The Rudolf Steiner Archive

We will be hearing more about Goethe's dramatic fragment “Pandora” today. If I wanted to tell you everything there is to know about it, I would have to give several lectures. [With this work by Goethe in particular, it will only ever be possible to make a few remarks about how the poet experienced this figure of Pandora as living forces within himself.] I can only gently hint at the meaning of the individual figures that the poet sensed within himself, as it were, as living forces. Those who immerse themselves in the drama from this perspective will get an inkling that it could not be otherwise than that the forces in question were at work in the poet's soul itself. In the last lecture we saw how Goethe contrasted the two figures of Prometheus and Epimetheus in a powerful way. [Creative powers were in the pre-earthly time, spiritual powers, these two figures, as the poet has portrayed them as human beings.] Already in individual words of the drama one can even feel that creative powers lived in Goethe. Spiritual powers had taken the place of human powers, so to speak, such as originate from the pre-earthly moon-period. You can imagine that those beings, the Angeloi, passed through their stage of humanity under quite different conditions. To pass through the stage as we are passing through it today, requires conditions such as now prevail on earth. They also had to go through a completely different state of consciousness than we have now. But it would be quite difficult to describe the peculiar storms of consciousness that those beings who lived on the old moon and completed their stage of human development there went through. [It was a very peculiar form of consciousness that those beings had as human beings on the old moon. At that time, man had only a dim awareness of images. Those beings who were then human beings certainly had a higher level of consciousness than we do, and this present consciousness of ours cannot be compared with the former consciousness of the moon. [The consciousness of these beings on the old moon is recorded in the consciousness of the beings who then remained above.] It was also an awareness of objects, but at a much higher level. If those entities on the old moon had held on to their consciousness and brought it with them into earthly conditions, they would not have been able to live there at all. That is why those beings had to withdraw to a higher sphere when the actual development of the earth began. They had to renounce, so to speak, the development of the earth. If they had not done so, they would not have been able to see the earthly conditions on earth at all. They would have experienced only what was still present in them as an inheritance from the old lunar conditions. Nor would they have been able to intervene in the course of earthly events. They owe the fact that they were really able to intervene to the circumstance that they renounced the fruits of earthly development and remained on a higher level. Their consciousness had radically changed into a reflective consciousness. If the Elohim had not remained above but had descended to the earth, they would have become Epimetheus natures. Man still retains a part of what he had become on a higher level. This part of his development manifests itself everywhere in his life. Man is subject, as it were, to the tragedy of seeing things afterwards that would have turned out differently if he had been able to see them beforehand.

It has long been known, for example, that Ibsen, who is revered today as a great poet, failed his school-leaving exam. This is just one case of a strange occurrence. Or you just need to let the grandiose example of the irony of the university teachers' day sink in, and you will see that this epimetheic moment is not an isolated case. Should high school students be supported sympathetically or not? Those professors confessed that they had no means of recognizing the gifts of such people.

This epimetheic element is what humans have inherited from the Elohim. But now humans have also conquered the other side, namely the possibility of ascending more or less in the foresight that receives impulses from what one already grasps as the future. In school, this case is rarely represented, as you know from experience. This Promethean moment could only slowly flow into our being, and the Epimethean gradually dries up. [Through the Promethean element, we now have two currents. One that is slowly drying up, the Epimethean, and one that is slowly rising, the Promethean.] In the former ability, however, people have not yet come very far today. But these two intellectual currents are essential for us. [As an example of how this slowly ascending current will shape itself in humanity, it is shown how there are already things today that people can objectively face without personal emotions:] In science, solar and lunar eclipses can be calculated in advance. Man is therefore Promethean in relation to mathematical things. Here, passion is silent and only truth speaks. In everything mathematical, therefore, foresight is possible. Mathematics is the clear, unambiguous and luminous beginning of the Promethean element. This had to develop at a certain pace, and this was brought about by the fact that the leader of this element did not descend to our earth too early. By the highest directive, he had to wait until the conditions were such that he could descend as Prometheus. The Prometheus of whom the myth speaks descended to men too early; therefore, by divine directive, he was chained to the rock. He knew the secret that another would come after him, who would then be the true Prometheus. Prometheus also knew the secret that Zeus would one day be overthrown. But the Prometheus who gradually allows the impulse of foresight to work in humanity is the Christ. (Christ is also the one who then overthrows Zeus.) Prometheus keeps his secret from Zeus, who had him chained to a rock in the Caucasus. (In the present, the two work together.)

Thus, Goethe's drama is at the center of everything we know about world development. One element brings one forward, the other connects one with that which is to be brought forward.

[So we can say: Yes], there is a being who descended to the people, which one must let enter more and more into his soul, [that is the Christ]. Only one must take time for it and always remember what can still come from above. But another part of humanity will take its time to accept the Christ, and will receive him more as a gift from above, where those beings who have not become Epimetheus remain. Thus, what the human being is allowed to receive within himself must merge with what comes from higher realms. In these words, Pandora's story comes to an end!

So you see how deep the shafts are from which we have to draw the feelings in order to understand such poetry. Only the theosophical school of thought teaches us to understand the greatest treasures of humanity correctly. But this movement also shows us that what truly leads forward lies with the gods in the spiritual world, from whence it must be fetched in order to connect it with what lies dormant in the human soul.

What the poets bring us is a gift from above, and with it we must connect what we have within ourselves. The poet gives us the Epimethean, and we in turn bring him the Promethean element from spiritual science. [People who take up Theosophy will become Prometheans. Epimetheans are those who want to be blessed from above. The Promethean element must have become the property of humanity if, three thousand years from now, Maitreya Buddha is to appear on Earth.]

We should never confuse things with words, especially with slogans. If we understand the enrichment of one's own self as egoism, we would have to place egoity in a category to which it belongs. [If we strive for the enrichment of our own self, we must first deal with human nature and here I come first to the ego, which can assert itself in various ways in the three human bodies.] I have often spoken to you about our four bodies. The ego within is just another name for the self. It permeates the three bodies with its substantiality, asserting itself in them with varying degrees of force.

With regard to the physical body, man does not have it at his discretion to rein this ego, which asserts itself more firmly within him than it should. It does not work. Why does it do that? Because at some point in his development, man has experienced an influence in the Lemurian period, the Luciferic influence. Man is permeated by the Luciferic entities. This asserts itself in all three realms of the body. [Later, man will succeed in acting on all three bodies; now he only succeeds in acting on his astral body, on his desires and passions.] You know that man is increasingly able to rework the bodies. Today he has this in his hands with the astral body. It is more difficult with the etheric body. And with the physical body [he has no influence at all], but that lies in the distant future. It will only become possible through the occult development of the breathing process, [in which he develops “Atma” within himself, which happens through a special breathing]. The part of the etheric body that we are reworking [develops “Budhi” within itself, and now that it can act on its astral body, it develops “Manas”. These influences are transformations of the different bodies. The influence that took place at that time through satanic entities is designated as “serpent,” and through this influence on man, the I of man was brought to stronger activity. If today the I asserts itself more strongly in the physical body than it would be without the satanic influence in the Lemurian time – serpent in Paradise – then man can do nothing. Lucifer brings the I to a more intense effect in the physical body. The first thing that came about as a result is death. Death is the direct consequence of a strengthened I. [And death will no longer come when the influence of the luciferic beings is overcome.]

What would have happened without Lucifer? We only need to describe what man would be like. He would grow old, but would begin to soften his muscles and bones through the powers of the soul, detach parts, gradually sweat out material parts. He would thus be able to attract other matter and rebuild the body. There would be a transformation that would take place consciously, a beneficial process. [He is not yet able to do that, and that is why death occurs, to dissolve the matter.] Death has occurred due to the densification of the bone system. [There would be no illness if the power of the ego were not working so strongly.] This inability to dissolve one's own matter, that is death. When the earth will have reached the end of its development, it will undergo a metamorphosis. It is different now because of the solidification by Lucifer. Through his influence, illness comes. Man has no influence on this at the moment. In the processes that should take place like dissolution and composition, and now do not take place that way, the cause of the illnesses predominates. The daytime thinking is a continuous dissolution of substances in the brain. [During the night, the dissolved parts are reassembled by the spiritual world.] The night is there to send forces from the spiritual world. [Somehow there must be balance in the breakdown and construction.] In the moment when not so much is built in at night as is dissolved during the day, the disease is there. The disease can only occur because there is an ego in the organism that is exerting itself too strongly.

Now, in the etheric body, how is the activity [through a too strongly acting ego]? It asserts itself through the possibility of error on the one hand and of lies on the other. Man is subject to error because the ego works too much in the etheric body, not in harmony with the outside world. Now, and the lie? When we lie, this thought form is formed as a real fact, and in the spiritual world there arises what we call an explosion in the physical world. If the I did not merge in the etheric body, the person would know that what is not in accordance with the truth, with reality, causes destruction, an explosion. We have to take this into our karma, destroying our life's journey until we have balanced it again. A liar destroys as much in his karma as bomb explosions in the physical world. Lies and errors are caused by the ego asserting itself too strongly in the etheric body.

The astral body is filled with what is called selfishness and egoism because the I goes beyond the measure of assertion. We must be clear about this when we study selfishness in the astral body. The astral body consists of a sentient body and a sentient soul. We must distinguish this exactly. The sentient body is of an astral nature, but built up from the outside during the lunar period. Now, in the sentient body, the substance of the sentient soul is secreted at a subconscious level. What the sentient body is, that is quite all right with humans. Therefore, they have the ability to properly perceive their environment. Schopenhauer [only retained the idea]: the world as an idea. [He said:] Without the eye there is no light. But it is also true that without light there is no eye. This is because physical light is completely flooded with astral light, and that is what the eye has developed [from the human being]. So it is the astral that brings out and then chisels out the astral in the human being.

[First, the astral senses are developed through the influx of astral substance.] This is how we come into harmony with the outside world. If we only had the sentient body, we would be soulless creatures, [we would see with the eye] but without joy; [the outside world would only be reflected in us]. But now we have the sentient soul in addition. In the sentient body, the 'I' will be able to be a little stronger than the correct measure would have been without the influence of Lucifer. [The influence of the Luciferic entities asserts itself in the sentient soul; it does not reach the sentient body.] This has an effect in the sentient soul. Then the discord arises. That is egoism. When the I constricts the forces of the sentient soul too strongly, then egoism arises. The sentient body also takes in beautiful impressions, but the sentient soul cannot rejoice in them. The world gives the colors. The sentient soul should pour itself into what the sentient body gives. He who finds the possibility of going out of himself so far as to embrace the world strengthens his ego. This egoism is healthy because it is rich in content. All beings should do this.

When the rose adorns itself, it also adorns the garden.

Schiller says:

Are you seeking the highest, the greatest? The plant can teach you. What it is without will, be you the willing one – that's it!

Angelus Silesius:

The rose has no why,
it blossoms because it blossoms;
it pays no attention to itself,
does not ask if it is seen.

The person who develops their own abilities as much as possible will serve their fellow human beings the most. Not leaving any of our inner powers undeveloped leads us to salvation. [But in the pursuit of developing our powers as much as possible,] there is a danger of falling into destructive selfishness, but without that, human beings could not develop any freedom. And so, for some, selfishness can lead to good fortune, while for others it can lead to disaster. Plants are prevented from growing beyond measure. When a blossom is at its most beautiful, it has brought forth its own essence. At the moment when there is a danger of its ego being emphasized, of its selfhood developing, the pollen arrives and the blossom must merge with the germ and die. This law also applies to a certain extent to human beings. When they create harmony between the sentient soul and the sentient body, they also experience that the moment they harden and do not pour themselves out into the world, they wither away. There are people who create harmony between what flows into the soul and what it experiences. They are then harmonious. This must be the aim of education. But people in whom the I is too active in the sentient soul, without balance in the outer life, where the inflow and outflow are not in harmony, these people become desolate. They cannot feel anything, not even in front of a work of art. This is the secret of what happens in egoism. People must find a way to become inflamed by the impressions of nature, [to learn to feel something when confronted with works of art]. The physician should put himself in the place of what the soul experiences; [an inner feeling must penetrate even into external movements, for example, when doing gymnastics]. He must be able to take joy in his surroundings; that is a spiritual person.

In other areas, we must establish this harmony, for example, in the knowledge of ourselves. We must find harmony in our knowledge of ourselves. “Know thyself” is often misunderstood. To reconcile our true self with knowledge of the world is self-knowledge, and it is part of the education of the human being to achieve that self-knowledge, which is selfless; to achieve justified selflessness so that the ego can pour itself out into the world again. Just don't brood! That hardens us. Self-knowledge is something that leads us to flourish. Otherwise we wither away as misfits, as pale envious people. If we seek the God only in us, we place ourselves in discord with the world. If we seek him in world knowledge, [we work outwardly], then there is a restorative equilibrium in our will impulses. This is an important law in relation to what we want. For nothing works as long as it remains within us, but only when it emerges from us. Then it works for our benefit when it [from outside] meets us in the mirror. These are the best conceivable deeds: to put out into the world what has been done. They are the invigorating ones. [A person can enrich his ego as long as the advancement of his own ego invigorates him.] The best deeds of the egoist, done for his own sake, do not further him. The moment egoism goes beyond a certain degree, it stifles the soul. Many are unsatisfied and desolate; many egoists live in withering. Egoism, overshooting its goal, turns against the egoist himself. When man crosses the boundary in the development of his ego, he becomes desolate. The egoist lives in withering. This would be more apparent if man did not live in an external society. We are interrelated, we human beings, and so the egoist does not bear the effects of his egoism alone; someone else must bear them too. For the egoist himself, this only expresses itself in karma.

“Wilhelm Meister” deals with the problem of the egoist. What does Wilhelm Meister want? Nothing other than to make his individuality as rich and perfect as possible. That is why he leaves his profession for the profession in which he expects the greatest freedom, so that everything can have an effect on him from the outside. Goethe shows where Wilhelm Meister's error has led him. He knew that there is a spiritual law. Goethe himself called humanity the great individual and so on. He said: Wilhelm Meister is a pretty poor fellow. But there is a guiding force in man that always leads him to do the right thing. That is the great law of karma, which does not allow us to do foolish things without making us do sensible things in the next life. It has been severely criticized that Goethe allows the secret guidance to be noticed. No one can see more in another person than he or she is. Thus, modern biographers depict Goethe as a philistine – [Engel is a grotesque, outrageous interpreter of Goethe]. In 1780, Goethe became a member of the Masonic Lodge “Duchess Amalie” – a symbol of spiritual leadership.

The best explanation of “Hamlet” is in “Wilhelm Meister”. In the “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul”, Susanne von Klettenberg reveals herself – almost word for word – as a reflection of her development. During her illness Makarie brooded as much as possible within herself, but her inner nature sought the outer world again within her own inner being, found contact with divine beings in her own nature, and enjoyed this pre-mystical life. She attained a high level. Her healthy nature pushed beyond this and came to the question [through an important event]: Is God only within? Then her gaze turned to Palestine, to Christianity. Christ became man, went through everything to the point of death. When she thoroughly understood this, she said: 'In every flower, the deity reveals itself from within to the world.' Now she lives with the event of Golgotha. Susanne von Klettenberg gave Goethe a significant push for his inner development. He never stopped.

The “apprenticeship years” were completed under Schiller's criticism. The “travel years” were created under peculiar circumstances. It turned out that the typesetter printed faster than Goethe could write; and in the beginning, he helped out with things he had written earlier: St. Joseph, Man of 50, Melusine and others. In the end, he could not keep up, so he gave it to Eckermann to revise. This is how the “Wanderjahre” came about. But it should be considered that everything Goethe wrote is full of the highest wisdom [and it is a concise excerpt of his own development]. Each one signifies a stage in his own development, a stage in Goethe's development. Thus life flows like a composition, if only it is taken up in the right way and can have an effect on individuality. Much has emerged from Goethe's development. Take the “Pedagogical Province”: the boys have three gestures. [Signs of] insight into the effect of the symbols. [There are three religious levels.] The best of the three religious categories: [a gesture upwards, downwards, towards one's own kind symbolizes real reverence for the highest, for those below us, and for our own kind.] Upwards, Goethe calls the first direction of reverence, the second to one's own kind, then reverence downwards. What is below us has also come from God. Then we have reverence for religion because the divine has descended. As the student immerses himself in what the gesture shows, the gesture should draw itself into his soul. The boys are dressed differently. Why? To develop their individuality, they should choose the colors themselves.

The conclusion shows how the self expands to embrace the whole world in Makarie, who looks inwardly at the laws of the stars – she has an astronomer at her side – and takes her measurements from the solar system. Selfless knowledge that is absorbed into the world – where Goethe subtly describes the entire intuitive life of such clairvoyant beings. At the end of “Wilhelm Meister”, the occult view of the world is described in Makarie, because Goethe wants to describe the unfolding of the self.

Thus, in 'Wilhelm Meister', Goethe shows the self rising from stage to stage, becoming richer and richer as the self grows into the world problem. In order for the human being not to lead to death, the shell must tear. The work is true and genuine.

Art is something that appears essential or inessential for life to different people, depending on their temperament and life experiences. How different were the points of view in the past: Plato had drafted that powerful plan of statecraft, but he saw poets and artists as dispensable in the whole organism. Schiller saw art as an uplift for humanity.

What does art have to say about the true forces of life? Theosophy lets things speak for themselves and asks: What has art shown us in the different ages of the world? We must first try to find our way around in sketch form. Theosophy is something quite new in this form. It is based entirely on a certain premise, on the premise that the supersensible spiritual world can be investigated. There are powers in the human soul that can be developed through awakening the soul's powers of spiritual vision. This is as much a fact as learning to see after undergoing an operation for blindness.

In the past, art did not look the same as it does today. It has changed a great deal over centuries and millennia. Today, this is often not taken into account. The ancient Greeks were not the same as we are. At that time, they were much closer to the state of soul in the spiritual world, which lies behind the physical. In prehistoric times, there were countless people who, through their natural gifts, were able to see into the spiritual world. This was linked to the fact that people were different then than they are today, both in themselves and in their feelings. Today, people have to develop the same qualities in their outer lives as others. Everything that prehistoric people did was influenced by the supersensible world. They saw, for example, the spiritual power behind stone and plant. Now, the one who is spiritually developed, who sees into it, knows that there is a spiritual lawfulness in it, and that what happens in the physical world is the reflection of spiritual processes. For the ancient Greeks, it was quite clear that when something happened in the physical world, the reason for it lay in the beyond.

For the ancient Greeks, there was one very special event: they transitioned to a completely different way of life. What we today call intellectual cultural life did not exist back then. They were beings who developed from clairvoyance. They had various clairvoyant abilities. Some outstanding individuals, what we now call geniuses, were those who knew their way around the spiritual world. Those who transformed their higher clairvoyant gift into action were the masters of the heroic age. This clairvoyance was a fact back then. Today, genius is not bound to heredity, but back then it was bound to blood. There were very specific families who were able to acquire this clairvoyant leadership. The heroes and rulers were people who had an instinctive connection with the supersensible world. They did not need to think about what to do, they acted out of their instincts, their desires. They followed them without rational consideration. That was the significant change, that feeling was transformed into intellectual culture. Such a Greek may well have felt in later times: Our ancestors acted on the direct impulse of their soul, but now such a quality is no longer inherited. The Greeks expressed this in images: the gods have taken this gift of clairvoyance from us and brought it to Asia Minor to the priestly state of Asia Minor, by having the most beautiful Greek woman, Helen, the wife of Menelaus, as the representative of clairvoyance, carried off to Troy, the priestly state of Asia Minor. Helen is another word for Selena – moon. It was felt that the service to the sun had replaced the old moon culture. Achilles, Agamemnon, Menelaus were seen as belonging to the age of the moon. Homer ties in with that event with his Iliad.

The Iliad begins: Singe, o Muse, mir vom Zorn des Achilles. Von Leidenschaften sollte gesungen werden, um auf die Zeit hinzuzuweisen, die der Verstandeskultur voranging.

The woman as a representative of clairvoyance is lost in two ways. The fight is for what has been lost, what has been banned to the priest-state of “Troy”. Homer describes the second way in which the ban is lifted when the storm rises, and it is only appeased when Iphigenia is sacrificed at [Aulis]. Greek legend shows us the replacement of the culture of clairvoyance with the culture of reason. Odysseus is the bearer of the modern culture of reason – a wooden horse, with the horse being a symbol of reason. He forms the transition to this.

Poseidon, the god of the sea, is the protector of the old. Athena is wisdom, and also a symbol of reason. Athena guides Odysseus home. Here, the fate of nations is to be described, and people are only used to illustrate it. The poet looks at the great world events and uses art to provide answers to them.

Plato, on the other hand, took the view that it is those who live that count, not those who come afterwards and tell the tale. He associated priestly poetry in the pre-Homeric period with looking up to the gods. This poetry was the first to contemplate life; before that, such contemplation did not exist.

Aeschylus is still completely absorbed in the contemplation of the supersensible world. The Eumenides and Prometheus Bound show the supersensible world growing into the sensual one.

More and more people grew into the culture of reason, and now we come to the thirteenth century, when Dante wrote his “Divine Comedy”. What does he present to us? A world of supersensible being. The whole philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus lived in Dante. Dante was a sage before he wrote that poem. The supersensible vision was before his soul. He was led through hell, through purgatory, his soul wandered through heaven. Man then became aware of his individual individuality. He asked about his relationship to his environment. This meant progress for humanity. Goethe says, for Goethe felt this as something powerful: What high thanks are to be said to him who brought us this world so freshly!

Again we skip a few centuries and come to the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries, to Shakespeare. Humanity was different. It had made progress in physical-sensual reality. How did Shakespeare create? For whom, first of all? He did not create for those who set the tone in education. He wrote for the lower classes and created his dramas in a completely abandoned society. The educated would never have come there, exposed themselves to shame and ridicule. Those who set the tone at the time were completely absorbed in the physical world, but the lower classes still retained a receptivity. Shakespeare takes man as he is in his actions, his destinies. The impulses of his characters were played out in the physical world, but it only created an image. He described only individual destinies. If Shakespeare had lived for centuries, he could have singled out many more such individual destinies and written many more such dramas. The greatest poet, Goethe, could not have created a second drama like “Faust”. “Faust” is what goes beyond the individual human being. Up to Shakespeare, man stands on the ground of the sensual world. Goethe rises above it and seeks to reconnect heaven and hell. Faust describes what is not the fate of an individual.

Schiller's search for and expression of the task of poetry can be found in his Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of Man. He asks: How does the human being rise from the everyday to the higher, the supersensible?

Wherever Goethe creates a single work of art, there is always a falling out of man from himself.

In this way, art moves in step with the development of man. Goethe leads from the sensual world into the supersensible one. The longing for the supersensible world is clearly shown to us at the end of “Faust”. The twentieth century will bring us Goethe's testament. In spiritual science, humanity is to absorb what art longed for. Now art is to lead humanity into the supersensible. Art is a secret manifestation of the laws of the world.

Spiritual science will be a fulfillment of the longing that Goethe expresses at the end of “Faust” in the “Chorus mysticus”:

All that is transitory
Is but a parable
The inadequate,
Here it comes to pass;
The indescribable,
Here it is danced
The eternal feminine
Draws us on.

Dear attendees!

If today we are to speak about the value and significance of truth for the development of the human soul, then the old question may well arise for some: What is truth anyway? Can one speak in any way in general about what truth actually is? And if one cannot answer this question, how can one then possibly determine anything about the value and significance of truth for the human soul? Nevertheless, it is by no means the case that one cannot distinguish between approaching the truth and moving away from the truth. What Lessing really meant to express in his famous saying about truth is truly valid: If God were to extend to me his right and his left hand and in his right hand held the pure, full truth; but in his left hand held the eternal striving for truth, then I would say: Father, give me what you have in your left hand, the eternal striving for truth; for the pure, full truth is, after all, only for you.

It is true that man can only have an eternal striving for the pure, full truth; but it would be a mistake if, because of this, one were to fall back into the misunderstanding that one cannot distinguish between that which corresponds more and that which corresponds less to the ideal of truth.

Let us visualize, not so much through theoretical discussion as through an example, how there is indeed a tangible difference, so to speak, between what can be called truth and what can be said to have removed man from the truth. It is not at all true in general that everyone can have their own point of view regarding the truth, that one cannot distinguish whether what someone claims from their point of view comes closer to the truth or moves further away from it. In this context, we may recall the saying of a recently deceased American multi-millionaire, who, among other things, in addition to his occupation, which was certainly more lucrative in terms of his millions, was concerned with arriving at the truth about certain things through thought. In his aphorisms, he made a remarkable statement about the value of human beings: no person in the world is irreplaceable; indeed, one cannot even speak of a special value of the individual. If I – so he said – now lay down my work, numerous others will be found to take it up where I left it. If I withdraw from what I have been doing, I will easily be replaced, and when I die – so roughly he said – the railways will run just as before, the dividends will be earned just as before. In short, nothing special in the world will have changed with the departure of a person. And then he adds – and this is important –: It is the same with every human being.

Let us compare this so-called truth, which the multi-millionaire has expressed from his point of view, about the value and significance of man in the world, with a similar saying by the witty German art historian Herman Grimm, who said this at the time. When Treitschke died, Grimm said about his work and significance: When a man like Treitschke has passed away, only then do we realize what he actually meant to all those who had contact with him. Treitschke was one of those people – as Grimm says – who, when they stop working, cannot find a successor for their work. He makes one realize that individuals are irreplaceable in their value and significance.

