by it in its majestic greatness. The human being is the world between death and a new birth, and he must be the world, because we prepare the next earth life. Together with the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies, we must help to prepare the future earth man. As we here are occupied with our outer culture and civilization, as here on earth we make boots or coats, use the telephone, do people's hair, give lectures, do something artistic, or whatever belongs to our present civilization, so, between death and a new birth, together with the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies, we prepare what the human being is, and what we ourselves shall again be in the physical body in the next earth life.

That is the goal of spiritual culture, and it is grander, infinitely grander and more magnificent than the goal of earthly civilization. Not without reason have the ancients called the physical human body a “Temple of the Gods”, because together with the Gods, with the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies, this human physical body is formed between death and a new birth. That is what we do, that is where we are with our ego—among the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies, working on humanity, together with the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies. We move about, as it were, among the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies; we are spirits among spirits.

What we do there we can, of course, do only according to what we have accomplished here in the earth life; and that also is revealed to us in a certain sense in the relation of sleep to waking. Just think how chaotic the dream is! I do not undervalue the wonderfully varied multiplicity and the grandeur of the dream; but we must nevertheless recognize that the dream, compared with the earth life, in whose images it is clothed, is chaotic. You need only to recall that dream which I have mentioned before as an illustration (Volkelt told this dream, according to a report from Württemberg, but we know of such, do we not?). A city lady visited her sister, who was the wife of a country parson, and she dreamed that she went with her sister to church to hear a sermon; but everything was quite peculiar; for, after the Gospel was read and the pastor went up to the pulpit, he did not begin to preach, but instead of raising his arms, he lifted wings, and finally began to .crow like a cock! Or recall another dream in which a lady said she had just dreamed of considering what good thing she should cook for her husband, and nothing at all occurred to her until finally the thought came to her that she still had an old pickled grandmother upstairs in the attic, but she would be very tough yet.—You see a dream can be as chaotic as that—strangely chaotic. But just what does it mean that the dream acts so chaotically? What does it really mean?

While we sleep, we are, with our ego and astral body, outside of our physical and etheric bodies. And during that time we experience again in reverse order—especially with regard to the moral significance—all that we have done, have said and have thought during the day. We live through that in reverse order. We are preparing for ourselves our karma for the next earth life, and this appears in pictures already in the time between going to sleep and waking. But these pictures are still very bungling; for when, upon waking, we are again about to enter into the physical body, the picture does not yet fit in properly: that is, we are not able to conceive things in conformity with the macrocosm; instead we conceive something entirely different, perhaps a “pickled grandmother”. That is because, with regard to what we have already formed in our sleep, we do not understand the adaptation to the human physical body. This adaptation to the human physical body is exceedingly difficult; and we acquire it in that working together, which I have described, with the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies between death and a new birth. There the soul-spiritual self must first readjust what otherwise in the dream so often enters so awkwardly, when the sleep consciousness is again fully overcome, and the person without his own cooperation has plunged again into his old physical body. This soul-spiritual self, between death and a new birth, must penetrate all the mysteries of the physical body, in order that the body may be built up in the right way. For the body is really not formed by the parents and grandparents alone. To believe that is one of the perfect follies of science. (We are justified in making such a statement!) For how does science approximately set forth this human development? Well, it says that as the basis of material substance we have molecules, which are built up in a complicated way from atoms. The albumen molecule, which is contained in the embryo-cell, is the most complicated of all, and because it is so complicated (naturally no scientist can describe it, but he points to its exceeding complexity) because it is so complicated, a human being can originate from it. That is the simplest sort of explanation of the human being! It is simply asserted that the entire human being is already contained in the molecule; it is merely a very complicated molecule.—The truth is, however, that the albumen molecule must completely revert to chaos, must become dust of disorganized matter, if a human being is to originate from it. We have in the outer world organized matter in crystals, in plants, and so on: if anything is to originate, even a plant, or an animal, then the matter must first completely return to dust. And only when it no longer has a definite form does the entire cosmos work upon the tiny bit of stuff, making in it an image of itself. How is it, then, with the human being? Between death and a new birth, we form this human image, with all its mysteries, into which we weave our karma, and we send this image down before us into the body of the mother. So we have first formed the spirit germ—only, this is very large in comparison with the physical germ—and this descends into the matter which has become chaotic. That is the truth—not what the present-day physiology dreams.

In this time of which I have been speaking, the Ego lives as a soul-spiritual being among soul-spiritual Divine Beings, actively occupied with learning to know completely the inner human being as such for the next earth life. Of that which is then spiritually experienced in tremendous majesty and grandeur, an image marvelously appears in the child in the individual actions in attaining equilibrium. It is very interesting to see how the Primal Powers, or Archai, work over from the life between death and a new birth into the whole effort of the child to attain balance or, as we trivially say, to learn to walk. Anyone who can see in everything earthly an image of the spiritual can see in all the practice in walking, in the use of the hands, and so on, an image of those soul-spiritual deeds which we performed between death and a new birth in seeking spiritual equilibrium as an ego among higher egos.

And, when we have completed those conditions in which we are a spirit among spirits, in which we prepare what is to be manifested in our earth life in the body, in the members, through which we again become a human being of such and such a nature, and experience our karma—when we have passed through these conditions yonder in the world between death and a new birth, then a condition appears in the pre-earthly life in which we can no longer distinguish the individual spiritual Beings with whom we have worked for so long, but in which there is only a general perception of the spirit. We know then, to be sure, that we live in a spiritual world; but, because we are now already approaching the earth life, the impression which the spiritual world makes upon us becomes one of greater uniformity, and is no longer a perception of the particular, individual spiritual Beings.

I can express myself by means of a trivial comparison, in order that we may be able to understand one another, but please be very clear about this, namely, that in doing so I refer, nevertheless, to something very exalted. If a little cloud appears somewhere in the distance, you say that it is a little cloud; but when you approach it, you become aware that it is a swarm of gnats. Then you are distinguishing the separate individuals. Well, in the spiritual world between death and a new birth, it is reversed: there you distinguish at first the single individualities of the spiritual Beings; then the impression becomes a general one. What I mean is that the manifestation of the spiritual replaces experience of the spiritual.

Indeed, this condition, which separates us, as it were, from the spiritual world, because we are already seeking the way down to earth again—this condition is reflected now in the inner something within us which forms the basis of human speech. Suppose we speak. It begins with the larynx (that is not exact, but approximate), and the other organs of speech are set in motion. But behind this there lies that which is essential. What is essential lies in the heart, behind the larynx; it lies in the breathing process and everything connected with it. Just as learning to walk, seeking equilibrium, is an earthly image of our movements in the spiritual world, so that which underlies speech is likewise an earthly image of the condition of manifestation in which we perceive the divine-spiritual Beings only as a blurred mass. So the child experiences again when it learns to walk a condition which it has gone through between death and a new birth.

And when we have sent down the spiritual germ of our physical body, when through conception it has gradually become united with the body of the mother, then we are still above. At the end of the time before earthly embodiment, we draw together our etheric body out of all the regions of the universe. And that action, which takes place in the supersensible world in attracting the etheric body, finds expression in the child's learning to think.

Now you have the three successive conditions: experience in the spiritual world in learning to walk; manifestation of the spiritual world in learning to speak. (For this reason, that which as Cosmic Word underlies speech we call the Cosmic Logos, the inner Word. It is the manifestation of the universal Logos, in which the spiritual expresses itself, as do the gnats in the swarm of gnats; it underlies speech.) And then what we do in the forming of our etheric body, which actually thinks in us—we think the whole night through, only we are not present with our ego and astral body—that is the last part which we gather together for ourselves before we descend to earth, and that activity is what extends over into the thinking. Thus, in learning to walk, to speak, and to think, the baby organizes into the physical body what it brings down from the pre-earthly existence.

This is what leads to real spiritual knowledge and also at the same time to the artistic and the religious comprehension of the world; namely, that we are able to relate each single occurrence in the physical sense existence to the spiritual world. Those people who would always like to speak of the divine-spiritual only “in general” I have often likened to a man who should go out into a meadow, and to whom should be pointed out daisies, dandelions, wild chicory, whereupon he would say: “All that does not interest me; they are all just flowers!” That is easy, to say they are all just flowers. But something in the flower-being is differentiated there. And so it is also in the spiritual world. Naturally, it is easy to say that something spiritual underlies everything of a sense-physical nature. But the point is that we should know more and more what spiritual something lies at the foundation of the various sense-physical phenomena; for only in this way can we from the spirit actually lay hold again upon the sense-physical course of life.

By means of this principle, for example, our Waldorf School pedagogy becomes a unique pedagogy, which actually considers the human being. This will appear even more clearly when once this pedagogy shall be developed for the child's first years. As there it would be adapted to learning to walk, to speak, and to think, and the further evolution of these faculties, so we now naturally adapt the method to the years following the sixth and seventh, in such a way that we consider questions such as these: What embodies itself in the child at this moment? What comes to expression in the child's life, with each week, with each month, of that which existed before birth? Thus the pedagogy is really developed from the spirit.

That is one of the impulses of which we must rediscover many, if humanity does not wish to remain in the downward course, but intends to begin to ascend. We must find the way again into the spiritual world; but we shall be able to do this only when we learn quite consciously to find ways and means to act and to speak from the spirit.

In the time immediately following the Atlantean catastrophe, human beings lived from the spirit—that is, each individual—because each could be told on the basis of the point of time at which he was born, what his karma was. At that time astrology did not signify that dilettantism which it often represents today, but it signified livingly experiencing the deeds of the stars with them. And as a result of this living experience, it was revealed from the Mystery Temple to each individual human being how he had to live. Astrology had a vital significance for the individual human experience. Then came the time, about the 6th, 5th and 4th pre-Christian centuries, in which people no longer experienced the mysteries of the starry heavens, but in which they experienced the course of the year. What do I mean by it when I say that human beings experienced the “course of the year”? It means that they knew from direct perception that the earth is not the coarse clod which present day geology contemplates. Upon such an earth as geology represents, plants could never grow, to say nothing of the appearance of animals and human beings. There could be none of these, because the earth of the geologists is a rock; and something will grow directly on a rock only if the entire cosmos works upon it, only if it is united with the whole universe. What man must learn again today was known even in ancient times, namely, that the earth is an organism and has a soul.

It is true that this earth-soul also has its special destiny. Suppose it is winter here with us, Christmas time, the time of the winter solstice—that is the time when the earth soul is fully united with the earth. For, when the cover of snow is over the earth, when, as it were, a mantle of cold surrounds the earth, then the earth-soul is united with the earth, rests within it. It is also true then that the earth-soul, resting within the earth, sustains the life of a multitude of elemental spirits. When today a naturalistic view believes that the seeds which I plant in the earth in the autumn merely lie there until the following spring, that is not true; the seeds must be protected throughout the winter by the elemental spirits of the earth. This is all connected with the fact that during the winter time the earth-soul is united with the earth-body.

