The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The last talk should suggest with a few lines that spiritual science can investigate the deeper profundities and the truth of the biblical documents and that it can read that in the right sense again which is written in this document. With some simple lines should be shown how concerning the Bible such a right penetration is possible into the deeper sense of the Bible in a quite unexpected way and how it can lead many human beings to a recapture of this document of humankind. What could be said in the last talk about the position of our newer time, about its research, its criticism, its worldview compared with the Old Testament someone can also say concerning the New Testament. In addition, here we are able again to point to the fact that in the seventeenth, eighteenth centuries a criticism started which has analysed and cut the Gospel to pieces, a document of such an immense significance for countless human beings for centuries, and attacked its bases. One would have to tell a long story if one paid attention to this biblical criticism of the New Testament in detail. How could it be different, because since that time, after the invention of the art of printing, the Bible has come to all hands, and with it, the materialistic thinking got out of control! How could it happen other than that people recognised clearer and clearer that there are contradictions in the Gospels?

For example, you need only compare the genealogies of Jesus in the Matthew Gospel and the Luke Gospel, if one adheres to the external letter of the matter, and you find that already the first chapters of both Gospels are contradictory. Not only that Luke and Matthew differently give the ancestors; also, the names do not comply. If you compare the single facts of the life of Jesus, you can find contradictions everywhere. In particular, people realise how extremely the first three evangelists, the writers of the Matthew, Mark, and Luke Gospels, on one side, and the writer of the fourth so-called John Gospel, on the other side, contradict. The result was that one tried to produce an accordance of the first three Gospels in a certain way. One believed to find that these three evangelists—even if they differ from each other in many details—give a picture of Jesus which is attractive to the whole view and to all ways of thinking of a newer time, at least to many personalities of our time.

However, many people realised long-since concerning the fourth evangelist that there cannot be talk of a historical document at all. Not only that the writer of the John Gospel, who completely brings the facts differently grouped, above all, concerning the miracles that he describes quite differently; it also becomes apparent that his whole standpoint towards the centre of the whole world history is different. This sight has developed more and more. If we want—we cannot go into the details—to turn again to the sense of this research, it is approximately this that one says that the three Gospels could give the image of the superior Jesus, the founder of the Gospel, if one considers them as portrayals of the brilliant time. The fourth Gospel is a confessional document, a kind of hymn of that which the writer wanted to show concerning his faith in the crucified Jesus. He wanted to give no story, but a teaching writing.

In particular, in the nineteenth century, this view settled in the souls of numerous people more and more due to the so-called Tübingen School, which the great Bible scholar, the brilliant Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792–1860) led. Baur's view is approximately this: the John Gospel is late; it was written very late whereas the other evangelists wrote earlier, still after certain reports of those who, perhaps, themselves had experienced or come to know it from persons who had witnessed the story in Palestine. However, the John Gospel originated only in the second century. Not from the original story, but influenced by the Greek philosophy and by that which had already appeared in the Christian communities, it were written, so that John created a picture of Christ Jesus, which could uplift the human beings in such a way that it is lyrical in certain ways. It teaches how one began to think and to feel like a Christian up to the second century, however, it was no longer able to inform about the events in the beginning of our era.

Indeed, there were also souls who vindicated the opposite viewpoint. If one must say on the other side that Christian Baur and his students proceeded with tremendously critical astuteness, nevertheless, we are not allowed to forget a biblical scholar like the historian and academic Gförer (August Friedrich G., 1803–1861) who asserts that the Gospel is due to the apostle John himself. With diligence he shows how just this Gospel shows almost in each sentence that an eyewitness wrote it or that somebody who had received his message from eyewitnesses wrote it. Gförer goes so far that he says in his Swabian way that anybody who cannot believe in the fact that the Gospel is due to John is out of his mind. He is also out of sorts with those who say that it is not historical and who bear down on this Gospel with all possible arguments.

The question that interests here is this: did really research, history cause this view in spite of all astuteness, in spite of all scholarship, which is never denied a moment?—Someone who can thoroughly explore not only the outside of history, but is able to immerse with his thinking and feeling, and with his whole view in the mental undergrounds of human development, notices something else. It was not only the historical sense, it was not only the so-called objective research, but they were the ways of thinking of the newer time, the beloved views that were spread more and more since the last century.

They did not accept that the confidence and the ideas of the figure of Christ Jesus survived which prevailed for centuries, that not only a superior being was included in Jesus of Nazareth, but a universal being, a spiritual-divine being that is not only related to the whole humanity but to the whole development of the world generally. The confidence and the idea got lost that this spiritual-divine being worked in the mortal body of Jesus of Nazareth, and that we face a unique event there. This contradicts the ways of thinking so much that they had to be directed against such confidence. The critical research slipped in unconsciously to justify what the habitual ways of thinking wanted for the time being. More and more the sense came up, which could not endure that anything topped the normal human-personal, the sense that says to itself, yes, there have been great human beings in the world evolution: Socrates, Plato, or others. Indeed, we have to admit that Jesus of Nazareth was the greatest. Nevertheless, we must remain within this human level.—The fact that something could have lived in Jesus that one can compare to the normal human being contradicts the materialistic mental images, which settled down more and more. We can see this sense slipping in unconsciously and combining with that which the so-called historical research ascertained.

Why did the first three evangelists become more and more the respected ones and the writer of the John Gospel the mere lyricist and confessional writer? Because they could say to themselves, the three evangelists, the Synoptics, describe an ideal human figure that does not top the human level, even if Jesus is an elevated one. It flatters the modern sense if one says what a modern theologian said: if we subtract everything supersensible and spiritual from Jesus of Nazareth, if we take the simple man of Nazareth, we are closest to Jesus.

That is not possible with the John Gospel. It immediately begins with the words: “In the beginning the Word already was. The word was in God's presence,” before a material world existed. What there was in the spiritual primeval grounds became flesh; it walked around in Palestine in the beginning of our calendar.—The writer of the John Gospel applies the highest wisdom to understand this event and to bring it to understanding. In view of this matter, it is not appropriate to speak of the simple man of Nazareth. Hence, he was never allowed to deal with a historical document. These are not only scientific reasons, it is the development of the usual thoughts, emotions and sensations which have found their expression in that which the Bible criticism of the New Testament and the historical research claim today to have the unconditional or at least relative authority of these matters.

However, there emerges another question from spiritual science. Let us position ourselves really on the ground on which some new researchers have positioned themselves. The ones wanted to portray an event that took place in the beginning of our calendar. They added mythical and legendary aspects. Assume that we positioned ourselves on this ground. There we must ask ourselves, is it yet possible to speak about Christianity as such under these conditions? Is it possible to speak about Christianity if we understand the documents, which tell about this Christianity, purely materialistically? Is it possible to behave towards the whole Bible in such a way?—Two things should be stated at first that prove that the question cannot be put different than it was put, and that it can be answered in outlines. Let us assume that Christian Baur's view is right that something took place in Palestine that one has to explain as the external historical, and that in the course of time the writers delivered that out of the prejudices of their time to the future generations what was in them. Let us assume that we have to presuppose such a research while we believe in the descent of a spiritual being from spiritual spheres that lived in Jesus of Nazareth, resurrected, won the victory of life over death—what we regard as the real essence of the Mystery of Golgotha. One has to break this doctrine, Baur says. One considers this view as a dogmatic one. This view must be cancelled. One has to investigate an event in Palestine like another historical event.

Is it then possible to speak generally in the true sense of the word of Christianity, of the Bible as such a work which reports what has to appear? On the other hand, I would like to point to two facts. What is the first big and enclosing effect of the Christian worldview based on, an effect that nobody can deny? What is the sermon of Paul based on? Is it based on the interpretations of the Gospels by a new sober research? Never Paul's strength is based on an announcement of that which is to be exhausted by the means of history. Paul's whole efficacy is based on an event that you can understand only from supersensible, never from sensuous causes. Someone who checks Paul's writings sees that his whole teaching is based simply on the fact that he could win the conviction and the experience that Christ has risen, and that in the Mystery of Golgotha the life in spirit carried off the victory over death.

Wherefrom does Paul take his conviction of the true nature of Christ Jesus? He does not take it, as for example the others who were round Christ Jesus, from an immediate instruction. He takes it, as you all know, from the event by Damascus. He takes it from this fact and he could say, I have seen Him who lived, suffered, and died in Palestine, I have seen Him living.—Paul means nothing but that he has seen Christ in spirit and has won the truth from the spiritual view that Christ lives. He announces Christ, whom he got to know in his spiritual view. In addition, he equates this appearance to the other phenomena, because he says to us, after death, Christ appeared to various persons, to the twelve disciples and others, and in the end to me as a mistimed birth.—With it, he thinks that he really beheld Him in a higher view, who carried off the victory over death, and that he knows since that time that Christ lives for someone who rises in the spiritual world.

Here we already stand concerning the New Testament where the new spiritual science must separate from any only literal view of the Bible. What do you find as a rule in the writings of the so-called new research about the event of Damascus? Saul became Paul in an ecstatic condition, a condition into which one cannot look really. This escapes from the human research. Yes, it escapes from the external human research. We have emphasised this so often in spiritual science that the human being—what we can learn in the following talks—can ascend to the knowledge of a higher world which is round him in such a way, as the colours and the light are around a blind person. The human being can behold this higher world as the operated blind-born can learn to see colours and light. This takes place by the spiritual-scientific methods in the soul of the true pupil of spiritual science and enables him to behold into the spiritual worlds, to behold what is there. What takes place with this pupil, what every pupil can bear witness today and at all time, that took place with Paul. He received it: to hear with ears which are not sensuous ears to see with eyes, which are not sensuous eyes. Then he could also perceive Him who lived in Jesus of Nazareth. So Paul's whole strength extends into the supersensible realm. If you take the whole Paul as he is, you can say, what he said is set aglow by “Christ was raised. Hence, our faith is not futile” (1 Corinthians 15:17).

If one goes just into the effects of Paul's sermons how he spread that form of Christianity, which went through the world, then one can never say, it does not depend on going back to any supersensible facts to investigate the facts about Jesus. One says that one must apply the usual scientific forms. Then one forgets not only the original facts in Palestine not only that which happened during 33 years, but also what happened for the dissemination of Christianity. One forgets that it is based on a supersensible event, and that this supersensible event is to be understood at first.

However, in quite similar way we also find if we consider the matters only seriously and really that the Old Testament, at least its most important document, the Law, is based on something similar. We find that the whole mission of Moses, the whole strength of Moses by which he provided big services to his people is also based on a supersensible event. We had to say the day before yesterday that if the spiritual researcher develops higher, so that he becomes sighted in the spiritual world and is able to behold into the spiritual undergrounds of the things that he can survey the facts of the spiritual world in pictures, in imaginations. Yes, you can express the processes, which happen in you if you ascend to the spiritual fields, only in pictures, however, you must get clear that somebody who speaks in such pictures does not want to speak about the pictures as those, but thinks that one has these pictures as expressions of his supersensible experience.

The supersensible experience by which Moses got his mission was clearly described in the phenomenon of the burning bush. There we see Moses, the leader of the people, facing his God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who issued the order to Moses to act for his people what we find happening then as the action of Moses. While we use this, we already face a basic issue of the whole Bible, namely the question: how have we generally to position ourselves in order to penetrate deeper into this document to these two supersensible facts, which make any merely external research impossible? How have we to behave to this basic issue of the Bible in the spiritual-scientific sense? We can penetrate if we bring the contents of the revelation or the experience of Moses home to ourselves.

The most important traits are only cited. Moses faces the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. God gives him the order at the same time to lead the people from Egypt, to increase it to a certain size and to teach it a certain attitude.

If then Moses wants to have something by which he can exculpate himself before the people, so that he can say who he is and who sends him, God reveals his name: “I am the I-am.” Nobody can understand the word who is not able to go into the whole sense and the being of old naming. Old naming is unlike the modern naming. Old naming should absolutely express the being of the personality, the being of that who faces us. In “I am the I-am” the being of the God had to express itself in particular who faced Moses, and who calls himself “the Lord the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” Why does he call himself the Lord the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? There is a secret hidden behind it, which must be unravelled. We can unravel it only if we move up to it with the help of spiritual science. We have to emphasise it over and over again at various places that the human being consists of the members of his being, that we only face one part of the human being as the physical body, that we have higher members which are supersensible, which are the real bases, the creative principles. We must add the etheric body or life body, then the astral body and as the fourth the bearer of the ego.

The human being has the physical body in common with the apparently lifeless beings, with the minerals, the etheric body with the plants and all living beings, the astral body with the animals, which can have passions and desires. Because of the ego, the human being towers above all sensuous beings, which surround him. Spiritual science has always recognized these four members of the human being.

We have to point to the physical body that also has its spiritual primal ground and is only condensed from the spiritual. As well as ice originates from water, the physical originated from the spiritual. We must go far back in the view of the spiritual development if we want to look for the first spiritual origins of the physical human body. This fourth member is absolutely the oldest of the human members. Today the physical body is the densest. It emanated from the spirit in the distant past. It has become denser and denser, has experienced some changes, and has thereby taken on its physical figure. This is the oldest in the human being. A younger member is the etheric body or life body. It came later; hence, it is less condensed. The astral body is even younger.

The ego is the youngest member, the bearer of the human self-awareness. All these members originated from spiritual primal grounds and spiritual beings, from divine-spiritual beings. We can say, spiritual science shows that this ego, by which the human being became the modern self-conscious being, immersed in the body. It was composed, before he became an ego-being, of the physical, etheric and astral bodies. The Bible also distinguishes those beings now who are the creators of these three human members. The teaching of Moses speaks about the creator of the human ego, of the creator of the bearer of the human self-awareness. Hence, the Bible also sees in the God who let the ego flow into the human being, so to speak, that God who was the last to come concerning the evolution of the human being. The divine beings, the Elohim, whom we have strictly distinguished from the God Yahveh or Jehovah, are the creators of the physical, etheric and astral bodies. They are exactly distinguished in the Bible from the God appearing last in our evolution, from the Yahveh God, from that who brought the ego to the human being.

If we ask, where does the human being find the being of this God, this youngest of the creative gods about which the Bible starts speaking in the fourth verse of the second chapter of the Genesis? Spiritual science shows that where the human being finds his ego in himself, which differs so substantially, already after its name, from all other beings round us, that he there finds a drop of this divine being in himself. This is no pantheistic teaching, also no explanation of the fact that the human being has to find his God in himself. Asserting this would be like someone who asserts that a drop of water is the same being like the sea—and says: this drop of water is the sea.

If we speak in the sense of spiritual science, we speak about something infinite, comprising, universal that is connected with the earthly development and the other things that belong to this earthly development. In our ego, we find a spark of this God Yahveh as we find the same being in the drop of water as in the sea. Nevertheless, it was a very long way the human development had to cover, while the God Yahveh started forming the human being in such a way that he could grasp the ego consciously. The strength of the ego had to work in the human being already well before, before he got the consciousness of the ego. Moses became the great precursor bringing the consciousness of the human being to the ego. However, these forces work and form in the human evolution already long before. They form in such a way that we can recognise their way if we deal with the evolution of the human consciousness itself.

Let us look somewhat back in the development of the human consciousness. One uses the word development very often today, but as drastically, as intensely as spiritual science takes the word development seriously, it is the case with no other science. This human consciousness, as it is today, developed from other forms of consciousness. If we go back far to the origin of the human being, not in the sense of materialistic science, but in such a way, as I have explained it the day before yesterday, then we find that the human consciousness appears more and more different, the farther we go back. The consciousness that connects the various intellectual concepts, the external sensory perception in the known way originated firstly, even if in the far-off past, but it originated firstly. We can find a condition of the consciousness at that time, which was completely different from today because memory was completely different in particular. The memory of the modern human being is only a dilapidated rest of an old soul force, which existed quite differently. In old times when the human being did not yet have the inferring force of his today's mind, when he was not yet able to count in the today's sense, when he had not yet developed his intellectual logic, he had another soul force for it: he had developed a universal memory. This had to decrease, had to withdraw, so that at its cost our today's mind could develop. This is generally the way of development that a force takes a backseat, so that the other can appear. Memory is a decreasing force; mind and reason are increasing soul forces.

For those who hear these talks already for some years, it cannot be something especially miraculous what I say now. For the others it will seem absurd if one speaks about the nature of memory in the following way. What is the appearance of the human memory? It is that which remembers yesterday, the day before yesterday and so on, until the childhood. Then, however, it discontinues once. The memory did not stop in old far-off past, not in childhood, not even at birth; but like the modern human being remembers what he himself has experienced in his personal life, the prehistoric human being remembered what his father, his grandfather had experienced through whole generations. Memory was a soul force through generations that extended really. For centuries, memory survived in the old far-off past, and another kind of naming was connected with the different formation of memory.

We come to the question now: why is talk of individuals in the first chapters of the Bible who become hundreds of years old like Adam, Noah? Because it makes no sense to limit these human beings. Memory reached through generations up to the primal father. One gave this whole generation one name. It would have made no sense to give the name Adam to a single person. Thus, in those days one gave the name to that which remembered, holding on the same recollection, for centuries from generation to generation—Adam, Noah. What was this? It was that which goes through father, son and grandson, but maintained recollection. So faithfully, the biblical document maintains these secrets, which one can understand only with the help of spiritual science.

If we look at the consciousness of the ego with which we comprehend the being of the Yahveh God, we see that the ego lives in us between birth and death, and that it maintains its kind between birth and death. Thus, the ego maintained for generations at that time, for centuries. As we speak today about the ego and know that it goes back as far as we can remember, the human being of primeval times said to himself: it makes no sense to call myself an ego. I recall my father, grandfather, and great-grandfather.

His ego went through generations, and it had even a name. As we find an expression of God in our personal ego if we become engrossed in this ego, the ancient human being said to himself, looking up through the generations: God who lives in the ego lives for generations,—as a divinity which then Moses recognised in the higher worlds. The God was the same who lived as an ego from generation to generation in ancient times. One declared as ego, in the parlance of the past, what reproduced as an expression of the Yahveh God, with the Yahveh word “I am the I-am.” Moses learnt to recognise this in his spiritual revelation. In contemplating the burning bush this was revealed for the first time. The same God once lived from generation to generation, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He was the force, which lived in the memory and brought everything at the same time that founded the human order. Thus, we look up at the predecessors of Moses. In the biblical sense, we look up at the patriarchs, at those, in whom the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob lived.

These times needed no external commandments, no external laws. For that lived on with the lively memory, quite different from ours, which one had to do. According to what did one act in these primeval times? If you understand the Bible correctly, you find that the human beings did not act after commandments. One acted after that which memory said to one, what the father, the grandfather et cetera had done. With his blood, the human being got the direction to that which he had to do. In these ancient generations was something like a spiritualised instinct that one can compare with “acting instinctively” as we call it today. Not after a commandment the ancient human being acted, no, he acted after the character of his being, after his type. How did Abraham, Isaac and Jacob act? They acted in such a way as the blood running through generations induced them. They had brought down the God Yahveh with their egos, whether they waged war whether they lived in peace. They had no commandments; they had no law. The spiritualised instinct of God lived in them.

At the time when Moses appeared, the human personality was on the first level of its development. There its consciousness broke away from this common generational consciousness. There the generational memory had already stopped quite thoroughly. There one did no longer have the spiritualised instinct of action. There something else had to replace it. The God of Abraham, of Isaac and Jacob—who in his spiritual physical figure gave Moses the law, the commandments because one did no longer have the spiritualised instinct—had to regulate the external order, the social living together by commandments, by laws. It is the same God who worked before as a natural force, who is now efficient as legislator to found the external order with laws. We see that it has a deep sense to read the words at this point: the God of Abraham, of Isaac and Jacob. The God who calls himself the God “I am the I-am” is the same as the fourth member of the human being, the same who let flow the ego into the human being. However, the human beings could not take up the spiritual nature of the ego in their consciousness. A longer preparation was necessary to it, and this takes place at the time, which is portrayed in the Bible as the Old Testament, at the time of Moses up to the Mystery of Golgotha. Hence, this time is a time of promise, which the new Gospel shows, the beginning of the “time of fulfilment.” The God announces himself to Moses as the “I am the I-am.”

He announces himself in such a way that he orders the external order of the human beings, their living together by laws indirectly by Moses's vision. Humankind lived this way in the pre-Christian time in which the God was creating, in which the Yahveh God was forming, in which the “I am the I-am” lived, in which, however, humankind could not yet live consciously but according to the external law coming from the Yahveh God. More and more the time approached when humankind should become completely aware of the ego. For the whole antiquity, there was only one means for the human beings who could not yet behold, could not yet face God in the physical world. There was only one way how this God could become effective for them. This was the law, the order. This applied to the external world.

Moreover, there was a supersensible way to get to know this God, and these were the mysteries or initiation. What was initiation? Everything that was delivered to certain personalities which were regarded as suitable to apply the methods of spiritual-scientific research to develop the forces and abilities slumbering in the human being, so that they could behold into the spiritual world. Hence, for the confessors of the Old Testament it would be in such a way to behold God spiritually from face to face who lives in the “I-am.” If they applied this method, they were able to see and to hear with spiritual eyes and ears independently what Moses had seen, when the God, the “I-am” gave him his mission. Only in the mysteries, only by initiation this was possible.

However, there were also those who recognised the “I am the I-am,” but they had to go through the procedures, the methods with which the human being is transformed into an instrument of the higher vision, the vision in the spiritual world. So the God who already lived in Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was concealed to the physical world. He ordered the world by law. To the initiate, the secret of the mysteries becomes visible in thinking. Then the time came when the Mystery of Golgotha should take place. What happened there, actually? Imagine what the initiate experienced in the old times. Only sketchily, I can describe the process of initiation by meditation, concentration and the other exercises. The soul of the neophyte was prepared for a long time. Then the processes of initiation were finished during three and a half days. There the sages of initiation prepared the neophyte prepared so far, so that he was transported to a state in which his physical body was completely sleeping. It was not only sleeping but it was like dead, so that the neophyte could not use his physical senses, his physical eyes, and ears. For it, however, he beheld with the organs of his spiritual members into the spiritual worlds. He could perceive there if he was outside his body if he was not connected with the physical organs. Then he could behold what lived invisibly in him as the “I am the I-am;” but he could behold it only in the depths of the mysteries. Then he was awoken—as everybody knows who has experienced these things—in his physical body and used the physical senses again. Now he had the full consciousness: I am the I-am, I was in the spiritual world. What has spoken to Moses, the “I am the I-am” faced me, and it is that which refuses eternity to me, which has entered my body. I was connected with it. I was connected with the divine primal bearer of the I-am whose reflection is my I-am.

Thus, the initiate returned to the physical world and bore witness of the fact that something spiritual exists in the ego, because he had beheld it. He could give his listeners news and message of it. However, one could only behold the “I am the I-am” in the spiritual world. By the event of Golgotha, the same being descended to the human beings who had announced himself by Moses in the burning bush with the words “I am the I-am.” This complies completely with the sense of the John Gospel: the ego became flesh in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, lived in it, and walked around among the human beings. This primal force brought the human being to the height on which he stands today. The primal force became a human being; the human being became a divine being and walked around among the human beings. It was possible that on Golgotha that took place as a historical event within the evolution of humankind, which the initiates could behold only in spirit: the fact that the Christ-being carried off the victory over the death of matter.

This is the historical-external-real fact, which the initiates often experienced in the mysteries. This was the course of initiation in the ancient times in the deep darkness of the mysteries with those who left their physical bodies for three and a half days, walked around in the spiritual world and recognised that a spiritual-divine being descends into the physical world, and that this event would take place once as a historical fact. This was the course of initiation. However, the time came now when humankind came to the event of Golgotha turning emotions, sensations, and thoughts to it by faith.

Then the understanding originated from it. It was something new. One got as something external that one could have, otherwise, only by the rapture in the spiritual world. If one assumes this in such a way, we understand why Christ Jesus says: I am the I-am in a completely new figure. He says, look back at the primeval times, at that which lived as the everlasting in the human being that lived in Abraham, Isaac and Jacob that made known itself then in the Law of Moses. Now the time has come when the ego becomes aware in the single person, when the human being has to become aware in his ego, in the divine living in him.

If it was in the old times in such a way that the human being looked up at the God that he beheld and could say to himself: what lives in me lives for generations,—it is now in such a way that he finds the divine in his ego if he beholds into himself. The divine from which any ego originated was embodied in Jesus of Nazareth, and someone understood this who wrote: In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and God was the word.—By these words, the being of the innermost human nature and at the same time the primary source of this innermost being is meant. He lets Christ Jesus say, what lives in me a spark of which is in every human being existed before the Gospel was.—The significant sentence in the John Gospel was “Before Abraham was, I am.”—Before Abraham was, the “I-am” was, this I-am which is not bound to any time which was before Abraham, was already in the spiritual primeval grounds of the human being. While he calls himself the primary source of this I-am, Christ spoke the significant words: “Before Abraham was, the I-am was.”

Therefore, we realise how the sense of human development, which flows through these fundamental books of humankind, the Old and the New Testaments, is brought back to life again by spiritual science. In addition, we realise how to us the most important words become readable first if we fathom the sense of these books, regardless of the words, with the help of spiritual science. I give an example that gives something to think to the materialistic sense. I would like to remind you of the resurrection of Lazarus. There such a man like Gförer says: who asserts that the John Gospel is not written by John, helps himself saying, the writer wrote down a lot, as he experienced and understood it, but the Lazarus miracle must have been told to him. He cannot have been present.

One must understand the Lazarus miracle only correctly. Let us understand it in such a way that Christ when he entered the world took on the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Let us believe, however, that that which prepared in the Old Testaments became expression in the New Testament. He had to have somebody who could understand him completely, who could penetrate in the deepest sense into what he could announce, and that means that he had to initiate a person in his way.

Initiation stories are told to us secretly at all times. The Lazarus miracle is nothing else than the miraculous and tremendous representation how Christ created the first initiate of the New Testament. Christ waked up Lazarus as an initiate recalled the soul of his pupil to the body who was for three and a half days in a state similar to death, after he had walked around in the spiritual world. Someone can simply see through all that who understands something of it, because it is the language in which generally initiation stories are told. “This illness is not to end in death; through it God's glory is to be revealed and the Son of God is glorified” (John 11:4). This means: external appearance as revelation of the inside; so that one has to translate the sentence in truth: “The illness is not to end in death, but that the God manifests as an external appearance, so that He can also be revealed to the senses.”

In Lazarus slumbers the deeper human being who has the ability and the strength that it could be developed in mysterious way in him, could be led up in the spiritual world, so that he could recognise the being of Christ, the Son of God. However, this strength had to develop first. Christ Jesus developed it in Lazarus, so that the divine that rested in Lazarus could be revealed, and could reveal the Son of God. Christ Jesus created in Lazarus the first to know from own inner observation who Christ Jesus is real. At the same time, this miracle shows—because it is to someone a real miracle who wants to accept the external physical principles only—what the pupil concerned has to go through during the three and a half days. Because this can be compared to a real death since the etheric and the astral bodies are raised out of the physical body and only the physical body lies there.

Thus, we have understood even such a miraculous event like the Lazarus miracle—miraculous only to anyone who cannot explain it out of spiritual science. All that reveals itself to you in the Lazarus miracle if you have the light only, which illuminates it with the words: “His illness is not to end in death but to reveal the inside.”—If these abilities are woken in the human being, it is like a birth. As a child arises from the womb, the higher is born by the lower human being. In the same way, the illness of Lazarus is connected with the birth of the new life, of the divine human being, so that the divine human being is born in the physical human being, in Lazarus.

So we could go through the John Gospel step by step and would experience that that which happens in the spiritual initiation had to be described quite different from that which we see in ancient times when with quite different spiritual powers the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is working. If we look into the Bible in such a way, then it is the high universal book again, which lets shine to us what we have now found ourselves. While we must admit—we can say this—that only someone who has developed the higher spiritual forces can come to this truth, we have also to admit and say—if it faces us in the John Gospel—what brought it in these writings. While a new spiritual researcher approached the Gospel and the whole Bible, he learnt to see this and can say: the human beings will come to the true value of this document and recognise that only a materialistic prejudice can speak the words: “the simple man of Nazareth.” However, because of true knowledge we have recognised Christ as an overwhelming world being living in the body of Jesus of Nazareth.

The first three Gospels appear to us in relation to the John Gospel possibly, as if three persons stand grouped on a slope of a mountain and every reports what he sees. Everybody sees a part. Someone who looks down from the higher vantage point surveys more and portrays more from this higher vantage point. We come to know not only what the others below describe, but also what can make the three understandable at the same time. That is why it is not difficult to say, who stood on the higher vantage point, but for us it is in such a way that the first three writers were also initiates in certain respects. However, the deep initiate, who could write much deeper, could look much deeper than the three others could and about the true spiritual facts of the matters, which lie behind the sensuous, this is the writer of the John Gospel. So the Gospels combine harmoniously and show that the Mystery of Golgotha cannot be understood as a usual historical event, but is only explicable by a process as we find it with Paul, who says: “the life I now live is not my life, but the life Christ lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). What the external research shows beside becomes also important in the spiritual research. If we look at Christianity, it is important to us to figure the clairvoyance of Moses out which is shown to us in the vision of the burning bush. It is this what one had to explain. I have to emphasise that this new spiritual science is able to form the picture of the world events of its own accord, to look at Christ, so to speak, spiritually from face to face and to find Him again and, hence, to find Him truly in the Gospels. That biblical scholarship is not really without presuppositions, which says, we want to investigate the Bible like any other story.

For it assumes the dogma that there can be only usual, sensuous, natural facts. Only spiritual science is really without presuppositions, and this leads to a renewed recognition and high esteem of the Bible in all its parts. A time will come when maybe those are disgruntled who want to say today that only the simple mind is able to grasp the Bible. This wisdom must misjudge the Bible. The time will come when just the wisest wisdom estimates the highest what is given to us in the Bible because clairvoyance will face clairvoyance in the Bible. Then some word, which is written in the New Testament, appears in a new light. It will become apparent that a document like the Bible can lose nothing by impartial research. It would be sad if any research cut this Bible of its reputation, of its name. A research that cuts the Bible of its name has only not come far enough. Research that goes until the end will show the Bible again in its greatness.

The human being is allowed to do research freely. Who has the view that by research religion could perish shows with it only that his piety stands on weak feet. The divine being put the impulse of research in the human being, so that he is active. It would be a sin against this impulse if one did not live researching. I recognise God by my research. God recognises Himself in my research. Truth is a good in the human development from which the religious life will never have anything to fear. However, this is a basic truth, which penetrates the New Testament completely.

You should not take those into accounts who want to keep away the human beings from the Bible because of comfort, and who say, if you come to philosophers and interpret the Bible, these say, they want to know nothing about it.—However, such a research is based on comfort. However, that research is justified and right which says: we cannot go deeply enough to understand what is written in the Bible.—That research in the Bible is the right one that goes into it in free research and then understands the Bible in the right sense. These researchers understand the truth of the biblical saying: “you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32).