They are different, these two statements about the value and significance of a person: one from the American millionaire, the other from the spirited German art historian Herman Grimm. I would like to add: Grimm did not add what the American millionaire added: That is how it is with every human being! Two points of view, one could say, if one wanted to judge lightly, to the effect that the truth can take on a special form for each person. Two points of view, one could say, about the value and significance of the human being.

Now, which is the truer? If you examine the two statements a little, you will notice a huge difference between the two. You just have to examine them according to certain characteristics that are not usually examined today. How does the millionaire take his point of view? Merely in terms of his own personality. He considers what would become of the work he has done up to a certain point in time; he judges entirely from himself and comes to the conclusion that the work he is giving up could be taken up by someone else at any moment, and therefore it must be the same for everyone. A very personal point of view confronts us here, which looks only at itself in order to arrive at the truth about the value and significance of the human being. And Herman Grimm, he does not judge anything about himself in this case, but about another personality. He judges in such a way that he completely disregards himself and is, so to speak, overwhelmed by something that is outside of him as a being. And that is precisely how he comes to judge the case, not making a general judgment from this individual case, but simply accepting the case as it is. We need only consider the difference in the two points of view to see what is characteristic in each case. In the one case, the value and significance of the human being is judged quite subjectively, quite personally, quite from one's own ego; in the other case, the ego is not involved at all. And if we really consider both statements, who could fail to feel that the one who judges impersonally, who disregards himself, allows himself to be overwhelmed, as it were, by the objective, has more to say about the value and significance of a human being than the one who judges quite subjectively, quite personally! This must be the natural feeling of everyone. Such a comparison shows that we must never say: point of view is just a point of view; but that there is a way of approaching the truth, of actually arriving at it in certain respects, if we try to fathom the truth by taking an impersonal approach. Or do we not feel that in certain respects, as Herman Grimm says, each person is irreplaceable? Not only great people are irreplaceable. Can the point of view of the American millionaire apply when one considers how irreplaceable a mother is for many a child, for example? Can one say that something can step into this gap to replace her? Oh, one will feel it as soon as one takes the point of view that there is a coming closer to the truth, even if there can only be an eternal striving for the pure, full truth.

So it is precisely with those things that have such value for the human soul that it is important to examine them sometimes in a very intimate and profound way. And with what we have gained from the simple example of personal and impersonal judgment, we have already gained a great deal precisely for the characterization of truth.

In the lecture on the mission of anger, we started from the assumption that what is actually the nature of the human soul, what we can call its soul nature in contrast to the human body, consists of three parts: the sentient soul, which is, so to speak, the lowest of the human soul members, the mind or emotional soul, which forms the second link of the human being within, and the consciousness soul, which is the third link. And we have already characterized that this sentient soul is the link in the human being within which we find desire, instincts, passions and so on. We have, after all, examined a part of this sentient soul ourselves by pointing to the element of anger and its effect on the sentient soul, and we have seen how the I is present in this sentient soul in a dull way, as it is still overwhelmed by the passions, drives, instincts, and so on.

If we ascend to the next higher level of the human soul, to the soul of mind or feeling, then the I becomes clearer and more luminous, and the I becomes a power in the human being that can perceive and understand itself. How does the soul of mind or feeling actually free itself from the sentient soul? The human being stands in relation to the external world. This external world makes its impressions on the human being; it gives him the rich world of color and light, of sounds, of warmth and cold, in short, everything we perceive through our senses. When we bring our soul into relationship with the outer world through its organs, then, in our sentient soul, joy and delight, suffering and pain, and so on, arise in relation to what we perceive outside in the world of color, in the world permeated by sound, in the world of taste and smell, and so on, through our perceptions. Everything that is connected to our perceptions in our sentient soul, our desires and instincts, makes up the lowest of the soul's members, so to speak, and in this lives, still unaware of itself, the human I, this center of the human being. But in this lowest limb of the soul also live the affects, the passions, the drives and desires. Man lets himself be easily carried away by them; his ego is not yet master over anger, annoyance, vexation; it lets itself be carried away by lust and suffering, by drives and desires, is submerged in them, is not the conductor, the actor in relation to these drives and desires. We can say that the I lives down there, brooding in the surging sea of the sentient soul; but what we call the mind or feeling soul cannot be distinguished from this surging sea of the sentient soul, that which we call the mind or feeling soul, unless the human being delves so deeply into himself that he connects in his inner life with what he has experienced in the outer world. We receive direct impressions from this outer world. We carry these away from our interaction with the outer world. Then we are alone with ourselves. There we weigh one joy against another, there we brood over our pain, we try to get over it or to delve even deeper into it. There we expand within ourselves what we have received from outside impressions. What the soul builds up within itself could not be worked through by it if the I did not do something with what has been received, if the I did not work in this soul. Stimuli from outside can come without the ego; man only has to face the outside world, the world has an effect on him. Like in a mirror, the outer world gives rise to pleasure and suffering, desires and instincts and so on in the sentient soul; but it is only when we turn away from this outer world and collect ourselves, when we process our instincts and desires, when we form a whole in our imaginations, that we say: We work our way through the ego from the sentient soul to the mind soul, then we internalize ourselves within our self, then we process what we have received from the outside. And this inner work is the content of the mind or emotional soul. And only then, when we are able to relate what we have built up to the outside world, when we have formed a realm of inner experiences through our inner life, when we have developed a sum of pleasure and joy in our soul that we call ' beautiful', for example, and then apply all this to the outer world; when we come to recognize something in the outer world as good, beautiful, true through the concepts we have formed, then we say we attain knowledge of the outer world. There we work our way up to grasping the outer world, up to the knowing, cognizing human being: there we develop the consciousness soul. This is initially the highest level of the human soul. Thus the sentient soul leads us from the outside in, we live in ourselves through the mind or emotional soul, and we find the way again to grasp the world through knowledge and understanding through our consciousness soul.

Within the sentient soul, we have encountered the element of anger, and in that anger we have found one of the preparers for the development of the I and the soul. A person who is not yet mature enough to form an opinion about what is true, just, and good will, by falling into righteous anger at the sight of some lie, some injustice, some evil, take a stand on this external world. Anger will, so to speak, indicate to him: This is not in accordance with you, [this is a discordance, an obstacle] and in his inner being awakens that which is called the ego, which opposes the outside world. Where we are inflamed with anger at something we cannot admit, there is the awakening of the ego. [And [the anger] develops this in the transition and ascent into the intellectual and emotional soul through constant internalization out of the developmental soul.] So if anger is something that a person must overcome in order to develop, we can almost say of anger: It has its value in that it can be overcome; if anger has only attained its full significance for a person when the has been transformed into love and gentleness, we can say that the most important thing for the mind or soul is that it presents itself to us as the element that, in the best sense, brings the two sides of the ego mentioned yesterday to development. If the human ego is to develop in an appropriate way, it must happen in such a way that, on the one hand, it becomes fuller and fuller. Only by developing a rich life of ideas and thoughts, a rich life of feelings, emotions and will within himself [and thereby strengthening his ego forces within himself], only in this way will he be able to embrace much of the world on the one hand – and on the other hand, the ego will be able to become a strong starting point for working outwards. The more his individuality develops, the more — we may say — a person is worth in the world as a human being. But we have already pointed out that this I is a two-edged sword, that on the other hand this I, by only aspiring to become richer and fuller in itself, can close itself within itself; that precisely by wanting to live only in itself, it closes the door to the outside world and thereby becomes impoverished. If, on the one hand, a person is to become as independent and strong as possible, then he must avoid impoverishing himself by closing himself off from the outside world by also cultivating the second aspect of the self, selflessness, the merging with the outside world.

Where is the element in human development that, by its very nature, does justice to these two sides of the I? There is nothing else that does justice to both sides of the I as much as truth does. Truth is something that, if it is to appear to us in its highest form, we can only find in the innermost part of our I. Only that which we have recognized as such through our I itself can be considered truth for us. Thus, the truth for the ego must be found in the innermost part of the human ego. We can say: Through the self, the truth for the human being is found. When the human being understands this character of truth, then he will say: It is precisely through the work for the truth that the ego becomes stronger in its selfhood in its inner strength; for truth is only achieved when the ego has to make an effort, because truth can only be found in the depths of the ego.

Hence the peculiarity of truth: we need nothing more than the work of our own ego if the truth is to have any value for us. Admittedly, in the case of present-day man, there are hardly any truths other than the simplest ones that take on such a form for him that the ego can really decide through itself. These are the simplest arithmetical truths. Once we have decided for ourselves that three times three is nine and not ten, then this decision, made in the innermost sanctuary of our ego, is enough to know that this is true. And even if millions of people were to say that three times three is ten, we would still decide for three times three is nine. This is valid for mathematical truths because they are clear and, so to speak, present themselves to us directly in their simplicity. Therefore, when we overcome this simplicity through the passions that assert themselves in the sentient soul, by the I working its way up into the rational soul, it must overcome the other affects in the same way as it overcomes anger. For only by casting out the instincts, desires, drives and passions that are in the soul can what a person experiences in the soul become truth. Where people disagree about the truth, where not everyone finds the same truths in their soul, it is precisely the urges, the desires, the passions that prevent them, so to speak, from truly seeing the circumstances of the truth transparently and brightly and clearly. The passions cannot have a say in simple mathematical truths. If, for example, passions were to arise regarding the transparency of mathematical truths, then many a housewife would certainly desire that if she takes three times three marks to market, it would make ten marks; for the passions speak in favor of this, but the simplicity and transparency of the mathematical truths do not allow the passions and desires to arise. In this case – in any matter at all, where we have managed to silence the passions and desires, we also clearly see the circumstances of the truth. In all the things in which we have not yet succeeded in silencing the passions and desires, we are not yet capable of deciding on the truth in earnest. But when we have succeeded in deciding on a truth, then the ego is in its inmost being the judge of the truth. Thus, the ego must feel itself in its power when it decides on the truth, when it acquires truth.

And again: once we have acquired the truth about something, we may say: this truth, although acquired in the most personal way, is the most impersonal of all; for we can find the same truth in all souls. When we have found a truth, it will take on the same form in millions of people who have also found it. Thus we will be able to communicate with the whole world about the truth. Thus truth is the most personal and thus it is the most impersonal. It leads most deeply into us, because there it must be decided, and it leads out again, because it applies independently of our arbitrariness. Truth is therefore the element in the life of the soul that has the most important mission in relation to this life of the soul. On the one hand, it educates the self to independence – for the self is the judge of truth – and on the other hand, it educates the self to selflessness, in that truth brings together this self with everything in our environment where truth is to be spoken at all. The two sides of the double-edged sword are best educated by the truth, and so the ego becomes strong to be led up from the surging activity of the sentient soul, where it still broods dull; so it becomes strong enough to be led up into the soul of mind or emotion, and at the same time it is prepared to be led up into the consciousness soul, where it comes out again to grasp the environment, to grasp the world selflessly. Thus we have characterized truth as the most important and essential element in the development of the I, in the work of the I on the three soul-members, the sentient soul, the mind or emotional soul, and the consciousness soul. This is why truth is such a powerful educator of the ego, because it works on both sides. We just have to take it seriously. Only those who truly strive for the truth in their own selves, and only strive for the truth, who allow only the truth to determine their inner world of ideas, may hope that this truth will fulfill this implied mission for them. A great English poet rightly says of truth, hinting at its brittleness, hinting at the high demands it makes of us: “To him who prefers anything to truth, this goddess does not surrender.” Those who place their Christianity above truth will soon realize that they are placing their particular denomination above Christianity. But those who place their particular denomination above Christianity will soon realize that they are placing their sect above their denomination. And those who place their sect above their denomination will soon realize that they are placing their personal whims above even the teachings of their sect. So says the poet Coleridge. Truth reveals itself only to him who is in turn ready to surrender himself entirely to it. But now we meet this truth within ourselves in a twofold form. The I asserts its two sides, which we have characterized, quite well in relation to this truth. If we want to characterize these two sides of the I, then we must present to our soul the way in which truth presents itself to the I from the world.

We look into the world. World phenomena present themselves to our senses, that is, to our sentient soul. Those who want to form concepts, ideas, and images about the world but do not want to believe that this world is built from concepts, ideas, and images may as well admit that it is possible to scoop water out of a glass that contains no water. However nonsensical it would be to claim this, it is nevertheless true that we can draw from a world in which there are no ideas or concepts and create in our minds what we then have in our souls: ideas and concepts of the world. A world that was not built according to ideas, that was not steeped in wisdom, could never evoke a reflection in the human soul that represents concepts and ideas of this world as an inner experience. For what would our concepts and ideas be, through which the laws of the world are to be experienced in us, what would all science be, if the world were not built according to ideas? All science would be fantasy, reverie; for science is a sum of ideas and concepts. If there were no ideas and concepts, in other words, if there were no wisdom in the world, if the world were not interwoven and permeated by wisdom, then our wisdom would be folly; for it would be pure fantasy, pure error. We would imagine something in our soul as a picture of the world that is constructed quite arbitrarily. It only makes sense to create an image of the world with the help of concepts and ideas if one assumes that these concepts and ideas are present in the world and that the things themselves that present themselves to our senses arise and grow out of the wisdom of the world, out of the wisdom that flows and streams through the world. So we say to ourselves: Behind this world, which we perceive through our senses, which we feel and desire through our sentient soul, behind this world is wisdom. And we seek to approach this wisdom by working our way up in our soul to that which our mind-soul inwardly reveals as truth. Wisdom is there in the world; wisdom works its way out in our own soul as we ascend to the mind and consciousness soul. But when we relate to this wisdom in the world, we have to say: Oh, this wisdom is built into the world, incorporated into it. We human beings stand, so to speak, as belated observers in relation to this world and explore the wisdom that is implanted in it. [A large part of our striving in the acquisition of knowledge consists of appropriating what pulses and lives through the world as wisdom.] If we allow the wisdom that flows through the world to shine in us as truth, then we are truly the ones who come afterwards. And if we look at the development of humanity, [it shows us how, with all his doings and inventions, man falls short of the wisdom already achieved by the environment with its wisdom]. So we can say: A closer look at human development soon shows us how man, so to speak, stands behind the wisdom of the world with his truth. One can see this by taking a look at the historical development of humanity. In the school books, one can read how people gradually came to produce what we call paper from certain substances. Through human wisdom, people have learned to produce paper. Just as man makes paper out of certain substances, so the paper of the wasp's nest is made – for the wasp's nest consists of paper. The wasp's nest shows the art of making paper, which has been present in nature as wisdom for countless centuries and which man, in his historical development, has found afterwards. In this way, man is truly a thinker of what has been thought outside. A large part of our striving in the acquisition of knowledge consists in reflecting on the wisdom of the world, in appropriating within ourselves what pulses and lives through the world as wisdom. By relating to the world in such a way that we allow its wisdom to shine in us, we feel, precisely in the innermost essence of our I, that we are strengthening ourselves, that we are relating to the world with the substance that is outside as spiritual substance. We grow stronger as the wisdom of the world shines in our I as truth. This truth, which reflects the wisdom of the world, corresponds perfectly to one side of our ego, namely the side that we can call the selfless side. After all, everything we think about the world is there without our ego, it has been there long before we could think it. In grasping the wisdom of the world, we experience something that is outside of our ego. We pour our I out into the world, so to speak: we are completely world, we are completely given to the world, completely selfless, by reviving the wisdom of the world in ourselves. In this way we make ourselves selfless by completely giving ourselves, objectively giving ourselves, to the wisdom of the world, which, as the light of truth, is to shine in ourselves. That is one side of the truth.

The other side of the truth comes to us when we consider human labor. When we consider all the human ideas that we realize in the smallest and largest of things, whether it is an everyday idea or the idea of an inventor who invents a machine, for example, we have the resounding, productive, creative work of man in mind. First we have the idea, then we have what is the external expression of this idea or the consequence of the idea. We see what arises in us, what has not yet been thought in the world, springing from our I. We see our innermost being emerge in our everyday activities, in the activities that we can describe as the realization of the great ideas of the inventors. First there is the thought, we do not reflect on the thought, the sensory phenomenon is not there first, the thought is there first, in which the sensory phenomenon comes to us through our own action, we are the forethinkers and we are the ones who, after our forethought, enter the world creatively ; there we feel our I growing stronger on the other side; there we feel how the essence of our I has flowed out, feel that which we can call our selfhood; through which we become capable of seeing realized that which the I first experiences outside in the surrounding of our existence. There we feel that side of the I where we do not merge into something that exists without the I, but on the contrary, there we feel our inner activity, our selfhood. [Our I is in our deeds, our works, just as it has also worked first in our thoughts.] As a forward thinker, the I is truly cultivating its selfhood; as a backward thinker, the I is truly cultivating its selflessness. And in these two components of the entire inner life, the truth within our work and striving in the world confronts us as reflected truth and as thought-out truth.

Now we ask ourselves: Is there a mediation between these two sides? Just as life approaches the human being, so do the two sides of his ego approach each other, but still keeping the components of truth apart. Truth is indeed the great educator of both sides, but the way the ego appropriates this truth introduces a division. Is there anything where the two sides of truth confront us in the world? [But if there are such truths that existed before, before the ego, and the ego grasps them independently of the external world, then realizes them in the world, that is a truth that we can recognize as one of selfhood and at the same time of selflessness.] If there are such truths that, on the one hand, can be conceived before all sensual reality and yet are realized, not in machines and daily activities; but if we enact the truth independently of the external world and then see it realized in this external world; if the truth that presents itself to us as pre-thought can at the same time show itself to be formed entirely according to the pattern of the postulated truth: Such a truth would be one that particularly cultivates both sides of the self. Do such truths exist? It is precisely such truths that Theosophy or spiritual science seeks to provide for modern humanity.

Let us try to make this clear with an example. It has already been stated that it is the task of Theosophy to present the proposition: that which is soul-spiritual arises only out of that which is soul-spiritual, just as Redi, in another field, first presented the proposition: that which is alive arises only out of that which is alive. We have seen that this proposition follows from what we call the realization of the repeated lives of man on earth. The way in which spiritual research reveals that the innermost core of man's being re-embodies itself is not brought about by logical conclusions, but is an immediate realization of the clairvoyant consciousness. Just as a person with physical eyes sees color and light, so a person who has developed the inner, hidden powers of the human soul perceives the essence of the human being, which we can call the immortal, that lives in the human being and presents itself to the clairvoyant consciousness, that comes from previous embodiments and that goes to future embodiments. So, through supersensible knowledge, we have the concept of the re-embodiment of the human essence. So the spiritual researcher comes and says: Through my research I have established that the human being undergoes re-embodiments; he describes the re-embodiment, he conceptualizes it in the same way that modern natural science conceptualizes the sensory perception and intellectual acquisitions. With these concepts he presents himself to people. Such knowledge cannot be found through outer perception; it must be found through supersensible vision, through the development of those organs that we call the spiritual eyes and ears. But when it is found, it can be conceptualized, thought of, and given forms that we call the forms of truth. So, we have a truth before us that expresses itself in a way that is not possible through outer perception. We have a preconceived idea in contrast to external perception. Just as the thought, as the idea of the machine lives in the mind of the inventor, without him seeing it externally, so the thought of re-embodiment lives as a result of research in the spiritual world, it lives in the mind of the spiritual researcher, but then the message goes out into the world, then we can we can look at the outside world and say: We see how [for example, a child] from the first day of a human being [gradually] develops from the vague, blurred facial features into distinct forms, [into a fixed physiognomy], which slumbers in a dark background of existence. There we see the definite forms developing. And we say to ourselves: According to what the spiritual researcher tells us, we can easily understand this. What has been brought over from previous embodiments is the core of the human being, [who lives anew in the child and comes from a previous life], who works out what was indeterminate into definite forms. We look at the whole development and say: When we look at life and test life, then this life itself in its appearances shows us the truth of what the spiritual researcher says; and only bias can cloud a person's view to such an extent that he would not find the truth in the external sensory appearance of what the spiritual researcher brings down as a preconceived idea from the higher worlds. Thus the spiritual researcher brings his truths down from the higher worlds, and holds them up to external perception. What confronts us in the external world offers us the evidence for the truths from the higher worlds, in that we then understand the external world. We penetrate beneath things with what we bring to them as truths. Thus what has been thought out agrees with the outer world, as the inventor's idea agrees with the finished machine. Thus what is otherwise separate is united in the truths that Theosophy presents. There we have, as it were, nothing behind us. The theosophical truth is not found like the idea of an inventor — created out of nothing in a certain sense —, it is found through observation in the spiritual world. But it can be applied to the external sensual world. This theosophical truth is both a pre-thought and a post-thought. Therefore, it affects the human soul in a completely different way than all the other truths that we encounter. (By absorbing this truth, man unleashes his ego.

By immersing himself in the wisdom of the world, man loses his self, and his I becomes one that, so to speak, flows out more and more; it becomes impoverished of inner strength. By thinking ahead in his daily activities, by demanding that what has been thought ahead be translated into external reality, he wants to imprint his ego on the external world, he wants to see more and more in his surroundings what his self wills; he wants to imprint his self on his surroundings. In this way, he is completely absorbed in his selfhood, and has created an interest in making this I, quite apart from the environment, as strong as possible. We can see two possibilities for the education of the I. One is that the I becomes a completely reflective one, where it is completely devoted to the outer world, where it is more and more devoted to the outer world, where it does not grow stronger in its power. The other is where the self is not merely filled with ideas from the outside world, but should be filled by the will. In the first case, the self can become desolate in the will. We can experience that such people, who absorb objective truth in the most conscientious way, are weak in will. On the other hand, we can observe that those people who only want to impress their will on their environment become closed off from what is going on in the outside world, from what should awaken their interest in the wisdom-filled content of the world. Thus we see, so to speak, the thinking I developed in those people who develop in the first way, and the willing I in those who develop in the second way. But we can achieve harmonious interaction between the thinking I and the willing I by allowing spiritual-scientific truths to take effect in us. Then the two beneficent powers in the I will awaken. On the one hand, the I will let all the content of the world into itself, out of which it is born, and will enrich itself inwardly through what is poured out into the whole world as its spiritual content. On the other hand, it will gather itself together within itself in order to become strong within itself. Thus the ego will not be impoverished in either direction, but will become strong and healthy in both. And this is the health-giving quality of theosophical truth: on the one hand, it is as fully realized as the reflective truth, and on the other hand, it has the same effect as the reflective truth. Therefore, it is healing because on the one hand it pours into us all the beauty of the world and on the other hand makes our ego so flourishing and fruitful because it enables what grows in the ego to find its reflection in the outer phenomena. Through the theosophical truth, we develop our ego so much because it is the truth that is both premeditated and reflected. That is the healthy aspect of the theosophical truth. While we would see in a person who is only a reflective person, who only wants to comprehend the wisdom of the world, that he can, under certain circumstances, paralyze himself more and more in terms of willpower and that his inner weakness , that he becomes inwardly ill from lack of such power, we would see on the other hand that he who only wants to realize his will becomes inwardly impoverished because he has no connection with the world. On the other hand, we see harmony prevailing in all respects in the theosophist. The thought becomes more concentrated as it is seized by the confidence of realization. In short, by permeating itself with the theosophical truth, the ego becomes a point of passage for wisdom. There the will is enlightened and on the other side becomes the true center by having the premeditated truth with the postmeditated truth in relation to the world. Humanity will gradually recognize that the will, which can appear so dry and so sober to the one who merely wants it implemented in external reality, warms up to living feelings because it meets with the wisdom of the world; and again, that this wisdom, which can seem so dry to us when we merely reflect on the world, can seem individual to us when it meets with the living will in the ego. Wisdom and will must meet in the ego. This is the healthy, life-affirming truth that we not only produce mind-soul - or emotional soul - but mind-permeated mind-soul and mind-permeated emotional soul in the higher soul members, in the mind-soul, through the nature of the I, these two sides of approaching the truth.

Above all, in more recent times, no one has felt this so deeply as the person we have spoken about here many times before, who was as close to spiritual science as possible, who created the greatest poetic works, as Goethe. And a work by the later, older Goethe should serve as an illustration to what has been said today. Oh, Goethe knew clearly and distinctly that the way in which man confronts the truth depends on how he has developed in his own self. That truth is merely something objectively compelling was never Goethe's thought. That truth enlightens man all the more the more receptive he is, that was his fundamental conviction, which is little understood today. People come and say: Oh, we have long since gone beyond a certain way of grasping the truth. Science has led us to the point where we cannot help doubting that there is something spiritual in a living being. [Science has thoroughly driven out of us the belief that something spiritual is to be sought behind every material thing. It has driven out our belief in something like an etheric body or a life force, because science is close to showing how living substance can be composed of external chemical components. Don't you hear everywhere that we are told: We cannot recognize such fantasies as those presented by Theosophy, because our ideal is to produce protein, that is, something living, from dead matter in the laboratory. May a counter-question be asked here? After all the development of man, can what he expects about the composition of a living being decide anything? Can that decide anything for his beliefs about the spirit of the world? If you want to think about it, you can find external proof that nothing is decided about the belief in the spirit through something like the expectation that protein could one day be produced chemically in a laboratory. The one does not force the other at all, this can be proved historically. Ask what else people have believed in the past, for example, in earlier centuries, in the Middle Ages, they not only believed that they would succeed in synthesizing protein from carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and so on, they believed something quite different. Imagine the sentences in Goethe's Faust, where Wagner stands before the preparation of the homunculus; the ability to do this was a belief that existed in the Middle Ages. People believed that they could create something that was a small human being from external substances through the various processes they performed in the laboratory. However, this belief that they could create a human being from external substances did not cause these people to deny the spirit. Therefore, the denial of the spirit today does not arise from the compulsion of objective facts, but from the inability [to grasp the spirit] to rise within one's own soul to the kind of thinking that sees the conditions for professing the spirit. One must also consider such things, then one will understand what it meant that only the one who can work in the substance of the soul as the external naturalist works in the external substance can grasp the life of the soul.

