The Rudolf Steiner Archive

"Were Christ born a thousand times in Bethlehem, and not in thee, thou art lost eternally."

There are two aspects of this beautiful saying of the great Mystic Angelus Silesius. The one is the declaration that the true Christmas must be celebrated in man's inmost heart, that any outward celebration of Christmas must quicken the impulse whereby in the Holy Night of winter, the very deepest forces of the soul are drawn forth from the darkness prevailing within as the darkness of winter prevails without. These deep forces of the soul are aware of their union with the Being Who pervades all earthly evolution, giving it meaning and purpose. Within us we find some thing with which Christ is united if with conscious devotion to the Spiritual Powers working in the world we penetrate deeply enough into our life of soul.

And the other aspect of the words of Angelus Silesius is that the human being in earthly evolution to-day can become conscious of the fact that true manhood, assurance of true manhood, depends upon the soul feeling inwardly united with the essence and substantiality of Christ Jesus.

In the course of years our studies have brought it home to us that as earthly evolution proceeds, consciousness of Christ deepens, that human beings passing from incarnation to incarnation attain greater and greater understanding of the real nature of Christ. And we have tried to intensify this knowledge by drawing upon a source which enables us to celebrate the Holy Night of Christmas, the Festival of the Birth of Jesus, in a deeper and more worthy way.

What this implies will become clear from the lecture to-day.

A famous modern historian was once asked by a man interested in world events, why no mention is made in his writings of happenings which are the outcome of the Mystery of Golgotha, nor of the influences of Christ Jesus in the course of human history. The historian was asked why his books speak of the influences exercised upon history by popes, monarchs, military campaigns, governments, even by happenings in nature, but have no single word to say about the forces that have poured into mankind from the Mystery of Golgotha and since then have been at work in all human life and human affairs. After a long pause and deep deliberation, the historian answered: The method I have adopted for the exposition of history must remain as it is; for the Christ-forces that stream through happenings in the world belong to a primordial realm into which the human mind is incapable of gazing. The effects and influences of the Mystery of Golgotha—yes, certainly they can be discerned; but to describe the intrinsic, essential nature of these deeds of Christ is not possible in the writing of history.

This is only one of the many examples that could be given in proof of the fact that the most distinguished and enlightened minds of modern times cannot claim to celebrate the Christmas Festival in an inner sense. For in the soul of this historian, Christ Jesus as a living Figure, a living Being, had not become such intense reality that he could feel His presence in all human evolution from year to year, from week to week, even from hour to hour. It is possible for a really learned scholar to-day to survey the whole course of history without perceiving that since the Mystery of Golgotha, the Power of Christ has been working everywhere. There are many causes to account for the fact that the Festival of the Holy Night, the Festival of the Christmas Mystery, is not yet celebrated in the souls of the vast majority of human beings.

A certain illumination is given by one who has spoken of these things out of a deep and true feeling for the Christian Mystery. This was Goethe, who so beautifully recounts the life and travels of Wilhelm Meister. Wilhelm Meister comes to a stately building and is conducted around it by its owner. He is shown the gallery which contains a series of paintings of the most important historical occurrences among various peoples of antiquity—notably among the early Hebrews—from the time of Paradise, the Fall, and on through the later epochs. History is portrayed in impressive scenes, ending with the destruction of Jerusalem ... but there is no single picture of a scene from the life of Christ Jesus, although the series continues beyond the Crucifixion as far as the destruction of Jerusalem. Wilhelm Meister asks: Why does nothing in this picture-gallery portray the life of the divine Man who has brought such blessing into the evolution of humanity?—These are his words:¹ "In your historical series I find a chasm. The Temple of Jerusalem is destroyed and the people dispersed, yet you have not introduced the divine Man who taught there shortly before; to whom, shortly before, they would give no ear." The answer made to Wilhelm Meister is: "To have done this, as you require it, would have been an error. The life of that divine Man whom you allude to, stands in no connection with the general history of the world in his time. It was a private life; his teaching was a teaching for individuals. What has publicly befallen vast masses of people and the minor parts which compose them, belongs to the general history of the world, to the general religion of the world, the religion we have named the First. What inwardly befalls individuals, belongs to the Second religion, the Philosophical: such a religion was it that Christ taught and practised, so long as He went about on earth."

These are deeply moving words. Every human being on the earth is related individually to the Christ. Folk-history, as it may be called, is woven by the affairs of the several peoples, for it is concerned with human affairs in general, within the orbit of general human destiny. But what Christ Jesus has brought into the world penetrates deeply and inwardly into the experiences of every human heart, every human soul—belonging to no matter what part of earthly evolution—in so far as it feels itself truly Man. We must realise that this ‘feeling of oneself as man’ arose for the first time from what came into human evolution through the Mystery of Golgotha.

And now to continue. The owner of the palace leads Wilhelm Meister to another gallery that has been kept closed, where the events of the New Testament are portrayed. Wilhelm Meister is therefore not permitted to see the events of the New Testament in a place where external happenings and actions in the world are presented, but only in an esoteric sanctuary, for the sight of which the soul must have been prepared, have withdrawn from things pertaining to the worldly history of the peoples. The basis of the soul's activity must now be esoteric and individual: then it may cross the Threshold leading to the pictures of scenes from the New Testament. Here again the pictures go no farther than the Last Supper. Wilhelm Meister asks: "As you have set up the life of the divine Man for a pattern and example, have you likewise selected his sufferings, his death?" The answer he receives is full of significance; it is an answer which indicates what reverent awe accompanies the experience of the mystery fulfilled on the earth by the Being dwelling in the body whose birth is celebrated in the Holy Night of winter. Wilhelm Meister has been conducted as it were to the first level of esoteric truth, where he witnesses the delineation of scenes as far as the Last Supper; but then comes the most esoteric portion of all, referred to with deep and holy awe: "We draw a veil over these sufferings, because we reverence them so highly. We hold it a damnable audacity to exhibit that torturing Cross and the Holy One who suffers on it, exposing them to the light of the sun." (Travels of Wilhelm Meister. Part II.)

This is an example of the feeling for esotericism to be found in the 18th century. The feeling was sound and true, for we ourselves shall readily agree that pictorial representations of Christ's sufferings, unless they are from the hand of a supreme artist, drag down the Mystery of Golgotha to the human level. And we can understand that one who in the 18th century had a deep, deep feeling for the Mystery of Golgotha was averse from looking at the many distorted portrayals of this sacred Mystery, preferring to draw a veil over these things, because he felt that only the inmost forces of the soul can be united, supersensibly, with what is connected with and follows the Last Supper.

But what is it that underlies these esoteric feelings and experiences? The hearts of men were yearning for a vista, a conception of the Christ Mystery greater than any that was possible at that time. With all humility, with a humility deeper than that with which we approach any other matter presented by spiritual science, it may truly be said that for long ages the best human souls have been yearning, pining for the knowledge of Christ that can be imparted by occult science. And to-day we may be assured that when the time is ripe, the souls of men will behold as reality, what hitherto could only be known in a different form.

The consciousness that such knowledge will one day be within the reach of the human heart, and the longing for it, has been one of life's great riddles to the best souls. Men have been reaching out for an understanding of Christ that will enable them to grasp the import of the mighty Deed accomplished on Golgotha which can be revealed to the eye of soul when the veil is lifted. In the lecture yesterday I explained why a knowledge of Christ once enriched by the old clairvoyance was bound to recede, how it was received in the earliest periods of Christendom but then gradually waned and faded away. I will read, again to-day, an ancient Gnostic hymn from which it is clear that in the old, clairvoyant form of knowledge the consciousness was alive that the Christ Who came into the world through the Child born at Christmastime, is a Cosmic Being, increasing in majesty and greatness, the higher the soul's vision soars into the realms of spirit—for through these realms He descended. It was inevitable that in later times, when the springs of this knowledge had run dry, a veil should be drawn over the great Event, because men were no longer able to explain that in the secret represented by the Child, the highest wisdom is enshrined. In this Child was born a Being Who traversed the heavenly worlds before His appearance on earth.—

Behold, O Father, how, distant from Thy Breath,
This being upon earth
(this ‘being’ is the human soul)
Wanders, the target and victim of all ill,
Lost and perplexed, it flees the deadly chaos—
How shall it find its way?

In converse with the Father God, Jesus is speaking of the descent through the cosmic spheres, of how his eyes turn to the human soul to whom he would fain bring salvation, wandering in chaos but yet longing for Christ.—

Therefore send me, O Father,
Descending, I bear the seal of heaven,
Traversing all the Aeons ...

The spiritual worlds are ranged one above the other in the heavenly spheres and the higher we ascend the more do we find that the older worlds are still living realities, the most ancient being present to this day in the highest spheres of all. What was once connected with the Saturn evolution is to be found in the very highest spiritual spheres, and these successive spheres, related to the flow of time, are called ‘Aeons.’

Traversing all the Aeons,
Teaching all sacred knowledge;
Thus may God's image be made manifest;
And thus to you I give
The deeply hidden knowledge of the sacred way:
‘Gnosis’ it shall be for you.

Mankind has very largely lost consciousness of the Christ as a Cosmic Being. This loss was inevitable, for the old clairvoyance had to disappear and an intervening period—an Aeon devoid of spirit—to come, in order that eventually a new form of clairvoyant vision may arise. But this new vision must again be directed to the spiritual worlds, must not characterise in forms such as are presented to men's outward sight, the Being Who in the Holy Night entered into the evolution of humanity. This new vision must reveal how the Christ Being descended from heavenly sphere to heavenly sphere and thence to the earth, giving the earth meaning and purpose.

Behold, O Father, how, distant from Thy Breath,
This being upon earth
Wanders, the target and victim of all ill,
Lost and perplexed it flees the deadly chaos—
How shall it find its way?
Therefore send me, O Father,
Descending I bear the seal of heaven,
Traversing all the Aeons,
Teaching all sacred knowledge;
Thus may God's image be made manifest;
And thus to you I give
The deeply hidden knowledge of the sacred way:
‘Gnosis’ it shall be for you.

What, in reality, is the earth that surrounds us, when we perceive its essential being? If the corpse of one whose soul already dwells in spiritual worlds lies before you, will you ever say: This is a man? Will you ever say: This is still, in the full sense of the word, a man? The higher members of human nature are no longer in the corpse from which the soul has departed. But since the middle of the Atlantean epoch the earth has been gradually becoming a corpse devoid of soul. The earth around us, despite its manifold beauties, has been approaching the state of a corpse since the middle of Atlantean times and is becoming more and more corpselike. Standing before the huge rocks, one can say no truer thing than that here is the skeleton which the earth has been in process of becoming ever since that time! In the rock-strewn earth we perceive the dying part of the earth-organism, which was a living organism only until the middle of the Atlantean epoch. Geology itself realises that when we walk over the earth or guide the plough through the soil, we are walking over the corpse of the earth, guiding the plough through the corpse of the earth. Geologists have acknowledged this and external science itself, when it begins really to think, cannot do otherwise. And so, inasmuch as we are surrounded by the earth, we confront death; we are spectators of the gradual dying of our earthly globe.

And now let us imagine that the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place, that the Cosmic Being Whom we call Christ had not entered through the two Jesus boys into earth-evolution.² Earth-evolution would then be no more, would already by to-day have been overcome by death. But through the two Jesus boys the Christ did enter earthly evolution and then, living in the one for three years, consummated the Mystery of Golgotha, whereby a new seed of life was imparted to the earth. Therefore when the time is fulfilled, the earth will not remain a corpse in cosmic space—the soul having become the prey of Ahriman and Lucifer! No—that is what would have happened had Christ not come into the earth as a living, fertile seed. Because He has come, the earth will not fall into dust, the soul will not be in the sole possession of Lucifer and Ahriman, for the Christ Seed has infused new life into earth-evolution! Just as the earth once separated from the sun and has become a child of the sun, so will earth-evolution, imbued with a new impulse, be fraught with the meaning and purpose imparted by Christ.

Thus spiritual science turns our eyes with awe and reverence to the Mystery of Golgotha and because it points to realms beyond the range of material vision, we feel that it is for us to lift the veil ... since we are resolved to see behind this veil not only what comes before the eyes of an age destined to grow into materialism. Therefore it is again beginning to be possible for those in whom the impulses of spiritual science have come to life, to look up to the Christ as a Cosmic Being. Again and again let it be repeated that the infinite devotion we can feel towards the Child born in the Holy Night of Christmas is not thereby diminished. Rather is this devotion deepened when we can feel the reality of Christ as did Christian Morgenstern when there sprang from his soul a poem which seems like a resurrection of ancient and holy Gnostic thoughts pervaded alike by the Christ-Love and cosmic wisdom. And so a new Christmas is celebrated when in the dark night of materialism, voices ring out that are not the voices of the Gnostics of olden times but are quickened and enriched by dedication to the Living Being of the Cosmic Christ.

Licht ist Liebe ... Sonnen-Weben
Liebes-Strahlung einer Welt
schöpferischer Wesenheiten—

die durch unerhörtte Zeiten
uns an ihrem Herzen hält,
und die uns zuletzt gegeben

ihren höchsten Geist in eines
Menschen Hülle wahrend dreier
Jahre: da Er kam in seines

Vaters Erbteil—nun der Erde
innerlichstes Himmelsfeuer:
dass auch sie einst Sonne werde.

(Light is Love ... the rays of sunshine are the weaving radiance of a world of loving Creator-Spirits. Who, after hiding us in their heart through endless ages, at the last surrendered to us their sublimest One. Wrapped for three years in the body of a Man, He came then into possession of His Father's estate—and is now the innermost heavenly flame of Earth herself, that she too may one day be a Sun).

"Were Christ born a thousand times in Bethlehem, and not in thee, thou art lost eternally."

May there be celebrated in our souls an inner festival of the Holy Night; may our souls be filled with the realisation that a new knowledge of Christ must be born in our time. This new knowledge of Christ links the inmost core of man's being with primal innocence, links the state of childhood, not, as yet, that of mature life, with the very heights of cosmic being. When, in the Holy Night of winter our minds turn to the Christ Child, there is enacted before our souls the greatest of all festivals of consecration, the festival that rings through all the Aeons—and we know that the deepest realities of man's being and nature are indissolubly connected with all cosmic evolution.

Those whose hearts are kindled by spiritual science feel and know that victory over all death can be achieved when the soul is united with the Christ Being. I spoke of this to-day at the funeral of one taken from us so tragically by the war. Realisation of how the heights of cosmic being are connected with the inmost nature of man was impossible as long as the human mind was unable to conceive that the very quintessence of history lies in the Mystery of Bethlehem. But this insight will dawn in those who understand the secret of the two Jesus boys. In the one boy there was present the power of the wisest of all men in pre-Christian times, namely Zarathustra. This boy represents the flower of the previous stages of human evolution; the aura of the other boy was illumined by the forces of the great Buddha. The body of the one boy springs from the noblest blood of the ancient Hebrew peoples; the soul of the Jesus boy described in the Gospel of St. Luke leads back to the earth's beginning.³ The soul of this Jesus boy was kept back, when, in the age of Lemuria, man came to the earth; this soul was guarded by the Mysteries until it was sent into the body of the Jesus whose birth is described in the Gospel of St. Luke. It is said that immediately after birth, this Child uttered words intelligible only to the Mother, in a language unlike any other language, and which the Child himself forgot directly earthly consciousness awoke in him. A mystery was voiced immediately after birth ... And indeed, much of what we have to reveal concerning the Christ Mystery is an exposition of what was uttered by the Jesus boy of the Gospel of St. Luke directly after his birth.

And so spiritual science enables us to understand the Christ Impulse in the deeper aspect of human evolution—in the evolution of pre-Christian times too—for the differences disappear and the voice of the Initiates can still be heard. When once the magnitude of what poured into the evolution of humanity at the Mystery of Golgotha is grasped it will be possible for these forces to be brought to even greater fruition. But men must know Who the Christ was before they can speak truly of Him—in history, for example. If within our movement there are individuals—in greater and greater numbers—who resolve to kindle the light that can be kindled in those inner depths which since the Mystery of Golgotha have been within men's reach then the Christ Light will shine out in every single soul. This Christ Light becomes the Christmas Tree that will illumine all evolution in ages of time to come. The soul will behold an earth again made living, will find Christ everywhere within this new earth.

Those who have allied themselves with spiritual science can receive its tidings of Christ with such depth of feeling that the Christmas Festival will one day be celebrated in every individual soul. It is the Festival which represents the birth of that knowledge of Christ which comes from Christ Himself and is therefore a birth of Christ within us, True, indeed are the words: "Were Christ born a thousand times in Bethlehem, and not in thee, thou art lost eternally." But to this beautiful string of Angelus Silesius we can add: We are secure eternally if we seek the experience belonging to the Holy Night of winter, if we seek to bring Christ to birth in the depths of our souls!

• 1. The translation of the quotations from Wilhelm Meister is that of Thomas Carlyle.
• 2. See: The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Mankind; also the Lecture-Courses on the Gospel of St. Luke and the Gospel of St. Matthew by Rudolf Steiner.
• 3. See Rudolf Steiner's Lecture-Courses on the Gospel of St. Matthew and the Gospel of St. Luke.

The yearly celebration of the physical birth of the Being Who entered earth-evolution in order to give that evolution its meaning, has for many people become a matter of habit. But if, conformably with the task of our spiritual-scientific movement, we are not content with celebrating a festival of mere custom—as is so general nowadays—it will be opportune at this grave time to turn our minds to many things that are connected with the physical birth of Christ Jesus.

We have often pictured how in Christ Jesus, so far as human comprehension goes, two Beings merge as it were into one: the Christ Being and the human Jesus Being. In the evolution of Christianity there has been much conflict, much conflict of dogma, about the meaning of the union of Christ with Jesus, in the Being whose physical birth is celebrated at the Christmas Festival. We ourselves, of course, recognise in the Christ a cosmic, super-earthly Being, a Being Who descended from spiritual worlds in order, through His birth in a physical man, to impart meaning to earth-evolution. And in Jesus we recognise the one who, as man, was predestined after thirty years of preparation, to unite the Christ Being with himself, to receive the Christ Being into himself.

Not only has there been much strife, much conflict of dogma, about the nature of the union of Christ with Jesus, but the relationship of Christ to Jesus contains a hint of significant secrets of the earthly evolution of mankind. If, in the endeavour to understand something of the union of Christ with Jesus, we follow events up to the present day and reflect upon what has still to take place in the evolution of humanity before this relationship can be rightly understood, then we touch upon one of the deepest secrets of human knowledge and human life.

At the time when Christ was about to enter the evolution of humanity, it was possible, through faculties that were a heritage from the days of the old clairvoyant wisdom, to form certain conceptions of the sublimity of the Christ Being. And at that time there existed a wisdom of which people often speak nowadays in a way that is almost blasphemous, but of which they are scarcely able to form any true idea. There existed something which up to this day has been completely exterminated from human evolution, rooted out by certain currents running counter to the deeper Christian revelation: this was the Gnosis, a wisdom into which had flowed much of the ancient knowledge revealed to men in atavistic clairvoyance. Every trace of the Gnosis, whether in script or oral tradition, was exterminated root and branch by the dogmatic Christianity of the West—after this Gnosis had striven to find an answer to the question: Who is the Christ?

There can be no question to-day of reverting to the Gnosis—for the Gnosis belongs to an age that is past and over. True, its extermination was caused by malice, ignorance, enmity towards knowledge and wisdom ... but for all that it happened out of an underlying necessity. When anthroposophical spiritual science is accused of wanting to revive the ancient Gnosis, that is only one of the many expressions of ill-will directed towards it to-day. The accusation is, of course, made by people whose ignorance of the Gnosis is on a par with their ignorance of Anthroposophy. There is no question of reviving the Gnosis, but of recognising it as something great and mighty, something that endeavoured, in the time now lying nineteen hundred years behind us, to give an answer to the question: Who is the Christ?

Before the inner eye of the Gnostic lay a glorious vista of spiritual worlds, with the Hierarchies ranged in their order, one above the other. How the Christ had descended through the worlds of the spiritual Hierarchies to enter into the sheaths of a mortal man—all this stood before the soul of the Gnostic. And he tried to envisage how the Christ had come from heights of spirit, how He had been conceived on earth. The best way to get some idea of the knowledge then existing is to reflect that everything produced by the world after the extermination of the Gnosis was paltry in comparison with the grandeur of the Gnostic idea of the Christ. The Mystery-wisdom behind the Gospels is infinitely great—greater by far than anything which later theology has been able to discover from them. To realise how paltry and insignificant compared with the Gnosis is the current conception of the Christ Being, we have but to steep ourselves in the ancient Gnostic idea of Him. Picturing this, one is filled with humility by the grandeur of the conception of the Christ Being entering into a human body from cosmic heights, from far distant cosmic worlds.

This majestic, sublime concept of Christ has fallen into the background, but all the dogmatic definitions handed down to us as Arian or Athanasian principles of faith are meagre in comparison with the Gnostic conception, in which vision of the Christ Being was combined with wisdom relating to the universe.¹ Only the merest fragments of this great Gnostic conception of Christ have survived.

This, then, is one aspect of the relationship of Christ to Jesus: that Christ came into the world at a time when the wisdom capable of understanding Him, yearning to understand Him, had already been rooted out. People who speak of the ancient Gnosis as oriental phantasy that had to be exterminated for the good of Western humanity, have always believed themselves to be good Christians, but the real cause was that the mind of the age lacked the strength to unite earthly with heavenly concepts. One must have a feeling for the tragic if human evolution is to be understood.

How long after the Mystery of Golgotha was the Temple at Jerusalem, the sanctuary of peace, destroyed? The Temple of Solomon was within the precincts of the city of Jerusalem. What the Gnosis contained in the form of wisdom, Solomon's Temple contained in the form of symbolism. Cosmic secrets were presented in symbols and pictures. And it was intended that those who entered the Temple, where the pictures all around them were reflected in their souls, should receive something through which alone they became truly man. The purpose of the Temple of Solomon was to inculcate the meaning of worlds into the souls of those who were permitted to enter it. What the Temple revealed was something that the earth as such did not reveal, namely, all the cosmic secrets that ray into the earth from the cosmic expanse.

If one of the old Initiates possessing real knowledge of the Temple of Solomon had been asked: Why was the Temple of Solomon built?—the answer would have been somewhat as follows: ‘In order that here on the earth there shall be a beacon light for those Powers who accompany the souls seeking their way into earthly bodies.’ Let us try to grasp what this means, realising that these old Initiates of the Temple of Solomon knew that when men were being accompanied into earthly bodies in conformity with all the signs of the stars, then particular souls must be guided to bodies in which the great symbols of Solomon's Temple could be mirrored.

This, in the nature of things, might give rise to arrogance. If the knowledge was not received with humility, with the humility of the Essenes, it led men into Pharisaism! But at all events, this was the situation: The eye of earth looked up to the heavens, beholding the stars; the spiritual eyes of those who were guiding souls from cosmic worlds to the earth gazed downwards and beheld the Temple of Solomon with its symbols. The Temple was like a star whose light enabled them to guide the souls into bodies which would be capable of understanding its meaning. It was the central star of the earth, shining out with special brightness into the spiritual heights.

When Christ Jesus had come to the earth, when the Mystery of Golgotha had taken place, the great secret that was intended to be mirrored in every single human soul was this: "My kingdom is not of this world!" It was then that the external, physical Temple of Solomon lost its significance and its destiny was tragically fulfilled. Moreover at that time there was no living person who would have been capable of apprehending the full compass of the Christ Being from the reflections of the symbols in Solomon's Temple. But the Christ Himself had now entered earth-evolution, had become part of it. That is the all-important fact. The Gnostics were the last survivors of the bearers of that ancient, atavistic earth-wisdom which was comprehensive and powerful enough to make some understanding of the Christ possible.

That, then, is one aspect of the relation of Christ to Jesus. In those days the Christ Being could have been understood through the Gnosis. But according to the world-plan it was not to be—although the Gnosis teemed with wisdom concerning the Christ. And it may truly be said that the path now taken by Christianity through the countries of the South, through Greece, Italy, Spain and so on, led more and more to the obliteration of insight into the essential nature of Christ. And Rome, sinking into decline, was destined to bring about the final extinction of understanding.

In regard to this relation of the Christ to Jesus it is strange that on the one hand we find lighting up in the Gnosis a sublime conception of the Christ which died away as Christianity passed through the Roman system, while on the other hand, when Christianity encountered the peoples from the North, the concept of Jesus came to the fore. In the South, the concept of Christ flickered out. The form in which the concept of Jesus emerged was by no means very sublime, but it gripped men's hearts and feelings in such a way that something wonderfully absorbing stirred in their souls at the thought of how the Child who receives the Christ is born in the Holy Night. Just as in the South the concept of Christ was inadequate, so in the North was man's feeling for Jesus. But for all that it was a feeling that stirred the very depths of the human heart. Yet in itself it is not quite comprehensible. For if we contrast the immeasurable significance of Christ Jesus for the evolution of humanity with all the sentimental trivialities about the ‘dear little Jesus’ contained in many poems and hymns commonly used to move the human heart—for in their egoism men believe that these trivialities kindle emotions capable of storming the heavens—then we have a direct impression that something is striving to make its home but is not fully able to do so, that one element is mingling with another in such a way that the deeper meaning, the far deeper significance, remains in the subconsciousness.

What actually is it that remains in the subconsciousness while the Jesus-thought, the Jesus-feeling, the Jesus-experience, is coming to the surface? The process takes a strange and remarkable course. The understanding for Christ sank into the subconsciousness and there, in the subconsciousness, the understanding for Jesus began to glow. In the subconsciousness—not in the consciousness, which was dim—the consciousness of Christ that was flickering out and the consciousness of Jesus that was beginning to stir were destined to meet and counter-balance each other. Why was it, then, that the peoples who came down from Scandinavia, from the North of present-day Russia, received Christianity without the Christ-idea which, to begin with, was wholly foreign to them? Why was it that they received Christianity with the Jesus-idea? Why was Christmas the festival which above all others spoke to the human heart, awakened in the human heart feelings of holy bliss? Why was it? What was present in this Europe which in truth received from the South a completely distorted Christianity? What was it that kindled in men's hearts the idea which then, in the Christmas Festival, created such a deep, deep fount of experience?

Men had been prepared—but had largely forgotten by what they had been prepared. They had been prepared by the old Northern Mysteries. But they had forgotten the import and meaning of these ancient Mysteries. And we have to go very far back into the past to discover from the source and content of the Northern Mysteries the deep secret of the penetration of the Jesus-feeling into the soul-life of the European peoples.

The principles underlying the Northern Mysteries were quite different from those underlying the Mysteries of Asia Minor and of the South. The experiences underlying the Northern Mysteries were more intimately and directly connected with the existence of the stars, with nature, with earthly fertility, than with the wisdom represented in symbols within a Temple. The Mystery-truths are not the childish trifles presented by certain mystic sects to-day; the Mystery-truths are great and potent impulses in the evolution of mankind. Present-day Anthroposophy can no more revert to the Gnosis than mankind can revert to what the ancient Mysteries of the North, for example, signified for human evolution. And to believe that such Mystery-truths are now being revealed because of some kind of hankering to go back to what was once alive in them, would be a foolish misunderstanding. It is for the sake of deepening self-recollection, self-knowledge, that mankind to-day must be made aware of the content of such Mysteries. For what linked the Northern Mysteries with the whole evolution of the universe, arose from the earth, just as the Gnostic wisdom, inspired from the cosmos, was connected with happenings in the far distances of the universe. How the secret of man, linked as it is with all the secrets of the cosmos, comes into operation when a human being enters physical existence on the earth—it was this that, with greater depth than anywhere else at a certain period of earth-evolution, lay at the root of these ancient Northern Mysteries.

But we have to go very far back—to about three thousand years before Christ, perhaps even earlier—to understand what was alive in the hearts of those in whom, later on, the feeling for Jesus arose. Somewhere in the region of the peninsula of Jutland, in present-day Denmark, was the centre from which, in those ancient times, important impulses went out from the Mysteries. And—let the modern intellect judge of this as it will—these impulses were connected with the fact that in the third millennium before Christ, in certain Northern tribes, he alone was regarded as a worthy citizen of the earth who was born in certain weeks of the winter season. The reason for this was that from those places of the Mysteries on the peninsula of Jutland, among the tribes which at that time called themselves the Ingaevones, or were so called by the Romans—by Tacitus²—the Temple Priest gave the sign for sexual union to take place at a definite time during the first quarter of the year. Any sexual union outside the period ordained by this Mystery-centre was taboo; and in this tribe of the Ingaevones a man who was not born in the period of the darkest nights, at the time of greatest cold, towards our New Year, was regarded as an inferior being. For the impulse went out from that Mystery-centre at the time of the first full moon after the vernal equinox. Only then, among those who might believe themselves united with the spiritual world as became the dignity of man, was sexual union permissible. The characteristic virility—even in its aftermath—marvelled at by Tacitus, writing a century after the Mystery of Golgotha, was due to the fact that the forces which enter into such sexual union were preserved through the whole of the rest of the year.

And so those who belonged to the tribe of the Ingaevones (and in a lesser degree this was also true of the other Germanic tribes) experienced the process of conception with particular intensity at the time of the first full moon after the vernal equinox. They experienced it, not in wide-awake consciousness, but as it were heralded in dream. Yet they were aware of its significance in regard to the connection between the secret of man and the secrets of the heavens. A spiritual being appeared to the woman who was to conceive and in a kind of vision announced to her the human being who, through her, was to come to the earth. There was no clear consciousness, but only semi-consciousness, in the sphere experienced by souls when the entry of a human being into the physical world is taking place; subconsciously men knew that they were under the direction of the Gods, who then received the name of the Wanen, connected with wähnen, that is to say with what takes its course, not in clear, intellectual, waking consciousness, but in cognitive dream-consciousness.

What was once in existence and fitting for its own epoch, is often preserved in later times in symbols. Thus the fact that in those ancient times the holy mystery of the generation of a human being was wrapped in subconsciousness, and led to all births being concentrated in a particular period of the winter season, so that it was regarded as sinful for a man to be born at another time—this was preserved in fragments which passed over to a later consciousness as the Hertha or Erda or Nertus Saga. No erudition, as scholars themselves openly admit, has hitherto been able to interpret these fragments, for actually all that is known externally of the Nertus Saga, with the exception of a few brief notes, comes from Tacitus, who writes as follows about the Nertus or Hertha cult:

"The Reudigni, Aviones, Anglii, Varini, Eudoses, Saurini and Nuitones—Germanic peoples living amidst rivers and woods" (that is, roughly the several tribes who belong to the Ingaevones) " specially revere Nertus, that is, Mother Earth, and they believe that she intervenes in human affairs, makes journeys to the peoples." (Germania 40).

In the ancient cult of the Wanen it became known in dream-consciousness to every woman who was to give a citizen to the earth that the Goddess worshipped later on as Nertus would appear to her. The Divinity was, however, represented not exactly as female, but as male-female. It was not until later, through a corruption, that Nertus became an entirely feminine principle. Just as the Archangel Gabriel drew near to Mary, Nertus on her chariot drew near to the woman who was about to give a citizen to the earth. The woman concerned saw this in the spirit. Later, when the Mystery-impulse in this form had long since died out, echoes of the happening were celebrated in symbolic rites which Tacitus was still able to witness and of which he says the following:—

"On an island of the ocean is a sacred grove and in it there is a consecrated chariot covered with a veil. Only the priest may approach it."—This priest was taken to represent the ‘Initiate’ of the Hertha-Mystery—"He knows when the Goddess appears in the sacred chariot. He becomes aware of the presence of the Goddess in her holy place, and in deep reverence accompanies her chariot drawn by cows. Then there are days of joy and feasting in all the places which the Goddess honours with a visit. Then there are joyous days and wedding feasts. At those times no war is waged, no weapons are handled, the sword is sheathed. Only peace and quiet are at those times known or desired, until the Goddess, tired of her sojourn among mortals, is led back into her shrine by the same priest." (—This was actually the form taken by the vision—

"Then there are joyous days and wedding feasts." In such ancient records the descriptions are accurate and exact, only men do not understand them. "Then there are joyous days and wedding feasts. At those times no war is waged, no weapons are handled, the sword is sheathed." And so it was in very truth at the time which is now our Easter, when human beings believed in their inmost soul that the time of earthly fruitfulness had come for them too; it was then that the souls who were born at the time that is now our Christmas, were conceived. Easter was the time of conception. The experience was regarded as a holy, cosmic mystery, and it was this that was symbolised later on by the Nertus cult. The whole experience was veiled in the subconscious region of the soul, might not rise up into consciousness. This is hinted at in the description of the cult given by Tacitus: "Only peace and quiet are at those times known or desired—until the Goddess, tired of her sojourn among mortals, is led back into her shrine by the same priest. Then the chariot and the veil and even the Goddess herself are bathed in a hidden lake. Slaves perform the cult, slaves who are at once swallowed up as forfeit by the lake, so that all knowledge of these things sinks into the night of unconsciousness. A secret horror and a sacred darkness hold sway over a being who is able to behold only the sacrifice of death."

Everything that comes into the world calls forth a Luciferic and an Ahrimanic counterpart. The event which—as experienced by the Ingaevones—was part of the regular, ordained evolution of mankind was connected with the time of the first full moon after the vernal equinox. But owing to the precession of the equinox, what had remained from olden days as a dream-experience was transferred to a later date and therefore became Ahrimanic. When the experience that had arisen in ancient times in the true Hertha cult was advanced about four weeks, it became Ahrimanic. This meant that the union of the woman with the spiritual world was sought in an irregular way—at the wrong time. Here lies the explanation of the institution of the Walpurgis Night—between the 30th April and the 1st May. It is nothing but an Ahrimanic transposition of time. Luciferic transposition of time goes backward; Ahrimanic transposition of time runs in the opposite direction, being connected with the precession of the equinox. Thus the Ahrimanic, Mephistophelean form of the Hertha cult, the perversion into the diabolic, later became the Walpurgis Night; it is connected with the most ancient Mysteries of which only faint echoes remained.

Much of the content of the ancient Northern Mysteries lived on—if the matter is rightly understood—in the Scandinavian Mysteries. There, instead of Nertus, we find Friggo, a god who, according to the symbolism associated with him—but this can become intelligible only through spiritual science—turns into the very betrayer of what lies at the root of this Mystery.

One more thing must be mentioned in regard to these Mystery-practices. You can see that if the human seed was ripening from the time of the vernal full moon to winter time, one such human being would be the first to be born in the ‘Holy Night.’ Among the Ingaevones the first to be born in the Holy Night—the Holy Night of every third year in the most ancient times—was chosen as their leader when he reached the age of thirty, and he remained leader for three years, for three years only. What happened to him then I may perhaps be able to tell you on another occasion.

Careful investigation reveals that not only are Frigg, Frei, Freiga, merely additional designations for Nertus, as is the Scandinavian ‘Nört,’ but the name ‘Ing’ itself, whence Ingaevones, is another name for Nertus. Those who were connected with the Mystery called themselves "Men belonging to the God or the Goddess Ing"—Ingaevones. Only fragments of what really lived in this Mystery survived in the external world. One such fragment consists of the words of Tacitus already quoted. Another fragment is the well-known Anglo-Saxon rune of a few lines only. These famous lines are known to every philologist of the Germanic languages, but no one understands their meaning. They are approximately as follows:

"Ing was first seen among the East Danes. Later he went towards the East. He walked over the waves, followed by his chariot."

In this Anglo-Saxon rune there is an echo of what lay behind the old Mystery-customs of the Easter conception with a view to the Christmas birth. What happened then in the spiritual world was known best on the Danish peninsula. Hence the rune correctly says: "Ing was first seen among the East Danes."

Then came the time when this ancient knowledge fell more and more into corruption, when it was to be found only in echoes, in symbolism. This was the time in the evolution of humanity when what originated in the warm countries spread abroad. And what comes from the warm countries is something that is not connected—as is the case in the cold countries—with the intimate relation between the seasons and man's own inner experiences. From the warm countries came the impulse which resulted in the distribution of conceptions and births over the whole year; this of course had already happened in the South even in the days of the old, atavistic clairvoyance, although it was still to some extent pervaded by the old principles, the principles which prevailed in the times when in the cold regions the Women held sway and in the South the Temple Mysteries had long since superseded the old Nature-Mysteries. The Southern practice spread towards the North, although an intermixture of the old still remained at the time when the Wanen gods were superseded by the Asen gods. Just as the Wanen are connected with wähnen, so are the Asen connected with the German sein (being)—that is to say, being or existence in the material world which the mind tries to grasp externally. And when the men of the North had entered into an age when individual intelligence began to assert itself, when the Asen had supplanted the Wanen, the old Mystery-customs fell into decay. They passed over into isolated, scattered Mystery-communities of the East. And one Being only—he in whom the whole meaning of the earth was to be made new, he in whom the Christ was to dwell—he alone was destined to unite within himself what had once been the essence and content of the Northern Mysteries.

Hence the origin of the account in St. Luke's Gospel of the appearance of the Archangel Gabriel to Mary, is to be sought in the visions of spiritual realities once reflected in the Nertus-symbol of the ancient Northern Mysteries. The symbol had moved eastward. Spiritual science discloses this to-day and this alone explains the meaning of the Anglo-Saxon rune. For Nertus and Ing are the same. Of Ing it is said: "Ing was first seen among the East Danes. Later he went towards the East. He walked over the waves, followed by his chariot,"—over the waves of the clouds, that is, just as Nertus moved over the waves of the clouds.

What had once been general in the colder regions, here became singular, individual. It occurred as a single, unique event, and we find it again in the descriptions given in the Gospel of St. Luke.

But whatever has once existed in the world and has taken root, whatever is anchored in the heart's understanding, remains a possession of the soul. And when knowledge of Christianity was received in the North from the Roman South, men felt—not in clear consciousness but in the subconsciousness—it had some connection with an ancient Mystery-custom. Hence in the North, men were able to develop a particularly intense feeling for Jesus. The reality that had lived in the old Nertus Mystery had already sunk into the subconsciousness, yet in the subconsciousness it was present, it was sensed and dimly experienced.

When in those long past times in the far North, when the earth was still covered with forests that were the home of the bison and the elk, families came together in their snowcovered huts and under their lantern-lights gathered around the new-born child, they spoke of how with this new life there had been brought to them the new light announced by the heavens in the previous spring. Such was the ancient Christmas. To these people, who were one day to receive the tidings of Christendom, it was said: In the hour that is especially holy, one destined for greatness is born. It is the child who is the first to be born after midnight in the night designated as holy. And although men no longer possessed the ancient knowledge, when the tidings came that such a one had been born in far-off Asia, one in whom lived the Christ Who had come down from the world of the stars to the earth, something of the old feeling came alive in them.