Before some time when I stayed in a little town in Germany, I made the acquaintance of a poet, a dramatist, and in the time of our acquaintance, he was just occupied to complete a drama. On an afternoon, he worked on the completion of his drama almost like with steam power, as I could notice in a visit which I had to do. One could not speak at all with him, because he had to further the matter as quickly as possible. In the evening shortly before eight o'clock, I did a walk. I met my good dramatist, when he speeded on a bicycle to the post office and could not be impeded. Nevertheless, it interested me—you will soon see why—why the person concerned speeded so exceptionally fast to the post office just that day. It was shortly before eight o'clock when it was closed. When he came back, he said to me on my question, why he had to go in such haste to the post office just even today, this would be a peculiar matter.

Now you understand this matter best of all, if I say first that after a just beginning, then prevailing fashion the dramatist concerned belonged to the freest spirits of the present and that he represented his worldview in the freest phrases. He was a very advanced person. Telling the following, I would like to show that I commit no indiscretion. If he were here, he would completely be pleased to hear that I tell this matter. Now we are able to form an opinion about what he said when he came from the post office: “I have gone so quickly to the post office because I wanted to bring my drama to the post office today. Today is the last auspicious day. If I had waited till tomorrow, I would have exposed myself to the danger that the theatre management rejects the drama.”—I asked, “Have you finished it, actually?” For it seemed impossible to me. “No,” he said, “however, I have written a letter, so that one sends the drama back again to alter the last scenes.” This was the free spirit! I had to remember a lady who had worked on a dress many years ago and wanted to have it ready and put on at Thursday. If she had put it on for the first time on Friday, she would certainly experience a misfortune. One normally does not take into consideration sufficiently, what it means for our feeling and thinking in the present if a free spirit makes a post, like the poet speeding to the post office to send off the drama incomplete and then to let it send back again, so that he can finish it. You see that superstition can be something rather strange.

It may be something that a person has banished completely from his worldview and it may be that he protests strongly against it in a boasting way to be concerned with such superstition. However, if it depends on it, there are loopholes through which this superstition can slip in. We live in a time in which in the most scornful sense one speaks about all possible forms of superstition. However, at the same time it happens in this present that those who speak about superstition have no idea of it now and again through which loophole slips in just with them. For it does not need to be an old form of, like with this dramatist speeding on his bicycle. New forms of superstition can also appear. Just somebody who speaks scornfully about the old forms of superstition may be exposed worst to some new form of superstition. It is maybe difficult to realise these concepts of superstition anyhow in our time, because in our time the tendency prevails so much to regard everything that one himself believes as the only reasonable and to deny everything that one himself does not believe. Just this way of feeling in our time opens the doors to various new forms of superstition. Hence, it is not sufficient to continue the common talking about superstition, if we want to get involved thoroughly in superstition from the spiritual-scientific viewpoint.

Various old traditions have come into our time, various things that our ancestors have believed various things that our ancestors and the scholars of ancient time believed to be strictly scientific and what is expelled to the region of superstition today. We ask ourselves, should not the idea light up in those who face the old traditions with a shrug who seem to be scientifically advanced, that that could be erroneous which is believed today? Could it not be that our descendants may regard this as the biggest superstition some centuries later? Indeed, someone who believes to stand on the firm ground of natural sciences is easily inclined, for example, to cast everything that is pronounced from a viewpoint that assumes a spiritual world beside the physical one, generally in the field of superstition. On the other side, one can easily understand that theosophy—admittedly maybe also unfounded—combats and characterises the superstition of natural sciences. The fact that the one or the other party regards this or that as superstition can never become a characteristic feature of the real nature of superstition. Various things which project from old times just show us if it is real superstition that it depends with such matters much less on the human logic, on human reason than rather on the human ways of thinking, on that which people are used to think today.

How many things appear in our popular literature, in our daily press today, which are apparently contrary to the enlightened thinking! For example, there is a city in Germany—it is not far away from Berlin—where you would look for a cab with the number 13 in vain. He who had it once got no passenger. It was ignored, the number 13. Also at hotels you can often experience that the number 13 is absent in the room numbers. You can also find in baths where nothing but enlightened doctors are that the number 13 is ignored with bathing cubicles because nobody wants it. That right in the middle and beside the way of thinking of modern literature and daily press! However, someone who is a soul expert to some degree already finds that superstition is, nevertheless, something that slips into the human thinking and feeling completely quietly.

There is a popular booklet about superstition in which something reasonable and something absurd can be found. Then, after the author slaughters what astrology and astronomy and other forms of superstition are, he states that astrologers once existed who cast horoscopes to the human beings and derived their destinies from the moment of birth. Such astrologers would no longer exist as far as he would know; the midwives would do this now. Indeed, it would not take place in Berlin but in remaining Germany. You can really read this sentence in this booklet about superstition. I do not believe that anybody can call it other than superstition, because, otherwise, he would have to say that many astrologers cast horoscopes today. What the man says does not correspond at all to the facts; it is the purest superstition. Every investigation could show him the opposite of his assertion. Similar things slip in the consciousness of the human beings every day if these are also less palpable things and one would regard it as a paradox if I spoke of superstition.

The opinion has arisen in certain circles of scientific consideration since some time that one has to look for physical causes of human memory, in particular in the field of sexuality. Not only this, but also the writings and brochures are numerous which examine the mental conditions of great spirits. A Leipzig scholar took great pains till recently to examine a whole group of great spirits, among them Goethe, Schopenhauer, Scheffel (Joseph Victor von Sch., 1826–1886, German poet), and Conrad Ferdinand Meyer (1825–1898, Swiss poet), to what extent they had, actually, this or that insanity and whether their geniuses would be connected with this or that insanity. On the other side, the tendency of physical illness relates to inheritance, and no current event escapes from such an interpretation today. Here we are concerned with a superstition that rises just now, which penetrates, however, our education like a scourge. Future times will not understand that it was possible that science could worship such a superstition for a while. If our descendants repaid this in the same sense, judged in the same sense what science believes and teaches today as one teaches and judges today what our ancestors believed in former times, then those who are active in these fields today would come off the worst. Thus, we already see, while we survey the facts impartially, that the old forms of superstition are rightly thrown to the window and, on the other side, new forms slip in that are not just simply recognised as those.

Who looks around a little in science knows how many demons of superstition slip in here and there which only have a short existence fortunately, but can be not less detrimental. Sometimes trends are not far from that which one may call superstition. I would like to give an example. During my activity as educator, I could make some observation that was possible only because I could go into a large field concerning the human development. More than twenty years ago, it was standard to give little children red wine, generally wine to drink—possibly in the second, third, fourth years. One could realise how by a certain trend of medicine just children got their glass of red wine at this age every time during dinner. He, who observes such a thing, maybe observes too short periods in relation to the effect of these matters. If one compares those persons who are 20-year-old today and were children of two to five years at that time to others who got no wine at that time for their strengthening, the difference of the present nervous manifests itself to a hair's breadth between those who got wine and those who got no wine.

There was in those days the superstition that wine contains a strength in itself. This was a trend of superstition. One offered this opinion like any other superstitious opinion. Now we can refrain from all that and go over to some other fields where one does not speak at all of superstition, although the mental fact of the matter is completely the same one in the human being. If speak of the weird idols, fetishes or catchwords people have in social life which they run after like others run after certain idols in other fields, and we realize how much superstition is contained in it, then you would recognise: if the quantity of superstition does not live it up in one field, it changes over to another field. If the human being towers above superstition on one side, it is swiftly expressed in another field where one does not notice it so much.

After we have characterised the situation a little, we may be allowed to try to come to the real origin of superstition, to the peculiar state of mind in which a superstitious person is. Above all one is allowed to say that with the emergence of this state of mind the bias of a human being plays the conceivably biggest role in this or that school of thought. Someone understands the same fact—depending on his school of thought—in the one or other way. Let us try to bring a concrete case home to us. The French physiologist Richet (Charles R., 1850–1935, Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, 1913) had the following experience: he walked in the street once, and on the other side of the street a person was walking. At this moment, he had the thought: nevertheless, it is strange that professor Lacassagne is in Paris today. However, it is not so strange. Fourteen days ago, professor Lacassagne sent me an article and wrote that he would be here in fourteen days. Richet wanted already to go to the other side and greet him when he said to himself that he wants to go to the editorial office, and the other would probably also come there. At the same moment, he realised that the professor resembled an ophthalmologist known to him. Richet goes to the editorial office, and there appears professor Lacassagne after one hour. Richet says to him, I saw you in the street before one hour. The professor answers: this is impossible. I was not there an hour ago, but somewhere else.—It is no doubt; Richet could not have seen him. It is peculiar how two persons often behave to each other if they have two different lines of thought. Richet saw a person and had the certain impression to see professor L. However, when he faced the professor L., it seemed to him brainless to have taken another person who was big and blond for professor L., who was of medium height and had a dark moustache. However, Richet is a man who believes in occult effects, in telepathy. He said to himself, professor L. is in Paris and thought to go to the editorial office—and at this moment, I saw this thought by telepathy!

A Danish researcher, Lehmann (Alfred Georg Ludvig L., 1858–1921, psychologist), who has written a book about Superstition and Magic (1898) thinks differently about that. He says, “Richet believes in telepathy; that is why he sees something mystic in this quite usual experience which should prove the correctness of his confidence, however, he overlooks the incidental circumstances completely which explain the matter absolutely naturally. I myself have experienced various such cases, and because I do not believe in telepathy, I have always looked for and found an obvious cause of the phenomenon.”

There you have two persons who judge the same event quite differently depending on the school of thought. I myself would like to agree with the Danish researcher Lehmann, because those who approach occult matters by inadequate means overstate the case the easiest and can explain anything in the world to themselves like in this case. However, you see from it how the bias, in which a person is with his line of thought, causes that he colours another person whom he faces in such a way.

Now think how the things are reflected in the human soul if they are not exactly figured out. There we come to the real nature of superstition in the spiritual-scientific sense. You can read countless writings and discussions about the superstition of alchemy, the hapless art to produce gold to which so many have dedicated themselves. Those who wrote about it were mostly—in the modern view—exceptionally competent, positive researchers in other respect. They occupy an important place with their writings, in which in this or that way the art of making gold is informed. However, what you read there appears to you as sheer madness, as absolute nonsense. Moreover, it appears in numerous cases as such obvious fraud that one can realise very easily how just at that time when the human being believed such a thing in this field fallacy by fallacy was spread.

Even though chemistry developed from alchemy, we must be infinitely happy that we have, finally, the true chemical science, in contrast to those figments and errors to which our ancestors have abandoned themselves in alchemy. Perhaps we can understand just the easiest what is deception if we consider some simple cases. We want to refrain from the number thirteen, but you know that for some people the number seven causes something dreadful that some regard it as a lucky number, sometimes, however, also as an unlucky number with which magic effects should be connected. I need to mention something only that can lead you to that which is connected with the number seven. I want not only to mention that the number seven is also found in the purely physical nature—seven colours, seven tones et cetera—what has often enough been mentioned here from which one can conclude that this or that is connected with the number seven. However, we want to refrain from that today. We want to turn our attention to something else.

• There is an illness, pneumonia, which increases for seven days and then decreases. Only during the seventh day the crisis occurs, so that someone who has to treat such a sick person has to pay attention in particular to this physical rhythm. There we have the number seven connected to a particular process, something that can be observed in any single case. The modern materialistic science does not get involved with any explanation of this process. If we traced back medicine in ancient times in which you do not have to see a sum of mistakes only as it is shown in the history of medicine, one would understand that the ancient doctors and experts of nature knew how all life proceeds in a certain rhythm. They knew that a rhythmical coherence exists between the processes in the human being and outdoors in the big nature, in the macrocosm. Because the human being is, actually, born out of the macrocosm whose life proceeds in certain external processes, the human life also proceeds in a certain rhythm. He, who knows the rhythm of human life, knows very well that an increasing and decreasing rhythm of 28 days, of four times seven days, in an organ like the lung in which certain functional strengths and weaknesses appear. There it is no longer surprising, as soon as one recognises this basis, that the illness of the lung becomes especially dangerous where it collides, so to speak, with the general rhythm of life phenomena. Briefly, we would see if we considered the facts in the sense of spiritual research and not superstitiously, why after seven days a particular crisis of pneumonia takes place. However, one does not want to come to such things in our materialistic age, which can be pursued only by the means of spiritual science.

There was a time in which the doctors not only knew that pneumonia goes through this crisis during the seventh day, but in which they also knew why this is so. They knew how this is connected also with the healthy rhythm. However, this spiritual-scientific knowledge is forgotten to the external life. One does no longer know the real lawfulness, it got lost to humankind. The mere number seven remained. One did not know at all, in the end, why pneumonia shows something particular after seven days. Then one takes out such a thing, of course, without being able or wanting to understand it. One applies it because one sees something particular in the number seven as such. One says to himself, something particular is connected with the number seven. One can apply it anyhow here or there. As long as one keeps to formalities, as long as one does not look into the matter, one has no reason to apply the thing here or there. So one applies it where apparently an occasion exists. Above all, a human law is involved, which is only too comprehensible: in all cases where one has arranged such a thing from abstraction where one applies it and sees that it fits the thing works; however, if it does not fit , one overlooks it.

Thus, it also applies to some country lore. Who comes from the country knows for sure that from the first thunderstorm, which appears in the spring, this and that is prophesied. If the prophesied comes true, it is accepted as a rule, if it does not come true, one forgets it. Nevertheless, deep profundities are in some country lore, and one would have to investigate it on its deep wisdom. Then again, one applies not the purely exterior of superstition, but intends to penetrate the thing independently. Indeed, I was pleased rather well if beside other country lore once again that is pronounced, if the cock crows on the dung heap, the weather changes or remains as it is.—A healthy trait appears here that must not be generalised but individualised. On these essentials, the development of our soul and spirit should depend.

In a similar way, only not so transparently, many things of alchemy are concerned. Some of you know when I spoke about the Rosicrucian initiation and the philosophers' stone that I showed what one has to understand by the philosophers' stone in the real spiritual science of all times and what can remain in force before our present most modern thinking. Among the various methods that lead up the human being to higher knowledge, in particular to the Rosicrucian initiation, you find one method that one calls “the preparation of the philosophers' stone” downright. Something is understood by this preparation of the philosophers' stone that is connected with a regulation of the respiratory process. Becoming conscious and regulating breathing according to spiritual principles belonged to the different methods, with which the human being works his way up to the higher worlds. After particular instructions, someone breathes who becomes a disciple of spiritual science in the positive sense.

This breathing has a particular result for the whole organism that the external science is no longer able to investigate because it knows nothing of the matter. The human being develops something by the instrument of his own body in himself that really appears in his body and enables him to another worldview because by the respiration an effect happens which expresses itself in the mineral composition of the physical body. Thus, we have produced something by the regulation of the respiratory rhythm in the human being that was called the philosophers' stone. It is that which is to be produced inevitably in the human organism if the human being has to grow into the higher worlds. The process can be given, but one cannot impart it to any human being just without further ado. Since only someone can apply this process by its very nature who does it in a completely unselfish way without any personal regard.

When I spoke once in a little circle how one is able to do it today already as I would suggest it also wholeheartedly in one of the talks, a person said afterwards, it would be rather useful, if one publicly announced the method to produce a particular mineral in the human being. For this mineral would be something very useful if one produced it in big masses.—I had to answer: the fact that you put this question gives the reason why it is not allowed to be announced. As long as such questions are put, it is just impossible that it is allowed to be announced. You can find it in the literature, but it is veiled there. It is only comprehensible to that who gets to know the parlance going through a pre-school. “Mercury,” “philosophers' stone,” “silver” mean something else. If one speaks of the union of mercury and its addition to any other product, “mercury” and “philosophers' stone” just mean something else than external matters.

However, these things exist in literature. Those who have no idea what the expressions and the signs in particular signify which are connected with them take the thing simply literally. If one takes them literally, it is the purest nonsense. So, for example, it has happened to a Danish researcher of superstition that he read something about strange personalities of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, about Ramon Llull (~1232–1316) and others. It is at everybody's discretion to regard him as a swindler, a charlatan or as the greatest sage of his time, depending on he can understand him. Now, however, it is told that Ramon Llull succeeded in finding the philosophers' stone after a 30-year-study—to most people an uncomfortable matter—and that he thereby became able to make gold, while he transformed a certain amount of mercury by a part of the stone into a powder which still had all qualities of the stone. If one takes a tiny amount of it, it gets the quality again to transform mercury. Then a tiny amount is taken from this again, and so on, until gold originates finally.

If one tries this, if he takes what he finds in the book, takes certain substances, mixes them and adds them to the mercury, it is the biggest nonsense that can be done. Everybody is right to mock it. The Danish researcher also does this. He mocks it. Who knows, however, how to interpret the expressions finds that in literature the “philosophers' stone” exists just as in the writings by Ramon Llull, with which he achieved his goal. This is the wonderful of the matter that the sentence has been known for centuries and is right even today. This shows somebody who knows something about it how brilliantly right it is. Then he realises that in Ramon Llull really the soul of one of the wisest of his age lived. However, who sticks only to the external mode of expression gets up to nonsense really. Many people got up to nonsense who believed that the wise alchemist produced external gold, and they also went insane, although I believe that they already went insane a little when they started the matter. Psychiatrists, however, state that they went insane thereby. They may have lost their wealth, because they did not find gold at last. Hence, one must not disagree with the writer so much who calls alchemy nonsense, because—what he could understand of it is nonsense only. However, no nonsense is big enough not to be believed by this or that person.

This is connected with an addiction that you can experience in the field of spiritual science day by day. You experience the following: if you face this or that person with a natural phenomenon, which needs clarification, and you try to explain such a phenomenon in connection with its spiritual undergrounds and claim to lead back an everyday phenomenon to its spiritual base, then you excite no special interest with most people today. Many human beings do not search the explicable but the inexplicable. They are happy if they can find anything that remains inexplicable to them. Tell to anybody that here or there, something has taken place that cannot be explained, and then they are pleased with it. People really want to be pointed to the inexplicable. They do not want to penetrate what presents itself to them, but they want to increase the miraculous. Try to explain something about the development of plants to anybody, while he can grasp them from the undergrounds of development and look deeply at nature, so that he is led from the sensuous where one deals with the spirit at one end deeply into the spiritual—then he cannot believe in a spiritual world! However, if you tell such a person that a hand of a statue got lost, was found again in another city, and has been reinserted, he says: no one can explain this, consequently I believe in a spiritual world.—This is in such a way that the persons want to remain without an understanding of the spirit because they believe that one is not allowed to fathom this. With it, they open the doors to superstition everywhere.

If the human being does not strive for impartiality with that which is available to him in his reason and logical thinking, he is exposed to all possible forms of superstition when he does not want to rely on this, as soon as something appears that is different from the usual. Thus, one could see, for example—you forgive if I say this, although I stand completely on the ground of spiritual science and theosophy—how often just those who stand on the ground of theosophy reject what could lead to enlightenment in the spiritual-scientific sense. When the theosophical movement had begun in the world, two significant persons lived by whom this wisdom was revealed to humankind at first. Those who have this wisdom have not behaved in such a way as it... (Gap)

I have characterised this heaps of times. For: how could one have behaved compared with a truth that was received from an unknown side? The first intermediaries of the theosophical worldview said, from personalities who stay in the background we have got the wisdom we committed to this or that book.—There one could have said the following, well, these human beings who bring this wisdom are honourable, but we want to check this wisdom ourselves.—I always emphasise that only somebody can do research in the higher worlds who has attained particular abilities. However, if this wisdom is informed, so that it is verifiable, then what? This wisdom was not checked in many cases. One accepted the matter in good faith because one said to them that it has come from higher beings. The others, however, said, whether it is founded or not, this does not matter; whether the higher beings generally exist, that is the point; and if one does not know for sure whether these higher beings exist or not, we reject the whole theosophy.

However, could it not have happened that anybody said to himself, this wisdom may have come wherever from at first, I check it, whether and how it fits the phenomena of life, whether it proves true in life; above all, I check its relation to the current worldview, to the positive science?—There one could maybe come to the view: how poor is that which the worldview gives us built up on positive science compared with that, which has come from theosophical side. One must not accept it in good faith, but one can check and understand it. The result will be whether those from whom this wisdom has come are greater than those who stand on the ground of the so-called scientific facts. We have no reason to assume that H. P. Blavatsky received her worldview from a rain cloud. Such wisdom that one has found as reasonable must originate from somewhere. Whether one can call it great, this depends on what arises if one compares this worldview to that which one already recognises as great.

Such a check would have been reasonable. However, this is the only one that brings honour to the human mind, not accepting on good faith, also not rejecting on good faith, but examining without prejudice. Indeed, not anybody can do research. Those should do it who can develop their mental powers especially. However, everybody can examine impartially, if only he did not search the inexplicable instead of the explicable and were satisfied having found the inexplicable. As long as one says to him, he should try hard to fathom the spirit; he does not want to come along. However, if one informs him of anything that is not to be understood at all, he is present because it is more comfortable. This is especially distinctive of the soul state of the human being.

There is another case, which took place (taken from Lehmann's book). I talk again not in such a way, as if anything true is behind it, but I talk about the human spiritual condition that has become obvious thereby. One told that in certain regions of Asia human beings existed who can do the following: they spread out a cloth, take a rope, throw the rope in the air, let a little child climb up, until it becomes invisible on top; then they themselves climb up, and after some time the limbs of the child fall down dismembered. Then the fakir also follows, takes a bag, packs the limbs into it, shakes the whole, then he pours out the bag and—the child is recreated completely. I do not want to decide what is behind, but only speak about the way of superstition.

The process appears to the human beings as something that is hard to believe at first. A certain S. Ellmore wrote about that in the Chicago Tribune, and a painter drew strange pictures that showed the different stadia quite correctly: the thrown rope, the climbing child and so on. Ellmore himself added photos which were shot especially cunningly, because one always saw the fakir and the spectators only who looked upwards once, then downwards. However, one did not see the remaining. Ellmore explained the whole matter, so that one could easily elucidate it. He meant namely that the person concerned who carried out the matter must be a very significant hypnotist who could suggest the process to a whole company. There people said to themselves that the process was no superstition but suggestion, and it seemed explicable that all people were hypnotised. However, this suggestive process appeared to a person even more incredible than the original process. For he thought that there could be matters in the world, which cannot be explained by our principles, and said to himself: concerning suggestion one already knows something, but concerning the soul forces one must still investigate many a matter.—This person turned to S. Ellmore to find out the place where this was present at such a performance. Now the truth became known. S. Ellmore explained that the whole story was invented, what already his pseudonym points to: S. Ellmore = sell more. He had dressed the matter in this form, because he could not believe the original process and found the form of suggestion acceptable to the modern consciousness.

You see that it really depends on the mental constitution that it depends on what takes place in our souls if one wants to elucidate the concept and the being of superstition fairly. Quite different factors must decide whether a matter is correct or is not correct in the end. However, what can protect us from any aberrations which become superstition can be solely the pursuit of real knowledge, of seeing through the matters. Someone is always addicted to superstition who does not want to penetrate really into the depth of the matters. It anyway is in such a way that this longing for a certain quantity of superstition prevails absolutely. With it, I pronounce the basic principle of superstition: as long as the human being remains only in the observation of the physical environment, as long as he does not want to penetrate to spiritual science, to the real knowledge of the spiritual primal grounds of the things, a certain need of superstition lives in him.

If you like, take a modern doctor: if he rejects any form of superstition in his thinking ever so much—that who is impartial can easily prove how he covers his requirements of superstition in another form copiously. This is the principle of compensation in the human soul. You see in it how typical the principle is.

You have a person who wants to be way beyond the old superstition in every respect, but how much superstition Haeckel (Ernst H., 1835–1919, naturalist, philosopher) registers in his Miracles of Life and in his World Riddles! Those who know me know that I recognise Haeckel in all because he is the great researcher. Who knows me also knows that I always point to the positive that Haeckel has performed. Because he has thrown out the old superstition and does not want to go back to the spiritual backgrounds of the things, he applies it to another field. He becomes the most superstitious person on the other field. In the field of energy and matter, as he imagines it, there the atoms are dancing and whirling.

He calls that his god. He attributes to the dancing and whirling atoms that they can create conditions which simple living beings show, and that these again are made up to more complex things which fit together, in the end, to the form of the human brain. Everything that the human being can feel and want, all ideals, and moral, all religions are for that who can judge the thing impartially only dance of atoms. No difference exists to him between the dance of the atoms and the big fetishes of African savages. Whether the African savage adores his wooden block and looks at it as his god, or whether Haeckel lets his little atoms dance and looks at them as little gods—there is no difference between both concerning superstition. The one and the other superstition stand at the same point of view. There was a time—it is behind us already in certain ways—there one could see how this superstition emerged bit by bit. New discoveries of natural sciences were done in the course of time, in particular in chemistry. New compounds could be explained that one noticed differences of weight of the smallest parts in space. Many a thing was explained by the principle of the atomic weights. The view appeared fertile to construct such an atomic theory. Later, one forgot that one had constructed this atomic theory in spirit. The atoms became real idols which one adored.

When I was a pupil, a headmaster (Heinrich Schramm, see Steiner's autobiography, chapter II) made me realise what atomic superstition is. The headmaster calculated all phenomena of physics and chemistry as movements in those days—a long time ago. However, he did not yet calculate the thinking. However, he made calculations up to the chemical phenomena. The booklet, which contained these things, is called The General Movement of Matter as a Basic Cause of All Natural Phenomena. This was something that could fascinate somebody who defers to this issue. I would just give everybody this booklet with pleasure. However, it is no longer available in the book trade for a long time. Perhaps in libraries it may be still to be found. There we see superstition appearing in the omnipotence of the atomic whirl.

We saw all possible forms of superstition appearing one by one in natural sciences. Consider once that we really have a certain direction in natural sciences that speaks of the omnipotence of natural breeding.

Everywhere you can see that everything is gathered that is or is not indicative of the one or the other theory, if once the researcher concerned is fascinated by a catchword that has an effect on him like an idol. We would just see similar cases in our time if we only wanted to have an eye for them. Already at the beginning of the talk, I mentioned how the matters slip in that will become obvious as the dreadful superstition of time in a time not too far away.

Where is the cause of superstition now? Always the possibility occurs that superstition replaces what can prevail only as a fertile thought, as a fertile opinion. If we forget the original thought, the original opinion and take the formality presenting itself for it, we forget the essentials like the crisis of pneumonia appearing after seven days. If we pull the number seven out and retain it, the possibility exists that this changes into superstition. There you have the reason why ancient sages could show great natural phenomena.

Spiritual science wants to bring to the human being: that he does not search the inexplicable, but that he wants to search the explanation. Otherwise, if he stops in the area of the environment and does not want to rise to the higher point of view from which he can see what is justified or not justified in the one or the other field, then he replaces superstition by superstition. Who stops in the physical world leaves the one superstition and comes into the other. Not before he rises above himself and above superstition, he sees the right in the one and in the other. Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778, philosopher) already ascertained that it does not make a difference whether one is more or less clever. He said, the clever ones and the prudent ones have their prejudices just as the silly ones, even if the clever and prudent ones know something more and have more prejudices than the silly ones. The silly ones retain to few prejudices the more tenaciously in return.—This is absolute a principle which someone who observes human life can find confirmed in many cases. Thus, we see that a basic healing of superstition can be if one rises to the higher point of view from which the spiritual undergrounds of the world are readily comprehensible.

Various sorts of superstition will still emerge, and something slips into our view today. We are developing in such a way that the human beings have no right sense, actually, to eliminate superstition from the public life if it does not just come from old times. Oh, it absolutely applies to our time in various fields what an old story tells us. Call it an anecdote, but it applies, and it shows truth better than something else does. In a certain region of Spain, on the border between two provinces, an epidemic had broken out once. It was close to two universities. One university had a medical faculty in which one swarmed for bloodletting in particular. At the other university, one swarmed against bloodletting. In this region were two doctors. The one doctor was instructed in the one university, the other one at the other university. The one prescribed medicines, and the other venesected. It turned out that the one doctor kept all patients alive, while all patients of the other doctor died. Even if all patients stayed alive and all patients of the other died, nevertheless, both operated correctly according to their theory; one, indeed, wrong in practice, but correctly according to his theory.

If one tells such a thing, it may seem stupid. If one sees the things, however, day by day, one finds that the anecdote says nothing wrong, and one finds it even necessary. Therefore, it can only concern—if about superstition is spoken—that spiritual science has really no reason to propagate this or that superstition. It stands on the ground that the spiritual is explorable and that there are means and ways to penetrate into the spiritual world by which one is able to overlook the world from a higher viewpoint. Thereby the human being is led beyond superstition, and beyond that, which superstition can cause as damage in the human life. One can express that with a Goethean word which reveals truth comprehensively even if simply: “Wisdom is eternal, and it will be victorious, and it will raise the human being in us to humaneness in the most manifold tumults.”

It seems strange to people when spiritual science has something to say about that which is regarded by many with a certain logic as the most material, as the most unspiritual subject: nutrition. There are people who want to indicate their particular idealism, their particular spirituality by saying: oh, we care only about that which is above the questions that are connected with the material life.

Such persons also believe—and in certain respects they may be right—that it is irrelevant to one's spiritual development how the human being satisfies his bodily needs.

The materialistic way of thinking judges differently. A great philosopher of the nineteenth century had a saying that has often been repeated and that causes many who are idealistically minded to shudder. Feuerbach (Ludwig F., 1804-1872) once said: “The human being is what he eats.” Most people understand it in such a way—and the materialistic sense will absolutely agree with it—that the human being is made up of the substances which he supplies to his body, and from this develops not only the course of his bodily life but also that which presents itself in his mind.

If outsiders hear more or less cursorily about spiritual science, they believe that anthroposophists are too concerned with eating, with diet. An outsider cannot understand why the anthroposophists care so much about their diet. It should not be denied that in some anthroposophical circles whose members want to penetrate rather deeply into the spiritual life in an easy way, lack of clarity prevails. Some believe, nevertheless, that they should avoid this or that, should not eat or drink certain things in order to reach certain higher levels of knowledge! This is also a fallacy, like that just characterised view of Feuerbach's saying: “The human being is what he eats.” It is a one-sided view at least.

However, in a certain sense spiritual science can agree with this sentence, only in a rather different way than it is meant by the materialists, differing in two respects. Firstly, we have already stressed on occasion that everything around us is the expression of something spiritual. A mineral, a plant or something in our surroundings is material only with respect to its outer form. As with the limb of a human being, the outer form is the expression, the gesture of the spirit. Something spiritual is behind all material, and this is true of food as well. When we eat we absorb not only what spreads out materially before our eyes, but also that which is spiritual behind it. We come into relation through the material element of the food to the spiritual which is behind it. This is a rather superficial standpoint. However, someone who understands this is able to admit the materialistic sentence in certain respect: “The human being is what he eats.” Only one has to understand that there is a spiritual process within the material process.

This is the only way we can orient ourselves to these questions in the spiritual-scientific sense. If spiritual science puts emphasis on and pursues investigations regarding the nature of the foodstuffs, a unique perspective on the relation of the human being to nature appears. The human being comes into relation with nature because he absorbs the surrounding nature in a certain way and composes himself with that which is in it. The question arises, is the human being not subject to the external forces, because he ingests that which is external, and can he free himself from these forces? Is there any possibility that the human being can become free from the effects of his diet, so that he receives a certain power from and a certain influence on the surroundings? Could it not be that the human being, indeed, could be what he eats, through following a certain diet—and could it not be that by another diet the human being gets rid of the compulsion that is exercised on him by diet? So, the question is asked by spiritual science: how has nutrition to be arranged that the human being gets rid of the compulsion of diet, so that he becomes more and more the master of the processes within himself?

