The Rudolf Steiner Archive

It is exceedingly difficult for modern consciousness to see any relation between the soul and spirit of man and the purely material, physical world around him; and there is, indeed, some justification for the failure to understand Anthroposophy when it says that the soul and spirit of man—that is to say, the astral body and ego—leave the physical and etheric bodies and continue to exist outside them.

Where, then, are the astral body and ego? This is the question put to us by people who draw their knowledge from the materialistic consciousness of the present day. They naturally cannot conceive that an element of soul may find its place within the bounds of space. At most they can recognise that somewhere or other air exists and that space is pervaded with light—but the idea that soul and spirit exist in space is, for them, beyond the realm of possibility.

This impossibility is but a short way from that other impossibility of conceiving whither the soul and spirit pass when, at the moment of death, they leave the human body. True, modern man says he can “believe” in such things. The moment, however, he begins to make use of his own powers of thought, he finds himself immersed in endless conflicts. These conflicts cease when he strives upwards to Spiritual Science. But the ideas which have then to be assimilated are somewhat strange and unfamiliar to modern man, and he can approach them only slowly and by degrees. At this point let us turn to the consideration of certain facts of spiritual history which today are but little known in the outer world.

We know that the old traditional conceptions, which were incorporated later on into various religions and became matters of faith, may be traced back to primeval wisdom. We know that in ancient times there existed the Mystery centres which really fulfilled the functions alike of churches, places of learning and schools of art. These Mystery centres were the source of all the knowledge which flowed into the masses of the people, and of the impulses determining their activities.

In these centres the initiates dwelt—men who by dint of special training had attained to higher knowledge. As a result of the tests through which they had passed, they had entered into a definite relation with the cosmos—a relation which enabled them to learn, by giving heed to cosmic processes, to the progress of cosmic events, what they wished to know with regard to the world.

It is only the later, more or less corrupt forms of such an understanding that have been preserved for us in external history. You know that in Greek temples, where the oracles were given, certain individuals were wont to pass into a mediumistic condition, and when, at certain times, vapours rose out of the earth, these individuals fell into a state of consciousness which at the present day would be called “trance” by those who persist in maintaining a superficial attitude towards spiritual things. No true knowledge, no knowledge corresponding to reality can ever be attained through trance; everything is a confused jumble and has no foundation in fact. But in times when the old methods of entering into relationship with the cosmos had already deteriorated and become corrupt, people turned to the oracles as a last resource. And all that was revealed from this trance-like consciousness was looked upon as a revelation of the aims of the Divine-Spiritual Beings behind all cosmic processes. Men ordered their lives in accordance with the utterances of these oracles.

Now at the time when men turned to the oracles, they had already lost the faculties which had once been possessed by the initiates in the Mysteries. That was why they relied upon other and more external means for regulating their actions. I shall now try to make clear to you one of the ways by which, in very ancient times, those initiated into the Mysteries penetrated into the secrets of the universe, into secrets which expressed the purposes of the Divine-Spiritual Beings whose mission it is to direct and govern the phenomena of Nature. Such initiates, after they had undergone a long period of preparation during which they so worked upon their whole being that they were able to observe the more subtle life-processes, finally reached a point in their development when, gazing upon the rising sun, they entered into a definite mood. This was a practice to which the old initiate constantly applied himself. He tried to become spiritually receptive to all that took place at daybreak. When the sun was slowly rising above the horizon, a feeling of awe and intense inner devotion was called up in the soul of the initiate. It is difficult today to form any conception of this mood—it was a feeling of the deepest reverence combined with a yearning for knowledge.

A last echo of this mood can, I think, still reach us from the outer world when we read the wonderfully beautiful description of the rising sun by the German poet and writer, Johann Gottfried Herder. This description was, however, written more than a hundred years ago, and it differs from anything that might emanate from some of the insignificant modern poets. For Herder looks upon the sunrise as a symbol of all waking life—not only in Nature, but also in the human soul, in the human heart. The feeling of dawn within the human soul itself, as though the sun were rising from inner depths—this was wonderfully portrayed by Herder when he tried to show how the poetic mood entered into human evolution, and how this poetic feeling had once upon a time been quickened by all that man could experience when he looked at the rising sun.

Still more intensely was the mystery of the sunrise felt by a man such as Jacob Boehme, whose first work was called, as you know, Aurora, or the Coming of Dawn. And the following words from Goethe's Faust: “Up, Scholar, away with weariness—bathe thy breast in the morning red,” are not unconnected with the secrets of the dawn.

The farther we go back in the history of human evolution, the more wonderful do we find the moods that were awakened in the human soul at the moment of sunrise, when the first rays of the morning sun carried down on their waves the pulsating, quickening light of the cosmos. And in the centres of the Mysteries, the old initiates, when they had prepared themselves in a definite way, were able, just at this moment of sunrise, to put their most solemn and sacred questions to the cosmic spirits, and to send these questions, rising from the depths of their hearts, far out into cosmic space.

Such an initiate said to himself: “When the sun sends the first rays of light down upon the earth, that is the best time for man to send his questions out into the wide spaces of the cosmos.” And so the old initiates poured out into cosmic distances the riddles which filled their souls and hearts. They did not, however, look for answers in the trivial way that we are used to in our physical science; they entered into a mood in which they said: “We have now given over our riddles and our questions to universal space. These questions rest now in the cosmos; they have been received by the gods.”

People may think as they like about such things. They were as I have described them; such were the practices in ancient times. Then the initiates waited, and again at night-time they made their hearts ready. But now they did not give themselves up to a questioning mood; they made themselves receptive, and in a devotional mood they stood awaiting the rays of the full moon as it rose above the horizon. They felt that now they would receive an answer from the cosmos. In the older Mysteries this was a very usual procedure. At certain times, questions and riddles were sent out into cosmic space, and the answers were sent back to earth by the gods through the rays of light from the full moon.

In this way man communed with the cosmos. He was not then so proud that he turned over certain questions in his head, as a modern philosopher might do, and then immediately expected an answer. He was not so conceited as to believe that he could sit down with a piece of paper in front of him, and by means of the human brain alone solve the great riddles of existence. Rather did he believe that he must hold counsel with the divine-spiritual powers working and weaving in the cosmos if he were to discover the answers to cosmic riddles. For he knew: “Outside me, in the cosmos, I do not find merely the content of my ordinary sense-perceptions. A spiritual element is everywhere living, working and weaving. And at the moment when the rays of the sun penetrate to me, I can myself send out to meet them the whole content of my will.” This secret has been completely lost to modern research. At one time, however, such things were understood by man and lived in him as true knowledge and wisdom. In Europe, one of the last to reserve this tradition was Julian the Apostate. He was imprudent enough to take these things seriously, and as a result he fell a victim to his enemies.

Nowadays men describe the sun by saying that it sends its rays down upon the earth. The old initiate would have said: “That is only the physical aspect. The spiritual truth is that men live upon the earth and upon the earth they develop their will, and while the rays of the sun pour down from the heavens upon the earth, man can send his will out into the direction of the sun—far out into cosmic space.” On the waves of the will which as it were streams out from the earth towards the sun, the old initiates sent forth their questions into the cosmos. And while a man of today says: “There on the other side is the moon, and the moon sends its rays down upon the earth”—the old initiate said: “That again is only the physical aspect. The truth is that thoughts are brought down to the earth on the waves of the moonlight.” Thus the old initiate entrusted his questions to the rays of will which stream up, from the earth towards the sun, and he received the answers from the rays of thought which come down to the earth from the moon.

Modern science knows only one side of the picture. The scientist sees only the physical properties of sun and moon. The old initiate said: “While the sun continually sends its light down upon the earth, the earth sends its rays of will—the combined will-forces of all the human beings living on earth—into the cosmos. And when man allows the light of the moon to shine upon him, rays of thought are sent down to him from out of the cosmos.”

The human organism has undergone many changes. Anyone, therefore, who is today seeking super-sensible knowledge cannot proceed in the old way. Man's power of understanding is cruder than it was in ancient times. It is true, of course, that even today the rays of his will stream out into the cosmos. But he no longer feels that the rays of his will could carry his questions out into the cosmos; they no longer burn within him, as once they did. He has become too intellectual, and the intellect cools the intensity of all questions. We have very little feeling or the insatiable yearning which once existed in man for knowledge of the most sacred riddles of the universe. We are no longer passionately eager for knowledge; we are merely inquisitive and would like to know everything as quickly as possible without taking the trouble really to understand the world around us.

In our present age only lovers like to dream in the moonlight! Men of learning would deem it frightful superstition if they were asked to believe that answers to the most burning riddles of existence could be brought down to them by the rays of the moon. For modern man, the world is utterly bereft of the spirit, and he understands nothing of the spirit which reveals itself everywhere in the world; or, if he speaks of the spirit he does so in a vague, pantheistic sense, with no concrete knowledge of how, for instance, the rays of the will are related to the rays of the sun, how human forms of thinking are related to the light coming from the moon.

By means of an initiation suited to modern times, however, we are enabled to enter once more into relationship with the cosmos and with the spirit of the universe. The only difference is that the modern intellect has to do it in another way. The preparatory exercises leading to initiation are described in my books, particularly in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment The purpose of such exercises is to bring the man of today to a point at which it is possible for him really to receive answers to his questions—not merely in his modern pride to turn the questions over in his head, and expect answers to arise from his own brain. The latter method may indeed result in exceedingly clever ideas; but mere “cleverness” can never lead to true answers to the riddles of life. This continual turmoil in his head shuts man off from the universe.

The modern initiate must also ask questions, but he must have patience and not expect to receive the answers immediately. The modern initiate gradually reaches a stage in his development at which he no longer merely observes the outer world in order to satisfy his curiosity with the impressions received through his eyes, ears and other senses. True, he receives external impressions by means of his senses, but while he observes just as definitely, just as intimately as others, all that is around him—the flowers, the sun, moon, stars, other human beings, plants and animals—while he turns his senses in all directions, and allows all these external impressions to flow through and into him, he sends out to meet them a current of force from his own being. And it is this force which represents the question he wants to ask.

Such a man looks, maybe, at a beautiful flower. He does not, however, look at it merely passively, but fixes his gaze upon its yellow colour, and allows yellow to make an impression upon him, At the same time he sends his question out towards the yellow of the flower; he plunges the questions and riddles of existence into the colour yellow, or perhaps into the rosy colour of the sunrise or into some other perception. He does not render up all the questions of his heart to one particular impression—as, for example, to the impression of the rising sun—but he pours them out into each and all of his sense-perceptions. Were he now to expect to receive his answers from these sense-perceptions themselves, it would be just as if an old initiate had sent his problems out towards the sunrise and had then expected the answers to come from the sun, instead of waiting, as we know he did, until the time of the full moon. The old initiate had to wait at least fourteen days; for it was at the time of the new moon that he put his questions to the rising sun, and he received his answers only when the moon was full.

A modern philosopher would hardly be prepared to wait as long as fourteen days. By that time he would expect his book to be in the hands of the printers; or, let us say, he would have expected this before it became so difficult to find a publisher! Today, however, he must again learn to have patience. When a man delivers his questions over to the impressions of his senses, when he allows these questions to be plunged in all manner of things, he must not expect that these same sense-impressions will immediately bring him anything in the nature of a revelation. He must wait—and this is easy for him if he has carried out the preparatory exercises for a long enough time—wait often for a long, long while, until at last all that he has rendered up to the world outside rises up within him in the form of an answer. Should you throw out questions at random, in a haphazard kind of way, you might perhaps receive fortuitous answers of a kind—answers which might afford certain people a measure of egotistical satisfaction—but of one thing you may be sure: they would not be real answers. You must cast your problems into flower and ocean, into the great vault of heaven and its stars, into everything which comes to you as an impression from without—and you must then wait until sooner or later the answers emerge from your innermost being. You have not got to wait for exactly fourteen days; it is not for you to determine, as the old initiates were able to do, the duration of the period. You have merely to wait until the right moment comes, the moment when all that was previously external impression becomes inward experience, and the answer rings from your own inner being

The whole art of spiritual investigation, of investigation of the cosmos, consists in being able to wait, in not imagining that answers will be immediately forthcoming. It follows also, as a matter of course, that definite questions must be put if answers are to be obtained. Should you enquire from those who have already obtained true knowledge, as this is understood in the sense of modern initiation, you will hear the same thing from them all. Such a man may perhaps tell you the following story: “When I was thirty-five years old I became aware of this or that great problem of existence, and all that I had experienced in connection with it entered profoundly into my being. At that time I entrusted this problem to some particular impression which came to me from the outer world; and when I was fifty years old the solution to the problem arose from within me.”

In days of old, the initiates placed their questions within the womb of space in order that out of space they might be born again. The solar element passed through a lunar metamorphosis. Today the riddles that man would fain unravel, all that he fain would learn in converse with spiritual Beings, must first be laid by him within the stream of time. The cosmic element must appear once more, born out of the human soul after a period of time determined by the cosmic powers themselves. But it is necessary for man to reach a point where he is able to feel and know when a divine, cosmic answer stirs within him, and to distinguish between such an answer and one that is merely human.

Thus the real content of ancient initiation is still present, but in another form. It is, however, necessary to be quite clear about the following. If a man desires to penetrate into the great mysteries of existence, he must be able to enter into a spiritual relationship with spiritual Beings, with cosmic Beings. He must not remain a hermit in life, he must not try to settle everything to please himself in his own egotistical way. He must be willing to wait until the cosmos gives him the answer to those riddles and problems which he has himself sent out into cosmic space.

It is evident that if a man has once learnt to send the forces of his soul out into the cosmos and to receive cosmic forces into himself he is much better able to understand the mysteries of birth and death than he was before he had attained to such knowledge. When a man has begun to understand how the element of will inherent in the soul streams out towards the rays of the sun, how it streams into all the sense-impressions he receives from the outer world—he also begins to understand how his soul and spirit stream out into the universe on the waves of a spiritual element, of a cosmic element, when his physical body has fallen a victim to the forces of death. Moreover, he learns to understand how spirituality is brought back again to earth by the moon, by the moonlight. He realises that his highest thoughts are given back to him from cosmic space. For although in this present age thoughts rise up from within man's own being, it is, nevertheless, the lunar element in the human organism that generates the thoughts.

In addition to all this, a man who has had these experiences learns to measure the true significance of certain transitory phenomena which stand, as it were, midway between processes regarded as physical and cosmic in their nature, and those which are cosmic and spiritual. The man of today, owing largely to his materialistic education, describes everything from the physical point of view. He says: “An eclipse of the sun is due to the fact that the moon comes between the sun and the earth, cutting off the rays of the sun.” This is a physical explanation, built up from physical observation and as obvious as if we were to say: “Here is a light, and there an eye. If I place my hand in front of the eye, the light will be darkened.” As you see, it is a purely physical, spatial explanation, and that is as far as modern consciousness goes.

We must strive once more for a true knowledge of such phenomena. They are not of everyday occurrence, and on the comparatively rare occasions of their appearance they should be studied not only from their physical but also from their spiritual aspect.

At the time of a solar eclipse, for instance, something totally different takes place in the part of the earth affected from what is happening when there is no eclipse. When we know that on the one hand the rays of the sun penetrate down to the earth and on the other hand the forces or rays of will stream out to meet the sun, it is possible to form some idea of how a solar eclipse can affect these radiations of will which are altogether spiritual in their nature. The sunlight is blocked by the moon; that is a purely physical process. But physical matter—in this case the body of the moon—is no obstacle to the forces streaming out from the will. These forces radiate into the darkness, and there ensues a period of time, short though it may be, in which all that is of the nature of will upon the earth flows out into universal space in an abnormal way. It is different altogether from what takes place when there is no eclipse. Ordinarily, the physical sunlight unites with the radiations of will streaming towards it. When there is an eclipse, the forces of will flow unhindered into cosmic space.

The old initiates knew these things. They saw that at such a moment all the unbridled impulses and instincts of humanity surge out into the cosmos. And they gave their pupils the following explanation. They said: Under normal conditions the evil impulses of will which are sent out into the cosmos by human beings are, as it were, burned up and consumed by the rays of the sun, so that they can injure only man himself, but can do no universal harm. When, however, there is an eclipse of the sun, opportunity is given for the evil which is willed on earth to spread over the cosmos. An eclipse is a physical event behind which there lies a significant spiritual reality.

And again, when there is an eclipse of the moon, the man of today merely says: “Now the earth comes between the sun and the moon; hence we see the shadow cast upon the moon by the earth.” That is the physical explanation. But in this case also the old initiate knew that a spiritual reality was behind the physical fact. He knew that when there is an eclipse of the moon, thoughts stream through darkness down upon the earth; and that such thoughts have a closer relationship with the subconscious life than with the conscious life of the human being. The old initiates often made use of a certain simile when speaking to their pupils. It is, of course, necessary to translate their words into modern language, but this is the gist of what they said: “Visionaries and dreamers love to go for rambles by moonlight, when the moon is full. There are, however, certain people who have no wish to receive the good thoughts coming to them from the cosmos, but who, on the contrary, are desirous of getting hold of evil, diabolical thoughts. Such people will choose the moment of a lunar eclipse for their nocturnal wanderings.”

Here again we approach a spiritual reality in a physical event. Today we must not absorb such teaching in its old form. Were we to do so, we should be led into superstition. But it is very necessary to reach a point at which we are able once more to perceive the spiritual which permeates all cosmic processes. Eclipses of the sun and moon, recurring as they do in the course of every year, may really be looked upon as “safety-valves.” A safety-valve is there to avert danger, to provide an outlet for something or other—steam, for instance—at the right moment. One of the safety-valves which makes its appearance in the cosmos and to which we give the name of a solar eclipse, serves the purpose of carrying out into space in a Luciferic way, the evil that spreads over the earth, in order that evil may work havoc in a wider, less concentrated sphere. The other safety-valve, the lunar eclipse, exists for the purpose of allowing the evil thoughts which are present in the cosmos to approach those human beings who are desirous of being possessed by them. In matters of this kind people do not, as a rule, act in full consciousness, but the facts are nevertheless real—just as real as the attraction of a magnet for small particles of iron. Such are the forces at work, in the cosmos—forces no less potent than the forces we analyse and investigate today in our chemical laboratories.

Man will not be able to free himself from the forces in his being which tend to drag him downwards until he develops in himself a certain feeling for spiritual concepts such as these. Then only will the path leading to a true comprehension of birth and death be opened up to humanity. And such a comprehension and understanding is sorely needed by humanity today, when men are plunged in spiritual darkness. We must learn again what it really signifies when the sun sends its light towards us. When the sunlight streams towards us, the surrounding space is made free for the passage of those souls who must leave their physical bodies and make their way out into universal space. When the sun sends its light down to earth, the earth sends human souls out into cosmic space, where these souls undergo many metamorphoses. Then, in a spiritual form, they approach the earth once more, passing in their descent through the sphere of the moon, and taking possession once again of a physical body which has been prepared for them in the stream of physical heredity. It will not be possible for us to enter into a right relationship with the universe until such time as we begin to feel and experience these things in a real and living way.

Today we learn astronomy, spectroscopy and so on. We learn how the rays of the sun penetrate down to earth, and we fondly imagine that there is nothing more to be said. We learn how the rays of the sun fall upon the moon, and from the moon are reflected back again to earth, and we look upon the moonlight in this way only, taking into consideration merely its physical aspect. By such means the intellect is brought into play. Intellectual knowledge cuts man off from the cosmos and tends to destroy inner activity of soul. This inner life of soul can be reawakened, but man must first win back for himself his spiritual relationship with the cosmos. This he will be able to do only when he is once more to say to himself: “A man has died. His soul is radiating out towards the sun. It streams out into the cosmos, traveling the path made for it by the rays of sunlight, until it comes into a region where space has an end, where one can no longer speak in terms of three dimensions, but where the three dimensions are merged into unity. In this region, beyond space and beyond time, many and various things happen: but later on, from the opposite direction, from the direction of the moon, of the moonlight, the soul returns once more and enters into a physical human body, is born again into earthly life.”

When man learns once more that the souls of the dead go out to meet the light rays of the sun, that the shining beams of the moon draw the young souls back again to earth, when he learns to feel concretely how natural processes and phenomena are everywhere permeated with spirit—then there will arise once more on earth a knowledge which is at the same time religion; a truly devotional knowledge. Knowledge that is based entirely upon materialism can never become religion. And religion that is founded on faith alone, that does not spring from the fountain of knowledge, can never be made to harmonise with all that man sees and observes in the universe around him. Today men still repeat certain prayers from ancient times. And if anyone maintains—as I have done in the booklet entitled “The Lord's Prayer”¹—that deep spiritual truths are concealed in these ancient prayers, the clever modern people say: That is mere visionary dreaming, mere fantasy. But it is not fantasy; it is based on knowledge of the fact that these prayers, which can be traced back to ancient times, and which tradition has preserved for humanity, have been conceived out of a profound understanding of cosmic processes. We must win back for ourselves once more a knowledge and an understanding that will enable us to call up in our souls a feeling akin to religion whenever we are confronted by great cosmic events. We must be able to say, with the men of old: “O sun, thou sendest towards me the rays of thy light. These rays form a pathway to me upon earth—and along this pathway, but moving in the other direction, the souls of human beings, the souls of the dead stream out into cosmic space.” And again: “O moon, thou shinest down with gentle radiance upon the earth from thy place in the heavens. And borne on the waves of thy gentle light from far cosmic spaces, are those souls who are on their way once more into earthly existence.”

That is how we can find again the connection between the light and radiance of the outer world and all that lives and weaves in the inner being of man himself. We shall then no longer say thoughtlessly: “Man is surrounded by the physical universe and he can form no conception of what will become of his soul, when, separated from the body, it passes out into this purely material universe.” On the contrary, we shall know that while the piercing rays of the sun make their way through space, they are all the time working towards the forces streaming out from the human will, and preparing a pathway for them. We shall recognise also that the moon does not shed its gently undulating light over the earth without aim or purpose, but that a spiritual element surges and streams through space, borne on the waves of the moon-beams.

When once perceptions such as these enter into our consciousness, we shall no longer be able to look with indifference on a plant, let us say, when it is bathed in the light of the early morning sun. For at such a moment very special processes are taking place in the plant. It is then that the juices in the plant are carried up by its delicate vessels into blossom and leaf. It is then that the rays of the sun, as they fall upon the plant, make way for the forces of will coming from the earth. And it is not only the juices described by our modern scientists which stream through the plant at such a moment; those forces of will which have their seat in the depths of the earth, stream upwards also from the root of the plant into its flower. And in the evening, when leaves and petals close, when the rays of the sun no longer prepare a pathway for the emanations of will streaming upwards from the earth, the inner activity of the plant ceases for a time, and its life rests.

The plant, however, is also exposed to the gentle light of the moon. The moonlight does not cast its spell on lovers only—it has an influence too on the sleeping plant. Interwoven with the moonlight, cosmic thought streams down into the plant and works within it.

Thus in the plant-world we learn to look for the combined forces of “earthly will” and “cosmic thought.” And we study the form of many different plants in order to discover how far each one is woven out of “cosmic thought” and of “earthly will.” And when we learn how spiritual, healing forces spring up from these cosmic thoughts, and from this earthly will, the healing properties of plants make themselves known to us, and we learn to see in the plant the medicinal herb. But it is only when one has attained to an intimate knowledge of cosmic processes that it becomes possible to recognise the remedial potentialities of the several plants.

We must win this knowledge afresh. We must reach the point, when we can understand how the human head is actually moulded in the image of the earth herself. In the human embryo it is the head which first takes shape. It is moulded in the likeness of the earth, and the rest of the body is joined on to it. When the human head is bathed in light, and the sunlight penetrates it, then that which in the human head is analogous to “earthly” will shines out into the cosmos with a living power.

If, now, we consider a plant whose root contains the forces of “earthly will” in marked degree, we can be sure that the root of such a plant seeks continually to evade the light of the sun; and we can be equally sure that it is specially subject to the influence of the moonlight, which, feebly though its rays seem to us to shine down upon the earth, nevertheless penetrates right through to the roots of the plants.

If, by burning the root of such a plant, we bring to it the element of light, and if we preserve the ashes thus obtained and make a powder out of them, then we have the means to prove how such a powder is able, by virtue of the cosmic processes inherent within it, to work upon the human head, for the forces of will in the head are similar in their nature to the forces of will in the earth. The point is that we should learn to fathom the connection which everywhere exists between matter and spirit—a connection which does not differ whether we are dealing with the smallest particle of matter or the greatest mass. Then we shall be able to do something which at present holds good only for mathematics; we shall be able to apply to the whole realm of nature truths which first come to us as purely spiritual apprehensions.

A cube, we know, is made up of six squares. Such a thing can be spun out of thought; it is a thought-picture. In salt, in ordinary cooking-salt, we find the cube again in nature herself, and here we discover the connection between a spiritual principle—something “thought out”—and a material substance in outer nature. But I ask you:—What does the average man of today know of the degree in which spiritual forces—cosmic forces of thinking, earthly forces of will—are present in the root of any particular plant? And yet the process is the same as that which we carry out today, albeit in the most abstract manner possible, when we first conceive of the cube, and then proceed to find it again in ordinary salt.

What we do today only when we are thinking in terms of mathematics, we must learn to do again with everything that comes within the range of the human soul. The study of mathematics does not, as a rule, give rise to a devout, religious attitude of mind. Such a man as Novalis could, it is true, be rapt in devotion when given up to the study of mathematics. For Novalis, the science of mathematics was a great and beautiful poem. But one comes across few people who enter into a devout mood of soul when studying mathematics!

When, however, we go a step farther, when we conjure up the spirit from the depths of man's being and bear this spirit out into the cosmos, where of course it already is (one merely learns to recognise it again)—then science becomes permeated with religion; harmony between religion and science is once again achieved.

• 1. Anthroposophical Publishing Company. Second English edition.

I will allude briefly to the indications given in last Sunday's lecture. They were on the subject of man's relationship to the universe and attention was called to how the forces of the human will find their way out into the cosmic expanse in the direction opposite to that of the light streaming from the sun to the earth. So it can be said that forces of will stream out from earthly humanity to meet the light. On the other hand, the element of thought is borne to the earth along the waves of the moon's light.

It was further explained that what is spreads out from man at the dissolution of his physical body is of the nature of will and thus streams out into the cosmos towards its inflowing light; and that man is borne back again towards earthly existence on the currents of the thought-element which flow along the lines of light together with everything that proceeds from the moon.

Naturally, in regard to this aspect of the will-element and the light-element, of the thought-element and the moon's light, and also to what I shall say in the present lecture, it must be remembered that when speaking of these things and making use, as it were, of the structure of the universe to illustrate them, an illustration only is meant. For it must not be thought that in these happenings the actual physical sun and the physical moon are anything else than signs for what is taking place spiritually. The true state of affairs can be described approximately in the following way.

I want to speak of these things from a certain historical aspect, but they could also be presented in a different way. My aim is to make the things I am now saying intelligible to you in greater detail.—You know that according to a more materialistic mode of thinking, our solar system originated from a kind of primal nebula. Thinking that is bound up with purely material existence conceives that our visible cosmos, our solar system, sprang from a kind of primal nebula which then consolidated and contracted into what now exists as the solar system.

From all you have heard in Anthroposophy it will be clear to you from the outset that this cannot be an exhaustive presentation of the process. However much this material explanation of cosmic happenings may be modified by saying that the nebula is permeated with forces, and so on, what is actually present cannot be fully explained in this way, for the reason that nothing contained in a Kant-Laplace or other primal nebula, or what develops from it according to the laws governing the gasiform or aeriform states, could ever have produced the animal and human souls that are living on earth, or even the forces working in the growth of plants. Such an explanation of cosmic happenings is an abstraction even if a materialistic abstraction. It must surely be obvious that in the primal nebula conceived by materialistic thinking, a spiritual reality is contained and that this primal nebula is only the outer, material expression of something spiritual. To be complete, therefore the idea of the primal nebula must include the weaving activity of the spiritual. So this Kant-Laplace nebula must be amplified by being regarded as the body of an element of spirit-and-soul—not, it is true, uniform and individual as in man, but manifold, diversified, yet for all that of the nature of spirit-and-soul.

The purely materialistic way of thinking and of formulating hypotheses goes no farther than this primal nebula. Now let us imagine that not we ourselves, but other beings, beings of the future, were to evolve ideas, based on similarly materialistic thinking, of the genesis of the world-system in which they are, or rather will be, living. Whether what I am now saying represents the reality is quite beside the point; it is said only for the sake of clarifying a thought.—We will assume, then, that in a distant future such beings conceive of a Kant-Laplace nebula as the beginning of the world's existence. At what point in the course of the ages would this nebula exist? When such beings of the future look back, it would have to be assumed—in order to make the thought clear—that our earth, that is to say, our solar system, had long since passed away, that the space it occupied had as it were become free, and that then, in this freed space, a Kant-Laplace nebula of a future world had come into existence. As long as our solar system is there, this future nebula could obviously not be imagined to exist in the space it occupies, I will formulate this example by assuming that these beings who might elaborate a materialistic theory of a future world-system place their primal nebula in the space now occupied by our own. But in accordance with what has been said, spirit-and-soul too would have to be contained in such a nebula of the future; this nebula could only be the bodily expression of an element of cosmic spirit-and-soul. Where would this cosmic element originate? What would have to be said about it?