Now let us take the opposite season, that is, midsummer, St. John's season. Exactly as the human being inhales the air and exhales it, so that at one time it is within him and at another time outside of him, so the earth breathes in her soul—that is during the winter; and at the height of summer, St. John's season, the earth-soul is entirely breathed out, sent out into the far reaches of the cosmos. At that time the earth-body is, as it were, “empty” of the earth-soul. The earth in her soul lives with the events of the cosmos, the course of the stars, and so on. Therefore, in ancient times there were the winter-mysteries, in which man experienced the union of the earth-soul with the earth; and then there were the summer-mysteries, in which man was able to perceive the mysteries of the universe, from the experience which the earth-soul shared with the stars, for it was granted to the human souls of initiates to follow the earth-soul out into the cosmic spaces.

That people had a consciousness of these things you can learn even from the fragments of ancient tradition which are still extant.—It is now a long while ago, but I often sat—right here in Berlin—with an astronomer, who was very famous here, and who started a fearful agitation about the Easter Festival, saying that it was very disturbing when the Easter Festival, let us say for example, did not fall each year at least on the first Sunday in April, and it was awful that it should be on the first Sunday after the spring full moon. Naturally, it helped not at all to give reasons against his argument, for the fact which lay at the root of the matter was the fear that a dreadful confusion was caused in the debit and credit columns of the ledger, if Easter falls at a different time each year! This movement had already assumed rather large dimensions. (I once mentioned the fact here that on the first page of the ledger there usually stand the words, “With God”, but generally what is in these books is not exactly “with God”.) In those times when the Easter Festival was established according to the course of stars—when the first Sunday after the spring full moon was dedicated to the sun,—in those times a consciousness still existed that in the winter season the earth-soul is in the earth; that at St. John's season the earth-soul is wholly outside in cosmic spaces, and in the spring it is on the way to cosmic spaces. Therefore, the spring festival, the Easter Festival, cannot be established only with reference to the earth, on a definite day, but must be regulated according to the constellations of the stars. There is a deep wisdom in this, which comes from the times when, as a result of the ancient instinctive clairvoyance, human beings were still able to perceive the spiritual reality in the course of the year. We must attain to this again, and we can attain to it again in a certain sense if we lay hold upon the tasks of the present in connection with just such explanations as we have carried on together here.

I have already often said here that, of the spiritual Beings with whom man is united each night, in the way I have told you—for instance, through speech with the Archangels—certain Beings are the ruling spiritual powers throughout a certain period of time. In the last third of the 19th century the Michael-time began, that time in which the Spirit who in the records is usually designated Michael, became the determinative Spirit in the affairs of human civilization. These things are repeated in cycles. In ancient times men knew something of all these spiritual processes. The ancient Hebrew age spoke of Jahve, but it spoke always of the “countenance of Jahve”, and by the countenance was meant the Archangels who actually mediated between Jahve and the earth. And when the Jews expected the Messiah on earth, they knew that it was the time of Michael; that Michael was the agent of Christ's activity on earth. They misunderstood, however, the deeper significance of that fact. Now, since the '70's of the 19th century, the time has come again for the earth when the Michael Power is the ruling spiritual power in the world, and the time has come when we must understand how to bring spirituality into our actions, to arrange our life from the spirit. That means to “serve Michael”—not to order our life merely from the material point of view, but to be conscious that he who has the overcoming of the low Ahrimanic Powers as his mission—that is, Michael—must become our Genius, so to speak, for the evolution of civilization. How can he become that?

Well, he can become our guiding spirit if we call to mind how we can again make connections with the course of the year in the spiritual sense. There is actually great wisdom in the entire cosmic course in the fact that we may unite with the spring festival the festival of the resurrection of Christ Jesus. The historical connection—I have often explained it—is a completely right one: The only possibility is for the spring festival—that is, the Easter Festival—to occur on a different day each year, precisely because it is viewed from the other world. Only we upon the earth have the narrow-minded conception that “time” runs along evenly, that one hour is always as long as another. We determine time by means of our earthly expedient, mathematics; whereas, for the actual spiritual world, the cosmic hour is something living. There one cosmic hour is not equal to another but is longer or shorter. Therefore, it is always possible to err if we establish from the earthly point of view something which should be fixed according to the heavens. The Easter Festival has been established rightly in accordance with the heavens.

What kind of a festival is it? It is that festival which is intended to remind us, and which once reminded humanity with the greatest vividness, that a God descended to earth, took up his abode in the man, Jesus of Nazareth, in order that, at the time when human beings were approaching the development of the ego, they would be able in a suitable manner to find the way back through death into the spiritual life. I have often explained this here. The Easter Festival is, therefore, that festival in which man sees in the Mystery of Golgotha death and immortality following it. We look upon this spring festival in the right sense when we say to ourselves: Christ has affirmed the immortality of man in that He Himself has conquered death; but we human beings only rightly understand the immortality of Christ Jesus if we appropriate this understanding during the earth life; that is, if in our souls we vitalize our relation to the Mystery of Golgotha, and if we are able to free ourselves from that materialistic concept which would dissociate from the Mystery of Golgotha all spiritual significance. Today people no longer wish to acknowledge “Christ” at all, but merely “the humble man of Nazareth, Jesus.” A man would feel embarrassed, as it were, in the presence of his own scientific instincts, if he were to grant that the Mystery of Golgotha involves a spiritual mystery in the middle of earth existence—namely, the death and resurrection of the God.

When we experience that fact spiritually, we prepare ourselves to have spiritual experience of other things also. This is the reason it is so important for the human being of the present time to attain the possibility of experiencing, at the outset, the Mystery of Golgotha as something purely spiritual. Then he will experience other spiritual facts, and he will find the approach, the way, to the spiritual worlds through the Mystery of Golgotha. But then, beginning with the Mystery of Golgotha, the human being must understand the Resurrection while he still lives; and, if he feelingly understands the Resurrection while he lives, he will thereby be enabled to pass through death in the right way. In other words, Death and Resurrection in the Mystery of Golgotha should teach the human being to reverse the condition; that is, during life to experience Resurrection within the soul, in order that, after this inner soul resurrection, he may pass through death in the right way. That experience is the opposite of the Easter experience. At the Easter season we should be able to immerse ourselves in the Death and Resurrection of the Christ. As human beings, however, we need also to be able to immerse ourselves in what is for us resurrection of the soul, in order that the resurrected soul of man may pass rightly through death. As we in the spring acquire the true Easter mood when we see how the plants then germinate and sprout, how nature is resurrected, how nature overcomes the death of winter, so we shall be able, when we have experienced summer in the right way, to acquire a feeling of certainty that the soul has then ascended into cosmic spaces. We are then approaching the autumn, September is coming, the autumnal equinox; the leaves which in the spring became budding and green, now become brownish, yellowish, and drop off; the trees stand there already partly denuded, nature is dying. But we understand this slowly dying nature if we look deeply into the process of decay, into the approach of the snowy covering of the earth and say to ourselves: There the earth-soul is returning again to the earth, and it will be entirely within the earth when the winter solstice shall have come.

It is possible to feel this autumn-time with the same intensity as the spring-time. And if we feel in spring, at Easter-time, the Death and Resurrection of the God, then we shall be able to feel in the autumn the resurrection and death of the human soul; that is, the experience of resurrection during the earth-life in order to pass through death in the right way. Then, however, we must understand also what it signifies for us, for our present time, that the earth-soul is breathed out into the cosmic spaces during St. John's season, in the summer, is there united with the stars, and comes back again. He who has insight into the mystery of this succession of the seasons in the course of the year knows that the Michael-force, which in former centuries did not come down to earth, now comes down through the nature forces! So that we are able to meet the autumn with its falling leaves, when we perceive the Michael-force coming down from the clouds to the earth. Indeed, the name “Michael” is to be found in the calendars on this date, and Michaelmas is a festival day among the peasants; but we shall feel the present time spiritually, in such a way that earthly human events are for us closely connected with the events of nature, only when we again become capable of understanding the year's progression to such an extent that we shall be able to establish in the course of the year the annual festivals, as people of old established them from their ancient dream-like clairvoyance. The ancients understood the year, and on the basis of the mysteries which I have been able only to indicate today, they established Christmas, Easter and the St. John's Festival. At Christmas people give one another gifts, and do some other things also; but I have often explained, when I have given Christmas and Easter lectures here, how little remains with humanity today of these ancient institutions, how everything has become traditional and external. If we shall come to understand again the festivals, which today we merely celebrate but do not understand, then, from the spiritual knowledge of the course of the year, we shall also have the power to establish a festival which will have true significance only for the humanity of the present time: that will be the Michael Festival at the end of September, when autumn approaches, the leaves become withered, the trees become bare, nature moves toward decay—just as it moves toward the sprouting of the Easter season. We shall have the power to establish such a festival, if in decaying nature we perceive how then the earth-soul unites itself with the earth, and how the earth-soul brings Michael with it from the clouds! If we have the force to create from the spirit such a festival as shall again bring into our social life a community of interest, then we shall have done it from the spirit; for then we shall have originated something among us of which the spirit is the source. It would be more important than all the rest of social reflection and the like—which, in the present confused conditions, can only lead to something if the spirit is in them—if, to begin with, a number of intelligent persons were to unite in order to establish again upon earth something from the cosmos: that is, to originate something like a Festival of Michael, which would be worthy of the Easter Festival, but as an autumn festival would be the counterpart of the Easter Festival! If people were able to decide upon something the motive for which lies only in the spiritual world, but which in such a festival would again bring among men a feeling of common interest, something which would be created in the immediate present, out of the full, joyous human heart, that would result in something which would socially unite people again.

For in ancient times the festivals made strong bonds between human beings. Just consider what, has been done, and what has been said and thought on behalf of the festivals and at the festivals for the whole civilization!