When we put this question to ourselves today, something must be said about the whole position of spiritual science in regard to these questions. This question, also about health, must be understood in such a way that in no way spiritual science argues for any particular point of view. Whoever believes that what is said today is agitating for or against this or that diet has an extremely erroneous view. Today nobody should go away from here with the view that I argued for or against abstinence, vegetarianism, meat diet.

All these questions about dogmas have nothing to do with the innermost feeling of spiritual science. We do not want to agitate, do not command the human being in this or that way; we want to say only how matters are. Then everybody may organise his life, as he wants, according to these overarching principles of existence. Thus, this talk will solely expound what is real in this field. On the other side, I ask you very much to take into consideration that I do not speak for anthroposophic circles in the narrow sense which want to go through a certain development and have to observe special conditions. Today, the question is discussed in the general-human sense. Because of the vast range of the subject, only single things can be taken out, and, above all, everything must be avoided that is connected with general health. We shall hear about this in the next talk.

Today, we deal with nutrition in the narrower sense. That is why the respiratory process is not taken into account. The human being has to take up proteins, carbohydrates, fats and salts in order to maintain the life process of his organism. You know that the human being satisfies the needs of his organism with the so-called mixed diet. He takes the main parts of his diet partly from the animal, partly from the plant realm. There are many more defenders of the mixed diet than of a one-sided diet among our contemporaries. We must ask ourselves, how do the laws of our environment dictate how the human being takes his food to the true forces and needs of the human organism? I speak only about the human being today, not about the animals.

The human being is easily inclined to understand his organism rather materially according to the so-called scientific results of his time. Spiritual science has to substitute this with the laws of the spiritual connections. Even if not always stated explicitly, the method which is adopted is based more or less unconsciously on the idea that the human organism consists more or less only of the physical body, and the sum of the chemical substances in their interaction with each other. One traces these substances back to their individual chemical elements and attempts—after one has recognised how these substances work—to get an idea how they could continue chemically working in the retort which one regards as the human being.

It is not necessary to state that many people are already beyond the view that the human being is only a big retort. It is not a matter of theories, but of the ways of thinking. The true practitioner is not concerned about anybody's thoughts, but about the effects of the thoughts. That is the point. It does not matter so much whether one is an idealist or not, but it is significant for life that one has fertile thoughts which are active in such a way that life prospers and progresses. It is important to bear in mind that spiritual science, even in this direction, has nothing to do with dogma or any belief. Anyone may espouse the most spiritual theories. It is not this which is important, but rather the fact that these thoughts are fertile if he introduces them in life. If one says that he is not a materialist, that he believes in the vital force, even in the spirit, but proceeds in the question of nutrition always as if the human being is a retort, his worldview cannot become fertile. Spiritual science has something to say about these concrete questions only if it itself is able to illuminate the details, and it is able to do so concerning the issues of nutrition and of health.

We must come again to clarity regarding the multi-membered human being. For the spiritual researcher the human being is not only the physical being, which one sees with the eyes, can touch with the hands - this physical body is only one part of the human being. This physical body consists of the same chemical substances that are spread out in nature. However, the human being has higher members. Already the next part of the human being is supersensible, has a higher reality than the physical body. It forms the basis of the physical body; it is the whole life through a fighter against the decay of the physical body. At the moment when the human being goes through the gate of death, the physical body is subject only to its own principles, and then disintegrates. In life, the life body fights against the decay. It gives the substances other directions and forces, other connections than they would have if they followed only their own nature. For the clairvoyant consciousness, this body is as visible as the physical body for the eye. The human being has this life body or etheric body in common with the plant.

We know from other talks that the human being still has a third member of his being, the astral body. What is it? It is the bearer of joy and sorrow, of desires, impulses and passions, of all that we call our inner soul life. All that has its seat in the astral body. It is spiritually discernible, as the physical body for the physical consciousness. The human being has this astral body in common with the animals.

The fourth member is the bearer of the ego, of self-consciousness. The human being is thereby the crown of creation, he towers over the things of the earth, which surround him. Thus, the human being faces us with three invisible members and a visible member. These always work in each other and with each other. They all work on any single member and each single member works on all others. Thus, the physical body—I say once again in parenthesis that all this applies only to the human being—as it faces us, is an expression in all its parts also of the invisible members of human nature. This physical body could not have in itself the members that serve the nutrition, the reproduction, life generally if it did not have the etheric body. All organs that serve nutrition and reproduction, the glands and so on, are the external expressions of the etheric body. They are that which the etheric body creates in the physical body.

Among other things, the nervous system is, in the physical body, the expression of the astral body. Here the astral body is the actor, the creator. We can imagine just as a clock or a machine is constructed by a watchmaker or by a mechanical engineer, the nerves are constructed by the astral body.

The characteristic of the human blood circulation, the blood activity, is the external physical expression of the ego-bearer, the bearer of the self-consciousness. Thus, the human physical body is also four-membered in certain ways. It is an expression of the physical members and of three higher, invisible members. The senses are pure physical; the glands are the expression of the etheric body, the nervous system of the astral body and the blood of the ego.

If we look at the human being in contrast to the plant, the plant faces us as a two-membered being. The plant has a physical body and an etheric body. Now we compare the human being to the plant, while we proceed universally and take the inner, the spiritual, into consideration. We relate the human four-membered organism with the two-membered organism of the plants. In order to support our view we may start from physical, known facts.

We can show how the plant builds up its organism. It builds up its body from inorganic substances. It has the strength to compose its body from single inorganic components in the most wonderful way. We need to see only how the plant is in a special interaction with the respiratory process. The human being inhales oxygen and exhales carbonic acid. The plant can absorb what is useless to the human being. It holds the carbon back for the construction of its organism and returns the oxygen for the most part. However, it requires something that is not regarded by many people as something particular: it needs the sunlight. Without sunlight, it could not build up its organism. The light that flows to us and delights us, that can animate us also emotionally, is at the same time the great assistant of the construction of the plant organism. We see how there a marvel takes place, how the sunlight helps to construct an organic being. What makes our eyes effective helps the plant to construct itself.

The human being also has the astral body beyond the physical one and the etheric body. The plant does not have it. That which helps the sunlight to build up the plants so marvellously is the etheric body. This is turned on one side towards the substances. The human being could not develop his physical organism if he did not do anything that is in certain ways in the opposite way that which the plant does. Already in the respiratory process, the human being does something contrary. The human being already goes through the contrary process. We can say the same concerning the complete nutrition of the human being. We can say, nutrition must take place in such a way that everything that is built up in the plant is destroyed in the human being again. The process in the human being is very peculiar. If it were only the etheric body that built up a physical body, consciousness or soul sensation would never appear. What the etheric body has built up must be destroyed internally over and over again, must be destroyed. Indeed, the etheric body is a fighter against decay, but, nevertheless, always some decay occurs. The astral body causes the decay that keeps the human being from becoming a plant.

The sunlight and the human astral body are two opposite things in certain ways. For one who gets to know the human astral body with clairvoyant consciousness the astral body is an internal spiritual light, invisible to the external eye. A spiritual light body is this astral body. It is the contrast to the external luminous light. Imagine once the sunlight becoming weaker and weaker, until it expires, and let it go even farther to the other side, let it become negative, then you have an inner light. This inner light has the opposite task of the external light that would build up the plant body from inorganic substances. The inner light which initiates the partial destruction, only by which process consciousness is possible, brings the human being to a higher level than the plant, because the process of the plant is transformed into its opposite. Thus, the human being is in a certain contrast to the plant because of his inner light. This is to understand the matter spiritually, and we would see on closer consideration how the destruction caused by the astral body is then continued by the ego. However, today this does not need to occupy us further.

We now take the relationship of the human being to the plant, which becomes so real that the human being takes up his nutrients from the plant. He continues within himself what is for the plant a whole world process. What is built up by the sunlight is destroyed by the astral body, indeed, over and over again, but it thereby integrates the nervous system into the human being and makes the human life a conscious one. Thus, the astral body being a negative light body is the other pole that is opposed to the plant. Something spiritual forms the basis of this process of building up the plant organism; spiritual science shows us more and more how that which appears as light to us is only the external expression of something spiritual.

Something spiritual shines, through the light, perpetually towards us, the light of the spirits shines towards us. What is hidden behind this physical light, but is separated in parts appears also in our astral body. It appears externally in its physical form, astrally in the astral body. The spiritual light works in us internally on the construction of our nervous system. So wonderfully do the plant and the human life work together.

We now examine the human being's relationship with the animal realm as food. Here matters are different. In the animal from which he takes his foodstuffs, the process is already carried out in certain ways. What man takes usually from the plant is partially transformed by the animal, already prepared, Since the animal has an astral body and a nervous system, too. Therefore, the human being takes up something that does not come to him unchanged, but that has already gone through a process that has taken up astral forces. What lives in the animal has already developed astral forces in itself. One could now believe that thereby the human being saves work. However, this thought is not quite correct. Imagine once the following: I build up a house with the help of various pieces of equipment. I take the original equipment. There I can construct the house completely by my original intentions. However, let us assume that three or four other persons have already worked on it bit by bit and now I have to complete it. Does this make my work easier? No, surely not. You read in a widespread literature that work is made easier for the human being if someone has already worked on it. However, human being becomes a more versatile, more independent being just by taking up the original.

Another picture: somebody has a balance with two scale pans. The identical weights keep the balance. On both sides there may be fifty pounds. However, that is not always the case. I can take a balance on which the arms are different lengths. Then we only need half the weight at twice the distance. Here the weight is defined by distance. It depends not only on the amount of the forces but also on the delicacy of the materials in particular. The animal processes the materials in a more imperfect sense. What the human being takes up continues to have an effect by that which the astral body of the animal caused in it, and then the human being has to overcome this first.

However, because an astral body has worked so that a process has already taken place in a sentient being, the human being gets something in his organism that has an effect on his nervous system. This is the basic difference between food from the plant realm and food from the animal realm. The food from the animal realm works in particular on the nervous system and with it on the astral body. In contrast, with plant food the nervous system is left untouched by anything external. Then, however, the human being has also to create everything concerning the nervous system by himself. Thereby only that which originates in him flow through his nerves. He who knows how much in the human organism depends on the nervous system understands what that is. If the human being builds up his nervous system himself, it is fully receptive to that which the human being has to expect of it in relation to the spiritual world. The human being owes to the plant foods the ability to look up at the greater connections of things that raise him above the prejudices that arise from the narrow borders of the personal being. Where the human being regulates life, and thinking freely from the great viewpoints, this he owes to the plant foods. Where the human being lets himself get carried away by rage, antipathy, by prejudices, he owes this to his meat-based food.

I do not agitate for plant foods. On the contrary: the animal food was necessary for the human being and still today it is often necessary because the human being should be firm on earth, should be hemmed in the personal. Everything that brought him to his personal interests is connected with the animal food. The fact that there were human beings who waged wars, who had sympathy and antipathy, sensuous passions for each other originates from the animal food. However, the human being owes to the plant foods that he is not limited to these narrow interests, that he can grasp universal interests. That is why the talents of certain peoples who prefer plant foods are more spiritual, while other people develop more bravery, courage, boldness that are also necessary to life. These qualities are not to be developed without the personal element, and this is not possible without animal food.

We speak about these questions from a general human viewpoint today. However, this brings to our mind that the human being can go in this or that direction, can immerse himself also in his personal interests with the animal food. His sense is thereby clouded concerning the larger overview of existence. One mostly does not see how it is founded in the diet when the human being says: now I do not know how I should do this or that, how has he done it?

This impossibility of surveying these connections comes from the food. Compare this to someone who can see the larger connections. You can look back at the food of these human beings and maybe at the food of the ancestors. A person who has a virginal nervous system given to him by his ancestry is completely different. This person has a different sense of the larger connections. Sometimes, abuses in one life cannot destroy what the ancestors have founded. Even if such a person, descended from peasants, for instance, stirs up what he has in himself, it has only been stimulated by the consumption of meat because he was more sensitive.

Progress is made when the human being, as far as the requirement for protein that is not prepared in the human nature itself, confines himself to the animal foods that are not yet set aglow by passions, such as milk. The plant food will take up more and more room in the human diet.

Concerning single foodstuffs, we can emphasise certain advantages of the vegetable foodstuffs. If the human being gets his protein from vegetable foodstuffs, he has to work harder, but he develops the forces that make his nervous system fresher. A lot of that which humanity would face if the consumption of meat got out of control would be avoided if vegetable foodstuffs would be preferred. We can see in the vegetarian and meat-based food the different effects they have. To illustrate this, we can say the following: look at the physical process under the influence of meat-based food. The red blood cells become heavy, darker; the blood tends to coagulate. Impacts of salts, of phosphates originate easier. If plant food is absorbed, the blood sedimentation is much lower. It becomes possible for the human being not to let the blood take on the darkest colouring. Just thereby is he able to control the coherence of his thoughts from his ego, while heavy blood is an expression of the fact that he is given away slavishly to that which is integrated in his astral body by the animal food. This picture is definitely an external expression of truth. The human being becomes internally stronger by the relation to the plant realm. By meat-based food he integrates something that gradually becomes foreign matter which goes its own way in him. This is avoided if the food consists mostly of plants. If the materials in us go their own ways, they strengthen the forces which cause hysterical, epileptic states. Because the nervous system receives these impregnations from the outside, it becomes susceptible to heterogeneous nervous diseases. Thus, we see how in certain respects “the human being is what he eats.”

In details it would be still even more provable, but through two examples we can show that one must not be one-sided. A one-sided vegetarian may say, we are not allowed to enjoy milk, butter and cheese. However, milk is a product in which the etheric body of the animals is advantageously involved. The astral body is involved in it to the least extent. The human being can live in the first times of his life as a baby only on milk. There everything is contained in it that he needs. With the preparation of milk, the astral body comes into consideration only rudimentarily. If one enjoys milk primarily at later age, if possible only milk, one achieves a particular effect with it. Because the person ingests nothing that is processed externally and can influence his astral body, and because he absorbs something in the milk that is already prepared, he is able to develop particular forces of his etheric body in himself, which can exercise curative effects on the fellow men. The healers who want to have a curative effect on their fellow men have a particular aid in the consumption of milk.

On the other hand, we want to describe the influence of a luxury that is taken from the plant realm, the influence of alcohol. This has a particular significance. It originates only when the real plant process, the effect of the sunlight, has stopped, namely the opposite that the astral body carries out. Then a process begins in the assimilation of alcohol that takes place on a lower level and impairs the human being even more than animal food. The human being brings the substances up to the astral body, gives them a particular structure with the astral body. However, if that which should be brought to the astral body disintegrates in the way as it is the case with the alcohol, then that happens without the astral body, hat which should happen under the influence of the astral body, namely the effect on the ego and the blood. The effect of the alcohol is to take over that which should happen, otherwise, from the free decision of the ego, by the alcohol. In certain respects, it is correct that a person who enjoys alcohol needs less food. He lets the forces of alcohol penetrate the blood. He provides what he himself should do with something external. One can say in certain ways that in such a person the alcohol thinks and feels. Because the human being provides to the alcohol what his ego should be subject to, the human being places himself under the constraint of something external. He gets a material ego. The human being can say, I just feel a stimulation of my ego thereby. Indeed, but now he is not experiencing the ego, but something else with which he has banished his ego. Thus, we could still show by various things how the human being can get around to being more and more what he eats. However, spiritual science also shows us how he is able to become free from the forces of food.

Thus, I wanted only to describe the relation of the human being to his surroundings along general lines today, how he relates to the realms of nature through the processes of nutrition. Who visits this or that talk further on will see that individual questions can also be answered on other occasions. This talk will have shown you that spiritual science is something that has its effect also on the most material needs of life. Spiritual science is something that can be an ideal for the human future. Today one still says often if one sees the substances combining and separating in the human being: it is like in a retort, and one believes that one can find something salutary in it for the human beings. However, a time is coming when someone who does research in the laboratory will also keep in sight what I have said about the light and the astral body. Is not anybody able to make the usual chemical observations if he says to himself, that here the larger elements have an effect on the smallest things which are penetrated by the external physical sunlight, and those which shine up to the spiritual in the human consciousness? One will explore these things in a light that gives us an overview of the whole.

By the spirit, everything is born that is in our surroundings. The spirit is the primal ground of all. If we want to come to truth, the spirit has also to stand with us as we conduct the research. Then we recognise that truth which the human beings need both on the macro cosmic and on the microcosmic scale.

The subject that should occupy us today encloses a number of questions, which rightly interest the human being in particular. The issues of health are connected with everything that makes the human being able to cope with life, with everything that helps him to fulfil his determination in the world without hindrance. Therefore, health is indeed for most people something they aim at, as one aims at external goods. However, health is also to be considered as an internal good that is aimed at like the external goods first not for their own sake by the healthily thinking human being but as the means of his working and creating. Hence, we can probably explain why the urge, the longing for getting enlightenment about the riddles and questions of the healthy and ill life are so far-reaching in particular in our present. Indeed, you find that attitude in the general thinking only a little which is suitable to make the human being receptive just to those answers that one needs if one wants to solve such questions connected so intimately with the whole nature of the human being.

As already once at a similar occasion, I remind of an old saying, which comes to somebody in mind if one speaks about health and illness: there are so many illnesses and only one health! This saying seems to be natural to some, and nevertheless it is a fallacy, a fallacy in the eminent sense of the word, because there is not only one health, but there are as many healths as there are human beings. We must incorporate that in our attitude if we want to see the issues of health and illness in the right light. We must incorporate in our attitude that the human being is an individual being that every human being is different from the other, and that that which is salutary to the one is noxious and disease causing to the other, that it completely depends on his individual state.

Each of us can experience every day that these viewpoints are not so widespread. For example, a mother finds out that her child is not quite healthy; she remembers that this or that has helped her in similar cases once, so she cures straight on in such a way. Then comes the father who remembers that something else has helped him once. Then the aunt comes, then the uncle; they maybe say, fresh air, light, or water help. These prescriptions often contradict each other so that one cannot fulfil them at all. Everybody has his remedy by which he swears, and then this must be unleashed on the poor sick person. Who would not have found out that this good advice coming in a rush from everywhere is, actually, a surely awkward thing if the human being lacks this or that! All these things originate from an unrealistic way of thinking, from an abstract way of thinking, from a dogmatism that does not take into consideration that the human being is an individual being, a single being. Every human being is a being for himself, and it depends on it above all: to contemplate this reality “human being” if one deals with the phenomena of health and illness.

Now arises such a need for help as the ill human being has it indeed from a property of his inner being, which must evoke the sympathy, the compassion of his environment. We can understand that everybody would want to help with pleasure, because this is only an expression of the fact that these questions just cause the deepest interest in the connection with the whole human nature. Indeed, if one contemplates this deep interest on one side, however, looks only a little into that which different views of health and illness prevail in our time, on the other side, then one can be rather saddened possibly. One could say, illness is such an important matter in human life and why it happens that learnt and unlearned people, doctors and laymen, argue not only about the remedies of the single illnesses, not only about the right ways to health, but even about the nature of illness in the most manifold theories. It sometimes seems that in our time of mental and scientific activity the ill human being and maybe the healthy one is exposed more than ever to the biased views asserting from all sides concerning important questions of human development.

Are we allowed to hope that spiritual science, which I have characterised from the most different sides in these talks, can also bring light into the theories and biased views concerning health and illness, which we see today round ourselves?

I have many a time emphasised here that spiritual science aims at a higher viewpoint that makes it possible to bridge that which divides the human beings into parties, because they have certain narrower circles of watching and observing only, and to show how one view resists to the other because it is one-sided. We have shown many a time that spiritual science is there just to search the good in the one-sidedness and to harmonise the different one-sided views. It may be one-sidedness—someone must say to himself, who considers the matter not only cursorily—what faces us if these or those dogmas are preached with demanding authority from the side of this or that pathology. You all have come to know how many biased views are opposing each other concerning these questions. Everybody knows that the academic or allopathic medicine—as it is called already, unfortunately, in the contemptuous sense—is on one side and homeopathy on the other side. Then, however, also wide circles have gained confidence in natural medicine that often has another view about illness and health and recommends not only what concerns the ill human being, but also that which is regarded as right for the healthy human being, so that he keeps himself robust and strong. Everything is coloured from this or that side, from the academic medicine or from natural medicine.

If we realise from which viewpoint such a quarrel about illness and health comes into being between the supporters of the natural medicine and those of the academic medicine, then we hear the supporters of the natural medicine saying, the academic medicine searches its certain remedy of any illness. It takes the view that illness is something that seizes the human being as an external cause, and that there is also this or that external remedy for the illness. We do not want to forget with such characteristic that that which the one or the other side says often overshoots the goal and do not want to forget that in many aspects both parties do wrong by each other.

Nevertheless, we want to stress single reproaches, which can clarify this. The supporter of natural medicine emphasises that the academic doctor relieves an inflammation in certain cases by ice packs and that he tries to help in articular rheumatism with salicylic acid et cetera. Particular supporters of natural medicine make serious allegations. They say, if the stomach secretes too much acid, the academic doctor tries to neutralise this stomachic acid. The naturopath says, this disregards the deep nature of illness and, above all, the deep nature of the human being. All that does not hit the nail on the head. If we assume that the stomach really secretes too much acid, it may be a proof of the fact that anything is wrong in the organism. In the properly functioning organism, the stomach does not secrete too much acid. Hence, if one neutralises the stomach acid, one does not yet suppress the tendency to create too much acid. One must not pay attention to remove the excess of acid in the stomach.

Those who polemicise against the academic medicine say this. One would almost stir up the organism—if one removed the stomach acid—to produce quite a lot of acid. One has to go deeper and look for the real cause. Therefore, in particular the naturopath if he becomes fanatic will rail if one gives anybody who suffers from sleeplessness sleeping pills. Sleeping pills remove sleeplessness for a certain time; but you have not removed the cause. However, you must remove it if you want to help the sick person really.

Among those who prefer the pharmacological point of view are two parties: the allopaths who state and use < specific remedy against certain illnesses, so to speak, a remedy that has the task to remove this illness. They start from the view that the illness is a disturbance in the organism, and a medicine must remove this disturbance. The homeopaths argue against it that this is not at all the real nature of illness, but the real nature of illness is a kind of reaction of the whole organism against an impairment in it. An impairment has appeared in the organism, and now the whole organism defends itself against this impairment.

They say that one has to recognise with the aid of the symptoms, which appear with the ill human being and take into account that that which produces fever et cetera is something like an appeal to the forces in the organism. They can expel the enemy that has crept in.—Hence, the supporters of this method of healing say that one must just take those substances from nature, which cause the illness in the healthy organism. Of course, one must not give the ill organism these substances in heavy doses, which cause certain symptoms in the healthy organism, but just only so much that the relevant substance is sufficient to cause a reaction of the organism against the impairment. This is the principle of homeopathy: what can cause a certain illness in the healthy organism can also make the ill organism healthy again. One applies that remedy, which the organism shows by the symptoms. One imagines that in such a way that the organism shows in the ill state by the symptoms that he tries to overcome the illness

That is why the homeopathic doctor applies just the opposite of that in many cases, which the allopathic doctor would apply. The naturopath stands often—not always—on the point of view that it does not matter whether any specific remedy removes an illness but that it matters to support the organism and its activity, so that it evokes its inner forces of recovery to control the illness process. Thus, the naturopath is anxious above all to advise also the healthy human being to support the activity of his organism. He stresses, for example, that it matters less for the healthy one whether a diet gives the human being special opportunity to stuff himself with this or that, but whether a diet gives the human being opportunity to evoke his inner forces in such a way that they become active. The naturopath stresses the function of the organs above all also with the healthy human being. He says, you do not strengthen your heart if you try to spur it perpetually with stimulants, but you strengthen your weak heart activating it, for example, with mountain walks et cetera.—Thus, someone who aims at the activity of the human organs also recommends to the healthy human being to activate his organs appropriately.

You have may be seen if you have cared about such questions because they occupy, nevertheless, the present so much, with which fierceness and with which dogmatism is often fought by the one or the other side, how the one or the other side emphasises what it has to argue for its view. Thus, the academic medicine can point to the fact that it made big advances in the field of infectious diseases in the course of the last decades, in particular in the course of the last three to four decades. This academic medicine can point to the fact that it investigated the external pathogenic agents that destroy the human health. It improved the living conditions in such a way that, indeed, in the last time an upturn took place. Just that direction of medicine looks preferably at the pathogenic agents—at the today so dreaded realm of bacteria. That is why it has intensely intervened in the field of hygiene and sanitary facilities—not at all in a transparent way for the nonprofessionals—and has improved the health conditions.

It is stressed indeed by some side—again, not completely wrong, but even with one-sided right—that this academic medicine has almost caused a fear of bacteria. However, on the other side the investigations have led to the fact that the health conditions were improved in the course of the last decades. The supporter of this direction proudly points to the fact that the death rate has really decreased by so many percent in the last decades. Those, however, who say that these are not so much the external causes of an illness, but that the causes are in the human being, in his disposition of illness, in his reasonable or unreasonable life, stress again that in the last times, indeed, the death rates have decreased undeniably; however, the numbers of patients have increased in terrifying way. One stresses that certain kinds of illness have increased, for instance, heart diseases, cancer illnesses, kinds of illness, which are not mentioned in the literature of the older time, illnesses of the digestive organs et cetera. Those reasons, which the one or other side alleges, are remarkable.

One cannot object from a superficial point of view that the bacteria are not pathogenic agents of the most dreadful kind. However, one cannot deny on the other side that either the human being is strengthened in certain respects and is protected against the influence of such pathogenic agents or he is not. He is not protected if he has cut himself out of his strength by unreasonable life-style.

In many a respect those things are admirable which have been performed by the academic medicine in the last time. How subtle are the investigations of the yellow fever concerning the way in which certain insects transfer it from person to person. How superior are the investigations of malaria and the like! However, on the other side, we can see that justified demands of this academic medicine can thwart our whole life very easily, what can lead to tyranny in certain respect. With a certain right one asserts that in the case of stiff neck, an illness often appearing in the last time, the pathogenic agent is not transferred from a sick person to another person, but that quite healthy human beings bear the germs in themselves and transfer them to other human beings. So human beings who walk around among us are the carriers of germs from whom then those who have a disposition of the illness can get it, while others who bear germs do not fall ill.

Thus, it could happen that one demanded to isolate the carriers of germs; for if anybody has fallen ill with stiff neck, he is not as dangerous as those are who nurse him and are perhaps the real carriers of illness. To which consequences this must lead if one impeded the contact to these persons, one may recognise from the following: one can assert—and it has already been asserted—that at any school suddenly a bigger number of children fell ill with this or that illness. One did not know where from the illness came. Then it became apparent that the teachers were the real carriers of the illness. They themselves did not catch the illness, but they infected the whole school. The expression bacteria carrier or bacteria catcher is an expression, which a certain side can use even with a certain right. Already after the few explanations I could give, it is almost a matter of course that the nonprofessional knows just a little in these fields, which face him from this or the other side.

We have to say now, just that which we have explained at the beginning of this consideration would have to be a real guide of welfare based on good reasons that are brought forward by the one or the other side. We have to regard, as a principle in the deepest and most significant sense that the individuality of the human being is a single reality, is something that is different from any other human being. We visualise, so to speak, a concrete example best of all. Imagine a human being—I say things which have definitely happened—who had an uncontrollable aversion of meat. He could not bear meat, could not eat it. He could not eat what is connected anyhow with meat, too. He developed quite healthy with his vegetarian diet. This went well as long as benevolent, good friends used all their energy to dissuade him from his paradoxical sensation. They advised him first, urged him, so to speak, to try broth at first. He was driven on and on, up to mutton. Besides, he always felt more and more ill. After some time, a phenomenon appeared with him like a particular abundance of blood. A peculiar hypersomnia appeared, and the good man perished by an encephalitis. If one had not drawn his attention every day once more to what he should eat, actually, if one had left him with his healthy desire, if one had not believed, “every shoe fits every foot,” if one had not adhered to dogmatism but had respected the individual nature of the person, then he would have kept well and fit.

However, from such a case we should only learn to respect the individual nature of the human being. We should not derive a new dogma from it; thereby we would come to one-sidedness. If we consider how the death was caused in this case, we can answer this question in the following way. If you remember what I have said about issues of nutrition last time in the talk, you can infer the following from it: what one calls life processes leads the plant up to a certain point; it processes lifeless material to living organism. This process continues in the human organism. In certain respects is that which the human organism and the animal one do a decomposition of that which the plant has built up. The human and the animal bodies are based in certain respects on the fact that that is destroyed, which the plant has built up.

Now an organism can be arranged in such a way that it requires, so to speak, just the point for itself to begin where the plant has stopped with its activity. Then it can be detrimental to it in the most remarkable sense if he is relieved of that part of the process, which the animal has already performed with the plant products. The animal leads the plant process up to a certain point, and then the human being can only continue it. If he enjoys animal food, he is relieved of it. If his nature just disposes of the forces, which can absorb the plant food freshly and strongly and continue them, then he has forces in himself, which are not used now for any absorption of nutrients and food processing. These forces are there. We do not get rid of these forces by the fact that we give them nothing to do, for then they turn to something else. They work inside of the human organism. The result is that it destroys the organism as an excess activity inside.

You see—if you have a view sharpened by spiritual science—this excess activity occupying the whole human being, turning to his blood and his nervous system. One sees how it has looked in the organism like with a house building where one has used inappropriate material so that one must try to order and to arrange the material. One does not lead the forces for the processing of the nutrients to the inside with impunity. If we realise this, we become tolerant and do not position ourselves against nature. Then we must not stereotype in the opposite direction again and to become fanatics of vegetarianism for every human being.

Just in such a way as with the above-mentioned man the activity was deflected to the inside and came in a rush, it can be on the other side that there are human beings who do not dispose of this force at all who cannot continue the plant process directly where it has stopped. Such persons would experience if one expected from them to become vegetarians just without further ado that they would have to take the forces that they need there poorly from their own organism. They would consume it and thereby make it starve. This can happen absolutely on the other side. What it concerns is that we turn away our view from these or those dogmas if we talk about conditions of health and illness, turn away from the view to eat this or that only. The point is to get to know the single human being and the necessity of his needs. It depends above all on the fact that this single human being has the possibility to feel and to recognise his needs in certain respects.

If a materialistic view looked too very much at the only material, nevertheless, it would be necessary to this materialistic view to move in this direction that I have suggested now. Just to this, it would be actually impossible to stereotype and standardise.

