The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Translated by Antje Heymanns

When we look at what seems to have run like a kind of Leitmotif through this winter’s lecture cycle, when we focus on what lives within man as his nature and which we observe not only once between birth and death, but which we presuppose to exist in repeated Earth lives—then the question about the foundation of man’s development in his one life, in one earthly incarnation, appears to become quite essential for us, especially in our present time. Because the human being of the present certainly questions and searches when he encounters the peculiar manifestations of predisposition, talent and education of human beings. However, as he is not much inclined to look away from what appears to be manifesting itself in a life, and to focus his gaze instead on the real builder, the actual creator within a human being, then even the questions of this contemporary will easily assume the character of a half-measure, of vagueness. You see, when one presumes that something exists in human nature that like the actual inner enlivening force runs through many lives, then one encounters the completely enigmatic nature of this human being that is worthy of exploration. Then one will want to see questions about predispositions, talents and education in a completely new light, in a very different light from how they can be seen, when one’s gaze focuses only on what is presently so often emphasised: heredity, predispositions inherited from one’s ancestors. It is not as if Spiritual Science wants to turn the eyes away from that what is expressed in inherited characteristics—it is not so that it ignores all careful observations of all that what the outer senses and the intellect focussed on these could say. However, Spiritual Science knows that all this relates to the very essence of man like something that man uses by taking it in, just as in physical life the outer matter is absorbed by the small germ of a living being who determines its own form out of itself; yet what is supposed to enable it to express this form in its external life—the substantial, the material—it acquires from its environment. By and large, we must recognise the way a human being lives as a confluence of everything that comes into being at birth, with that in which man’s essence and individuality will be embedded and from which it draws its spiritual and soul nourishment.

For example, if we as educators have tasks concerned with a human soul who steps into existence and from hour to hour, from week to week reveals more and more of its inner abilities; if we face a human being who is growing up like a holy riddle that we have to solve, that has come to us from infinity so that we provide it with an opportunity to unfold itself and to develop, then a whole sum of new tasks, new views, new possibilities will indeed arise for all human relationships in existence. Thus we see a human being step into existence at birth and presuppose that, in a certain way, he brings the core of his being at birth into existence. If we do not look at catchwords and theories but at facts, then external natural science also shows us how this spirit and soul core of a human being continues to work on a child even after its birth, and how what we encounter as bodily organisation changes, and is plastically shaped under the influence of spirit and soul. External science, for example, can also illustrate how what we must first see as a tool for external activities, how this brain, when it is stepping into existence at birth, is a still an undefined, yet still quite plastically malleable matter in a human being; and how, what he endeavours to absorb of spiritual treasures of his environment, penetrates forming and shaping the plastic matter of our brains like an artist and works on it.

If we make the assumption—and this is a fact and has been mentioned several times already in different contexts—that a human being, who, after birth, would helplessly be placed on a lonely island, cannot acquire the ability to speak, then we must say: The spirit and soul content that we meet wrapped up in language from birth onwards is not something that emerges from man’s inner being, it is not merely attached to his disposition, or something that he receives, as it were, without the influences of his spirit and soul environment—like he receives his second set of teeth at age seven due to inner predisposition—instead speech is something that works on a human being. Speech works like an actual sculptor, who, as it were, forms the brain. We can well follow, also externally, scientifically, this sculpturing of the brain throughout the early times, yes, even for years. If it will then anatomically and physiologically be proven that human language ability, memory for certain language concepts, is bound to one or another organ and each word is, as it were, kept like a book in a library, then we are allowed to ask: What has shaped the brain for this initially? And we can answer: The same that existed as spirit and soul in the language vocabulary in a human being’s environment.

This shows us, that in regard to a human being’s entire soul-development, we have to differentiate everything he experiences in his thoughts, imaginations and feelings—also in his will impulses and emotions—everything, so to speak, that is merely inner experience, from something else that remains an inner experience so that it intervenes in the outer physical organisation, plastically sculptures it, and thus shapes it into a tool for future mental capabilities or future spirit and soul life. This can be illustrated best by tracking one ability of a human being throughout his life, that shows quite different sides, although these different sides have been repeatedly thrown together by external psychology: when we follow our memory.

When we acquire something through our memory, by memorising, then we do this by way of tools, of which one of the main ones is repetition. We have then made it our own, and are able to repeat it. Yet everyone knows the awkward thing—forgetting; because things are forgotten again, disappear from our memory, so that we are unable to reproduce them at a later date. Or aren’t you able to remember how much you had to learn and recite by heart in your youth, and how much of it you are no longer able to recite by heart? But does really everything disappear that we have memorised?

We will now only consider that of which man will say later: I have forgotten it —namely that which he is unable to retrieve so that he can reproduce it. Is it really completely gone? It is present in a similar way to what has already been mentioned, which in normal human life is always forgotten: like the wonderful, rich, first experiences of childhood are forgotten. In our normal human life, we can only remember back to a certain point in time. Yet prior to this point in time we have gained infinitely many impressions. Who would not acknowledge this, if he would observe the development of a child in its first life years in a really unbiased way.

But is it forgotten in the sense we normally speak about forgetting? Is it really not there at all? Does it no longer play a role in the human soul? Yes, it does play an important role in the human soul. Because what our first childhood impressions are like, whether we experience joyful or sad things, love or indifference, these or other outer impressions, on these depends infinitely more than what is usually thought—such as what someone is capable of doing later in life—depends on the overall mood and the entire constitution of his soul.

What is forgotten in the early years is more important than is generally acknowledged, as it forms and shapes us in our soul being. This is also the case with what we learn later—we forget the wording, the thought, but it remains in us as a certain mood of soul. If a person learnt at a certain age, for example, ballads or other literary works about great heroes with very specific tasks, with quite defined characteristics, then he might forget the thoughts and occurrences and so on, and will not be able to reproduce them; but what he has learnt remains within the structure of his own character, maybe as soul strength, or as a way to face life and allow joy and sorrow to approach him.

What we forget turns into moods, sentimental values, yes, into will impulses; it becomes what rests more or less unconscious within our soul life, yet it still works and forms within us. Only sometimes, through very particular processes later in life, it is revealed that those forgotten things are actually not quite forgotten. Because, if one takes relevant measures and places something familiar in front of someone’s soul, then that person will remember something that was seemingly forgotten. Thus one can prove that the memory is still present within him, but something like a blanket has been put over it in the unconscious layers of his soul life. In this way we can really see how what we forget, what disappears from our memory works formative and creative on our soul, and then often reveals itself in the mood with which we face joy and suffering, in our courage, in our bravery or cowardice; or also in our fearfulness and anxiety towards life. What we see sinking down, as it were, out of the treasure trove of memory into our more subconscious, works creatively on our soul itself. Basically, we ourselves are what the things we have forgotten have made of us. Because what else is a human being actually, than the way how he enjoys, how he can be brave, and so on! If we look at a human being not in an abstract but in a concrete way, then we have to say:

The human being is the harmonic interweaving and inter-play of his characteristics, so that he himself is limited by what flows down into deeper levels of his consciousness. We observe this in the course of life.

From all that has been taken into account so far, and from what is still to be added, it can follow that the soul-spiritual that sinks into deeper layers, sinks even deeper when a human being crosses the threshold of death. Because every time when someone, through what he absorbs, wants to work formative on his external physical organisation during his life, he finds that in this life a particular organisation already exists. This is shaped one way or another, he enters life with these or other dispositions. That what is creative in our souls must storm against this. Let's assume that through what we absorb courage could be build up within us as a trait. But if we have an organisation that is more suited to being chicken-hearted than to be a courageous human being, then we must more or less fight against something that we have got in our life from our structure. When we go through the time between death and a new birth, the essence of this human development lies in us creating in advance the archetype, the original shape of our new physical body, for our new physical earthly structure.

There we do not meet any limits and resistances such as are presented to us between birth and death. We build plastically with what we have obtained during life, the basis, the basic strengths for a new corporeality within wider limits than it is the case between birth and death. Hence we may say: Those forgotten concepts, which only affect our soul during our life between birth and death, work to shape our next physical organisation when we step through the portal of death, until the time of our re-incarnation, and work themselves into what is connected with our new bodily structure. In this way, we will stride through birth into our new existence with such dispositions that reach down into even deeper levels of our being than those ideas that were forgotten in the life between birth and death.

From all of this it becomes quite understandable that the human being, because he brought forth from life, from his immediate environment, the causes for the organisation of a new corporeality, that he indeed needs in a certain way the same conditions again.

It is different with animals, where, as we have seen from observations on the ‘human soul and animal soul’ and ‘human spirit and animal spirit’, the organisation is determined by line of heredity. There the animal appears with wholly defined tendencies that want to express themselves plastically, because these tendencies were not derived from the animal’s environment. Let us consider how little an animal acquires from the external world through education or conditioning, and how little it therefore needs a stage, located in the outer world, to bring out again what has been absorbed of educational principles. The human being, however, needs such a stage. Therefore he steps clumsily into this world, steps into the world so that we once again only have to put the finishing touches to the finer formation of his organisation. This explains the living and weaving of man’s individuality, of his true essential beingness, in the early years of his existence. Therefore his spirit organ, his brain, steps plastically determinable, malleable into existence, and basically, only after birth the last decisive pathways, lines and directions are added, that determine how the predispositions must be realised.

This illustrates, how what matters in regard to development needs to be viewed as something that came across from earlier developmental stages, and therefore it is less important to have defined, stubborn educational principles, than to look at each individual human being, at each individuality as a problem, as a holy riddle that needs to be solved, and that it is up to us to create opportunities, so that this riddle is solved in the best possible way.

An education is uncomfortable if it cannot establish any firm educational principles at all, but instead has to appeal to a principle that is related to the artistic within the educator, to observe what emerges from the essential nature of a human being. It is even more inconvenient than someone saying in a regimented way: these or those abilities are to be expressed in this way or that way. But we only have the right attitude towards the growing human being if we regard him in each case as an individuality, as something special in itself.

Although if one insists on seeing things trivially, and some people have a talent for seeing everything trivially, you could say: Individuality does not only show in a human being, but also in each single animal. Of course it shows. No one speaking from the basis of Spiritual Science will deny this. I have often said, that if one speaks about individuality in this sense, then one must be more precise, must be conscious, that if one wants to see things trivially, you can also speak about the biography and individuality of a quill. I knew a man, who—because in his days nibs were still cut from goose quills—was able to distinguish between the quills, because everyone cut their own quills, each one developed a personal relationship with him. And because the latter had an excellent fantasy, he would have been able to write a detailed biography of every single quill. However, as far human beings are concerned, it is not about applying the standard of triviality, but a standard drawn from the depths of realisation.

It is just through such observations that we can see the way and manner in which a human being forms and shapes his actual being, plastically forms his outward appearance, his outer organisation and lives out his actual being in it. From this, in turn, we can see how life happens in the early years and how it reshapes and remodels itself with the development of man, and what it utilises of what it can absorb from its environment. In the first years of a human being’s life we find that it is of very special importance to preserve for him his abilities, so to speak, to intervene plastically, malleably in his physical or body and soul organisation, and that we do not block the opportunity for him to intervene plastically.

We block someone’s opportunity most of all, if we stuff him too early with concepts and ideas that relate only to the external sensory nature and which have the strictest contours, or if he is pinned down to an activity that is theoretically confined to very specific forms. Then there is no variability, no modification, and no opportunity to develop the spirit and soul capabilities, in the way the soul is active from day to day, from hour to hour. Let us assume a father would be a terribly obstinate man, who has adopted the following principle:

My boy must become like I was! Throughout my whole life I have made shoes for my customers in this way, and my boy must make his shoes in the same way. My boy must think like me! Thus, into the environment of this boy a spirit and soul structure is brought, that works on his spirit and soul organisation just like it has worked on the father. Through this, the boy will be pressed into very specific forms, although this should be about exploring the individuality that steps into existence, and then, based on insight gained from this, shaping the spirit and soul organisation.

The educational instinct of humanity has already created a wonderful tool through general consciousness by which the human being in the early years of life is given the possibility to work on the changeable, the modifiable, the flexible of his spirit and soul, so that there is free scope for the forming of the human being. That is ‘play’. This is also the best way to keep a child occupied without giving it concepts that are bound into fixed contours, but such that give the thoughts room for manoeuvre, so that it can wander off here or there.

Only then one will find the course of thought that is predetermined by the inner predisposition. If I tell a fairy tale in such a way that it stimulates the inner activity of the child, without concepts being formed in pre-determined contours, but so that the outlines of the concepts remain flexible, then the child works like someone who tries and by trying attempts to find out what is right. The child works on finding out how its spirituality needs to move so that it can best sculpt its organisation in the way it is internally pre-formed. And it is the same with playing. Play differs from activity that is pressed into solid forms in that when playing one is to a certain extent able to do what one wants—so that one does not have sharp contours in thoughts and mobilities of organs from the outset. Hence, the soul-spiritual organisation of a human being will have an effect again in a free, determinable way. Play and the activity of the spirit and soul of the child in the first years of life, as just described, arise from a deep awareness of what the nature and essence of a human being really are.

Whoever who wants to become a real educator, will, also for the later years, definitely be conscious that indeed each single ability, as it were, must first be studied, recognised and determined in an evolving human being. Yet there is an opportunity to observe certain great principles. Such principles then lead us to the way in which the essential core of a human being, which stretches from birth to birth, utilises the external that lies in the line of heredity.

It is most interesting to focus on the way in which the spirit and soul core of a human being utilises the qualities, characteristics, virtues and so on, of father and mother, of paternal and maternal ancestors in completely different ways to build something new. And indeed: the paternal and maternal qualities are not equally used by the individual core of a human being, instead this is based on a very specific law. Just this law is infinitely instructive. If we attempt to grasp it in its completeness to fully see through it, then we must look at how two things assert themselves in the human soul. One of these is the rationality, to which we now want to add the ability to think in pictures, in concepts, faster or slower, cleverer or dumber. The other is the general direction of will and feeling, of the emotions, the interest that we take in our surroundings. The whole manner of how we are able to perform something, depends on whether we have a spirit that is agile or slow, or dull, or one that penetrates into things; if we are astute or not. What a human being is able to achieve for his fellow human beings and how we achieve it depends on us understanding of how to connect our interests in the right way to what goes on in our surroundings. Some people have good pre-conditions, but they have little interest in their fellow men and the environment. In this case the interest does not draw the abilities out. Hence it is necessary to pay as much attention to the interest within us, as to whether the flexibility of our rationality allows us to achieve this or that for our contemporaries.

Now, we can imagine that the whole kind of interest is linked to the way a human being’s desires are shaped, how the external approach to the entire life is organised, how a human being develops as being clever or clumsy. In short, the whole nature of the soul life—which is connected to our interactions with the external world and our greater or lesser interest and our skilfulness for this outer world—the most important elements for this are inherited by a human being from the father. Our interests and that which from these interests makes us skilful and capable to use our organs and our entire being, is as a rule an inheritance from the father. Thus the soul takes the appropriate elements from the father, so that it can form those characteristics within itself. In contrast, the intellectual agility, with which imaginative activity, pictorial imagination and inventiveness are connected, are received by our individuality when we come into existence at birth as heirloom from the mother’s characteristics. You will find that Schopenhauer has in a certain way hinted at this extraordinarily interesting chapter; he had an inkling of it, however, he was not in a position to also point out the deeper things.

On the other hand we are allowed to also say something else. In a certain way the following is borrowed from the father; how, what lives in the father as his manner of relating to objects, what his interests are, the desires towards objects, how he demands, wants, wills, if he is a brave man who courageously intervenes in life conditions or withdraws faint-heartedly, if he is pedantic or generous, also his characteristics that are connected to the will-impulses. By contrast, all that is flexibility of the soul, of the rationality, we find is passed on from the mother. Now, however, an interesting difference comes to light, which can only be observed when looking at the whole scope of life. Then you will find evidence of this everywhere; namely with regard to sex, there is a immense difference. It can be said that the relationship of a son to his father and mother is wonderfully described in Goethe’s words : “I’ve got my stature from my father, to lead a serious life,” this includes all that is related to the interactions of a human being with the external world. “From my mama I’ve got the cheerful nature, the joy to fabulate,” —this includes the entire nature of the spiritual life.

Yet when we now look at the daughter, it becomes apparent that in a peculiar way, the father’s qualities appear in the daughter so that they are now lifted one level above the nature of the will-impulses, from the nature that expresses itself more in the communications with the environment—into the soul.

Hence we can find a father’s qualities—of course this applies only in the same circumstances—who always courageously steps in, who has a lively interest in this or that, and therefore lives out a certain seriousness in his communications with his environment—are being adopted by the individuality of the daughter in such a way that they are lifted up into the soul, so that a daughter exists with a serious soul life, with the character life of the father translated into the soul which makes, what was probably viscous in the father, more flexible, so that the most important qualities that we encounter in the father as more external, show themselves as more internalised by the daughter.

Therefore we can say: the character traits of the father live on in the soul of the daughter; the soul characteristics of the mother, the alertness of the spirit as well as the talents and abilities that can be developed, live on in the son. Goethe’s mother, the old ‘Mrs Councillor’, was a women who was able to fabulate, in whom the fantasy functioned in the most wonderful way. This went down one level in the son, became an aptitude, an organisation, so that the son Goethe had the ability to give to humanity what lived in the mother. We can see, how the maternal qualities are lowered by one level in the sons, so that they are transformed into organ abilities; whilst the father’s characteristics are lifted up one level by the daughters, so that we encounter them as internalised and spiritualised.

Perhaps nothing is more characteristic than the beautiful contrast between Goethe and his sister Cornelia, who was just like the old Councillor, internalised, spiritualised a quiet, serious nature and thus was able to be for the poet, already in his boyhood, what he needed: an exceptionally good companion. Now take this into account and consider how Goethe, according to his description, felt unable to develop a favourable relationship with his father. This was because the paternal characteristics were externalised in the old Mr Councillor. What Goethe needed were these characteristics, but he could not understand them as they existed in his father, whom they fitted. Spiritualised they lived in his sister, who could thus be such a good comrade to him.

Now walk with me through history and you will see how each step confirms what has been said and how wherever you find hints, you could provide historical confirmation of such a matter. The most beautiful confirmation in this regard we got from the mother of the Maccabees , who with heroic greatness lets her sons face death for what she believes and what her fathers believed, with these great, beautiful words: “I have given you the outer corporeality; but the one who has created the world and human beings, has given you what I could not give you, and he will take care that you will get it back again, if you lose it for the sake of your faith!”

How often will just the maternal element be held up to us in history: from Alexander’s mother and the mother of the Gracchen to our present time, when we see characteristics appear in a person that show that someone is able to affect his surroundings, that he has the strength and talents and also the body and soul organisation for this. We could open the history of great man everywhere, wherever we wanted to: everywhere we will find the maternal characteristics translated in such a way that they have descended one level, and have become abilities placed into life. Let us take the example of Bürger's mother and his father, from whom he has also inherited the willpower characteristic. Basically, he did not have much in common with his father: his father was glad when he did not need to concern himself with the development of the little boy. Yet the mother had a wonderfully agile spirit; it was she who possessed the right grammatical and stylistic expression. This in turn was necessary for the poet, he inherited those traits from his mother, and they just came about because he belonged to the next generation. Or, let us think of Hebbel and the relationship he had with his father. Anyone who knows the poet Hebbel better will sense that in all the rough idiosyncrasies and stubbornness of interests there is a distant echo of his father’s legacy. In this respect, the old master bricklayer Hebbel has bequeathed much to his son. But the son and his mother understood each other. It was the mother who protected her son from becoming a master bricklayer in his birthplace, instead of later giving his dramas to mankind. It is quite touching to read how Hebbel himself tells in his wonderful diaries, what connected him with his mother.

These examples could be multiplied ad infinitum. Yet we should definitely not conclude that things are wrong, just because we believe to be observing life and encounter something different here and there. This would be like someone saying: The physicists verify for us the law of gravity; I will now, by way of installing many contraptions, prove to them, that this law can be impaired. Laws are not there for us to consider every single circumstance, but to focus on what is probable. This it how we must do it in natural science and how we must do it in Spiritual Science. Yet Spiritual Science is not at present advanced enough to proceed in a similar way. If one takes this into account, one finds confirmation of the above law of paternal and maternal heredity everywhere. Yet when looking at a whole human being, one must be clear, that what we call the human soul, and which expresses itself in the entire body and soul structure of man, is nothing simple. Again, one could have an unreserved will for trivialities and ask: ‘Why do you Anthroposophists have the quirk to distinguish three soul-members in the soul, and even multiple members in human nature? You are talking about a sentient soul, an intellectual soul and a consciousness soul. It would be much easier to talk of the soul as of a unitary entity in which one thinks, feels and wills.’ Yes, it is certainly more simple, more convenient—and also trivial. At the same time, this is something that scientific observation of a human being cannot in truth promote. Not out of a desire to divide and to make many words has the structure of the human soul into a sentient soul arisen—which means into the part, that initially establishes contact with the environment and receives perceptions and feelings from outside, and in which desires and instincts also develop. This then is to be separated from the part in which, in a certain sense, what has been gained has already been processed. We activate our sentient soul when we face the outer world, receive from it impressions of colours and sounds, but also by allowing that to come to the surface what we as normal human beings initially cannot control: our drives, desires and passions. But when we withdraw and process within what we have absorbed by way of perceptions and so on, so that what has been stimulated in us by the external world transforms itself into feelings, then we live in our second soul-limb, the intellectual or mind soul. And insofar as we direct and guide our thoughts and are not being kept on a leash, we live in the consciousness soul.

In ‘Occult Science’ or in ‘Theosophy’ you will see, that the three sheaths of the soul have even more relationships—of a different kind—to that what is in the external world. This is so not because we enjoy to categorise, but because what is called the sentient soul is related to the cosmos in a completely different way from what we call the consciousness soul.

It is the consciousness soul that isolates man, that leads him to perceive himself quite rightly as an internally self-contained being. What we call the intellectual soul, is what brings him into a relationship with his environment and the entire cosmos, hence he is a being that appears to be like an extract, like a confluence of the whole world. Through the consciousness soul man lives within himself, isolates himself. The main, most important thing that one experiences in the consciousness soul is that what amongst a man’s aptitudes is the latest one to be developed: The ability to think logically, so that we can form opinions, thoughts and so on. This rests within the consciousness soul. In relation to these characteristics, the individual core of a human being that comes into existence at birth is in fact the most inclined to isolation. This innermost core of a human being is the last to reveal itself. While its sheathing, its bodily organisation is the earliest to emerge, its actual individuality emerges last. But the way a human being currently is—he has been different in the past and will be different in the future—he actually develops his opinions, terms, concepts in the most isolated part of his being. These therefore exert the least influence on the overall construction and detailing of his entire personality and only emerge as aptitudes when the entire personality is already firmly established and plastically shaped.

There we see how the talents of man develop in a particular sequence. Firstly, we see what lives in the least isolated, separated element of the human being, in the sentient- or emotional soul. This has therefore the most strength to intervene in the entire human organisation. Hence we can see that getting close to a child with opinions, theories and ideas is least likely, when this sentient soul wants to shape these most intensely from within. We will only get close to a child when we affect its sentient soul—as I have presented in my essay ‘The Education of the Child from the perspective of Spiritual Science.’ Especially during the first life years one has to ensure not to develop theories or teachings, but that the child is instead encouraged to imitate, that one sets living examples for it to copy. This is of infinite importance, because this urge to imitate appears as one of the very first predispositions that one can influence. Admonitions and teachings are least effective during this time.

The child imitates what it sees, because it must form itself in accordance with its relationship to the external world. We lay the first foundation for the whole personal nature of the child, when during the first seven years we are living examples of what the child is allowed to imitate, when we can guess how we must behave in the presence of the child. However, this is for many a most peculiar educational principle. Most people will ask how the child should behave, and there comes Spiritual Science with its demands: the people should learn from the child how they must behave in its environment—down to words, attitudes and thoughts! Because the child is much more receptive in its soul than is generally believed, especially more receptive than an adult human being.

There are people with a certain sensitivity, who, for example, immediately recognise when a person comes in who is going to spoil the good mood. Even though little attention is paid to this nowadays, it happens incredibly often with children. And what you do in detail is much less important than the kind of person one endeavours to be, what kind of thoughts, of concepts one nurtures. It is not enough, that one keeps silent in front of the child about something, but allows oneself to think thoughts that are not meant to be for the child. But instead our thoughts need to be lived out in such a way that we have the feeling: this may live on in the child and should live on. This is inconvenient, but it is still right!

When the change of teeth has occurred, consideration will be given to what we may call ‘building on authority’—not building on what someone might do, but what he holds within himself as personality. It is most important that a child in the first years of life must be able to imitate what we speak, do and think, and in the second epoch perceives us as a human being on whom it can rely, so that it can say: What he does, is good! It is not so that we are admonishing the child from the seventh to the fourteenth, sixteenth year of life, based on the principle to develop a moral theory to show it that this must be done, that must be stopped—but rather we pass on to the child the best treasure, when its rational or intellectual soul can have the perception: What this human being next to me does, is good! I must refrain from doing, what he refrains from doing! — This is of infinite importance.

Only from the age of about fourteen to sixteen, does the possibility arise for a human being to build upon the most isolated part of his being, on the consciousness-soul, i.e. on that which forms in his consciousness soul: on his opinions, concepts and ideas. However, these must first have a solid foundation, and this must be created. If we do not create this by providing the opportunity through education, as the individuality allows us to recognise, and if we do not thereby clear the way for free development, then the human being will be seized by a different element: by the firmness of his hull nature. Then he externalises himself; his individuality, which goes from life to life, does not intervene, but he becomes a slave to his bodily organisation, which comes from the outside into the human being and subjugates him. Man shows this by not being master of his spiritual and soul part, but by being completely dependent on his body and soul organisation and showing rigid characteristics that are unchangeable. On the other hand, a human being in whom we took care to ensure that his predispositions are realised as far as possible, retains a certain flexibility throughout his whole life, and is also able to cope with new situations in later life. In comparison, in another person the organisation is externalised and takes on rigid forms, and that person retains them throughout his whole life. We live in an epoch, where the individuality of someone is little appreciated and hence there are few opportunities to convince oneself that the individuality is still agile and vigorous and able to cope with new situations and truths. We now arrive at a chapter in which we can gain insight into how some people simply must face life.

How many people, when they have looked into a world view and are convinced of it, try to convince others of it as well. They believe it is a very commendable effort when they say: Since I am seeing it so clearly, I should actually be able to convince everyone else of this! However, this is naivety. Our opinions are not dependent on something being logically proven to us. This is possible in the fewest cases. Because opinions and convictions of a person are formed out of completely different substrata of his soul—out of his will nature, his mind and emotional nature, so that a person can understand your logical arguments quite well, can follow your astute conclusions and then afterwards does not take them in at all, simply because what a person believes and what he professes does not flow from his logic or his understanding, but from the whole personality, namely from those limbs where will and mind arise. However, our thinking is the last of all our dispositions to emerge, when the bodily organisation has long since been completed. This is the most isolated field. This is where we find the least access to other people. We can reach more people, when we seize them in those parts that lie deeper: their mind and will. Here, intervention in bodily organisation still happens. However, if a human being grows up in a very materialistic sphere, lets say, where only material substance is deemed valid, then, during the time of his growing up, a sum of mind and will-impulses are formed that plastically shape his physicality and his brain. Later he can then acquire quite good logical thinking, but this no longer intervenes in the plasticity of his brain. Logical thoughts are the most powerless within the human soul. Therefore it is especially important to also find access to other people in the soul, not just in logic. If someone has already trained his brain in a certain way, then this brain, which only reflects the old concepts over and over again, cannot realise logic anymore because it has become physical. Hence, in regard to such world views, which are build on the purest, the sharpest of logic, as is the case with Spiritual Science, one cannot hope to be effective by going from person to person to convince someone. If someone, who understands the spiritual scientific impulse, would like to believe that he could convince people by persuasion or by way of logic—if for instance someone wants to believe that a spiritual scientist indulges in such illusion—then he is very much mistaken! Because in our era there is a large number of such people who, due to their overall personality, their will nature and emotional nature do not look out for what the spiritual world and spiritual research are. Out of the great mass of people who live around us, those who have a disposition for Spiritual Science will self-select, will go to what they dimly foresee, what they already have within their souls. A selection, a choice can only be made with regard to a worldview based on what is capable to purely encompass logic, human consciousness. Hence the Spiritual Scientist approaches human beings and knows how to differentiate between them: There is someone to whom you can preach for years, he is unable to grasp your thoughts. You first would have to make him conscious of this; would have to speak to his soul, but he himself is not able to reflect from out of his whole soul-toolkit, out of his brain. Another man is built in such a way that he can understand what Spiritual Science shows in its logically developed way, and he therefore also finds his way into what is basically already living in his soul.

In this way and manner we have to face the great cultural tasks of the present or the future. We need to recognise how the total personality of a human being relates to what a person, in the course of his development and education, is able to absorb incrementally of new truths, of such things that really must be united with his personality. When we have once again understood, that basically the soul-spiritual is the shaper, the sculptor, the artist for body and soul, then one will place greater importance on conducting the development of the spirit and soul in a human being in such a way that he can get a handle on it—especially in the years when he is open for education—and is powerful in regard to the way in which he can affect his body and soul. We have to be clear that a lot can be sinned against in this regard. We can see from our presentations, how human preference and so on, contributes much more to the formation of views than pure logic. One could only let pure logic alone speak when desires and instincts are completely silent. Prior to that we must be clear, that if we believe we have one-sidedly shaped a person’s aptitudes in a particular area, then what we have not considered will come to light in a peculiar manner.

Let us assume that we educate a man in such a way that we only bring to expression his abstract talents, as it is often done at school. Then the pure concepts and abstract ideas cannot intervene in the whole soul- and emotional life. This then remains undeveloped, uneducated and will confront us later in all kinds of trivial lifestyles. Later in life, two natures often become apparent. Even in people of high standing—if they have not been able to integrate within themselves what is located in the depth of personality—preferences, inclinations, likings, which are more deeply rooted assert themselves in other ways. Which examinee would not have experienced, that no matter how clever the examiner is who confronts him, who is able to maintain an overview over much of his science—the one-sidedness will come to expression by him having a preference for how the answers he wants to hear have to be worded. And woe betide many an examinee, if he doesn’t know how to put what he has to say into the words the examiner wants to to hear.

In this regard, in a book about psychology by Moriz Benedict, a lot of correct things were said about mistakes in human education. Also this, which is true: When two candidates were tested by two different examiners the misfortune happened that one candidate gave Examiner A answers shaped as if the Examiner B had asked the questions. If he would have given the answers to the other examiner, he would have passed the exam splendidly. And with the other candidate it was the other way round! Hence both failed the exams!

This can illustrate to us how what is indisputable can very well be clothed in logical forms. Yet as soon as we are not able to immerse our ideas in thought-education during our upbringing, no suitable field can be found to work from here formatively on man. How then must we behave towards the human being? In the time in which a person is preferably still being modelled plastically, and in which abstract concepts and ideas are least effective, we must behave in such away that we confront him with as few concepts and ideas as possible, and only with ideas that are as pictorial as possible. For this reason I have stressed that the pictorial, the illustrative—which is as little removed as possible from the actual picture, the form and contour—is taken up conceptually. Because what is absorbed in this way as a picture, as a form or as a figure of fantasy, has great strength to intervene in our bodily organisation. That the pictorial we encounter in the design intervenes in the physical organisation can already be deduced from seeing how little it helps to try and convince someone who is sick, who is in a particular situation, that he should be doing this, and refrain from doing that. This is of little help. But if you set up an apparatus, something like an electrifying machine , so that the sick person can form a picture for himself, and then give him two handles that do not let any current go through—as long as he has the picture in front of his eyes, he will feel the current, and that will help! But wherever it is so beautifully declaimed that imaginative power plays a major role, we must be clear, that this is not about any kind of imaginative power but only about visual imagination.

We live in an age in which it has become customary, to pay very little homage to the following principle of Spiritual Science—that a human being only becomes able to form concepts and ideas between the age of fourteen or sixteen and age twenty-one, twenty-two; that one then picks up concepts that are only to be shaped later. Instead, before this age, people nowadays become mature enough to write newspaper articles, which are either above the line or not up to standard, that are printed and then accepted by people. This then makes it difficult to keep abstract concepts away until the characterised age and to put the pictorial, the illustrative in front of a person’s eyes. Because the illustrative has the power to intervene in the organisation of body and soul.

You can always find confirmation of what I am saying now, however, one does not always pay attention to it. Moriz Benedikt , for example, complains that many college students are often quite clumsy in later life. Why is this so? Because the whole education is so nondescript, so little concerned with the illustrative and adheres only to abstract ideas even when languages are taught. In contrast, we can feel the illustrative that we encounter, right into our hand, because the objects themselves step in front of us as pictures.

It could be said, that if you want to imagine an object, you must move in such a way that you feel with your hand in a circle or in an elliptic shape the growing together with the object in pictures. It is not only imitating the manual dexterity, but also feeling and learning to love objects, that show us how a pictorial, an illustrative imagination twitches in our limbs, makes our limbs agile and mobile. Today we can find many people, who, if a button is torn off, are not able to sew on a new one. This is a great disadvantage. The most important things is, that we are able to intervene in the external world with everything we have. Of course, we cannot learn everything. But we can learn about how the spirit and soul slide down out of the spiritual into body and soul and make our limbs agile. And no one, whom we have instructed in his youth to try and copy the feeling of what is outside of him, will be a clumsy person later in life. Because what already lies below the threshold of our consciousness, can work most essentially on our organisation. This also applies to language. One learns a language best at a time when one is not able to understand the language grammatically, for at that time one learns with the part of the soul-being that belongs to deeper layers.

This is how humanity developed—and this is how the individual human being must develop. Elsewhere I have pointed out how Lorenz Müllner , in a school-director’s speech, drew attention to the St. Peter’s Church in Rome—how magnificent it stands there, how secretly the spatial laws are embedded within the mechanics of the cupola construction, so that one can see the spatial mechanics expressed in the most wonderful way. Now he pointed out though, that only through the laws which Michaelangelo expressed therein, and which Galilei subsequently by way of his high-flying spirit discovered, did Galileo give mechanical science to us. I have also pointed out, that the date of Michaelangelo’s death almost coincides with the birthdate of Galilei, so that the abstract laws of mechanics—which live in the consciousness soul of a human being—appeared later than that, what Michaelangelo had built into the space out of his deeper soul-members. Just as the higher members of the soul develop on the foundation of the lower ones, just as we have to develop our limbs based on our predispositions, so that we can look back on them and gain an understanding of them—so it works in every single life. In each individual life, too, man must be surrounded by human company, must place himself into that which immerses him in a kind of atmosphere, into the spirit and soul of our surroundings. Then, what a human being brings with him into existence, is shaped and built. But the human being does not only bring along what is given to him from the hereditary line, but something that will be determined in the most diverse way by a third, namely by the eternal individuality of the human being. This human individuality needs the inherited characteristics, must acquire and develop them. This also stands higher than that which comes into existence with our individuality. We step into existence at birth: A creative, productive spirituality acquires—when we cannot yet build any concepts—the plastic substances from the hereditary line. Only later the consciousness-soul is added. So we look at something individual within human nature, which plastically forms the capabilities and talents. When we become educators, it is our task to solve, what we consider to be a spiritual riddle, for each human being anew.

This all points us to a mood. When Goethe, at the excavation of Schiller’s bones found his skull and saw the distinctive forms, saw how the human individuality had worked on this, he saw: into this form the liquid spirit of Schiller had to pour itself, so that he could become what he did become, which Goethe was able to express thus:

What greater gain in life can man e'er know
Than when God-Nature will to him explain
How into Spirit steadfastness may flow,
How steadfast, too, the Spirit-Born remain.^*

Such an expression by Goethe needs to be understood in the context of the situation. If one takes it without looking at what it is that as spirit-made in firm shape is sculptured, misunderstands him. Nor does anyone understand him, who is unaware of the depth of Goethe’s insight into the eternal weaving of an individuality, who goes from birth to birth and always newly reincarnates, and who is the true architect of the human being. How we have received our organs from the spirit, which in turn are organs of spirit, basically could be said by simply using a childish comparison: the clock shows us time, but we could not use it, if it had not first been formed by the human spirit. — We need our brain for thinking in the physical world, but we could not use it for thinking, if the cosmic spirit would not have formed it. And we would not have sculptured it with such an individuality, if not our individuality had poured itself as a spiritual product into our brain, which was formed out of suitable human species substance. Then we understand more deeply, what we were able to say today, and what Goethe meant when he pointed towards that in a human being, which in his nature is determinative for all his talents and capabilities—as if the stars themselves would be perceived like any situation in the world, and how that which effects man’s inner being as something eternal, passes through the threshold of death only to advance to new forms of development. In short, we may summarise what we have observed today, in the mood of Goethe’s thoughts, which he expressed in the “Orphic Primal Words”:

As stood the sun to the salute of planets
Upon the day that gave you to the earth,
You grew forthwith, and prospered, in your growing
Heeded the law presiding at your birth.
Sibyls and prophets told it: You must be
None but yourself, from self you cannot flee.
No time there is, no power, can decompose
The minted form that lives and living grows. ^*

• *. Translator Unknown *
• *. Translator Unknown *

Among the ideas advanced by Spiritual Science, that of Reincarnation occupies a foremost place. The idea that the human individuality has to manifest over and over again in a single personality in the course of the development of mankind on the Earth is at present but little understood, and, moreover, it is generally unpopular. As we have seen and shall still see, many questions arise in Spiritual Science, among them that of the meaning of repeated earthly lives.

When we study the evolution of human life on Earth in the light of Spiritual Science, we find that there is a very deep meaning behind the fact that the human individuality passes, not only once, but many times through earthly life. Every epoch and every age has its special content, its special characteristics, and all the varied possibilities which it offers have to be assimilated over and over again by the individual life-germs of man. This is possible because man, with all that composes his being, is connected not once and for all, but over and over again with the living stream of evolution. Looking upon this evolution as a rational progress into which new contents, new qualities are poured, we begin to realise the true significance of those Great Ones who have been the leading and guiding spirits of the different epochs. From each of these Great Ones, new qualities, new impulses for the progressive evolution of humanity have emanated and in the course of these lectures we shall be considering important questions connected with such leaders of mankind.

To-day our attention is turned to an individuality who, so far as historical investigation goes, is shrouded in mystery—an individuality lost in dim prehistoric ages, of whom no documentary records exist. I refer to the personality of Zarathustra.

A personality such as that of Zarathustra, whose gifts to humanity, in so far as they are preserved for us, seem so strange to the present age, makes us realise what great differences arise in the sum total of human nature during the various epochs. Superficial opinion may state that ever since man has been man, he has thought, felt and conceived ideas of morality exactly as he does to-day. But Spiritual Science shows us that the life of the human soul and the nature of man's thought, feeling and will, have undergone great changes in the course of human evolution. Human consciousness in olden times was of quite a different nature and we have reason to believe that, in the future, other stages of consciousness will be reached, again very different from the normal consciousness of to-day.