That is what has been gradually interwoven into the physical world through the fixing of festivals directly out of the spirit. If people of today could decide in a worthy manner to establish a Michael Festival at the end of September, it would be a deed of the greatest significance. For this purpose, people would have to have courage, not merely to dispute about outer social organizations and the like, but to do something which will unite the earth with the heavens, which will again connect physical conditions with spiritual conditions. Then, because by this means the spirit would again be brought into earthly affairs, something would actually happen among men which would be a mighty impulse for the extension of our civilization and of our whole life. There is naturally no time to set forth in detail all that this would mean for scientific, religious and artistic experience, but such a new festival, created from the spirit, in grand style, would affect these realms just as did the ancient festivals. And how much more important would be such a creation from the spiritual world, than all that is developed today in social tirades. For what would be the significance of such a creation? Oh, it signifies much for the deep observation of the human soul, if I see what a man intends, or if I understand his words rightly. If we today are able to learn from observation how the whole cosmic course operates when autumn approaches, if we can unriddle, can decipher, the entire physiognomy of the universe, and out of our knowledge can act creatively, then we shall disclose not only the willing of human beings in the creation of such a festival, but we shall disclose the willing of Spiritual Beings, of Gods!

If we consider human existence on Earth, the most significant element in life must appear to be our capacity to think or make mental images—the capacity to think for ourselves about the world, our own actions and so forth. Any other view would be a self-deception. Certainly there are temptations to consider other aspects of life as more valuable. We can feel, just below the threshold of consciousness, that our feelings about our own tasks, about our relationships and about the world, are more valuable than our thinking. And if we consider our moral existence, and the voice of conscience, we can tell ourselves that this conscience speaks to us from depths that thinking can never reach.

We may feel all the more inclined to such a view when we see that even the most highly trained thinking, schooled in accordance with normal life, cannot arrive at the moral impulses of a simple, unschooled conscience. Still, we would be fooling ourselves if we imagined that thoughts are not the essence of human life on Earth.

Certainly the voice of conscience, the feeling of compassion, come from inexpressibly deeper sources than our thoughts. Yet these impulses that well up from the depths only find their right place in the human sphere when they are permeated by thought. The voice of conscience, too, only finds its true value by living within our thoughts, so that we clothe in thoughts what the voice of conscience says. Without overestimating thought, we still have to acknowledge, if we want to proceed in describing human consciousness without illusion, that it is thinking that makes us human. So Hegel is right, in a sense, when he says that thinking distinguishes man from beast.

Let us consider the total compass of the thoughts that fill us from the moment we wake to the point of going to sleep. If we are honest about it, we will have to say that the majority of our thoughts in life are dependent on what comes from outside, on sense impressions and experiences that have to do with the material processes of earthly life. Our thoughts pass by in intimate connection with the Earth, so that whatever is most significant for us between birth and death seems to be connected to the Earth. But if we consider the totality of human life on Earth, we notice that a third of it goes by without any thoughts at all. If, with the means available to ordinary consciousness, we look back over a period of life, we naturally link one day's experience to the next and leave out the experiences of sleep that remain in the unconscious. But this leaves a third of life out of consideration.

From my earlier lectures you know that our activity during sleep, though unconscious, is not uneventful. The I and the astral body go through experiences at night that simply do not light up within our awareness. And if we look more closely, we notice that the unconscious forces that operate during sleep continue while we are awake—though we might say they live a life of sleep, for they operate in our whole activity of will, which is no clearer to us than the state of sleep. And they operate in a large portion of our feeling life, which is a kind of dreaming.

When we try to look at what comes from our deepest essence, from our fundamental nature, we have to look at something unconscious. Through spiritual scientific observation, we find that what operates in us while we sleep continues to operate while we are awake. It is present as the I and the astral body, though they do not enter ordinary awareness except in their effects—the expressions of our will and our feeling life—which give a special aspect to what does enter into clear, waking awareness: our life of thought. This becomes more comprehensible when we take into consideration the existence we participate in between death and rebirth.

When we pass through the gates of death, we undergo states I have described to you before, and that you already know in some of their aspects. If we examine very precisely what element of the human being is necessary for our thinking, our conceptual life, we arrive at the insight that for the formation of thoughts on Earth we need the physical body. The physical body must be set in action for us, as earthly human beings, to have thoughts. Beyond this, we also need to set our life body in action. But these are the two elements of human nature that seem to lie unconscious in bed while we sleep. Only when our consciousness has developed somewhat, through a certain training of our soul, and when we can even see physical things from a spiritual viewpoint, do we realize that actually we are thinking all the time, even when we are asleep. If we consider the whole human being, we can say that during earthly life we are never not thinking.

When we return in the morning to our physical and life bodies, normal consciousness forces itself very quickly back into them, and it is only then that normal consciousness becomes aware of external things—of sense perceptions that we then process conceptually, of objects that we perceive around us. But when we begin to enter much more consciously into our physical and life bodies, then as we awaken we meet the thinking that has gone on while we were asleep. We think; that is, the physical and life bodies are caught up in continual thought activity while we are asleep, only we are not present to it; we are outside this activity in our I and astral body, so we are not aware that it is going on. But this is a great self-deception. And just as we can better recognize any aspect of ourselves when it is torn away from its harmonious relationship to the whole of life—that is, when it appears in an abnormal state—so too we can realize based on external experiences of the world that while we are asleep we not only continue to think, but we think far more cleverly while asleep and absent than when awake and present. We arrive at the depressing fact that our life body thinks less well when we are within it, with the normal consciousness of our I and astral body. We spoil the thoughts that course through our life body by being present to them with our normal consciousness.

Someone who can see into these things can therefore confirm reports like the following. There were once two university students. One was a philologist and knew nothing of numbers. The other was a mathematics student. Now, we know that at certain moments in the study of mathematics, you do sweat through certain problems, whereas in philology it tends to go more easily. And that's how it was with these two students, who shared a room. One night, at the end of their preparations for their exams, the philology student was very pleased with himself, while the mathematics student was not, since he couldn't solve a problem he needed to solve for a written assignment. So he lay down to sleep very dissatisfied, and a strange event followed. At a certain hour the philology student woke up and saw the mathematics student get out of bed and walk to the desk. There, he thought some more, wrote for a long time and then went back to bed and slept. The next day, when they both got up, the mathematics student said, “We didn't drink anything last night, but this morning I have a terrible headache.” The other replied, “No wonder, if you get up at three and do calculations for hours, of course your head will swim the next day.” And his roommate said, “I was not up in the night!” He knew nothing about having been up. Then he looked and saw that he had solved the problem, though he had no memory of it.

These things are not fairy tales. I chose this example, which belongs to the literature, because you can check it. I could tell you many other such things. It is not a question of the individual example, but of the reality of all this. When consciousness is not present—and I emphasize that the person in question had no memory of his nocturnal activity—then the physical and life bodies are worked on by outside influences, and the life body works in the physical body to solve the assignment.

Now, I know that many will wish this kind of thing could happen more often. But we today do not have it so easy. In such a case as this the life body proves to be much more clever when it is left alone to work on the physical body than when the I and the astral body are present. This was merely an illustration of how we go on thinking all through the night. For our thoughts are stimulated directly by the outer world through the mediation of the life body, and then the physical body helps as well, to raise up thoughts for the physical human being on Earth.

So our thought life is definitely bound up with our physical and life bodies. Not so our feeling life and our will life. It is merely a superstition of modern science to imagine that our feeling and will are as bound up with our physical and life bodies as our thoughts are. I will only review a few points on this topic.

In contemporary earthly life, it is not true to say we can survey what happens with our I and our astral body when they separate from the physical and life bodies, taking with them from normal life only the will and a portion of the life of feeling. For this experience between going to sleep and waking up takes place in a completely different world. It takes place in a spiritual world, a world in which the environment is not the kingdoms of nature, the mineral kingdom and the plant kingdom, but the higher hierarchies, spiritual beings, spiritual events. But as long as we are beings of the Earth, we are not adequately developed to survey what we are experiencing in our I and astral body between falling asleep and waking up. The experience stays unconscious, but it is not less lively than what becomes conscious. We do go through it. And once we have done so, it is something that belongs to our inner content. Each morning we awaken changed; the night has changed us. We don't awaken in the same state we arrived at before going to sleep. Instead, we awaken in the state that our sleep life has put us into.

Now, when we pass through the gates of death, we lay down our physical and life bodies. And so, in the first days after death (since it takes about three days to let go of the life body), we feel that our thought life is being sucked up by the universe. First, we have a brief glance over our previous earthly life. It is as if our past life were the world around us; we see it in pictures before us. The whole of the past life stands before us at one stroke once the soul is free of the physical and life bodies, that is, once our passage through the gate of death has been accomplished. But it still takes days afterward for the life body to be completely dissolved in the general life processes of the universe.

During this time, our impression is, first, of a living and sharply contoured overview of the life. Then it grows weaker and weaker, but at the same time more “cosmic,” until after a few days it finally melts away. But in these few days, the most valuable aspect of the earthly life that is past departs from the person who has died. Everything we thought about the things of the world, about our whole earthly environment, what filled our normal consciousness—all this melts away from us in just a few days. And to the exact extent that the content of earthly life melts away, there emerges the content of what we all go through unconsciously every night during sleep. This content now begins to become conscious for us. If we really experienced nothing during our sleep life, then three or four days after death our conscious life would be at an end. For everything we thought of as most valuable during our life has melted away, and out of this darkening, dimming awareness there emerges what we lived through every time we slept, but which formerly remained outside awareness.

Now, the peculiar characteristic of our sleeping experiences is this: that in sleep the world takes place in reverse. Whether our sleep is long or short, once we fall asleep it is all the same, since other states of consciousness also have completely different time-senses. So the characteristic I am talking about holds true whether you sleep all night or only for a few minutes. From the time we go to sleep until the time we wake up again, we leave backwards through everything we just experienced between our last waking and the current moment of falling asleep. But we live through it in a different form than we did at first. When we are awake, we live through the day from start to finish, every event and every circumstance, in terms of physical, intellectual nuances. While asleep, however, we experience it all backwards and in terms of its moral nuances. Moral and religious impulses appear; we pass through everything evaluating how it has made us more or less valuable as moral human beings. We indulge in no illusions, nor can we, but we evaluate everything we did the previous day in terms of our fundamental humanity.

Natural science is wrong when it claims that human life relies on causality, on necessary consequences, though in waking life we may only see this linking of cause and effect. Reality contains another current, though it remains unconscious for us during the day, and every night as we sleep we experience this moral ordering of the world. There, we evaluate things morally, that is, in connection with our own human value. We do this every night, or every time we sleep, with regard to the last-experienced period of being awake. And when we pass through the gates of death, then we go backwards through the last night, the next-to-last night, the night before that, and so on, up to the first night after we were born when we became conscious for the first time—for about a third of the time we were alive, since we slept through about a third of our earthly life.

The physical, cause-and-effect course of the world passes away from us, and what rises up before us is the course of the world as the gods and spirits think about it, feel about it and will it. Still, it appears to us bearing the coloration that earthly life gave it, since we have to pass through it in the form in which we lived it during our life on Earth. We need about a third of our lifetime to live it over again backwards in this way, just as I described it in my book Theosophy. There, I described the land of the soul and the world of the soul.