Suppose that here (drawing on blackboard) is our Kant-Laplace primal nebula (physical plus spirit-and-soul) and here the primal nebula conceived at some future time by beings of whom I have spoken. In that nebula too, the element of spirit-and-soul would have to be contained. Where would it originate? If this future nebula were to be at the place occupied by our own solar system it would include an element of cosmic spirit-and-soul. But this would be what has remained over from the solar system in which we ourselves have lived. Our solar system would have come to an end, would have dispersed in cosmic space. The element of spirit-and-soul would have remained and that would be embodied in a new Kant-Laplace primal nebula. In other words: what I have here described would represent the Jupiter evolution. But within this Jupiter evolution would be contained the element of spirit-and-soul prepared during the Earth-evolution of humanity. In the same way we must go back beyond the Kant-Laplace nebula of the Earth to the spirit-and-soul contained in it. And this was prepared by the beings of the (Old) Moon-existence.

So when you look at the present solar system, you are beholding the outer corporeality of what passed away with the Moon-existence or was transformed from the Moon-existence into the Earth-existence. And again, what we today send out into the cosmic expanse prepares the Jupiter-existence. When, therefore, we look at our solar system we are actually looking at something that is the product of an earlier stage of existence. So when I speak of the light streaming to us from the physical sun I am speaking of something that comes out of the past. And when I speak of the streams of will flowing out to meet this light, I am speaking of something that is preparing the future. The primal work, the cosmic element of which I speak in order to have a form of expression for what happens spiritually, was thus prepared by the Old Moon-existence; and what I describe as the Spiritual is already the foundation for what will live on into the Jupiter-existence. Hence it must not be said that the sun seen by our eyes out in cosmic space draws the human will to itself. This physical sun is only the symbol for that sun-nature towards which the human will streams. And equally, the physical moon is only the physical sign for the Moon-nature which in streams of thoughts pours continually into Earth-existence.

You will find these thoughts necessary if you want to understand rightly what is meant when, in what follows, I shall be speaking of cosmic relationships which reflect, in pictures, what takes place spiritually through mankind on the Earth. And here an addition must be made to what was said in the last lecture. When our solar system as a whole is observed from the Earth, we have the Sun, and, as outer planets: Mars, Jupiter, Saturn—others are of less importance. Nearer to the Earth than to the Sun we have Venus and Mercury. Let us now recall that the element of will streams out from humanity on Earth towards the Sun in cosmic space, and that after the dissolution of the body the soul too is borne out into the cosmos through this element of will, which reaches, first, the Sun-existence, the Sun-sphere.

What must in this way be stated as a fact was discovered, as I said in the last lecture, through the experiences of the ancient initiates. They sent their questions towards the Sun along the streams of the will and then received the answers from the Moon in the form of thoughts. So that what I have now said, expressing it in this particular way, is a reality. And again, if more insight is to be gained, we must go back to the experiences of the initiates in the ancient Mysteries.

Think once again of the initiate of these Mysteries sending out his questions, giving them over to the stream flowing out towards the rays of the Sun; he waits, and then, after a time, receives his answers from the Moon—in this respect holding converse with the universe.

But in this process the answers received by the ancient initiates had a specific bearing only; they were answers relating to the actual structure of the universe. So that what was contained in that ancient, more primitive science—which was in truth a lofty, although dreamlike wisdom—was brought into being by the answers received to questions sent out to meet the rays of the Sun streaming from the opposite direction. These answers were to questions referring to the structure of the universe, to the forces at work in the universe, and so on. In short, they were answers relating to the realm of physics, astronomy, to the music of the spheres, to everything embraced in these domains of knowledge in the ancient sciences.

But these initiates sent out other questions as well into the universe. They also knew, for example, how to send out questions to Mars, to the Mars-sphere. At the time when Mars could be seen in the sky they gave over their questions to currents streaming in the opposite direction to the rays of Mars. When they sent their questions to Mars they did not await the answers from the Moon but from Venus, when Venus was standing in a position facing Mars. The important point, however, is that they awaited from Venus the answers to the questions they had sent upwards to Mars.

And again, they awaited from Mercury the answers to the questions sent upwards to Jupiter. The questions to Saturn were sent far out into the cosmic expanse, and the initiates knew that in this case the answers could be awaited from the heaven of the fixed stars only, or from what represented it in those olden times—the Zodiac itself.

What was the nature of these latter questions that were sent out into the universe by the ancient initiates, the answers to which they awaited? These answers were not the abstract, scientific truths connected with the structure of the universe, as I indicated just now; but the questions were those which the initiates wished to address directly to the divine-spiritual Beings.

Thus they sent upwards to Mars questions they had to put to the Angeloi, and awaited the answers from Venus. They sent upwards to Jupiter questions addressed to the Archangeloi, awaiting the answers from Mercury. And to Saturn they addressed questions to be answered by the Archai, awaiting the answers from the Zodiac.

Whereas, therefore, direct converse was held with the cosmos in a more abstract, impersonal form, in the converse of which I am now speaking the initiates were conscious of speaking to actual Beings, divine-spiritual Beings, and of receiving utterances individually from them. In this way, therefore, decisions of will were received from the choir of the Angeloi, from the choir of the Archangeloi, from the choir of the Archai. The discourse between Sun and Moon and the initiates was concerned with the outer aspect of the cosmos; the discourse with the other planets and with the Zodiac was directed to the spiritual Beings in the cosmos.

And so there was actual and continuous intercourse between man and the cosmos, not only concerning its outer structure, but also with the cosmic Beings themselves. The old initiates knew that if, for example, they were directing their forces to Mars, it would not do merely to formulate and send out their cherished questions in terms of thought. Such questions reached only as far as the Sun and the answers came back from the Moon. When the ancient initiates wished to address questions to Mars, they were obliged to do it by composing aphoristic sayings, recitatives, mantrams, which could also be declaimed. These, sent out into the universe, were the means whereby the Mars-forces were activated in such a way that the answers to the questions, coming back from Venus, were audible to a kind of inner hearing.

If it was desired to address questions Jupiter, even the declamation of mantrams did not suffice; in this case the performance of certain definite rites was necessary. And what streamed out into the universe from these rites in the form, shall we say, of cosmic thought, came back from Mercury in certain signs which the ancient initiates knew how to interpret. If they allowed themselves to be inspired by Venus they were able to interpret the corresponding signs; so, too, if they allowed themselves to be inspired by Mercury. These signs were infinitely varied. They meant nothing at all unless a man was inspired by Mercury. If he was inspired by Mercury, he knew: This or that event is an answer to a question asked by means of ritualistic acts.

In this way, happenings and processes in nature, and also those in history which otherwise appear to be nothing more than natural or historical processes, acquired definite content; they could as it were be read. Questions addressed to Saturn entailed very special difficulty, for actions lasting over a lengthy period of time were necessary before they could even be put as questions. In the ancient Mysteries this was as a rule arranged in such a way that the teachers in the Mysteries gave their pupils a certain mission to fulfil, a mission in which the life of the pupil was dedicated to some actual achievement. What it was incumbent upon these pupils to accomplish, often extending over a period of many years, constituted the questions put to the Saturn-existence. And the answers then came back from the Zodiac.

An actual and intimate participation in the cosmos and its happenings was achieved in those rites of prayer and meditation, and by other procedures carried out by the initiates and their pupils in the ancient Mysteries. Nor was anything accomplished in a short time; what took place in such Mysteries through the course of years consisted in unceasing acts of knowledge, and in acts by which the right impulses for the deeds of men were engendered.

Insight into such happenings also enables us to picture how the forces designated as those of Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Moon, Venus and Mercury, work upon man and their significance for him. The significance of the Sun-forces is that they draw man's will-nature towards the Sun and after his death lead him out into the cosmos and thence into the spiritual world. The particular quality of the Moon-forces is that they instill into man the organic configuration which makes thinking and reflection possible; but they are also the forces which bear him back again when, coming down from the spiritual world, he must find his way through the spheres of ether to earthly incarnation.

We can speak in a similar way of the other forces, known by the names of the celestial bodies they represent, and of their effects upon man. As an example, let us take the Mercury-forces. These forces are not concentrated exclusively in the planet Mercury. They permeate the whole of space that is accessible to us and the physical Mercury is merely a manifestation of the Mercury-forces in a concentrated mineral form.

Imagine the whole of our solar system filled with the Mercury-forces. They permeate all the bodies in the solar system, and naturally our own bodies as well; but at the point where Mercury appears in the heavens they are concentrated in a physical-mineral form and so are visible there.

The Venus-forces again are all-pervading. They are merely concentrated in a physical-mineral form at the definite point where Venus is seen. And so it is with all these forces. Speaking in accordance with the reality, we must say: Venus, Mercury, Moon and the rest, all interpenetrate, but their concentrations stand at different places in the heavens.

If we can gradually form a conception of this by perceiving how Mercury gives the answers for Jupiter, by learning to know Mercury, then we also acquire knowledge of what these Mercury-forces signify for man, in the unconscious realms of his life as well. To take a simple example; When we want to walk we must have certain forces by means of which, from out of the spirit, we permeate our bones and muscles. With our spirit-and-soul we have to penetrate into the physical, into the solid constituents of our body. That we are able to do this is due to the Mercury-forces.

It can therefore be said:

1. The effect of the Mercury-forces is that man can take hold of the solid constituents of his body. If there were no Mercury-forces in the world, we should be outside the solid constituents of our body all the time.

2. The Venus-forces enable man to take hold of the fluids in his body. You know that 90 per cent of you is a column of fluid. So if the Venus-forces were not in the world you would be obliged as beings of spirit to move around the outside of this column of fluid; you could not take hold of the fluids if the Venus-forces were not in the world.

3. The Moon-forces enable man to take hold of the aeriform element in his organism.

These things can be known by studying cosmology, but such study can advance to further stages. The ancient initiates pursued this kind of study, although their science was only primitive and their clairvoyance dreamlike. Let us say, for example, that from their cosmological studies they had discovered that the Venus-forces enable man to take hold of everything that is fluid in him. Then they waited until they came across someone in whom this inability to take hold of the fluids was evident—in other words, definite forms of illness were present. A very definite form of illness sets in when, for example, a man is unable to take hold of the fluid element even in a single organ only. In such a case these ancient initiates asked themselves: What kind of medicament must be administered? When a man was not properly interpolated into the Venus-forces—when, therefore, the fluids in his organism were not under sufficient control—the initiates realised that copper must be administered as a medicament. In finding that copper has the effect of enabling the soul-and-spirit to take hold of the body; that its effect is similar to that of the Venus-forces, they discovered that the nature of the forces in the metal copper is the same as the nature of those of the Venus-sphere. Hence they connected the metal copper with Venus. Or when illness was caused by a man's incapacity to take proper hold of the solid constituents of his organism, the ancient initiates found that mercury or quicksilver must be administered. In this way they established the parallelisms between the metals and the planets. The parallelisms are given in extant literature today; but it never occurs to anybody to ask: Why is copper related to Venus?—and so on. Nevertheless these things were the outcome of genuine investigation.

If, therefore, a man speaks out of real knowledge of copper as a means of healing, it is knowledge of the connection of the human being with the cosmos. To discover whether some metallic element found in a plant has a remedial effect in one respect or another, the whole relationship of this plant to the universe must be borne in mind. And from the plant's relationship to the universe, and again from the relationship of the universe to the human being, the insight comes to us of how the medicament can take effect.

The fact that there is a certain disinclination today to admit these things can be well understood. For the endeavour nowadays is to learn in four or five years—admittedly in a way somewhat open to question—everything that is needed in order to be able to heal. But because this is not possible, because we must forever be learning more, whereas the desire is to be fully qualified after these four or five years and there is unwillingness to admit that a great deal more remains to be learnt—that is why there is this aversion to something to which no end can be in sight. But the world itself is without end, not only in the extensive but also in the intensive sense, as that is usually understood.

Unlike the Mercury-, Venus-, and Moon-forces, the Mars-forces do not enable us to take hold of something, but they protect us from dissolving away in the element of warmth.

4. The Mars-forces protect us from the tendency to flow out and away in the element of Warmth. If the Mars-forces were not present and functioning in the right way, man would have the constant tendency to dissolve in the Warmth. The Mars-forces hold him together, guard him from this. This is a matter of supreme importance, for since the warmth in man's organism is greater than the warmth of his environment, he is in perpetual danger of flowing away in the element of Warmth. To prevent this is of the very greatest importance. Therefore there must be a concentration of the Mars-forces in the human organism. And this is brought about through the presence of iron in man's blood. Iron contains forces that are identical with those of Mars and they hold man together in opposition to the tendency to dissolve away into the warmth.

The Jupiter- and Saturn-forces are not present in the human organism in this material form. They are there, but in a different form, not immediately detectable.

5. The Jupiter-forces. These forces protect man from dissolving away in the element of Light, in the Light-Ether. He would become an ever-expanding cloud of light if the Jupiter-forces were not present and at work.

6. The Saturn-forces. These forces protect man from dissolving in the Chemical Ether. Penetrating as they do into the human constitution, these Saturn-forces are connected, in a certain sense, with the innermost essence of man's nature. We speak of a “sour” or a “sweet” disposition, for example, more in a metaphorical sense. But these things are not merely metaphorical; if a human being makes an impression of sourness in the moral-physical sense, this has some connection with his chemical make-up. And the Saturn-forces have their share in this chemical make-up. The particular manner in which a human being gives expression to his nature as a whole depends upon the way in which Saturn is working in him.

A melancholic person has this particular temperament because he lives very strongly in his chemical constitution, in everything that seethes and is astir in the liver, in the bile and even in the stomach; the melancholic temperament is therefore due to this living into the chemical make-up of the organism. And this characteristic again is due to the fact that in such a person the Saturn-forces work with particular strength.

The human being appears to be concentrated inside his skin, but this is only apparently so; in reality he is part and parcel of the whole cosmos, and it is possible to indicate in detail how the cosmos has its share in the formation of the human constitution.

Thus the planets near the Sun have to do more with the physical elements in man's organism: solid, fluid aeriform. The planets distant from the Sun have to do more with the etheric elements in man s organism. Between the two groups of planets is the Sun itself. The forces of Mercury, Venus and Moon bring the human being into connection with the solid, fluid and aeriform elements. The forces of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. protect him from flowing away into the Warmth, Light and Chemical Ethers. As you see, the effects are polaric. And the Sun stands between, preventing the two groups of planetary forces from interpenetrating. Suppose the Mars-forces were able to work without restraint—and they could do so on the Moon-forces, for example. If the Sun-forces were not placed in the middle, acting as a kind of dividing-wall which simply does not allow these forces to unite, the Mars-forces—which hold the human being together as an independent entity in the Warmth-element—would, it is true, still prevent him from flowing away into the Warmth; but this independent entity would then at once be obliged to take possession of the Air, and man would become a spectre of air. In order that both processes may take place, in order that man may take hold of the aeriform constituents in his organism but also live as an independent being in the Warmth-element, the two sets of forces, those of Mars and Moon, must be kept separated. And for this purpose the Sun stands between them.

This too was well known to the old initiates. If, for example, definite symptoms of illness appear in a man owing to the fact that the Mars-forces are working too strongly, so that they break through the Sun-element, with the result that the man is then living intensely in the aeriform organism because he is better able to take hold of it—in such a case the Mars-forces must be kept separate from the Moon-forces. And for this purpose aurum (gold) must be administered. To prevent the Mars-forces and Moon-forces from flowing into one another, the Sun-forces must be strengthened. In this way the remedial effect of aurum was discovered; its effect is to bring the organism again into harmonious balance, so that what ought not to flow away is kept in check.

From all this it will be evident to you that knowledge of the universe is not possible without knowledge of man, nor is knowledge of man possible without knowledge of the universe, above all in the domain where it is a matter of applying science in the art of healing.

In the lecture yesterday I described the external aspect, as it were, of what I am going to speak about today.

I tried to show how man and the cosmos together form one whole, and how what is present in the individual human being is connected in manifold ways with processes and with beings of the cosmos. If what I shall be saying today is not to seem groundless and incomplete, you must bring it into relation with the two preceding lectures.

The individual human being can be viewed in his external aspect, as he appears to ordinary sight, or to anatomy and physiology. But he can also be viewed in his inner aspect, so that his qualities of soul, his spiritual forces, are revealed.

The “whole” that is composed of man together with the cosmos may also be contemplated in two aspects. But these aspects will be the reverse of those presented by the individual man. In his case we speak of an outer and an inner aspect. When we speak of the universe, the cosmos, and of man as a member of this universe, ordinary feeling will tell us that the words must be used in the reverse way. We are actually within this cosmic existence when we think of it as purely spatial; from our own point of vision we look outwards. When, therefore, we are speaking of the universe from the human standpoint, we are speaking from within the universe, for we are standing at some point within it. Seen from this point of view the universe presents to us its physical, material aspect.

The human being presents his physical aspect when we view him from outside, and his aspect of spirit-and-soul when we view him from within. The universe presents its aspect of spirit-and-soul when we view it from outside. The concepts that must be applied here will be difficult, for they have almost entirely dropped out of use in modern language. But modern language cannot penetrate directly into the realm of the spiritual. Words that are suitable have first to be coined. Any attempt to fathom the realities of the spirit-and-soul by using words with their ordinary meanings is an absurdity.

In order to picture what I have just tried to characterise, the following must be said. In the case of a human being we speak of his external aspect as that which presents itself to the senses. If we speak of him from the inner aspect, we speak of his nature of spirit-and-soul. In the case of the universe, the cosmos, we must picture the reverse: we are at some point within the universe and from there it presents its physical aspect to us. If we are able to view the universe from outside, the aspect of spirit-and-soul is revealed to us. The natural question is this: Is it possible to view the universe from outside?

As we know, man alternates between the conditions in which he lives from birth until death and those he experiences between death and a new birth, and it is the external aspect of the universe that reveals itself during his existence between death and a new birth. If you will read in my book, Theosophy, the description given of the conditions in which man lives between death and a new birth you will find it amply indicated there that words must be used in a different sense.

The world, the universe, in which we find ourselves between birth and death is manifold enough, but it becomes even more manifold, far richer, when contemplated during the life between death and a new birth. Naturally, in such descriptions, a few selected details only can be mentioned. And it has always been my endeavour to add more and more information about matters which, at the beginning, are presented in an elementary way. I want to speak today of the spirit-and-soul of what was described yesterday in its material-physical aspect—the aspect of the cosmos viewed from within. I want now to describe what reveals itself when the cosmos is viewed from outside, when it is contemplated from a vantage-point of spirit-and-soul on the path of the experiences stretching between death and a new birth. From the different studies pursued here you know that this kind of contemplation is necessary, and you know too that no ordinary, logical exposition of the subject could ever reach the reality. It can therefore only be a matter of describing the vista that reveals itself when the methods referred to in anthroposophical literature are applied.

A vantage-point of vision lying outside the physical-material cosmos is reached only by degrees. When a man has reached this vantage-point—it cannot be until some while after his death—then for the first time he finds the solution of those questions which cannot be solved by the intellectual methods we employ while in the body. Such questions have, of course, constantly formed part of philosophical discussions: Is the world of space, the spatial cosmos, finite or infinite? However much discussion there may be—Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is right in this respect—questions such as those of the spatial or temporal limits of the manifested universe will never be led to a conclusion by discussion carried on from within the physical body. Under these conditions it is equally possible to prove that the universe is finite or that it is infinite. The questions are resolved only when the vantage-point of vision can be shifted, when a man is able to contemplate the world from the other side—not, therefore, from a point within it, but from outside it. In the middle stages at least of the life between death and a new birth, man is on yonder side of the boundary of the material-physical cosmos. The boundary of the material-physical cosmos actually lies midway between what is seen from the earthly viewpoint and what is seen during the life between death and a new birth.

This too is wisdom: To know what questions can indeed be asked in earthly existence but not answered there, because thinking can take place only on the physical foundations of the bodily nature. Such questions can be answered only when, outside this physical existence, a man is able, either through initiation or through death, to change the vantage-point of his vision.

Now if this vantage-point is, in fact, changed, we experience it from within; we are not within it as we are between birth and death, but we experience it from outside, view it from outside. But the strange fact is that the manifoldness presented by human beings disappears when we pass into yonder world. And whereas we behold many structures, many configurations, of the cosmos—actually as many as there are human souls connected with the earth—when we are looking back upon the earth we see man once only, both in time and in space. Between death and a new birth we behold many worlds and only one “manhood,” one human nature.

Without pondering upon this in meditation from every angle—it is of tremendous importance although in human words no more than the merest indications can be given—it is really not possible to have a clear conception of the radical difference in the picture of the world when it is experienced between birth and death and when it is experienced between death and a new birth. Between birth and death we experience one world and many men; during the life between death and rebirth we experience many worlds—representing our unitary world—and only one human nature. When from our life between death and rebirth we look back upon earthly life, men are not seen in their manifoldness but all are embraced in one single human nature. Everything, therefore, is completely reversed and attention must be called to this radical reversal. For it is essential to realise once and for always how impossible it is to acquire adequate ideas of the spiritual world without concepts that have been completely re-cast. With the easy-going methods by which people usually want to gain ideas of the spiritual world, it is simply not possible to reach ideas that conform with the reality. Man must be willing to metamorphose his ideas, even to the point of complete reversal. That is what many people are not willing to do, hence the battle that is waged against a true science of the spirit.

I explained to you yesterday in greater detail how man is related to the Sun-nature on the one side and to the Moon-nature on the other, but also to the natures of the several planets. This was all considered from the standpoint of Earth-evolution. I explained the way in which man is related to the Venus-nature, to the Mercury-nature, and so on, saying that through modern spiritual science we are led again, by an entirely independent path, to knowledge that was cultivated in the ancient Mysteries, through an inspired, dreamlike wisdom. Everything I said yesterday was a presentation of the subject from one aspect. As long as we endeavour to acquire knowledge as the initiate in the ancient Mysteries sought to acquire it during the life between birth and death, we gain ideas about our planetary universe such as were presented yesterday. But the moment we reach a vantage-point outside the cosmos in which we live between birth and death and view its aspect of spirit-and-soul from without, at that moment all the detailed matters referred to yesterday also reveal to us their other aspects, their reversed aspects.

It was said that the Mercury-forces in the world—whether in their material or in their planetary aspect—help man as a being of spirit-and-soul to take hold of the solid constituents of his organism. The Venus-forces enable him to take hold of the fluids in his organism. The moment we reverse this whole conception, all these qualities, too, are revealed to us in a quite different guise. If, leaving Neptune and Uranus out of account, we begin with Saturn, the outermost planet of our system, it becomes possible—in contemplating the Saturn-existence as it were from the other side of existence—to understand, by means of all the faculties we possess between death and a new birth, the real nature of man's life of instinct.

The essential nature of the life of instinct which wells up in man from subconscious depths of his being cannot be fathomed and understood by means of the faculties acquired only on the Earth; it must be fathomed either between death and rebirth, or in the realm of higher, super-sensible knowledge, in Initiation-Science.

So we may say: If, with the eyes of spirit, we contemplate the Saturn-nature from the viewpoint of the Earth, we gain an idea of the forces which help man to feel himself as an independent being of spirit-and-soul in face of the chemical processes working in his organism. The Saturn-existence viewed from outside, in its aspect of spirit-and-soul, reveals to us those forces in the cosmos which implant instincts into man's nature.

The Jupiter-existence reveals those elements in man which are more definitely of the nature of soul than are his instincts, namely, his inclinations, his sympathies. For whereas instincts are still entirely of an animal nature, in inclinations an element of soul (animal-psychic) is already evident.

The Mars-existence reveals all those impulses which are not, indeed, the moral commandments a man imposes on himself, but moral impulses which spring as it were from his whole character and fundamental disposition. Whether a man is courageous in his moral conduct or whether he is slack in this respect depends upon the forces that come into our ken when we view the Mars order of existence from the other side.—I am speaking, not of the fully conscious moral impulses described in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity as rooted in pure thinking, but of moral impulses in which there is invariably a considerable degree of unconsciousness.

When, therefore, we are considering man's connection with these outer planets, we are led more to the qualities which in a sense are actually bound up with the human organism. What is born with a man, stems from the cosmos, the universe; what wells up in the form of instincts from the whole organism is of the nature of Saturn; what wells up in the form of inclinations, sympathies, is of the nature of Jupiter; what wells up in the form of active forces of initiative but is bound up with the organism, is of the nature of Mars.

We come now to those qualities which are a more integral part of man. They also reveal themselves to our vision, inasmuch as they proceed from forces in the cosmos. Leaving aside the Sun-nature for the present, there is, for example, Mercury. It will not generally be believed that man's cleverness, his sagacity, is also grounded in the universe. This is true, nevertheless. And if, entirely without any preconceived ideas, you look at the phenomena of the universe, you will say to yourselves: The activity which your intelligence finally discovers in itself is present in the phenomena of the universe. Intelligence is manifestly present in these phenomena. Now the forces which represent this element of intelligence in the cosmos, and are born with us as our intellectual gifts, our sagacity—these forces pertain to the Mercury-nature in the universe.

The Venus-nature has been amply described in traditions and manifests in everything that constitutes love. The Moon-nature comes to expression in the activities of imagination, of phantasy; also in those of memory—not the organic activity underlying acts of remembrance but the activity that is present in the forming and shaping of mental pictures, of ideas. The pictures of memory are really identical in nature with the pictures of imagination, only they arise as faithful reproductions of the corresponding experiences. Therefore we can say: Imagination or phantasy, and memory, the more inward qualities and capacities, are connected with the forces of the Moon, Venus and Mercury.

When we contemplate the material-physical aspect of Jupiter, for example, that is to say when we contemplate Jupiter from within the universe, it represents the concentration of those forces—in the sense indicated yesterday—which make it possible for man not to flow away in the light but to maintain himself as an independent being of spirit-and-soul within the light. If the Jupiter-forces are viewed in their aspect of spirit-and-soul, that is to say, from without, then Jupiter reveals those forces which man has within him in the form of inclinations, sympathies and the like. In its outermost aspect Jupiter enables the soul-life to maintain its own independent footing in face of the light. In its aspect of spirit-and-soul, Jupiter enables inclinations, sympathies, to arise, to take shape, to be engendered.

When man is passing through these stages after death, or also in the process of Initiation—as I have described them in the book Theosophy—there comes a certain point of time when he ceases to see the stars—whether planets or fixed stars—as they are seen from the earth by means of the senses. It is quite understandable that he should cease to see the stars; but he does not cease to know about them. He knows, firstly, what I described yesterday. And from a certain point of time onwards he comes to know the nature of the stars from the moral aspect. He is now looking back upon the cosmos. But he sees the cosmos as a moral reality, not as a physical reality. And after the intermediate condition during which he sees what I described yesterday, he then sees from outside, especially during the middle period between death and a new birth, not what could be called Saturn in our parlance, but the surging life of instinct in the cosmos which then becomes part of himself when he again passes into physical embodiment on the earth. He sees the weaving life of inclinations, sympathies, and so on.—Materialistic thought may, of course, deny all this, but to do so is about as sensible as to deny the reality of the spirit and soul of a man when confronting the physical body.

This vision of the cosmos, of the planetary world, in their moral aspects fills man's existence between death and a new birth. These perceptions are, however, dependent in a certain respect upon how he passes through the gate of death. He beholds the life of instinct, of inclinations, of moral impulses and so on in accordance with the unconscious understanding he acquired during his life on earth.

For example, a man who during his life has been on friendly terms with many individuals who are what is called “unconventional” in some respect, a man who is not a philistine in his attitude to others but has a certain kindly understanding of them, letting them be as they are instead of criticising—such a man acquires for himself, in addition to the understanding by which his consciousness is already enriched, an abundance of unconscious forces. A great deal is gained from letting other human beings be as the are, trying to understand them, not picking them to pieces with criticism; but as well as this understanding, in itself an asset to his consciousness, he acquires, as I say, a wealth of unconscious impulses. Equipped with these impulses, he will then be well able to observe the mysteries of the Saturn-existence from the other side of life, from the side of the life between death and a new birth.

The mysteries of planetary existence reveal themselves in many different aspects. According to a man's capacity for understanding them, he combines these forces into a whole and so incorporates them into his own nature when he returns into earthly existence.