When we turn our attention to Zarathustra, we must look back over an infinitely long period of time. It is true that certain modern investigators have fixed the date of Zarathustra as contemporary with that of Buddha, which would mean that he lived some five or six centuries before the Christian era. It is however significant that our modern historians, after careful investigation of the traditions referring to Zarathustra, have been obliged to indicate that the personality hidden beneath the name of “Zarathustra,” the original founder of the Persian religion, must be placed a great many centuries before Buddha. Greek historians have repeatedly pointed out that Zarathustra must have lived about five or six thousand years before the Trojan War. We are prepared to state that historical research will, however unwillingly, eventually be forced to admit that the Greek tradition is correct in regard to the epoch in which Zarathustra lived. Spiritual Science, which is based on inner knowledge, agrees with the Greek tradition and it is therefore reasonable to indicate that Zarathustra, living as he did thousands of years before the birth of Christianity, was confronted by a consciousness entirely different from that of the present day.

I have often pointed out, and I shall explain it further, that human consciousness in ancient times was bound up with certain dream states, or rather clairvoyant states, in normal human life. Primeval man did not contemplate the world with the strong, clearly-defined sense perceptions of to-day. We shall best understand the way in which man of those primeval times took his environment into his consciousness, if we think of a last remnant of the ancient consciousness, still left to us in dreams. Everybody knows how dream images appear and disappear, how they emerge and fade away. To our present consciousness they are for the most part dream pictures, meaningless reminiscences of the outer world. Interwoven though they are with higher states of consciousness, they are incomprehensible to people of our time. Images, ever-changing pictures, symbols—of these our dream consciousness consists. Everyone has experienced how a fire, for instance, is symbolised in a dream. Think of the difference between a dream and ordinary waking consciousness. Such as it is, this dream state represents the remnant of a primeval consciousness of man. Man then lived in a world of images—images not vague or empty but proceeding from a real external world. In this ancient consciousness there were intermediate states between waking and sleep and in these states man was face to face with the spiritual world. The spiritual world actually entered into his consciousness. Nowadays the door into the spiritual world is locked against the normal consciousness of man, but this was not the case in olden times; for he then entered into those intermediate states between waking and sleep when the spiritual world appeared before him in dreamlike images. In these dreamlike images he saw the working and the weaving of the spirit behind the physical world of sense. He had direct experience of the spiritual world, although by the time of Zarathustra this was already indistinct and dim. A man of antiquity could say to himself: “I behold the outer physical world and the life of sense, but I also have experiences and perceptions in a different state of consciousness; I know that there is another world behind the world of sense—a spiritual world.”

Evolution consists in one faculty being acquired at the expense of another, and thus as the epochs took their course, the faculty which man once possessed of understanding the spiritual world became less and less. Our clear reasoning and cognitional faculties, our present logical thinking which we regard as the most important feature of modern culture—these did not exist in those early times. They had to be developed by man in the epoch to which we now belong, at the expense of the old clairvoyant consciousness. Clairvoyant consciousness will have to be cultivated again in the future evolution of mankind, but in a different way. It has to be added to the purely physical consciousness that is bound up with the faculty of intellectual logic. A rising and a falling can be traced in the evolution of human consciousness and we see therein a deep purpose in man's development.

The old consciousness described above dates back to a prehistoric age of which there is no documentary evidence. Zarathustra himself belongs to this age of which, as yet, no historical traditions have reached us. He was one of those leading personalities who gave a stimulus for great steps forward in the civilisation of mankind. Whatever the level of human consciousness at the time, these leading personalities must always draw from the source which we may call Illumination, Initiation into the higher mysteries of the universe. Among such personalities were Hermes, Buddha and Moses, as well as Zarathustra, whom we are to study in the course of these lectures.

Zarathustra lived at least eight thousand years before our present era, and the gifts to civilisation which poured from his enlightened spirit shine forth clearly across the centuries. Those who penetrate into the inner currents of human evolution can detect them even after this lapse of time. Zarathustra was one of those whose soul had experienced Truth, Wisdom and Intuition to an extent far transcending the normal consciousness of the age. In that part of the Earth which later on was known as the Persian Empire, Zarathustra proclaimed mighty truths from the super-sensible worlds—regions lying far above the normal consciousness of the men of that time.

If we would understand the significance of Zarathustra's teaching, we must realise that his mission was to communicate a certain conception of the universe to one particular section of humanity, while other streams had, as it were, a different mission in human culture. The personality of Zarathustra is all the more interesting to us in that he lived in a part of the world directly adjoining on its South side another land whose people transmitted an entirely different order of spirituality to mankind. I refer to the peoples of India, from whom arose the Vedic poets. The region permeated with the mighty impulse of Zarathustra lies to the North of the land from which the great teaching of Brahma went forth. Zarathustra's message to the world was fundamentally different from the Brahministic teachings of the great leaders of ancient Indian thought. These Indian teachings have come down to us in the Vedas, and in the profound philosophy of the Vedanta, of which the revelations of Buddha represent, as it were, the final splendour.

We shall understand the difference between the two thought currents—the one proceeding from Zarathustra and the other from the ancient Indian teachings—when we consider that man can reach the spiritual world along two paths of approach. There are two ways by which we may raise the inner powers of the soul above their normal level so that we may pass from the world of the senses into the super-sensible world. One way is to penetrate deeply into our own souls, to immerse ourselves, as it were, in our inner being. The other way leads behind the veils spread around us by the physical world. Both ways lead into the super-sensible world. If in the intimate experiences of soul life we so deepen our feelings, ideas, and impulses that the powers of soul grow stronger and stronger, we can descend mystically into the “Self.” Passing through that part of our being which belongs to the physical world, we may indeed find our real spiritual essence—the imperishable essence that passes from incarnation to incarnation. When we pierce through the veil of the inner being with all the desires, passions and inner experiences of soul (which are only one part of us in so far as we live in a physical body) we then reach our eternal essence and enter a world of spirit. On the other hand, if we develop powers which not only perceive the physical world with its sounds, colours, sensations of warmth and cold—if we so strengthen our spiritual powers that they can penetrate behind the encircling veil of colour, sound, warmth, cold and other physical phenomena—then our strengthened spiritual forces will reach the super-sensible worlds, stretching before us into boundless distances, into infinity. The first way is that of the Mystic; the second the way of Spiritual Science. It was along one of these two ways that the great teachers attained to the revelations of truth which they had to inculcate into mankind as the basis of culture.

In primeval times the evolution of humanity was such that only one of the two ways was open to a particular people. Only later, in the Greek epoch (coinciding with the beginning of the Christian era) did these two currents mingle and gradually become a single current of culture. When we speak to-day of the ascent into higher worlds, it is right to state that the man who would make the ascent must to a certain extent develop both kinds of spiritual powers within his soul—the mystical powers on the path into the inner self and the powers developed by Spiritual Science as it penetrates the outer world. To-day these two paths are no longer strictly separate from one another, for it is part of the purpose of human evolution that the two currents should meet. Before the Greek and Christian eras these two methods of development were practised by different peoples living in regions not very far apart in space. We find traces of them in ancient Indian culture, in the Vedic songs and in the Zarathustrian civilisation to the North. All that we so greatly admire in the old Indian culture—which later on found expression in Buddhism—all this was attained through inner contemplation, by turning away from the outer world. The eye had to become insensitive to physical colour, the ear to physical sound, the senses to turn away from outer impressions, and finally, with his inner powers of soul made strong, man attained to Brahma. In Brahma, he felt himself united with the inner being of the Cosmos, moving and creative. And so there arose the teaching of the Holy Rishis which flowed into the Vedas and lived on in the Vedantic philosophy and in Buddhism.

The other path springs from the teachings of Zarathustra. Zarathustra handed down to his disciples the secret of how to strengthen the powers of understanding in order to penetrate the veil of the outer world of sense. Zarathustra did not teach as did the Indian mystics: “Turn away from colours, sounds and all the outer impressions of the senses, and seek the way into the spiritual worlds entirely by means of inner contemplation, in your own soul life.” On the contrary, Zarathustra taught: “Strengthen the powers of knowledge and understanding for everything that lives, be it plant or animal; understand all living things in air and water, on the mountain heights or in the valleys. Look upon this world!” We know that for the Indian mystic, this world was Maya—illusion; he turned from it in order to find Brahman; but Zarathustra taught his disciples rather to penetrate the world with understanding and to feel, behind the outer realm of physical phenomena, the reality of a spiritual power, active and creative. This is the other path.

It is remarkable how these two paths converge in the Greek age, where the understanding of things spiritual was far deeper than it is in our time. This understanding was expressed in symbolical imagery, in mythology. The two thought currents, the mystic path into the inner self and the other leading into the outer Cosmos, blended in Greek culture. One current derived its name from the mystical God Dionysus, the mysterious being who was to be found when a man descended more and more deeply into his inner being and there discovered the sub-human element which formerly he did not know, and from which he evolved into full manhood. This element, still unpurified, still partly animal, was known by the name of Dionysus. The other element, in which the eyes of spirit beheld the phenomena of the physical world, was expressed by the name of Apollo.¹ Thus we find the teachings of Zarathustra expressed in the cult of Apollo and the mystic doctrine of contemplation in the cult of Dionysus in Greece. In ancient times, these two currents arose separately, but in the Apollonian and Dionysian cults they were united and blended. If we, in our modern culture, undergo a true spiritual training, we can re-experience them both in one.

Nietzsche had an inkling of the significant difference between the cults of Apollo and Dionysus. True, he did not enter very deeply into the matter, but in his first Essay, “The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music,” he shows that the Apollonian and Dionysian cults of ancient Greece are represented on the one hand in the mystic current, and on the other in the current which is now expressed by Spiritual Science.

Zarathustra taught his disciples to see the Spirit behind every physical phenomenon. The whole civilisation inspired by him was based on this principle. Now it is not enough to say that behind the world of the senses there is the Divine-Spiritual. Man may think he has discovered a great truth here, but it leads to nothing but a vague Pantheism. We may think we express a truth when we say: “God is at work behind every physical phenomenon”—but this is merely a conception of a nebulous spiritual power behind all things physical. A teacher like Zarathustra, who had actually ascended to the spiritual world, did not speak in this abstract and vague terminology to his disciples and his people. He showed that just as individual physical phenomena are different, so the spiritual essence behind them is at one time more evident, at another less. He taught how behind the physical Sun—the origin of all life and activity—there is the centre of spiritual life.

Let us try to condense into simple language the doctrines which Zarathustra tried to inculcate into his disciples. He spoke thus: “Man, as we perceive him, is not merely composed of a physical body, for this physical body is but the outer manifestation of the Spirit. Just as the physical body is nothing but the manifested crystallisation of the Spiritual in man, so the Sun, in so far as it is a body of luminous matter, is nothing but the external body of a spiritual Sun.” The spiritual part of man is spoken of as the “Aura”—or “Ahura,” to use the old expression—in distinction to his physical body and in the same sense the spiritual part of the physical Sun may be called the “Great Aura,” for it is all-embracing. Zarathustra called that which lies behind the physical Sun, Aura Mazda or Ahura Mazdao—the Great Aura. With this spiritual essence behind the Sun, all spiritual experiences and conditions are bound up, just as the existence and well-being of plants, animals and all that lives on Earth are bound up with the physical Sun. Behind the physical Sun lives the spiritual Lord and Creator, Ahura Mazdao. This is the derivation of the name “Ormuzd,” Spirit of Light. While the Indians searched mystically in the inner self to find Brahma, the Eternal, shining like a luminous centre in man, Zarathustra pointed his disciples to the great periphery, showing them that the mighty Spirit of the Sun, Ahura Mazdao, the Spirit of Light, dwelt in the physical body of the Sun. Ahura Mazdao has to face his enemy—Ahriman, the Spirit of Darkness—just as man, who bears within himself the enemies of his good impulses, strives to raise his real spiritual being to perfection and has to battle against his lower passions, desires, and the delusive images of lying and falsehood.

Zarathustra was able to transmute his conception of the universe from mere doctrine into real feeling, real vision. And so he was able to teach his disciples that within them was an active principle of perfection. Whatever their development might be at the time, they were taught to realise that this principle of perfection could raise them to higher and higher stages of existence. They were taught that passions and desires, lying and deceit within the soul lead to imperfection. Zarathustra taught of the attacks made upon Ahura Mazdao in the outer world by the principle of imperfection, by the evil which casts shadow into the light, by Angra Mainyus—Ahriman.

Zarathustra's disciples were thus enabled to realise that the great universe is reflected in each individual. The real significance of this doctrine lay, not in its theoretical concepts and ideas but in the feeling it called forth in man—a feeling which taught him of his relationship to the universe and made him able to say: “Here I stand—a little world, but a little world which is a replica of the great world. In human beings, the principle of perfection is opposed by evil; in the great universe, Ormuzd and Ahriman face one another. The whole universe is, as it were, a man grown immeasurably great and the highest human forces are Ahura Mazdao—their enemy, Ahriman.”

If man directs his attention truly to the physical world he must finally discover that all phenomena are part of the great cosmic process; he is filled with awe when spectro-analysis reveals the fact that the same substances which exist on Earth exist also on the farthest stars. In the light of Zarathustra's teaching, man felt himself in his spiritual being, part of the Spirit of the whole Cosmos; he felt himself emanating from this Spirit. Herein lies the great significance of the doctrine.

The teaching was not abstract but very concrete. Even when people of our time have a certain feeling for the Spiritual behind the physical world it is very difficult to make them realise that there must necessarily be more than one central spiritual power. But just as there are different natural phenomena—heat, light, chemical forces and the like—so there are different orders of lower spiritual Powers, subordinate forces whose realm of activity is more limited than that of the One All-Embracing Power. Zarathustra made a distinction between Ormuzd and other lower spiritual beings, who were his servants. Before we turn to consider these lower spiritual beings, let us realise that the doctrine of Zarathustra is not mere dualism, a teaching of the two worlds of Ormuzd and of Ahriman. He taught that underlying these two currents in the universe there is one power whence both the realm of light (Ormuzd) and the realm of darkness (Ahriman) proceed. Old Greek writers tell us that the unity behind Ormuzd and Ahriman was worshipped by the ancient Persians as the LIVING UNITY, but it is difficult to re-create this idea nowadays. Zarathustra calls this Zervane Akarene—that which lies behind the light. To get at some conception of the meaning of this, let us think of the course of evolution. We must conceive of all creation as travelling towards greater and greater perfection, so that if we look towards the future, the Ahura of Ormuzd grows clearer and clearer. Looking into the past, we see the Ahrimanic powers in opposition to Ormuzd; in course of time, however, their existence must cease. In all these things we must understand that a survey of the future and of the past leads to the same point. It is very difficult for the man of to-day to realise this. Let us think of a circle, by way of illustration. If we start at the lowest point and pass along one side, we arrive at the opposite, the highest point. If we pass along the other side, we also arrive at the same point. If we enlarge the circle, we have further to go, and the curve of the arc becomes flatter and flatter. Draw the circle larger and larger, and the arc eventually becomes a straight line; thereafter both lines lead to infinity. But before this, with a smaller circle, we arrive at the same point along both sides. Why should we not assume that the same result obtains when the sides of the circle are flat and its fines straight? In infinity, the point must then remain the same on the one side as on the other. Therefore to conceive of infinity, we may imagine a line continuing indefinitely on both sides—in effect, a circle.

This is an abstract conception of what underlies the Zarathustrian doctrine of Zervane Akarene—Zaruana Akarana. Taking the concept of Time, we look into the future on the one side and into the past on the other. Time, however, is welded into a circle; the completion takes place in infinity. This is symbolically represented as the serpent biting its own tail; into the serpent the Power of Light which grows brighter and brighter, is woven on the one side, and on the other the Power of Darkness, which appears to grow deeper and deeper. While we ourselves remain in the centre, Ormuzd and Ahriman, Light and Shadow, are intermingled, and into all this is woven the self-contained, mysterious “Zaruana Akarana”—Time.

This ancient conception of the universe did not merely state vaguely: Outside and behind the world of the senses which works upon eyes and ears, there is “Spirit.” A kind of alphabet, records of the spiritual world were revealed. Suppose we to-day take a page of a book. We see letters on it and we build up words from these letters, but we must first have learnt to read. Those who have not learnt to read in the spiritual sense, cannot understand Zarathustra; they cannot read the sense of his teaching but merely see signs and symbols. Only those who know how to build up these signs into a doctrine to which their souls respond can understand Zarathustra.

Now behind the world of the senses, in the ordered grouping of the stars, Zarathustra perceived a symbolic writing in cosmic space. Just as we have a written alphabet, so Zarathustra saw in the starry worlds of space, a kind of Alphabet of the spiritual worlds, a language through which they became articulate. Thus arose the science of penetrating into the spiritual world and of reading and interpreting the constellations. He knew too, how to decipher the signs in which the Cosmic Spirits inscribe their activities into space. Their language is the grouping and movement of the stars. Zarathustra and his disciples saw that Ahura Mazdao creates and manifests by describing an apparent circle in the heavens, in the sense of our Astronomy, and this circle was for them the outward sign of the way in which Ormuzd manifested his activity to man. Zarathustra showed—and this is a most important point—that the Zodiac is a line which returns on itself, forming a circle as the expression of the rotation of Time. In the highest sense, he taught that while one branch of Time goes forward into the future, the other turns backwards into the past. Zaruana Akarana, the self-contained line of Time, the circle described by Ormuzd, the Spirit of Light, is what was later called the Zodiac. This is the expression of the spiritual activity of Ormuzd. The course of the Sun through the Zodiac is the expression of the activity of Ormuzd. The Zodiac is the expression of Zaruana Akarana. Zaruana Akarana and Zodiac are one and the same word, like Ormuzd and Ahura Mazdao. Two things must here be remembered.

When the Sun passes in summer through the light, his full powers fall upon the Earth; they are the forces of spiritual light sent forth by Ormuzd from his realm of light. The signs of the Zodiac through which Ormuzd passes in the summer or in the daytime reveal his activity unhampered by Ahriman. The signs of the Zodiac below the horizon are symbolical of the realm of shadow through which Ahriman passes. What, then, are the expressions of Ormuzd (who represents the light part of the Zodiac) and of Ahriman (the dark part), in their activity on Earth? Now there is a difference between the influence of the Sun in the morning and at noon time. When Ormuzd ascends from Aries to Taurus, the effect of his rays is not the same as when he is descending. His rays differ in summer and in winter and they differ with every sign through which the Sun passes. The course of the Sun through the signs of the Zodiac revealed to Zarathustra the many sides of the activity of Ormuzd, and he beheld here the expressions of spiritual beings who are, as it were, the servants, the “sons” of Ormuzd, who execute his commands. These subservient powers, each having their own special activity, are the “Amschaspands” or “Ameschas Pentas.” While Ormuzd represents the collective activity of the Zodiac, the Amschaspands have to perform the specialised activities expressed in the raying forth of the Sun from Aries, Taurus, Cancer, and so forth. The activity of Ormuzd is expressed in the raying of the Sun through all the light signs of the Zodiac—from Aries to Libra or Scorpio. According to Zarathustra, Ahriman works from the centre of the Earth, from the darkness where his servants, the Amschaspands, dwell; they are the opponents of the good genii surrounding Ormuzd. Zarathustra distinguished twelve orders of spiritual beings, six or rather seven, on the side of Ormuzd; six, or rather five, on the side of Ahriman. They are symbolised as good and evil genii, or subservient spirits, according to whether the Sun's course runs through the light or the dark signs of the Zodiac. Goethe was thinking of these helpers of Ormuzd when he wrote at the beginning of Faust, in the Prologue in Heaven:—

“But ye, pure
Children of God, enjoy eternal beauty:—
Let that which ever operates and lives
Clasp you within the limits of its love;
And seize with sweet and melancholy thoughts
The fronting phantoms of its loveliness.” (Shelley's translation).

The Amschaspands of Zarathustra are the same beings to whom Goethe refers as the “pure children of God,” who serve the highest Divine Power.

There are twelve Amschaspands or genii; below, there are other spiritual powers of which the teaching of Zarathustra distinguished twenty-eight grades. The number is approximate, for it varies between twenty- four, twenty-eight, and thirty-one. These subordinate powers are called Izerads or Izods. What class of beings are these? If we think of the Amschaspands as the twelve great powers in Space, then the Izods are the subordinate forces behind the lower activities of Nature, and of these, there are from twenty-four to thirty-one. There is yet a third group of spiritual powers—powers which, in our sense, are not really active in the physical world as such. They are called by Zarathustra, Ferruhars or Frawashars. The twelve forces behind which the Amschaspands live are active in all the physical activities of light upon the Earth: behind the Izods we must imagine the forces affecting the animal kingdom. The Frawashars are to be thought of as the spiritual beings guiding the group-souls of the animals.

Thus Zarathustra saw a real super-sensible world behind the world of sense: Ormuzd and Ahriman, behind them Zaruana Akarana, below them the Amschaspands, good and bad. Now what are the Izods and Frawashars? According to Zarathustra they are the spiritual essence pervading the macrocosm, the living essence² of the external physical phenomena we perceive with our senses. Man, as he stands in the world, is a replica of this greater world; therefore he contains within himself all the powers which ensoul the greater world. Just as we have recognised Ormuzd in the struggle of man towards perfection, and Ahriman in man's impure instincts and impulses, so we can also find in man the imprint of the other spiritual beings, the lesser genii.

And now I have to speak of something which may appear extraordinary to-day to the usual conceptions of the Cosmos held by man. The time, however, is not far distant when even external science will discover that there is super-sensible element behind all physical phenomena, a spiritual world behind the world of the senses. It will then be realised that the physical body of man in all its parts, is an image of the whole Cosmos The Cosmos pours itself into, and densifies within the physical body of man. Thus, according to the conception of Zarathustra—which much resembles that of Spiritual Science—we can say that both Ormuzd and Ahriman work upon man: Ormuzd as the impulse towards perfection, and Ahriman as the impulse in opposition to this. But the spiritual activities of the Amschaspands are also at work in man. We must think of these beings as so far densified in man that they are physically manifest.

In the time of Zarathustra there was, of course, no science of anatomy in our sense of the word, but he and his disciples, with their spiritual conception of the world, saw the twelve currents of the Amschaspands as a reality. They saw these currents flowing towards man and working in him. The human head was to them the visible expression of the activities of the seven good and five evil currents of the Amschaspands. How is this truth expressed at the present time? To-day, the anatomist has discovered the existence of twelve pairs of cerebral nerves which are repeated in the body. These are the physical counterparts, the frozen currents, as it were, of the Amschaspands. There are twelve pairs of nerves and by their means man can either attain the highest perfection or sink to the greatest evil. Thus the spiritual teaching given by Zarathustra to his disciples appears again, materialised, in our own age. People may regard it as so much fancy on the part of Spiritual Science to say that Zarathustra was referring to the twelve pairs of cerebral nerves when he taught of the Amschaspands, but the world will have much to learn besides this, for it will be found that all the moving and weaving Cosmos works on further in man. The ancient teachings of Zarathustra are indeed revived in modern physiology. The twenty-eight to thirty-one Izods occupy the same subordinate position to the Amschaspands as do the twenty-eight nerves of the spine to the nerves of the brain. The spinal nerves which stimulate the soul life of man are created by the spiritual currents of the Izods outside; they work into us and crystallise, as it were, into the spinal nerves. And in that which is not of the nature of the nerves but which makes us individuals, which does not now pour in from outside, but lives within—there dwell the Frawashars or Ferruhars. They live in those thoughts which transcend the merely physical activity of the brain and nerves.

There is a remarkable connection between the tendencies of our own time and the doctrines which Zarathustra gave in spiritual pictures flowing behind the veil of the world of sense. There is, however, one significant thing to be remembered. The teachings of Zarathustra influenced the thought of the people for a very long time and then for a while they receded into the background. Sometimes it was the mystical way of thought which predominated, sometimes the occult, after Greek thought had in a measure united the two currents. Nowadays there seems to be a tendency to the mystical way. Many feel drawn towards Indian occultism with its tendency towards introspection and this explains the fact that little heed is paid to the essential features of the doctrines of Zarathustra in the spiritual life of to-day. There is a great deal of ancient Persian thought in our own spiritual life, yet in a sense, its most essential features, the very core of the doctrine of Zarathustra, is lost to our age. When we realise once more that the teachings of Zarathustra are the spiritual prototypes of countless examples of physical research, then the key-note of our present day culture will be replaced by another. Now one important feature in almost all other mystical currents of culture is missing in the religion of Zarathustra. The reason for this is its entire preoccupation with macrocosmic phenomena. Other religious systems have accentuated the contrasts presented by the division of the sexes. In most old religious systems, Goddesses and Gods are contrasting symbols of the two streams active in the world. The religion of Zarathustra rises above this conception in the symbols of Goodness as Light and Evil as Darkness. Hence the sublime purity of this religion and the nobility which lifts it above ideas which play an ugly part in any endeavour to deepen the thought life of our time. Even the Greek writers stated that the highest Godhead had perforce to create Ahriman as well as Ormuzd in order that there might be the necessary contrast. This implies that one Primal Power was set over against another. In the Hebrew religion, woman, Eve, is the symbol for the evil which came into this world. In the religion of Zarathustra there is no element of sex antagonism. The ugly things which nowadays enter so largely into our daily literature, pour into our thoughts and feelings and so unpleasantly accentuate the chief causes of health and disease without touching upon the essentials of life—all these will disappear when the “heroic” conception of Ormuzd and Ahriman is understood, when the true Zarathustrian influence spreads in present-day culture, clothed in the words of its great founder. These things pursue their own course in the world and nothing can arrest the progress of the truth inherent in the culture of Zarathustra. If we follow the progress of culture in Asia Minor, down to later times among the Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, and even up to the Christian era, we find traces of concepts derived from the illumination of the great Zarathustra. And we shall not wonder at the view expressed by a Greek writer, that the great spiritual leaders of the races imparted to the people part of a future culture of which they stood in need. This Greek writer pointed to Pythagoras, showing what he had learned from his great predecessors—Geometry from the Egyptians, Arithmetic from the Phoenicians, Astronomy from the Chaldeans—and how he had turned to Zarathustra's doctrines to learn from them the sacred teaching of the relations of man to the spiritual world and the true conduct of life. The same writer asserts that the conduct of life laid down by Zarathustra leads man above all minor conflicts, that they all culminate in the one great conflict between Good and Evil, where victory can only be gained by purification from evil, lying and falsehood. The worst enemy of Ormuzd bears the name of “Calumny”—one of the chief qualities of Ahriman. The Greek writer tells us that Pythagoras could not find the highest moral idea (the moral purification of man) among the Egyptians from whom he learnt Geometry, nor among the Phoenicians from whom he learnt Arithmetic, nor among the Chaldeans from whom he learnt Astronomy; but that he had to turn to the followers of Zarathustra to understand the heroic conception of the universe, since purification alone can vanquish evil. This shows the high value placed upon the noble teachings of Zarathustra in olden times.

What I have said may be illustrated by quotations from historical documents. Plutarch, for instance, says that Zarathustra teaches the worship of Light because Light is the greatest factor for the well-being of the Earth and the highest spiritual factor is Truth. This is in complete agreement with what has been said.

Let us now return again to the ancient Vedic conceptions. They were the result of a mystic descent into the inner being. Before man can penetrate to the inner light of Brahma, he meets with his own passions, his wild and semi-human impulses. These oppose his entry into the true life of spirit and soul. The Indian mystics realised that the mystic union with Brahma could only be attained by the elimination of all the impressions of the physical world, that the sensuous appeals of colours and sounds must cease. So long as these elements enter into meditation, the opponents of the attainment of perfection are there. The Indian mystic would have said: “Cast away all that may enter the soul from the outer powers; deepen yourself in the innermost core of your own soul; descend into the realm of the Devas, and when you have vanquished the lower Devas you will find the kingdom of Brahman. But shun the world of the Asuras, those beings who would fain penetrate into you from the world of Maya, the outer world. These must on no account be allowed to enter.”

And now listen to what Zarathustra taught his disciples: “The peoples of the South are differently constituted and they seek the spiritual world in another way. Their way would not help a nation whose mission is not only to dream and meditate in this wonderful world, but to teach mankind the art of Agriculture and the conquest of savagery. Do not look upon external things merely as Maya; you must penetrate behind this veil of colour and sound around you. Shun all that threatens to keep your soul within the bonds of egoism, shun all that bears the stamp of the Deva qualities! Make your way through the realm of the lower Asuras and ascend to the higher. Your nature is such that you can do this if you will!” In India the Rishis had taught that man was not so organised as to enable him to seek what lies in the realm of the Asuras, and that he should therefore shun their world and enter that of the Devas.

This is the difference between the Indian and Persian cultures. The Indian peoples were taught that the Asuras are evil spirits and must be avoided, for the organisation of the Indians was such that they only could know the lower Asuras. The Persian peoples, on the other hand, knew only the lower Devas and were therefore taught: ‘Penetrate to the realm of the Asuras and you will be able to rise from there to the realm of the higher Asuras.’

The impulse which Zarathustra gave to the men of his epoch lay in the fact that he had a gift for mankind which could work on through all the ages—a gift which would make clear the upward path and conquer all the false doctrines deceiving man on his path to perfection. Zarathustra therefore looked upon himself as the servant of Ahura Mazdao, and as such, he personally knew the opposition of Ahriman. His teaching was intended to aid mankind to a heroic conquest of the Ahriman principle. We find his words recorded in the documents of a later era. Inspired by the inner impulse of his mission, and fired by the passion with which he felt himself the antagonist of Ahriman, he said: “I will speak! Harken, ye who journey from afar, and ye that come from near at hand, with longing to hear. Mark well my words! No longer shall the Evil One, the false leader, conquer the Spirit of Good. Too long has his evil breath permeated human speech. I will refute him with the speech which the Highest, the Primal One has put into my mouth. I will speak what Ahura Mazdao says to me. And he who hears not my words nor understands their meaning as I speak them will experience much evil ere the end of the world-cycles!” Thus spake Zarathustra.

May we realise from these words that Zarathustra's message to mankind can be felt and experienced through all later epochs of culture. Those of us who have ears to hear the dim echoes still living in our time, will, if they listen with spiritual ears, hear the faint tones of Zarathustra's words to mankind thousands of years ago. For those who have ears to hear, the message of Zarathustra and other great Leaders of whom we shall speak in these lectures, may be summed up in the following words: “These God-sent Spirits shine as stars in the heavens of Life Eternal. May it be vouchsafed to every soul to behold their radiance in the realms of earthly life.”

• 1. See Chapter VI. of “The East in the Light of the West” by Rudolf Steiner. Anthroposophical Publishing Company
• 2. das Wesenhafte

The title of this lecture series is, Spiritual Science's Answer to the Large Questions of the Present Time, published in German as, Antworten der Geisteswissenschaft auf den Grossen Fragen des Daseins.

It is a far cry from the great Zarathustra or Zoroaster, who formed the subject of our last lecture in this series, to the three great personalities who provide the subject matter of our lecture to-day, and the gulf of time which, in our imagination, we are called upon to span is wide indeed. It is a gulf which stretches from a time thousands of years ago, long before our Christian Era. A time which we can only understand by attributing to the human beings existing then a mental outlook utterly foreign to our own. From this distant standpoint of time, we pass to the 16th and 17th centuries of our own era, to the time when that spirit was first kindled which, ever since, has been the source and inspiration of all vital and progressive culture from then to the present day. As we shall see, this spirit, which burnt so fiercely in the 16th and 17th centuries in individuals such as Galileo and Giordano Bruno, found a fresh medium in a personality so near our own times as that of Goethe.

Galileo and Giordano Bruno are the two names we must mention when we review the beginnings of that epoch in our human evolution at which Natural Science had reached the same turning-point as Spiritual Science has reached to-day. The same great impulse which was then given to the thought of Natural Science will be, in a certain sense, given to this of Spiritual Science in the immediate future. Hence the importance of a comprehensive survey of the lines of thought and feeling of the men of that day, viz.: during the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th centuries—the time of Galileo and of Giordano Bruno—so that we may be able to understand their teaching in the full sense of the word.

Casting a retrospective glance over the centuries immediately preceding theirs, viz:—from the 11th to the 15th centuries, we must try and realize what at first sight appears to be the peculiar conception of the Science current in those days, and how wide was the field which the term then embraced. We must realise that during these centuries, Scientific Knowledge was viewed from an entirely different standpoint from that from which it is viewed to-day. The popular conception of Scientific Knowledge was then very different from the ideas which prevailed in later times and from those which prevail to-day. For we are now speaking of the days before the printing-press, of those days when, for the majority of the people, their sole means of participating in Spiritual and intellectual life was through the Church or the school, etc.—That is to say they could only learn from oral instruction. Hence the necessity, if we would understand those times, of obtaining a correct picture of the scientific methods pursued by the educated men of that day.

In the times preceding those of Galileo and Giordano Bruno, there was an impulse towards Science, but it was an impulse which is very difficult for the modern mind to understand. We can only understand it by placing ourselves, in imagination, in an entirely different mental atmosphere from that by which we are surrounded to-day. In those days, whatever auditorium you might have entered where Science was being taught, you would always have noted one thing. Let us take, for example, a lecture on Natural Science. No matter what branch of Natural Science it might be, whether Medicine or another, the lecturer would base all his deductions solely upon the authority of ancient writings, especially upon those of Aristotle. To-day, the lecturer on Science bases his thesis upon the results of modern investigation, carried out in such or such an institute, where scientific methods of research are followed. But the lecturer of the days preceding those of Galileo and Giordano Bruno based his thesis upon the ancient writings, especially upon those of Aristotle, which were the foundation of all Science in those days.

The figure of Aristotle stands out pre-eminent as an intellectual giant in the history of human progress; and the service he rendered to his time is unspeakably important. But, for the moment, the interesting point for us is the fact that the books of Aristotle were seldom read in the sense in which they were originally given, but the traditional rendering gave the tone, and was everywhere considered determinant.

No matter whether it were a question of the definition of a principle or of an axiom, or the question of any truth whatever, it was always referred to Aristotle. “Such was Aristotle's opinion on this point,” “you will find it expressed thus by Aristotle”. Now the modern investigator or the lecturer on Science, or even the popular lecturer, always emphasizes the fact that this or that has been observed in some place or another. But the scientific teacher in the centuries preceding Galileo and Giordano Bruno laid stress upon the fact that a few centuries ago, the great authority, Aristotle, made such or such an assertion upon such or such a question. Just as to-day we refer, in Spiritual matters, to the authority of the revelations of religious documents and tradition and not to personal investigation, so, in those days, teachers of Science did not refer to nature the observation of nature, but referred back to written authority. They referred back to the writings of Aristotle.

It is extraordinarily interesting to study a University discourse and to note how doctors and their colleagues relied upon the theories of Aristotle.

Now Aristotle was an intellectual giant; and though we must admit that even such an intellectual individuality should not be taken literally after the lapse of so many centuries, still, on the other hand, we must acknowledge that the works of Aristotle are so prodigious and so magnificent that even if they learnt nothing new, if men had studied Aristotle diligently, that is to say the original Aristotle, they would have accomplished a great deal. For the deeply illuminating teachings and theories of Aristotle could not have failed to have been of the greatest benefit to them.

This, however, was not the case. The lecturers of those days and the teachers who preached Aristotle in season and out of season, as a rule, understood nothing at all about him.

The doctrines taught in the time preceding that of Galileo and Giordano Bruno and claiming to be those of Aristotle were an almost incredibly mistaken version of his teaching. To-day, I will confine myself to showing you from the standpoint of Spiritual Science the place Galileo and Giordano Bruno took in the intellectual life of their time. I would call to mind in this connection an incident which is perfectly true and which I have often related before.

One of the most devoted adherents of Aristotle was at the same time a friend of Galileo's. Galileo, like Giordano Bruno, was an opponent of the followers of Aristotle, and with good reason, but not of Aristotle himself. Galileo maintained that men ought to go to the great book of Nature, which speaks so clearly to man, and learn from there the meaning of the Spirit in Nature. They should not rely entirely upon the books of Aristotle for their final authority. Now at that time, the School of Aristotle taught a marvelous doctrine concerning the seat of the nerves. Their theory was that the whole nervous system originated in the heart, that from the heart, the nerves spread to the brain and from thence spread over the entire body. “This”, said they, “is the teaching of Aristotle, therefore it must be true.” Galileo, who based his information upon the investigation of the human body, carried out by means of his physical eyes, and did not rely upon the teaching of ancient writings and ancient tradition, affirmed that the nerves had their seat in the brain and that the chief nerves originated in the brain. Galileo told this to one of his friends and wished him to see for himself and be convinced. “Yes, indeed, I will see it,” said the friend who took the opposite view, and he attended a demonstration on the human body. Then, indeed, this scholar, who was a devout follower of Aristotle, was greatly astonished and said to Galileo:—“It does indeed seem as if the nerves originated in the brain; yet Aristotle maintained that they originate in the heart. If there appears to be any contradiction here, I would believe in Aristotle rather than in Nature.” Such was the mental attitude which Galileo had to combat. Aristotle, or rather the distorted view of Aristotle, was dragged into all questions connected with Science.

To quote another instance:—A scholar of the Church wrote a treatise on immortality. Let us consider for a moment the method they employed in those days. They took their subject matter from the Church Doctrine, adding to that what they believed to be the teaching of Aristotle on the subject. Thus they used the words of Aristotle to support their own views, twisting his teaching so that they could claim its support, no matter from which side of the question, whether for or against, they wished to argue. To return to our scholar of Divinity. He had collected various passages from Aristotle in order to demonstrate the opinion of Aristotle upon the question of the immortality of the soul. Now this also is a perfectly true incident. The clergy had to submit their books to their superiors before publication. In this case, the superior objected to the book. “It is dangerous,” he said, “It would be better not to attempt it, for these extracts from Aristotle (in support of immortality) might also be used to support the opposite view.” The author of the book wrote back “If it is only a question of demonstrating more clearly the most acceptable meaning of Aristotle on this subject, then I will support it by another quotation, for one could quite well go on making quotations.” In short, from every point of view, Aristotle was used and abused.

From these two incidents, we can see how greatly Aristotle was misunderstood at the time of Galileo and Giordano Bruno. We will take the example of the origin of the nerves in the heart. The meaning of this statement is hidden. We can only understand it when we realize that Aristotle lived at the end of the period of ancient Greek culture and, therefore, at the end of the period of the old clairvoyant consciousness. Because Aristotle looked back into the past, he transmitted a Science that arose out of a clairvoyant consciousness which was able to see behind the material world into the Spiritual. It was this clairvoyant consciousness which had produced the old Science. The essence of this primeval Science was transmitted by the Greek culture as ancient Science, and this it was which Aristotle possessed. He was one of the last who recorded it. But Aristotle was not himself capable of developing that clairvoyant consciousness, for he only possessed an intellectual consciousness.