And Goethe was one who could see deeply into the ideas we have presented today. Above all, he was aware of the contrast between reflective and pre-reflective truth. And he beautifully expressed this contrast in a wonderful little poem, his “Pandora”.

This “Pandora” was written in 1807; a lot of nonsense has been written about it. People said: This is a Goethean late work, in which Goethe presents all kinds of concepts in symbols. In a Goethe edition, by a much-praised German scholar, you can read the words: Well, what does that tell us, other than that we can form a concept of ourselves, that man represents what he thinks of himself? Goethe would have thanked himself for presenting to the world what he had “formed of himself.” Goethe himself may have once expressed himself in a manner that was not polite but clear about people's judgment of his late works.

Anyone who takes [Pandora] in hand [and lets it sink in], attentively and without prejudice, will recognize one of them. Oh, there are not many works in which the content is evaluated in such a wonderful way, in keeping with the style. It is the one in this work that can be called the light artistic hand. Read “Pandora” and, if you imbue it with your sense of style, you will admire the ease with which everything is shaped to suit the person and situation in question, whether in the verse structure or in the diction. One person speaks in this verse form, the other in a different, more lightly flowing style. Everything is easy in this “Pandora”. It is precisely in this that the greatness of Goethe having to leave this work a fragment is revealed. Even with a Goethe, such a powerful artistic accomplishment as that evident in “Pandora” is only possible for moments. Even for Goethe it was only sufficient for the beginning of Pandora; but then he lost his way, for he was too small to continue the work in the greatness that inspired him as an artist when he created the beginning. But that should not deter us from recognizing the greatness that is present in Pandora.

Goethe was very clear about people who say: Yes, what Goethe wrote in his youth, one can go along with, it is all full of poetic originality; but what Goethe allegorized in his old age, no reasonable person can understand. This was already the case during Goethe's lifetime – not with regard to Faust, but to his other works of later years – Goethe himself by no means held the first part of “Faust”, which is so admired, in the highest esteem. He knew what he had put into it in order to develop ever higher and higher; he knew within himself how much his later works stood above his earlier ones. And so he says something impolite, but clearly:

They praise Faust
And what else
In my works roars
In their favor.
The old Mick and Mack
Is very pleased;
The pack of rags and bones thinks
It would no longer be!

This judgment is justified in the face of the philistine critics of Goethe, who make Goethe into what they themselves are – at least something good comes of it! In recent times, our audience has been inundated with such interpreters of Goethe. [Let us take a closer look at the work in terms of our topic today:] “Pandora” contains on a large scale the problem of the reflective and the forward-thinking human being – [Epimetheus belongs to the former, Prometheus to the latter]. Zeus wanted to take away the existence of evolving humanity. Under Zeus's rule, humanity would have been doomed. Prometheus confronts Zeus. According to the legend, he brings man fire, language and writing. He is thus the one who gives people the opportunity to emerge from the state in which they used to be, where the ego brooded dull down in the sentient soul. Man was to develop his I more and more. It is a correct observation that everything to do with fire, for example, is somehow connected with human forethought. Travelers described how, in areas where they had made a fire, the monkeys, for example, came and warmed themselves, but it never occurred to the monkeys to stoke the fire themselves; that is, these animals of the highest species are not able to envision the future. These higher animals, which are closest to humans, certainly felt the pleasant warmth of the fire; they may also have felt some kind of thought in a dull form, but they still did not think the thought through to the point of maintaining the fire by adding wood, much less to think of further practical applications. It is precisely because man has mastered the element of fire that he has been enabled to make his ego the starting point of thinking ahead, [and thereby gradually to lead his ego to a higher level in ever-increasing measure].

Thus, in his “Pandora”, Goethe presents us with the two brothers, Epimetheus and Prometheus. There stands the one brother: Epimetheus. His name already indicates that he is the contemplative; he is devoted to that which is imprinted on the world as wisdom, those thoughts that can shine as truth in the human soul. He is not prepared to think ahead; in his soul he dreams the truth dream of the world, which is an afterthought conceived behind the wisdom of the world as truth. Such is Epimetheus. Prometheus, on the other hand, is devoted to the other one-sidedness; he wants nothing to do with the reflection of wisdom. He only wants to know about that which arises in the soul of man himself, in order to realize it.

The true celebration of the real man is the deed

— that is Prometheus' saying. [He is a man of action, and this is how he appears before us as a forward thinker.] Thus we see the two opposites: Epimetheus, the thinker, and Prometheus, the forward thinker. Goethe expresses this in his “Pandora” already in the scenery. On the one side, we have Prometheus' dwelling. We see that everything that has been built there has been created by human labor. Although it is rough, we see that it does not bear the character of nature anywhere, does not depict anything outside in nature; we do not see a copy of a natural beauty, it is rough and crude, but as a human work it stands before us. In contrast, what is on the side of Epimetheus as his residence, comes to us as a scene that is composed of the beautiful creations of nature, of parts of nature, and continues into a wonderful landscape. We see in it the reflection on nature and the act of settling in such a way that one lives according to what is exemplified outside. Epimetheus and Prometheus appear to us as complete opposites in their striving for truth.

In the Greek saga, we are told that Zeus wanted to take revenge for the act of Prometheus. [Through Hephaistos, Zeus had an image of a woman made in an artful, artistically beautiful way] – Pandora – [which he brought to life]. She was to bring people gifts from the world of Zeus. [After her descent to earth, Prometheus rejects the divine being, but Epimetheus takes her in and makes the beautiful goddess his wife.] The saga tells how Pandora, the woman created by the gods, opens the box [that Zeus gave her] and how the goods that actually make people miserable fly out. Only one good remains in it: hope. Thus we see that in the saga, Pandora also has something to do with that which belongs to the human race of the past. From the future, thinking humanity has only hope from Pandora. What else it has, what people can use to get by, has been handed down from the past.

This Pandora also appears in Goethe as the wife of Epimetheus. But we see very clearly that Goethe takes what is an external action and elevates it into a spiritual world. We see the reflective soul of Epimetheus and see it connected with Pandora, that is to say, in this soul of Epimetheus lives that which is spread out in the world as wisdom, which is reflected upon as in a dream. The characterization of Epimetheus, who dreams wisdom, which is nothing other than Pandora herself when personified, is wonderful. He feels unsatisfied and weak, and then, in the further course of the drama, Goethe has Prometheus, the brother, confront Epimetheus. There Epimetheus raves about the [beloved, but also vanished, divine] Pandora, about the all-gifted Pandora. Goethe shows us that through this figure, worldly wisdom is illuminated to him, but worldly wisdom as it is grasped by man in reflection. What is this reflected truth like? It is abstract, uncreative, unproductive. Imagine that we could combine in our soul all knowledge about the entire world; but this knowledge would be unproductive if it were only reflected. Just as the wife of Epimetheus, just as Pandora, is endowed with the wisdom of the world but is unproductive. Prometheus, who has no sense for this Pandora, confronts Epimetheus; while Epimetheus raves about Pandora's magnificent hair, about how beautifully her foot moves – Prometheus says: Oh, I know how it is made. [I know how Pandora was made by Hephaestus, the blacksmith, and how she was brought to life by Zeus. He thinks only of the origin of the goddess, not of the beauty of what has come into being, what has been created, and so Pandora, who is otherwise unproductive, gives him the impetus for productivity. And this is what can come out of it as a reaction in him.] In Pandora's case, it is something mechanically put together, something that cannot be put into practice; something against which he asserts his saying:

The true man's true celebration is the deed!

Now Goethe shows how Elpore and Epimeleia, Hope and Foresight, have sprung from the marriage between Epimetheus and Pandora. [In her departure, Pandora took one of her daughters, Elpore, with her to the gods and left Epimeleia, chosen by Epimetheus, with her father.] These two daughters show different sides of Epimetheus's nature, [especially the latter in particular]. Hope, [Elpore], is what reflection alone can defend in relation to the future. The one who is a forward-thinking person sees what he has thought come into being in reality; the one who is a reflective person can say: I expect this or that to happen in the future; because what should happen does not come from himself. On the other hand, there is Epimeleia, the other daughter, who protects the past.

Prometheus also has a scion, Phileros; the one who descends from this I-human Prometheus is the actual caretaker of human I-ness. But already in the son we see the full one-sidedness of mere self-seeking. He no longer wants to create. He no longer wants to create. He cannot endure in a useful, different, thinking activity. This does not endure, because one-sided striving for the self is not complemented by wisdom. In Prometheus, this striving for the self is still present in such a way that it permeates the whole being of Prometheus. In the son, it manifests itself in such a way that it shows its harmful side at the same time. The son is not only the creator, but also the enjoyer of what is there. In this way, he causes conflict. In his blind rage, he even wounds the one who protects what exists, [his beloved] Epimeleia, the daughter of Epimetheus, in a fight.

Thus the powers of the human soul, the reflective and the thinking powers, confront each other in this Goethean drama. [And so these powers fight each other. But nothing is achieved by this; for the soul powers only increase and strengthen each other through harmonious interaction. Only in this way can truth fulfill its mission in the human being.

Goethe shows us how, ultimately, it is through the interaction of the two currents that true human salvation comes about. And Goethe also shows us how what he has depicted here is, for him, a mature result of development. Goethe looked back to the time when he had only developed the Promethean nature in himself one-sidedly. In 1774, the Goethe who was certainly already endowed with all the makings of Goethe, but still immaturely youthful, expressed this one-sided Promethean truth as his conviction in his 'Prometheus' at that time, and it flows towards us there. And if today we find a certain self-satisfaction in pointing to this youthful “Prometheus” as if it gave us the whole of Goethe, then we have to say: this is only a one-sided expression of Goethe himself. Goethe did not stop at thinking ahead; he added the thinking of his mature knowledge, his reflection. No, not only the premeditation, not only that which rejects all wisdom, not only the pre-thinking that rejects all reflection, but the confluence of both alone can establish the mission of truth.

That Goethe in his youth stood on a one-sided point of view, we can still gather from something else. He does not remember the words in the first part of “Faust” where Faust sets out to translate the Bible. There we see how Faust approaches the Bible and wants to replace the correct word “In the beginning was the word” with another: “In the beginning was the deed.” This is what he wants to contribute to the Bible more as a youthful person; that was not Goethe's final opinion. People should stop seeing the whole of Goethe in this. In his youth, Goethe probably cultivated this Promethean point of view, but later he clearly showed how he had progressed beyond it, how he later knew that in addition to the aforementioned deed, in order to develop people healthily, the word, that is to say the reflection of the wisdom imprinted by the world's spirits, must occur. Therefore, in his “Pandora”, Goethe adds from his totality, broadening his youthful point of view:

From heaven,
Senkert's word and deed blessedly descend,
a gift descends, undreamt of before.

That is, he means, unimagined by himself in the past, when he still believed that he had to correct the Gospel of John at this point, to replace the passage “In the beginning was the word” with “In the beginning was the deed”. For Goethe, the deed becomes the word, which expresses the character of what was previously conceived. The word becomes the other, the illuminating wisdom of the world. This is why Goethe says in “Pandora”:

What you below feel is our wish;
What you can give, we know.
You Titans make great beginnings; but
To lead to the eternal good, the eternal beautiful
Is the work of the gods; let it be.

Thus Goethe complements his youthful Prometheus point of view in the right, harmonious way with the point of view of Epimetheus, showing us what attitude and loyalty to true philosophy should be. In this way, Goethe's example shows us the mission of truth within our own human hearts.

Today you have recognized the truth as an educator of the human being. You have seen that truth is something most personal and at the same time something impersonal; something that makes the human being an I-human being, and something that in turn brings the I together with all other beings. You have seen that the ego is so strong on its two sides that it still expresses its selfless character in the Epimetheus-like element of truth and its selfish character in the Prometheus-like element on the other side; and you have seen that it is possible to bring about harmony between the two in spiritual-scientific truth, which encompasses the two, leading the will up to wisdom, leading wisdom down and allowing it to be seen as light, to illuminate the will itself.

Thus we see that truth, although it yields to the strong human ego at an intermediate stage, nevertheless fulfills the great mission in its perfection of shaping the ego ever higher and higher. Truth has this mission, to be the greatest educator of the human ego, at the same time leading to strong inwardness in thinking ahead and to strong selflessness in reflecting.

Thus, truth is the power that has the strongest mission, that leads the ego from level to level, making the soul more and more perfect. And we see this from the point of view that Goethe himself took towards truth, not ignoring any earlier stage, adding the necessary Epimetheus element to the Prometheus element. And Goethe is a true model of a person striving for truth precisely where we eavesdrop on him so intimately, where we readily admit: precisely because we see that he has become more and more mature, we can emulate him; he is great because he shows us the hopeful paths in the pursuit of truth. And then we feel this striving in us in such a way that it fills us with healthy strength, making us stronger and more unselfish. We feel that, in contrast to this, the sentence falls silent that wants to say that truth depends solely on the point of view.

But then again we turn to Goethe and let another mood come over us. In all seriousness of striving for truth, we must never abandon that other healing element that tells us: When you believe you have reached some level of truth, have recognized something, it is also able to tell you on the other side: You must also have already decided; you must tell yourself about no truth that it could be completely infallible, you must strive to let it appear before your soul in an even more truthful form, even with regard to that which you have already recognized as truth. When we feel earnest and dignity in our striving for truth, we also feel a serious, dignified humor, which on the other hand so beautifully corrects what pride could instill in us as a sense of truth. We then also feel the other thing that Goethe always said when he was in danger of holding on to the one truth too tightly: Oh, the thought that has been considered could only be an illusion, the thought that has been considered could be something that does not prove feasible. Yes, let us also feel that as a corrective to our arrogance of truth, as a strain on our seriousness, our dignity in the pursuit of truth! Let us feel the Goethe word

Quite and truly
I am a poor wretch.
My dreams are not true,
And my thoughts go awry.

If we can feel this, then we will be able to cope with our lofty ideal of truth.

In August 1831, Goethe sealed away the second part of his “Faust” as his spiritual testament to humanity. The importance he himself attached to this work is evident from the words he addressed to Eckermann: “Now I have actually fulfilled my life's work, whether I do this or that in the years that may now remain to me, it no longer matters.” The yearning thoughts and interests that he put into this life's work go back to the poet's earliest youth. It is said that not everything I will say about it today is in it, but it has worked and lived in his soul in his creative power. In 1827, he said that he had made sure in his second Faust that the soul-related aspects of the external images, the theatrical aspects, were such that they could appeal to the external, sensual view, but that for those with a deeper insight, the esoteric meaning would become quite clear. It is the predispositions, the moods, it is the whole constitution of his soul from which emerged what became image, figure in Faust. From his birth, Goethe was attuned to what may be called man's penetration into the spiritual world. Not to remain with what the outer senses and the mind bound to them give as knowledge and worldly wisdom, but to penetrate through the veil of the sensual world of observation, of the world of the mind, to the invisible, supersensible foundations of existence!

We cannot find in young Goethe the mature wisdom that has found its way into the second part of “Faust”; he could only give the most mature, profound and profound things at the end of his life. To those who later find his works incomprehensible, such as “Pandora” or “The Natural Daughter”, the youthful Goethe appears as a naive poet who has expressed great and powerful things in his works, including the first part of “Faust”. That is something that powerfully moves people; in the second part, he has woven quirks and incomprehensible stuff into it.

Then they praise Faust
And what else

In my works roars
In their favor,

The old Mick and Mack
Is very happy;

It means the pack of rags,
It would no longer be!

We want to follow how “Faust” grew out of Goethe's life, how he always tried to penetrate to the spiritual sources of external nature. Even as a boy, he sought to approach what he then understood as the great God of nature, as the spirit that rules over all natural phenomena. As a seven-year-old boy, he took a music stand, laid minerals, rocks, plants from his father's herbarium on it to hold the realms of nature together. — This expressed a feeling in the mood, the representatives of what nature is. For the seven-year-old Goethe, this was the altar at which he wanted to make his sacrifices to the great god of nature. He placed a small incense stick and a burning glass on top and waited for the rising morning sun to collect its rays and ignite the small incense stick to a sacrificial fire before the great god of nature.

We then see how his soul gradually matured to the mood – after the move from Frankfurt to Weimar – that he enthusiastically expressed in the prose hymn “Nature”. Here he expresses his reverence for the spiritual realm, in the words:

Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by her – unable to step out of her, and unable to get deeper into her. Uninvited and unwarned, she takes us into the cycle of her dance and carries on with us until we are tired and fall out of her arms.

He knew himself so at one with everything excellent and everything seemingly deformed in nature that he said:

Even the most unnatural is nature, even the most clumsy philistinism has something of her genius.

And the other:

she invented death in order to have many lives.

What lies between these two times? Frankfurt and Weimar. How did he ascend to what we find in the powerful lyrical outburst in that prose hymn? From step to step, sometimes in unconscious urge, he has ascended in life. In his innermost being, at first unconsciously, he felt an irrepressible, invincible urge to know, which could not be hindered by anything, and which was connected with the whole of his life at every moment, pouring out, as it were, into the whole of his life, so that there can be no theory, no world of ideas for him at all, without his whole world of feeling and emotion being impregnated with his heart's blood. During his student years in Leipzig, he studied natural science, although he was destined for jurisprudence. In nature, he saw a kind of writing, in the natural world and natural facts, parables that express, speak like a writing, something that reigns as a secret in the outer sensual nature. Not through flashes of inspiration and fantasies did he want to penetrate the secrets of existence – he was born to the quiet walk through the world, which goes from step to step, from appearance to appearance. He did not want to grasp the phenomena of the world with a fanciful philosophy, even if the outer life, the passions, often rule more stormily and make invisible, so to speak, the actual, inner, calm, sure striving — this was always present in Goethe's life as a deep foundation. Now, towards the end of his time in Leipzig, a life event of the most serious kind occurred that immensely deepened his quest for knowledge: He fell dangerously ill. Where must knowledge lead us if it is to be true knowledge? It must lead us to where we penetrate into the secrets of life, as if led through closed gates, to those gates that life itself locks. Knowledge that would recoil from the problem of death could not satisfy the earnest striving of the human soul. The passing of death, which puts an end to everything that lives within the human mind and can be perceived with the external senses, imbued him with the seriousness in his quest for knowledge that his soul demanded.

In Frankfurt, where he now returned, it was other important experiences that strongly influenced him and about which he gives us hints in his autobiography “Dichtung und Wahrheit”. He came into contact with circles that were characterized by the earnest striving to connect what lives as spirit in ourselves with the great spirit of the world. At the center of those circles, which aspired from the depths of their souls to the depths of the world, was Susanne von Klettenberg. He turned to the study of very strange works, for example, “Aurea Catena Homeris”. Some of today's intellectuals would find only the most extravagant nonsense in it. Goethe did not. He did not find the kind of information one would find in a book on natural science, but rather things that affected him in such a way that he felt forces well up in his soul that he had to assume were otherwise dormant in man. He felt like a blind person born blind, in relation to the physical world, when he is operated on and his eyes open so that he can now perceive what was previously also present but not perceptible. He found symbolic thoughts in those books. The dragons, triangles, signs of the planets awakened in him a hunch that our soul can become like an organ for spiritual worlds.

He was still in this mood when he moved to Strasbourg. The first mood pictures of “Faust” emerged from this mood. So it is part of his soul, of his heart's blood, when we see Faust at the very beginning, how he has studied all the sciences - like Goethe in Leipzig - and then, unsatisfied by this, tries to penetrate into the supersensible world through a special method of spiritual research. Nostradamus, Sign of the World Macrocosm. He now lets Faust experience that his soul is still too small to develop within itself a sense for the great world. He seeks to evoke within himself the mood with which he can penetrate into what lives as a spiritual being, beyond earthly existence. He conjures up the earth spirit. From the answer that this gives him,

In the flood of life, in the storm of action I surge up and down, weaving back and forth! Birth and grave, an eternal sea, a changing weaving, a glowing life, that is how I create at the whirring loom of time and work the living garment of divinity.

It is clear that the earth spirit is a creative, productive force, that life is expressed in the elements of earthly existence, but one thing is missing: there are no passions or desires in it – only birth and death. He, the earth spirit, appears as an entity that expresses the higher, desire-free, purified forces of human nature in his character. It is an important law of the spiritual world that knowledge is not independent of moral endeavor. Knowledge in the higher sense can only be attained when our soul sheds that which is connected with desires, affects, inclinations, passions. The passions slumber in the depths of the soul, pervading the world of thought and knowledge. Goethe knew that the purity of the earth spirit is an ideal, but he also knew how difficult it is to fulfill. When the earth spirit then calls out to Faust:

You resemble the spirit you comprehend, not me,

sounds like the echo of his own inner being, which is aware of how far removed it is from the actual spirit of knowledge.

The body also hinders its materiality from revealing the pure forces that can approach the spirit. Faust feels: I am held down by what I do not see in my outer corporeality, not by the material forces, but by what is supersensible in corporeality. The embodiment of this supersensible in the physical is Mephistopheles; that is the spirit that he grasps for the time being. All the scenes in which he portrays how this companion and fellow attempts to lead Faust through the whole life of sensuality arise from him, always trying to pull him down from the regions of spiritual life into that which man as spirit and soul can only experience within the body. Step by step, Faust seeks to overcome Mephistopheles. Through the development of his own soul, he wants at all costs to penetrate into the spiritual world. But not through artificial, tumultuous means - spiritists - but seriously, piece by piece, [Goethe] lets the world affect him until he sees in all the details of nature something like characters that express the mysterious life of nature. After all that he had seen in the way of minerals and plants, he wanted to make a journey to India to look at what he had discovered in his own way, to read it again with the powers of the spirit that had now become his own. Appearance after appearance, fact after fact, he wanted to let it work on the soul, so that through the spiritual eyes and ears developed for the soul, the spiritual natural reasons for existence would leap out of the facts.

In Italy he examines everything to see if it can be a sign in the great cosmos. When he saw the works of art, he wrote, who had previously been a follower of Spinoza's theory:

There is necessity, there is God!

because he felt that there is a spiritual force behind art, that each individual work of art is a letter and that letter by letter, work of art by work of art, they fit together to teach us to read what, as a spirit, stands behind creative humanity in relation to art. Nature, plants, animals, everything, even in the mineral world, does not belong to dead material, but to the written character for the spirit behind it.

When Faust addresses the earth spirit:

Exalted spirit, thou gavest me, gavest me everything,
why I asked. Thou didst not in vain
turn thy face to me in fire

etc., it is as if he wanted to say: I now have a different relationship to the exalted spirit, which at the time touched me like a presentiment that made me unhappy because I could not realize it. I am beginning to understand you! The difference between the Promethean urge of the young Goethe and the overarching wisdom of the old Goethe is expressed in the fact that he does not want Faust to translate the first chapter of the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word.” In contrast, in Pandora-1807, he writes:

From heaven descend
Word and deed, blessing each other,
Gift descends, unimagined before.

Man is more than what he locks up in himself, he is something that great cosmic forces fight for, forces of good and evil – prologue in heaven. The human soul is the theater of their struggle. The soul world is a world of spiritual colors and sounds: the new day is already born for spiritual ears, it trumpets, it sounds, the unheard does not hear itself.

Yesterday I endeavored to show how what is to be presented here about Goethe's innermost and most intimate opinion and view of the development of the human soul can be gained and that nothing in his works and especially in his Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily is arbitrary, that nothing has been arbitrarily secreted into it. I have tried to show how the whole basis for the explanation of the “fairytale” and Goethe's world view can be gained from an historical consideration of Goethe's life, from the historical pursuit of Goethe's most important ideas and impulses. An attempt has been made to substantiate what is to be given on the subject today in a more freely formulated way.

If we allow the fairy tale we discussed yesterday to come to mind, it does indeed seem to us to be completely immersed in mystery, and one might say: either we have to assume that Goethe wanted to incorporate many, many secrets into this fairy tale, as in Faust, according to his own words, or that we could regard this fairy tale as a mere play of the imagination. If the latter were not already excluded by Goethe's whole way of thinking and being, one would have to say that such an assumption is particularly prohibited by the fact that Goethe placed this fairy tale at the end of his story “Conversations of German Emigrants”. For it is the same thought that is characteristic of Goethe's entire life, which also lies in his conversations with German emigrants, and from what immediately precedes it, we can once again take the theme for this fairy tale.