For before we enter a world that is completely spiritual, we have to live through everything that we experienced on Earth unconsciously in our sleeping state. In this way, we are training our awareness for the actual spiritual experiences between death and rebirth. At the same time, this backward experience of earthly life frees us from earthly life. Until we have done this, our consciousness is not adequately free to move among the spirits of the higher worlds. And once we have come to this point, we are only at the beginning of our life in the higher worlds.

Our life in the higher worlds, until we come to Earth again, can become a purely spiritual experience. Just as here we live among physical beings and events, there we live in a spiritual world among spiritual beings and spiritual events. We live among the spiritual beings and deeds that never descend to Earth, and among the spiritual beings who as human beings came to Earth and passed through the gates of death before us, or even after us. We meet again with all the people we knew during earthly life. And this community of ours is very widespread. For through our sleep life we include in this community everything that we only touched on briefly with human beings during our life on Earth. In sleep, we already live within the spiritual world, but we are still experiencing earthly events in reverse as earthly human beings; just this distinguishes our nightly experience from what we go through once we have passed through the gates of death.

First, we have to acknowledge that in the first few days, the content of our earthly consciousness melts away from us. The unconscious experiences of sleep, which we ignored during life, now emerge and we really do experience them. For in those earthly states of sleep, we experience backwards, and in pictures, only the events of waking life. As we step through the gates of death, we submerge ourselves in spiritual substance, just as here we submerge ourselves in material substance. Just as we have the physical and life bodies on Earth, after death we receive a higher kind of external sheath, a spiritual sheath. Through this process, we can actually go through, in a real way, what we only pass through in pictures, in images, during our periods of sleep on Earth. It is a real, true experience, just as real as our experience of earthly life in a physical body. This real experience, a repetition in reality of the pictorial experience of our sleep states, is the basis of the further experiences we go through in the later course of our life between death and rebirth.

What follows between death and rebirth, after we have put aside our whole earthly existence, is a preparation for the next life on Earth. In conjunction with the beings of the spiritual world, we form the spiritual seed of our next earthly life, and above all our next physical body. Then comes another period in which we grow oriented toward life on Earth. After dwelling for a long time among spiritual beings and spiritual facts, something happens that can be compared to a feeling of tiredness, of wanting to go to sleep. We feel how the awareness we have in the spirit becomes weaker, how we can no longer work together with the beings of the spiritual world in the way we have done, and our consciousness shifts over to an interest in a new life on Earth.

Just as every day we sink into the unconsciousness of sleep, our purely spiritual consciousness that fills most of our time between death and rebirth sinks down, not to unconsciousness but toward being filled with interest for life on Earth—as seen from the other side, from the point of view of the spiritual world. This interest in earthly life emerges many years, even many centuries, before we descend again to an actual life on Earth. The interest we took for so long in the purely spiritual world transforms itself into an interest in the succession of generations, and at the end of this succession, we ourselves are to be born. From out of the spiritual world, we take note of our ancestors through many long years before our own parents are born. So from out of the spiritual world we grow together with our ancestry.

At some point all this will become common knowledge, and only then will we see how limited today's science really is, despite its partial correctness, with regard to the concept of inheritance. Physical inheritance can only become comprehensible to us when we understand the role of those forces by which we participated in our ancestry from out of the spiritual world. When we point out here, with our limited scientific means, that we possess this or that characteristic of our great-grandfathers, we shouldn't forget that while this great grandfather was alive, we took an interest in him from out of the spiritual world; we grew together with what played itself out as the characteristics of the succeeding generations. We grew into it from out of the spiritual world.

When anthroposophy makes itself felt in the general civilization of humanity, these things will gain practical significance. We hardly realize how much in the way of cowardice and lack of energy derives today unconsciously from our notions of inheritance, for our science can only speak of inherited characteristics in a completely inadequate way. It has even permeated our arts, the whole of human thought.

When we finally penetrate to a realization of how we have been connected to the physical formation of our own ancestors, and also to the development of our own soul, which from out of the spiritual world has followed and co-created the whole evolution of our ancestors, then this awareness will become an inward reality for us. Then energy and courage will come from the spirit into our souls, where today we derive only cowardice and lack of energy from our contemporary style of thought. For it is not of the slightest value if we think this or that theoretically about the spiritual world. For the most part, we even clothe whatever we think about the spiritual world in physical thought forms. It is not a question of our making theoretical thoughts for ourselves about the spiritual world. ... What matters is not that we have mere thoughts about the spiritual world—we have to have them initially, so that the content of the spiritual world enters our souls at all—but that these thoughts become living and creative forces within us. Normal physical thoughts on Earth are completely abstract. Most scientific thoughts are abstract; they accomplish nothing within our human nature—no more than mirror images. Such thoughts are only pictures. If you are standing with another person, looking in a mirror, and the other person smacks you on the ear, you won't ascribe the blow to what happens in the mirror, but to the real person standing next to you. Thoughts are like these mirror images: they don't do anything, they don't act as impulses on reality. It is moral intuitions that can act as impulses. So, even if we have to start from thoughts, our thoughts about the spiritual world have to be active, active as reality itself and not like other thoughts.

We only enter into the real Anthroposophic view when we sense and experience thoughts as realities. A common objection arises at this point. It can be stated superficially that the whole anthroposophical world view is based on auto-hypnosis, a kind of self-suggestion. People say for instance that some of us are so suggestive that the very thought of drinking lemonade can fill us with the feeling of drinking a real lemonade. It is true that there are people so sensitive that they can taste lemonade in their mouths when they think about lemonade. This seems to be a good objection, but just let someone tell us about quenching thirst by the mere thought of lemonade! Mere thoughts do not become realities. As long as anthroposophy remains mere thought, it is like an imaginary lemonade. But it need not remain so, for it derives from spiritual reality. It does not simply operate like a thought, but it operates the way outer reality operates on material substances. It permeates, it resonates through our human life of feeling and of will. It becomes a reality in us. This is what matters.

So we don't have much if we have anthroposophy as theory. It has to become life. It is life if it fills our souls with energy, perseverance, courage. It is life if, faced with the cares of physical life on Earth—in our deepest sorrow, our deepest suffering—we become filled with inner joy, inner consolation, inner energy by looking up toward the spiritual world. Then anthroposophy becomes like a living being; it becomes something that seems to move amongst us as a living being. Only then has it become amongst us what it should be, permeating all our activity. And then it helps us to permeate this world in which we have come for the sake of the spirit, not for the sake of physical matter. Above all, anthroposophy arrives at real knowledge of what we are as human beings.

Today I would like to look at something from a completely different perspective that has occupied us a great deal here in recent times. I would like to look at the fact, from an historical perspective, that in the last third of the 19th century there was indeed a decisive turning point for human spiritual life. This decisive turning point was expressed in the most diverse facts. And these facts are essentially the underlying causes of all, I might say, the misery that befell humanity in the 20th century, for the underlying causes of all this misery nevertheless lie in the spiritual.

But now I would like to give a brief description of the actual nature of the spiritual crisis of the last third of the 19th century. It was indeed the case during this time that on the one hand there was materialism, the materialism of external life, and behind it the materialism of world view. And one would like to say how bashfully and gradually idealism as a world view completely abandoned its position. I have just tried to point out this contrast between materialism, which often did not want to be one and yet was one, and idealism in the penultimate issue of the “Goetheanum”. There I sketched out how idealistic spirits, certain spirits who continued the idealism of the first half of the 19th century, extended into this last third of the 19th century, but how these spirits, these thinkers, precisely because they only knew the spiritual life in the could not penetrate against everything that could assert itself on that basis, which natural science, so to speak, sovereignly explained, which natural science, against which nothing can be objected, led beyond its scope, as if all world affairs could be decided by pure natural science. This natural science had its great successes in the characterized time, successes in relation to knowledge, successes in relation to the outward practical-technical life. Those who wanted to reject everything that did not follow from the results of this natural science could point to these successes.

And so, I might say, the successful ones who confidently declared natural science and who, after all, represented nothing else and to this day represent nothing else but materialism, were confronted by those thinkers who wanted to be the guardians of idealism. But they knew the spiritual life only in ideas. They saw, so to speak, only ideas behind the material essence of the world, and behind the ideas nothing further, no active spirit. Ideas were the end, the last thing they could arrive at. But these ideas are abstract. They were cultivated as such by these thinkers in the first half of the nineteenth century, and remained abstract, even when they were further developed by idealists in the last third of the nineteenth century. And so these idealists could not, with the abstract ideas, which for them was the only spirit, keep up with the, I would say, tangible results of the natural scientific world view.

That is the external history. But the inner history that lies behind it is something else. That is that materialism, if it remains consistent and has spirit - even if it denies spirit, materialism can have a great deal of spirit - is actually not refutable. Materialism cannot be refuted. It is completely in vain to believe that materialism is a worldview that can be refuted. There are no reasons with which one can prove that materialism is incorrect. Hence the completely superfluous talk of those who always want to refute materialism with some theoretical reasons.

Why can't materialism be refuted? Well, you see, it can't be refuted for the following reason. Let us take that part of matter which provides the basis for spiritual activity in man himself, let us take the brain or, in a broader sense, the nervous system. This brain, in the broader sense the nervous system, is truly a reflection of the mind. Everything that occurs in the human spirit can also be demonstrated in some form or other, in some process of the brain or nervous system. So everything that can be cited spiritually as an expression of the human being can simply be found in its material counterpart in the brain, in the nervous system.

So how could someone who points to this nervous system not be able to say: Now you see, everything you say about the soul, everything you say about the spirit, is contained in the nervous system. If someone were to look at a portrait and say: This is the only thing about the person that is depicted, there is no original at all – and one could not find the person of whom the portrait is, one could perhaps not prove that there is an original. You cannot prove that the original exists from the portrait. Nor can you prove that there is a spirit from the material reproduction of the spiritual world. There is no refutation of materialism. There is only one way to point to the will, how to find the spirit as such. You have to find the spirit quite independently of the material, then you will indeed also find it creatively active in the material. But it is never possible to draw conclusions about the spirit through any descriptions of the material, through any conclusions drawn from the material, because everything that is in the spirit is in the material only as an image.

That is the secret of why, in a time like the last third of the 19th century, when people did not have direct access to the spirit, materialism stood there unrefuted, irrefutable, and why those idealistic thinkers could not arise in this time against the materialistic thinkers. The dispute could not take place in proof and counter-proof. It took place, so to speak, under the influence of the opposing greater or lesser power of the contending parties. And in the last third of the 19th century, those who were able to point to the easily understandable, because tangible, progress and successes of natural science and its technical results had the greater power.