Note this well. Not without reason was Aristotle the first historian of Logic. This is because the intellectual argumentative thought was to become dominant. Thus, Aristotle assimilated the ancient teaching and reduced it into a logical system in his writings. Hence there is much in his writings which we cannot understand until we have learnt what it is he really meant. Thus, when he speaks of nerves, we must not ascribe to the word the meaning given to it to-day, nor the meaning it had even in the time of Galileo and Giordano Bruno, which was already related to our own. When Aristotle speaks of the nervous system, he means the Etheric Body of man. By which we mean the super-sensible part of human nature, which is closely connected with the human physical body. This Etheric body can now no longer be seen by man, the power of doing so having been lost during man's progressive evolution. Aristotle could no longer see it, but he knew about it, the knowledge having come to him from those times when the clairvoyant consciousness saw, not only the physical body, but also the Etheric Aura, the Etheric Body, which is really the builder and strength-giver of the physical body.

Aristotle drew his teaching from those times in which man perceived the Etheric Body as we now-a-days perceive colours. Thus, if you look at the Etheric Body instead of at the physical body, the former is truly the origin of certain currents. For Aristotle, this origin was not in the brain, but in the heart. The description given by Aristotle of these currents had usually been designated by the title of nerves. By those currents he did not mean nerves in our sense of the word, but he meant super-sensible currents, super-sensible forces. These proceed from the heart, flow to the brain and, from thence, are distributed to the various activities of the human body. These are matters which we cannot understand until we have learnt by means of Spiritual Science about the super-sensible parts and principles of human nature.

Man had lost the power of seeing clairvoyantly even so long ago as the centuries preceding Galileo and Giordano Bruno. Hence people had no idea that Aristotle was speaking of the Etheric Current. They thought he meant the physical nerves, so they asserted that “Aristotle states that the physical nerves proceed from the heart.”

Such was the contention of the devout followers of Aristotle. Those, however, who had studied in the book of Nature could not allow this. Hence the great battle between Galileo and Giordano Bruno and the School of Aristotle.

The followers of Aristotle completely misunderstood him; no-one understood the real Aristotle; Galileo and Giordano Bruno naturally did not understand him either, for they did not take the trouble to penetrate to the real meaning of the works of Aristotle. Thus Galileo and Giordano Bruno were the two great Intellectuals of their time, who turned away from the pedantry of the Scholastics and of book-learning to the great book of Nature itself, which is available to each and all

Professor Laurenz Muellner, for whom, as philosopher, I have the greatest admiration, refers to this in a lecture which he gave in 1894 as Rector of the Vienna University. In this lecture, he drew attention to the fact that the great Galileo, with his wonderful knowledge and grasp of all the great laws of mechanics, had discovered the laws which govern the distribution of space. Now it is just these laws which govern the operation and, distribution of space which strike the eye and stir the emotions so very forcibly when we see them exemplified in St. Peter's at Rome. This mighty building influences us all. And each one experiences something tangible, which we can all understand. Let me illustrate this by the following example:—Speidel, the Viennese journalist, and the sculptor Natter were driving in the neighborhood of Rome. As they approached the city, Speidel suddenly heard a most extraordinary exclamation from Natter, who was a very genial spirit. Natter sprang suddenly to his feet. His friend could not think what was the matter with him, for he only heard the words “I am frightened”. As Natter would say no more then, it was only later that his friend heard that the exclamation had been called forth by the sight of the dome of St. Peter's in the distance.

Something akin to terrified wonder at the effect of the marvelous distribution of space, created by the genius of Michelangelo, overwhelms all who see this wonderful building. Laurenz Muellner draws attention to the fact that it is owing to Galileo, that great thinker, that it has become possible for mankind to conceive mathematically and mechanically such an effect of space-distribution as meets the eye in the wonderful building of the dome of St. Peter's, at Rome. At the same time, we must not forget that Galileo, who discovered the laws of Mechanics, was born when Michelangelo, the builder of St. Peter's, was almost on his deathbed. This means that it was from the Spiritual forces of Michelangelo that that skill in the distribution of the laws of space arose, which was not available to the intellect of man until later.

From this, we must infer that what we may term intellectual knowledge, knowledge governed by reason, may come much later than the actual composition of matter in space.

If such matters are carefully and thoughtfully considered, it will be seen that human consciousness has undergone a change; that, earlier, men possessed a certain clairvoyance and that the manner of thinking with the intellect does not go back very far. This habit or manner of thinking with the intellect, owing to certain historical necessities, arose during the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Minds like those of Galileo and Giordano Bruno are the first harbingers of what was to come. Hence their fierce opposition to the school of Aristotle and especially to those who first completely misinterpreted Aristotle—who may be taken as the expression of the ancient wisdom—and then used their misinterpretation of him as an argument against Natural Science. We have now indicated Galileo's position in the world. He was, in the highest sense of the word, the man who first inaugurated the system of severe thought necessary for Natural Science, that system of the relation of Natural Science to Mathematics, which has continued on his lines from his day to our own.

What is it that distinguishes Galileo from all other men up to his time? It is the doctrine which he was the first to realize and which he preached with such noble courage, thus proving himself a child of his age. The feelings which possessed Galileo can be to some extent rendered in the following words, which will help us to understand his whole soul and attitude of mind. “Here we stand as men upon the earth. Nature spreads herself out before us, with everything requisite for our senses and for our reason, which is connected with the instrument of the brain through nature”. Galileo says this many times, in various passages in his works, as may be verified, ”through Nature speaks the Divine Spiritual. We men approach Nature, view it with our eyes and study it with our other senses. What we perceive with our eyes, what we receive through our senses, is implanted in Nature by Divine Spiritual Beings. At first, the thoughts of the Divine Spiritual Beings exist yonder; then, as if springing forth from the thoughts of these Beings, come the visible things of Nature as the revelation of. Divine thought. Then come our powers of perception and, above all, our reason, which is inseparable from the brain. There we stand, ready to spell out, as from the letters of a book, and to arrive at the author's meaning, that which Divine thoughts have expressed in Nature.”

Galileo took his stand firmly on the ground upon which all the great minds in the course of earthly evolution have taken their stand. He believed that the manifestations of Nature, the things of Nature, are as the letters of an alphabet, which express the mind of the Divine Spiritual beings. Thus the human mind exists that it may read what the Divine Spiritual Beings have written there, written in the form of minerals, in the course of natural phenomena, in the course of the movements of the stars. Human nature exists that it may read the thoughts of the Divine Mind. To Galileo, however, the Divine Mind is only distinguished from the human mind by the fact that everything that can be thought is thought by Divine Mind at once, in a single moment, unfettered by space or time. Let us apply this to any single field; to the field of Mathematics. We see at once how extra ordinary this conception is. If a student desires to learn all that has as yet been learnt by mankind about Mathematics, he will have or to toil at Mathematics for years. Then, as you know, man's conception of Mathematics depends greatly on time. Now, Galileo argued thus:—What humanity succeeds in grasping in the course of many years is conceived by the Divine thought in one second. Divine thought is unfettered by space or time. Above all, the human mind must not suppose that with its reason limited, as it is, by space and time, it can immediately understand the Divine Mind. Man must strive. He must observe each step. He must study each separate phenomenon carefully. He must not think that he can afford to ignore the phenomena, that he can leave out of account what God has planned as the foundation of the phenomena. Galileo affirmed that it was wrong not to wish to know the, true meaning of the wonderful manifestations which Nature unfolds, by means of human reason, that it was wrong not to strive to ascertain the truth by minute investigation. He affirmed that to endeavour to arrive at the truth by speculation, instead of studying carefully the details of the various phenomena, was an entirely false method of thought.

But the motive which prompted Galileo was quite other than those which give rise to similar language to-day. Galileo would not limit the human mind to observation because he denied the operation of the Divine Mind in Nature; on the contrary, just because the Divine Mind manifests itself in Nature and reveals itself as so great, so powerful and so wonderful; because (to the Divine Intelligence) all creative thought springs into being in a moment, while the human mind requires an eternity in which lovingly to decipher the letters of the Alphabet and can only arrive gradually at the detailed thoughts which they represent. It is humility at the thought of how far human reason is below the Divine Reason which prompts Galileo to warn his contemporaries. “you can no longer see behind the things of sense. Not because this was never possible to man, but because the time for doing so has gone by.”

Observation, experience and individual thought; these composed the standard which Galileo placed before his contemporaries. This he was able to do because, in a certain sense, his mind was cast in a mathematical mould and because his method of thinking was so rigidly mathematical. In illustration of this we will take the matter of the telescope. Galileo heard that a discovery had been made in Holland, by means of which it was possible to perceive the most distant stars in the firmament. We must bear in mind that there were no newspapers in those days. He only heard from travelers that some thing had been discovered in Holland of the nature of a telescope. Galileo could not rest till he had found out for himself what this was and himself invented a telescope by means of which he made the great discoveries which confirmed the theories which had recently been promulgated in the Copernican-cosmo-conception. In order to understand these things aright, we must remember these two facts:—that nothing was then understood of the old super-sensible science, and that Galileo was a pathfinder for the new science. Secondly, that a short time before, Copernicus had given a new aspect to the conception of the world through external thought concerning the movements of the planets round the Sun. We must put ourselves in the position of the men of that time and try to enter into the mentality of those who believed, as men had done for thousands of years before them:—“Here we stand on the firm earth, immovable in space.” To men with views such as these, the idea was now presented for the first time, that the earth was spinning round the Sun with incalculable rapidity. Such a conception literally out the ground from under their feet. We cannot be surprised at the excitement such an idea created in all, whether partisans or opponents. To minds like that of Galileo, the way by which Copernicus had arrived at his conclusions was particularly convincing. Let us examine in the light of the present time the means by which Copernicus arrived at his conclusions.

What made Copernicus arrive at the conception that the planets move round the Sun?

Up to his time, a theory of the universe had prevailed, which was itself not understood because it was intended to be taken in a Spiritual sense. As then understood, it was indeed an impossible conception. Men had to suppose that the planets described the most complicated movements—circles—and then circles within circles. It was precisely this terrible complication of ideas which had to be got rid of. This it was which was so obnoxious to certain types of mind.

In reality, Copernicus made no new astronomical discoveries. Be said to himself “Let us proceed along the simplest lines of thought in order to arrive at an explanation of the movements of the planets.” He expressed his system of the universe in the simplest of terms. And with what a wonderful result! The Sun was placed in the centre while the planets revolved around it in circles or in ellipses, as Kepler proved later. The whole conception of the universe was reduced to a wonderful simplicity.

It was this simplicity which so greatly influenced the mind of Galileo. For he always emphatically affirmed that “the human mind is capable of recognizing truth in its simplicity.” Beauty is to be found in the simple, not in the complex. And truth is beauty.

It was because of its Beauty and because of the simplicity of its Beauty that the Copernican theory of the system of the Universe was accepted by so many minds at that time. Galileo in particular accepted it because he found in the teaching of Copernicus that Beauty in simplicity for which he was seeking.

Now he could see the Moons of Jupiter, which hardly anyone would believe in. The eyes of Galileo were the first to see the Moons of Jupiter which encircle him as the planets do the Sun. It was a solar system in miniature. Jupiter with his Moons was as the Sun with his planets. This discovery confirmed the theories of a solar system constructed in accordance with a conception. It seemed so to Galileo, who applied the theory of Copernicus in miniature to a visible world. Hence Galileo was indeed a Pioneer of the New Science.

Thus it came about that he divided the presence of mountains in the Moons, that there were spots in the Sun and that the Nebulae extending across the stars were disintegrated worlds of stars. In short, all which may be expressed as the revelation of the Divine Wisdom expressed in the world of sense. All this made a tremendous effect upon Galileo. With his mathematical mind, the question of time, which was completely lost sight of in the material conception of the visible world, naturally influenced him greatly. Galileo first created the impulse in the human mind to admit that we cannot see behind the material veil with our normal consciousness: “The super-sensible is not to be understood by the human senses. It cannot be comprehended by human reason. Divine Reason grasps it outside time and space, while man's reason is limited to time and space. Let us confine ourselves to that which, in time and space, our human reason can understand.”

Now, seeing that Galileo achieved such greatness in so many things, he is also, from the point of view of philosophy, one of the most important pioneers of the modern Spiritual development of humanity. Can we then wonder that we also see in him a mind who wished to make clear to himself and to others the relation of man to the world of sense and to his own soul-life.

It is a popular fallacy that Kant was the first to draw attention to the fact that the world around us is nothing but illusion and that it is not possible to arrive at “the thing in itself,” at things as they really are. Expressed rather differently, Galileo had already demonstrated this idea; only, behind the visible, he always saw the all-pervading thoughts of the Divine Spiritual, and it was only from humility and not from principle that he said that only after long aeons of time would mankind be fit to draw nearer to it.

But Galileo said:—“When we see a colour, it makes a certain impression on us. For example, red. Is the red colour in the things?” Galileo used a very remarkable illustration, which showed at once that the primary conception was incorrect. That, however, is immaterial to our purpose. The point we wish to emphasize is the conception itself as an idea of that time. Galileo said:—“If you take a feather and tickle a man on the soles of his feet or the palms of his hands, the man will experience a sensation of tickling. Now is the tickling in the feather? No. It is entirely subjective. What is in the feather is quite different. As the tickling is subjective, so too is the red colour subjective, which is visible in the world.” Thus he compared colours and even sounds with the tickling caused by the application of a feather to the soles of the feet.

Once we realize this, we can already trace in Galileo the beginnings of what came down to us as the philosophy of our modern times. For modern philosophy doubts the possibility of Man's ever being able to penetrate behind the veil of the world sense in any way whatsoever.

Thus we see in Galileo, who was born in 1664, the quiet, determined pioneer, while Giordano Bruno, who was somewhat older, being born in 1648, reflected in his mentality all the great truths which were fermenting in the minds of men such as Copernicus, Galileo himself and others at that period. The mind of Giordano Bruno mirrors for us all the great ideas of that time in a mighty, comprehensive system of philosophy.

What was Giordano Bruno's own personal attitude to the world, quite apart from the mental attitude of the men of his day? Giordano Bruno (who only knew the corrupted version of Aristotle) argued thus:—“Aristotle maintains that a sphere exists which extends to the Moon, thence to the different spheres of the stars; then comes the sphere of
the Divine Spiritual. Thus, according to Aristotle, the Living God must be sought for outside the spheres of the stars.”

Giordano was viewing the Universe according to the conception of Aristotle. He saw first the earth, then the spheres of the Moon and of the Stars. Then, finally, beyond these again, beyond this world and beyond that inhabited by man, in the great periphery of this world, the Divine Spirit, which literally directs the revolutions and movements of the world of the planets.

Giordano Bruno could not reconcile this conception with the actual human experience of his day. That which could now be perceived by means of the human senses, that which he himself perceived when he looked at plants, animals and man, that which he saw when he looked at mountains, seas, clouds and stars, all this appeared to him as a marvelous image of what lives in the Divine Spirit itself. In the moving stars, in the clouds sailing through the air, he saw not only a script written by the Divine Being, but something which might pertain to the Divine Being as a finger or a limb does to ourselves. The fundamental conception of Giordano Bruno was not that of a God who directs the visible world from outside, from the periphery, but a God who is incorporate in every single manifestation of the visible, whose bodily form is the visible world.

If we seek to understand how it was that he arrived at such a conclusion, we find that it was the result of the joy of the intoxication of delight in the spirit of the new age which had just begun. This new age had been preceded by a time during which man had been content to grope about amongst the old ideas of Aristotle. A time in which the leading Scholars, if they walked through woods and fields, had no eyes for Nature and all her beauties, but had their minds wholly set on Parchments and Writings which had originated with Aristotle.

Now, however, the time had come when the voice of Nature began to make itself heard by men. Great discoveries revealed themselves one after another. Mighty minds like that of Galileo pressed on from point to point, recognizing the Divine in Nature herself at every step.

The theory of the God in Nature, in contradistinction to the mediaeval conception of Nature, from which God was eliminated, was accepted everywhere with an universal delirium of joy. To this spirit, every fibre of Giordano Bruno's being responded. “There is Spirit in all things,” he says, “This is proved by physical research. Wherever we see a visible creation, there we shall meet the Divine.” There is only one difference between the physical and the Divine. Because we are men and confined within narrow boundaries, the visible appears to us to be limited by time and space. To Giordano Bruno, the Spirit of God exists behind the sense-world. Not in the way in which (as he thought) it had existed for Aristotle or the men of the Middle Ages. He believed the Divine Spirit to be self-existing; and Nature only the body by means of which its Spirit manifested itself in all its beauty.

Nevertheless, man cannot perceive the whole of the Divine Spirit in Nature, he can only see a part. In all things, in all time and in space, the Divine Spirit is to be found. This was the creed of Giordano Bruno. Hence he says “Where is the Divine? In every stone, in every leaf, the Divine is everywhere. In all creation, specially in beings possessing a certain independent existence”. These beings, which recognise their own independence, he terms Monads. By a Monad, he means something which floats and flourishes in the ocean of divinity. All Monads are mirrors of the Universe. Thus Giordano conceived of the universal Spirit as divided into many Monads, and in each Monad that was an individual Spirit, there was something which was a reflection of the Universe.

Such a Monad is the human soul, and they are many. Indeed, the human body itself is composed of many Monads, not of one. If we understand the truth about the physical body according to the ideas of Giordano Bruno, we shall not see the fleshly human body, but a system of Monads; these Monads cannot be clearly seen, just as we cannot distinguish the separate midges in a swarm; the chief Monad is the human soul. When the human soul comes into existence at birth, so said Giordano Bruno, the other Monads which belong to the soul collect together and, by this, the existence of the Chief-Monad, of the Soul Monad, is made possible. When death approaches, the Chief-Monad discharges and disperses the other Monads.

According to Giordano Bruno, birth is the assembling of many Monads round a Chief-Monad, while death is the separation of the inferior Monads from the Chief-Monad, so that the Chief-Monad may be able to take on another form. For each Monad is obliged to take on, not only the form by which we know it here, but every form which it is possible to take on in the Universe. Giordano Bruno conceives of a procession through every form. Thus he approaches as close as possible—in his enthusiasm—to the idea of the re-incarnation of the human soul.

And with reference to the conception of our collective reality, he says:—Man, with his normal consciousness, stands confronted by this reality. What he first receives are the impressions of the senses. These are his first means of knowledge. Of these, there are four, says Giordano Bruno. The first means by which man acquires knowledge is by the impressions of the senses.

The second are the images we construct in our imagination when the things which have impressed the senses are no longer before us, when we only remember what we have experienced. Here we already penetrate further into the soul. This second channel of knowledge he terms “the power of imagination.” The word must not be taken to mean what it does to-day, but it must be understood in the sense in which it was used by Giordano Bruno. After a man has received what the impressions of sense have to give him, he enters (forming the picture within himself) into the impressions. The impression is made from without on the within. It then follows that man, while he penetrates the things with his reason and then proceeds further, draws nearer to the truth, instead of going further away from it. Hence Giordano Bruno recognises reason, the intellect, as the third means of acquiring knowledge, and in this he has in mind the moment when we leave the objects visible to our senses and ascend to the realm of thought. Then something higher and truer than any impression created by the senses flows towards us.

According to Giordano Bruno, the fourth stage is Reason. Reason to him is a living and weaving in the regions of Pure Spirit.

Thus the system of Giordano Bruno comprises four stages of knowledge. He does not, however, classify them in the same way as they are classified, for example, in my books, “The Way of Initiation” and “Initiation and its Results”, under the headings of Present Knowledge, Imaginative Knowledge, Inspirational Knowledge and Intuitive Knowledge. His classifications are more in the abstract. We must, therefore, think of him in the following way: Giordano Bruno lived first at that point of time when the knowledge of visible phenomena was, advancing, therefore he used expressions which resemble those used now to express knowledge of the ordinary visible world, rather than those which relate to the higher worlds. But when Giordano Bruno looks up to the Spiritual World, we can have no doubt of his meaning from the tremendous emphasis with which he says “The Divine Spirit which exists in everything, which has its bodily form in all things, possesses that of which we have the representation, as the idea is the conception of the thing”.

“In what way is the world in God? How is the Spirit in God?” he asks, and replies: “The Spirit is in God as Idea, as the Thought that precedes the Word.” In everything is the Spirit in Nature, as form, he replies, by which he means, that the idea which exists in the Divine Spirit is in the crystal, which has a form; it is in the plant, which has a form; in the animal, which has a form; it is in the human body, which has a form. Of all visible things which have form, a counterpart exists in the human soul as the concept of them.

Giordano Bruno carries this still further. The things of Nature are shadows of the Divine Ideas. “Note well”, he says, “Our concepts are not the shadows of things, they are the shadows of the Divine Thoughts.” Thus, if we have the things of Nature around us and thus have the shadow of the Divine Idea, our concepts will be again fructified thereby. While we are forming our concepts, the Divine Spirit is weaving His Ideas into the original, so that we come in direct contact with the stream which connects us with the Divine Idea.

When we study the theories of that Physical Science which is to-day called Monism, (unlike that of Giordano Bruno), what strikes us most is the fact that, if we would be consistent in speaking of these theories, we must say “they do not mention the Divine Thought”. But Giordano Bruno did not say that, he was a Spiritualist in the strictest sense of the word. What he has to gibe us out of the true inspiration of the Renaissance relates to the Monads. The assembling of the Monads at birth and their dissolution at death refers to the Divine Thoughts, which, in his conception of the world, flow into the world of ideas; and in his own words “The human thought is a reflection of the Divine.” If this is once thoroughly understood, we shall understand something of the spirituality of Giordano Bruno.

But for this, one thing is necessary: we must distinguish between the real and the unreal Giordano Bruno, between the Giordano Bruno who was so greatly misunderstood and the real man himself.

Giordano Bruno was the master-mind, who, by his unbounded enthusiasm, spread broadcast among his contemporaries the more intellectual achievements of Galileo in the realms of Scientific Thought. This is why every utterance of Giordano Bruno carried such weight. All the joy and enthusIasm of the Spirit of the age, all its delight in the discovery of the working and weaving of Nature in the physical world, was concentrated in the personality of Giordano Bruno. This flood of rejoicing was itself crystallized into a system of philosophy, for the Divine Spirit which dwells in all visible things most certainly illuminated the soul of Giordano Bruno, and he was conscious of it. Hence we can understand those utterances of Giordano Bruno, which we do well to remember; they sound as if Nature herself had a direct message for men in those days. We can only quote a few words here.

Consider how wonderful the following thought is, to which Giordano gives expression in contradistinction to the teaching of Aristotle on the same subject. “The Spirit of Divine intelligence is not beyond the visible world, it is not exterior to it, it is everywhere, wherever we may look. The Divine Intelligence does not dwell in any place exterior to the visible world. It does not dwell in that vague realm, of which we may say ‘something moves in circles wide’, it does mot dwell in a revolving, encircling realm, with which we can communicate only from a great distance. The Divine Spirit is the united principle of that vital force, which is in everything and in Nature herself.”

Such was the language which rang out at that time, such the convictions which sprang from the innermost depths of the soul of Giordano Bruno. The question now remains how best to reproduce this language to-day, so that it will speak directly to our hearts and minds. Hermann Brunnhofer, who called attention to this and had to submit to being called a too enthusiastic admirer of Giordano Bruno, put his words into fine verse:

Non est Deus vel intelligentia exterior
Cirounrotans et circumducens;
Dignuis enim illi debet esse
Internum prinzipuim Motus,
Quod est Natura propria, species propria, anima propria,
Quam habeat tot quot in illius
Gremio et corpore vivent
Noe generali Spiritu, corpore.

Anima, Natura animantia
Plantea, Lapides quae univena ut
Disimus proportionaliter cumastro
Euden composita ordine, etaedem
Contemperata complexion um, symmetus,
Secundum genus, quantumlebet secundum
Specierum numeros singula deslingunlui.

1. Giordano Bruno says philosophically: It is worthy of God to be the inner moving principle of things.
2. See also: Herman Brunnhofer, The Influence of Giordano Bruno upon Goethe—Goethe's Journals—Vol. VII, 1886.

Goethe translates this line for line in the poem beginning:

“What Kind of God were He who from the World
Remained aloof and the great Universe Around His finger twirled?” etc.

This is a poetical translation of the mind of Giordano Bruno through the instrumentality of the mind of Goethe. It was not merely that Goethe wrote these verses with Giordano Bruno's works lying beside him. Some other influence must have been at work than that which would have made Goethe merely recast the words of Giordano Bruno in a poetical form. We see in this how the spirit of Giordano Bruno becomes fully alive in Goethe. Nevertheless it is not only a couple of centuries which have to be bridged when we pass from the days of Galileo and Giordano Bruno to Goethe. We must realise that what in the case of Giordano Bruno had its origin in the first great enthusiastic mood from which arose the philosophic cult of Nature, became in Goethe a mood leading him with complete devotion from one thing to another and finally causing him to bring back into Nature the God whose existence man now learned to feel in Nature herself. In Goethe the mood of Giordano Bruno had become his own. It was born in him, as it were. It was already present in him when, at the age of seven, he took the music desk belonging to his father and arranged on it mineral ores from his father's collection, so as to have some products of Nature herself—for the same purpose he took plants from his father's herbarium. He then placed a little stick of incense on the top of the heap and waited, burning glass in hand, for the Sun to rise, so that he might enkindle the incense from its rays and thus consummate a sacrifice culled from the forces of Nature to the God who lives in the plants and minerals and to whom he had erected an altar.

Thus did Giordano Bruno live in Goethe at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, but in such a way that what lived as the innermost attitude of his soul, Goethe carried into every detail of Nature.

It was this mental attitude which made it impossible to Goethe to understand how the Scientific investigators of that day could attach such importance to the outward signs which differentiate men from animals. The physical Scientists of the eighteenth century maintained that man did not possess the same number of small bones in the upper part of the jaw bone as the animals—viz. the inter-maxillary bones—which contain the sheath of the upper teeth. Animals possess these and this is where men differ from animals. Goethe could not understand this highly materialistic idea. This indeed could not be the God who was the inner vital principle of Nature. The God of whom Giordano Bruno spoke as “circumroians et circumducens.” He must be a God who worked outside Nature, a God who, first of all, made the animals, then made man and then, in order to differentiate man from beast, arranged that animals should have the inter-maxillary bones, while these should be wanting in man.

Goethe was the great investigator of Nature, who endeavoured to show that that which existed in Nature as form was capable of rising higher, and that it is not in anything external, such as the inter-maxillary bones, that the difference between the human and the animal world is to be found, but that something exists in man which, though it may be clothed with tones and muscles like those of the animals, constitutes the higher mind of humanity. This is only another proof of the magnitude of Goethe's genius. He not only discovered traces of the inter-maxillary bone and proved that it had only disappeared in man because it was a subordinate bone, but he also shows that the vertebrae may be distended if the activity of the mind contained in the brain finds this to be necessary. A long time ago, when I was studying the Scientific writings of Goethe, in order to understand his assertion that the bones of the skull are transposed vertebrae, the latter having been extended into the cavities of the skull, I came to the inevitable conclusion that Goethe must have conceived the idea that the brain itself was transposed spinal marrow and that this change had been wrought by the mind. That not only the covering tissue, but that the brain itself had been moved up from the vertebrae and spinal marrow to a higher level. It was a wonderful moment im my life when I discovered that, in the last decade of the eighteenth century, Goethe had written in pencil on a slip of paper “The brain is in reality only a piece of transposed spinal marrow.” Professor Bardeleben relates this in his article in the Weimar Year-Book on “Goethe as Scientific Investigator.”

Thus we see the mood which first appeared in Giordano Bruno applied by Goethe to the different parts of living beings. We see how Goethe applied the ideas of Giordano Bruno—to whom, as we have seen, he approaches so closely, even in his choice of words—in a practical way to everything in natural scientific thought.

This is why Goethe laid such stress upon finding in the whole plant world the metamorphosis of the primal archetypal plant (Urpflanze). Added to the great achievements of Goethe as artist were his noteworthy achievements as a scientific investigator of Nature. In a certain sense, the spirit which had come down from the clairvoyant stages of perception to a material form of vision was incorporated in Goethe, as a personality who saw the Divine in all his observations of Nature, even in the individual plants. The expression “Urpflanze”, Primal Archetypal plant. What did Goethe mean by that? He meant to indicate the Spiritual essence in the various species of Plants. With regard to this, the conversation between Schiller and Goethe at Jena, after a meeting of the Botanical Society, which they had both attended, is important. When they had left the assembly, Schiller said:—“What they said about plants was very unsatisfying.” Goethe replied:—“It might have been expressed differently. We ought to be able to see, not only those parts of the plant which we hold in our hands, but also their Spiritual relationship.” Then he took a piece of paper and drew the structure of a plant in a few strokes. He showed to Schiller that the type is not only present in the Lily, the Dandelion or the Ranunculus, but in all plants. Then Schiller, who could not understand the structure of the primal plant) said:—“That is no reality, it is nothing but an idea.” Goethe was very puzzled and said:—“It would gratify me very much to think that I could have ideas without knowing it and even see them with my physical eyes.” For Goethe could perceive the Spiritual element which permeates all plants. He saw it so clearly that he could even draw it. The same applies to the primal archetypal animal in all animals.

Thus Goethe pursued the God who does not work from without the material world, but who lives and operates within all visible things. Thus he followed the Divine Spirit which moves invisibly in everything, working in a concrete way from plant to plant, through leaf, blossom and fruit. It works in the same way from one animal to another, and also from one bone to another, from one animal form to another. It is interesting to note that Goethe was not understood by the men of his own time, not even by Schiller. But little by little the spirit of Goethe will take root even in the thought of the Natural Scientists. It will be acknowledged that Goethe's ideas were a stage higher than those of Giordano Bruno. Giordano Bruno spoke of a God, a pantheistic God, who is to be found everywhere, in plants and in animals. But Goethe, although he too sought the great spirit who does not operate from without, said further:—We must not only seek for Him in general; we must study the detailed phenomena and look for the Spirit in the separate things. For it lives in one way in plants, in another in mineral; one way in this bone and another way in that.

The Spirit is in perpetual action; it forms the various parts of matter, matter follows the moving spirit. This can be expressed as one universal spirit, as was done by Giordano Bruno. It can also be sought with deep devotion in every single detail, as Goethe did. In this way, man draws nearer and nearer to the Spirit at work in the outspread carpet of Nature, by degrees will that Spirit reveal itself.

If we study the successive stages of progress represented by Galileo, Giordano Bruno and Goethe, and search for the root principle which directed such great minds, we shall learn by degrees to adhere to the root principle which directed them, and not to be led away by the will-of-the-wisp of superficial criticism. For even the greatest minds do not escape criticism. Let us take Galileo with his great conception of the Divine, which embraced the whole of Creation in the span of one moment, and was unfettered by space or time. When we consider this, the question is bound to arise:—“What do the men of to-day know about the real significance of Galileo?” As a rule, they know little more about him than the one incident which is assuredly not true, that he said, as is supposed, “It moves, nevertheless.” A fine saying, truly, but, as can be seen from the investigations of the Italian scholar, Angells de Gubernatis, it cannot be true. And how often do we not hear that the last words of Goethe were:—“More light”, which is exactly what he never did say.

Hence we see that these great minds must be studied in the light which Spiritual Science is able to throw upon them, We cannot, as we are so fond of doing, judge of the past with our own, individual, unaided, modern mind.

These three master-minds form a wonderful, harmonious triad, which marks the beginning of our modern age; in Galileo and in Giordano Bruno we see the dawn, in Goethe we see the Sun itself, which show how the Spirit of the modern age already taught him to see that the smallest atom of matter cannot exist without Spirit behind it, which brings one atom in touch with another.

I would call to your remembrance an incident which Goethe relates himself. Many years after the death of Schiller, it was decided to transfer his remains from their grave to the Princes Mausoleum. There was some difficulty in deciding which were really the bones of Schiller. Goethe was attracted by a skull, which he saw must have belonged to a man of the type of the genius of Schiller; on closer inspection, he decided that this must be Schiller's skull, as he recognised it from the strongly marked peculiarity in the shape of the skull. This skull was accordingly placed in the Princes Mausoleum. Here he recognised the principle, which was also recognised by Galileo, that the spirit (or genius) must be sought for humbly and mathematically.

The ancient church lamp still hangs in the cathedral at Pisa, swinging backwards and forwards before countless souls. But Galileo had only sat before it once, when he measured the beating of his pulse by the regular swinging of the lamp and thus discovered the laws of balance, which are of such vast importance to-day. This was a Divine Inspiration. There are many such cases. At the grave of Schiller, Goethe was inspired with the thought which lived in the philosophic inspiration of Giordano Bruno. “Spirit is inseparable from matter. It is everywhere. Not, however, tossing it wildly about and driving it round, but, as Spirit which exists in the minutest atom.” This conception of the Spiritual, which existed in Giordano Bruno, was re-born in Goethe's soul, as he held the skull of Schiller in his hand, and, as water congealed into ice, so was the Spirit of Schiller made manifest to him in the skull of Schiller.

Goethe's entire spiritual standpoint lies before us when we study the poem which he wrote after having looked on Schiller's skull. Especially those lines, which are so often misinterpreted, and which we can only understand when we realise that in the situation which we have described above, Goethe saw the individuality of Schiller in plastic form before him, as if frozen.

Then he cries, as he must do, forced thereto by the similarity of the Spirit which united Giordano Bruno and Goethe:

Was kann der Mensch imleben mehr gewinnen,
Als dass sich Gott-Natur ihm offenbare,
Wie sie das Feste ladesst zu Geist verrinnen,
Wie sie das Geisterzeugte fest bewahre.

What can a man wrest more from life
Than that Nature, all-divine, reveal to him
How that she causeth the firm and formed to melt into Spirit,
And how what is born of the Spirit she holdeth fast in form.

It could weigh like a nightmare on the world-conception based on spiritual science if in all earnestness and truthfulness it were obliged to come into opposition to the well-founded results of the investigations carried out by natural science—investigations which in the course of the last centuries, and especially during the nineteenth century, have accomplished such great things and brought such blessings on mankind, not only in the field of knowledge but in the whole field of human progress. But it would be particularly depressing if spiritual science were compelled to take a stand in opposition to a branch of natural science which is comparatively one of the youngest, but which by virtue of its nature and its special tasks is able not only to arouse human interest in the deepest sense of the word, but also to open perspectives into the very coming-into-being of our planet, as well as into the origin and evolving forms of the creatures inhabiting it. This young branch of natural science is Geology, the science which, especially since the second third of the nineteenth century—but also already prior to that—has made such tremendous strides and achieved results of real importance, even though the great questions about which we shall have to speak still remain open. Our main purpose today will be to envisage the relationship in which spiritual science must stand to geology—and to answer the question, how much from the point of view of spiritual science—that knowledge which has always formed the base of our considerations here—has geology to say about the question concerning the origin, the gradual emergence and evolution, of the earth and its living organisms?

To answer this question we must first think briefly of the way in which the methods employed in the specific study of geology really work. It is, of course, well known that geology draws the content of its knowledge from the solid ground of our earth itself, and that out of what it finds there—within the earth's strata—it forms its conclusions concerning the way in which our planet may have come into existence and the changes it has undergone in the course of time. We know, if, for instance during railway-construction or work in stone quarries or mining-operations, any breaking-up of the ground gives us the opportunity of studying deeper layers of the earth in regard to their rock formations or other contents, that these layers present a different appearance from that of the ground on which we tread—which is the outermost surface. But within this surface-layer, too, we discover very manifold variations when we investigate the ground as to the nature of its rock-formations and mineral character. And it is perhaps also known that some of the most interesting studies are concerned with layers of the earth's surface whose character is clearly such that we can say: the material which covers the ground must originally have been dissolved in water or have been subject to the force of water in some other way, must once have been washed up as it were by the waters in times long past. We still see today how rivers carry accumulations of shifting rocky material far away and deposit them in other parts. We see the ground covered by such alluvial deposits and we must conceive that in the same way, in far distant times, successive layers of deposits were formed. Over one layer which originated in that way we have to imagine another covering it which, on examination, proves to be different in character from the one below. Thus in its successive layers, the earth shows us how the character of their rock-material differs. It stands to reason that the upper strata must be the latest, superimposed by the most recent occurrences on the earth. As we have occasion to penetrate more and more deeply and to study the lower parts of the earth's crust, we come to strata which are the deposits from earlier and ever earlier times, successively overlaid by the later ones. Likewise it is common knowledge that within these strata of the earth all kinds of forms have been embedded, originating, according to present-day concepts, from organic beings of the animal kingdom, from plants which, carried away by the waters and the alluvial layers, have met with their death, as it were, and by this natural process have become thus entombed, and then, more or less changed or unchanged, are to be found there in the rock-material as the remains of prehistoric organic beings. Nor is it difficult to come to the conclusion that a certain relationship must be presumed between such a layer of rock-material and the fossil remains of animals and plants within it. But we must not imagine that the younger strata have overlaid the older ones so conveniently over the whole face of the earth; on the contrary, there is clear evidence that sometimes older strata—recognisable by their character—extend to the surface, that in the course of the earth's development manifold disturbances have occurred through sets of layers having become intermingled, overlaid, upturned, and so on. So that it is by no means an easy task for the geologist to determine how one layer has been deposited over the subjacent layer. These are matters which can only be mentioned briefly here. In any ease we need not concern ourselves with the irregularities just referred to; we may assume that the geologists have access to the earth's strata with their fossiliferous constituents, and that from this they draw their conclusions as to the appearance of the earth at the time when the present top layer had not yet been deposited or successive lower beds did not yet exist, and that in this way it is possible to form some idea of the appearance which our earth must have presented in times gone by.

Moreover, it is an interesting and generally known fact that the upper layers—and therefore the youngest of our terrestrial material—contain fossils of more highly developed forms of animal- and plant-life, and that in the deeper layers we come to fossil remains of less developed forms of life, which today we are accustomed to count among the lower species and genera of the animal- and plant-kingdoms. We then come, as it were, to the lowest layers of the earth's crust, overlaid again and again by others; we come to the so-called “Cambrian” layer of our earth's development and find there only fossil remains of animals which did not yet possess a spinal column. We find other animals with a spinal column in the upper layers, which geology is therefore justified in regarding as the younger layers in earth-evolution:

Thus geology seems to be fully in conformity with what natural science knows today from other inferences, namely, that in the process of the earth's evolution the living creatures have developed by slow degrees from quite primitive to more perfect forms. When we now examine the Cambrian bed, namely, the lowest layer, and imagine that all the other layers had not yet come into existence, we shall have to assume that in the most ancient times there existed only the lowest animal forms, which as yet had no skeleton and were the first predecessors of the still undeveloped animals which were entombed in the deposits covering the lowest stratum of the rock-material. Then we must imagine that these beings have had descendants, that the latter may have underdone changes under the then prevailing, different conditions. In the next layer, which is again younger, we discover those animals in which there are already some indications of skeleton-like structures. And as we approach the younger layers we see evidence of more highly-developed animal species, until we come to the tertiary layers, where we already find the mammals, and then, in layers still younger than the tertiary layers, man.