How much does one stereotype in our time! There one says, for example, just like that, this or that foodstuff or this or that medicine is detrimental. It has literally broken out an epidemic of stereotyping, and this has to happen if not any one-sidedness is excluded with the controversy of the different methods of healing. An epidemic has broken out under the headword “force,” so that one says, for example, at meetings of naturopaths, this or that is “force.” With it, one believes to have done enough to denounce this or that and to say that they only started from the material. Those who arrogate to themselves above all to consider the human being as an individuality should also consider it. In addition, if one surveys, for example, the other living beings, the word “force” loses any sense. We must modify our views concerning such matters. Who would not assume a particular force of the human being if he hears that, for example, rabbits eat the hemlock without harm, while Socrates died of it? In addition, goats and horses can eat the hemlock without harm, likewise aconite. With all these matters, we must always visualise the individual organism as a rule. If we visualise the individual organism, we get around to saying to ourselves: in single cases something may be right but “every shoe fits not every foot.”

The question is, how can the human being gain a criterion for his health in himself? The child could be a certain lighthouse to us. Hence, we must absolutely keep in mind that the child expresses its sympathy or antipathy for this or that food in particular way. The careful observation of these things would be of extraordinary importance to each of us. It proves sometimes absolutely mistaken if anyone who has to educate a child wants to expel the instincts, which appear there with the child and express themselves as a certain desire, if one regards it as misbehaviour. Rather it is in such a way: what the child expresses as desire, as instinct, is a sign how the inner being of the child is natured. What the child feels and tastes, what it longs for, there the sensation, the desire is nothing but the expression of the fact that the organism requires just this or that. Yes, a hint, or, if we want to speak more drastically, a lighthouse for knowledge can be to us this leading instinct of the child. We can wander through the whole life and find the necessity everywhere that the human being must just develop this inner assurance concerning the needs of his organism. This is more uncomfortable than to get the direction dictated from this or that party and to listen to anybody what is good for all human beings. The human beings do not have it as easy as those who come with a certain general prescription, which one needs only to put in the pocket to know what can sicken and what can cure the human being. Just if one looks at such a guide of health, one also has to realise concerning illness that for the different human beings the most different conditions of health and healing exist.

Let us assume that anybody has migraine. Somebody who stands dogmatically on the viewpoint—even if the academic medicine does no longer want to admit this—that there are specific remedies for this or that illness will say, one gives certain remedies against migraine to the sick person. The sick person will feel finer, and the migraine disappears.—Who stands on the viewpoint of natural medicine and has become a practitioner says, one can only combat the symptom that way and has damaged more with it than it was useful. It depends on the fact that one comes to the deeper causes; then one gets to all kinds of things which come, however, more to the core of the thing, which maybe do not restore the well-being in the single case so fast, which come, however, really deeper to the core of illness.

One will combat the one or the other or regard it as useful if one positions himself dogmatically on the one or the other viewpoint. However, it concerns, as strange as it may be, the human being again. There could be a person who says to himself, if I have a violent migraine, indeed, it would be nice to wait until the natural medicine has got to the core of the illness to recognise it in its deeper roots and then to do what removes it. Nevertheless, I have no time. It is much more important to me that I get rid of the migraine as soon as possible and that I can resume my activity.—We assume now that this person has a wholesome occupation, so that he would get rid of the evil also without any remedy. There the remedy for migraine would damage him a little, because he would be torn out a little from his activity that is useful to him. Then, indeed, he would be treated after a prescription, which compares the human being to a machine to be overhauled. However, one has to end this comparison. One must not forget that someone must be there who works like the engineer on the locomotive. We assume that a crank of the locomotive moves with difficulty. There anybody could say, I see that the engineer cannot move the crank because he is too weak; I take another engineer who can exercise more strength to turn the crank. Another could say, perhaps one could file off what obstructs the crank, so that the crank has less difficulty to move; then the engineer can remain.—Therefore, one overhauls the engine. Of course, one must not apply this as a general prescription, because if one wanted to say: if the engine lacks something, one has to file off something, this does not always need to be right. It could be that not anything must be filed off at the concerning place, but that one has to add something.

With the person, who had migraine, one simply repaired the harm by the remedy, and if he has the inner strength, the thing will already be in good order if he is not disturbed. Of course, it would be bad eventually if one proceeded in the same way towards anybody who wants to get rid of a migraine, but does not go over to an activity connected with his medical capability. He would have done better to remove the inner causes. Thus, we have to have penetrated this matter completely and have seen that there are specific remedies for illnesses, and that the application of specific remedies is connected in certain respects with the fact that our organism is an independent being and can be mended in many a direction. If one can rely on the fact that after the repair a right efficient strength exists which drives the human being, one does not need to stress that one pursues a cure of symptoms only, for there one thinks again materialistically. The naturopath knows something that would be quite appropriate to remove this or that illness, but it is as true that this or that human being does not have the time and not the strength to carry out it, and that he is concerned above all to compensate for the harm quickly.

You see that here must be spoken not in one-sided, but in a universal way and one must accept the inconvenience to be not only a theorist, but to go into the facts and to look at the whole human being. That is the point. If we speak in such a way, we must take stock of the fact that we must consider the whole human being if we want to consider the human being as reality. For spiritual science, the whole human being is not only the external physical body, in particular if our health is not destroyed only by external, but by inner causes. What one has to consider even more is the health of the etheric body that is a fighter against the illnesses, up to death, is the health of the astral body, which is the bearer of passions, desires, impulses and ideas, and, finally, the health of the ego-bearer that makes the human being a self-conscious being. Who wants to take the whole human being into account must take the four human members into account, and if the issue of health is considered, it concerns not only that we remove disturbances of the physical body, but also look at that which takes place in the higher members, the more mental-spiritual members. There we must note that not only this or that party trespasses against that but also our contemporary attitude. You can learn from this that one puts the question very seldom: how is the issue of health connected with the mental-spiritual matters?—Today, you get a lot of approval if you speak about the caloric values of this or that food and about the effects this or that food has. One will also find full approval if one explains how the air is in this or that region where this or that sanitarium is located, how the air and the light work there and there. However, you do not find an echo if you indicate mental qualities as possible causes of certain illnesses.

We take the instincts of the child as they express themselves in sympathy and antipathy compared with this or that food. If we take the feelings of disgust with which it rejects this or that as a sign which points to the fact that also the astral body must be healthy. It forms the basis of the healthy physical body, and if one notices a divergence from the healthy condition of the human being, one must pay attention to the recovery of the astral body.

Does one still ask today really considering these questions, which experiences the human soul has towards the outside world? The spiritual scientist has to point to the fact that it depends basically a little whether one sends a person who suffers from this or that disease to this or that place, because one believes that the air or the light have a recovering effect on him because of external mechanical or chemical reasons. Another, much bigger question is whether I can bring him in such surroundings that he can experience joy, raise, in certain respects a brightening up of his emotional life.

If we look at this on a large scale, we also understand that it belongs to the human health that the human being likes a diet that he has, so to speak, an indicator in his taste, in the immediate sensation of taste, an indicator of that which he should eat. On the other side, he has an indicator in the emerging sensation of hunger when his organism should eat. These are not only influences coming from the material world, which destroy this inner assurance of the human being, these are in the most cases also influences from the mental life which undermine the assurance of the sensation of hunger. Instead of teaching a healthy sensation of hunger at the right moment, the mental influence on the human nature can work in such a way that he feels no hunger but lack of appetite.

A human being who has developed the needs of his organism in the right way also has the right pleasant feeling to find the right surroundings which serve his health in relation to light and air, so that the sensation of hunger comes to him at the right time afterwards.

These are demands that are connected tightly with the medical life, and lead there to that which the astral body and the ego have to contribute to this health. One easily objects: if anybody has hunger, he cannot live on feelings and sensations. It is true that if one serves anybody with a tasty dish, his mouth is watering, but one cannot sate him with it if the real taste of the dish remains concealed to him. This objection is easy. We cannot sate or bring anybody back to health while we influence his soul to let the sensations and mental pictures proceed in the right way; this is a matter of course. However, one ignores something else. We cannot regulate the food explaining it, however, regulating the taste up to the appearing sensation of hunger. Here leads that which is fragmented today, because it is used only from the external material viewpoint, to the spiritual-mental.

It is relevant whether the human being takes in this or that food with appetite or aversion, whether he lives in these or those surroundings, whether he does his work with joy or listlessness. The inner disposition of health is connected with it in mysterious ways, more than with something else. As we see with the child that it develops right instincts, and have an indicator of its inner needs, it is also necessary that the adult experiences the spiritual-mental, so that the right needs appear before his soul at the right time, that he feels which relation he has to produce between himself and the outside world.

Life is appropriate in the broadest sense to mislead the human being concerning his relation to the outside world repeatedly. Moreover, just our today's attitude is the reason of such mistakes in more than one respect.

In order to understand each other better I would like to point to the small beginning, which we have done with a certain method of healing. In Munich, one of our spiritual-scientific friends tries a kind of cure or method of healing as it results from the views of spiritual science. Someone who believes today that only material, physical-chemical and physiological influences can have recovering effects on the human being will maybe laugh about the fact that the person concerned is led into especially coloured chambers. There one works on the human soul—indeed, not on the surface—by the forces of a certain colour and other things, which I do not discuss. However, you must see the difference between this impact in the chambers, a kind of chromotherapy, a kind of colour therapy, and that which one calls light therapy. If the human being is irradiated with light, the idea forms the basis to let the physical light work immediately, so that one says to himself if one lets this or that beam of light work on the human being, one works on the human being from without. However, that does not apply to the mentioned colour therapy.

With this method of healing taken from spiritual science, which our friend Dr. Peipers has arranged, one does not count on the effect of the beams of light as those, regardless of the human soul. However, one takes that into account, which, for instance, under the effect of the blue colour, not of the light via the mental picture originates in the soul and thereby it reacts on the physical organism.

One has to consider this huge difference between light therapy and colour therapy. It happens that certain sick people are filled with the contents of a particular colour image. One has to know that the colours contain forces in themselves, which appear if they irradiate us not only, but work on our soul. One has to know that one colour works challenging, that another colour is something that releases longing forces, that the third colour is something that raises the soul above itself, and another colour is something that depresses the soul beneath itself. If we look at this physical-spiritual effect, the primal ground of the physical and the etheric becomes apparent to us: the fact that our astral body is the real creator of the physical and etheric. The physical is only a condensation of the spiritual, and the spiritual can react again on the physical, so that it is processed and enlivened in the right way. If we visualise the basic idea of such a thing, we can hope to be able to understand that that which lives in the spiritual-mental expresses itself in health and illness in the physical.

Who realises this can hope for spiritual science concerning the issues of health. One can easily say, with any worldview, you cannot cure a human being—nevertheless, it is also true that the health of the human being depends on the worldview. This is a paradox to the modern humankind; it is a matter of course in future! I want to discuss this still a little more. One can say that the human being must come to the purely objective truth; he must make his concepts precise likenesses of the external physical facts.

One can put up such a demand as a theorist. One can put a human being as an ideal who tries to think only what the eyes see what the ears hear and what the hands can touch.—Now there spiritual science comes and says: you can never understand what is real if you look only at that which is externally discernible, what the eyes see, what the ears hear, what the hands can reach. What is real contains the spiritual as a primal ground. One cannot perceive the spiritual; one must experience it by the cooperation, by the production of the spiritual-mental. One needs productive forces for the spiritual. The spiritual scientist is—if he speaks of the single parts of his science—not always in the position of demonstrating quite plainly what leads to his concepts. He describes what cannot be heard with ears, what cannot be seen with eyes, or cannot be seized with hands because it must be pursued with the eyes of the spirit. It is a portrayal of something that does not exist in the sensory world. We consider that as truth which gives an inner likeness of the outer reality. One may put up such a theory, but today we do not want to speak about its logical or epistemological value, we want to speak about its curative value.

The point is that all those mental pictures which we abstract only from the outer sensuous reality which are not based on the inner co-operation of the soul creating pictures, have no inner formative forces; they leave the soul dead; they do not invoke the soul to activate its forces slumbering within.

The fanatics of the external facts may speak about it ever so much that one should not intersperse reality with pictures of the supersensible world. However, as paradoxical as it may be, these pictures put our mind again in an activity that is commensurate with it. They harmonise it again with the physical organism. Someone who sticks to the purely abstract mental pictures of the merely materialistic science does nothing for his health from his spiritual. Who positively creates abstractions in his concepts only, makes his soul dull and void, and he always is dependent to make the external instrument of the body the carrier of health and illness. Who lives in disordered and wrong mental pictures does not know that he inoculates the causes of destruction of his organism to himself in mysterious way. Hence, spiritual science represents the viewpoint that by its points of view of the supersensible world, of that world which we do not recognise with external senses, but which we have to wake up with strong inner activity, we activate our soul, so that its activity complies with the spiritual world from which our whole organism has been created. Hence, our organism is healed not with petty means, but spiritual science itself is the great remedy.

Somebody who forms his thoughts from the big viewpoints of the world and enlivens these thoughts causes such an inner activity that also his feelings and sensations proceed harmoniously making the soul happy. Who works on his thoughts in such a way works also on his intentions, and these have a recovering effect. However, they do this only because really a healthy worldview, a healthy harmony of thoughts fulfils our soul. Our sensations, and in connection with them also our desire and listlessness, our sympathy and antipathy, our longing and disgust are thereby, so that we face the world in such a way that we know what to do in every single case, like the child whose instinct has not yet been ruined. Thus, we evoke those feelings, sensations, will impulses, and desires in our souls, which are sure guidelines, which instruct us what to do to cause the right relation between the outside world and us.

We say not too much if we say, clear, bright thoughts, comprehensive thoughts, as they are caused only by a comprehensive worldview, considering the whole world and aiming at the supersensible, are a condition of health. Pure feelings and will impulses that correspond to the objective of the spiritual enable the human beings to feel healthy hunger. Even if one cannot feed the human being a worldview, nevertheless, this offers the possibility to find what corresponds to his soul to look for what is suitable to him and to abhor what is not suitable to him. Thoughts that are likenesses of the supersensible world are the best digestive means—even if as a paradox—not because in the thoughts the forces of digestion are, but because the forces are evoked by energetic thoughts which make digestion proceed in a way.

As long as the human beings do not hear this call of spiritual science, as long as they believe over and over again that any form of illness finds its recovery if one has found suitable means for it, as long they will not have recognised the significance of spiritual science. They will also not have recognised to what extent health plays a role in the development. In addition, those do not go far enough who say, one should not cure symptoms. They also do not grasp the spiritual core. Who approaches spiritual science finds out that it is a worldview through which internal bliss flows, a worldview of joy and desire, that it is a condition to promote the big remedy for health. It is easier to use this or that means than to enter the current of spiritual science in order to find what makes the human beings healthier and healthier. Then, however, one understands that it is true what an old proverb says: “Sound mind in a sound body,” but that it is wrong to understand this proverb materialistically. Who believes that he has to understand this proverb materialistically should only also say, here I see a house. This house is nice. Therefore, I conclude from it that a nice owner built it. The nice house makes a nice owner.—Nevertheless, someone is a little cleverer who says: here is a nice house; I conclude from it that in it an owner lives who has artistic taste. I consider the owner of the nice house as a person of good taste, and the house as the external sign of the fact that the owner is a person of good taste.

Perhaps, anybody clever says, because external forces have made the body healthy, the body has formed a healthy soul again.—However, that is not correct, but someone is right who says: here I see the healthy body. This is a sign of the fact that a healthy soul must have built up it. It is healthy because the soul is healthy.—Therefore, one can say, because one sees the external symptom of the healthy body, a healthy soul must form the basis there. A materialistic time may interpret the proverb “sound mind in a sound body” quite materialistically. However, spiritual science shows us that a healthy soul works in a healthy body.

The basis of our consideration today may seem a weird arrangement to somebody: on one side Tolstoy, on the other side Carnegie, two personalities about whom probably some say, more different, more opposite persons one can hardly find. On one side, the solver of riddles of the highest social and spiritual problems searching from the depths of spiritual life—Tolstoy; and on the other side the steel tycoon, the rich man, the man about whom one knows literally hardly more than that he thought about how the accumulated wealth is to be used best of all—Carnegie. Then again the arrangement of both persons with spiritual science or anthroposophy.

Indeed, with Tolstoy nobody probably doubts that one can illumine the depths of his soul with the light of spiritual science. However, with Carnegie some probably say, what has this man to do generally with spiritual science, this man of the only practical, business work?—Spiritual science would be the grey theory, the unrealistic and life-hostile worldview as one regards it is so often, if it does not care a little about the issues of practical life, as one believes sometimes. Therefore, it could appear weird that just such a man of practical life is adduced to illustrate certain issues. If one has understood that this spiritual science is something that can flow into all single fields, yes, into the most mundane fields of practical life, then one does not consider it as something surprising that also this personality is adduced to illustrate something that should be just illustrated within spiritual science. Secondly—to speak in the sense of Emerson—we have two representative personalities of our time before ourselves. The one like the other expresses the whole striving on the one side, the work on the other side typically, as they prevail in our time. Just the opposite of the whole development of personality and soul is so characteristic with these both men on one side for the variety of life and work in our time, on the other side, nevertheless, again for the basic nerve, the real goals of our present.

We have, on one side, Tolstoy who has grown out of a distinguished class, of wealth and abundance, of a life sphere in which everything is included that external life can offer as comfort and convenience. He is a human being whom his soul development has brought almost to proclaim the worthlessness of all he got with birth, not only to himself, but also to the whole humankind like a Gospel. We have the American steel tycoon on the other side, a personality that has grown out of hardship and misery, grown out of a life sphere where nothing at all exists of that which external life can offer as convenience and comfort. A person who had to earn dollar by dollar and who ascended to the biggest wealth, who got around in the course of his soul development to regarding this accumulation of wealth as something absolutely normal for the present and to thinking only about it how this accumulated wealth is to be used to the welfare and happiness of humankind. What Tolstoy never desired when he had reached the summit of his soul development he had it abundantly in the beginning of his life. The external goods of life that Carnegie had abundantly acquired last were refused to him in the beginning of his life. This is the expression of their natures, even if in exterior way, however, the characteristic of both personalities to a certain extent at the same time. What can take action with a person in our time, what one can reflect of these external processes in and around the personality shows us with both what prevails in our present in the undergrounds of the social and mental existence generally. We see Tolstoy, as said, born out of a sphere of life in which everything existed that one can call comfort, wealth, and refinement of life. Of course, we can deal only quite cursorily with his life, because today it concerns of characterising our time in these representative personalities and of recognising their needs in a certain way.

In 1828, Leo Tolstoy is born in a family of Russian counts about which he himself says that the family immigrated originally from Germany. Then we see Tolstoy losing certain higher goods of life. Hardly he is one and a half years old, he loses the mother, the father in the ninth year. Then he grows up under the care of a relative who is, so to speak, the embodied love, and from her spiritual condition, the marvellous soul condition had to flow in his soul like by itself. However, on the other side, another relative who wants to build up him out of the viewpoints of her circles, out of the conditions of time as they formed in certain circles influences him. She is a person who is completely merged in the outward world activity which later became very odious to Tolstoy and against which he fought so hard. We see this personality striving from the outset to make Tolstoy a person “comme il faut,” a person who could treat his farmers in such a way, as it was necessary in those days, who should receive title, rank, dignity, and medals and should play a suitable role in the society.

Then we see Tolstoy coming to the university; he is a bad student as he absolutely thinks that everything that the professors say at the University of Kazan is nothing worth knowing. Only oriental languages can occupy him. In all other matters, he was not interested. Against it the comparison of a certain chapter of the code of Catherine the Great (1729–1796) with The Spirit of the Laws (1748) by Montesquieu (Charles de Secondat, Baron de M., 1689–1755) attracted him. Then he tries repeatedly to manage his estate, and we see him almost getting around to diving head first into the life of luxury of a man of his circles, diving head first into all possible vices and vanities of life. We see him becoming a gambler, gambling big sums away. However, he has hours within this life over and over again when his own activities disgust him, actually. We see him meeting peers as well as men of letters and leading a life, which he calls a worthless, even perishable one at moments of reflection. However, we also see—and this is important to him who looks with pleasure at the development of the soul where this development manifests in especially typical signs—particular peculiarities appearing with him in the development of his soul which can disclose us already in the earliest youth what is, actually, in this soul.

Thus, it is of immense significance, what a deep impression a certain event makes on Tolstoy at the age of eleven years. A friendly boy once told him that one has made an important discovery, a new invention. One has found—and a teacher has spoken in particular of the fact—that there is no God that this God is only an empty invention of many human beings, an empty picture of thought. Everything that one can know about the impression that this boy's experience made on Tolstoy shows already how he absorbed it that in him a soul struggled striving for the highest summits of human existence.

However, this soul was weird in other ways as well. Those people who like to state outer appearances and do not pay attention to that in the soul, which emerges from the centre as the actual individual through all outer obstacles, they ignore and do not pay attention to anything in such youth experiences that has different effects on the one soul and on the other one. In particular, one has to pay attention if a soul shows a disposition in the earliest youth that one could pronounce with the nice sentence of Goethe in the second part of his Faust: “I love the man who wants what cannot be.” This sentence says a lot. A soul, which desires, so to speak, something that is obvious foolishness to the philistine view, such a soul, if it appears in its first youth as such, shows the width of the scope of view just by such peculiarities. Thus, one must not ignore it, if Tolstoy tells such things in one of his first writings, in which he gives reflections of his own development.

We are not allowed to ignore when he says there things, which were absolutely valid for him, for example, when he shaved off his eyebrows and defaced his not very extensive beauty in such a way for a while. This is something that one can regard as a big outlandishness. However, if one thinks about it, it becomes an indication. Another example is that the boy imagines that the human being can fly if he presses the arms against the knees rather stiffly. If he did this, he would be able to fly, he thinks. He goes up once in the second floor and jumps out of the window, retaining the heels. He is saved like by a miracle and carries off nothing but a little concussion, which compensates one another by an 18-hour sleep again. He proved for his surroundings with it to be a strange boy. However, someone who wants to observe the soul and knows what it means to go out in his soul in the earliest youth from the track, which is predetermined on the left and on the right, does not disregard features in the life of a young person. Thus, this soul seems to be great and to have many talents from the start. Hence, we can understand that he was fulfilled with a certain disgust of himself when he was tired of the debaucheries of life, which were due to his social rank, in particular after a gamble affair.

When he goes then to the Caucasus, we can understand that there his soul becomes fond of the simple Cossacks, of those people whom he gets to know and recognises that they have, actually, quite different souls than all those people whom he had got to know up to now basically. All the principles of his peers appeared to him so unnatural. Everything that he had believed up to now seemed to him so strange, so separated from the original source of existence. However, the human beings, whom he got to know now, were people whose souls had grown together with the sources of nature like the tree by the roots with the sources of nature, like the flower with the liquid of the ground. It impressed him enormously that they were grown together with nature, that they had not become foreign to the sources of existence, that they were beyond good and evil in their circles.

In 1854, when he became a soldier, full of zest for action, to take part in the Crimean War, we see him with the most intensive devotion studying the whole soul life of the simple soldier. However, we see now a more specified feeling taking place in Tolstoy's soul, we see him being deeply moved by the naturalness of the simple human being on the one side, on the other side, also by the misery, poverty, the tortures, and depression of the simple human being. We see how he is fulfilled with love and desire to help, and that the highest ideals of human happiness, human welfare, and progress flash as shades in his mind, how he realises completely on the other side that the natural human beings cannot understand his ideals. This causes a conflict in his soul, something that does not allow him to penetrate to the basic core of his being.

Thus, he is thrown back repeatedly from that life he leads and in which he is thrown just with the Danube army from one extreme to the other. A superior says, he is a golden human being whom one can never forget again. He works like a soul that pours out goodness only and, on the other hand, has the ability to amuse the others in the most difficult situations. Everything is different if he is there. If he is not there, everybody hangs his head. If he has plunged into life, he comes back with a terrible remorse, with awful regret to the camp. Between such moods, this great soul was thrown back and forth. From these moods and experiences those views and pictorial descriptions of his literary career come, which caused, for example, the most accepting review even from Turgenev (Ivan T., 1818–1883, Russian author), and which have found recognition everywhere. However, we see at the same time how in a certain way beside the real centre, the centre of his soul, always he looks at the big strength, at the basic spring of life, how he struggles for the concepts of truth and human progress. However, he cannot help saying at a being together with Turgenev: you all do not have, actually, what one calls conviction. You talk, actually, only to hide your conviction.

One can say, life made his soul feel low, bringing it into heavy, bitter conflicts. Indeed, something most serious should yet come. At the end of the fifties, one of his brothers fell ill and died. Tolstoy had often seen death in war, had often looked at dying human beings, but he had not yet realised the problem of life to such extent as at the sight of the beloved dying brother. Tolstoy was not so fulfilled at that time with philosophical or religious contents that these contents could have supported him. He was in such a basic mood that expressed itself towards death possibly in such a way that he said, I am incapable to give life a goal. I see life decreasing, I see it running in my peers worthlessly; they do things which are not worth to be done. If one strings up an event to the other and forms ever so long rows, nothing valuable results.—At that time, he could also not see any contents and life goal in the fact that the lower social classes were in distress and misery.

He said to himself at that time, such a life whose sense one searches in vain is finished by the futility of death and if the life of everybody and any animal ends in the futility of death, who is generally able to speak about the meaning of life? Sometimes, Tolstoy had already set himself the goal to strive for perfection of his soul, to search contents for the soul. He had not advanced so far that any contents of life could be roused in the soul even from the spirit. Therefore, the sight of death had put the riddle of life in such horrible figure before his spiritual eye.

We see him travelling in Europe just in the same time. We see him visiting the most interesting cities of Europe—in France, Italy, Germany. We see him getting to know some valuable persons. He gets to know Schopenhauer (Arthur Sch., 1788–1860, German philosopher) personally shortly before his death, he gets to know Liszt (1811–1882, Austrian-Hungarian composer) and still some others, some luminaries of science and art. He gets to know something of the social life, gets to know the court life at Weimar. Everything was accessible to him; however, he looks at everything with eyes from which the attitude looks that has just been characterised. From all that he had gained only one: as well as it is at home, in the circles, which he has grown out of, it is also in Western Europe.

Now a goal faces him in particular. He wanted to found a kind of model school, and he founded it in his hometown where every pupil should learn after his talents where it should not be a stencil. We cannot get involved with the description of the pedagogic principles, which one used there. However, this must be stressed that he had an ideal of education in mind, which should meet the individuality of the child.

We see a kind of interregnum taking place, where in certain way the stormy soul experiences a kind of standstill, that soul in which the problems and the questions followed in rapid succession, into which the sensations and emotions have flowed in contradicting way. A calmer life prevails in it. This time begins with the marriage in the sixties. It was the time from which the great novels come in which he gave the comprising tremendous pictures of the social life of the present and the previous time: War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1873–1877). So much has flowed in from that which he had learnt onto these works.

Thus, he lived until the seventies of the last century. Then comes a time of his life where he faces a crucial decision where all qualms, doubts, and problems come to life again which prevailed once like from dark spiritual depths.

A comparison, a picture that he forms is rather typical of what his soul experienced. One needs to visualise this picture only and to know that it means quite another matter to a soul like Tolstoy's soul, as for another soul that is much more superficial. You need to visualise this picture only, and you can deeply look into the mind of Tolstoy. He compares his own life to an Eastern fable, which he tells possibly in such a way:

There is a man, pursued by a beast. He flees, finds a dried out well and plunges into it to escape from the beast. He holds fast onto the branches, which have grown out on the sides of the well wall. In this way, he thinks he is protected against the pursuing monster. However, in the depth, he sees a dragon, and he has the feeling, he must be devoured by it if he gets tired only a little or if the branch breaks, onto which he holds fast. There he also sees on the leaves of the shrub some drops of honey from which he could feed himself. Nevertheless, at the same time he also sees mice gnawing away at the roots of the shrub onto which he holds fast.

Two things to which Tolstoy adhered were family love and art. For the rest, he considered life in such a way that all tantalising worries of life pursue him. He escapes one and is welcomed by the other monster. Then one sees mice gnawing away the few things that one still.—One must take the picture deeply enough to see what goes forward in such a soul, what is shown there and what Tolstoy experienced in all thinking, feeling and willing in the most extensive way. The branches still pleased him. However, he also found various things, which had to gnaw away at the delight in them. If the whole life is in such a way, that one cannot find sense in it, that one looks for the meaning of life in vain, what does it mean to have a family, to build up descendants to whom one transfers the same futility? This was also something he had in mind. And art? If life is worthless, what about art, the mirror of life? Can art be valuable if it only is able to reflect that in which one looks for sense in vain?

That just stood before his soul and burnt in him after an interregnum again. Where he looked around with all those who tried to fathom the meaning of life in great philosophies and in the most various worldviews, he nowhere found anything that could satisfy his searching. Recently it was in such a way that he turned his look to those people who were originally connected with the springs of life according to his opinion. These human beings had preserved a natural sense, a natural piety. He said to himself, the scholar who lives like me, who overestimates his reason finds nothing in all researching that could interpret the meaning of life to him. If I look at the usual human being who unites there in sects: he knows, why he lives, he knows the meaning of life. How does he know this, and how does he know the meaning of life? Because he experiences the sensation in himself, there is a will, the everlasting divine will as I call it. What lives in me devotes itself to the divine will. What I do from morning to evening is a part of the divine will. If I move the hands, I move them in the will of the divine. Without being brought by reason to abstractions, the hands move.—That faced him so peculiarly, that grasped him so intensely: if the human is deeply grasped in the soul. He said to himself, there are human beings who can answer the question of the meaning of life to themselves that they can use.

It is even magnificent how he contrasts these simple human beings with those who he got to know in his surroundings. Everything is thought out of the monumental of the paradigms. He says, I got to know people who did not understand to give life any meaning. They lived by force of habit, although they could gain no meaning of life, but I got to know those who committed suicide, because they could not find any meaning of life.—Tolstoy himself was before it.

Thus, he studied that category of human beings about whom he had to say to himself, it could not be talk of a meaning of life and of a life with a meaning. However, the human being, who is still connected with the sources of nature, whose soul is connected with the divine forces as the plant with the forces of life, can answer to the question: why do I live?—Therefore, Tolstoy came so far to search for a community with those simple human beings in the religious life. He became religious in certain way, although the outer forms made a repellent impression on him. He went to the Communion again. Now it was something in him that one can explain in such a way: he strove with all fibers of his soul to find and to feel a goal. Nevertheless, again his thinking and feeling impeded him everywhere in certain way. He was able to pray together with these human beings, who were believers in the naive sense and answered to the question of the meaning of life to themselves.

He could pray—and this is tremendously typical—up to the point of a uniform way of feeling. However, he was not able to go further when they prayed: we confess ourselves to the Father, to the Son and to the Holy Spirit.—This made no sense to him. It is generally typical that he was able to come up to a certain point, looking for a religious life, which was based on brotherly feelings. This life in devoutness should produce a unity of feelings, unity of thoughts. However, he could not rise to the positive contents, the knowledge of the spirit, to the spiritual view, which gives reality. The traditional dogmatics meant nothing to him. He could not connect any sense with the words, which are given in the Trinity.