Of course, those people who, as idealists, as idealistic thinkers, as I characterized them in the penultimate issue of the “Goetheanum”, preserved the traditions of the first half of the 19th They were the ones whose ideas could touch people much more than the materialists' ideas; but the materialists were the more powerful. And the dispute was not decided by evidence; at that time it was decided as a question of power. We must face this quite disillusioned. One must be clear about the fact that to reach the spirit presupposes the necessity of directly seeking a way to it, not to open it up, to want to prove it from material phenomena. Because everything that is in the spirit is also found in matter. So if someone has no direct path to the spiritual, then he finds everything he can observe in the world somewhere in matter.

Since even the noblest minds in the last third of the 19th century could not open up access to the spirit, they came, because the needs and longings for the spiritual still lived in them, almost into an insecurity of the whole human soul condition. And behind many a truly extraordinary personality of the last third of the 19th century stands, like a background, a sense of instability. People who, despite being extraordinarily intellectual, are often extraordinarily emotional, said to themselves: Yes, there is the material world, there are the ideas. The ideas are the only thing that can be found behind the phenomena of nature and humanity, behind nature and history. But then these people felt that ideas are something abstract, something dead. And so they came to feel insecure and unstable.

I would like to recommend an example to you, an actually quite significant personality, so that you can see in detail what this development of the human spirit, which finally led to our present time, actually was. Today I would like to draw your attention to the so-called Swabian Vischer, also called V-Vischer because he writes his name that way, in contrast to the other learned fishermen. Today I would like to point out the Swabian Vischer, the esthete.

You see, he had completely outgrown the idealism of the first half of the 19th century. He could not profess crude materialism. He saw ideas everywhere behind material entities and behind material processes, and basically also saw a sum of ideas in the moral world order. He was particularly concerned with finding the essence of beauty. In the Hegelian sense, he sought the essence of beauty in the emergence of the idea from sensual matter.

When an artist takes any material and shapes it in such a way that an idea appears through this form, that one is not just looking at a product of nature that does not reveal an idea, but when the artist arranges the material, be it the material of the ore, or the matter of musical tones, or the matter of words, so that one senses an ideal through his arrangement, then it is the appearance of the idea in a sensual form, in a sensual shape, and that is the beauty. It may be that the idea is so powerful that one perceives the sensual appearance as too weak to express the greatness of the idea. If, for example, the sculptor has something so powerful in his idea that no sensual material is sufficient to shape the idea, so that one can only sense the idea as something immeasurably great behind the material, then the beautiful becomes the sublime. If the idea is small, so that one can play with the material, and the idea is expressed in an amiable way throughout the playful treatment of the material, then the beautiful becomes the graceful.

Thus the charming and the sublime are different forms of beauty. Then, when man senses the harmony of the world in what is artistically created, he can turn either to the sublime or to the charming, depending on how the artist presents it. But then one can see, as happened so very often with Jean Paul, for example, how world events are presented in such a way that one never sees harmony, that one only sees contradictions everywhere in the world, that harmony is actually something unattainable that lies behind everything, but that world phenomena appear to one as the nearest thing. For example, you see how, let's say, there is a small schoolmaster who has an extremely idealistic mind, who has a great longing for knowledge, but has no money to buy books, and instead of books, only gets book catalogs from the antiquarian bookshops, and at least now has the book titles instead of the books. He can still buy white paper, and he now writes the books himself for all these titles that he has in the antiquarian bookshop catalog. Yes, but then he notices that there is still harmony in the material that the poet deals with. It is beautifully harmonious, how he balances out the disharmony that money introduces. And then again, the books he writes for himself are not as clever as those in the catalogs. The contradiction remains. You are tossed back and forth between what should be and what is and what should not be.

If you can come to terms with this contradiction in your mind, which cannot be resolved, wherever one contradiction replaces another, where you would not get beyond the contradiction at all, but would have to dissolve into dust yourself , if one nevertheless knows how to calm one's mind, then that is the mood of that beauty that one enjoys in humor.

Yes, it was precisely the case with the Swabian Vischer, the V-Vischer, that he virtually glorified humor as an esthete, that he, because he lived in the age when one was at a loss contradictions, the contradiction between mind and matter, because there was no actual penetration of the world harmonies for human understanding as something achievable, he wanted to help himself through humor over all of this. And so he glorified humor. But again, it is the case with humor that behind it, nevertheless, there must be a harmonization somewhere, otherwise humor does not come about, otherwise one sees in the end that one calms oneself through the mind with something, whereby one should not actually calm oneself if one does not want to become a wishy-washy person. And so, behind all this, there is the striving of the Swabian Vischer to enjoy the world – he is, after all, a leading figure for the second half of the 19th century – behind all this there is a striving, because one cannot enter into the spiritual world, but only into ideas, a striving that in turn has something terribly philistine about it. A laughing humor, but behind which is not really the balance of the mind, but something convulsive, a humor that easily, when it explores the contradictions in the world, instead of humorous balance, only finds the foolish juxtaposition.

All this is connected with the fact that the more noble minds in this second half of the 19th century could not find what was actually behind the world spiritually, that they therefore looked for means of information that ultimately led them into a certain lack of direction, into something convulsive. And yet, out of these convulsions of the last third of the 19th century, only the tragic and the unhealthy of the beginning, of the first half of the 20th century could emerge.

Now, when this Swabian Vischer, one might say, although he resisted it, wanted to present his own self – it is his own self, after all – to the world in this way, he wrote the novel “Auch Einer” (Another One). One can say that the “hero” of this novel, as one would say in philistine aesthetics, or as it is scientifically called, the hero of this novel - in reality his name is Albert Einhart, but V-Vischer abbreviates it: A. E., calls him “Auch Einer” (just “one of many”), and that is also the title of the novel - well, this “Auch Einer”, there is something in him. He would like to be a one as a human being, a real one. He would like to be a “one,” such an individuality, who is something in himself. But now, despite his magnificent, powerful talents, he becomes only “one of the ones,” not “one,” but “one of the ones,” perhaps not exactly twelve, but of which there are still a considerable number in a dozen! Yes, as I said, Vischer resisted the idea that “Auch Einer” is a portrait of his own character. He is not that either, but nevertheless Vischer has mysteriously incorporated into this “Auch Einer” that which lived in him as inner disharmony. At the same time, there are the discrepancies of the soul from the last third of the 19th century.

This novel “Auch Einer” actually consists of three parts. The first describes how V-Vischer becomes acquainted with Albert Einhart, with the “Auch Einer”. It is an interesting travel acquaintance, not exactly an everyday occurrence.

You see, V-Vischer, too, in the end, could see in the approach of the Mystery of Golgotha to earthly evolution nothing but the evolution of an idea. For him, the Christ was actually an abstract idea that has permeated the evolution of mankind. And at Golgotha, in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, an abstract idea — Christ — was actually crucified. It does not breathe much reality. It leads back to the time of David Friedrich Strauss and so on, where the actual content of religion was only understood as if religion only contained images for something that is actually meant ideally, abstractly. Thus Christ and the story of Christ could only be understood as images, the absorption of the highest ideas into earthly development, the crucifixion only as the appearance of the idea in a particularly outstanding sensual human form, and so on. All this has indeed been the subject of great intellectual efforts in the 19th century and has been the subject of bitter disappointments for the deeper minds in this 19th century, because behind all this idealism a real spirituality could not be found. And of course people thirst for the spiritual, as they always thirst for the spiritual, and most of all when they do not have it. And those thinkers thirst for it most who believe they can prove that there is no such thing as a spiritual reality, only matter or only ideas. One could say: at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, the more outstanding minds had actually already grown tired of this intellectualist quest for an answer to the question: how do ideas actually work in nature? How do abstractions actually work in history? Only at most such mercurial flatworms as Arthur Drews, have again brought forth that which had long been somewhat dismissed among those who could really think. Therefore, in the personality of this mercurial non-thinker, something of this still extends into the 20th century: an idea was crucified, not a real spiritual being.

But from what I say, you can see that ultimately, even for a thinker like Schwaben-Vischer, everything that was spiritual dissolved into ideas. In the end, it was the ideas, in their abstract form, that were the thing that worked through the world as a web. And everything that was told in the mythologies, in the religions up to and including the Christian religion, was, only clothed in material, something that was at most an image for the idea. And ultimately, from this striving to see only the idea in the sensual image, people had to realize that it does not really matter in which sensual image one expresses the weaving and spinning of the idea in matter.

And for a crank like Albert Einhart, who is “just one of those people,” matter asserts itself in a very strange way. It so happens that Albert Einhart wants to ascend to the sublime at every possible opportunity. When he wants to ascend to the highest heights of the spiritual, which for him is only the ideal, then he gets a cold, then he has to sneeze terribly, or he has to clear his throat terribly. That's when matter asserts itself, isn't it, that's matter. He doesn't usually feel matter so strongly as when he gets a cold or when he has a corn. After all, if you are a thinker from the second half of the 19th century, you don't know which end to grasp materialism, which just reflects ideas. It is best to grasp it where matter asserts itself the most, where it always appears in such a way that it even conquers the spirit. And in the end, like Albert Einhart, “one of them”, you even become a critic of what is already there.

For Albert Einhart does eventually come up with the idea that those who have approached the subject in a more neutral way have actually succumbed to an error. Schiller presented Tell completely wrongly, because it cannot be like that; the subject is grasped at a much too high level. You have to go deeper. You have to go into the catarrhal stage if you want to really grasp the subject. And so the correct composition of Tell should be that when he pushes off with the little boat, he doesn't just get across, but capsizes, falls out and is caught by Gesler's men, who give him a good thrashing, but he escapes again, falls into the water a second time and catches a cold. Now he gets a terrible cold, and just as he is about to draw the crossbow, he has to sneeze. And the bailiff cannot say: That is Tell's arrow – but: That is Tell's sneeze! That is how Tell should be, says Albert Einhart, the “Auch Einer” (the “Also Einer” is a play on words with “Auch einer” meaning “another one” and “einer” meaning “one”). No, you have to go deeper, more thoroughly into materialism, if you want to be consistent.

There have been all kinds of interpretations and explanations for Othello, psychological explanations; but one should see, says Einhart, that Othello is constantly trying to get a handkerchief, that he has a bad cold that drives him so crazy that he ends up strangling Desdemona. Nothing but a cold! One must go deeper into the matter, into the actual material. One must find it at the right point.

That is what Vischer seeks through his cozy, humorous approach. He cannot get beyond materialism. He cannot prove it away, and so he wants to at least rise above it in his mind. He cannot humorously ignore hydrogen and oxygen; well, one must humorously ignore catarrh. And that is precisely one point of view that one can take vis-à-vis materiality.