As you know, there is a line of thought today which simply assumes that the lower animals of the Cambrian period have had descendants, some of which remained unchanged, while others developed towards vertebrate forms and so on; so that the appearance of more highly developed animals in the later, younger layers has to be explained by the assumption that the most primitive and simple forms of animal- and plant-life gradually evolved to higher forms. That would give a clearly outlined picture of the gradual development of life and also of the other occurrences on our earth—roughly as it might have presented itself to the eye of an observer who could have looked on during the billions and billions of years which geology has calculated for these happenings. Some idea of the methods applied and of the manner in which research is conducted may be gained from the following.—If, for instance, one observes how certain layers are still being formed today as alluvial deposits washed up by river-action or the like in the course of so and so many years, and if by measuring the thickness of such a layer a certain measurement is obtained by which it can be reckoned how many years it has taken for that layer to be deposited – then one can calculate how long the accumulation must have taken of all the layers we have had under review—provided that conditions were the same as they are today. As a result, the most divergent figures are obtained from the calculations made by the geologists. There is no need to enlarge upon contradictions which arise from this; for anyone who understands the contradictions will know that they have no essential significance, although they are really sometimes rather pronounced and amount to many billions of years according to the results obtained by different investigators.

When we contemplate all this we have, after all, only a picture of the course which, according to the ideas of geology (conceived and expressed precisely in the tone applied in the present description), the events in the evolution of our earth have taken during the later billennia. Moreover, geology compels us to presume that all these happenings have been preceded by others. For all these layers which contain remains of animal life rest, as it were, on others, and such others, having pushed through the overlaid layers, then protrude over the surface, form mountains, and thus become visible. The tenets of geology, therefore, lead to the conclusion that all fossil-carrying layers of our earth are resting on some other layer—a conception which takes us back, so to speak, to an age of our earth which preceded all “life.” For the composition of this oldest and lowest stratum of the earth's crust shows us that, when it came into being, there could not—at least according to ideas prevailing at the present time—have been on the earth any “life” as it is today. For geology finds itself compelled to assume that the lowest stratum owes its origin to a fire-process within which any possibility of life is unthinkable. Geology, therefore, would take us back in the process of our earth-evolution to olden times when as it were out of a fire-process the oldest rock-formations and minerals originated, while only later the basic foundation of the lowest layer was overlaid by the younger, fossiliferous layers through other events, events which occurred when, through radiating its warmth into cosmic space, the earth had cooled down sufficiently to make life possible. One has to envisage all this as being accompanied by processes of a physical and chemical nature, which cannot be described in detail.

If in this way we look back into those oldest times of our earth when a certain degree of cooling down had already taken place (for geology conceives the earth before the time of the first rock-formation as still in a state of heat), we find our globe, evolving towards the surface, possessed of a basic layer, and we observe how over this basic layer have spread those layers which with their fossilised remains provide living witnesses of the fact that life has existed on the earth for a very long time. When we consider those oldest layers upon which the life-carrying layers are resting, and study their rock-material which consists mainly of what is called granite,¹ we envisage our globe in a form which, according to modern geology, still presents itself in a kind of lifeless condition. That is where the upper layers are open, and granite protrudes and forms mountains, so to speak, as a witness of the oldest times of our earth.

When Goethe, who besides being a great poet was also a great student of Nature and of natural philosophy, found this oldest rock-formation of the earth—granite—it was borne in upon him that this granular rock-material is something on which, as on the bone-skeleton of the earth, everything else rests. Intuitively, Goethe experienced this as the echo of a primeval quiescence of our planet—and it was with reverence that he regarded this rock-formation. A man of his calibre was bound to contemplate the occurrences within earth-evolution not merely with his intellect but also with his heart, searching for what these remains can reveal of the earth-being. Profoundly moving and leading more deeply into the secrets than all abstract thinking are the words spoken by Goethe when face to face with this “oldest son of the earth” as he calls the granite:

“... With such sentiments I approach you, you most ancient, most noble monument of the time. Sitting on a high, bare summit with a free view over a wide landscape, I can say to myself: There you are resting directly on ground which reaches down to the very lowest depths of the earth. No newer layer, no accumulations of alluvial deposits have interposed themselves between you and the firm basement of the primeval world; you do not walk, as you do in those fruitful, beautiful valleys, over a perpetual grave; these summits have produced nothing living, have devoured nothing living; they are prior to all life, above all life. – At this moment, as the inner attracting and moving forces of the earth are directly affecting me, as it were, while the influences of the heavens are weaving more closely about me, I become attuned to higher contemplations of nature; and as the human spirit vitalises everything, so too does a secret stir within me, a secret of a sublimity which I cannot resist. Such loveliness, I tell myself as I am looking down from this bare summit and hardly able to see some modestly growing moss far away on the river bank, such loveliness, I say, overcomes the man who wants to open his soul only to the oldest, the first and deepest sense of truth.”

Goethe: Abhandlung über Granit.

That is the mood which came over Goethe when he contemplated this rock-formation, which by its whole nature showed that it could not contain anything living, and consequently could not, like the overlying layers, have engulfed anything living.

Sketchy though it is, what I have been able to illustrate so far shows nevertheless—as if outlined in a rough charcoal drawing—the picture given us by geology today of the course of the evolution of the earth and its living creatures. It was not, however, always so conceived; this way of thinking has developed only very gradually. In the days of Goethe, for instance, when he occupied himself with geology, a certain dispute was raging about the origin of our earth—the dispute between the Plutonists and the Neptunists, as it was called. One of the principal supporters of the latter was the geologist Werner, who was also acquainted with Goethe. He held that, generally speaking, nothing that we are able to observe of the accumulated layers within the earth's crust can be traced back to any kind of action by fire, but that everything we can learn from investigations points to the earth having in effect consolidated out of nothing but a watery element, out of a watery form of the planet, that even the oldest strata are alluvial deposits from water and that, consequently, granite too owes its origin not to the action of seething fire, but to watery deposits—and only in the course of time, through later occurrences, underwent changes which make its watery origin less apparent today. Everything, so to speak, has originated from water—that was the basic conception of the Neptunists and especially of Werner. Contrary to this, the contention of the Plutonists was based on the assumption that the earth, together with the whole planetary system, had emerged out of a gaseous cosmic nebula in a state of high temperature, had detached itself through cooling down, that this process of cooling continued through radiating heat into cosmic apace, and that then the time came when heat-conditions made the formation of granite and perhaps of similar kinds of rock-material possible; but that through the radiation of heat only the surface-crust of the earth was cooled down, while the interior remained in a state of fiery fluid, and that volcanic eruptions and earthquakes are living witnesses that the interior of the earth beneath the crust remains in a fiery-fluid state. The adherents of the Neptunistic school, on the other hand, saw the cause of all volcanic phenomena in processes which, through pressure from within or through chemical conditions in the interior of the. Earth—by no means thought of as fiery—made it possible for mighty catastrophes to take place in the interior and erupt outwards. So that only at this juncture events occur which in their upward trend have the effect of pushing up whole mountain-massifs out of the interior of the earth.—In short, here we see a very interesting dispute being carried on as recently as the first half of the nineteenth century about the conception which, on the one hand, can be briefly put in the words used by Goethe in his “Faust:” “Everything has its origin in water,” as against the other contention that fundamentally all terrestrial formations are the result of fire-processes and that it must be imagined that on the surface of the outer crust—corresponding in its relationship to the interior to that between the egg-shell and the yolk of the egg—events have taken place through which quite a thin layer has remained in a cooled condition, forming, as it were, a covering sheet all round the mighty earth-volcano, which this planet under our feet was conceived to be.

Now we must ask ourselves: What has this external investigation to tell us? And what, with the means elucidated, in the lectures given so far, has spiritual science to reveal about the origin of the earth? (Concerning the present and earlier evolutionary stages of the earth, more detailed information can be found in my book “Occult Science.”) How far, then, does geology lead us? We will now put into plain words what geology can tell us. It is this:—

Look at the layer-formations to be found in the earth's upper crust. The order of their superpositions shows that alluvial deposits have formed—in any case, in most recent times—as a result of which animal beings have been entombed, whose descendants are still on the earth, but also those which have now become extinct and of whose existence as inhabitants of the earth we know only from the excavation of their remains. Then we are led to the lowest layer of the earth's crust; it still belongs to that part which is to the whole planet what the egg-shell is to the yolk of the egg, and shows signs that it might well owe its origin to fire-action. But those with deeper insight—Goethe, for example—are more cautious in their pronouncements—also when they are intent on thinking entirely in terms of geology. And it is interesting to hear what Goethe says about this lower layer:

“... In the innermost bowels of the earth it (this layer) rests, firm and unshaken; its back rises on high, where its summit was never reached by the all-surrounding waters. So much, and so little more, do we know of this rock-material. Composed in a mysterious way of known constituents, it does not entitle us to trace its origin to fire anymore than to water.”

Thus Goethe already points out that in the last resort neither fire-action nor water can be thought responsible for the mysterious formation of this oldest son of our earth—granite. If against the investigations of geology, which anyhow have reached a point from which they cannot lead us any further, we quite simply set down what spiritual science has to say, what clairvoyant investigation has revealed, it presents itself somewhat in the following way.

When with the eyes of Spirit—which can be sharpened by the methods repeatedly indicated in these lectures—we look at the prehistoric times of our planet, we observe what would have presented itself to our physical eyes approximately during the periods covered by geological research. We also see how in this research into the past, geological investigation had to resort to speculative phantasy. And looking backward from those beings which from our human point of view we call perfect today, we come to ever less and less perfect forms of life on the earth with a mixture, at times, of grotesque forms as, for instance, the various Saurian types such as Ichthyosaurus, Plesiosaurus, Dinosaurus, Archaeopteryx. We then find creatures without any vertebrate skeleton, and so, with clairvoyant vision, we do indeed come to a tellurian epoch in which we cannot find such beings as are now living on our earth. We must admit, therefore; that drawing from its own sources, spiritual-scientific research also reveals this gradual advance in degrees of perfection. When we now go back in time and clairvoyant research comes to the period connected by geology with granite, which according to the modern theory coagulated out of the tellurian mass already cooled but still subject to the effects of fire-action, we must ask: What has geology, what has spiritual science, to regard as prerequisites for conditions prevailing in an earlier time?

If in the field of geology we remain on really safe ground (and no student of natural science ought to doubt what I am now saying), geology has only suppositions in regard to what precedes the granite-age; likewise geology can have no more than suppositions about conditions in the interior of the earth. For the bores that have been driven into the earth by drilling-operations reach depths which must be regarded only as tiny pin-pricks. There are suppositions, hypotheses, and nothing else—at best some dim divination about conditions which preceded the weaving and surging processes in granite-formation and so forth.

Now spiritual science—with the specific outlook often characterised here—follows earth-evolution backward into prehistoric times and finds in the domain which eyes can observe ever less and less perfect beings as the forerunners of all forms of life on the earth at the present time. But, tracing evolution backward in this way, spiritual science finds that there is a stupendous difference in the earth's appearance as compared with what it is at present. When we go back to pre-historic times, the earth does not present itself in the very least as we know it today, as the mineral base on which we walk surrounded by air with its fog and cloud-formations and so on. A great number of substances which are now in the interior of the earth were still in the surroundings of the earth in earlier times and settled only by degrees. This must also be admitted by geology. But we find, the further we go back, that our earth appears more and more as an utterly different planetary body, becomes something totally different; as we go further back, what is now the surrounding air does in effect take on the character of a living entity; in the environment of our earth we do not find only such mineralised air and cloud-formations as we have them now, but in the most ancient times we find within all that belongs to our earth something like live members of a great living being. And as we go back in this way we can see ourselves as if we were quite tiny beings today, standing within a human organism: if, standing within it on a firm, bony base, we looked out into outer space, we should there observe the blood-system, the nervous-system and so on, like an outer world. Thus one who stood on the earth in the remote past and looked out into space would not have seen a weaving, mineralised air but intense, pulsating life. And the further we go back the more this would be the case. So that we could go back to the epoch to which we assign granite-formation and reflect: There the earth is essentially a mighty, living body, containing multifarious and varied life within it, not yet inhabited by such living beings as move today on its surface or live in the water, and so on, but having their life within it—like parasites of the entire living earth-organism, swimming as it were in its blood, as today masses of rain float through the air. And then we come to a period of which we must say: It is true that on the earth's surface the heat is so great that life cannot develop; but in the environment life is developing which wants to, but cannot descend. Why is it that it cannot descend? Down in the depths, through the fire-process, under conditions of intense heat—it is there that what the living organism of our earth segregates out of its system as our living organism segregates the hard parts, the bones from the soft parts, is first absorbed. And now we look at the granite-formation and say: Originally the material which the granite contains—quartz, feldspar and mica – is in a state of dissolution within the great living being “Earth.” The 1atter needs for its development the capability to discard these substances: it segregates them and lets them fall to earth. What is below absorbs these segregations, builds up a basic massif, a bone-structure in the living being “Earth.” And when we go still further back we must investigate the causes as to why the whole living earth segregates from its organism the substances which today, as chemical-substances, form our earth and which at the same time are not those which appertain to the animal, plant, or human organism. These chemical substances were at that time segregated in a similar way through the effect of fire or water action, and were then transformed into the bone-structure of the earth.

When we now reflect how it is that there are these substances which were eliminated from the living earth-being and form a solid foundation from which life has departed, and when we search for the causes which could have brought this about—then we come to something which, if spoken of as part of the development of our earth, is still apt to cause wide-spread annoyance today—not indeed among the thinkers in natural science (for they ought to acknowledge it) but especially among those who on the strength of a few preconceived ideas want to build up a world-conception. But a true picture must be given of the facts established by the investigations of spiritual science. They show that these processes—the segregation of the rock-materials—have been preceded, within the living being of the earth, by a process which in terms of anything occurring today can only be described as similar to our own internal-functioning, little known to external science, but already described to some extent in these lectures – as similar to that activity which functions all day in our own body when through work, through mental effort, we exert our muscles or the instrument of our brain—in short, our whole body. What is in operation here is the process we call “fatigue.” It is, in essence, a kind of destructive process of the organism. Therefore we can say: As we live our waking life today from morning till night, through thinking, feeling and willing, processes of destruction are working within us which we then feel us “fatigue.” A world-conception based on natural science would not readily admit that such processes of spirit-and-soul, working into matter as they do, underlie external effects in nature. But they functioned; they were at work in that mighty organism which the earth once was. And when the earth approached the time when granite and similar material segregated, it was laid hold of by all such destructive processes—which were the means whereby forces of spirit-and-soul worked upon matter. Into that organism into which formerly were worked not only the substances appertaining today to the plant, animal and human organisms, but also the substances which today constitute our earth-massif – into this organism flowed the effects of all these destructive processes that were due to the working of forces of spirit-and-soul. These destructive processes were introduced into the life of the great being “Earth” by forces which then brought about the ejection.- through a process of segregation, as it were—of those chemical substances which today are incorporated in the make-up of our earth, and which are not to be found in organic bodies.

Thus spiritual science leads us back to the earth as an organism—not to a primeval state in which the earth was, so to speak, dead matter; on the contrary, the earth was originally a mighty organism. From the point of view of spiritual science one must practically reverse the way of asking a question that is put quite wrongly today. No science which assumes that the earth was once a dead globe in which only chemical and physical processes were active will be able to explain how life could arise out of this dead globe. This is a highly controversial question; but as a rule it is put quite wrongly. For generally people ask: How could “life” have developed out of the lifeless?—But that is not how it is: the living is not preceded by the lifeless, but them reverse is the case; the lifeless is preceded by the living. The lifeless mineral is a product of segregation, as our bones are segregations of our organism. Similarly, all rock-material is a product of segregation in the earth-organism, and processes of spirit-and-soul forces—processes of destruction in the first place—are the means of producing such segregations in the organism of the earth. And were we to go further back we should see how this path would lead us much further still. We are led by what operates in the mineral domain to the earth as an organism, and indeed we already see, as we go still further back, that we are being led not only to an organism, but to a formation of our planet that is permeated with the working of forces of spirit-and-soul. No longer do we trace life back to the lifeless, but we trace the lifeless back to processes of segregation from the living, and we regard the living as a state emanating from the sphere of the spirit and of the soul. And the further we go back, the nearer we come to that sphere in which lies the real origin of the present minerals, the plant-forms and so on: we approach the Spiritual and we let spiritual science tell us that it was not merely out of a lifeless, fiery nebula that there came into existence all that we perceive in the manifold forms of earthly phenomena, but that all this has taken shape out of the Spiritual, that originally our earth was pure Spirit, and that the course of evolution was such that on the one side emerged those forms which tend more towards the mineral element, and that on the other side the possibility arose for certain new forms to develop, capable of responding to spiritual functions of a new order. For if we now proceed in the opposite direction and say: In the old rock-material we have something which segregated out of the original organism of the earth, and if we then go on to our present age, this segregation is going on all the time. Granite is merely the oldest segregation; but the processes which bring about the segregation will be ever less and less living processes; for more and more they will tend to be mere chemical, mere mechanical processes; so that at last, in our time, we still have only those effects due to water-action, which can be observed when, for instance, a river carries rock-material from one place to another. But what we perceive there as the result of mechanical-chemical processes is only the final product; this has turned into the minerals in accordance with the laws of nature; it is a state resulting from what was originally at work in the realm of the life-forces.

And so we see how actually in the course of the development of our earth something takes place in connection with the formation of the ground beneath us, which we find in a similar way in the individual human or animal organism. There we see, how a man lives to a certain age, how he then passes through the gate of death, leaving his body as a corpse, and we see the continuation of those processes which are purely mineral processes; during the body's lifetime, however, these chemical and physical processes were an integral part of those working through the forces of spirit-and-soul. Similarly we come back to a time of earth-existence when the processes which today are of a chemical and mechanical nature were caught up and perpetuated by organic—yes, by spiritual and soul-processes. But what is taking place on the ground formation of our earth is, so to speak, only the one stream, left from earlier—to begin with more living, organic processes—and then spiritual processes. This foundation had to come into existence, had to form itself, so that on its firm ground, life of a different order could function – that life which gradually became our life, in order that as time went on such cerebral instruments could develop in living beings which enabled them to become “inwardly” aware of the spirit, inwardly able to form thoughts and produce feelings which, as it were, repeat the outer processes in reflective and emotional awareness. Therefore the whole mass of our earth's substance had to be “sifted,” the present purely mineral substances had to be discarded—and those retained which today can form the organisms which are permeated by a part only of the substance of the old massif. These are the parts which only now can form themselves, for example, into what man is today. The spirit which lives in the human head, in the human heart, that is to say in a being whose organisation is as it were, more refined than that of the planetary being of the earth as a whole, this spirit could only originate in a being from which were eliminated those substances which today do not belong to organic 1ife. This “sifting” of the whole mass of our earth's substance had taken place, and the one part was given over as a foundation to the purely mineral life in order that on it can develop a new life, which we see entering its lowest form at the moment which in later times geology has marked as that of the emergence of the most primitive beings in Cambrian form.

When, with the outlook of spiritual science, we thus observe life as it is today, we shall have to say: This life was originally in the outer atmosphere encircling the earth; then it descended as it were, but could not set foot on the surface of the earth until after it had sent down in advance all that it needed of mass-substance—as a basis on which to function. The process of decomposition, caused by processes in the domain of the spirit-and-soul forces, introduces two currents which have since been in operation: an ascending current, which unfolded a life of a finer, higher order – this needed only a part of the mass-substances—and another current which continued the process of decomposition and provides a foundation for the finer organisms, which then culminate in the human being. The development of these finer organisms is in the ascendancy. Why? Because (and again this would not be admitted today) through having segregated the coarsest material as in a mighty process of elimination, which then became the surface of the earth, they were in a position to isolate themselves more or less from the earth and its inner processes—and are now open to cosmic influences streaming towards the earth from outside. They are now exposed to the more spiritual effects of the cosmos and it is to this that they owe the ascent from primitive forms of life to that of man.

Looking thus at the development of the earth, we regard the firm ground on which we walk – irrespective of the various processes—in such a way that we say to ourselves: On it we stand; it contains—in the granite and in the superimposed deposits—that which the kingdoms of the living beings could not use except as material ejected to form the ground on which to walk. And what exists as its continuation is a process of destruction and decomposition. That should logically lead to the following reflection – When the modern geologist gives us his explanation of the earth's crust with its valleys and mountains built up in successive layers, this would appear to be something like a decaying corpse, in which an old process of destruction and decomposition continues to work. From the standpoint of spiritual science, we move about on a ground in process of destruction which had to come about in order to give us the firm, solid ground we need when we consider the blossoming forces which point to the future and move in the opposite direction to those we encounter in the body of the earth; for these future-building forces are something which, independent of the solid ground of the earth penetrates into human souls, into human spirits, perhaps also into those beings which are outside the human element, and are only beginning their ascent on the foundation of the solid earth. In the latter itself we should, however, have something in a state of decomposition. From the point of view of spiritual science our earth would appear as a progressively disintegrating dead body, and the geological laws would at the same time be those governing the decomposition of the earth-corpse. And man on earth would be a being who lifts himself out of the dead earth body, just as the human soul, passing through the gate of death, rises from the corpse and abandons it to those forces which bring about its decomposition and destruction.

This may seem to be a gloomy picture. But it can only be so if one despairs of the spirit, regards the spirit as merely bound to matter, and believes that together with man's desertion of the living body of the earth, his end has come. But if we look at things as presented by a sound observation of nature, we shall say: In some way it must obviously come about that not only the individual human being but the whole of humanity gradually throws off the earth-body in order to be able to rise step by step to other realms of development. And so, from the standpoint of spiritual science, the mid-period of earth-evolution had already been passed ever since the time when “the oldest son of the earth” was segregated, and the beings which are beginnings in preparation for the future will unfold further on the foundation thus laid down.

What does modern geology say to this conception of spiritual science?

When dealing with words, theories, hypotheses, world-conceptions so light-heartedly and readily advanced by currents of thought on factional lines and the like, it is easy enough to demonstrate that spiritual science in itself is a contradiction of the way of thinking prevailing in natural science. But if spiritual science, which works as conscientiously and, methodically as any other science, is considered in relation to natural science, it is obviously necessary to pay attention to what natural science really has to say and, particularly in reference to what has been brought forward today, to raise the question: What has geology to say concerning the origin of the earth?—Nowadays, things of a very secondary nature are often presented to the general public in popular scientific publications and in the form of popular views of the world; and then it is said: “Science” has established this end that. If this is compared with what those half-crazy spiritual investigators say, it will strike a good many people as something which cannot be taken at all seriously.—For that is what will be said by many people who perhaps do not know much more about spiritual science than what has come to them indirectly through remote sources. But clearly there is need to turn to what real science and real spiritual science have to say. For spiritual science must not be regarded as being on a par with popular world-conceptions which are only seemingly derived from “science;” spiritua1 science must be examined with the sternness which should be applied to every true science and which its genuine investigators will always demand.

And now we come to somethin6 which I cannot describe to you better than by drawing your attention to a work by one of the most eminent geologists of our time, and which a well-known contemporary geologist has called “the geological epic of the nineteenth century,” namely “The Face of the Earth” by Eduard Suess. It can truly be said that this work, on which Suess has been engaged not merely for years but for decades, gives a comprehensive survey—compiled with the greatest care imaginable—of the investigations which geology, this youngest branch of natural science, has carried out in the course of a few decades. And what does this book show us?

Suess is a man who said: Let us for once set aside all the prejudices of the Neptunists, of the Plutonists, and all the theories amassed by the geologists of the nineteenth century; do not let us speculate, but let us observe the physiognomy, the picture presented by the earth's surface. Starting from a mental attitude based, it is true; on sense-perception but pure and unclouded by any theory or hypotheses. Eduard Suess arrived at results which differed from those that had been current for many decades. He came to the conclusion that the mountains which tower over us as seemingly mighty massifs, can after all only be likened to wrinkles on the peel of an apple, and can be explained in no other way than by assuming that certain forces of a purely physical-chemical nature are at work in the body of the earth-planet, as the result of which the unevenness, the valleys and mountains, the various layers and so on, have been formed; so that generally speaking, the distribution of water and land, the formation of continents and so forth, can be explained as the result of folds being formed, of certain forces piling up earth-massifs and thus forcing some particular masses of rock up into towering mountains. Other forces again have brought about the collapse of what has been piled on high; and in that way oceans are formed. In short, to such collapses, up-pilings, foldings and the like, he ascribes, for instance, the formation of the Alps. In an ingenious way we are thus shown that the face of the earth has emerged as the result of such aggregations, subsidences, foldings and so on. The formation of oceans and continents is explained asbeing brought about through certain subsidences causing the waters to be drained off in one direction, so that what had formerly been covered by sea becomes dry land. We are therefore concerned here with an earth-surface subject to processes due to a shaking up of earth-masses through mechanical forces, and to subsidences. And in trying to obtain a general picture of what is happening on the ground on which we walk, Suess arrives at an odd conclusion: that fundamentally the whole process that is taking place on the earth's surface is one of destruction, and that the ground where today we plough the fields and which yields to us the fruits of the earth, only came into existence through the occurrence elsewhere of foldings, subsidences—in short, through processes of destruction. I need quote only a short passage from this most important work of present-day geology and you wil1 see where Eduard Suess's purely sense-perceptive method of research has led this most conscientious natural scientist:

“... The collapse of the globe is what we are witnessing. True, it had already begun a very long time ago, and so the brevity of the span of human life lets us be of good cheer. Not only are there traces of it in the high mountain ranges. Great blocks of earth have sunk hundreds, yes, in certain cases, many thousands of feet, and not the slightest sign of graded subsidences on the surface, but only the differences in the kinds of rock or deep mining betray the existence of a fracture. Time has levelled everything. In Bohemia, in the Palatinate, in Belgium, in Pennsylvania, in numerous places, the plough draws its furrows above the mightiest fractures.”

(Eduard Suess, Das Antlitz der Erde, Vol. 1, page 778.)

Here we have the results of conscientious scientific research concerning the ground on which we walk. And now think of what spiritual science has to say about the inauguration of this process through a process of destruction proceeding from forces of spirit-and-soul, a process which on the one side has its continuation in the physical-mechanical process of destruction taking place on the earth's surface, and which careful research impels geology to admit. So it is in all fields. When you take the results of real research and go by facts, you will always find: here stands spiritual science with all it has to say out of clairvoyant research, and there, provided only that it is free from monastic, materialistic or other prejudices, natural science stands firmly on the pure and sound basis of facts; and everywhere, as you will see, spiritual science links up with natural science in such a way that the latter on the pure basis of facts provides ample proof of what spiritual science as such has to offer. Never are there any grounds for contradictions between spiritual science and true natural science. Contradictions arise only between a sound spiritual science which deals with realities, and the theories of phantasts and of those who, while they claim to be standing on the firm ground of science, at once lose their foothold when their theories do not concur with what the facts proclaim, and adhere to what they themselves would like to say about the facts. Spiritual science lets the spiritual facts speak for themselves and tell what they have to reveal of the cosmic mysteries; natural science speaks of what it has established by its own methods: the two are in full concord. If you ignore those popular works which declare this or that to be a “scientific fact” and go to the sources, then you will find, especially in the field of geology, that the geologists everywhere get to a certain point—and then put a question-mark. Arriving at those question-marks, one can take them as a starting-point for spiritual research. Then spiritual science tells us: if it is true what clairvoyance reveals, the external factual material must appear in this or that form.—In the case of geology it was this: if what spiritual science has to describe is right, then, with the present process of decomposition continuing, our globe must now be in a state of collapse. Geology, adhering to facts, has shown that according to the laws it is so! The findings of true natural science everywhere are in line with the results of spiritual scientific investigation.

When we consider the whole spirit and meaning of this exposition, we shall in no wise be taken aback by the thought that we are walking on ground which is a dead body in process of disintegration. For we realise that on this ground something has developed which again contains seeds for the future. The lectures to follow will show more and more clearly that just as man looks to his spirit, so the spiritual, which once created for its own purpose the ground on which we set our feet, is advancing towards future epochs when it will be revealed on ever and ever higher planes. And when such a man as the geologist Suess—because in his intercourse with nature he enters into all that is beautifu1, even in the destructive processes—expresses his admiration for the wonders of the Face of the Earth, he clothes it in his monumental work in these memorable words:

“In the face of these open questions we rejoice in the sunshine, in the starry firmament and in all the manifold features on the face of our earth, which has been created by these very processes—recognising at the same time the extent to which life is governed by the character and destiny of the planet.”

If even a geologist, rising above all pessimism, experiences such a moment in his soul, how much more does the spiritual investigator who knows the truth of the words of Goethe: “Nature has invented death in order to have abundant life,” and who also knows through perceptive cognition that it is true to say, “Nature has invented death in order to have ever higher and ever more spiritual life;” how much more must the spiritual investigator, knowing this, say: Although we have to regard that which has produced out of itself a higher life as a corpse in process of destruction, nevertheless in all that moves on this ground we see, lighting up seeds of what can quicken hope and assurance in our hearts and tells us: We walk on the ground which a primeval world has given us, and which, through a process of disintegration, or destruction, has let the ground under our feet become what it is. We walk on this ground, divining – as in the spirit we rise to heavenly heights—that in the course of future development we shall have to leave this ground at the right time, in order that we may be received into the fold of the spiritual world with which, if we have the right understanding, our inmost being feels so firmly united.

• 1. It must be pointed out that this lecture was given in the year 1911. Granite was formerly classified by geology as belonging to the archetypal rock-formations, as is also indicated in the descriptions given here by Rudolf Steiner. Today, the rocks included in the Archaean System are only old gneiss-formations and other crystalline schist-formations. It is held today that Granite is of eruptive origin and that there are various epochs of granite-formation. [The above statements refer in general to the actual archetypal rock-material, also when granite is spoken of.

While it is of vital importance in Spiritual Science to study the whole spiritual life of humanity as it advances from one epoch to another, rising slowly to the surface from hidden depths, it is perhaps of still greater significance to study the culture and civilisation of ancient Egypt. We realise this the more strongly when we try to penetrate deeply into this ancient Egyptian spiritual life.

The echoes sounding to us across the ages seem at first to be as full of mystery as the Sphinx itself, standing there as a memorial of the civilisation of ancient Egypt. The mystery grows deeper still when we find that even external research has recently been compelled to go back to ages more and more remote in order to explain the culture of later Egyptian times of which certain physical evidence is still available. According to external research the prime of Egyptian culture must be dated at least seven thousand years before our era, perhaps even earlier still. This may be one reason for the great interest evinced to-day in Egyptian culture, but another is that man of the present day feels, whether he likes it or not, that there is a mysterious connection between this ancient civilisation and his own aims and purposes. It is not without significance that Kepler, at the very dawn of the development of modern Natural Science should have spoken of the achievements of Science up to that time and his own contributions to knowledge, in words like these: “When I have endeavoured to unravel some of the mysteries of the course of the planets round the Sun, I have tried to peer into the secrets of cosmic space. And it has often seemed to me as though I have actually penetrated to the mysterious sanctuaries of the Egyptians and brought their holy vessels into our modern age. I have felt then that the significance of my message to the world will only be understood in the future.” So strongly did one of the greatest minds of modern times feel himself related to ancient Egyptian culture that he could only express the keynote of his knowledge by speaking of it as a renewal of the wisdom given to the disciples in the secret sanctuaries and places of learning in ancient Egypt, although it was clothed, naturally, in different words. It must therefore be of great interest to us to understand how these ancient Egyptians themselves conceived of their whole culture, of their whole nature as human beings.

A certain very significant incident has been preserved by Greek tradition. It indicates not only what the Egyptians themselves felt but the way in which Egyptian culture was regarded by the civilised world in general in olden times. An Egyptian sage once said to Solon: “You Greeks are still children. All you know is the outcome of your own contemplation and vision; you have no ancient traditions, no wisdom hoary with age, and children you will remain.” Wisdom hoary with age—the significance of this expression only dawns upon us when the light of Spiritual Science is cast upon the whole mode and nature of Egyptian thought and feeling.

In the successive epochs different forms of consciousness have unfolded in humanity. Our consciousness to-day, the way in which we grasp the outer world by means of our senses and the combining of intellect and reason, in short, our scientific mode of thought, has not always been in existence; consciousness has ever been subject to the laws of evolution. Not only is the external world of form subject to these laws but man's qualities of soul and consciousness also. This is an indication of the fact that we can only understand ancient centres of culture if we begin by admitting what Spiritual Science tells us, namely, that in olden times, in the place of our present intellectual consciousness, men possessed a clairvoyant consciousness unlike our waking consciousness and yet unlike the complete absence of consciousness during sleep. Traces of this consciousness of prehistoric man are now only retained atavistically as a waning heritage, in the picture world of dreams. But whereas our dreams are chaotic and meaningless in ordinary life, the picture consciousness of the Ancients was “clairvoyant,” although, indeed, of a hazy, dreamlike nature. The pictures referred not to the physical world but to the spiritual world behind. In reality, all clairvoyant consciousness, that of prehistoric man, as well as the clairvoyance acquired by true discipline in this age, works in pictures and not in the concepts and ideas of outer physical consciousness. The pictures must be related to the spiritual realities lying behind the sense-realities of the physical world.

The marvellous pictures that have come down to us in the mythologies are not merely phantastic concepts of Nature, as materialistic consciousness imagines to-day. On the contrary, these pictures indicate an actual vision of the spiritual world. If we study the old mythologies and legends—not with the materialistic consciousness of to-day, but with a true feeling for man's spiritual achievements—the strange stories related in the mythologies will reveal a wonderful connection with cosmic laws higher than our laws of physics, chemistry and biology. A note of spiritual reality permeates the old mythologies and religious systems.

Now it must be clearly understood that the several peoples built up this world of pictures in different ways, according to their own nature, temperament and race. These picture-worlds represented, to the several peoples, the higher forces underlying the purely external forces of Nature. We must also realise that in the course of evolution there have been many transitional stages between the old clairvoyant consciousness and the objective consciousness of modern man. The ancient clairvoyance grew dim and gradually faded away. Clairvoyant powers decreased little by little in the different peoples and the pictures arising before the souls of those still able to gaze into the spiritual world contained less and less of spiritual force. The higher worlds gradually closed their doors until only the lowest stages of spiritual activity were perceptible to lower clairvoyance. Then, so far as humanity in general was concerned, the old clairvoyance died out entirely. Waking consciousness was limited to the physical world around and to ideas and conceptions of physical phenomena. Thus arose our modern science. The old clairvoyant powers gradually faded as the development of present-day consciousness proceeded—although of course the process varied in the different peoples.

All that we know from olden times, even what external documents have told us in recent Egyptian research (if we understand aright) proves the truth of what Spiritual Science asserts, namely, that the mission of the ancient Egyptian people was to look back to still earlier times when their leading Individualities were able, with their wonderful powers of clairvoyance, to gaze into the spiritual worlds. In the people of Egypt a somewhat feebler clairvoyant power was preserved on into relatively late times. The later Egyptians—down to the last millennia before the Christian era—knew from actual experience of another mode of vision besides that of ordinary daily life, a vision enabling man to see into the spiritual world. But they only knew the lowest images of the realm of which this vision made them aware, and they looked back to olden times when their Priest-Sages were able, in the golden prime of Egyptian civilisation, to gaze into the very depths of the spiritual world.

The mysteries of the spiritual worlds were preserved, more especially by the earlier Egyptians, with great piety and reverence for thousands of years. Those who lived in the later Egyptian epoch could say: “Even now we can still perceive a lower spiritual world; vision of the spiritual world is possible and to doubt it would be as senseless as to doubt that our eyes can behold the external world.” These later Egyptians had, it is true, only a dim perception of the spiritual worlds, but they felt that there had once been an age when their predecessors had gazed more deeply into all that lies behind the physical world. And this old Wisdom-teaching—of which the Egyptian Sage spoke to Solon—was preserved in wonderful scripts in the Temples and on the columns, bearing witness to deep and all-embracing clairvoyant powers in days of hoary antiquity. The Being to whom the Egyptians looked up as the embodiment of the primal glory of that old clairvoyant wisdom, was called by the name of HERMES. And when in later times a man came forth with a message which was to renew the ancient wisdom, he also (according to the custom of Egyptian sages) called himself “Hermes,” and his disciples, believing that he had revived the primeval wisdom of the old Hermes, called this first Being, “the Thrice-Greatest,” “Hermes Trismegistos.” (It was of course, only the Greeks who called him Hermes; among the Egyptians he was known as Thoth). We can only understand this primeval Being if we realise what the Egyptians, under the influence of the later teachings of Hermes or Thoth, took to be the true Mysteries of the Cosmos.

Such beliefs as have been handed down to us from Egyptian times by external evidence seem very strange. Various Gods, of whom the most important are Osiris and Isis, are represented in forms not wholly human; we often find human bodies and animals heads, or an amalgamation of human and animal forms. Wonderful legends of this world of Gods have come down to us and there is something very remarkable in the Egyptian animal-worship, the worship of the cat and so forth. Certain animals were even recognised as being sacred animals; deep veneration was paid to them for they were regarded as the embodiment of higher beings. It is even said that cries of lamentations were uttered at the death of cats. Again, we are told that if an Egyptian saw a dead animal, he dared not approach for fear of being accused of having killed it, in which case he would have been severely punished. It is said too, that in the age when Egypt was subject to Rome, any Roman who had killed a cat was in danger of death, because his act aroused such fury among the Egyptians. This animal-worship is an enigma in the sphere of Egyptian thought and feeling. And again—what a curious impression is made on modern man by the Pyramids, standing on their four-cornered bases, with their triangular sides! Strange indeed are the Sphinxes and everything that is being continually excavated and brought to our knowledge from the depths of Egyptian civilisation. And now we will ask ourselves: of what nature was the life of feeling and ideas among the ancient Egyptians? What had Hermes taught them? How did they acquire all these strange conceptions?

We must realise that all these Legends, especially the more significant, contained a deeper wisdom and their purpose was to convey in picture form, knowledge of definite laws of spiritual life, laws higher than those of external Nature. The Egyptian legend of the God and Goddess, Osiris and Isis, is a case in point. According to the legend, Osiris was a Being who lived in dim primeval times in regions later inhabited by human beings. Osiris is represented in the legend as the benefactor of humanity under whose wise guidance Hermes or Thoth gave the Egyptians their ancient culture. Osiris had an enemy, for whom the Greek name was Typhon. Typhon pursued Osiris, killed him, dismembered the body, hid it in a coffin and threw it into the sea. Isis, the sister and spouse of Osiris, sought unceasingly for him who had been torn from her by Typhon or Seth, and when at length she found the fragments of his dismembered body, she buried them in different places in the land where Temples were then erected. Then, after the death of Osiris, Isis gave birth to Horus. A spiritual ray descended upon Isis from Osiris, who had meanwhile passed into another world. The mission of Horus was to conquer Typhon and, in a certain sense, to re-establish the dominion of a life, which, proceeding from Osiris himself, was again to stream into mankind.