And now you can surely feel that through this vision a man gains knowledge and experience, just as he does here on the earth. On the earth he gets to know one human being after another; thereby he acquires knowledge of man. He also gains experiences in accordance with what is revealed to him from the other side of life. But these latter experiences, which are acquired during the second half of the life between death and a new birth, become creative forces, and the man bears them into the organism he receives through heredity. You will realise that this is connected with the forming of karma, that something takes place here which may be called the technique of the forming of karma. Between death and a new birth man acquires the experiences that are necessary to enable him to implant his karma into his nature, through these visions that come to him from the other side of life.

I have had to describe these matters with a certain subtlety because they are subtle in themselves, and because it is necessary to stress that concepts must be radically transformed if the universe is to be understood. For in everything we see here on the earth, physically to begin with, but then also through deepened spiritual perception, the one side only of existence is revealed. Indeed when we look outwards, the cosmos too reveals only this one aspect of existence. The other aspect reveals itself only when we are able to contemplate the cosmos while we are outside the body, in an existence that is purely of the nature of spirit-and-soul. And then the cosmos is revealed in its aspect of spirit-and-soul, in its moral aspect.

In very ancient times of human evolution on the earth, men still brought many “cosmic remembrances” with them when they came into physical existence. Compared with the men of today these primeval men were more animal-like in outer appearance (although the whole crude theory of man's descent from animals is a fallacy)—but for all that, in earthly existence too, they knew something of the other side of life. They had brought this knowledge with them into bodies that were still incompletely developed. In the course of evolution, man has progressively lost his remembrance of the other side of existence in which he lives between death and rebirth; and so he is now obliged to rely upon the experiences offered by earthly existence. Only so can man incorporate into himself a power which can be incorporated into him nowhere else in the universe. For the power to act out of freedom must be, and is, acquired during earthly existence; it will then remain throughout man's earthly and cosmic future.

Because, to begin with, these things naturally come as a shock to people, it is still necessary in public lectures to speak in abstract concepts of the fact that while man is within an existence of spirit-and-soul, the universe reveals its reverse aspect. But, as you see, it is also possible to describe the detailed, concrete facts of planetary existence—and one could also go farther out into the world of stars—and in so doing show how man is connected with the whole cosmos.

Only with these data of knowledge as a foundation is it possible to speak of the fact that the cosmos as it reveals itself when contemplated from the earth is firstly the physical cosmos (including the earth), then the etheric cosmos. But in ordinary physical space there are, in reality, only the physical cosmos and the etheric cosmos. The moment when, passing through the gate of death or through initiation, man becomes able to experience himself purely as a being of spirit-and-soul—that is to say, to contemplate the universe from the other side—conceptions of space cease to have any meaning for him. As long as the words of human language have to be used, we can say: When we contemplate our spatial universe from outside, it still appears to us as if it were spatial, but it no longer is so. For in truth it must be said: Here we look outwards from a single point, but we must imagine the point dispersed. The point is no longer a point, it is dispersed.

We embrace space within ourselves as it were, and behold the non-spatial; just as here we look at space from one single point, when we are outside our body we look back from out of space upon the point. And with this is connected the experience of beholding as many worlds as there are human souls connected with the earth, and only one human nature, one “manhood.”

We are each and all of us a single human being when we look at ourselves from outside. That is why the science of Initiation speaks of the mystery of number, because even number itself has meaning only from this or that particular point of vision. What here on earth is a unity—the cosmos—is a plurality when seen from outside. What here on earth is a plurality—namely, human beings—is a unity when seen from outside. To regard something as a plurality or as a unity is also maya, is also illusion, for if viewed from an entirely different point of vision, a unity may reveal itself as a plurality and a plurality as a unity. This is something that has also formed part of mathematical science in the course of its evolution on earth. I have spoken of this before.

Today we count by adding one unit to another. We say: one, then two, then by adding another unit we have three, and so on. But in very ancient times men did not count like this. They counted in this way: the unit is one, in the unit there is two, then, still in the unit, three. They did not add one unit to another but the unit was that which embraced all numbers. In the unit all numbers were contained. In our time the unit is contained in all the numbers; in ancient mathematics all the numbers were contained in the unit. This conception sprang from the different modes of thinking, which were in turn connected with the remembrances of an extra-cosmic science still surviving in very early times of evolution.

I have lately been describing to you man's relationships to the surrounding world, as they appear when we turn our attention away from the earth and more to the starry world, especially to the world of the planets. Today I should like to add, aphoristically at least, some of the observations and experiences gained by spiritual vision concerning man's relationship to his immediate earthly environment.

In the ordinary way man looks at things in his environment without discrimination and arrives at fallacious conceptions of being and reality. Let me remind you of what on various occasions I have already given as an illustration. When we look at a rock-crystal, we can say, from an earthly point of view: “This crystal is a self-contained entity.” In its finished form we can always see something complete in itself.

This is not so, if, for instance, we pick a rose and take it into our room. As a rose with its stem, just by itself, it is altogether unthinkable within the compass of earthly existence. It is thinkable only while it is growing on its stem on the rose-bush with its branches and roots. In other words, to speak in accordance with reality, we must not call the rose an entity in the same sense as a rock-crystal. For in terms of reality we must speak in that way only of something which, relatively at least, can exist in itself. Certainly, from a different aspect, the rock-crystal cannot be regarded as something that has an independent existence either, but then it is seen from a different point of view. For simple observation, the rock-crystal as a conceptual entity is quite different from the rose.

Unfortunately, far too little attention is paid to such things, and this is why human thinking is so far from grasping reality and men find it so difficult to bring clear concepts to bear upon what spiritual observation has to say. Clear concepts could be attained easily enough if only people would pay the necessary attention to such simple matters.

When we reflect upon our immediate earthly environment, we find, to begin with, various kinds of soil on the surface. If you look round in our own neighbourhood, you find limy soil. Further south you find slaty kinds of soil. I will confine myself, first, to these two main kinds of earth: the limy kind, the lime-formation which, especially as Jura-limestone, you can observe here in our immediate surroundings, and the slate-formation, where the rock, the mineral, is not in such a compact form as in the limestone-formation, but where it is schistous. Just think of shale, even of gneiss, of mica-schist and the like, which you find in the central Alps. Here are two great and important opposites: slate-formation and lime-formation.

Judged by present-day conceptions, these mineral deposits represent something that can be explained only in terms of mineral-physical laws. No account is taken of the fact that the earth is one whole. Let us consider the science of geology as it is today.

The different kinds of earth, the deposits of ore, of metals, of minerals in general in the various earth-layers are observed. But the earth is not regarded as if it were also a dwelling-place for the living world of plants and human beings. To have such a conception of the earth is rather like regarding the human skeleton as having an independent existence. Taking a human skeleton by itself, you must, to be correct, say: that is not a self-contained entity. Nowhere in the world can such a thing as a human skeleton originate by itself. It exists as the remains of a whole human body, but it could never materialize without the supplementary action of muscles, nerves, blood and so on. Therefore we must not look upon the human skeleton as an independent entity or attempt to explain it as such.

Nor is it possible for anyone who thinks in actualities, and not in abstractions, to apprehend the earth with its various rock-formations without reflecting that the earth is a totality; that the plant, animal and human kingdoms belong to it, just as muscles, blood and so on belong to the human skeleton.

We must therefore be clear in our mind what it means to study the earth in terms of geology. It means forgoing at once any chance of reaching realities. We do not arrive at anything real. We arrive at something that can be found within a planetary being only when this contains the plant-world, the animal world and the human world.

If, first of all, we observe what, as part of the earth-skeleton, pervades the earth as slate-formation, we see that its external appearance differs very considerably from that of the concentrated compactness of the lime-formation. And indeed, if we make use of the methods which have been applied to the broad outlines of earth-evolution in my book Occult Science, we have to trace the difference between the slate and lime formations to the relation between one or other of these to man, to animal existence, to plant-existence. We must see how what belongs to the earth as soul-and-spirit is related to these rock-materials.

We cannot understand a human skeleton if we do not connect it ultimately with man's will-nature; and we cannot understand the slate-formation, or the lime-formation, unless we connect them with the tasks which these formations have to perform for what is also present in earth-existence as spirit-and-soul. And then we find an intimate connection between all that is slate-formation and plant-life; between all that is lime-formation and animal-life.

Certainly, as the earth is today, the mineral element contained in slaty matter can naturally be found also in the plants. The mineral substance to be found in animal matter has its origin in very diverse formations. But that is of less importance just now; the important thing is that to spiritual observation and to spiritual experience the particular way in which plant-life, the whole plant-world, belongs to the earth, reveals itself as having a certain special relationship to the slate-formation.

If I am to sketch it diagrammatically, it will be somewhat like this (a drawing is made on the blackboard): Here is the earth, with some accumulation of slate-formation on it, and then the plants growing out of the earth towards the outer universe. Spatially, the plants need by no means coincide with the slate-formation, just as, for instance, a thought, which is based on the instrument of the brain, need not coincide with a movement of the big toe. We are not concerned here with spatial coincidence, but with apprehending the nature of the slate-formation when we try to do so not only through chemical and physical examination, but also through penetrating to the essence of this slaty formation by means of spiritual investigation. Then we shall come to the conclusion: If the forces inherent in slaty matter were to act upon the earth only by themselves, they would have to be connected with a condition of life which develops in precisely the same way as the plant-world.

The plant-world develops in such a way that it represents only physical corporeality, etheric corporeality; that is, in the actual plants themselves. But when we come to the astral element of the plant-world, we must imagine this astral element of the plant-world as an astral atmosphere which encompasses the earth. The plants themselves have no astral bodies, but the earth is enveloped in an astral atmosphere, and this astrality plays an important part, for instance, in the process of the unfolding of blossom and fruit. The terrestrial plant-world as a whole, therefore, has one uniform, common astral body which nowhere interpenetrates the plant itself, except at most in a very slight degree when fructification begins in the blossom. Generally speaking, it floats cloud-like over the vegetation and stimulates blossom and fruit formation.

What unfolds here would fall into decay but for the astral forces which emanate from the rock-material of the slate-formation. Thus we have in the slate-formation all that which tends to turn the whole earth into one organism. Indeed, we must see the relation of the plants to the earth as being similar to that of our hair to ourselves, as being of one and the same order. And what holds this whole organisation of the world together are the forces that radiate from the rock-material of the slate-formation.

In due course these things will also be substantiated by natural science. It will, for instance, be said: Man has his physical body and his etheric body. His organisation as a whole is based on a plant-existence. Man can in fact be regarded as a plant-being on which has been superimposed what is animalistic and human.

When the human being in health or illness is treated with mineral substances deriving from slate-formations, it will be possible to perceive, even externally, the action of these particular minerals; and it will be of special importance to know which types of disease in the human organism are due, for example, to over-exuberance of the plant-element.

Over-exuberance of the plant-element must always be combated by treating the affected person with schistous mineral substance. For everything that belongs to this slate-substance keeps the plant-element in man—if I may put it that way—in a normal condition, in the same way as it perpetually normalizes plant-existence on earth. The plant-life of the earth would tend to spread with over-exuberance into outer cosmic space were it not kept in check by the radiations from the mineral-forces of the slate-formation. One day, people will have to study from this point of view a living geography and geology of the earth; it will be realised that a study of what constitutes the skeleton of the earth, as it were, must be pursued not only from the geological angle, but in relation to the being of the earth as a whole; in relation, also, to its organic life and its nature of soul-and-spirit.

Now the entire plant-world is intimately bound up with the sun-forces, with solar action. The effects produced by the sun are not confined to the emanations of warmth and light radiating from the etheric-physical rays of the sun, for the warmth and light are permeated through and through by spirit-and-soul. These forces of spirit-and-soul are allied with those pertaining to the slate-formation. That in a certain way everything of a slate-nature is spread all over the earth is connected with the fact that plant-life on the earth exists in manifold forms. The spatial aspect is—as I said—of no immediate importance; it must not be imagined, for example, that the slate-formation has to be here or there in order that plants may grow out of it. The radiations of the slate-formation stream out; they are carried all over the earth by all kinds of currents, especially magnetic currents, and on these earth-encircling radiations of the slate-formation, the plants live. Where, on the contrary, the slate-formation is in itself developed to the highest degree, plant-life cannot thrive today because there the life-forces of the plants are drawn too forcibly into the earthly element and therefore cannot unfold. There, the forces which fetter the plant to the earthly element are so overpowering that the unfolding of plant-life—in which the cosmic forces must also play their part—is prevented.

To account for the nature of the slaty element in the earth is possible, therefore, only if one can go back, in the sense in which it is described in my Occult Science, to the time when the earth itself had a Sun-existence. It was then that the slaty element within the earth was being prepared. At that time, when the earth had a Sun-existence, the physical part of the earth had advanced only to a state of sprouting plant-life. The Sun-existence was such that no definite plants or animal beings could develop there. Plants as they are today were non-existent, but the earth itself had a kind of plant-existence, and out of this plant-existence there emerged on one hand the plant-world, while on the other hand a hardening took place of what in the plant-world are also formative forces, a hardening into slate-formation.

When, however, we look at the lime-formation, it reveals itself to super-sensible vision as intimately connected with all that permeates animal existence on the earth with—shall I say—independence. The plant is tied to the ground, is connected with it, as our hair is connected with the skin on which it grows. The animal moves about. But the radiations of the lime-formation are connected less with this movement as such, which is a local movement, than with the independent build of the animal-form.

When you look at a plant you can see that with its root it turns earthwards; it grows into the earth—is, as it were, drawn towards the centre of the earth—and then unfolds outwards. The plant's structure gives a clear indication of its complete adaptation to earth-existence. Naturally, a more complicated plant form calls for a more complicated description, but on the whole it remains essentially the same. The plant is not independent. Where it enters the soil it contracts, unites itself with the earth; where it rises up it spreads out and turns towards the light that radiates in all directions. This structure of the plant is best understood if studied in connection with its intimate relation to the plant's position in respect of the earth.

It is true that in their basic design some features of the animal form—for instance the horizontal position of the spine, the functioning of the limbs in a downward direction—point to an adaptation to earth-existence. All the same, by its natural form the animal has detached itself and has become independent of the earthly. You can discern in every animal-shape not only its adaptation to the earthly element, like that of the plant, but something entirely independent, a form set in itself. The fact is that even in respect of its structure the animal has been released from the grip of the earth.

Now super-sensible observation has revealed that everything that radiates from the light of the moon, everything that streams as reflected sunlight from the moon on to the earth, and also streams into our thought-life as formative force—all this works, too, in the shaping of the animal forms. Essentially, all that is indeterminate, formless will-force in the animal is to be found within the sphere of the direct light from the sun. But all that gives the animal its independent form, which is not adapted to the earthly element, is, in the true sense of the word, woven out of the gleaming moonlight.

All forms on the earth are shaped by the moon-forces. That the animals have different forms is due to the fact that the moon passes through the signs of the Zodiac. According to whether the moon stands in the sign of the Ram or the Bull or the Twins, the lunar formative forces act in their different ways on the animal world. This also establishes an interesting connection between the Zodiac and the animal form itself, of which the ancient dream-like wisdom was dimly aware. What draws these forms down on to the earth—forms which would otherwise dissipate into a kind of fog enveloping the earth—are the forces streaming from the lime-formation. The mineral element on earth does not radiate from radium only. Thus on the one side we have in the slate-formation that which binds the plant to the earth, and in the lime-formation that which draws from the moon-forces all that lives in the specific build of animal-forms. And so spiritual perception tells us how the slate-formation on the earth is connected with the structural nature of the plant-world, how the lime-formation is connected with the structural nature of the animal-world.

We must realise that such attributes as we find, for instance, in the lime-formation are also to be found in every detail of organic life. It can be observed quite exactly, if one is properly equipped for such investigations, that there are, for example, people who show a marked tendency to skeleton-formation. I do not mean that they have a strong skeleton, but that they have many lime deposits in the rest of their organism as well. There are, if I may say so, people who are richer or poorer in lime content.

But you must not think of this in a grossly material sense; it should naturally be conceived as being present in a homeopathic form, but it is of great significance. People with a greater lime content are as a rule cleverer, capable of forming a combination of subtle ideas and of resolving them again under the scrutiny of searching analysis. You must not think that by saying this I am giving a materialistic explanation of the human being. I should naturally never dream of doing any such thing; for the fact that one person deposits more lime than another is connected with his karma. So it is that in both past and future everything has its connection with the spiritual. And a truly penetrating knowledge of the world is not based on any vague talk about the “spiritual” and the “material,” but on a mental outlook which recognises how the spiritual works creatively by shaping out of itself the material world. A man who, as the result of his former earthly lives, has acquired a predisposition for becoming a particularly clever person in his next incarnation, for example a particularly good mathematician, develops between death and a new birth those forces of spirit-and-soul which later deposit the lime-substance in him.

We have to be dependent on lime deposits within us if we want to become clever. We have to rely more on deposits of clay-substance—which exists for instance in slate-formations—if it is primarily a matter of developing the will.

There can be no true conception of the material unless it is understood in its constant interrelation with the spiritual. We can say, therefore, that the lime-formation carries those radiations and currents which are concerned not only with building up animal life in all its forms on the earth, but also with providing the material foundation we need for the shaping of our thoughts. Outside in space are the manifold animal forms; within us, in our intellect, are the thought-forms. These are, in fact, the animal forms projected into the spiritual. The entire animal kingdom is at the same time intellect. And this whole animal kingdom projected into man's inner life, so that it appears there in mobile thought-forms, is the intellect. But as the animal kingdom needs the lime-formation to build up its forms in the outer world, so we need, as it were, a fine inner lime deposit, a lime formation, in order to become clever.

This must, of course, not be carried too far. If a man were to deposit lime in excess, he would forfeit his cleverness; it would not remain his own. He would, as it were, bring about an objective cleverness in which his own personality would have no part. Everything has its limits. And as we follow up these things further, we come to interesting discoveries about the extent to which the mineral element plays its part in the life of man, animal and plant. When we consider all that works in us as lime-forces we are led—as I have said—to what struggles for expression in the formative forces and helps us to develop inner firmness.

Man's connection with the forces of clay, of the clay-slaty element, on the other hand, leads him to fight against this inner firmness; to dissolve it, liquefy it and make it plant-like. Man is always in a sense the embodiment of a kind of interaction between the lime element and slate element—by which, of course, I mean the inner forces they contain.

Now we can look more closely at the slate element. In much of it we find flint and silicious substances, especially those to be found in the rock-crystal, in quartz. In their radiations and currents the forces of quartz are also fully active in man himself; and if he possessed only these quartz-like forces which he takes in with the harder slaty element, he would be in constant danger of his spirit and soul striving to return to what he was in his pre-earthly life. The quartz element always wants to draw man away from himself, to take him back again to his still unembodied being. To counteract this force, another force is needed, and this is the force of carbon.

Man has carbon working in his organism in manifold ways. Carbon is observed by natural science today only in its outer aspect, merely by physical and chemical means. In reality, carbon is the element which makes us always remain with ourselves. Carbon, in a sense, is our house; we dwell in it; while silica always wants to take us back in time to where we were before we took possession of our carbon-house.

This means that a constant struggle is waged in us between the forces of carbon and those of silica. And our life is woven into this battle. If we consisted only of carbon—for instance the physical plant-world has its foundation in carbon—we should be completely earth-bound. We could not have the slightest inkling of our extra-terrestrial existence. The fact that we can know about it we owe to the silica element in us.

If one has insight into all this, one also discovers the healing forces contained, for instance, in silica, in quartz or flint. Where an excessive inclination towards carbon causes a man to become ill—this applies, for example, to all cases of illness due to certain deposits of metabolic products—then silicious substances provide the remedy. Especially when the deposits are peripheral or in the head, the healing properties of the silica element are a strong antidote.

You can see that if one gets to the heart of these matters, with a comprehensive knowledge that combines nature-knowledge and spiritual knowledge, seeking the spiritual in all purely material things, and finding the material again in all that is spiritual, the spiritual being conceived as creative power—you can see that only such knowledge can furnish a clue not only to an understanding of human existence but also to the methods which must be applied when human existence suffers from functional disturbances.

A point of special importance is that attention should be paid to what lives as the nitrogen element in man, to nitrogen as such and to its combinations. The fact that man has nitrogen in his system enables him, as it were, to remain always open to cosmic influences. This again I can best illustrate by a diagram.—Let us assume that this represents the human organism. (A sketch is made on the blackboard.) The fact that man has nitrogen, or bodies containing nitrogen, in his organism, ensures that the laws governing the organism keep, as it were, within their confines everywhere; along these lines (in the diagram) indicating the nitrogen in the body, the latter ceases to impose its own laws. This allows the cosmic laws to enter freely everywhere. Along the nitrogen-line in the human body the cosmic element asserts itself in the body. You can say: As far as nitrogen is active in me, the cosmos, right to the most distant star, works in me. What there is of nitrogen-forces in me draws the forces of the whole cosmos into me. If my organism had no nitrogen-content, I should be shut off from everything that comes in from the cosmos.” And when it is important that the cosmic forces should unfold in a special way, for example in human propagation when in the body of the mother the embryo develops—the embryo which as you know, is moulded from the cosmos—this is made possible only because the nitrogen-containing substances open the human being to the influences of the cosmos. But everything in the universe and in human existence is so ordered as not to go to extremes. Indeed, if one-sided action were allowed to prevail, everything would lead to extremes. If nitrogen, which impels man always to expand, spiritually, into cosmic space, could exert its full force on the human organism, it would work together with the silica element—which induces man, I might say, to lose himself in the spiritual past—and the effect would be that man would constantly lapse into unconsciousness.

Now it is always interesting when observing anything in nature or in man to find that important things play a double role. Thus the lime element, which gives man the physical stamp for cleverness, also counteracts the effect of nitrogen. So that we can say: On the one hand, silica and carbon form polaric opposites in man; on the other hand, nitrogen and lime do the same:

Silica—Carbon.

Nitrogen—Lime.

The lime substances in man so regulate him that he always re-asserts his own organisation in face of the force which, through the medium of nitrogen, seeks to work into him from the cosmos. Through nitrogen, the cosmic forces enter; through lime-action, that which issues from the human organism opposes and balances it. So that in many different places in the human body an influx of cosmic forces and likewise an expulsion of cosmic influences takes place. It is a ceaseless pendulum-movement: nitrogen effect—lime effect, lime effect—nitrogen effect. Thus we can not only relate man to the starry world, but also give him his place in his immediate earthly environment.

In the last number of the periodical Das Goetheanum, I used an aphorism to emphasise that in reality materialism as a world-conception does not arise from the fact matter is too well known; on the contrary, too little is known about it. What is really known about carbon? That it is to be found in nature as coal, as graphite, as diamond. These bodies are then described according to their physical characteristics. But it is not known that carbon is the element which holds us firmly within ourselves, so that we are a self-contained human organism, and that this is constantly challenged by the silica element, which seeks to draw us away from ourselves.

We learn to understand matter only when we learn to know it also from its spiritual aspect there is matter it is penetrated by spirit. You get nowhere if you are content with a vague, nebulous play of fancy and declare: where there is matter there is spirit. It is not sufficient to know: lime, silica, carbon, nitrogen, contain spirit—that goes without saying, but it is not enough. One must also know how the different substances are, as it were, embodiments, “substantiations” of spiritual processes. One must also be able to see how the lime element acts on the inner organisation of man; how the nitrogen element always aims at permeating him with cosmic impulses.

The plants, which must always maintain a relationship to the cosmic element as they grow up from the earth out into the cosmos, need nitrogen-combinations for their growth; and it will be possible to study plant-growth, too, in the right way if proper attention is paid to the relevant connections just mentioned. These matters have, in the first place, their scientific side; we learn to know the world only when we understand the true nature of things; but they also have their practical side. And one really never gets beyond the most primitive aspects if one cannot assess things in their wider connections. One will then have to go into details and find out how the required nitrogen-combinations enter into plant-growth. As you know, this alone is a very important subject of study; but in agriculture, too, this study can be complete only if pursued by the methods of spiritual science. Spiritual science alone is the true science of reality.

You see, everything I have been describing has to be re-established through the methods of spiritual science as they are available today and as they will be more and more developed in the future. For an older science received these things through a kind of dreamlike clairvoyance. We must attain a fully conscious clairvoyance. This, as you know, is a subject I have dealt with on very many occasions.

Today we cannot simply imbibe again the things that once became known to men with the aid of a quite different human make-up. It is, of course, folly for people to devote all their studies to ancient science, for that will not help them to understand things. The ancient things themselves cannot be understood either, unless they are illumined spiritually in the right way. And yet it is remarkable how practically everywhere today the scientific mind, through a kind of instinct, turns to what was once found through dreamlike clairvoyance.

Take a specific case. The old Initiates took for granted the presence of lead everywhere in earthly existence—because to the radiation of lead they attributed what works in the human form from the extreme top, from above downwards. In the widely distributed lead on earth they saw something that is connected with the inner structure of man, especially also with human self-consciousness. Naturally, the modern materialist would say: But lead has nothing to do with the human organism. In answer to that the old Initiate would have told him: It is certainly not, as you imagine, the gross lead-substance that we have in mind, but the forces emanating from exceedingly fine lead-constituents; and such lead is very widely distributed. That is what the ancient Initiate would have said.

What does the modern student of natural science say? He says: There are minerals which give off radiations, among them the so-called radioactive ones. The radiations of uranium are, of course, known; it is known that certain rays—alpha rays they are called—stream out; then, the remaining part, in the course of further radiation, undergoes certain changes, even comes to possess—as the chemists say—a different atomic weight. Briefly, in radioactive matter, transmutations take place. In fact there are people today who are already talking about a kind of revival of the old mystical metamorphoses of matter. But now, those who have investigated such matters say: These radiations give rise to something which appears as a terminal product, no longer radioactive, and this has the properties of lead. Thus you can learn strictly from the investigations of modern science that there are radioactive substances; within the source of these radioactive radiations there is something which, in accordance with its inherent forces, is in course of formation. There is always a lead-content at the bottom.

You see, the researches of modern natural science are getting critically near to ancient initiation-Science. And just as today modern scientists cannot help discovering the presence of lead right under their noses, as it were—or at least under the noses of their physical instruments—so they will also find out things about the other metals. Then it will gradually dawn upon them what was meant when it was said that lead is to be found everywhere in nature. You see, it is only through spiritual science that one can discern what is implicit in the discoveries of natural science—discoveries with which, in the context of ordinary general knowledge, one hardly knows what to do.

But now we still have to consider something important in this field: You know that the air which belongs to the immediate surroundings of our earth consists of oxygen and nitrogen, Nitrogen is, to begin with, of little use for our physical life. Oxygen we inhale; in the body it undergoes a change and carbon dioxide is formed, which we exhale. So the question might arise: Then what exactly is the main importance of nitrogen, which does not enter into chemical combination with oxygen, but lives out there in a kind of intimate mixture with oxygen? In nitrogen we cannot live; for that, we need oxygen. But without nitrogen our ego and our astral body when outside the physical body during sleep, could not exist. We should perish between going to sleep and waking if we could not immerse ourselves in nitrogen. Our physical body and our etheric body need the oxygen from the air; our ego and astral body need nitrogen.

The nitrogen is a substance which brings us into intimate connection with the spiritual world. It is the bridge to the spiritual world in the state in which our soul lives during sleep. Take what I said before, together with what I have now said about nitrogen. Nitrogen draws the cosmic element in from the circumference. From within us, it prepares us for the cosmic element. Outside, it allows those parts of us which are not properly of the earth to live in themselves, so to speak, as forces of spirit-and-soul. Hence it is not for nothing that there is a considerable admixture of nitrogen in the air, for nitrogen carries the physical death-forces and the spiritual life-forces of earthly existence. And when between falling asleep and waking we escape from the physical death-forces to another existence in our soul-life, we immerse ourselves in the nitrogen-element, which forms the bridge between our life of spirit-and-soul and the cosmos. With our earthly-personal existence we are rooted in carbon; with our life of soul-and-spirit, in nitrogen. In earthly existence, carbon and nitrogen are related to one another and to man as I have just described.

Look at carbon; it is contained in ordinary coal, in graphite, in the diamond. These are three different forms in which carbon can occur. What you see as carbon in the black, sooty coal and in the diamond and in graphite, we also carry within us in a different form. We are—not to a very great extent, it is true, but to a small extent—a little piece of diamond and this holds us firmly within our earthly house. That is where our spirit-and-soul are at home when within the body.

Nitrogen, which occurs in the various nitrogen-compounds, nitric acid, and in saltpeter and so on, is the element which always allows us to emerge from ourselves, as it were. As I said, it forms the bridge to the spirit-and-soul element in the cosmos. This too must be discovered again through the new spiritual science. It was once within the realm of earthly knowledge, but only in a dreamlike way. It was perceived with the old clairvoyance by the ancient Initiates.

As I have often said, true respect for an ancient Initiate begins when we rediscover things we cannot learn from tradition. Only when we can find them ourselves can we also value them as tradition. And as we proceed to rediscover them, we also feel a true reverence for what was once the primeval wisdom of mankind.