The matter has also led to Vischer being able to point out how he actually makes the acquaintance of this peculiar character. He is staying in a hotel, which – given the various circumstances, one can assume – must not be too far from here, albeit in the High Mountains, and because he already has a cold, he gets into an argument with the hotel servant, becomes somewhat violent, and so all the scruples of life come to his mind from this material affair. And it comes to such a pass that he even wants to end his own life. He throws himself down. But on this occasion the Swabian-Vischer sees him and prepares to save him, and in doing so tumbles down over the precipice. The other man sees this again, and forgets that he actually wanted to commit suicide himself, and comes to the aid of the Swabian-Vischer. That is how they make their acquaintance. It is not an everyday acquaintance. So they both roll down. And there you can still hear the curses of this “one too,” who is now expressing his worldview. You don't really hear it because there is a roar from all possible waters; it is not quiet, only individual parts can be heard like: World – a cold of the absolute – in solitude – spat out and the world was – the world coughed up by the eternal, coughed up – disgraceful jelly – breeding ground of the devil – and so on, you hear it all through. He will have said much more, of course!

Now they have made each other's acquaintance in this way, Vischer the Swabian and “Another One”. But they can't communicate right away because they both get a cold and have to sneeze terribly. And so it takes a little longer to communicate. The first part is about how you make a travel acquaintance in a not-quite-ordinary, everyday way. The second part is a work by “Auch Einer” that is inserted, a pile village story. It describes the life and activities in a pile village. One could talk at length about the age in which this pile village existed and so on, but there is also some information from which one can deduce that the pile village of “Auch Einer” is near the city of Turik. This city is nearby. And about the time – well, the pile-dwellers have to call in a bard boy from Turik. And this bard boy from Turik is called Guffrud Kullur. Yes, you can't really discuss the time in which this pile-dwelling existed.

The details of this pile-dwelling story are now developed in the narrative of “Auch Einer” (Another One), and we are introduced to the way in which, for example, the pile-dwellers take care of their religious needs. This is precisely what Swabian Vischer and his counterpart Albert Einhart describe in their study of religions: This has been the material-figurative expression of the rule of ideas everywhere. And so this religion of the pile dwellers is one that they adopted in a time when no one could catch a cold. It was a completely paradisiacal time when no one could catch a cold. But these paradise pile dwellers were not so comfortable. They felt somewhat irritated by this cold-free, catarrhal time, and so they fell for the temptation of the great god Grippo. This Grippo, who actually dwells in the cold west, but works and creates through fire, through heating. And so it came about that they, the people of the paradise on stilts, succumbed to the temptation of the god Grippo! And they caught cold, had to sneeze all the time, and so they surrendered to the weaver of worlds, who often appears to people as a white cow. They see: material-pictorial expression, elaboration of the spiritual. The World Spinner advises them to found their village on the lake, but the lake sends forth a constant cold, damp fog. The sniffles are properly expelled. The results of the god Grippo come out and are finally cured. This can only happen in pile villages.

Then a kind of heretic also comes to this pile village. But the pile villagers are led in an extraordinarily good way by a druid. A druid who is actually not much smarter than the other pile villagers, but who has learned to properly teach the catarrhal religion, completely dominates these pile villagers. And there is only one thing: The Druids must live celibate, so he does not have a wife, but a mistress, Urhixidur, who again rules him and from whom a lot emanates in this pile village. So now a heretic comes along who wants to teach the pile villagers a kind of enlightened religion, a religion without God. But the stake villagers have not only come to know the good gods, but also the Grippo and all sorts of other things. And the druid, egged on by the Urhixidur, sets up a heretic's court. The stake villagers become a little bit mad at the druid, because they dig up a deeper stake village, and now he can't explain that. And now they call Guffrud Kullur and another scholar, Feridan Kallar, from the neighboring city. But the strange thing is that when pile villages were excavated in a Swiss town other than Turik, one of the experts was Ferdinand Keller, who was not appointed by a town with a present-day name, but by Turik, just as, of course, the reference is not to Gottfried Keller, but to Guffrud Kullur. Well, the battles are taking place between the people with an original religion, with the religion of catarrhal conditions, and a heretic who now wants to teach a religion without God, a religion of the moral world order. They are interesting struggles. They come to a head in particular when the pile dwellers celebrate a festival that corresponds to Catholic confirmation and Protestant confirmation, namely the festival of investiture. This is when children are introduced to the community. But of course, in keeping with the events, they receive a handkerchief, not the things that usually happen at confirmation, but they have to get a proper handkerchief for the road through life.

All kinds of cultural struggles are still taking place there. It seems to “Auch Einer” that the cultural struggles were not only visible in the world during this time, but they also seem to have taken place in the pile villages.

Yes, I would say, the Swabian Vischer develops a humor to represent the inability to come to terms with materialism in this oddball. Whether one finally takes – this is probably what the Swabian Vischer meant in his heart – the concepts that start from the materialist art historians, who tie in with such neutral material, or others that show the material more clearly: perhaps it just depends on whether one takes the clearer concepts.

A man like Gottfried Semper, for example, asserts the working of stone and the workability of wood when explaining this or that architectural style. Yes, but why talk about the extent to which wood or stone can be worked? Why start from this side of the material? It is much more sensible to examine how people were affected by the different architectural styles, and then you have the connection between these architectural styles and the human being and human development. With the Greeks, it will have been the case that their style of building was open on all sides, so that if you spent a good deal of time in the buildings, you would catch a good, strong cold. These are the purely catarrhal architectural styles, the ancient architectural styles. And the Gothic architectural styles, there you were more protected, you only caught a cold now and then when you opened the windows: these are the mixed-catarrhal architectural styles. And the ideal is only in the distant future: these are the buildings in which you don't catch a cold at all. We can make a very nice distinction – and this is how it is done in scholarly writings – between architectural style A: purely catarrhal, architectural style B: mixed catarrhal, and architectural style C: where you no longer catch a cold. This is the classification of architectural styles by “Auch Einer”.

You see, V-Vischer didn't know how to approach materialism. He wanted to approach it humorously, and so he took this side of materialism where man feels matter in him in one way or another. That is, after all, what really underlies this novel, “Auch Einer”.

In a third part, there are also Albert Einhart's aphorisms. You get to know him better, so to speak. You get to know his struggle against nature, his struggle with the spirit, with the moral world order, with pure idealism; very witty remarks that are presented in aphorisms. Sometimes you get the feeling that the somewhat philistine Swabian Vischer has already anticipated the witty ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche. There is really something extraordinarily ingenious in this third part of Albert Einhart's aphorisms.

And Albert Einhart is also a very original personality. When you meet him in the novel, he is retired, of course, because he was something of a police director, but even then he was actually already an important personality. So the Swabian Vischer obviously wants to suggest that this in itself must be taken with humor: an important police director. But because he was important, he was also elected as a member of parliament, and there he gave an extraordinarily important speech. In this important speech, one sentence had a rousing effect, then a second sentence had a rousing effect again. But the second inspiring sentence had the same effect on the first as if the first had been poured over with horribly cold water. It is strange that the inspiring effect was as if the first flame of fire were to be extinguished: Now there are people again who belong to the old terrible, barbaric times and would like to introduce corporal punishment in the most diverse forms in the military and in schools. This is something that leads us in the most blatant form to the time when there was no idealism yet, when people did not yet live in pictorial religions, when they still had a purely moral view, religion without God. We must not expose ourselves to this in our time. In our time, there must be no beating, beating must be thoroughly eradicated. In our time, many other damages must be eradicated. We see how much barbarism still extends into our time. For example, we see how animals are tortured on the street by rough people, how these poor horses, who are not designed for it, are beaten with whips. Or we see how dogs, which have other organs on their feet than hooves and are not suited to pulling carts, have to pull carts. In short, we see how the animals are tortured, and I would like to make a motion here in the chamber that all animal abusers be publicly flogged!

These are the things, again, that one can only get over with a certain sense of humor when the second spark of fire pours out like a cold jet of water on the first. Yes, this Albert Einhart, this “Auch Einer,” is really a true creature of the last third of the 19th century! And much of what Vischer felt in terms of his own psychological discrepancies, he brought to light in this “Auch Einer”. But one must not identify Vischer with “Auch Einer”, nor with the person who had come to the village as a heretic and was tried as such, otherwise one would come to strange conclusions.

Not true, the Schwaben-Vischer has, though not in Turik, but in another city, for a time provided a kind of heretic protectorate, and it has done him badly. But it would be taking an overly humorous view of V-Vischer himself to interpret such things. For V-Vischer did not even want to accept the second part of Goethe's “Faust” and ridiculed the commentators and interpreters by calling himself in a third part of “Faust” that he wrote, with allusions to all those who find so many witty things in the second part of “Faust”, Deutobold Allegoriowitsch Mystifizinsky all those who find so much ingenious things in the second part of “Faust”, Deutobold Allegoriowitsch Mystifizinsky; Deutobold Symbolizetti Allegoriowitsch Mystifizinsky and so on he called himself. And as such he wrote the third part of Goethe's “Faust” to mock the commentaries that wanted to see a deeper wisdom in Goethe's “Faust”. One does not want to become an allegoriovitch like that, and since the Swabian Vischer's own fates are expressed or somehow hinted at in his “Auch Einer”.

One would like to say that it is remarkable how, in this last third of the 19th century, on the one hand there is Nietzsche, who is to be taken so deeply tragically, who perished because of the discrepancies that took place in his soul , and this Swabian Vischer, who could not help but express the groundlessness of the worldviews of his time in such a way as he did in the novel “Auch Einer” (Another One). One can only say that there is a certain unity even in this novel, as there is a certain unity in certain natural scientific materialistic views. After all, if you look at hydrogen, look at oxygen, look at zinc, look at gold, they are so different things, but together you find the one atomic unity everywhere. The atoms are everywhere, they are just a little differently collated, so that they look a little different. And here in this novel there is also a very strange unity.

For example, the “Auch Einer” finds the personality, the female personality, that really instilled a great respect in him in life, now as a widow again. It is a great moment for him. He is deeply indebted to the man who died. He finds the personality he deeply admires as a widow in a hotel. She enters into a conversation with him. And this conversation is interrupted because the “one too” is seized by a terrible sneezing fit. This conversation does not end. It is always matter that has a devastating effect, that rebels in this search for a worldview, for the spirit; it is always matter that intervenes and ultimately makes everything material. One can't do anything but ascribe everything to materialism when one wants to express the most sublime revelations of the human soul, and now, isn't it true, not even the word “ideal” comes about, but “ide-” and then comes a long sneeze! One sees how matter asserts itself everywhere and how the ideal simply disappears in the face of matter.