Such a legend must not be analysed merely in the sense of allegory or symbol. It should be used as a means whereby we are led into the whole world of feeling and perception of the old Egyptians; for only so can our understanding of such figures as Osiris and Isis become really living. It is not right to state crudely that Osiris is the Sun, Isis the Moon and so forth. An astronomical interpretation of this kind leads men to believe that the legend only contains symbolical images of certain occurrences in the Heavens. This is not the case. Rather must we go back to the feelings living in the ancient Egyptians and envisage the nature of their upturned gaze to super-sensible, invisible Powers underlying the world of sense, and typified in the figures of Osiris and Isis.

Let us try to conceive what the names of Osiris and Isis conveyed to the ancient Egyptian. He said to himself: “Behind man there is a higher spiritual essence, which does not proceed from his material existence. This spiritual essence has ‘condensed' into material, human existence. The real evolution of man has proceeded from a more spiritual existence. When I look into my own soul I realise that I have a longing for the Spiritual, a yearning towards the spiritual wellsprings of being from which I myself have descended. The forces from which I came forth are still living within me. My highest powers are inwardly related to these primordial Osiris-powers within me, bearing witness that I was once a super-sensible being dwelling in other worlds, in worlds of Spirit. And although this being of Spirit has but a dim and instinctive life, although it had perforce to be clothed with the physical body and its organs in order to perceive the physical world, yet in days gone by this being lived a purely spiritual existence.”

According to the ancient Egyptian conception, human evolution must be regarded as a duality, consisting of the Osiris-forces and the Isis-forces. “Osiris-Isis”—this was the duality. Let us consider our own being, as we now exist. The idea of a triangle, for instance, must have been preceded by active thinking. After having been active in soul, we may then be passive as regards the result of our thinking and conceptual activity. Ultimately we perceive in our soul the form that has been built up by our active thinking. Now the act of thinking bears the same relation to the final thought, the conceptual act to the final concept, the active principle to the product of the active principle there before us, as Osiris to Isis. In short, activity per se is a Father-Principle, a masculine Principle. The Osiris-Principle is male, active—filling the soul with thoughts and feelings. The old Egyptian said to himself: “Man as he stands here to-day has within him substances living in his blood or forming his bones, but these substances were not always within his blood or bones, they were spread over cosmic space. This physical body is a combination of substances which have now passed into the human form, whereas they once filled the Cosmos. The same is true of the powers of thought. The active principle of thought has become the power of ideation in man. Just as the substances in the blood now live in the human form but were formerly spread over cosmic space—so the Osiris-power now living within us as the active principle of thought was once spread over the spiritual universe as the Osiris-power that permeates and weaves in the Cosmos, pouring into human beings, just as in the case of the substances composing blood and bones in the bodily nature of man. Into the thoughts and ideas there flow, from out of the Cosmos, the living and weaving Isis-Powers.”—This is how we must envisage the attitude of soul in the ancient Egyptians towards Osiris and Isis.

This old consciousness could find no expression for such ideas in the world surrounding physical existence on Earth; for everything here was known to be of the world of space and it could offer no outer image of the super-sensible world. And so, in search of some form of language, some kind of script in which to clothe such conceptions as “the Osiris-Power is active within me”—men reached out to the script placed by heavenly bodies in cosmic space. They said: “The super-sensible power of Osiris may be envisaged as the active power of light proceeding from the Sun, living and moving through space. Isis may be seen in the sunlight reflected by the dark Moon—just as the soul is dark when the active principle of thought does not enter. The Moon awaits the light of the Sun in order to reflect it, even as the soul awaits the Osiris-Power to reflect it back as Isis-Power.” But when the old Egyptian said—“The Sun and Moon out there show me how I can best picture the activities of my soul,”—he knew at the same time: there is no mere chance connection between the Sun with its outpouring light and the reflecting Moon, but this radiating and reflected light has some inner connection with the super-sensible forces I feel within my soul.

Although we would not describe a clock as something that drives its hands with the help of little demons, but as a mechanical contrivance, we realise, nevertheless, that the thought of the inventor, the thought proceeding from the soul of a human being is at the back of the construction of the clock. Something spiritual, therefore, is responsible for its mechanism. Just as the hands of a clock are interrelated and dependent upon each other, so did the Sun and Moon appear to the Egyptians as the expressions of a mighty cosmic clock. When we gaze at this mighty clock in space, it seems at first sight to be subject to mechanical laws, yet in the last resort it is subject to those laws which a man felt in his soul when he spoke of the powers of Osiris and Isis. The old Egyptian did not merely say: “Sun and Moon are images of the relation between Osiris and Isis.” He also felt: All that lives in my being was once subject to the mysterious relationship between light and the Sun and Moon.

Again, a relation similar to that between Osiris and Isis and the Sun and Moon was seen to exist between the stars and planets and the other Gods. The Egyptians saw in the positions of the Heavenly Bodies, images of their own super-sensible life, or of traditional experiences of ancient Seers, but in these expressions of the mighty cosmic clock they saw a portrayal of forces within their own souls. Thus the great cosmic clock, with the movements of its stars and the relation of its moving stars to the fixed stars, was a revelation of underlying spiritual, super-sensible forces—forces which had determined the positions of all the stars and had created in a cosmic script, an expression of super-sensible activities.

Such were the feelings in regard to this higher world, feelings which had been handed down to the Egyptians by their traditions of ancient clairvoyance. They knew of the existence of this spiritual world because they themselves still possessed the last remnants of ancient clairvoyance. But now they said: “We have descended from this spiritual world and we are now placed in a world of matter manifesting in physical phenomena, physical processes. We come from the world of Osiris and Isis; the highest qualities within us, the qualities which make us strive towards higher perfection, came forth from Osiris and Isis. These qualities live invisibly within us as energy and power. The physical part of man's being is derived from external circumstances, is taken from the outer world. This physical part of man is but the vesture of Osiris-Isis.”

Now this conception of primeval wisdom was the one dominating feeling in the soul of the old Egyptian; it filled his whole life of soul. A man may imbue his soul with abstract ideas and yet remain untouched in his moral and ethical life; his sense of destiny or his happiness may be quite unaffected. Abstract and mathematical concepts of Natural Science may be so deeply absorbed that a man can discuss electricity and other forces of a similar nature without feeling any need to concern himself at the same time with problems of destiny. Now the feeling of kinship with Osiris and Isis, the vision of the spiritual world existing in ancient Egypt—these things could not be conceived of apart from thoughts of destiny, happiness and moral impulses. For the ancient Egyptian said to himself: “I bear a higher Self within me, but since I have entered into a physical body this higher Self withdraws to the background and is at first not wholly manifest. Osiris and Isis are the primal source of my being; but Osiris and Isis belong to the archetypal worlds, to the golden, holy ages of long ago. The Osiris-Isis nature is now subject to the forces which have condensed outer physical substances into man's body. Osiris and Isis are fettered within the corruptible body, and this body is subject to decay even as the outer forces of Nature.”

The legend of Osiris and Isis must thus be interpreted in terms of the inner life. Osiris, the higher power in man, spread over cosmic space, is overcome by forces which are subject to destruction in the realm of human nature. The Osiris-power living in man is fettered by Typhon—fettered within a form that is the “coffin” of the spiritual nature of man. Into this coffin the Osiris-nature in man disappears and is invisible to the outer world. The mysterious Isis-nature remains, in order that in future ages, after it has been permeated by the power of the intellect, it may again reach the well-springs of man's being. Thus there lives in man a hidden quality which strives to bring Osiris to life again. The Isis-power lives in the human soul in order gradually to lead man back again to Osiris. So long as man remains a physical being he cannot of course be separated from the world of matter, yet it is the Isis-power which enables him, while he remains a physical being in the outer physical world, to maintain in his inner being a striving towards a higher Ego. And according to every true thinker, this higher Ego is there, deeply concealed in all the powers of man. This being—who is not the outer physical man but the man who has an unceasing urge to rise to the light of spirit, who is ever impelled by the hidden Isis-forces—appears as the earthly son of One who did not arise in the earthly world. He is the earthly son of Osiris who remained in the spiritual worlds. This invisible being—the being who strives to reach the Higher Self, was known by the name of Horus, the posthumous son of Osiris.

Thus the old Egyptians looked up with a certain sadness to the Osiris-origin of man, but at the same time they gazed into their innermost being, saying: “The soul has retained something of the Isis-power and this Isis-power gives birth to Horus who has the urge to strive towards spiritual heights. In these heights man finds Osiris.” Man can attain to Osiris in a twofold way. The Egyptian said: “I came forth from Osiris and to Osiris I shall again return. Osiris, my spiritual origin is within me: Horus will lead me back to Osiris his Father; but Osiris can only be attained in the spiritual world. He could not enter into the physical nature of man. In the physical nature of man he was vanquished by the Typhon-forces which are subject to decay because they are forces of external Nature.”

Osiris can therefore only be reached along two paths. One is the path leading through the Portal of Death; the other is the path through the Portal leading not to physical death but to Initiation. The Egyptian therefore said: When man passes through the Portal of Death and has passed the stages of preparation, he comes to Osiris. When he is freed from the sheaths of his earthly body in the spiritual world, the consciousness of his kinship with Osiris awakens within him. The dead man feels that in the spiritual world he may himself be called “Osiris.” And so, after death, everyone was an “Osiris.”

The other path to Osiris—the other path into the spiritual world—is through Initiation. To the Egyptian this path was a means whereby man could learn to know the Invisible, the Supersensible in human nature—Isis, or rather the Isis-power. In the knowledge gleaned from everyday life man does not penetrate to the depths of his soul, he does not reach the Isis-power. Yet there is a means whereby he can pierce through to this Isis-power, whereby he reaches the true Ego and realises that it is enveloped in physical matter. If we follow this path we reach the spiritual home of the Ego. This, then, was the teaching of ancient Egypt: Man must descend into his own innermost being; there he first understands his physical nature—the expression of his Ego. He must force his way through this physical nature. He beholds the outer world, the creation of spiritual, super-sensible Powers, in the three kingdoms of Nature: in the stones with their forms based on mathematical laws, in the plants with their life-filled forms which are the dwelling place of Divine Powers, and in the animals. But when he beholds Man he must penetrate through the outer form to the Isis-powers of the soul.

Part of the Initiation into the Isis-Mysteries, therefore, consisted in showing man how he was clothed in matter. The processes enacted when a man thus plunged into his own nature, were practically the same as occur at death but they were enacted in a different way. The aspirant had to pass in actual life through the Portal of Death, to learn of the transition from physical to super-physical vision, from the physical to the spiritual world—in short the transition experienced in actual death. He had to follow this path of descent into his own inner being, to learn what can only be experienced there. And in this region he learnt, in the first place, how the blood, the physical instrument of the Ego, is formed from Nature. Now the system of nerves is the physical instrument for the soul-activities of Feeling, Willing and Thinking and the instrument of the Ego is the blood. If a man would descend into his instruments—so thought the old Egyptians—he must descend into his physical-etheric sheaths, into the etheric qualities of soul. He must learn to be independent of the forces in his blood upon which he otherwise depends, and, after having first freed himself from these forces, he must then enter into the marvellous processes of his blood. He must learn to know his higher nature in its physical aspect. This he can only do when he is able to contemplate himself as he contemplates an outer object. Now man can only know an object as object if he himself is outside it; thus if he wishes to perceive himself, he must stand outside his own being. That is why Initiation develops forces which enable the soul-powers to have real experiences without making use of physical instruments. The physical instruments are there objectively before man, just as after death his spiritual being looks down at his physical body.

And so the pupil in the Isis-Mysteries was first taught the secrets of his own blood. He passed through an experience which may be described as an approach to the Threshold of Death. This was the first stage of Initiation into the Isis-Mysteries. The pupil had to behold his own blood, to behold himself as object, to plunge down into the sheath that is the instrument of his Isis-nature. In the sanctuaries of Initiation he was led to two Portals, where he was shown in picture form the processes taking place in his inner being. Two doors stood before him, one open, the other closed. These teachings, echoing down to us across the ages, harmonise most wonderfully with what man believes at the present day, although he now gives a materialistic interpretation to everything. The old Seers of Egypt said: “When man is in the underworld he comes to two doors; through two doors he enters into his blood and his inner being.” The modern anatomist would speak of the two entrances lying beside the valves of the heart. If the pupil wished to penetrate into his body he would have to pass through the “open” door, for the “closed” door is there to prevent the blood stream from taking a wrong path. These anatomical phenomena are material images of what the ancient sages experienced in clairvoyant form. The forms were of course not so exact as the structures confronting the modern anatomist, yet they represented what clairvoyant consciousness perceived when it gazed at the inner being of man from without.

The next stage of the Isis-Initiation may be described as follows: The pupil was led through the tests of Fire, Air and Water—that is to say he learnt to know the nature of the sheaths around his Isis-nature. He learnt to know Fire as it courses through his body, using the blood as its instrument; he learnt to know how air enters the body in the form of oxygen; he learnt to know his watery nature. Fire, Air and Water—the warmth of the breath, the fluidity of the blood. And his knowledge of the sheaths, of Fire, Air and Water purified him until he finally attained to his Isis-nature. This again may be expressed by saying: Only when the pupil reached this stage did he feel that he had really “come to himself,” realising his spiritual existence, no longer limited to the human faculties pertaining to the outer world but able to gaze into the spiritual world. In the outer world we can only see the physical Sun by day; at night it is hidden from us by matter. In the spiritual world, however, it is not so; in the spiritual world man beholds the spiritual Powers at the very time the physical eyes are not functioning. In the Isis-Initiation it was said: When a man is purified he beholds the spiritual beings face to face; he can see the Sun at Midnight. That is to say, when darkness prevails, the spiritual life and the primal spiritual Powers behind the Sun are visible to those initiated in the Isis-Mysteries.

Such was the path of the soul to the Isis-powers, the path which might be traversed by those who while still living sought to energise their deepest forces of soul. There were still higher Mysteries—the true Osiris-Mysteries. In these Mysteries man learnt how through the Isis-power he might find himself one with the spiritual super-sensible Power whence he himself had come forth.—He knew Osiris and Osiris arose within his soul.

Now when the old Egyptian wished to depict the relation between Isis and Osiris, he used a script drawn from the movements of the Sun and Moon in the Heavens; he used the relationships of the other starry bodies to express the activities of the other spiritual Powers. His script was drawn from the Zodiac in its condition of comparative rest, and from the Planets moving across the constellations. In all the mysteries thus revealed, the ancient Egyptian saw a spiritual script. He knew: Nothing that is on the Earth can help me to express what man experiences if he goes forth to seek Osiris with the Isis-power within him. The starry constellations themselves must be the script.

Hermes, or Thoth, the mighty Sage of antiquity, was revered by the Egyptians as having had the most profound insight into this relation of man to the Cosmos. It was Hermes who expressed with the greatest sublimity the relation of the stars to these spiritual Powers and to events in the Cosmos. The language of Hermes was the language of the stars themselves. The relation of Osiris to Isis, for instance, could be explained exoterically to the people in the form of legends. Those who were preparing for Initiation were taught in greater detail of the light proceeding from the Sun, its reflection by the Moon, and the marvellous processes enacted by the light passing from the new Moon through different phases to the full Moon. The primal forms of writing were derived from processes taking place in the Heavens. Man little knows to-day that the consonants are images of the Zodiacal constellations, of a cosmic element that is at rest; the relations of the vowels to the consonants are images of the connections between the moving Planets and the Zodiac. The earlier forms of the letters of the alphabet were in this sense derived from the Heavens.

The ancient Egyptians felt that the great Hermes had himself been taught by the Powers of the Heavens and that he expressed, in his own being, the deepest soul life of man. All that was expressed in the deeds of man, even in daily pursuits where mathematical sciences, geometry (which Pythagoras afterwards learnt from the Egyptians), land-surveying and the like, were needed—all these things were traced back to the wisdom of Hermes who had seen the processes and phenomena of Earth to be reflections of heavenly activities as expressed in the stellar script. This script was brought down by Hermes into mathematics and geometry and he taught the Egyptians to find, in the stars, the counterpart of earthly happenings.

Now we know that the whole life of Egypt was deeply bound up with the floods of the Nile, with the deposits swept down by the Nile from the mountainous lands in the South. And we can realise how necessary it was for the Egyptians to know in advance when these floods would occur. They reckoned time according to the stellar script in the Heavens and when Sirius, the Dog Star, was visible in the Sign of Cancer, they knew that the Sun would shortly enter this Sign and that its rays would charm forth all that the flooding of the Nile bestowed upon the soil. They said: “Sirius is the Watcher; it is he who tell us what is to come.” And they looked up in gratitude to the Dog Star, to Sirius, for it was he who enabled them to cultivate their land aright and provide for the needs of their daily life. They looked back to ages of hoary antiquity when mankind had first been taught that the movement of the stars is the expression of the mighty cosmic timepiece.

Thus did the Egyptians take counsel from the stellar script. Hermes, or Thoth, was the great Spirit who, according to the oldest traditions, had given the original script of the Cosmic Wisdom and with the inspiration flowing into him from the stars, had built up the alphabet, had taught men the principles of agriculture, geometry, land-surveying—in short all they needed for their physical life. Physical life, however, is but the body of a spiritual life, a cosmic spiritual life whence Hermes drew his inspiration. Thus all culture and civilisation came to be bound up with the name of Hermes, and indeed the Egyptians felt themselves connected with him in a still more intimate sense.

Suppose, for example, that an Egyptian living in the year 1322 before our era, were looking up to the Heavens. He would behold a certain constellation. The ancient Egyptians had a convenient method of reckoning time-conditions, convenient, that is to say, for purposes of calculation; twelve months of thirty days each, with five additional days—making three hundred and sixty-five days in the year. They had reckoned thus for centuries, for the method was really a mathematical convenience. After three hundred and sixty-five days a year had run its course. Now as we know from Astronomy, this leaves a quarter of one day unaccounted for; that is to say, the Egyptian year fell a quarter of a day too early. If you reckon it out, you will see that every successive year began a little earlier than the last. So month by month the year receded until, after a lapse of four times three hundred and sixty-five years it returned to the beginning. Thus it always happened after a period of one thousand, four hundred and sixty years that the heavenly relationships were readjusted with the earthly calculation. In the course of one thousand, four hundred and sixty years the year receded through a complete cycle. If you reckon this back three times from the year 1322 before our era, you have the epoch to which the Egyptians ascribed their holy primal Wisdom. They said: “In those ancient times men possessed the very highest clairvoyance. Each of the great Solar Years denoted a stage in the waning of clairvoyant power. We are now living in the fourth stage. Our culture has reached a point where we have only traditions of the teaching of antiquity. But we look back through three great Cosmic Years to an age when the greatest of our Sages taught his pupils and successors what we to-day possess—though in much changed form—in writing, mathematics, geometry, the science of land-surveying and astronomy.” At the same time the old Egyptians said: “Our human calculations—which adhere to the convenient numbers of twelve times thirty plus five supplementary days—bear witness how the divine-spiritual world must correct our affairs, for our intellect has estranged us from Osiris and Isis. We cannot reckon the year accurately. But we look up to a hidden world where the Powers guiding the stars correct us.”

Thus even in their Chronology the old Egyptians looked up, as it were beyond the feeble quality of the intellect, to spiritual Beings and Powers living in hidden worlds, who in accordance with deeper laws, supervised protected and watched over all that man has to experience on Earth. And in Hermes, or Thoth, they revered the Being whose inspiration flowed from these watchful Powers of Heaven. Hermes was not only a great Teacher, but a Being to whom the old Egyptians looked up with feelings of deepest gratitude and reverence, saying: “All that I possess comes from Thee! Thou wert there in days of old and lo! Thy blessings stream into the world for the healing of men through those who have been Thy messengers.” Thus both the original source of Power—Osiris—and Hermes, or Thoth,—the Guardian of that Power—were not only known to the wisdom of the ancient Egyptians, but their souls were filled with a deep moral feeling, a feeling of reverence and gratitude. All external evidence shows that the wisdom of the Egyptians (especially in very ancient times, and later to a less and less degree) was permeated with religious feeling. All human knowledge was bound up with feelings of holy awe, all wisdom with piety, all science with religion. In the later Egyptian epoch this no longer appears in its purest form. For just as in the successive epochs it is the mission of the several peoples to express the Spiritual in different forms, so do the several civilisations begin to fall into decadence when their prime has been reached. Most of what has been preserved from ancient Egyptian culture belongs to the period of decadence and one can only surmise what lies behind the marvellous pyramids, for instance, and the strange animal cults. The Egyptians knew: The age when wisdom itself was working was preceded by another, when all beings—not only man—descended from divine-spiritual heights. If we would understand the innermost nature of man we must not look at his outer form, but penetrate to his inner being. What we see externally are stages at which primordial creation has remained stationary; such stages are to be seen in the three kingdoms of Nature. The first stage is the world of the minerals and stones—the forms of which are expressed in the Pyramids. The second stage is the world of plants and the inner forces of this world are expressed in the Lotus flower. The third stage is represented by the animal forms, strewn, as it were, along the path to man. Divine forces which have not attained to the human stage have poured and crystallised into the different animal forms. Such were the feelings of the old Egyptian when he beheld the retarded forces of the Gods. He looked back to primeval ages when all creation sprang from Divine Powers. He felt that Divine Powers had remained at an earlier stage of development in the beings of the three lower kingdoms of Nature and had finally risen to human form in his own being. We must always be mindful of the feelings, the consciousness of the old Egyptians, for then we shall realise that their wisdom had a moral effect in their souls. Their conception of the Divine world and Supersensible forces gave rise to a relation to the animals, which only assumed a grotesque form when Egyptian culture entered upon its period of decline. The imperfections of later Egyptian culture were not there at the beginning when it was filled with spiritual revelation. We must not—as is so often done to-day—ascribe primitive and simple conditions to the early stages of civilisations. On the contrary, primitive conditions belong to periods of decadence which set in after the original spiritual treasures have been lost. Barbaric conditions are not to be regarded as the original states of civilisation; they are in reality the result of the decadence of civilisations which have fallen from their spiritual prime.

Such a statement may be a cause of irritation to the science that describes all civilisations as having originated from old primitive conditions such as survive in savage tribes to-day. Primitive states of culture still in existence are to be regarded as stages of decadence; at the beginning of human life on Earth the early civilisations were directly inspired from the spiritual world by the Spiritual Beings standing behind external history. This is what we are told by Spiritual Science.

Again it may be asked: Does the science of to-day, representing as it does, the heights of modern culture, come into collision with this statement of Spiritual Science? I should like here to quote from a recent work by Alfred Jeremias, The Influence of Babylon on the Understanding of the Old Testament, which shows that outer research too has found its way back to an ancient culture permeated with sublime and far-reaching conceptions and that the so-called barbaric civilisations must be regarded as the outcome of decadence. This point is clearly made in the book:

The oldest records, as indeed the whole cultural life of the Euphratean civilisations, postulate the existence of scientific and at the same time religious conceptions not only in the secret lore of the Temples but according to which the State organisation was regulated, justice declared, property administered and protected. The further back we go into ancient times, the more do we find the domination of these conceptions; only when the ancient Euphratean culture enters on its period of decadence do other forces make themselves felt.

External science is here beginning to open up paths which can unite with what Spiritual Science has to introduce into modern civilisation. If it advances along these paths it will gradually abandon the dead image of primitive conditions at the starting-point of human civilisations and will come instead to the Great Individualities. And they appear before us in all sublimity because it was their task to transmit to men who still possessed the power of clairvoyance, the greatest blessings in every branch of culture. And so we look back to mighty figures—to Zarathustra, to Hermes—who appear so sublime because they were the first to give the great spiritual impulses to mankind in those remote ages of which the Sage spoke to Solon. Hermes stands there as a great Guide of mankind. As we contemplate these great Individualities, we feel a strengthening of our own powers. We realise that the Spirit not only lives in the Cosmos but flows into cosmic deeds, into the evolution of man himself. Our own life is fortified, we have greater confidence in our own actions, our hopes and purposes are strengthened by the contemplation of these great Individualities. We who are born in after ages look up to Them, seeking the fulfilment of our own existence in Their mighty powers of soul, understanding our own actions in the light of the eternal Spirit pouring into humanity through Them.

That Buddhism and the teaching of Buddha should frequently be discussed to-day, is a fact of special interest in the study of human evolution; for an understanding of the essential nature of Buddhism—or rather the longing for such an understanding—has only made itself felt comparatively recently in the spiritual life of the West. Think for a moment of Goethe, who so powerfully influenced Western culture at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When we examine Goethe's life and writings we find no trace of the influence of Buddhism; yet shortly afterwards there are distinct traces of Buddhist influence in one who was in a certain sense a disciple of Goethe—I refer to Schopenhauer. Since his time, interest in the spiritual life of the East has steadily increased, until in our age many people feel an inherent desire to understand what really entered human evolution through all that is connected with the name of the great Buddha.

It is true that most people connect Buddhism, among other things, with the idea of reincarnation. Yet with regard to its essentials one cannot do so—at all events in the form in which this truth is now often conceived. For to those who have deeper insight, this linking up of Buddhism with the teachings of repeated earthly lives is almost tantamount to saying that the deepest understanding of ancient works of art is to be found among those peoples who set about destroying them at the beginning of the Middle Ages! Grotesque as this may sound, it is nevertheless true, and its truth is brought home to us by the realisation that the whole mood of Buddhism is to undervalue earthly lives, indeed its aim is rather to reduce their number. Liberation from rebirth—this is the innermost nerve of Buddhist thought. To be freed from repeated earthly lives—reincarnation being of course an already recognised truth—is the essence of Buddhism.

Even a superficial study of the history of Western spiritual life should tell us that the idea of reincarnation is not really essential to the understanding of Buddhism—and vice versa. For within our Western culture we find that Lessing had a magnificent conception of the idea of reincarnation and yet was quite uninfluenced by Buddhistic thought. His most mature work The Education of the Human Race concludes with a confession of belief in repeated earthly lives. “Is not all Eternity mine?” he exclaims, feeling that man's sojourn on earth may become fruitful if earthly lives are repeated. We are not on this earth for nothing. We are active in earthly life and we may look forward to an ever fuller life wherein the fruits of past lives may ripen. The prospect of a rich and greater future, the consciousness of continuous activity—these are the essentials of Lessing's thought. On the other hand, the essence of Buddhism is that it urges man to strive for such knowledge and wisdom as will free him from all desire for rebirth. Only when in one such earthly life he can liberate himself from this necessity—only then will he enter the state that may be called “Eternity.”

I have endeavoured to show you in the course of these lectures that Spiritual Science has taken the idea of reincarnation neither from ancient tradition, nor from Buddhism, for the idea of reincarnation arises of necessity from an unprejudiced observation of life in the sense of Spiritual Science. It would therefore seem superficial to connect Buddhism directly with the idea of repeated earthly lives, for to understand the essence of Buddhism we must turn our gaze in quite another direction. Here I must again remind you of the law of human evolution which we considered in connection with the great Zarathustra. [See Anthroposophy, Easter, 1927.]

In the course of the ages the whole constitution of man's soul has passed through different stages and conditions. The events of which outer history and outer documents tell are really a comparatively late phase in the evolution of mankind, and when with the help of Spiritual Science we go back to prehistoric ages, we find that the nature of the soul and of man's consciousness in those early times was very different indeed from what it is to-day. Let me briefly recapitulate.

In normal human life to-day we examine objects with our senses and form chains of thought with our practical wisdom and science (in effect our essentially intellectual consciousness), which has developed from quite a different kind of consciousness. In the chaotic medley of the dream we have a last remnant—an atavistic heritage—of clairvoyant faculties that were normal in the soul of prehistoric man. In those early times the nature of the soul was such that in a condition midway between waking and sleeping, man gazed into all that lies hidden behind the world of sense. Our consciousness to-day alternates between the waking and sleeping states and we think of “intelligence” in connection with waking life only, but in more ancient days pictures continually arose and passed away before the soul of man. These pictures were not as void of meaning as are our dream pictures to-day but were related to super-sensible events. Out of the condition of consciousness arising from these flowing pictures, our present so-called intellectual consciousness gradually evolved. A kind of primeval clairvoyance preceded the gradual development of our modern consciousness. Prehistoric man, gazing into the super-sensible worlds with this dreamlike clairvoyance, not only acquired knowledge but experienced a deep inner satisfaction and bliss as he felt the connection of his soul with a spiritual world. In his intellectual consciousness to-day man knows with certainty that his blood is composed of substances which also exist externally in physical space, indeed that his whole organism is built up materially. With equal certainty, prehistoric man knew that, so far as his soul and Spirit were concerned, he had come forth from the spiritual world into which he gazed with his clairvoyant consciousness.

I have said before, that certain phenomena in human history, of which external facts also speak, can only be understood if this spiritual origin of man's earthly life is admitted. Even science is less inclined to agree with the assumption of materialistic anthropology, that in prehistoric ages the general condition of humanity was such as we find still existing among the most primitive peoples to-day. It is becoming more and more evident that sublime conceptions of a spiritual world were current among ancient peoples, though clothed in pictorial forms. Myths and legends are only intelligible if we trace them back to a primal wisdom which was altogether different in its nature from the intellectual science of to-day. True, there is not much sympathy as yet with the view that primitive peoples to-day are not typical of the original spirituality of man but represent the decadence of an earlier time. Neither is it generally admitted that originally all peoples possessed a lofty wisdom, derived from clairvoyant powers. But facts will in time compel thinking people to admit, hypothetically at all events, some of the truths investigated by Spiritual Science and fully corroborated by Natural Science. What Spiritual Science has to say about the future evolution of man will also one day be verified. Thus we must look back, not only to a kind of primeval wisdom, but also to primeval feelings and perceptions in man whose clairvoyant powers gave him knowledge of his connection with the spiritual world.

Now it is easy to understand the possibility of two streams arising in the gradual transition from this ancient clairvoyance of the human soul to our modern intellectual mode of observing the material world. The one stream can be traced among peoples in whom the memories and instincts were preserved, and who felt that through his clairvoyant perception, man was once united with the spiritual world but has descended into the world of the senses. This feeling gradually extended into a general attitude of soul, till it could be said: “We have entered the phenomenal world but this world is maya, illusion.” Only when he was linked with the spiritual world could man know his true being. And so among those peoples who had preserved this dim remembrance of ancient clairvoyant powers, there arose a sense of loss, and a certain indifference to their material environment and all that can be apprehended by the intellect.

On the other hand there is a second current, of which the religion of Zarathustra is typical.—“We must adapt ourselves to the new world which now enters our consciousness for the first time.” These men did not look back with regret to something that man had lost. On the contrary, they felt impelled to seek and acquire all the powers that would enable them to penetrate and understand the surrounding world of sense. The urge arose within them to unite themselves with the world, not to look back with regret, but to look forwards, to be warriors. “The same Divine-Spiritual essence of which we were once a part is also poured into the world immediately surrounding us. It is in this surrounding world that we must seek it. Ours [is] the task to unite with the good spiritual elements and so help forward the evolution of the world!” This conception is typical of the stream of thought which had its rise in Asiatic regions lying north of the lands where men looked back with sorrow to what man had once possessed.

In India arose a spiritual life which was the natural fruit of this backward-turning gaze to men's former union with the spiritual world. Consider the Sankhya philosophy or the Yoga system and discipline. It was the constant endeavour of the ancient Indian to rediscover his connection with the spiritual world whence he had come forth; he tried to disregard all that surrounded him in the world, to free himself from the links binding him to the world of the senses and by eliminating this world to find again the spiritual realms whence he had descended. Reunion with the world of Spirit, release from the world of sense—this is Yoga.

Only when we see these principles as the fundamental tendencies of Indian spiritual life can we understand the mighty impulse of the Buddha as it flamed up in a last gleam across the evening skies of Indian spiritual life a few centuries before the Christ Impulse was destined to dominate Western thought. We can only understand the figure of Buddha when we contemplate him in this setting. On the soil of India it was possible for a mode of thought and consciousness to arise which gazed at a world in the throes of decline, of a descent from Spirit into maya—the great “Illusion.” It is also natural that as the Indian looked at the external world with which human life is so closely interwoven, he should have evolved the idea that this descent from Spirit into the world of maya had proceeded stage by stage, as it were, passing from epoch to epoch. We can now understand the deeply devotional mood of Indian culture—albeit a culture representing the glow of sunset—and how the concept of Buddhahood there finds a natural place. The Indian looked back to an age when man was united with the spiritual world; he then descended to a certain level, rose once more and again sank, rose, sank—but in such a way that each descent was deeper than the last.

According to ancient Indian wisdom, a Buddha arises whenever an epoch of decline draws to its close. The last of the Buddhas—Gautama Buddha—was the Being who incarnated as the son of King Suddhodana. The Indian, therefore, looked back to former Buddhas, of whom five had already appeared during the time of man's gradual descent from the spiritual world, and who, coming again and again into the world of men could bring them something of that primordial wisdom whereby they could be sustained in earthly life and not utterly lost in maya. In his descending path of evolution man loses hold of this wisdom and when it is lost, a new Buddha appears. Of these, Gautama Buddha was the last.

In the course of many earthly lives such a being as a Buddha must previously have reached the level of a Bodhisattva before he can attain to Buddhahood. According to Eastern Wisdom, Gautama Buddha was first a Bodhisattva, and as such was born into the royal house of Suddhodana. By dint of inner effort he attained, in his twenty-ninth year, the illumination symbolically described as “sitting under the Bodhi tree.” The wisdom arising from this could then be revealed in the great Sermon of Benares. In his twenty-ninth year, this Bodhisattva rose to the dignity of Buddhahood and was then able, as Buddha, to bring again to mankind a last remnant of the Ancient Wisdom. And when in the following centuries man again sinks so low that the last remnant of the wisdom brought by Buddha disappears, another Bodhisattva, Maitreya Buddha, who, according to Eastern Wisdom, is expected to appear in the future, will rise to the dignity of Buddhahood.

Legends tell us of all that was enacted in the soul of the last Bodhisattva who was to become Gautama Buddha. Up to his twenty-ninth year he had known only the surroundings of his royal home. Human misery and suffering—all life's sorrows—were hidden from him. He grew up seeing only the joys of life. But the Bodhisattvic consciousness was ever present—a consciousness teeming with the inner wisdom of former earthly lives. The legend is well-known and we need only consider the main details. We read how Gautama left the royal Palace and saw something he had never seen before—a corpse. At the sight of the corpse he realised that death consumes life, that the element of death enters life with its fruitfulness and power of increase. He saw a sick man—disease eats its way into health. He saw an old man tottering wearily along his way—age creeps into the freshness of youth.

We must of course realise that he who was to become Buddha passed through all these experiences with Bodhisattvic consciousness. Thus he learned that the destructive element of existence has its place in the wisdom-filled process of “being and becoming,” but so deeply was his soul affected that he cried out—so the legend runs—“Life is full of suffering!” Let us try to enter into the soul of Gautama the Bodhisattva. He possessed mighty wisdom, although he was not as yet fully conscious of this wisdom. In his earlier years he had seen only the fruitfulness of life. Then his eyes fell on the image of destruction, of corruption, and within his soul the feeling arose that all attainment of knowledge and wisdom leads man to increasing life. His soul is then filled with the idea of “Becoming”—a process of perpetual fruitfulness. The idea of fruitful growth proceeds from wisdom. Gazing into the world, what do we behold? Forces of destruction, sickness, old age, death. Knowledge and wisdom cannot surely have brought old age, sickness and death into the world. Something else must have been their cause! And so the great Gautama felt—because he was not yet fully conscious of his Bodhisattvic wisdom—that man may be filled with wisdom and through this wisdom be filled with ever-fruitful forces of growth, but life reveals decay, sickness, death and many other destructive elements. Here was a mystery unfathomable even to the Bodhisattva. He had passed through many lives, through incarnation after incarnation had accumulated an ever-increasing store of wisdom, until he had reached a point whence he could survey life from the very heights of existence. Yet when he left the palace, and life in its grim realities stood before him, the meaning of it all did not wholly penetrate his consciousness. The accumulated knowledge and wisdom of earthly lives cannot, in effect, lead to the solution of the ultimate mysteries of existence, for these mysteries lie hidden beyond the region of the life that passes from incarnation to incarnation.

This conception, quickening in the soul of the great Gautama, led him finally to full illumination “under the Bodhi tree.” We may express the results of his wakened consciousness as follows: “We are living in a world of illusion. Life after life we live in this world of maya whither we have passed from a spiritual existence. In this life we may rise in Spirit to infinite merit—yet the wisdom of innumerable lives will never solve the great riddles of old age, of sickness, death.” He then realised that the doctrine of suffering was greater than the wisdom of a Bodhisattva. In his illumination he knew that all that is spread abroad in the world of illusion is not true wisdom, for even after countless births, outer existence gives us no understanding of suffering, nor can we release ourselves from pain. Outer existence contains something that is far removed from true wisdom. And so it came about that the Buddha saw an element void of wisdom as the cause of old age, sickness and death. The wisdom of this world could never bring liberation; liberation could only proceed from something this world cannot give. Man must withdraw from outer existence and from his repeated births.

From this moment onwards Buddha saw that the doctrine of suffering was the principle necessary for the further progress of humanity. Devoid of wisdom was the “thirst for existence,” which seemed to him the cause of the suffering that had entered into the world. Wisdom on the one hand, a meaningless thirst for existence on the other. And so he realised: “Only when Man is liberated from the wheel of births can he be led to true redemption, to true freedom, for of itself the highest earthly wisdom cannot save him from suffering.” Buddha then sought the means whereby man could be led away from the scene of his successive births to a world which we must learn to understand aright, for many fantastic and grotesque ideas have arisen as to the meaning of “Nirvana.” One who has reached a point in life where there is no more a thirst for existence and no desire for rebirth, passes into Nirvana. What is the nature of this world?

According to Buddhism, the world of redemption and bliss eludes all descriptions derived from the world sense and space man knows in earthly life. Nothing in the physical world of space points to liberation. All the words man uses to describe the world around him must be silenced; they do not and cannot apply to the world of bliss. It is absolutely impossible to form an idea of the realm entered by one who has been liberated from the necessity for re-birth, for since it has no resemblance to anything in the objective world, it can only be characterised by a negative term—Nirvana. A man enters Nirvana only when everything that connects him with earthly existence has been blotted out.

Yet for the Buddhist, Nirvana is no empty void. Rather is it a life of bliss no words can describe. Here we have the root-nerve of Buddhism and an expression of its pervading mood. From the Sermon of Benares where it was taught for the first time, this doctrine of the suffering of life, of suffering and its cause in the “thirst for existence” permeates all that we know of Buddhism. One thing alone can lead to human progress, and that is redemption from rebirth. And the first step is the following of a path of knowledge which leads beyond earthly wisdom. Treading this path a man will find the means gradually to reach and enter Nirvana. In other words, he may learn so to use his earthly incarnations that he is finally freed from their necessity.