We are presented with the conversations of people who have been forced to emigrate due to events in their French homeland, which look back in the most diverse ways on their sad experiences. The whole story is focused on showing what people who have been uprooted from their environment can go through as a result of this uprooting, in terms of the loneliness of the soul; what people in this situation can gain by reflecting on their psychological experiences, by observing themselves. We can only highlight a few examples to show how Goethe wanted to focus everything on revealing how the soul that wants to observe itself, that asks: What kind of guilt have I accumulated, how have I blocked the paths to development? First of all, we meet an Italian singer who is to reveal her destiny to us because in this destiny a human soul appears before us that must cling to the surface of the world view, which, although it follows what is going on around it attentively because it is forced to do so by is forced by the processes of life to do so, but is not yet mature enough to distinguish between what may be called chance and the spiritual necessity of things, a soul that does not know how the phenomena of life must be connected, if we assume the spirit in the environment. She has behaved towards a man in such a way that he has become seriously ill as a result of her repulsive manner and is dying because of her behavior. She is summoned to his deathbed, but she refuses to come. He dies without having seen her. After his death, all kinds of things happen that give the soul just described food for thought. 'How should I behave towards this?' she wonders. After the man's death, something very strange happens. She hears very strange things in the room, the furniture dances, she is slapped in the face by an invisible hand, and she is always forced to ask herself: Is the dead man somehow there, wanting to assert himself because I refused him? The top of a cupboard bursts, and at the same moment a cupboard in her own apartment in France, made by the same carpenter, goes up in flames. Goethe did not want to express that there was anything in such events that could give rise to the assumption of hidden spirits or the coming of the dead, but he only wanted to say that there could be such spirits that interpret all kinds of events in such a way that they are not sufficiently superstitious to say that the dead are certainly rumbling; they only come into an indefinite feeling and cannot get over it. What happens to the souls in the outside world according to their level of development is what Goethe wants to draw attention to. He then shows how one comes to the position of healing a lady from sensuality and passion; he takes the path of asceticism. This is again an indication of what the soul can go through in order to experience development. Goethe then leads upwards in stages. First a soul digging in the dark, then a more real thing in the lady just described, because many come to a cleansing of their soul through fasting. We are already entering more into a reality. And through the third of the things mentioned by Goethe, we enter completely into reality. He shows how a person is initially somewhat unscrupulous, he is in a subordinate soul development and says: What belongs to my father also belongs to me. He commits theft. Then conscience awakens, the soul rises, and precisely through the unrighteous deed he becomes a kind of moral center for all the people around him. He shows a soul development that signifies an ascent from a subordinate level to a higher level of knowledge and world view.

We are dealing with soul forces that are represented by the figures, the beings of the “fairytale”, and with the play of soul forces that is to be purified into harmony, into a symphony of soul forces in the deeds that the persons perform. At first we are confronted with will-o'-the-wisps that are ferried across the river by a ferryman. These will-o'-the-wisps are initially filled with gold, but the ferryman does not want their gold as a reward because everything would end in wild tumult. He much prefers to have fruits of the earth: three cabbages, three artichokes and three large onions. The will-o'-the-wisps have the ability to create a golden haze around themselves. They meet the snake, the aunt of the horizontal direction. For her, the gold is fertile and beneficial. She becomes inwardly radiant through the gold pieces. She can now illuminate what she could not see before.

When I tried more than twenty years ago to gain access to this fairy tale in every possible way, it was above all a rewarding thought in the tangle of questions of the “fairy tale” when it became clear that above all one had to follow the gold. Gold plays a role in different ways. The will-o'-the-wisps scatter it around. There it is not something blessed in a certain respect. In the snake, it becomes beneficial. Then we encounter gold again in the golden king, on the walls of the hut of the old man with the lamp; the will-o'-the-wisps lick it down, making themselves thicker. Once we are pointed to the human soul quality that gold has something to do with when we are pointed out that the golden king represents the giver, the bringer of wisdom. Goethe himself tells us: the golden king, in comparison to the others, represents the giver of wisdom. So gold must have something to do with wisdom. Gold is what makes the king wise, what enables him to endow the youth with wisdom:

Recognize the Most High!

Gold is something that the giver of wisdom is able to instill in man. The will-o'-the wisp must therefore represent the powers of the soul that are capable of receiving wisdom and that can also shake wisdom off. It must be shown how the gold can be stored; it is stored for a long, long time in the walls of the hut. We will have no choice but to see soul forces in individual persons, because we know how well it is founded. We can describe the will-o'-the-wisps as the abstract mind, the abstract thinking, which is capable of acquiring a certain amount of wisdom. Now we also understand why knowledge in the pure power of reason plays such a role in will-o'-the-wisps. Those who absorb what science is with their bare minds absorb it in order to have something personal about it, in order to be able to use it personally.

Goethe often congratulates himself on not officially representing science as a teacher. He congratulated himself on being able to give of his wisdom to the world only when he was inwardly compelled to do so, rather than being forced to cast it aside, as is necessary when one is destined to be a teacher or mere abstract dispenser of wisdom. Goethe presents such people in the will-o'-the-wisps, who have abstract knowledge. The abstract intelligence can absorb a vast amount of knowledge, but it leads to vanity. It is also spoken in Goethe's sense: However cleverly we think, however many abstract concepts we have, as long as we have ideas that are not drawn from the depths of life, they are unsuitable for ultimately leading us into the secrets of the eternal riddle of existence. Where we need something that goes straight to the heart of the eternal ideas of existence, we need something other than abstract concepts. When we come to the boundary of the physical world and the realm of spirituality, we are repelled by all abstract concepts and ideas. Indeed, all these abstract concepts and ideas are not even capable of making us understand, so to speak, what is closest to us. How far removed the abstraction is from even the most mundane things that surround us. It is incapable of giving anything to the stream through which we must pass if we want to enter the supersensible world. And if we want to approach the very source of life, it rears up when we come up with mere intelligence. The will-o'-the-wisps are from the vertical line, while the snake is from the horizontal line. This indicates that man, with abstract ideas, removes himself from the ground, from the ground of everyday life. We see how vividly the will-o'-the-wisps are formed. But are ideas and concepts, philosophical expositions, under all circumstances that which separates us from the true source of existence? No, it is not that; for if man has the ability to live in such a way that he combines his own life forces with things, that he does not rise up into the realm of abstract concepts and ideas, but moves quietly in things, such a spirit becomes, as Faust is one when he says:

Exalted Spirit, thou gavest me, gavest me everything
I asked for. Thou didst not in vain
Turn thy face to me in the fire.
Gavest me the glorious nature of a kingdom,
The power to feel and enjoy it. Thou dost
You only allow coldly amazed visitors,
Allow me to look into their deep chests,
As into the bosom of a friend,
You lead the line of the living
Before me and teach me my brothers
In the silent bush, in air and water.

Where man truly enters into communion with nature, the same concepts that alienate him from the world when he deals with abstractions serve him to penetrate ever deeper into existence. We must not simply turn around and say: because the abstractionist distances himself from reality, concepts and ideas are worthless in general. If there is a soul-power in them, which lives in and with things, then they become full of light at the same time. This is why gold becomes such a blessing for the snake, which lives in crevices and has a horizontal direction, and does not become alienated. When man loves things, when he mystically immerses himself in things, then ideas are the light that can help him through. Therefore, it can be experienced that sometimes scholastically presented philosophy seems frosty and sober. But when we encounter the same ideas in lonely nature lovers, in herb and root gatherers, and so on, we see how, in fact, in the serpents, in those who make contact with things, the ideas become full of light, which are sober in the abstractions. The snake thus points to the power of the soul, which has the mystical urge to submerge itself mystically in things everywhere. This is represented when the snake moves through the crevices. Man, who does not move in abstract things, comes close, like the snake, to the underground temple. If a person has a sense for the mysterious workings of the forces of nature, he comes to the heart of nature; he can experience something of what lives outside in nature in things, even if he does not have the ideas. The snake shows us the people who can live without ideas in an emergency, but who, by lovingly immersing themselves in things, come to grasp the riddles of the world. But when a balance is created, in that ideas and concepts are immersed in these mystical soul forces, then it comes about that the person who is lovingly inclined towards things can also illuminate with his own light what was previously only sensed from the sources of existence. Goethe says meaningfully:

If the eye were not solar,
How could we behold the light?
If not the divine power of God lives in us,
How can we be enraptured by the divine?

He immediately points out how we must respond to the light of nature's secrets if these secrets of nature are to shine back again. Man must have the inner sense, the open heart, he must have cultivated the recognition of the spiritual. Only then can he also see the spiritual in his environment. Then the snake enters the underground temple. Such underground places exist for the life of the soul. These things can only be characterized if they go into the strange workings of the human soul in development in a little more detail. Can it be felt that before the soul is able to perceive the spirit in the outer world, it has the inner certainty: Yes, there is a primary source from which everything flows? It can have this certainty and still not be able to see the spirit everywhere. Oh, it is a great goal to see the spirit everywhere. [Feeling: I myself have emerged from the spiritual. To do this, man must awaken.] Man must first develop the highest soul powers within himself. He must first evoke in himself the supersensible that sleeps in ordinary, normal consciousness. First he must ascend to higher levels of development.

First, the human being must have an inkling that something like this exists. Then he comes to another realization: I can only achieve my ultimate goal if I see how my whole existence is permeated by the spirit. I have been crystallized, born out of the spiritual, out of the supersensible, without my being involved in this birth out of the supersensible, which I can ultimately achieve through knowledge. In a mysterious way I am born out of the land that I can only reach again in the end. This characterizes the land of the beautiful lily, from which man also comes. The ferryman brings him over. Man is brought over by secret powers. The ferryman who brings to this shore must never bring anyone back again. The same real way by which we are brought over from the supersensible through birth cannot be the way by which we consciously return. Other paths must be taken.

Then the will-o'-the-wisps ask the snake how they can enter the realm of the beautiful lily, that is, how a single soul force can ascend to the highest. Two means are indicated: firstly, when the snake crosses the river at noon. But the will-o'-the-wisps do not like to travel there. It is quite beyond the scope of the Abstract Being, who wants to live entirely in ideas and inferences, to cross over in the way represented by the snake, through devotion to things, through mystical communion with things. This mystical communion cannot always be achieved. A great mystic of the Alexandrian school confesses that he has only achieved a few moments in which the spirit of the infinite has entered the soul, where the God in the breast is experienced by the human being himself. These are moments at midday when the sun of life is at its highest, when something like this can be experienced. For the Abstractlings, who say to themselves: Once you have the right thinking, it must lead to the highest, such midday hours of life, which one must await as a grace of life, are not hours in which they can travel; for them, what they are looking for must be achievable at any time. Then the snake points out to them that the shadow of the giant, who is powerless by himself, will fall across the river, and that is when they can cross over. If we want to understand the giant, we must bear in mind that Goethe was well aware of the powers of the soul that lie below the threshold of consciousness, which in the normal person only emerge in dreams, but which belong to the subordinate clairvoyant powers. These are powers that are not acquired through the development of the soul, but that occur particularly in primitive souls in intuitions, second sight, in all that is connected with less advanced souls, from which a primitive clairvoyance emerges.

Through such clairvoyant powers, man arrives at some notions of supersensible worlds. Many people today still prefer to come to the supersensible world through such intuitions or through spiritualistic shadow images than through the actual development of the soul. Everything that belongs to the realm of the subconscious, to the realm of the soul, that is not illuminated by clear understanding, by the light of insight, of self-control, everything that expresses itself like dream-like knowledge, is represented by the giant. In truth, one can recognize nothing through this consciousness, for it is very weak compared to real knowledge. It is something that one cannot control. It is best personified by a person who cannot carry weight, because through this realization nothing can be recognized that has weight for a worldview. But the shadow of this subconscious plays a great role in life. Only one word needs to be said to characterize this shadow: superstition. If countless people did not have superstition, the shadowy image of the subconscious that operates in the twilight of knowledge, they would have no idea of the supersensible world. For countless people today, superstition is still the shadow of the subconscious that leads into the supersensible. I need only emphasize how people can say that Theosophy, spiritual science, is something that only those people can grasp who put a lot of effort into raising the soul to a higher level. That is an uncomfortable thing. If the spirits want to be there for us, they should descend to us. This is where all the abundant superstitions in the field of modern superstition come from, which even today scholars pay homage to, who absolutely do not want to admit that the soul can become part of the spiritual through development. They are readily available to a medium who can give them some gift from the spiritual world. This is not to say that these things cannot be based on truth, but the distinction between error and truth is extremely difficult here and only possible for the initiated.

Goethe wants to point out this shadow of the subconscious, this realm in the human soul, but not like a polemicist, which Goethe never was. Goethe is clear that every power of the soul has its significance at its level; he even finds it useful here to have the snake give advice to the will-o'-the-wisp. But superstition plays a major role in drawing attention to and directing the human mind to the supersensible world. Goethe, who wanted to depict the entire spectrum of the soul's powers in their symphonic harmony, shows how this superstition has its good basis in the soul, in the powers that do not always come up with sober, clear concepts, but say to themselves, the things are rich, we just want to sense secrets for now, not frame them in sharp contours. This intuitive sense is something tremendously important that is to play a role in the overall consciousness and life of our soul development.

What was so clearly expressed in external nature for Goethe plays into the development at a higher level.

Goethe saw a certain law in all natural activity like a leitmotif. It is a law of balance that nature has a certain measure for all things and can give rise to all possible beings from unity. Goethe sought the law in all of nature in order to see in harmony everything that is embodied one-sidedly in the external world. When Goethe uttered this sentence, he was seen as just a poet, an amateur. The sentence only caused a stir when Cuvier, in his dispute with Geoffroy St. Hilaire, also drew attention to this law. Goethe, who lived in an understanding of nature that saw one-sidedness everywhere and wanted to grasp the whole by harmonizing the one-sided, also saw something in the soul that he wanted to combine by harmonizing. There are people who represent one-sided soul forces. The false prophets, who want to apply their wisdom everywhere, are the will-o'-the-wisps; then there are serpents and so on. He wanted to show that man can reach higher levels by representing the type of human being within himself. Thus, the sense that senses the supersensible in the sensible must be connected with abstract intelligence. One must not let the sober intelligence be subjugated by the sense, but nor should one emphasize the abstract concepts one-sidedly and refuse to understand how full of content is that which lives and moves in things. Goethe wanted to show how man can become one-sided, but how he must strive for the beautiful lily, for the inner, balancing human soul.

After the snake has received the inner glow, it enters the temple. The powers that must inspire the human soul give the strengths that man must have within him if he wants to ascend to higher existence. Goethe shows that there are certain powers of the soul that the soul must have if it is to ascend to higher levels. But if a person wants to attain the higher levels without having found the right path at the right time through inspiration, through the world powers, then this world view is something that can kill him, confuse him in his soul, paralyze him. Therefore, the youth who is not mature will be paralyzed at first, or even killed by complete exposure. So, what wants to free the mind without giving us control over ourselves, that has a killing effect, says Goethe. All our striving must be directed towards making us mature, towards shaping us so that the soul receives the highest in the right mood, in the right state. So the youth is killed at first. He is to be prepared by the endowment of soul powers by the kings. We have already seen from the golden king that he is the spiritual power that can be kindled in the soul and that gives wisdom in the right way when it harmonizes with the other soul powers. The silver king represents piety. For Goethe, beauty and the cult of art are closely related to piety. Beauty is that which makes us inwardly pious. The power of the soul that draws us through our feelings to the spiritual world is represented by the second king. The power of the soul of will [to do good] is represented by the brazen king.

But these soul powers must enter into the soul in such a way that we can distinguish them, that they enter into us in the right way, that we can master them, separate them; the life of feeling from the life of wisdom, and likewise the life of will from the life of feeling and the life of wisdom. These powers, which thus appear separately, condition the higher life of wisdom. The lower life is represented by the mixed king. Every human being has these three soul powers within them, but mixed. A higher age in the development of humanity will only begin when this chaotic mixing of soul forces ceases, when they are no longer mixed in such a chaotic way as in the fourth king, but are clearly separated from each other, with the area of soul power permeated with wisdom, and that permeated with beauty, and that permeated with the will to do good. Then the time comes when man may say to himself: “It is time.” Something else must precede this. A soul that has been led unprepared through wisdom, beauty and power would hardly see anything special.

Another soul force must guide us, which is represented by the man with the lamp. The lamp can only shine where there is already light. It is the light of faith that radiates from our hearts, even if we have not yet penetrated into things. It is what is brought as faith to things. It is a light that can only shine where there is already another light: religion can only generate faith where it is adapted to what people feel in a particular climate, in a particular cultural epoch, and so on. There the serpent, which wants to penetrate to wisdom, beauty and strength through the mere inner soul power, must encounter the light of faith that prepares the soul. Thus Goethe shows that the right time must approach, that first the soul must be guided by the light of faith, and that we can then come up to a direct grasp of the soul forces in being separate and in direct interaction. On this side of the river, then, man must prepare himself. On the other side it is shown how man, if he connects with the soul forces unprepared, damages his soul.

A strange figure is the old man's wife with the lamp, who is described as human, all too human, vain and so on, who is chosen to pay the ferryman with the fruits of the earth. This is primitive human nature, which has the power to be connected to the light of faith. We are shown: that the light shining from the lamp of the old man transforms stones into gold, wood into silver, dead animals into precious stones. The pug is transformed into a precious stone. This shows the power of faith, this very wonderful power of faith, oh, how it is able to show us all things in such a way that they really show us their divine in a certain way, show us what is in them. Dead stones turn to gold, showing themselves to be endowed with wisdom. Faith already senses this in things, how all things are not what they appear to us through the senses. This is shown by the transformation through the lamp. Man, when he remains in his healthy nature, when he cannot attain to science, has something within him that leads much more to the boundary of the supersensible. The scientist becomes a doubter, a skeptic, and one tries to see how certain some original nature, represented by the old woman, is able to give facts to the flow as the will-o'-the-wisps cannot. Such natures have an original feeling that connects them to the supersensible, which weaves and lives in everything; and one can see in such people how a compassionate smile appears when scientists talk, saying, we know something that you cannot know, that brings us together with what we are created from. This is shown by the fact that the woman can pay.

The temple must be transported from below the earth up into the upper realm, it must rise above the river. And it is conceivable that a soul has gone up the steps in such a way that it can experience, feel the midday moments of life; so that it is achieved through a higher soul development, that not only special spirits can cross the river. That is what is achieved in the new culture through spiritual science. And Goethe behaves like a prophet in the new culture by pointing out that not only special minds can find the transcendental realm, but that there is a soul development that everyone can undergo; so that everyone can walk over and across when what is the actual secret has occurred.

“How many secrets do you know?” – “Three,” replied the old man. “Which is the most important?” asked the silver king. “The obvious one,” replied the old man.

The expression “the revealed secret” often occurs in Goethe because, like all true mystics, he believed that the connection between the material and the spiritual is evident everywhere; therefore, it is not so important for man to seek the spiritual in all sorts of detours, but to really connect with things as the snake connects with them. The revealed secret of all three is that which can be found everywhere, and which requires only a certain maturity of soul. The three secrets are simply these: wisdom, piety and virtue. A fourth is still needed for this, the snake whispers into the old man's ear; the old man cannot know that. But he can know that it is now time. What does the snake say now? That she is willing to sacrifice herself to be a bridge over the river. There you have the whole secret of the sacrifice of the lower soul forces. You can find this sacrifice further in Goethe's words:

And so long as you do not have this,
this dying and becoming,
you are only a dull guest
on the dark earth.

First, a person must go through all that has led him through life. But what he has gained, what he has experienced through the lower soul life, he must be able to sacrifice in order to ascend.

Jakob Böhme, whom Goethe knew very well, expressed this secret beautifully:

He who does not die before he dies, will perish when he dies.

He who enters the supersensible world before he has died for the lower self would not yet be able in this embodiment to see correctly the spiritual after death.

He who does not die before he dies, will perish if he dies.

The soul protects itself from ruin in the lower self, says Goethe, when it becomes like the snake that sacrifices itself, that is, there is a soul force in us that can connect with the forces of nature and that must be sacrificed: that which, as lower selfishness, is necessary to achieve human freedom. Therefore, that which has led us becomes the way into the beyond. We enter the supersensible world through that which we have sacrificed ourselves. The will-o'-the-wisps are now able to unlock the door of the temple. Science has the key to the realm of the supersensible, but it cannot lead into the real secrets, because it only leads to the gate of the temple, just as Mephisto has only the key to the realm of the mothers, but cannot penetrate it himself. So we see how the will-o'-the-wisps actually fulfill their role to the end and how Goethe captures the meaning of soul development in each individual case.

What remains of religious belief? The tradition in our cultural processes. Go to the libraries, look up how much of the gold is stored there, and see how the abstractions lick the gold down and make new ones out of the old books, as a librarian once said. Goethe shows that the will-o'-the-wisps can feed on that. How many scholars walk around full of what comes straight from these sources. The pug dog dies from it, it makes him feel worse. But he can be revived by the lily, as he has passed through death. Whoever wants to endure contact with the lily must first have passed through the lower death. The youth is only ready to unite with the beautiful lily when he has suffered the last misfortune, is completely dead, has fully felt the effect of what happens when one unites with the supersensible while still immature. The snake sacrifices itself, which has an immediate effect on the details of natural existence. When all this has happened, the youth can then be led into the temple. Then the soul is led upwards to the realization that everything is permeated and animated by the spirit. Then the temple is led upwards, the soul endowed with that which leads to the supersensible. Wisdom gives him that which is characterized by:

Recognize the Highest

and by the oak wreath; the golden king gives that. The silver king says:

Feed the sheep,

in memory of the pious shepherd,

Feed my lambs;

is an expression of piety. The iron king gives him a sword and a shield and says:

The sword on the left, the right free!

Stand strong and firm on your feet when it comes to defending human dignity and human dignity, but do not be aggressive. Now the young man is allowed to connect with the lily. The powers of the soul may be illuminated with truth and love, which the soul only finds when it connects with the spirit. The young man feels the love, of which it is said last: wisdom, beauty, piety and virtue, they promote the development of the soul, love forms the soul, harmonizes everything. When man ascends into the temple in which knowledge can be experienced, he comes, in holy awe, to see, like a small temple in the great temple, the highest, the secret of man himself, who passes from the spiritual world into the world of this world. The ferryman's hut is placed as a small world in the great temple; when the soul advances to higher knowledge, then it attains what Goethe felt as Spinozian love of God, it comes to the riddles, the secrets of the world. But as the highest of the mysteries, as that which he in turn sees like a small temple in the great one, that is the mystery of the existence of man himself in connection with the divine being.

The giant comes last and becomes something like an hour hand that indicates the time. Our knowledge becomes spiritual, shedding all that is external consciousness as we ascend; all forces that work mechanically, that are a remnant of the subconscious. All this may remain only in one, when we look up at what is the most external for our inner being. Thus, the merely mechanical, which has not yet been elevated to higher knowledge, has a right to exist. Goethe could have had in mind all the superstitions that have been practiced with the art of numbers and all the prevailing beliefs from old worldviews. But one thing remains behind, to form a kind of chronometer for what knowledge gives it. Thus everything is transformed into a plastic image, right down to the last detail, which Goethe felt was the law of human education.

Today I was only able to explain the main features, but if you read the “fairy tale” with this in mind, you will find that every page, indeed every half-sentence, can be proof of its correctness. One can only hint at this symbolically, in richly symbolic images. We must be aware that what is contained in Goethe's “Fairytale” is infinitely richer than what could be said, and that everything said today is only a suggestion of how to search and feel about a symbolic fairy tale. It is not possible to give more than a hint. But perhaps you have gained a sense of the great and immeasurable productive power with which Goethe created, how right he was when he said that only beauty and art can be an expression of truth. This is also what lived as a conviction in Goethe and led him from stage to stage in restless pursuit. But this is also what led us so to Goethe. Goethe is one of those minds that work in a way that only the greatest minds can. You read a work by Goethe and think you have understood it. Each time you read it again later, you believe that you have finally understood it correctly. Finally, you say to yourself: I still don't understand it, I have to wait until I become more and more mature. This is only the case with the most exquisite minds. This assures us that in Goethe we have one who belongs to the leaders of mankind. Thus, in summarizing what is to be characterized here, one may say of Goethe's spirit:

They shine like stars
in the heaven of eternal being
The spirits sent by God.
May all human souls succeed
in the realm of earthly becoming
To see their flames of light.

On a beautiful September day this year, I went on a trip to Zurich. Since the day was free, I decided to go to Maria-Einsiedeln, which was an important place of pilgrimage in the early Middle Ages and enjoys a wondrous location. There was also a so-called pilgrimage on this day, and since fine, sunny weather was in prospect, one could expect an extraordinarily lively atmosphere in Maria-Einsiedeln, as is well known.

I also wanted to make a pilgrimage, for which there was an opportunity here, so I took a carriage to the Devil's Bridge, which goes up and down hills, and after a while I found myself there in front of a house that had recently been built in place of an old, historically significant house. a plaque identifying it as the birthplace of the famous physician and naturalist Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus Paracelsus von Hohenheim, who was born here in 1493 and died in 1541, at the age of forty-eight. If you linger there a little, you really feel the magic of nature, as you can only encounter it in the Alps. All the plants and animals there inspire you with a sense of intimacy, a language of the most intimate familiarity with the untouched essence of nature. And in the midst of such strong impressions of the interweaving with an outwardly charming nature, the image of the young Paracelsus arose in me, who had spent the first nine years of his life in this impressive environment. In him, we have a receptive personality who, even in his childhood years, was open to learning about nature. This boy had an individuality that seemed to prepare him to eavesdrop on many of nature's secrets in such a unique place, even if it was only at first by guesswork. We can imagine how the boy longingly awaited his absent father, a respected and busy doctor, with his questions, how he often accompanied his father on short trips, and how many a word about patients, their care, and the surrounding nature was exchanged in questions and meaningful explanations. When the boy turned nine, the family moved to Villach in Carinthia, where he was able to continue his interaction with nature and his father to an even greater extent.