At the next opportunity I will speak about the connection between all these rediscoveries and the Mystery of Golgotha.¹ For this, I needed spiritual-scientific and natural-scientific premises; and after all, these deliberations will in themselves have helped to throw light on a number of questions concerning the world and human existence.

• 1. The attention of readers is called particularly to the following two Lecture-Courses given by Rudolf Steiner:
  
  Man and the World of Stars (7 lectures, 26th Nov. – 26th Dec. 1922;
  The Spiritual Communion of Mankind (5 lectures, 23rd – 31st Dec. 1922.)
  
  (Translations are available as typescripts in the Library of the Anthroposophical Society in Great Britain.)

I would like to introduce some of the material that I will be presenting here over the next few days today by taking up the life and teaching of a personality whom I have already mentioned here and there in the lectures and whom I have also dealt with in more detail in the third chapter of my book “Von Seelenrätseln” (Soul Mysteries). I will have much to say about this personality, Franz Brentano, as one of the representative spirits of the second half of the 19th century, for reasons that will become clear as we move forward in our considerations. Some of these indications can also be found in the journal 'Das Goetheanum'. I am linking up with Brentano's teaching and life today for a specific reason, namely the publication of the first volume from Franz Brentano's estate, which covers one of the most important chapters of the world view, namely the teaching of Jesus as illuminated by Franz Brentano himself.

Franz Brentano, a philosopher, died in Zurich in 1917 at the age of seventy-nine. With his death, a philosophical life came to an end that undoubtedly ranks among the most interesting in history and, above all, in the second half of the 19th century. Not only did a philosophical teacher live in Franz Brentano, but also a philosophical personality lived in him, a personality in whom philosophical striving emerged from the full extent and depth of the personality.

The philosopher Brentano is a member of the family to which Clemens Brentano, the German romantic, belonged. Clemens Brentano was the uncle of the philosopher Franz Brentano. And Clemens Brentano is a member of the family that was friends with Goethe through Sophie La Roche and Maximiliane Brentano, and that two, at the beginning of the 19th century, often interrelated intellectual currents . These were Catholicism on the one hand – we are dealing with a devout Catholic family in the Brentano family – and the romantic spirit on the other. Clemens Brentano truly created some of the most beautiful German romantic poetry, and, emerging from the romantic atmosphere of German intellectual life, he was an extraordinarily important storyteller. One would like to say that, through the German Romantics' telling of tales, the German fairy tales were transformed in such a way that a light from the spiritual world really shone on those to whom fairy tales were told from just such a source. And our philosopher Franz Brentano heard tales told by Clemens Brentano, his uncle, when he was still a very young child.

For us, two aspects are important here. One is that Franz Brentano emerged from this spiritual atmosphere. He was born in 1838. In 1842 Clemens Brentano died. And on the other hand, we have to consider that Franz Brentano, who grew out of Catholic romanticism, grew into the strictest scientific view that prevailed in the second half of the 19th century in the spiritual life of modern civilization. Franz Brentano grew up in such a way that even as a child a pious spirit entered his soul. The religious element is something that comes naturally to him from his soul. And Catholicism does not enter his soul as something external, but as something that constitutes the essence and weave of this soul. With complete inwardness, the boy Franz Brentano embraces Catholic piety and grows into it. He has awakened within himself, brought up by romanticism, a powerful intellectualism. While in the romanticists of the Clemens Brentano school, the spiritual lived in the form of fantasy, while a genius like Clemens Brentano paid little attention to the rules of logic and strove to gain the spiritual world in flight, but in flight of the imagination , to gain the spiritual world and to live in it, this high regard for the intellectual life, which was also developed in Franz Brentano, was transformed into a special talent for the elaboration of strict concepts.

This was helped by the fact that, coming from Catholicism, it was, so to speak, natural for Franz Brentano to make philosophical-theological studies his own. And his fine spirituality had led him early on to penetrate the web of thought of Aristotle and then also into the strict conceptual training of medieval scholasticism. In this medieval scholasticism, as I have already explained in more detail here, Aristotelianism also lived on. And one would like to say: While Franz Brentano retained the disposition to take intellectual flights of fancy, he could not develop unconcerned with the logical powers of the human soul, in the manner of Clemens Brentano, for example, but he developed precisely the strictest logic and only arrived at his conceptualization through the strictest logic. But however great the development of Franz Brentano's abilities in logical training, in theological-philosophical matters, his genuine Catholic piety was even greater in his early youth.

There is something truly remarkable about the modern scholastic training that Franz Brentano, in particular, was able to undergo out of his Catholicism. We must always repeat: the really strict logic, not that superficial logic which is contained in today's everyday education and also dominates science, but what really strict logic is, which is connected with the whole human being, not only with the human head, that already emerges from scholasticism. Scholasticism is the art of logical conceptualization to the highest degree. But in the Middle Ages and in Catholicism to this day, scholasticism was used only to support Catholic doctrine of revelation, in the sense that I once explained by discussing 'Thomism.

With a mind like Franz Brentano's, a very specific spirituality developed precisely out of Catholic piety and out of the rigorous training of scholasticism. He developed the ability to simply take the existence of a spiritual world for granted. By immersing himself in Catholicism and scholastic theology, he was, after all, living in the spiritual realm, and he could not help but live in the spiritual realm. And he grasped this spirituality by developing it in strict logic. He was truly a true Catholic. He was a Catholic in the strictest sense, and although he cultivated the strictest logic within himself, he would never have allowed himself to criticize Catholic revealed doctrine, up to a certain point in his life.

I beg you to imagine just once a human being in all his human depth, in whom the strictest logic lives, which in so many modern minds has practiced the most disparaging criticism of Catholic revealed doctrine. This gave rise to strong doubts in him, but he pushed them all down into the subconscious, never allowing them to surface into consciousness; for the moment they did arise in consciousness, he pushed them down. He said to himself: Catholic revealed doctrine is a closed system and shows very clearly that it has come to earth from the spiritual worlds themselves, albeit by the most varied detours, and also through people. It shows its own truth, and one must always assume, when doubts arise, that one can err as an individual human being in the face of such an all-encompassing system of such venerable greatness as Catholicism. Since it belongs to the teachings of Catholicism that only the councils could ever speak about the truth of the dogmas, Franz Brentano, in his state of mind, could never allow himself to really assert a doubt against the doctrine of revelation if any doubt arose from the unconscious. He pushed everything aside, he simply said to himself: It is impossible to really accept such a doubt. But the doubts, in his feelings, in his sensations, in his unconscious, were terribly stirring in his soul. He did not do as the rationalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did, and give himself up to these doubts, but always pushed such doubts aside as something forbidden.

Then an event occurred that caused a mighty upheaval in his soul. Brentano was born in 1838. He was ordained a Catholic priest in his sixties, and it was as a Catholic priest, but with the state of mind I have just described to you, that he became a professor of philosophy at the University of Würzburg. And so he was affected by the movement for the dogma of infallibility, which was developed towards the end of the 1860s. This dogma was to be declared in 1870. As an excellent theologian and pious Catholic, Franz Brentano – who was still a relatively young man at the time – was commissioned by the famous Bishop Kezteler to say what could be said from the point of view of Catholic theology about the dogma of infallibility.

I will first describe the sequence of external events. Ketteler was one of the German bishops who rebelled most vigorously against the establishment of the dogma of infallibility. He had a memorandum prepared by Franz Brentano, which was to be presented by Ketteler at the bishops' assembly in Fulda, in order to decide on behalf of the German bishops that they would not endorse the dogma of infallibility. Ketteler also presented the full content of Brentano's memorandum, which was directed against the dogma of infallibility, at the bishops' assembly in Fulda. That is the outward appearance, to which only the fact needs to be added that the German bishops then fell down, that when they were gathered in Rome and the dogma of infallibility was to be declared, they finally submitted and agreed to the dogma of infallibility. So Franz Brentano criticized this dogma in the negative sense as a non-Catholic doctrine for Bishop Ketteler. And then the infallibility dogma was declared.

In what position was Franz Brentano as an excellent theologian and as a devout Catholic? He would never have allowed himself to criticize a dogma that he had already grown into. But when Bishop Ketteler called on him to criticize the dogma of infallibility, it had not yet become a dogma, was only about to become one. So he allowed himself to attack this nascent dogma with his intellect. It was also entirely in line with the thinking of Bishop Ketteler, who was initially also against the dogma of infallibility. So Franz Brentano would never have challenged an existing dogma out of his mood at the end of the sixties. But infallibility was not yet a dogma, and so he criticized it with tremendous acumen. For what Ketteler had put forward at the bishops' meeting in Fulda was precisely Brentano's memorandum.

But now infallibility became a legitimate Catholic dogma. You see, not a mere intellectual consideration, but the fact that he had grown together with one of the most important events of modern Catholicism was a decisive turning point for Franz Brentano. What might not have happened at all through a mere intellectual step: his break with the Church occurred for him in connection with these events. He was the most important critic of the dogma of infallibility and at the time had to ask himself: Was the orthodox Christian Franz Brentano, who had criticized the dogma of infallibility from the depths of Catholic consciousness before 1870, still a Catholic when after 1870 the dogma of infallibility had now become a legitimate dogma? You see, there are facts here that play a stronger role in people's lives than an intellectual decision, which in most cases is worthless, can do. And so a man as upright and as alive in his conscience as Franz Brentano could do nothing but leave the Church. You have only to take the whole context to see how deeply Franz Brentano had actually grown together with a certain side of the intellectual life of the second half of the 19th century.

Thus Franz Brentano stood as a philosopher, in a sense cast out of his Catholic career. He had a completely different education from the other philosophers of the 19th century; for the education he had is not otherwise evident in the philosophers outside the Church. But now he was included in the series of philosophers outside the Church. In this context, the 19th-century scientific way of thinking had made the strongest possible impression on him. This scientific way of thinking had indeed set the tone for the whole of scientific life since the middle of the 19th century. And when Franz Brentano habilitated in Würzburg, he did so with the thesis: “In philosophy, no other methodological principles can prevail than in true science.” Natural science made such a deep impression on him in its method that he could not help but say: philosophy must make use of the same methods as natural science if it wants to be a real science.

It is really not easy to untangle the mental tangle in which Franz Brentano was entangled in the 1860s. Let us just look at the situation objectively. On the one hand, we have a person who was perhaps one of the greatest experts on Thomism and Aristotelianism of his time, an extremely sharp thinker and conceptualizer, but all this based on Catholic doctrine. On the other hand, we have a man who is extremely impressed by the scientific method. How is that possible? Yes, it is quite possible, for the following reason. Take the meaning of medieval scholasticism. Medieval scholasticism is a science that works according to scholastic concepts for the spiritual, but a science that commands itself to know only something about the external sense world, and then some insights that result from conclusions from the sense world, while everything supernatural is left to revelation, to which intellectual knowledge should not dare.

Thus, in medieval scholasticism, we have a strict division: the realm of sensory knowledge with some conclusions, such as the existence of God or other similar conclusions; these belong to human knowledge. On the other hand, the actual mysteries, the contents of the supersensible world, can only be gained through revelation, that is, through what the Church has preserved from the revelations of the supersensible worlds that have come to people at various times in a manner that the Church considers legitimate.

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But that was already the preparation for the modern scientific view. This modern natural science also only wants to draw sensory knowledge and at most some conclusions from sensory knowledge. This modern natural science does not even know that it is the continuation of scholasticism, only that certain radical minds have done it somewhat differently than the scholastics. Let us visualize this schematically. The scholastic says to himself: With the intellect and with ordinary science, I gain knowledge of the ordinary sensory world and some conclusions that arise from it (yellow); then there is a boundary beyond which lies the supersensible world, into which one cannot penetrate (red). It is no different with modern natural science! It says: With human knowledge, one penetrates into the sensual world and can draw some conclusions that follow from this knowledge. The scholastics said: Above that lies the supersensible world, which one must recognize through revelation. Radical spirits of the modern world said: One can only recognize the sensual world, we leave out the supersensible world, which does not even exist, or at least one cannot recognize it. In this they became agnostics. What was current in scholasticism with regard to the knowledge of the sensual world and some of the conclusions drawn from it was merely continued in the modern scientific attitude, so that a mind that had so earnestly absorbed scholastic training throughout its youth needed to see nothing in the modern scientific method but the continuation of scholastic views. But for him, because he was also a devout Catholic, the spiritual world was again a matter of course. So Franz Brentano was actually only more consistent than hundreds and hundreds of others, both on the Catholic and on the non-Catholic side.

So Brentano turned to the scientific method. But this scientific method must either become aware of its limitations or else declare agnosticism or the non-existence of the supersensible world. If, nevertheless, one perceives the supersensible world as a matter of course, but can no longer hold to the truth of Revelation – because one can no longer hold to the truth of the Church – as was the case with Franz Brentano, then one is in a special situation.

A superficial mind can easily get by in such a situation. He either denies the existence of the supersensible world or he does not care about it. Franz Brentano could not do that. But precisely because of his strict scholastic training, he was able to express the thesis that true philosophy must use no other methods than those of true natural science.

Now you all know that anyone who, despite saying yes to the scientific method, still wants to arrive at a spiritual world through knowledge must ascend from the ordinary scientific method to what I call exact clairvoyance or exact seeing, which is developed according to the methods I have described in my books. But Franz Brentano recoiled from the development of this kind of seeing, from the development of any kind of method that went beyond the natural sciences and yet was supposed to be cognitive. He was influenced by the attitude he had as a Catholic towards revelation. Science was not allowed to enter into revelation. He could understand a natural-scientific method that was limited only to the sense world; but precisely when one takes this seriously, one must develop supersensible abilities. He recoiled from this.

In this frame of mind, Franz Brentano became a philosopher, no longer a theologian, but a simple philosopher. We may say that such a personality, in whom one finds all the storms and struggles that took place in the intellectual life of the time very distinctly marked, and in whom one must say in the end: he did not become the victor in his own soul - such a personality is naturally often much more significant and much more interesting than others who easily, in lightly-draped concepts, can cope with everything possible.

In this frame of mind, Franz Brentano was now called to Vienna, to that Austria of which I spoke to you here the other day. I have characterized its peculiar spirituality, and if you recall what I said about Austria at the time, you will understand that a philosopher of this kind could make a great impression in Vienna. And that is precisely what Brentano did. He was extraordinarily interesting as a personality, even in his outward appearance. He had a very intellectual head and sparkling eyes, which probably had something similar to the eyes of the romanticist Clemens Brentano. Franz Brentano was actually strikingly interesting in his personality, in that when you saw him walking, for example when he mounted the podium, he always had something about him, as if he had not quite slipped into his physical body. Almost every movement, whether walking or moving the arms, the facial expressions, the formation of the words themselves, all this had something unnatural about it. One always had the feeling that something was dangling with the physical body, as if one were dangling with clothes. And yet the whole thing made an extraordinarily sympathetic and spiritualized impression. One could not help feeling that it was quite natural for this personality, with her always serious tone of voice, with her constant striving to shape concepts in the strictest way, but who in turn gave the impression of having lived in her thinking not in her head , but lived a little above her head, it was basically quite natural for her to feel in her physical body as if she were in a suit that was not quite right for her, that was too big or too small, we can say, too big. And some things that one would have found flirtatious in the movements of another person were interesting in Franz Brentano.

Franz Brentano endeavored to apply scientific method everywhere. When he treated intellectual problems, he treated them with an attitude inspired by scientific method. But I would like to say: the theologian was still there in the tone of voice. There was a great difference, for example, between hearing the scientific method used by any old naturalist and by this philosopher who had grown out of theology.

For those who had some idea of Franz Brentano, it was quite natural that when he came to Vienna in 1874, he initially became, in a sense, the darling of Viennese society, that is, of the society that particularly loved such famous personalities as Franz Brentano was at the time. The women in particular – for the men of this society were less concerned with education, especially in the 1870s – had a particular taste for Franz Brentano, because one could always hear something witty from him. He was superior to you, and yet again he was not completely superior to you; but then you were also superior to him. When he came, he took off his greatcoat awkwardly. It was so easy to help him, and you could feel so superior to certain sides of his nature when you could help him, when you could support him, for example, so that he wouldn't fall over the doorstep and the like, or when he didn't found the spoon right away, or when he, who liked to do so, cut the meat so long on one side and then on the other, until it was no longer individual pieces, but something that in some areas of Germany is called a mess. So you could feel superior and yet at the same time see something like the revelation of a spiritual world through him.

A poet, Adolf Wilbrandt, who was sometimes extraordinarily witty but never very receptive to the depths of the human being, tried to ridicule this in a somewhat disdainful way in his “Guest from the Evening Star”. This novella was seen everywhere in Vienna as a mockery of Franz Brentano, but it is really only in the sense that I have just characterized it.

Now, at the time when Franz Brentano, in the state of mind I have described, was giving his lectures in Vienna, he enjoyed an enormous popularity for the time. One must bear in mind that philosophy was not a very respected subject at the time. But Franz Brentano had already attracted a large audience in Würzburg as an associate professor, and in the same lecture hall where students had written “sulfur booth” on the door after the first lecture by his predecessor – they did not go there again later. In this same auditorium maximum, Franz Brentano read about philosophy, and the lecture hall soon filled up. And so the lecture halls in Vienna where he gave lectures were always full.

One of his first literary works was his “Psychology”. He had set out to write a psychology using a scientific method. It was intended to be four or five volumes. The first volume appeared in the spring of 1874. He had promised the second volume for the fall, and so it was to continue. He had set about investigating, using a scientific method in the strictest sense of the word – just as one investigates whether a metal heats up or cools down, or whether heat is conducted from one metal to another – how one idea follows another, how one idea and another correspond, in short, all the smaller relationships of the soul life. He did not go further. But he had already said in the first volume: Science must also be used for the study of the soul, for psychology. But if this scientific basis were to be bought at the price of modern psychology having nothing to say about the fate of the better part of the human being when the body is given up to the elements of the earth, then something quite valuable would indeed be given up for the sake of this scientific basis. For Brentano — who, of course, lived in the spiritual, but who, of course, could not prove it using the scientific method — this spiritual was by no means something that he did not want to see as an object of knowledge. He definitely wanted to penetrate into the spiritual world with knowledge, but he also wanted to remain with natural science.

And so this first volume remained the only one of Brentano's “Psychology” to be published. He was too true and scientifically conscientious a man to have continued in the sense of mere formalism. Of course he could easily have done that, and he could still have produced psychologies of that kind, like those of the others. But if Brentano had continued a psychology, it would have had to be true on every page, like the first volume, true, of course, within the limits within which man can penetrate to truths. But Franz Brentano wanted to remain in the realm of natural science. This did not lead to a continuation into the soul. He could not deny the soul, as those psychologists have done who have written “souls without souls.” He could only fall silent. And so he wrote no second volume to his first, much less the following volumes.

The Brentano students resented my stating this fact in the third chapter of my book “On Soul Puzzles” because they themselves are inclined to explain the matter much more superficially. But even if one were to decide to say: well, perhaps the Brentano students know better that this was not the reason, from Brentano's estate or from the fact that they were close to him, the first volume from the Brentano estate, which has been excellently edited and introduced by the Brentano student Alfred Kastil, does in fact show the same frame of mind in Franz Brentano that prevented him from adding a second volume to the first of his psychology. In this first volume of Brentano's estate, the first chapter is entitled “The Moral Teaching of Jesus according to the Gospels,” which was written long after he left the church. In the strictest sense, he did not want to accept anything that was not compatible with a strictly scientific attitude. The second chapter is: “The teaching of Jesus about God and the world and about his own person and mission according to the Gospels.” The third chapter is particularly detailed and is a critique of Pascal's thoughts on the defense of the Christian faith. Then, after a short interlude about Nietzsche as an imitator of Jesus, there is an appendix: The Truth of the Faith in a Brief Presentation of its Essential Content.

It is tremendously moving to have this little book about the teachings of Jesus by Franz Brentano in front of you, after Jesus and his teachings have been written and spoken about from all possible points of view in the 19th century, from orthodox, semi-orthodox, free-thinking , from completely atheistic points of view, and much has been written and spoken about Jesus and his teachings, taking everything for help, for example, from David Friedrich Strauß, what is there in the way of mythology and so on. It is moving to see how the excellent philosopher Franz Brentano, who had left the Church, characterizes in his own way Jesus' moral teaching and its lasting significance, then Jesus' teaching about God, the world and Jesus' own mission, then the whole significance of the Church's dogmatics and church administration, the significance of the Church as it is presented apologetically by Pascal. It is touching to see how Franz Brentano, in turn, appears in a forceful way as Pascal's astute opponent and now speaks out about Catholicism as such. It is touching because here we have the Brentano of his youth before us, with all his piety, with all his great ability to immerse himself in the spiritual, and yet also the man of the strictest scientific mind , an attitude that grows out of scientific methodology, a man who, for example, could not be impressed by so-called modernism because Brentano is a deep spirit and modernism, even Catholic modernism, is something shallow. So, despite having fallen away from the Church, he did not, for example, express any kind of approval of modernism.

In the 19th century, spirits who believed they stood on the ground of natural science, such as David Friedrich Strauß, had in the strictest sense of the word asked the question: Are we still Christians? Do we still believe in a God? — These two questions were asked and answered in the negative by David Friedrich Strauß, and by countless others as well. They simply did not have the same profound training as Brentano. Their cognitive life was therefore also less tragic. They had less to struggle for than the scientific method, for it was easier for them, because of their superficiality, to abandon themselves to it than it was for Franz Brentano, for whom it was difficult to abandon himself from his depth. Nevertheless, he considered this scientific method to be absolutely necessary in our time.

I am relating this to you because I believe that by taking the pure facts of his inner and outer life, the example of this personality can give us a clearer insight into the workings and essence of civilization in the second half of the 19th century than if I were to describe it in the abstract. Franz Brentano's psychological makeup is such that, if one regards him primarily as a psychologist, one must say: Everything in this man's abilities tends actually toward the development of supersensible knowledge, so that the soul can be observed. If Brentano had wanted to write even the second volume of his Psychology, he would have had to arrive at imaginative knowledge, and then at inspired knowledge, and so on. He did not want that. Because he did not want to do this, he conscientiously refrained from writing the second and third volumes. Nevertheless, in a sense he became a victim of the scientific method, an honest and conscientious victim. And just as only supersensible knowledge, in the sense in which I have described it, for example, in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, can penetrate to the real nature of the soul, so only such supersensible knowledge of what natural science offers can penetrate to what is present as the all-pervading and weaving spiritual world.

Purely scientific astronomy knows of heavenly bodies floating out there in space. At most, it analyzes the nature of the light of these heavenly bodies using spectral analysis. But for it these are all spheres floating in space. All this is spiritless. And the content of zoology, biology, botany and mineralogy is spiritless. By the very nature of its method, natural science must extract the spiritless and leave the spirit unconsidered. Spiritual science in the anthroposophical sense must in turn lead to the spirit. supersensible knowledge, not only in psychology but also in the world in general, leads to spirituality.

Just as Brentano was unable to approach the nature of the soul with his strictly scientific attitude in his “Psychology”, he was just as unable to truly approach the Mystery of Golgotha when he had abandoned Catholic dogmatics. How can one approach the Mystery of Golgotha? Only if you can grasp that the world is interwoven with a supersensible spiritual. In this supersensible spiritual there is an entity, as I have often described to you, the Christ, who lived as Christ-entity in the body of Jesus of Nazareth when the Mystery of Golgotha took place. Without spiritual science, one comes to no other understanding than that of the personality of Jesus. Only anthroposophical spiritual science can reveal how the divine Christ lived in Jesus. Franz Brentano did not want that.

But he still retained enough from his Catholic consciousness that Jesus has a central significance in the whole evolution of the earth. That was clear to him. Just as it was clear to him that the soul is immortal, but that he could not find this immortality in a cognitive way, so it was clear to him that Jesus forms the center of earthly development. But he could not find the transition from Jesus to Christ. And so we see that he is emotionally and willfully seized in an enormously strong way by the significance of Jesus' personality and Jesus' teaching. Take sentences like this: “Not overcome” - as David Friedrich Strauß thinks - “if one interprets it harmoniously and pays attention to its essential features, the teaching of Jesus in history, but in its perfection in life, has still not been achieved. Because of human weakness, it will still take hard struggles to achieve full victory, but because of its inner strength, it will be impossible for it to ever perish. Conscience will always bear witness to the truth and sacred beauty it contains. Indeed, it has done so since pre-Christian times among pagans and Jews and in the Asian Orient as well as in the European Occident, so that Jesus' moral teaching does not so much signify a mighty advance by proclaiming entirely new commandments, but by the fact that Jesus illustrated them in such a way by the incomparable example he gave in his life and death that the possibility of such sublime virtue was fully grasped and thus inspired imitation with a higher courage. This example will shine forever and no prophecy is more certain than when one says in this sense: Jesus and no end.” Thus the philosopher and former Catholic, the excellent theologian Franz Brentano, who could not arrive at Jesus as the Christ only because of his scientific mentality!

Compare these beautiful words about Jesus as the center of earthly development with much of what has been written by theologians who remained in the Church, and form an opinion about them. But also form an opinion about what it means when a person with the state of mind that I have characterized says the following about Jesus' world view: “So Jesus' world view was not only geocentric,” that is, not only but also Christocentric, and in such a way that not only the whole history of the earth, but also that of pure spirits, both good and evil, is ordered around the person of the one man Jesus, and in every respect finds its understanding only through the purposeful relation to him. The world is a monarchy, not only in view of the one all-powerful God, but also in view of that creature which, before all others, is his image."

Thus Franz Brentano approaches the personality of Jesus. But still, he comes from this personality of Jesus, of whom he says that his world-view is not merely geocentric but Christocentric, and that not only men on earth but also higher spirits, both good and evil, are guided by it. He comes from the personality of Jesus, not to the essence of Christ.

And so there is a terrible contradiction in him. For he does ask himself: What is this man Jesus, around whom the whole of human history revolves? But there is no idea in Franz Brentano that would lead to such a reality that the Christ in Jesus could really be grasped. For only he who grasps the Christ in Jesus can think of making him the center in such a way.

Here too, although he at least brought it to a literary conclusion for religious reasons, but then did not publish it himself, and it was only published by his students, here too Franz Brentano did not reach the end of his quest, although he was, so to speak, standing directly at the gate, which he only had to open to arrive at the immortality of the soul and also at an understanding of the mystery of Golgotha. That is why it is such an extremely interesting document, this little book by Franz Brentano, 'The Teaching of Jesus and Its Permanent Significance', because Franz Brentano certainly had an idea of this permanent significance. Once again, after he has presented the teaching of Jesus and its permanent significance as the second chapter, he asks again: Are we still Christians? The answer will depend, he says, on the sense in which the question is put. And then, however, after blaming modern education for the fact that a real Christ-idea cannot arise, he says once more: “Perhaps someone will call the hopes I have expressed here vain, because the mighty influence that Jesus' teaching and example has exercised on humanity is essentially connected with the fact that one has ascribed to him a divine nature and thus professed a belief in which, according to my own admission, even the most advanced no longer hold today.” There he comes, I might say, into the unclear.

"But they overlook the fact that the possibility of such influence did not begin with the belief in the divinity of Jesus, but rather that looking at his example, as it is presented in the Gospel narratives, was one of the strongest motives that led to the belief in the divine superiority of his person. No other... could be placed at his side, and the more these centuries grow into millennia, the more will be given to distinguish him and to shine as a light in our own lives.

They feel once more how close Franz Brentano came to the gate of the supersensible world, and how he was held back by the most powerful guide of modern civilization, by the methodology and spirit of the natural sciences.

And so, after this publication from Brentano's estate, one can say what one also had to say about his writings printed during his lifetime: Franz Brentano stands there like a ghost from the second half of the 19th century, who with every phase of his mental life driven to the apprehension of the supersensible world, but who allowed this apprehension of the supersensible world to be forbidden to him by natural science, just as he allowed the criticism of dogma to be forbidden to him by the dogma itself. Thus it is that Franz Brentano, precisely through what he was unable to achieve, stands before us as a luminous personality, as one of the most significant personalities of the second half of the nineteenth century, and teaches us, perhaps like few others, to recognize how the intellectual heritage of the nineteenth century, which entered the twentieth century, actually relates to the development of humanity in terms of its effects.

I have spoken of Franz Brentano at some length because the fact is immediately apparent that the first work of this important philosopher, published by his students from his estate, was a work about the life of Jesus, the teaching of Jesus. That provided the external point of contact. But I wanted something more profound with the presentation of this philosopher's life. I wanted to show, through a person who was not just a thinker, not just a scientist, but who was truly a seeker of truth as a whole human being, how a personality of this kind had to position itself in the spiritual life of the second half of the 19th century.