Turning now from this somewhat abstract conception of Buddhism to its fundamentals, we find that such an attitude towards life tends to “isolate” man; it raises the question of the aims and destiny of his life as an individual personality in the world. How could it be otherwise in a conception of the world built upon such a foundation? It was believed that man had descended from spiritual heights to find himself in a world of maya from which the wisdom of a Buddha now and again can rescue him, as the last Buddha had taught. Such a conception of the goal of all human striving could be characterised in no other way than as an isolating of man from his whole environment, for his earthly embodiments followed a descending path in a descending earthly order. How did Buddha himself seek illumination? Unless we consider this, we shall never understand Buddha himself, or Buddhism. He sought illumination, as we know, in complete isolation. He went out from his father's palace into solitude. All knowledge gained from previous lives must be silenced in a life of solitude, where he must seek an inner illumination of the soul which shall reveal the mystery of the suffering world. In isolation the Buddha awaits the enlightenment which reveals: The cause of suffering inheres in the thirst for existence and rebirth which burns in every individual soul. The world too thirsts for existence and this is the cause of all the suffering and all the destructive elements in life.

Now we cannot understand the essential nature of Buddha's illumination and teaching unless we compare it with Christianity. Six hundred years after the appearance of the great Buddha, quite different conditions are present. Man's whole attitude to the world and to his environment has changed. How has it changed? Oriental thought contemplates one “Buddha-epoch” after another. “History” is not a process of descent from a higher to a lower level; rather is it an effort to attain a definite goal, a possibility of union with the whole world, with the past, and with the future. Such is the oriental conception of history. But the Buddhist stands there isolated and alone and is concerned only with his individual life. In his individual existence he strives for liberation from the thirst for existence and hence from the cycles of his births.

Six hundred years later, the Christian has quite a different attitude. Putting aside prejudices now widely spread in the world, we may describe the Christian conception as follows. In so far as the Christian conception is based on the Old Testament, it points to a primal humanity when man's relationship to the spiritual world was not at all the same as in later times. We read of this in the mighty pictures of the Book of Genesis. The attitude of the Christian to the world is very different from that of the Buddhist. The Christian says: “Wisdom lives within my soul and this wisdom arises from the very nature of the soul. Wisdom, knowledge and morality—all these arise within me as a result of the way in which I observe the world of sense and co-ordinate my impressions by means of my reasoning faculties.” But in an older age the constitution of the human soul was altogether different. Something happened then which cannot merely be called, in the Buddhistic sense, a descent from Divine-Spiritual heights into a world of maya, but must be spoken of as the “Fall of man.” The Fall is bound up with the whole of human existence. Man feels that there are forces within him which had their origin in a far-off past and were part of a process which caused the human being not merely to “descend” but to descend in such a way that his relationship to the world was completely changed. If the conditions obtaining before this event had prevailed, man would have been a different being to-day. The Fall was due to man's own sin, even though he sinned unconsciously.

Thus in Christianity we are concerned not merely with the direct descent of which the Buddhist thought but, with an altered state of things in which the factor of temptation plays an essential part. The Christian who pierces the surface of Christianity into its depths must say that because of an event which happened untold ages ago, the subconscious workings of his soul are different from what they were designed to be. The Buddhist says:—“From a state of union with the Divine-Spiritual world, I have been transported into this world of maya and illusion;” the Christian:—“I have descended into this world. If I had descended in the original state of my soul I should everywhere be able to look behind the illusion of physical ‘appearances’ into reality and find the truth. But since another factor has entered into the process of descent I myself have turned this world into illusion.” The two modes of thought are very different. The Buddhist asks why this world is illusion and is taught that illusion is its very nature. The Christian asks the same question but realises: “The fault is mine! My powers of cognition and the state of my soul no longer enable me to see the original reality. My actions are not fruitful. I myself have drawn a veil of illusion over the world.” The Buddhist says that the world is in itself the Great Illusion, therefore he must overcome the world, but the Christian feels himself in the world, and in the world he must seek his goal.

When the Christian realises that Spiritual Science can lead him to the knowledge of successive earthly lives, he can resolve to use them as a means whereby the goal of life may be attained. He knows the world to be full of sorrow and error, because man himself has wandered so far from his primal state that his vision and his actions have changed the world around him into maya. Yet he need not alienate himself from this world in order to enter into blessedness. Rather must he overcome the forces which make him see the world as illusion and thus be led back to his true original nature. There is a higher man. If this higher man could look upon the world, he would see it in its reality; he would not pass through an existence of sickness and death but a life of health, full of the freshness of youth. A veil has been drawn before this inner man because humanity took part in a certain event in the evolution of the world. Man is not an isolated entity, an individual, nor is thirst for existence responsible for his present state. He is indeed one with all humanity and shared in the original sin of the whole human race.

And so the Christian feels himself bound up with the whole historical course of humanity, realising as he gazes into the future that he must find once more that higher nature which man's process of descent has veiled. He says: “I must seek, not Nirvana, but the higher man within me. I must find the way back to my Self. Then will the surrounding world no longer be illusion but reality—a world in which I am able to overcome sorrow, sickness and death by my own efforts.” The Buddhist seeks liberation from the world and from rebirths by overcoming the thirst for existence. The Christian seeks liberation from the lower man, seeks to awaken the higher man within, whom he himself has veiled, in order that he may behold the world in its truth. How great a contrast lies here between the wisdom of Buddha and Paul's words: “Not I, but Christ in me!”—words which express a consciousness that places man in the world as an individuality! The Buddhist says: “Man has descended from spiritual heights because the world has urged him downwards; therefore a world that has implanted in him the thirst for existence must be overcome. He must leave this world!” But the Christian says: “It is not the fault of the world that I am as I am. Mine is the fault!” The Christian stands in the world acknowledging that beneath his ordinary consciousness a power is at work which once gave him a clairvoyant picture-consciousness. Man “sinned” and lost this spiritual vision. For this he must make amends if he would reach his goal. In later life a man does not feel it unjust that he should suffer from the faults of youthful actions committed in a different consciousness. Equally, he should not feel it an injustice that he should atone in his present state for an act arising out of an earlier consciousness. This former consciousness he no longer possesses, for his intellect and reason have usurped its place. Atonement is only possible when the will arises in man to press forwards with his present Ego-consciousness, to that higher state described in Paul's words: “Not I, but Christ in me!” The Christian should say: “I have descended into conditions other than those ordained for me from the beginning. I must re-ascend—not with the help of the Ego I now possess but through a power which can live within me and lead me beyond my human Ego. This I can only do if Christ works in me, leading me to behold the world in its reality and not in illusion. The forces which have brought illness and death into the world can be overcome by what Christ fulfils in me.”

The innermost heart of Buddhism only reveals itself when we compare it with Christianity. Then we realise the words of Lessing in his Education of the Human Race: “Is not all Eternity mine?” That is to say: If I use the opportunities of successive embodiments to bring the Christ Power to life within me, I shall reach at last the sphere of the Eternal. This has hitherto eluded me because I have covered myself with a veil.

Reincarnation shines with a new radiance in the sunlight of Christianity and will indeed in the future penetrate Christian culture more and more deeply as an occult truth. This however is not the point at issue. The point is that the essential attitude of Buddhism makes the world responsible for maya or illusion, while the Christian holds himself, as man, responsible—knowing that the path to “redemption” lies in his own innermost being. In the Christian sense, redemption is also a “resurrection” because the Ego is raised to a higher Ego whence it has descended. The Buddhist believes in the “original sin” of the world and seeks liberation from the world. The Christian's conception is an historical one, for human life is seen as linked both with an event of a prehistoric past and with a future event through which he may reach a point where his whole life will be illuminated by the Being of Christ.

Thus Christianity does not point to successive Buddhas, recapitulating more or less the same truths through the successive epochs, but to a unique event occurring in the course of human evolution. While the Buddhist pictures his Buddha sitting under the Bodhi tree, rising to enlightenment as an isolated individual, the Christian looks to Jesus of Nazareth, into whom the Spirit of the Cosmos descended. The enlightenment of the Buddha under the Bodhi tree—the Baptism by John in Jordan—these two pictures stand clearly before us. Buddha sits under the Bodhi tree in the solitude of the soul. Jesus of Nazareth stands in the waters of Jordan and the very Spirit of the Cosmos descends into his inner being—the Spirit in the image of the Dove.

The Buddha deed contained for his followers the message: “Quench the thirst for existence; tear thyself away from earthly existence and follow Buddha to realms which no earthly words can describe!” The Christian realises that from the Deed of Christ flows redemption from the original sin of man, and he feels: If the influx of the spiritual world behind the physical grows as strong within me as it was in Christ Himself, I shall carry into my future incarnations a force that will enable me to cry with St. Paul, “Not I, but Christ in me!” And so I shall rise to the spiritual world whence I descended.

Deeply moving in this light are the words of Buddha to his intimate disciples: “Page after page I look back upon my former lives as upon an open book; I see how in life after life I built a material body wherein my Spirit dwelt as in a temple. Now I know that this body in which I have become Buddha, is the last.” And referring to Nirvana, whither he was to pass, he said: “The beams are breaking, the posts are giving way; the material body has been built for the last time and will now be wholly destroyed.” Compare these words with an utterance of the Christ recorded in the Gospel of St. John. Christ indicates that He is living in an outer body: “Destroy this Temple and in three days I will build it up again.” Here we have exactly the opposite conception, for it can be thus interpreted: “I shall accomplish a deed that will make fruitful and living all that from God—from primeval humanity—flows into this world and into us.” These words indicate that the Christian, through repeated earthly lives, comes to cry in truth, “Not I, but Christ in me!” We must however understand that the re-building of this Temple has an eternal significance in that it points to the in-pouring of the Christ Power into all who share in the collective evolution of mankind. There can be no repetition of the Christ Event in the course of evolution. The true Buddhist assumes a repetition of earthly epochs, a succession of Buddhas having each a fundamentally similar mission, but the Christian looks back to the Fall of Man and must point also to a further and unique event—the Mystery of Golgotha and man's redemption from the Fall.

There have been times in the past, and indeed in our own days, when men have looked for a renewal of the Christ Event; but such an expectation can only arise from a misunderstanding of the basic facts of man's historical progress. True history must take its start and pursue its course from a central point. Just as there must be one equilibrating point on a pair of scales, so in “history” there must be one event to which both the past and the future point. To imagine that the Christ Event could be repeated is as meaningless as to suppose there could be two focal points in a balance. Eastern wisdom speaks of a succession of similar individualities, the Buddhas, and herein lies the difference between the Eastern and the Western conceptions of the universe, for the Christ Impulse is a unique event and to deny this is to deny an historical progress in evolution—that is, to have a false idea of history.

The consciousness that the individual is indissolubly bound up with humanity as a whole, that not mere repetition but a great purpose rules throughout the course of evolution is Christian in the deepest sense and cannot be separated from Christianity. Human progress inheres in the fact that an older Eastern conception has evolved into a new one. Man has advanced from thinking that the wheels of world-events roll on in an endless repetition to the belief that there is meaning and an onward-flowing significance in the changing events of human existence.

Thus Christianity first gives reality to the doctrine of repeated earthly lives. For now we say that man passes through repeated lives on earth in order that the true meaning of human life may again and again be implanted in him, each time as a fresh experience. Not only the isolated individual strives upwards, for a yet deeper meaning lies in the striving of humanity as a whole, and we ourselves are bound up with this humanity. No longer feeling himself united with a Buddha who urges liberation from the world, man, gazing at the central spiritual Sun, at the Christ Impulse, grows conscious of his union with One Whose Deed has balanced the event symbolised in the “Fall.”

Buddhism can be best described as the sunset of a mode of thought that was nearing its decline but flamed into a mighty afterglow when Gautama Buddha appeared. This is not to honour the Buddha less; we revere him as the great Spirit who once brought to man a teaching pointing to the past, and the sense of union with a primeval wisdom. The Christ Impulse points with the hand of power to the future, and must live with ever increasing strength in the soul till man realises that not redemption but resurrection—the “transfiguration” of material existence can alone give meaning to man's earthly life.

Concepts or dogmas are not the only driving forces in life, though many may feel more drawn to Buddhism than to Christianity. Rather are the essentials such impulses, perceptions and feelings as give meaning to human evolution. There is indeed something of a Buddha-mood to-day in many souls, drawing them towards Buddhism. Goethe could not feel this mood, for through his recognition that the Spirit which is the source of the human Spirit permeates also all external things, he could greatly love life. During his first stay in Weimar, freeing himself from all narrowness and prejudice, he closely studied the outer world. He passed from plant to plant, from mineral to mineral, seeking behind all these that Spirit whence the Spirit of man descends, and with this all-pervading Spirit he sought to unite himself. Goethe once said to his pupil Schopenhauer: “All your splendid conceptions will be at war with themselves directly they pass into other minds.” Schopenhauer's motto can be expressed in his own words: “Life is full of perplexity. I try to make it easier by contemplation.” Trying to find an explanation of the origin of existence he turned naturally to Buddhism, and his ideas assumed a Buddhistic colouring.

In the course of the nineteenth century the different branches of culture yielded such great and mighty results that the human mind did not feel able to assimilate the mass of scientific achievements pouring in from external research. The sense of helplessness grew greater and greater before the overwhelming mass of scientific facts. True, this world of facts tallies in a wonderful way with Spiritual Science, but we see at the same time that thought in the nineteenth century was not equal to coping with it. Man began to realise that his faculties of knowledge could not assimilate all the facts nor could his mind gauge them. And so he began to seek a philosophy or a world-conception that did not attempt to wrestle with all the facts of the outer world. In contrast to this, Spiritual Science takes its start from the deepest principles and experiences of spiritual knowledge; it is able to compass and elaborate all the facts brought to light by outer science and to show how the Spirit lives in outer reality. Now many people do not like this, So far at least as knowledge is concerned, they draw back from the investigation of the world of facts and strive to reach a higher stage merely in the inner being, by a development of soul. This has led to an “unconscious Buddhism” which has been in existence for some time now. We can find traces of it in the philosophies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. When such people—and they are really unconscious Buddhists—come into contact with Buddhism, their longing for ease makes them feel more readily drawn to this mode of thought than to Spiritual Science. For Spiritual Science deals with the whole mass of facts, with the knowledge that Spirit manifests in them all.

It is really, therefore, an element of unbelief and paralysis of will, born of a feebleness of spiritual knowledge, that awakens the attraction to Buddhism to-day. Whereas the Christian conception of the universe—as it lived in Goethe, for instance—demands that man should not give way to his own weakness and speak of “boundaries of knowledge,” but rather feel that something within him can rise above all illusion and lead to truth and freedom. True, a certain amount of resignation is demanded here, but not the resignation which shrinks back before “boundaries of knowledge.” In the Kantian sense resignation means that man is altogether unable to penetrate the depths of the universe. This is a resignation born of weakness, but there is another kind whereby man can say with Goethe: “I have not yet reached the stage where the world can be known in its truth, yet I can evolve to it.” This resignation leads him to the stage where he can bring to birth the “higher man”—the Christ-man. He is resigned because he knows that for the moment he has not reached this highest level of human life. This indeed is a “heroic” resignation, for it says: “We pass from life to life with the feeling that we exist, and we know as we look towards the future that in the repetition of earthly existence all Eternity is ours.”

And so two great streams of thought can be seen in human evolution. The one is represented by Schopenhauer who says: “This world with all its suffering is such that we can only know man's real position through the works of great painters. They portray figures whose asceticism brought something like freedom from earthly existence, who are already lifted above terrestrial life.” According to Schopenhauer, the greatness of this liberated human being consists in the fact that he is able to look back upon his earthly existence and feel: This bodily covering is now nothing but an empty shell and has no significance for me. I strive upwards, in anticipation of the state I shall attain when earthly existence has been conquered and I have overcome all that is connected with it. Herein is the great liberation—when nothing remains to remind me in the future of my earthly existence. Such was Schopenhauer's conception, permeated as he was with the mood Buddhism had brought into the world. Goethe, stimulated by a purely Christian impulse, looks out upon the world as Faust looks out upon it. And if we in our time rise above external trivialities, though realising that our works will perish when the earth has become a corpse—we too can say with Goethe: We learn from our experiences on earth; what we build on earth must perish, but what we acquire in the school of life does not perish. Like Faust, we look not upon the permanency of our works but upon their fruits in the eternity of the soul, and gazing at horizons wider than those of Buddhism, we can say with Goethe: “Aeons cannot obliterate the traces of any man's days on earth.”—

“Es kann die Spur von meinen Erdentagen
Nicht in Aeonen untergehen!”

You may have noticed that the lecture today on “The Human Soul and the Animal Soul” is to be followed by another in a week's time on “The Human Spirit and the Animal Spirit.” The reason why spirit and soul must be dealt with in two separate lectures will not become completely clear until the next lecture has been given. In the meantime let it be emphasized that when life and existence are viewed in the light of spiritual science, the task is in one respect more difficult than it is in modern science as we know it today, where concepts and ideas which—if things are to be truly comprehended—must be kept separate, are thrown together. And it will be realized that the riddles connected with soul and spirit in animal and in man cannot be solved unless the distinction between soul and spirit is clear and unambiguous.

When we speak of “soul” in the sense of spiritual science, the idea of inwardness, of inner experience, is always bound up with this concept. And when we talk of “spirit” with reference to the world around us, we are clear that in everything we can see or with which we can be confronted, there is a manifestation of spirit. Man would find himself involved in a strange self-contradiction were he not to take for granted the presence of spirit in all the phenomena of existence around him. Without falling into disastrous self-contradiction, nobody can have an intelligent grasp of the external world unless he admits that what he eventually finds in his own spirit concerning this external world—the concepts and ideas he acquires in order to understand outer phenomena—has something to do with the things themselves. If when a man believes he has learned anything from the concepts he has formed about the things of the outer world, he will not admit that there lives in these concepts something that is contained in the things themselves, he can never advance to knowledge—if he is to be true to himself and understand the nature of his own acts of cognition. He alone can speak of knowledge in the real sense who says to himself: “What I can ultimately discover and retain, what I can bring to realization in my spirit in acts of knowledge, must be contained, primarily, in the things themselves. And insofar as I take something into my spirit from the things of the world, no matter to which kingdom they belong, then in all kingdoms I must presuppose the existence of spirit.”

This acknowledgment, of course, will not always be forthcoming. But it can only fail to be made when a man has given way to the self-contradiction referred to above. Therefore in speaking of “spirit” we realize that it reveals itself in all worlds, and we try to understand how it pours into, becomes manifest, in these worlds. We speak differently of “soul.” We speak of “soul” when the spiritual—that which we assimilate with our intellect, our reason, and through which we cognize things—when a being experiences the spirit inwardly. We ascribe soul to a being which not only takes in but inwardly experiences spirit, creates out of the spirit. Thus we speak of the soul only when spirit is active in a being confronting us. In this sense we find spirit inwardly creative in man and in animal.

If one clings to current ideas it is easy to disavow many things and above all to disavow the results of spiritual investigation which make it clear that man is not a single-membered but a many-membered being. There are, of course, very many people today—one can well understand this, one can feel with them and discern what is in their minds—who, from their point of view, have reason to be skeptical when it is said as the outcome of spiritual investigation that man must be thought of as composed not only of the physical body that is perceived through the senses and investigated by science, but also of a higher body, the so-called “etheric body” or “life-body”—which is not to be associated with the hypothetical ether of physics. Equally, according to spiritual science, there is a third member of the human being; namely, the astral body; and also a fourth member, the “Ego,” the “I.”

If the existence of these members is not acknowledged, it is extremely easy, from the standpoint of modern scientific research, to deny the validity of what is stated by spiritual science; it is easy because before the validity of these things can be recognized the whole character and method of spiritual-scientific research must to some extent be understood.

To the spiritual investigator himself, these four members of the human being—physical body, etheric or life body, astral body and ego—that is to say, one visible and three invisible, super-sensible, members—are realities because he has developed the faculties slumbering in his soul in such a way that he can perceive the “higher” bodies of man just as ordinary eyes can perceive the physical body. These “higher” members of man are realities, and as invisible members underlie the visible member, the physical body. But although they are perceptible realities only to the spiritual investigator, it may nevertheless be said that thinking can apprehend what is meant when reference is made to these higher members of man's being. In the etheric body the spiritual investigator recognizes the bearer of all the phenomena of life, of the living, in man. Death ensues when the physical body is deserted by the etheric or life body. Therefore the spiritual investigator sees in this etheric or life body that which prevents the physical body from coming under the sway of the physical and chemical forces active in the physical body. The moment death occurs the physical body becomes a combination of purely chemical and physical forces and processes. That the human body during life is extricated from the sway of these chemical and physical processes which take possession of it immediately [after] death occurs, is due to the etheric or life body. During life the etheric body wrenches the chemical and physical substances and forces from their purely physical operations and surrenders them again to these physical activities only at the moment of death.

It is very easy to argue against this, but these arguments fall to the ground when the matter is more deeply understood. Quite apart from the fact that the etheric body is a reality to the spiritual investigator, logical thinking will itself disclose that a living organism is inconceivable without the existence of an etheric or life body. Therefore in spiritual science we ascribe an etheric body also to the plants. We say: Whereas man has still higher super-sensible members—the astral body and the “I”—the plant has only physical body and etheric body; and a mineral, as we see it in the outer world, consists of physical body only.

Of the animal we say that an astral body is membered in the physical body and etheric body—associating with these terms for the time being nothing beyond what has just been said.

In the astral body, the spirit which, in the crystal, for example, produces the structure, becomes inward, inwardly and organically formative. In an animal the sense organs, the functions of the animal soul, arise out of the inner organization itself. Whereas in the mineral the spirit expends itself in elaborating the form, it remains inwardly alive in the animal. And we speak of this inner, living activity, this existence of the spirit within the animal organization itself, as an activity of the astral body. But of man we say that in him the astral body is also permeated by an “I,” an ego, and we shall presently see what significance this has for human life.

What do we really mean when we speak of “spirit”? We ascribe to spirit that reality which we ourselves experience, as it were, in our intelligence. Through our intelligence we execute one thing or another; we bring the forces of different beings into an ensemble. This creative intelligence of ours has a particular characteristic. In that it enters into us in temporal existence, and is a creative force, we form a concept of intelligence, of reason, of creative intelligence, and then we look at the universe around us.—We should have to be very shortsighted before we could possibly ascribe intelligence, all that we call “spirit,” to ourselves alone. The incapacity to penetrate the riddles of existence is due, fundamentally, to the fact that man is nevertheless prone to ascribe intelligence to himself alone and can never answer the question: How comes it that I am able to apply intelligence to existence. But when we look around us and see that the things of space and time manifest in such a way that our intelligence can apprehend the existence of law, then we say: What lives within us as intelligence is also outspread in space and time, is actively at work in space and time. When we look at the lifeless realm of nature, we say that there the spirit is, as it were, frozen into matter, that our intelligence can apprehend, can lay hold of what comes to expression in the forms, in the law-determined workings of matter—and thereby we have in our intelligence a kind of reflection of the spirit weaving and working through the world. If we thus contemplate the spirit in the great universe, and then compare the way in which it is frozen, as it were, in the lifeless realm of existence with the way it confronts us in the animal, we say to ourselves: If we look at any particular animal, we see before us a self-enclosed existence, creative in the same way as the spirit outspread in space and time is creative. And a feeling will dawn in us of why those who knew what they were doing called this spirit working actively in the animal, the “astral body.” They turned their eyes to the great universe through which the stars move in their courses and which men apprehend through their intelligence, and they said: “The spirit lives in the ordering of the universe and in a single animal organism we see a certain conclusion, we see the spirit confined within the space bounded by the animal's skin.” That which is active in the animal and is identical with what is outspread in space and time, they designated as the “astral body” in the animal organism.

Now between a dim feeling of the kinship of what comes to expression in the animal with what is spread out in space and time, and the knowledge resulting from strict investigation carried out by spiritual science, there is a long, long path. But this feeling is a trustworthy guide and it will enable many a man, before he himself is capable of this investigation, to perceive the truth of what the spiritual investigator says. When we observe how this spirit which with wonder and awe we see outspread in time and space, works in the animal, we can say: In the animal we see springing forth from its very organism the spiritual activity which is made manifest in all the laws of spatial and temporal existence. There is no need to study strange or rare phenomena, for those lying close at hand will suffice. A man of discernment need not go far field to perceive how, from the activity of animals, there go forth workings of the spiritual which are also to be discovered in the whole range of existence.—When he sees the wasp building its nest, he says to himself: There I can see intelligence springing forth as it were, from the animal organization itself; the intelligence which I perceive out yonder in the cosmos when I direct my own intelligence to the laws of existence, that same intelligence I perceive in the spirit that is working in the animal organization. Observing the activity of this spirit in the animal organization—no matter where—he will say with truth: This spirit that is active in the animal organization, this inwardness of the spirit in the animal, far surpasses what man is able to produce in the way of intelligence! An example lying near to hand has often been mentioned.—What a long time man has had to wait in the course of his existence before his own intelligence rendered him capable of producing paper! Think of the forces of intelligence which man was obliged to apply and master in his own soul life before he was able to produce paper. You can read in any simple textbook of history what a great event it was when men succeeded in making paper. But the wasps have been able to do it for thousands of years! For what is to be found in the wasps' nest is exactly the same as what man produces as “paper.”

So we see unmistakably that what flows out of man's intelligence in his struggle for existence, springs from the animal organism with full vigour of life. But as people generally go the wrong way to work, they have been indulging for a long time in strange speculation as to whether the animal is intelligent or not intelligent—never noticing that the essential point has been ignored. For the question cannot be whether the animal is or is not intelligent, but whether in all that it accomplishes, the animal unfolds what man can perform only through his intelligence. Then the answer can be given that in the animal there is an inwardly creative and powerful intelligence, operating directly out of animal life. And it will then be possible to have an inkling of what the spiritual investigator observes in the astral body and which he sees inwardly and outwardly active in the animal, in that the intelligence is creative in the organism itself, and creates from out of the organism. The spiritual investigator speaks of the astral body when there are present in the organism, organs which, through their activity, accomplish something that man can accomplish only through his intellect. And we see how this inner, spiritual activity is distributed as it were among the different animals, how it comes out in the faculties and skill of the various animal species. One species can do this, another that—and this is due to differentiation of the astral body in the various animal species.

We come now to consideration of the individual activity of the spirit in the animal organism. This inner working of the spirit in an organism, this experiencing of the spirit in its activity, is what we call soul experience. Now when we study this soul experience without bias or preconceptions, we find that it develops quite differently in man and in the animal. A great deal has been and is still being said on the subject of instinct in the animal and conscious activity in man. It would be well, in this connection, to cling less to words and to keep the real point more in mind—to try to understand the nature of instinct. Our study has already shown that instincts may far outstrip human intelligence, and that the qualities here brought into evidence are not to be connected with the word “instinct” in its ordinary sense. Man is so ready to ask in his infinite pride: “Am I not greatly superior to the animal?” But he would also do well to ask: “In what respect have I remained behind the animal?” Then he would find that he has remained behind the animal in respect of many faculties—faculties which are innate in the animal, but which man, if he is to develop them himself, has to acquire and master by dint of effort.

Man comes into existence at birth as a helpless being, whereas when the animal is born, natural forces abound in its organism and it brings with it as inherited “capital,” as it were, what enables it to live as it has to live. We do not, of course, ignore the fact that, to begin with, the animal too has much to learn.—The chick is able to peck as soon as it is born but cannot at once distinguish between what is good or not good for it, between what it can or cannot digest. But that is only for a short time. The point is that certain faculties of the animal come into evidence in a way which makes it obvious that they lie in the line of heredity, they are truly innate, and they emerge at the proper time. The fact that some faculty does not begin to function until a particular time is no proof that it could have been acquired only after cultivation. The whole organization of animals and also of plants makes it obvious that something which lies in the line of heredity can emerge only when the organization of the being in question has already been in existence for a considerable time. Just as a human being gets his second teeth without having to wait until he himself acquires them by his own efforts, so it is with certain faculties and abilities of the animal. These faculties come into evidence only later, but for all that they belong to heredity. Take the hermit crab as an example. When it has lived for a time it has the urge to search for a snail shell, because the back of its body is too soft to be a firm support. This search for a snail shell in order to have protection for the back of its body is undertaken at a definite time out of the urge of self preservation, but then it occurs with certainty—that is to say, it is innate in the very organization of the hermit crab. Thus the moment the animal comes into existence we can perceive the whole circuit of its life in broad outline; the manner in which the animal is to develop is laid down at the moment of its birth and is then further elaborated. In this process of development and elaboration we recognize the activity of the spirit, and in the way in which the animal participates in the process we recognize its life of soul.

If the expression is not misunderstood, one could call the soul life of the animal an “enjoyment of the spirit within the organism,” and if we keep this idea in mind it will be a great help in characterizing this soul life. But then we shall see—for the time being we will confine ourselves to the higher animals—that this experiencing of spiritual activity by the animal is largely expended inwardly, that it lives itself out inwardly. Soul experience in the animal consists in the hankerings of its organs, in the cravings of its organs—and especially in the activity of those organs that are directed to the inner life. An inkling of how the animal as it were “enjoys” the work of the spirit within it can be gained—although full clarity can be reached only by spiritual investigation—by observing an animal engaged in the process of digestion. While an animal is digesting its food, that is to say, is experiencing the inner activity of the spirit, it has its greatest feelings of well being. In its soul, the animal experiences the inner, bodily reality in which the spirit is directly at work. Thus in the animal kingdom, soul experience is in a certain way bound up with the bodily nature. It is a delightful sight to see a herd of cattle lying down to digest immediately after grazing and to observe the soul life that is kindled in each animal. This experience is even more intense in animals which sink into a kind of digestive sleep. They are then experiencing the activity of the spirit in their organs.

In the animal, the activity of the spirit is closely knit to the organization. In that the spirit has built up a certain sum total of organs, the animal has to bring to expression the manner in which the spirit has worked in and is manifest in the organs; and it is not possible for the animal to go beyond the bounds of the spirit manifesting in the organs. When we observe the outer, psychic life functions, the outer life processes of the animal in this or that species, we see how closely the expressions of soul life are bound up with its inner organization, that is to say, with what has been wrought in the animal by the spirit. If we notice under what conditions an animal shows fear, we can say: When it shows fear, this is due to its particular organization. Again, when an animal shows a tendency to thieve, we can say the same.

What has here been said from the standpoint of spiritual science has been well put in the essay entitled “Is the Animal a Being of Intelligence?” by Zell, a writer of great value in the realm of research into the animal soul. Although this short essay is written from a different standpoint, it gives most useful examples of how psychic experience in animals is bound up with their organization, and it can be taken as confirmation of what the spiritual investigator discovers from quite another side.

Soul life in the animals is graduated in many variations in the different animals because, in creating the organs, the spirit has in each case given them a particular stamp. But we see that the spiritual activity of creation—which is anchored in the astral body—expends itself in organic formations, in what the animal actually brings with it into the world. In creating these specific formations, the spirit expends itself. The animal brings with it into the world what it is able to bring and what existence allows it to experience. It can go very little beyond this. This is evidence that the spirit has spent itself, has poured itself out, in the fashioning of the organs. In the formation of the organs, however, the species of animal is revealed to us. Therefore to the question: “What is it that the animal enjoys and experiences in its life of soul?” we can answer: From birth until death the animals' experiences are determined by its species.—It experiences in its soul life, and from out of its own organism, what it has been given by the spirit to accompany it into existence.

Goethe was one who reflected deeply about the life of the animals and of man and he wrote these fine words: “The animals are instructed by their organs—so said the men of old. I add to that: men, too, but they have the advantage of being able to instruct their organs afresh.” (Letter to Wilhelm von Humboldt, 17th March, 1802.)

These are words of great profundity. Of what is an animal capable in life? What its organs make possible. And so an animal is nervous, courageous or cowardly, rapacious or gentle, according to how the spirit has poured itself into its organization. The creative activity of the spirit has poured itself into its organization. The creative activity of the spirit in its organs is mirrored in the soul life and soul experiences of the animal. This means that soul experience in the animal is confined within its species; it cannot go beyond the species, the genus; it experiences itself as species, as genus.

Contrast with this, man's life of soul. Man's life of soul as it comes to expression in his willing, his feeling, his thinking, in his cravings, his interests and in his intelligence, is something that when he enters existence at birth is not bestowed upon him by heredity and cannot be passed on by the man himself to his descendants. Far too little attention is paid to this latter fact. Yet it is of infinite importance, a fact upon which all observation of life should be based, and which may be put in somewhat the following way.—As soon as an animal or human being has acquired the power to reproduce his kind, the development of the etheric body is, to a certain point, complete. This etheric body has the power to bequeath what it contains within it to the descendants. But if a human being lives beyond this point he cannot bequeath to his descendants faculties which still remain to be developed. That is obvious. The moment a human being reaches puberty, he possesses all the faculties upon which hereditary transmission depends. Therefore faculties which remain capable of development after the time of puberty cannot be possessed by man in the same way as those which originated in the etheric body and can be transmitted by heredity. This is a cardinal truth of which sight must never be lost.

An important consideration in the study of human life is that from birth to death a man is capable of learning new languages, and what is equally significant is that if a man were to grow upon a distant, uninhabited island, he could not develop this faculty at all. The same applies to the faculty of forming concepts, and the development of the mental picture of the “I.” These are things which have nothing to do with heredity, and which cannot be transmitted by heredity, because they do not belong to the species or genus. In what does not belong to heredity, in faculties that remain capable of development beyond and apart form heredity, man has something that is not conditioned by the species or genus, but belongs to the individuality. And in the faculty of speech, in the possibility of forming ideas, and in the experience of the Ego concept, there lies what man himself so brings into the world that by means of it he instructs his organs afresh, teaching them what they have not yet received, but which they must acquire.

This is a “transaction” between the human being and the spirit, lying beyond the horizon of what he is able to experience. Its results cannot be transmitted nor received into the qualities which lie within the line of heredity. Man unfolds something which cannot flow into the species, which is removed from the species. Insofar as man is a generic being, he has inherited all the faculties accruing to him as a generic being, just as the animal has inherited them; only he does not inherit as much skill, as much spirit, as does the animal. There is still something besides, which man can acquire as individuality. And the life of the spirit connected with these non-inherited qualities, constitutes his soul experiences—which transcend those of the animal. In that man enjoys the fruits of his work and activity insofar as they are acquired in life through qualities that are not inherited, he unfolds a life of soul transcending that of the animal.

Man comes into existence with less skill than the animal. He is less skillful for the reason that the transaction with the spirit cannot be undertaken until some time after birth, whereas in the animal it has already been completed. Thus in its life of soul the animal enjoys what heredity can bequeath to it. That is to say, the soul life of the animal points to the past. And the moment we see the soul life of the animal passing into death, all that the animal can experience through its species also passes into death. Everything that is individual soul experience in the animal is something that has come to it from the past. In its existence the animal expends its life of soul and there is no basis for immortality. On the other hand, what is experienced in the animal soul lives on, ever and again, in the life of the species. Therefore in the sense of spiritual science we speak of a species—soul of the animal, which constantly arises anew, constantly lives on within the species. No one who desires clear concepts can deny the justification of this. The work of the spirit in the animal genus and species is experienced in the single animal individuality. But we see, too, that this experience points to the past, and that the very moment this past is exhausted, when the soul life must go towards death, towards its ending, the sunset glow begins.

It is different when, without preconceived ideas, we observe the soul life of man. There we see that when man is born, something comes with him that has not been expended in his organs; we see how he works further upon his organs, how he really teaches his organs. From this, however, we realize that in his individual life man is in direct interconnection with the spirit; he experiences in his life of soul not only what is transmitted to him by the past, but also what comes from outside to meet him in life, what is presented to him directly as spirit.

Thus man's life of soul is twofold: like the animal, his soul experiences the species to which he belongs as a human being; this he lives out as a being of the past, and it is this that goes forward to death when the spirit withdraws from the organs, when the organs begin to lignify, to wither away. But man's own dealings with the spirit do not belong to his organs; this is something that man has taken into his etheric body independently of the organs. Hence it is something that does not relegate him to the past that is inherited but is a seed for further life. In the measure in which we see that the inner man emancipates himself from his organs, that is to say, becomes individual, in that same measure we can say with logical truth that here we see the immortal part of man crystallize out of the bodily life.

So do we learn to feel that this grows in the human being, whereas in respect of what has been inherited he experiences the past in his life of soul. Thus there grows in man something that goes forward to the future that cannot be absorbed into the line of heredity. This is evident if we observe the life of soul in man and in animal. We see how closely the soul life of the animal is bound to its organism, how closely its faculties and skill, indeed all its experiences, are bound up with its organs and with its inherited characteristics. We can rightly observe the soul life of the animal only when we look for it in the self enjoyment of its bodily nature. That is the essential point. We see very little of the essential nature of an animal by watching the delight it takes in the outer world—but a great deal when we observe how it experiences its own digestion. The highest level of experience in the soul life of an animal lies within the boundaries of the organs. In its soul experiences the animal spends itself within its organization; and what remains to it for its outer life is significant for the animal only insofar as it can be experienced inwardly in its life of soul. It is of course the case—and this is also confirmed by the spiritual investigator—that the heights where the eagle passes its existence do give rise to experiences in its life of soul. But this experience lies in the activity of what lives in its organs and comes to expression within them. In man, soul experience emancipates itself from the inner enjoyment, the inner experiencing of the organs—and man has to pay the price for this. The animal has a certain security in its instincts; it knows which food is harmful and which is good for it. The animal injures itself very much less than it is injured by man. Animals are injured most of all when man keeps them in captivity. But in the freedom of nature, when the animal follows what is innate in its organism, its instincts are unerring, because it is so closely united with its organs. The human being, on the other hand, emancipates himself from his organs; and the consequence is that he can no longer directly adhere to what is good or bad for him. He becomes insecure. And whereas the animal displays passions that are in keeping with its organs, the human being unfolds passions which are possibly far more injurious and are not fitting for his organs. Whereas the spider spins its web with unerring certainty and it would be absurd to talk to it of reasoning, man is obliged to think a great deal before he can perfect any handiwork. For he can make great errors. Man's life of soul has emancipated itself from his bodily nature, but at a cost.

But man can unite with the spirit from the other side; he can receive into his soul what the spirit conveys to him. He is able to receive the spirit without the spirit having first to pour through the organs, through the bodily nature, whereas the animal is dependent upon how the spirit pours into its organs. The animal experiences within itself how the spirit flows into its organs. Man, on the other hand, wrests his organs away form the life of soul and thus experiences the direct inpouring of the spirit into his soul.