Thus, he came, while all these things flocked together, to the mature period of his life, to the period in which he tried to delve completely into that which he could call true, real Christianity. He strove in such a way, as if he had wanted to comprise, to penetrate the liveliness of Christ's soul with his own soul. With this spirit of Christ's soul, he wanted to penetrate himself. A worldview should arise from it, and from this something like a transformation of all present life should result which he subjected to harsh criticism. Because he believes now to feel in his soul, what Christ had thought and felt, he feels strong enough to issue a challenge to all ways of life, to all ways of feeling and thinking of the present. He criticised harshly that out of which he has grown and which he could see in the farther environment of his time. He feels strong enough to put up the demand, on the other side, to let the spirit of Christ prevail and to get out a renewal of all human life out of the spirit of Christ. With it, we have characterised, so to speak, his maturing soul and have seen this soul having grown out of that which many of our contemporaries call the summits of life. We have seen this soul getting around to harshly criticise the summits of life, and to putting as its next goal the renewal of the spirit of Christ which it finds strange to everything that lives presently, in the renewal of Christ's life which it nowhere finds in reality. Therefore, in certain sense, Tolstoy says no to the present and affirms what he calls the spirit of Christ, which he could not find in the present but only in the first times of Christianity. He had to go back to the historical sources, which came up to him. There we have a representative of our present who has grown out of the present, saying no to this present.

Now we have a look at the other man, who affirms most intensely, what Tolstoy denies most intensely, who reaches the same formula but applies it quite differently. There we see Carnegie, the Scotsman, growing out of that dividing line of modern times which we can characterise by the fact that trade, large-scale industry and the like sweep away the small trade from the social order. We really see Carnegie growing out of that dividing line of modern life, which a newer poet so nicely characterised with the words (poem by Heinrich von Reder, 1824–1909, Bavarian officer, poet, and painter):

Gone to rack on a mule track

a smithy stands in woodland solitude;

no longer does the hammer blow

accompanied by merry songs.

Not far away the buildings rise

where sooted blacksmiths

are working so hard.

With the steam mill's nails

the coffin is closed,

it carries the nail-smith

impoverished to grave.

One needs to wake only such a mood, and one illuminates brightly that dividing line in the cultural development of modern times, which has become so important to life. Carnegie's father was a weaver who had a good living at first. He worked for a factory. This went well up to the time when the large-scale industry flooded everything. Now we see the last day approaching, when Carnegie's father can still deliver the produced to the trader. Then poverty and misery enter in the weaver's family. The father does no longer see any possibility to make a living in Scotland. He decides to emigrate to America, so that both sons do not live in misery and die.

The father finds work in a cotton factory, and the boy is employed as a bobbin boy in his twelfth year. He has to perform hard work. However, there is after one week of hard, heavy work a happy day for the 12-year-old boy. He gets his first wage: 1 dollar and 20 cents. Never again—so says Carnegie—he has taken up any income with such delighted soul as this dollar and twenty cents. Nothing made more joy to him later, although many millions went through his fingers. We see the representative of practical pursuit in our present that grows out of distress and misery that is natured in such a way to immerse himself in the present, as it is, and to become the self-made man in it. He struggles. He gains his dollar every week.

Then somebody employs him in another factory with a better wage. Here he has to work even more, he must stand in the basement and has to heat and maintain a small steam engine with big heat. He feels that as a responsible post. The fear to turn the tap of the engine wrongly what could lead to an accident for the whole factory is dreadful to him. He often catches himself sitting in his bed at night and dreaming of the tap the whole night which he turned taking care of turning it in the right direction.

Then we see him employed as a telegraph messenger in Pittsburgh after some time. There he is already highly happy with the small wage of the telegraph messenger. He has to work at a place where also books are which he had hardly seen before. Sometimes he also has newspapers to read. He has now only one worry: telegraph messengers are not to be needed in the city if they are not able to know all addresses of the companies by heart, which receive telegrams. He really manages to know the names and addresses of the Pittsburgh companies. He also already develops a certain independence. His consciousness is paired exceptionally with cleverness. He goes now a little earlier to the telegraph office, and there he learns to telegraph by own practicing. Thus, he can aim at the ideal that any telegraph messenger is allowed to have in a young, ambitious community: to become a telegraph operator once. He even succeeds in a special trick. When one morning the telegraph operator was not there, a death message comes in. He takes up the telegram and carries it to the newspaper to which it was determined. There are connections where one regards such an action, even if it succeeds, not as favourable. However, Carnegie thereby climbed up to the telegraph operator.

Now something else presented itself to him. A man who dealt with railways recognises the talents of the young man and one day he makes the following proposal to him. He said to him, he should take over railway stocks of 500 dollars that had just become available. He can win a lot if he pursues these matters. Carnegie tells now—it is delightful how he tells this—how he raised 500 dollars really by the care and love of his mother, and how he bought his stocks. When he got the first revenue, the first payment of more than five dollars, he went with his fellows out to the wood. They looked at the payment and thought and learnt to recognise that there is something else than to be paid for work, something that makes money from money. That aroused big viewpoints in Carnegie's life. With it, he grew into the characteristic of our time.

Thus, we see him immediately understanding when another proposal is made. It is typical how he grasps with complete presence of mind what appears before his soul for the first time. An inventive head shows him the model of the first sleeping car. Straight away, he recognises that there is something tremendously fertile in it, so that he takes part in it. He emphasises now again by what this consciousness, actually, grew. He did not have enough money to take part in suitable way in the enterprise of the first sleeping car society of the world. However, his ingenious head caused that he got money already from a bank: he issued his first bill of exchange. This is nothing particular, he says, but this is something particular that he finds a banker who accepts this bill of exchange. This was the case.

Now he needed to develop this only to become completely the man of the present. Hence, we have not to be surprised that he became a steel tycoon when he got the idea to replace the many wooden bridges with iron and steel bridges, that he became the man who set the tone in the steel industry and acquired the countless riches. Thus, we really see the type of the human being in him who grows into the present, the present, which unfolds the most exterior life. He grows into the most outward of appearance. However, he grows into it by his own strength, by his abilities. He becomes the extensively rich person out of distress and misery, while he himself really acquired everything from the first dollar on. He is a pensive person who associates this whole impulse of his life with the progress and life of whole humanity.

Thus, we see another strange Gospel growing out of his way of thinking, a Gospel that follows Christ. However, Carnegie immediately says at the beginning of his Gospel, it is a Gospel of wealth (essay Wealth or Gospel of Wealth, 1889). That is why his book shows how wealth is applied best of all to the welfare and to the progress of humanity. He opposes Tolstoy immediately about whom he says: he is a person who takes Christ in such a way as it is not suitable at all to our time, who regards him as a strange being of old past. One must understand Christ in such a way that one transfers Him to the present life.—Carnegie is a person who affirms the whole life of the present completely. He says: if we look back at the times when the human being were more alike than today, they were still less divided into those who had to assign a job and those who have to take a job, and if we compare the times, we see how primitive the single cultures were in those days. The king was not able in that old time to satisfy his needs in such a way as today the poorest person can satisfy them now. What happened had to happen. That is why it is right that one distributes the goods in such a way.

Carnegie establishes a strange doctrine of the distribution or application of wealth. Above all, we find with him that ideas of the purely personal efficiency, of the nature of the efficiency of the human being originate in his soul who has worked his way in life up to that which he becomes in the end. At first Carnegie sees outward goods only, then also that the human being must be efficient, externally efficient. Someone has to apply his efficiency not only to acquire wealth but also to manage it in the service of humanity.

Carnegie intensely draws the attention to the fact that quite new principles would have to enter, so to speak, in the social construction of humanity if welfare and progress should originate from the new progress and the distribution of goods. He says, we have institutions of former time that make it possible that by inheritance from the father to the son and the grandchildren goods, rank, title and dignities go over. In the life of the old time, this was possible.—He regards it as right that one can substitute with routine what the personal efficiency does not give: rank, title, dignities.

Nevertheless, he is convinced by that life he has experienced that it requires personal, individual efficiency. He points to the fact that one had ascertained that five of seven insolvent houses became insolvent, because they demised to the sons. Rank, title, and dignities devolved from the fathers upon the sons, however, never business acumen. In those parts of modern life, where commercial principles prevail, they should not be transmitted simply from the testator to the descendants. It is much more important that someone builds up a personally efficient man, than to bequeath his wealth to his children. That is why Carnegie concludes in the absurd sentence: someone has to make sure that he applies the accumulated wealth to such institutions and foundations by which the human beings are promoted to the largest extent.—The sentence with which he formulates this, which can appear grotesque, which originates, however, from Carnegie's whole way of thinking is this: “Who dies rich dies dishonourably.” One could say in certain sense, this sentence of the steel tycoon sounds even more revolutionary than many a sentence of Tolstoy.

”He who dies rich dies dishonourably” means: someone dies dishonourably who does not apply the accumulated goods to endowments by which the human beings can learn something, can get the possibility to do further studies. If he makes many human beings efficient with his wealth during his life and does not hand it down to descendants, who can use it their way lacking any talent and only to their personal well-being, he dies not dishonourably.

Thus, we see with Carnegie a very strange principle appearing. We see that he affirms the present social life and activity, that he gains, however, a new principle from it: the fact that the human being has to advocate not only the use of wealth, but also its management, as a manager of the goods in the service of humanity. This man does not at all believe that anything can devolve from the parents upon their descendants. Even if he knows the outward life only, he realises, nevertheless, that inside of the human being the forces have to originate which make the human being efficient to do his work in life.

We see these two representatives of our present: that who harshly criticizes what has developed bit by bit and who wants to lead the soul to higher fields out of the spirit. On the other side, we see a man who takes the material life as it comes, and who is pointed to the fact that within the human being the spring of work and of the health of life is to be found. Nevertheless, one may find something just in this teaching of Carnegie that allows me to remark the following. If anybody does not look thoughtlessly and pointlessly at this soul life, but looks at the forces pouring out of the souls bit by bit, does look at the individual, and is clear in his mind absolutely that it is not handed down,—what has one then to look at? One has to look at the real origin, at that which comes from other sources. One finds if one comes to the sources of the present talents and abilities that these are caused in former lives. By the principle of reincarnation and of spiritual causing, karma, one finds the possibility to process such a principle meditatively that it has forced the practical life upon a practical person.

Nobody can hope that from a mere externalisation of life anything could come that the soul satisfies, can bring the civilisation to the highest summits. Never can one hope that on those roads anything else would come than a distribution of wealth salutary in the external sense. The soul would become deserted, it would overexert its forces, but it would find nothing in itself if it could not penetrate to the sources of the spirit, which are beyond the external material life. While the soul is rejected by a material approach to life, it must find the spring, which can flow only from a spiritual approach to life. With such a life praxis, as Carnegie has it, that deepening and spiritualisation coming from spiritual science have to combine, so that the souls do not become deserted. On the one side, Carnegie demands that from the single soul, which makes it fit for the external life, on the other side, Tolstoy wants to give the single soul what it can find from the deep well of the spiritual being.

As well as Carnegie grasps the being of the present with sure look from the material life, we find Tolstoy on the other side with sure look grasping the characteristic of the soul. Up to a certain limiting point, we see Tolstoy coming who affects us, indeed, strangely if we compare everything that lives in Tolstoy's worldview to that which faces us in particular in the West-European civilisation.

One can examine work by work of Tolstoy and one sees one fact emerging above all. The matters, which one has gathered here in the West with an immense expenditure of philosophical reflection, academic pondering, and moving conclusions from pillars to post, appear to Tolstoy in such a way that they occur in five to six lines like flashes of thought and become conviction to that who can understand such a thing. Tolstoy shows, for example, how we have to find something in the human soul that is of divine nature that can visualise the divine in the world if it lights up in us. Tolstoy says there, around me, the academic naturalists live; they investigate what is real outdoors in the material, in the so-called objective existence. They search the divine primal ground of existence. Then such people try to compose the human being from all principles, substances, atoms et cetera that they search spread out outdoors in the space. Then in the end, they try to understand what the human being is, while they believe to have to combine all external science to find the primal ground of life. Such human beings, he says, appear to me like human beings who have trees and plants of the living nature round themselves. They say, this does not interest me. But there is a wood far away, I hardly see it; I want to investigate and describe this wood, then I also understand the trees and the plants which are around me, and I am able to describe them.—People appear to me that way who investigate the being of the animals with their instruments to get to know the nature of the human being. They have it in themselves; they only need to see what is in close proximity. However, they do not do this. They search the faraway trees, and they try to understand what they cannot see, the atoms. However, they do not see the human being.

This way of thinking is so monumental that it is more valuable than dozens of insights and theories that are written out of old cultures. This is typical for the whole thinking of Tolstoy. To such things, he came, and in such things, one must look. To the West European this is extremely unsatisfactory; only by a devious route via Kant he gets around to it. With the assurance of his soul, Tolstoy is driven to pronounce what is not proved, but is true, what is recognised by immediate view and of which one knows if it is pronounced that it is true. His work On Life (1887) shows this monumental original springing of the deepest truth like from the spring of life, which he searched. His last writings just show this and what is in such a way that it can shine like an aurora to a rising future.

Therefore, we have to say, the less we are inclined to take Tolstoy dogmatically, the more we are inclined to take up the gold nuggets of a primitive paradigmatic thinking, the more he becomes fertile. Of course, those who accept a personality only in such a way that they swear on their dogmas, who cannot allow to be fertilised by it, they do not have a lot from him. Something does not agree with them. However, someone who can allow to be fertilised by a great personality may receive a lot from Tolstoy. We see truth working in him, paradigmatically, and that this truth flows with strong forces onto his personal life. How does it flow in there? It is rather interesting to see that different views live in his family and tolerate each other. How was he able, however, to introduce his principles in the everyday life? By working, and not only with principles. Thereby he becomes a true pioneer of something that only must sprout in future. On the other side, Tolstoy is also a child of his time, even though he is a pioneer of the future.

Perhaps, one can nowhere feel more impressively how he puts himself in the present than in that strange picture of the year 1848, when he was twenty years old. One looks only at the face of the 20-year-old, which expresses energy and willpower, also reticence at the same time. However, the spirited twinkle in the eyes reveals something that faces the riddles of life quizzically. He is volcanic inside but not able to cause the volcano to erupt. Indeed, we see mysterious depths of the soul expressing themselves in his physiognomy, and we get the expression of the fact that something tremendous lives in him but that he cannot yet express it completely in this hereditary organism.

It is also that way with the variety of the forces which live in Tolstoy, and which could not be expressed so really. It is in such a way, as if they are expressed as caricatures, distorted in certain respect. One has also to recognise the character in him that is sometimes distorted grotesquely. Hence, it is quite wonderful if he is able to point to that which one calls something transient with the human beings normally: look at the human body. How often its substances have been exchanged! Nothing material is there that was there in the ten-year-old boy. Compare the usual consciousness to the image life of the fifty years old man: it has become completely different, until the soul structure. We cannot call it permanent, but everywhere we find the centre in it, which we may imagine possibly in the following way. The objects of the outside world are there. There is this, there is that, there a third one. Two human beings face the objects. The eyes see the same things, but they are to the one this way, to the other that way. The one says, I like this; the other says: I do not like this.—If in the outside world everything is the same, and if the one soul says, I like it, and the other says, I do not like it, if the way of life is different, a centre is there that is different from all appearance that remains constant, in spite of all change of consciousness and body. Something is there that was there before birth and is there after birth, my particular ego. This my particular ego has not begun with birth. It is not the point that anybody positions himself with the west-European habits to such a remark, but it matters that one has the sensation: one can do such a remark. Therein the greatness of the soul appears. It becomes apparent that the soul lives and how it lives. Immortality is guaranteed therein.

Tolstoy just approaches the border of that which we get to know as the innermost being of the soul by spiritual-scientific deepening. He is wedged by the world against which he himself fights so much and cannot penetrate to true cognition of that which is there before birth, and of that which comes after death. He does not come to the teaching of reincarnation and karma. Just as little, he gets to the inner impulse of the soul like Carnegie who almost demands it. Therefore, we see whether now a human being is in contradiction to everything that lives and works in the present or whether someone complies with all life forms of the present: he is led to the gates of the anthroposophic approach to life. Tolstoy would be able to find the way to Carnegie, Carnegie never to Tolstoy.

With this talk, I wanted to show that a worldview and an approach to life could be given which introduces into the immediate life praxis, which can transfer the newfound to the known, to the performed. Moreover, we see if we familiarise ourselves deeper and deeper with spiritual science that it brings that to the human beings of the one and the other view which, in the end, Tolstoy has found his way and Carnegie has found his way: a satisfying life. However, it does not depend on it that the immediate viewfinder finds the satisfactory life, and that those who search with him can find it. What Tolstoy and Carnegie have found for themselves as adequate, this can be found for all human beings only impersonally and spiritually if true spiritual knowledge of that is found which goes from life to life, which carries the guaranty of eternity in itself.

The anthroposophic spiritual science that is represented here—of course, always only piecemeal—is regarded by a lot of people who do not know or do not want to know it as a field of daydreamers and of such human beings who, as one says so easily, are not in the real, in the practical life. Indeed, someone who wants to inform himself cursorily with this or that brochure or with a single talk about the contents and the goal of spiritual science can easily get to such a judgment. That applies, in particular if he—like many others—is less willing on penetrating into the real spiritual fields or if he has all prejudices and suggestions which arise from our civilisation so numerously against such a field of research. Moreover, it is not so seldom today that the bad will is added, no matter whether consciously or unconsciously, then the judgement is ready: oh, this spiritual science deals with matters which the practical human being who wants to stand firmly with both feet on the ground of life should not care about!

However, spiritual science feels intimately related with the most practical fields of life, and where it is appropriately pursued, it places the greatest value on the fact that thinking, the most certain guide, experiences a practical development with the real practical life. Because firstly spiritual science should not be anything that hovers unworldly and otherworldly anywhere in the cloud-cuckoo-land and wants to deduct the human being from the usual everyday life. However, it should be something that can serve our life with all that we think, act, and feel at every moment. Secondly, spiritual science is in a certain sense a preparation of our soul for those levels of knowledge, by which the human being himself penetrates into the higher worlds. One often stresses that spiritual science has a value not only for the human being who already has open eyes to penetrate in the spiritual world, but that the healthy human mind, the unclouded reason and power of judgement are able to understand what the spiritual researcher knows about the higher worlds. For the acceptance of his communications has an infinite value for the human being, long before he himself can penetrate into the spiritual fields. One can say, spiritual science is for everybody a preparation to develop the higher organs of knowledge bit by bit slumbering in the soul by which the spiritual worlds become discernible to us.

We have already spoken partly; we will have still to speak partly about the different methods and performances, which the human being has to carry out in order to penetrate into the spiritual worlds. However, there is always an unconditional requirement: who wants to penetrate into the spiritual world, who wants to apply the methods exactly given by spiritual research, so that the spiritual senses are opened to him, that should never ever venture this way to the higher fields of life without standing on the ground of a healthy, a practically qualified thinking. This healthy thinking is the guide, the true leitmotif, in order to reach the spiritual worlds. Someone reaches them best of all using the methods of spiritual science who does not disdain to educate himself strictly to a thinking bound to reality and its principles. Indeed, if one speaks about the real practical thinking, one easily is contrary to practice, and probably practice of thinking in our world. One has only to remind of something that I have already often suggested here in order to characterise this. Many a person attributes practice to himself in our world. What is, however, practice about which today the so-called practical human beings talk? There is somebody apprenticed to a master. There he learns all those performances and measures which were carried out for decades, maybe since centuries and which are strictly compulsory. He appropriates that all, and the less he thinks, the less he forms an independent, free judgement, the more he goes beaten tracks, the more the world considers him as practical, in particular those consider him who are active in this field. One calls this often impractical what differs only in the least sense from anything that one practises since long time. Maintaining such a practice is mostly not bound to reason, but only to force. Someone who has any position in life and has to carry out things in a way, which appears to be correct for him, insists that every other who is active in this field must do this just as he does it. If he has the power, he pushes everybody out who wants to go forward differently.

Life praxis consists of such conditions in many cases. Then the right also results, as for example in the case where a big progress should be implemented: The first German railway should be built from Fürth to Nuremberg. One consulted an eminently practical board, the Bavarian Medical Council, whether generally this railway should be built. One can read this judgement, even today. It reads, one should build no railway because the driving would ruin the nerves. However, if one wanted to build railways, one should fence them on the left and on the right with high wooden walls, so that passing persons would not get concussions. This is a judgement of practitioners. Whether one would consider these practitioners as practitioners even today, this is the question. Probably not.

Another example, which can show us whether progress originates from those who call themselves practitioners or from other people: you find it certainly very practical that one has no longer to go to the post office with any letter where the postage has then to be determined according to distance and weight. Only during the forties of the nineteenth century, the uniform letter postage was introduced in England. However, not a practitioner of the postal system invented it, but such a practitioner said when the matter should be decided in the parliament, firstly he did not believe that such an advantage arose, as Hill (Sir Rowland Hill, 1795–1879) calculated, and secondly the post-office building had to be extended. He could not imagine that the post-office building has to comply with the postal traffic and not vice versa the traffic with the post-office building. When the first railway should be built from Berlin to Potsdam, a practitioner said, namely that who let two stagecoaches go to Potsdam for many years: if people wanted to throw their money out of the window, one could build the railway. Because this practice of the so-called practitioners is so impractical, if the big issues of life are considered, one can become contrary to these practitioners if one speaks about the practical development of thinking. Something presents to the impartial observer in all fields of life that can show how it is with the real life praxis.

Once I experienced a quite vivid example, what practical thinking can prevent. A friend of my study time came once excitedly with red head to me. He said, he must immediately go to the professor and inform him that he has made a great invention. Then he came back and said, he could speak the expert only in one hour, and then he explained his invention to me. It was a device, which set a machine in motion expending a very small quantity of steam power only once supplied, and then this machine perpetually performed an immense work. My friend himself was surprised that he was so clever to make such an invention, which exceeded everything and made good economic sense. I said to him, he should trace back the matter to a simple thought. I said, “Imagine, you stand in a railroad carriage and you try to push against the walls of the carriage in order to move it. If you succeed in moving the carriage standing and pushing in it, your engine is good, because it is based on the same principle.”

At that time, I realised that a main obstacle of all practical thinking can be called with a technical term: one is a “carriage pusher from within!” This fits the thinking of many people; they are “carriage pushers from within.” What does that mean? That one is only able to survey a certain narrow field and to apply to this field what one has learned to this field. However, one is also forced to stop within this field and cannot see at all that everything changes substantially, as soon as one exits from the “carriage.”

This is one of the principles, which one has to follow above all with a practical development of thinking: that every human being who is active in any field must try to connect it with adjacent fields regardless of his own activity. Otherwise, it is impossible that he gets to a practical thinking. For this is a peculiarity which is connected with a certain internal sluggishness that the human thinking likes to be encapsulated and forgets what is outdoors, even if it is palpable.

I have recently stated in other connections that one wants to prove the Kant-Laplace theory: Once the universal nebula was there. This started rotating by any cause; the single planets of the solar system separated bit by bit and received the movement, which they have still today. One makes this very clear in a school experiment, the so-called Plateau (Joseph P., 1801–1883, Belgian physicist) experiment: one gives an oil drop in a vessel with water. Then one cuts out a disc of cardboard as the equator. One lays this under the oil globule. Then one pierces it with a needle, rotates the needle—and small oil globules separate in the equator area like planets, and they move around the big globule. One has committed something very impractical in intellectual respect: the experimenter has forgotten himself what is sometimes rather good; he has forgotten that he himself has turned the thing. For one is not allowed to forget the most important of the matter. If one wants to explain an experiment, one has to invoke all things in the field to which it comes down; these are the essentials.

The first that must exist with that who wants to experience a practical development of thinking is that he confides in reality, in the reality of thoughts. What does this mean? You cannot scoop water from a glass without water. You cannot take out thoughts from a world without thoughts. It is absurd if one believes that the whole sum of our thoughts and mental pictures exists only in us. If anybody disassembles a clock and reflects the principles of its construction, then he must suppose that the watchmaker has joined the parts of the clock first according to these principles. Nobody should believe that one could find any thought from a world, which is not created and formed according to thoughts. All that we learn about nature and its events is nothing else than what must be put first into this nature and its events. It is no thought in our soul, which has not been outdoors in the world first. Aristotle said more correctly than some modern people did: what the human being finds in his thinking last exists in the world outdoors first.

However, if anybody has this confidence in the thoughts, which are contained in the world, then he sees very easily that he has to educate himself at first to a thinking full of interest in the world. He has to educate himself to that great, beautiful ideal of thinking as it distinguished Goethe: the concrete thinking, that thinking which isolates itself as little as possible from the things, that sticks to the things as intensely as possible. Heinroth (Johann Christian August H., 1773–1843, physician, formed the term “psychosomatics”), the psychologist, used a sentence concerning Goethe that his thinking is a concrete one, where the thoughts express nothing else than what is included in the things themselves and that in the things nothing else is searched than the real creative thought. If anyone has this confidence, this faith in the reality of thoughts, he easily realises that he can educate himself in harmony with the environment, in harmony with reality to a practical, healthy thinking not receding from the things.

One has to take into consideration three ways if the human being really wants to take on an education to practical thinking: firstly, the human being must and should develop an interest in the surrounding reality, interest concerning facts and objects. Interest in the environment, this is the magic word for the education of thought. Secondly, desire and love of that which we do. Thirdly, the satisfaction of that which we reflect. Who understands these three things: interest in the environment, desire, and love in the activities and the satisfaction of contemplation soon finds that these are the main demands of a practical development of thinking. Indeed, the interest in our environment depends on matters that we discuss with the next talks when we speak about the invisible members of the human nature and about the temperaments.

The biggest enemy of thinking is often thinking itself. If anybody thinks that only he himself can think and the things would not have any thought in themselves, he is hostile, actually, to the practice of thinking. Imagine that a person would have formed some narrow mental pictures of the human being, would have made a few stereotyped schematic concepts of the human being. Now any human being faces him who has roughly the qualities, which fit his pattern. Then he is ready with his judgement and does not believe that this human being can tell him anything particular. If we approach anything that surrounds us with the feeling that any fact can tell us something particular, that we are not entitled at all to let judge something else about the things than the things themselves, then we soon notice which fruits such concrete sense bears. The confidence that the things can tell us much more than we are able to say about the things is again such a magic ideal of the practice of thinking. The things themselves should be the educators of our thinking, the facts themselves.

Imagine once that a person brings himself to use the following two important means of education for his practical development of thinking: he opposes himself with any fact, for example, that somebody has done a walk to this or that place just today. He experiences that at first. Now the person concerned wants to educate his thinking. There it is good if he says to himself, I have experienced this and that, now I want to contemplate how the today's event was caused yesterday, the day before yesterday and so on. I go back and try to form a view from that which goes forward to that which could have been. If I have selected such an event and the cause of it after my intellectual imagination, then I can investigate whether the real cause complies with my thoughts. I have something very important from such compliance or non-compliance. If my thoughts comply with that which I can know as the cause, then it is good. In most cases, this will not be the case. Then one investigates in what one was deceived and tries to compare the wrong thoughts with the right course of the events. If one does this repeatedly, one notices that one no longer makes mistakes after a shorter or longer time, but that one can liberate such a thought from a fact, which corresponds, to the objective course of the events.

Alternatively, one does the following: again, someone takes an event and tries to construct in thoughts what can result tomorrow or in some hours from this event. Now he waits quietly whether that happens which he has thought himself. In the beginning, he experiences that this is not right which he has thought. However, if he continues this, he sees thinking immersing itself in the facts that it does not form any mental pictures for itself, but that the thoughts proceed as the things proceed. This is the development of the factual sense. If he even forbids to himself to form abstractions, then he experiences that he grows gradually together with the things and that he obtains a sure judgement.

There are people who are directed by a certain sure instinct to such a thinking. This is because they are already born with special dispositions to develop such a thinking. Such a person was Goethe. He had grown together with the things so that his thinking did not proceed in the head, but in the things inside. Goethe, who was once a lawyer, had a healthy power of judgement and a sure instinct to tackle the things. There was no long referring to documents and reviewing of documents if a case had to be undertaken. Goethe did not allow that. It was a practitioner.

If once all documents of the Weimar minister Goethe are published—I have seen big parts of them—then the world will recognise Goethe as an eminently practical nature, not as a quixotic human being. One knows that he accompanied his Grand Duke with the training of recruits to Apolda (small town near Weimar). He observed everything that took action—and, besides, he wrote his Iphigenia. Compare to it what disturbs a modern poet at work. Moreover, Goethe was a much greater poet than anyone was who is not allowed to be disturbed today. Because of the eminently practical thinking, he could also say, for example, if he looked through the window: today we cannot go out, because it will be raining in three hours.—He had done cloud studies, but had put up no theory. It was in such a way that from his thinking developed what developed in nature outdoors. One calls this concrete thinking. One obtains such concrete thinking if one does such exercises in particular as I have just stated them. However, this is connected with a certain unselfishness, as strange as this sounds. However, there are principles also in the soul, and someone will not attain very much who thinks only of himself if he does such experiments. If he looks, for example, at a fact and says then immediately, ah, have I not said it? Therefore, this is the most certain obstacle of practical thinking. Thus, we could state many things to show how one can systematically develop the sympathetic adherence of the thoughts to the things, so that one learns to think in the things.

The second is desire and love of all we do. They really only exist if we can renounce success. Where it depends only on success desire and love are not undimmed. Hence, not anyone who is dependent on success can develop that rest in trying which is necessary, so that desire and love of activity can inspire us bit by bit. By nothing, we learn more than by lending a hand to everything possible and renouncing the so-called success. I knew somebody who had the habit to bind his schoolbooks himself (Steiner himself). It looked bad, but he thereby learnt enormously. If he had looked at the success, he would have maybe refrained from it. However, just in the activities we develop the qualities, the talents that enable us to become dexterous up to the movements. We never become dexterous if we look at the success of our activities in particular. If we are not able to say to ourselves, the failures in our activities are as dear to us as our results, we never reach the second level, which is necessary if one trains thinking.

Thirdly, we have to find satisfaction in thinking itself. This is something that appears so unambitious and is mostly combated today. How often does one hear saying, why have our children to learn this and that? They cannot need this in the practical life.—This principle to think only what one can need is the most impractical principle. There must be areas for a human being if he wants to think practically where the mere activity of thinking grants satisfaction to him.

If a human being does not find time, may it be only short, to do something that he does purely intellectually and that satisfies him intellectually, he can remain always only on beaten paths. If he finds, however, such a thing that he does only because of his inner interest, then he has something that has a big, strong effect on him, on his finer organisation, on the finer structure of his organism. Never work the things on us creatively, which captivate us to life, which enslave us; they wear out our talents, they take vitality from us. The things, however, which we do intellectually only to our satisfaction create vitality, new talents and they go into the subtlest organisation of our being and increase the subtle structures of our organism. Not by working for the benefit of the outside world, but by working to our satisfaction we create something by which we advance a developmental step. If we approach practice with this finer organisation again, this affects the practice, and everybody can see that it is right.

Take a painting, for example, the Sistine Madonna by Raphael, and put a human being and a dog before it. The painting makes a different impression on the human being and the dog. The same applies to the life praxis. If one remains captivated in life, the things always make the same impression on us, and one is not able to intervene creatively. If anyone develops a level higher in his activity of thinking, he faces the impressions as the same being in two different forms. He faces it once with that on which he has not yet worked, the other time with that on which he has worked. He becomes more and more practical because the impressions, which make the things on us, are raised more and more. Hence, there is loss of time, indeed, if one does such a thing that does not belong to life praxis directly, however, it promotes life praxis extraordinarily indirectly.