It is an extraordinarily significant cultural-historical phenomenon, this novel “Auch Einer” (i.e., “Just Another”) by Schwaben-Vischer, even though one must also say that there is a lot of philistinism in it. But that is precisely what makes it a particular expression of the time. And it expresses the fact that, as a spiritually minded person, one could no longer find one's way in what had become of spirit and matter, so that one could, like “Auch Einer”, come up with the most abstract ideas with the mind, which killed each other as much as the abolition of corporal punishment and the public flogging of those who tortured animals. So one idea kills the other. And if you turned to matter, you got matter where it was most perceptible to you: in the nasal mucus.

That was not exactly fine, one might say, but the Swabian Vischer also wrote a very interesting book about frivolity and cynicism. He never wanted to be frivolous, hated the ladies' narrow waists, but he found something extraordinarily right in cynicism, which one must apply everywhere if one wants to present this or that properly. And that is why he did not shrink back, one might say, not frivolously, but sometimes somewhat unsavory, from presenting world events in a materialistic sense, but humorously, as he thought.

You have to grasp what is alive in the times not only through abstract thoughts and not only through sentimentality, but you have to grasp it in moods. And I really think that something of the mood of the last third of the 19th century lay in those feelings that permeated this Swabian soul, the Vischersche, when he wrote the novel “Auch Einer” (Another One).

When we consider an appearance such as the one we were talking about yesterday, it becomes as clear as possible that not only did materialism arise in the last third of the 19th century in the spiritual development of humanity, but something that is fundamentally even worse than materialism: a certain insecurity and lack of stability has arisen, especially among those minds and thinkers who could not unconditionally go along with materialism. In this last third of the 19th century, we actually find the following situation. We find that the actual materialistically minded and attuned people at that time already had a certain inner security. One need only take a look at all those people who, out of their, one might say, power of knowledge, declared the scientific results to be sovereign and, from there, founded a world view. They appeared with a certain tremendous self-assurance. And it was not so much the content of what they gave as the certainty of their appearance that produced the numerous materialistic followers at that time. On the other hand, all those who, as I discussed yesterday, only held to the spirit with the abstract ideas, felt more or less as uncertain as the Swabian Vischer, of whom I spoke yesterday. They could only hold on to the spirit by saying: There are ideas at work behind the phenomena of the external sense world. But they could only present these ideas in the abstract. They could not bring a real spiritual life behind these ideas to the people's attention. They could not speak of a real spiritual life. Therefore, the abstract ideas did not have a guiding power for them. And so, by the 1890s, there was actually nothing left in public life of that idealism that had still been valid in the first half of the 19th century, which was then represented by isolated people, as I indicated in the penultimate issue of the “Goetheanum”, but which had just dried up by the turn of the century.

It is characteristic that the last third of the 19th century was introduced by a very effective book, the “History of Materialism” by Friedrich Albert Lange. This “History of Materialism” made an extraordinarily deep impression. It was first published in 1866, so it actually marks the beginning of the last third of the 19th century. This “History of Materialism” can be seen as a symptom of the state of mind that humanity was now approaching. For what exactly does this “History of Materialism” contain?

Friedrich Albert Lange presents the idea that man could not arrive at any other rational worldview than materialism, that he could not actually do otherwise if he did not want to indulge in illusions, than to declare atomistically arranged matter to be the starting point for a knowledge of the world. So one must take this world of material atoms filling space as the basis for reality.

Friedrich Albert Lange, of course, noticed that one had to form concepts about this world and that these concepts, ideas, were nevertheless something other than that which lives in atoms. But he said: Well, the concepts are just a fiction. - He actually coined the term “conceptual poetry”. And so man fashions his concepts for himself. Only the extraordinary fact arises that not every man fashions his own concepts; but, to understand each other a little, it comes about that people fashion common concepts. But the concepts are fictions. Real is only the atomic matter scattered in space.

You see, that would be crass materialism, which explains everything that goes beyond materialism as fiction. And one could say: at least it is a consistent point of view! But that is not the case in Friedrich Albert Lange's book. If he only went as far as I have told you so far, he would be a consistent materialist. Fine. I told you yesterday that consistent materialism cannot be refuted. And if someone has no access to the spiritual world – Friedrich Albert Lange certainly had none – then he can actually do nothing but posit materialism as the only valid world view.

But that is not what he does. Instead, Friedrich Albert Lange says something else that, I would say, runs like a red thread through all the arguments in his book. He says: It is true that one can only assume the material world of atoms to be real. But if one assumes that, if one now goes and says that the material world of atoms is at work in space, arranged in hydrogen and nitrogen in such and such a way, interacting in such and such a way, if ideas are boiled down in the brain, and so on – if one assumes all this, then in the end it is also just a construct of concepts. So materialism, which one is forced to profess, is itself actually only idealism, because one is again only inventing the world of atoms.

There is a much simpler image to express what Friedrich Albert Lange expressed in his world-famous book; with regard to logical form, there is a much simpler image. It is the famous Munchausen personality, which grasps its own hair and pulls itself up. The idealist takes the idealistic hair and pulls himself into materialism.

We see that one of the world's most famous works, written at the beginning of the last third of the 19th century, is actually nothing more than quite ordinary nonsense. It cannot be said otherwise. It is actually quite ordinary nonsense. If it were materialism, this “History of Materialism,” then at least it would be new. But that it is a materialistic materialism, a fabricated materialism, yes, that is pure nonsense. But what happened in this last third of the 19th century, which was so successful scientifically? This historical fact must be brought to mind. What happened? Friedrich Albert Lange's book became world-famous, because it was translated into almost all the cultural languages, and the most outstanding, enlightened minds regarded it as a redemptive act.

You are familiar with the matter that has now been performed so often in eurythmy: “Bim, Bam, Bum”, where the one tone, Bam, flies past the tone Bim; but Bim has surrendered to Bum:

“He is also a good Christian,
but that is just it”.

I have to remind you: All those who then drew their wisdom from Friedrich Albert Lange and who in turn formed the starting points for the fact that basically all our public thinking is permeated by this, were all enlightened minds – but that is just it: for the last third of the 19th century! And those who were merely the audience didn't notice any of this. And so, with regard to the most profound issues of human interest, a state of intense sleep has indeed descended.

You will say: these things are exaggerated. — They are not exaggerated! Only the depth of the sleep that has befallen humanity with regard to the greatest questions of spiritual life, the depth of this sleep is understated, not what I have said is exaggerated, but the general view of these things is understated. And if a healthy foundation is to be created for a future spiritual life, this whole serious fact, as I have just characterized it, must be brought to mind, brought to mind with all intensity. For it is just this that has excluded the interest of humanity in the spiritual world from the development of this humanity. And gradually it became the case that the less someone touched on spiritual problems at all, the more he was considered a great scientist. That was the situation at the turn of the century.

It was into this situation that Anthroposophy was to be introduced. And this is how, if I may put it, the task of Anthroposophy must be conceived. It must be conceived in such a way that it must actually work from the foundations, and must not tie in with this or that that already exists in one direction or another. There is simply nothing there, and one must understand the essence of anthroposophy from the foundations. Then, when one understands the essence of anthroposophy from the foundations, one will find that the facts that are currently available through the natural sciences are highly useful for anthroposophical research in all areas and that these facts of natural science can only be properly illuminated through anthroposophical research. This is how the situation must be understood. But for this to happen, it is necessary that a certain part of humanity really decides to lead intellectualism into the spiritual.

Of course, the people who join the anthroposophical movement are all deeply imbued with a certain urge and inclination towards the spiritual world. But very few people love to lead the world of ideas of the present into the spiritual. They would like to take in Anthroposophy as a kind of comfort for the soul, so to speak, by excluding the world of ideas. But that will not suffice to give Anthroposophy its impulsive power in spiritual life. You see, what is involved here must really be grasped in the individual, concrete fact, and today I want to present you with just such a single concrete example.

I have often told you that what you have put on as a head today is the transformed organism from your previous life. But you have to imagine the head as being separate from this organism from your previous life on earth. It really is like that. In the previous life on earth, you had to think away the head, it dissolved in the universe. But what was the rest of the organism, that now becomes the head of the next life on earth. And this organism in turn becomes the head of the next life on earth, and so on. That is how it is.

Now someone might say: But not only my head was buried in my previous life, but also the rest of my organism. It has not had the opportunity to transform into the head of my present life. — Yes, that is a very superficial view. You do not look at your head and the rest of your organism, but at the physical matter that fills your head today. Yes, that also changes about every seven years during your life on earth. What you carry within you today as matter, you did not have eight years ago. That which goes through the earth life is the invisible, supersensible form.

The matter that fills your head you have, of course, only taken up in this life. But the form, the supersensible forces that today round the eyes and turn up the nose, are the same forces that in the previous life formed arms and legs and the rest of the organism. That you can be seen by other people with physical senses is due to the fact that completely formless matter fills your form. It is not matter that gives you form. If you eat salt, the salt wants to be cubic, it does not want to be nose-shaped, nor eye-shaped, it wants to be cubic and so on. You do not owe the form in which you appear as a human being to the matter that is the basis of your physical visibility; but the form of your present head has really gone through metamorphoses, through the form of your organism, except for the head of the previous earth life. But that is why your head was really in an extraordinarily favorable situation. Because it has been so well treated in the universe, it is also the first to appear as a properly formed head in embryonic life. Just think, the head is very beautifully formed at first, while the other organs in the first embryonic life are really only attached to it as secondary organs. It must first be formed from the outside, and actually looks terrible in relation to the human form when you look at it, while the head is actually very beautifully formed from the very beginning. Of course, for someone who only recognizes the fully grown human being, the embryo's head will also have something unappealing about it, but actually it is already beautifully formed. This is because it brings its formative forces with it from the previous life.

This head has actually been worked on between death and the present birth, as I described in the lectures on cosmology, religion and philosophy, which I gave some time ago at the Goetheanum. This work between death and a new birth relates precisely to the development of the formative forces of the human head.

But that is why the human head is something extraordinarily perfect in relation to the cosmos. The human head actually contains the material image of the human spirit, soul and body. So when you look at the head, you have spirit, soul and body working together in a material way, in that they appear in shaped matter. One could say: for the human head, spirit, soul and body are still bodily. You see, that is the secret of the human head, that the spirit appears in a bodily way, that we can show materially in the miracle of the brain: this miracle is an image of the spirit. Just as sealing wax expresses what is on the seal, so through the head we have materially given spirit, soul and body.