It is incumbent upon the present age to understand such things more and more deeply and thereby grasp in concrete reality the meaning of the evolution of earthly humanity. Truths of mighty, awe-inspiring significance are contained in the Holy Scriptures, not just the trivialities of which we so often hear in religious teachings to-day, but sacred truths which thrill through the very fibres of our being, stirring our hearts to the depths. These are truths which flow through the whole evolution of humanity and resound in the Gospels. And as spiritual science reveals their deep, deep source, the Gospels will one day become a precious treasure, prized at their true worth. Men will know, then, why it is recounted in the Gospel of St. Luke:

"And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed. (And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria).

And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city.

And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David).

To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child.

And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered.

And she brought forth her first-born son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for him in the inn."

It was for Him, the first-born among men in whose souls true ego-hood was to awaken, that the holy Mystery-power of ancient days had passed over from the Danish peninsula to the distant East.

"And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.

And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid."

Nerta too, moving across the land, had announced to the old Wanen-consciousness, that is to say, in the subconsciousness of atavistic clairvoyance, the arrival of human beings on the earth.

"And the angel said unto them, Fear not; for behold I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.

And this shall be a sign unto you: Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying ..."

And now the heavenly Powers proclaimed what the Nerta-Priest in the old Northern Mystery-cult had proclaimed to the woman about to conceive.

"The revelation of the Divine from the Heights takes place at the time when there is peace among men who are of good-will."

As Tacitus narrates: "Then there are joyous days and wedding feasts. At those times no war is waged, no weapons are handled, the sword is sheathed."

The great goal for which man must strive is the attainment of the power to gaze into the course of the evolution of humanity. For the Mystery of Golgotha, too, through which earth-evolution received its deeper meaning, will become fully comprehensible when its place in the whole evolution of humanity is understood. In future times, when, with the disappearance of materialism, man will know, not in abstract theory but as a concretely real experience, that he is of divine origin, the ancient, holy Mystery-truths will again be understood; then the intervening time will be over, a time in which the Christ, it is true, lives on earth, but can be understood only by the awakened consciousness. For the Gnostic conception of Christ faded away; understanding for Jesus developed in connection with the old Nertus cult, but in unconsciousness. In the future, however, humanity will have to bring both the unconscious streams to consciousness, and unite them. And then an ever greater understanding of the Christ will take foothold on earth, an understanding that will unite the Mystery-knowledge with a great and renewed Gnosis.

Those who take the anthroposophical view of the world seriously, and the movement associated with it, will see in what it has to say to mankind no child's play but great and earnest, soul-shaking truths. And our souls must submit to this because it is right that we should be shaken by greatness.

Not only is the earth a mighty living being; the earth is an exalted spirit-being. And just as the greatest human genius could not stand at the height he reaches in later life if he had not first developed through childhood and adolescence, so the Mystery of Golgotha could not have taken place, the Divine would not have been able to unite with earth-evolution, if at the beginning of earthly days the Divine—in a different manner but in a manner still divine—had not descended to the earth. The form taken by the revelation of the Divine from the heavenly heights was not the same in the ancient Nertus cult as it was at a later time, but for all that it was a true revelation.

The knowledge contained in this ancient wisdom was, it is true, atavistic in character, but for all that it was infinitely more exalted than the materialistic view of the world which, in the sphere of knowledge, so brutally reduces humanity to the level of the animal.

In Christianity we have to do with a Fact, not with a theory. The theory is a necessary consequence and of importance for the consciousness that has had to develop in the further course of human evolution. But the essence of Christianity as such, the Mystery of Golgotha, is an accomplished Fact. The impulse entered, to begin with, into subconscious currents, as was still possible in Asia Minor at the time when the union of Christ with the earth took place.

Shepherds, men bearing a similarity with those among whom the Nertus cult flourished, are also described in the Gospel of St. Luke. I can give only very brief indications of these things. If we were able to speak of them at greater length you would find that there are deep foundations for what I have told you to-day. The human being has descended from spiritual heights ... hence the revelation of the Divine from the heavenly heights ... The revelation had to be expressed in this form to those who out of the ancient wisdom knew the destiny of man to be united with the secrets of the stars of heaven. But what must live on earth as the result of Christ's union with a man of earth—that can be understood only very gradually. The message is twofold: ‘Revelation of the Divine from the heights’—‘Peace in the souls on earth who are of good-will.’ Without this second part, Christmas, the Festival of the birth of Christ, has no meaning!

Not only was Christ born for men; men have also crucified Him. Even behind this lies necessity. But it is none the less true that men have crucified the Christ! And it may dawn upon us that the crucifixion on the wooden Cross on Golgotha was not the only crucifixion. A time must come when the second part of the Christmas proclamation becomes reality: ‘Peace to the men on earth who are of good-will.’ For the negative side too is discernible. Men are very far indeed from a true understanding of Christ and of the Mystery of Golgotha.

Does it not cut to the very heart that we ourselves should be living at a time when men's longing for peace is shouted down?³ It seems almost a mockery to celebrate Christmas in days when voices are raised in outcry against the desire for peace. To-day, when the worst has not actually befallen, we can but fervently hope that a change will take place in the souls of men, and a Christian feeling, a will for peace supersede these demonstrations against the desire for it. Otherwise it may not be those who are struggling in Europe to-day, but those coming over from Asia, who will one day wreak vengeance on this rejection of the desire for peace; it may be they who will have to preach Christianity and the Mystery of Golgotha to humanity on the ruins of European spiritual life. And then the indelible record will remain: that at Christmas time, nineteen hundred and sixteen years after the tidings of peace on earth to men of good-will, humanity came to shout down the desire for peace.

May it not succeed! May the good Spirits who are at work in the Christmas impulses protect luckless European humanity from such a fate!

• 1. Arius: "The Son was once created out of nothing by the Divine Will, was the first creature and the creator of the Universe, hence to be called God, though subject to the Father," This was declared heretical by the Council of Nicea in A.D. 325, and replaced by the Athanasian principle of faith. "The Son of God is from eternity, not created, but begotten out of the Being of the Father, and is of like nature to the Father.
  
  Streams of blood were shed in consequence of these doctrines, impenetrable as they are by the human mind (Weber: Lehrbuch der Weltgeschichte, 1875).
• 2. Mannus had three sons, after whom the people nearest the North Sea are called Ingaevones, those of the centre, Hermiones, the remainder Istae. (Germania 2).
• 3. A reference to the agitation against the German proposal in December, 1916 for peace negotiations.

Basel, April 9, 1915

Dear attendees! It is impossible to convince someone directly or to want to convince someone with a consideration in the field of spiritual science, as it is to be undertaken this evening, and it would be naive to assume such. For spiritual science as such, as it is meant here, is in the early stages of its development, and it only wants to gradually become part of the cultural development, of the spiritual life of people. Today, the ideas put forward by spiritual science completely contradict the usual conceptions of the widest circles. And it is much more natural, I might say much more to be expected, that objections arise against things as they had to be said this evening, that these things are seen as fantasies, as dreams. This is much more to be expected than if the things were immediately approved. In particular, anyone who has become familiar with the field of spiritual science or its results will not assume that they can easily convince anyone. Rather, what is the result of spiritual science must very slowly and gradually, as has always been the case with spiritual progress in the world, become part of our thinking habits, our whole way of conceiving of time.

And so it is only too understandable, even self-evident, that from many sides – and many more sides could be cited than can be mentioned in this introduction – objections and contradictions, even ridicule and mockery, must be raised against the results of spiritual science today. Above all, the most obvious objection is that spiritual science contradicts the well-founded achievements and ideas of natural science, which has made such great and powerful advances in our time. Today's lecture will perhaps be able to shed some light on this objection in particular. But objections also arise from other quarters, and as will hopefully become clear in today's and tomorrow's lectures, I would say understandable but unfounded objections.

The religiously inclined person, the adherent of this or that religious community, easily thinks - and I say again: understandably - that spiritual science could somehow behave in a hostile or antagonistic manner towards the religious deepening and religious life of the human soul. And in particular, there will still be many people today who are convinced that spiritual science - in that it wants to lead the soul to a world that is not the world of the senses and not the world of the ordinary mind, to a world of spiritual entities and spiritual activities - must fall into all sorts of superstitious beliefs and somehow spread them among those who want to become followers of spiritual science.

In particular, I might say that certain contemporary views must be ridiculed when spiritual science asserts its most fundamental tenet, namely, that man in his totality , in his totality, is not merely that which meets our external senses, that which he appears to himself for his external senses and that which he appears for the intellect, which is bound to the brain, to the nervous system. It is quite natural that from certain points of view today not only this is seen as a reverie, but that it is also ridiculed when it is said that this physical human being, as studied by ordinary science, this physical body, as it must be considered by many today as the only real thing - I must say - is not the only thing that can be recognized in a human being, but is, this physical body, only one limb of the entire human being.

Supernatural and invisible, as it were, - that is one result of spiritual science - in this physical body and underlying it, there is a fine, spiritual human being, who, in a certain way, as we shall see, is even the actor, the producer, the originator and activator of the physical body. And when spiritual science speaks of calling this second, supersensible, invisible body the etheric body, it is, as I said, quite understandable that such a result is presented as a blind assumption, ridiculed as a fantasy. And if spiritual science cannot be satisfied unless it establishes, in addition to this physical man, the spiritual man just mentioned, but must assume a higher link of human nature in addition to this, and if from some quarters this higher link of human nature is called the astral , for reasons that we shall return to today, then, as I said, it would be almost naive to believe that such assumptions would not be ridiculed from the point of view that is often considered the only scientific one today.

In the course of our present study, we want to create a little foundation for such supersensible members of human nature by presenting to the soul's mind the way in which spiritual science can arrive at such assumptions, what the spiritual scientist has to do in order to be allowed to present such assumptions to human knowledge.

True, real spiritual science is entirely in harmony with natural science as it has developed with its wonderful results. Indeed, it not only harmonizes with it, but it even wants to be a true, genuine successor to natural scientific research for spiritual phenomena, for the phenomena of the spiritual world. And when today, with regard to the life of the soul, the radical natural scientist says: Do we not recognize that this life of the soul, as it lives and develops in man, stands in intimate connection, in relationship, with the physical phenomena? Or does it not follow from this that this life of the soul is absolutely materially dependent, like the light and warmth of the flame, on the physical, material life? When the scientist of today, I say not out of a certain irreligious feeling, but out of his most fundamental conviction, presents this, then it must be said that true spiritual science, as it is beginning to develop today, for that, what natural science really has to say in relation to what has been hinted at, does not contradict natural science. On the contrary, it is entirely in agreement with natural science on all that is the legitimate result of natural science.

If we look at the soul as it initially presents itself in life, as we go through this life between birth and death, if we look at this soul life when we see through ourselves through self-knowledge with regard to our inner soul life, we can say that this soul life takes place in thinking, feeling and willing. And basically, in these three activities of the soul life, in thinking, feeling and willing, we have the scope, the horizon of the soul life before us. And if someone who does not yet stand on the ground of spiritual science, but would have the need, I would like to say, to understand something of the human being, to assume something that goes through the gate of death and after death dwells in a spiritual world, when such a one looks at the ordinary thinking, feeling and willing that presents itself in the everyday life of man and then, for some philosophical or other reason, would say: This thinking, feeling and willing is something that has nothing to do with the material processes in the human body, and if someone wanted to save the soul of man from physical destruction or from physical nature in general , the scientific researcher would come and say: But just look, it only takes a slight injury to the nervous system for this thinking, feeling and willing to be undermined. So, just as light and warmth depend on the flame, on the fuel, so does thinking, feeling and willing depend on physical processes. If these are interrupted in any way, then thinking, feeling and willing cannot take place in the right way.

In a plausible way, physiology, psychology and medicine know how to cite all sorts of reasons to prove that thinking, feeling and willing are entirely bound to these material processes of the nervous system, to the physical body in general.

Furthermore, it is pointed out: one can see how, in youth, with the development of the physical body, the soul life also develops; how in old age, when the activity of physical processes diminishes, thinking, feeling and willing also diminish. Does the scientifically minded person rightly say: “Can't we see that what we call the soul life is only an effect of physical and material processes?” The natural scientist may ask: “Is there anything left that could be said to enter the spiritual world through the gate of death as a living inner being?”

Again and again, the natural sciences draw our attention to an age-old contradiction in the explanation of the human soul, which we encounter in Plato's wonderful dialogue on the immortality of the human soul, which is linked to the death of Socrates. There we see how Socrates objects to Simmias, to the one who says: Ah, this whole soul life of man, we can grasp it as something like a game, the sounds of a lute, and the lute is the physical human body. When the forces of physical human life unfold, it is as if the strings of the lute unfold and produce a sound and give the context of the sounds. The physical activities and material processes of the human body give rise to the soul life, and when the lute is destroyed, the harmonies of the lute also cease. But the moment that which brings about material processes in man is destroyed, that which results from the sounding of human activities also ceases, and so does the soul life.

And it may even be said, my dear attendees, if one does not start from the subjective need of human life, from the longing for a life free of the body, then it is very difficult to escape if one only has the necessary feeling for the supporting forces of present-day scientific ideas, it is very difficult to escape from what science has to say from its point of view in the direction just mentioned. It is difficult to escape from it because the reasons that have to be given for the fact that the life of the soul, as it is known, as it takes place in everyday thinking, feeling and willing, is really demonstrably dependent on physical processes. The reasons to be presented for this are weighty for anyone who is able to see through the supporting forces of these reasons, who is at all able to enter into what present-day natural science has to give for general knowledge of the world, what it has to say.

But spiritual science stands - and this must be particularly emphasized - with regard to everything that has been said so far, completely on the ground of contemporary natural science. And there is - I cannot, of course, really mention the whole range of what would have to be mentioned now - there is nothing that can legitimately be brought forward in the indicated direction from the side of natural science that true, genuine spiritual science would contradict. Genuine, true spiritual science must fully admit that this thinking, as it confronts us in everyday life, that this feeling and willing, as it confronts us in everyday life, are the results of physical and material processes of the body and must therefore be extinguished the moment the body ceases to function at death. Everything that natural science has to say about this everyday life of the soul – and that alone is what it has to say – must also be a valid premise for true, genuine spiritual science.

But now, for the first time, true and genuine spiritual science is emerging, leading to paths of spiritual research that go beyond ordinary thinking, feeling and willing and that know how to cite yet another essence of the human soul. Yes, spiritual science says that what a person experiences in ordinary life as his thinking, feeling and willing is entirely dependent on bodily processes. But behind this thinking, feeling and willing are other soul forces, soul forces that are invisible and imperceptible to the ordinary soul life and that are independent of the physical, and that go through the gate of death when the body undergoes dissolution.

Ordinary thinking, it is carried out in such a way that, in our everyday lives, we perceive things through our senses and connect our thoughts to this perception. What we do, especially in spiritual science, must be admitted in the most serious sense that all of this is bound to the material processes of the nervous system. The actual soul does not come at all in everyday life, not even to the thinking consciousness. This soul life, as we shall see in a moment, also lies behind ordinary thoughts and ideas and it is this soul life that brings about the material processes. And because the material processes take place in the nervous system, images are created by the true soul life. These images are our thoughts. These images are, so to speak, no different from the mirror image that we see when we stand in front of a mirror.

As human beings, we stand before a mirror – this is meant to be a comparison, but it should mean something more than a mere comparison – if we cannot see ourselves, we see our image. The image is only there as long as the mirror stands before us; it depends entirely on the nature of the mirror. Dearly beloved attendees, with our soul life, with our true soul life, which spiritual science is only now discovering, which does not consist of ordinary thinking, feeling and willing, we stand like the person in front of the mirror who cannot see himself; and what this person does is that he causes processes in his nervous system in the unconscious. But this is what makes the nervous system a mirror, and thoughts and ideas are reflected back from this mirror. Thoughts and ideas are only there as long as the nervous system is able to function. Just as the mirror image has no reality of its own, so what we usually call our thinking has no reality other than as an image, a real image. It depends on the soul life being mirrored in the material processes of the nervous system.

Now, that which lives in thinking, the actual soul power, which can be compared to the person standing in front of the mirror and to whom his thoughts only appear as an image, this actual soul power must first be found through spiritual science. And in earlier lectures, I have already indicated from this point how the real, underlying soul life can be recognized in the mere pictorial existence that we experience in everyday thinking and imagining; I would like to say that which is present in thinking as the underlying soul power of thinking.

I have pointed out – you can read more about this in my books, in “How to Know Higher Worlds?” and in the second part of “Occult Science”. I can only hint at the principles of these things in the short time available to me here. I have already hinted at what then has to happen within the soul, so that what is reflected in thoughts and images in the picture becomes aware of itself, so that the life of the soul is truly grasped in that element which remains completely unconscious to it in ordinary, everyday life. What the soul has to accomplish within itself are intimate inner processes and experiences of the soul itself. If we only apply the thinking and imagining that we have in our ordinary daily experience, then we will never discover the real, supersensible soul that dwells in us and that passes through the gate of death even when the body is destroyed. For this, we have to undertake certain inner, intimate processes in our thinking, in our everyday thinking, which are called meditation and concentration of thought. I can only briefly hint at this.

While we usually follow the ordinary laws - imposed on us by the world - and let one thought follow another, in meditation and concentration, in the inner exertion and effort of thought, we try, through inner arbitrariness, to place certain thoughts, which we ourselves form or which we receive from somewhere, at the center of our attention. We try not only to let ourselves be guided by the world in terms of thinking, but to inwardly concentrate the soul's powers in such a way that these powers of the soul are directed towards a single series of ideas over a longer period of time. We endeavor to develop an inner activity of thinking, which one otherwise never develops in life, and to look with all the inner strength at a single thought; this is called meditation, concentrating on a thought.

It is not important that you merely think a thought, but that this thought is not prompted by any external stimulus, but arises from within, coming to the center of your consciousness and remaining in your soul for a long time, so that you can, as it were, survey this thought inwardly, so that your soul is directed towards it. It does not depend on what this thought says or whether it is true in relation to external appearances, but on the soul's inner focus. What matters is the soul's inner experience, what it experiences in its inwardly strengthened thought activity. It does not depend on what the soul presents. Therefore, it is better to focus on an allegorical idea that does not depict anything external. So it is important to use inner forces that one would not otherwise need for this presentation. It is then, however, necessary to have a great deal of patience and perseverance, because it sometimes takes years to develop an inner habit of thinking, so to speak, that is developed in this concentration, to such an extent that what is hidden, which lies behind thinking, which is active in thinking, as it were, but does not appear to ordinary consciousness, that this comes to consciousness. If you, and indeed often for years, in patience, energy and perseverance, I am now not just saying his thinking, but his inner powers, which underlie thinking, from the hidden, deep foundations, then you realize what it means not just to think, but to form in thought, to strengthen your inner experience in thought. What comes out of this, ladies and gentlemen, is an absolutely new experience of life, something that a person cannot have if they have not strengthened their thoughts in the way described. As I said, you can read more about this in the books mentioned; I can only give the basic principles now.

What does one find when one experiments purely in the realm of the soul and spirit? Well, dear listeners, what one finds can best be characterized by the following words: Where does ordinary thinking actually get us? If we really look at this ordinary thinking, as it develops in the human being in everyday life, with an open mind, we have to say: it gets as far as what we call remembering, as far as recollection, as far as the unfolding of memory. We have been able to point out that what actually lives in thinking stands before the bodily as before a mirror, and that what the ordinary thoughts are is reflected back by the body. But then this thinking, this imagining develops such thoughts, such ideas, which, as one usually thinks, so to speak, become ingrained in the soul life, remain there, so that later one can look back again and, without an external experience being present, what one has experienced earlier finds an echo in one's own soul life. Basically, all philosophy and all science is based on the fact that man can develop memory, that he can look back on that which is no longer present. And it is precisely with regard to that which one can call memory that the truly correct scientific conception of the world is in complete harmony with the spiritual researcher. However, one must not believe – and progressive natural science will prove this, it will prove what I will now have to explain as a result of spiritual science – one must not believe that something like a photographic image of an experience remains in the soul when it is recalled in memory. Nor should we believe that something remains in the nervous system which, when it becomes active again, has a similarity to the experiences we had years ago or even yesterday. Indeed, the ideas that people working in the field of natural science have today are still inadequate, to a certain extent. But it is precisely the direction of natural science that leads to what I am about to say.

What actually remains when we have an experience and then days or years pass and we later recall what we have experienced from the well of our memories? What remains then? Does an image remain? No.

Dear attendees, natural science in particular will prove that what remains in the body when we remember something looks, so to speak, no more like what we are remembering than the letters on a piece of paper. And we read what we remember as we read these letters. Natural science will prove that this memory bears a similarity to subconscious reading, that what remains in our memory is nothing but signs that must first be interpreted by the deeper soul life. Just as someone who would describe: There is a letter that has a vertical line, an upward line, a curve, there is a letter that has the curve ahead, then vertical lines and so on – how one does not read, but how the one who has learned to read does not describe what he on paper, but rather, through his ability to read, forms certain ideas that have nothing to do with what is on the paper, so it is with what remains as a sign in the bodily organization in relation to what we then have in the actually experienced memory. This memory is an inner reading. As I said, science will prove this, especially from its point of view. It will increasingly move away from the adventurous ideas it currently has. You will soon see that spiritual science can come to such an insight, as it has just been expressed, when other types of spiritual scientific ideas are discussed.

In this way, the human being's thinking comes to a point where it goes beyond mere perception of mirror images, to a kind of backward reading, to a subconscious backward reading. This too is a kind of mirror; but what is mirrored are only signs, not an actual image, but signs that we later evoke through what we have within us as soul power, to what the resurgence of memory then is. Let us note from this that when we weave and live in our memories, we are actually weaving and living in a truly spiritual realm. At the moment when thinking passes over into memory, a deeper, purely spiritual-soul power is already at work in this thinking; one just does not want to admit it in the ordinary way. For when we remember, we cannot conjure up the process that remained in the brain — that would be nothing more than a description of the letters. We live and weave in a real being. In a real inner experience, we are in remembrance. It is through memory that man ascends from thinking, feeling and willing, which are still bound to the body in the broadest sense, to the spiritual. And when man trains his will sufficiently, he becomes aware that when he lives in memory, he lives in the soul, in the soul that is independent of the body, in that only the signs are in the body.

When, through meditation and concentration, thinking is strengthened and enlivened in the manner described, one comes to transform this thinking itself into what it is not in ordinary life. This thinking then gains in inner activity. It is just the same with this thinking as when one stands before a mirror and makes it so active that one thereby wipes out the mirror image and then becomes aware of oneself as standing there in one's own soul-power. So it is with thinking in concentration. You extinguish the ordinary thoughts, but you awaken in the power of thinking, and then you realize: You are awakening in something that no longer has anything conditional in the body; you become aware of something completely new. You also notice the difference, which consists in the fact that ordinary thinking is completely bound to the body; if the body does not reflect the thinking back as a mirror image, it is not there. But now one becomes aware that there is a thinking that is independent of bodily experience. As I said, it is still difficult today for a person to readily admit, without the usual ideas and habits of thinking, that there really is an inner soul force that underlies thinking, and that this force becomes so aware that the person, by having this inner experience, becomes completely independent of the body. So that one can say: The thinker, by experiencing himself in the power of thinking, in his own thinking, slips out of the body and becomes independent of the body. Now he can also judge that this inner power of thinking is really something that is independent of the body. With concentration, a real process has been achieved, a soul has become something else, has become that which can know itself independent of the body.

And now, just when you have patiently and persistently and energetically done such exercises, through which you have become more and more powerful inwardly and have come to an experience, something significant occurs; an inner tragic experience occurs. I would like to say that it is like this: basically, everyone who seriously undergoes these methods of spiritual research must experience these processes. It is the case that, by concentrating and developing the soul forces on which thinking is based, we do indeed feel more and more alive inwardly. But this is only possible up to a certain point. There comes a point in the inner experience when the inner strength comes to an end, when, without exaggeration, one can say that the whole burden of an unknown world weighs on the soul. And then the possibility of experiencing this strengthened thinking disappears. One feels how this inner experience is extinguished by an unknown power. If one were to do only the exercises that I have listed so far, one would indeed come to a point through these exercises where, as if in a kind of inner, tremendous strain, one feels as if one's soul has dissolved into nothingness.

Therefore, no true spiritual scientific method can recommend for the path into the spiritual world only what has been presented to you now. Rather, other exercises must be done at the same time as this meditation, this concentration. For you have been able to see how the practice discussed so far develops and draws on the soul forces on which thinking is based. We would really enter into phenomena that would tear us apart like a tremendous resistance from an unknown power if we wanted to do this exercise in a one-sided way. In addition to this thinking, the human will must be developed, which is more the active soul power. When a person begins not only to deepen his thinking through meditation and concentration, but also to seek inner strength for this thinking, which otherwise lies hidden in the deep well of the soul life, only then does he arrive at the right thing.

Now it is of course possible - I refer again to the books mentioned - that one can also make one's life of will more and more calm and serene through intimate, inner soul-searching, that one can extract from it more and more of what the human soul's ordinary egoistic drives and passions are. But I would like to mention those exercises through which one can most surely come to an inwardly developed soul life in the same way as one comes to the development of the thinking life in the other way. There we must approach something that enters human life in such a mysterious, often terrible, but always unfathomable way for ordinary experience. This is what we call human destiny. Not that we can develop our will only in the face of fate, as it is now being presented. But it is, in a sense, a position in relation to human fate that is to be characterized now, the next way in which we can achieve this inner cultivation of the will in us.

This fate, how does it approach man in ordinary life? Well, it is often said: the blows of fate fall upon us. Something happens, and we can either be touched sympathetically or antipathetically by what happens to us; we can undertake this or that against the blows of fate, but in this life between birth and death we will feel fate as a power that shapes our lives, but to which we can only relate as to an unfathomable, mysterious power.

But if you look at this human life without prejudice, you will come to a different view of fate in ordinary life. Let us try to understand how we are what we are in this moment of life – not in the abstract, but in reality. Let us try to understand how we are what we are in reality. We can do this or that; we do this or that; we are capable of applying this or that strength, of rejecting this or that in ourselves. Let us think about how we can do this, how we have become the whole human being that we are now, how we are this. We will find that if we look back over our lives, something happened so many years ago that intervened in our lives as if by chance. If it had not happened to us, we would not have done this or that, we would not have developed this or that strength, we would not have acquired these or those inclinations. The way we are configured today is the result of what fate brought us at that time. After years, we see it quite differently. We see that fate has forged us. We couldn't even write today if we hadn't lived in the second half of the nineteenth century, when we were taught how to write.

What is it, then, that we call our self? What is it other than the result of our destiny, the result of what has flowed into us, what we now want because we want to do it, if fate had not shaped our will, forged our will, in life between birth and death? When we confront our destiny in this way, we realize that we ourselves, our ego, our self, are actually a product of this destiny, that this destiny has coagulated in our self, in our ego, just as the mass of a mineral coagulates in a crystal. We are formed out of our destiny. What we want now has coagulated out of everything that has formed our destiny.

If you live abstractly in these thoughts, they do not mean much, dear attendees, but if you look at your entire inner soul life, with the totality of your feelings and sensations, you might say, as if at something very substantial, at a fixed point, then you begin to develop certain feelings, certain sensations towards this fate. You may develop gratitude to this fate for having shaped you into what you are now, even if it has inflicted terrible and painful blows on you. But all the feelings that arise can be characterized by one common trait: you grow together with your destiny in the life between birth and death; you learn to recognize how you are a result of this destiny, how destiny is inherent in what you are. As a result, you grow together with your entire stream of destiny. What you have within you as a sense of your own identity is what you tear out of yourself and identify with intimately in the stream of fate. However, this must not remain an abstract thought, but a deep, inner experience must again be that the soul frees itself from this corporeality and now no longer feels itself as I just in its skin, but really feels itself in its stream of fate. One looks at one's destiny and says to oneself: That is you yourself; you would not be what you are if it had not been for your destiny.

Just as the power of thought frees itself from the body, as described earlier, so such contemplation - but it must take hold of the mind, the feeling, the will - frees the human being from the body and flows out into destiny.

But it does not stop there, that is the peculiar thing, but by doing the one exercise of the power of thought, which I have mentioned, and doing the other exercise, which tears him out of himself and identifies him with his destiny, he comes to stand before a truly new world. If we were to do the thinking exercise alone, we would come to the point where we say: it is as if the whole development of the world were waiting for us. But if we do the whole exercise at the same time, which relates to the will and through which an outlook on destiny can be formed, then the thinking exercise is also stimulated.

The two exercises stimulate each other and make something completely new out of the soul, tearing the soul out of the body. And while in the ordinary memory the human being must still live in his body for the images to emerge, the images of the memory of past experiences - there must indeed be signs in the physical -, we are able to develop a world of images; a completely new world that was previously unknown to us emerges. This exercise of the will must go hand in hand with the thinking exercise.

Why do I call this exercise, which is related to destiny, an exercise of the will? Because the human being comes to truly say to himself: this destiny has not just happened to me, but I have wanted it. As true as the will I develop is won from destiny, so true have I shaped my destiny out of my will. By practicing this exercise of will, the human being is able to tear his will out of himself and identify with his destiny. And so, by deepening his thinking and thereby discovering a new power of soul, a new power of thinking, and by tearing his will out of himself and developing it into a new power, the human being is able to have before him not just a world himself, but to have a world before him that he experiences in such a way that he knows, by experiencing it, that he is independent of his body, that he lives in the merely spiritual-mental.

To make us better understand each other, it should be said that man, in a certain way, knows what I have now described as a world of images that appears before man when he discovers a hidden power within himself through meditation and concentration. Man knows what I am talking about, but he knows it in a merely chaotic way, in chaotic images, in scraps of imagination. When a person sinks into sleep every day, dream images can arise from this, as is well known. But what do we have in front of us in these dream images? Now, you see, when a person lives in their dreams, as is the case in ordinary life, there is nothing special in these dreams. But when one gradually comes to discover the power of thought as a deepened power within oneself, then one knows that with the soul, with which one steps out of the body, one is now also out of the body in sleep, only one remains unconscious in the process.

One is not in one's body during sleep, one has gone out of the body with what one has discovered in the described way. But one has not developed the powers initially, so the soul remains unconscious when it is outside the body. But the dreams can emerge. They arise from the fact that the human being is bound to the body by an inner force. During waking life, the body reflects the soul life in thinking, feeling and willing. Dreams are formed from the body mirroring the soul life. In this state, the human being does not understand what is happening. Only as a spiritual researcher can one understand that during sleep one is really outside of the body. Only a spiritual researcher can understand that the body is an object for the sleeping soul outside of it. Because the human being does not yet have a full understanding of these things, they interpret everything in the context of ordinary life. Only when one's soul life deepens, as I have described, one does not come to a dream life only, not at all to a dream life only, nor to something morbid, somnambulistic, but one comes to a life that also takes place in images, but in images that one knows mean something real, that they are not mirror images.

What do these images mean? By developing the soul power on which thinking is based, one encounters something that is like a memory power that is no longer bound to bodily signs but develops freely in the soul-spiritual. It is not at all like the kind of thing we know as somnambulistic clairvoyance, but an inner life comes to meet us, which, in terms of its configuration, is the same as the power of remembrance. And now one can learn to decipher that which one recognizes as belonging to oneself, but which was within oneself without one consciously feeling it; that is this world of images. From this one gradually realizes that it is the world from which our physicality, our physical life, was first formed. One recognizes from what one is aware that it has connected with what has come to one as physical from father and mother through inheritance, what announces itself to us within this physical as our self, what has descended from the spiritual world and permeates and shapes us inwardly. We come to recognize ourselves as coming from a state that existed before our birth, a state in a spiritual world. An imaginative world comes towards us. But this imaginative world contains everything that unites with the physical materiality that we have inherited from our father and mother. This world contains the eternal soul, which now works in the physical body, which is mirrored in thinking, feeling and willing; the real soul life, which cannot be investigated by scientific methods, which lies behind all that is known as soul life in ordinary life. It is this that now also passes through the portal of death into a spiritual world. And our life is thereby directly included in the life that takes place in the spiritual world, in a spiritual existence. This becomes an experience for true spiritual research, a real inner experience.

And when the spiritual researcher has progressed so far as to apply this art of inner experimentation, he experiences not only what he now knows as his spiritual and psychological experience; he does not merely experience something that can so easily be ridiculed. he truly experiences that there is an ethereal, a finer existence, that he finds a finer body underlying his physical body, which descends from the spiritual world and returns to the spiritual world. He not only experiences this, but, just as we not only have eyes and ears, but also experience the things of the world ourselves, which stand outside of us, so we can, in the moment when we enter into our own spiritual being, come into contact with the spiritual being that underlies all being. We enter into an elementary world, into a world where spiritual experiences and processes take place that we have not known before and that underlie all physical experiences and processes. This is not philosophical speculation, it is not something imagined, of which spiritual science speaks; it is the result of the most serious research. It is true that this research is not carried out in the laboratory with external objects and instruments in external activities, but it proceeds in direct inner, intimate experiences of the soul itself. The soul-spiritual must be explored through methods that are applied to the spiritual-soul in man. Of course, great harm is being done to spiritual science by people who believe that they can already stand in this spiritual science, talking about all sorts of foolish things that can be attained without renunciation in one's soul, without work in one's soul that is much more difficult, much more renunciation than work in the outer natural sciences.

If it is repeatedly believed that someone who has applied this spiritual-scientific method to his soul can proclaim anything about the spiritual world, then one has a naive idea about these things. The work that needs to be done to explore the slightest thing in the spiritual world requires real inner exertion of the human soul. The soul must first tear itself away from the physical for the particular area it wants to explore spiritually, in order to place itself in the spiritual. And one cannot say that one can write down the rules by which the soul rises to a body-free realization in a small booklet and then say: Follow these rules and you will enter an area that leads into the spiritual world. Rather, one must say: what has to happen there changes according to the preconditions one brings with one. It cannot be grasped in individual rules, but one must recognize inwardly through direct experience: Now you are facing a real new world, a completely real new world, not a world of fantasy.

When we have reflected on our own soul and spirit and are able to see that, with our soul and spirit, we also enter a spiritual and soul world of supersensible processes, we can ask again: What happens when we then also develop our will using the example of fate? Where does the human being end up when he says to himself: My will is in the whole stream of my destiny; I say “Yes” to everything that has affected me; I myself have flowed out of what is the stream of my destiny; I am not in myself, but in the stream of destiny? When one really makes the experience of becoming one with destiny, then one comes to experience something even higher in human nature. We do not just experience what I have described, that I said it is there before birth. Rather, by developing our will, we experience a core of our being that lies very deep in our soul. And we gradually learn to recognize: Yes, this destiny, it is really the case that only the person who identifies this destiny with his or her being can truly grasp this destiny. Just as someone who has never heard of natural science cannot unravel the why when he sees lightning and thunder and other forces of nature outside in nature, as it stands before such a person quite incomprehensibly before the soul, but these processes can be explained by someone who has studied natural science, so it is with destiny using the spiritual scientific method. Something comes into fate that we ourselves are in our deeper essence. We flow out into our fate. But by flowing out into fate with our whole being, we get to know our inner soul core.

However, you then have to learn to use the knowledge you have gained to dissect this fate. Just as natural phenomena were only deciphered over centuries and centuries, you have to learn to decipher fate in order to find an inner order. Then we find that what presents itself as our destiny when we identify with it represents what we were in previous lives. And by getting to know the inner order of our destiny, we learn that this destiny is connected with earlier lives on earth. In this way, our knowledge of our life is not composed of an overview of our present life on earth, but we recognize that our destiny contains what was once or repeatedly present for us as an earthly life, which has now formed that which we have imaginatively recognized in images as our core being, so that it is revealed as it stands before us now. That which we explore through the power of deepened thinking, we learn to relate to our supersensible life before birth and after death. And that which we explore by deepening our will and destiny, we learn to understand in such a way that it refers us back to earlier earthly lives and points us to future earthly lives. As this fate melts together with the world of inner images, we know that this world of images is like a core that takes hold of our fate and carries it over into a life between death and a new birth, and in turn leads us into a new earthly existence.

In this way, we get to know a part of human nature by deepening our thinking. We learn to recognize, as it were, our etheric being, that which, as a supersensible body, underlies our physical body, as soul power. When the spiritual researcher speaks of an etheric body, this etheric body is found by a method that is just as reliable as the method used by the chemist to separate hydrogen from oxygen. Just as it cannot be seen from water that it contains a substance that burns, hydrogen, while water does extinguish fire, so too, when a person is standing in front of you, if you just look at the person with your ordinary mind, you cannot see that a supersensible person in this physical man lives and can extend his life beyond birth and death; but who can be investigated by just as certain, even if inward scientific methods, as it is the just mentioned method, through spiritual science, which rises with it to the rank of a real science. That which underlies man as an ethereal being — not speculation, not some kind of fantasy leads to this, but a real experience, an experience, however, that must first be developed.

By going even further and deepening our will, we come to grasp the astral human being – it is easy to ridicule the word, the 'astral' human being, but this word is justified, as we shall see presently, we come to take hold of the astral man, the human being who develops from life to life and who then becomes aware that he is no longer bound to his body but is connected with the whole world. In this way, the human being comes to recognize himself in his astral body, in that he is dependent on the whole cosmos, in which the laws of the stellar world prevail. Therefore, in a comparative expression, one can call this human being, who is not bound by the laws of what we experience between birth and death, but by the laws of the whole world, the astral human being.

You can see that anyone who approaches spiritual science can truly live in the belief that, with this spiritual science, we are at the end of a spiritual development. The spiritual scientist, as I have already mentioned here, is unconcerned when he is told: Yes, you are claiming something that you cannot claim at all if you use your five senses. You are well aware that this is also how it was said when Copernicus tried to make people understand that the Earth does not stand still and the Sun revolves around the Earth, but that, conversely, the Sun stands still, so to speak, and the Earth revolves around the Sun. This also went against the five senses, and it took a long time for people to adapt their way of thinking to what was a better truth than the earlier one that corresponded to the five senses.

That which is being researched from the depths of being must first become established in the understanding of people, despite the resistance of the world. The spiritual researcher is unconcerned that this will happen, but it takes time.

And in the same way, one can say: Yes, what the spiritual researcher has to present as a world that stands above the ordinary world of the senses is very different from what a person perceives in this world. It has to be different. For with regard to everything that the ordinary life of the soul contains, this thinking, feeling and willing, which science can only speak about when it becomes psychology, the spiritual researcher is in complete agreement with the natural scientist. He will not speak in a dilettantish way of an immortality that merely lives out in images, which must disappear with the mirror of the brain, with physicality in this form. But that is precisely the peculiarity of spiritual science: it agrees with natural science in all that it contains, and it never says that spiritual science must turn against natural science, because the spiritual researcher fully admits all the justified criticisms of natural science. He only discovers through his methods that which cannot be present in ordinary life, and which is nevertheless what is to be regarded as the eternal, immortal essence of man, who goes through births and deaths and through repeated earthly lives and who bears within him the character of the eternal.