These are the three levels of any practical development of thinking: interest in the environment, desire, and love of all trying and working, and perpetually controlling oneself. You see, for example, such an astute man like Leonardo da Vinci already describing the way in which one can advance just while trying. He does not despise to say how one can appropriate the art of drawing bit by bit. He says, draw on tracing paper, put what you have drawn on the template, and look at that in which the drawn differs. Then make it once again and try—doing so—to do the right thing at the wrong places.—Thus, he shows how it depends on working with desire and love. The third is the satisfaction within contemplation that refrains from the external world and can quietly rest in itself. These are such things that can show us first that we grow into a real practice of thinking by the trust in the thoughts in nature, in the world building of thoughts. However, if we also believe that thinking itself is a creative force, we advance. Someone does much for the practical development of his thinking who does the following systematically: he thinks about something, for example, about what he has to do or about a question of the worldview, it may be anything usual or anything of the highest. If he is out now to find a solution quickly, then he develops no practical thinking as a rule. This rather means saying to himself: you are as little as possible allowed to interfere, actually, in your own thoughts.—Besides, most human beings can imagine nothing at all if one says this. This is a main requirement: that we open ourselves to the thoughts in ourselves that we get used to becoming the scene of the work of our thoughts. We could think, there would be only one single way to accomplish a certain thing, or only one single answer to a question. Nevertheless, we are no dogmatists to whom only one single answer is right.

If we want to learn practical thinking, we have to try to give ourselves also another answer, maybe also a third one, or a fourth. There are things to which one can think ten sorts of answers. One has to imagine them all carefully, of course, only such things where this is possible, not with such ones, which must be made quickly; one often makes them rather badly than too slowly. If one has ten possible solutions, one carries out each in thoughts with love. Then one says, I want to think no longer about it, I wait until tomorrow and open myself to the thoughts. These thoughts are forces that work in my soul, even if I am not at all involved with my consciousness. I wait until tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, and then I cause this thought again in myself.—Maybe I do this still a second or a third time, and each time I survey the single things much clearer and can then decide better than before. This is an incredible schooling of practical thinking presenting different possible solutions of a thing in thoughts to oneself, to allow them to rest and to take up them later again.

Who does this for a while notices that his thinking becomes versatile, that he develops presence of mind and repartee by a certain practice. Then he grows together with life until the most usual things and recognises what is clever and clumsy, what is wise, and what is foolish. It does not come into his mind to behave in such a way as often so-called practical persons behave. I already had to know many practical persons who can use the beaten paths of their occupation very well; if you see such persons in other situations, for instance, at travelling, their practice is often rather odd. The proof that the practical development of thinking can lead to real life praxis is founded in experience. This works up to the hands, up to the way to seize something. Much less, you drop plates and pots than other persons if you work in such way on your inside. Practical thinking works up to the limbs. If it is carried out actively and not in the abstract, it makes pliable and flexible.

However, impractical thinking is most obvious where the practice of thinking should work, for example, in science. I have stated the hypothetical astronomic experiment as an example. One often experiences, how frightfully impractical just the scientists of today are. I do not attack the real methodical work, the excellent activity of our science in the slightest. Nevertheless, the thoughts, which the modern human beings form, are often almost dreadful. Our microscopes and the photograph are very well developed. One can observe all possible mysterious facts in the various little beings. One observes plants and sees certain strange things in these plants, possibly faceted organs like the eyes of a fly, and one even sees a sort of lenses in some plants at this or that place.

One observes with other plants that certain insects are attracted, and then the plants close their leaves and catch the insects. One has excellently observed that all. How does the present impractical thinking explain these phenomena? One confuses the human soul, which reflects the outer processes internally, with that which one observes purely externally in the plants. One talks about the ensoulment of the plant, and one throws plant soul, animal soul and human soul in a mess. One throws this in a mess. Indeed, I object nothing to the marvellous observations of nature, which are popularised in the world. However, the thinking of our contemporaries is confused if anybody says, certain plants have their stomachs at the surface with which they draw in the food and devour it. This thought is approximate in such a way, as if anybody says: I know a being, this is organised artfully and has an organ in itself by which something like a magnetic force is exercised on little living beings, so that they are drawn in and are devoured; this being, which I have in mind, is the mousetrap! This thought is completely the same as that which assumes the ensoulment of the plant. You could speak in the same sense of an ensoulment of the mousetrap as you talk about the ensoulment of the plant if you really thought in this peculiar way.

The matter is that one is able to penetrate into the very own nature of thinking, and that one becomes no “carriage pusher from within” in such fields. Something else is important for the practical development of thinking and this is that one has confidence in the inner spiritual organ of thinking. With most human beings, the benevolent nature provides that this spiritual organ of thinking is not ruined too very much because the human being must sleep.

Because the spiritual does not stop then, because it is there always, this organ of thinking works for itself and the human being cannot ruin it perpetually. However, it is quite another matter if the human being allows nature to take care of thinking with important and serious facts of life only, or if he himself takes this in hand. It is a very important principle to let the organ of thinking work in yourselves. You are practicing this best of all if you try not to think for a while, howsoever short. A big, immense decision belongs to it to sit or to lie somewhere without letting thoughts go through the head. It is much easier to let your thoughts surge up and down in yourselves, until you are released from them by a good sleep than to tell yourselves: now you are awake and, nevertheless, you do not think, but you think nothing at all. If you are able to sit or to lie quietly and to think nothing with full consciousness, then the organ of thinking works in such a way that it gains strength in itself, accumulates strength. Who puts himself in the situation over and over again not to think with full consciousness notices that the clearness of his thinking increases, that in particular repartee grows because he does not only leave his apparatus of thinking to itself by sleep, but that he lets this apparatus of thinking itself work under his guidance.

Only somebody who has taken leave of his spiritual senses can believe that then it is not thought at all. Here the word applies that Goethe says about nature: “She has thought and thinks continuously.”

In addition, the innermost nature of the human being has thoughts, even if the human being is not present with his conscious thoughts. Nevertheless, in the case where he is not at all with his thinking, something thinks in him of which he is not aware. At these moments, if he lies there without his own personal thoughts, something higher really thinks in him, and this higher works tremendously educating on him. This is essential and important that the human being also lets the superconscious, the divine work in himself, which does not announce itself directly but in its effects. You become a clear and glib thinker gradually if you have dedicated yourselves to such exercises of thinking. A certain energy belongs to it to carry out such exercises of thinking.

You realise at the single examples, which I have given today, how one can develop this thinking with own strength. I could only give some examples of self-education of thinking, but these examples have shown that one is able to point to real remedies of thinking whose fruits life and experience can give only.

Who exercises his thinking that way experiences that—on the one side—he can go up to the highest fields of spiritual life, that he can use this thinking—on the other side—also in the everyday life. What one gains with the overview of the big spiritual facts one should apply to practical life. All fields of the everyday life, education in particular, could experience a tremendous fertilisation because of this, and another view of life praxis would make itself noticeable all around us. In addition, someone who wants to develop the qualities slumbering in him in order to penetrate to the spiritual fields would have a sure base and stand firmly in life. This is something that one has to demand absolutely, before anybody penetrates to the higher spiritual fields. In addition, the usual science would be able to attain tremendous knowledge if it is fertilised by spiritual science.

The carriage pushers of thinking who fancy themselves often as great practitioners do not have this practical thinking; they lack it. They are not able to lead back something to a simple, comprising thought. Spiritual science gives us this: it enables us to survey what is usually small and detailed in life, with big, comprising viewpoints. The human being thereby gets the survey because he is able to think from great viewpoints into the details; then he is led to real life praxis.

We can take Leonardo da Vinci as an example, who was a practitioner in many fields. He said, theory is the captain, and practice is the soldiers.—Who wants to be a practitioner without controlling the viewpoints of practical thinking is like someone who goes on board a ship without compass, he does not have the possibility to steer the ship correctly. Goethe showed repeatedly from his practical way of thinking how just scholarship gets by impractical thinking to infertile fantasising. There are people, who lead the outside world back to atoms, and others who lead them back to movements; others deny any movement. On the other hand, the most practical thinkers point to the fact that simplicity comes from the greatness of the worldview. Goethe's dictum is suitable, and we can put it before our eyes:

Some hostile may occur,
Keep quiet, remain silent;
And if they say
There is no movement,
Walk around right
Under their noses.

If there is talk of the practical significance of the invisible, particularly of the invisible in the human being, I would like to illustrate by a comparison what I meant. Those people are practical who turn their look, their view to the supersensible view of existence, and those are impractical who stop at the only exterior, at the mere physical. Is anybody, actually, the true practitioner who has a horseshoe-shaped iron as a magnet before himself and uses this thing for anything that appears useful to him by all appearances? On the other hand, is such a person not impractical in the true sense of the word, and practical only someone who says to himself: in this piece of iron something rests that makes a lot of higher, nobler application possible to me than the mere inspection allows to suppose.—This is, of course, only a comparison, because we are not allowed to compare the higher forces about which we speak today with any natural force. However, practical is only someone who chooses the internal forces from the things and can use the things corresponding to their true values. Compared with those who can be led by a certain practical sense one could quote Fichte's word of the practical significance of ideals. Fichte (Johann Gottlieb F., 1762–1814) tried to explain the determination of the human being using high ideals.

In the introduction to his lectures on The Vocation of the Scholar (1794), he protests that none who speaks from such high idealistic viewpoints knows what can be objected to it, namely, that ideals cannot be shown directly in practical life. Perhaps, those who put up these ideals know this better than the opponents do. “We state only that reality has to be assessed and modified according to them by those who feel sufficient strength in themselves. Assumed, they could also not convince themselves, they lose very little, after they are once what they are; and, besides, humanity loses nothing. It becomes thereby only obvious that one does not count on them in the plan of the improvement of humanity. This will continue its way without any doubt; the benevolent nature may provide for them rain and sunshine, wholesome food and undisturbed circulation of humours at the proper time and—clever thoughts as well!” I want to point to this in particular. We briefly want to imagine the invisible members of the human nature. Spiritual science speaks of these invisible members of the human nature, but not as of anything that is there, as of an adjunct of the visible, but it speaks just of the spiritual as of the creative of the visible.

An almost obvious example is the following: everybody—also someone who cannot see into in the workshop of spiritual life—should imagine the senses of shame and anxiety repeatedly, so that he learns to believe that the supersensible is the reason of the sensuous. What are they? They are soul experiences undoubtedly to someone who does not think complicatedly. Anything, we must say, is there that threatens us; the soul feels threatened. This expresses itself as sensations of fear. Indeed, we could state various physical mediations. This would be easy, of course, and the modern researcher would hardly be able to state anything that the spiritual scientist would not know, too. Nevertheless, the matter is that the blood is forced back from the surface of the body to the centre.

We have a material process resulting from a soul process. The same is the case with the sense of shame. Again, we have a rearrangement of the blood, a change of the circulation caused by something spiritual. What one sees here in microcosm and what one can observe to a bigger extent, if because of a sad event tears are shed shows that the soul can cause bodily processes. Today, of course, there are people under the influence of our not evidently but latently materialistic way of thinking who also assert materialistic views here. I have also quoted the sentence of a certain worldview: one cries not because one is sad, but one is sad because one cries. This sentence came, actually, from somebody who thought idealistically, but one interpreted it wrong.

These are full-grown materialistic ways of thinking. Who has retained a piece of healthy thinking from the materialistic basis of our time sees in such evident connections between physical facts and spiritual-mental facts something that can make him gradually understand that spiritual science must say from its point of view: everything material has a spiritual origin.

Thus, something mental forms the basis of that which we see in the human being, what we can seize with hands with him. It is not the influence of the physical but just the primal ground of the physical. We call that a physical body in the human being, which he has in common with all beings surrounding him, which he has in common with the mineral world. The next, supersensible human member is the etheric body or life body. It prevents the physical body to being a corpse during the whole life, to following the principles of the physical only. Plants and animals also have such an etheric body, which one can deduce by thinking of someone who thinks philosophically only. It is real to the clairvoyant like the physical body.

A spiritual way of thinking defends itself with pleasure to understand the human body as a machine, however, does not need to defend itself if one is not a “carriage pusher of thinking from within.” One can absolutely say, the human body is a complex mechanism if one wants to include the physical and chemical in the mechanic. However, behind any machine, a builder and preserver must be, so also here, and this is the etheric body or life body, that is a loyal fighter against decay. Only at death, it separates from the physical body, and then the physical body follows as a corpse its physical laws. Then it is a corpse. The etheric body is something more certain than the mere physical body.

If we keep on studying the human being, we get to another member of his being, which every human being could already realise if he said to himself, I face a human being, a physical body, and an etheric body. Is there nothing else included in this human being than what one can see from without, what physiology et cetera disclose to us? Oh, there is something else: the sum of emotions, sensations, desires and wishes, pains and sufferings, impulses and passions.

All that represents the astral body. Now one could say, nevertheless, one cannot imagine that these things form a concluded reality. However, the spiritual scientist can perceive this clairvoyantly. There the astral body exists as the physical body exists. Nevertheless, the healthy human mind could also already say to itself that such a thing as an astral body must be there. Why could it say that to itself? I want to give you an example where, so to speak, with hands is to be seized how the astral body works, actually. There are people who say when the human being enters the physical world; he is not yet as developed as later. The external science can determine that, indeed, the senses and their organs exist in the brain that, however, the connections of the single senses in the brain develop relatively late. One can really study how the connecting nerve cords develop from the hearing to the facial sphere and make the human being the thinker finally. So—the materialist concludes—one sees how the internal parts develop bit by bit and then the world of sensations, images, sufferings, joys, complexes of thought et cetera flashes in the human being.—Imagine this development of the human brain. The complex lines of thought, which solve the world riddles, develop bit by bit. Are we then allowed to call that a mere mechanism which has developed, which builds itself up?

One can also admire a marvellous construction, as for example that of a clock. However, he would be a fool who wanted to believe that the clock has originated by itself. Who is able to do something, can develop only what he is able to do. Someone who had seconds, minutes, the principles of the clock in himself has joined it; one has thought ahead what we then reflect. Is there nothing that joins these connecting cords in the brain in such a way that you become a thinker finally? I mean, a healthy thinking would have to realise that for that which develops a master builder must exist who joins the cords, so that you can become a thinker. We are loyal only to ourselves and to our healthy human mind if we say, an astral body has to have constructed the physical brain. In the first weeks, months, years of the child, the astral body constructs the instrument only, which is able later to solve the world riddles. Who does not believe this, acts just as anybody who wants to use a machine, but denies that a constructor was there who has built it. The time will already come when again healthy judgments prevail in the human being, when they say to themselves that first the spiritual master builder must be there if anything should originate. This master builder has been already there before the human being is born.

The third human member is this astral body, that which forms the basis of the material again. The fourth human member is the ego, which makes the human being the crown of creation. The human being has the physical body in common with all minerals, the etheric body with all plants, and the astral body with the animals. He rises above the three physical realms by the ego. Therefore, all religions have probably directed their attention to the fact that there is only one name, which differs from all other. There is one thing that can be never called from the outside: this is in us as our core. No name can come from without that signifies us. Therefore, “I” was in the old Hebrew religion the inexpressible name that was inexpressible for all others.

These are the four lower members of the human nature from which only one is visible. The three others are real, are the primal grounds of the real. Any member is a basic being and cause for the next lower body; the ego-bearer for the astral body, the astral body for the etheric body, the etheric body for the physical body. Any experience of the ego imprints itself on the astral body. Here all experiences of the ego express themselves. Any momentary imagining, judging and feeling originate in the human being that way.

What lives in the astral body, expresses itself, imprints itself on the etheric or life body, and thereby it becomes permanent, not momentary, but keeps itself in a certain way. Let us assume that we pass momentary judgment; we make a mental picture about this or that. If we form a mental picture repeatedly, it becomes a habitual mental picture. Because it becomes a habitual image, it imprints itself in the etheric body. What lives in our memory, what we keep in mind from day to day, lives in our etheric body or life body. The fact that we play a piano piece once is in our astral body; the fact that we acquire the talent, the habit of playing is in the etheric body. All habits are in the etheric body or life body. If we pass moral judgment, it is again an action of the astral body. If a certain direction of judging imprints itself on us by repeated judgments, the moral judgment becomes a permanent once, it becomes conscience. The moral judgment is an experience of the astral body; the conscience is an experience of the etheric body or life body. Thus, we see how by the interaction of the higher members with the lower ones the whole human life builds itself up from within outwardly.

As far as the human being is a mere physical being, he has the etheric body or life body in common with the plants. What allows the humours to ascend in the plants, what causes that they subsist, reproduce, this causes the same in the human being. However, on this etheric body or life body custom, skill, conscience is imprinted top-down. Something mental-spiritual is imprinted on the human beings top-down. The experiences of the higher members are transferred more and more to the lower members. It is important for the human being to know that the higher members work into the denser members. Thus, the human being can work into the lower members in healthy, practical way.

The human being can ruin again, what nature has given him. As with the plant only malformation could originate if the etheric body or life body did not regulate what goes forward, an internal malformation originates in the human being if he works wrong inside, from the ego on the lower members. The astral body must be penetrated by the experiences of the ego in a healthy way. Who does not admit that an astral body builds on the brain of the child will also not realise how important it is that the ego has a proper effect on the astral body. Who realises this, however, says to himself, you are able to keep on working where nature has stopped. If you allow the whole scale of sensations to take place in healthy way, this continues working on your physical body, on your brain, and thus you build up your physical body during your whole life.

How many human beings walk around today with writer's spasm? The human body is wonderfully constructed. The human being adjusts his hand with everything that he does to the world outdoors. This cooperation of the hand with the outside goes adrift in certain ways from him if he is not able to set his hand aglow, to invigorate it with his inner life. This is a similar process, as if one gets artificial teeth. It is essential that all that we can get as our own is set aglow and invigorated by our ego. You get trembling hands only if the hands go adrift from the remaining forces to some degree. These are matters which one takes into consideration most intensely again in a not so distant future, and then one will realise what it means to grasp the spirit of the human being again.

I want to make clear this at an example. We remain in our field. It will become apparent how that which happens in the spirit really seizes the human being and makes him suitable or unsuitable for life, practical or impractical. Let us take a person who is impractical for life because he suffers from certain sensations of anxiety, so that thereby nervousness originates. This word already sounds the whole sum of lacking practice. Any human being who does not control himself completely in any respect is characterised as nervous, or one uses the catchword of genetic predisposition if anything is absent or exists that makes the human being impractical for life. All these things do not originate from a careful observation of the real facts, but because one has no palate for the spiritual due to the materialistic way of thinking.

It is important to pursue whether in the first times of life, when the invisible works so intensely on the visible, everything proceeds properly and is not disturbed. What is omitted here cannot be corrected later. If something is not formed well enough, the manifold discrepancies originate in the whole life. The human being, who is not able to let harmonising experiences surge up and down in the astral body, will always make himself impractical for life in certain ways. Instead of searching for genetic predispositions of fear and anxiety, we should rather look for something that is formed by this or that experience which has a solidifying effect on the physical body. It could be, for example,—however, it needs not always be in such a way—that a considerable part of claustrophobia was caused possibly by a particular way of parenting in the human being. He does not get loose from this evil because he lacks the means to stir it up again. Imagine children who recognise all festivities, actually, all the year round, only because they are showered with presents! They receive more than they can destroy. This abundance of undeserved gifts immobilises certain striving forces, which would generate healthy self-assurance. Such a thing can slumber in the human being during the time when the external education fulfils him or a new occupation absorbs him; but this appears once in the form of claustrophobia.

One cannot realise this if one does not understand what it means that the astral body changes itself bit by bit into that which the human being is in his physical, discernible behaviour. On the other hand, we can find—if particular states of unsuitability appear anyhow—that something presses on his soul. He cannot say it, cannot confess it, and thinks to have to conceal it. Because the human being does not find the way to the word, it seizes the lower members and works on them. What a soothing effect experiences the human being if he can confess such a thing! Then he has the feeling, now it is no longer lying on my heart like a stone, and this feeling of relief works recovering. Confession is an important remedy in this respect. The denominations have known this well. There we realise how the invisible inside of the human being works on the visible. Even certain reasonable doctors already realise that one cannot cure unsuitability for practical life by systematic application of cold water (Kneipp cure), but in such a way that one has to induce a kind of confession, has to detach something from the human being if healing should take place.

We want to look at the reverse now. There are reasonable doctors who say to themselves, one has to turn to the soul of the human being if one wants to know how the human being becomes unsuitable in certain respects. These doctors know that joy and desire are remedies, that they work recovering, that they soften again, what is solidified and ossified, and bring it under our control. However, this is not enough, just as little as it is enough if anybody says, the concealed secret must be detached from the soul of the human being. They do not know that everything that is experience of the inside has a big significance even if it appears wrong. Should we cancel everything mysterious in the human nature because it appears wrong with some persons? Should we make the doctors father confessors, as it one demands here and there? It can also be infinitely recovering for the soul if it is able to draw the veil of secret about some things. A Persian saying says, one saves the time that one uses for silent reflection, before one says something, in relation to the time of remorse about that which one has said thoughtlessly! Goethe pronounced the word of the “obvious secret” not without reason. In everything sensuous that surrounds us, we can realise something mysterious, something that lies so deeply in the things and that one cannot pronounce; however, it still flows from soul to soul. Health spreads out if the human being can feel the secret of life that way.

Spiritual science maintains this secret of life. Indeed, it does not make it easy for the human beings to approach the things. It is not so comfortable to approach them. Spiritual science can only stimulate, only say, this and that exists. Then the human being has to approach and co-operate. It may be uncomfortable, but it is infinitely healthy. The innermost member of the human being is thereby stimulated; spiritual science works immediately on the ego. If we hear anything about the evolution of the planets, if to us is told about the invisible members of the human nature, what goes from life to life with the human being—with all that one appeals immediately to the ego. All these world-enclosing ideas do not remain dry ideas and abstractions. They emit warmth and bliss; warmth and bliss irradiate and penetrate the astral body of the human being. Contentment and bliss originate from that which spiritual science offers. What sets the human being aglow as warmth, as fire keeps moving to his life body. The forces of spiritual science itself penetrate all forces of the etheric body, and the etheric body transfers the forces again to the physical body, it transfers it as a skill, in such a way that, for example, the hand becomes dexterous and practical if the great, elated ideas of spiritual science flow into the physical body.

Spiritual science makes the brain a flexible, pliable tool, so that it can get away from prejudices. Spiritual science works strongly down until the physical body of the human being. Up to the practical movements, he can be immersed in spiritual science. I want to give you an example of that. It helps, indeed, if one makes gymnastics possible to the child. This is an exceptionally healthy exercise if one makes it properly. Already in the talk on education, I have drawn your attention to the fact that it is important to remain aware that the human being is not only a physical apparatus, but is spiritualised by higher members. One should be able to project oneself completely into doing gymnastics to share any emotion of the etheric and the astral bodies. I knew a gym teacher, who was a big theorist. He knew the human physical body to a hair's breadth. He also had to give theoretical physical education. It does not matter that one knows the physical exactly, but that he experiences an increase of the inner ease with any exercise. One should experience purposefully what should be the single exercise. Who has a living feeling, not only an abstract idea of the physical body knows that one can have a living feeling for everything that the child experiences, for example, while climbing up a ladder.

A sort of gymnastics is imaginable that works so harmoniously on the cooperation of the etheric and the physical bodies that the best basis is laid of a good memory in old age. In addition, that which takes action visibly is properly understood only if it is understood from spiritual science. We would have the best means against the dwindling memory in old age in gymnastics if one wanted to do physical education from spiritual science.

Spiritual science is no theory, nothing dogmatic, but bestows something living to life. Once one will realise that only by spiritual science the human being can become a true practitioner of life. Someone only is a practical person who can use this life who is not its slave. The human being should always control his outer nature with his invisible members. The human being becomes a practitioner only down to the last detail of his life if he is the guide of the bodily. That human being is a practical person who can understand out of a true understanding of his members what Fichte said, but what is often misunderstood. This will be the ideal of the human being if he controls the visible from his invisible again: “The human being can what he has to do; and if he says: I cannot, he does not want it.”

The only meeting with Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900, German philosopher) belongs to the experiences I do not forget again. At that time, he was quite mad. The sight was very important. Imagine a human being, a man who has dealt with the question the whole morning which immediately suggests itself, and who has the wish to rest some time after dinner and to let go on the thoughts sounding in himself: he lay there this way. I had the impression of a healthy man, and, besides, he was already completely mad; he recognised nobody. His forehead was moulded like that of an artist and a thinker, and, nevertheless, it was the forehead of a maniac. A riddle faced me. Human beings of his kind of insanity would have had to look completely different. Only by means of spiritual science, one can explain this unusual.

The etheric body, the carrier of memory, is connected with the physical body during the whole life, but it is connected different with the different human beings. With some, the relation is not very solid, with others very close. Now Nietzsche's etheric body was very movable from the start. Such human beings can have two qualities: the one is an ingenious, easily movable mental force and imagination, the ability to connect widely separated concepts and to get a synopsis of widely divergent perspectives. Such persons are not as easily restrained as others are by the gravity of the physical body in the conditions given by life.

Before Friedrich Nietzsche had done his doctorate, he was appointed professor of Classics in Basel. From his teacher, Professor Ritschl (Friedrich Wilhelm R., 1806–1876), information was gathered. This answered: Nietzsche is able to do everything he wants. Thus, it happened that he did his doctorate when he already held a chair. Nietzsche had an agile mind. Such a human being does not live in ideas, which are palpable. He lives, so to speak, separated like by a wall from the everyday life.

However, something else is connected with such a mental disposition: he is condemned to a certain life tragedy. He hard finds the way to the immediate things of existence, he easily lives in that which cannot be seen by the eyes, be seized by the hands what can be observed in the everyday life but in that which humanity has acquired as spiritual goods. He lives in certain ways like separated by walls from the sufferings and joys of life. His look wanders into the vast, more in that which humanity has gained and created for itself, than in the everyday. Hence, it could occur that Nietzsche was in a special situation towards the civilisation of the nineteenth century.

Someone who surveys the civilisation of the second half of the nineteenth century sees that an immense jerk forward is done in the conquest of the physical world. We take the year 1858/59. It was the year, which brought the work of Darwin (Charles D., 1809–1882, English naturalist) of the origin of species by which the look of the human beings was banished completely in the physical concerning the evolution idea. This year also brought the work by which the matters of our fixed stars and the most distant sky space were conquered: the spectral analysis by Kirchhoff (Gustav Robert K., 1824–1887, physicist) and Bunsen (Robert Wilhelm B., 1811–1899, German chemist). Only since that time, it was possible to say, the substances, which are found on earth, are also found on the other planets. Then appeared the book about aesthetics by Friedrich Theodor Vischer (1807–1887, 1846–1857: Aesthetics or the Science of Beauty) which wanted to found the science of beauty bottom up, while one had once explained beauty top down, from the idea. To complete the picture: that work appeared which wanted to force the social life into the only sensuous world, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy by Karl Marx (1818–1883). Briefly, the time in which Nietzsche grew up was the time in which the human beings directed their look completely to the physical world.

Now imagine which forms all that has accepted in the course of the second half of the nineteenth century: think of Haeckel (Ernst H., 1834–1919, German naturalist) and other researchers who only targeted what presented itself to their sensuous eyes; think of everything that natural sciences and technology have performed in the nineteenth century. It appears to us compared with these currents like an escape of humanity to spirituality if at that time wide circles are seized by the philosophy of Schopenhauer (Arthur Sch., 1788–1860). At that time, the mere interest in Schopenhauer's philosophy shows that the human souls escaped to something that should grant spiritual satisfaction. We see one of the great spirits of the nineteenth century, Richard Wagner (1813–1883, composer), attempting to let spirituality flow again into civilisation.

In this cultural trend, Nietzsche positioned himself. How did he do this? The just mentioned persons positioned themselves creatively in it, and creating is something blissful. Working makes the human being young and fresh. This becomes apparent with Haeckel. Somebody who works on the microscope and other instruments and does research can make himself happy and rejuvenate in this work, he is able to do all that also light-heartedly, and he forgets the need for a spiritual world; in him something lives that can animate the human being, creative enthusiasm, which has something divine-spiritual. Nietzsche's destiny was this cultural trend. He was destined to take joy and sorrow from this cultural trend because he was not directly connected with the everyday life. He had the nagging feeling, how can one live with that which the modern civilisation offers? Nietzsche's heart was involved in everything with joy or sorrow. He lived through everything with his soul that happened in the nineteenth century.

We see two spirits intervening early in Nietzsche's life: Schopenhauer whom he got to know not personally who had a deep effect on him by his writings, and Richard Wagner with whom he was tied together by the most tender bond of friendship. Both spirits induced Nietzsche to become engrossed in the riddle of ancient Greece in the beginning of our culture. He had done deep looks in the Greek world, from the oldest time up to those periods which history illumines brighter. The Greek of the oldest time seems to be much closer to divinity than later, when he tries to show pictures of the gods in his pieces of art: he makes them human-like, raises the form of the human being to the ideal image. The Greek was not that way in primeval times. He felt everything vividly flowing into himself what was outdoors what blows in the storm and grumbles with the thunder, what streaks in the flash what as harmonising wisdom has set up the world outdoors. At that time, in his original music the Greek expressed this harmony and created it in his temple dances.

Nietzsche called the ancient Greek the Dionysian human being. The later Greek, the Apollonian human being, reproduced what the original Greek was. He stood there considering and expressed it in his pieces of art. At this development Nietzsche looked like at a riddle, because he had no knowledge of that primeval culture which was the basis of the Greek and even earlier cultures from which it had taken its force. An expression of that primeval culture was also, what was expressed as wisdom in the Orphic and Eleusinian mysteries as myth creation and art. Nietzsche did not know this. He thought that everything was instinct, basic instinct with the ancient Greek. He knew nothing about that wisdom which was fostered by initiates originally in the mysteries, which then flowed into the world, illustrated in pieces of art and mystery plays. Nietzsche was not able to look into these mysteries, but he had a premonition of them. Hence, he felt worried, because he could not find the correct answer to his questions. In that primeval wisdom of the human being to which spiritual science goes back, he would have had to search the answer to his Dionysian human being and his Apollonian human being. He would have to get the solution of the riddle from the Eleusinian and Orphic mysteries. Then he could have seen how art fosters the beholding, and how science and religion look for that which can penetrate the human heart with devoutness.