In the case of the metabolism-limbs-human being, you can say: Actually, everything is more or less physically present. The legs, these two pillars, have not yet received anything of the miracle of the human head. They will undergo a metamorphosis. The lower jaw, with its wonderful function and mobility, will appear in the next life on earth, while the arms, after transformation, will be incorporated into the upper jaw in the next life, and so on. So that one can say: In the movement system - it is true that the arms are somewhat transformed after man has acquired his upright gait - the opposite is essentially the case, there spirit, soul and body are actually spiritual. There spirit, soul and body are thoroughly spiritual.

One would like to say that the way a person looks materially in terms of his legs and everything that is attached to them is not true. It will only show itself in its true material form in the next life on earth, when it has become a head. Now it is at the very beginning, and is actually quite insignificant in what it appears materially. The essential thing about it is what it first becomes through the will: the movement, the dynamics, the statics, everything that the human being transfers from his system of movement into the will. Thus, what is spiritually intangible, what is spiritually supersensible, is what this remaining human being is. So while the head of every material being is an image of the spirit and the spirit itself appears bodily, the bodily system of the body is hardly bodily. If one wants to find meaning in the whole bodily system at all, one must look everywhere: to what extent is the bodily suitable for the spiritual, for the spiritual revelation of the human being? So that one can say: This is the great mystery of the head, that spirit, soul and body are physical. That spirit, soul and body are spiritual, that is the great mystery of the lower human being.

You see, the Old Testament knew much more about these things from instinctive clairvoyance than today's man. Today's man actually overestimates the head. I have already discussed this from various points of view. In the Old Testament you will never find the illusion presented as if the brain concocted dreams! It says: “Yahweh tormented the man in his sleep in relation to his kidneys.” They knew that what is represented in dreams lies in the metabolic system. They did not attribute everything to the head. Why do we attribute everything to the head today? I'll tell you why: we don't believe in the spirit, so we don't look at the part of the human being where even the body is still spiritual. We don't really look at the lower human being, we are not proud of it. But we look at where even the spirit is physical and material, at the head: we are proud of that because that is where the spirit becomes material and bodily.

So, overrating the head, that is materialism. One wants only matter and also wants to have the spirit only as matter. That is why today in our physiological, in our scientific representations, the head is described as it is described, because one wants to have the spirit only materially. That is what it is, but in the head. Of course, no one knows that before this head could bring the spirit down to the physical, that is, material pictoriality, it had to go through the whole life between death and a new birth. That this material image of the human spirit could arise in the head at all had to be preceded by a long spiritual development. This material miracle of the development of the human brain is the conclusion of a wonderful spiritual development. But people only want to look at the material side and only want to accept the spirit in its material form.

Now, let us try to pay attention, my dear friends. Even if you are over fourteen years old, you can still pay attention. Isn't there a region in man that is entirely physical, and a region in man that is entirely spiritual? Yes, must there not be an intermediate point that is neither entirely physical nor entirely spiritual, that is both, and therefore neither of the two? There must therefore be a neutral point in the middle, where the spiritual passes into the physical and the physical into the spiritual, where neither of the two is present, where man is dependent neither on above nor below, where he is independent of both. That must exist somewhere in the middle.

Let us try to understand the significance of this point, which must therefore lie in the middle man, in the chest man. Imagine you have a scale here. Imagine a load here, and weights on the other side; now you create a balance. I must not give an excess weight here, otherwise it will go down; I must not give an excess weight there either, otherwise it will go down; I must not take anything away either, otherwise the whole thing will move. But look, here is a point, a neutral point. You could add as much as you wanted to this point, nothing would change in the balance of the scales. You could also take the scales there, and if you avoid creating an excess weight somewhere by any swing or something like that, you can move the scales all around, the balance remains the same. You can carry out the weighing correctly during the movement. This is a point that is not at all concerned with the whole system of the scales, an equilibrium point. You can do whatever you want with it, and nothing will change for the rest of the balance. For example, someone has a load on one side and weights on the other. Now he realizes: the balance beam is made of iron, I don't like that, I'll make it out of gold. Now all he has to do is enlarge the center point a little, because actually the point of rest is a mathematical point, but it will be possible to enlarge it a little. You can bring gold into this point of rest quite well: the balance will not be changed. If you put the gold somewhere else – outside the center – then the balance will change immediately. But if someone wants to create a hollow space there and put flesh in it, they can do that too, it won't change the balance. Another person puts butter in there: the butter melts in the sun, the balance of the scales does not change. In short, there is a point here, quite independent of the whole system of the scales, where you can do whatever you want.

In the same situation is the point that lies between the physical and the spiritual as a point of balance. It is not dependent on either the physical or the spiritual. Man can do whatever he wants with this point.

If you simply imagine that a person is a physical being and that everything is connected one-sidedly according to cause and effect, then you will not find this point. If you imagine that a person is only a spiritual being and that everything is determined from above by divine worlds, then again nothing can be done, because then a person must carry out what is determined by the gods. But if you know that there is a point of equilibrium, where man is determined by God upwards and by matter downwards, and with the one point, which can now be demonstrated in his middle-stage human existence, he can begin in the world whatever he wants to begin out of himself – if you have this threefold constitution of man, then you will find in the middle part, scientifically and strictly demonstrable, the fact of human freedom. You can say that, it is as scientific as any quadratic equation can be solved or a differential quotient can be sought or anything. It is something that can be treated according to the strict rules of science. So freedom is the result of a real knowledge of the human constitution, because there is a point in man that is as independent upwards and downwards as the fulcrum of the scales is independent of the load on the right and left. You can carry the scales around with you everywhere, you can replace this point, as I have told you, with whatever you want. In this way, you can also find a point in a person where natural causality, the connections between cause and effect, end, where the connections from above also end, the determination by the spiritual world, where the two maintain a balance. There, in this hypomochlion of human nature, human freedom is guaranteed. And it can be rigorously proven scientifically if one has a true physiology and a true psychology, not what one has today and which, as I have already shown you, adds up to amateurism squared in psychoanalysis.

These are the things that should make people who learn about them think, bearing the following in mind. You can take all of literature and philosophy, you can read about the problem of freedom everywhere – no one can cope with the problem of freedom. Why? Because they have no real view of the human being. Today, this does not exist except in anthroposophy. And the fact that one cannot cope with the problem of freedom points, in turn, to the other fact that I tried to shed light on yesterday, albeit with a humorous tone. But what I tried to characterize humorously yesterday, from an at least supposedly humorous creation, can also be presented in all seriousness.

And these things must be treated seriously if one is to profess Anthroposophy in earnest. Then it is really a matter of getting at the real realities and using them in the appropriate way. Not if one is not quite sure: should one profess spirit because one only knows spirit in abstract ideas, or should one profess materialism, yes, then one becomes a humorist like the Swabian Vischer, then, as a humorist, one devises a humoristic world system that, I might say, is not for a finer taste, the catarrhal world system. Of course, one can laugh about it, but one cannot say with absolute certainty that the world did not come into being through a “sneeze of the Absolute.” Once again, a material is not used in the right way. It is only a matter of always using the material in the right way. Whether you just want to recognize it or actually want to use it, you have to use this material in the right way. Yesterday I gave you an example of this, I presented the view of the Swabian fisherman, how he actually creates an entire world system out of catarrh as a compelling, overwhelming reality. Yes, in the field of anthroposophy we do not do that! There I also have a catarrh like I had yesterday, but I have only used it from time to time for illustration: now and then the catarrhal, the coughing came out; that was only used for illustration, not to somehow gain the basis for a worldview, but only to provide illustrative instruction.

Not true, if you stagger so aimlessly between the catarrhal matter and the merely ideal spirit, then you come to speak of the seduction and temptation by the god Grippo. That is no longer possible on the basis of anthroposophy. There you propagate a flu remedy precisely in order not to be exposed to the temptation of linking a whole myth of the Fall to the god Grippo! It is a matter of grasping the material at the right corner and putting it in its right place.

So things have to change significantly. If you were a person of the mindset of Vischer in the last third of the 19th century, you would get annoyed and spit and clear your throat and finally come up with the farce of the god Grippo. If you are an anthroposophist, you try to fight the flu with our very effective flu medicine! These are the things that point to the right difference in how one treats the material out of the spirit.

Just by looking at the way the human head is viewed epistemologically today, one can see that the entire contemporary worldview has a deep sympathy for materialism. And the fact that we are at a loss when faced with the problem of freedom is expressed by the fact that we simply do not know that two very different world impulses are at work in the upper human being and in the lower human being. And those who, in ancient times, only looked at the upper human being, found that man cannot be free because he is determined everywhere from the spiritual world. Those who look at the human being today simply ascribe a natural causality to everything that manifests itself in the human being. From both points of view, the human being cannot be free. But spiritual causality applies to the head, natural causality applies to the metabolism-limb-human being. In between lies the rhythmic organization, which is rhythmic precisely because things within it balance each other out rhythmically. In the rhythmic organization there is something that is neither determined in the spiritual nor in the material sense, that is neither determined nor causalized, that represents the point from which the impulse of freedom comes in the human being.

You see, at such specific points one can show how anthroposophy can shed light on the deepest problems of human existence. The moment the threefold human nature was presented in my book 'Von Seelenrätseln': the nerve-sense human being, the rhythmic human being, and the metabolic-limb human being, the same moment was reflected back to the 'Philosophy of Freedom', in which freedom was simply presented as a fact. It was illuminated by this fact of freedom, so that one could say: If you consider the human being in terms of his true essence as such a threefold organization, then you can arrive at a completely scientifically exact representation of freedom in the human being, just as one arrives at the representation of the hypomochlion in the case of the scales, or at some point in a system of forces, at the representation of a point of equilibrium, which is then there, independent of the rest of the interplay of the forces in question in the system. But you will also see from this how you can actually look everywhere today: Nowhere will you find the truth about these things. And from those inadequate concepts, which are very far removed from the true organization of the human being, people are educated today, forming moral systems, religious systems, and especially social systems. Yes, it is no wonder that these social systems reveal themselves in such aberrations of thought, as is so clearly evident from the example recently given by Leinhas in the “Goetheanum”, where one has to admit that the views that tie in with Marxism have been refuted by life itself, that life shows that they cannot apply. But that is not decisive; one must first wait until someone scientifically proves that they are invalid. One can actually, as it has been done by Leinhas, only quote such things in quotation marks with the authority's own words, because if one wants to repeat them, one thinks one's head will burst. Not only does a mill wheel turn in one's head, but one generally thinks one's head will burst if one is only to think about such things.

It is necessary not just to move within the anthroposophical movement and let everything go straight and crooked outside, but to take an interest first in how chaotic our knowledge and that which has been drawn from this knowledge in the world is gradually becoming.