When the natural scientist comes and says: From my way of thinking I must reject this, — then the spiritual researcher must say to the natural scientist: So give your reasons. Then the natural scientist gives the reason: The soul life is dependent on the brain. The spiritual researcher will say: You are right. He will agree with the natural scientist on all points. But he will say: Only then, after one has entered your territory, does the investigation of the spiritual-soul life begin, which has to do with completely different forces than those for which natural science is fully justified. Therefore, it is indeed a thoroughly understandable misunderstanding when one or the other objection is raised against spiritual science from the point of view of natural science. Spiritual science knows very well what it has in natural science. And it would be dilettantism in the field of spiritual science if it were to oppose natural science. And nor can it be said that the spiritual researcher cultivates superstition in any way.

This spiritual science leads into a real spiritual world. By discovering the real spiritual world - not the spiritual world that is dreamed up by those who only want to dream up a spiritual world but cannot find one - it actually confronts superstition. Spiritual science is precisely that which can and will heal all superstitious beliefs. Superstition flourishes where spiritual science is not accepted, yet people still want to enter the spiritual world. Spiritual science leads people into the spiritual world in a fully satisfying way and shows them the real course of a spiritual event behind the world of the senses. It shows the human being that his soul, as a spiritual being, is part of this spiritual world and that it formed the body itself out of this spiritual world before birth, with which it is part of this earthly life. But by discovering a real spiritual world, an unjustified spiritual world, as it underlies superstitious beliefs, is counteracted.

And as for the standpoint of spiritual science in relation to religion, here, too, one very often encounters misunderstandings. I will have to deal with this in more detail tomorrow in my lecture, which is intended to provide information about the building that we are constructing as a place of care for this new kind of science, spiritual science. Today, I have only allowed myself to speak to you about some of it, to stimulate your souls, certainly not with the intention of convincing you, but only to give you some food for thought.

The subject will be how spiritual science must be cultivated in a building that, in its artistic design, can truly serve as an environment for this spiritual science, and to show what is meant by the building, what is meant by placing spiritual science in the artistic endeavors of our time. In doing so, a spotlight will also be thrown on the extent to which it is unfounded when religious minds believe they have to address spiritual science as something hostile to religion. Today I would like to say only this much about it: While it is true that natural science with its ideas leads people to stray from religion, to become alienated from religious ideas, spiritual science, by showing people how the spiritual world is a reality, how the spiritual world really exists, will stimulate people's minds in such a way that even those who may consider themselves enlightened can in turn find a religious deepening.

Spiritual science cannot replace religion. It cannot dissuade anyone from their religion. This is because the task of religion is different from that of spiritual science. Religion must be cultivated alongside spiritual science. But by presenting itself as a science of the spiritual world, spiritual science does not, like natural science, lead people who want to be enlightened away from religion, but rather leads them to religion. And so those who are sincere about religious life must welcome spiritual science as the movement that can lead enlightened people to a deeper religious experience, to religious contemplation, to a true, genuine faith.

But I would like to talk about that tomorrow in connection with what I will have to say about the place of care that is to be built for spiritual science over in Dornach. But what I have tried to develop before you today as the basis of spiritual science should be something that can ultimately be summarized in a basic feeling of the human soul. For that is the peculiarity of spiritual science, that it does not merely stimulate our intellect, which is bound to the brain, but that it speaks to that which lives in every human soul, independently of all diversity. One should not think that one must become a spiritual researcher, but anyone can become one. I would ask you to read up on this in my books.

You don't have to be a spiritual researcher, but the spiritual researcher speaks to what is in every person, what lives in every human soul. He speaks to that in man which passes through births and deaths; to that which is eternal in the human soul. And what the spiritual researcher says can be understood by every human being, who just clears away the debris and obstacles in themselves that have arisen through today's habits of thinking. And that will, in a sense, be the spiritual scientific development of the future, that there will be individual spiritual researchers, as there are individual chemists, who will put what they produce through their research at everyone's disposal. There will be individual spiritual researchers who will be guided into the spiritual world by what has been described as the spiritual scientific method, and they will be able to speak about this spiritual world. But what they will say about this spiritual world will be able to be inscribed in every soul with understanding when the many prejudices that still exist today have been removed. But that will then be able to engender a new life in the soul, a life that the soul needs in the face of the ever more complicated and complex conditions of the outer world, which in the present time everywhere, wherever we look in the non-neutral countries, present such a sad picture. But even apart from such aspects: we can recognize that the soul will need these strong life forces in the face of ever more complicated and complex circumstances. Spiritual science wants to give the soul these strengthened life forces, which will stimulate an inner fulfillment and strengthening in it that can cope with everything that will flow into the soul, more than has ever been the case in the past.

And so I would now like to summarize, not in a rational judgment, but in a sentence of feeling, what I have tried to suggest to your souls through these reflections. For it is not what we intellectually retain and know of spiritual science that matters, but what is awakened in the soul as direct experiences of feeling, emotion, and mind, that is what matters.

And what should be stimulated by the words of the lecture, I would now like to let it flow together into an overall feeling that, like a result, should summarize the lecture and conclude it:

The senses of man speak to
The things in the vastness of space;
They have an effect on the human soul,
Changing in the course of time.
Experiencing itself, the soul seizes
The boundlessness of space,
The boundlessness of time,
The spirit's realm of being
In its eternal uniqueness.

Basel, January 12, 1916

Dear attendees!

In earlier lectures on spiritual science that I have been privileged to give here, I have repeatedly indicated that anyone who is grounded in this spiritual science, as it is meant here, is well aware that, from the present habits of thought, from all that one is accustomed to regarding as truth research, much, much can be objected to, and that it is quite understandable to the spiritual researcher himself when what he has to present is initially seen as fantasy, reverie or perhaps worse. Nevertheless, today, since it is possible to continue the reflections the day after tomorrow, I would still like to arrange what I have to say today as if the very obvious objections that can be raised against spiritual science from a scientific, religious and so on point of view were initially disregarded. This evening, I would like to consider the spiritual science, the essence of the research into the supersensible worlds, without taking any of these objections into account. The day after tomorrow, I will address these objections, which can be described as objections and apparent refutations from a wide range of perspectives.

In fact, dear attendees, all of humanity's deeper thinking and research has always been aimed at recognizing the essence of the human being itself as a supersensible one, because in the study of the essence of the human being, it becomes clear to the observer, let us say, to the philosophical observer, for example, that it is a matter of course that one which one is accustomed in the sensual world, one cannot approach the real essence of man; or at least - if one believes that in all that the senses can see, what the mind bound to the brain can explore, if one also believes that one can grasp the essence of man in this way, as the more or less materialistically inclined monism believes, then it always turns out – that for a deeper reflection of the thinker or researcher, what can be said from such sides about the nature of man, leaves the deeper needs of knowledge unsatisfied, and that one still has the feeling, the sensation, that something must be able to come from some side that shows the essence of man outside the sensual world.

I would like to draw attention to one of the very first thinkers in the development of human thought who endeavored, through the most strenuous thinking, to point out to his students at the university, to his listeners in the lecture itself, how one can immediately emerge from what does not allow the being of the human being to be recognized, to what one can find it in, in the inner life of the soul. This thinker is Johann Gottlieb Fichte. And in a way that one might say was paradoxical, he tried to show his listeners how the soul should move, as it were, in order to find its way from the sensory into the supersensible. For example, at the beginning of lectures he would say to his listeners: “Try to think of the wall.” Now, of course, that was easy. The listeners tried to put themselves in the state of mind in which they thought the wall. So after he had let his listeners think the wall for a while, he said: “So now try to think the one who thought the wall.” And that had the immediately convincing effect that Fichte knew how to achieve: it amazed his listeners, so much so that we contemporaries, who have recorded this scene, can describe how amazed the listeners actually were, how you could see that they were now making an effort to think the one who had previously thought the wall – how thinking slackened in a certain way, how it did not venture to go to the point to which it was being pointed.

Goethe, who approached the questions of knowledge primarily from a very human point of view, namely from the point of view of fruitful life, once made the statement that – one might say – is illuminated precisely that one refers to Fichte's claim in such a way as it has just been done – Goethe made the statement that he had behaved wisely in a certain way by avoiding thinking about thinking. He, who in everything he did for the soul wanted to sense direct life, felt very particularly that with this attempt to think thinking, man is led first of all to a kind of impossibility if he only sticks to ordinary thinking. And yet, anyone who begins to research the supersensible worlds can only initially rely on thinking, because they soon realize that what the senses can teach them or what can be combined from sensory phenomena still raises questions that, to a certain extent, lead the human being outside of their actual being. In thinking, he is with himself, and he can hope, at least, that if he really gets into the inner movement of thinking with the power of his soul, something may perhaps reveal itself to him that leads to the actual being of the human being.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, it is a peculiar phenomenon that the further one gets in thinking, as it exists in ordinary life, the more one struggles with this thinking, the more intense the doubts become, with this thinking somehow to find a gateway into the world in which the actual essence of man is. Yes, from what one experiences inwardly in thinking, one really does come, in the end, to the conviction that one can actually — let me use the trivial comparison — one can actually think thinking just as little as one can wash water.

And yet, the real methods, the real way to penetrate into those worlds in which the essence of the human being can be recognized – or, as we shall see later, can actually be experienced – they nevertheless lead through thinking. Only it leads to thinking in such a way that this thinking is not accepted as it presents itself in everyday life or in ordinary science, but that it is developed in such a way that, through this development, it basically becomes a completely different kind of soul power than it was before. And basically, all understanding of the study of the supersensible worlds depends on first learning how thinking can become something quite different in the human soul through a certain inner treatment than it is in outer life and in ordinary science.

Now, I have often had the opportunity here to point out the essential thing that has to be done in the treatment of thinking, so that this thinking becomes a completely different soul force than it is from the outset; and so today I do not want to point out again, in principle, what thinking must now accomplish in order to, so to speak, come out of itself and become a completely different soul force. I will only mention a few things that characterize what is actually achieved when thinking is treated in a certain way, purely inwardly, in a soul-like way, so that it becomes something quite different from what it is in the first place. You can find a detailed description of the methods by which thinking can be treated in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds.” You can find it in the second part of my “Occult Science.” Today I want to emphasize only the fact that certain inner activities are indicated that thinking can undertake, but which are purely of a soul nature – a certain way of taking perceptions into one's consciousness and relating to them, taking perceptions, connections and to relate to them and so on - that the soul becomes capable of doing this by interspersing the thinking with something that is unusual for ordinary thinking, that one thereby experiences something within the thinking, I would like to mention this first. And these experiences, which one brings about, are a first step in the exploration of the supersensible worlds. What one experiences precisely by strengthening and inwardly reinforcing one's thinking through meditation – and the types of meditation and concentration are mentioned in the books mentioned – is that one comes to realize that the thinking one applies in ordinary life and in ordinary science is, as it is, unsuitable for exploring the supersensible worlds. One notices, in particular, that when one devotes oneself to this ordinary thinking, one does not, in this thinking, become aware of the forces that can lead into the supersensible worlds. And even more than the mere materialistic theorist, through such mental exercises, through the actual inner experience of thinking, one gains the full conviction that the thinking one does in ordinary life, between birth or, let us say, between conception and death, that this thinking everywhere requires the bodily tool, the bodily organization. And because the bodily organization is necessary for this, because this thinking proceeds in such a way that everything it accomplishes makes use of the bodily tool, this thinking cannot free itself from being within the sensual world, and therefore one cannot enter through this thinking into any other world than the one in which one cannot find the essence of man. And precisely by commanding silence to all outer perception in meditation, by switching off the senses arbitrarily, so to speak, by commanding the inner affects, the inner feeling and sensing to stand still and by devoting oneself purely meditatively, inwardly, to certain thoughts in order to concentrate all soul powers on these thoughts and thereby strengthen thinking, one notices that it is the attachment of thinking to the physical tool that prevents one from entering the supersensible worlds. This is precisely what one attains through meditation: one realizes, one perceives exactly how one makes use of the body in order to think. One becomes, so to speak, more convinced of this through experience than the theoretical materialist can prove through it. One lives with this thinking within the bodily, the physical organization. But one also notices that, by living within the bodily, physical organization, this bodily, this physical organization makes something specific possible that would not be possible without it, that it, this bodily organization, gives thinking something that thinking would not have without this organization – if I may first express this paradoxical sentence. It will already prove true in the further considerations of the evening. Namely, what one notices is that, in the process of thinking, something must remain of the thought in healthy mental life. Everyone knows what must remain. It is the memories. It must be possible that, alongside thinking, something arises in our mental life that we call 'memory'. He who would lose what he thought the moment he thought it would not be an ordinary man for our external physical world. The fact that we can store thoughts in memory is the basis for this. And now, through the inner methodical treatment of thinking in the indicated direction, one notices that one's physical organization is necessary for memories to remain of the thinking. And with that, one also notices that one can, in a certain way, detach thinking from the physical organization. One can only not detach the thinking that becomes memory.

What I have just said leads the spiritual researcher down a very specific path. It leads him to recognize that memory, as we initially have it as human beings, is a force that is only significant for the physical-sensory world, and that this memory must first be detached, so to speak, from the activity of thinking, from the actual process of thinking. I would like to say: Just as the chemist uncovers the secrets of material nature by separating substances from one another in the laboratory, so too must the spiritual researcher proceed with the individual soul processes. Only that his analysis, his spiritual scientific analysis, consists of purely inner soul processes, and the synthesis, the reassembling of what has been separated, is all the more so. Thus it turns out to be necessary to detach in thinking that which leads to ordinary memory, to ordinary recollection, from the actual thinking activity. But how can one do that? This question now arises: how can one, so to speak, treat certain substances physiologically in such a way that substances dissolved in them are made to fall out of them through certain processes, leaving the dissolving substance behind – how can one bring out of thinking that which leads to memory, to recollection, so that something remains? This happens, dear honored attendees, by repeatedly and faithfully repeating it over long periods of time, even if only for very short periods during the day, to dwell on it within thoughts or images, or whatever it is , and that one actually attaches importance to paying attention in the soul, not to remembering it, but to paying attention in the soul to what one is doing, by becoming absorbed in the thinking activity. Then one notices that in this thinking activity something is alive, which one actually always has in one's everyday life and in ordinary scientific research, but which remains unconscious, which does not penetrate into consciousness. I can make myself understood by saying the following: Let us assume that we carry out an external activity that is related to our business, our profession. In doing so, we repeatedly produce this or that. After all, people have to choose a profession that, so to speak, leads them to the same activity every day. In this way, the main thing is taken for granted in our outer life, namely that what can be brought forth through our work is brought forth. The result is the main thing. But in addition to this, something else very often comes along, and we can very well regard it as something important and essential in our outer life, even if it relates to our outer work. By practicing the same occupation every day, we become more and more skillful; our hands, our other actions become more and more alive in us, so that we not only produce the result, but also an increase of activity takes place in us. We may often not pay attention to this increase in activity. But it can be observed.

What I have mentioned here for the outer life, where it naturally has a completely different meaning, must now be transferred by the spiritual researcher to the inner experience of thinking, and indeed of the thinking that he is carrying out in meditation, when he, so to speak, completely immerses himself in it, forgetting his entire surroundings and the actual experiences he has otherwise undergone, when he immerses himself in what can be called meditation or contemplation. And there he will find, if he does not overdo the individual meditations – I will also talk about this later – he will find that if he repeatedly and again and again and intensely pursues such inner thought development, he will learn to observe, not the thoughts, but the activity of thinking. From the increase, he realizes that there is an activity of thinking. And by experiencing, by grasping, so to speak, his own activity of thinking, by strengthening this activity of thinking in order to feel it in such a way that it enters his consciousness, whereas in ordinary life and in ordinary science it remains unconscious, he gradually gets into his soul that which he can now detach from the memory work of thinking. For the continuation of such exercises, as they have been described, they yield a very definite result. They yield that man gradually lives himself into the moments, which he himself can evoke, that man gradually lives himself into a new activity, which thinking now performs, that for this new activity memory actually falls away and only an experiencing in the thinking activity is there. One could describe it as follows: when a person develops his thinking in the way indicated, he experiences it, he experiences his thoughts disappearing, and he lives and moves in the activity of thinking, in the inner activity at first. The strange thing is: once one has grasped this point, where one lives in inner activity, then one notices: for this kind of inner soul activity, what is memory in ordinary life is not there at first. Something else is there. And I would like to point out, by way of comparison, how the whole inner soul life has now been changed out of thinking.

A certain experience of the poet Grillparzer is known from his biography. I do not mention this experience because Grillparzer's capacity for knowledge was from the standpoint that is being advocated here, but because — I would like to say — a beginning of what Grillparzer experienced was present in what — I would like to say — must be artificially brought about in order to effect the investigation of the supersensible being of man. Grillparzer had conceived the whole idea of his “Golden Fleece”. He had thought out the plan, the individual events and how they were connected. In short, he had grasped his drama, The Golden Fleece, in thought, in the life of imagination. The remarkable thing was that he forgot it as he had grasped it in a later period. He could not remember it at all. And lo and behold, one day, when he played the same piano pieces that he had played at the time when he had conceived the idea of the Golden Fleece, the memory came back to him; the whole thing was before his soul again. How did that happen? Well, this indicates to us that through the inner activity, which was the same now as it was earlier, through this inner activity he was led again to look inwardly at the whole content of thought. As I said, this is on the way to what is actually to be considered here – but it is just on the way. This path just has to be followed further.

For that is the peculiar thing that the meditant, the spiritual researcher, comes to, that he, as it were, finds himself dying within himself - but only, of course, at the times when he is engaged in spiritual research. The ordinary memory dies away and, as it were, can arise again and again - not now in memory, but through other activities - the activity in which he has once lived can arise. This activity occurs again and again. And lo and behold, once you have gotten used to it for a while - that is, to separate the activity of thinking from the thoughts that can remain as memories - then you notice that the whole mood of your soul life has changed under the influence of these exercises. You do notice something, though, when you get to a certain point in this development of soul exercises. You do notice something that can, in a certain way, have a disturbing effect on the soul: One notices that one can have experiences that do not leave memories behind, and because they do not leave memories behind, [but] are like flowing and weaving processes of experience, they are, so to speak, real dreams, but dreams that exercise a great deal of control over our inner soul life. And so one notices very soon that one's consciousness has become empty, I would say, and can no longer store memories of what one is immediately thinking, that they arise not through the same thinking activity of remembering, of straining to bring thoughts up, but that one's own experiences come from outside, just as sense objects come from outside. One gets an impression more or less of one's life on earth back to the moment up to which one usually remembers. The thoughts appear like realities. The thoughts appear like something alive. They come to you like living beings; not as they appear in memory, but they come to you like living beings.

In fact, thinking takes on a completely different character under the influence of the exercises. It really becomes a completely different soul power. And I would like to point out, by way of comparison, how surprising this change in thinking activity can be. Imagine that you have a statue, a sculpture, in front of you; it is formed. Imagine that the moment could come when this statue, this sculpture, begins to walk, to live. Then you would initially find something that violates the laws of external nature. Of course, that cannot happen. I only wanted to mention this as a comparison because something occurs in the life of the soul that can indeed be compared to it. In the thoughts that one otherwise has in ordinary life and that lead to memories, one has the impression, in one's own inner experience, that these thoughts must be passive images that depict the external, that they do not, so to speak, live inwardly. And if they led a life of their own, then the life of the soul would express itself through the inner life, through the independent life of thoughts, in fantasy, in dreams, if not in something worse, if not in hallucinations. In the ordinary life of the soul, thoughts really have something that can be compared to the forms that a column has. Of course, nothing should be said against the value of sculpture. That would, of course, be foolish. But in a certain way, what takes place as the logic of thinking in the ordinary activity of thinking can be compared to the dead statue, where we are not aware of the actual activity in thinking, of what connects the thoughts, what brings them together and what separates them again. While the statue cannot merge into activity, into life, the inner logic, the inner weaving and life of thoughts can now merge into consciousness, can become inwardly alive; the statue “logic” can, as it were, become an inner living logical being, which one now feels as if one were living into a completely different world. From this moment on, one knows: That which one first peeled away from memory, that is, thinking activity itself, has become detached from its dependence on the bodily organs. As I said, I will discuss all possible objections from the point of view of science the day after tomorrow. But what the spiritual researcher experiences at this important point in his development of the soul forces is that he now knows: You have detached the thinking activity from the physical-corporal; you have emerged with your soul, insofar as the soul moves in thoughts, from your physical organization; you are no longer in your body.

As paradoxical and strange as it may seem, it is a reality. It is possible - but only through inner experience - to observe this separation of the spiritual soul within us from the physical body. What the spiritual researcher experiences has been described at various times with one word, which has also been mentioned here in earlier lectures, but which may be mentioned again and again because it represents something that has an infinitely shattering effect on the soul when it has arrived at the point of which I have just spoken. Because, indeed, the development that the spiritual researcher undergoes, dear attendees, is such that the individual stages are connected with inner shocks, with inner conquests, of which we must also learn some. This has no objective value. But when one speaks of the paths and methods by which one researches the supersensible entity of man, this must also be mentioned. But now it must be said: in the way I have shown it, spiritual research can actually only arise in our time. All that arises in the ongoing culture of humanity must, after all, occur at a certain time. Just as the newer scientific way of thinking arose three to four centuries ago, as it was made possible by external circumstances, by the inner developmental circumstances of humanity as a whole, so such a treatment of the soul forces as has been described was not possible before our time. This could only come about after centuries of scientific training of humanity, so that thinking in general would acquire the strength within human development to be able to undertake something like this. In earlier centuries and millennia, however, there were always people who, on other soul paths and out of other developmental forces of the soul, also penetrated into the spiritual worlds, on developmental paths that are no longer appropriate only for today's advanced humanity. These paths must be changed, just as the way of looking at nature has also been changed in the course of development. But in their own way, spiritual observers of the most diverse millennia have also come to the point that is meant here, where they were seized by something living in the world, which is, so to speak, a living, weaving power of thought, an objective power of thought that flows and weaves through things. They realized that when the soul comes to this point, it is so moving that they said: “The soul arrives at the gate of death.” And indeed, one knows something about this coming to the gate of death, which, precisely because it comes before one's soul inwardly, has a harrowing effect; one knows: by having pushed the activity of thinking so far that this activity has transformed itself in the indicated way, one enters into such a coming to life of thinking. But one faces an inner - not a physical - danger. Not a danger that has something to do with the [gap in the transcript], but one faces a danger.

One faces the danger of not being able to carry into the world, purely inwardly, the soul, that which is otherwise ordinary everyday self-awareness, into the world that one is now experiencing. One faces the danger of entering a world in the face of which one is powerless, spiritually, purely spiritually powerless, to carry one's self-awareness into it, in which one seems to lose oneself at first, so that one actually comes to stand at the gate of a world, but by standing there, it is as if one had to leave oneself behind. This losing of oneself, this no longer having oneself, that is initially a harrowing experience. And this experience, fully lived through, really experienced inwardly, so that one has it in one's soul, that allows one to experience something else now, that allows one to experience that one knows: Yes, this self-awareness that you have there, this self-awareness that once arose in this life occurred in this life, at the point in time up to which one otherwise remembers back, where one started to call oneself an ego - this self-confidence is in the most eminent sense, even more than the other soul powers, bound to the physical body organization. And now that one has emerged from the physical body organization, one is faced with the danger of no longer being able to say “I” to oneself, of losing oneself. One learns to recognize what is snatched from one when one passes through the portal of death, when the soul-spiritual separates from the physical-bodily in reality through death. One really comes to - I would like to say - experience vividly in theory what death is in the soul-spiritual sense, is objectively.

That is the harrowing experience. And that is why those who knew something about it described this experience as approaching the gate of death. But one must go through the path that has been described to this significant experience. Only when you follow the exercises described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in the second part of my “Occult Science”, when you go through these exercises in your soul, will you develop the way in which these exercises are formed from the experiences of the soul. Alongside this path, which has just been described, a parallel path develops, which, as it were, runs parallel to it and prevents one from really losing oneself when one's consciousness has reached the threshold of death. So the spiritual researcher, the meditator, has to go through something else so that he does not lose himself at the point in question, but can carry himself into the world that he has now entered. Just as one needed a development of thinking, a separation of thinking, of the power of thinking, of the activity of thinking, from that which leads to memory in thinking, in order to arrive at the point described, so one needs for the other path a very definite development of the activity of the will, of the will, which again is to be achieved through inner soul exercises.

And here it must be said that this development of the will is based on the fact that one now separates something from the will that one has used in ordinary life, something that is connected with it in ordinary life, as it were – if I may use this chemical comparison – something falls out, is separated from ordinary will activity. In our ordinary volitional activity, especially when one observes this volitional activity in a scientific way, then one knows that one never experiences the will in ordinary life, never, even in the most ideal activity, that one never experiences the will in ordinary life and through ordinary consciousness other than in that it is filled with inner emotions, with affects, with what the motives of the will are. They have to be inside, otherwise the will would not work in ordinary life.

Now, in order to be able to complete the other path that runs parallel to the first one, the spiritual researcher has to do such exercises that enable him to separate the will, [that enable him to have the experience of] separating the will from everything that must be connected because motives must live in the will that come from our physical, from our ordinary soul life and so on, to separate the will from everything that makes up the essence and value of this will for ordinary life. Of course, this separation should not be made for ordinary life – otherwise the person would be unsuitable for ordinary life, or perhaps even worse – but only for those moments, for those times when the person wants to explore the spiritual worlds, when he must create the possibility for himself to experience a will that is free from the ordinary will. And there are again exercises that are now applied to the will, so that the will breaks free. You will find this described in the books mentioned.

Above all, these exercises aim – while the thinking exercises aim to strengthen thinking, to put oneself in the place of experienced thoughts, which one moves to the center of consciousness – these will exercises aim to get more and more arbitrariness over switching off the ordinary will activity, to command calm, inner peace of mind over the whole inner soul life. The ordinary life of the soul is traversed by the remnants of the motives of the will, by worries, by all other feelings, in short, by whatever surges as living power from the ordinary life of the soul into the mind. The exercises are aimed at learning to suppress all this at will. And then the spiritual researcher is able to bring about something that otherwise can only be brought about involuntarily in ordinary life.

To describe this, I must refer to something that occurs cyclically in everyday life, that which one always experiences in a twenty-four-hour period if one leads a somewhat regular human life, namely the alternation of waking and sleeping. Today we need not go further into what happens in the human being as the transition from waking to sleeping takes place within him. But everyone already knows this from trivial, from ordinary observation of life, that at first the activity of the senses involuntarily fades away - in a certain sequence that could be described, the description has no particular value here - that then also that which remains at last, the inner feeling of oneself, the inner living through of oneself, that this also fades away. And then the human being remains in a state that can truly be called unconscious in the most eminent sense.

Now the spiritual researcher comes to the conclusion that when a person is asleep in this unconscious state, his soul essence is nevertheless still within it. And he comes to the conclusion that he can learn to bring about a state through a certain development of the will, which on the one hand is similar to the state of sleep and yet on the other hand is so radically different from it that one can say: It is the opposite state of sleep. The development of the will ultimately aims to switch off all sensory activity and to bring about the same thing with sensory activity that is otherwise achieved in deep unconscious sleep; similarly, to bring this about with all thinking activity, with all feeling activity, with everything that lives in the motives of the will, to suppress the whole sensual and ordinary life of the soul through arbitrariness. And then one notices – when one has acquired the powers to achieve this – that one is really able to induce a standstill of physical, organic life in the same way as it would otherwise occur involuntarily in sleep – one does not need to remain unconscious, one does not really enter into sleep, but one experiences this transition in a conscious state. The power that leads one to suppress this organic activity also leads one, at the same time, to raise the soul-spiritual consciousness out of the body by a different path, now as a volitional activity, so that you are now really not unconscious as in sleep outside of your body – I do not need to explain these statements today because nothing depends on them – but you are consciously asleep and know: you are no longer in what lives in you. But consciousness has not disappeared. Consciousness is intact, along with self-awareness, along with the possibility of knowing yourself as an ego.

This state is radically different from that of sleep, because when you are asleep you are unconscious, but now you are fully conscious when you step out of your body, you can see your body as you would otherwise see a table or an external object in front of you. In this way, one consciously leaves the body and knows that one is outside because one observes the body now as an external object, as one can otherwise observe external objects.

This appears self-evident to someone who has not yet received any messages about such things or cannot acquire an understanding of them, as something quite paradoxical and dreamy. Nevertheless, it is a real process, much more real than any process that the soul can otherwise evoke, and through which the soul now comes to bring the experience of itself in the will to full consciousness.

But now, dear readers, you will experience something that, when described, must at first be taken for granted, as if you just wanted to express yourself figuratively, as if you just meant a mere thought, something symbolic, perhaps even something allegorical. But that is not the case; instead, one experiences something quite inwardly real. One experiences that in this will, which is detached from ordinary mental activity but is now conscious, one experiences something that is always within one, but not as something dormant, not as something substantial, but as a spiritual-soul life of consciousness: One experiences a second person within oneself, who is always in every person, but who cannot be brought to light only through ordinary consciousness. Of course, when people in ordinary life say that a person carries a second person within them, they often mean something figurative, something imaginary. That is not meant here, but what is really meant here is that a person comes to realize: You carry a second person within you, a second person who really has consciousness and who watches you in everything you do in ordinary life in terms of will activity. We are never alone. In the depths of our being there is a true being that develops and is a spectator of us, a being that is in constant activity and that we get to know more and more intimately if we continue such exercises as they have been described. Yes, one first gets to know it in such a way that, before one can really get to know it, one has to overcome a harrowing inner soul experience. I have described the other soul experience, which spiritual researchers have called and call reaching the gate of death. But now one reaches a soul experience that can be described by saying: Only now does one experience in a comprehensive way, spiritually and soulfully – and spiritually and soulfully is, of course, meant to include everything – one experiences in a comprehensive way, spiritually and soulfully, what actually exists in the world, permeating and interweaving this world, in pain and suffering. In a sense, one experiences the foundations of the suffering and pain that lives and weaves through the world. Only now do we learn to recognize what mental pain and suffering is. And we have to, because it is only through experiencing this pain, through experiencing this pain that we develop the ability to grasp, to grasp, to experience this inwardly conscious being that sits within us, directly inwardly, spiritually and mentally. One can say: the person who has an open heart, an open mind for that which surrounds him in the world, will feel that which surrounds him in the world in many respects as something beautiful, as something sublime, as the flowering of the world. The one who undergoes what has been described knows that out of the soil of the pain that flows and weaves through the world, the flower of all beauty, all sublimity, all glory in the world arises.

Of course, dear attendees, there could be people who, in their human wisdom, say: Yes, something like that could make you despair of the wise guidance of the world, of the wisdom of God even; because why didn't God arrange it so that the beautiful, the magnificent, the sublime would appear without the basis of pain? Such people raise objections based on human wisdom, without being able to feel and experience the iron necessities of existence in their depths. The one who asks, “Why is there no sublimity, beauty, or bloom in the world without the basis of pain?” is in a similar position to someone who demands of a mathematician that he draw a triangle whose angles do not add up to 180 degrees. There are necessities. These necessities do not contradict the wisdom-filled guidance of the world. Just as the plant's blossom must develop from the root, so everything that is sublime and beautiful in the world must develop from what one now experiences at the bottom of one's soul as suffering. This leads to a deeper understanding of life and the world; this shows us in which basic element of life beauty, sublimity, and wisdom are rooted, and that this could not be there, that the strength to experience it could not be there at all, if the strength were not acquired by growing out of suffering.

But now the question arises: why do we experience suffering at the very moment when we are inwardly experiencing this inner observer, this inner conscious soul being? Why just then? It begins with this – and I would like to describe these things in detail, although this may make me more difficult to understand – it begins with the fact that, through the development of the will, one really experiences inwardly, as if weaving and living in the newly developed will activity, what is there inwardly as a spectator. By experiencing it first, one experiences it as if it were contradicting everything one has otherwise experienced in one's soul life, in this life, since one can think. The person who experiences it in this way has an intensely heightened sense of what it might be like to have done some kind of careful thinking and then to have someone come along who thoroughly refutes that thinking, presenting it as something that cannot stand up. I would say: one feels what emerges from the depths of the will as an experience in a living refutation. At first it is a very strange, very peculiar experience! Precisely that something comes into the life of the soul that begins like the pain of a refutation of one's own soul life, precisely that which begins like that, which is experienced in such a way, gradually becomes such that one really experiences what one can call: one feels oneself in the stream of pain that flows on the mother soil of existence. But then it is precisely this experience of suffering that makes what arises out of the will, I would say, more and more concrete and concrete, more and more essential and essential. And then one experiences what is actually there, what comes out of the will. One gradually learns to understand why it appears in the form of pain, because one learns to understand: You are now actually experiencing that which you otherwise cannot experience in your everyday life in thinking and willing; what underlies it, what has basically developed in the depths of your soul throughout your whole life, what you have now grasped at the stage when you began to become a spiritual researcher. You experience that which is otherwise hidden in the life of the soul, that which remains when everything in the life of the soul that is bound to the instrument of the outer body falls away. One experiences that which passes through the gate of death, that which, when we die, enters into a purely spiritual world, and because that which now enters into a purely spiritual world is initially suited to live in a spiritual environment, which is not adapted to the life that we have developed, which is now in this life, without being adapted to it. That is why it initially appears in a sorrowful form, in the form of suffering and pain. It is something that develops so that it is intended for a different kind of experience. And now we know what is present in the soul that passes through the gateway of death when our body decays, what the soul really possesses as an immortal. One experiences it now, but through inner experience, just as a plant would feel if it could experience how, in its growth, it gradually prepares the forces that then, in the flower, lead to the germ, which, after going through another life, through the soil of the earth or something similar, can develop into a plant of the same kind. One feels a germ of life, a new germ of life within oneself. And just as the germ of the plant develops out of the forces of the plant and can become a new plant, so one experiences now that this germ of life, which one can initially experience embedded in pain, goes through a spiritual world and can become a new human life, a repeated life on earth. One experiences only that, while the plant germ can be destroyed by the outer circumstances that take place in space and time, so that not every plant germ develops into a new plant, that in the spiritual world, which applies when a person has passed through the gate of death, no such obstacles exist, but in what has just been described the spiritual world and must reappear as a new life on earth, must again seek a body to which it adapts, which it forms, in which it joins with that which comes from father and mother, which lies in the hereditary current, which it thoroughly organizes and leads to a new life on earth.

The spiritual researcher, esteemed attendees, comes, by walking the path that I have described, so to speak, to two inner soul elements, to the one soul element where he feels the danger: you can lose yourself; but he also comes to the other soul element, which gives him a consciousness of the otherwise unconscious thinking in him. The consciousness that he is otherwise aware of is in danger of being lost. But with the consciousness that arises out of the stream of will, one can now enter the world, through it one can lead oneself into the world, which one thus experiences. And here it becomes apparent that, while if one were to experience only that which lives in the will as a new human germ of life, one would feel only pain, it becomes apparent that, when one does the exercises in the right way, these pains show themselves to be something that reveals to one the reveals the secrets of the world, but that in reality it happens that one now carries this consciousness at the bottom of one's soul into what one would otherwise feel as an emptiness, in the face of which one would become powerless if one felt it. There it ceases to be painful, there it awakens to such a life as our senses otherwise awaken to when they have matured from their embryonic state and can behold the sensual world.

As the two elements I have described unite, they now become a new sense, what Goethe calls the “eye of the mind” and the “ear of the mind”, but which is now present in reality. The thinking, which has been further developed to the point that has been described, unites as an activity with the new consciousness, and a fully developed spiritual person, who is now completely outside of the physical within the person, experiences the soul within himself, with whom he lives together, and this spiritual person is now inside in the spiritual world. Now, this spiritual person, by being in the spiritual world, receives something that I have already hinted at, which is like a higher level of remembering, not a remembering that arises from thoughts occurring again, but from what is present in the spiritual world coming before one as a living entity. Now, what has been lived through in the time that we have lived through before we united with a physical earthly body, that which has passed between our last death and our last birth - or let's say conception - also appears as a living entity. Experiences of previous earthly lives arise. A higher kind of memory arises. As paradoxical as it seems, it is the kind of memory that can be developed just as truthfully as other abilities are developed in the course of life from the childlike state of mind, which then become effective in the physical life and one day become aware of themselves as a spiritual being within the spiritual world. He experiences himself as a spirit in the spiritual world. And just as he is surrounded by physical beings of the same kind as his physical organization here in the physical world, so he is now in the spiritual world as a spirit man among entities that are of a spiritual nature. Such spiritual beings, which never enter into physical life, which have their task in the spiritual world, such beings, which, like human souls, lead alternately a spiritual life between death and a new birth, or a physical life between birth, or let us say, conception, and death, all this now becomes, I might say, a spiritual-objective world. However, one must not imagine that this spiritual-material world is somehow a mere repetition of the physical world. More precise things in this direction will be discussed the day after tomorrow; today it should only be mentioned that the whole way in which one experiences the spiritual world is different. For example, by am giving an example, I must, of course, since today, to a certain extent, one compromises oneself with truths about the spiritual world, I must compromise myself even more than is already the case with the way of thinking that is customary today. Let us assume that, with regard to the spiritual experience in this person who has developed out of the other person, we are dealing with a soul, with a human soul that passed through the gateway of death years ago. It may well be that in the way the spirit can perceive the spirit, one feels the soul of the dead person taking effect on oneself. But it is not as some might imagine – as I said, this will be discussed the day after tomorrow – it is not as if one were to see a refined material image; it is not as if one were to see a nebulous in the sense in which trivial superstitious clairvoyance believes – but in a completely different way, the spiritual enters our consciousness, which has been born out of the stream of will. And to characterize the way in which the spiritual is now experienced, I have to say something like the following: Let us assume that we, as human souls, have thoughts. The thoughts live in us. Let us assume that the thought could experience itself; then the thought would say: I am in the human soul. The thought would not depict an external world to each other as we do, but it would know itself in a world, it would know that it is in a world. I could also say: instead of looking at it, it experiences being looked at, that it itself is being experienced. That is what it experiences. So being together with the spiritual world is now much more real than being together with sensual things, but in a different way. That which lives in the spiritual worlds enters into our consciousness, so that the consciousness, which we ourselves have only just brought into the spiritual world in the way described, now knows of other consciousnesses that come together with it; the consciousness knows that it is experiencing spiritual beings.

It may therefore happen that a soul from the spiritual world that wants to help or lean towards ours – it can be a human soul, or also any other soul that never embodies itself in a physical body – that this is experienced by us as living in our consciousness. Then you realize that in ordinary life on earth we actually always have the spiritual world living in our consciousness. But because we are not aware of this, our ordinary consciousness does not contain these spiritual beings. However, one can learn to feel when one has to perform a spiritual task, for which one needs inspiration. Such experiences can be had.

It is self-evident – and it is not out of immodesty – that one has personal experiences, personal research experiences, so to speak, to indicate what has been researched. But it has happened, for example, that a soul who died years ago, who had a very special artistic inner ability, carried this artistic inner ability through death and now helped with certain artistic endeavors. The one who has acquired spiritual perception in the manner described knows how to distinguish what is his own, although it could flatter his pride and vanity more to attribute it all to his own genius; he knows what is alive in him and what is coming from the spiritual world and its beings.