Once we have grasped what the spirit really is and how the spirit lives itself out within the soul, these things are of infinite significance. We shall, however, have to wait for the lecture on “Human Spirit and Animal Spirit” before they can be fully clarified. But when we think about the inner life of soul we get a feeling of the difference between man and animal if we contrast the inward bodily life of the animal soul with the outward bodily life of the human soul. Because of this outward bodily life, the human soul can become spiritually more inward. The fact that the human soul can delight in the things of the external world, can take in what the spirit in its external manifestations says to the soul, man owes to the circumstance that his soul has emancipated itself from the bodily nature, has separated from the inward bodily experience of the spirit and has gained the certainty of experiencing the spirit itself at the cost of uncertainty and lack of skill, of imperfectly developed instincts.

It is quite easy to say: How is it possible to speak of an animal “soul,” since “soul” implies the notion of inwardness and man cannot look into the inner life of another being. The people who base themselves on this glib objection are the very ones who refuse to listen to any talk of soul experience, because—so they contend—soul experience can only be “within ourselves” and can therefore be inferred in another being only by analogy. But if these things are taken as they really are and not talked about in the abstract, it is quite clear that the very way a being lives reveals what it actually experiences inwardly. Anyone who refuses to believe that a being lives according to what it experiences inwardly will be incapable of any real observation of the world. Admittedly, without demonstration, there is no absolute guarantee in direct observation that the animal experiences something in its life of soul when it shows pleasure in digesting. But a man who compares things in the world, and does not confine his observation to one phenomenon only, will soon recognize that there are many good reasons for speaking in this way. Once we have acquired a feeling of the difference of soul experience in the animal and in the human being, this feeling and perception will help us to understand the nature of soul life in the animal. Above all we shall feel with greater and greater clarity how man's life of soul is emancipated from spirit as a bodily experience. It is the spirit that creates the organs and works in the organism, building it into what it is, and when we speak of the building of the organs we are speaking of the spirit as it works in the etheric body. When the astral body inserts itself into the organization, this spirit can, under certain preconditions, be experienced in a particular way. If we take seriously what has been said above about physical body, etheric body and astral body, we can say: In human beings and animals the physical body is the lowest member of their being; the etheric body so fashions the chemical and physical substances that they become life processes. The etheric body lives within the physical body, comprises and embraces the chemical and physical processes. In all this lives the astral body, experiencing—as soul experience—everything that is going on in the etheric body. Thus the etheric body is the active, creative principle working on the physical body, and the astral body is that part of the animal or human being which experiences the deeds of the etheric body. Thus the physical body is united with the etheric body in the building up of the organs; and the etheric body is united with the astral body in the inner experiencing of this upbuilding and activity of the organs. Everything in the physical body, the etheric body, and the astral body is mutually related.

Now what is it that evokes soul experience of a particular kind? That which pours, as it were, over the whole inner organization in man and animal. We can best understand this particular kind of experience by observing it in certain circumstances. Is there anyone who is not familiar with the characteristic form of soul experience which is present only while the animal is growing and the size of its organs is increasing and which stops when growth is completed? What expresses itself there in the experience of exuberant energy is connected with certain work that is being performed by the etheric body on the physical body and is an indication that the work is proceeding in the proper way. But what stands out prominently in this condition is always present as a certain feeling of well being in the soul, a feeling of life, of comfort or discomfort; and this depends upon whether the etheric body has or has not command over the physical organization, is able to master it or not. If the etheric body is unable to assert itself properly in the physical organs, this expresses itself in the astral body in a feeling of discomfort. But if the activity of the etheric body can everywhere find access to the physical organs, if that activity can take effect with the help of the physical organs, this engenders the feeling of general well being in men—either in a subtler or cruder form. If indigestion occurs, this can only mean that the etheric body cannot carry out an activity which it ought to carry out. This makes itself manifest in the accompanying discomfort. Or let us suppose someone has so exhausted himself by thinking that the organ of the brain “goes on strike.” In such a case the etheric body is still able to think, but the brain is no longer able to participate. Then the thinking begins to cause headaches; and from there the discomfort spreads into the general feeling of life. This is particularly intensified when the part of the organ that is built up by the etheric body is completely disorganized. We say then: “It is as though the skin cannot expand when outer heat makes it want to expand,” or, “I feel as if a burning brand is being held to my head.” In such a case the etheric body is meeting with resistance. Not being absorbed or seized by external impressions, it then comes up against a physical body to which it is not adjusted, and this expresses itself in the astral body as a feeling of pain.

So we understand “pain” in the astral body by conceiving it as the expression of weakness of the etheric body in relation to the physical body. An etheric body that is in harmony with its physical body works back upon the astral body in such a way that the feeling of well being is an inner experience of health. On the other hand, an etheric body that is at odds with its physical body works back upon the astral body in such a way that pain and discomfort are bound to arise in it. Now we shall be able to realize that because in the higher animals—it will be better to speak of the lower animals in the next lecture—the life of soul is so intimately bound up with the bodily nature, this soul experience will be much more deeply felt—as will also be the case in a disordered body—than it can be in a disordered human body. Because the soul life of man is emancipated from the inner, bodily experience, pain that is merely due to bodily circumstances is far less torturing, it gnaws much less deeply into the soul than in the higher animals. We can also observe that bodily pain in children is a much keener psychic pain than in later life, because in the measure in which the adult human being becomes independent of his bodily organization, he finds in the qualities which arise immediately out of his soul, the means to struggle against bodily pain; whereas the higher animal, being so closely bound up with its bodily nature, feels pain with infinitely greater intensity than man. Those who maintain that human pain can be more intense than pain felt by the animals, are talking without foundation. Pain in the animal is far, far more deep-seated than purely bodily pain in man can ever be.

So we see that in rising above this bodily nature, man draws out something from the innermost depths of his being; namely, his “I”, his ego. That which he does not inherit, which can sustain its existence above and apart from the species, which he must develop more and more through his individuality—that pertains to the ego. It is this that must enter human existence; it cannot be imparted by heredity, for it proceeds from the human individuality which comes from the spiritual realms into existence at birth and after death returns again to the spiritual realms. Therefore we speak of a core of being in man which passes on from life to life, because we can apprehend it in actual existence, provided only that we observe life with unprejudiced eyes.

I have tried today to indicate how it can be established from direct experience that we may speak of a being in man who is not inherited but enters human existence from quite another side and when what man inherits is dissolved by death can pass into another spiritual existence. When further principles of spiritual science are understood, this needs no more explanation because spiritual investigation relies on direct vision and can bring from quite another side the proof and evidence for what was intended to be made clear today from experiences of everyday life. But it is also possible for spiritual science so to relate together these everyday experiences that they reveal to us that which can establish in man the hope—based upon observation of facts—of an enduring life of soul that transcends bodily existence.

So we see how observation of existence everywhere confirms the words of Goethe already quoted. Soul experience in the animal is enclosed within the circle of its organs. The organs are everywhere the masters, fashioned by the spirit in order that the animal can experience a soul life in keeping with its organs and is able to make use of them. Man, on the other hand, enters existence in such a way that his organs themselves give him no guidance upon what he must take from life and impress into his life of soul. But just here we find that which gives him his guarantee of immortality, that which is eternal because it cannot originate in heredity.

That is what Goethe meant by the words: “The animal is instructed by its organs, but man has the advantage of being able to instruct his organs afresh.” Anyone who understands this in the right way—that in the course of his existence man is capable of teaching his organs afresh—will say to himself: How a man teaches his organs becomes manifest in the life of soul and here his union with the spirit is revealed, a union that is indissoluble because it does not spend itself and does not come from the past but points the way to, and is the seed for, the future, the means whereby man can attain that which in his soul will engender the power to vanquish the old death in life that is ever and again renewed.

Let me in a few words recall some of the things dealt with in the last lecture. Particularly important for us were the views we were able to form, from immediate observation, concerning the difference between the human life of soul and that of the animals. We realized that the animal soul life may not be distinguished from that of man in such a way as to justify the assertion that man is superior to the animal in respect of certain spiritual attributes. To refute such a view we need only point to how certain achievements, obviously attained only by man struggling to a definite stage of intelligence, are brought about objectively within the animal world in the building of their dwellings and in the whole of their life. So that in what the animal does, in what it produces, in what it creates, we have exactly the same intelligent activity that is shown by man in the tools and products he makes. It might really be said: Into what the animal does there flows, and then congeals, the same intelligence that we find in man. Therefore we may not speak of animal soul and human soul by simply saying that the animal is to a definite extent behind man or man to a definite extent in advance of the animal.

When speaking of the soul—and we describe the soul life as the inner life, in contradistinction to the spirit life seen pre-eminently in formation and development—we referred to the fact that we discover how intimately bound up is the soul life of the animal with its own organization; and what the animal can experience in its soul appears to us as predetermined by its whole structure and the whole arrangement of its organs. Thus it must be said: the animal's life of soul is determined by the fashion of its organization, and in its soul life the animal lives, as it were, within itself. But the essential feature of man's life of soul lies in the human soul being emancipated to a high degree from the immediate organism, and in the fact that—I beg you not to misunderstand me, I mean relatively only—independently of the bodily organization he experiences the spirit as such, in the way we have understood it; in other words, that the human soul is able to surrender itself directly to the spirit.

If we now rise to the consideration of the spirit in man and in animal we shall have to start from the concepts and ideas developed in our consideration of the soul in man and animal; we shall have to concern ourselves rather more deeply with a phenomenon arising out of what was said last time; namely, that in the animal all spiritual achievements immediately connected with its organs and experienced in its soul have been implanted into, and bound up with, what is hereditary in its species. We may also say that there lives itself out in the animal's soul that which belongs to the species, and because this is hereditary the animal comes into existence with the predisposition towards all the activities conditioned by the spirit which can be experienced through its soul nature. Thereby the animal enters existence fully equipped, and bequeaths to its racial descendants its inherited characteristics which we may call an outpouring of the animal spirit. It is different with man who in his life of soul emancipates himself from his bodily organism. But because in the course of nature this is transmitted through lineal descent, he enters existence helpless, to a certain extent, where the functions that should serve him in life are concerned. On the other hand, however, this helplessness is the one thing that enables man to develop in soul and spirit. Thus we find it to be the most important thing for man that, when he enters life through birth, everything determined from without should remain indeterminate. With this we have indicated how we have to consider the relation of the spirit to the bodily nature in animal and man—the soul lying between the spirit and bodily nature. In the way the animal appears to us as member of a species, gradually attaining its instinctive aims in life, we have a direct activity of the spirit in the organic bodily nature. The organic body in which the animal experiences its life of soul is, as it were, the spirit that has entered reality. An immediate relation exists in the animal between spirit and body. And if we look at the animal, study it—whether superficially as a layman, or more thoroughly with all the facilities comparative anatomy and physiology or any other science can offer—we see everywhere in the animal form, in the conditions of animal life, congealed spirit being lived out in this way in the individual animal species. And the external form—the external life in the same way—is for us the direct imprint of what we call the spirit lying behind the animal, so that in the animal we have to look for the closest relation between spirit and bodily nature.

This is quite different when we come to man. And when we have to draw attention to the most important differences between man and animal, it is essential not to look for them too far afield. In considering things in the right way, what is most important lies so near that there is no need for us to enter into all manner of intimate details in the investigation. Observing man, we find something standing between spirit and bodily nature which we need not take into consideration in the animal. This is important. In the animal form and organization the spirit works as it were directly. In man it does not work directly; an intermediate member thrusts itself in, which can be very easily observed in life. As man confronts us when we observe him, this intermediate member which brings about a looser connection between spirit and bodily nature is expressed in what we call the self-conscious ego. I do not want to refer now to the way in which this self-conscious ego takes shape in the body; I wish only to say: In the way man appears to us, in the way he confronts us as a phenomenon of soul, this self-conscious ego stands between his spirit and his bodily nature. Certainly from the point of view of those who believe they are standing on the firm ground of natural science, it is child's play to find objections to the expression “self-conscious ego.” But, at the moment, we are wanting to follow up the way in which this self-conscious ego is inserted between the spirit and the bodily nature.

Here we find above all—we drew attention to this last time—that man is dependent on the life of his environment, of the world outside, in relation to his language, his way of thinking and also to the extent he has developed a consciousness of self. It is a generally recognized fact that man, if shut out from all contact with humanity, if obliged to grow up alone, would never arrive at speaking, nor definite thinking, nor consciousness of self; he would be forced to remain in the state of helplessness in which he was born. Thus we see that in the case of the animal all the activities necessary for animal life, for animal existence, come to it through heredity. And we see human activities arise in such a way that they may not be looked for in the line of heredity any more than, let us say, the original warmth necessary for hatching a hen's egg may be sought within the egg; it has to come to it from without. So we find that the things of which man has need for his development have to be acquired through something within him; whereas in the case of the animal it is imprinted into him by the spirit. Thus there remain open to man certain possibilities of development into which he takes up definite organizing forces through his self-conscious ego. For, naturally, no one will doubt that changes in the organization are bound up with man's gradual acquisition of speech, thinking, consciousness of self, and the activities connected with these; so that tendencies possessed by the animal from the beginning through hereditary activities, are taken up by man from the environment, just as warmth is taken up by the hen's egg that is being hatched; in other words, it is introduced from outside. Thus possibilities of development remain open to man as regards the inter-working of the environment. Naturally Spiritual Science does not adopt the view that man could achieve anything without organs. So we must be clear that everything working into man changes his organization. If we investigate the human organization closely, we see that this organization is actually changed by forces coming from without, which have to reach man by way of his ego. And then we see something else—if we consider man as he takes his place in the world, to become what he is able to become through speech, through his way of thinking and his consciousness of self, we grasp him as it were at one pole, at one end. We must, however, grasp him also at the other end. If we would penetrate him with thought, this is not so easy a matter. But it is in fact necessary to lay hold of man's other end.

Man actually enters the world as a helpless being. It is perfectly easy to see what we are dealing with here, but not so easy to make it the subject of observation. In the course of his life the human being has to do something that the animal is spared. This is done by the human being when he learns to walk, or, rather, learns to stand. Connected with this learning to stand, a great deal in human life lies concealed; namely, the gaining control over what we may call our bodily equilibrium. If we carefully study the design for the animal's organization, the organization of its structure, we find that the animal is so organized that a certain balance is imprinted into it making it possible for it to carry on its life. It is so formed that his body is endowed with a firm balance. It constitutes man's helplessness, from one point of view, and, from another, his advantage over the animal, that he has to make the effort to acquire balance with the help of his ego. There is no question here of comparing man with the animals nearest to him. Where the comparative anatomy of all the individual organs is concerned, it would be childish were Spiritual Science to assume a gulf between man and the animals nearest him. But whereas in the design of the animal organization there lies a predetermined balance, to human beings the possibility is open to acquire this balance after birth; but still more possibilities are open to them. The direction of its movement is laid down for the animal through the predetermined organization imprinted into him—if one may use the word imprinted; whereas for man the possibility is open to develop, within limits, his own sense of movement. Other things too are open to the human being, and we shall come back to the various manifestations of this. It is open to man to be able to imprint life itself into his organization. It is certainly possible to speak of this imprinting of life into the living being. Who with any mind for these questions would fail to notice that the organization of a duck comes to expression in plastic form, or that this is also the case where the elephant is concerned? Who would fail to see how the skeleton, if one looks at it, as distinct from the single animal species, discloses riddle upon riddle; how life is as it were discharged into the form, is caught up into the form, appearing to us as if frozen there? Here, too, man has come in a certain way to pour life into his own form. We need therefore only make the preliminary remark that in studying an animal form with open mind, we are interested far more in the universal, the general, what has to do with species, bestowing little thought on the individual forms. What interests us in man's skeleton is the noblest organ, the structure of his skull, above all, its plastic art. And in every human being this structure is different, because it is open to what lies at the basis of the human ego—to what is individual; whereas in the animal it is what belongs to the species that comes to expression. Thus when we lay hold of man by his other end we find that during certain periods of life he has full scope for imprinting into himself his sense of balance, the sense of his own movement and his whole sense of life. The interesting point here is that at the beginning of human life we are able to watch this working of the spirit in man, this imprinting of the spirit into form and movement; how in the struggle for upright gait, in the struggle to acquire a sense of one's own movement, in the imprint of bodily form, these forces are really active and coming to expression. Then at a certain age, however, the possibility ceases for the further working of the forces which in childhood had free play. At a certain period of life, in regard to the activity we have been describing, these forces close down. But when they are really within the individual man, having finished their work in a particular sphere, they cannot at once vanish; they come to meet us at a later time in life, and at this later time we should be able to show that these forces are there in human life as realities.

Now in fact we find these forces clearly arising in man again in a quite characteristic way for the progress of the spirit. What is accomplished by man in the development of his sense of balance, we find again in his later life, when he applies the same force to the development of his gestures. Gesture is something actually leading us into the deeper parts of the human organization, insofar as the spirit lives in man. And by bringing what is within him to expression in gesture, man has recourse to the same force he applied to the effort of gaining a sense of balance, for the setting up of a certain balanced poise. What man developed manifestly through learning to walk and stand, appears in later life in a finer, deeper, more intimate form when, instead of coming to physical expression, it is expressed more through the soul, in gesture. Hence we feel ourselves really intimately within man when we confront him and can let his gestures, the whole manner in which what is within him is expressed in outer movement, work upon us. In this respect every man is actually more or less of a gifted artist when confronting his fellows. For if we would penetrate to the finer psychological influences passing from man to man, we should see what an infinite amount depends—without it rising into consciousness—upon how gestures taken as a whole play upon a man. This need not enter into the broad light of external consciousness, yet it enters the soul and comes to expression when external consciousness sums up a host of intimate details, played out beneath the surface of consciousness, into everyday words such as “I like him,” “I don't like him”, or “I like her”, “I don't like her”.

We can also see how the forces organizing individual movement work on in later life. This we see when, passing from the gesture expressed in movement, we turn more to where the inner being of man may be found poured into the external form, but still in movement, in mimicry and in the physiognomy. There in fact what begins as individual sense of movement works on further, giving scope to the human being to go on developing out of helplessness, and then keeping this helplessness in check. When we notice how man, in his mien and in the play of his physiognomy, keeps his external self in continuous movement through his inner self, we find how what actually first appears in the organization more as a mere expression of bodily activity, then appears rather as poured into the soul-nature and intensified. What worked more directly in the earlier days of the human being is caught up more within him, in the self-conscious ego, to pour itself then from within outwards into the bodily regions; whereas to begin with self-conscious ego and spirit had, as it were, come to terms.

If we now see that what justifiably interests us in man is the particular form of his skull, we have to say: In this particular form of the skull of man something indeed is also expressed of his innermost being. Everyone knows that, broadly, this is the case, and that in the form of the brow, in the form of the skull, of each human being, we shall always find individual differences in men's inner nature. It goes without saying that we are not speaking here of those spheres of the spiritual life which are emancipated from the soul bound up with the body. There exists, however, as a certain ground work what may be described as an expression of the spirit that has become soul—what is wrongly developed in the sciences called phrenology, craniology, and things of that kind. It is above all essential for us to be clear that the forms coming to expression in the human skull are not general but individual to man, as he confronts us as a moral, intellectual being. When we begin to generalize, we fail to understand the whole connection. From this aspect, all phrenology practiced in this way is mischievous materialism. It should never be counted as science in its legitimate sense, for that it cannot be. What confronts us in the formation of the human skull is individual, different in each man. And the way in which we seek to form an opinion of each man in accordance with these characteristics must also be individual, just as our attitude is individual to each work of art. As there are no universal, fixed rules, as we have to take up our own attitude to each work of art, that is a work of art, if we consider according to universal rules what in an artistic sense lies hidden in man, we shall come to some kind of judgment but a judgment quite different from the ordinary one. And the following will make itself felt—that in observing the human skull we shall see how the spirit works in direct relation to the form, how forces of the spirit, of the ego, from within outwards push against the form of the skull which encases what works from without inwards. Only when we have a feeling for this working from without inwards and from within outwards, can we enter into what meets us in the form of the human skull that envelops the brain.

Thus, direct observation show us how in reality the spirit lives itself out in the animal forms. And since the animal's soul life is immediately bound up with its organization, the instinctive life being an expression of this organization, it will always be possible to see why some particular instinct or impulse must appear in the animal as part of its life of feeling. On the other hand, it may be said of man that in him we also see the spirit working on his organization, but from within; we see, too, however, that what lies at the basis of the self-conscious ego is in opposition to the organization and forces its way into it, at the same time forcing its way into the work of the spirit.

Now let us consider man in a rather different way. In him we see the capacity for speech—which is quite obvious; then a definite way of thinking and a certain consciousness of self as the result of education. These capacities arise through man's contact with the external world. But it is not enough simply to take things on trust; we must realize that something far more profound lies at the basis of speech, of the way of thinking and of the consciousness of self brought about through the environment. What lies at their basis is the fact that man possesses three senses not found in the animal. The word sense has to be taken literally, but let us keep to fact and not to words. In the realm of speech-sound, of concept and of what we call ego being, the animal shows itself quite incapable of taking things in, in the way of human beings. Of all the senses, the animal gets as far as that of tone. For outer perception this is for the animal a kind of zenith. Its sense faculty rises to tone. But beyond that no possibility is offered by its general organization for an understanding of speech-sound, concept or ego being as in other beings. The animal recognizes its own species, the dog the dog, the elephant another elephant, and so on. But no spiritual investigator would ascribe to animals any perception of their own ego being. And materialistic investigation will never succeed in producing any proof of a perception of ego being in the animal organization; thus scientific investigation should not, and spiritual investigation will not, be in doubt about this.—So we see in man that the possibilities of development remain open where perception of the inner nature of sound, the inner nature of concept and idea, and the inner nature of the ego being are concerned. Were the possibility of development in these three activities closed to man, the other forces I named would have no nourishment pouring from within, and would be unable to find expression. Animals have no organs to make it possible for them to develop in these three ways. For all that man shows in life as superiority over the animal ears the imprint of what is within him as capacity for expression—his conception of sound, his conception of concepts, and his conception of the ego, of the ego consciousness. Meanwhile we find in the animal the expression of how the spirit is poured into form; we therefore see in the animal gestures and physiognomy determined by the nature of the species. This all expresses how the spirit can be active while becoming, as it were, congealed directly in the form. In man we find each individual has his characteristic gesture, his own particular physiognomy and facial expression; in this there comes to very clear expression what, on the other hand, he has in the way of capacity for developing speech-sound, concept or idea, and consciousness of self. In reality the capacity for this development pours itself into gesture, physiognomy, facial expression, into the whole way his consciousness of self is manifested. Here we see flowing from within outwards, expressing itself in the human being, what can be experienced only through the direct intercourse of the self-conscious ego with the spirit.

If we experience things in this way, we may say: If we do not approach man with abstract, dry, prosaic concepts but perceive him in a living way, we see how ego being, the being in idea and the being in speech-sound, work directly on external form and movement. It is indeed as if, as crystallographers, we were to study the forming forces of a crystal, then discover that we have in front of us a cube in the rock salt, an octahedron in the sulphur, and in the garnet a rhombododecahedron. Just as there we see how inner forces pour their activities into form, when perceiving man in a living way we see immediately living in his external form all that he actually is, what in his being makes a strong impression on us—what meets us as congealed ego idea, congealed concept or conception, and as congealed sense of sound. We should be able indeed to picture quite vividly this congealed sense of sound that meets us. For that intercourse with the spirit which man cherishes perhaps in the most intimate way, which every man, artist or not, is able to cherish, which works into this being as the finest weavings of his soul, this intercourse is experienced by man in a characteristic way, the whole importance of which for man's life should not be overlooked. We dare not indeed overlook it in its content, in its inner nature—I am not speaking here of word content—in the inner nature of the “how” in the word content, in the inner nature of the character of sound, or the soul in language. Language does not only have the spirit expressed in the content of words; language also possesses a soul. And much more than we think, a language works upon us in the character of its sound. A language with many “ah” sounds works upon us in one way; a language that in the character of its words is more prone to “ee” or “o” in quite another way. For in the timbre of the sound character there is poured out as if in the unconscious, the soul that flows over the whole of mankind. This builds us up, works upon us, and comes to expression in life as a special kind of gesture. For man's speech is a special kind of gesture—not as to the words but insofar as it has soul—in the way man lives in speech with his soul and expresses himself. In all that, indeed, we should be able to mention significant differences.

Everyone knows that, apart from what is said, there belongs to what flashes from man to man in that queer indefinable way the inner quality of the way in which it is said. If we take this into consideration we shall say: We learn an infinite amount of what is deepest in human beings just from the way in which they speak. In ordinary life we have often to disregard this, for higher points of view may drive it into the background. Yet there is something in us that is very alive to the harshness or the pleasing tone of a voice. Those who really observe the soul know that harshness of voice is far more unpleasant in a man than in a woman, for the simple reason that this sphere is closely connected with our organization, and that the pitch of the voice in a man is more intimately related to, far more deeply bound up with, the life of soul than is the case in a woman. It is true but it cannot be proved. It can only be indicated, and if you are observant you will soon see it is so. Anyone able to understand such things, if wanting to give expression to something important, will therefore need to convey in his speech what has just been referred to, and not merely the word content. To give you an example of what I mean, really not from lack of modesty, I should like to refer to the Rosicrucian Mystery play I wrote—“The Portal of Initiation.” In all the most important passages in it, it is clear that what cannot be expressed in the content is brought out in the use of language, in the vowel sounds. You will find that where you get the sound “oo” after “ah,” “ee” cannot follow “ah.” It is of outstanding importance that we bear in mind that this realm is the “gesture” of speech, recognizing how the might of the spirit is working into the organization; and that we pay heed to this direct working of the spirit on the soul that contains the self-conscious ego. And then we look back on how the human soul pours itself into the bodily nature. I am coming now, it is true, to a language that obviously for many of you must be hypothetical; to talk of it may seem bold to some of you and to others even offensive. That, however, is beside the point.

We see how in man the ego being, what the sense of forming ideas can yield and undergo, and what the sense of sound can experience, pour themselves into gesture, physiognomy and facial expression, also, within the limits I have indicated, into the form. So that in man, in that period of his life between birth and death when the ego inserts itself between spirit and bodily nature, we see the direct activity of the spirit. Now let us just consider the following; and because the matter is more or less subtle, I shall speak figuratively. Let us imagine that what man accomplishes with his ego being, his power of conception and his sense of sound, in the way this flows more or less into his balance, individual movement and consciousness of self, and later into freedom of gesture, facial expression and the physiognomy revealing what is within him—let us imagine all this working together out of necessity, so that no conscious ego intervenes between these two, or three, aspects. Let us therefore imagine the ego to be eliminated, allowing the two sides of human nature to work on each other, so that through a sense of sound that does not enter consciousness but lives itself out in the innermost being, there is realized from the outset, in experience, the setting up of a balance that is not promoted by the ego; you would then have something which remains free for man, established without the intervention of the ego. This is what from the very beginning determines balance in the animal. And imagine the conception through which man grasps his laws and the animal species—in other words the whole organization so far as it is individual movement, physiognomy and facial expression, expressed in all animal movement, expressed also in animal instincts, passions and so on—and you have, bound up in the animal through the necessity of natural laws, what man has in his life through the intervention of the ego. We have, too, bound up from the outset with the animal, through the necessity of natural law, what in man is directly expressed only in life. In man the formative force of life works right into his form. But imagine it was no longer kept in reserve for individual life but from the beginning it acquired its form through Nature's activity, and then you have it in accordance with species, and in the way it confronts us plastically in the various animal species.—Thus we see in man a being with a sense world lying between two poles. He has his sense world, the world of perception, sound world, world of taste and world of smell and so on, lying between, on the one side, the way in which, conscious of himself, he finds a relation to his sense of balance in the different spatial directions, in the way he feels his existence in his own body; and on the other side, his sense of sound, his comprehension of concept, and his ego conception. As with inner necessity the inner life stands in relation to the intervening sense, so for the animal the inner life is related as something intervening, which, out of necessity, forms the whole organization. Let the two sides in man come together without the intervention of the ego and you have the direct working of the spiritual into the bodily without the intervention of the soul. In man we have what may be thus described—according to the spiritual and physical side he is an unfolding in space, gestures and so on, which on both sides stands open to the working of the spirit. And with this we must reconcile ourselves to the fact that through it in a certain way a foundation is laid for the whole understanding of man and the human spiritual life altogether, insofar as it plays its part in the history of the spirit. We see that we may not confound what man experiences conceptually with what he experiences when he realizes and develops the concept itself. In a certain relation man is in a quite different situation where the realization of a concept is concerned from his situation in respect of understanding it. The development of a concept is quite a different story from the means of understanding it. In this connection I should like to refer to an actual fact.

In the year 1894 Laurenz Müllner, a great admirer of Galileo, on being appointed Rector of the University of Vienna, gave his inaugural address, and in it he drew attention to a remarkable fact which indeed is very interesting. He pointed out that in Galileo we have a spirit able to grasp the physical laws of mechanics, the laws of oscillation, of the motion of projectiles, of the velocity of falling bodies, of equilibrium, which perhaps—said Professor Müllner—are expressed in the most grandiose way in Michelangelo's wonderful work—the lofty dome of St. Peter's in Rome. This is indeed true and must be admitted by anyone upon whom the work of art in question has made an impression. Thus it might be said—Laurenz Müllner went on: In Galileo's intellect these laws first arise in the form of concepts, which we then see in Rome rising to the heavens in the symmetry and equipoise of the gigantic cupola of St. Peter's. In Galileo man has learned to grasp in concepts what is presented in St. Peter's as the artistic creation of Michelangelo. Added to this we have the actual fact that the day of Galileo's birth and the day of Michelangelo's death fell in the same year. In 1564 Michelangelo died on 18th February and in the same year, almost on the same day—the 15th of February—Galileo was born, Galileo who discovered for mankind the physical laws of mechanics.

That is really an extraordinarily interesting fact. For it goes to prove that man brings about in a direct way the intercourse with the spirit through which he is able to imprint upon things the laws discovered afterwards; he does not accomplish this with his understanding, nor through concepts—not through the intelligence at all. But this points us to something else; namely, that in his organization man is in touch with the spirit before the intelligence has worked upon his soul inwardly. Hence in a certain way it can be said: Man is so constituted that he himself is able to incorporate into his substance what lives in him as outpouring of the spirit, what has worked upon him before he has been able to grasp it with his intelligence. This is so in the creation of any work of art. This fact is of interest because it enables us to see that man in physical life in regard to all that he lives, and all that comes to clear expression in an organ, before understanding the laws of that organ has something within him which carries out these laws plastically, gives them plastic form. So that if we follow up this thought it is quite clear that the sense for these laws of the spirit, expressed, for example, in a work of art, is there—must be there—in the soul before the laws are given bodily form. Hence, at the spiritual end of man, so to speak, we have also the reverse side—if we use the word in its better sense, raising it to the proper spiritual sphere. For then we are definitely shown that through an ennobled and purified instinct man creates what he discovers only later. As animals create instinctively, in the way bees, for example, organize their wonderful bee community, so man creates directly out of the spiritual world, before the spiritual world is reflected into this intelligence.

Thus we see that even in this direction everything points to the meeting of the self-conscious ego with the working of the spirit. Through instinct the animal arrives even in its feeling life at reflecting into its intelligence what it puts into its buildings, and so on. Take, for example, the beaver and what it builds. Among beavers Michelangelos will always be found, but never a Galileo who understood the same laws to which the beaver gives form in its constructions. In man there is something confronting his self-conscious ego, something created by the spirit when it enters the organization.

So in our study of human development, we have seen that between spirit and bodily organization the expression of the self-conscious ego intervenes, that the purified organization of the human being has immediate experience of the spirit, as it is seen in the imaginative creations of the artist; and that a self-conscious being lives in him which can oppose the ordering of the spirit in the body. Thus it is not a question of giving man preference over the animal or not; that would be the wrong way to approach the matter. We have, however, to realize that in the animal the spirit comes into direct contact with the bodily organization, and the soul passes its life in accordance with this bodily organization; whereas in man the living ego which is found in the soul pushes its way between spirit and bodily organization, establishing itself as mediator—thus working there between spirit and bodily organization. Through this the human ego has direct intercourse with what lives in the spiritual world. And it lives out this direct intercourse primarily by strenuous efforts to establish spiritual conditions in its environment which the animal is able to establish only instinctively. We see strongly marked a certain life of rights, a moral life among animals. But we understand the life of rights, the life of the State, and the whole course of world history, only when we see in man the emancipation of the spirit from the bodily nature by the intervention of the ego between spirit and bodily nature, through which the ego enters into immediate intercourse with the spiritual world.

The way in which this ego enters into direct intercourse with the spiritual world constitutes the normal condition of the human being. But as the intervention of a self-conscious ego between spiritual and bodily nature signifies progress beyond animal evolution, it is possible for man to go farther on this path by again developing within him the spirit which he set free from the bodily nature—developing it in the free intercourse experienced. The possibilities for this will be found in the lecture “The Nature of Sleep”, and its full significance appears in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. There we see how in normal human beings the emancipation of the spirit from the bodily nature has arrived at a certain stage, but can be carried further by developing slumbering germinating forces in man, through the unfolding of which he can advance to direct vision into the spiritual world.

We had first to lay a foundation for what we are able to cultivate as actual contemplation of the spiritual world, by seeking the real significance of the human being in this intervention of the ego between spirit and bodily nature. But this again is given us also in an external bodily way, since the self-conscious ego as it confronts us in life does so in the inner being of man, entirely in his physiognomy and in accordance with his gestures. Some of you may remember that I have not only mentioned but have also substantiated that the old saying “Blood is a very special fluid”¹ is founded on deep truth. This is really so, and in what is thus expressed simply as a direct working of the soul on the blood circulation, we can divine something of that working of the self-conscious ego into the bodily nature, into the organization. That is, so to say, the nearest gate for the ego, fertilized by the spirit, to enter the bodily nature and work upon it. We see this on observing how the soul works upon the blood circulation. In the phenomena of blushing and turning pale I have often given you common examples for the direct working of what goes on in the soul and expresses itself physically; for fear and shame are actual processes of the soul. Anyone wanting to deny this would have to be an unconscious materialist, like, for example, William James: for although he wishes to be spiritual he is actually a materialist in wishing to defend the assertion: “Man does not weep because he is sad, he is sad because he weeps.” According to this we should have to imagine that man experiences sadness in his soul because some kind of material influence has an effect on the organism and squeezes out tears: and if man notices this—so says William James—he becomes sad. If we do not recognize how untenable this conclusion is, we shall not be able to understand that in affairs like laughing and weeping, and also in blushing, where a rush of blood takes place from the centre to the periphery, we have to do with material processes directly under the influence of soul and spirit.

If we think this over we shall be able to admit that in man what belongs to the soul does in very truth express itself in the circulation of the blood. What we say here about man; namely, that in the blood, and in the circulation, the self-conscious ego has its life, we cannot directly apply to the animal, because in it a self-conscious ego cannot work into the blood circulation, and—what is essential—because the animal does not open itself directly to the influence of the spiritual world which works into it; rather, from necessity. Whereas in the animal's blood circulation we have before us something in which the soul life of the animal finds immediate expression, in the blood circulation of the human being something is to be seen of the way in which the spirit works on the ego. If some day people will begin to give a little thought to what is here in question; namely, the importance for human life that man should not be organized from the outset to receive a definite imprint, of balance, of individual movement and of the sense of life, but must himself struggle to attain them—when they can discover how true it is that in spatial directions we have to do with realities, whether a spine is in a horizontal or vertical relation to space, or whether the blood circulates in this or that direction—then they will see how essential is the way in which such organizations are inserted into the whole cosmic connection. We should be obliged to see in reality, for example, in the spatial direction of a certain line, something of essential importance. When this is understood we may judge how great is the significance of the position and all the processes in the blood, in the human blood system. Today it is believed that the theory of the blood circulation is complete in itself. It is not so at all. We are only beginning to learn something of the secrets of the blood circulation. And not dogmatically to make bare assertions I will point to the following.

Not more than twenty-five years ago, a scientific investigator in this sphere, the criminologist Moritz Benedict, celebrated for his mathematical qualifications in this direction, was first to draw attention to the important fact—generally ignored today—that the corresponding beats in the right artery and the left are different—an important fact for knowledge of the connections in the human being. And of special importance is something found in this sphere, not by anyone famous but by a very simple man, a Dr. Karl Schmidt. It was published by him in 1892 in the Vienna Medical Weekly in his article “Heartbeat and Pulsation,” in which quite important observations were indicated. Only when these things, still in their infancy, are studied to some degree, will a beginning have been made in knowledge of the connection between the self-conscious ego and the blood circulation, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the connection between the animal spirit working in the animal and the animal blood circulation. Last time, I pointed out that we, indeed, are able to go into details in the sciences of the organs and their individual functions, and are able to give evidence of the different ways the spirit shows itself in man and in animal. In this connection it is quite comprehensible that modern investigations into the relation of man's blood to that of apes say little, because they go only into externals—the purely physical substance, the chemical reactions, and so forth—not into the real question. Were it only a matter of physical substance it would necessarily be quite immaterial whether a wheel was used as a child's toy or for a watch. But it always depends on how a member or an organ is used in the whole of a being or of a thing. It has nothing to do with how man's blood is related to the blood of the ape, or the like, but with how the organs in question are placed in the service of the organization as a whole.

How the actual truth is treated by external investigation is best shown in Goethe's dealings with natural science. In Goethe's days, where the things of Nature are concerned, a rigid materialism was already prevailing, and even the most eminent scientists who wished to maintain the difference between man and animal founded their claims on something purely material. They were of the opinion that this difference was to be seen in the fact that in the upper jawbone of the animal there is an intermediate bone not found in man. They said: What distinguishes man from the animal is that the animal possesses an intermaxillary bone to accommodate the upper incisors, and this bone is not found in man! For Goethe this was inadmissible. His concern was not to find the difference between man and animal in anatomical details, but in the way the spirit in man and the spirit in the animal made use of the organs. (Incidentally I will just refer you to Goethe's “Theory of Metamorphosis” in which may be found information about all the individual human organs.) Thus from the outset Goethe could never reconcile himself to the idea that man's superiority to the animal was to be sought in a material detail. Therefore his one wish was to prove that this assertion was incorrect, that this chasm did not exist; and he set himself to work to find this intermaxillary bone in man. If Goethe had never accomplished anything but this one deed, if he had discovered nothing further than the presence in man of the intermaxillary bone, though no longer in a developed state and not apparent, through this alone for human evolution he would still remain a mighty genius. Said Goethe to himself—and I do not relate this because he did it but because it came to light through his experience: With Herder, and with others who are at pains to understand man spiritually, I have directed attention primarily to how man rises above the animal because the animal is bound up with its organization; but man is emancipated from it and enters into immediate intercourse with the spirit, thus being able to work back upon his organs. Goethe says this, as I have indicated, but in the following words: “Animals are taught by their organs, said the men of old. I add to this: man, too, is taught by his organs; however, he has the advantage of in turn teaching them.” Goethe could not but admit that the organs are the same but formed from different sides. Hence his great joy when at last he found the intermaxillary bone in man. At this point he writes to Herder: “... I have found—neither gold nor silver but something that gives me infinite joy—the ‘os intermaxillary’ in man! With Loder I compared man's skull with that of the animal and got on its track—when, lo! There it was. But I beg you to keep quiet about it, for this affair must be handled with caution. This should, however, make you too rejoice, for it is a kind of keystone to man; it is not lacking, it is there—actually there. I have imagined it in connection with your ‘whole’—how splendidly it will fit in. ...” (Letter of 27th March, 1784.)