Religion, art, and science were not yet separated in the old mysteries from each other. They originated from one root. The ancient mysteries are this root. With the leading peoples of antiquity, they were fostered in secret sites efficiently and were developed to ritual acts. The descent of the primeval wisdom was represented to the neophyte in pictures. This remained concealed to Nietzsche; therefore, he could not find the coherence, which he searched. Only tragically, the development of the Greek spiritual life could present itself to him. He stills sees Aeschylus (525–456 BC), who was close to the mysteries, creating his drama penetrated with inner wisdom. However, he also sees Sophocles (497–406 BC) and in particular Euripides (480–406 BC) already creating their dramas which only show the exterior. He recognises that the Socratics find concepts that are far from the world sources and that they place themselves like considering beyond the world content in the universe. It seemed to him in such a way that in Socrates the world itself does no longer pulsate, but only the concepts of it, that he leads the Greek pulsating life to dry, sober abstraction. Nietzsche was painfully affected by the fact that Socrates put up the sentence that virtue is teachable. He understood it in such a way that the old Greek felt what he should do; he did not ask whether it is right or wrong. Only a time estranged to divinity could ask, can one learn what is good? Hence, Nietzsche considered Socrates as the person of the decline of Greek culture.

Schopenhauer appeared to Nietzsche as a human being who had an idea of that what led to the sources of existence. He built the bridge from the abstract world of human mental pictures to the deeper sources of existence pulsating in the will. This satisfied Nietzsche's pursuit of truth. Richard Wagner appeared to him as a person risen from the old Hellenism. It was blissful for Nietzsche to develop according to such an exceptional person who walked along beside him in flesh and blood. A substitute of that which the external world is to the other human beings was this friendship with Richard Wagner.

As a deposit of his world of thought in this time we have the writing The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, appeared in 1872, in which already the whole Nietzsche is included. There is already found the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Further Schopenhauer as Educator. Nietzsche writes empathically about Schopenhauer like someone who writes about his father. Then Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, it is regarded by everybody as the best writing about Richard Wagner.

No time is so closely related to philistines as the time of materialism. In no book, David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874, German theologian) expresses this connection so strongly as in the book The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined (1835/36). Nietzsche named and shamed this philistine attitude in his writing about David Friedrich Strauss. Nietzsche who longed for the re-erection of the Dionysian human being could be outraged against the philistine attitude of David Friedrich Strauss. David Friedrich Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer is a redeeming essay.

Then he did something as an academician. He had experienced the time without fire and enthusiasm of the academics. If anybody said, there can be new ideas, one can do this or that, then the others came who said: however, history shows us that nothing can develop by leaps and bounds, everything goes on quietly. One was afraid of what one called a leap in history. Nietzsche wrote a book in which he said, pluck up courage, be a human being, do not only look for history, have the courage to be independent and to act independently! Again a releasing book, of a comprising radicalism in its demand for emancipation from history. He expressed that historical mood is an obstacle of everything original in the impulses of the human beings.

Nietzsche lived up to 1876 in such a way. His development was in such a way that he stood far from the events in the world. The easy mobility of his etheric body caused this. In 1876, when Wagner was at the peak of his creating and had realised in the outside world what lived in his soul, Nietzsche discovered, what faces you does not correspond to the picture, which has lived in you.—This was the case simply because he had built something like a wall against the demands of the external realities.

He could not recognise in the outside what he had formed inside as mental pictures. There Nietzsche became confused. What made him confused? Wagner? Not really. Richard Wagner never made him confused, because he did not know the objective Richard Wagner at all. He was confused by his idea, which he had got of Wagner. Now Nietzsche became confused by the whole perspective, which had led him to Wagner. He was confused by any idealism. With the idealistic Wagner, he lost all ideals which humanity can generally spin out. Thus, the feeling originated in him: idealism and all contemplation about the spiritual is a lie, is untruthfulness, illusion. The human beings have deluded themselves about that what is real, while they have made pictures of the real to themselves. Nietzsche began to suffer from himself.

Now he is engrossed in opposite currents of the spiritual life, in the positive natural sciences and the branches, which are built up on these. He becomes acquainted with an interesting spirit, with Paul Rée (1849–1901, German philosopher) who had written a book about moral sensations and the origin of conscience. This work The Origin of the Moral Sensations, 1877) is typical for the last third of the nineteenth century in which is searched and worked according to the methods of natural sciences. It completely gets the origin of moral sensations and conscience out of the impulses and instincts of the human being. Paul Rée makes this wittily. Nietzsche is delighted by this worldview about which he says to himself, there any illusion is overcome, and one can understand human life only from that which is palpable. Now I feel all ideals like masks of desires and instincts. In Human, All Too Human, a book which appears in aphoristic form, he tries to show how basically all ideals do not lead beyond the human being, but are something that is rooted in the all too human, in the feeling and in the everyday. Nietzsche could never find the way to the everyday immediately. He did not know the general-human from practice. He wanted to experience it now from theory with all joys and sufferings. In addition, life praxis became theory to him. This was wonderfully expressed in Daybreak (1881). Everything appears to him not only disproved, but got cold, as put on ice.

With particular satisfaction, Nietzsche now studies Eugen Dühring's (1833–1921) Philosophy of Reality (1878). In it, he delights himself; however, he is not a parroter of it. He writes many, partly extremely disparaging remarks in his personal copy. However, he tries to experience emotionally what is brought forward there as positive science. The French morality authors who aim at assessing moral of life not by standards, but by events become a stimulating reading for him. This becomes his tragedy or also his bliss. These are the essentials that he lives through all that. It works different on him from those who had created these works. He must always ask himself, how does one live with these things?

Now, however, we see significant ideas originating to him from such conditions, ideas from which we must say that Nietzsche knocked at the gate of spiritual science, just as he had once stood before it with his Dionysian human being, guessing the mysteries. The gates were not opened to him. With one of these ideas, one can prove almost how it has originated. In Dühring's book A Course of Philosophy as a Strictly Scientific Worldview and Way of Life you find a strange passage. There Dühring tries to put the question whether it is possible that the same combination of atoms and molecules, which has been there once, returns one day in the same way.

During three weeks in which I have ordered Nietzsche's library, I myself have seen that he had marked this passage in this book and had added remarks. From then on, at first in the subconsciousness, the idea of the so-called everlasting return worked in him. This idea, which he developed more and more, has imprinted itself on Nietzsche's soul in such a way that it became a creed to him; he has familiarised himself with it that it became his tragedy. It expresses that everything that was there once returns in the same combination and with all details repeatedly, even if after long intervals. As well as we are sitting here now, we would come again heaps of times. This was a feeling, which belonged to the tragedy of his soul, the feeling: with all grief which now you experience you will always return.—Thus, we realise that Nietzsche has become the materialistic thinker by Dühring's idea of return—which Dühring rejects. For him there was only this return of the same a consequence of a materialistic idea.

We see Nietzsche's ideas crystallising from the cultural trend of the nineteenth century. Darwinism shows how the evolution of the imperfect to the perfect takes place how evolution advances from the simple living being to the developed human being. As for Nietzsche, it is not speculation; this becomes a source of bliss for him. It is a satisfaction for him to see the world in its development. However, he cannot stop. He says to himself, the human being has become; should he not develop further? Should the development be concluded with the human being if we see that imperfect beings have developed up to the human being? There we must look at the human being as a transition to a super-human.—Thus, the human being became to him a bridge between worm and super-human.

Nietzsche stood with his idea of the everlasting return with his whole feeling and thinking before the gate of the spiritual-scientific truth of reincarnation. He stood also with the idea of the super-human before the gate of spiritual science, which shows us that in every human being something lives that we have to understand as a divine essence of the human being. This essence is a kind of super-human if we are allowed to use the expression. When the human being has gone through many incarnations and has become more and more perfect, he will ascend to even higher degrees of existence.

Nietzsche knew nothing about all these concrete secrets of spiritual science. He knew nothing about that what we know if we look behind the sensuous, palpable. He could only emotionally grasp what lived in his soul, not with his ego. Instead of the portrayals of the spiritual facts that can fulfil us with bliss, instead of the portrayal of that world of facts which shows us how within the planetary development the human being ascends from stage to stage, all that lived with Nietzsche in the feeling, and sounds lyrically from Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885). It is an enthusiastic portrayal of the guessed that he could not behold. Like a question appears to us his hymn on the super-human.

How could this thirsty soul have been satisfied? Only if it had got to know spiritual science as contents. Nietzsche had to bleed out emotionally in his longing for it. Only spiritual science could have brought him what he strove for without being able to grasp it. In the last book, which he wanted to call Will to Power, it is especially clear how he could come to no fulfilment of his soul with the desired spiritual contents. Compare everything that spiritual science says about the higher human being and his affiliation to spiritual worlds with the abstract will to power, which has, actually, no contents. Power is something quite abstract if it is not said what should have power.

Just this posthumous work Will to Power shows Nietzsche's vain and fateful striving that is so great in its notions. Again, you can observe the tragedy, how this striving for an unknown land grows into insanity. Just at the example of Nietzsche, you can see where the civilisation of the nineteenth century had to lead the deeper feeling personalities. Therefore, many people who guessed something beyond the material, the palpable and could not find it because they stopped with this civilisation had to bleed out. That is why Nietzsche's tragedy also shows a big piece of the tragedy of the nineteenth century. This tragedy appears in particular, if we realise how Nietzsche with a boldness which only a human being can have who is not firmly connected with his etheric body, with the inhibitions of the physical body, how Nietzsche criticises Christianity in his Antichrist (1895). For Christianity is that what he says a harsh but comprehensible and extremely urgent criticism. A lot of that which this Antichrist contains is exceptionally worth reading. Nevertheless, the whole standpoint of Nietzsche shows us how a mind must behave to whom all philosophy appears as nihilism, who wants to search the spirit from reality and cannot find this spirit in the modern form of Christianity. It will turn out more and more that humanity recognises the big impulses and the whole deepness of Christianity only by spiritual science, so that one can say, Christianity has been recognised up to now only to a lesser extent. Nietzsche did not have this consciousness; he did not recognise Christianity properly. Why could he not recognise it? Because he could not anticipate the course of development—in the sense of spiritual science. I want to show it with an example.

About 600 years before Christ, Buddha appeared whom one cannot admire and revere enough if one recognises him really. He grows up as a king's son, surrounded by all joys of life. Any grief is kept away from him. It is ensured that he never leaves the gardens of his palace. Nevertheless, once he comes out of the sanctified area of the palaces and temples. He meets an old man, a sick person, a dead person. He sees: age is suffering, illness is suffering, and death is suffering. He recognises that in every rebirth the sufferings must come again. The great truth of the spiritual life reveals itself to Buddha. Therefore, he teaches that one should give up his longing for re-embodiment to be merged in the peace of the spiritual world.

We look at Christ now. We reincarnate in the substances of the earth. Our task is to purify, to internalise and to spiritualise this substance gradually. We carry the fruits of our pilgrimage on earth up to the spirit, and connect them thereby with the spiritual existence. May the earth then be only a vale of tears, which one should leave? No, the earth was blessed, because Christ walked about it, because his body was built from the substances of the earth, and because He permeated the earth with his forces.—The first Christians spoke that way. The human being absorbs something of the Christ principle in every life, purifies himself thereby gradually. Rebirth is not suffering, because only thereby we become able to recognise illness, age, evil as tests, as a means of education of our soul to become good and strong. The soul, which soars this knowledge, is healthy and fosters its surroundings.

Today the fear of hereditary predisposition penetrates humanity. If the human being opened himself or herself to the Christ impulse again, the illnesses would be overcome. On Golgotha, the symbol of death became the symbol of redemption. Being separated from that what one loves is suffering. However, one can be connected with those whom one loves if one is inspired by the Christ principle. One learns bit by bit to experience this union as reality. The Christ principle transforms the sufferings described by Buddha. Overcoming the sufferings one can reach not only by turning away from life, but also by the transformation of the soul. At the sight of the corpse of the crucified, we realise the riddle of the everlasting life going through death.

Nietzsche regards Christianity just as the opposite of that, what lies in its concealed deepness and what should be brought to light by spiritual science. He bleeds out because he could not recognise this. Nietzsche's grief is the deepest, most painful longing for the sources of life. Because his spirit was not firmly tied to his physical body, he does not come to the right solution of the world riddles tormenting him. Thus, it could happen that he did not find the right answer to his question to life which spiritual science could have given him, that he passed by. When the tools of the physical body could no longer serve him, he cast it off, so to speak, he divests himself of the physical body that has become useless for the thinker, and he hovers over it as it were. Thus, he appears to the viewer looking at him as healthy, as someone who only wants to rest from intensive work of thought. In such a way, he lay there like a picture of the tragedy of modern materialistic science, which cannot recognise the spiritual.

This year I shall again be giving a series of lectures on subjects related to Spiritual Science, as I have done now for several years past. Those of my audience who attended those previous lectures will know what is meant here by the term, Spiritual Science (Geisteswissenschaft). For others, let me say that it will not be my task to discuss some abstract branch of science, but a discipline which treats the spirit as something actual and real. It starts from the premise that human experience is not unavoidably restricted to sense-perceptible reality or to the findings of human reason and other cognitive faculties in so far as they are bound up with the sense-perceptible. Spiritual Science says that it is possible for human beings to penetrate behind the realm of the sense-perceptible and to make observations which are beyond the range of the ordinary intellect.

This introductory lecture will describe the role of Spiritual Science in present-day life, and will show how in the past this Spiritual Science—which is as old as humanity—appeared in a form very different from the form it must take today. In speaking of the present, I naturally do not mean the immediate here and now, but the relatively long period during which spiritual life has had the particular character which has come to full development in our own time.

Anyone who looks back over the spiritual life of mankind will see that “a time of transition” is a phrase to be used with care, for every period can be so described. Yet there are times when spiritual life takes a leap forward, so to speak. From the 16th century onwards, the relationship between the soul and spiritual life of human beings and the outer world has been different from what it was in earlier times. And the further back we go in human evolution, the more we find that men had different needs, different longings, and gave different answers from within themselves to questions concerning the great riddles of existence.

We can gain a clear impression of these transition periods through individuals who lived in those days and had retained certain qualities of feeling, knowing and willing from earlier periods, but were impelled to meet the demands of a new age.

Let us take an interesting personality and see what he makes of questions concerning the being of man and other such questions that must closely engage human minds—a personality who lived at the dawn of modern spiritual life and was endowed with the inner characteristics I have just described. I will not choose anyone familiar, but a sixteenth century thinker who was unknown outside a small circle. In his time there were many persons who retained, as he did, mediaeval habits of thinking and feeling and wished to gain knowledge in the way that had been followed for centuries, and yet were moving on towards the outlook of the coming age. I shall be naming an individual of whose external life almost nothing is historically known. From the point of view of Spiritual Science, this is thoroughly congenial. Anyone who has sojourned in the realm of Spiritual Science will know how distracting it is to find attached to a personality all the petty details of everyday life that are collected by modern biographers. On this account, we ought to be thankful that history has preserved so little about Shakespeare, for instance; the true picture is not spoilt—as it is with Goethe—by all the trivia the biographers are so fond of dragging in. I will therefore designate an individual of whom even less is known than is known about Shakespeare, a seventeenth century thinker who is of great significance for anyone who can see into the history of human thinking.

In Francis Joseph Philipp, Count von Hoditz and Wolframitz, who led the life of a solitary thinker during the second half of the seventeenth century in Bohemia, we have a personality of outstanding importance from this historical point of view. In a little work entitled Libellus de nominis convenientia¹—I have not inquired if it has since been published in full—he set down the questions which occupied his soul. If we immerse ourselves in his soul, these questions can lead us into the issues that a reflecting man would concern himself with in those days. This lonely thinker discusses the great central problem of the being of man. With a forcefulness that springs from a deep need for knowledge, he says that nothing so disfigures a man as not to know what his being really is.

Count von Hoditz turns to important figures in the history of thought, for instance to Aristotle in the fourth century B.C., and asks what Aristotle says in answer to this question—what the essential being of man really is.² He says: Aristotle's answer is that man is a rational animal. Then he turns to a later thinker, Descartes, and puts the same question, and here the answer is that man is a thinking being.³ But on reflection he comes to feel that these two representative thinkers can give no answer to his question; for—as he says—in the answers of Aristotle and Descartes he wanted to learn what man is and what he ought to do. When Aristotle says that man is a rational animal, that is no answer to the question of what man is, for it throws no light on the nature of rationality. Nor does Descartes in the seventeenth century tell us what man ought to do in accordance with his nature as a thinking being. For although we may know that man is a thinking being, we do not know what he must think in order to take hold of life in the right way, in order to relate his thought to life.

Thus our philosopher sought in vain for an answer to this vital question, a question that must be answered if a man is not to lose his bearings. At last he came upon something which will seem strange to a modern reader, especially if he is given to scientific ways of thought, but for our solitary thinker it was the only answer appropriate to the particular constitution of his soul. It was no help for him to know that man is a rational animal or a thinking being. At last he found his question answered by another thinker who had it from an old tradition. And he framed the answer he had thus discovered in the following words: Man in his essence is an image of the Divine.⁴ Today we should say that man in his essence is what his whole origin in the spiritual world makes him to be.

The remaining remarks by Count von Hoditz need not occupy us today. All that concerns us is that the needs of his soul drove him to an answer which went beyond anything man can see in his environment or comprehend by means of his reason. If we examine the book more closely, we find that its author had no knowledge gained direct from the spiritual world. Now if he had been troubled by the question of the relation between sun and earth, he could, even if he were not an observer himself, have found the answer somewhere among the observations collected by the new forms of scientific thought. With regard to external questions of the sense-world he could have used answers given by people who had themselves investigated the questions through their own observations and experiences. But the experiences available to him at that time gave no answer to the questions concerning man's spiritual life, his real being in so far as it is spiritual. Clearly, he had no means of finding persons who themselves had had experiences in the spiritual world and so could communicate to him the properties of the spiritual world in the same way as the scientists could impart to him their knowledge about the external world. So he turned to religious tradition and its records. He certainly assimilated his findings—this is characteristic of his quality of soul—but one can see from the way he worked that he was only able to use his intellect to give a new form to what he had found emerging from the course of history or from recorded tradition.

Many people will now be inclined to ask: Are there—can there be—any persons who from their own observation and experience are able to answer questions related to the riddles of spiritual life?

This is precisely what Spiritual Science will make people aware of once more: the fact that—just as research can be carried out in the sense-perceptible world—it is possible to carry out research in the spiritual world, where no physical eyes, no telescopes or microscopes are available, and that answers can thus be given from direct experience as to conditions in such a world beyond the range of the senses. We shall then recognise that there was an epoch, conditioned by the whole evolutionary progress of humanity, when other means were used to make known the findings of spiritual research, and that we now have an epoch when these findings can once more be spoken of and understanding for them can again be found.

In between lay the twilight time of our solitary thinker, when human evolution took a rest, so to speak, from ascending towards the spiritual world, and preferred to rely on traditions passed down through ancient records or by word of mouth. In certain circles it began to be doubted whether it was possible for human beings to enter a spiritual world through their own powers by developing the cognitive faculties that lie hidden or slumbering within them. Are there, then, any rational grounds for saying that it is nonsensical to speak of a spiritual world that lies beyond the sense-perceptible? A glance at the progress of ordinary science should be enough to justify this question. Precisely a consideration of the wonderful advances that have been made in unraveling the secrets of external nature should indicate to anyone that a higher, super-sensible knowledge must exist. How so?

If we study human evolution impartially, we cannot fail to be impressed by the exceptional progress made in recent times by the sciences concerned with the outer world. With what pride—and in a certain sense the pride is justified—do people remark that the vast, ever-increasing advance of modern science has brought to light many facts that were unknown a few centuries ago. For example, thousands of years ago the sun rose in the morning and passed across the heavens, just as it does today. That which could be seen in the surroundings of the earth and in connection with the course of the sun was the same then, for external observation, as it was in the days of Galileo, Newton, Kepler, Copernicus, and so on. But what could men say in those earlier ages about the external world? Can we suppose that the modern knowledge of which we are so justly proud has been gained by merely contemplating the external world? If the external world could itself, just as it is, give us this knowledge, there would be no need to look further: all the knowledge we have about the sense-perceptible world would have been acquired centuries ago. How is it that we know so much more and have a different view of the position of the sun and so on? It is because human understanding, human cognition concerning the external world, has developed and changed in the course of hundreds or thousands of years. Yes, these faculties were by no means the same in ancient Greece as they have come to be with us since the 16th century.

Anyone who studies these changes without prejudice must say to himself: Men have acquired something new. They have learnt to see the outer world differently because of something added to those faculties which apply to the external sense-world. Hence it became clear that the sun does not revolve round the earth; these new faculties compelled men to think of the earth as going round the sun.

No-one who is proud of the achievements of physical science can have any doubt that in his inner being man is capable of development, and that his powers have been remodeled from stage to stage until he has become what he is today. But he is called upon to develop more than outer powers; he has in his inner life something which enables him to recreate the world in the light of his inward capacity for knowledge. Among the finest words of Goethe are the following (in his book about Winckelmann)⁵ “if the healthy nature of man works as a unity, if he feels himself within the world as in a great, beautiful, noble and worthy whole, if harmonious ease offers him a pure and free delight: then the universe, if it could become conscious of itself, would rise in exultation at having reached its goal and would stand in wonder at the climax of its own being and becoming.” And again: “Man, placed at the summit of Nature, is again a whole new nature, which must in turn achieve a summit of its own. He ascends towards that height when he permeates himself with all perfections and virtues, summons forth order, selection, harmony and meaning, and attains in the end to the creation of a work of art.”

So man can feel that he has been born out of the forces he can see with his eyes and grasp with his reason. But if he applies the unbiased observation we have mentioned, he will see that not only external Nature has forces which develop until they are observed by the human eye, heard by the human ear, grasped by the human reason. In the same way a study of human evolution will show that something evolves within man; the faculties for gaining exact knowledge of nature were at first asleep within him, and have awakened by stages in the course of time. Now they are fully awake, and it is these faculties which have made possible the great progress of physical science.

Is it then inevitable that these inner faculties should remain as they are now, equipped only to reflect the outer world? Is it not perfectly reasonable to ask whether the human soul may not possess other hidden powers that can be awakened? May it not be that if he develops further the powers that lie hidden and slumbering within him, they will be spiritually illuminated, so that his spiritual eye and spiritual ear—as Goethe calls them⁶—will be opened and will enable him to perceive a spiritual world behind the sense-world?

To anyone who follows this thought through without prejudice, it will not seem nonsensical that hidden forces should be developed to open the way into the super-sensible world and to answer the questions: What is man in his real being? If he is an image of the spiritual world, what, then, is this spiritual world?

If we describe man in external terms and call to mind his gestures, instincts and so forth, we shall find all these characteristics represented imperfectly in lower beings. We shall see his external semblance as an integration of instincts, gestures and forces which are divided up among a number of lower creatures. We can comprehend this because we see around us the elements from which man has evolved into man. Might it not be possible then, to use these developed forces to penetrate similarly into a spiritual external world and to see there beings, forces and objects, just as we see stones, plants and animals in the physical world? Might it not be possible to observe spiritual processes which would throw light on man's inner life, just as it is possible to clarify his relationship to the outer world?

There has been, however, an interval between the old and the modern way of communicating Spiritual Science. This was a time of rest for the greater part of mankind. Nothing new was discovered; the old sources and traditions were worked over again and again. For the period in question this was quite right; every period has a characteristic way of meeting its fundamental needs. So this interlude occurred, and we must realise that while it lasted men were in a special situation, different both from what had been in the past and from what would be in the future. In a certain sense they became unaccustomed to looking for the soul's hidden faculties, which could have given insight into the spiritual world. So a time drew on when men could no longer believe or understand that the inner development of hidden faculties leads to super-sensible knowledge. Even then, one fact could hardly be denied: that in human beings there is something invisible. For how could it be thought that human reason, for example, is a visible entity? What sort of impartial thinking could fail to admit that human cognition is by its nature a super-sensible faculty?

Knowledge of this fact was never quite lost, even in the time when men had ceased to believe that super-sensible faculties within the soul could be developed so as to give access to the super-sensible. One particular thinker reduced this faculty to its smallest limit: it was impossible, he said, for men to penetrate by super-sensible vision into a world that comes objectively before us as a spiritual world, just as animals, plants and minerals and other people are encountered in the physical world. Yet even he had to recognise impartially that something super-sensible does exist and cannot be denied.

This thinker was Kant,⁷ who thus brought an earlier phase of human evolution to a certain conclusion. For what does he think about man's relationship to a super-sensible, spiritual world? He does not deny that a man observes something super-sensible when he looks into himself, and that for this purpose he employs faculties of knowledge which cannot be perceived by physical eyes, however far the refinement of our physical instruments may be carried. Kant, then, does point to something super-sensible; the faculties used by the soul to make for itself a picture of the outer world. But he goes on to say that this is all that can be known concerning a super-sensible world. His opinion is that wherever a man may turn his gaze, he sees only this one thing he can call super-sensible: the super-sensible element contained in his senses in order that he may perceive and grasp and understand the existence of the sense-world.

In the Kantian philosophy, accordingly, there is no path that can lead to observation or experience of the spiritual world. The one thing Kant admits is the possibility of recognising that knowledge of the external world cannot be attained by the senses, but only by super-sensible means. This is the sole experience of the super-sensible that man can have.

That is the historically important feature of Kant's philosophy. But in Kant's argument it cannot be denied that when man uses his thinking in connection with his actions and deeds, he has the means to affect the sense-perceptible world. Thus, Kant had to recognise that a human being does not follow only instinctive impulses, as lower animals do; he also follows impulses from within his soul, and these can raise him far above subservience to mere instinct. There are countless examples of people who are tempted by a seductive impulse to do something, but they resist the temptation and take as their guide to action something that cannot come from an external stimulus. We need only think of the great martyrs, who gave up everything the sense-world could offer for something that was to lead them beyond the sense-world. Or we need only point to the experience of conscience in the human soul, even in the Kantian sense. When a man encounters something ever so charming and tempting, conscience can tell him not to be lured away by it, but to follow the voice that speaks to him from spiritual depths, an indomitable voice within his soul. And so for Kant it was certain that in man's inner being there is such a voice, and that what it says cannot be compared with any message from the outer world. Kant called it the categorical imperatives significant phrase. But he goes on to say that man can get no further than this voice from the soul as a means of acting on the world from out of the super-sensible, for he cannot rise beyond the world of the senses. He feels that duty, the categorical imperative, conscience, speak from within him, but he cannot penetrate into the realm from which they come.

Kant's philosophy allows man to go no further than the boundary of the super-sensible world. Everything else that resides in the realm from which duty, conscience and the categorical imperative emanate is shut off from observation, although it is of the same super-sensible nature as the soul. Man cannot enter that realm; at most he can draw conclusions about it. He can say to himself: Duty speaks to me, but I am weak; in the ordinary world I cannot carry out fully the injunctions of duty and conscience. Therefore I must accept the fact that my being is not confined to the world of the senses, but has a significance beyond that world. I can hold this before me as a belief, but it is not possible for me to penetrate into the world beyond the senses; the world from which come the voices of moral consciousness, duty and conscience, the categorical imperative.

We will now turn to someone who in this context was the exact antithesis of Kant: I mean Goethe. Anyone who truly compares the souls of these two men will see that they are diametrically opposed in their attitudes towards the most important problems of knowledge. Goethe, after absorbing all that Kant had to say about these problems, maintained on the ground of his own inner experience that Kant was wrong. Kant, says Goethe, claims that man has the power to form intellectual, conceptual judgments, but is not endowed with any contemplative faculty which could give direct experience of the spiritual world. But—Goethe continues—anyone who has exercised himself with the whole force of his personality to wrest his way from the sense-world to the super-sensible, as I have done, will know that we are not limited to drawing conclusions, but through a contemplative power of judgement we are able actually to raise ourselves into the spiritual world. Such was Goethe's personal reply to Kant. He emphasises that anyone who asserts the existence of this contemplative judgement is embarking on an adventure of reason, but he adds that from his own experience he has courageously gone through this adventure!⁸

Yet in the recognition of what Goethe calls “contemplative judgement” lies the essence of Spiritual Science, for it leads, as Goethe knew, into a spiritual world; and it can be developed, raised to ever higher levels, so as to bring about direct vision, immediate experience, of that world, The fruits of this enhanced intuition are the content of true Spiritual Science. In coming lectures we shall be concerned with these fruits: with the results of a science which has its source in the development of hidden faculties in the human soul, for they enable man to gaze into a spiritual world, just as through the external instruments of the senses he is able to gaze into the realms of chemistry and physics.

It could now be asked: Does this possibility of developing hidden faculties that slumber in the soul belong only to our time, or has it always existed?

A study of the course of human history from a spiritual-scientific point of view teaches us that there existed ancient stores of wisdom, parts of which were condensed into those writings and traditions which survived during the intermediate period I described earlier. This same Spiritual Science also shows us that today it is again possible not merely to proclaim the old, but to speak of what the human soul can itself achieve by development of the forces and faculties slumbering within it; so that a healthy judgment, even where human beings cannot themselves see into the spiritual world, can understand the findings of the spiritual researcher. The contemplative judgment that Goethe had in mind when he spoke out against Kant, is in a certain sense the beginning of the upward path of knowledge which today is by no means unexplored. Spiritual Science is therefore able to show, as we shall see, that there are hidden faculties of knowledge which by ascending order penetrate ever further into the spiritual world.

When we speak of knowledge, we generally mean knowledge of the ordinary world, “material knowledge”; but we can also speak of “imaginative knowledge”, “inspired knowledge” and finally “intuitive knowledge”.⁹ These are stages of the soul's progress into the super-sensible world which are also experienced by the individual spiritual researcher in accord with the constitution of the soul today. Similar paths were followed by the spiritual researcher in times gone by. But spiritual research has no meaning if it is to remain the possession of a few; it cannot limit itself to a small circle. Certainly, anything an ordinary scientist has to say about the nature of plants or about processes in the animal world can be of service to all mankind, even though this knowledge is actually possessed by a small circle of botanists, zoologists and so on. But spiritual research is not like that. It has to do with the needs of every human soul; with questions related to the inmost joys and sorrows of the soul; with knowledge that enables the human being to endure his destiny, and in such a way that he experiences inner contentment and bliss even if destiny brings him sorrow and suffering. If certain questions remain unanswered, men are left desolate and empty, and precisely they are the concern of Spiritual Science. They are not questions that can be dealt with only in restricted circles; they concern us all, at whatever stage of development and culture we may be, for the answering of them is spiritual food for each and every Soul.

This has always been so, at all times. And if Spiritual Science is to speak to mankind in this way, it must find means of making itself understood by all who wish to understand it. This entails that it must direct itself to those powers which are most fully developed during a given period, so that they can respond to what the spiritual researcher has to impart. Since human nature changes from epoch to epoch and the soul is always acquiring new aptitudes, it is natural that in the past Spiritual Science should have spoken differently about the most burning questions that concern the soul. In remote antiquity it spoke to a humanity which would never have understood the way it speaks today, for the soul-forces which have now developed were non-existent then. If Spiritual Science had been presented in the way appropriate for the present day, it would have been as though one were talking to plants.

In ancient times, accordingly, the spiritual researcher had to use other means. And if we look back into remote antiquity, Spiritual Science itself tells us that in order to give answers in a form adapted to the soul-powers of mankind in those times, a different preparation was necessary for those who were training themselves to gaze into the spiritual world; they had to cultivate powers other than those needed for speaking to present-day mankind.