Now follow me in your mind to a house in the eastern part of Salzburg, where a plaque announces that Theophrastus Bombastus Paracelsus von Hohenheim died here on September 23, 1541. The legend associated with his death may come to mind, according to which the doctors, who were extremely hostile towards him, hired someone to throw him off the nearby hill. Between the years mentioned, a highly peculiar life is enclosed, and this remarkable personality at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries appears in the development of mankind as the dawn of a certain epoch, which can still show the spiritual sky of all that is beautiful and grandiose. Basically, everything that can be heard from the soul of Paracelsus is a testimony to the fact that he maintained a continuous and intimate connection with nature and understood the world around him. He maintained these strong relationships during his extensive travels throughout the world, in the areas of his homeland, throughout Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Russia, Turkey, everywhere quickly understanding and at home with what presented itself to him in the most diverse forms as the secret of existence. Thus, he gathered a rich treasure trove of knowledge and wisdom on his travels, and how he explored the world in his own way becomes even clearer to us when we imagine how he lived out the impressions he had brought with him from there and from his youth at the University of Basel, especially when we consider how university studies were conducted at the time, and how it was with scientific research and medical knowledge in particular. The old writings of Galen and Avicenna were used as a basis everywhere, and the learned men of the universities of that time delivered a kind of commentary on these ancient writers in Latin.

Paracelsus said to them: You speak about books, you are far removed from all that nature speaks to us in powerful revelations when we only open the gates of our soul to her, and he left this official teaching center of that time. Some called him a tramp then and still call him one today, but he was only a tramp on the outside, and only because he believed that if you wanted to learn the secrets of the world, you had to go to the spiritual beings that lived in that very world. He wanted to use his clairvoyant powers of the soul to learn how nature lives in its creation, to eavesdrop on the secrets of the world in all the countries he traveled through. Not from books, but from the great book of nature, he wanted to turn the individual pages of the same, as he said, while traveling from place to place. Paracelsus believed that behind the sensual lies the spiritual and that what is outwardly perceptible is only a manifestation of the spiritual. The great, all-embracing spiritual has different sensual forms in plants, animals and humans in different countries and climates, although the spiritual is unified. He sought the spiritual in its diversity, like a hidden aroma or a concealed light. It was also clear to him that the external form of the current life, including that of the types of humanity and the individual peoples, in their healthy and diseased states, also belong to these diversities. He imagined disease to be something mysterious, but with a different character in Germany, Hungary, Italy, and so on. He wanted to get to know what came to his mind when he was directly confronted with nature, in order to establish a salutary science of medicine. When we see Paracelsus placed in the multiform world, we recognize how he found special powers in the great book of nature and in his soul, and what he said, according to his studies and experiences, takes on an almost personal character. He developed a very unique state of mind as a result of his special relationship with nature. Without this leading to arrogance, he said that he felt forces speaking in and through him, which he felt as if not his own arbitrariness and logic, but as if nature were speaking directly in and through him. Only someone who is capable of grasping such a relationship, in which Paracelsus felt completely natural and at ease, will be able to understand how he could not relate to his colleagues and their books differently than actually occurred, since it did not appear to him that they were striving for genuine knowledge, when he said: “He who wants to learn and practice true pharmacology should not go to the old authors, not to Galen and Avicenna, not to Bologna, Paris and so on, not to those, not there, but follow me; for mine is the monarchy!” He was so grounded in himself, and his motto was: “No one should be a servant to another; he can remain alone for himself.” Thus, we see Paracelsus as an honest, defiant personality among his contemporaries, as a person in whom a clairvoyant power had emerged, who knew how nature lived in its creation, how it expressed itself in the healthy and diseased state of man.

But just as uncomfortable as he felt as a student, so he also felt as a professor and city physician in Basel. Although he was famous for his travels and his skills, and although he was able to help where all others failed, he was more or less considered by his colleagues to be a tramp who had roamed with dubious people, and although he should have behaved differently as a teacher in office and dignity, he had remained the same even in his university life. So he didn't get along with his colleagues either; even when we follow him on his travels, how he performs famous cures on the poor, on princes and respected people, and is cheated of his fee by them, as well as at the highest levels. He became famous, among other things, for healing a person whom we can regard as a forerunner of the age of printing, namely Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, who, as a credible scholar, expressed a judgment full of respect and reverence for Paracelsus. In Basel, a strange and momentous event took place: Paracelsus cured a canon of Lichtenfels of a severe and painful illness, and had stipulated a fee of one hundred talers for the cure. The sufferer took the remedies prescribed by Paracelsus three times, and then recovered. However, he did not want to pay the sum for such a simple service, as he saw it. Paracelsus then became quite angry and sent loose notes around the whole city. The city council, however, told him that if, after such insults to the highly esteemed canon, he had not left the city within half an hour, he would be put in prison. Paracelsus therefore fled from the city under the cover of darkness.

As he so often clashed with his environment, so it happened with his colleagues, since he cured according to other aspects. Besides, they took it very badly that he shared the connections that were self-evident to him, which he had overheard as secrets of nature and now applied to the healing and care of the sick, quite unashamedly, that he and connected, did not believe that he should express them better in the Latin language with its sharp, abstract contours, but instead used the living German language with its great flexibility and fine nuances. His colleagues did not understand how his knowledge, which was inaccessible to them, was interwoven with innumerable imponderables, how he was able to present this in German, contrary to the custom of learned schools, to his listeners, and thereby dare to reduce the dignity of the university according to their outdated view. During his wanderings, they tried to blacken his name everywhere. The scholars challenged him to Latin disputations, which he accepted, but in which, in the event of technical differences, he shouted at them in German, thus providing a vivid picture of the relationship between him and his contemporaries. It is understandable that almost everyone treated such a man in the most hostile way, and also that his life could only be short in such a grueling struggle. With his comprehensive and penetrating knowledge, he was unable to adapt to the externalized habits of his colleagues in his field and to wear the old-fashioned robe in which they appeared at the university at that time, so that they said of him: “Our colleague Paracelsus was seen walking around in the robe of a cart driver.” Those who felt they were no match for him in terms of knowledge and ability, and whom he openly despised because of their scientific masquerade, can be understood to have felt a deep hatred for him, and this is the source of the legend that formed at the end of his life: that he was deliberately annoyed to death or even thrown off the mountain near Salzburg. Thus we see his portrait, traversed by the deep traces of mental labor and the furrows of suffering that his opponents had caused.

In order to get closer to the spiritual life of this man, we have to try to answer the question of how Paracelsus actually imagined the surrounding nature, which he needed for his medical science, and human nature in his individual way; how peculiar his spiritual conception was. He initially established the following points of view: One must be able to comprehend the whole great world, the macrocosm, in its manifestation and understand how man, as microcosm, is situated in it as a particular detail, how air relates to the lungs, light to the eye, how the same works outside and inside in man. Everything that has effect outside we also find in man with its laws. Therefore, we have to look for what can make a person healthy or sick in the macrocosm, especially as a member of the Earth planet as a large organism in which the human being represents a link. He then said: Although the human being can be integrated into the chain of natural phenomena, he is still a self-contained being. The forces of the whole of nature are concentrated in man, but cannot easily lead him to cut himself off from the external forces and beings of nature. This is because, said Paracelsus, man has within him a living architect, an “archaeus”, who literally tears him away from the whole of nature and gives him his own unique configuration.

Paracelsus wanted to explore what a person absorbs from external influences in order to then process them within themselves, and he took such elementary insights to the highest expression. This is the most important thing to him, but not much is said about it. When man eats bread and fruit, for example, he said, the “archaeus” transforms it in man into flesh, into the various substances of the organs, as an inner alchemist, and depending on how this happens, the external substances become healthy, useful bodily substances or poison. He then examined this transformation, the unconscious art of this being, and viewed a certain type of disease from this perspective.

He established the third law: what has been integrated in this way is organized from many groups of individual organs and is independent. The human being is a whole small world, a microcosm in the image of the macrocosm.

He therefore came to the conclusion that out there in the cosmic conditions of the large planetary bodies there is something that corresponds to the microcosm of the human being. For example, the way the sun and moon relate to each other is how the heart relates to the brain internally; so you have to study both in their uniqueness and mutual interrelations and transfer them to the human being in their effectiveness, and likewise transform Saturn and Jupiter in their movements, sizes and light conditions to the liver and spleen of the human being, as their microcosmic image.

Thus, he constructed an internal heaven from the organs of the human being as an image of the external starry sky. He thought of the dynamically differentiated energies in the human being in this way, considering nothing to be separate, but everything in lively interaction. It is interesting to see how he defended what appeared to him to be the effect of an inner heavenly system, not as a rough interaction of the food we take in, but in rough language: “Oh, they don't understand anything, those who believe that the food we take in interior according to their chemical constitution, so to speak, only in continuation of their external chemical forces; because that would be about the same as regarding the plant as an effect of the dung, compared to the living configuration of the organs active in the human being. Thus, we see how the interacting organs appear to him like the dynamics of a complicated clockwork, and Paracelsus says: Man can therefore be “offended”, depending on the inner alchemist prepares the spiritual or unspiritual, with normal or anomalous interaction of the organs, even without external causes!

Fourthly, Paracelsus says as a basic principle: the soul falls ill through its own passions and emotional upheavals, with the organism also affected as an after-effect.

Finally, as a fifth point of view: the completeness of the science of medicine is given to him by the fact that the person in his illness must be seen as someone who suffers from his fate - karma - from something that towers above him spiritually, that intervenes in the spiritual microcosm from the spiritual macrocosm, so that the former is completely under the influence of the latter.

Thus, Paracelsus combined a wide-ranging knowledge with the greatest trust in the spiritual and mental powers of the human being, but also with the broadest trust in the spiritual forces of the great world that underlies the organization of the human being. He therefore said, through the mind we find God behind the natural event, through faith we find Christ and through imagination we find the Holy Spirit. He had a deep soul, his heart was imbued with the most intimate piety. We see the most essential part of his clairvoyant vision in his piety, from which everything that accompanied his deeds as a doctor emerged. It is therefore understandable that he described love and hope as his two most important remedies, and the nature of his medical treatment emerged for him without fail from this, when he did everything in full love and devotion that was possible according to his five points of view, and in the knowledge of these connections, he hoped that his remedy would have the healing effect that he had intuitively seen. He lived completely with the disease and the conditions of his patients in general. He looked clairvoyantly according to his five aspects, what had worked from the outside into the person, what the “inner alchemist” had done on it. What then penetrated from the great spirit of the whole of nature to the sick person, was not reflected back to him in abstract terms, but in such a way that it flowed down from the sick person to him again and concentrated in him to that which he had to prescribe as a remedy. Therefore, we can understand how Paracelsus was deeply convinced that his medical work was a continuous production as an artist. He guided the substances beyond nature to become effective remedies by forming and combining them for this purpose. Higher nature in nature was his art, his intention and his alchemy; he created art products in relation to nature. In Paracelsus, something reminds us of Goethe's saying:

When the healthy nature of man functions as a whole, when he feels himself to be a part of a great, beautiful, dignified and valuable whole in the world, when harmonious comfort grants him pure, free delight – then the universe, if it could feel itself, would exult as if it had reached its goal and would admire the summit of its own becoming and being.

There is no more precise way to describe this clairvoyant man than through these words!

And if we turn our gaze from Paracelsus to Goethe over the centuries, then, despite all the differences, Goethe's spirit has much in common with that of Paracelsus. We see that, as a young boy, Goethe placed himself in nature when, at the age of seven, he took a music stand, decorated it with all kinds of minerals from his father's collection, with plants and shells, crowned the whole thing with a small incense cone, and then waited for the sun to rise. He collected the rays in a burning glass, ignited the incense stick with it, and thus offered a sacrifice to the great, almighty God in front of his altar. If we consider the motives for which the young Goethe acted in this way, then we feel how he, like Paracelsus, felt most intimately connected with nature. Paracelsus said of himself, as a rough-and-ready country boy, that he was sent out of the house in all weathers, and that he did not grow up in soft beds on figs and wheat bread, but on sour milk and coarse oat bread.

In Goethe, we find a rarely disturbed harmony, always soon regained, also in his view of nature, which is evident in many ways in his work as a scientific researcher on his trip to Italy, where he, like Paracelsus, traveled the country observing keenly and wrote home about coltsfoot, for example, which, among other things, particularly caught his eye as it developed in different ways after changing the climate and sun, location, soil type and so on. He sees the emergence of diversity from unity, as he particularly wanted to demonstrate with the primal plant, from which he developed the diversity of plant natural phenomena. He also wrote that he would like to travel further to India, not to discover something new, but to follow nature in its ever-changing diversity.

In this way, something in Goethe was awakened that can be found in many ways in the figure of Paracelsus. And when Goethe embodied his main character in Faust, many traits are interwoven into this that evoke the thought that, when conceiving of “Faust”, Goethe was under the influence of the character of Paracelsus, despite the great difference between “Faust” and the historical Paracelsus, who died before the end of the forties of his life, but until then carried an inner harmonious seclusion as a treasure in his soul, which he had gained from his intimate intercourse with nature. It was only a short lifetime of this in itself rarely happy spirit, which his research results and his professional activity connected with the eternal reasons of nature.

Faust begins where Paracelsus ends, but with great doubt in all his extensive knowledge, Faust strives in the years of his life that Paracelsus no longer reached.

Goethe had developed Faust to the point where he had reached the stage of soul development that Paracelsus had when he penetrated into the essence of nature, when Faust breaks out into the words:

Exalted Spirit, thou gavest me, gavest me everything
I asked for. Thou didst not turn
Thy countenance to me in fire in vain.
Gavest me the glorious kingdom of nature
and the power to feel and enjoy it. Thou dost
allow only cold, wondering visitors,
granting me to look into her deep breast,
as into the bosom of a friend.
You drove the line of the living
before me, and taught me my brothers
in the silent bush, in air and water.

Thus he was related to the life and workings of nature, but nevertheless Faust's research was different from that of Paracelsus; for Goethe shows us that Faust's insights are not always gained in direct contact with nature, as they are with Paracelsus, but remain confined to the realm of the soul forces.

Therefore, in Mephistopheles, without such a confrontation with the phenomena of nature, Goethe brought a confrontation of the soul, so that the soul was not seen in nature, but only in the soul.

And yet, we can see a strong relationship between Faust and Paracelsus when the latter put the Bible aside for a long time and turned away from it, just as Paracelsus did from the learned works of Galen and Avicenna. Both trusted their own powers to find their own way. Thus we feel that Goethe often sees Paracelsus in the background and, to a certain extent, sees him through Faust. For example, in the scene where Faust goes out into the spring landscape with Wagner and recounts:

My father was a dark man of honor
Who, in his own way, thought long and hard
about nature and its sacred circles
with whimsical effort;
who, in the company of adepts,
locked himself in the black kitchen
and, according to endless recipes,
brewed up the adverse.
Then a red lion, a bold suitor,
was married in the lukewarm bath of the lily,
and then both tormented with open flames
from one bridal chamber into another.

One could almost see Paracelsus talking to his father. Or when we read how Faust struggles to “translate the New Testament into his beloved German”, into the language that flows from his soul, just as Paracelsus does not want to express the wisdom of nature that he has deciphered in the foreign Latin, but only in German. But nowhere in Faust does the struggle with the surrounding nature in the direction of its knowledge appear as it does in Paracelsus, but in the first part with moral, in the second part with spiritual, spiritual powers - Homunculus.

What Faust wanted to achieve was something natural for Paracelsus, who thought and acted completely selflessly. Only at the end, after a selfish life, when he had become blind in old age, did Faust achieve selflessness, when “a bright light shines within”, when he became a mystic, when he gained insight into the innermost being, which Paracelsus had discovered throughout his life as an elementary feeling spirit from external nature. Paracelsus was the dawn at the turn of the fifteenth to the sixteenth century, clearly visible to all. In Faust, we can only seek it within, as a soul-acting power.

Why was Goethe able to describe Faust as he did? Because something special occurred in the development of humanity between the life of Paracelsus and the conception of Faust, which powerfully shifted the earlier conditions and steered them into new channels. What Copernicus and Kepler discovered, Paracelsus no longer experienced. He was only the dawn of a science that had then entered the morning dawn from the sensual into the supersensual. Paracelsus penetrated through the phenomenal side of nature to the spirit, but through Copernicus and the men working in his spirit, humanity has been led into the age of intellectuality, of thinking, which does not want to penetrate the veil to explain the world of the senses in the sense of earlier times, but seeks satisfaction in the knowledge of the soul. It was therefore inevitable that a spiritual approach would be chosen as the basis for the work of Goethe's Faust, just as Copernicus, Kepler, Giordano Bruno and Galileo worked in the same way. As a mystic, Paracelsus appropriated the same knowledge that Faust acquired through direct observation of nature. Goethe's Faust shows how modern man depends on the inner life of the soul. In the same way, spiritual science searches in the depths of the soul for that which can lead from the transitory to the infinite eternal.

After Paracelsus, a new era dawned, which said that if we turn to the non-sensuous, we will gain a correct understanding of our world system. And so Goethe presented his Faust as a representative of this view who had risen to a higher level. Spiritual science is advancing along this path, which leads from the realm of the soul into the secrets of nature. Just as Giordano Bruno broke through the blue firmament of the eighth sphere, so spiritual science is now breaking through the boundaries of birth and death by revealing the soul as an infinite being that reaches beyond space and time. Goethe thus seems like someone who shows us the beginning of the right path by presenting us with an image in Faust, to which the memory of Paracelsus leads us, in order to be able to understand him even more.

Thus, individual human beings are placed in the context of the further development of the world, and so today, too, man must again break new ground so that he can find the harmonization of his soul forces in his insights, beyond Paracelsus and Faust. Based on such relationships, one feels more and more deeply the inner affinity between Paracelsus and Goethe, especially in the latter's words:

When the healthy nature of man functions as a whole, when he feels himself to be a part of a great, beautiful, dignified and valuable whole in the world, when harmonious comfort grants him pure, free delight – then the universe, if it could feel itself, would exult as if it had reached its goal and would admire the summit of its own becoming and being.

In man as in a microcosm, Goethe, like Paracelsus, seeks and sees the entire workings of the great world, the macrocosm.

On the way back from the birthplace of Paracelsus in Maria-Einsiedeln, one is thoroughly shaken by the journey over the valley and hills, and in this way, one becomes quite aware of the gnarled character of Paracelsus, in addition to which, the memory of Goethe also resurfaced on approaching the pilgrimage church. Symbolically, the spirit of the great seemed to manifest itself to me in the outwardly small-looking church of Maria-Einsiedeln, as soon as one really lets the interior take effect on oneself and appreciates the tasteful interior in its kind accordingly. Goethe once stood in this atmospheric room, in this small yet great church, which, like a microcosm in the macrocosm, also presented the human being as an image of the great world to the contemplative observer. I sensed this in his words and could imagine how Goethe, in this place where Paracelsus often stood, felt the basic sensation of the correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm in man becoming clearly expressed within himself. The path from Paracelsus to Goethe shows us this: the two boundary points of this path, the evening star and the rising sun of the new age, point to a profound similarity between the souls of the two men as a living protest against an external, unspiritual, non-spiritual understanding of things, which Goethe says in Faust, and which, significantly, Mephisto says:

Who wants to recognize and describe something alive,
First seeks to drive out the spirit,
Then he has the parts in his hand,
Unfortunately, only the spiritual bond is missing.
Encheiresin naturae is what chemistry calls it,
Mocks itself and does not know how.

This also belongs to the character of Paracelsus as a living protest against overlooking the whole when considering the parts. Instead of the final words, Goethe had written in the earlier version of “Faust”:

He makes himself an ass and does not know how.

Paracelsus and Goethe both condemned such a view of nature; both were inspired by the opposite tendency, which, in line with Mephisto's words, could be translated as:

Who wants to get to the bottom of something living
should seek to fathom the spirit in the depths!
And when he has the parts in his hand,
he sees the spirit's light
as the only salvation in the spiritual bond
that holds together what otherwise does not recognize itself
and the secrets of the universe.

Dear attendees!

The point of view from which I am to speak this evening at the request of some local friends of the theosophical or spiritual scientific world view is by no means a popular one in the world and recognized in wider circles. With the exception of a few, relatively few of our contemporaries, who, from a deep knowledge and long study of the subject, have gained an intensely effective conviction in the direction of the world view under consideration, with the exception of these, this point of view is everywhere met with opposition, doubt and misunderstanding. And anyone who speaks about such a subject for the first time in a particular place does not, of course, harbor any illusions that a mere suggestion of a few remarks that can be made in a short lecture can somehow lead to conviction. This evening, I find myself in the somewhat dubious position of having to cite a variety of things from the theosophical worldview, for which there is sufficient evidence for those who delve deeper into the subject, but which cannot be cited this evening with all the necessary proof.

In accordance with the wishes of our local friends of our world view, we will start with a figure in the spiritual development of humanity who must, to a certain extent, be of interest to this part of the world in which we find ourselves, because he lived here in this city for a long time. We will then move on to a personality who, as everyone must recognize, has had a profound impact on the intellectual life of our time – Goethe. Not that it is to be shown that one could only find confirmation in the world view of Paracelsus and Goethe of what can arise from spiritual science, but it is to be shown that figures are already given in them which, precisely in their struggle and striving, show that what spiritual science or Theosophy wants has been longed for and striven for by those who, with the approach of modern spiritual development and our present time, tried in their own way to interpret the signs of the times and the needs of the human soul.

But before we can tie in with the spiritual significance of Paracelsus and Goethe and the path that development has taken from Paracelsus to Goethe, we must first characterize the point of view of Theosophy as it presents itself to us in the world today. Theosophy or spiritual science is by no means to be confused with any religious It has no intention of interfering with outward religious observances, nor of forming a religion or sect of its own. Such a thing is far from its mind, for its sources are such that it cannot in any wise impair religious beliefs or convictions.

On the other hand, the subject characterized finds its opponents namely among those who believe that they stand firmly on the ground of natural science, which is also appreciated by spiritual researchers. The greatness of the spiritual-scientific view is that, in terms of its way of thinking, it stands entirely on the ground of scientific thinking; but, starting from this scientific thinking, it wants to lead up to the highest regions of existence, which the human soul longs to know. It longs for this because man needs views of higher worlds if he wants to be secure in his work within the outer visible world in which he has to work. It is into the world of the spiritual, into that world which can also be called the supersensible world, that theosophy or spiritual science should lead. At the same time, this indicates, my dear ladies and gentlemen, what must create an enormous number of opponents for you at the present time, because even today, quietly thinking first scientists admit that what is achieved by the means of ordinary science cannot provide any information at all about the highest powers and entities that permeate and permeate this world. So it is often admitted that a spiritual world underlies our sensual one. But even if such level-headed people of the present do not want to put themselves on the level of those people who, out of materialistic thinking, want to say: Man knows that nothing is real but what surrounds us, they still often stand on the ground that they say: May a supersensible world exist behind our sensual world — but the powers of human knowledge are so limited that one has to stop before this spiritual world.

That there is a spiritual world to which man belongs with his soul and with what lives spiritually in him, just as man belongs to the outer world with his physical powers, is something that is to be made known to the world again through spiritual science. The second is that one can penetrate into this world with the same means as in natural science. It will be good, since our time is limited, to now draw attention to how man, in the way of natural science and its thinking, can look up into the spiritual world. Natural science penetrates into what it wants to explore through observation, but it also penetrates through experiment. Exploration through observation, but also through experiment, are also the means of spiritual science. Here too, it must be emphasized that spiritual science must place itself quite honestly and sincerely on the ground of a Goethean saying that anticipated the method of our science:

Mysterious in the bright day
Nature cannot be robbed of the veil,
And what it may not reveal to your mind,
You cannot force it with levers and screws.

What does such a saying mean in essence? It means that we can penetrate into the outer world of things and into the forces on which they are based with all the tools that are made in the world. And if we disregard the new instruments of natural science, we already know that in the elementary realm, the world of the infinitely small has been explored through the microscope, and the infinitely large world, the macrocosm, through the telescope. In this way, one penetrates into the world of things, but one cannot penetrate into the world of the spirit. Only the spirit of man can penetrate into the world of the spirit, and there can only be one tool: the spirit of man himself.

Now it is the case that what this spirit is in man has certain limits, that only certain things can be grasped that are bound to the intellect. You can read about what can only be touched on here, and what means more than all power and all riches, that man can be led further, that he can penetrate into completely different worlds, in my writing: “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds”.

Just as one does it in the laboratory, as in the clinic, so one cannot make the human soul suitable to penetrate into the supersensible world. Only through purely spiritual processes can one do that. One understands the whole meaning of this spiritual process when one realizes the following example, which shows that one can be very clever in thinking, in the way it is done in the methods of natural science.

If you have water, you know that this water can be understood if you break it down into its two parts: hydrogen and oxygen. You know that. But to examine what hydrogen is and what oxygen is, you have to separate it, the oxygen or the hydrogen, and then you can look at it on its own.

The mind and soul are now in the human being, as he stands in the world, connected with the whole body, like oxygen and hydrogen with water. Our soul and spirit perceive only the external world through the senses, through the mind, in colors, sounds, smells and tastes. One forms a picture by discovering the laws of nature. Everything that reaches the spiritual and soul reaches it in the same way as oxygen, when it is combined with hydrogen in water. But if we want to examine it, we have to separate it from the physical just as we have to separate the oxygen from the hydrogen when we want to examine it. Now there are means to secrete this spiritual-mental: meditation, concentration. All these are means by which something is achieved in the soul that is similar to what the chemist achieves when he breaks down water into oxygen and hydrogen.