And if someone then says – as I said, more will be said about this the day after tomorrow – if someone says, esteemed attendees: Yes, all this can be an illusion, all of it can be a hallucination – then for today the only thing to be said in reply is that there are also certain philosophical schools of thought that say: Everything you see with your eyes is actually only a creature of your eyes themselves. One need only recall Schopenhauer's writing: the world is only an illusion – which was so exaggerated by a man who once stood before Goethe that this man expressed the conviction to Goethe: “If I have not opened my eyes, then the sun is not there!” A more recent naturalist, who is not at all averse to including borderline areas of natural research in his research area, said: Well, yes, but it has been established that the man has long since died and can no longer open his eyes – but the sun is still cavorting around in space.

I myself know what objections can be raised against this; but essentially it is still true. But precisely [gap in the transcript] justifies these philosophical objections. Man learns to grasp what in the real world is real and what is merely imagined, merely experienced in his soul. Just as man can learn to distinguish between what is real in the external world of the senses only through life, so too, with regard to spiritual and psychological experiences – which have developed, as has been described – only one's own soul can justify itself and, if I may use these expressions, perceive entities and events as real. Once you can do that, then all the objections that can be raised are as futile as the objections of the philosophical idealist – in the technical sense, that is meant – against the reality of the external world. In the external world, reality can only be experienced. There is no proof that can be logically derived; only in life itself can one learn to distinguish the real from the dreamed, from the hallucinated. And how the soul life remains healthy and learns to distinguish the hallucinated from the experienced will be discussed the day after tomorrow. This is how one learns to distinguish the dreamed from what is real. And so also in the spiritual world.

So today I wanted to take these considerations only to the point where it shows how man, through an exploration of the spiritual world, can come to the knowledge of his own spiritual being, which belongs to this spiritual world. This particular consideration of the spiritual world, which is based on an inner development of the soul, could only arise in the period of modern science, which, in relation to the education of the soul of humanity, was, so to speak, the preparatory school for it. And it is quite understandable that, having familiarized itself for a while with the very thing that constitutes the greatness of the newer natural scientific way of thinking, humanity has strayed from even considering it possible that the soul can really come to a knowledge of the spiritual world. How every person, even if he is not a spiritual researcher, can absorb knowledge of this spiritual world and recognize its truth, just as one can, without being a chemist, utilize chemical products and chemical truths for ordinary life - I will talk about that the day after tomorrow. And today I will merely point out that it is quite understandable to the spiritual researcher that those who have become immersed in mere external natural science and have become acquainted with the soul forces that are involved in this external natural science, who have learned to use these soul forces and their development into a research method, those who have fully recognized the splendor and the heights and the great successes and achievements of modern natural science, which has brought about all this, [to the spiritual researcher it is quite understandable] that those who have come to know these soul forces could, for a while in the development of humanity, come to believe that there can be no science at all beyond that which is based only on the development of sense perception and of thinking bound to the brain, that is, to the physical organization.

But what can really be experienced, dear honored attendees, testifies that the field of real knowledge can be extended into the spiritual world, that man can truly explore his spiritual-soul being, which goes through births and deaths, in repeated earth lives. And when a brilliant nineteenth-century natural scientist rightly emphasized that the contemplation of those cognitive powers that have brought about success in natural science cannot lead beyond the realm of sense-perceptible nature, but nor can it enter into the reasons for existence – when this brilliant naturalist, Du Bois-Reymond, therefore proclaimed his Ignorabimus, therefore his “not knowing” – it was precisely because he had become accustomed to those powers of knowledge that are only able to fully see through and penetrate the outer sensual world. And he said that if one wants to undertake something in order to know something other than outer nature, then, as he says, 'supernaturalism' begins, that is, becoming familiar with the spiritual world. Only, he says, where supernaturalism begins, science ends. He does not yet know – and quite rightly could not know – that those powers of cognition that have just been sharpened and strengthened by observing the external world cannot lead into these spiritual worlds. It is only when these powers of cognition, as we have them, are transformed that thinking and will must develop in a different way than they do in ordinary science. Then they must be enlivened, invigorated, to penetrate into the spiritual world.

And so one must say: There is a certain one-sided correctness to the ignorabimus, to what Du Bois-Reymond says – one cannot penetrate into the spiritual world with the powers of knowledge that have made natural science great. But one can develop those powers of cognition, exactly the same powers of cognition, through an inner spiritual-soul method, so that one can then strive up into the spiritual worlds through the thus developed powers of cognition, can penetrate up - [and that is] when knowledge does not remain merely the passive knowledge that contributed to the greatness of external science, but when knowledge becomes a living one - in the transition from the statue to living logic, to inner life - when, so to speak, the soul itself becomes living, living logic, and this logic can be permeated and experienced with what it finds in the current of the will. For that which the spirit is - dear honored attendees, allow me to conclude with these words - can only be experienced by awakening knowledge to life and living as LIVING knowledge in the living spiritual world, by leading life itself, which the human being otherwise leads bound to the sensory and physical organs, by leading life itself to knowledge, to living knowledge! Through knowledge becoming living knowledge, through a new person, an inner person being discovered in the person, the person lives their way up into the world in which they are as a spiritual being among spiritual events and among other spiritual beings; through this they live their way up into the world in which their true origin, their true task, their true meaning lies. More on this the day after tomorrow.

Dear attendees!

In the lecture I had the honor of giving here the day before yesterday, I tried to explain how the concept of spiritual science, as it is used here in this lecture, comes about, and I pointed out that in that lecture I would like to pay less attention to the objections that may still be raised against the recognition of spiritual science in our time, particularly from the natural sciences.

Today, I would like to address these various possible and, as you will see, quite understandable objections. The day before yesterday, I tried to show that the spiritual researcher does indeed come to the conclusion that the human soul can be penetrated into the spiritual world, but that this conviction develops in such a way that it is simultaneously connected with the insight that it cannot be the same soul forces, the same cognitive abilities that lead into the spiritual world and those that lead the human soul to penetrate into the sensory world and everything that belongs to it in a sensory way; that it is rather necessary for the spiritual researcher to first develop and develop out of the ordinary thinking, feeling and willing, as they and ordinary science know and control, to first develop and evolve other soul abilities and other soul events through which the soul is then enabled to carry itself alive into the spiritual world and in this way to receive something that can be called spiritual science. I have pointed out that it is first necessary to practise what is called thinking and what is called imagining in a very specific way, so that something arises out of ordinary thinking and out of ordinary imagining that is no longer the same as this ordinary thinking and imagining, but has become something different, which, above all, differs from ordinary thinking and imagining in that it experiences itself, comes to life, in order not just to rise up in images like this ordinary thinking, but to experience itself in reality. This transition of the soul's rising in images, as is the case with ordinary thinking in ordinary life and in ordinary science, this rising in images must be transformed into a living in real being. In this way, when one has attained this, one actually discovers something that the soul could not previously know, of which it could not even form a concept; for it cannot be grasped by any ordinary concepts, but must be directly experienced if it is to come to consciousness, even though it is continually present in every soul. As a result of this - I said the day before yesterday - the soul, through the strengthening of its power, through the intensification of its thinking, on the one hand, manages to lift itself out of the body, to become independent of the body and to experience itself in a reality, so that it knows: You have now stepped out of your body with your thinking.

On the other hand, I emphasized, these exercises of thinking, through which thinking frees itself from the body, must be accompanied by an exercise of the will, of the powers of the mind in general, so that the will also frees itself from the body. Then one does not enter into such a sphere of experience as through the elevation of thinking, but one comes rather to recognize that something real lives in our will current, which works through the organs of the physical organization in ordinary life, but which, when these exercises have brought the will so far, in turn lifts itself out of the physical. But now it becomes consciousness through consciousness, as the human being continually carries within himself as a different consciousness from his ordinary one, but which can only become truly inwardly vivid in this way. And then I showed: When, on the one hand, everything that is bound to the physical, such as ordinary memory, is driven out of thinking, when thinking is experienced freely in its own activity, and, on the other hand, this other consciousness is, as it were, crystallized out of the will, then the two can combine, and a new person is created in the human being, who can now know himself in the spiritual world, who can also perceive spiritually in the spiritual world - a spirit-soul being among spirit-soul beings, as the physical person is a physical being among physical facts and entities.

That was roughly what I explained in the lecture the day before yesterday. It is self-evident that the assertion of such insights in our present time must, one might say, meet with opposition from all sides. For what is being said here contradicts the habits of thought that must, quite understandably, dominate the thoughts of the vast majority of people today, and one might even say, when looking at the history of the last few centuries. In particular, there is initially a complete contradiction from the scientific side. Now the spiritual researcher does not see this contradiction, this opposition from the scientific side, as being due to human limitations or a very dry logic, but he understands very well that such opposition is possible. The spiritual researcher can, precisely because he views the world from a spiritual point of view, can fully empathize with every kind of contradiction, especially those raised from the natural science side. And above all, the opinion should not be entertained that the spiritual researcher despises the natural science point of view. On the contrary – and I have emphasized this time and again in earlier lectures here – on the contrary, the spiritual researcher acknowledges the great, the tremendous achievements for all human work and for all human knowledge that natural science has incorporated into human development over the last few centuries since the dawn of modern times. Indeed, the spiritual researcher even views his relationship to natural science in the following way. Speaking in the abstract – it could be presented here in detail, but that is probably not necessary today – speaking in the abstract, I say, one recognizes that in a certain time that which today is called natural scientific knowledge of the external material world had to arise. Anyone who delves into the history of natural science, connecting with the great names of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and so on, will realize how different what was called natural science before these names came about was from what we now call the scientific approach to the world. This scientific approach has now, over the course of three to four centuries, provided humanity with a wealth of knowledge that has had a profound and far-reaching impact on all of life. And it is easy to see, if you just take a little understanding look at this life as it has developed over the last three to four centuries, the significance that scientific achievements have for the ideal and material side of life.

Now the spiritual researcher continues: We are now living in a time when the human soul must be able to look into the spiritual life in a similar way to the way people were able to look into the processes and entities of the purely natural three to four centuries ago. Spiritual science would like to penetrate into the spiritual realm in the same way that natural science has penetrated into the realm of nature in recent centuries, in the same way of seeking truth, in the same spirit of research. And one can say: spiritual science shares this conviction with many personalities, but in such a way that precisely with many personalities, who also understand the tremendous turnaround brought about by the scientific approach, this relationship between spiritual contemplation and natural science is viewed differently than the spiritual researcher must view it. Thus, for example, one can see how philosophy, which also wants to penetrate into the spiritual realm through the same conceptual world - not through the spiritual-scientific conceptual world of which I spoke the day before yesterday, but through the conceptual world that is applied in ordinary life and in ordinary science -, which wants to penetrate into the spiritual realm through this conceptual world , this philosophy has often been forced in modern times, under the influence, I might say, of the splendor of natural scientific observations, to take the path of simply taking the truths that the natural scientist has discovered about the essences of nature and the facts of nature. And then, through all kinds of conceptual connections, through reflection on what natural science has discovered, one tried to penetrate more deeply into the essence of the phenomena. One felt, as it were, no longer as philosophically sovereign as before in the face of nature and the world; one felt that one had to reckon with the findings of natural science. The peculiarity of many personalities who wanted to appreciate the scientific way of looking at things in this way lies in the fact that these personalities say to themselves: one must accept the results of natural research; one must simply process philosophically what natural research reveals about nature and its events. Then one will recognize that which can be fathomed more deeply about the world.

The spiritual researcher does not say this directly. Rather, the spiritual researcher is fully aware that, although science has not yet fathomed every mystery in its field, and that much remains to be done before the scientific approach has reached its ideal, the spiritual researcher is also aware that the scientific methods as such have developed, at least up to a certain scientific attitude, in such a way that natural science itself has provided information about what can be deduced from nature, and that further reflection, following on from natural science with the same means of thought that natural science also applies, can lead to nothing more. Natural science is, as it were, something that is so constituted that, as it develops, it leads to a totality, not to something that could be taken and philosophically expounded upon. It is not by taking the results of natural science, combining them and speculating on them that spiritual research intends to proceed, but spiritual research stands in a different relation to natural science. Spiritual research says to itself: Because of the fact that the transition has been made, we say, through Copernicus, through Kepler, through Galileo, with a special way of looking at nature, the soul forces have also entered into a special relationship with natural events. Under the influence of this newer natural science, the human spirit had to relate to nature in a completely different way than it did before. This has given rise to completely different methods of thinking. A completely different kind of relationship to nature has arisen. In the last three to four centuries, people have thought and felt differently about nature than they did before. And by directing the powers of the soul towards nature in a different way, humanity has, so to speak, inwardly exercised these soul powers. The soul forces themselves have thereby carried out a different inner activity than they did before.

Spiritual research does not take the starting point of taking the facts of natural science directly, but it builds on what the soul forces themselves have acquired over the centuries through a different exercise of the soul forces. A person who has gone through the process of scientific thinking, through physics, chemistry, biology and physiology, thinks differently from someone who has not gone through these sciences as they have developed in modern times, because they have acquired the methods and forms of thought of these sciences. Spiritual research first looks at the way in which thinking has been practiced in recent times. And spiritual research becomes clear about this: the way in which thinking is practiced must gradually lead, through what is experienced in this exercise, to what was described the day before yesterday as a special exercise of thinking and will. Thus it is not what has been investigated by natural science that is placed in a relationship by the spiritual researcher to spiritual research, but rather what inner consciousness of these activities one has acquired, that is what is particularly emphasized; how one has learned to think differently, how one has learned to feel differently in nature, how the soul forces have been stimulated. And then the spiritual researcher says: This stimulation is just the beginning of a path; because if you follow it up - he himself has led to what was described here the day before yesterday - you can see from it that you are really led to grasp something in the soul through the exercise of thinking, feeling and willing, which can detach itself from the physical organization.

In this context, dear attendees, it is important to note that the spiritual researcher must, in a certain respect, actually be a true believer in the scientific way of seeking truth and knowledge. And this is also the case with the one who has recognized the true nerve of spiritual research; he sees what it actually means for the spiritual development of the world that such profound and exact scientific methods have emerged in the course of recent times, methods that are so suitable to eliminate all that may be illusion about the world, all that may be fantasy about the world, simply by developing a certain sense of fact, which can only lead to spiritual research if a sense of fact becomes a fact [fanaticism]. That inner discipline of the soul that humanity has been able to acquire by bringing thinking so close to the external objective course of facts, this inner discipline of the soul is highly recognized by spiritual research as something exemplary. For in this way something enters into the whole structure of thinking by which the soul says to itself: You must not follow as truth that which lives subjectively in you, that which you would like to believe to be true, that which you like; you must refrain from all that which speaks in you out of your liking, out of your sympathy, out of your affections: you must let purely the world of facts itself speak for itself. In particular, by moving from mere observation in natural science to experiments - whereby nature expresses its secrets in compiled facts and one is only a spectator - in particular, by doing so, humanity, which has gradually absorbed the scientific attitude into its world view, has earned a certain respect for the fact - and, connected with that, for the inner discipline of truth-seeking.

However, this is very often opposed by those who do not enter into spiritual research with a thorough knowledge of the soul, but who engage in such spiritual research with dilettantism and superficiality. And the disaster, I would say, in relation to the assessment of spiritual research, can arise in particular from the fact that those who want to form an opinion do not form it according to what true spiritual research has to give, but form it according to what all kinds of spiritual research dilettantes offer the world. It is very often the case, however, that a certain contempt for scientific methods and also for scientific results comes to light in these presentations. This contempt is usually in direct proportion to what is actually not known about this science. The true spiritual researcher will always take the trouble to discipline himself in the good discipline of truth and research of the scientific way of knowing. And often the contempt for the scientific way of thinking is enormous, especially among those who have never actually learned anything useful from science.

What I have just said in this sentence need not be said, dear attendees, if practical life does not show that very often one does not approach what is serious spiritual knowledge that measures itself against natural science, but that one adheres to all the excesses of spiritual-scientific dilettantism, which suffers from the mistake I have just described. If misunderstandings arise, they are very often not the fault of those who indulge in such misunderstandings about spiritual research, but in the vast majority of cases they are the fault of those who glorify spiritual research dilettantism and give the world a miserable image of all kinds of talk. The only guilt that lies with those who call this talk nonsense, fantasy and reverie, is that they allow themselves to be convinced by this amateur spiritual science and disdain or find it too inconvenient to approach real spiritual research. But that's it.

Understandably, misunderstandings arise from many, many other things as well. I would now like to point out a misunderstanding that is bound to arise in a perfectly understandable way. As we saw the day before yesterday, the spiritual researcher has to speak of how, through what he does with his own soul, the soul powers are changed, that a different kind of soul activity from that of ordinary life and ordinary science occurs in his soul. And so someone who is grounded in natural science must say to himself: Well, if a different soul life can be distinguished from the soul life that we can call normal — we are familiar with that; these are all the abnormal phenomena of the soul, which are known under the most diverse names, and which can only be distinguished by the self-deception that the spiritual researcher arbitrarily wants to bring about with his own soul. Then the naturalist shows us how certain soul processes of normal life are closely bound to a normal brain; he shows us, by the very sure and conscientious scientific method, how spiritual processes cease when certain parts of the brain are switched off, and he shows us how spiritual processes, how the whole soul life, the whole soul mood, can be changed by a physical change. The natural scientist can then reply to the spiritual researcher: Yes, is nothing more achieved by those strange exercises, which you speak of as a strange enthusiast, than a change in the physical organization, albeit one that cannot be proven externally or anatomically? And is not, after all, what you call spiritual research methods with other soul powers nothing more than a special kind of disorder of the soul life in general?

I would like to emphasize, dear attendees, that it is a perfectly possible view from the point of view of someone who is firmly grounded in natural science, if they do not know exactly the spiritual scientific methods. It is a perfectly possible view, which expresses itself in this way, and in particular it is a possible view when one then looks from the natural scientific point of view at the nature of the soul forces, which many who now also call themselves spiritual researchers have, and who possess the opposite of what can indeed be described as a healthy soul life. Now the natural scientist also repeatedly points out something to us that I would say is trivial, but which is no less striking when viewed from the perspective of the scientific way of thinking. It is striking when one wants to refute the observation of particular, completely free forces and experiences of the soul that go through births and deaths. The natural scientist says, precisely on the basis not of mere prejudice but on the basis of careful observations by physiological science, the natural scientist says: One can see how physical life develops slowly from childhood on, and how the development of soul life goes parallel with physical development. One really sees how closely bound the soul life is to the bodily life. One then sees how the body must have attained a certain formative maturity at a certain age in order for the soul life to develop in a way that can be described as normal. And again, one sees how, with the decline of physical strength in old age, with the demise of the organs, the spiritual-soul life recedes. And objections to an independent spiritual and mental life have repeatedly arisen in the course of the nineteenth century, which - I would say - were based on this ground.

Now the spiritual researcher is by no means opposed to the natural scientist in this field, but on the contrary, with regard to the positive statements of the natural scientist, the spiritual researcher fully agrees with him. The spiritual researcher says: Yes, if one looks at the thinking, feeling and willing that is taken for granted in ordinary life and in ordinary science, then what physiology has to say is fully justified; for this thinking, feeling and willing is closely bound in this form to the physical organization of the body. But the true spiritual researcher does not stand on the ground that, for example, by merely observing ordinary thinking, feeling and willing - as it presents itself in everyday life and in ordinary science - one can thereby arrive scientifically at the immortality of the human soul. Rather, the true spiritual researcher says to the natural scientist: You are quite right when you claim that the forms of thinking, feeling and willing that reveal themselves in ordinary life and in ordinary science are bound to the physical-bodily organization, that they are so bound to the physical-bodily organization that they could not and should not be thought of at all without this physical-bodily organization. But it is precisely through the spiritual research method that it can be seen that there is something in this thinking, feeling and willing: the thinking of which I spoke the day before yesterday, or rather the thinking activity and that being that is contained in the stream of will, that they are so intrinsic that they cannot be grasped by the consciousness of ordinary science and ordinary life, and that they are what preceded our present life on earth in the spiritual world and will follow our death in the spiritual world. What is eternal in the human soul must first be sought. And it cannot be sought if one stops at ordinary thinking, feeling and willing. So says the spiritual researcher. If today there could even be any philosophical worldviews that believe they can contradict science by looking at ordinary thinking, feeling and willing and mentally deriving all kinds of things from this thinking, feeling and willing - they could contradict by saying: If you look at this thinking, feeling and willing through the usual scientific method, you can see something that reaches beyond death. When philosophers speak like this, the spiritual researcher says: No, these judgments will increasingly disappear from the world. Rather, with what is indicated here, the natural scientist will be proven right more and more. And that is why spiritual research is actually in complete harmony with the justified results of the scientific way of thinking in this field.

But now natural science is making progress and says, for example: Yes, but if you develop your thinking through spiritual research, if you say that this thinking can be brought to life in a completely different way through such exercises as those mentioned the day before yesterday, then it experiences something that it has not experienced before. If you say that, then you are actually deluding yourself; for you do not know how much unconsciousness there is in the life of the soul, how much dependence there is in the life of the soul on mere – well, let us say, if we speak in terms of more recent natural science - nerve dispositions, bodily dispositions, and how much has entered into these nerve dispositions without the consciousness noticing, but which now comes up when - as the natural scientist might easily think - one maltreats one's thinking as described the day before yesterday. So that the natural scientist says: Yes, the spiritual scientist is deluding himself, he is creating a pure illusion. While he believes he is finding something that leads him out of his body, something that is independent of his body, he is only bringing unconscious dispositions, the numerous unconscious mental dispositions, into his consciousness, and he actually has only life and perception processes, and naively believes that by bringing up his unconscious soul life, he has something new that leads him out of the whole sensory world and into a spiritual world, while in truth he is only immersed in the bodily life that he has otherwise not known.

As long as one is confronted with what one can grasp in thinking, feeling and willing in ordinary life and in ordinary science, this objection on the part of science is completely understandable. It is also entirely appropriate to the facts. It is so appropriate to the facts that, even today, because spiritual science, as it really is, has not yet found much entrance, it is still the case in very many instances that some person believes that through special soul exercises he has recognized something that goes far beyond the sense world, that is rooted in the spiritual world , while he brings forth nothing but the bodily dispositions that would otherwise remain unconscious, all kinds of illusions that arise, which he does not recognize only because he does not have an overview of his soul life, all kinds of things that are transformed from bodily dispositions into hallucinations and the like. It must be all the more understandable that the natural scientist, who strictly adheres to the facts, also looks at spiritual scientific research in this way, because amateur spiritual scientific research is often nothing more than what the natural scientist quite rightly criticizes.

On the other hand, however, it must be said, dear attendees, that by developing thinking as it was presented the day before yesterday, by taking thinking so far that it does indeed come to a point where it shows itself to be something very different from what it was before, that the spiritual researcher is just learning to recognize what comes up from the subconscious, that he is learning to distinguish, to carefully distinguish, everything that comes up from the physical body. That which does not come from the physical body, but which has an effect from a spiritual world, can only be acquired through experience.

But this distinction is acquired through differentiation. And precisely because one becomes familiar with this distinction, for everything that is not investigated through the right path of developing thinking out of the spiritual world, one must basically agree with the natural scientist. Dearly beloved, there is a great difference between what can be regarded as a morbid, abnormal manifestation of consciousness and what the true spiritual researcher attains in order to enter the spiritual world. And this must be emphasized, because the right method of spiritual research, as you will find it indicated in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” or in the second part of my “Occult Science”, because this right method of spiritual research actually leads to the result that it does not present itself as a change in the ordinary life of the soul, but leads to the new life of the soul, which is now attained through the altered soul forces, taking its place beside the earlier life of the soul in such a way that both are embraced and comprehended by the full consciousness of the human being. Indeed, one could even say that an incomplete consciousness has been achieved in spiritual research if the ordinary consciousness merely changes, if it becomes different, so to speak. The right thing has been achieved when this ordinary consciousness in man remains in such a way that he now also develops the ordinary logic that he had developed before, that he is just as reasonable as he was before, that he further develops and oversees the same impulses of will as he actually is as a simple, straightforward, reasonable person in ordinary life; and in addition to that - but alongside it - has the consciousness through which he can see into the spiritual world. If you compare what is achieved through the correct methods of spiritual research with what arises from a morbid mental life, you can say to yourself: In the case of a diseased soul life, it can be seen everywhere that the abnormal state of consciousness takes the place of the normal one and develops out of it. You cannot imagine that a person who has become a little foolish can at the same time, while being foolish, understand and practise his normal human state. You cannot be insane and rational at the same time. That is the essential feature of the pathologically altered consciousness: it develops out of the ordinary normal state, and when the pathologically altered consciousness is there, the normal consciousness must have gone away. Of course, the normal state can return, naturally; but at the same time, in the trivial sense, they cannot be simultaneous. But the consciousness that the spiritual researcher develops in the way described the day before yesterday must be completely identical to the normal consciousness, so that the spiritual researcher is confronted with what he was before, just as the ordinary person is confronted with an external object; that is to say, what one is as an ordinary normal person, one sees through the attained consciousness of spiritual research as something that one can look at, just as one looks at an external object with ordinary sense consciousness. One has become an object to oneself with one's ordinary organization. But this object continues to function; it remains completely intact. [...] And anyone who applies the methods described in the books in the right way and right style will achieve nothing other than to do the same with the newly acquired consciousness.

But there is one thing in particular that must be considered, dear attendees, which, I would say, is of particular importance for the beginner in the methods of spiritual research. It is of particular importance that the beginner does not allow himself to be tempted to change his ordinary life immediately, to transfer it immediately to a different one - something that can very often correspond to a person's inclinations. Rather, it is necessary and good, at least advantageous, for the beginner in spiritual research, in the performance of the life, in the reasonable conduct of life, which he has previously pursued from his education or from other circumstances, remains as far as possible, and that which he wants to develop as a spiritual consciousness, really develops alongside. Otherwise, a kind of bondage must usually befall the person. Certainly, esteemed attendees, one really does not have to go so far as to grow long hair in order to become a spiritual researcher, or, if one is a lady, to cut one's hair very short or to seek to remove oneself from ordinary life by other extravagances; one does not have to take it that far. But even if you do not go that far, you can still have the belief that if you are to become a spiritual researcher, you have to step out of the ordinary routines of life, create some kind of colony where you live in completely new circumstances, and you even have to arrange these living conditions in a certain way. This will not be particularly beneficial for the beginner in spiritual research, because it encourages the mistake of introducing the previous way of life into another, and one does not have the advantage of having the previous way of life alongside, like an object to hold on to.

So one can say: The objection from the point of view of the natural sciences, the objection of thorough, careful physiological science, that the consciousness of spiritual research could also be based only on illusions or the like, one can fully understand it. But it does not apply if the consciousness of spiritual research is developed in the right way. And here it will also be of particular advantage if the spiritual researcher is not, I might say, partly too proud or too lazy to get involved in what natural science now gives, not only in theories but also in practical instructions, in order not to lead the soul life into all kinds of extravagances. And one can even say: the more spirit-scientific education strives to apply the beautiful, the careful results of justified natural scientific practice, the better it will be for this spirit-scientific education. What spiritual research strives for - precisely because it strives into the realm where mere natural science can never enter - that which spiritual research will always carry with it will be: complete respect for the legitimate claims of natural science itself and of that which arises for life from natural science. That will have to be striven for between the two, which can be described as complete harmony. And for someone who, I might say, is familiar with the nature of the soul behavior in healthy natural science on the one hand and in healthy spiritual research on the other, it is only now that complete harmony is revealed. But he will also realize that, seen from one side or the other, objections and antagonism can arise in a completely understandable way. Opposition also arises from the side of one-sided spiritual science, which believes it can fight natural science without knowing its actual core. So, for example, one hears - of course I do not blame it when someone who knows the scientific methods speaks of an unjustified materialism - and knows how a one-sided criticism of spiritual science is directed from these scientific methods. And indeed, we see that many who want to be scholars of the humanities speak about the materialism of the natural sciences from one or other point of view, from a point of view that they consider “sublime”, and believe that, without knowing what the natural sciences achieve in terms of methods and intellectual discipline, they are hitting the nail on the head when they reproach materialism in some aspect of the natural sciences. Natural science has developed its methods over the centuries and has developed these methods by not exceeding its limits. It has developed these methods by strictly adhering to material processes.

However, this has also led many to believe [- and this is the other side -] that what they had been working on, the “be-all and end-all” of all existence, was matter, which had to be adhered to in order to explore natural facts. Matter finally became an adored god; it entered the human field of vision so completely and so stunningly that they were led away from everything spiritual. But natural science itself, when working in its field, must adhere to material facts. It acquires its objectivity precisely by adhering to material facts, and it can be said that a materialism has legitimately found its way into scientific methods. If it is only applied as far as one wants to observe nature, then one even has to respect this materialism, then one has to have the greatest respect for it. For only by not speculating in a confused way about everything that is not the result of material processes, but by adhering to what observation of processes or experiment reveals, only by proceeding scientifically, can we bring to light the great achievements of scientific facts, which can then also be applied to practical life. And what this materialistic method of natural science has brought in particular in terms of soul discipline, what it has brought above all in terms of soulful devotion to the happenings, to the events of the world, to the essence of nature, must also be exemplary in spiritual research.

Spiritual research is now very likely to evoke not only justified objections against itself, but also, I might say, justified prejudices. This comes about in the following way. The natural scientist, because he has to adhere to the facts of material events with a certain healthy materialistic method, very easily comes to regard the spiritual completely as something that is either not there at all, or at least cannot be recognized. And so science gradually becomes not what it could be – I would say: an external revelation of profound inner facts of spiritual life itself – but science becomes something that is only pursued in such a way that one gets stuck in material life. Then this theoretical standstill in the material world is very easily transferred to practical life; and the consequence may be that one actually comes to the conclusion that all spiritual has no value after all or at least cannot be recognized; that science is a guide for human benefit. So that science has in many cases become a mere servant of social and also of individual egoism in the course of time, that it has entered into the service of egoism, that instead of seeking truth like a goddess in science, in many cases only that which can serve material human development in one field or another is sought. Those who see this material development of humanity as the only one that matters must, if they are consistent, also view the science of nature in such a way that all knowledge gained from nature ultimately finds an application in the material progress that humanity is undergoing. Yes, one can see how - I would like to say - a scientific direction that serves practical, purely material interests appears threateningly before the soul's eye. Man is very easily inclined, when he devotes himself to natural scientific methods without feeling and sensation for the reality of the spirit, man is very easily inclined to then respect only the material, the material use at all.

A similar mistake, albeit, I would say, in a certain respect, the opposite, can easily arise when one engages in spiritual research in a similarly incorrect way. That which is externally researched in the field of matter can easily be seen as being placed solely in the service of man's material progress. That which is investigated by spiritual research can easily serve the immature soul, which is less concerned with truth than with its preference, its sympathy, the satisfaction of certain desires and longings. It can easily serve the soul to promote a certain inner complacency, a certain inner vanity. And so it happens that just as utilitarians – those who want to apply science only to material processes – are becoming very common in the field of external materialistic science, so very often in the field of spiritual research or the life that spiritual research wants to bring, one sees a mirroring in the vanity, in all possible delusions of the human soul, because one does not proceed by seeking to bring the soul to the truth, but takes what spiritual research gives in such a way that one takes pleasure in it, that one feels, so to speak, uplifted in one's soul powers and in one's vanity, especially through what spiritual research has to give.

Just as natural science can very easily lead to materialism when a person becomes accustomed to its material aspects, so spiritual research can lead to all kinds of enthusiasm and to a complete detachment from the external rationality of life if a person does not want to follow the path of truth but instead wants to devote himself to what seems plausible to him according to his subjective needs and desires. Natural science deals with nature – this can easily lead to material things; spiritual science deals with the human being and his soul. As a result, it is particularly easy for a person to take himself very seriously, I would even say out of pleasure, out of pleasure from his soul. And by feeling, “You belong to the spiritual with your soul,” he repeats this to himself again and again, and it is not only the case that the great, all-encompassing truth of repeated earthly lives easily leads such voluptuaries of the soul that they then endeavor above all to brood over whether they themselves could actually have been Alexander or Caesar or Marie-Antoinette or someone else in historical life, or are still searching somewhere else in previous earthly lives. But I will not speak of such aberrations myself. Fanaticism - I would say - inner need, being connected in vanity with the spiritual life, that characterizes very many as not standing on the ground of truth in spiritual science, but standing on the ground of vanity and fanaticism, on that ground on which one is detached from the complete connection with life. True spiritual science does not lead away from this ground of true life, but on the contrary, it leads closer to life. Those who have no inclination to take life with full interest, with full seriousness, but to a certain extent in their soul are inclined to a kind of soul vagabondage, can easily come to even more triviality, to a casual attitude towards life, by being immersed in spiritual science. And very many who cannot bring themselves to fulfill something sensible in life through their hands, through proper diligence, you see them talking about a higher mission that has been given to them from the spiritual world and that they have to fulfill above all things. Speaking in truth, one would often have to say: laziness and carelessness in life appears translated into a strange language as a spiritual mission. Then one can no longer be surprised, dear audience, when those who are accustomed to inner soul discipline, which follows from the scientific world view, look with a certain contempt at those who now, in turn, despise science and often look down on life itself and talk about all kinds of spiritual stuff just because they don't want to understand life scientifically and don't want to apply themselves to ordinary life with the appropriate diligence, seriousness and attention.

But the moment you see through these things, when you see the nerve of spiritual science, its legitimate lifeblood, you find a complete harmony between natural science and spiritual science. One will find that the spiritual scientist, in every moment, finds that which natural science has to offer positively, right up to its justified materialistic method, completely justified and admits that by admitting this, he simultaneously shows how one can enter the spiritual world with soul abilities other than those justified in natural science and in outer life, in order to truly explore them.

Misunderstandings regarding spiritual research will not be dispelled unless people become more and more familiar with what is actually active and alive in spiritual research and how that which lives and is active in spiritual research must, through an inner necessity in the development of humanity, be carried into the spiritual impulses of humanity from now on, just as scientific thinking has been carried into them for three to four centuries. Therefore, one need not be surprised if this harmony between natural science and spiritual science cannot yet be found everywhere. On the contrary, it must be fully understood when spiritual research is simply taken by many as a fantasy. And those who are firm in spiritual science, who are thoroughly grounded in it, will find this misunderstanding to be something quite understandable. Of course, this does not exclude the need to seek to clear up the misunderstandings and to establish harmony between knowledge of nature and knowledge of the spirit.

And also in the external, dear attendees — what can come into the world through spiritual science, it is indeed little, relatively little —, and also in the external, misunderstandings are bound to arise and are basically understandable. In this regard, I would like to say a few words again today – I already tried to do so from this same place last winter – about the external symbol of spiritual scientific research, the Dornach building, which has not yet been completed. It is understandable, completely understandable, that this Dornach building is still met with many, many misunderstandings today. Because basically, It is just as true that it is based on purely artistic principles and not on anything symbolic or similar as it is true that it enters the world in such a way that it basically presents itself as something quite different from what we have been accustomed to seeing as a building or as an artistic presentation. In many respects, it contradicts the habits of feeling of previous artistic views in the same way that spiritual science contradicts and must contradict the habits of thinking of previous scientific views. Why is this the case? Yes, dearest ones present, as was shown the day before yesterday, spiritual science, in accordance with its methods, leads to a different way of thinking, or rather, to a transformation of thinking, leading to such an activity of the soul that arises from thinking, which lives much more in reality than the ordinary pictorial thinking, which wants to give nothing other than a reproduction of external reality. While ordinary thinking must see its value precisely in the fact that the ideas it awakens are faithful replicas of an external reality, nothing directly experienced itself, but only something relived from external reality, that which develops from thinking through the spiritual research method must be something that the soul experiences directly. The soul should not have to rise into an image, but into real life, into the objective thought-being of the world. And so it is also with what develops out of the will. But through this, the soul also comes to immerse itself more in what otherwise emerges instinctively as the artistic, as the stylistic, as the artistic formation - in which it can immerse itself even more. That is the essential thing in the soul's activities that come to light through spiritual research, that the soul becomes more immersed in spiritual reality. And by becoming immersed in spiritual reality, it also immerses itself differently in the world of forms, in the world of shaping. But through this it is led not to replace art with something other than art, but to approach art in a different way. While the other art must start from what presents itself to the senses, and what presents itself to the senses can be elevated into the spiritual, so that art appears as something elevated out of the sensory world, into which is poured that to which one has ascended in a spiritual quest. What can be called 'the artistic being grasped by spiritual science' is something that takes the opposite path to the external sensory reality. The human being is first within the spiritual. He lives vividly the weaving and living of spiritual events, he faces the spirit as spirit. And when now the possibility of artistic activity is present in him, when art is to come into being, then the sensuous element is not led upwards until one can give it the splendor of the spiritual, as it happens in other art, as it has happened in art up to now, but the spiritual is led down into the material.

This, above all, is the essential thing that should be striven for in the architecture of the Dornach building, for example. The first question that arose was: What has to happen here? And in the light of this thought, the question was not: how to create a building out of the previous architectural style, out of what is otherwise common practice or can be learned in architecture. Instead, a completely different question arose, a question – I would say – whose practical answer shows how one must stand with spiritual science in the immediate reality quite differently than with ordinary logical or soul-life activities.

When a fruit forms a shell around itself, then that which separates itself as a shell has emerged and grown out of the same life forces as the fruit itself with its individual formations. And anyone who observes how the fruit is formed in its core and in its shell, how, for example, I might say, the core of the nut forms the shell around it with all the fine veins, with all that arises from the same forces, how the core itself arises in its individual structures, anyone who observes this says to themselves: the nutshell comes from the same forces as the core itself. This nutshell is not formed in such a way that one could somehow have conceived a style to give a shell around the nut; the whole is one. So what is done in the Dornach building had to become one: the forces that will prevail in what will be presentations, representations from the spiritual scientific world view, what messages will be from the spiritual world, what thoughts, ideas will be developed: all that is, so to speak, the core life. But the same forces that prevail in this core life must also be used to form the shell. It must be a unity, as in every fruit of nature, the shell and the core are a unity and are formed out of the same forces. The question could never arise: Which architectural style can be applied here? Rather, the fact that a spiritual thing was to be done in the building gave the building its entire form; the two-dome form, which encompasses everything, really came about in this way. It had to be a unity.

And so, I would say, in a certain sense, the walls also had to become something other than what walls had been up to now. I have already mentioned this here. But it is significant, especially for grasping the peculiar art that is to be developed there—still quite primitive in the beginning—that this be taken into account. Walls, even those that are artistically designed – and especially these – have signified closure in art to date. Even in Greek architectural works of art, walls signify closure; they close off the outer world.