The difference between man and animal cannot be found in any particular detail. It has to be found entirely in the way the spirit makes use of things. For through this we behold man's relation to the spirit, how he has emancipated himself from what belongs to the body and is able to enter into direct intercourse with the spirit. Hence the difference in the sensation we experience on contemplating something spiritual from what we experience on contemplating anything physical and material. We seek to use words in quite different ways according to whether we look upon the spiritual or the physical.

Among Goethe's works two poems may be found together. Each contains three remarkable lines:

“In all things the eternal's moving past,
For everything must come to naught at last
If in being it still would stay.”

“Das Ewige regt sich fort in Allen:
Denn Alles muss in Nichts zerfallen,
Wenn es im Sein beharren will.”

Thus ends one poem, and the other begins:

“No being can come to naught at last!
In all the Eternal's moving past.
In being know thyself, then, blessed.”

“Kein Wesen kann zu Nichts zerfallen!
Das Ewige regt sich fort in Allen,
Am Sein erhalte dich beglückt!”

A complete contradiction! How may we explain it? And Goethe has put it so blatantly in two poems next to one another. In truth if we contemplate the spirit in material existence, in our heart we may call forth the feeling: If the spirit would continue in material being, if it were not to break up all form, it would have to crumble into nothingness. The moment we see the spirit in the bodily nature we have to say: We have here to do with the eternal, immortal being, with the spirit with which we can unite in man's emancipated soul. Then we may say:

“No being can come to naught at last,
In all the Eternal's moving past.
In being know thyself, then, blessed.”

if we bear in mind the immortal, the eternal, in a being.

If we see the soul, if we see the spirit in the bodily nature, we have to say: If it lived itself out entirely in the body, if it would hold fast to the body, then it would have to fall into nothingness.

Thus the study of the animal's spirit and the human spirit leads us gradually upwards to a premonition of what in reality may be called the spirit. But before it is wished to find the way in which knowledge about the spirit can be acquired, it is necessary to know the way in which the spirit shines forth in the human soul which it frees from the body in order within it to live a life independent of the bodily organization, a life in its own sphere.

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• 1. A lecture called in English: “The Occult significance of Blood”

Lecture 3 of 16 from the volume: Human History in the Light of Spiritual Investigation. The volume of the Complete Edition of the works of Rudolf Steiner containing the original text of the this lecture, among sixteen others, is entitled: Menschengeschichte im Lichte der Geistesforschung. (No. 61 in the Bibliographical Survey, 1961).

Words spoken by Shakespeare's most famous character: “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy” are, of course, perfectly true; but no less true is the saying composed by Lichtenberg, a great German humourist, as a kind of rejoinder: “In philosophy there is much that will be found neither in heaven nor earth.” Both sayings are illustrations of the attitude adopted nowadays to many things in the domain of Spiritual Science. It seems inevitable that widespread circles, especially in the world of serious science, will repudiate such matters as prophecy even more emphatically than other branches of Spiritual Science. If in these other branches of Spiritual Science—in many of them at least—it is difficult to draw a clear line between genuine research and charlatanism, or maybe something even worse, it will certainly be admitted that wherever super-sensible investigation touches the element of human egoism, there its dangers begin. And in what realm of higher knowledge could this be more apparent than in all that is comprised in the theme of prophecy as it has appeared through the ages! Everything covered by the term ‘prophecy’ is closely connected with a widespread, and understandable, trait in the human mind, namely, desire to penetrate the darkness of the future, to know something of what earthly life in the future holds in store.

Interest in prophecy is connected not only with curiosity in the ordinary sense, but with curiosity concerning very intimate regions of the human soul. The search for knowledge concerning the deeper interests of the human soul has met with so many disappointments that earnest, serious science nowadays is unwilling to listen to such matters—and this is really not to be wondered at. Nevertheless it looks as though our times will be obliged at least to take notice of them, and also of the subjects of which we have been speaking in previous lectures and shall speak in the future. As will be known to many of you, the historian Kemmerich has written a book about prophecies, his aim being to compile facts which can be confirmed by history and go on to show that important happenings were pre-cognised or predicted in some way. This historian is driven to make the statement—at the moment we will not question the authenticity of his research—that there are very few important events in history that have not at some time been predicted, conjectured and announced in advance. Such statements are not well received in our time; but ultimately, in the sphere where history can speak with authority, it will not be possible to ignore them because proof will be forthcoming, both in respect of the past and of the present, from outer documents themselves.

The domain we are considering today has never been in such disrepute as it is nowadays, nor regarded as so dubious a path of human endeavour. Only a few centuries ago, for instance in the 16th century, very distinguished and influential scholars engaged in prognostication and prophecy. Think of one of the greatest natural scientists of all time and of his connection with a personage whose tendency to be influenced by prophecies is well known: think of Kepler, the great scientist, and his relations with Wallenstein. Schiller's deep interest in this latter personality was due in no small measure to the part played in his life by prophecy. The kind of prophecy in vogue in the days of Kepler—and only a couple of centuries ago leading scientific minds all over Europe were still occupied with it—was based upon the then prevailing view that there is a real connection between the world of the stars, the movements and positions of the stars, and the life of man. All prophesying in those times was really a form of astrology. The mere mention of this word reminds us that in our day too, many people are still convinced that there is some connection between the stars and coming events in the life of individuals, even, too, of races. But prophetic knowledge, the prophetic art as it is called, was never so directly connected with observation of the movements and constellations of the stars as was the case in Kepler's time.

In ancient Greece an art of prophecy was practised, as you know, by prophetesses or seeresses. It was an art of predicting the future induced by experiences arising perhaps from asceticism, or other experiences leading to the suppression of full self-consciousness and the presence of mind of ordinary life. The human being was thus given over to other Powers, was in an ecstatic condition and then made utterances which were either direct predictions of the future or were interpreted by the listening priests and soothsayers as referring to the future. We need only think of the Pythia at Delphi who under the influence of vapours rising from a chasm in the earth was transported into a state of consciousness quite different from that of ordinary life; she was controlled by other Powers and in this condition made prophetic utterances. This kind of prophecy has nothing to do with calculations of the movements of stars, constellations and the like. Again, everyone is familiar with the gift of prophecy among the people of the Old Testament, the authenticity of which will certainly be called into question by modern scholarship. Out of the mouths of these prophets there came not only utterances of deep wisdom, which influenced the life of these Old Testament people, but fore-shadowed the future. These predictions, however, were by no means always based upon the heavenly constellations as in the astrology current in the 15th and 16th centuries. Either as the result of inborn gifts, ascetic practices and the like, these prophets unfolded a different kind of consciousness from that of the people around them; they were torn away from the affairs of ordinary life. In such a condition they were entirely detached from the circumstances and thoughts of their personal lives, from their own material environment. Their attention was focused entirely on their people, on the weal and woe of their people. Because they experienced some thing superhuman, something reaching beyond the individual concerns of men, they broke through the boundaries of their personal consciousness and it was as though Jahve Himself spoke out of their mouths, so wise were their utterances concerning the tasks and the destiny of their people.

Thinking of all this, it seems evident that the kind of divination practised at the end of the Middle Ages, before the dawn of modern science, was only one specific form and that prophecy as a whole is a much wider sphere, connected in some way with definite states of consciousness to which a man can only attain when he throws off the shackles of his personality. Astrological prophecy, of course, can hardly be said to be an art in which a man rises above his own personality. The astrologer is given the date and hour of birth and from this discovers which constellation was rising on the horizon and the relative positions of other stars and constellations. From this he calculates how the positions of the constellations will change during the course of the man's life and, according to certain traditional observations of the favourable or unfavourable influences of heavenly bodies upon human life, predicts from these calculations what will transpire in the life of an individual or of a people. There seems to be no kind of similarity between this type of astrologer and the ancient Hebrew prophets, the Greek seeresses or others who, having passed out of their ordinary consciousness into a state of ecstasy, foretold the future entirely from knowledge acquired in the realm of the Supersensible. For those who consider themselves enlightened men of culture today, the greatest stumbling-block in these astrological predictions is the difficulty of realising how the courses of the stars and constellations can possibly have any connection with happenings in the life of an individual or a people, or in the procession of events on the Earth. And as the attention of modern scholarship is never focused on such connections, no particular interest is taken in what was accepted as authentic knowledge in times when astrological prophecy and enlightened science often went hand in hand.

Kepler, the very distinguished and learned scientist, was not only the discoverer of the Laws named after him; not only was he one of the greatest astronomers of all time, but he devoted himself to astrological prophecy. In his time—also during the periods immediately preceding and following it—numbers of truly enlightened men were votaries of this art. Indeed if we think objectively about life as it was in those days, we realise that from their standpoint it was as natural to them to take this prophetic art, this prophetic knowledge, as seriously as our contemporaries take any genuine branch of science. When some prediction based upon the constellations—and made perhaps, at the birth of an individual—comes true later on, it is of course easy to say that the connection of this constellation with the man's life was only a matter of chance. Certainly it must be admitted in countless cases that astonishment at the fulfilment of astrological prediction is caused simply because it came true and because people have forgotten what did not come true. The contention of a certain Greek atheist is, in a sense, correct. He once came in his ship to a coastal town where, in a sanctuary, tokens had been hung by men who had vowed at sea that if they were saved from shipwreck they would make such offerings. Many, many tokens were hanging there—all of them the offerings of men who had been saved from shipwreck. But the atheist maintained that the truth could only be brought to light if the tokens of everyone who in spite of vows had actually perished in shipwreck, were also displayed. It would then be obvious to which category the greater number of tokens belonged. This implies that a really objective judgment could only be reached if records were kept not only of those astrological predictions which have come true, but also of those which have not. This attitude is perfectly justified but on the other hand there is certainly much that is very astonishing. As in these public lectures I cannot take for granted a fundamental knowledge of all the teachings of Spiritual Science, I must speak in a way which will convey an idea of the significance of the subjects we are studying.

Even a confirmed sceptic must surely feel surprise when he hears the following. Keeping to well-known personages, let us take the case of Wallenstein. Wallenstein wished to have his horoscope drawn up by Kepler—a name honoured by every scientist. Kepler sent the horoscope. But the matter had been arranged with caution. Wallenstein did not write to Kepler giving him the year of his birth and saying that he would like him to draw up the horoscope, but an intermediary was chosen. Kepler therefore did not know for whom the horoscope was intended. The only indication given was the date of the birth. There had already been many important happenings in Wallenstein's life and he requested that they too should be recorded, as well as predictions made of those still to come. Kepler completed the horoscope as requested. As is the case with many horoscopes, Wallenstein found very much that tallied with his experiences. He began (it was often so in those days) to have great confidence in Kepler and on many occasions was able to adjust his life according to the prognostications. But it must be said too, that although many things tallied, many did not, so far as the past was concerned and, as subsequently transpired, the same was true of the predictions made about the future. It was so with numbers of horoscopes and in those days people were accustomed to say that there must be some inaccuracy in the alleged hour of birth and that the astrologer might be able to correct it. Wallenstein did the same. He begged Kepler to correct the hour of birth; the correction was only very slight but after it had been made, the prognostications were more accurate. It must be added here that Kepler was a thoroughly honest man and it went very much against the grain to correct the hour of birth. From a letter on the subject written by Kepler at the time it is obvious that he did not favour such procedure on account of the many possible consequences. Nevertheless he undertook to do what Wallenstein asked—it was in the year 1625—and gave further details about Wallenstein's future; above all he said that according to the new reading of the positions of the stars, the constellation that would be present in the year 1634 would be extremely unfavourable for Wallenstein. Kepler added—as well he might, for the date lay so far ahead—that even if this were a cause of alarm, the alarm would have passed away by the time of these unfavourable conditions. He did not therefore consider them dangerous for Wallenstein's plans. The prediction was for March 1634. And now think of it: within a few weeks of the period indicated, the causes occurred which led to the murder of Wallenstein. These things are at least striking!

But let us take other examples—not of second-rate astrologers but of really enlightened men. The name of an extraordinarily learned man in this sphere will at once occur to us—Nostradamus. Nostradamus was a doctor of high repute who, among other activities, had rendered wonderful service during an epidemic of the plague; he was a man of profound gifts and the selflessness with which he devoted himself to his profession as a doctor is well known. It is known, too, that when on account of his selflessness he had been much maligned by his colleagues, he retired from his medical work to the isolation of Salon where, in 1566, he died. In Salon he began to observe the stars, but not as Kepler or others like Kepler had observed them. Nostradamus had a special room in his house into which he often withdrew and, as can be gathered from what he himself says, from this room he watched the stars, just as they presented themselves to his gaze. In other words he made no special mathematical calculations but immersed himself in what the soul, the heart, the imagination can discover when gazing with wonder at the starry heavens. Nostradamus spent many an hour of reverent, fervent contemplation in this curious chamber with its open views on all sides to the heavens. And from him there came not only specific predictions, but long series of diverse and remarkably true prophecies of the future. So much so, that Kemmerich, the historian of whom I spoke just now, cannot but be astonished and attach a certain value to the prophetic utterances of Nostradamus. Nostradamus himself made some of his prophecies known to the public and was naturally laughed to scorn in his day, for he could quote no astrological calculations. As he gazed at the stars his predictions seemed to rise up in him in the form of strange pictures and imaginations, for instance of the outcome of the battle at Gravelingen in the year 1558, where the French were defeated with heavy loss. Another prediction, made long beforehand, for the year 1559, was to the effect that King Henry II of France would succumb “in a duel” as Nostradamus put it. People only laughed, including the Queen herself, who said that this clearly showed what reliance could be placed upon prediction—for a King was above engaging in a duel. But what happened? In the year predicted, the King was killed in a tournament. And it would be possible to quote many, many predictions that subsequently came true.

Again there is Tycho de Brahe, one of the brilliant minds of the 16th century and of outstanding significance as an astronomer. The modern world knows little of Tycho de Brahe beyond that he is said to have been one who only half accepted the Copernican view of the world. But those who are more closely acquainted with his life know what Tycho de Brahe achieved in the making of celestial charts, how vastly he improved the charts then existing, that he had discovered new stars and was, in short, an astronomer of great eminence in his day. Tycho de Brahe was also deeply convinced that not only are physical conditions on the Earth connected with the whole Universe, but that the spiritual experiences of men are connected with happenings in the great Cosmos. Tycho de Brahe did not simply observe the stars as an astronomer but he related the happenings of human life with happenings in the heavens. And when he came to Rostock at the age of 20, he caused a stir by predicting the death of the Sultan Soliman, which although it did not occur exactly on the day indicated, did nevertheless occur. The indication was not quite exact but this will probably not bring an outcry from historians, for they might well argue that if anyone were intent upon lying he would not tell a half-lie by introducing the difference of a mere day or so into the prediction.

Hearing of this, the King of Denmark requested Tycho de Brahe to cast the horoscopes of his three sons. Concerning his son, Christian, the indications were accurate; less so in the case of Ulrich. But about Hans, the third son, Tycho de Brahe made a remarkable prediction, derived from the movements of the stars. He said: The whole constellation and everything to be seen goes to show that he is and will remain frail and is unlikely to live to a great age. As the hour of birth was not quite accurate, Tycho de Brahe gave the indications very cautiously ... he might die in his eighteenth or perhaps in his nineteenth year, for the constellations then would be extremely unfavourable. I will leave it an open question whether it was out of pity for the parents or for other reasons, that Tycho de Brahe wrote of the possibility of this terrible constellation in the eighteenth or nineteenth year being overcome in the life of Duke Hans ... if so, he said, God would have been his protector; but it must be realised that these conditions would be there, that an extremely unfavourable constellation connected with Mars was revealed by the horoscope and that Hans would be entangled in the complications of war; as in this constellation, Venus had ascendancy over Mars, there was just a hope that Hans would pass this period safely, but then, in his eighteenth and nineteenth years, there would be the very unfavourable constellation due to the inimical influence of Saturn; this indicated the risk of a “moist, melancholic” illness caused by the strange environment in which Hans would find himself. And now, what was the history of Duke Hans' life? As a young man he was involved in the political complications of the time, was sent to war, took part in the battle of Ostend and in connection with this, as Tycho de Brahe had predicted, had to endure the ordeal of terrible storms at sea. He came very near death, but as the result of friendly negotiations set on foot for his marriage with the daughter of the Czar he was recalled to Denmark. According to Tycho de Brahe's interpretation, the complications due to the unfavourable influences of Mars had been stemmed by the influences of Venus—the protector of love-relationships: Venus had protected the Duke at this time. But then, in his eighteenth and nineteenth years the inimical influence of Saturn began to take effect. One can picture how the eyes of the Danish Court were upon the young Duke: all the preparations for the marriage were made and the news that it had taken place was hourly awaited. But there came instead the announcement that the marriage was delayed, then news of the Duke's illness, and finally of his death. Such things made a great impression upon people at the time and must surely surprise posterity.

Now world-history sometimes has its humorous sides! There was once, in a different domain altogether, a certain Professor who asserted that the brain of the female always weighs less than that of the male. After his death, however, his own brain was weighed and proved to be extremely light. He was the victim of humour in world-history!

The horoscope of Pico de Mirandola (a descendant of the famous philosopher) prophesied that Mars would bring him great misfortune. He was an opponent of all such predictions. Tycho de Brahe proved to him that all his arguments against prognostications from the stars were false, and he died in the year that had been indicated as the period of the unfavourable influence of Mars.

Numbers of examples could be quoted and we shall probably realise that in a certain sense it is not difficult to make objections. For example, a very distinguished modern astronomer—a man greatly to be respected too, for his humanitarian activities—has argued that Wallenstein's death cannot be said to have been correctly predicted in the horoscope drawn up by Kepler. In a certain respect such arguments must be taken seriously. We cannot altogether ignore Wilhelm Foerster's argument that Wallenstein knew what had been predicted; that in the corresponding year he remembered his horoscope, hesitated, did not take the firm stand he would otherwise have taken and so was himself the cause of the misfortune. Such objections are always possible.

But on the other side it must be remembered that although in illustrations produced by science, external data are of value, the modern age accepts these data as an absolutely adequate basis for scientific truths. Many things may be problematical. But we should not shut our eyes to the fact that careful comparison of events that had actually occurred in life with indications obtained from the stars, did indeed lead, in earlier times, to confidence in prognostications of the future. People were certainly alive to mistakes but they did not conceal things that were genuinely astonishing, nor did they accept these things entirely without criticism. In those times too they were quite capable of criticism and in all probability applied it on many occasions.

I wanted to quote very striking examples in order to show that in accordance with the standards of modern science too, it is possible to take these matters seriously. And even when we take what there is to be said against them, we shall have to admit that the reasons which in times of the relatively near past made brilliant minds place firm reliance in them, were not bad but sound and well-founded reasons. Even if these reasons are rejected, it must be admitted that the impression they made on brilliant and enlightened minds was such that these men believed—quite apart from details—that there is a connection between events in the lives of individuals and of peoples, and happenings in the Cosmos. These men believed that there is a real connection between the macrocosm, the great world, and the microcosm, the little world.

They believed that human life on the Earth is not a chaotic flow of events but that law manifests in these events, that just as celestial events are governed by cyclic law, so too a certain cyclic law, a certain rhythm is manifest in human and earthly conditions. To explain what is here meant, I shall speak of certain facts that can be collated by observation, as truly as the most exacting facts of chemistry or physics today. But the observations must be made in the appropriate spheres. Suppose we observe something that happens in a man's life during his childhood. If we study the longer sweep of human life, remarkable connections will come to light, for example, between the life of earliest childhood and that of very old age; a connection is perceptible between what a man experiences in the evening of his life and what he experienced in early youth. We shall be able to say: If, during youth, we were shaken by emotions due to alarm or fright, we may possibly have been exempt from their effects all through our life, but in old age things may appear of which we know that their causes are to be sought in very early childhood. Again there are connections between the years of adolescence and the period immediately preceding old age. Life runs a circular course.

We can go still further, taking as an example the case of someone who, say at the age of 18, was torn right away from the course his life had taken hitherto. Until then he may have been able to devote himself to study but was suddenly obliged to abandon this and become a merchant, perhaps because his father lost his money, or for some other reason. To begin with he gets on quite well but after a few years, great inner difficulties make their appearance. In trying to help such a person to overcome these difficulties, we cannot apply any general, abstract principles. We shall have to say to ourselves: At the age of 18 there was a sudden change in his life and at the age of 24—that is to say, six years later—difficulties cropped up in his life of soul. Six years earlier, in his twelfth year or thereabouts, certain things happened in his soul which actually explain the difficulties appearing in his twenty-fourth year: six years before, six years later—the change of profession lies between. Just as above a pendulum swinging to right and left there is a point of equilibrium, so, in the case quoted, the eighteenth year is a pivotal point. A cause generated before this pivotal point has its effect the same number of years afterwards. So it is in man's life as a whole. Human life takes its course not with irregularity but with regularity and according to law. Although the individual does not necessarily realise it, there is in every human life one centre-point; what lies before—youth and childhood—allows causes to rest in the depths of subsequent happenings, and then what took place a number of years before this centre-point of life reveals itself in its effects an equal number of years afterwards. In the sense that birth is the point polar to death, the happenings of childhood are the causes of happenings during the years that precede death. In this way life becomes comprehensible.

In the case, for example, of illness occurring, say, at the age of 54, the only really intelligent approach is to look for a pivotal point at which a man passed through a definite crisis, reckoning back from there to some event related to the fifty-fourth year somewhat in the same sense as death is related to birth, or the other way round. The fact that happenings in human life reveal conformity to law and principle does not gainsay our freedom. Many people are apt to say that this conformity to law in the course taken by events contradicts man's freedom of will. But this is not the case and it can only appear so to superficial thinking. A human being who at the age, say, of 15, lays into the womb of time some cause, the effects of which he experienced in, say, his fifty-fourth year, no more deprives himself of his freedom than does someone who builds a house and then moves into it when it is ultimately ready. Logical thinking will never say that the man deprives himself of his freedom when he moves into the house. Nobody deprives himself of freedom by anticipating that causes will have their effects later on. This principle has nothing directly to do with freedom in life.

Just as there are cyclic connections in the life of the individual, so too are there cyclic connections in the life of the peoples, and in life on the Earth in the general sense. The evolution of mankind on the Earth divides itself into successive epochs of culture. Two of the epochs most closely connected with our own, are the period of Assyrian-Egyptian-Chaldean civilisation and that of the later culture of Greece and Rome; then, reckoning from the decline of Greek and Roman culture and its aftermaths, comes our present epoch. According to all the signs of the times this will last for a very long time yet. There, then, we have three consecutive periods of culture.

Close observation of the life of the peoples during these three epochs will reveal, during the Greco-Latin period, something like a pivotal point in the evolution of mankind. Hence, too, the curious fascinating of the culture of Greece and Rome. Greek art, Greek and Roman political life, Roman equity, the conception of Roman citizenship ... it all seems to stand like a kind of pivotal point in the stream of the evolutionary process: After it—our own epoch; before it—the Egypto-Chaldean epoch. In a remarkable way, those who observe deeply enough will perceive certain conditions of life during the Egypto-Chaldean period operating again today, in quite a different but nevertheless related form. In those times, therefore, causes were laid into the womb of the ages, which now in their effects come again to the fore. Certain methods of hygiene, certain ablutions customary in ancient Egypt, also certain views of life are now, strangely enough, in the forefront again—naturally in absolutely different forms; in short, the effects of causes laid down in ancient Egypt are becoming perceptible today. In between—like a fulcrum—lies the culture of Greece and Rome.

The Egypto-Chaldean epoch was preceded by that of the most ancient Persian culture. According to the law of cyclic evolution, then, it can be foreshadowed that just as in our civilisation there is a cyclic re-emergence of Egypto-Chaldean culture, so ancient Persian culture will re-emerge in the epoch following our own. Law is revealed everywhere in the flow of evolution! Not irregularity, not chaos—but also not the kind of law conjectured by historians: that the causes of everything happening today are to be sought in the immediately preceding period, the causes of happenings in the recent past again in the immediately preceding period, and so forth. This is how historians build up a chain of events—the one directly following the other. Closer observation, however, reveals the existence of cycles, breaks ... what was once present appears again at a very much later time.

External observation itself can discern this. But it will be quite apparent to those who study the evolution of humanity in the light of Spiritual Science that there is evidence of spiritual law in the flow of happenings, in the stream of the ‘Becoming’ and that a certain deepening of the life of soul will enable men actually to perceive the threads of these inner connections. And although it is not easy to grasp everything that belongs to this sphere, although it may sometimes tend to charlatanry or humbug and direct its appeal to the lower impulses and instincts, nevertheless the following is true: When a man is able to eliminate personal interests and quicken the hidden forces of spiritual life, so that his knowledge is drawn not merely from his environment or from remembrances of his own life and that of his nearest acquaintances, when he is uninfluenced by material and personal considerations ... then he grows beyond his own personality and becomes conscious of the presence of higher forces with him, which it is only a matter of developing by appropriate exercises. When these deeper forces are brought to the surface, happenings in the life of a human being will also reveal their hidden causes and such a soul will then glimpse the truth that whatever has transpired through the ages throws its effects into the future. The law presented to us by Spiritual Science is that no happenings—and this also applies to the domain of the Spiritual—float meaninglessly along the stream of existence; they all have their effects and we must discover the law underlying the manifestation of these effects in later times. Therewith the insight will come that this law also embraces the return of the individuality into the present earthly life, where the effects of earlier lives are working themselves out.

Just as knowledge of the workings of Karma, the Law of Destiny, arises from insight into how causes lie in the womb of time and appear again in transformation, so too this insight was present in all those who have taken prophecy seriously or have actually engaged in it; they have been convinced that laws prevail in the course taken by human life and that the soul can awaken the forces whereby these laws may be fathomed. But the soul needs points of focus. In its facts, the world is an interconnected whole. Just as in his physical life the human being is affected by wind and weather, it is not difficult to assume that there are connections in everything around us, even though the details are obscure. Without actually seeking for laws of Nature, something in the courses of the stars and constellations evokes the thought: The harmonies perceptible there can call forth in us similar harmonies and rhythms according to which human life runs its course. Further observations will then lead on to the details.

As may be read in the little book, The Education of the Child in the Light of Spiritual Science, epochs can be distinguished in the life of the individual: from birth to the change of teeth, from then to puberty, then the years up to twenty-one and again from twenty-one to twenty-eight ... 7-year periods clearly different in character and after which new kinds of faculties are present. If we know how to investigate these things we shall find clear evidence of a rhythmic stream in human life, which can as it were be found again in the starry heavens. Strikingly enough, if life is observed from this point of view (but such observation must be calm and balanced, without the wonted fanaticism of opponents) it will be found that round about the twenty-eighth year something in the life of soul indicates, in many cases, a culmination of what has come into being after four periods of seven years each. Four times seven years—twenty-eight years ... although the figure is not absolutely exact, this is the approximate time of one revolution of Saturn. Saturn revolves in a circle consisting of four parts, passes therefore through the whole Zodiacal circle, and its course has an actual correspondence with the course of man's life from birth to the twenty-eighth year. Just as the circle divides into four parts, so too these twenty-eight years divide into four periods of seven years each. There, in the revolution of a star in cosmic space, we see indications of similarity with the course taken by human life.

Other movements in the heavens, too, correspond to rhythms in human life. Little attention is given today to the very brilliant researches made by Fliess, a doctor in Berlin; they are still only in the initial stage but if ever they are properly studied, the rhythmic flow of births and deaths in the life of humanity will be clearly perceived. All such research is only at the beginning; but in time to come it will be realised that one need only regard the stars and their movements as a great celestial clock and human life as a rhythm that runs its own course but is in a certain sense determined by the stars. Without looking for actual causes in the stars, it is quite possible to conceive that because of this inner relationship, human life runs its course with a like rhythm. Suppose, for example, we often go outside the door of our house or look out of the window at some particular time in the morning and always see a certain man on the way to his office ... we glance at the clock, knowing that every day he will pass at a definite time. Are the hands of the clock the cause of it? Of course not! ... but because of the invariable rhythm we can assume that the man will pass the house at a definite time. In this sense we can see in the stars a celestial clock according to which the life of man and of peoples runs its course.

Such things may well be vantage-points for the observation and study of life, and Spiritual Science is able to indicate these deeper connections. We shall now understand why Tycho de Brahe, Kepler and others, worked on the basis of calculations—Kepler especially, Tycho de Brahe less. For insight into the soul of Tycho de Brahe reveals a certain similarity with that of Nostradamus. Nostradamus, however, does not need to make calculations at all; he sits up in his attic and gives himself up to the impressions made by the stars. He ascribes this gift to certain inherited qualities in his organism, which for this reason is no cause of hindrance to him. But he also needs that inner tranquillity of soul that arises after he has put away all thoughts, emotions, cares, and excitements of everyday life. The soul must face the stars in purity and freedom. And then what Nostradamus prophesies rises up in him in pictures and images; he sees it all before him in pictures. If he spoke in astronomical terms of Saturn or Mars being injurious, he would not, in predicting destiny, have been thinking of the physical Saturn or the physical Mars, but he would have pondered in this way: Such and such a man has a warlike nature, a temperament that loves fighting, but he also has a kind of melancholy making him subject to moods of depression which may even affect him physically. Nostradamus lets this interweave in his contemplation and a picture rises before him of future happenings in the man's life: the tendency to melancholy and the fighting spirit intermingle—“Saturn” and “Mars.” This is only a sense-image. When he speaks of “Saturn” and “Mars,” his meaning is: There is something in this man which presents itself to me as a picture but which can be compared with the opposition or conjunction between Saturn and Mars in the heavens. This was merely a way of expressing it; contemplation of the stars evoked in Nostradamus the seership that enabled him to see more deeply into souls than is otherwise possible.

Nostradamus, therefore, was a man who by acting in a certain way was able to waken to life inner powers of soul otherwise slumbering within the human being. In a mood of devotion, of reverence, he completely put away all cares and anxieties, all concerns of the outer world. In utter forgetfulness of self, with no feeling of his own personality, his soul knew the truth of the axiom he always quoted: “It is God Who utters through my mouth anything I am able to tell you about your concerns. Take it as spoken to you by the Grace of your God I ...” Without such reverence there is no genuine seership. But this very attitude ensures that those who have it will not abuse or make illicit use of their gift.

Tycho de Brahe represents a stage of transition between Nostradamus and Kepler. When we contemplate the soul of Tycho de Brahe, he seems to be one who is calling up remembrances from an earlier life, rather reminiscent of Greek soothe-saying. He has in him something that is akin to the soul of an ancient Greek seeking everywhere for the manifestations of cosmic harmony. Such is the attunement of his soul—and his astrological insight is really an attitude of soul—it is as if astronomical calculation were merely a prop helping him to call up those powers which enable pictures of happenings in the past or the future to take shape before him. Kepler's mind is more abstract, in the sense that modern thought is abstract—in a still higher degree. Kepler has to rely more or less upon pure calculation in which there is, of course, accuracy, for according to knowledge derived from clairvoyance there is an actual relation between the constellations and the actions of men. As time went on, astrology became more and more a matter of reckoning and calculation only. The gift of seership gave place to purely intellectual thought and it can truly be said that astrological forecasts now are nothing but intellectual deduction.

The farther we go back into the past, the more we shall find that the utterances of the ancient prophets concerning the life of their peoples rose up from the very depths of their souls. So it was among the Hebrew prophets; in communion with their God and free of their personal interests and affairs, they were wholly given up to the great concerns of their people and could perceive what was in store. Just as a teacher foresees that certain qualities in a child will express themselves later on, and takes account of them, the Hebrew prophet beheld the soul of his people as one unit; the Past mellowed in his soul and worked in such a way that the consequences were revealed to him as a great vision of the Future.

But now, what does prophecy mean in human life, what does it really signify? We shall find the answer by thinking of the following: There are certain great figures to whom we always trace streams of happenings in history. Although today the preference is for everyone to be at one level, because it goes against the grain when a single personality towers over all the others (in their desire that all faculties shall be equal, people are loath to admit that certain men are more forceful than the rest)—in spite of this, great and advanced leaders are at work in the process of historical evolution. Things have come to such a pass nowadays that the mightiest happenings are conceived to be the outcome simply of ideas and not to lead back to any one personality. There is a certain school of theology, which still claims to be Christian, although it contends that there need have been no Christ Jesus as an individual. In reply to the retort that world-history is after all made by men, one of these theologians said: That is as obvious as the fact that a forest is composed of trees; human beings make history in the same sense that trees make a forest ... But think of it—surely the whole forest could have grown up from a few grains of seed? Certainly the forest is composed of trees but the primary step is to find out whether it did not originate from grains of seeds once laid in the soil. So, too, it is a matter of inquiring whether it is not, after all, the case that events in human evolution lead back to this or that individual who inspired the rest.

This conception of world-history suggests the thought of “surplus” forces in men who play leading parts in the evolution of humanity. Whether they apply these forces for good or ill is another matter. Such men work upon their environment out of the surplus forces within them. These surplus forces, which need not be drawn upon for the affairs of personal life, may express themselves in deeds or they may find no outlet in deeds; but with others, some kind of hindrance always seems to prevent this. Nostradamus is an interesting example: he was a doctor and in this capacity brought blessing to very many human beings. But the thought that someone is doing good, often goes against the grain! Nostradamus became an object of envy and jealousy and was accused of being a Calvinist. To be a Jew or a Calvinist was looked upon askance and circumstances therefore forced him to withdraw from his work of healing and abandon his profession. But were the forces used in this inspiring work no longer within him when he had retired? Of course they were! Physics believes in the conservation of energy or force. What happened in the case of Nostradamus was that when he threw up his work, the forces in him took a different direction. If his medical activities had continued, these forces would have produced quite other effects in the future. For where can our deeds really be said to end? If, like Nostradamus, we withdraw from some activity, the flow of our deeds is suddenly stemmed—but the forces themselves are still there. The forces in Nostradamus' soul remained and were transformed, so that what might have expressed itself in deeds at some future time, rose up before him in pictures. In his case, deeds were transformed into the gift of seership. The same may be true of human beings endowed with a faculty for prophecy today; and it was true in the case of the ancient Hebrew prophets. As biblical history indicates, these men had a real connection with forces belonging to the past and to the future of their people; their own soul, their personal life, was nothing to them. They were not war-like by nature but had within them surplus forces which from the very beginning took the same form as those of Nostradamus after their transformation. Forces, which in others poured into deeds, revealed themselves to the Hebrew prophets in the form of mighty pictures and visions. The gift of seership is directly connected with the urge to action in men, with the transformation of surplus forces in the soul.

Seership is therefore by no means an incomprehensible faculty; it can be reconciled with the kind of thinking pursued in natural science itself. But it is obvious, too, that the gift of seership leads beyond the immediate Present. What is the way, the only way, of reaching out beyond the Present? It is to have ideals. Ideals, however, are usually abstract: man sets them before him and believes that they conform to the realities of the Present. But instead of setting up abstract ideals, a man who desires to work in line with the aims of the super-sensible world tries to discover causes lying in the womb of the ages, asking himself: How do these causes express themselves in the flow of time? He approaches this problem not with his intellect but with his deeper faculty of seership. True knowledge of the Past—when this is acquired by the operations of deeper forces and not by way of the intellect—calls up before the soul pictures of the Future, which more or less conform to fact. And one who rightly exercises the gift of seership today, after having pondered the stream of evolution in olden times, will find a picture rising up before him as a concrete ideal. This picture seems to tell him: Mankind is standing at the threshold of transition; certain forces hitherto concealed in darkness are becoming more and more apparent. And just as today people are familiar with intellect and with imagination, so in a Future by no means distant, a new faculty of soul will be there to meet the urge for knowledge of the super-sensible world.

The dawn of this new power of soul can already be perceived. When such glimpses of the Future astonish us, our attitude will not be that of the fanatic, neither will it be that of the pure realist, but we shall know why we do this or that for the sake of spiritual evolution. This, fundamentally, is the purpose of all true prophecy. We realise that this purpose is achieved even when the pictures of the Future outlined by the seer may not be absolutely accurate. Anyone who is able to perceive the hidden forces of the human soul knows better than others that false pictures may arise of what the Future holds in store; he understands, too, why the pictures are capable of many interpretations. To say that although certain indications have been given, they are vague and ambiguous does not mean very much. Such pictures may well be ambiguous. What matters, is that impulses connected with evolution as it moves on towards the Future, shall work upon and awaken slumbering powers in man. These prophesyings may or may not be accurate in every detail: what matters is that powers shall be awakened in the human being!

Prophecy, therefore, is to be conceived less as a means of satisfying curiosity by prediction of the Future than as a stimulating realisation that the gift of seership is within man's grasp. Shadow-sides there may well be—but the good sides are there too! The good side will be revealed above all when men do not go blindly through the day nor blindly onwards into a remote future but can set their own goals and direct their impulses in the light of knowledge. Goethe, who has said so many wonderful things about the affairs of the world, was right when he wrote down the words: “If a man knew the Past, he would know what the Future holds; both are linked to the Present as a Whole complete in itself.” (“Wer das Vergangene kennte, der wusste das Kunftige; beides schliesst an heute sich rein, als ein Vollendetes, an.”) This is a beautiful saying from the “Prophecies of Bakis.”

And so the raison d'être of prophecy does not lie in the appeasement of curiosity or the thirst for knowledge, but in the impulses it can give to work for the sake of the Future. The unwillingness to be really objective about prophecy today is due to the fact that our age sets too high a value on purely intellectual knowledge—which does not kindle impulses of will. But Spiritual Science will bring the recognition that although there have been many shadow-sides in the realm of ancient and modern prophecy, nevertheless in this striving for consciousness of the Future a seed has formed, not for the appeasement of cravings for knowledge or of curiosity, but as fire for our will. And even those who insist upon judging everything in the human being by cold, intellectual standards, must learn from this vista of the world that the purpose of prophecy is to stimulate the impulses of will.

Having considered how attacks against prophecy may be met and having recognised its core and purpose, we have a certain right to say: In this domain lie many of those things with which academic philosophy will have nothing to do ... that is certainly true. But the light of this very knowledge will reveal, in connection with those facts which illustrate the other saying, that data of intellectual knowledge—however correct they may be—are sometimes completely valueless because they are incapable of engendering impulses of will. Just as it is true that there are many things undreamed of by philosophy, so on the other side it is true that a great deal in the realm of scientific research into the things of heaven and earth comes to nothing because it does not quicken the seed of right endeavour. But progress in life must be made in the light of a kind of knowledge which reveals that at the beginning, the middle and the end, everything turns upon human activity, human deeds!