To characterize this, we will see what fills people between waking and sleeping in terms of volitional impulses, hopes and worries. All that which fills us so, if we look more closely, we will find [and we will see] that it is not there without external cause. We know that when we see the red roses, we then hold on to the image, as one has not created the image itself in the soul. This is also how we find the laws of nature through our mind. When we look at our hopes, as well as our desires and passions, we find them stimulated by external factors. How can we say that we have acquired this through our own will? We know how it happens through external influences, through unknown depths of our soul life. Our pain, our joy, our suffering and our desire are prepared by the outer world without our intervention. We have not placed the experiences in the soul at the center of the soul. That is what the spiritual researcher must undertake. When the spiritual researcher brings such ideas, which he has made himself, into his soul through pure inner will, we say “symbols”. For example, let us imagine the light emanating from some cosmic body. But we imagine this light as the body of a spiritual being, which also has a body of light, just as we have a body of flesh. If you tell me that this is a mistake, I would like to point out that when we use such images as spiritual instruments, we do not in any way succumb to the illusion that we are thereby gaining an idea of the external world. When such images are given, they are not intended to be true in the sense that our usual images of the external world are true; they have the function of serving as facts of the soul. The person needs infinite patience and energy to arrive at such images, because he must reject all thoughts that relate to the external sense world. He must become as a person is in sleep. When all external impressions are silent and the mind is also silent, while the person is surrounded by darkness and unconscious, the person who devotes years and years to inner exercises – as soon as we have our own idea of the moral content – will come to be in relation to the outside world and the rest of the soul life as he is in sleep. Only that the unconsciousness is not there. Powers arise there. Now we know that the soul is a spiritual being that can give itself content. The soul does not arrive there in platitudes, as in mysticism. Through the same kind of efforts at contemplation as a person makes externally with the help of physical tools, the soul comes to experience itself inwardly. There it comes to an experience that is as free of corporeality, of materiality, as oxygen is free of hydrogen when they are chemically separated.

It is difficult to believe in it from the outset. But it is no more difficult than believing in a new scientific finding, to believe that a person comes to know that he has spiritual eyes and spiritual ears. An initial finding that can be gained through this path is that a person becomes aware of what actually happens when we fall asleep at night. Spiritual science tells us that what remains in bed is what man has in common with the plant world, an external corporeality, but that an inner spiritual-soul core of being emerges from this corporeality. This spiritual-soul core of being is not in the physical being of man from the time of falling asleep to the time of waking up, but in his own world. Man is just not able to perceive this. But it is perceived when the human being has acquired spiritual eyes and ears. Then the person knows that he is in a world in which spiritual facts take place just as they do in our sensual world. Every night, nature separates what the spiritual researcher has obtained as consciousness, only the person does not know it. Now an important result of spiritual science comes to light: that by means of spiritual science one can give proof of something that great minds have always suspected, which is, however, regarded as a dream in the widest circles, but which will make a way through world culture, like many other things that have lived through many a contradiction in the world. I would like to draw attention to something similar. Not so long ago, mankind believed that lower animals, small lower animals, can develop from mere inanimate matter, lifeless matter. It was even believed that worms could develop from river mud. And until a few centuries ago, it could be found in books that were considered scholarly how animals developed here.

It was a great deed of the Italian naturalist Francesco Redi to have pointed out to people that nothing can develop from non-living matter, but that only living things can develop from living things. In truth, there was a living germ in this river mud, originating from living beings. The man who recognized this and first expressed it barely escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno.

Modern spiritual science must apply this sentence: “Living things come only from living things” to man, but must then also come to proofs that stand just as high above the sentence “Living things come only from living things” as man stands above all living things, because with man we are dealing with an individual, while all other living things present themselves in groups and species. In our time, it is quite natural that we have to speak in terms of the spiritual and soul-related in the same way that Francesco Redi does in terms of the living; that we have to say: If a person is born with certain aptitudes and abilities, and even with a certain destiny, and people then think that this is based merely on heredity, this is based merely on inaccurate observation, just as it was based on inaccurate observation that people believed that worms can develop from river mud.

Spiritual research shows, as Lessing demonstrated, that as a human being grows up, the features become more and more distinct, the abilities become more and more distinct, and the soul and spiritual express themselves more and more. Then we may say that it is not only inherited from father and mother, grandfather and grandmother, but we must trace it back to the spiritual and soul, which is laughed at in the present, but which will become established in the same way as the sentence: 'Living things can only arise from living things'. What is born with us, what shapes us from birth or from conception, comes from a previous life on earth, and what we now carry within us as our spiritual and soul essence is something that will continue to live in the spiritual world when we pass through the gate of death, to form a body again in a later life on earth. In line with the natural sciences of our time, spiritual research comes to the view of different earth lives, to that doctrine of reincarnation decried as madness and to that doctrine of karma, which says that what we experience, what we are and how we face the world can be an effect of what we have done, experienced and felt in previous earth lives. That what we do, experience and feel now will be a cause for what we will do, experience and feel in a later life on earth.

Thus the spiritual researcher divides his life between what is between birth and death and a new birth, and in this he is a spiritual being. One only attains independence, the distinctiveness of the human being, through spiritual science, when one separates the spirit. Just as little as one can recognize oxygen as long as it is connected to hydrogen in water, so little can one recognize the spirit as long as it is connected to the body. When it is separated from the body, it can be recognized. Then one also recognizes that it cannot be destroyed by the body, that it characterizes it as something lasting, as something eternal.

When we see this spiritual science or theosophy emerging in modern times, it should not be something that ties in with the old, that can be picked up here or there. For example, some people say: Yes, this spiritual research with its doctrine of reincarnation and karma is only bringing something that we find in Buddhism. But we can find that it differs in its most important and essential aspects from the doctrine that Buddhism teaches as the doctrine of reincarnation, something that it recognizes from within through the spirit. It is a mistake to think that it is based on Buddhism; no, it stands on its own ground. It comes to what it wants to recognize through the investigations of those who make their own soul into an instrument that can penetrate the spiritual world.

We can see how the best of our minds, with all their yearning, have tended towards what spiritual science today wants to pick as a ripe fruit from the tree of knowledge. And so we come to direct our gaze to a mind that we understand when we have spent a long time in the area, as I was able to do near Maria-Einsiedeln, and we know that this spirit saw the light of day, that this is the birthplace of this spirit, that Paracelsus was born there in 1493 and lived there until the age of fourteen. We find a remarkable spirit in this Paracelsus. It is so very special in the soul when you are in this nature of Maria-Einsiedeln. What surrounds us in nature reminds us of how the boy grew up in wonderful surroundings into what later confronts us so greatly in his spirit. And this awakens the wish in us: May those who will be our successors be fairer to us than we were to our ancestors. We say so lightly: Yes, actually Paracelsus had a very commendable aspiration, but what he brought to light, no one can take seriously today, we have gone beyond that. In short, in a more or less veiled sense, one says nothing other than that such a person is a drip. If only posterity would be fairer to us, because what the botanist now knows will be able to be characterized in the same way after a few centuries, because only a short-sighted person will be able to say that this will last for all eternity.

But Paracelsus is an individuality who presents himself as strange to those who want to penetrate into the higher world because he was a wiser and more characteristic expression of his time, a time that seems strange precisely in a time when it presents itself as such. Paracelsus appears to us as if from his earliest youth he was intimately connected with everything that works and lives in nature. One cannot but apply the words spoken by Goethe to Paracelsus:

Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by you – unable to step out of it and unable to get deeper into it. Uninvited and unwarned, she takes us into the cycle of her dance and carries on with us until we are tired and fall out of her arms. She is forever creating new forms; what is there has never been, what was does not return – everything is new and yet always the same.

In a wonderful way, Goethe honors this interweaving of people with nature there. With Paracelsus, it was present only in the sense that he saw in his spirit, not just with his eyes and mind. And it was still the case that he did not need the kind of soul training that has been described today. Rather, it was his nature to perceive the spiritual forces of nature when he heard the trees rustling and felt the wind playing through the room; he never perceived in isolation what is found in nature. He said, “A soul is expressing itself, as in a human being who is not just made of papier-mâché.” Thus, Paracelsus saw in nature not only the outer appearance, but gestures for the spiritual entities that are present in a supersensible world and are active in nature. Therefore, wherever he encountered a natural fact or a natural being, he sought the spiritual and soul-like. He was predestined for this by the way he had grown up. He therefore always said later that he was proud of the way he had remained a primitive man: I did not grow up with wheat bread and figs like the Sugar Fairies, I grew up with rye porridge and coarse rye bread. From this close relationship with nature, an inner certainty arose in Paracelsus, a connection with the spiritual world. It is also a wonderful life, how the boy walked through nature at his father's hand in Maria-Einsiedeln, and how much he had already learned in the earliest days of childhood about the secrets of nature.

And how differently it touches us when we saw the man grow up, feeling so strongly this coexistence with nature that he dared to oppose what was around him. We just have to put ourselves in the shoes of the science of the time. The focus was not on the facts of nature, but rather on ancient traditions, traditions preserved in books, which were passed down. People listened to what people said, what Aristotle and Galen had taught. What I am telling you now is by no means a mere legend, to show how things were at that time. It was believed and taught by Aristotle that the nerves of the human being do not originate in the head but in the heart. Galileo had a friend who was a scholar. He pointed out to him that it could easily be demonstrated on a corpse, but his friend did not want to believe it. So Galilei took him there and showed him on the corpse that the nerves emanate from the brain, and then the learned gentleman said to him: “That may be right, you may be right, but when I see nature and ask Aristotle, I am more inclined to believe Aristotle.”

It is clear to see how enormous the efforts had to be to lead back to the source of nature. Paracelsus did not want to learn from books. Therefore, we see him traveling through all neighboring countries: England, France, Hungary, Poland, Turkey. Those who want to know about the world must not let it come to them, but go there. The world is like a large organism: it makes humanity healthy and sick. But health in France is one thing, health in Germany is another. Paracelsus wanted to read in the great book of nature. Therefore, he did not hesitate to hear what the farmers and the shepherds said, and even what the knackers said. He knew that with their elementary observation they could find something for true knowledge.

It was not surprising, therefore, that this Paracelsus, after he had, so to speak, put all the learned works behind him, according to which the others were taught, that he wanted to express what he had learned in word forms that were deeply related to what nature spoke to him. He expressed what nature allowed to shine into his soul from its spirit: he wanted to shape it, not in Latin, as was customary at the time, but in his mother tongue. That was what brought him into such stark contradiction with the scholarship of the time. When he was called to Basel, he not only taught what he had observed himself, but also dared to teach it in German. And when he went against other customs of the time, he was no longer tolerated. His wonderful teaching, so to speak, broke his neck. He had performed cures that were appreciated by the respected people of the time, esteemed by Erasmus and other great minds, but never had he confronted his patients in such a way that he would have seen a fee. It was the spiritual and mental state of the people that he was referring to. He never just saw what was on the outside. He said, “My main remedy is love. I immerse myself in my patients with love and feeling; and that which was in the body came to life in the soul of Paracelsus. When the image of the inner illness of a person met with the own soul of Paracelsus, then the image of the plant or mineral that he had to process arose in his soul as if by itself. This is why he had his great and significant successes. Even if, in a certain sense, he could be seen by people as a tramp, he was a great benefactor of humanity.

But that did not prevent something like the following from happening. A great gentleman went to Paracelsus to be cured by him. A fee of one hundred thalers had been agreed upon. Paracelsus prescribed a remedy. After taking it three times, the gentleman recovered. But then he said: “Yes, if I have recovered so quickly, it is not worth a hundred thalers.” And although Paracelsus did not usually attach particular importance to payment, Paracelsus flew into a rage and had “evil notes” printed, as it was said at the time, or as they say today: pamphlets. He had them passed around. A friend then advised him to flee, and he lost his job.

But that was how he usually felt about life. On the surface, the story of his death may be a legend, but the doctors had hated him so much that it does not seem incredible that an individual in Salzburg pushed him down a slope and killed him – in 1541. Since Paracelsus was a very temperamental person and represented with all his enthusiasm what he experienced, it can be said that this has an inner truth, especially when we look at the last picture of Paracelsus with his furrowed face, then we have the feeling: He met a tragic end because what lived in greatness in his soul was not compatible with the smallness of his time.

When we consider how he viewed the times, we can say: He has not yet been able to penetrate to the teaching of repeated earthly lives, but he knows that the human being standing before me is not a being that exhausts itself with its physical existence, but a being that has an inner nature, is connected to inner invisible forces of a supersensible world. Yes, he said: Man can only be recognized if he is seen as a threefold being. First of all, there is the human being who can be known with the physical mind. But above this physical world there is another world that can only be seen with the eyes of the spirit. This human being is taken from the astral or sidereal world, as Paracelsus also called it. He then further distinguishes the highest human being, who belongs to the purely spiritual world. There Paracelsus saw two others interwoven into our sensory world, and the human being interwoven with these two others, and knew that the human being belongs in the spiritual-soul world.

And then Paracelsus said again: When we look at this human being, the way he thinks and ponders must indeed present himself as a spiritual-soul being. When he saw how a choice was made within his organism regarding food, for Paracelsus this was a sign that between the person who thinks and researches and the one who presents himself in the body, there is still another one present. He speaks of a spiritual body that is taken along when a person passes through the gate of death.

Paracelsus calls this inner man the inner alchemist because he transforms the substances of nature so that they can become a builder of the human being. And Paracelsus is aware that he must not only use external means if he wants to heal people, but that the supernatural powers are at work when a person is healthy or sick. Therefore, he not only says: “The person must have passed a nature test, but he is also a pious man.” He knows that if he wants to heal people, he must penetrate to the deepest hidden causes of the illnesses. Therefore, when I am standing in front of a sick person, I know that I have a preparation, but more than anything else, if I can let something overflow in my soul, that is my hope. That in the spiritual course of events, what I have gained as a spiritual experience can also flow in, that the power of my hope, which completely permeates me, can flow out.

There is still much to be said, but one can divert one's gaze from Paracelsus in order to get to know him in yet another way, in a later, even more awakened spirit, in Goethe. And here, the figure of Paracelsus stands quite remarkably beside the contemplation of Goethe, as if Paracelsus were looking over Goethe's shoulder, and especially when one devotes oneself to the contemplation of Goethe's life's work, “Faust”. It is remarkable that in terms of external characteristics, Faust bears some similarity to Paracelsus. But this is understandable. Besides the sixteenth-century Faust, Goethe always had the figure of Paracelsus before his soul. And just as Paracelsus once placed the ancient Galen to one side, so we read of this Faust: He put the Bible behind the bench for a while and became a man who lives in the world. Paracelsus did not put the Bible behind the bench, but he turned away from the old medical books and wanted to gain independent knowledge. And when we follow Faust, in everything as Goethe describes him, how he goes out with the country people and how he is remembered by them, how his father taught him as a boy, the image of this boy Paracelsus, holding his father's hand, comes to mind. And one has the same image as Goethe gave in the walk before the gate.

But one thing is still very strange. Paracelsus lived to be 48 years old. He passed through the gate of death after a life of rich inwardness, and if he had had good health, not affected by the smallness of his time, he would also have had to say: There you stand alone; which is the ideal of “Faust.” Can we not imagine Faust as being as old as Paracelsus when he died? There is nothing to prevent us. But while Paracelsus would have stood there through his rich, precious, appreciative inner life, through the harmonious balance with all the longings of the world, Faust stands before us – at about the same age at which Paracelsus stands at the height of eminent satisfaction and knowledge, Faust stands before us in despair. Paracelsus could not have stood there with the words:

“I have now, alas! studied philosophy,
jurisprudence and medicine,
and unfortunately also theology
with great endeavor.

Paracelsus would have said: Thank God that I soon ran away when I was supposed to study all these things, and went to nature. Therefore, he had a different relationship to the great things of nature than Faust. No one would have said of him:

You resemble the spirit you comprehend, not me!

Rather, he was akin to the spirit that

In the floods of life, in the storm of action
I surge up and down,
weaving back and forth!

and from which Faust turns away in horror:

terrible face.

And so Faust stands, despairing of what science can give us, yet unable to find what he seeks, having surrendered to magic. We can, of course, only touch on this, as time is of the essence.

Goethe lets his Faust go through everything that man can achieve through his aberration, he lets him go through all the aberrations that man goes through when he does not enter the spiritual world in the right way, and he presents this particularly in the witches' kitchen. The one depicted in Faust does not arrive in a harmonious way at what Goethe particularly desired in his “Faust”. Only Goethe penetrates more and more, especially through his Italian travels, more and more into what nature gives him.

Eminent Spirit, you gave me, gave me everything
I asked for. You did not turn
your face to me in the fire for nothing.
You gave me the magnificent nature for my kingdom,
the strength to feel and enjoy it. You do not
allow only cold, astonished visitors,
grant me to look into their deep chests,
as into the bosom of a friend.
You lead the line of the living
before me, and teach me my brothers
in the silent bush, in air and water.

This interweaving with the spirit of nature is something that Faust possesses: but he has not yet reached the point where he can recognize the spirit in a mature form. Therefore, Goethe must depict the recognition of the higher world in the characterized form of the witches' kitchen. But we move on and see how he — Faust — arrives at the imperial court and how he has to amuse the emperor in all sorts of ways, and finally has to bring him Helen from the underworld. We see how Goethe lets him descend into the realm of the mothers, that is, into the world of the soul and spirit. But at first he only brings up the image of Helen. But in the course of time he must bring up not only the image that resembles the spiritual Helen, but also what she really is in the spiritual world. What is needed for this? That he gets to know the right connection between body, soul and spirit, namely the physical body, the etheric and the astral body in the spiritual-scientific sense. Just as Faust initially fails to hold on to Helena, but first has to connect body, soul and spirit, so this soul must first be presented in such a way that the body can penetrate into it from one side and the spirit - homunculus - from the other. Goethe uses a strange image here, which people have studied a lot about:

He is not lacking in spiritual qualities,
but all too much in the tangible and practical.

And Thales advises him:

Give in to the praiseworthy desire
to start creation from the beginning!
Be ready for rapid action!
You move according to eternal norms,
through a thousand and one forms,
and you have time until the human being.

That he - the homunculus - is to become human is clearly stated. Furthermore:

Come with me spiritually into the moist expanse,
There you live equally in length and breadth,
You can move about here as you like;
Just do not strive for higher orders.

The comments come entirely from the text because the emphasis is on the word “order” as if he had been striving to receive an order. But it is a very simple matter. As so often, Goethe was speaking his Frankfurt German, and people also printed it that way, but it should simply be written Orten: “But do not strive for higher places”. When he arrives at the classical Walpurgis Night, the Homunculus, who is not lacking in spiritual qualities, is advised that he must pass through such realms of nature, through what natural science teaches, that man develops through the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms to human corporeality.

You have to start at the very bottom. The passage through the greenness of the plant world is depicted to characterize what a person experiences when they reach the plant stage, and Homunculus says:

It grunelt so.

And now to come to what is brought about in man through love, we experience the end of the second act, where Homunculus, who has progressed so far that he has the powers of the three kingdoms of nature within him – this is shown to us by the allusion to the elements – is dashed against the shell of Galathea. Then, when the spiritual has become so embodied through the three realms, this appears to us as the image of Helen.

Then Goethe shows further how Faust develops. It is wonderful how he demonstrates how Faust comes to ever deeper realization, which Goethe shows as complete only at the moment when the eyes go blind. Darkness outside, but inside the light shines. Through experiencing the spiritual world, he can become free from the external world. He shows us this by the fact that Faust only experiences inner vision when the outer light goes out. And yet, Goethe should not present Faust as Paracelsus. Faust falls into misfortune: He can only come to the realization of the spiritual light by dying to the external, by becoming a completely different person. Paracelsus was able to lead his enemies to their deaths.

Why did such a transformation of human research and forms of knowledge occur on the path from Paracelsus to Goethe? The answer is provided by an event that occurred a few years after Paracelsus passed through the gates of death, and which was experienced as a major event on the path from Paracelsus to Goethe. The world was introduced to the Copernican system of the world. It has not yet been realized what this means. Until then, the earth had been regarded as the center around which the firmament moves. Now, through Nicolaus Copernicus, the ground was taken from under people's feet, so to speak. There has been no greater upheaval in the world view. What was the fruit of such a change? That from now on such a path of the soul could lead to direct knowledge of the spiritual world. Until now, a supreme being had provided a worldview that recognizes that which is in physical space as the only thing, and presents it as if the senses recognize it. A sensual process was presented as the decisive one, and the solution to the riddles of the world was sought in external facts.

Paracelsus now faced the world unperturbed by such a materialistic solution to the world's riddles and acquired what he could recognize through direct observation of nature. But in his time, the solution of the world's riddles was otherwise sought in external facts and sensory processes. But this meant that the power to direct oneself to the spiritual in the innermost part of the soul was suppressed for a while in the innermost part of the soul.

Faust cannot gain any satisfaction from his yearning for the spiritual world. The human soul had been taught different ways of thinking. Faust faced spiritual science with despair, because the first thing that reveals itself as spirit to him is: “Don't talk to me like that!” – which is how Goethe made Faust a person of the eighteenth century. Goethe had to experience in Faust what he was to attain in the spiritual world. In this way, Goethe also characterized our immediate present, our time.

Goethe made his Faust character a tragic one, saying: In our time, man has not yet reached the point where he can penetrate into the spiritual world without losing the context of the world of sense. Faust had to lose his eye.

Spiritual science or theosophy, however, has a kind of fulfillment of what Goethe characterized as the task of modern times, because spiritual science wants to be a balance between what modern science has brought about as facts and what the spirit can be as a fact of the spiritual world. Man needs this, and we need nothing more as proof of this than the correctly understood Faust figure. Man needs not only his theory of the development of external facts, but he needs a knowledge of what is the bearer, the creator of the external world. And so, in addition to the law of Francesco Redi, that living things can only arise from living things, there is another: spiritual and soul forces in present earthly life arise out of spiritual and soul forces in earlier earthly lives.

Thus, spiritual-mental aspects will appear as the very legitimate continuation of natural science, as it were a re-embodiment of a Faust. A Faust who does not need to go blind, and yet has spiritual eyes and spiritual ears, so that it will be as we can read in Goethe:

Hark! Listen to the storm of the hours!
The new day is already born for the ears of the spirit.
Rock gates creak and rattle,
Phoebus' wheels roll and clatter.

What a roar brings the light!
It drums, it trumpets,
the eye blinks and the ear is amazed,
unheard-of things are not heard.

Thus Paracelsus appears as a personality that we still find in ancient times, where people still had an old heritage, where the spiritual powers of vision could draw from the spiritual world. But the time came when the spiritual powers of the soul were obscured by external materialism. Now we are at a time when they will develop again, and science will be warmed and enlightened by the assurance, hope and fulfillment of all that we strive for in our thoughts and meditations. Thus science will become much more useful, but spiritual science or theosophy will teach that man, with his innermost core of being, belongs to the spiritual world.

The social question, which is to occupy us today, did not, as will immediately become clear for everyone, arise out of a mere idea or out of the undoubted need of a few people, but is a question that confronts us with facts as strongly and clearly today as ever. One who looks around just a little in the surrounding world will know what a distinct language these facts speak. It could well be that someone who does not want to hear this language of the facts will find out in the not too distant future that he has closed his ears too long to what was necessarily going on. With regard to the social question, the human being of the present is standing within the battle that is at times still playing itself out under the surface of our social order. One who wants to say, more or less precisely, how the social battle has increased in extent and violence doesn't need to go any further into externals, he needs only to draw attention to the violent workers' movement on the occasion of the work stoppage at Crimmitschau, to the miners' strike on the occasion of the lockout of the electrical workers, and, in sum, to what is going on in Eastern Europe.¹ In all this we will have to discern the social question being lived out.

The reproach has often been addressed to Theosophy that it has a number of dreamers among its followers, that it seeks to work only in those areas to which one retreats from the great common questions of the time, where one wants to linger in leisurely contemplation of the human soul, and so they say: Theosophists are a few people who have nothing particular to do, who in an egoistical way want to retreat into the self and cultivate it in the manner of Theosophy. One easily makes the reproach to Theosophy that it wants to stand apart from the great battle of the day, from what touches humanity in the present time. The Theosophist should be setting this right again and again. He should ever and again point out that wherever there is something to investigate and think regarding warranted human affairs in the present, there the Theosophists must be, that he must have a clear heart and clear thinking, that he must not lose himself in some cloudy utopia, but rather must stand within the everyday, helping and caring.

And this other reproach can also easily be made: that Theosophy is touted as a universal cure for all the evils and injuries of the present. That also is otherwise. To be sure, it is claimed that Theosophy, the Theosophical movement, has something to do with all that must prepare itself in the present for a salutary future, but not like a mastering, not as a universal cure do we extol Theosophy; rather we only want to show that with it something so comprehensive is given that without it today we cannot progress in the mosl essential things that we should be concerned about, and that all speculation and reforming must remain half- baked unless the human being approaches the matter with the Theosophical view. The doctrines of thinkers about grand encompassing cosmic connections, about the universal law of world destiny and world events occupy us, in the inner circles of our Theosophical movement, not merely so we can gaze at the starry vastness at leisure, but rather because we know that these laws we are studying and which are active in the great world-all are also active in the human heart, in the soul, and in fact give this soul the capacity really to see into the life of the immediate present. We are sort of like an engineer who absorbs himself for years in his technical studies, but not in order to engage in contemplations of the mysteries of the calculus and marvel at them; rather we seek the laws which we then apply to human life, as the engineer builds bridges and applies the laws to reality.

There is also something here that is universal and widespread and opens up a further horizon. Who would dare to present thinking as a universal remedy, even though this thinking is necessary for what can happen in the cosmos? Theosophy is no dead matter, no dead theory. No, it is something life-awakening. It is not a matter of the concepts, the ideas, that we take on. What is told here does not have the intention of dealing with the ideas as such, nor the intention of developing interesting notions about hidden facts, but rather, what is here passed before the human soul has a very special quality. Non-Theosophists may believe it or not, but one who has occupied himself with it knows that what I am about to say is correct in practice. One that has applied himself to how, in Theosophy, the world and life are considered will notice his life of the senses and of soul becoming something different from what they were before. He learns to think in another way and will observe human circumstances in a more unbiased way than previously.