Franz Brentano was born in 1838, so he was a student at the very time when the scientific mentality was emerging within modern civilization. He was a student who, as you have seen, was a devout Catholic who, as a devout Catholic, held firmly to the spiritual world, but only in the way that was possible from Catholic religious practice and Catholic “theology.” This man, who had thus grown into a certain self-evident grasp of the spiritual world, of the immortality of the soul, of the existence of God and so on, did so as a scientist, and indeed as the most conscientious scientist imaginable, in the era when scientific thinking meant everything. So that, more than with any other personality, when one is familiar with Franz Brentano, one has the feeling that here is a person of deep spirituality who, however, in the face of the scientific attitude of the 19th century, did not rise to it, could not penetrate it to a real grasp of spiritual life. I do not actually know of any personality in modern times in whom the necessity for the anthroposophical world view emerges so characteristically. In the case of Franz Brentano, one would like to say: he actually only needed to take one or two steps further and he was with anthroposophy. He did not come to it because he wanted to keep to what was scientifically common practice. Franz Brentano, precisely because of what I described yesterday as the characteristic of his personality, even in his outward appearance, through the dignity of his demeanor, through the seriousness that was present in everything he uttered, already gives the impression that he could have become a kind of leading personality in the second half of the 19th century.

You may now rightly ask: But how is it that this personality has remained quite unknown in the broadest circles? Franz Brentano actually became known only to a narrow circle of students. All these students are people who received the most profound inspiration from him. This can still be seen in the work of those who are in turn the students of those students, for it is they who are actually still around today. Franz Brentano made a significant impression on a narrow circle. And most of the students in this circle are certainly so minded towards him that they perceive him as one of the most stimulating and significant people for centuries.

But the fact that Brentano has remained unknown in the widest circles is characteristic of the entire development of civilization in the 19th century. One could, of course, cite many personalities who, in one direction or another, are also representatives of intellectual life in the 19th century. But you could not find a personality as significant and as characteristic as Franz Brentano, no matter how hard you looked. Therefore, I would like to say: Franz Brentano shows that although natural science, in the form it took in the 19th century, can acquire great authority, it cannot exercise spiritual leadership within the whole of culture despite this great authority. For that, natural science must first be developed into spiritual science; then it has everything in it that can truly, together with spiritual science, assume a certain leadership in the spiritual life of humanity.

To understand this, we must today take a broader view. If we look back to the earliest times of humanity, we know that a kind of dream-like clairvoyance was present everywhere as a general human faculty. To this dream-like clairvoyance, the initiates, the initiates of the mysteries, added higher supersensible knowledge, but also knowledge about the sensory world.

If we were to go back to the very early days of human development, we would find no difference in the way the physical and the supersensible are treated. All spiritual life has proceeded from the mystery schools, which were basically churches and art institutions at the same time. But in the deepest sense, this spiritual life influenced all human life in the old days, including state and economic life. Those who were active in state life sought the advice of the mystery priests, but so did those who wanted to provide impetus in economic life. There was actually no separation between the religious and scientific elements in those ancient times. The leaders of religious life were the leaders of intellectual life in general and were also the people who set the tone in the sciences. But more and more, the development of humanity has taken shape in such a way that those currents of human life that originally formed a unity have separated. Religion has become separate from science, from art.

This happened only slowly and gradually. If we look back to Greece, we find that there was no natural science in our sense, and alongside it, for example, philosophy; rather, Greek philosophy also discussed natural science, and there was no separate natural science. But as philosophy in Greece emerged as something independent, the religious element had already separated from this philosophy. Although the mysteries were still the source of the deepest truths, in Greece, especially in later Greece, what the mysteries gave was already being criticized from the standpoint of philosophical reason. But religious revelation continued, and when the Mystery of Golgotha appeared, it was essentially religious revelation that set out to understand this mystery. Whatever understanding of theology still existed within European civilization during the first few centuries is no longer properly understood by people today; they refer to it disparagingly as 'gnosis' and the like. But there was a great deal of spiritual understanding in this gnosis, and there was a clear awareness that One must understand spiritual matters in the same way as one understands today, for example, gravity or the phenomena of light or anything else in the physical sense. They did not have the awareness that there is a science separate from religious life. Even on Christian soil, the first church fathers, the first great teachers of Christianity, were absolutely convinced that they were treating knowledge as something unified. Of course, the Greek separation of religious life was already there, but they included both the contemplation of the religious and the rational contemplation of the merely physical in the treatment of all spiritual matters. It was only in the Middle Ages that this changed. In the Middle Ages, scholasticism arose, which now made a strict separation - as I already pointed out yesterday - between human science and what is actual knowledge of the spiritual. This could not be attained through the application of independent human powers of knowledge; it could only be attained through revelation, through the acceptance of revelations. And more and more it had come to be that one said: Man cannot penetrate the highest truths through his own powers of knowledge; he must accept them as they are delivered by the church as revelation. Human science can only spread over what the senses give and draw some conclusions from what the senses give as truths, as I said yesterday.

Thus, a strict distinction was made between a science that spread over the sensory world and that which was the content of revelation. Now, for the development of modern humanity, the last three to five centuries have become extraordinarily significant in many respects. If you had told a person from those older times, when religion and science were one, that religion was not based on human knowledge, he would have considered it nonsense; for all religions originally came from human knowledge. Only it was said: If man confines himself to his consciousness, as it is given to him for everyday life, then he does not attain to the highest truths; this consciousness must first be raised to a higher level. From the old point of view, it was said just as one is forced to say today, for example, according to what I have presented in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in the second part of my “Occult Science in Outline”: that man must ascend through special treatment of his soul abilities in order to gain higher knowledge. This was also said in ancient times. People were aware that with ordinary consciousness one can only recognize what is spread around man; but one can further develop this consciousness and thus arrive at supersensible truths. Thus in those ancient times one would not have spoken of a revelation reaching man somewhere without his own activity. That would have been felt to be nonsense. And so all the dogmas contained in the various church teachings originally come from such initiation truths. Today, people easily say: dogmas such as the Trinity or the Incarnation must have been revealed, they cannot be approached through human cognitive abilities. But originally they did arise out of human cognitive abilities.

And in the Middle Ages, people had progressed to a greater use of their intellect. This is characteristic, for example, of scholasticism, in that the intellect was used in a grand sense, but only applied to the sensual world, and that at this stage of human development one no longer felt capable of developing higher powers of cognition, at least not in the circles in which the old dogmas had been handed down as doctrines of revelation. Then they refused to pave the way for man to the supersensible world through higher powers of knowledge. So they took over what had been achieved in ancient times through real human knowledge, through tradition, through historical tradition, and said that one should not examine it with human science.

People gradually came to accept this attitude towards knowledge. They gradually got used to calling belief that which was once knowledge, but which they no longer dared to attain; and they only called knowledge that which is actually gained through human cognitive abilities for the sensual world. This doctrine had become more and more pronounced, especially within Catholicism. But as I already told you yesterday: basically, all modern scientific attitudes are also nothing more than a child of this scholasticism. People just stopped at saying that the human intellect could only gain knowledge about nature, and did not care about the supersensible knowledge. They said that man could not gain this through his abilities. But then it was left to faith to accept the old knowledge as handed-down dogmas or not.

After the 18th century had already proclaimed mere sensual knowledge and what can be gained from it through rational conclusions, the tendency emerged in the 19th century in particular to only accept as science what can be gained in this way by applying human abilities to the sensual world. And in this respect, the 19th century has achieved an enormous amount, and great things are still being achieved in the field of scientific research through the application of scientific methods.

I would like to say that the last public attempt to ascend into the spiritual world was made at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century by the movement known as German idealism. This German idealism was preceded by a philosopher like Cart, who now also wanted to express the separation between knowledge and belief philosophically. Then came those energetic thinkers, Fichte, Schelling, Flegel, and these stand there, at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century, like last mighty pillars, because they wanted to go further with the human capacity for knowledge than mere sensory knowledge and what can be deduced from it.

Fichte, Schelling and Hegel are very different from one another. Fichte started from the human ego, developed an enormous power precisely in grasping the human ego, and sought to conquer the world cognitively from the human ego. Schelling developed a kind of imaginative construction of a world view. This impetus in the imaginative construction of thoughts even brought him close to an understanding of the mysteries. Hegel believed in the thought itself, and he believed that in the thought that man can grasp, the eternal lives directly. It is a beautiful thought when Hegel said that he wanted to recognize the spirit and conquer it from the point of view of thought. But only those who grasp Hegel's general striving, this striving towards the spirit, can really taste him. For when one reads Hegel — most people soon stop reading, after all — he is, despite his belief in the spirituality of thought, a terribly abstract thinker when he expounds his ideas. And it is true that, although the impulse that lived in Hegel in terms of the spirit was an immensely strong one, Hegel gave mankind nothing but an inventory of abstract concepts.

Why was that so? It is indeed a tremendous tragedy that these robust, powerful thinkers, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, did not actually penetrate to spirituality.

This is because, in the general civilization of that time, humanity was not yet mature enough to really open the gates to the spiritual world. Fichte, Schelling and Hegel only got as far as thought. But what is the thought that lives in man in ordinary consciousness?

Do you remember what I said some time ago? When we follow a person's life from birth to death, we have the person before us as a living being; soul and spirit warm and illuminate what stands before us as a physical being. When the person has died for the physical world, then we have the corpse in the physical world. We bury or cremate this corpse. Just think what a tremendous difference there is for an unprejudiced human observer of life between a fully living human being and a corpse. If you can only grasp this difference with your heart, then you will be able to understand what the spiritual scientist has to say about another phase of life, when man is considered between death and a new birth, as he is as a soul-spiritual being in a spiritual world, how he develops there, how he, while growing old here on earth, becomes younger and younger in the spiritual world until the moment when he finds his way down to a physical embodiment. What lives in man can be grasped just as much with the higher spiritual powers as one can grasp what lives in a physical human being. And then one can ask oneself: What remains of it when the human being has been born, what presented itself to our view in the spiritual world above, before the soul-spiritual descended? What remains in the human being, perceptibly, are his thoughts. But these thoughts, which the human being then carries within himself here on earth through the physical body, are the corpse of the thoughts that belong to the human being when he lives between death and a new birth in the spiritual and soul world. The abstract thoughts we have here are quite a corpse compared to the living being that is in man between death and a new birth, just as the corpse is in the physical compared to the living person before he has died for the physical world.

Those who do not want to take the step of enlivening abstract thoughts allow nothing more to live in them than the corpse of what was in them before they descended to earth. And only this corpse of thoughts lived in Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, however magnificent these thoughts are. One would like to say: In ancient times, when religion, science and art were still one, something of the life that belongs to man in the spiritual world still lived on in earthly thoughts. Even in Plaio, one can perceive in the sweep of his ideas how something supermundane lived on in him. This is becoming less and less. People keep the knowledge of the supermundane as revelation. But otherwise the human being would not have been able to become free, he would not have been able to develop freedom. The human being comes more and more to have nothing but the corpse of his prenatal inner life in his thinking. And just as one sometimes finds in certain people, when they have died, an enormous freshness in the corpse for a few days, so it was with the corpse-thoughts of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel: they were fresh, but they were nevertheless just those corpses of the supersensible, of which a real spiritual science must speak.

But I ask you now: Do you believe that we could ever encounter a human corpse in the world if there were no living people? Anyone who encounters a human corpse knows that this corpse was once alive. And so someone who really looks at our thinking, our abstract, our dead, our corpse thinking, will come to the conclusion that this too once lived, namely before man descended into a physical body.

But this realization had also been lost to man, and so people were experiencing dead thinking, and they revered everything that came to them from living thinking as a revelation, if they still placed any value on it at all. This was particularly confirmed by the great advances in natural science that came in the period I have already mentioned, when Franz Brentano was young.

To the many peculiarities of Franz Brentano, I must add two more today. Yesterday I wanted to characterize the personality more, today I want to point out the development over time. Therefore, today's consideration must be somewhat more general.

In addition to all the qualities that I mentioned yesterday about this Franz Brentano, who grew out of Catholicism but then became a general philosopher, he had an immense antipathy towards Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. He did not rail against them as Schopenhauer did, because he had a better education; but he did use harsh words, only more delicately expressed, not in the same truly abominable tone as Schopenhauer's. But one must realize that a man who grows out of Catholicism into a new outlook cannot, after all, have any other attitude toward Fichte, Schelling and Hegel than Franz Brentano had. When one has outgrown scholasticism, one wants to apply to the sense world what for Hegel, for example, is the highest human power of cognition, thinking, and in the sense world, thinking is only an auxiliary means.

Just think: with this thinking-corpse one approaches the sense world, one grasps inanimate nature first. You cannot grasp living nature with this thinking anyway. This thinking corpse is just right for inanimate nature. But Hegel wanted to embrace the whole world with all its secrets with this thinking corpse. Therefore, you will not find any teaching about immortality or God in Hegel, but what you do find will seem quite strange to you.

Hegel divides his system into three parts:

logic, natural philosophy, and the doctrine of the spirit = art, religion, science

Logic is an inventory of all the concepts that man can develop, but only of those concepts that are abstract. This logic begins with being, goes to nothingness, to becoming. I know that if I were to give you the whole list, you would go crazy because you would not find anything in all these things that you are actually looking for. And yet Hegel says: That which emerges again in man when he develops being, nothingness, becoming, existence and so on as abstract concepts, that is God before the creation of the world.

Take Hegel's logic, it is full of abstract concepts from beginning to end, because the last concept is that of purpose. You can't do much with that either. There is nothing at all about any kind of soul immortality, about a God in the sense that you recognize it as justified, but rather an inventory of nothing but abstract concepts. But now imagine these abstract concepts as existing before there is nature, before there were people, and so on. This is God before the creation of the world, says Hegel. Logic is God before the creation of the world. And this logic then created nature and came to self-awareness in nature.

So first there is logic, which, according to Hegel, is the god before the creation of the world. Then it passes into its otherness and comes to itself, to its self-awareness; it becomes the human spirit. And the whole system then concludes with art, religion and science as the highest. These are the three highest expressions of the spirit. So in religion, art and science, God continues to live within the earth. Hegel registers nothing other than what is experienced on earth in everyday life. He actually only proclaims the spirit that has died, not the living spirit.

This must be rejected by those people who seek science in the modern sense, based on a scientific education. It must be rejected because, when one penetrates into nature with dead concepts, the matter does not go so that one remains with the abstractions. Even if you are so poorly educated in botany that you transform all the beautiful flowers into the number of stamens, into the description of the seed, the ovary and so on, even if you have such abstract concepts in your head, and then go out with a botany drum and bring back nothing but abstract concepts, at least the withered flowers are still there, and they are still more concrete than the most abstract concepts. And when you, as a chemist, stand in the laboratory, no matter how much you fantasize about all kinds of atomic processes and the like, you cannot help but also describe what happens in the retort when you have a certain substance inside and below it the lamp that causes this substance to evaporate, melt and so on. You still have to describe something that is a thing. And finally, when physicists in optics also draw for you how light rays refract and describe everything that light rays still do according to the physicists, you will still be reminded of colors again and again when that beautiful drawing is made that shows how light rays pass through a prism, are deflected in different ways. And even if all color has long since evaporated in the physical explanation of color, you will still be reminded of the colors. But if you want to grasp the spiritual with a completely abstract system of concepts and with completely abstract logic, then you have no choice but to use abstract logic. A person like Franz Brentano could not accept this as a real description of the spirit, nor could the other scholastics, because at least they still have tradition as revelation. Therefore, as a student in the mid-19th century, Brentano was faced with a truly irrepressible thirst for truth and knowledge, with an inner scientific conscientiousness that was unparalleled in his time, so that he could not receive anything from those who were still the last great philosophers of modern civilization. He could only accept the strict method of natural science. In his heart he carried what Catholicism with its theology had given him. But he could not bring all this together into a new spiritual understanding.

But what is particularly appealing is how infinitely truthful this human being was. Because – and this brings me to the other thing I mentioned – when we look at the human being as he is born into the physical world, as he makes his first fumbling movements as a child, as we first fumbling movements as a child, we see in an unskillful way the unfolding of what was tremendously wise before it descended into the physical world. If we understand spiritual science correctly, we say to ourselves: We see how the childlike head organism is born. In it we have an image of the cosmos. Only at the base of the skull do the earthly forces, as it were, brace themselves. If the base of the skull were rounded, as the top of the head is rounded, the head would truly be a reflection of the cosmos. This is something that human beings bring with them. We can certainly regard the head, when we consider it as a physical body, as a reflection of the cosmos. This is truly the case.

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I was criticized for mentioning an important fact in public, but without mentioning such facts, one cannot actually get to the world's interrelations: I have publicly stated that there is a certain arrangement of furrows in the human brain, certain centers are and so on. Even in these smallest details, this human brain is a reflection of the starry sky at the time when the person is born. In the head we see an image of the cosmos, which we also see externally with our senses, even though most people do not perceive its spiritual aspect. In the chest organism, in what mainly underlies the rhythmic system, we see how the roundness of the cosmos has already been somewhat overcome by adapting to the earth. But if you follow the chest organism with its peculiar formation of the spine with the ribs and sees how this thoracic organism is connected to the cosmos through breathing, then, even if only in a very altered form, something like an image of the cosmos can still be seen in the thoracic, in the rhythmic organism. But no longer in the metabolic-limb organism. There you cannot possibly see anything that is modeled on the cosmos. Now, the formation of the head is connected with thinking, the thoracic organism, the rhythmic organism with feeling, and the metabolic-limb organism with will.

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Why is it precisely the metabolism-limb organism, which is actually the most earthly part of the human being, that is the seat of the will? This is how it is connected: in the human head we have a very faithful image of the cosmos. The soul-spiritual has flowed into the head, into the formative forces. One could say that the human being learned from the cosmic forces before descending to earth and formed his head accordingly. He still forms the thoracic organism a little, but no longer the limb organism at all. The will is in the latter. So that when one looks at the human external organism, thinking must be assigned to the head, feeling to the middle man and willing to the metabolic-limb organism. But in what is really the lowest, the metabolism and the limbs, the spiritual also maintains itself best, so that in our thinking we have only a corpse of what we were before we descended. In our feelings we have a little more, but feeling, as you know, remains in a dream-like state, and the will, one no longer even notices with the ordinary consciousness. The will remains entirely in the unconscious, but in it there is still most of the life of what we were before we descended to earth. When we are developed as a child, most of our immortal soul is in our will. Now, most people do not have many scruples; they say: Man has the three soul powers within him, thinking, feeling and willing. You know, these three soul activities are listed as if they were present for ordinary consciousness, whereas in anthroposophy we first have to point out that actually only thinking is fully awake. Feeling is already like dreams in people, and people know nothing at all about willing. I must emphasize again and again: Even if we only want to raise an arm, the thought, “I am raising my arm,” flows into the organism and becomes will, so that the arm is actually raised. Man knows nothing of this, he sleeps through it in the waking state, just as he otherwise sleeps through things from falling asleep to waking up. So instead of saying: we have in us the waking thinking, the dreaming feeling, the sleeping willing, they say: we have thinking, feeling and willing, which are supposed to be on a par with one another.

Now imagine a person who has an infinite sense of truth and who works with modern science, that is, who only uses thinking. The modern natural scientist, whether he is using a microscope, looking at the cosmos through a telescope, or doing astrophysics with a spectral analyzer, always turns only to conscious thinking. Therefore, it became an axiom for Franz Brentano that all unconsciousness had to be rejected. He wanted to stick only to ordinary conscious thinking, and for this he did not want to develop higher cognitive abilities. What could we actually expect from such a person when he speaks of the soul, when he wants to speak as a psychologist? One might expect that he would not speak of the will at all in psychology if he sticks only to the conscious. One might expect that he would cross out the will entirely, be quite uncertain about feeling, and really treat only thinking correctly.

Other, more superficial minds have not come to this. Franz Brentano's psychology does not divide the soul faculties into thinking, feeling and willing, but into imagining, judging and into the phenomena of love and hate, that is, into the phenomena of sympathy and antipathy, that is, of feeling. You will not find any will in him at all. The right active will is absent from Brentano's psychology because he was a thoroughly honest seeker of truth, and he really had to admit: I just can't find the will.

On the other hand, there is something tremendously moving in seeing how infinitely sincere and honest this personality actually is. Will is absent from Brentano's psychology, for he separates judgment and imagination so that he now has three parts to the life of the soul; but judgment and imagination coincide in terms of the capacity of the soul, so that he actually has only two.

Now consider the consequence of what appears in Brentano. What does he have in reality i. in man? By becoming a modern natural scientist and not giving anything a value that does not present itself to conscious thinking according to the natural scientific method, he excludes volition from the human soul. And what does he thereby eliminate? Precisely that which we bring with us as living beings from our state before we descend into a physical body.

Brentano was confronted with a science that eliminated precisely the eternal in the soul for him. The other psychologists did not feel this. He felt it, and therefore there arose for him the tremendous abyss between what was once a doctrine of revelation that spoke to him of the eternal in the human soul, and what he could find alone according to his scientific method, which even cut away the volition and thus the eternal from the human soul.

Thus Brentano is a personality who is characteristic of everything that the 19th century was unable to give to humanity. The gates to the spiritual world had to be opened. And that is the reason why I have spoken to you about Franz Brentano, who died in Zurich in 1917, because in him I see the most characteristic of all those philosophers of the 19th century who already had a serious striving for truth But they were held fast by the fetters of the natural-scientific spirit, which did not want to rise to a spiritual comprehension of the world, and in this way show everywhere that the time has come when this spiritual conception is needed. What, after all, is the difference between what spiritual science in the anthroposophical sense really wants and the tragic striving of a man like Franz Brentano? That Franz Brentano, with tremendous acumen, has brought in the concepts that can be obtained from ordinary consciousness, and said: That is where you have to stop. But the knowledge is not complete; one strives in vain for real knowledge. But he was never satisfied with that; he always wanted to get out. He just could not get out of his natural science. And that remained so until his death. One might say that spiritual science had to begin where Brentano left off, had to take the step from ordinary consciousness into higher consciousness. That is why he is so extraordinarily interesting, indeed the most interesting philosopher of the second half of the 19th century, because in him the striving for truth was truly something personal. It must be said: if you want to study one symptom of what a person had to experience in the development of science and in the spiritual development of modern times, you can consider this nephew of Clemens Brentano, the philosopher Franz Brentano. He is characteristic of everything that a person has to seek and cannot find with the usual scientific method. He is characteristic of this because one must go beyond what he strove for with such an honest sense of truth. The more closely one looks at him, right down into the structures of his psychology, the more this becomes apparent. He is precisely one of those minds that show: humanity needs a spiritual life again that can intervene in everything. It cannot come from natural science. But this natural science is the fate of modern times in general, as it has become the fate of Brentano. For like the true modern Faust of the nineteenth century, Brentano sits first in Würzburg, then in Vienna, then in Florence, then in Zurich, wrestling with the greatest problems of humanity. He does not admit to himself that “we cannot know”, but he would have to if he were fully aware of his own method. He would actually have to say to himself: natural science is what prevents me from undertaking the path into the spiritual world.

But this natural science speaks a strong, authoritative language. And so it is also in public life today. Science itself cannot offer people what they need for their soul. The greatest achievements of the 19th and 20th centuries could not give people a kind of guiding spirit. And this scientific attitude is a strong obstacle due to its powerful authority, because wherever anthroposophy appears, science initially opposes it, and although science itself cannot give people anything, when it comes to anthroposophy, the question is: does science agree with it? — For even those who know little about science have the overriding feeling today that science is right, and if science says that anthroposophy is nonsense, then it must be right. As I said, people do not need to know much about science, because after all, what do the monistic speakers know about science? As a rule, they have in mind the general things that applied three decades ago! But they act as if they were speaking from the full spirit of contemporary science. That is why many people see it as an authority.

One can also see from Brentano's inner destiny the outer destiny, not the inner destiny of the anthroposophical world view, but its outer destiny.

This time I wanted to use a personal example to make it clear how what we now call anthroposophy had to grow out of the whole of spiritual life. After all, the objection is justified when it says: When such things are discussed, we are actually dealing with a narrower circle. One is considering individual scientific, philosophical or otherwise striving people who have not become known to the greater mass of humanity, and one actually then places oneself outside of what lives in the great masses of people. But you only need to look a little more impartially and you will not be able to see things in this way. One must only bear in mind that everything that lives as the content of the soul, and as the impulse for all the actions and omissions of the great masses of people, comes from the influence of certain leading personalities who may not have received any knowledge of what personalities of the kind we have been considering experience in their quiet study, as one says.

But one must bear in mind that in such personalities, time itself pulsates with their thinking and feeling, so that a larger number of people, and especially those who acquire a higher education, absorb what such personalities experience and then carry it back to the places where the leading personalities of humanity, who influence the masses, also educate themselves. So that, just by observing the experiences of people living in their quiet study, one can see what constitutes the impulses that will then live in the great masses of people at some time. We just do not usually recognize the channels through which these spiritual impulses pour into the great masses of people. And so, in the end, what lives in truth, in reality, in the culture of our time, can only be seen as we have seen it again in these days, and it is justified to say that out of the deepest spiritual experience of the nineteenth century, something like anthroposophy was bound to arise, because the spirit of the age, being what it was, actually crushed human souls, as we have just seen from the outstanding example of Franz Brentano.

And in order to generalize a little more about what I am actually trying to achieve with these observations, I would like to extend the observation to a somewhat wider circle.

We find Franz Brentano, still a devout Catholic, as a teacher of philosophy in Würzburg. After what I said yesterday and the day before, we can roughly imagine the philosophical problems that Franz Brentano, still thoroughly Catholic and with a keen intellect, presented from his lectern in Würzburg. He tried to explain everything with his keen intellect, but in the background, what he had received from Catholic theology always lived with him. Many an extraordinarily significant thought emerged from there. For example, the realization of the newer scientific theory of evolution was already alive in Franz Brentano, which is based on the fact that the human brain is not entirely dissimilar to the brain of the higher apes. This purely naturalistic theory of evolution drew the conclusion from this that there is a relationship between humans and higher mammals. Franz Brentano also accepted this assertion positively, just as he did not negate scientific knowledge in general, but accepted it positively. He said: Well, of course, natural science can show that the human brain is not very different from that of anthropoids. But if you look at the mental life of anthropoids and that of humans, you find an enormous difference. Above all, we find the difference that even the highest ape species cannot develop abstract concepts. Man can develop abstract concepts. So if, as Franz Brentano thought, the human brain is so similar to the ape brain, then it must be said that the thoughts that man develops for himself cannot come from the brain, because otherwise they would also have to come from the ape brain. We must therefore conclude that man has something that represents a special soul substance from which thoughts arise that anthropoids cannot grasp.

Thus it was precisely from the assimilation of scientific knowledge that Franz Brentano concluded the independence of the soul substance. This was still the case in the years from 1866 to 1870, when he was a teacher of philosophy in Würzburg, because in the background of what he developed philosophically was still what had remained for him as an overall view of the world from Catholic theology. However, when Franz Brentano later outgrew Catholic theology more and more and grew more and more into what was peculiar to him from the beginning, but which was initially still illuminated by Catholic theology, when he grew more and more into a merely scientific understanding of the phenomena of the soul, he lost the substance of the soul and could no longer say anything about it. His ability to perceive simply weakened when he wanted to rise from the mere socialization and separation of ideas to the problem of the inner soul life itself.

Now I have already told you that this scientific way of thinking, however much individual followers may resist it, is nevertheless nothing more than a straightforward continuation of scholastic thinking. Scholastic thinking has led to the statement: Revelation is about the supersensible world; the sensible world, with a few conclusions drawn from sense observation, can alone be the object of human knowledge. — And what was cultivated among the scholastics, that is, on the one hand, they took what was attainable only by human sense knowledge as a science, and on the other hand, what was available as knowledge of the supersensible world through revelation, that also developed in the further

throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to such an extent that natural phenomena were observed according to the principles actually stated by the school, and the doctrine of revelation for science was simply dropped. Thus, in the sense that I have just expressed, modern natural science can be called a true child of medieval scholasticism, and therefore it should not surprise us when we see how people who continue to adhere to revelation, as Franz Brentano did in his youth and as Catholic scholars still do today, readily admit the validity of natural science, which is limited to the sense world alone, and hold fast only to the view that one must not strive after a knowledge that extends to the supersensible; for this supersensible must remain the object of the belief in revelation. Thus it is easy to imagine that natural scientists and Catholic theologians work together at an institution without any dispute arising over the area in which the Catholic theologian wishes to work and that which he concedes to the natural scientist. I would like to give an example of this.

Let us look at how Franz Brentano taught logic, metaphysics, ethics, and the history of philosophy in Würzburg from 1867 to 1870. Now, to make the matter quite clear to you, I would like to stay in the same place, in Würzburg, and visualize Brentano's lecture hall, around the year 1869, where he taught the subjects I I have just characterized, where he spoke of how, in addition to the similarity of the brain to that of higher apes, there must be a soul substance that ordinary thought in man brings forth.