Spiritual science should lead spiritually into all expanses through what it is. Therefore, forms must be created on the walls, as sculptures and the like, which - I would like to say - cause the walls to destroy themselves when looking at the forms, so that one has the feeling: by living in the building and directing one's gaze to the forms, one has something in the forms that leads out into the world.

And yet, in context, one had to be with all of reality. Therefore, such window artworks, as they have existed in the past or still exist today, could not be created from the old art of windows, but rather a kind of window etching, if one may call it that, was used. Different glass panels, different colors, but each one in a single color. The figurative is now worked into this, and it is worked in in such a way that only thickening and thinning achieve what is artistically intended. And then the sunlight shining in will interact with this, that is, that which works and weaves in nature itself, to make art complete. There, nature and art will intertwine into a single work of art.

And so new approaches had to be taken in the most diverse ways. In painting, which will fill the domes, the aim was to treat the colors in a very specific way.

Dear attendees, I can of course only touch on these things in a very fragmentary way. Precisely for that which is important in the treatment of colors for the figurative, something should be attempted that is not usually attempted with color. One should try to experience color directly. Everything that the soul engages in through spiritual research should be experienced inwardly there. The color should not be just a surface that reveals something that is underneath, but the color should have an inner life and develop this inner life itself; so that from the corresponding color and color composition, life itself arises; so that one looks at the pictorial work of art in such a way that one has the feeling directly in the interaction of the colored and that which lives from the color into the form: You live in what is alive in the color, what is alive in the color lives in you. You grasp reality in the color, not through the color, but through the reality behind the color. Colors should express themselves, forms should express themselves – not something through colors, not something through forms. For this is precisely what leads to life with the spiritual world, the colors and forms, when they are to be depicted pictorially, to depict them only as we really have them artistically in every moment, that one does not immediately stick to some model, but that one brings what life and weaving is in the spiritual fact and in the spiritual essence into the weaving of the colors and into the life of the forms, which one then brings onto the surface. And this other had to be striven for, for the reason that the whole of the structure, like the shell, which results from the same forces, should be like spiritual science itself. There had to be a departure, for example, from the principle of placing columns, each of which is always the same as the one before, columns with capitals that are all the same. A certain development had to be followed from the first pair of columns with their capitals to the second and so on. This results in an inner design, an inner development, as nature itself does, by developing the other tones, the second, third and so on from the fundamental, from the prime. And just as it is not superstition, just as it is not some kind of mystic madness, when one sees seven tones in the scale and in the eighth tone the repetition of the fundamental, so it is not something mystically mysterious when one seeks to find a progression in the inner motives of the capitals, and thereby a sevenfold number of columns is quite automatically brought out, because one is standing inside the creation of the world with the spiritual, just as the creative element in nature lives inside the creation itself. Thus a parallelism emerges between what is present in nature in a primitive form, such as the seven tones, the seven colors in the rainbow, and what occurs in the spiritual realm. The strange thing is that it could happen that people looked at this building in Dornach and thought that seven columns had been chosen here out of some superstition about the number seven. These same people might say: What a grotesque superstition it is that the rainbow has seven colors or that the musical scale has seven tones! - It would be the same logic, the one as the other. The one as the other is required by the nature of the facts.

If someone comes and says: Well, yes, with what is there at the construction, one would like to come to an agreement. But that you do such superstitious things or do such mystical things as seven pillars, and made of seven different woods at that - where again only the artistic, which is connected with the differentiation in the wood, is actually meant - anyone who speaks like that is like someone who says: I don't understand why every string on a violin has to be different; they could all be the same and so on, and so on. It is a matter of recognizing that what leads from spiritual science to art is, so to speak, in agreement with the whole purpose of spiritual research work.

Natural science has made enormous progress in recent times. Spiritual research in particular recognizes this. But it is as if someone starts drilling a tunnel from one side – as indeed happens – and works towards it from the other side. Now, spiritual science is working towards natural science from the other side. They will meet one day. Natural science works conscientiously where it is actually working properly. It comes [up], I would say, to the point where life is to be grasped. The materialist therefore denies life altogether as a special element. He sees life only as a combination of the other forces of nature. Natural science works from the bottom up to life. Spiritual science works consciously against natural science, and in its own way comes to have this consciousness not only as such consciousness, as it is in ordinary human life, but to expand this consciousness to the point where reality is grasped in consciousness. While science cannot grasp life, the spiritual researcher often cannot grasp reality in consciousness. But both work towards each other in order to grasp the life that natural science is working towards with a different consciousness that is developed out of the ordinary human consciousness. The two work towards not only harmony but also the inner interpenetration of life and consciousness: spiritual research and natural science. And if we look at it this way, we also see in the art that begins today, and which works from the other side than the other art, something that meets this other art.

What cannot be understood, however, is how people can enter the lecture hall in Dornach and say: “Everything inside is mysterious, full of symbols, full of special signs.” There is not a single sign, not a single symbol inside. Rather, an attempt has been made to answer the question, “How should the thought be if it were to flow into artistic forms?” The nonsense that is otherwise often indulged in, let us say, in theosophical circles, the search for all kinds of mysterious signs, to which everything imaginable is attached and in which something artistic or an artistic surrogate is sought – all that has been avoided in this building. And everything is dissolved into artistry. That is precisely what has been attempted. Nowhere should the mere thought be effective. And this could happen all the more since the thought, which otherwise seeks the allegorical, the symbolic, when it strives out of sensual reality, cannot, after all, get out of the pictorial, the unreal, the merely conceptual. When this thought often seeks the symbolic, the allegorical – the living thought that becomes one with the [gap in the transcript], it can express itself directly in art, so that art in forms, in colors and so on, lives out in external reality. That which was to be depicted [in this building] was not depicted in all kinds of artistic surrogates such as allegories and symbols and the like. It is therefore surprising when people look at the things and, although they cannot see a single symbol, talk about all kinds of mysteries, all sorts of signs and the like that can be seen in this Dornach building.

But there is no need to be particularly surprised at these things, when it can even be said that what has been characterized here as spiritual science has something to do with the citation of the dead. If this can be said in all seriousness, as it has been, then the other can also be said, and can be said all the more easily.

If we really look at the work of the natural sciences on the one hand and the humanities on the other, we will find how the two work into each other, how the two work quite contrary to each other, and then the misunderstandings will disappear. Yes, dear attendees, they will disappear as they have disappeared in another area. I have already pointed this out. Today, there are still many who believe that they are standing on the firm ground of natural science and that they must object to spiritual science in this or that way. We have seen how this is understandable. Exactly the same applies when we look at the matter in the right way, which emerged when people had to get used to the fact that the earth does not stand still in space, but moves at a tremendous speed, that the movement of the heavenly bodies or even the standing still of the sun cannot be explained as it was in the past, but in the Copernican way. At that time, the new natural scientific world view contradicted the habits of thought. And people, especially those of a religious persuasion, believed that they had many, many objections to raise against this newer scientific way of thinking. It was even believed that religion was endangered by this newer natural science. As a result of this newer scientific way of thinking, with which science was intimately connected over the centuries, many things have changed. Those who today engage with the objections raised against Copernicanism and Galileo in the past find it historically interesting, but today it no longer makes any particular impression. The habits of thought have changed. What was once vigorously opposed is now taken for granted by many. And the following example, which I already mentioned here in a lecture last winter, can be repeatedly brought before our souls.

At a university in the nineties, a priest gave a lecture about Galileo; he gave this lecture about Galileo as a rectorate speech. He gave an excellent lecture about Galileo, despite the fact that he took up the rectorate of his university as a theologian. He did not speak about a theological topic, but he spoke as a Christian, as a true Christian about Galileo. And he pointed out at the time that times had changed so much that one could say: back in the days of Galileo, there were many who believed that Galileo's findings were somehow endangering religion or Christianity; that what people had previously known was somehow being endangered. But now, said this priest, we have come to the point where we have realized that No kind of scientific progress could ever really endanger religion, but on the contrary, the more is discovered of the glory of creation, the more one will learn to admire that which lives as divine in the world.

Habits of thought have changed, and this is particularly evident in such an occurrence as the one mentioned. There will also come a time when people will realize that neither any other Christian principle nor the principle of redemption is in any way endangered by what spiritual research has to discover about repeated earthly lives and the like, just as people have learned to see that Copernicanism cannot endanger Christianity. On the contrary, one must say: How fainthearted are those who think that the tremendous power that lives in Christianity could be endangered by anything that is discovered, be it in the field of natural science or in the field of the spirit. No, esteemed attendees, those who are spiritual researchers do not have such little faith in the religious, in the Christian, but they have the strong awareness that in Christianity, in the greatest impulse of earthly existence, lives that which, through no discovery in the field of nature or in the field of intellectual life, could ever be weakened in its power, but that everything that can ever be investigated in the field of the intellect will be there [precisely to reinforce] that which, as the greatest impulse on earth, lives and reigns in religious life.

And so it was that at the time when the Catholic priest gave his rectorate speech about Galileo, something very strange happened.

Anyone who delves into Haeckel's various writings will find in Haeckel a human being who, in his “Welträtsel” (World Mysteries), even went so far as to vilify and insult what can be found through pure spiritual research. He is a human being who always emphasized that there is a “law of substance” and that this is life, which one must seek. Now he has written “Eternity Thoughts”. They are no less material than his “world puzzles”; but now he is instinctively led to something very strange. He says: He recognizes - right at the beginning of these “eternity thoughts” - he recognizes the eternity of matter, the eternity of forces and the eternity of the psychoma - the eternity of the world soul - as he translates it.

Well, dear attendees, what does Haeckel do? Does he always only talk about this: You chemist, you physicist, you should declaim: eternity of matter, eternity of forces? - No, Haeckel allows the chemist to study the individual substances, the individual relationships between substances. Does Haeckel demand that one should only declaim eternity of forces? No, the individual perceptions of forces – electricity, magnetism, and so on – are studied concretely in their mutual relationships. Only with regard to the psychom, to the soul, does Haeckel for the time being stop at saying the one word – or the three words: “eternity of the psychom”.

Spiritual science wants nothing more than to study the psychoma in detail, that which, as spiritual and soul-like, spreads in reality just like matter and forces. Those who work from their natural science will truly intensify their penetration into spiritual science, if they still have the strength for it, which Haeckel, of course, already lacks today. But something will become clear: that, dear attendees, in the future people will look at nature and let what science has to say about nature take effect on them. Today there are still many who believe that what science has to say are results that only need to be summarized, and then a worldview is formed; and that is where it must stop. Those who believe this call themselves monists and so on. But the time will come when what the natural sciences give will not be regarded as mere results, but when it will be recognized that what the natural sciences give leads to further questions, indeed only to the right questions, where every scientific book studied for the purposes and goals of knowledge will not seduce people into remaining vainly in what science gives, but will lead them to questions, to a higher need for knowledge. The time is approaching when the study of science will raise questions, not seduce people into remaining with the results of mere science. The need will arise from the study of natural science to approach the study of the spirit. Natural science will create a need in the human soul, and spiritual science will satisfy this need. Just as needs arise in the human soul and are satisfied by what the course of the world gives, so natural science and spiritual science will work together like the creation of needs and the satisfaction of needs. Natural science will provide that which organizes itself as a sensual reality and develops need; spiritual science will provide that which serves this need. Just as the plant grows out of the earth, out of the substance of the earth, leaning towards the light, having the need for light, just as the light meets it, warming and shining, the power of the sun penetrates into the plant and makes the plant's life possible in the first place as a unified, harmonious life, so in the future, the needs that develop from natural science will appear as what grows out of the soil of the earthly, and what spiritual science is able to offer will be what illuminates and warms this earthly. Matter will seek the light, the light will seek the matter. Natural science will stand by itself as a higher, more refined material. Spiritual science will be there to warm and illuminate this material world.

Thus, let me say in conclusion, natural science will become like a body, and spiritual science like a soul. Together they will form the organism of human striving for knowledge and insight in full harmony.

Moritz Benedikt, the criminal anthropologist and well-known physiologist, found that the posterior cerebral lobe of criminals is relatively small, as in higher apes; he established atavism in this case. In this way, crime is attributed entirely to the physical constitution. Even the soul life is controlled quite mechanically by modern school psychology, the speed of absorption of sensory impressions, strength of memory and so on. The human being is treated like a machine. This has been happening increasingly for 50 years. Even social life should be shaped in this way, as it is through the sentence [...]: Act so that your motive can become the norm for all people. It's like saying, “Wear a skirt that fits all people.” It is Kant's categorical imperative. But even if one achieves excellence in the natural sciences, it does not follow that one could (transfer their results) to the moral field. So it is with Oscar Hertwig, who so brilliantly refuted Darwinism; in the social field, he has not only produced inadequate but also harmful results.

Spiritual knowledge is necessary to gain insight into the possibility and essence of human freedom; knowledge of what man's true nature is leads to love of the human being and is the only basis for true morality and social life of the future, based on brotherhood. Generalized morality, as we have it now, leads to the opposite of what is desired, as current events prove; moral preaching is like telling the stove: get warm without heating.

Thinking, feeling and willing find their correlate in the nervous system, in breathing and rhythm, for example in the blood circulation for digestion or metabolism, for reproduction. The nervous system is degenerative, leads to death, just as thinking in waking consciousness always destroys something. It must merge with imagination if it is to become viable. Volition, the metabolism, leads to life, to being born, when it is connected with intuition. The essence of intuition is love. Feeling in the middle then maintains the balance so that the pendulum does not swing in one direction or the other.

New religions no longer arise since the synthesis in the Christianity of all religions. Anthroposophy should not be confused with all kinds of obscurantism, but is common knowledge and should become more and more so, even if it is currently being rejected. From it will be born a realistic, benevolent socialism, in which all is salvation. Because people today are asleep, it has been possible for a few people to bring about these catastrophic events.

You hear repeatedly if one talks about anthroposophy that it originates from the fantastic inspirations of single personalities. Many people at least judge that way who fancy themselves as capable. However, one has to say from the start that this anthroposophic spiritual knowledge wants to cover a research field that contains the most important interests of the human life generally. Hence, isolated attempts were done repeatedly at all times to cultivate this field. But one must say that these were mostly only light flashes in our time which were cast on this field by this or that outstanding personality who contemplated the human spiritual life. These light flashes with which one always has the sensation that they come from quite different origins of the human being than the knowledge that refers to the outside sense perception.

Unsurprisingly, an unaware cognitive instinct makes the human beings illuminate this field by such light flashes repeatedly, because on this field there are the most important soul riddles which the human being has to face over and over again with his feeling, thinking and willing. The human being has to feel: if he does not take a position to these questions, it has an effect on his soul that you can compare with a kind of bodily illness. The soul life becomes banal; it feels exposed to all kinds of “addictions”—I would like to say—if the doubts, the uncertainties emerge concerning these questions. However, in our times the human beings were less eager to satisfy their desire for knowledge, which arises from such impulses, with spiritual food. Who did not know the fashion of those who could afford it to visit the most different sanitariums where, actually, for many people nothing was extinguished but that desire for knowledge of which one liked, actually, to be unaware in the usual life. What the human beings searched in sanitariums and similar institutions, were, strictly speaking, only suggestions with which they did not want to be present, so to speak, with their souls and which should meet those mysterious desires about which I have just spoken and which one does not want to satisfy spiritually.

A picture repeatedly emerges to me if I have to contemplate such questions. When I was—to visit somebody—in a sanitarium just at a time when the different guests were passing and when I found out for myself after the conversation and the sight of single patients that that who mostly needed recovery of his nervous system was the doctor in charge. The others needed much less recovery of their nervous systems than the doctor in charge needed.

On this field, single persons who dealt more intensely with questions of the spiritual life have cast single light flashes that arose to them from the depths of their souls. Besides, one thing always became known that would run like a red thread also today through the considerations of this evening. The fact that in the human being, as he walks on earth today, another human being sleeps and rests who is not perceived due to the conditions of the usual life because he sleeps quieter in the usual human being than dream images exist in him which emerge and disappear.

However, one thing always struck just spirited persons when they found out for themselves how this second human being rests in the usual human being: they could not conceive this sleeping human being without bringing him together with death in any way. More or less instinctively, the one or the other personality recognised that just as the phenomena of the outer sense perceptible physical life are associated with the laws of existence, of growth, of birth and so on, this second human being sleeping in the first is associated intimately with death, with fading. You notice that it is a great, important moment for persons of knowledge if they have to think the higher human being in the usual human being associated with the forces of death.

Such a personality is the philosopher and psychologist Karl Fortlage (1806-1881). I want to take an important statement as starting point that he did in a course of eight psychological lectures in 1869. In these lectures, you can find the following, quite important place:

 “If we call ourselves living beings and attribute a quality to ourselves which we have in common with animals and plants, we inevitably understand by the living state something that never leaves us and always continues in sleep and in the wake state in us. This is the vegetative life of nourishing our organism, an unaware life, a sleeping life; it is outbalanced in the breaks of waking by the life of consumption. The brain makes an exception here because this life of nourishing, this sleeping life, is outbalanced in the breaks of the waking by the life of consumption. In these breaks the brain is exposed to prevailing consumption and gets consequently into a state which would bring about the absolute weakening of the body or death, if it extended to the other organs.”

After Fortlage has come to this strange statement, he continues this consideration with the following, profound words: “Consciousness is a little and partial death, death is a big and complete consciousness, an awakening of the whole being in its innermost depths.”

You realise that such a light flash, emerging from the depths of the soul, illuminates the coherence of death and consciousness what accompanies us during our wake life always and makes up, actually, the human being. Fortlage gets to an idea of the relationship of death and consciousness, realising that that which seizes all human beings at once at the moment of death works in microcosm if we unfold our consciousness during the wake life. Every conscious act is in microcosm the same as death is on a large scale. So that—as to Fortlage—the real death if it occurs is the emergence of an enclosing consciousness, which puts the human being into a supersensible world, while he is put into the physical world if his soul needs the physical body between birth and death.

Fortlage wrote many volumes on psychology. However, such light flashes appear only now and again in his writings. The remaining contents of his writings even deal with that which one finds so normally today in psychology: the association and course of mental pictures, the emergence of desires and so on, briefly, with all those questions on which one ventures solely in psychology and which are far away from that what, actually, interests the whole human being in psychology, which are far away from the main questions of freedom and immortality.

The considerations of this evening deal with the question of immortality while in some weeks here I hold a talk about freedom from the same viewpoint.

Even if Fortlage is concerned with the subordinate questions in his vast psychological research, and in such a way that this kind of activity cannot lead to the highest questions, at least, such light flashes are found with him. However, one reproved him for it. Eduard von Hartmann reproved Fortlage sharply that he would have left the path of science introducing such a coherence into the strict science as that of consciousness and death.

Well, one may say, not only Fortlage but also many personalities produced in single light flashes something of knowledge that refers to this characterised second human being sleeping in the sense-perceptible human being. However, these were isolated light flashes.

Anthroposophy has the task now to systemise, to make methodical that what has come up instinctively in single light flashes like manifestations of higher knowledge from the depths of the human soul, so that that which originates from it can place itself as a fully valid science beside the modern natural sciences. However, it is necessary that that who wants to form an opinion about anthroposophy casts off some prejudices that easily result from certain advantages of modern science.

I had to say, the human being whom spiritual science considers is something sleeping in the normally waking human being. From it, however, it is explicable that everything that refers to this second human being is generally drowned as it were at first in our consciousness by the sensory experience and the needs of our personal life. If in this usual life now and again such light flashes appear, they disappear faster than a dream does. No miracle, hence, that most people once say to themselves after the absolutely entitled judgement of our time: indeed, what emerges there from the soul and will manifest of this low sounding sleeping human being, this does—if it appears with those who call themselves spiritual researchers—the impression of something dreamish, fantastic. Our time does not want to get involved with such phantasms. It has rapidly finished its judgement: nonsense, this is something that has arisen from the imagination of single ones.

However, something else could be right. How would it be if it were right that one could get such weak images as they exist in dream of that what lives in the human being beyond birth and death what is the everlasting of the human nature compared with the transient? If this held true, one would have to renounce either any knowledge of the everlasting in the human being if one did not want to recourse to images of imagination or dream life, or one would have to bring the logical discipline into this world that usually seems to be fantastic, the sense of methodical research that one applies to the sense-perceptible world. One has to raise the images with certain soul forces, so that they do not only scurry like dreams, but also become as distinct and impressive as the images of the usual consciousness are.

Is anyone able to do this? Today it is difficult to bring home to a human being that one is able to do it even in scientific sense because today one regards natural sciences as the only science that has a strictly reasonable methodology. If one distinguishes other sciences, one accepts them, actually, only as far as they are founded methodically after the pattern of natural sciences. One has to say for certain fields: what natural sciences have brought up in modern times as mental pictures, showed that it must be that way if they want to control the area which is assigned to them. However, one must also say that one cannot approach the everlasting life of the human being with these mental pictures.

These images cannot be appropriate to the same extent to solve the riddles of nature and the riddles of the human soul. To the latter one has to add something else. Which means must be applied to make the soul so strong that it can bring up the mental pictures which rest sleeping below in our consciousness and can apply the strict discipline and methodology of thinking to them, about which I have spoken in particular in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?. As in former talks, I want again to emphasise some viewpoints of these writings. One gets no idea of the approach of the spiritual researcher what he has to do, actually, to behold into the spiritual world with his soul if one does not realise what one can experience as a whole human being with the suitable desire for knowledge at certain limiting points of knowledge to which just the modern natural sciences lead.

Modern natural sciences give that who dedicates himself to them not only explanations, which nobody admires more than the spiritual researcher does, of the outer physical course, of various things which have an impact on the practical life, but natural sciences give that who dedicates himself from certain viewpoints an inner education of the soul life. More than one was able in former stadia of scientific cognition, today one is prepared to spiritual research cognitively, actually, just by natural sciences. One should not be restricted by that what natural sciences have to say about the outside world in their own field.

One should rather be able to soar an inner discipline of the soul life by the way one does research in nature. The mental pictures that natural sciences deliver can explain the outer nature only; after their contents, they have nothing to say about the spiritual life. But while one applies them devotedly, they educate that human being by the way who is able to take care of that what goes forward in him, of certain inner living conditions which bring along him to receive a concept, an inner experience of that soul life beyond the body.

I know very well that this concept—living with his soul beyond the body—is for many people the summit of nonsense today. However, this never minds. Everybody can convince himself that the inner experience gives him the certain insight of the life beyond the body if he goes through such soul exercises as I have indicated them in my writings or as I want to pronounce them, in principle, here.

One can experience especially important things if one just arrives at that boundary area of cognitive life to which natural sciences lead so often. You know, many people speak of the big boundary questions of cognition. One speaks of the fact that the human soul comes to a border if it wants to know about whether the world is infinite or limited spatially or temporally, if the soul wants to know whether it is subject to an irresistible constraint in all its actions or whether it is free.

Indeed, these are the highest boundary questions. Du Bois-Reymond put such boundary questions in his famous speech about the limits of the knowledge of nature, about the seven world riddles. You can experience the deepest impression if you feel out of the pain of a person longing for knowledge how such a person stands at such a boundary place.

I could bring in many examples. Such an example is contained in the writings of the famous aesthetician and philosopher Friedrich Theodor Vischer (1807-1887). If one reads his writings, one has often to stop with that what he experiences at such boundary places of cognition. He wrote a nice treatise on a book that the philosopher Johannes Volkelt (1846-1930) had written about the dream fantasies.

In this treatise that reproached Vischer that he had mixed with the spiritists, Vischer states such a place where he shows what he had experienced at the boundary places of cognition. He said, it is most certain that the human soul cannot be in the body; however, it is also most certain that it is not beyond the body. Here we have such a boundary question, which is paradoxical, because it has an entire contradiction in itself, as those are which one meets just always then when one delves devotedly in strict natural sciences, in life generally. The soul cannot be in the body; however, it can also not be beyond the body!—Why does one get to such contradiction?

At such border places where such contradictions appear, the scientific cognition is not at all helpful and it is most annoying if one believes that it helps something. Then, however, most people are soon ready with their judgement. They simply say in such a case, well, up to here just the human knowledge reaches; we are not able to get further.—However, it is not that way. Because Vischer had the prejudice, he experienced the contradiction only. However, he did not experience what one can do to get further with his soul at such border places. Here the usual cognition must stop and a particular experience of the soul has to begin. Here you must be able to forget as it were what the images of the usual life are because they lead you just to this border place only. You must be able to experience this here. Here you must be able to struggle with that what faces you if you let yourself in for such a contradiction. One should experience such contradictions with the whole soul. Then something new faces the soul like from spiritual depths that it cannot experience without this experience of such contradictions.

One has formed mental pictures of how, for example, lower animals that still have no senses develop senses in contact with the outside world. An inner life existed; it is confronted with the outer world, adapts itself to the outer world, and experiences the impulses of the outer world. While before the life pulsates in the organism and then everywhere stumbles against the sensory outside, it develops, we say, a sense of touch. First, it is a kind of internal tunnelling, then bumping against the borders of the externally spatial. Nevertheless, the being learns in the contact with the outside world to adapt itself; it forms a kind of picture of the outside world by the sense of touch; by the collisions with the border, this sense of touch develops.

One can compare to this image of that what develops the outer senses in the lower organisms what the soul experiences if it gets to such border places of cognition. There the soul really experiences in such a way, as if you bump against anything in the darkness that you have outside at first. Then that differentiates itself, which you experience there in such contradictory mental pictures that one forms at boundary places of knowledge. As the sense of touch arises as a physical sense from the undifferentiated cells, a spiritual existence arises from the mental, while the soul bumps against the border of the spiritual world. You really bump against the spiritual world. However, you also adapt yourself to it. You experience the significant that you have the soul first as it were as an undeveloped soul organism, which the outside spiritual world faces, then however, this soul develops spiritual senses of touch and spiritual eyes, spiritual ears in the further process to perceive that with which it is confronted at first.

I gladly believe that today those people who feel the urge to experience something of the spiritual world would prefer if one could teach the ability of perceiving the spiritual world while one imposes them mystically or as the case may be. Some people believe this. Nevertheless, it is not that way. What opens the spiritual world to us is inner soul work. This inner soul work really leads to that which I have indicated. The human being who changes his soul into an organised soul knows that his soul gets free from the body, when pushing against the spiritual and perceives the spirit. Getting free from the body is a result of inner perception. Since also that which I have explained just now appears repeatedly with persons of knowledge.

It is strange, how the course develops which I have described spiritual-scientifically with those who have worked through the longings for knowledge.

Let me bring in an example of Vischer once again, the example of a quotation by him by which he shows how he felt placed repeatedly at those boundary places of cognition where one cannot help perceiving contradictions, but contradictions that cannot be solved while you solve them logically, but while you settle down into them and develop your spiritual organs.

In particular, the following contradiction appeared to Vischer over and over again: the brain should be the organ of the soul, should produce mental pictures as it were; but if one becomes engrossed in the being of the mental pictures, one cannot regard them as cerebral products. This is such a boundary place of cognition; Vischer says referring to it:

“No mind, where no nerve centre, where no brain, the opponents say.”—Vischer himself does not say it—“No nerve centre, no brain, we say if it were not prepared from below on countless levels. It is simple to jibe at a spirit rumbling about in granite and lime—it is not more difficult than if we ask mockingly how the proteins in the brain soar ideas. The human knowledge cannot measure the level differences. It will remain a secret how it appears and happens that nature behind which the spirit still must slumber is such perfect counterblow of the spirit that we get bumps from it. It is a diremption of such apparent totality that with Hegel's alterity and exasperation, as witty as the formula may be, nothing is said; the asperity of the imaginary partition is simply covered. One finds the right recognition of the cutting edge and the thrust of this counterblow with Fichte, but no explanation of it.”

This portrayal is very strange. Friedrich Theodor Vischer feels facing a limit of knowledge; he describes his experience. How has he to describe it?

He gets to the expression: “we get bumps from it.” He gets to the expression: “cutting edge and thrust of the counterblow.”—One sees the soul that wants to differentiate to develop internal spiritual organs by which it can experience the supersensible outside world, in which it lives.

For a long time in the history of humanity, it was an obstacle to soar spiritual organs in the right way because one believed only the human thinking that takes the sense impressions as starting point could solve certain questions, just the questions of God, freedom and immortality.

Well, thinking is important, because strictly speaking a big part of those exercises that one must do to attain spiritual organs consists of a higher development of thinking than the thinking is which one uses in natural sciences. However, if you only abandon yourself to the usual thinking, that originates from the usual human being not from that second human being sleeping in you. This thinking does not lead into the spiritual world; this thinking can only realise that it is in the spiritual world. However, no unbiased person concedes that thoughts are something that lives in the sensory world; however, these thoughts contain nothing but impressions of the sensory world if they are taken from the usual human nature. People with deeper inner life have always felt like in flashes of inspiration where to the human thinking leads if it is left to itself, emancipated from the outer sense perception.

You can find—if you have experience of the spiritual-scientific literature—such light flashes with numerous personalities which sometimes are, however, darkness flashes. With them, one has to stop and observe to which cliffs the human cognitive life leads if this life is sincere and honest to itself and does not fool itself with all kinds of prejudices, and does not apply all kinds of methods taken from other, verified fields to the soul life itself. Again an example of many:

A man who really struggled with knowledge problems and riddles is Gideon Spicker (1840-1912) who taught philosophy at the University of Münster until few years. Gideon Spicker took the education for the spiritual as starting point. The deepest knowledge questions arose to him from theology. Some years ago, he wrote two nice booklets: From the Cloister to the Academic Lectureship. Destinies of a Former Capuchin (1908) and In the Turning Point of the Christian World Period. A Philosophical Confession of a Former Capuchin (1910); in the one he describes his life, in the other his knowledge desire.

At a place, one has to pause particularly where this former Capuchin, who then became a professor, expresses himself about the experience that he had with thinking that he had emancipated from the sensory experience. However, he did not have the courage to go into spiritual science; he did not develop the power of thoughts so far that it wakes the spiritual organs, so that he faced a spiritual world, felt with his soul being in the realm of the supersensible. Because he was at such a border place where he experienced something with the thinking, he expressed himself as follows:

“To which philosophy one confesses, whether to a dogmatic or skeptical, to an empiric or transcendental, a critical or eclectic one: all without exception take an unproven and unprovable proposition as starting point, namely the necessity of thinking. No investigation gets to this necessity, as deeply as it may prospect one day. It must be absolutely accepted and can be founded by nothing”—he means the necessity of thinking—“every attempt to prove its correctness always requires it. Beneath it a bottomless abyss yawns, a nightmarish darkness illuminated by no beam of light. We do not know, where from it comes, neither where to it leads. Whether a merciful God or a bad demon put it in the reason, both are uncertain.”

However, no human being speaks this way who has learnt a little bit only, has maybe learnt very much, and puts up all kinds of philosophy from the learnt concepts. Thus a human being speaks who has worked through what the knowledge researcher can go through if he submerges with his soul forces only deeply enough into that undergrounds of inner experience into which one can submerge where one is confronted with the cliffs, the partitions which one only penetrates if the spiritual organs really awake if they become consciousness.

In my life, I became acquainted with a number of such persons like Gideon Spicker, and I have tried to reflect such characters in the picture of Strader in my mystery dramas. However, I had to experience with it that just those who are often called followers of anthroposophy misunderstood me to the greatest extent. While the persons whom these dramas show are taken out of the real, comprehensive life, from that life that should just show the necessity and the validity of spiritual science from the other areas of modern existence, weird persons believed, I would write such roles that are tailor-made for those who should represent them, whereas I was just a far cry from this.

I could show with a comparison what such a person experiences who does not get to the knowledge of spirit but to the insight of the necessity of thinking. Someone who gets to the knowledge of spirit knows that if one not only wants to consider the thinking but experiences it, he does not experience, indeed, that beyond the thinking that Gideon Spicker describes, the bottomless abyss, the nightmarish darkness illuminated by no beam of light, but he experiences the spiritual world beyond this thinking that bears the sense-perceptible reality. He experiences with his soul in this supersensible area. He also experiences that there is no uncertainty whether a merciful God or a bad demon has been put in the reason, but he experiences and observes the spiritual that penetrates the reason, as the sense perceptible world penetrates the sensory observation.

However, one must say that the thinking—if it is left to itself if it is only thought, and is not experienced—that such a development of the soul life can be compared—you forgive for the somewhat odd comparison—with a hungry organism. If one believes to be able to recognise something of the highest questions by mere thinking—God, freedom, immortality—, then one resembles a person who does not want to still his hunger with food from the outside, but lets the hunger develop. As little as you can develop a hungry organism, so that it balances out its needs in itself, just as little you can attain any spiritual content of the soul and any solution of the questions of God, freedom, immortality if you abandon yourself only to the thinking. As you starve on and on unless you eat, you cannot attain the spiritual development if you think only on and on.

The older philosophical metaphysics wanted this. As hard as it is, it is true: this outdated metaphysics that is something new, however, to some people is nothing but a science that suffers from mental malnutrition.

However, it is not enough that you gain this knowledge only to understand the inner experience correctly. As you have to understand that mere thinking leads to mental malnutrition if this thinking does not brace itself up for inner experience, you have also to understand that much knowledge of the outer sense-perceptible reality and its processing by the intellect, by methodical research do not lead to any knowledge of the soul.

You will convince yourselves if you take common textbooks of psychology that one normally starts speaking about the nervous system. What one says, otherwise, about the human organism is borrowed from physiology, from natural sciences.

Now I have to stress repeatedly not to be misunderstood that spiritual science is a far cry from misjudging what natural sciences have reached concerning the secrets of the nervous life, the secrets of the human organism. I do not want to discount its value. Nevertheless, the value is in another area than in that of the soul knowledge. You may abandon yourself to the mere thinking, then you starve; but abandoning yourself to the outer observation for the knowledge of the soul life only resembles the supply of all kinds of stuff that is indigestible. If you fill your stomachs with stones or the like, the human organism cannot make anything from this indigestible stuff.

Thus you cannot suppose, if you take the scientific results simply in such a way as they are and do not process them mentally, that you receive any enlightenment of the spiritual world, of the life of the soul in the supersensible realm. In our times, people abandoned themselves to the most different mental pictures that should explain how actually the soul relates to the body. Not only that there the oddest fairy tales are bustling about in that what one often calls science. One wants to eradicate fairy tales and superstition from the outer life, in science they often flourish, one only notes it in science just as little as one noted it in the outer life of former times. That fairy tale also belongs to it that the nerves are telegraph wires to the soul that pass on the outer sensory impressions, then again other nerves are there which direct the will impulses to the periphery. About this fairy tale, one would not like to talk at all, because what is meant with this comparison is far away from reality and arises only from an unnoticed scientific superstition.

However, I would like to emphasise two mental pictures that are also widespread today with those who contemplate the relationship of the body and the soul.

Some people believe that they have to regard the body or the nervous system as a kind of tool of the soul, as if the soul is a being that uses the body like a tool. The others who cannot realise how a mental-spiritual being should find a working point to work on something material like the body got even to the weird mental picture of the mental-bodily parallelism. There the processes of the body should proceed for themselves. Without the soul working on the body like a cause or the body reacting on the soul, the soul life should proceed in parallel with the bodily processes. One current always accompanies the other, but the one does not work on the other. Wundt (Wilhelm W., 1832-1920), Ebbinghaus (Herman E., 1850-1909), Paulsen (Friedrich, 1846-1908) and many others dedicate themselves to this weird parallelism theory.

All these theories suffer from the fact that they do not realise what the coherence of the soul with the body is based on. This coherence can be expressed neither by the fact that one says, the body is the tool of the soul, nor that one says, the soul processes proceed in parallel with the bodily phenomena.

However, I am able to bring only forward that what I can say that encompasses a wide field as a result and observation of anthroposophy. Everybody can find the other reasons in my various writings. Nevertheless, I would like to show the essentials briefly today.

If one wants to express the relationship of soul and body correctly, one has to say, as far as one considers the human being, everything bodily of the human being turns out to be for a real observation neither as tool nor as a process running alongside but as a creation of the soul in microcosm and on a large scale.

It is nothing bodily at the human being that is no creation of the soul. However, one has to cast off some prejudices and to take up new concepts from spiritual science if one wants to envisage this far-reaching idea that everything bodily is a creation of the soul.

Already in microcosm, this is in such a way if we form any mental picture if a feeling emerges in us. Yes, only because one has not learnt to observe spiritually and bodily, one believes that there something exterior works on a finished body; the exterior effect spreads to the finished body through the eye or ear, then the effect continues inwardly. Have an unbiased look at the suitable theories. You will find everywhere that they are not at all based on real observations but on prejudices. Since what really goes forward if we perceive if we hear anything, is already carried out, actually, for the most part when we become aware of it, and is strictly speaking always a developmental process in the body. A beam of light hits us and causes something. It is in the same world in which our body is. In our body, something goes forward. What goes forward in it is of the same kind, only in microcosm, as it is if on a large-scale forces form our organism on a large scale. As the forces of growth and other forces form our organism, something is formed in us if a beam of light hits us if a tone hits us and so on. That which is formed there as something subtle in us is reflected in the soul that is not in the body but always in the supersensible realm. We become aware of the reflection. The process, however, which must take place there for the wake consciousness must be a destructive process, a little death.

We cannot completely convince ourselves of the consciousness, of the soul being with the help of the usual consciousness processes, and with bodily-spiritual observation. Nevertheless, if we come on what also accompanies our usual awake life, on the forming of memories, we come already nearer to that which I have just said. Someone who is able to observe what goes forward in the human being knows: what makes a mental picture aware to us does not lead straight away to memories. No, something has always to run alongside, another process has to take place. If you have sense for observation, look at a pupil who studies hard ever so much; what he must perform as auxiliary exercises, so that that which he takes up also goes over into his memory. For a subconscious accompanying process must proceed always. That which we know does not remain to us, but that which goes alongside the consciousness in the subconsciousness. However, that which happens there in our organism by this side flow of the consciousness is still very similar to the growth processes of childhood.

The origin of mental pictures is a growth process in microcosm. Usually we grow like with tremendous power in proportion to the small growth process that takes place in us, unnoticed in the usual life if memory forms. Under the surface of the current of the conscious mental pictures, events happen which carry the memories; and this is very like the growth processes. Do you ask why one can well train the memory just in your youth? Because you still have fresh growth forces in yourselves, because they have not yet withered. However, I can always give such single proofs only; you can prove what I have said with many single observations.

Our usual imagining, feeling and willing intervenes already in such a way that it is reflected not only and makes aware what happens; but in such a way as concerning the memory an undercurrent is there for our conscious life, there is also an upper current. As one does not note the undercurrent—one notes it at most if the pupil studies hard and does movements and knocks its head to support this undercurrent—, one does not note the upper current all the more. However, this upper current belongs above all to that second human being who sleeps there in the usual human being, while we think, feel, and will in our usual life.

Just as the current of memory proceeds beneath the consciousness, something purely mental proceeds above the consciousness, something that does not intervene at all anyhow in the body. Because this conscious soul life has such hyper-experience, I would like to say, the forces of growth are not sufficient for this conscious soul life, for the entire soul life at all. The forces that lead the human being to birth are not sufficient. These forces could only evoke that in the human being that we perceive with the sleeping organism.