We have a distant future in mind when we speak of awakening higher powers through inner development. But for the near future we also keep an eye on the life that we can bring about through Theosophical development: that is, the possibility of coming to a comprehensive, clear, and unbiased assessment of the human situations immediately surrounding us. Our culture, with all the scientific character which it has developed up to now, has come up with theories that are impotent regarding life. The Theosophical world-view will not produce such impotent theories. It will teach mankind thinking, awaken thinking forces in mankind that are not powerless regarding reality, but will empower us to take hold of human evolution itself, to take hold of the immediate conduct of life.

Let me bring in a little symptom that will further clarify what I mean to say. Recently a clear example in the political field was provided by a Prussian government councilor who went on leave to find work in America, to take part in and get to know conditions there.² A state councilman is normally called upon to be active in human evolution. Taken in a higher sense, it is his duty and obligation to let something live in his heart that corresponds to real conditions and not merely to theories. And if he has nothing that chimes with the conditions, then his theory is impotent. This man, who for years previously had been called upon to deal with the human element, got to know the human element himself. Of course what I am saying entails not the least reproach against the individual man. This deed is to the highest degree honorable and bold, and admirable. But what he has written is a symptom of what is urgent. It shows the discrepancy in his orientation toward the world and toward workers. Here are just a few words from his book As a Worker in America [4th edition, Berlin 1905, p.31] { Bracketed statements [ ] are insertions by the German editor.}: “How often, earlier on, when I saw a healthy man begging, did I ask, with moral indignation, why doesn't the lout go to work? Now I knew why. In theory things look different from practice; even the most unappetizing aspects of the national economy are easy enough to handle at your desk.”

There is no greater mark of poverty than when someone who is called upon to participate says that the theory which he had doesn't agree with the conditions. Here's the point at which one can take hold of the matter, just as logic enables people to think at all, and just as no one can become a mathematician without manipulating logic, just so no one can develop the power of practical thinking without Theosophy. Look at the national economy that is overwhelming our developmental [free] market. If you set about looking into things with healthy, comprehensive thinking, Theosophical thinking, you will find that things that are supposed to be guideposts, emanating perhaps from university professors or party leaders, are gray theory suitable for being dealt with at the desk, but are useless when one is facing reality. Such things reveal themselves, for instance, at congresses. One just has to look more closely. Congresses in general bear this character. If those who busy themselves would care to descend into practical life, they would soon find that they are capable of nothing. Merely gazing at life doesn't do it. Nor can someone who judges from the standpoint of today's customary culture pass judgment on the women's question or the social question, nor can someone judge who merely looks at things, for nothing is done by that either.

Now if you were to ask this gentleman who wrote these words, What can lead to an improvement?, then you would find that he has only learned how it looks; but how things should be done, that is a different question altogether. It is also not a question that can be answered in an hour or a day. It can't be answered at all by theoretical debate. No Theosophist worthy of the name will say to you: I have this program for the social question, for the women's question, for the vivisection question, or about the care of animals and so forth, rather he will say: Put people who are Theosophists into the institutions dealing with all these questions, set such people in professorial chairs of national economy; then they will have the ability to develop the thinking which will lead to making the single branches of their activity into guideposts in the realm of public life. As long as this is not the case, people in this realm will be charlatans and will have to witness the world collapsing around them, and how this idle circumlocution in congresses shows itself in its uselessness.

I say this not out of fanaticism, rather from what in every Theosophist is a real Theosophical attitude, real Theosophical thinking. Theosophical thinking develops clarity about the various realms of life, a clear, objective view of the forces and powers working in the world. To look at the matter rightly, that is what Theosophical life enables you to do. Therefore Theosophy is not a panacea in the ordinary sense, rather it is the foundation of contemporary life.

After these introductory words let us give a few indications about what has given our social question, as it arises from the facts, its special stamp. Whoever wants to see what will happen must know the laws of becoming, may not have gray theories, must know the laws of the becoming of humanity. We cannot find these laws through some sort of abstract science. Theosophy does not proceed abstractly. It proceeds from clear contemplative thinking. And so let me indicate with at least a few words how the life of today has shaped itself, how this life today has come to be. One who looks more closely at life will realize that some self-knowledge also belongs in these realms in order to see clearly. First I will picture the outer facts, then I will say a few things concerning what it is actually all about.

Every one of us knows what the human being needs in order to live. We all have an idea of what food and clothing we need. A few figures will tell us how much the majority has of all these. All we need to do in this regard is to examine the tax structure. It has been told over and over, but we can bring it to mind again and again. In Prussia, someone who has an income of less than 900 marks pays no taxes. One can very easily check how many people in Prussia have an income of less than 800 or 900 marks. That's 21 million people. Ninety five percent of the total population have less than 3,000 marks income. Take England. Only those who have an income over 150 pounds are taxed. [...] You see, we have most ample figures that speak of how many people have what one must have as absolute necessity.

Look at statistics. They speak a distinct language. But what has that to do with our self-knowledge? A lot. For it is a matter of gaining the right standpoint for ourselves regarding these facts. And in this connection people let themselves miss out a great deal on what is right. What are people around us doing? What is the cause of their receiving this low income? It is what we give them for what they do for us. We are now making no distinction between workers and non-workers, between proletariat and non- proletariat. For if one makes this distinction, then the matter is already entirely false. And that is the mistake of all our national economic considerations, that one does not proceed from self-knowledge, but rather from theory.

[The following sentences of the transcript reveal a few discrepancies, so that the original wording cannot be reconstructed. By the gist of it, Rudolf Steiner most likely described how every person lives from the products that another has produced. Even for someone out of work, whose means of livelihood are insufficient, products are produced. Even the seamstress working for starvation wages wears clothes that have been produced in turn for a starvation wage. Compare the paragraphs written in the same year in the essay “Spiritual Science and the Social Question,” in Lucifer Gnosis.]

And if in our emotions and perceptions we are able to feel a certain pain over the fact that the clothes we have on have been produced for a starvation wage, then we are looking deep into the heart of the question. When in all this you think over what you wear in the way of clothing, what you put in your mouth for nourishment, where it comes from, only then will you grasp the social question in all its depth. Not through speculation, but rather through a living contemplation does one get an insight into what it is all about.

It isn't right when they say that today's misery, even if we could portray it in its direst colors, is greater than it was in former centuries. That is not the case. We would decisively be committing a falsification of objective reality. Just try to study conditions objectively in the city of Cologne today and 120 years ago, and you will see that much has gotten better. And even so we have the social question. We have it because human beings have gone through yet another evolution, and this is because in large measure they have come to thinking, to self-consciousness, and because their needs have greatly changed. And there, if we study the question thus, we are indeed of necessity directed toward the broad contexts that arise for us in world history if we are not, like the modern researcher, too shortsighted. In order to judge these things it is necessary to get to know the great laws of life. What has brought it about that social affairs have taken this shape? It is the manner and method which the human spirit has taken on. Look back to the time of the French Revolution. At that time they demanded something else. It was a question tending more toward the juridical that brought out the ideal of Liberty - Equality - Fraternity. The French revolutionary heroes in Western Europe called for Liberty. Those now battling in Eastern Europe call for bread. It is simply two sides of the same coin, two different demands of human beings who have learned to put such questions because their souls have undergone a transformation.

This transformation of the soul we have to study more closely. We must study and understand why the souls of the great masses of human beings today—and this will spread over the centuries—have come to these demands. At this point the Theosophical world conception comes in with practical application, underpinning our comprehension. Only someone who understands the case is qualified to judge it. The only one who is able to look into the soul is one who, in the great world framework, sees what is going on in this soul. And only one who understands something of the laws of the soul is able to effect something in souls and lead into the future.

A small side remark: The sciences of today, biology, Darwinism, Haeckelianism, [The worldview of Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), German naturalist and philosopher.] have brought us great ideas. So also the idea that each living entity, in the first stages of its existence, even in its germinal state, recapitulates the forms of life that have previously been gone through out in nature. This brief recapitulation of the various stages occurs also in that being which includes them all, climbing higher on the ladder of evolution than all others: the human being. Assume that a spirit had consciousness at a time before there were any human beings, then he would have had to know not only what had already happened, but he would also—by contrast—have had to form a picture of future evolution. He would have had to form a picture for the future out of the animal condition of that time. Only the human being, who in his germinal configuration recapitulates the preceding conditions, can show us what to do. It is the doing that must pass beyond all knowing. No knowing occupies itself with anything but what was. But if we want to work into the future, we have to do things that haven't been there yet. The great laws that are to be realized in the future show us this. In a certain way everything that is to come about in the future has already been there in the past, namely through intuition. A spirit who had intervened at that time would have had to have had intuition in order to be able to find out about the hidden laws of existence that apply to the past and the future. That is why Theosophy cultivates intuition. That is what reaches out beyond the mere physical experience of the world. Theosophy looks for the laws that are to be cognized by intuition and which lead us into the future of the human race. [For a characterization of intuition as used by Steiner, see, for example, his essays from 1905, The Stages of Higher Knowledge.]

One of these great world laws that can be a guide for us is the law of reincarnation. First, it renders understandable for us how, in higher spiritual realms, what obtains as law is nothing else but what Darwin and Haeckel have intimated. It renders comprehensible why this or that was felt as a need in any given age. One who steeps himself in this knows the last time in which there was life thirsting for universal freedom, when human beings took up impulses for which they should be calling today. The ones who today call for liberty and equality—I say this with the same objective certainty with which the natural scientist has spoken about the physical—all those souls who today cry for liberty and equality have learned it at another stage of their existence, in an earlier incarnation. The greatest needs of the human being of today were embodied in the early time of Christianity, in the first Christian centuries. All human beings have taken up this press for equality, before which the human being of today stands in spiritual life. Christianity brought the message of equality before God. In times prior to that, there had been no such equality.

I do not say what I have just said in a derogatory way, I say it with the same sober objectivity with which I would speak of any scientific problem. If one considers the actual soul and everything which creates outward inequalities, the same soul that once took to itself as an impulse “they are equal before God and before mankind”—when one considers the actual soul—finds that everything that determines outward inequality has no meaning for contemporary life. When the grave closes over us we will all be and become equal. What the soul has taken up lives on in the soul and emerges in a different form. If we consider cultural progress from the perspective of the macrocosm we come to tremendous implications regarding education. I have already drawn attention to what this pedagogy on earth was like in pre-Christian times. Let us look back into Egyptian times. A large number of people there were occupied with work, the difficulty of which a man of today can no longer estimate. They labored willingly. And why? Because they knew that this life is one among many. Each one said to himself: The one who is in charge of my work is like the person I will be sometime. This life must be compensated in different incarnations, for it directs itself out of this knowledge.

Linked with this is the law of karma. What I have experienced in one life is either deserved or will be compensated for in later times. If it had merely gone on like that, however, then the human being would have overlooked the kingdom of the earth. This one life would not have been important to him. In that regard Christianity took measures for education in order to have this life between birth and death be of importance to him. It is merely illusory when Christianity deviates from that, for it has pointed strongly to the beyond; it has even made eternal punishment and eternal bliss a function of one life. Whoever believes that the one life is of primary importance learns to take this life seriously. It pivots around the truths that are suitable for the human being, and it is suitable for the human being to be raised in the idea of this one earth life. Such were the two tasks: education for the importance of earthly life between birth and death, and, on the other hand, that outside this earthly life everyone is equal before God. This earthly life has been bearable only by being so considered that all are equal before God. Whoever looks at it that way will observe, in the development of mankind since the rise of Christianity, a descent into the physical world. More and more the human being feels committed to physical existence. Through this he transferred the importance of the rule of the equality before God more and more to equality in material existence itself.

That picture should not be misunderstood. The soul that 1800 years ago was accustomed to claiming equality for the beyond now brings the impulse for equality with it, but in connection with what is important today: “equality before Mammon.” Please do not see a criticism or anything pejorative in this, rather the objective confirmation of a cosmic law of the developing soul. One must study the course of time this way. Then one will understand that only one thing will again bring about in this soul a change in direction, an ascent, namely if we get the soul who is calling for equality back into the beyond. Toward the beyond we looked up, from the here-and-now we looked out. Today, due to this impulse, the soul is turned back upon itself. Today it seeks the same thing in the here-and-now. If it is to find an ascent again, it must find the spirit in the present, the inwardness, in the soul element itself. That is what the Theosophical world movement is striving for: to prepare the soul for the third stage, [The German “drei Stadien” translates to “three stages.” We suggest this represents a stenographic error and take the liberty of correcting it for the sake of clarity.] because it is filled with God, filled with divine wisdom, and will thereby again know how to place itself in the world, so that it will again find the harmony between itself and the surrounding world.

Such thoughts have value in giving direction. We can't bring this about from one day to the next. But we also cannot consider only our individual deeds. Every deed must stand under some influence. Then it becomes practical, then it is something, then it is no gray theory, rather immediate life, because we are looking into the workings of the soul.

Our national economists and our social theorists today so often say: the human being is only the product of outer circumstances. The human being has come to this because he has lived in these or those outer conditions. Thus speaks, for example, in earnest, social democracy, saying that the human being becomes what the environment makes of him, that because he has become a proletarian worker, due to the entire development of industry, he has also become one in his soul, the way he has evolved through just these conditions. The human being is a product of circumstances. We can often hear that. Let us study the conditions themselves, let us consider what is round about us, what we are most dependent on. Are we dependent merely on nature? No! We notice what we are dependent on only when we stand starving in front of the bakery and have nothing in our pockets to buy anything with.

All these conditions are made and put into effect in turn by human beings. The spirit that is evolving through history has brought these conditions about. People have thought up, out of concern for their own welfare, sometimes only shortly before, what obtains today; they simply insert it. Thus the one who thinks people are dependent on circumstances is reasoning in a circle, because the circumstances were brought about by people. If we picture this to ourselves we must say: it isn't a matter of the circumstances, rather we have to look at how the circumstances have come to be. It is idle to insist on saying: the human being is dependent on his circumstances. In fifty years the human being will also be dependent on the conditions that surround him. You can concede to every social democrat [Social Democracy is “a political theory advocating the use of democratic means to achieve a gradual transition from capitalism to socialism.” American Heritage Dictionary, 1992. Social Democrat (with capitals) refers to a member of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in Germany, which was founded in the late 19th century.] that the human being is dependent on circumstances, but on those that we cause today, that emanate from our disposition, from our soul. We create the social conditions! And what will live then will be the crystallized perceptions and feelings that we put out into the world today.

This shows us what it is all about: that one must learn the laws under which the world is evolving. It cannot be a matter of science, rather it can only be an intuition of what we must contribute as law. This comes directly out of a perception that seems most fantastic to most people, but which is much clearer and more objective than much of the fantastic fantasy of our scientists. One that can tell what lives in the soul and then crystallizes outwardly, can also, out of the wisdom, out of the divine in the soul, tell what an individual can spread out into the world and what is proper for humanity.

If in the future you want to have such circumstances around you, if you want to have it set up that way, as an institution which will satisfy people, about which people will be able to say: “That's it—we want to live under these conditions,” then you must first pour humanity into these conditions, so that humanity will stream out of them again. The deepest humanity, the deepest soul-inwardness must first stream out of our own hearts into the world. Then the world will be an image of the soul, and in this soul there will be an image of the world. This will be able to satisfy people again. Therefore the human being cannot expect anything from all those quackeries in the social area that are perpetrated by looking at outer circumstances. These outer circumstances are made by human beings; they are nothing else but human souls which have streamed outwards. The first things that have to be worked over, what we have to take up first as the social question, are the souls of today, which produce the environment of tomorrow. You can see how better conditions stream into the environment if only you would study it. Again and again I have had to hear from social politicians: Make the conditions better and human beings will become better. Just let these people study what individual sects, developing themselves cut off from world evolution pursue as soul culture, just let them study what the latter contribute to the shaping of outer conditions. If human beings realize that the improvement of conditions depends on themselves, if they acquire Theosophical knowledge, and if they cognize the first fundamental principle to establish the kernel of a universal brotherhood [Refers to the first fundamental principle of the Theosophical Society: “To form a nucleus of the universal brotherhood of humanity without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste or color.”] and develop it in themselves as a social feeling for the surrounding world, then the actual social is possible, and one is prepared for what will happen in the near future.

Our entire national economy today lives under false premises. Therefore our theories are mostly false because they proceed from assumptions entirely different from those that arise out of the human being and from humanity. One starts with production, or one believes one can achieve something with the development of compensation. All thinking moves in this direction. To be sure, an improvement will not occur immediately with a change in thinking. But it will occur when the direction is changed. Moreover, our proletariat has no inkling about what is here in question. What it demands is more pay and shorter hours. Take a look at the worker in any particular sector, say the electric sector, which has been unionized in order, through this collective, to get better pay and working conditions. What does he want with these better working conditions? He wants a different relation regarding compensation to take place between him and his employer. That's all he wants. The conditions of production don't change. All that happens is that the worker gets higher wages [...]. That's all that happens. If s just a shift in capital.

But that doesn't really change anything much at all, because if one gets more pay today, food will be more expensive tomorrow. It is not at all possible to bring about any kind of improvement for the future in this way. This ongoing endeavor is based on false thinking. There it's a matter of production and consumption. Here a great comprehensive worldwide law about work applies. One has to know this. Certain people who are used to thinking in today's national-economic terms will say perhaps that I am placing a foggy brain in front of them. One who has worked his way through to Theosophy has, as a rule, gone through today's thinking. Theosophy should be active in us as a life impulse. But as every thought will draw into us and stimulate every action in us, just so this also should stimulate us. We needn't think that we can realize it right away. Also, the government councilor who doesn't live in gray theories can look at life entirely differently. He doesn't need to travel to America in order to get the idea that someone who doesn't have any work has to be a lazy lout. In the course of time work has greatly changed its form.

Take a look at ancient Greece. What was work in those days? The worker stood in an entirely different relation to his master. At that time work was slavery. The worker could be compelled by force to work. What he received from his master was his living. But his master took the proceeds of the work; it had nothing whatever to do with the particular relation of the worker to his master. He had to work; moreover, he was maintained under precarious conditions; he was not compensated for the things he did. There we have labor under duress, without pay.

[A] commodity is the result of something other than directly compensated work. Thus its value also has nothing to do with what is to be paid in wages. Look at today's situation. Today we have jobs for which the worker is partly compensated—partly. What they bring in flows as profit into the pockets of the entrepreneur. Thus work is partly compensated. What, thereby, has the worker himself become? He invests his labor power into this work. In Greece, when one was confronting a unit of work, it was a product of slavery. Today's commodity involves something entirely different. Today the luxury that I receive is crystallized labor for which the worker is compensated. If we ponder this we will find that a half freedom has taken over from the old slavery. A contractual relation has taken its place. In that way labor has become a commodity in the figure of the laborer. So we have labor that is half compelled and half voluntary. And the course of evolution is in the direction of completely voluntary work. This path no one will change or reject. Just as the Greek laborer did his work under the compulsion of his master and a present laborer works under the compulsion of wages, just so in the future only freedom will obtain. Labor and compensation will in future be completely separated.

That will constitute the health of social conditions in the future. You can see it already today. Work will be a voluntary performance out of the recognition of necessity, out of the realization that it must be done. People perform it because they look at the person and see that he needs work done for him. What was labor in antiquity? It was tribute, it was performed because it had to be performed. And what is the labor of the present time? It is based on self-interest, on the compulsion that egoism exerts on us. Because we want to exist, we want labor to be paid for. We work for our own sake, for the sake of our pay. In the future we will work for our fellow human beings, because they need what we can provide. That's what we will work for. We will clothe our fellow men, we will give them what they need—in completely free activity. From this, compensation must be completely separated. Labor in the past was tribute, in the future it will be sacrifice. It has nothing to do with self-interest, nothing to do with compensation. If I base my labor on consumer demand, with regard to what humanity needs, I stand in a free relation to labor, and my work is a sacrifice for humanity. Then I will work with all my powers, because I love humanity and want to place my capacities at its disposal.

That has to be possible, and is possible only when one's living is separated from one's labor. And that is going to happen in the future. No one will be the owner of the products of labor. People must be educated for voluntary work, one for all and all for one. Everyone has to act accordingly. If you were to found a small community today in which everyone throws all one's income into a common bank account and everyone works at whatever he can do, then one's living is not dependent on what work one can do, but rather this living is effected out of the common consumption. This brings about a greater freedom than the coordination of pay with production does. If that happens, we will gain a direction which corresponds with needs. Already today this can flow into every law, every decree. Of course, not absolutely, but approximately. Already today one can organize factories in the right way. But that demands healthy, clear, sober thinking in the sense of Theosophy. If such things penetrate into human souls, then something will be able to live again in these human souls. And the way the one determines the other, just so this life of the human soul will also determine that the outer arrangements will be a mirror picture of it, so that our labor will be a sacrificial offering—and no longer self-interest—so that what controls the relations with the outer world is not compensation, but rather what is in us. What we have in our power to do, we offer to humanity. If we can't do much, then we can't offer much; if we have a lot, then we offer a lot.

We must know that every activity is a cause of endless effects and that we may allow nothing that is in our soul to go unused. We will be making every offering out of our soul if we completely renounce any pay that can accrue to us from external conditions. Not for our own sake, not for the sake of our welfare, but rather for the sake of necessity. We want to firm up the soul through the law of its own inner being, so that it learns to place its powers at the disposal of the whole from points of view other than the law of wages and self-interest. There have been thinkers who in some connection have already thought thus. In the first half of the 19th century there have been thinkers who have brought this feature of a grand soul-based contemplation of cosmic law. Is this feature not a sanctification of labor? Isn't it so that we can lay it on the altar of humanity?

Thus labor becomes anything but a burden. It becomes something into which we place what is most sacred for us, our compassion for humanity, and then we can say: Labor is sacred because it is a sacrifice for mankind.

Now there have been people who in the first half of the nineteenth century spoke of “sacred industry.” Saint Simon was one of those who had an inkling of the great ideas of the future.³ Whoever studies his writings will, if one deepens them in the theosophical sense, gain endlessly much for our time. Saint Simon spoke in a rudimentary way, but of a type of living together, as in an association. He has projected associations into which the single individuals deposited tribute, and thus existence became independent. He had great ideas about the development of humanity, and discovered several things. He said: The human races correspond to a planned development, and souls make their appearance one after the other and work their way upwards. That's the way to regard the development of humanity, for then one comes to the correct view. He also speaks of a planetary spirit that changes itself into other planets on which humanity will live. In short, here is a national economist whose works you can read and who lived in the first half of the nineteenth century. You read his work like a Theosophical book.

Today the palingenesis [continued rebirth, metempsychosis] of soul existence can be proved. Whoever acknowledges Haeckel will also have to acknowledge reincarnation if one carries Haeckel's ideas further. Fourier⁴ also thought in this way. You can find in him a primitive Theosophy. Thus for one who looks at things the way they are, Theosophy's first major principle for our social life—to establish the kernel of a universal brotherhood—is the only thing that can propagate healthy conditions in the environment. This view of the Theosophists is not impractical, rather it is more practical than the view of all those social theorists (you'll have to admit this if you apply these theories to life), and only someone like that will say, with good old Kolb: Studying theories of national economy is no burden. Only if Theosophy comes to be heard in debates on the social question can a healthy way of looking at it, a healthy thinking come into it. So it is necessary for someone who wants to see and hear in this area to come to terms with Theosophy.

For the Theosophists two things are clear, not out of fanaticism, but rather out of a knowledge that comes from looking at life: it is possible to stick with gray theory and relegate the matter to people who will later have to admit that at the desk it looks different from what it turns out to be in life out there. Then one will have to wait a long time, and what must come will come anyway. In the end, living theory will have to intervene in life—one can hear it already today—already today one can argue about what Theosophy has to say about the social question. Then one can't hear just one lecture, rather one has to deal with Theosophy in its entirety. From it one will derive the gift, the ability, in a healthy way to view life from top to bottom in its most secret and intimate forces, then healing and blessing can soon come into our social order.

Let us achieve in ourselves, as much as we can, what should happen. The reshaping of labor, working not for pay, is a sacrifice. Then we will have done our duty, then we will have regarded life in a healthy way. Or else we will keep looking at the world with gray theories, alien to life. Then it could turn out that future humanity could say: Questions were raised. When these questions were there to be raised, when recovery in a good way was possible, that was just when they did not want to study them. Goethe once said: “Revolutions are entirely impossible if the rulers do their duty.” He knew who was to blame for revolution.⁵ Let us try to consider what the history of the future can say about our present. You have seen what time has wrought, until the earth was drenched with blood, and how the time has raised the most burning questions in an even more frightful way.

• 1. Crimmitschau strikes: Among the numerous work stoppages in the first years of the 20th century, the strike of the textile workers of Crimmitschau, from 7 August 1903 to 17 January 1904, stands out especially because the management reacted to the strike of 600 textile workers in five factories with an unprecedented mass lockout: they locked out the entire work force. Subsequently, in Crimmitschau, with a population of 23,000, around 8,000 textile workers and 1500 who worked at home stood in conflict with a management that was obviously intensifying its measures against the workers. For details on this strike see F. Deppe et al., Geschichte der deutschen Gewerkschaftsbewegung (History of the German Trade Union Movement), Cologne, 1978, p.77f.
  