Let us now take another chapter that he also presented at that time: On the Existence of God, on the Proofs of the Existence of God. There he presented in a sharp-witted way everything that the mind of man can bring forward for the existence of God, and of course he pointed out in the end that one can only approach this existence of God with human knowledge, that the truth about the existence of God must be given through revelation. Now let us vividly recall how Franz Brentano, with an ecclesiastical-Catholic sense, presented his metaphysics, his philosophy, to a large audience, taking full account of natural science, and how he approached the highest problems of man in this way, and let us go from Franz Brentano's lecture hall at the University of Würzburg to the lecture hall of the physiologist Adolf Fick. For at the same time that Brentano was lecturing on metaphysics and philosophy, Adolf Fick was lecturing on physiology in Würzburg.

Now I would like to show you what a listener in Adolf Fick's lecture hall of physiology could hear, a listener who might have just been listening to philosophy at Franz Brentano's, out of such a mind as I have just characterized for you. The following idea was presented: I am only quoting, because what I am telling you now is contained almost word for word in the lectures that Adolf Fick later gave at the University of Würzburg. He said something that could be summarized in the following sentences: We consider, for example, warmth, which we first perceive through our sensation. When we touch a body, it seems warm or cold to us; we have sensations of warmth. But what corresponds to these sensations of warmth in the external world is a movement of the smallest parts of the bodies, that is, a movement that is carried out in the atoms and molecules or also by the atoms and molecules in space. If, for example, we look at a gas, then this gas must be enclosed in a space that is closed on all sides; but the atoms and molecules of the individual gas are present in it. However, they are not in a state of rest, but are floating back and forth, bumping into each other and into the walls. So everything in it is in motion and turmoil (see drawing). And if we touch with the surface of our skin what is only a movement inside, we have the sensation of warmth.

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This view was common in the natural sciences at the time; it was the view that emerged in particular from the work of Julius Robert Mayer, Helmholtz, Clausius and other natural scientists of the time. Jose, the English brewer who was also a naturalist, had discovered that water can be heated by a movement, for example, of a paddle wheel moving in the water. One could then measure how much work the paddle wheel does and how much heat is generated, and this gave one the opportunity to say: Heat is generated by movement, by mechanical work. This must therefore be nothing more than a transfer of the visible movements performed by the paddle wheel as it turns in the water; this is transformed into invisible movements, which, however, are then felt as heat. So heat was definitely understood as a kind of movement.

But now, in those days, it had been discovered that not only heat can be converted into motion, but that other forces of nature can also be converted into motion. And so a physiologist like Adolf Fick was able to announce at the time that all natural forces, magnetism, electricity, chemical forces, can be transformed into one another, that one can be converted into the other, that basically the only difference is that we perceive the different forms of movement with our senses in a different way. So if we disregard what we have within us in the way of sensations of warmth, light and so on, and look at what is outside in space, there is only movement everywhere. This physiologist then continued this observation by saying: Even when we look at the human body, the highest organism – and here Adolf Fick came into his actual domain, physiology – we cannot assume a special life force that sets the parts, the molecules of the human organism, in particular motion, but that which moves outside when we perceive heat, any kind of tension or electricity or magnetism, that is also active in the human body. He then explained how carbon burns to form carbonic acid, how hydrogen burns to form water, and how the oxygen that is absorbed causes the oxygen in the human body to be consumed by combustion. He then discussed how to determine how a certain amount of oxygen is absorbed and how a person releases heat. In those days, experiments had already been carried out with the calorimeter to determine how much heat is released by this or that animal, and they had also been carried out on humans, and it had been found that the results were inaccurate. But it was said that mistakes had been made in the experiments, and approximate figures had been found from which it emerged that what corresponded to the absorption of a certain amount of oxygen was then released as heat. It was assumed that some of what is processed internally is converted into muscle movement, that what is produced as heat in the human body through the combustion of carbon to form carbonic acid or hydrogen to form water, is represented by such movements in the human body. Man inhales oxygen. Hydrogen burns to water, carbon burns to carbonic acid. What makes man warm inside, but what he then radiates, is only the movement of his smallest parts. Only after the transformation of the forces do parts transform into what underlies muscle performance when a person not only radiates warmth but also does work with his muscles or even just moves his limbs. So that one can say: Man as a whole is a kind of complicated physical-chemical device that radiates warmth and does work through the inhaled oxygen.

Adolf Fick continued in a manner that he said: But if people continually breathe oxygen and consume the oxygen by using it as a combustion agent, it should have been noticeable long ago in the history of the Earth that the oxygen would have become less. But that is not the case. But this can also be explained because oxygen is always being produced. The plants are irradiated by the sun, and as the plants absorb the sunlight, they release oxygen. This in turn releases the oxygen. Man can breathe it in again. What humans and animals consume in oxygen is always produced again by the plant world.

Furthermore, Adolf Fick said in his lectures: At least the sun should get colder, since it radiates light and heat continuously. He then explained how one could calculate how much colder the sun should be. Julius Robert Mayer had already calculated this and had also shown that the sun should have cooled down long ago, that it could no longer radiate heat at all, given the amount it radiates. Therefore, Julius Robert Mayer assumed, and Fick presented it in his lectures, that comet masses, of which, according to Kepler's saying, there should be many more in space than fish in the ocean, would continually crash into the sun. When something impacts a body, new heat is generated. Through this continuous approach, the solar heat and thus also the sunlight are constantly being recreated. It was only, as Adolf Fick assured, an embarrassment because one would have to assume that such masses are always present. So one would have to assume that the masses that fly into the sun are thrown out again so that they can fly in again later. But he also found a way out of this by showing that according to the so-called second law of mechanical heat theory, it is not necessary for the heat of the sun to be always present, because it is a law of development, which, however, can be proven in the strictest sense – at that time Clausius had already published the second law of mechanical heat theory – that through the transformation of forces, forces are continually transformed into heat, but heat cannot be transformed back into forces, so that heat is always left over, so that ultimately everything that happens in the world must transform into states of heat that balance each other out. Then there will be nothing left of what happens in the world but the so-called heat death. And everything must end in this so-called heat death.

Thus Adolf Fick presented how the earth, with everything that happens on it, including man, develops into this heat death, and how all events in this heat death will one day come to an end. A strictly physical worldview!

We can imagine how Adolf Fick, the physiologist, presented this doctrine as a physical world view, while over in his lecture hall Brentano presented what I have just described to you. But now I would also like to tell you two conclusions from these two lectures. Let us assume that Brentano, in his lecture hall, once closed his lecture as follows: When we consider the scientific view of the development of the world, we must start from an initial stage that can be scientifically understood. We arrive at a final state, which today even science describes as the heat death. But all this is permeated and inspired by divine spiritual happenings. We are led to the beginning, where a creative act of God calls into being that which can then be observed scientifically. We come to the heat death, from which only a creative act of God can continue the evolution. — This is what Franz Brentano might have said as the conclusion of one of his lectures, and that is what he said.

Let us assume that the two lectures took place one after the other, not simultaneously, and that a student, after hearing Franz Brentano, went over to Adolf Fick to listen to the final lecture on physiology. What would he have heard there?

Well, I am just quoting, I am just saying what Adolf Fick himself said in those years, around 1869, at the same university where Brentano taught. He said, after he had preceded such considerations, as I have just explained to you now, in a whole series of lectures: We come to the point that once upon a time everything that happens around us and in us, in the heat of death, that is, in the end of the world. But if we can assume such an end of the world according to all the rules of natural science that we have now, if nothing is forgotten, if we must assume such an end of the world according to strict natural science, then it is inconceivable that this world did not also have a beginning; for one cannot imagine that a world that has existed from eternity with natural scientific events would not have long since reached the heat death. Since this heat death must therefore develop only after some time, this world must also have had a beginning, that is, Adolf Fick concluded, it must have originated from a creative act of God.

So you could go to a lecture by Franz Brentano in the Catholic theological philosophy department and hear the conclusion that I have just characterized, and then go to the physiologist – not one of the type of “fat Vogt” and the like, who just did not think things through, but to a physiologist who thought things through – and he said the same thing, only based on the principles of natural science.

This is an extremely interesting fact. It means that if one did not go further than pointing to a creative act of God from the point of view of natural science, one was entirely in line with what was being presented in the neighboring lecture hall from the perspective of Catholic theology.

What could a student do who had heard this view from Adolf Fick, who had heard, for example, how the world is physically constituted, but that it can even be proved that it emerged from a creative act of God? Adolf Fick would have simply told him: If you want to know something about this act of God, go to the other lecture hall where Catholic theology is being presented! A student would have felt that way in any case.

And now put yourself in the shoes of Franz Brentano. At the time, he was able to make such a final conclusion directly with his scientific mindset because what seemed certain to him about the supersensible world came from Catholic theology. Ten years later, it was no longer so. Ten years later, as I have described to you, he could no longer find the supersensible world fully based on the doctrine of revelation in the sense of Catholicism. That means in other words: if the listener went over from natural science to where he was supposed to hear the supplement that natural science itself demands, then the person who could no longer hold on to the old traditions of revelation could no longer tell him anything. And that was basically how it was when Franz Brentano lectured in Vienna. He had recently left the Church. He came to Vienna in 1874; in 1873 he had actually only completely left, although he had already inwardly disintegrated with the Church after the dogma of infallibility. But he was so attached to the Catholic Church that for many years he thought about the matter thoroughly.

Now we can no longer imagine that, as in the 1960s, a student could have gone from the lecture hall, let's say instead of Adolf Fick in Würzburg, from Brücke in Vienna or some other physiologist, because they all said the same thing, of course, he couldn't have gone to Franz Brentano and found the complement there. For with Franz Brentano he certainly heard extraordinary and interesting things about ethical and psychological problems, but nowhere did Brentano find the possibility of passing through direct knowledge to the supersensible. We see from this example in particular how the possibility of coming to the supersensible from the old spiritual culture disappears if one does not want to return to the old belief in revelation. This is the most important spiritual cultural fact of our time. For it is out of the moods that could be awakened by something like this that the souls of the leader-natures have grown. And it is through what these leader-natures have achieved that we have ended up in the cultural chaos of our time.

Now I would like to show you the problem from a different perspective. Among those who were still studying at the time when Franz Brentano was performing his brilliant deeds at the university, was Richard Wahle. In 1894, Richard Wahle wrote his book, which is actually much more important than is usually the case in philosophical circles: “The Whole of Philosophy and its End, its Legacies to Theology, Physiology, Aesthetics and State Pedagogy.” Anyone who looks at the development of intellectual life with an open mind must point to this book in particular as being an extremely significant phenomenon. I would like to briefly characterize the way in which Richard Wahle viewed the world. This view was born entirely out of what Richard Wahle undoubtedly received as powerful stimuli from Franz Brentano, and out of what else was available in terms of intellectual culture at the time.

Richard Wahle says: What do we actually experience of the world? Well, what we experience of the world is that “events” occur before us. I am standing there; the walls, the light, the lamps, the people appear before my eyes. I have to make these occurrences my personal experiences through my perceptions. There are occurrences everywhere that are given to me through perceptions. I carry nothing else within me but the perceptions of the occurrences. The world is a sum of occurrences that represent themselves to me through my perceptions. But let us look impartially at what we actually have. Do we ever have a table in front of us? We have an occurrence that is represented to us by the idea of the table. Do we have a person in front of us? We have an occurrence that is represented to us by the idea of the person. We have nothing but the representatives of occurrences. It is extraordinarily ingenious at the moment when one was so influenced by Franz Brentano that one perceived how he, as I told you yesterday, eliminated the will and only allowed the life of representation and, at most, the life of feeling to count. This life of representation only gives subjective representatives of occurrences. And what are these occurrences like? They are powerless, thoroughly powerless! For, let me give you a drastic example: the event of one person slapping another — it is an event or a sum of events — I don't know what is behind it! Richard Wahle says quite correctly in his way: We only have the events, represented by the subjective ideas. We cannot get to the primal factors. He fully admits that primal factors are hidden behind what we have as human beings, but we cannot get to them. Therefore, we come to nothing but agnosticism. We have to admit to ourselves that when one person slaps the other, my idea of the moving hand is powerless, that it is by no means sitting on the other person's cheek. I only have the idea. Wahle resolves everything that is accessible to man into subjective representations of events. Even what we perceive within ourselves are events that only emerge from within, instead of being given by events from outside. Again, we know nothing of the primal factors that are within ourselves. We don't even have a conception of which primal factors underlie the occurrence when my own hand rises from my thought, which is powerless and cannot itself give the other person a slap in the face. We don't know what factors underlie it, we don't know what underlies us. But we cannot possibly admit that the thought, which is given to us alone, gives the other a slap in the face, because thought is completely powerless, and if we take the greatest heroes in history, they are only given through subjective thoughts. Imagine, for example, Bismarck: he is only given as a subjective representative of events. The contents of his soul life, even of that of the greatest heroes, did not do the deeds. The deeds were done by the primal factors. But man does not penetrate to the primal factors.

In Brentano you see the striving out of a view that still strives towards reality, but towards a reality that is only given through the faith of revelation, towards the pure intellectualism of the life of representation, where he falters, so that he cannot even continue his “psychology” beyond the first volume. And you see how Richard Wahle, who comes from the same time direction, feels compelled to stick to the content of the intellect when faced with weak ideas. Everything becomes weak. Man only develops intellectual concepts and finally realizes that they are weak.

It was a significant experience for me when, after my first lecture in Vienna, Richard Wahle told me: I also have my ideas about the primal factors, but basically we are only a kind of gravedigger compared to the ancient philosophers. — Richard Wahle is a particularly harrowing example, for he was condemned to make the ultimate confession in the most spirited way: that man, from the newer culture, can gain nothing in his soul but something that is weak and anemic. I then quietly touched on the names of the teachers back when Wahle was still a student in Vienna, namely Zimmermann and Franz Brentano. He said, “Yes, at least they still dared to make claims, we can't even do that anymore.”

And look at what was published as a book in 1894: “The Whole of Philosophy and its End, its Legacies to 'Theology, Physiology, Aesthetics and State Pedagogy.” Theology! Should what is theological tradition be taken up again? Should man completely renounce the attempt to penetrate to the supersensible himself? Should we simply go back to what Franz Brentano had to leave in such a significant way? How, then, should the process take place whereby that which philosophy once offered is to pass in part to theology as a legacy? How should what philosophy has offered pass to physiology as a legacy?

Just think — physiology, in the sense of Adolf Fick, leads us to an act of creation by God at the beginning of evolution. This legacy would therefore not be able to provide anything satisfying. According to the demands of science in the present day, aesthetics would certainly not be accepted as something that is capable of somehow leading into the fields of truth. And state education? Well, it is quite understandable that someone who cannot establish a connection between themselves and the spiritual world appeals to those ideas that are created by people within human societies, that he wants to channel what should lead to action into state education education in the broadest sense; that everything that leads the human being, be he child or adult, to action, should be determined by state laws, that certain directions should be given to him by state laws. We see agnosticism in its most spirited, most energetic, most conscientious bloom in this book “The Whole of Philosophy and its End”.

And how could it have been otherwise? I want to express in a single image what I would now like to say. Philosophy, love of wisdom; one can only love something that one knows as a living thing. As long as one knew Sophia as something living, one could speak of Philosophia. Now that Sophia is supposed to be only an aggregate of everything possible that can be found in the universe in terms of the inanimate, the Philo also had to fade away.

Basically, this revolutionary Richard Wahle did the most consistent thing one could do in the field of philosophy. He simply stated what has become of philosophy under the influence of mere intellect. One can no longer love that. It must fall apart into indifferent things. It must have reached “its end.” After Sophia has died, there can be no more love for the dead Sophia, at most in memory. But then one could only write a story about the now deceased philosophy. One could dedicate a good memoir to it. Of course, the history of philosophy could still be written. One could still galvanize old systems. That has basically become the most common thing among the new philosophers. There have been New-Kantianers, New-Fichteans, Haeckelianers; everything that can remind one of the love for a dead lover has arisen. And if we consider the powerless and insipid subjective representations of the events, which are, however, the intellectualistic representations, then we will understand the whole course. But then we will also understand that in fact the old philosophical thinking has come to an end, must have come to an end.

That is why, in my book “Riddles of Philosophy”, after having presented the whole course of philosophy from the ancient Greek philosophers to the second half of the 19th century, I tried to show how what philosophy was must pass over into anthroposophy. The last chapter is therefore a sketchy presentation of anthroposophy.

The fact that one must proceed in this way, that in today's historiography of philosophy one must have anthroposophy as the last chapter, is not the result of subjective considerations, but of the objective course of historical development itself. And when we consider the most characteristic personalities of modern times, they force us to look at it this way. For, after humanity has really come to the anemic and powerless concepts that no longer contain any reality, after humanity has forgotten that these concepts are the corpses of what once was, before we descended from spiritual worlds into earthly life, it is necessary that we revive these concepts and ideas through meditation and concentration, by means of what you will find presented in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds.” And we are faced with the task of not stopping, as Franz Brentano did with the concepts of natural science, for example, but of taking them up and giving them life through the inner spiritual work that consists of meditation and concentration. And then the scientific conceptions of the most recent times will lead most surely up into the supersensible world. Then they will lead to the evolution of that method which is the method of anthroposophy; then the method of anthroposophy will develop out of natural science. This, in turn, can then imbue the anemic and powerless representatives of the events with essence, with life, because this essence, this life, must arise from the intellect itself for a humanity that has once advanced to the intellect.

And I would like to say: Franz Brentano also seems to me to be particularly characteristic when it comes to the more intimate aspects of the problem. When he was still a fairly young man, he wrote a letter to an acquaintance about meditation, because he was attached to the meditation that had been taught to him from his Catholicism, but which he never led to the independent development of an inner spiritual life. Franz Brentano wrote something like this about the meditation he had come to know: “I advise you not to give up meditation. He who leads only an active and not a contemplative, meditative life, lives only a quarter of life; three quarters of life must be lived by devoting oneself to meditative contemplation. Everything that can bring one close to God can only come from meditative contemplation. — Then he concludes with the characteristic sentence: “I would rather die than give up meditation.”

But it was a meditation that had been trained from ancient spiritual life. And we feel the tragedy of a personality who loves meditation so much and yet, because he is fettered by science, cannot develop into a free meditation that leads him to a renewed grasp of the spiritual and supersensible life. Perhaps it can be seen from this passage in the letter how Franz Brentano was led by an inner necessity to the gates of anthroposophy, but how he could not unlock them because he rejected everything that he believed should be rejected by the scientific attitude and way of thinking.

It is a simple fact that science has certain limits. If science does not merely say, “There is nothing more to be achieved,” but, in the words of Adolf Fick, Franz Brentano's colleague at the university, must say, “There is a creative act of God, a creative deed,” then one can also say, “Just as it is legitimate to make one's observations in the whole realm of the physical, it must also be possible to make these observations here.” The physical does not just set limits, but it points out that there is something that must also be considered positively. It is truly not a subjective arbitrariness when one points out these things today, when one points out the necessity of anthroposophy for general human culture, but rather: anyone who looks at the history of spiritual life without prejudice can see the necessity of anthroposophy precisely from it.

Suppose anthroposophy were recognized as a science. In that case, the Adolf Ficks would simply teach: This is as far as physical research goes; I cannot say anything about what comes after this, but there is a continuation, which is anthroposophical research. However, what will happen physically at the end of world evolution, something like the heat death, will only be seen in the right light when the whole evolution is considered as in my “Occult Wissenschaft im Umriß (Occult Science), where even the existence of Saturn is traced backwards to the beginning, where you also have the existence of nature at the beginning, consisting only of warmth, and then again the existence of Vulcan, also consisting of warmth. But the creative activity of the spirit is not only observed at the beginning and the end; throughout the entire process of evolution, the physical is always considered in connection with the spiritual forces and spiritual deeds of those spiritual entities that do not undergo physical embodiment. So of course it will not be the case that the anthroposophical and the physical stand side by side, but rather that the two will permeate each other. When, for example, we consider individual physical facts, we will have to hear a great deal about the spiritual forces that are at work in the physical world. Then we shall no longer speak merely of occurrences and unknown factors, but we shall speak of how, in what appears as occurrences, we can find the unknown primal factors not only at the beginning and end of the development, but throughout the entire development.

I would like to make this clear to you with the help of an image. Suppose you have a mirror and you see what I have just described. We can stick with the sensualization, even though it is somewhat drastic. You see in the mirror what I have described, namely one person slapping the other across the face. There you have the whole process in the mirror image. You certainly have images, and you will not be able to say that this image is so powerful that it slaps the other image. But that is more or less how the philosopher of modern times must think about his ideas. They are powerless like the mirror images. One mirror image cannot slap the other. But the philosopher, Richard Wahle, for example, goes further in a very spirited way. He says: We cannot get to the original factors, even if I have two people in front of me, so to speak, one of whom is slapping the other one. I only have the idea of this, and the idea of person A cannot give person B a slap in the face. And I cannot get to the original factors, to what actually gives the slap in the face.

This image helps to make it quite clear: the reflection of A cannot give the reflection of B a slap in the face. But look clearly at the reflections, and you will see all kinds of movements. You will not, however, think that this image here has been particularly hurt by the slap in the face; nor will you be able to feel any real sympathy for this image because it has received a slap in the face. But just keep looking! Look at the face of this picture afterwards, after it has received the slap, and you will find something in this face that would be inexplicable if it were merely a picture without strength or vitality.

In other words, philosophy had come to a point in Richard Wahle where it could only speak of events, but could not read into them, because all the old atavistic clairvoyance, which alone made reading possible, had been lost. You read into the image of the person who gets slapped, into the forms that the face takes, that it points to primal factors. If you open a book, you read in it, if you know how to read, without being able to say: Yes, I don't see the primal factors. — Because what you read does lead you to a certain understanding of the primal factors. We must learn to read again in what the phenomena are. We can readily admit that in the intellectual age only the representations of the events are there; but if we are able to approach these subjective representations with inner strength, then we will understand how to read them again. Then we will not become Kantians, but we will become anthroposophists who say to themselves: Of course, we cannot gain anything about the original factors from the representations that are immediately available to us. But if we know how to read the world, then we will gradually work our way through the events to an understanding of the pre-factors.

But this can only happen if we bring inner strength into our soul life again. And this can only be achieved through the paths indicated in meditation and concentration and so on. We may say, then, that modern philosophy has expressed and squeezed out of itself everything that gives life to the intellect. It was the fault of human beings that they could not find the way into the supersensible worlds, and we must learn from the time in which these human beings lived to strive for such an inner development that this way into the supersensible worlds can be found again.

This is what I wanted to discuss with you today, through a somewhat detailed historical examination of the second half of the 19th century. Through this examination, I wanted to prepare some things that I will then expand on in the next lectures.

The purpose of last week's lectures was to provide a certain historical perspective, showing how especially deeper-disposed personalities had to struggle with the currents of the 19th century, and in particular, how the contemporary scientific way of thinking prevented deeper natures from finding their way into the spiritual world. When we make observations directed at the personal, as we have done in relation to Franz Brentano, we can see much more intimately, in the inner soul struggles of human beings, in what has taken place in the spirit, what the great struggles and currents of the time are, than when we characterize only in the abstract. In the last issue of our journal 'Das Goetheanum', I pointed out how Franz Brentano, who, starting from Catholicism and immersing himself in the scientific mentality, got stuck, so to speak, in the physical-earthly, no longer found his way back into the spiritual, as he faced another personality who actually - albeit with some modification - suffered the same fate. That is Nietzsche's personality.

Just as one can show in the case of Brentano how the natural-scientific world view took hold of him and never let go of his devout Catholicism, and how one can show how this characterizes the entire course of his philosophical development, one can show something similar in the case of Nietzsche. It can be shown that Nietzsche, starting not from Catholicism but from a different spirit, was also held back by natural science within the physical-sensual, just as he could not, like Brentano, rise into the spiritual, but then his fate took a similar but still different path.

Brentano immersed himself in the spirit of natural science as early as the 1860s, and we have seen how the dogma of infallibility, as a wave of fate bearing down on him from outside, so to speak, then completely alienated him from his church. Nietzsche, who is a few years younger, went through a similar process of development in the 1870s. He did not start out from Catholicism. He actually started from an antique-like artistic world view, from what the modern human being develops as a world view when he absorbs more of the Greek way of looking at the world in his youth. And it can be said that Nietzsche was as passionate about the Greek way of looking at the world and about an artistic world view in general as Brentano was about Catholicism. He believed that in Richard Wagner and his art he found a renewal of Greekness. And just as Brentano had participated in all Catholic practice and had completely absorbed himself in everything that Catholic worship can evoke within a person, so Nietzsche immersed himself in Wagner's art, in which he believed he saw a resurrection of what the Greek way of looking at the world was. This is how he wrote his first writings, and this is how he experienced the irruption of the scientific way of thinking into his soul in the 1870s.

Before that, he was filled with the view that great human ideals are given to man in an independent spiritual sphere, that man can place these great ideals, the moral, the religious ideals, before his soul, that he finds in them the possibility of rising above the physical-human. And Nietzsche finds words of extraordinary enthusiasm and high flight to describe man's assimilation of ideals. Then the scientific view comes over him. And he feels he must increasingly imbue himself with the thought that the physical in man, in its broadest sense, also produces the ideals as results. It is unsettling for him to have to abandon the old belief that ideals are something independent, something rooted in an independent spiritual world, that ideals actually emerge as the results of what bodily-physical processes are. Nietzsche, so to speak, submerges with all that lives in his ideas as ideals into the physiology of human nature. What had previously seemed divine and spiritual to him now seems merely human, even all too human. He used to see how man has devoted himself to idealistic worlds, how he has elevated himself above base nature by devoting himself to them. Now he believed he recognized that man's lower nature develops only one kind of drive, becoming more and more powerful, and that the holding up of ideals is nothing more than a means of intensifying the inner power in man. In short, Nietzsche strove to explain all ideals as a kind of illusion of physiological processes in the broadest sense. He did not, however, conceive of these physiological processes in man in as philistine a way as today's natural science; but he wanted to regard ideals as a result of physiological, physical processes in the broadest sense. And so, for him, ideals became something that clouds the minds of people who do not see through them, while those who see through them are enlightened about the fact that ideals, like ordinary urges, arise from the physiological foundations of the human being and are only intended to bring the physical nature of the human being more and more powerfully to bear in the broadest sense.

Of course, this is a somewhat radical and retouched description, but it essentially reflects what had such a devastating effect on Nietzsche, especially when he believed that he had come to the conclusion that conscience, too, can only be explained from a physiological basis.

It is only that the natures of the two personalities are different: Brentano is a subtle mind, attuned to imagination, to cognition; he uses the natural-scientific method to create, as it were, an instrument with which he then wants to dissect human mental life in a subtle way, just as natural science dissects physical life. But this instrument becomes blunt at the moment when he wants to approach the real spiritual world. Nietzsche, when he comes to the conclusion that, according to the opinion of natural science, the physiological is the basis of everything, or at least according to its consequences, forms an instrument for himself that is not a fine analytical knife, like Brentano's, but a hammer, robust enough to get everything that is spiritual out of the physical, even physiologically. With this instrument, which is now robust enough to transform the moral and the ideal into the physiological, he grinds the intellectual to dust. He titled one of his writings: “Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophize with a Hammer.”

Brentano shrinks from the spiritual, as it were. Nietzsche crushes the spiritual. Basically, anyone who looks at the inner cultural history of the most recent times must find a profound similarity between these two personalities, despite all their differences. And yet, in the very latest writing of which I spoke to you recently, Brentano has a short chapter on Nietzsche in which he shows that he has nothing but mere rejection for Nietzsche. He calls him a belletristic, dazzling mayfly. He compares him to Jesus and finds that Nietzsche is a caricature of Jesus. One cannot help but say: It is strange that a man of such extraordinary refinement as Franz Brentano did not develop a way of penetrating, even to some extent, into the experiences of another mind that was so similar to his in character and destiny, as I have described.

But this is a general phenomenon of our time and only highlights, with excellent examples, what people are like today. They do not live in each other, they live apart. I have often emphasized that they pass each other by without understanding, and that is also a social phenomenon of our time. People pass each other by, even the strongest seekers of truth. Other people do it too, but with such outstanding personalities, what appears as significant symptoms is actually a general phenomenon of our time. Why do people pass each other by without understanding? We so urgently need the possibility of mutual understanding! Today we so urgently need the possibility that someone penetrates both Nietzsche and Brentano, or for that matter Haeckel, David Friedrich Strauß and so on, in order to show how these different personalities look at the world from the most diverse points of view. But only the spiritual-scientific view, the one that really ascends to the spirit, can achieve such a view that delves into the individual personal points of view. And that is precisely the reason why people do not understand each other: that they do not ascend to the spirit. We must seek the reason why a personality like Brentano, in the mere natural science, remained stuck, in the mere natural science, why he could not create a bridge to another personality, who basically had a very similar fate to his own. Only a spiritual deepening will be able to penetrate the most diverse points of view. But for this, a penetrating study of the human being, a penetrating knowledge of the human being, is necessary. For what do such personalities, who are seized by the scientific methodology of the 19th century, like Brentano and Nietzsche, ultimately face?