At the moment when the consciousness intervenes with its upper currents in the organism, those forces which also destroy this organism finally at death must intervene in the organism. These forces are destructive forces, so that the forces of growth must balance out them in sleep. Only then, one understands the supersensible life of the soul if one knows how far the purely organic reaches subsensibly.

I do not like speaking about personal experiences; what I tell, however, is associated substantially with that which I generally have to bring forward. I confess that I intensely pursued the problems about which I speak today and in my writings since for more than thirty years on all ways that may arise. These ways have to lead the soul into the area of spiritual life and in the coherence of this spiritual-mental life with the bodily life. I have found that—if you go about your work scientifically in the sense of our time honestly and sincerely—you really can obtain many fertile things, while you discipline yourself scientifically. On this way then you just find those questions for whose solution the usual natural sciences do not suffice. Yes, just from scientific thinking one gets other observation results about what is in natural sciences, actually.

The question of the nature of the nervous system was one of the biggest ones to me for decades, which the scientific psychologists, the psychological scientists regard as the organ of the soul who imagine that in the nerves an inner activity takes place, which is similar to other organ activities. Well, such activities also proceed in the nerves, but they do just not serve the forming of mental pictures, of feelings and will impulses. They serve the nutrition of the nerves, the production of the nervous substance if it has been consumed. They just do not serve the soul life; however, they must be there, so that the soul life can take place. I use a comparison that I have used here already once.

If you consider the nervous system as something that must be there for the soul life, you just have something, as if you say, the ground must be there, so that I do not fall into the depth if I want to go. However, if I go and the ground is soft, I leave behind tracks. Then someone will completely err who checks the ground and searches the forces in it, which my footprints have produced from inside. As little as these forces produce tracks from inside, any inner forces of the brain and nervous system produce the tracks that originate from imagining, feeling, and willing. There the mental works which prevails in the supersensible area.

Before one does not realise this and experiences it as real observation, one can generally come to no understanding of the true nature of the soul. That which is on the bottom of the soul life in the nervous life is not the organic processes of the nervous system—they lead to another direction—, this is that which I would like to specify now. I have brought in the preceding personal remark, so that you realise that I do not frivolously pronounce something such substantial that it is hard gained what I say about the nervous life: while organic forces go into the nervous ramifications, the human being goes over from life to death. In the nervous ramifications, the human being dies perpetually, if he uses these nervous ramifications for thinking, feeling, or willing.

The organic life does not continue as the growth conditions do, but it dies away, while ramifying in the nerves. While it dies away, it prepares the ground for the spiritual development, for the purely supersensible mental. As I remove the air with a pump from a container, produce vacuum, and then the air completely flows again into the container by itself, in the same way mental life flows in the dead part of the nervous system perpetually if the organism sends the partial death into it.

Hence, the partial death is the basis of consciousness. If one recognises that the human being does not need to pour his organic forces into his body to make this body the place of the soul, but that the human being needs to kill his organic experience to withdraw this organic life constantly from the places to which the nerves give the opportunity, you notice how the supersensible soul life can develop in the sensory body, however, after it has created this sensory body first. Since the same soul, which thinks, feels and wills in the time from conception to death, exists also before. The spiritual world is not anywhere in a cloud-cuckoo-land, it is there where the sense-perceptible world is also; it penetrates it. Where sensory effects are, they originate from supersensible, spiritual effects. This same soul lives in the supersensible world that has formed the body and has changed it into the apparatus reflecting the processes to it of which you can become aware. Before it came to conception, it lived in the supersensible world, and in this life on earth, it is connected with the supersensible world. This soul exists already since centuries, before it enters the sense-perceptible existence at conception. As in the life between birth and death this soul has created the body as its image and unfolds its life with this image of the body, the life of the soul unfolds the forces that develop the forces of heredity from the supersensible world.

It is correct that that which we pass on originates in the successive generations. However, our soul works already on them. We insert the forces in our ancestors by the effects of our soul that we receive then as inherited. Thus, we develop our whole organism from the spiritual world as we form something with the memory in microcosm; and only the base, the opportunity of it is given by the sensory heredity. The body is completely a creation of the mental-spiritual. As well as the single experience between birth and death is based on a creation of the spiritual, the entire human body is also based on the spiritual-mental. However, there are incorporated not only the forces of growth in this developmental current but also the forces that appear finally in the total sum as death which is only the outside of immortality.

Since while the mental-spiritual puts the body in the world, is reflected with it, it experiences its own life in the supersensible area. However, at the same time it destroys the body because the upper current mentioned just now develops. As every consciousness is based on a partial death, the complete death is nothing but the withdrawal of the soul from the body that is the beginning of a different experience of the soul. We know: as we develop memories between birth and death, we developed the inner human being in the supersensible current who goes through births and deaths who is everlasting.

What I have indicated as soul experience is not anything that the spiritual researcher produces, it is the characterised second human being whom one only oversleeps, otherwise, but is always in the human being. Spiritual research is nothing but making people aware of that what is perpetual and eternal in the human being, so that he can go through death. If you are able to move with your mental in the spiritual in the intimated way as you move with your senses in the physical-sensory, then you know that you live as a human being also in a spiritual world as one lives with the senses in a physical world. As one distinguishes the mineral, plant and animal realms in the physical world, one distinguishes realms in the spiritual world, which are full of beings that become more and more spiritual the higher you ascend to which the human being belongs with his soul, as he belongs with his body to the physical realms. Briefly, the soul consciously enters in the spiritual world.

I would like to call this worldview Goetheanism after its origins, as well as I would call the building in Dornach Goetheanum that is dedicated to this worldview. Since not on some daydreams but on the healthy condition on which the Goethean worldview is based that is also based what I mean as anthroposophy. Goethe differed in his view of the physical things just by such conditions from that what originated later as natural sciences. However, Goethe developed such scientific concepts that these concepts may sit heavily in the soul's stomach like stones, but can be transformed, so that you reach the mental realm with these scientific concepts. Goethe himself did not yet found spiritual science; he did not get around to doing this. Nevertheless, he developed his theory of metamorphosis so that you only need to develop the internal experience from the principles further, then you also attain knowledge of the mental-spiritual experience.

Whereto does the common psychology, actually, come? A very significant philosopher of the present, Franz Brentano (1838-1917), who died recently, had a rich knowledge life behind himself. He was a fighter in this area; last, he found asylum during this war in Zurich. He attempted to cope with thinking, feeling, and willing his whole life through, beside his other profound researches in the psychological field. These three concepts play a particular role in psychology. Franz Brentano did not advance further than to a classification, did not advance where one can grasp the mental itself only as something living. If one clusters imagining, feeling, willing so simply mechanically, one has three classes. To grasp the mental as something living, one has to grasp the mental, now, however, the spiritual-mental, in such a way as Goethe tried to grasp the outer physical things with his theory of metamorphosis, as Goethe imagined the green leaves of the stalk transformed into the petals, even into the fruit organs. As he attempted to explain all organs by a transformation into each other, one must not only leave thinking, feeling, and willing side by side, but also gain the living transition of them.

There I can bring in the research results again which matured in myself for a long time. Our will is not only put so externally beside the feeling and the imagining, but the feeling has simply originated as a metamorphosis of the will in such a way as the petal forms from the stalk leaf; and imagining develops from feeling. At the end the anthroposophist gets to the result that the will is basically a young being which if it becomes older changes into feeling, and if it becomes even older into thinking, into mental pictures. In the imagining the same is always mysteriously contained which is also inside feeling and willing. However, we do not experience how mental pictures arise from feeling.

However, if the soul has developed its spiritual organs, it experiences a mysterious feeling in all its mental pictures, but not a feeling which is bound to our body, but which leads us on the detour of the mental picture into the vastnesses of the spiritual world. You experience—if you are not led by the feeling into your bodily, but are led into the vastnesses of the spiritual world—that supersensible in which we are between death and a new birth. Then you experience the supersensible world with higher knowledge than the usual mental pictures are, with spiritual-mental knowledge.

However, most people would like to experience this supersensible world after the methods of the sensory world. They are not contented to experience it only in pictures, in Imaginations. They would like to experience it with the senses. However, as the body has to die to become pure spirit, one has to cast off the sensory knowledge that combines with the material. Knowledge has to become Imagination, so that in the Imaginative experience which is as subtle as imagination, but not so arbitrary, the sensory-material is cast off, and a picture of that reality is already attained between birth and death that the human being experiences after death.

Hence, nobody can hope to recognise the supersensible who would like to hear voices or to get other material effects like the spiritists do, while because of a weird self-deception these want to tackle, actually, the supersensible and put something sense-perceptible to themselves. With that subtle spiritual experience, which must happen if one wants to experience the imperishable human being, just many people are not content today. Only this supersensible experience can lead us to the real knowledge of the soul being in the supersensible field that leads us to a true view of the relationship of the body to the soul and that of the soul to the body.

As the feeling changes into imagining, the willing does it too. As one can find a feeling mysteriously in every mental picture, one also discovers a will impulse, which does not lead us to the movements of the limbs, to sensory actions, but leads us from imagining into the supersensible world.

If one discovers the young soul being of willing in the old-grown soul being of imagining, one discovers in this willing which is experienced purely spiritually those forces which work from the preceding life on earth on this life on earth. Then the repeated lives on earth and the intermediate lives in the purely supersensible world become real observation; then the human being gets to the real supersensible knowledge.

One could think that the supersensible knowledge is there only to satisfy the human need of knowledge. Let me quite briefly, at the end, only indicate with few words that this does not hold true. One could believe that only the human need of knowledge is satisfied, but this has its deep practical significance. Indeed, one is concerned with progress in the evolution of humanity. The Copernican worldview, the modern natural sciences came only, after humanity had gone through other levels before. Thus, the anthroposophical spiritual science only originates if the urge to recognise the supersensible is strong enough in the human beings. Many people who know that there is a supersensible world still believe that today the human beings are not ripe to develop those free cognitive forces to wake the sleeping human being. The opposite is the case! Today the human being thirsts for supersensible knowledge. He numbs himself only as I have said at the beginning of this talk.

This cannot go on this way for other reasons, too. One can recognise nature without ascending to laws that make the soul life explicable. You can even say that you can recognise nature the better, the more you keep away from any mental-spiritual while developing physical laws. The physical laws will be the more suited for their field, the less one confuses them with laws that refer only to the mental-spiritual. One has already to say this. However, as soon as it concerns the complete understanding of human life, so that our understanding can intervene in the development of this human life, as soon as it concerns the social and political living together, as soon as it concerns generally finding a right relation from human being to human being, something else is necessary. Then the thoughts that are formed only after the pattern of natural sciences are not sufficient.

Unfortunately, humanity has got used very much to thinking life after such thought forms after which one imagines natural processes. Thus people also have instinctively familiarised themselves with the social life, with the political living together in such a way and also to form it as the spirit forms which only is just used to thinking physical laws. More and more this has developed that way during the last four centuries. As it is correct if natural sciences exclude the spirit from their field, it is insufficient for the human living together, for everything that is connected with society, with sociology to develop thought forms that originate only from natural sciences. One does not become ready with how the human beings have to live together all over the world if one wants to develop this living together after political, after social ideals that are produced after the pattern of scientific principles.

One example of many: when this tragic war broke out, one could hear from many sides, just from the people who called themselves experts of the laws of human living together: this war can last no longer than at most four to five months.—In full seriousness, these persons said this from their scientifically developed thinking, which also exists with that who is not a physical scientist. Just the greatest experts spoke this way. How sadly has reality disproved these mental pictures! Nobody who figures spiritual-scientifically out the world can dedicate himself to such mistakes because he knows which difference exists between escapist mental pictures and realistic ones.

What fulfils our souls as spiritual science brings us together with reality; it puts us into the full reality. A social science, which really copes with this living together of human beings around the whole world which should not bring in instincts, impulses to the human beings which discharge as the today's dreadful, catastrophic events discharge—such a social science can arise only from the conditions which spiritual science gives. Since it deals not with a part of life but with the whole life; hence, it only can generate mental pictures and concepts that cope with reality.

If people do not force themselves to build up their social thinking based on spiritual science, humanity will not come out of the calamities that discharge today so frightfully. I can appreciate what goes out from the people who one calls pacifists or similarly. However, such things cannot be decided by mere orders, cannot be decided by the fact that one decrees: this and that must be.

One can absolutely agree with that which must be. However, if one only produces the orders, only the laws of the usual thinking, it is in such a way, as if one says to a stove: dear stove, it is your duty to heat the room; hence, heat the room.—It will not heat the room, without putting wood into it and making a fire.

Just as little all the usual ideas of peacekeeping et cetera are sufficient. It concerns that one not only says, human beings, love each other, but that one puts heating material into the human souls. However, these are concepts that arise from the living conception of spiritual life.

Since the soul does not only belong to the material, it belongs to the spiritual life. One does often not understand even today, what it means that this human soul belongs to the supersensible area. One usually thinks that one is with the laws which one develops today already in the supersensible area. One does not do this.

Just in the fields of serious science one often starts realising already that it is also significant to check for human experience not only that which scientific prejudice has sketched out in the last decades but also that there other concepts, other ideas are necessary.

Did we not experience the strange play in the last time that one of the most loyal disciples of Haeckel, Oscar Hertwig (1849-1922), the famous physiologist, wrote a book in which he says farewell to the whole outwardness of Darwin's theory which wants to explain the evolution only with a sum of contingencies, of coincidences, which does not want that forces intervene in this evolution that one cannot recognise with mere outer observation. Thus, one experienced the strange case that Oscar Hertwig wrote a significant book in the last time: The Origin of Organisms — a Refutation of Darwin's Theory of Chance (1916). In this book in which serious science itself attempts to come out from the only material, to ascend to the spiritual, Oscar Hertwig closes his explanations with the following considerations:

“The interpretation of Darwin's theory which is so ambiguous with its indefiniteness also permitted a versatile use in other fields of the economic, social, and political life. From it everybody could get desired answers, like from a Delphi oracle, concerning its practical applications on social, political, hygienic, medical, and other fields and refers as affirmation of his assertions to the Darwinian biology with its immutable physical principles. However, if now these putative principles are no real ones”—Oscar Hertwig believes to have proved that—, “should there not be social dangers with its versatile practical application on other fields? Nevertheless, do not believe that the human society can use phrases like the relentless struggle for existence, the selection of the fittest, the natural perfection etc. transferring them to the most different fields without being deeper influenced in the whole direction of its ideation. One could easily prove this assertion with many phenomena of modern times. Just therefore the decision of truth and error of Darwinism is beyond the scope of biological science.”

There you recognise how a naturalist realises: what the human beings think and what of their thoughts changes over into their impulses, that prepares and develops what then in the outer reality comes into being; the spiritual is also the creator of the material in the social field.

If the material appears in such figure as today, one has to search other reasons in the spiritual than someone searches them who goes forward with his concepts of the social only after the pattern of natural sciences. Spiritual science that is based on occultism will work different on the social life; it will not speak only of a relentless struggle for existence, but it will figure out what positions itself as something spiritual in that which appears in nature only as struggle for existence. It considers not only the existence after the outside, but after that which the spirit has poured into it; it will not only judge the course of evolution by its functionality but also by that which has been put as something ethical in the course of purposefulness. It will not only speak of perfection by natural selection but of the creative spirit that flows into the developmental current and creates the natural selection as well as the soul creates its body. It will search the bases of the social laws above all in the supersensible.

There we can already realise that spiritual science is not something that satisfies mere knowledge, but something that is intimately associated with the practical need, with the whole course of life. The future will demand those bases of thinking just for the practical life that can originate only from spiritual science.

Why are the human beings reluctant even today to accept spiritual science? Just from that which I have said now one can get an answer. We were mainly concerned this evening how spiritual science pursues the riddle of immortality. However, death separates us from immortality. We have realised that just in the course of life we have to recognise the perpetual intervention of death. In ancient times, one always said, someone who enters into the spiritual world must experience death symbolically.

It is maybe a radical diction, but it is true. Between our world of the senses and the intellect that analyzes the sensory observations and the world of immortality is no world of growth but of death. One has to envisage death; one has to look at the destructive forces that counteract the forces that just natural sciences regard as the forces of growth.

This produces something similar in the area of knowledge, as it is the fear of death in the outer life. One can already speak of the fact that people do not have the courage to penetrate that area through which one must go if one wants to enter into the supersensible. The human beings shrink from it. They do not know it. They deceive themselves with all kinds of theories and prejudices of limits of knowledge, with any only material significance of life. They rather deceive themselves than that they pass that gate courageously through which one can come only from the sensory to the extrasensory world. However, the gate is that by which one must recognise the nature of death. Since it is true: the human being will find adequate harmony of his soul only if he can absorb the secrets of immortality.

Nevertheless, to the fruit of knowledge that can be enjoyed as immortality one gets only if one ploughs over the ground of death. However, one must not be afraid of it. As the human being overcomes the deadly fear of knowledge in the area of cognition, a science of the immortal, of the supersensible will originate. Tomorrow I speak about the fact that this science of the supersensible disturbs nobody's religious confession. I hope that I do not engage your attention tomorrow as long as today; but I was not able to shorten this basic talk.

If religious feeling and experience wanted to understand its task properly towards the requirements of modern time and faced that with full understanding what anthroposophy intends, the religious feeling and confessing would consider anthroposophy as a welcome confederate just today. However, one does not always make it his business in the present to get to know the properties of those things about which one believes to judge competently. This is true to the greatest extent in particular compared with anthroposophy. One judges what one faces while one labels it from without, often sketches a caricature of that what it concerns in reality. Then one does not judge this reality but the self-made picture, the self-made caricature.

If one delved on anthroposophy, if one envisaged its task towards the riddles and problems of our time, one would become attentive above all to the fact that anthroposophy differs from all other opinions and views that arise about world and human being et cetera, because it is deeply penetrated by the idea of development in the most comprehensive sense.

Human opinions and worldviews feel contented only if they can say to themselves, in certain sense and within certain limits at least, I have thoughts that are true; they are valid in themselves; science, religion, or I have found them; but they are valid in themselves.

That does not apply to anthroposophy. Anthroposophy knows that the thoughts have to come from the spirit of time in every epoch. The spirit of humanity is continually developing. That is why that what appears as opinion in the world in an age must have another form than in another age. While anthroposophy appears to the world today, it knows that after centuries that what it says today it has to say in quite different form for quite different human needs and interests that it cannot aim at “absolute truths” but that it is in living development.

From such conditions a certain attitude results. On it the judgement depends, which anthroposophy must have about other spiritual attempts and currents; its relationship to other spiritual currents, other opinions, other views depends on it. Above all one has to take into consideration that anthroposophy did not originate in such a way as many people mean, and that it is not able to position itself in the network of contemporary opinions and views as one thinks frequently. Since one thinks if one gets to know anything about anthroposophy cursorily, while one has heard a talk about it once or has read a few pages of any book about it, or maybe not even this, but has heard from anybody who knows only very dubiously what anthroposophy intends; one thinks that anthroposophy is a religious confession as other religious confessions are.

In the course of time, one has just developed the sensation: developing ideas about the world is a religious view beside others. Hence, one thinks that anthroposophy is also such a sect, as many sects exist in the world.

I have to stress on the other hand first, just this is distinctive of anthroposophy that it did not appear anyhow in the world beside or in contrast to any faith. It did not appear because of this or that creed on which it has to take a stand, but because the scientific development made it necessary which has a formative influence on the views of the present. Anthroposophy wants to extend and to perfect what natural sciences have brought. One has to consider this starting point. If one gets to know the scientific achievements that go over in the public consciousness and work on its worldview, one has to say, natural sciences have worked and will work their way out even more in the course of time as interpreter of the outer sense-perceptible existence. The laws and methods that they develop are suitable in the most eminent sense to understand the outer existence, but unsuitable if one does not transform them in order to grasp the spiritual. If one wants to grasp the spiritual just with the same scientific severity as one grasps the natural, one has to work into the spiritual world as I have shown it yesterday from the way of thinking and attitude of natural sciences.

There, however, big difficulties tower up for some people. One may say: just by the brilliant progress of natural sciences by which one has also looked into the spiritual border areas it has happened that one has developed a worldview in which, actually, the spirit has no place. This must be like that. Just as the scientific methods are suitable for the natural existence, they must be in such a way that they exclude the spirit from their research fields. If one takes the human being himself into account, one has to say, anatomy, physiology, and biology can study the bodily existence of the human being only if they show that with their methods, with their way of research the spirit is excluded as it were.

However, if one gets involved how natural sciences go forward, then one can continue natural sciences in such a way as I have characterised this yesterday. One finds his way with certain methods that the human soul applies to itself just from the natural existence to the spiritual world. The spiritual world becomes such a reality to the spiritual senses, as the mineral realm and other realms of nature are real to the outer senses. One works the way up to the spiritual.

A difficulty arises there for many people. They say if one speaks of the relationship of natural sciences to anthroposophy in such a way, yes, he is right maybe completely if he speaks about natural sciences; one cannot grasp the spirit with the scientific methods, one cannot know anything of the spirit; there are just borders, there are areas beyond natural sciences about which we can know nothing.

However, just from the yesterday's talk it may have arisen that anthroposophy is not of this opinion. The opposite is the experience of anthroposophy: that one can really penetrate into the spirit, into this unknown land with certain spiritual methods. It is hard for some people to concede that one can still get to know something of an area if one gets involved in certain ideas and research results.

It is much more comfortable to say, this is an area about which all human beings know nothing—because they themselves know nothing about it. However, this is no proof that one can know nothing of it, although one often concludes this. Hence, it concerns just if anthroposophy argues that one can enter as a human being into the spiritual world—using those methods to which I have yesterday pointed—in which in truth the human being lives with his soul. In this spiritual world, he experiences immortality and freedom, the real impulses of his supersensible existence.

Because during the last centuries and up to now natural sciences follow the transient, just something had to face them that appreciates the same scientificity in the spiritual area. In former times, natural sciences did not yet face the religious confessions that referred the human beings to the spiritual world. Hence, a special spiritual science was not yet necessary. Such natural sciences did not yet exist which could dupe the human beings into regarding the outer sense-perceptible reality as the only one. Only in the time when such a science and with it such a belief could appear, a spiritual science had to come.

This is in the course of development. That is why one can understand the emergence of anthroposophy only properly if one understands its arising from natural sciences. If natural sciences produced a kind of confession only of their own accord in the human beings, they would gradually entice them because of their strictly scientific methods and completely dissuade them from the view that one can penetrate by knowledge into the spiritual world. They would bring along that the human beings believe to the greatest extent: well, one can know everything about the sense-perceptible world; anything else that is beyond the sense-perceptible world is subject to faith that can never lead to any certainty.

Here is the point that is hard to understand for the contemporaries at first because it requires a major effort to subject the soul to those experiences by which it attains spiritual senses to itself beside the physical senses to penetrate into the real spiritual world. It will still last long, until the prejudices disappear which prevail in this respect, until an sufficiently big number of human beings realise that one can really penetrate into the spiritual world as scientifically as into nature.

So that spiritual science can gradually settle down in our cultural life, it is necessary that people unite who intend and feel a need to maintain it. From that desire everything has also originated that comes into being in the Dornach building and its surroundings. However, the union of single persons leads straight away to the wrong opinion: well, there one deals with a sect, there the persons consort who want to support any new faith among themselves. However, associating in this area has another sense than associating in sects. Associating in the anthroposophic area has the sense that anthroposophy cannot be attained by reading a single talk, but that anthroposophy is something on which someone who wants to know it properly has to work gradually.

This takes place also in the schools, in the universities; and if one wants to call an audience in the university a “sect,” one may call an association of those who practise anthroposophy a “sect,” otherwise not. If to certain talks, to certain events only some persons can come who have absorbed other things already in themselves, this seems quite natural; since with any other knowledge it is that way. Anthroposophy wants just to consider the modern institutions. Nothing mysterious forms the basis if human beings come together and carry out events, but only that which they have searched as preparation as you prepare yourself for university lectures, before you can visit them because, otherwise, the visit is useless. Any other view about such a coming together does not apply because it does not get to the heart of the matter.

However, one has to say, an association in this area must have another character in certain respect than an association of students at a college, for example. The cognitions that a college provides refer mostly to the outer life, with the exception of quite small “enclaves;” they refer by the influence of natural sciences to the intellect based on the sensory observation. However, this is directed more to the mere thinking, to a part of the human being, to the head. By no means has anthroposophy opposed the intellectual understanding!—People who consider themselves as capable sometimes judge anthroposophy just with their prejudices and regard anthroposophy as amateurish. However, if these people engaged in it, they would realise that the thinking and the logic that one uses in the outer science must also exist in anthroposophy, but a much subtler, higher logic is necessary to understand its advanced parts really. However, what anthroposophy reveals of the spiritual world because of its research seizes not only the head, not only the thinking, but it seizes the whole human being with his whole soul: feeling, thinking, and willing. However, the human being thereby gets a more intimate relationship to that what is delivered to him as knowledge than possibly the mere university study does.

 I would now like to go back—in order to make understood myself completely in this regard—to the fact that anthroposophy is important for the human development as a supplement of natural sciences that it appears in the sense of the spirit of our time that, however, the cognitions that anthroposophy intends as they corresponded to the needs and interests of former times were always there. Nevertheless, one had other views about the development of the suitable knowledge. One has to talk about mysteries, even of secret societies if one looks for the analogous things of former times that correspond to anthroposophy. One performed that in the mysteries in the course of the human development which today anthroposophy does in another form, which corresponds to the present. Those who did such researches in former times initiated procedures by which the higher knowledge of the spiritual world approached the human beings. They took the view that they had to cut themselves off just in a circle of human beings who were very well prepared for such activities. With them one had made sure that they really had that attitude and character which is necessary to receive something that seizes the whole human being and his whole soul. Hence, one has strictly kept secret the knowledge that one cultivated in such mysteries, in such secret societies.

One can realise even today that good reasons existed to protect this higher knowledge against profanation by the public. There were good reasons. More in view of the today's development of spiritual science I would like to indicate something of these reasons.

If you get from the sense-perceptible world to the spiritual one, as I have described it yesterday, you have to cross a certain border area. One may very well use a term that many people used who understood something of such things: one has to cross the threshold of the spiritual world. This expression means something. It is not an only pictorial term. It means something, as far as the science of the spiritual—if it really approaches the human being and the human being combines with it—brings images, ideas and views with it which are completely different from the images, ideas, and views which one has in the outer sensory world. One can already say: someone who is habitually eager to accept the truth of the outer sensory world only will discover that truths of the spiritual world sound paradoxical at first; they are so different from the truths of the sensory world that they could seem maybe crazy, fantastic. This comes from the fact that one completely goes astray if one believes, the spiritual world which forms the basis of our sensory one is only a kind of continuation of this sensory world; it only seems somewhat more nebulous, somewhat subtler and thinner than the sensory world. No, you have already to familiarise yourself with the fact that you must experience something new, incredible, paradox as truth if you want to engage in the real spiritual world.

Hence, this engagement in the real spiritual world is not only something astonishing, but it often evokes feelings of fright in the human being, in particular if he stands at the threshold of the spiritual world. They are like fear, like shyness that always exists if the human being if he enters into an unknown area. Since for someone who has done his experiences only in the sensory world the spiritual world is an unknown area. Hence, it happens that at the threshold of the spiritual world two things may flow into each other: on one side that is which you have still to acknowledge as truth concerning the sensory world that you have to acknowledge as consecutive facts, as lawful course of facts. Then, however, something confronts us from the other side of the world, from the spiritual side, something that is subject to other laws, that proceeds quite different that makes a paradoxical impression. This can intertwine at first. However, thereby the thinking comes into a situation, which puts high claims to the human mind, to a healthy power of judgement of the whole state of all circumstances. One must be well prepared if one wants to distinguish illusion from spiritual reality within the border area.

Someone who studies the books really which I have mentioned yesterday will realise that the given method to penetrate into the spiritual world is designed in such a way that the human being does not impair the health of his senses, of his mind, and reason, on the contrary it furthers it. Any intrusion in the spiritual world that is managed mystically or with hypnosis is the opposite of that what a healthy spiritual research intends.

However, this does not prevent that malevolent people come repeatedly and state that the spiritual-scientific method hypnotises the human beings, persuade them of all kinds of things. Nothing can contribute so decidedly to save the human being from any hypnotic influence and suggestion as the true spiritual-scientific methods do which make the human being free. One works in the spiritual-scientific method with the following principle: I have pointed in my book The Riddle of Man to the fact that one can say: as well as the human being awakes from sleep where he has only a quite vague consciousness; he can wake from the usual consciousness to the spiritual beholding. It is like an awakening in a spiritual world what you attain with the spiritual-scientific method. However, as the usual day life can be never healthy unless one makes preparations so that the sleep is healthy, the entry into the spiritual world cannot be healthy unless one can develop a healthy everyday life based on reality, on worldly wisdom unless one has disciplined himself, so that one is a human being who copes with reality.

The awakening to the beholding can occur only from a healthy day life. Spiritual science has to expel all preparations in the usual life by which the human being becomes estranged to this life may it be by prejudices, by wrong asceticism, or by wrong turning away from life. Just the proper existence in the practical life is the best preparation to enter into the spiritual world.

However, if one has acquired a healthy sense for the outer reality if one has developed,—to put it another way—a healthy mind and power of judgement, you can distinguish illusion and reality in the border areas of the sensory and spiritual worlds, where the threshold is between both worlds. Hence, one has himself strictly convinced in former times whether the human beings who associated with the mysteries were really prepared to stand the stronger fight that the common sense had to lead off in the border area. Since someone who does not have common sense is misled by the apparently paradox phenomena. He soon leaves the whole matter as one drops an ember if one has burnt himself, and he feels disappointed and becomes more and more an opponent of any spiritual pursuit. These ancient societies wanted to be sure of their people.

Such associations have continued their work up to now; there are still ones. Anthroposophy does not belong to them; anthroposophy reckons that today on a much bigger scale than it was the case in former times, everything that approaches the human being must be subject to the public. We hear with a certain right that even the secret diplomacy has to be replaced by a public one. The spirit of time tends to public. However, just with this spirit of time anthroposophy lives. Only in this respect which I have mentioned before—because certain preparations are necessary if one wants to understand something later—only from such conditions something still has the appearance of the old institutions, but it strives to position itself completely in the public. Since anthroposophy can only become an element of the modern cultural life—what has to happen—if anthroposophy positions itself in the public.

However, not only this is a peculiarity of anthroposophy what I have just indicated, but this internal soul experience which enables you to behold in the spiritual world as you look with the physical senses in the physical world. This requires that you can generally behave to concepts, views, and mental pictures somewhat different from you behave toward the outer reality. In this area, natural sciences have also created concepts that are useless as such in spiritual science. They are useless because the spiritual researcher realises the following very soon: a concept, an idea, a mental picture is real, as soon as one approaches the spiritual facts and beings, is nothing but an image, a photo which one gets in the physical world, we say of a tree. If one takes a photo of a tree from one side and a photo from another side, a photo from the third side—these pictures look different. However, they all are of the one and same tree. Only because one takes these photos from different sides one can receive a complete idea of reality. However, one does not like that today. One likes limited concepts. One wants to adhere to them. Spiritual science cannot do this. Spiritual science describes a matter from most different sides; it describes it once from one side and knows that it gives an one-sided picture only; then it describes it from a second side, from a third side, from a third viewpoint.

Indeed, what astonishes even more is the following. If one really wants to become a spiritual scientist, one has to be completely penetrated by the sentence that Goethe formed: between two contrary opinions, the problem is right in the middle. One must know not only—if one wants to know the truth of a spiritual being or a spiritual fact—what militates for it, but also what speaks against it.

The listeners who have frequently heard talks by me know that it is my habit from the spiritual-scientific attitude to not only say what militates for, but also what militates against a matter. In particular, I have the habit of doing this always if I hold talks about more intimate talks on higher fields of anthroposophy. That is why someone who peruses my writings not only discovers with which arguments one can found certain spiritual facts, spiritual beings, but also with which arguments one can disprove the things. Only thereby, one receives truthful experience.

However, this has led just in this anthroposophic area to strange things that one can experience, actually, only in this area today. Just from within the ranks of the followers, persons have appeared who did not search work in spiritual-scientific respect but personal interests. They have seceded; they became adversaries. They needed only to copy what one can read in my writings what I have said in my talks, and then they could easily disprove anthroposophy. Indeed, one does not need to invent own disproofs, one needs only to copy the disproofs!

However, what I have just indicated is a peculiarity of anthroposophic research: to light up the things from the most different sides. Thereby only one acquires the necessary inner discipline if one does not want to live only in abstractions, but wants to unite with spiritual realities. Someone who only knows the outer nature and natural sciences has no idea of this inner discipline. For he thinks, he may be able to transfer certain concepts, certain mental pictures that one obtains from the outer nature, simply to the spiritual area; since he regards them as generally valid. However, one is not able to do this.

I would like to clarify this with the following. Indeed, the paradoxical concepts immediately begin with it. I think, for example, of a lecture which at the beginning of this century Professor Dewar (James D., 1842-1923) held in London. Professor Dewar attempted in a similar way, as the geologists do concerning the beginning of the earth, to form ideas of the possible end of the earth from physics, from chemistry. These ideas are exceptionally brilliant. If one pursues how the earth cools off gradually, and with it the conditions of the single substances change on earth, one gets to certain insights which are valid within the border of observation. Then one extends them and asks: how will all that be after millions of years?—One can be a rather witty physicist or chemist and imagine, it is so cold that, actually, no human being can live with his current constitution; even so, one calculates, how then, we say, for example, the milk looks like. Then the milk will be solid, it cannot be liquid and will have another colour. One can find certain materials, as for example proteins with which one coats the walls, so that they shine, so that one can read newspapers. The professor has derived all that from physics and chemistry as a nice idea.

Nevertheless, someone who has trained himself with spiritual-scientific methods must deny himself such ideas with inner soul discipline; he cannot get to them. Since how does one attain them, actually?

I just get now to what is paradoxical compared with the usual mental pictures: if one observes how the vital functions of a child change from the seventh, eighth years on, you get a suitable picture. Then you can continue calculating how the organs must look in 150 years. This is exactly the same method after which Professor Dewar calculated the final state of the earth.

However, if one applies it to the human being, one notices: he does no longer live in 150 years! One does not consider that that is not applicable to the human being, that the earth is dead before the state enters which one calculates from physics. One could also calculate from the changes from the seventh until the ninth years how the child was 180 years ago—but it was not there! The geologists calculate how the earth looked millions of years ago. However, at that time the earth did not yet exist.

This sounds paradoxical, and one has as a spiritual researcher to bring in concepts that sound paradoxical. Nevertheless, what one gets to know spiritual-scientifically is just something that can give soul discipline. To settle in the spiritual, just a soul discipline is necessary which can also deny itself certain concepts, which does not calculate after the same pattern which one would follow if one said, the human being who faces me existed 200 years ago.—The calculation would completely be after the same pattern.

I know very well how paradoxical this is what I say with it. However, if one does not point to such paradoxes, one draws attention to that which upsets some people so much. If one crosses the threshold of the spiritual world, one cannot enough emphasise how much the common sense must be active. However, if one appropriates such a soul discipline, one can unite with reality this way; then this becomes an achievement of the whole soul; it becomes a disposition, a basic character of the soul.

Then, however, the soul can judge how its view relates to other worldviews. Then it will understand how its worldview relates to other viewpoints. Then one can pursue which other currents of thinking, feeling and experiencing are there to criticise not only but to settle in them. Such a behaviour extends to all historical and contemporary developments concerning the human cultural life.

Only if one takes the attitude from the deepest impulses of anthroposophy, one can judge the relation of spiritual science to the religious confessions. Anthroposophy attempts to understand these religious confessions above all. It attempts to settle down into them not with critical mind, but in such a way, that one takes them, as they are to understand their right to exist. Hence, anthroposophy succeeds in making a fair judgement of the past spiritual currents in quite different sense than other directions of thought often do.

Let us take the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas or the philosophy of Aristotle at first. Someone who is today a philosopher or scientist after the pattern of the common concepts says: well, Aristotle is an old obsolete philosopher; the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas is a thing of the Middle Ages.—Anthroposophy knows that something special must arise from the conditions and impulses of the spirit of our times; it does not want to take over what in former epochs was the right thing. However, it understands that out of the conditions of those epochs what only those epochs could offer. It understands their nature; it knows that the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas was basically a servant of Christianity at that time that it could arise from the spirit of that time. You have to familiarise yourself with what cannot arise only from the spirit of our time. Anthroposophy does not regard the engagement in Thomism as an only historical study, as something that one can get only from it. This is very important. Since this does not produce that washed out tolerance, but it produces that understanding tolerance which looks at that what developed once not as something obsolete, but appreciates it at its place, appreciates it also in its developing reality. Some things have to develop in nature, in the spiritual life as annual plants develop from which again annual plants originate. However, other plants develop further from one year into the other forming wood, for example; they are perennial plants.

In the spiritual culture, it is likewise. Something must go on in the spiritual culture, must be taken up in later times by those who want to feel united with the whole development of humanity. You can also get an idea of the relationship of anthroposophy and the religious confessions that believe, but only because of a misunderstanding, that anthroposophy opposes them as another religion.

No, that is not true. Anthroposophy knows very well that it can never become a religion because it knows that just as little, as one can become a child at the age of 60 years again, just as little the modern humanity will be able to form religions of its own accord. New religions do no longer originate. Hence, anthroposophy is appropriate just to figure out the absolute value of the confessions. Anthroposophy would badly get along with itself if it believed to be able to found a new confession. However, the religions originated because human beings should receive impressions of the spiritual world. They keep their value and can be understood just with anthroposophy that also works its way to the spiritual world.

Hence, properly understood, religion and anthroposophy can meet each other. Anthroposophy works its way from the human being, developing human forces, to that spiritual area in which the religion puts its revelations.

May one be, actually, so little religious that one can believe, one has received the religion as truth from divine heights and one does fear for it if the human being strives now after working his way to the truth of the spiritual world with the forces that he received from God, as the religions believe? Is it not religious from the start if one knows that one has revelations of truth in the religion that one is not afraid that this truth will comply with that truth which the human being finds with his forces given by spirit?

One should consider that seriously if one wants to judge the relationship of religion and anthroposophy. In former times, the human being was not minded in such a way that he needed one way more into the spiritual world beside the religious way. As the human being of the Middle Ages did not need the Copernican worldview, he did not need anthroposophy. Today he needs it because humanity is developing. Nevertheless, that which certain forces, existing only in certain epochs, gave once to humanity keeps its value.

However, in this respect there is a complete contrast of anthroposophy and the modern scientific current: The latter owes its brilliant results, its value just to the fact that its methods are not suited to lead into the spiritual world. Anthroposophy could not get to such errors because quite different forces lead to anthroposophy and because it would regard any attempt to found a religion as not contemporary. It would be as if a man wanted to do the same as a child does. That what the child does has not to be less worth than what the man does. Anthroposophy knows that the time of forming religions is over. Hence, it will use just its forces to understand the religions, to lead the human being deeper and deeper into the understanding of the religions.