  Miners' strike: A further high point in the strike movement was the miners' strike in the Ruhr from December 1904 to 9 February 1905, at the center of which stood the demands for am eight-hour day, higher pay, better worker protection, and recognition of the workers organizations. For this also see the portrayal of F. Deppe et al. op cit. p. 78f. what's going on in Eastern Europe: On 22 August 1905, “bloody Sunday,” in Petersburg, peaceful demonstrators were shot down by the military. The strike wave now turned into revolutionary unrest that soon spread over all of Russia. In the fall of 1905 the socialistically organized workers called for a general strike and, with the participation of Bolsheviks, Menscheviks, social revolutionaries and independents, formed the first Soviet (Council).
• 2. a Prussian government councillor, Alfred Kolb: Rudolf Steiner also deals with him in the essay “Spiritual Science and the Social Question” in Lucifer Gnosis, GA Bibl. No. 134, and in the Hamburg lecture of the same name of 2 March 1908 in Die Welträtsel und die Anthroposophie (Anthroposophy and the Riddle of the World), Bn/GA Bibl. No. 54.
• 3. Saint Simon (Claude Henri de Rouvroy), 1760-1825: social reformer. Lettres d'un habitant de Geneve a ses contemporains (1803) (Letters of an Inhabitant of Geneva to his Contemporaries), Réorganisations de la societi europtenne (1814) (The Reorganization of European Society); Le nouveau christianisme (1825) (The New Christianity). Also see A. Voigt, Die sozialen Utopien, Leipzig, 1906 (Social Utopias). This book is also to be found in Rudolf Steiner's private library (Archives of the Rudolf Steiner Estate Administration) and contains numerous underlinings by him concerning Saint Simon. See p,107ff.
• 4. Fourier, François Marie Charles, 1772–1837; Théorie des quatre mouvements et des destinées générales (1808) (Theory of Four Movements and General Destinies), Lenouveau monde industrielet sociétair (1829) (The New Industrial and Societal World). See A. Voigt op.cit. p. 95ff.
• 5. Goethe once said: Literally it says: “I was also completely convinced that any great revolution is never the fault of the people, rather of the government. Revolutions are altogether impossible as long as governments are continually just and continually vigilant, so that they anticipate them with timely reforms and don't hold back until what is necessary is compelled from the bottom up” (Eckermann, 4 January 1824).

Today, allow me to shed some light on a very current topic that touches the immediate present from the point of view of Theosophy. The fact that it is possible for such a question, such a movement that directly engages cultural life, to be placed in the light of our worldview is demonstrated by a small piece of evidence from the last few days that is extraordinarily significant in several respects. It shows that practical people in particular recognize the need to deepen our culture through the theosophical worldview, and that on the other hand, in the broadest circles, theosophy is still something that seems quite unknown.

Last Sunday, a very strange article appeared in the “Tag”, on whose political content I do not want to go into at all, about Russia, Japan and peace, by Carl Peters. You can think what you want about the name Carl Peters; no one will dispute that he is one of the great practitioners of our day. In this article, he talks about the differences in the perception of the peace between Japan and Russia within the two countries. He mentions the manifesto with which this peace was proclaimed to the people in Russia, which contains the words that God may give his great blessing to these people, and for the development of Russia in the future. He then mentions the proclamation of peace to Russia. [The Mikado says in his peace manifesto]: The result of the war is due to the kind souls of our ancestors. Now that peace and quiet have been secured, we call upon the great ancestors to enable us to pass the fruits on to our descendants. The Emperor of Japan visits the temple to bring the news of the conclusion of peace to the imperial ancestors. ... [space] I am quoting this because of the words the author of the article says about it. He says: “The two have this in common, that they appeal to a spiritual fate in the world process.” The difference is that, according to the East Asian view, it is not a victory of the material. The Japanese view is more pantheistic, the Christian view more [monotheistic]. Which one is right cannot be determined by rational arguments. I would like to add the following remark: The Japanese are a [sober, almost mathematical] nation, so I do not assume that what we can believe plays a major role for them. If they assume an influence on earthly fate, it is based not on faith but on knowledge. I would like to suspect that High and East Asia possess certain spiritual knowledge that the highly developed West can only dream of. If they are able and willing to introduce such knowledge into our more or less flattening culture, they would provide us with ideal values that go far beyond what we can offer them. ... [space]

It is not what is contained in these words that we want to examine. The fact that they have been spoken by a so-called [practitioner] is what we want to put at the top of our consideration. Two things strike us. One is that the necessity for a spiritual deepening of our culture is pointed out in such harsh words [about forces that do not live in the material world], and on the other hand, reference is made to East Asia and the hope is expressed that our flattening culture should receive a refreshment from the East, in that the hope is expressed that these knowers can offer us more than we can offer them with our culture. The fact that one can know something about the forces emanating from people who no longer live in earthly existence is taken very seriously here by a man of the world.

It is very strange that on the one hand the necessity is so emphasized, and on the other hand at the same time there is no awareness that for thirty years there has been a movement in Europe that is not working from the remnants of an older people whose spiritual consciousness cannot be at its full height today, but that, I say, there has been a spiritual movement in Europe itself for thirty years, as there is Theosophy. This is completely forgotten; and no consideration is given to the fact that we may be called upon here to establish this spiritual culture in a completely different way than those East Asian peoples. The whole thing is a throwing of light on the one hand, after the longing for spirituality, for knowledge of the spiritual world, and on the other hand, I would like to say, a superficial conception of our own European aspirations.

More than any other question, what has been touched on here may interest us when discussing the women's issue. The theosophical movement can in no way be suspected of treating this matter in any reactionary way. Simply the way it has developed would flatly contradict such an assertion. Women have been among the best founders and collaborators of the theosophical movement from the very beginning. Yes, the actual founder of the Theosophical Society – Helena Petrovna Blavatsky – was a woman. And in terms of the sum of knowledge contained in the works of this woman, nothing that has been given in the cultural works of the last few centuries can match it.

You don't have to believe it. If you seriously immerse yourself in what this woman has given, then the conviction grows that what has just been said is a truth. And Annie Besant, her successor – another woman – has understood in a quite extraordinary way how to combine modern science, modern thinking, and a progressive outlook on life with the theosophical ethos and the theosophical movement in general.

Within the Theosophical Society, men and women work together. Never, in any way, does one have the feeling within the Society that gender plays any role in this. Yes, from one side, which has not grasped the Theosophical movement in its deepest essence, this movement has been called a feminine one; partly because it was founded by a woman, partly because perhaps now in the majority women work in the movement. This fact protects us above all from the prejudice that we could understand this matter in some kind of retrogressive, hostile sense.

But the theosophist is called upon to consider all these things in the light of spirituality, in the light of the highest spiritual culture. He must also do this with regard to this matter. Above all, we will notice that this women's issue, as it now presents itself to us, is a product of our modern world view, our modern thinking and feeling. The way it presents itself to us today would not have been possible a hundred years ago. Insofar as Theosophy is always concerned with clearly and distinctly understanding the spirit of humanity in different epochs, we will also have to clearly understand how this women's issue in particular has emerged from our culture. Theosophy is less concerned with criticizing and more with understanding in all directions. Therefore, it will be less programmatic about this issue of women's rights, but will rather have to explore what the cause of this issue is.

We do not get to the bottom of this issue as easily as we do with others. This is because Theosophy leads us deep into human nature. And this is more diverse and complicated than one might think. While the modern man could easily ignore the distinction between man and woman, the theosophist must look at this difference from the depth of human nature and ask himself whether, despite this difference, the peculiar cooperation that has emerged within the Theosophical Society could also benefit larger cultural circles, perhaps even give rise to a general world view on this question in the present day.

If we look back over time, we find that the perception of women, both of themselves and of the perception they had of the opposite sex, has changed greatly over time. Likewise, the external institutions within which the two sexes have lived have changed significantly. If we look at this superficially, we will not arrive at the real cause and basis. It is known that in the beginning of the time into which not history, but prehistory leads us, the woman played a substantially different role. It is known that patriarchy, the “father family”, with its peculiarly constituted inheritance law and other social institutions, arose from an original “mother family” - matriarchy, that woman had a privileged position with regard to matters relating to the offspring, such as inheritance law and so on.

The theosophist must ask himself: how is such a thing connected with the original spiritual forces of the world? This brings us to the discussion of a fact that has been touched on here several times, but which we must apply to this particular case. The basis of all human life in its historical development on earth is a natural one, one that has developed from an [instinctive] disposition to conscious, clear thinking, to conscious, clear institutions created by the intellect and certain moral concepts.

The original bonds of humanity had arisen from nature. Blood relationship was the original one. Institutions that created moral concepts are later placed in the place of ancient blood relationship.

The materialist sees nothing but the raw force of nature in this blood relationship. But anyone who has a spiritual worldview knows that what is expressed as instinct, what comes to the fore as drive, what is expressed as blood relationship, can all be traced back to spiritual forces, to spiritual beings that stand behind the sensual existence. Just as man today, more or less consciously, directs the social order, so originally the devas [or dhyans], divine powers, directed the context of humanity, [they ordered human conditions].

This working out of a spiritual basis, which is still unconscious to man, appears as drive and instinct. The bearer of this original instinct, based on spiritual essence, was woman. The ancient myths and legends of the peoples bear witness to this fact. [From the theosophical point of view this is easily provable, but this view can also be proved purely intellectually.] Only one thing needs to be mentioned. If you look at the images that go back to the earliest stages of human existence, you will have found in these images the tradition of an original female basis for the entire human race. The Greeks depicted their Zeus with a female bust.

The theosophical worldview takes us back to the very beginning of time, as far back as we can trace time on Earth, to those times when there was no gender separation, to those times of which we cannot speak in detail today, to those times when the sexes were not divided between two different individuals, but were united. Those familiar with scientific research will know that even natural science points to a being from prehistoric times that was not single-sex but two-sex. In this regard, I draw attention to the Darwinian Oskar Schmidt. Theosophy speaks of that time in which the pictorially represented prehistoric man was a fact. He was more inclined towards the female sex.

A little thought can make this clear. Reproduction was tied to the female sex at all times. That which was there as a basis was also expressed in the external social context. In the early days, this natural basis was translated into a kind of moral worldview, in terms of social institutions, rights and institutions.

That the spiritual power of man was particularly concentrated in woman, is shown to us even by the view that we find in Tacitus, where woman is seen as a prophetess, [called to proclaim from the spiritual world what will happen in the future – Velleda, Alruna –] who has to proclaim whether right or wrong exists, whether something should be undertaken or not. We find such views among various peoples. The fact that the spiritual, too, where it appears at the beginning of our times, where it appears as something new, as something wise, is rooted in the same natural foundation, emerges from such facts.

And now something else: Go back to the earliest times of religious world view, and you will find a common trait in all peoples that is connected with this natural basis of the human race, and on the other hand with the consciousness from which the oldest institutions and the thoughts and aspirations of humanity have developed. In sexual symbols, in images that are connected to this natural basis, the culture and religion of different peoples is expressed in very specific times. These are naive but beautiful and magnificent times when people, in sweet simplicity and naivety, associated nothing low or frivolous with these sexual symbols, where procreation was a power of nature and was symbolized in the woman, who showed herself in various forms of expression like the divine creation for them. There have been attempts to revive these views from a so-called sexual religion. There is no right to do it the way it was done. For the current basis of feeling is not such that one can feel one's way back to that original and unblemished state that was associated with these symbols, so that the way these old things are discussed today has something offensive about it for the connoisseur.

Only slowly and gradually did those institutions, those states of consciousness that are linked to the female origin of the human race, change into a different order, an order that, to put it briefly, was made by man, by the man who has broken away from this natural foundation, by the man who has nothing to do with the visible progress in the human race.

It is only through the law, through legal regulation, that the right of the man is introduced into the original right based on blood relationship, taken from the female point of view. Thus we see that it is only on this original basis of a religious world view, which starts from the generative powers of nature, that what we encounter in the remnants of ancient peoples, [Mongolian ancient tribes] as ancestral culture, develops. A power that worked directly was revered in woman.

Then, in place of the wise and the soothsayers, and in place of the veneration of the directly present female, there arises what is called the cult of the ancestors, the veneration of deceased members of the people who have rendered outstanding services for the good of the whole — male ancestors. They venerated what had an effect beyond death. You can still see this in the fact that the Mikado brings the message of peace and war to the graves of his ancestors. So we see the transition from female culture to male culture.

The conquest of institutions that have been linked to women by nature since time immemorial through reason and the thinking of man is slow and gradual. But something else is connected with this, something that I cannot better describe than as the transition from a primeval conservatism to an idealism that is gradually emerging in the world.

You can follow this in those periods of world development in which those old religious cultures of which I have spoken developed. These go back either to times when the divine-creative could be seen in the power of creation, or to times when it had long since died but still continued to work as something present. These cultures build on something in the past. At first, we find in world development those that build on humanity's starting point, that point to the old, to what has come from before, to what has been sacred since time immemorial, to nature, to the ancestors. This is the starting point of the human race, and gradually this view changes into a completely different one. In all peoples who have provided the starting points for the culture to which we ourselves belong, you will find the veneration of the ancestors in the veneration of the prophets, the veneration of those who proclaim the future. In all the peoples who provided the starting points for the culture to which we ourselves belong, you find, instead of ancestor worship, the worship of the prophets, the worship of those who proclaim the future, those who hold up the high ideals to the people. Primitive conservatism gradually gives way to idealism. The focus turns from the past to the future, even among the people from whom Christianity itself emerged. The prophets were the real great personalities, and hand in hand with them goes a detachment from the natural, from mere blood relationship, from all that points to the foundations of our race.

We see the tremendous depth of human development when we look at this turnaround. That which is connected with the relationship between the sexes, which is the subject of much discussion among anthropologists and others today, the so-called sense of shame, was not present at the starting point of our culture. [What was connected with the creation of man was not hidden; it was something natural, self-evident.] It only emerged at the time when a characterized change took place as a necessity. Where the power of nature gave way to reason and ideals, people began to cover what was considered to be a remnant of the natural foundations of the human race.

Take a closer look at this point. What is man ashamed of? Consider this feeling of shame in other areas. Everywhere you will find that man is ashamed when something is done by him in such a way that he actually more or less recognizes the demand that he could have done it better, that it is actually not right the way he did it. We can say something quite similar about the feeling of shame in general. It is there and refers to something that comes from ancient times and can be overcome, and which is as it should not be if we look to the future.

Here human instinct, human perception, points to something that the theosophical world view presents as realized in the distant future. Today I must point out that the development of humanity through the sexes is only a transitional stage, that just as humanity has emerged from the union of the two sexes in one individual, humanity is again heading for a state in which there are again not two, but only one sex. Thus you see our present development through the theosophical world view placed in a distant past and a distant future that are similar, that resemble each other in certain ways.

We can perceive how this fact is reflected in the most intimate expressions of the human race. Take a look at ancient artistic or semi-artistic representations of the divine creative power, at the way the ancient Egyptians associated it with the service of Isis, and compare it with the peculiar trait that emanates from Raphael's Madonna. What is natural, what is connected with the power of creation, can be seen to have been expressed in a semi-artistic way in ancient times. This creative power is shyly veiled in a Raphael Madonna, and we encounter a completely different, higher moment: love, a spiritual relationship that takes the place of the old natural relationship. The mother with the child, bathed in the magic of love. And the spiritual is expressed, as for example in the Sistine Madonna, in the protruding angel heads. The creative power is hinted at as a spiritual echo. There you see a great universal truth sensed by the artist.

The religions themselves take this path. Ascetic religions, such religions that are escapist, are not at the starting point of humanity. They only emerge at the time when the indicated change has taken place. It is magnificent and powerful in the times when this change is being prepared. The saviors in human development are mythically depicted as immaculately conceived. You have this with Buddha and with the other saviors of humanity and finally in the Christian religion itself. In religion, the original natural foundation is developed into the most sacred.

[Again, compare the Egyptian Isis service with these spiritualized religions.] This is wonderfully indicated in the transformation of Egypt, with the ideal and the spiritualized perception at the starting point of our era. Then you will feel this transformation in all humanity. That is why the theosophical world view is clear about the fact that the natural basis from which the human race originated is the external physiognomic expression of a spiritual being. This spiritual essence is the same that man will approach again in a conscious way in the future.

If we bear in mind that we are progressing from the spirit in its natural form to the spirit in its immediate form, then we will understand many things better that have taken place in the course of sexual development. Above all, we will better understand what I mentioned earlier: the replacement of ancient female institutions and female foundations by a male culture, in which we still live today. The natural basis was to be suppressed. At first it could only be suppressed in the area of external institutions, but otherwise it remained in place, and so we are confronted by a strange hybrid in our present-day institutions. Half of them are still based on what remains of the old natural basis with blood relationship, and half of them are steeped in human understanding, in moral institutions that have been poured over them. In our current institutions, both elements peek out in a colorful mix. [Basically, man has only whitewashed what the original natural basis of women's culture has provided him with; it shows through everything.] However, we will turn to the future with its culture and efficiency. Then this spirit will show itself in its actual, appropriate form, and in the light of a completely different view than the one that originally existed. When man originally wanted to raise himself to the Divine, when he wanted to raise his eyes to Him to whom the highest honor and worship must be paid, then he turned to the Power that is germinating and sprouting through man himself, creating naturally.

More and more, this view is changing into a completely different one, and today we are only just at the dawn of this other view. But for a select few, it has long since emerged. Three words in the wonderful, ancient Indian Vedanta wisdom already express the germ of this world view: Tat twam asi – that art thou. – And what does this mean? It means a great deal. When the Vedanta sage immersed himself in this “That thou art”, he turned to the whole great universe, he turned to everything outside of himself, to that with which he felt at one. He then said to every stone: You are of the same nature and essence as I – that thou art. Just as my hand belongs to me, so the stone belongs to a being, to which I also belong.

Everything around us is an invitation to look outside, to seek the divine in the world itself, not just to worship the spirit in the creative and generative forces that work through human nature itself. Tat twam asi is the worship of the divine spirit in all of nature, and with that, at the same time, the call to carry this divine spirit into our entire environment, to transform this environment so that the original state around us from which the human being himself has sprung will arise again.

From asexuality comes sexuality. From the male-female comes the male and the female. This difference will again submerge in the common, objective spiritual world when man will find his self in the great universe, when he will feel brotherhood and connection with the whole great universe, which has no gender, which is all the more perfect the more exalted it is above all similar differences.

When this thought lives completely so that he can permeate culture with this thought of the higher human being exalted above all gender, then the sun has risen. This is what shines for you today as the dawn of a new culture. Then the future of our culture is self-evident, the culture into which we must enter when idealism is further developed, and this culture must not carry anything in the outer world that has anything to do with gender. So we enter institutions and facilities that show us a cultural environment, a moral environment, that applies equally to men and women, that is the same for men and women.

That is the theosophical thought, and the theosophical ideal is to reorganize our institutions according to this, which have emerged [from an originally female culture that has passed through a male culture, to bring them into a higher state in which these two epochs will only exist in the Hegelian sense as dissolved moments].

This can only be in a culture that is spiritual in the best sense of the word, a culture that starts from what has nothing to do with gender differentiation. The one that is emerging in the theosophical movement is such a culture. For what does the theosophical worldview cultivate? The higher self in man, that nature and essence which has nothing at all to do with man and woman. For that in man which the theosophist looks at, that which he makes the object of his special consideration and study, the higher man, the spiritual man, appears in one embodiment as man, in another as woman. The one who lives as a man today has, like the other who lives as a woman, passed through as many male and female incarnations. Man and woman were an outward expression of the inner higher individuality, which is neither male nor female.

Thus, something that is male-female at the same time already lives in today's man, something that unites both sides. And a worldview that shows this male-female as the basis of both through the embodiments, a worldview that cultivates this, only prepares the ground on which man and woman are completely equal, not only in our legal institutions, but also in their feelings. Through “Tat twam asi” we overcome gender differences, and the cooperation between men and women in the Theosophical Society is a kind of model, a small beginning for a great, powerful culture that must develop in this direction in the future, where the two sexes will not live side by side in abstract equality, because the diversity can be greater than it is today. But what is the same is what matters. That is the external world that is formed around us.

What matters is not what we carry within us, but what lives around us outside. As long as man is selfish, as long as the whole culture is based on domination and personality, man draws the impulses for institutions from his female or male personality. But as soon as he creates what is grounded in the higher self, the inner being can be shaped as it likes, the outer world, which is reflected in the inner being, is the same. To use an image, set up two concave mirrors, a convex one next to a concave one, and place the same image in front of both. The convex mirror, the one that curves outwards, will show a different image than the concave mirror, but it is the same image in both cases. As long as there is male and female in the physical body, there will of course still be a convex and a concave mirror, but the same external world will be reflected. It must not be shaped in a one-sided way by one sex or the other.

Those who have grasped the spirit will see something infinitely higher in it. Only a materialistic view sees the spiritual as an effect of matter. The theosophist, however, comes to the conviction that all matter originates only from the spirit, that everything that is material today was once spiritual, and that everything we could observe at the starting point originates from earlier, spiritual foundations. In the same way, a future natural super-sexuality will arise from the present super-sexuality, which man himself creates. We will create our outer institutions, which we will bring into the world, to an equal extent out of the spirit of woman and man. They themselves will be the cause of the later natural effects. What man creates as asexual culture will later create a super-sexual nature.

Therefore, it was quite natural that the original culture reverted to the worship of that which was conservatively held from ancient times, to the worship of creative natural forces, to the worship of ancestors. The spirit preceded nature. Through it, nature was created. If one wanted to look up to the spirit, one had to look at the dawn of the world. But if you want to see the future, you have to work with it as a human being – in both the conscious and unconscious state. Then the prophetic view of the future takes the place of the old cult of ancestors and the worship of the family. We ourselves must prepare today what is to be in the future, what kind of external culture is to exist.

Thus a great, all-embracing cosmic horizon leads us to a solution of the women's question that opens up great perspectives for us. If today, through the theosophical worldview, the higher human nature is sought in man or woman and gender remains a completely private matter, then what is really being covered is not considered. In a sense, this is the higher development of feeling, which emerges as a sense of shame in times of transition. What used to be a shy concealment is now a holy overcoming.

This kind of reaching out and looking forward is a great and powerful ideal for the future. By developing the higher human being in man and woman, the theosophical worldview awakens such feelings in man and woman that create culture. Noble, beautiful feelings that transcend everything base must arise from this cultivation of the higher human nature. Culture originated from a kind of female foundation. And when we look back to ancient times, we can find the female generative powers revered as divine nature everywhere. This then developed into a [male] culture. Initially, we have a true antithesis to this [male] culture in today's women's movement, which can also be explained from it, [today the women's movement is a revolt against this male culture, and it is entirely justified].

But every one-sidedness in the world shows us its complement. What confronts us in external history presents itself to us ideally in a kind of counter-image. The one-sided older culture seeks a counterpart. The old feminine culture, the Isis culture, finds its ideal antithesis in the Osiris cult, which was dismembered, perished, and for which Isis longs. This is the image through which the female wants to complement herself, where a new thinking takes the place of the old culture.

Then another ideal appears in Christianity. In the beginning, Christianity had to be a masculine level of culture. But it was complemented. Just as the culture of Isis was complemented by an ideal of man, so this culture of man was complemented by an ideal of woman: in the medieval cult of Mary.

Goethe also hinted at the contrast between female and male culture in his “Faust”. “The eternal feminine draws us up,” he says in connection with the preceding verses. This is what he envisioned: higher culture will be the one in which the female counterpart of the male no longer needs to be longed for in the female and the female ideal no longer longed for in the culture of men, where the feminine no longer needs to be drawn up, but where the higher divine, the higher self, appears as the drawing force in man. This higher self, the whole human being, is what the theosophical worldview strives for. How could it not be that women are the first to understand what is now, at dawn, to be the culture of the future.

For thousands of years we have had a culture of man. Our whole culture is a male culture. Our modern justice, theology, medicine and so on are almost exclusively products of the male culture. Those who approach these things more deeply will easily find a physiological expression of the male soul. But if it is to be different now, then it is self-evident that the inspirer must be the woman. If the theosophical movement is to be understood more quickly, then it must be understood in this direction. Those who do not see it this way can call it a feminine in a pejorative sense today. But those who are clear about the fact that the great progress of culture takes place from the feminine to the masculine and from there to the masculine-feminine will find it self-evident that women can best understand this theosophical world view.

It is more difficult for a man to [free himself from the prejudices of today's culture], because he has grown up from an early age with the results of a man's culture. He should literally transform himself inwardly. He will also have to do so if he wants to be up to date. But all that is to come also prescribes for us the free interaction, the completely free cooperation of man and woman, the absolute equality in the perception of the higher self, the actual spirit of the human being.

Thus the former ideal of the eternal in man, which we encounter in the Osiris cult, and the eternal in woman, which has found a mystical formal expression in the new age and has been lived by poets and mystics, will be transformed into the ideal of the harmoniously structured human being, who is not afflicted with any one-sidedness. We can foresee a culture all around us that will bear the outer physiognomy of supersexuality. That is the task of the theosophical world view. We do not work with phrases, with words and programs, not with demands, but we seek to awaken the living life in the soul from the contemplation of the spirit, to open up the source that is self-creating. We do not just speak as Theosophists, but we indicate what, according to the nature of the facts, must develop in these souls.

So you can see from this particular question that European spiritualism, European theosophy, has something quite different to say than to reproduce the remains of old worldviews that have retained the cult of the ancestors. They have spirituality, the reference to the spiritual, but they do not have what we have as those who have to work according to ideals, not according to old habits. Spiritualism is certainly a necessity for us and it must come into the world; but not a spiritualism that carries the achievements of our culture to the graves of our ancestors – although we can understand and respect such a thing – but a spiritualism that is prophetic, that carries the best that we can develop within us to be burned for a fire that will be the beacon of our future.