One day they are confronted with the fact that, as honest seekers of knowledge and truth, they have, on the one hand, the physical world and the excellent scientific methods for penetrating into it; on the other hand, a spiritual world. Of course, people like Nietzsche and Brentano did not go so far as the superficiality that many today display, who do not even see this spiritual world as the great opposite of the physical world. They see the physical world, they see the spiritual world, but there is no bridge between the two. They see what man wants by virtue of his basic nature; they see the will that is based on instincts and impulses, and they attempt to explain these impulses and instincts from the physiological nature of man, how they accumulate, as it were, into volition. But then they notice that a spiritual world erects ideals above them, which are to be striven for; they notice the 'should' in relation to the 'wanting', and they find no bridge between the 'wanting' and the 'should'. A person like Brentano becomes a psychologist, a scientist of the soul. Physiology is, after all, to a certain extent complete. But he wants to examine the phenomena of the soul. He wants to imitate natural science by investigating the phenomena of the soul. At first he is not at all certain whether he has soul phenomena, because in a sense science denies this. Brentano is actually only certain that there are soul phenomena because he was a devout Catholic for so long, not out of any scientific knowledge.

This dichotomy is terrible in the soul of these people: the spiritual world, the physical world, and no bridge between the two. How do you get from one to the other? The moral ideals are there. But it is not possible to understand how what the moral ideals want can take hold of the human muscles, how it can lead people to action. For science merely says how muscles and bones move according to physical laws, but not how the ought is reflected in the movement of muscles and bones.

The point is that, however perfect the scientific method may be, this scientific century was basically helpless when it came to the human being. You simply could not examine the human being. It did not occur to anyone that the human being is a threefold being, in the way I have described in the last sections of my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' (The Riddle of the Soul). It was not possible to arrive at the conclusion that the human being can be divided into a nervous-mental human being, which naturally fills the whole human being but is mainly localized in the head; into a rhythmic human being, which in turn permeates the whole human being but is mainly concentrated and localized in the respiratory and circulatory organs; and finally into the metabolic human being of the limbs, which is the remaining human being. This is such a profound fact that everything that is to lead to an understanding of the human being must be linked to it. Of course, one must not say that the three parts of the human being are the head, chest and limbs. I have already said that the human being is a nerve-sense being everywhere, only this is primarily expressed in the head. But look at this head. It is so formed that we cannot but be filled with ever deeper admiration when we consider the structure, especially the nervous structure, of the human head. Within the world of physical phenomena, there is nowhere to be found any real reason why the human head, especially in its inner parts, should be formed precisely as it is.

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This is where the realization I have often spoken of here occurs. The human head is modeled on the cosmos in its outer form, if you disregard the base of the head. It is actually spherical in shape (see drawing). Its form is taken from the cosmos. All the cosmic forces in the mother's body also work together to first create the human head during embryonic development. If we look at this spiritually, we see that the human being's soul and spirit live in a spiritual world before the person descends into physical earthly existence, first connecting with the cosmic forces and only then taking hold of the forces of heredity. The actual spiritual-soul-man first forms out of the ether of the world and only then goes to the physically ponderable matter that is offered to him in his mother's body. So actually this head is formed out of the cosmos, and what has descended from man out of spiritual-soul worlds to earth is imagined from this cosmic formation. Therefore, in the physical world, no one understands the structure of the human head who does not explain it in spiritual terms, saying: the human head is an image, an immediate imprint of the spiritual. These wonderful convolutions of the brain, everything that can be discovered physiologically in the human head, is as if it were crystallized spirit, spirit present in material form. The human head is, as a physical body, an immediate image of the spirit.

If someone were to sculpt the spirit as such, they would actually have to study a human head permeated by spirit. Of course, if they are a model artist, they will not capture anything special; but if they are not a model artist, but create from the spiritual, then they will achieve a wonderful image of the innermost nature of the cosmic spiritual forces when they create the human head. What is present in the human head is intuition, inspiration, imagination of cosmic spirituality. It is as if the Godhead itself had wanted to create an image of the spiritual and had placed the human head on it. It is therefore basically comical when people seek images of the spirit, while they have the best, the most magnificent, the most powerful image of the spirit, but precisely the image of the spirit, not the spirit itself, in the human head.

The opposite is the case with the human being with limbs. If you contrast the human being with limbs, they are only attached to the earth. They have only one sense as an attachment to the earth. The arms are somewhat lifted out of the earthly. In animals, those limbs that are arms in humans are also still attuned to the heaviness of the earth. But essentially, the nature of the human limbs is thoroughly organized around the forces of the earth. Just as the human head is a reflection of cosmic spirituality, so what we encounter in the human limbs shows us how the spirit is bound to the forces of the earth. Just study the shape of a human leg with a human foot! If you want to understand it in a plastic way, you have to understand the forces of the earth. Just as you have to understand the highest spirituality if you want to grasp the human head, so, in order to understand the form of the limbs, you have to study what binds the human being to the earth, what presses him to the earth, what causes the human being to be able to walk along the earth and to sustain himself in space within the forces of gravity. All this must be studied, the whole way the earth affects a being that relates to it in this way, as man does. Just as one must study the spirit in order to understand the human head, so one must study the physical of the earth with its forces in order to understand the human being in terms of his limbs and metabolism.

But this has a very significant consequence. Only when one looks into the human being in this way, when one is able to see the human head as it were, in the crystallized, all-encompassing spiritual world, and when one sees in the lines of gravity and again in the lines of momentum, in which the earth turns, the origins of the formations of the human limbs, when one sees through dynamically, in the effect of the forces, the way in which the human being is formed and built, only then can one form an opinion about it.

Two things can play a major role in the human soul that are, to a certain extent, opposed to each other. One is what I would call doubt, and the other is what I would call conviction. One could perhaps also find other, even more succinct words. But you will all feel that we have a kind of polar opposite of the soul when we speak of doubt on the one hand and conviction on the other. Imagine what happens when a person is seized by doubt on the one hand and conviction on the other, and this happens on a more intense level. Try to visualize yourself being seized by doubt about something, even if it is only a matter that is occupying you intensely. It does not have to be a great cosmic truth or a great cosmic riddle, just a matter that interests you greatly. You must go to bed with this doubt. Imagine tossing and turning, feeling restless, and unable to find peace of mind. And then try to visualize how something flows into your soul as a soothing conviction, bringing an inner calm, how, as it were, a warmth of soul can fill you completely. In short, if you really look at the matter impartially from within, you will be able to visualize before your soul the opposite natures of doubt on the one hand and conviction on the other.

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What is the difference in relation to the essence of the human being? The human head is modeled out of the cosmic ether from what we were in the spiritual world; the human head is a pure replica of the most human, namely the spiritual human being. Doubting ideas come to the head, but they find no place in the head. The head does not absorb them. They have to pass through the head down to the nature of the limbs. In the nature of the limbs, they combine with everything that becomes grainy in the human material being, that becomes so that it permeates this human material being grainily, that thus takes on an atomistic nature. Doubting ideas pass through him as if our head were permeable to them. The blood first absorbs these doubting ideas, then they are carried down into the whole organism, preferably absorbed by the metabolism, and only then handed over to the nervous system, and they live in all that is atomistic in human nature, that is, granular, salty. They connect with it very intimately. The body absorbs the doubting ideas, and they pass through the head. Only when one understands this special kind of human head, and that the matter of the head is not suitable for doubting ideas, because the head is an image of the truth itself, from which we come when we descend from the spiritual into the physical , we understand: just as light passes through a transparent glass, so do doubting ideas pass through our head and take hold of the other part of the nervous system and disturb our metabolism. The head only takes in doubting ideas to the extent that it itself is a matter of metabolism. But it passes them through its special nervous organization and only takes in convincing ideas.

The convincing ideas find related structures everywhere when they enter the human head. They find accommodation everywhere in the nervous system. They settle in the human being's head first and go out into the rest of the body not through the blood but through the nervous system, which is in a kind of destructive process, so that they pass directly into the whole of the rest of the human being in their spirituality. But they find accommodation in the head, they fill the head. And in the head, from the spirituality of the head form, also from the inner formation, they receive their suitable form for the whole person and therefore work as if they were intimately related to the person, as if the person himself would live in them inwardly, as if they were the person himself. One would like to say: In the convincing representations, the head of the person forms something that is particularly appropriate for the person.

Study the human embryo and you will see that the head forms first, then the rest of the organism; for it is from the head that the forces that form the rest emanate. When you take convincing ideas into your head, it is like this spiritually: they are first taken up spiritually in the head, and the head then sends them to the rest of the human being. Just as the other person is physically reproduced in the embryo according to the human head, so here the spiritual of the convictions and ideas of the other person is radiated, and a person arises from it in a spiritual way from the convincing ideas (left drawing, red). An inner image of a person radiates in that person. And whatever radiates in the form of convincing ideas in a person connects with everything that permeates the person like warmth. Just as the doubting images seize everything granular, everything atomistic, so the convincing images seize the warmth flowing through the body, the first link of the etheric that permeates the whole human being, and do not enter further into the physical.

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Try to imagine the presence of doubting and convincing ideas in human nature, and you can grasp the truth of the matter in immediate life every time you feel and experience the beneficial effect of a convincing idea and the torturous effect of doubting ideas.

I have often said that the spirit of language is a spirit that works rationally. And if you ascribe the natural embryo to procreation (drawing on the right, white), you are not at all surprised that this formation is attributed to conviction (on the left, red). We must not regard these things as mere coincidences. They are the deeds of the ruling genius of language, which knows more than the individual human being. I know that today's linguistic science regards this as a gimmick. But once one really looks into the workings and weaving of the ruling language genius, one will regard much of today's philology and linguistics as gimmicks.

But now consider what it all means. You get a picture of how two soul experiences, doubt and conviction, continue to work in the physical person. They provide an absolutely comprehensible bridge from the soul and spirit to the physical. You see a physical person, and through his physical corpuscles in his body you can see the shimmering and undulating of his soul and spiritual experiences: this person is a skeptic, this one a doubter. You can see how the doubting spirit vibrates on in the soul and in the body through the inner structure of the material. You look at the other person, in whom the warmth flows through the limbs in a calm manner, and you see in this calm flow of warmth the physical expression of devotion to one's convictions. You see the spiritual directly expressed in the physical. Only then do you begin to understand the physical. Today's chemist and physicist says when he analyzes the human being: Inside there is lime, phosphorus, oxygen and nitrogen, carbon. Yes, you will never find anything spiritual in oxygen and nitrogen and carbon and hydrogen. Of course Du Bois-Reymond is quite right when he says: A number of oxygen and nitrogen and carbon atoms can be completely indifferent to how they lie and move. Yes, if you look at the substance in the body only as carbon, oxygen and so on, then it is like that. But if you know how a substance works that is receptive to the spirit in the most diverse ways, that is in the main an immediate image of spiritual essence, that is otherwise incorporated into the earth, so that the earthly holds there, which is driven through the head as doubting ideas, then the possibility of thinking ceases. It is not the same in our brain for a number of carbon, nitrogen atoms, and so on, as they lay and moved, as they lie and move. There we see how it matters to the substance whether the heat current flows into it or whether salt formation is at work in it, so that the body develops a tendency to develop a granular structure. These are two contradictions that express themselves in the material and that originate from the spiritual. It is actually the case that we did not end up with materialism in the 19th century because people did not know the spirit. The spirit in its most filtered form was best known in the materialistic age, because all previous ages did not actually have the spirit in its purest form; they always mixed material into the images of the spirit that they formed; they were images in which material was always mixed. Only the age of natural science has brought pure spiritual conceptions. But what the age of natural science had to neglect is just the knowledge of matter in reality, of spirit in matter. What has brought us materialism is the insufficient knowledge of the material nature of the world, the lack of insight into the spiritual weaving and working in the material. Science has become materialistic through ignorance of the material effects. Because people did not know how the spirit works creatively, they imagined this spirit as more and more abstract and abstract. As a result, the moral ideal finally became something that one could not even ask about, because it did not even have the materiality to fly around in space. It was no longer there at all. If you tried to grasp it, it was rather like trying to breathe in an element that is not there. The people of the 19th century seem like someone trying to breathe under the recipient of an air pump! When they gasp for moral ideals, for example, they are not there; they would like to have them, but they are not there because no one wanted to develop a concept of the workings of the spiritual soul in the physical body. Hence all the curious theories arose about the interaction of the physical and the bodily with the soul and spiritual, which were all fabrications, while real knowledge can only be gained by looking closely at the facts.

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When we have become familiar with how doubt and conviction permeate and interweave human nature, then we are able to become acquainted with that which we have come to know in man and in turn to know it in the world. We have in the world the sphere of material creation. We see, for example, how matter must form itself in grains out in the world, how it crystallizes. Once we have become familiar with how doubt takes hold of the granularity in us in the organism, we then learn to see doubt outside of us. We look at the mountain (white) that forms with its granular rock; but at the same time we find that the same thing is happening in the mountain that we are getting to know as doubt within us (red), and we get to know the creative power of doubt. The doubt within us makes us grainy because we are human and not nature. Doubt outside in nature has the right effect. When that which works outside in nature moves in us, it causes the wrong. By stepping on the rocks, you are stepping on the physical manifestation of what the deity sends out as doubt so that the world can become grainy. And again, when you study your convictions with a warm sense of being imbued, then you are in that which is being created. So when you think that basically the warmth is to be sought in the womb of the creative forces of the world, then you find that what is cosmic conviction works out of warm matter.

Get to know these things in truth within yourself, then you will also learn to judge the agents out there in the cosmos in the right way. If you see what is crumbling and crumbling away out there, so that we have, so to speak, the first preparation for the atomization of our earthly existence in the universe, as emanations of world doubt, then you will learn to understand much in cosmic existence. And conversely, if you are able to look into the cosmic with conviction, then you will get to know much of the Creative. But these are things by which I only wanted to hint to you how one must first know man in order to have any prospect at all of knowing the cosmic existence.

Well, you see, for Brentano in the 1860s and for Nietzsche in the 1870s, the methods of natural science were there; they found carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, some sulfur, and so on in the brain. There was really nothing spiritual to be recognized in it. And if one applied the method that had led to this to the spirit, then of course one could come to nothing but either the spiritual impotence that Brentano came to, or the wearing down of the spiritual that Nietzsche, who was more of a will nature, came to. But both were subject to the same fate, namely that they could not reach the spiritual from the physical, because they could not find the spiritual in the physical, and therefore did not perceive the spiritual as something powerful enough to bring forth the physical.

Thus, such minds were faced with a physical nature that actually had no meaning because it contained nothing spiritual, and with a spiritual nature that had no power, no might. That is the fate of the most significant minds that in the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century faced matter without meaning, faced the spirit without power.

Historians have spoken of ideas in history. This is mind without power. You really cannot put cultural instruments into the hands of ideas, through which culture arises, or through which historical events arise at all; ideas as abstractions are powerless, this is mind without power. In contrast to this is nature, which one studies only in its unspiritual matter: matter without meaning.

You will never find the bridge if you invent the absurdity on one side: matter without sense, and on the other side the un-spirit: spirit without power. Only when one finds the strength in the spirit, the strength in the conviction to drive the warmth through the body because the human being is organized in such and such a way, only when one finds the strength in the doubt to push through the head because there is no affinity with the head and to wear down the rest of the human being internally so that it disintegrates into a granular structure , that is, only when one finds in the spirit that which has the power both to dissolve the granular structure through warmth and to form it in the salt formation process, then one finds a matter in which meaning is, because then the powerful spirit works in such a way that what appears in matter is meaningful. And so we have to look for matter with meaning and spirit with power.

This is what such minds as Brentano and Nietzsche, in their tragic fate, also point to in their personalities.

It is, after all, something that should be taken into account that a meeting was convened some time ago by the opponents of the things presented at the Vienna Anthroposophical Congress, at which a wide variety of speakers spoke out of the materialistic sense of the present and that at the end a particularly materialistically minded physician summarized the various speeches in a slogan that was intended to represent a kind of motto for the opponents of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science: the battle against the spirit. — It is simply the case that today there are people who see the battle against the spirit as a real motto.

When such a word is uttered, one is reminded again and again of how many people, well-meaning people, there are in the present day who, in the face of what is prevailing in the civilized world, are actually caught in a kind of sleep state, who do not want to hear where things are heading. They consider things of the greatest importance to be insignificant phenomena of the times, the opinion of one person or another, whereas it is in fact the case that today a striving that is present in the real progress of human development is clearly asserting itself. And actually all those who can muster an understanding for such a cause should also be most intensely involved with it in their hearts in order to truly muster it.

I have now tried to show, by taking two personalities as examples, how deeper natures in particular were placed in the newer currents of thought. I have contrasted these two personalities, Franz Brentano and Nietzsche, to show how, from the most diverse sides, people who are initially oriented towards the spiritual are, as it were, submerged in the contemporary scientific way of thinking. If we consider personalities who have shared the fate I have outlined, we may perhaps be more deeply moved than if such things are presented only in the form of an abstract description.

In the case of Brentano, I wanted to illustrate how a personality who grew up in an education shaped entirely by Catholicism retained for life, on the one hand, what Catholic Christianity had implanted in its soul in terms of an affinity for the spiritual world. In Franz Brentano, who was born in 1838 and thus lived during the time when the scientific way of thinking of the nineteenth century flooded all human research and spiritual striving, we see what lives on from very old currents of world view.

If we look at young Brentano, who studied in Catholic seminaries in the 1850s and 1860s, we find that his soul was filled with two things that guided him in a certain way. One is the Catholic doctrine of revelation, to which he stood in a position that theologians of the Catholic Church have held since the Middle Ages. The Catholic revelation about everything spiritual is traditionally received. One finds oneself in a kind of knowledge of the supersensible worlds that has come to man through grace. For Brentano, the other element was connected with this, through which he first wanted to understand what he had received through the Catholic doctrine of revelation. That was Aristotelian philosophy, the philosophy that was still developed in ancient Greece. And until the mid-sixties, perhaps even a little longer, Brentano's soul lived in a way that was entirely in keeping with the spirit of a medieval scholastic: one must accept what man is meant to know of transcendental worlds as revealed by the Church, and one can apply one's thinking to the study of nature and life according to the instructions of the greatest teacher for this research, according to the instructions of the Greek philosopher Aristotle.

These two things, Aristotelianism and Catholic revelation, were indeed connected in the spiritual life of the medieval scholastics, who regarded them as compatible. This continued in Franz Brentano. He was only shaken in such a view by what then confronted him as the scientific method, so strongly shaken that when he took up his post as a private lecturer in Würzburg, he established as a main thesis the proposition that in all philosophy it must be done as in natural science. And then he wanted to found a psychology, a doctrine of the soul, in which the life of the soul would be considered in the same way that natural science considers external natural phenomena.

It is therefore fair to say that this man underwent a very radical change. He wanted to combine knowledge gained through revelation with knowledge gained through reason, which is limited only to earthly things. He thus demanded that science can only be what is formed according to the pattern of scientific methodology. One should really stop and think about what such a radical change really means.

What I would like to draw your attention to first is that, up until this change, medieval scholastic thinking still seems to be present in an extraordinary personality. This continues to have an effect, as it does today in many contemporaries who are honestly Catholic, as it basically exists, albeit in a slightly different form, in many honest confessors of the Protestant faiths. If I quoted Nietzsche, it was because, although Nietzsche did not have a survival of medieval scholasticism in his soul, something else lived on in his soul, namely, what emerged during the Renaissance as a kind of reaction to scholasticism. Nietzsche had a kind of Greek wisdom of art that formed the basis for his entire world view. He had it in the same way that the men of the Renaissance had it. But these men of the Renaissance by no means already had the urge and the inclination not to recognize the spiritual in its reality. They sensed, they still felt the reality of the spiritual. So that something from ancient times also survived in Nietzsche's soul. And he, too, as I told you yesterday, had to immerse himself in the scientific view of the 19th century and completely lost what connected his soul to a spiritual world.

The implications of this point to some tremendously significant riddles for the true seeker of truth in the present day. Let us take the two streams of spiritual thought that penetrated the life of the soul, as they lie in medieval scholasticism. Let us visualize what is actually present. I would like to do it in the following way. Within medieval scholasticism, we have a number of, let us say, doctrines about the supersensible world, for example about the Trinity of the original spiritual being, about the incarnation of Christ in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. series of doctrines that must be said to relate not to the sensual but to the supersensible world, which in very ancient times were once found by people who were then initiates, initiates. For one must not imagine, of course, that something like the doctrine of the Trinity or the Incarnation was simply invented by someone to deceive people. These doctrines are rather the results of the experiences of former initiates. That they were regarded as a supernatural revelation is only a later conception. Such doctrines were originally found by way of initiation. Later on, however, it was no longer admitted that one could undergo such an initiation and arrive at the conception of the Trinity oneself, for example.

There were such conclusions, which the medieval scholastic admitted to the knowledge of reason, which touched the supernatural; only the view of the supernatural was not admitted. But reason was admitted, through which one could not understand the real knowledge of revelation, but through which one could approach something like the existence of God or the beginning of the existence of the world. These truths, which could be found through reason, were called preambula fidei, and could then form a basis for penetrating to that which could not be explored by reason, but which was said to be the content of revelation.

Now, having juxtaposed these two currents of thought, of knowledge, let us place ourselves in the mind of a person who juxtaposed them in his own soul. During the period in which scholasticism flourished, what lived in a scholastic was by no means the evil that uninformed people tell of today, but at a certain time in medieval development it was simply what was required by the development of humanity. One could not have had any other view at that particular time. Today, of course, things have changed. Today, we have to find different ways to knowledge and to human soul activity than those that were at home in scholasticism. But that is why one should still try to penetrate this scholasticism with understanding. And you can only do that if you now ask yourself: How did the knowledge of revelation stand in the soul of an honest scholastic, alongside the knowledge of reason that was directed towards natural phenomena and towards one-sided conclusions of reason from natural phenomena? How did these two things stand side by side?

What did such a scholastic want, and with him all his believers, all who were honestly Catholic, when he put himself in the frame of mind that was in line with revelation, when he said: What the dogmas give must not be looked at, looking at it is not possible; one must accept it as a revelation? The scholastic attempted to evoke a certain mood of soul in relation to the supersensible world. He was completely imbued with the fact that this supersensible world exists and stands in an intimate relationship to that which lives in man as soul. But he did not seek a path of knowledge in man in order to come directly through his own personality to that which stands as the supersensible world in an intimate relationship to man.

Imagine this mood. It was the mood towards, I would say, a known unknown, towards an unknown acquaintance, towards someone you should worship and revere, but to whom you should still be shy, so that you do not, so to speak, open your eyes to him.

Next to it stood the knowledge of reason. Scholastic reason was an extraordinarily astute one, something that has not been achieved again later. One would wish – I have also said it here several times – that people who do natural science or science in general today would only learn to think as sharply as the scholastics were able to think. It was a rational knowledge that only denied itself the right to go beyond certain limits: knowledge by revelation on the one hand, rational knowledge on the other. But if we now compare the knowledge by revelation and the rational knowledge of the scholastics with similar structures of today, then a great difference becomes apparent.

The scholastic said to himself: You dare not intrude with your knowledge into the realm from which you are only supposed to have revelations. You dare not intrude into a vision of the Trinity, into a vision of the Incarnation. But in the revelation that he received through his church, ideas of the Trinity and ideas of the Incarnation were given. They were described. People said to themselves: knowledge does not penetrate to these things, but one can think about them if one reflects on these things in the sense of what has been revealed. You cannot say of the medieval scholastics that they had a mere dark mystical feeling of the supernatural. It was not that. It was a thinking that was already trained in plastic ideas and that grasped the content of Revelation. They thought about the Trinity, they thought about the Incarnation. But they did not think as one thinks when one arrives at a conclusion oneself, but as one thinks thoughts that are revealed to one.

You see, that too still corresponds to a certain fact of higher knowledge. There are still people today who have certain atavistic clairvoyant views, as you might call them, who have dream-like imaginations. There are people who, for example, can rise in such atavistic clairvoyant imaginations to the point of visualizing the events of Atlantis. That still exists today. Don't think that there are no thoughts in what such people have as clairvoyant imaginations. Such seers often have much more plastic thoughts than our strange logicians, who learn to think from today's schooling. Sometimes one would like to despair of the logic of those who learn to think from today's schooling, while one need not despair of the logic that simply reveals itself atavistically and clairvoyantly; for this is often very strictly developed.

Thus, even today it can be shown that thinking is already present in that which is truly revealed supersensibly for human observation. This was also the case in medieval scholasticism. It is only in recent times that thought has been eradicated from the content of revelation, so that today faith seeks to distil not only knowledge but also thinking out of its content. The medieval scholastics did not do that. They did extract the knowledge, but not the thinking. Therefore, if you take the dogmatics of medieval scholasticism, you will find a very highly developed system of thinking.

This lived on in a man like Franz Brentano. That is why he could think. He could grasp thoughts. This can be seen even in the rudiments of his psychology, in which he only got as far as the first volume. There you can still see that he has a certain inner plasticity of thought formation, even though he constantly steps on his own feet in a terrible way and thus does not make any progress. As soon as he has any thought about a psychological construct - and he has such - he immediately forbids himself to think about the things. This prohibition is something extraordinary today. I have told you how an extraordinarily brilliant man, who wrote the important book 'The Whole of Philosophy and its End', told me in Vienna himself recently: 'I have my thoughts about what stands behind mere events as the primal factors.' But scientifically he forbids himself to have these thoughts. One could easily imagine, hypothetically of course, that a scientifically trained person today would suddenly become clairvoyant through a miracle, and that he would fight against this clairvoyance in the worst possible way. One could easily imagine this hypothetically because the authority of knowledge that clings to the external is enormous. So that was one thing that lived in the soul of the medieval scholastic: a specifically formulated content of revelation. On the other hand, there was a rational knowledge that was based on nature, but it was not yet the same as our present-day knowledge of nature. To substantiate this, just open a book of natural history, for example by Albertus Magnus; you will probably find descriptions of natural objects as they are described today – but they are described differently than they are today – but alongside that, you will still find all kinds of elemental and spiritual beings. Spirit still lives in nature, and it is not the case that only the completely dry sensual evidence is described as natural history and natural science. These two things live side by side, a content of revelation, in the face of which one prohibits oneself from knowing, but which one nevertheless thinks, so that the human spirit still attains it in its thoughts, and a content of rational knowledge, which still has spirit, but which also still has something that one must look at if one wants to have it before oneself in its reality.

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Knowledge of nature has developed out of medieval scholasticism. One branch of scholasticism, knowledge by reason, has developed further and become the modern view of nature. But what has happened as a result? Imagine the thoughts of a scholasticist regarding knowledge of nature quite vividly. There is still spiritual content in them. What do these spiritual contents protect the medieval scholastic natural scientist from?

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Perhaps I can illustrate this schematically. Suppose this here was such a medieval scholastic with his longing for revelational knowledge at the top and his longing for knowledge of nature at the bottom. But in the knowledge of nature, he has the spiritual. I'll let some red pass. He has thinking in the knowledge of revelation. I'll let some yellow pass. Where does this rational knowledge actually want to go? It wants to go out to the objects, to the things around us. The thoughts you have want to snap into place with the objects. You don't want to recognize just any plant, you want to form a concept of the plant, without you counting on it: the concept snaps in there, it wants to snap in. But with the scholastic, the spiritual content, which still permeates his rational knowledge, prevents him from really snapping in down there. It doesn't snap completely, it is, as it were, thrown back a little. What does it not snap into? When today's intellectualistic rational knowledge snaps into external nature, when it snaps fully into it, it actually snaps fully into the Ahrimanic. What then does the spirituality of the medieval scholastic mean in relation to his rational knowledge? That basically, he wants to approach nature with this rational knowledge as if it were something that burns a little. But he feels the burning and shrinks back again and again: nature is sin! He guards himself against Ahriman! But further development has brought this: in the nineteenth century it has thrown out of all spiritual rational knowledge, and with that rational knowledge snapped into the Ahrimanic.

And what does rational knowledge, which has snapped into the outer Ahrimanic, say? It says: the world consists of atoms, atomic movement is the basis of all scientific knowledge. It explains warmth and light as atomic movements, it explains everything in the external world as atomic movements, because that satisfies our need for causality.