One has to say, as the soul strives after the spiritual world anthroposophically with its own cognitive forces not only of the head but also of the whole soul, the religions did not strive. They strove in such a way that one may say: while anthroposophy takes the human being as starting point and works its way to the spiritual world, the religions took that as starting point what they had received like by gracious revelation. However, this fulfils the human soul different from that what is created with his own forces. Anthroposophy is a science. That, however, which works there as religious truth seizes the soul different from a cognitive truth as anthroposophy must be. One cannot change anthroposophy immediately into a religion. However, from the properly understood anthroposophy a real religious need will also originate. Since the soul is not uniform, but multifarious. The human soul needs different ways to reach its goals. It needs not only the way of knowledge to the spiritual world but also the way of the warm religious feeling.

One thing was always strange. I have received many letters here from Switzerland that always had a fundamental note. In these letters, you may read the following: I can understand quite well what you intend with spiritual science, I can also understand that it is entitled to enter the spiritual world this way—not everybody writes in such a way, however, there are those who write this—but I miss that it leads so intimately into the Christian experiences as—and then the writers bring in this or that sectarian direction.

Yes, one wants to express a lack of spiritual science, of anthroposophy, in such a way. In my view, this lack is always a particular advantage. Since one demands something from anthroposophy that it just does not at all want to be by its whole nature. However, it wants also to concede the same right to the other side. They hold something against you if you still keep a way open to them. This is something peculiar.

Today some priests resent if one keeps a way open to them on which anthroposophy does not at all want to walk. There refutations appear, for example: you say something else about Christ than we do—anthroposophy says nothing else; it tells it only more explicitly—hence, you are not on the right track; we have to disprove you.

Yes, however, if the matter were in such a way that one just says that what he does not say, and lets him say what he can know what is on his way. He attacks you just because you want to accept him. On one side, he resents that anthroposophy does not solve his task because I leave it to him. If one said anything else, it would also be taken amiss. Thus the paradoxical appears that someone refutes you with that what he would have just to feel as benefit. Because anthroposophy does not want to interfere with the very own thing of the confessions because it gives them the right to work at their place of their own accord, therefore, it just says something else that is not said at this place. Anthroposophy does that in order to show the authorisation of the confessions. One demands from it, it should take over the task of the religion. In this area, a whole sum of clear mental pictures would have to replace unclear ideas.

One may say, a start has been made with the excellent book which Ricarda Huch (1864-1947. German author) has written about Luther's Faith (1916). Beside some other excellent things one gets an idea of this quite different colouring of the sentimental way that the religious confession takes. The way of the religious truth speaks from every page of this book. However, today deeper truths are trivialised as a rule because everybody believes, he does not need much to get involved with the depths of this or that matter, he is already perfect. Ricarda Huch has passed an appropriate remark concerning the way how Nietzsche's followers have originated everywhere some years ago because they believed to have the makings in themselves to be such men as they were described here and there. They do not want to work their way up, but they want above all to be on par with a superman if one describes a superman. Thus, one saw numerous “supermen” walking around who did not even have the anlage of a respectable guinea pig, they walked around as “blond beasts” in the sense of Nietzsche.

Anthroposophy is a way into the spiritual world, as the present demands it, which supports the religious confessions, the religious experience. One also judges the outer course of history too cursorily. One thinks, one has to familiarise wide sections of the population with the religion again, which does not have that influence as in former times. One believes to do the religion a favour if one fights against the putative opponents. If one goes into the deeper reasons, why, for example,—as it was stated in 1873—only one third of the French population was religious in the ecclesiastical sense if one took the matter seriously, you would say to yourself: not from these superficial reasons, but from deep soul impulses an indifference has arisen not only towards the single religions, but also towards the spiritual reality generally. A materialist age has approached.

Now anthroposophy knows the following of the course of development of humanity. While any developmental current proceeds, another proceeds unnoticed in the depths of consciousness. For example, while the tendency of materialism and denial of spirit prevailed, the need to find the way into the spiritual world developed in the unconscious depths of the souls. Thus, a human being could be with his head an atheist like David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1872 theologian and philosopher); and develop his soul forces which can be developed, however, only on a direct path of knowledge, just on the anthroposophic way, if one finds it. Then, however, one finds the connection with the religious confession again on this detour, while one leaves the religious confession if one sticks only to the brilliant progress of natural sciences.

How have those scientific directions positioned themselves that have developed only under the influence of natural sciences to the religious development? Quite different from anthroposophy. Anthroposophy attempts to understand the religious confessions. Because religious confessions speak of the spirit and anthroposophy knows spiritual facts and spiritual beings as its research results, it encounters the religious confessions.

Other directions speak different. I want to bring in the example of the psychologist Ebbinghaus (Hermann E., 1850-1909, German psychologist); he investigates with his scientific mind, with his power of judgement how religion came into being. He says, the human beings of former times did not yet have the enlightened thinking of the present, they noticed that they are exposed to dangers in the outer world, to heavy showers, thunderstorms and the like; there they imagined that hostile powers are there. Out of their fear, they imagined demoniacal spiritual beings. Then from necessity, they have invented the gods who should help them.

Such things sound rather nice, and that human being who is accustomed to the popular ideas of today understands these things easily. However, one takes a very wrong idea as starting point if one says repeatedly, the child of nature is inclined as any child to personify, to ensoul an edge of a table; if it stumbles against it, and it bashes the edge. It does not at all ensoul the edge of a table, but it does not yet know the difference of something dead and something living, and from an internal desire it bashes the dead; it does not at all ensoul anything. The child of nature does also not at all ensoul anything, but it follows its desires; and it is right that it always tries to explain that what faces it hostilely or harmfully anyhow by invention of a demon. I do not believe, if a naughty boy is a threat to a savage anyhow, that the savage invents a demon with which he defends himself against the boy, but he bashes him.

These things seem to be paradoxical again. Only spiritual science can judge it properly. Spiritual science knows how to interpret the facts properly that the child, actually, is not yet minded religiously, just as little as the savage is minded this way. One regards the religion as something childish. However, just the child is not minded religiously, but it must be educated to religion first. Thus, the human being has been educated in the course of human evolution.

A quotation by Ebbinghaus is in such a way that he says first, fear and hardship are the mothers of religion.—Then he says: “The churches fill and the pilgrimages increase in times of war and disastrous epidemics.”

I would like to know whether the churches also fill with those who are materialistically minded from the start at epidemics and war times. Nevertheless, they fill with those only who have a religious disposition anyway. However, this does not originate from fear and hardship, this originates because the human being experiences the spiritual in his soul. In ancient times, he experienced that more instinctively. Today he can experience it more consciously. Because the human being has gradually developed to the experience of the spiritual, he realises an image of the spiritual in the sense-perceptible.

If you want to call the connection that the human soul has with the environment if it faces the spirit with spiritual organs, but if you want to call it only with an analogon, you may say, it is a kind of sympathy. You know sympathy in the moral sense; it is a kind of love. The connection with the spiritual world can be compared with the feeling of love. Thus, anthroposophy may say, even if primitive religions originated from hardship and troubles, they were filled with spiritual contents, with concepts and ideas of the spiritual world because the human being lives in it. Perfect religions, above all that religion which is the synthesis, the union of the other religions have not developed from fear and hardship; it has developed from that what one can call spiritualised love, coalescing with the spiritual world. Not fear and hardship but love produces the perfect religions.

Hence, you may say, those who have materialist-scientific mental pictures only misjudge the whole relationship of religion and cognitive truth. One is allowed to repeat repeatedly: if one stands firmly on the ground of a religious truth, one can assume—if the human being approaches the spiritual world from another side—that understanding, even support is possible. Thus, one will experience more and more—even if people do not want to admit this today—that, while by the impulses of the scientific worldview the religions feel weak, their value for humanity is acknowledged if the human being can approach the spirit spiritual-scientifically. The representatives of religion should be just friends of anthroposophy.

They will become friends. Since the conflict between religion and science does not originate from certain religious conditions. This conflict originated from the fact that strictly speaking the representatives of the religious confessions once represented science at the same time. You need not go far back and you will find, the representatives of religion were at the same time those who taught the worldly sciences. They were connected with these worldly sciences. Only in the course of time, natural sciences emancipated themselves from religion. This emancipation contributes to the spiritual world process.

Only because of the human nature, the understanding of such things lags behind. As recently as in 1822, the Catholic Church abolished the decrees that had condemned the teachings of Copernicus and Galilei. Maybe it needs centuries that a decree, an opinion is abolished which forbids to the Catholics to believe in repeated lives on earth. However, this abolition will come. Since human religious experience will not come into conflicts with the repeated lives on earth, just as little as with the Copernican worldview.

On this occasion, I have repeatedly to remind of that priest (Laurenz Müllner, 1848-1911) who was at the same time a university professor. He said in a lecture on Galilei, a properly understood religion will not rebel against scientific progress, but on the contrary, the religious truth will feel supported, that it can say to itself, if astronomy points to the stars and discovers their laws, then it happens also out of the magnificence and power of the divine being. Copernicus did not undermine the religion, but he contributed with his activity to the revelation of the divine being.—These words of a priest are quite different from those, which oppose that what must just appear in the history of humanity.

I have already pointed out how strange it is that one demands that one should accept, for example, not only that about Christ Jesus as Christianity what the one or the other representative of this or that denomination says, but one should say nothing else. One cannot reproach anthroposophy that it disturbs any religious confession. Nevertheless, it has to recognise something of that most important incision of the earth evolution that is significant for the whole universe. It still can say things about the Christ impulse which are quite different from that which was said up to now. One holds against it that it wants to contribute even more to the understanding of Christianity than the official representatives contribute.

Do realise only once how little one is up to the tasks of time if one does not want to understand that anthroposophy never disturbs the truthful religious confession, but deepens it. Then, however, one needs an attitude as Bishop Ireland (John I., 1838-1918) has expressed it with the words: religion needs new forms and viewpoints to keep in step with the modern time. We need apostles of thought and action.

Yes, there are also within the religious confessions those who feel the signs of time. Then they even demand that another way is coming up to meet them. Since they understand that if humanity loses the interest in the spirit, also the interest in religion gets lost. However, if humanity gets again interest in the spiritual as it corresponds to its today's development, then one will properly understood the religious confessions again. Hence, one can always experience, while often by the unilaterally qualified natural sciences the human beings have been dissuaded from the religious experience, they are led again if the mind is filled with anthroposophy.

If one wanted to understand the way seriously how anthroposophy understands the work of the spirit in the confessions how it understands that from these conditions this confession, from those conditions another confession has originated how it can judge the value of the single confessions, one would never want to combat anthroposophy just from this side.

Today one likes stopping at abstractions. One says, anthroposophy wants to search the core in all religions; it equates, actually, all religions. That does not hold true, but it investigates how a religion developed from another. It tries to understand how that confession which wants to content all human beings in one spirit how the synthesis of the different confessions is which are distributed to the single peoples. It speaks like Frobenius (Leo Viktor F., 1873-1938, ethnographer) of ethnic religions and of the religion of humanity.

The relationship of the religious life to anthroposophy can become clear only if one realises how anthroposophy wakes the human being for the spiritual world and how he can thereby feel that again what he can experience in the religious community.

Not with details, I wanted to explain the relationship of anthroposophy and the religious confessions but from the whole spirit of the anthroposophic worldview. I wanted to show that for that who knows anthroposophy there can be no talk that anthroposophy disturbs any religious experience. In this respect, one has also to consider what I have already said yesterday: I would like best to call that worldview which has arisen to me as anthroposophy from the healthy Goethean ideas, I would like best to call it Goetheanism, and I would like best to call the Dornach building Goetheanum.

Everything that one can find on the ground of anthroposophy induces you to say to yourself, I continue only what this unique spirit has put into the human evolution. He stopped in many respects at the elementary mental pictures. But one is not a supporter of Goetheanism in the right sense if one looks historically or externally biographically at that what Goethe himself wrote; but you are Goetheanist if you can project your thoughts vividly in this worldview and develop it further.

Goethe was a Goetheanist up to 1832 here in the physical world. Today he would express himself quite different from that time. However, if anything is healthy, certain basic impulses remain which also carry over a worldview from one epoch to the other. If that blossoms anew what was there as seed, then it points to this solidarity of the entire human development that it takes up certain basic impulses. Thus, I would like to close with the known confession of Goethe.

Many people still consider anthroposophy, for example, as an uninvited guest within a society. One behaves rather refusing at first. Other scientific currents are well-invited guests of the modern spiritual striving because of the already recognised needs of the human beings. However, if one notes that the uninvited guest has something to bring that one had lost and that can be very valuable, nevertheless, in a certain respect, then one begins to treat the uninvited guest somewhat different from before. Anthroposophy is in this situation. It has to speak of spiritual-mental goods, which in a certain respect the modern civilised humanity has lost and which it has to receive again. They got lost because humanity had a certain instinctive cognition during millennia for that what is considered there; humanity cannot retain this instinctive cognition in the same way in future, it has even lost it up to a certain degree.

Just as little humanity could adhere to the medieval astronomy, it could adhere to the old instinctive knowledge about the being of the soul and with it about the real core of the human being. In the talks that I have held here weeks ago it was my task in particular to explain how in justified way the scientific thinking has taken possession of the human souls and has influenced the whole cultural development more and more. However, this scientific cognition is not suited on the other side to unveil the secrets of his own soul being to the human being, just if it wants to remain strong in the area that is assigned to it. This scientific imagination has the peculiarity that it destroys the old instinctive knowledge of the soul as it were.

Spiritual science wants to illuminate the spiritual area consciously with controlled cognition and to bring consciously again, what the human beings have lost as instinctive knowledge. Most certainly, the human beings who feel this anthroposophy as an uninvited guest will consider it just as a very welcome guest—I hope—if they have realised that this guest brings the knowledge of a lost treasure for life.

If we consider the different representations of the human soul and its being as they have appeared in the time in which the scientific way of thinking already had an impact, we realise that two of the most important questions, which were typical of the old doctrine of the soul, have disappeared almost from the scientifically oriented view of the soul. These two main questions are the question of immortality and the question of freedom. I have spoken in the last talks to what extent the question of immortality had to disappear more and more from the horizon of modern science, and I have already said that it should be my task today to approach the soul problem from the viewpoint of an at least sketchy consideration of the human freedom.

If natural sciences extend their way of thinking to the soul, they must focus their attention at first to what extent the soul has its basis in the bodily of the human being. However, this scientific view completely depends on considering the course of the outer processes causally, also of the soul processes as they take place in time. The scientific way of thinking can consider the soul only in the closest connection with the body. However, the body completely belongs to the material coherence of the outer world. The scientific way of thinking finds laws of this coherence. Nevertheless, these laws lead away from any consideration of the human soul life.

I would like to bring in one example only, while natural sciences took possession more and more of the consideration of the soul life, they also tried to apply their laws to the consideration of the soul. There they cannot but consider how a human action, how a human will impulse, how everything that the human being undertakes from his soul flows out of his bodily experience. They must experiment in their way as they are accustomed in their scientific field, and they feel deeply contented if they find with their experiments that also the soul life does not break what is ascertained scientifically for the outer natural life. One has only to consider such a thing that physiologists have experimentally found the amount of energy which the human being or the animal have taken up with their food is the amount of energy which the human being or the animal develop if they have emotions. The biologist Max Rubner (1854-1932) experimented with animals where he could show that everything that expresses itself as power in movements, in actions of animals is nothing but calculable energy of the food that they have taken up. Atwater (Wilbur Olin A., 1844-1907) carried out experiments that show that this law also applies to the human being. Everything that we exert in the work with movement and the like can be calculated as a transformation product of that what we take up materially with food as energy and transform it into warmth and the like in ourselves.

Thus, natural sciences trace the soul life back to the so-called principle of conservation of energy. They cannot but say from their viewpoint: where should something mental intervene of its own accord in the human being, create anything new like by a miracle if one can prove that everything that is active from the human being outwardly is only a transformation product of that what the human being takes up from the world? If the human emotion is that what the body has taken up in itself, then the principle of conservation of energy is fulfilled. Nowhere a new force appears; everything that appears as energy is only something that was already there. One cannot say if the human being accomplishes a so-called free, arbitrary action, it comes out of his soul, because then as if a new force would join the forces out of the blue which are already there.

Of course, someone who has familiarised himself with scientific mental pictures feels such a thing as a closed line of thought. Because this is in such a way, anthroposophy that wants to extend scientific severity to the spiritual area has a hard time. But not from some abstract sentences, but from the whole spirit of that what I have to bring forward in these talks should arise that anthroposophy does not contradict natural sciences, but that it continues and develops these natural sciences completely, although it follows a way from the sense-perceptible area to the spiritual life.

However, it meets countless prejudices there. As an anthroposophist, one knows best of all how enchanting prejudices are and how they evoke opposition. Since “proofs,” as one knows them in the usual science and in the usual life, absolutely exist within anthroposophy; but one has to understand them different from the “proofs” of the usual science. Above all that what one wants to investigate is a given. Nobody can deny that the world of the senses puts questions to us. This is not the case with anthroposophy. There the world itself must be disclosed first, about which one has to talk. Hence, a lot of the validity of anthroposophy depends on the fact that one realises: the preparatory work in the own soul that the spiritual researcher has carried out is necessary to come into the world at which he wants to look.

In science, one works on a certain basis, and then only the intellectual activity begins. In anthroposophy, the soul has to work at first, and its work is not something that finds laws about other things, but its work is something at first by which it prepares itself to observe what it concerns in the spiritual world, actually.

There one recognises that for the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science the following must be demanded what the present acknowledges only reluctantly: if one wants to attain insight of the supersensible world, one has to develop the appropriate abilities in the soul. Then it is possible to develop abilities from the undifferentiated human soul that lead to the view of the spiritual world.

Today I do not want to go into this preparation. Today I would like to refer only to my books, in particular to my writings How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds? and Occult Science. An Outline, in which I have shown what the soul has to carry out with itself, so that it becomes able to perceive in the spiritual world. It can attain this ability only if it makes its inner being independent from the body. Because I do not want to be repetitive, I will today not speak of how one attains such abilities. I would like only to state something of the peculiarities of this spiritual way into the supersensible area.

I would like to pronounce a truth which appears weird at first, concerning this way. The spiritual researcher must develop abilities of a path of knowledge that refers to things, which every human being would like to do the object of his consideration unless some scientific or other prejudices retain him from it. The everlasting of the soul, the nature of the human freedom and everything that is associated with it are questions for every human being. The old instinctive knowledge dealt with them. The spiritual-scientific knowledge has to go such a path of knowledge, which refers to something that everybody desires. However, the ways into this supersensible area are less popular, are almost rejected because of certain peculiarities of the human nature. There one has to consider the following in particular.

Forming mental pictures and concepts we are used to founding them on something essential that approaches us regardless of these mental pictures and concepts. We are connected as physical human beings with that which exists about which we form our mental pictures to which they refer. However, we are not immediately connected with that what the supersensible knowledge refers to. Hence, this supersensible knowledge makes use of a bigger strength of the soul than the knowledge of the sense-perceptible outside world that just is there from the start. Many people shrink from this inner strengthening of the soul life because it does not immediately refer to a being and appears as something fantastic. One can understand very well that someone who does not penetrate deeper into the matter considers the mental pictures and concepts of spiritual science as fantasy pictures because he is accustomed only to accept the mental pictures of the physical reality. However, that of the supersensible world in which the human being is interested above all must be grasped in such mental pictures of the supersensible cognition, which must be pulled out of the depths of the soul. This can happen only with stronger forces than they are necessary in the everyday life.

In the today's talk, I do not want to speak how one investigates them, but how they are in a certain respect.

The human being is used: if he forms a mental picture of something that proceeds as it were in reality, he just has a picture of something real; then he can remember it; it remains in his memory. This is a peculiarity of our usual imagining, which gives us life security, so that we can keep that, what depicts the outer world. If the spiritual researcher brings up those forces from the depths of his soul that enable him to behold into the supersensible world, he can look with the “beholding consciousness” as I have called this ability in my book The Riddle of Man. However, if he wanted to keep the beheld in mind in the same way as something of the outer sense-perceptible world, he would do a vain attempt at first. Experiences of the spiritual world, experiences that refer to the everlasting, to the immortal of our soul can be recognised with supersensible cognitive forces; but they cannot be added to the memory, they are fugitive as dreams are and are forgotten straight away.

Now you may say, may one consider this knowledge generally only as results of a fugitive dream?—One has to say, definitely yes, in a certain sense! Now the following is valid: one has to prepare the whole soul condition in a way to be able to behold into the supersensible realm; one must cause such an inner constitution every time anew so that the vision can appear. One can remember the activities that one carries out in the soul. If one has attained an insight of this or that event or being of the spiritual world, one knows which exercises one has to carry out, so that this vision can take place. Should this vision take place again after some time, one has to produce the same conditions in the soul. One can remember these conditions. What one beholds has to appear again anew. This is a big difference compared with the usual knowledge.

The spiritual researcher cannot experience something once—as paradox as it sounds—, and learn it by heart to bring it back to life again in himself like a memory.

No, if he wants to face the same spiritual being or the same spiritual event again, then he has to cause the opportunity in himself to experience it again. As weird as it sounds, if the spiritual researcher speaks of the most elementary truths—for example, during five successive days to any audience—, and he wants to speak in such a way that the spoken comes immediately from the spiritual experience, then he must do this spiritual experience every time anew. I want to express with it that one of the most important laws of our spiritual experience is: while our sensory images seem—it only seems so—, as if they could emerge later again from memory, as if they were a spiritual possession, this does not at all apply to the praxis of spiritual knowledge. One has to attain spiritual knowledge always anew.

Why do I explain just this? I would especially like to point out here that the appropriation of the spiritual-scientific way is by no means a necessity for everybody who wants to deal with spiritual science. Indeed, today it is a general aspiration to get to know to a certain degree what one should believe; and in this respect, it is justified if those who hear about spiritual science and its results ask, how can I myself conceive of such things?—However, the essentials of the relation of the human being to spiritual science are not at all that one becomes a spiritual researcher. Since the spiritual-scientific way can give life something, and the immortal life, too, only if that which appears in the vision is transformed into usual concepts. The spiritual researcher could be an ever so sophisticated being concerning supersensible knowledge, as a human being he would have nothing over any other human being because of his vision; since everything that takes place in this vision is only a way, is not the goal. The goal is to transform that what is attained with the vision into human concepts, in those mental pictures, which we have just attained in the outer sense-perceptible world even if a lot must seem to be pictorial what we express with such mental pictures attained in the sense-perceptible world.

Unless anybody wants to become a spiritual researcher, he could adopt what the spiritual researcher finds with his research. The results which he gets are clear for themselves if one is only enough unbiased. The possession of this knowledge in the usual human imagination—not in the supersensible beholding—constitutes the real treasure for life. The spiritual researcher would have nothing of his spiritual research if he wanted to indulge himself only in the supersensible beholding; this would be more transient than the usual outer sensory results. The point is that the transient vision is transformed into usual mental pictures. The soul can take them with it if it enters another spiritual life after death. You cannot take the visions as such with you, only that which the vision brings.

I have to say this once with any sharpness because even with many persons who are within the anthroposophic movement the prejudice prevails, as if a withdrawal from the outer world, from life, or a mystic deepening is important. That is not the point. The point is that one finds with certain soul exercises what applies to the supersensible world and that it can be transformed into usual human concepts. Nevertheless, it is entitled if the desire exists that everybody wants to behold into the spiritual world to a certain degree.

Literature accommodates this wish. This just corresponds to a demand of our time to believe not only, but to behold independently. However, this is not the central issue. When I have described the path of knowledge in detail with which one enters in the spiritual world, it is first to satisfy the mentioned needs, secondly, however, mainly because the spiritual researcher has to regard as a goal to give an account of how he has come to his truths.

Then, however, also that who reads such a writing as, for example, How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds? or the second part of my Occult Science, can realise from the way, how the spiritual researcher describes the spiritual-scientific path that it does not concern any speculative fiction but a real entering into the supersensible world. He can realise as it were how an account is given of a reality.

This is something again that one has to add to the fact that in many respects the proofs that the spiritual researcher has to adduce have to be different from usual. The spiritual researcher has just to claim that one acknowledges the entitlement of the way that he gives bit by bit and which leads into the spiritual world. However, if he emphasises such a special peculiarity of the vision as the just suggested one is—that the beholding into the spiritual world does not at all comply with our usual soul life—, then I do this just because I want to characterise the supersensible world which you enter there.

For the usual soul life it is typical that we keep in mind what we have taken up once from the sense-perceptible world; this does not apply to the vision. While I pronounce such a thing, I point to the fact that the existence in the spiritual world is quite different from the existence in the sense-perceptible world. I state peculiarities of the spiritual world as it were; I show that one enters into a world that does not at all combine with our body as the sense-perceptible world combines with it. The sense-perceptible world combines in such a way if we perceive it with our body that we can keep the percepts in mind. The spiritual world is so far away from our body that it does not cause the changes in our body that induce memories.

This is just a peculiarity of the spiritual world that you have to consider. The right knowledge of this peculiarity is just a proof, that you are with the vision in a world that is not at all concerned with our body. That is why it is completely entitled to say, while everything that is perceived in the body causes memories more or less, that which is perceived if the soul is beyond the body, like in the vision, does not cause any memories because it is only related to our supersensible soul, not to our body.

Other peculiarities of the supersensible world are also mentioned for the same reason and in the same sense. In the usual sense-perceptible world, the matter is as follows: if you repeat a mental picture over and over again—how much educational is based on it!—, then it becomes more familiar to us, we can keep them better in mind, it combines better with our soul. The opposite is the case for what we experience in the spiritual area. As weird as it sounds, one can almost say, if I have a spiritual experience and I try to have it once again, it is not easier but more difficult. One cannot exercise to get spiritual experiences better and better.

With it something very typical is connected. There are persons who strain to get insights of the spiritual world by certain soul exercises. Forces slumbering in the depths of every soul are called that way. Thereby once a blissful, often great experience takes place, fugitive like a dream. It may not appear again for a second or third time even if the person concerned makes any effort to cause the same soul condition again. One can almost say, a right spiritual experience escapes from us if it has been there once, and we must make stronger efforts if we want to get it again.

Often those are surprised who have made the first efforts that a very significant spiritual experience does not always re-appear. I also bring in this to show how the experiences of the seer are quite different from the experiences that one has in the sense-perceptible world.

Another peculiarity is the following: you feel, while you advance in spiritual knowledge, that you have to cope with the events that face you spiritually with the ripe state of your power of imagination if you do not want to get to fantastic images. Hence, you have to realise that the preparation for the vision is of particular importance. You must already have developed a ripe and versatile power of imagination, so that you can cope with the spiritual experiences. This is again completely different from the usual sense-perceptible world. There this area of perception is spread out before us; we get more and more images of this area; we enrich our images with it. After we have had the perception, we enrich our mental pictures. With the spiritual experiences, it is just the opposite: We have first to make our mental pictures rich and versatile, so that they are prepared if we want to have supersensible experiences. This is something else than it is in the usual life and in the usual science.

With that, I wanted to indicate that the way leads us to quite different experiences and percepts in the supersensible area. Many people shrink from this other kind of perceiving, from this quite different kind of having concepts and mental pictures. Hence, spiritual science will depend, above all, on the fact that the human beings again find courage and strength to form such mental pictures that are not borne by the available sense-perceptible world.

However, mainly the scientific way of thinking develops these mental pictures. Because it has achieved great results, it has led the human beings away from the spiritual cognition for a while. Nevertheless, it will lead them back again to this spiritual cognition. Just because it points always to the material and the human beings also see through the material more and more, they will be urged to acknowledge that one has to search the spiritual in another way.

There I would like to show using certain research results of spiritual science how human knowledge will generally become something else if bit by bit the spiritual science intervenes in the pursuit for knowledge. Those listeners who listen to me more often know that I speak about something personal only reluctantly. However, I would like to indicate something because it is associated as it were with that which I have to argue: what I say now about the relation of soul and mind to the body is the result of my research for more than thirty years. Since in the spiritual area one does not obtain the things as in the laboratory one can infer from any object or any process what is to be said about it if one has developed the method. The spiritual research proceeds mainly in time. It concerns that then only one conceives of certain things if one can relate experiences with each other that are widely separated in terms of time.

The progress of the usual scientific knowledge and of the usual consciousness to the spiritual-scientific knowledge can be compared with the unmusical listening of single tones and the musical understanding of melodies or harmonies. If one hears a single tone, it is a perception just of this single tone; it is a single experience. If one wants to enter into the world of music, the single tone is to be related to other tones, and then it becomes what it is only because it is related to other tones. In the usual percipience, the soul relates to a sensory outside world. This one can compare with the perception of the single tone. In the spiritual cognition, the soul has to relate to that what proceeds in time. I want to indicate only that it is, for example, of big importance that the spiritual researcher is able to experience that which he experiences in his soul today not only as a single event of the immediate present existence but that he can relate it to an experience which maybe dates back a year as well as a tone of a melody relates to another tone of the melody if a musical conception should be there.

As one is connected by the usual percipience with the soul, with something spatial, one is connected by the spiritual experience at first with the present experience, relates it then to something that is brought up vividly from the past. One looks from an event of the past at a present experience and then from an event which is even further away. While looking within time, the soul experiences are structured, so that one may say, the usual cognition becomes something like a musical overview of the mental.

The soul is thereby not only enabled to adopt what it experiences in the body. But it relates what it experiences and remembers between birth and death—like the ear relates a tone to another in a melody—, to that which is there before birth or conception and which is there after death. However, the soul has to prepare itself for it while it relates single experiences like the tones of a melody to each other within the life between birth and death; it not only lives through the single experiences, but also extends the experience over time and experiences the different gradations, the differentiations in time like inner music.

What also appears is not only inner music, but also something that is like inner reading or listening of words where one hears not only tones which relate to other tones of melodies or harmonies, but also express a sense. Then that will originate for the spiritual researcher which I can characterise in such a way that I say, the usual scientific consideration looks at the things as one would look at a printed page if one described the form of the letters only. This method, applied to nature, is natural sciences. This is a description of the letters. The spiritual researcher learns to read. He goes adrift completely from reading letters. What he finds in nature as something supersensible relates to that what is spread out in nature before the senses like the sense of something read and heard that one takes in to the single tones that form the words, or to the single letters that are printed on paper.

However, this depends on an inner progress to which one also comes if one is not an esoteric student, but if one only grasps the concepts and mental pictures of spiritual research. One gets to know the world as it were in its real harmony; one gets to know the sense that is behind this “sounding” world, comparatively spoken.

In such a way, something has arisen to me spiritual-scientifically in the course of more than three decades that I would like to pronounce as the coherence of the mental-spiritual with the bodily that will also arise to natural sciences, which are still far away from it in the next time. Since spiritual research and natural sciences will meet each other in the middle, spiritual research from the spiritual side, natural sciences from the material side.

What I have to bring forward I have found spiritual-scientifically. However, already the modern natural sciences, physiology and biology, offer sufficient opportunity to harden completely what I have now to bring forward as a spiritual-scientific result. Considering the coherence of the soul with the body one cherishes, I would almost like to say, a fateful one-sidedness.

If you take a textbook of psychology, you will realise that you find a consideration of the nervous system as introduction. This is completely entitled from the scientific point of view. One can absolutely say, the naturalist can only relate the soul unilaterally to the nervous system. An entire consideration of life proves something else, namely that only one part of the mental experience may be directly related to the nervous system, namely only the imagining activity. So that we can say, the whole imagining activity finds—we use the term—its physical counter-image in the nervous system.

The nervous system is the physical basis of the imagining activity, but not of the emotional life. The scientific psychologists put the emotional life in second place. Theodor Ziehen (1862-1950) does not regard—rightly from his point of view—the emotional life as something independent; he speaks only of the “emotional emphasis of the mental pictures.” Every mental picture would have as it were an “emotional nuance.” This contradicts the usual soul experiences. For these the emotional life is as real as the imagining activity. It is not only any “emotional nuance” of our mental pictures, but the emotional life develops beside the imagining activity. If one relates this emotional life directly to the nervous life as the imagining activity refers to it, one commits an error. Since as the imagining activity is directly associated with the nervous system, the emotional life is directly associated with all rhythmical processes of respiration and blood circulation especially with the subtler ramifications of the rhythmical system. These rhythmical processes are the physical basis of the emotional life.

I know very well that numerous objections may arise if I pronounce such a thing. I cannot come on everything, but I would like to mention one thing only, bring in one example only how one has—indeed, much more precisely than the “exact” science—to bear down on these things if one wants to recognise them in their true figure.

There, for example, somebody could say, oh well, there comes somebody and explains amateurishly that the emotional life seizes the rhythmical processes in the body as directly as the imagining activity seizes the nervous life. Does he not know that, for example, if any musical impression takes place in us, we take it in with the ear that it is delivered at first as an image that in this living in the musical image the aesthetic experience is contained that it is nonsense to say, the feeling, which is connected with a musical impression, is not a result of the imagining activity?

I know that this objection, actually, must be generally valid for the today's mental pictures; however, it is not valid for the reality. We have only to realise that that which we take in as the sound picture with our ear is not yet the musical experience. It becomes musical experience only if the sound image is coming up to meet what reaches the brain from the ramifications of the respiratory rhythm. The rhythm of breathing, which reaches the brain, meets the sound image, which penetrates into the brain; it is the bodily counter-image of the musical impression. The whole emotional life is originally associated with the rhythmical life in our body.

Thirdly, we have the will in our soul. As well as the imagining activity is associated with the nervous life, the emotional life is associated with the rhythmical interplay of the forces which originate from the respiratory rhythm and from the blood rhythm, any will impulse is associated with metabolism. As weird as it sounds, all will processes are directly expressed in metabolic processes. I have published these scientific results in my last book The Riddles of the Soul for the first time, indeed, in a shorter form because of the present paper shortage.

However, one has to envisage that the nervous system, the rhythmical system, and the metabolic system are not next to each other in the organism. The nerves must be also nourished, of course. So that perpetually food processes take place in the nerves. Of course, all organs of the rhythmical movements must be nourished, too

Three members of the organism penetrate each other. But a precise research shows that that which is metabolism, for example, in the nerves has nothing to do with imagining but with the will process, which extends also into the imagining. Of course, if I want to imagine anything, I will imagine it; directing my attention upon the imagining is already a will process.

The embryonic state that is associated with the will is also associated with the metabolism in the nervous system. But the essentials of imagining are connected with processes which have nothing to do with the metabolism, but, on the contrary, which deal with a metabolic destruction which deal with something in the nerves that can be compared not with metabolism, but rather with a withdrawal of metabolism, with the emergence of hunger. Save that, one deals with a destruction in the nervous system that must not be confused with the destruction in the whole organism.

Such mistakes have happened. Just while I point to such mistakes, I can emphasise the characteristic of anthroposophy compared with older and even today-approved spiritual currents. Who does not know that what the new spiritual science attempts to attain with inner soul exercises which are not concerned with anything bodily, one tried to attain in former times on such ways which were much concerned with all kinds of bodily performances, with asceticism. Think only that certain mystics produced their union with the spirit by starving, by destruction of the organism. True spiritual research has nothing to do with those ways. However, spiritual research must point to the fact that a destruction that is not abnormal but normal, takes place in the nervous system if the imagining should find its expression by the nervous system. I have pointed out in the talk that I have here held weeks ago that the consciousness that one experiences in the imagining activity is associated with death. I have even pronounced the sentence: while we are imagining, we die down perpetually in the nervous system.

Only if such mental pictures are formed, natural sciences will be able to meet spiritual research. Hence, we have to say, the tripartite soul life, imagining, feeling, and willing, is connected with the whole body, not only with a part of the body; since the whole body is involved with its three organic members, the nervous system, the rhythmical system and the metabolic system. Our soul life is not unilaterally connected with our nervous system, but the whole soul finds its expression in the whole body. This is a result of spiritual science that thinking, feeling, and willing have their counterparts in the body.

However, just as these three members of the human soul life have their bodily counterparts, they have their spiritual counterparts. As imagining is connected with the nervous system, it is connected with something spiritual that can only be grasped with spiritual cognition, which I have called the Imaginative knowledge. It is the first level of spiritual knowledge, the first level of the beholding in the spiritual world.

As well as we find the nervous system as a bodily counterpart of the imagining activity, we find the imagining activity arising from something spiritual that can only be grasped with the first level of supersensible beholding with the so-called Imaginative knowledge. In a reality that appears in pictures, one can recognise what corresponds spiritually to the imagining activity. At the same time, we face what penetrates our whole existence from birth or conception until death as body of formative forces. While the substances of our physical body are substituted perpetually, the uniform body of formative forces that is at the same time the spiritual basis of our imagining activity remains to us from birth until death.

Let us consider the emotional life. To the bodily side it is connected with the respiratory rhythm and the blood rhythm; on the other side it is associated spiritually with something spiritual that can be grasped on a higher level of vision that I have called the Inspired knowledge in my writings, which does no longer need pictures, but arises without pictures in the supersensible world. However, if this spiritual origin of our emotional life is figured out with supersensible knowledge, it is not that which extends from birth to death, but which we possess in the spiritual world, before we go by birth to the bodily life with which we walk through the gate of death. Since uniting spiritually with that what forms the spiritual basis of the emotional life means: extending the vision beyond birth and death.

In such a way as our will life is associated with the metabolism of the body, it is associated with the highest that the human being can attain in vision, with that what I have called Intuitive cognition. I do not mean the usual washed out intuition, but that what I have characterised in my books as an Intuitive knowledge: I have called the real settling in the spiritual world Intuitive knowledge. This is the highest spiritual level that the human being can attain.

Now the strange appears: while the metabolism is the lowest of the body side, is that what spiritually corresponds to the will the highest that forms the basis of our being. What we have to acknowledge as the highest between birth and death, the nervous system that corresponds to the imagining activity is based on the lowest of the spiritual world, namely that what one can attain with Imaginative knowledge.

The human being realises one thing in particular if he gets to know the relationship of his spiritual-mental with this spiritual to be grasped with Intuition. However, I can characterise this only in the following way. It is not only anything that one experiences in the vision but something that every human being can experience who understands the results of spiritual research with common sense. If one accepts these spiritual-scientific results really, one gets to know what spirit is, then this means something special. This event may be described because it intervenes as something particular in the soul, this event that wakes our internal consciousness for the first time: now I know what, actually, spirit is what the everlasting is in my soul.

One can call this experience only in such a way that one says, it is an inner karmic experience. The whole human life changes possibly, gets another direction under the influence of this experience which makes known itself in the fact that we know what spirit is in us. We thereby do not need getting dull towards other karmic experiences. Indeed, we experience events in the outer life where we are on top of the world or down in the dumps. The spiritual researcher does not want to get dull towards these experiences. On the contrary, he becomes more sensitive of them because he also figures out the spiritual side of all that.