In 1872, Da Bois-Reymond gave his famous lecture in Leipzig on the limits of knowledge of nature. It is the lecture in which the rational knowledge of scholasticism has advanced so far that all spirituality has been thrown out; and with the motto “Ignorabimus” the spirit of man should snap into the Ahrimanic. And Du Bois-Reymond describes very vividly how a human mind that now has an overview of everything that swirls as atoms in the universe no longer sees green and blue, but only perceives atomic movements everywhere. It feels no warmth, but wherever there is warmth, it feels that movement of which I spoke to you here eight days ago. He suppresses everything in his mind that has to do with colors, temperatures, sounds, etc. He fills his head with an understanding of the world that consists only of atoms. Imagine: the whole world as imagined by someone who thinks in terms of atoms. He has it all figured out in his head: the moment Caesar crossed the Rubicon, there was a certain constellation of atoms in our cosmos. Now he only needs to be able to set up the differential equation, and so, by continuing the calculation, he finds the next constellation, and the next, and so on. He can calculate the most distant future. Du Bois-Reymond called this the Laplacean mind because it was also an ideal of Laplace. So there we have, in 1872, a description of an intellect that comprehends the world universally, that comprehends everything as atomic motion, and all you need to do is know the differential equations and then integrate them, and you get the world formula.

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But what has actually been achieved as a result? What has been achieved is that one has learned to think as Ahriman can think, what the Ahrimanic ideal of thinking is. One can only recognize the full significance of what is happening in our time when one knows what it actually is. The Ignorabimus speech will go down in the history of the development of the modern spirit, but its true significance will only be recognized when we are in a position to show that here the one branch of the scholastic school of thought has actually snapped into the Ahrimanic. You see, the scholastic, so to speak, kept his knowledge in suspense. It did not quite reach what is out there. He always withdrew with his knowledge before Ahriman. That is why he had such a need to develop truly ingenious concepts; because ingenious concepts still have to be developed through human effort. When it comes to conducting experiments, well, then you only need human endeavor to put the apparatus together and so on, but the kind of astute thinking that scholasticism had is not needed.

This meant a very important turning point when one was once snapped into the Ahrimanic. Because what you see outside as the sensual phenomena of the world, as your sensual environment, that is only there as long as the earth is there. It perishes with our planet. What lives on are the thoughts that snap in outside. When something is conceived that is in line with Laplacean thinking, or what Du Bois-Reymond presented as an ideal of natural scientific thinking, it means not only that it is conceived, but that these are real thoughts that snap into place outside. And when everything we see with our senses on earth has perished, these thoughts can live on, if they are not eradicated beforehand. Therefore, there is a real danger that, if such a way of thinking becomes general, our earth will change into a planet corresponding to the materialists' conceptions. Materialism is only a mere doctrine as long as it does not become reality. But the Ahrimanic powers strive to make the thoughts of materialism so strong and widespread that the only thing left of the earth are atoms.

If we say today that we have to explain everything in terms of atoms, that is an error. But if all people start to think that everything has to be explained in terms of atoms, if all people put on Laplacian minds, then the earth will really consist of atoms. It is not true from primeval times that the earth consists of atoms and their components, but humanity can bring this about. That is the essential thing. Man is not merely predisposed to have wrong views, but wrong thoughts create wrong realities; when wrong thoughts become general, realities arise.

This danger from Ahriman has already manifested itself today. The other danger in the knowledge of revelation was sought to be avoided by the medieval scholastic, who still had the knowledge of revelation clothed in thoughts. It was concrete thoughts that grasped the content of the revelation. The dogmas were gradually thought through so little that people came to drop them altogether in general. One should indeed drop what is not understood. This is fully justified on the one hand, and if people can no longer follow the dogmas to the point of seeing them, it is natural that they drop them. But then what do they come to? Then they arrive at the most abstract of thoughts of dependence on some quite indefinite eternal or infinite. Then thoughts are no longer vividly formed that carry the content of the Revelation within them, but only some kind of dependence on some kind of infinite is felt in dark mysticism. Then the content of the thought disappears. This path has also been taken in recent times. It is the path that leads to the Luciferic. And just as surely as the path of knowledge through reason in modern times has led to the Ahrimanic, just as surely the other path can lead to the Luciferic.

And now look again at a mind like Franz Brentano's in the sense I have described. Franz Brentano approaches nature with this attitude: Just don't touch Ahriman! - and to the supersensible world: Just don't touch Lucifer! — So just don't become atomistic, just don't become a mystic. With this attitude he approaches natural science, which is such a powerful authority that he submits to it. He describes the phenomena of the soul in terms of the scientific method. If he had approached the subject from a more superficial point of view, as many of today's psychologists do, he would have written a doctrine of the soul inspired by Ahriman, a kind of psychology, a 'doctrine of the soul without a soul'. He could not do that. Therefore, he abandoned the attempt after the first volume, and did not write the following volumes – there should have been four – because something in him did not allow him to grasp the idea of rushing headlong into the purely Ahrimanic.

And take Nietzsche. Nietzsche was likewise seized by natural science. But how did he take up natural science? He did not really care much about the individual methods, but only looked at the natural scientific way of thinking in general. He said to himself: All that is spiritual is based in the physiological, is a “human, all too human” thing. What should actually be divine-spiritual ideals are an expression, a manifestation of the human, of the all-too-human. He rejected the very kind of knowledge that can be found in Brentano: knowledge through reason. He allowed the will to become active in him. And, as I said yesterday, he wore down the ideals, he wore down the spiritual. This is the other phenomenon where a personality, as it were, approaches the Ahrimanic, but strikes against it. Instead of snapping, he strikes. He also wants to develop atomism, but he strikes against a wall.

And so we see how such minds develop their particular soul mood in the 19th century because they come so very close to what plays into our knowledge as Ahrimanic powers. That is the fate of such minds in the 19th century: they come so incredibly close to Ahriman. And then they either end up in a situation like Brentano's, where they shyly retreat at the very boundary and do not advance at all with their knowledge, or they start lashing out like Nietzsche. But it is the Ahrimanic power that brought its waves to knowledge in the 19th century, which then had an effect on the 20th century. And one should understand that. And the original spirits who personally experienced this still half-masked encounter with Ahriman in the 19th century had a tragic fate behind them. But the students now received the prepared thoughts. These thoughts live in them. The Ahrimanic power has already formed the thoughts. The first original spirits recoiled; the pupils received the incomplete ahrimanic thoughts. These are now at work in them: 'Fight against the spirit', against the spirit that just does not want to surrender the earth to the ahrimanic powers, hatred of the spirit, fight against the spirit!

Today we must see this as a real connection. It lives today as a mood of the times, as a state of mind. We must understand it in order to truly grasp how necessary it is to assert a truly spiritual world view in all the different cultural forms in which such a world view must be lived.

The last lectures here were essentially devoted to an examination of the way in which we have to think about the present time consciousness. I then tried for the last time to reach back into earlier periods and to draw attention to the fact that what now lives in the souls has actually been preparing itself within Western civilization for a very long time. Today I would like to highlight some episodes from the immediate present that may draw your attention to how a spiritual life must necessarily arise out of the general consciousness of the times, simply out of the necessity inherent in the development of humanity. We can say: Wherever we observe man, whether in the West of present civilization, in the Middle or in the East, everywhere, on closer examination of the times, it can become clear to us how, without the onset of a spiritual impulse, things simply can no longer go on.

Today, we want to take a look at the last fifty years of Central European spiritual development, so as to prepare for tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, by considering the characteristics of the beginning and the end. I will do this symptomatically. I will characterize some things at the beginning and at the end of these last fifty years.

If we go back to the beginning of the 1870s, we find a wide range of spiritual phenomena that indicate the state of the human soul at the time. I will highlight a few of these spiritual phenomena. In 1872 and 1873, for example, there was a sensational novel that was closely related to the trends of the time. These things are actually forgotten for the younger people in our time, but the novel I mean is one that did indeed capture the imagination in an extraordinarily incisive way fifty years ago. I am talking about Paul Heyse's “Children of the World”. Paul Heyse, who was a famous writer of novellas at the time, wanted to use this novel to depict a number of personalities in their lives, all of whom were already imbued with a certain vague religiosity, but who had at the same time fallen away from some religious denomination or other. So, the children of God, whom, I might say, Paul Heyse saw in the traditional terminology of belonging to some denomination, he wanted to contrast with the children of the world, who belonged to no denomination, who, as they were said at the time, were without religious affiliation, but who nevertheless had a certain tendency towards embracing a religious belief. Now I do not want to talk too much about this novel itself, but I would like to draw attention to how such a work, which thus portrays people who are undenominational, made an impression in those days.

I have often mentioned my old friend and teacher Karl Julius Schröer before. He had the peculiarity of following intellectual phenomena as they made their impact in broader social life. Karl Julius Schröer characterized the effect of Paul Heyse's “Children of the World” by saying that it was extraordinarily strange how this novel was passed around fifty years ago, how it interested everyone, interested in how this novel actually gave people the idea that they had never thought about before: that they had no connection to any positive religious belief and that their religious search did not stop at any particular religious belief. And Schröer made the extraordinarily interesting comment at the time that people who had previously taken part in the religious practices of their church, who had thus gone along with their old religious practices, the customs of their church, out of habit, that such people said that this work actually expresses their innermost convictions. And then Schröer concludes with a sentence that is actually interesting: that in the face of such an apparition, religious disputes appear as an anachronism, as something that no longer fits into the present – he is referring to the present at the beginning of the 1970s – because people have already moved beyond them in their thinking. But as I said, although all this is true, we must still say: the people who are described there have lost all connection with any of the existing faiths, but there is a certain trait in them that allows them to find some kind of religiosity. They just can't find it. They go through the world without any religious affiliation, unable to find a connection to a spiritual world through religious feeling.

If we now look from such a phenomenon, which took place more within the literary-belletristic life, into the lecture halls, we find that it is roughly the same time in which the conviction of an extraordinary number of people within science was expressed by Du Bois-Reymond with the “Limits of Natural Knowledge”, which I have already mentioned frequently. In this famous lecture, which Du Bois-Reymond gave in 1872, it is stated that certain knowledge is only possible if one follows and penetrates the external phenomena of nature through experiment and observation, to a kind of mathematical-mechanical thinking about the structure of the world, to a kind of mechanism, an atomistic mechanism of the world. Science does not go beyond such a comprehension of the world, everything else must be left to faith. But if one had asked the people who spoke in this way at the beginning of the 1970s, such as Du Bois-Reymond in his “Grenzen des Naturerkennens” (The Limits of Natural Knowledge), how people should now seek their way into spiritual worlds in a religious way, no answer would have been forthcoming. There would only have been a comment, very similar to the comments made by the people in Paul Heyse's “Children of the World” who are described as having no religious affiliation.

Now it must be said that all those people who took part in the life that one calls educated, who absorbed something of scientific thought, who adopted something from other schools of thought, who lived in that time, were actually all more or less in a certain frame of mind. Whether they continued to practice their old religions or not depended essentially on old habits, on all kinds of prejudices and the like, and not on a strict and rigorous assertion of what the Zeitbewußtsein would have given to souls. In the last fifty years, people have actually lived in an indefinite, fickle relationship to the spiritual world. But we can also find something similar in other areas. A few years before the publication of Heyses “Children of the World” and Du Bois-Reymonds “Limits of Natural Knowledge”, the famous art writer Herman Grimm published “The Invincible Powers”, which is also a novel. In it, the prejudices and differences between social classes that dominate people in Western civilization are presented as invincible powers. And in an interesting way, this novel contrasts the differences in class and rank within Western civilization with what developed from certain, I would say unhistorical, habits in America as a new life, as a life that did not have to struggle in the same way with class differences and class prejudices. And it is interesting how Herman Grimm, at the end of the 1860s, that is, also about half a century ago, describes how, despite everything, European man, despite all his liberalism, despite all his humanism, does not have the strength to truly overcome class differences. These are insurmountable forces for him.

If you want to go deeper and ask yourself: Why are such things insurmountable forces for the European man? then one cannot get any other answer than this: because thinking, which in the case of the European has assumed a certain passive character, the thinking that I have characterized when, for example, I spoke about Richard Wahle, that thinking extends only to “events” and does not want to go into the primal factors, that therefore does not want to grasp forces but only wants to grasp appearances, because this thinking has dominated precisely the decisive people in the last fifty years. With such thinking, which has no power in itself, which is actually only a thinking, one might say, in powerless thought images, with such thinking one simply cannot overcome what has arisen in reality as class differences and class prejudices. What was needed was a thinking imbued with reality, a thinking permeated by reality. And this thinking permeated by reality, which once created the differences in social standing, which once created everything socially real, this dynamic thinking, in contrast to mere descriptive thinking, has actually been completely lost to people within European civilization over the last fifty years. It was absent from their science, which was therefore based only on observation and experiment; but it was also absent from their lives, so they continued to reproduce what had arisen from old habits based on old class prejudices. They did not think about it any further. Because if they had wanted to think about it, they would have needed active thinking. And when the proletarian class began to consider class differences, then this weak thinking, which contains no dynamism, was completely abandoned. It was said: these class differences do not come from forces that would have been within human thinking, but only from economic, physical forces. A conclusion was simply drawn.

There you have the situation at the starting point of our modern intellectual life fifty years ago. And now I want to present to you a work that was published recently and that is characteristic of our time, namely Werfel's “Mirror Man”. There you have something that has been born out of certain forces of our time, just as the “Children of the World” or the “Invincible Powers” were born out of the time of fifty years ago.

So what is the situation for people like Werfel today? In recent decades, this weak and anemic thinking has been at work. People have somehow sought something of a religious context, of a connection with a spiritual world, but nothing has emerged. But human nature cannot remain one-sided in the long run. It can do so in the development of world history for about fifty years, but then a reaction of human nature begins again. In a certain way, it wants to strive for something more powerful – if we stick with the last fifty years – than the powerless and insipid thinking was. Now, quite a few contemporary works already bear witness to this striving for a more powerful grasp of reality, but Werfel's 'Spiegelmensch' is particularly illustrative of this.

Werfel's “Mirror Man” compels us to speak about the present in this way: for long enough, people have sought their way in an indefinite, weak and impotent manner to something that makes man a full human being in the first place. Now an indefinite inner feeling asserts itself on the paths that have been taken in the last fifty years and which are actually not paths at all, but slippery passageways on which one continually slips. Nothing can really be achieved on these slippery passageways; one must get some iron into one's blood again. From such a striving for the times, something like this “mirror man” has emerged. Let us sketch with just a few lines what is depicted in this “mirror man”. It is not my intention to sin against the artistic by characterizing what is in this mirror man. But that is not the point at all; rather, we will see immediately afterwards that what I am about to say also touches on the artistic.

We see here a half-grown human being who has grown tired of the outer life as it can be led today. He takes leave of this outer life and now actually wants to become human. For he admits to himself that within the ordinary life, as we live it today, both in Asian and European and American civilization, one cannot really become human. You get up in the morning, have breakfast and do something to maintain yourself within the social order, you eat lunch or receive your guests and say things that perhaps need not be said, that ultimately do not aim to achieve much more than to make the lips move, that are not idle; you take your guests for a walk or whatever else you do today. You can't become a person in such company – I'm not quoting verbatim, I'm just characterizing. It is necessary to try a different path if you want to become a person. And so this “hero” – to use the old aesthetic style – tries to become a person by seeking admission to a monastery. But he is told that this is something extraordinarily difficult. I do not want to characterize the details, but only point out what is important to me today. He is therefore informed that it is something extraordinarily difficult and that, above all, he must be clear about the fact that he has to go through three stages of knowledge. In the first stage of knowledge, he would have to become clear about the human being's position in the world, insofar as this position is contained in the human ego itself. So this life in the ego and this striving to overcome the ego as the first level of knowledge. The second view of the world would consist in the fact that, after one begins to shed the ego in a certain sense, one no longer sees the world from one's prejudiced point of view, as one used to do before, when one had not even begun to shed the ego. And the third vision would be where man would truly penetrate into the world and its reality, not as seen by man living in his ego. He is told this. And he is admonished in the appropriate way not to want such an incarnation too urgently. He is made aware of the difficulties. But he does not back down.

So he is initiated in the appropriate way. The initiation takes place – I will mention only the essentials – by being led into solitude for the night, into a room where only a monk watches over him. And there, after he has initially abandoned himself to his thoughts, he falls into a brief sleep, from which he very soon believes he will wake up. And now he finds himself in the room whose one wall has a mirror on it. In this mirror he sees himself, and he is amazed at what is meant. It is meant that when one, after a collection of thoughts and after such a strong decision as this person has made, steps in front of his own reflection, one sees oneself in a different way. So it is actually pointed out that the person is only now beginning to see himself. The mirror image looks so similar to him, but yet again somewhat different. And by doing what must follow from such a surprising experience: by striking the mirror, believing that he has wounded himself, the mirror man steps out of the mirror towards him, that is, that of him which, in a certain respect, is himself and yet again not himself.

Now the person has arrived at the first step of knowledge. He must get used to not only going through the world as a person without ego consciousness, but also to having that which is himself and yet not completely himself, his mirror-person, accompany him. In the company of this mirror-man, who now tempts him to do all kinds of things in the outer world, lies a new encounter with world phenomena, with his own deeds, in that he finds himself precisely in the presence of his own ego.

Now, I do not want to go into the details. The person in question is actually lying in bed, but he goes through what he can go through according to his previous experiences of external world experiences and external actions. These are not always very nice. But how someone describes something like that depends on their own taste. You can see from the way the author describes things how he feels about such a case. People also experience the world according to their tastes. So we are led through the experiences of the world. Just as Mephisto in Faust has something of the driving force, this mirror man is now always the driving force, and he is led from event to event, being made to do many wrongs. Everything appears to him in a new light, because he has looked into the mirror and seen himself. He now sees one thing after another in the world. He sometimes sees things as they appear to him because he is an ego-person, and sometimes as they appear to him after he is already able to see his reflection. He becomes more and more familiar with the phenomena of the world. In the process, he comes out of his ego more and more. The mirror-man, who is rather slight at first, becomes fatter and fatter. This is a polar-parallel phenomenon, which is not uninteresting. And so this person now lives through the world by experiencing in a different way what he could have experienced earlier, now that he has seen his own self. And in the end he has become so entangled in the experiences of the world that he has to become his own judge, condemning himself to death, which is again very characteristic. He finds that he cannot really live in the world.

When he entered the monastery, he realized that it is impossible to live in today's society if you want to become a human being. This has increased to such an extent that now, when he has become his own judge, he condemns himself to death. And now he awakens. In a sense, he awakens from the execution of his own death sentence. He is again in the same room where he was. Now he looks at the mirror again. But by looking now, he notices, for example, that the mirror does not reflect a procession of monks passing by. Earlier, when he looked into the mirror, he saw himself and everything in front of the mirror. But now a procession of monks is passing by and is not reflected. He realizes from this that he is not standing in front of a mirror now, but that the mirror has become a window. He looks through it and sees out into the wide world, sees the landscape. He has attained the third vision. Now he sees the world, whereas at the beginning he saw only what the mirror gave. Because he had the mirror man at his side, he saw what he had seen before in a different way. But now, as it were, he sees through the surface of things - that is how it is presented - out into the free reality. It is, of course, implied that he now also sees out into the spiritual reality.

So we have a trilogy before us: the first is the mirror, the third is, let us say, the window. The mirror has become the window. So there we have the two polar opposite views of the world. At first, everyone sees in the other 'their own reflection', sees only what they already have within themselves in the other, where they are caught up in their own ego, and thus sees only their own reflection everywhere in their neighbor or in anything they see in nature. Finally, after breaking through the mirror, they no longer see the mirror, but through the surface of things into the spiritual. And in between

where the two merge into one another:

1. The mirror
2. One into the other
3. The window

Now, I would like to point out two characteristic features of this drama. The first is this: we see that there is a desire to depict a person in the process of rising to a certain religious connection with another world. That the first part, the mirror, is short, one can forgive, because it is very interesting to see how the person lives into an insight into his own ego, so that this ego becomes so concrete to him that it now accompanies him through his experiences in the world. The middle part is quite detailed, and a great many experiences are described. In order to find these appealing at all, one must have a taste, one could even say sometimes, distaste, for them. But as I said, everyone has to do it according to their own taste. In any case, this part, where one looks into the experiences of the world, is very long. But the third part is quite short, and what is seen out there is actually only hinted at, I would say symbolically, by looking through the window; nothing real comes into view. It is quite short, this third part. That is the one peculiarity I would like to emphasize. But the other peculiarity is this: one must recognize that here is the most beautiful expression of the striving to pour strength and energy into thinking. But one also sees that the modern man, of the kind that Werfel is, cannot do that at first. Why? Yes, it is very peculiar. When I had finished reading this drama – and I read with the greatest interest, I must say, because it is extremely significant for our present spiritual life as represented by individual personalities – I had to say the following to myself: the process is as follows: 1. Der Spiegel; 2. Eins ins andere; 3. Das Fenster. But one could also read the whole thing backwards from front to back. Of course, it would have to be rewritten, but one could also read the whole thing backwards from front to back. Because why? It is entirely possible to understand the matter in such a way that one says to oneself: the way a person initially relates to the world is how things appear to him. He is no different from the things. He has not awakened to his sense of self. He stands before the window, looks out into the world. Now we could say that the old monk, to whom he has now come and to whom he says that he can no longer bear it, that everything is always only inside, what he sees through the window, that he wants to find himself – that the old man now says to him: Yes, there are three views to go through. The first view shows us the world without our finding our ego in it. We lose ourselves to the world. The second view allows us to gain something of the ego, and then, gradually, a multitude of beings comes towards us from the world. The world is brought to life, spiritualized. We used to see it as spiritless, now the world is spiritualized. Everywhere, from every being, from plants, animals, clouds and so on, something spiritual comes towards us. Many spiritual beings come towards us in this second part. In the third part, we wake up. We step in front of the window, we look out. But we see everything anew, because now we see the real world for the first time. The window has been transformed into a mirror, the human being has come to himself. He unites all these mirror beings that have come to meet him in the world of plants, animals, clouds; they are in his only self, which has become cosmic to him. And now, by recognizing himself, he actually sees the cosmos for the first time.

You could easily describe the whole thing backwards, the last part of the trilogy first, then the middle part, then the part with which it started. That is extremely interesting, because it is precisely this that makes this drama particularly characteristic of the present. What is the peculiarity of intellectualism?

Yes, the peculiarity of intellectualism is this: you can start with the idea anywhere and stop anywhere, and you can assert one thing and you can assert another – I have emphasized this many times. In terms of thought, you can prove anything, in terms of thought you can refute anything. Intellectualism, which is nothing more than a system of vapid and feeble thoughts, allows you to start anywhere and go somewhere, but you will stop at a certain point. But you can also start at this latter point and go the other way.

Today, one can be a very clever person and a gross materialist, because materialism can be quite well proven in an intellectual way. And if one is purely intellectual, one can, in the way it happened after our anthroposophical congress in Vienna at a meeting, one can, from the standpoint of today's monism, quite intellectually lead the fight against the spirit. One can prove very well that materialism is right. But one can also want to be a spiritualist and prove this just as well. All these things, as long as one lives only in the intellectual, can be proved quite well, and they have the appearance of tremendous cogency, these intellectualistic discussions.

And so it is in our time. People do not suspect, as they become entangled in spiritualism, materialism, realism, idealism, that they are becoming entangled in the intellectual spirit. They rightly feel: this can be firmly proven. They are the creatures of intellectualism. Because it is indeed true that things can be proved, that is why it is so dismal when one is obliged today to seriously discuss something based on reality, and then 'free discussion' is set up. One person says this, another says that, a third says something else. Basically, if you are just a little bright, you can say: they are all right. Of course, they are all equally wrong. The whole point of the talk is, after all, that one or the other sees what a tremendous swindle of one's own self it is to live in intellectualism, because with intellectualism, everything can be easily proven. The only thing that matters is that one has immersed oneself long enough in some direction or current, in some sect or party or something else, then one can quite rightly say: Yes, that's all clear; the other one who claims the opposite is an idiot. - Certainly, but the other one can just as easily prove that the first one is an idiot and his own claim is correct. Today, with the configuration that intellectual life has attained, this is perfectly possible and is taken for granted. And so it is a matter of course that one can write such a piece today without arriving at a real spiritual insight. The fact that Werfel is not approached proves that nothing significant is seen through the window; the spiritual insight would only begin if something significant were seen through the window. But if you merely describe three steps, and then, after describing how he woke up and looked out, you do not describe what he sees, if you make so many concessions to the general consciousness that you can write such a “Mirror Man” and still say something reasonable in response to something like “Occult Science in Outline” or “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds” or the like: If one has to say that one would not be in one's right mind if one accepted it, and if one can only say: Yes, the person in question has arrived at the window, but I am wary of seeing what one sees when looking out through the window, then one is simply not yet ready to immerse oneself in the real spiritual life, then one is simply completely stuck in intellectualism.

That is why I was allowed to speak in this way. Of course, one would not have the right to give a philosophical critique of a work of art. But I did not give a philosophical critique at all; what I said is just as much an artistic view. Because it happens to you, you read a trilogy, read it with the utmost interest. Afterwards, when you're done, you suddenly feel upside down! It's an uncomfortable feeling, and to get back on your feet again, you would have to rewrite the whole story from back to front. It would take a very long time before you could finally work your way back to your feet, to your footing. Yes, it is quite true that one is also artistically cheated by becoming aware: in there is the spinning wheel of intellectualism, while the work of art must indeed make a beautiful impression. You cannot reverse that. Try to turn Goethe's “Faust” around, to start writing from the back to the front. You cannot! A work of art cannot be turned around. Here in this work you can, because the intellectualism predominates, because it has not penetrated to the real looking. Intellectualism has indeed received the vague, unconscious feeling that there must be juice and strength in the thoughts, but in reality neither juice nor strength has entered, there is nothing in it. There is only a pattern of a more real inner experience in it. And so we see just from something that is really full of spirit, which is extremely significant in terms of what our time can bring forth, where the path must go.

For fifty years it has been the case that people actually feel: they must go in the direction of something spiritual, but they would avoid the real path. So they take something out of all kinds of old traditions, like the three-part path and the like. But it is characteristic that today they take up this three-part path; you can find it in all kinds of books that describe some old atavistic clairvoyant paths.

As long as one refrains from accepting what one sees when looking through the window, this story of “mirror” and “one into the other” and “through the window” can very easily still be part of our spiritual life. It is easy to describe if one only has such general ideas about it. But as long as you stop at that, you still can't get out of intellectualism, which holds the people of the present day captive with a tremendous magic.

I have pointed out this intellectual element in our time in the most diverse forms. I have pointed out how one could get into all kinds of branches in the Theosophical Society, and there were great schemes, races and rounds, whole world systems and all kinds of things were built up in wonderfully intellectual forms - all intellectual! On the other hand, when it was a matter of characterizing the structure of the human being, there was a scheme: physical man: dense physical matter; etheric body: finer matter; astral body: even finer; kama manas: even finer; manas: even finer, ever finer and finer. Yes, but only from the intellectual point of view! This thinning out did not stop at all! But it is just purely intellectual. Just as you can always turn a wheel, you can, if you just stick to the intellectual, let matter become thinner and thinner. And so we had an intellectualized theosophy, and so we have here an intellectualized poetry that even borders on mysticism and that will certainly be admired by a great many of our contemporaries, and rightly so, because one can see from such poetry how the striving of our time is again turning towards something spiritual.

But my judgment is not an unartistic one. When I look at this mirror man who accompanies the hero throughout his entire evolutionary life, this mirror man is something completely different than Mephisto in relation to Faust. There is life in Faust. You know, I once showed how Mephisto is ultimately only the other side of Faust, like Wagner. “You resemble the spirit you comprehend, not me.” You resemble Wagner, you resemble Mephisto, and so on. But there is life in it. But it is not yet life when the self jumps out of the mirror, is initially frail and then becomes fatter and fatter as the person himself grows more and more out of life.

In short, what dominates from beginning to end is the inanimate, the abstract. The abstract can always be turned around. And because nowhere in the artistic work can one feel a full-blooded, intense contemplation, but everywhere one sees only thought-patterns blown up into images, one feels an unartistic quality. And it is strange that in the present day, this is often defended by saying: Anthroposophy, yes, that is only the pursuit of ideas, and that is not artistic. But in Anthroposophy, the aim is to gain insight, only one must really be prepared for this insight. One must look through a window and see something. But here, the actual artistic is called something that has not quite hatched, that is just about to hatch from the egg, but is content to remain in the egg. You know what I mean, that the chicken does not really hatch from the egg to live in the world. It is as if man wants to begin a journey of knowledge, but still avoids the spiritual world in all its concreteness and certainty. I don't want to say how the egg feels when the chicken just can't get out! But isn't it true that it is just the same with such intellectual products that don't really get out.

This is not to say anything against the value of such things. In the sense of the present I actually see something of the very first order in this mirror-man. But from a higher point of view it must be characterized and placed in the spiritual life, in the whole cultural life of the present, as I have tried to sketch it.