Whatever meets him in the outer life, the intervention of that what is the experience of the spirit, of the everlasting in itself is a bigger break in life, a more radical karmic situation. One recognises with it how one causes karma, because one must cause spiritual knowledge with own forces as one causes twists and turns in life, while spiritual knowledge becomes a vital question of the very first degree. This gives the understanding of the remaining human destiny, but also full understanding of Intuition. Then one notices with which the human will is associated on the spiritual side.

Then one evokes a force by such a karmic intervention in the soul life that does not only lead the supersensible cognition to that which appears in the life between birth and death, not only to that what takes place in the life between death and a new birth but to that everlasting-spiritual core that works in the repeated lives on earth. What the human being represents in his innermost core, he recognises it as associated with the impulses which have been there in former lives on earth. What he experiences now as destiny, while he performs own actions, becomes to him if the knowledge has become destiny, in such a way that he also knows it as basis of the following life on earth.

With the coherence of the tripartite soul life one gets to know the transient in the human being. With the relation of these three soul members with the spiritual one gets to know the immortal, the everlasting that goes through births and deaths, so that one surveys this entire human life which proceeds in successive lives on earth and in intermediate spiritual lives between death and a new birth. Thus, one beholds into the everlasting in the human life other than with philosophical speculations.

Not with conceptual analysis or conceptual synthesis spiritual research attempts to lead into that everlasting while it evokes the view of this everlasting. What we are as temporal-bodily beings has developed from the everlasting which consists of the Imaginative, Inspired and Intuitive part, as our body consists of the nervous system, the rhythmical system and metabolism.

These are some research results about the everlasting in the human soul. The human freedom can only be attributed to this everlasting. The naturalist must stop within the transient experience: in the nervous system, in the rhythmical system that he does not at all investigate even in this respect, and in the metabolism that he confuses with the nervous life even today, while he also looks in the metabolism for the basis of the nervous life. The naturalist must stop within this material life. Hence, he also finds something for every act of volition that produces this act of volition. However, if one recognises the everlasting in the soul, one recognises that this everlasting has contents in itself which are independent of the bodily life, then that becomes reality which one experiences as freedom internally. Why?

Well, I have just explained in the last talks and in the today's one that in us a destructive process must take place that consciousness is similar in a way to death that there are death processes in the nervous system if we form a conscious mental picture. However, thereby it arises to spiritual research that not everything that belongs to the soul being is an outflow of the bodily being, but that the bodily being is only the basis of the soul experience and that this soul experience finds just its basis in the bodily life if this bodily life does not develop its growing forces, but if these growing forces are diminished. Processes of degeneration in us form the basis of the conscious soul life. Natural sciences will discover that this truth complies absolutely with the scientific results.

I point only to the fact that the nerve cells are not divisible, for example, while the reproductive cells are divisible. The typical abilities of the growing cells have just been diminished in the nerve cells and in the red blood cells for the same reason. No plant-like growing corresponds in the body to the conscious life but destructive processes. So that—where in us conscious life should develop—the bodily life must be deleted first.

Spiritual science recognises the soul life in its independence. With it, the concept of freedom gets a sense only, and it becomes completely compatible with the concept that natural sciences develop completely rightly in their area, with the concept: that our organism causes everything that appears in our actions, in our will impulses. These scientific mental pictures exist completely rightly.

Nevertheless, the organism just causes,—just because it serves as basis of the consciousness—that it annihilates its processes that it withdraws compared with the conscious processes. With it, the concept of freedom gets sense that we can characterise possibly in the following way with a comparison: the child is physically a result of the parents; but it goes adrift from the parents. If we look for the causes, we have to search them with the parents. However, if the child has grown up and acts independently, we cannot always ascribe its actions and that what it is to the parents. If the child carries out this or that, after it is thirty years old, we do not ascribe the causes to the parents. Thus, the spiritual life goes adrift from the bodily life, so that the law of the conservation of energy is accomplished after any causality. However, as with the child the cause is in the parents, and the child grows up and becomes independent, the soul life evolves into the independence from the body in which are the causes of the soul life.

With it, I have pointed out comparatively how the concept of freedom receives a sense, while we do not explain this soul life from the bodily conditions, but from the independent spiritual life that goes through births and deaths. We can ascribe freedom to this spiritual-mental being. Freedom was philosophically treated always in such a way that one spoke of either-or: either the human being is free, or he is not free. I have already shown in my Philosophy of Freedom that one copes with the concept of freedom if one envisages the independent soul life. However, this independent soul life is only gradually gained in the course of the physical human development. One cannot say that the human being is either free or is not free. One can only say that freedom is something that the human being acquires in the course of his development that he approaches it more and more. He approaches it, while he supplies the forces to the internal spiritual-mental being, which strengthen it in such a way that it can develop causality for the human action, for the human will.

This is a weird contradiction, isn't it? On one side, one states that from the body between birth and death everything has to come that the human being puts into his action; on the other side the independent free soul life is claimed.

I would like to bring to mind again by a comparison what it concerns. Let us assume that we have an air-evacuated container. The air flows into it if we open this container.

The free human decision is related in this way to an intended action. The following will already turn out by spiritual research: if the human being does not follow the impulses of his instincts, but that what I have called the purely spiritual impulses in my Philosophy of Freedom to which he has to bring himself. Then he does not let that willing immediately take place which originates from bodily causes. Indeed, the free action also takes place in such a way that bodily causes are there. However, these bodily causes are first prepared in such a way that the free concept, the free mental picture spiritually creates a void as it were, and the effect on our body follows that action which is completely conceived by our soul. As the air streams from without into the void after purely natural causes, the body carries that out according to its laws, which are now purely scientific ones, what was prepared only in it, while the free soul decision created the basis.

Tomorrow we will build on this concept of freedom, and then I will still explain it further. I wanted to show how the concept of freedom is only conceivable if one rises by spiritual research to that soul life which is independent of the bodily life. The free action only originates from the Intuitive, Inspired, and Imaginative parts of the human being.

What arises from spiritual science for the social-moral concepts that are for our tragic present of so big significance what arises for legal concepts, for the outer social life, I want to explain tomorrow. Today I only wanted to show that anthroposophy can absolutely compete concerning the seriousness and the precision of its research with natural sciences. However, I also wanted to show that for the spirit quite different ways must be taken that spiritual research itself throws its light also on nature that the whole spiritual-mental human being is assigned to the whole physical human being, his nervous system, rhythmical system and metabolism. Just because spiritual science will work with natural sciences in harmony, something great will arise for the progress of humanity.

Today one often likes to refer to Goethe. I have said in the last talk here that I would like to call my spiritual science “Goetheanism” and the building in Dornach “Goetheanum.”

The young Goethe already looked at nature not as anything that can be exhausted by such mental pictures as the modern monistic or similar worldviews have them. However, Goethe already appealed as a young man to nature in his prose hymn Nature: “She has thought and is continuously reflecting.” Spiritual science does not at all struggle for words. If anybody wants to call that “nature” what consists of matter and spirit in the world and looks for the spirit in nature only, then he may call the whole universe “nature.” If he goes so far like Goethe saying: “Nature thinks and is continuously reflecting”—even if not as a human being, but as nature, then already the concept of spirit is included for such a thinker like Goethe in the concept of nature.

To those who would like to derive from this recognition of the concept of nature that the Goethean view is consistent with any view of the limits of knowledge that one cannot penetrate into the spiritual world one has to answer repeatedly as Goethe did to the very meritorious physiologist Albrecht Haller (1708-1777) who was absolutely right from his viewpoint saying:

“No created mind penetrates

Into the being of nature.

Blissful is that to whom she shows

Her appearance only!”

Goethe protested against this naturalist. By his protest, he made clear that the human being can find those cognitive forces in himself that do not put the spirit as something unfathomable to him, but as something into which he can enter gradually with industrious, exact spiritual research. Since Goethe argued in old age against Haller's words on basis of a matured knowledge:

O you Philistine!

Do not remind me

And my brothers and sisters

Of such a word.

We think: everywhere we are inside.

“Blissful is that to whom she shows

Her appearance only!”

I hear that repeatedly for sixty years,

I grumble about it, but covertly,

I say to myself thousand and thousand times:

She gives everything plenty and with pleasure;

Nature has neither kernel nor shell,

She is everything at the same time.

Examine yourself above all,

Whether you are kernel or shell.

These words make us aware of the true Goetheanism, which acknowledges the possibility to penetrate with the human mind into the spirit of the universe and to recognise the immortality and freedom of the human nature.

Tomorrow, I would like to speak how necessary it is for our practical life to envisage such social ideas that originate from spiritual research to show that spiritual research is an uninvited guest only for those who attribute no other needs to the human being than those, which can be satisfied with the mechanistic knowledge. If one still gets to know other needs of the human being, one will also recognise the necessity of spiritual research in the social-moral area.

A basic quality of anthroposophy is the pursuit for ideas, for mental pictures, for concepts of the world that are rooted in reality in a much deeper sense than the concepts, mental pictures and ideas of the scientific worldview are. Indeed, this could seem very weird at first, because many people believe that these scientific mental pictures are rooted very deeply in reality.

However, even if one disregards what I have brought forward in the three talks I held here this year and only looks at that which reasonable naturalists have brought forward concerning what natural sciences have to say about the being of the events of nature, one will get the insight that also such natural scientists are clear to themselves that with the usual scientific ideas one cannot penetrate into the being of reality. How much just natural scientists have spoken about the limits of the scientific knowledge! I have brought forward the typical fact in the first talk that one of the most significant disciples of Haeckel, Oscar Hertwig (1849-1922), published a basic book during these years where he shows that one cannot come close anyhow to the being of the life phenomena just with the scientific concepts, which celebrated the greatest triumphs in the second half of the nineteenth century.

As long as it concerns penetrating only into the being of nature, these limitations of the scientific images do not at all appear. Nevertheless, they appear if the human being wants to apply the soul forces that he uses to scientific cognition also to the moral-social life. What is maybe a mere error or a mere one-sidedness in natural sciences—if it is taken as a basis of the moral-social life—becomes injurious, causes minor or major disasters. One of the biggest disasters is that, in which we live during these years.

As peculiar as it will appear to somebody: someone who is able to grasp the things in their deeper coherence gets clear about that what happens now as such tragic events is associated with the inadequate moral-social ideas which prepared themselves since centuries and which showed to advantage in particular in the nineteenth century. The mere science, the mere knowledge, the mere theory corrects in painless way if inadequate concepts are inserted in it. Reality corrects at pains and disasters if actions are inserted in it, which arise from inadequate knowledge and penetrating reality.

Now we will get to apparently remote mental pictures if we want to apply the anthroposophic spiritual science to the moral-social life, remote only because they still appear very strange to the present habitual ways of thinking because of the prejudices with which one is coming up to meet them. I must take the starting point from calling attention to the fact that the consideration of the human being has become relatively one-sided just under the influence of the modern world view, so that, actually, also far-sighted naturalists attempt to penetrate not only into the pure physical side of the human being but into his whole nature.

Since only if his whole nature is considered, it can become reality in the social-moral life, can any influencing control work salutarily on the social-moral life.

It could now seem weird if anybody says, for the whole consideration of the human life it is necessary that one not only considers how the human being is active in the wake day life but that one has also to regard the other side of life, the dream life, to take the whole human being into account.

Reasonable naturalists even attempt today to come close to this dream life, while they want to consider the subconscious. However, already in case of the consideration of dreams it becomes obvious that such attempts work with inadequate cognitive means because they want to refrain from anthroposophy.

What spiritual science can show with its means leads us to the cognition that this sleep-dream life flows into the whole life of the human being much more intensely than one believes in the one-sided scientific consideration. I have to foreground a sentence which seems paradoxical even today to most people which will been corroborated, however, more and more if one goes over from abstractions to realistic concepts.

I could give a comparative psychology of the sleep of plants, of animals, of the human beings, it would turn out that it is more difficult to spiritual science than to the one-sided scientific consideration because it cannot take simple concepts as starting point and cannot encompass the whole world with them. As death of the plants, animals, and human beings is something else to the spiritual researcher, the sleep, the dream life of animals and that of human beings is different to spiritual science.

Spiritual science finds out for itself with its means that we can have our ego-consciousness only because we experience the sleep and the wake consciousness alternating in such a way as we experience the sleep as human beings. It is a trivial view that the human being must sleep because he is tired. However, already the consideration of a pensioner who visits a talk or a concert and who is most certainly not tired, but falls asleep after the first five minutes, proves adequately by experience that the theory of tiredness is most certainly not true. Only that will understand sleep who understands it as an internal rhythm as it must penetrate life and as we got to know such a life rhythm yesterday as one of the members which correspond as bodily tools to the soul being.

The human being has to spend his life as it were,—as well as the single tone can never be music but only in the interaction with other tones the impression of a melody or harmony can originate—in such a way that life condition interacts with life condition and an interaction takes place in time. Rhythmical events must form the basis of the soul life. Rhythmical events are also that which in the alternating conditions of sleeping, dreaming, and waking takes place fact.

One normally believes to understand this sleeping and dreaming condition if one considers it in such a way as it presents itself to the usual observation. However, just if one considers it in such a way, one will never get a real view of the nature of dream or sleep. Only if one can envisage the everlasting essence of the human being, one will also be able to recognise that—if the human being withdraws from the wake day life if he falls asleep and dreams—that then in him that is even more active which belongs to his everlasting being, than while awake. Save that the human being, as he is in the present world period, has developed little of this everlasting. If this everlasting does not have the basis of the bodily life as in the wake day life, if this everlasting is on its own as in sleep, that appears in this everlasting which points, indeed, to conditions that are different from those which proceed between birth and death, but points to them in such a way that the immediate perception, the immediate consideration cannot prove its nature at all.

Hence, spiritual science shows that the nature of dream, for example, is misunderstood in manifold way. One misunderstands it; one interprets dreams in the old way superstitiously if one considers the contents of a dream and is of the opinion that the dream may be prophetic. However, one also misunderstands the nature of the dream if one as an enlightened person smiles only at those who regarded something as prophetic in a dream.

Spiritual science shows that it is true that something prophetic is in the dream. In the dream that being works in us which is associated with our future in such a way that it still encloses that in us what we carry through the gate of death. The forces of our everlasting soul work prophetically in the dreams. The pictures of the dreams are memories of the past. One may say, the nature of the dream is falsified because the human being is not able to work really with that what works in the dream as his being. He dresses what he cannot realise in the pictures, which his body, certain sensory reminiscences, certain memories give him from the past life.

All that falsifies the dream and is a mask of the dream. As well as it is superstitious to think of the pictures, which appear in the dream, a healthy kernel is contained in the superstition that the dream has something prophetic. However, this prophetic cannot appear in the usual observation of the dream. The dream is just something exceptionally significant, considered spiritual-scientifically.

However, the important is something else; it is that one is of the trivial opinion that the human being lives and dreams at a certain time and at another time he is awake, fully awake. Spiritual science shows that this is a wrong opinion. The state of dreaming, of sleeping does not stop if we awake; these states continue into our wake day life; the wake day life drowns them only. This wake day life, the imagining, is as it were a bright light that outshines what remains subconscious. However, while we feel our wake day consciousness flowing in our soul, a continual dream life and sleep life penetrating the whole awake life flows subconsciously in us. We dream if we add feelings, affects, or passions to the clear mental pictures. I have pointed out in the first talk that that which spiritual science searches as coherent, was always found by single outstanding persons like with flashes and I have pointed to the great aesthetician and philosopher Friedrich Theodor Vischer (1807-1887). When he wrote his article about Volkelt's book The Dream Fantasies, he pointed out that nobody who does not understand the emotions, passions, and affects understands the nature of dream. However, one called Vischer a spiritist because of this assertion. Thus, we keep on dreaming in the usual life. Save that the pictures of the dream if we have awoken do no longer appear but that what proceeds now as feelings, affects and passions appears with the same degree of reality in us as the dream does.

In the feelings, affects, and passions lives also what lives in the imagining. Nevertheless, it lives in it in such a way as the mental pictures live in the dream. However, if we develop a feeling, a passion, we do not become aware of the pictures that form the basis as they form the basis of the dreams, but we become dreamily aware of the feeling, of the passion.

Similarly, the sleep in the wake consciousness forms the basis of the will. Why were there discussions repeatedly in the course of the spiritual human development about the nature of the will, about the free will? Why have the philosophers never agreed how actually the will lives in the human being, whether as a free or as a not free one? Because the usual wake day consciousness oversleeps that which happens in the will.

Although our mental pictures are clear during the wake day consciousness, we oversleep the real process of willing. In this will, something deepest of the human being lives, but one is not immediately aware of it.

Spiritual science now shows that it sees with the beholding consciousness into the supersensible world. With the levels of Imaginative and Inspired knowledge, it penetrates into that world which exists for the usual consciousness only in the chaotic dream world. To the human being with the usual consciousness that only emerges as distorted dreams from the world of the everlasting which works beneath the outer sense-perceptible. With the Imaginative knowledge, with the Inspired knowledge spiritual science fetches the true figure of that which lives and weaves in these undergrounds. With the Intuitive knowledge it fetches what one oversleeps otherwise, what the darkness of the consciousness covers completely.

However, you learn from it that in the human life not only that prevails what one can overview with the usual wake consciousness, but that in the human life—because dream and sleep also penetrate the wake day life—that prevails what is real, what for the usual wake consciousness is not accessible what one can only grasp with the beholding consciousness as concepts, as mental pictures. Hence, let us look at the social human life as it should be enclosed with the social, moral, political concepts and we discover that something lives in the human life that is only dreamt that is even overslept.

This is the secret of the social life and of the historical life; this is the secret of the moral-social existence. With the concepts, which come up from the habitual ways of scientific thinking and which belong completely only to the usual wake consciousness, one cannot grasp history, with these mental pictures one cannot grasp the moral-social life.

Yesterday I have pointed to the fact that spiritual science should bring back something to the human being that he has lost. For centuries, for millennia there were instinctive impulses the awareness of which spiritual science has to generate. It is interesting to envisage the intervention of modern natural sciences from this viewpoint of the human development. If one asks for these modern natural sciences and their significance only in such a way as one often does today, one gets to a completely wrong concept. One always assumes that these natural sciences have originated in such a way because just the concepts that they give correspond to reality. Someone who has insight in the matters knows that the following view is true: anybody who stands firmly on scientific ground must be a sceptic at the same time because he knows that these scientific concepts correspond to truth only superficially. These scientific concepts did not appear in the human evolution because the human being was silly and childish for millennia, as many people believe, but they have originated for a quite different reason.

If one looks back in time where one recognised nature and spirit more instinctively, the human being had concepts on one side that he applied to nature in such a way that he spoke of events of nature, of the being of nature, as if these were also something mental; and if he spoke of his soul, materialist mental pictures interacted.

Even in our words “spirit” and “soul” are still materialist mental pictures if we know these concepts historically to a T. The human being has still grown together with nature so that he did not distinguish his mental exactly from nature. The recent historical development means that the human being has gone adrift from the natural existence. Just, therefore, he has formed such concepts of nature as they show the contents of the modern scientific thinking that do no longer contain anything mental. To attain such a developmental level, the human being has developed these scientific concepts for his sake. Not because this is the only saving truth to which one got finally, but because the human being could get to a certain level of freedom, of self-determination only because he has got free from nature and has formed concepts which should enclose nature and which can give the soul nothing.

If the human being has such concepts of nature, one has to draw his attention all the more to own forces of his inside to which we have pointed yesterday. Then his self-consciousness can only awake in right way. We live in a transitional condition. Natural sciences will generate a spiritualistic conception of the soul life.

The scientific materialism has the big merit, because it divests nature of any mental to lead the human being to a high level of self-reflection.

If one looks at the development of modern natural sciences in such a way, they seem to be created for an “education of the human race” in the sense of Lessing. Then the scientific concepts have been developed so that the human being has no longer to ensoul nature mystically, as in former times, but that he gets free from any mental in the view of nature, but that he has to fetch that from the depths of his being which spiritualises this mental. Then one may regard the entitled materialism of natural sciences as something great.

One only defames anthroposophy if one says that it is anyhow in conflict with natural sciences. On the contrary, it points to the big, significant role that the scientific development has in the educational process of the human race. However, what appears as scientific mental pictures is just not adapted to grasp the moral-social life, it is not adapted to form concepts, mental pictures, or ideas from which actions can arise in the moral-social life. That which the human being overviews as nature, he overviews it in the wake consciousness.

Not such impulses form the basis of the moral-social life, of the historical experience as the wake day consciousness has them for seizing nature, but such ideal impulses form the basis of it as they appear, otherwise, only in the dreams.

Thus, spiritual science gets to the weird result that the historical life, the social life of humanity cannot be encompassed by a soul being which has built up itself with natural sciences and wants to write history after the pattern of natural sciences, wants to consider sociology after the pattern of natural sciences. Which inadequate concepts has one attempted to understand the social life with the cognitive means of natural sciences!

One needs only to remember the English philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) who wanted to enclose anything actual in which the human being lives, also the sociological configuration of humanity. He wanted to apply the concepts of embryology to the social life, to the configuration of the moral-social life: The embryo develops in such a way that one has to distinguish in its early state the ectoderm from which the nervous system evolves, the endoderm from which other subordinate organs evolve, and the mesoderm. From these three parts, the human embryo develops gradually. In the moral-social development, Spencer also distinguishes three impulses. He says, as in the natural development ectoderm, mesoderm, and endoderm exist, three parts exist in the social becoming of the human being. He wants to show: as the embryo has the ectoderm, the human being develops what is militarily and politically strong from the social ectoderm; that what works and practises agriculture from the endoderm; and the commercial class from the social mesoderm. There one has a parallelism between the ranks of the social-moral life and the layers of the embryo. It forms the basis of this view that because from the ectoderm the nervous system develops also from that what corresponds to the ectoderm in the social-moral life the most valuable must develop in the state. Hence, Spencer's worldview depends on considering the actually valuable class as the military one. In it the political higher life should develop. As the nervous life originates from the ectoderm, the political, the leading class should originate from the military. I do not keep characterising this strange view of the philosopher Herbert Spencer, I only want to point to it. I could still bring in many examples how one has tried to apply scientific mental pictures to the social life and to understand it with them.

However, the peculiar is that the old instinctive cognition that enclosed mind and body, matter and spirit at the same time was a not fully conscious cognition that bit by bit changed via the scientific purely external cognition of the dead into the higher levels of cognition to which spiritual science points today: to the Imaginative cognition of the beholding consciousness, to the Inspired cognition, to the Intuitive cognition. Scientific knowledge is only an intermediate stage between the instinctive cognition and the higher cognition that I have characterised in my books The Riddle of Man and The Riddles of the Soul. The beholding consciousness just disintegrates into the Imaginative consciousness that is the lowest level, the Inspired consciousness, a higher level, and the Intuitive consciousness, the highest level. It is typical only that for the consideration of the outer world the instinctive old cognition had to change into the scientific mental pictures. After this transition the other ways of spiritual knowledge will come. The social-moral life cannot have this transition. One has attempted it; but it cannot have it.

While skipping the scientific way of thinking the instinctive cognition of social-political ideas has directly to change into the conscious cognition of the same world, which is dreamt in the history and the social life of humanity. That which humanity dreams in history and in the social life can be only consciously recognised with the Imaginative, Inspired, and Intuitive consciousness. In this area is no transition from the instinctive consciousness via the scientific one to the Imaginative consciousness. It must become catastrophic if one wants to do this transition if one wants to insert such concepts that are formed after the pattern of scientific concepts into the social order. This happened in particular in the nineteenth century up to now. Scientific mental pictures work catastrophically if they transition into actions.

The transition from the old instinctive experience that used myths to the Imaginative cognition must be direct.

Thus somebody may ask mockingly: hence, one is not allowed to believe that one can master the social, moral life with the scientifically oriented concepts, but one can penetrate this social-moral life only salutarily if one realises that one has to deepen the concepts spiritual-scientifically?

Somebody may mock; he may close his eyes to the big signs of our disastrous time. However, it is in such a way. As well as already some people begin to take notice of spiritual science, which has a say if it concerns the configuration of reality, there will be more and more people who realise that one has to turn to spiritual science if one needs lively concepts for the moral-social existence. That is why, spiritual science has not appeared in our time from arbitrary agitation in favour of single people but because of deeper historical necessities.

We do not need to point to less significant personalities if we want to envisage that which we consider here. History as the science of the moral-social life is not yet very old. One believes that it is an old science. In reality it is, as well as it is practised today, hardly hundred years old. Everybody can convince himself of it. When history appeared, Schiller (Friedrich S., 1759-1805, German poet and writer) wanted to be one of the first teachers of history. Perhaps it may be good just to bring in a great personality as an example of that what is so often said that one can learn from history for the moral-social life of the human beings. How often does one hear from people, where every judgement is demanded about this and that what one has to feel under the influence of the tragic events: history teaches this, history teaches that.

Well, let us consider these teachings of history with one of the greatest: when Schiller started his professorship in Jena in 1789, he characterised a teaching of history that had arisen to him in the following way. Schiller said in his famous inaugural speech, it was the prelude of his historical lectures: “The community of European states seems to have changed into a big family. Their members may be hostile to each other, but do no longer tear each other to pieces, I hope.”

This is the lesson that even such a great man like Schiller drew from history! One has to consider that he spoke the words that should be prophetic in 1789!

How have the European peoples tortured themselves shortly after, and what does happen today again in this Europe! What a prophet was this historian, this genius Schiller?

Why is this that way? One could bring in many examples of the fact that a conception of history of such kind, as it is usual even today, gives nothing for life. Plainly and simply because one works in such a conception of history with mental pictures which are taken from the outer reality, the object of natural sciences. These concepts are not suitable to enclose history and the moral-social effectiveness what the human beings, as well as they are in life, only dream.

History is only dreamt. If we want to have concepts that can really intervene in history, in the moral-social life, they have to be scientifically clear, but the essentials should be that they grasp that clearly which appears from the usual consciousness only in the dreams of history and of the moral-social life.

I know that it is a paradoxical truth even today that people do not experience the historical development so that this experience works in concepts of the wake day life. Nevertheless, one has to acknowledge that truth. Then one will recognise of which kind the concepts, the mental pictures, the ideas and ideals must be which can master this life.

The art historian Herman Grimm (1828-1901) said more often to me in conversations, if one wants to have a historical consideration that really encloses the historical, then one cannot work with such concepts as the naturalist applies them, then one has to understand history with the creative imagination of the people. He said this because he still had no concepts of Imaginative cognition.—One has to take his starting point from that what remains in the subconscious as it were; one has to bring up this only into consciousness, but into a consciousness that is different from the usual one. A notion of that what is true in this area formed the basis of Grimm's intuition.

That is why someone is very much wrong who believes to be able to encompass history or the social-political life with the concepts that developed with the scientific thinking. Since someone who figures the things out knows, for example, that the most sure means to ruin a community in relatively short time is a parliament, in which you put nothing but theorists, professors who think scientifically. Let it legislate, and then you will cause the decline of the community with such parliament. Since they will put nothing but concepts, nothing but ideas into reality that can have no reality in the historical, in the social-moral life, but must destroy this social-moral life.

Hence, the remark of Herman Grimm is very fine when he said, it is strange that the excellent historian Gibbon (Edward G., 1737-1794, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) describing the first Christian centuries did not describe the advancing, growing Christian life but that he could only describe the decline of the old life with his concepts.—One cannot encompass the growing life with mental pictures of the wake day life but with mental pictures only which originate from the dreaming consciousness.

In recent time, these things have become particularly important because just in the nineteenth century the scientific approach tried to start its campaign of conquest also in the historical, in the social-ethical life. Only few people braced themselves against it. In particular, socialism, which wanted to be scientific, supported the emergence of this thinking most consciously.

Socialism tried to put the social-moral ideas completely into the waters of scientific consideration. Just in the recent time this extreme way appeared to consider the social-moral life only from the viewpoint of material interests, class conflicts, impulses of surplus value et cetera as it happened with Marxism.

Spiritual science does not take the view that one has to deal with either—or everywhere, but that concepts show one-sidedness as a rule. I have often enough used the comparison: if the spiritual researcher advances to concepts, so that he regards them as images of the real from different sides like four photographs of a tree from four sides, one can describe the world from a pantheistic, theistic, monotheistic, or polytheistic viewpoint.

One realises the true meaning of these things only if one looks at them as one-sided images of reality that can never enter into abstractions, but only into the living oneness with itself. Hence, you must not understand what I want to say now in such a way, as if I wanted to condemn everything lock, stock and barrel that has come up under the influence of the socialist thinking. I would not dream of that. Since this view has brought much valuable things, and it has fought its way through hard enough.

Those who are the significant official bearers of the cultural life who have to keep watch that right concepts and images originate have simply rejected for decades what has come from this side until not only the scanty concepts of the older academic socialism, but the much more voluminous concepts of modern socialism have become socially acceptable.

Such things are beyond the spiritual-scientific consideration that does not advocate anything which wants only to face up objectively to the facts. However, one has to say that this approach of the recent socialism, in particular the materialist historical view, is scientifically oriented. What are they in truth?

To the spiritual researcher is that which, for example, Karl Marx (1818-1883) has shown with urgent logic an expression of that what humanity has dreamt in social-moral impulses during four centuries up to the middle of the nineteenth century. Karl Marx described the impulses of the last three to four centuries. However, these impulses did not live in the wake day images, but humanity dreamt in its impulses, in its social, moral ideas. When actually the dream was already over when actually already a social-moral order had appeared as it was in the sense of the dreams of the last four centuries, Karl Marx wrote his books about what had already become a corpse from which one should awake. That what Karl Marx wanted to put as a program, lived in the time that was before, actually, even before he was there with his thoughts. However, reality demands that now—skipping the scientific way of thinking—the social-moral ideas are filled with the higher supersensible consciousness.

Once one could grasp this instinctively. Even that about which Karl Marx wrote was still dreamt instinctively. The new time can no longer venture to dream only to experience the social-moral ideas only instinctively; it must be able to immerse them into the Imaginative cognition.

One can say of any time if one wants to be trivial that it is a “transition period.” However, it concerns what transitions. In our time, the old instinctive cognition transitions into the conscious cognition.

In the area of the view of nature, our time has entered into the intermediate stage of natural sciences.

In the social it has to find the immediate transition from the instinctive social-political feeling of the old time as it existed, for example, in the Roman Law, it has to find the transition to the creative also where the moral-social ideas intervene immediately: in the area of education. With pure knowledge concepts, one can be neither a pedagogue nor a politician, nor anybody who participates in the creation of the social life at this or that place. A time will come where one will smile at the economics, at the sociopolitical theories as one smiles today if any theorist who is called an aesthetician writes how a right opera or symphony must be, a theorist who cannot compose who can only consider a symphony or an opera aesthetic-academically who cannot create out of Imagination. One would laugh if he put that as classic example.

As weird as it sounds even today: one will consider this way what appears as economics from mere concepts of the wake day consciousness, which turned out to be so inadequate. One will smile at it as an error that was comprehensible in the scientific age. However, one will overcome it if the consideration of the social-moral life is associated livingly with the supersensible reality that brings the supersensible into the legal life, into the spiritual life, which is penetrated by social love.

One can even give in detail that someone who wants to participate in the state-social design of a community can obtain a picture of a scientific consideration only which has something artistic which itself is artistic-creative. Not aestheticians, but composers have to create operas and symphonies. Not scientifically thinking theorists can find social concepts, but those who are penetrated with concepts that are out of this living that emerges, otherwise, only in the dream impulses, in the feelings, in the affects, and passions, and in the will itself.

The social design of any community can only arise from the Imaginative knowledge. That life which penetrates the social communities, that dream life, which flows from the human being in the love of a human being to his fellow man, where love becomes duty, can experience its outer configuration only in the community under the influence of Inspired concepts of the beholding consciousness.

The legal life is still the echo of old legal concepts even today and remains so dark to the scientific view about which one messes while one looks for all possible and impossible scientific psychological concepts of the recent time,. It will be able to become creative again if it is penetrated with Intuitive knowledge.

Really, it does not concern a few anthroposophic dreamers but human beings who should become able to put themselves powerfully into life. It does not concern the foundation of single colonies of a few people who want to have a good time or to be vegetarians somewhere in a mountain area and lark about there, but this is why it concerns understanding the signs of time knowing what is really historically inevitable in the developmental course of humanity. Anthroposophy is not the hobby of single groups; anthroposophy is something that the spirit of our time demands.

Many educational rules will give way to the knowledge that one can find spiritual-scientifically from nature, from the being of the human being. The future pedagogues will have no preconceived rules. However, an understanding changing into immediate, recognising love with the growing human being will penetrate the pedagogue. He will learn things quite different from theoretical education; he will learn to stand in the full life. Hence, he will also cope with any individual being. One will understand how freedom and necessity penetrate each other in life.

One understands that the moral-social life, considered scientifically, would be in such a way, as if I had three objects here. I light up the first object; then I light up the second object, the first one gets dark; now I let the second object getting dark and light up the third one. I pursue this. While I pursue this and say, the first object was lighted up, that is the cause of the light of the second one; the second one is the cause of the light of the third one. Such an illusion, as if the first body which is lighted up from the outside worked as a cause of the illumination of the second one and the second as a cause of the illumination of the third. Such an illusion forms the basis of that historical approach which looks at the consecutive facts always as effects of the preceding facts. Thus, there is no causal coherence in the consecutive historical events as in nature. However, there is the fact that a common light illuminates the consecutive facts. One has to penetrate into this light with higher, supersensible knowledge.

What is good in natural sciences: to seize the things in detail, does not apply to spiritual. However, it does also not apply to the social-political life. To spiritual science, a description of the social-political life in detail would be as if a chess player just wanted to consider which moves he wants to do. He cannot carry out them, because this depends on the moves of the opponent. Nevertheless, one can still be a good chess player if he masters the rules of chess. One can stand his ground as a chess player. The same holds true if one wants to master life. Only in the realms of nature are defined laws. If one faces life, one has to have a skill that copes with this life. Then one must be always ready that anything of the wealth of life faces you as the opponent of chess faces the player.

Any child is like an opponent of chess to the teacher. Education will accept forms by which it makes the human being capable of life, able to penetrate into the nature of any single human being.

However, such a life in the social-political can arise only from a real cognition of that what is contained in the human lives and human beings what is dreamt there as history what is dreamt as social-political impulses. How much does one miss in this direction even today!

In spiritual science one has started studying since many years what is the nature of the Western European peoples, of the Central European peoples, of the East European peoples, which impulses really exist, how the different soul expressions are distributed geographically and historically, which impulses really exist. Only by the knowledge of the available impulses that Imagination, that Inspiration can originate which can enjoy life in the moral-social ideas, as they become prominent in the social life, in the legal life. I would like to point to a very promising start just here in Switzerland. Your fellow-countryman Roman Boos (1889-1952) has published a book about The Over-all Work Contract under Swiss Law, a book that grasps the nature of certain institutions and concepts available in the legal life for the first time.

However, one has done various attempts in the recent time to recognise from the mental-social being how the laws, how the impulses gradually take place. Thus, an American has written a very interesting book in which he wants to show that the peoples split up into two groups: One group are the ambitious, the progressive peoples, the others are the descending peoples. The American, Brooks Adams (Peter Chardon B. A., 1848-1927) describes the soul life of the ascending peoples in the following way: it arises from a basic soul quality, from the imaginative-warlike; so that the peoples who have future are gifted with Imaginative fantasy life and with warlike impulses. That is not my opinion but that of the American Brooks Adams. Those peoples who become decadent are the peoples with industry and science.

This is one-sided, of course. However, even these one-sided considerations show that one has already done the attempt to master life with really moral-social ideas. However, one cannot survey life with the concepts that are formed only after the pattern of natural sciences. One can survey it only if one penetrates into the supersensible depths of life. One can do this only with the beholding consciousness.

I could only give scanty indications. In single talks, I can only give suggestions, which is why one can easily disprove spiritual science. However, today spiritual science is not so happy to have countless chairs at disposal as the other sciences have. This will also come. Spiritual science can only give suggestions also concerning the social-moral ideas.

If one surveys everything at last that I have brought forward sketchily today, I would let culminate it, while I show that the community must develop under the influence of vivid moral-social ideas also in such a way that the human being can develop as a whole in this community. However, to his whole being belongs what I have explained yesterday: the independent, everlasting being about which I have said yesterday that in it the idea of freedom lives.

The highest social-moral idea is the idea of freedom. No community will realise it in itself, which does not take its starting point from supersensible ideas. Since the supersensible can only prosper where the creation of the community originates from supersensible impulses, sensations, concepts, mental pictures. The mental pictures of the usual day consciousness do not work in that life in which the social-moral ideas work. If the human being wants to work in this life, he must work into this moral-social life with another member of his being.

One may say that the great persons of the past already realised with single light flashes what it concerned. As I have pointed to Goethe in another way at the end of the last talk I would like to point again to him today at the end. He did not yet have spiritual science. However, if he looked at the historical life and wanted to figure out what this social-moral life is, which embodies itself in history, he found strange words saying, the best we can have from history is the enthusiasm that it excites.

How wonderful is such remark! I said that Friedrich Theodor Vischer stated that one could not understand the emotional life if one did not understand the dream.—Goethe looks at the history of humanity, at the historical dream. He knows instinctively, intuitively that humanity is dreaming, while it lives history that the historical impulses do not enjoy life in the mental pictures but in that which enjoys life in the dream sphere of the historical experience. That is why, the best we have from history is not that “fable convenue” which you read in the history books and which we regard usually as history which gives, however, nothing but the corpse of that which develops as the stream of humanity in the social-political development.

Goethe knows: not that which you read in the history books is that which the human being has as best from history, but that which can be associated with this dream of history, as a creative quality: enthusiasm. With it, he pronounced a big truth from one side apprehensively, which must work reforming if humanity wants to overcome the catastrophic events of the present.

However, this truth can be complemented on the other side, while one points out that one cannot intervene with sophisticated concepts after the pattern of scientific mental pictures anyhow fruitfully in the social-moral life, but with concepts which are connected with life much more intimately, as the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science intends them.

One needs something stronger than the not creative ideas in history: one needs enthusiasm. Everything that should cause that the social-moral life can develop must arise from enthusiasm. However, from a right enthusiasm which originates if one can recognise by the connection of the single human being with the supersensible human by Imagination, by Inspiration, and by Intuition.

As Goethe could say on one side that the best we have from history is the enthusiasm that it excites, the spiritual researcher would like to add that anthroposophy attempts to penetrate into the supersensible; it tries to recognise the everlasting, the immortal, and the elements of freedom in the human life. However, the best it wants to give humanity will be that it gives enthusiasm that can develop the moral-social life.

In this direction, I wanted to give some indications and suggestions with this last talk to show that spiritual science does not want to be only a theory, but a force that co-operates from the innermost impulses of life with the energetic human life that we need in this catastrophic time.