Men who develop the forces that slumber in the soul in order to gaze into the spiritual world and to see spiritual beings there, as we see stones, plants and animals in the physical world—these men are and always have been called by Spiritual Science, Initiates, and the experiences that the soul has to undergo in order to achieve this faculty is called Initiation. But in the past the way to it was different from what it is today, for the mission of Spiritual Science is always changing. The old Initiation, which had to be gone through by those who had to speak to the people in ancient times, led them to an immediate experience of the spiritual world. They could see into surrounding realms which are higher than those perceived through the senses. But they had to transform what they saw into symbolic pictures, so that people could understand it. Indeed, it was only in pictures that the old Initiates could express what they had seen, but these pictures embraced everything that could interest people in those days.

These pictures, drawn from real experience, are preserved for us in myths and legends which have come down from the most diverse periods and peoples. In academic circles these myths and legends are attributed to the popular imagination. Those who are cognisant of the facts know that myths and legends derive from super-sensible vision, and that in every genuine myth and legend we must see an externalised picture of something a spiritual researcher has experienced, or, in Goethe's words, what he has seen with the spiritual eye or heard with the spiritual ear. We come to understand legends and myths only when we take them as images expressing a real knowledge of the spiritual world. They are pictures through which the widest circles of people could be reached.

It is a mistake to assume—as it so often is nowadays—that the human soul has always been just as it is in our century. The soul has changed; its receptivity was quite different in the past. A person was satisfied then if he received the picture given in the myth, for he was inspired by the picture to bring an intuitive vision of the outer world much more directly before his soul. Today myths are regarded as fantasy; but when in former times the myth sank into a person's soul, secrets of human nature were shown to him. When he looked at the clouds or the sun and so forth, he understood as a matter of course what the myth had set before him. In this way something we could call higher knowledge was given to a minority in symbolic form. While today we talk and must talk in straightforward language, it would be impossible to express in our terms what the souls of the old sages or initiates received, for neither the initiates nor their hearers had the soul-forces we have now developed.

In those early times the only valid forms of expression were pictorial. These pictures are preserved in a literature which strikes a modern reader as very strange. Now and then, especially if one is prompted by curiosity as well as by a desire for knowledge, one comes across an old book containing remarkable pictures which show, for example, the interconnections between the planets, together with all sorts of geometrical figures, triangles, polygons and so on. Anyone who applies a modern intellect to these pictures, without having acquired a special taste for them, will say: What can one do with all this stuff, the so-called Key of Solomon¹⁰ as a traditional symbol, these triangles and polygons and such-like?

Certainly, the spiritual researcher will agree that from the standpoint of modern culture nothing can be made of all this. But when the pictures were first given to students, something in their souls really was aroused. Today the human soul is different. It has had to develop in such a way as to give modern answers to questions about nature and life, and so it cannot respond in the old way to such things as two interlocked triangles, one pointing upwards, the other downwards. In former times, this picture could kindle an active response; the soul gazed into it and something emerging from within it was perceived. Just as nowadays the eye can look through a microscope and see, for example, plant-cells that cannot be seen without it, so did these symbolic figures serve as instruments for the soul. A man who held the Key of Solomon as a picture before his soul could gain a glimpse of the spiritual world. With our modern souls this is not possible, and so the secrets of the spiritual world which are handed down in these old writings can no longer be knowledge in the original sense, and those who give them out as knowledge, or who did so in the 19th century, are doing something out of line with the facts. That is why one cannot do anything with writings such as those of Eliphas Levi,¹¹ for instance, for in our time it is antiquated to present these symbols as purporting to throw light on the spiritual world. In earlier times, however, it was proper for Spiritual Science to speak to the human soul through the powerful pictures of myth and legend, or alternatively through symbols of the kind I have just described.

Then came the intermediate period, when knowledge of the spiritual world was handed down from one generation to the next in writing or by oral tradition. Even if we study only external history, we can readily see how it was handed down. In the very early days of Christianity there was a sect in North Africa called the Therapeutae¹² a man who had been initiated into their knowledge said that they possessed the ancient writings of their founders, who could still see into the spiritual world. Their successors could receive only what these writings had to say, or at most what could be discerned in them by those who had achieved some degree of spiritual development.

If we pass on to the Middle Ages, we find certain outstanding persons saying: we have certain cognitive faculties, we have reason; then, beyond ordinary reason we have faculties which can rise to a comprehension of certain secrets of existence; but there are other secrets and mysteries of existence which are only accessible by revelation. They are beyond the range of faculties which can be developed, they can be searched for only in ancient writings.

Hence arose the great mediaeval split between those things that can be known by reason and those that must be believed because they are passed down by tradition, are revelation.¹³ And it was quite in keeping with the outlook of those times that the frontier between reason and faith should be clearly marked. This was justified for that period, for the time had passed when certain mathematical signs could be used to call forth faculties of cognition in the human soul. Right up to modern times, a person had only one means of grasping the super-sensible: looking into his own soul, as Augustine,¹⁴ for example, did to some extent.

It was no longer possible to see in the outer world anything that revealed deep inner secrets. Symbols had come to be regarded as mere fantasies. One thing only survived: a recognition that the super-sensible world corresponded to the super-sensible in man, so that a man could say to himself: You are able to think, but your thought is limited by space and time, while in the spiritual world there is a Being who is pure thought. You have a limited capacity for love, whereas in the spiritual world there is a Being who is perfect love. When the spiritual world was represented for a human being in terms of his own inner experience, his inner life could extend to a vision of nature permeated by the Divine; then he had consciousness of God. But for particular facts he could turn only to information given in ancient writings, for in himself he had nothing that could lead him into the spiritual world.

Then came the later times which brought the proud achievements of natural science. These are the times when faculties which could go beyond the sense-perceptible emerged not only in those who achieved scientific knowledge, but in all men. Something in the soul came to understand that the picture given to the senses is not the real thing, and to realise that truth and appearance are contraries. This new faculty, which is able to discern outward nature in a form not given to the senses, will be increasingly understood by those who today penetrate as researchers into the spiritual world and are then able to report that one can see a spiritual world and spiritual beings, just as down here in the sense-perceptible world one sees animals, plants and minerals.

Hence the spiritual researcher has to speak of realms which are not far removed from present-day understanding. And we shall see how the symbols which were once a means for gaining knowledge of the spiritual world have become an aid to spiritual development. The Key of Solomon, for instance, which once called forth in the soul a real spiritual perception, does so no longer. But if today the soul allows itself to be acted on by what the spiritual researcher can explain concerning this symbol, something in the soul is aroused, and this can lead a person on by stages into the spiritual world. Then, when he has gained vision of the spiritual world, he can express what he has seen in the same logical terms that apply to external science.

Spiritual Science or occultism must therefore speak in a way that can be grasped by anyone who has a broad enough understanding. Whatever the spiritual researcher has to impart must be clothed in the conceptual terms which are customary in other sciences, or due regard would not be paid to the needs of the times. Not everyone can see immediately into the spiritual world, but since the appropriate forces of reason and feeling are now existent in every soul, Spiritual Science, if rightly presented, can be grasped by every normal person with his ordinary reason. The spiritual researcher is now again in a position to present what our solitary thinker said to himself: Man in his essence is an image of the Godhead.

If we want to understand the physical nature of man, we look to the relevant findings of physical research. If we want to understand his inner spiritual being, we look to the realm which the spiritual researcher is able to investigate. Then we see that man does not come into existence at birth or at conception, only to pass out of existence at death, but that besides the physical part of his organism he has super-sensible members. If we understand the nature of these members, we penetrate into the realm where faith passes over into knowledge. And when Kant, in the evening of an older period, said that we can recognise the categorical imperative, but that no-one can penetrate with conscious vision into the realm of freedom, of divine being and immortality, he was expressing only the experience natural to his time. Spiritual Science will show that we can penetrate into a spiritual world; that just as the eye equipped with a microscope can penetrate into realms beyond the range of the naked eye, so can the soul equipped with the means of Spiritual Science penetrate into an otherwise inaccessible spiritual world, where love, conscience, freedom and immortality can be known, even as we know animals, plants and minerals in the physical world. In subsequent lectures we will go further into this.

If once more we look now at the relationship between the spiritual researcher and his public, and at the difference between the past and present of Spiritual Science, we can say: The symbolic pictures used by spiritual researchers in the past acted directly on the human soul, because what today we call the faculties of reason and understanding were not yet present. The pictures gave direct vision of the spiritual world, and the ordinary man could not test with his reason what the spiritual researcher communicated to him through them. The pictures acted with the force of suggestion, of inspiration; a man subjected to them was carried away and could not resist them. Anyone who was given a false picture was thus delivered over to those who gave it to him. Therefore, in those early times it was of the utmost importance that those who rose into the spiritual world should be able to inspire absolute confidence and firm belief in their trustworthiness; for if they misused their power they had in their hands an instrument which they could exploit in the worst possible way.

Hence in the history of Spiritual Science there are periods of degeneration as well as times of brilliance; times in which the power of untrustworthy initiates was misused. How the initiate in those early times behaved towards his public depended to the utmost degree on himself alone. At the present time—and one might say, thank God for it!—all this is somewhat different. Since the change does not come about all at once, it is still necessary that the initiate should be a trustworthy person, and it will then be justified to feel every confidence in him. But people are already in a different relationship to the spiritual researcher; if he is to speak in accordance with the demands of his time he must speak in such a way that every unbiased mind can understand him, if the willingness to understand him is there. This is, of course, far removed from saying that everyone who could understand must now understand. But reason can now be the judge of what an individual can understand, and therefore everyone who devotes himself to Spiritual Science should bring his unbiased judgment to bear on it.

From now onwards this will be the mission of Spiritual Science: to rise into a spiritual world, through the development of hidden powers, just as the physiologist penetrates through the microscope into a realm of the smallest entities, invisible to the naked eye. And ordinary intelligence will be able to test the findings of spiritual research, as it can test the findings of the physiologist, the botanist, and so on. A healthy intelligence will be able to say of the spiritual researcher's findings: they are all consistent with one another. Modern man will come to the point of saying to himself: My reason tells me that it can be so, and by using my reason I can grasp clearly what the spiritual researcher has to tell. And that is how the spiritual researcher, for his part, should speak if he feels himself to be truly at one with the mission of Spiritual Science at the present time. But there will be a time of transition also today. For since the means to achieve spiritual development are available and can be used wrongly, many people whose purpose is not pure, whose sense of duty is not sacred and whose conscience is not infallible, will find their way into a spiritual world. But then, instead of behaving like a spiritual researcher who can know from his own experience whether the things he sees are in accord with the facts, these pretended researchers will impart information that goes against the facts. Moreover, since people can come only by slow degrees to apply their reasoning powers to understanding what the spiritual researcher says, we must expect that charlatanry, humbug and superstition will flourish preeminently in this realm. But the situation is changing. Man now has himself to blame if, without wishing to use his intellect, he is led by a certain curiosity to believe blindly in those who pass themselves off as spiritual investigators, so-called. Because men are too comfort-loving to apply their reason, and prefer a blind faith to thinking for themselves, it is possible that nowadays we may have, instead of the old initiate who misused his power, the modern charlatan who imposes on people not the truth, but something he perhaps takes for truth. This is possible because today we are at the beginning of an evolutionary phase.

There is nothing to which a man should apply his reason more rigorously than the communications that can come to him from Spiritual Science. People can lay part of the blame on themselves if they fall victim to charlatanry and humbug; for these falsities will bear abundant fruit, as indeed they have done already in our time. This is something that must not go unnoticed when we are speaking of the mission of Spiritual science today.

Anyone who listens now to a spiritual researcher—not in a willful, negative way that casts immediate doubt on everything, but with a readiness to test everything in the light of healthy reason—will soon feel how Spiritual Science can bring hope and consolation in difficult hours, and can throw light on the great riddles of existence. He will come to feel that these riddles and the great questions of destiny can be resolved through Spiritual Science; he will come to know what part of him is subject to birth and death, and what is the eternal core of his being. In brief, it will be possible—as we shall show in later lectures—that, given good will and the wish to strengthen himself by taking in and working over inwardly the communications of Spiritual Science, he will be able to say with deepest feeling: What Goethe divined and said in his youth is true, and so are the lines he wrote in his maturity and gave to Faust to speak:

The spirit world is ever open,
Dead is thy heart, thy sense-veil closely drawn!
Up, scholar, let thy breast unwearied
Bathe in the roseate hues of dawn!¹⁵

In the dawn-lines of the Spirit!

• 1. The “Libellus de hominis convenienta” by Francis Joseph Philipp Count von Hoditz and Wolframitz is a manuscript which was discovered in the Fürstenberg Library in Prague and which was written approximately between 1696 and 1700.
• 2. Aristotle, 384–322 B.C. Cf. the Parva Naturalia.
• 3. René Descartes, 1596–1650. Cf. for example the work “Meditationes de prima Philosophia”, 1641/42.
• 4. With this answer Hoditz goes back to the Neo-Platonist Philo of Alexandria (see Rudolf Steiner's comments on him in Christianity as Mystical Fact, Rudolf Steiner Press, London 1972) who in turn revives the Old Testament tradition; I Moses 1, 26/27
• 5. Goethe: Winkelmann, “Antikes” and “Schönheit”; in: Goethe, Werke, Weimar Edition, vol.46 (Weimar, 1891).
• 6. Cf. for example Goethe's essay “Wenige Bemerkungen” in Goethes Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften, edited by Rudolf Steiner, Dornach, 1975, vol. 1, p.107 or in “Entwurf einer Einleitung in die vergleichende Anatomie”, op. cit., p.262: “We learn to see with the eyes of the spirit, without which we grope around blindly as everywhere so also in natural science”. Also Faust II, sc. 1, 1 1.4667.
• 7. Immanuel Kant, 1724–1804. Cf. the chapter “The time of Kant and Goethe” in Rudolf Steiner's The Riddles of Philosophy, Anthroposophic Press, New York 1973.
• 8. Goethe, “Anschauende Urteilskraft” in: Goethes Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften, edited by Rudolf Steiner, Dornach, 1975, vol. 1, p.1 15/116.
• 9. Cf. fundamental account of the stages of knowledge in Rudolf Steiner, Occult Science, An Outline, Rudolf Steiner Press, London 1979, in the chapter “Knowledge of the Higher Worlds”.
• 10. The symbol of two intertwined triangles, the one pointing upwards, the other downwards.
• 11. Eliphas Levi, 1810–1875, occultist. Pseudonym for the originally catholic deacon Alphonse Louis Constant from Paris. Dogme et Rituel de la haute Magie, 2 vols, 1854 and 1856.
• 12. Philo of Alexandria (25 B.C.–50 A.D.) describes the life and thought of the Therapeutae in his work “De vital contemplative”. Cf. also Rudolf Steiner, Christianity as Mystical Fact, Rudolf Steiner Press, London 1972, p.137.
• 13. Decisive in this respect are the writings of Thomas Aquinas, especially the four books of the Summa philosophica. Cf. also Rudolf Steiner, The Riddles of Philosophy and The Redemption of Thinking.
• 14. St. Augustine, 354–430 A.D.. Had the greatest influence of the Church Fathers on theology and philosophy.
• 15. Faust I, sc.1,11.443–446.

We were able to close our lecture on the Mission of Anger (illustrated in Prometheus Bound) with the saying of Heraclitus: “Never will you find the boundaries of the soul, by whatever paths you search for them; so all-embracing is the soul's being.” We came to know this depth in the working and interplay of the powers of the soul; and the truth of the saying came home to us especially when we turned our attention to the most deeply inward part of man's being. Man is most spiritual in his Ego, and that was our starting-point.

The Ego complements those other elements of man's being which he has in common with minerals, plants and animals. He has his physical body in common with minerals, plants and animals; his etheric body in common with animals and plants; his astral body in common with animals. Through his Ego he first becomes man in the true sense and is able to progress from stage to stage. It is the Ego that works upon the other members of his being; it cleanses and purifies the instincts, inclinations, desires and passions of the astral body, and will lead the etheric and physical bodies on to ever-higher stages. But if we look at the Ego, we find that this high member of man's being is imprisoned, as it were, between two extremes.

Through his Ego, man is intended to become increasingly a being who has a firm centre in himself. His thoughts, feelings and will-impulses should spring from this centre. The more he has a firm and well-endowed centre in himself, the more will he have to give to the world; the stronger and richer will be his activities and everything that goes out from him. If he is unable to find this central point in himself, he will be in danger of losing himself through a misconceived activity of his Ego. He would lose himself in the world and go ineffectually through life. Or he may lapse into the other extreme. Just as he may lose himself if he fails to strengthen and enrich his Ego, so, if he thinks of nothing but developing his Ego, he may fall into the other extreme of selfish isolation from all human community. Here, on this other side, we find egoism, with its hardening and secluding influence, which can divert the Ego from its proper path. The Ego is confined within these two extremes.

In considering the human soul, we called three of its members the Sentient Soul, the Intellectual Soul and the Consciousness Soul. We also came to recognise—surprisingly, perhaps, for many people—that anger acts as a kind of educator of the Sentient Soul. A one-sided view of the lecture on the mission of anger could give scope for many objections. But if we go into the underlying significance of this view of anger, we shall find in it an answer to many important riddles of life.

In what sense is anger an educator of the soul—especially the Sentient Soul—and a forerunner of love? Is it not true that anger tends to make a man lose control of himself and engage in wild, immoral and loveless behaviour? If we are thinking only of wild, unjustified outbursts of anger, we shall get a false idea of what the mission of anger is. It is not through unjustified outbreaks of anger that anger educates the soul, but through its inward action on the soul.

Let us again imagine two teachers faced with children who have done something wrong. One teacher will burst into anger and hastily impose a penalty. The other teacher, though unable to break out into anger, is also incapable of acting rightly, with perfect tranquility, out of his Ego, in the sense described yesterday. How will the behaviour of two such teachers differ? An outburst of anger by one of them involves more than the penalty imposed on the child. Anger agitates the soul and works upon it in such a way as to destroy selfishness. Anger acts like a poison on selfishness, and we find that in time it gradually transforms the powers of the soul and makes it capable of love. On the other hand, if a teacher has not yet attained inner tranquility and yet inflicts a coldly calculated penalty, he will—since anger will not work in him as a counteracting poison—become increasingly a cold egoist.

Anger works inwardly and can be regarded as a regulator for unjustified outbursts of selfishness. Anger must be there or it could not be fought against. In overcoming anger the soul continually improves itself. If a man insists on getting something done that he considers right and loses his temper over it, his anger will dampen the egoistic forces in his soul; it reduces their effective power. Just because anger is overcome and a man frees himself from it and rises above it, his selflessness will be enhanced and the selflessness of his Ego continually strengthened. The scene of this interplay between anger and the Ego is the Sentient Soul. A different interplay between the soul and other experiences takes its course in the Intellectual Soul.

Although the soul has attributes which it must overcome in order to rise above them, it must also develop inwardly certain forces which it should love and cherish, however spontaneously they may arise. They are forces to which the soul may initially yield, so that, when it finally asserts itself, it is not weakened, but strengthened, by the experience. If a man were incapable of anger when called upon to assert himself in action, he would be the weaker for it.

It is just when a man lovingly immerses himself in his own soul that his soul is strengthened and an ascent to higher stages of the Ego comes within reach. The outstanding element that the soul may love within itself, leading not to egoism but to selflessness, is truth. Truth educates the Intellectual Soul. While anger is an attribute of the soul that must be overcome if a man is to rise to higher stages, truth should be loved and valued from the start. An inward cultivation of truth is essential for the progress of the soul.

How is it that devotion to truth leads man upwards from stage to stage? The opposites of truth are falsehood and error. We shall see how man progresses in so far as he overcomes falsehood and error and pursues truth as his great ideal.

A higher truth must be the aim of man's endeavour, while he treats anger as an enemy to be increasingly abolished. He must love truth and feel himself most intimately united with it. Nevertheless, eminent poets and thinkers have rightly claimed that full possession of truth is beyond human reach. Lessing,²¹ for example, says that pure truth is not for men, but only a perpetual striving towards it. He speaks of truth as a distant goddess whom men may approach but never reach. When the nature of truth stirs the soul to strive for it, the soul can be impelled to rise from stage to stage. Since there is this everlasting search for truth, and since truth is so manifold in meaning, all we can reasonably say is that man must set out to grasp truth and to kindle in himself a genuine sense of truth. Hence we cannot speak of a single, all-embracing truth.

In this lecture we will consider the idea of truth in its right sense, and it will become clear that by cultivating a sense of truth in his inner life man will be imbued with a progressive power that leads him to selflessness.

Man strives towards truth; but when people try to form views concerning one thing or another, we find that in the most varied realms of life conflicting opinions are advanced. When we see what different people take for truth, we might think that the striving for truth leads inevitably to the most contradictory views and standpoints. However, if we look impartially at the facts, we shall find guidelines which show how it is that men who are all seeking truth, arrive at such a diversity of opinions.

Let us take an example. The American multimillionaire, Harriman,²² who died recently, was a rarity among millionaires in concerning himself with thoughts of general human interest. His aphorisms, found after his death, include a remarkable statement. He wrote: No man in this world is indispensable. When one goes, another is there to take his place. When I lay down my work, another will come and take it up. The railways will continue running, dividends will be paid; and so, strictly speaking, it is with all men.

This millionaire, accordingly, rose to the point of declaring as a generally valid truth—no man is indispensable!

Let us compare this statement with a remark by a man who worked for many years in Berlin and gained great distinction through his lecture courses on the lives of Michelangelo, Raphael and Goethe—I mean the art-historian Herman Grimm.²³ When Treitschke²⁴ died, Herman Grimm wrote of him roughly as follows: Now Treitschke is gone, and people only now realise what he accomplished. No-one can take his place and continue his work in the same way. A feeling prevails that in the circle where he taught, everything is changed. Note that Herman Grimm did not add the words, so it is with all men.

Here we have two men, the American millionaire and Herman Grimm, who arrive at exactly opposite truths. How does this come about? If we carefully compare the two statements, we shall find a clue. Bear in mind that Harriman says pointedly: When I lay down my work, someone else will continue it. He does not get away from himself. The other thinker, Herman Grimm, leaves himself entirely out of account. He does not speak about himself, or ask what sort of opinions or truths others might gain from him. He merges himself in his subject. Anyone with a feeling for the matter will have no doubt as to which of the two spoke truth. We need only ask—who carried on Goethe's work when he laid it down? We can feel that Harriman's reflections suffer from the fact that he fails to get away from himself. Up to a point we may conclude that it is prejudicial to truth if someone in search of truth cannot get away from himself. Truth is best served when the seeker leaves himself out of the reckoning. Would it be true to say, then, that truth is already something that gives us a view (Ansicht) of things?

A view, in the sense of an opinion, is a thought which reflects the outer world. When we form a thought or reach a decision about something, does it follow that we have a true picture of it?

Suppose you take a photograph of a remarkable tree. Does the photograph give a true picture of the tree? It shows the tree from one side only, not the whole reality of the tree. No-one could form a true image of the tree from this one photograph. How could anyone who has not seen the tree be brought nearer to the truth of it? If the tree were photographed from four sides, he could collate the photographs and arrive finally at a true picture of the tree, not dependent on a particular standpoint.

Now let us apply this example to human beings. A man who leaves himself out of account when forming a view of something is doing much the same as the photographer who goes all round the tree. He eliminates himself by conscious action. When we form an opinion or take a certain view, we must realise that all such opinions depend on our personal standpoint, our habits of mind and our individuality. If we then try to eliminate these influences from our search for truth, we shall be acting as the photographer did in our example. The first condition for acquiring a genuine sense of truth is that we should get away from ourselves and see clearly how much depends on our personal point of view. If the American multimillionaire had got away from himself he would have known that there was a difference between him and other men.

An example from everyday life has shown us, that if a man fails to realise how much his personal standpoint or point of departure influences his views, he will arrive at narrow opinions, not at the truth. This is apparent also on a wider scale. Anyone who looks at the true spiritual evolution of mankind, and compares all the various “truths” that have arisen in the course of time, will find—if he looks deeply enough—that when people pronounce a “truth” they ought first of all to get away from their individual outlooks. It will then become clear that the most varied opinions concerning truth are advanced because men have not recognised to what extent their views are restricted by their personal standpoints.

A less familiar example may lead to a deeper understanding of this matter. If we want to learn more about beauty, we turn to aesthetics, which deals with the forms of beauty. Beauty is something we encounter in the outer world. How can we learn the truth about it? Here again we must free ourselves from the restrictions imposed by our personal characteristics.

Take for example the 19th century German thinker, Solger.²⁵ He wished to investigate the nature of beauty in accordance with his idea of truth. He could not deny that we meet with beauty in the external world; but he was a man with a one-sided theosophical outlook, and this was reflected in his theory of aesthetics. His interest in a beautiful picture was confined to the shining through it of the only kind of spirituality he recognised. For him, an object was beautiful only in so far as the spiritual was manifest through it. Solger was a one-sided theosophist; he sought to explain sense-perceptible phenomena in terms of the super-sensible; but he forgot that sense-perceptible reality has a justified existence on its own account. Unable to escape from his preconceptions, he sought to attain to the spiritual by way of a misconceived theosophy.

Another writer on aesthetics, Robert Zimmermann,²⁶ came to an exactly opposite conclusion. As against Solger's misconceived theosophical aesthetics, Zimmermann based his aesthetics on a misconceived anti-theosophical outlook. His sole concern was with symmetry and anti-symmetry, harmony and discord. He had no interest in going beyond the beautiful to that which manifests through it. So his aesthetics were as one-sided as Solger’s. Every striving for truth can be vitiated if the seeker fails to recognise that he must first endeavour to get away from himself. This can be achieved only gradually; but the primary, inexorable demand is, that if we are to advance towards truth we must leave ourselves out of account and quite forget ourselves. Truth has a unique characteristic: a man can strive for it while remaining entirely within himself and yet—while living in his Ego—he can acquire something which, fundamentally speaking, has nothing to do with the egoistic ego.

Whenever a man tries in life to get his own way in some matter, this is an expression of his egoism. Whenever he wants to force on others something he thinks right and loses his temper over it, that is an expression of his self-seeking. This self-seeking must be subdued before he can attain to truth. Truth is something we experience in our most inward being—and yet it liberates us increasingly from ourselves. Of course, it is essential that nothing save the love of truth should enter into our striving for it. If passions, instincts and desires, from which the Sentient Soul must be cleansed before the Intellectual Soul can strive for truth, come into it, they will prevent a man from getting away from himself and will keep his Ego tied to a fixed viewpoint. In the search for truth, the only passion that must not be discarded is love.

Truth is a lofty goal. This is shown by the fact that truth, in the sense intended here, is recognised today in one limited realm only. It is only in the realm of mathematics that humanity in general has reached the goal of truth, for here men have curbed their passions and desires and kept them out of the way. Why are all men agreed that three times three makes nine and not ten? Because no emotion comes into it, Men would agree on the highest truths if they had gone as far with them as they have with mathematics. The truths of mathematics are grasped in the inmost soul, and because they are grasped in this way, we possess them. We would still possess them if a hundred or a thousand people were to contradict us; we would still know that three times three makes nine because we have grasped this fact inwardly. If the hundred or thousand people who take a different view were to get away from themselves, they would come to the same truth.

What, then, is the way to mutual understanding and unity for mankind? We understand one another in the field of reckoning and counting because here we have met the conditions required. Peace, concord and harmony will prevail among men to the extent that they find truth. That is the essential thing: that we should seek for truth as something to be found only in our own deepest being; and should know that truth ever and again draws men together, because from the innermost depth of every human soul its light shines forth.

So is truth the leader of mankind towards unity and mutual understanding, and also the precursor of justice and love. Truth is a precursor we must cherish, while the other precursor, anger, that we came to know yesterday, must be overcome if we are to be led by it away from selfishness. That is the mission of truth: to become the object of increasing love and care and devotion on our part. Inasmuch as we devote ourselves inwardly to truth, our true self gains in strength and will enable us to cast off self-interest. Anger weakens us; truth strengthens us.

Truth is a stern goddess; she demands to be at the centre of a unique love in our souls. If man fails to get away from himself and his desires and prefers something else to her, she takes immediate revenge. The English poet Coleridge has rightly indicated how a man should stand towards truth. If, he says, a man loves Christianity more than truth, he will soon find that he loves his own Christian sect more than Christianity, and then he will find that he loves himself more than his sect.

Very much is implicit in these words. Above all, they signify that to strive against truth leads to humanly degrading egoism. Love of truth is the only love that sets the Ego free. And directly man gives priority to anything else, he falls inevitably into self-seeking. Herein lies the great and most serious importance of truth for the education of the human soul. Truth conforms to no man, and only by devotion to truth can truth be found. Directly man prefers himself and his own opinions to the truth, he becomes anti-social and alienates himself from the human community. Look at people who make no attempt to love truth for its own sake but parade their own opinions as the truth: they care for nothing but the content of their own souls and are the most intolerant. Those who love truth in terms of their own views and opinions will not suffer anyone to reach truth along a quite different path. They put every obstacle in the way of anyone with different abilities, who comes to opinions unlike their own. Hence the conflicts that so often arise in life. An honest striving for truth leads to human understanding, but the love of truth for the sake of one's own personality leads to intolerance and the destruction of other people's freedom.

Truth is experienced in the Intellectual Soul. It can be sought for and attained through personal effort only by beings capable of thought. Inasmuch as truth is acquired by thinking, we must realise very clearly that there are two kinds of truth. First we have the truth that comes from observing the world of Nature around us and investigating it bit by bit in order to discover its truths, laws and wisdom. When we contemplate the whole range of our experience of the world in this way, we come to the kind of truth that can be called the truth derived from “reflective” thinking—we first observe the world and then think about our findings.

We saw yesterday that the entire realm of Nature is permeated with wisdom, and that wisdom lives in all natural things. In a plant there lives the idea of the plant, and this we can arrive at by reflective thought. Similarly, we can discern the wisdom that lives in the plant. By thus looking out on the world we can infer that the world is born of wisdom, and that through the activity of our thinking we can rediscover the element that enters into the creation of the world. That is the kind of truth to be gained by reflective thought.

There are also other truths. These cannot be gained by reflective thought, but only by going beyond everything that can be learnt from the outer world. In ordinary life we can see at once that when a man constructs a tool or some other instrument, he has to formulate laws that are not part of the outer world. For example, no-one could learn from the outer world how to construct a clock, for the laws of Nature are not so arranged as to provide for the appearance of clocks as a natural product. That is a second kind of truth: we come to it by thinking out something not given to us by observation or experience of the outer world. Hence there are these two kinds of truth, and they must be kept strictly apart, one derived from reflective thought and the other from “creative” thought.

How can a truth of this second kind be verified? The inventor of a clock can easily prove that he had thought it out correctly. He has to show that the clock does what he expects. Anything we think out in advance must prove itself in practice: it must yield results that can be recognised in the external world. The truths of Spiritual Science or Anthroposophy are of this kind. They cannot be found by observing external experience.

For example, no findings in the realm of outer Nature can establish the truth we have often dwelt on in connection with the immortal kernel of man's being: the truth that the human Ego appears again and again on earth in successive incarnations. Anyone who wishes to acquire this truth must raise himself above ordinary experience. He must grasp in his soul a truth that has then to be made real in outer life. A truth of this kind cannot be proved in the same way as truths of the first kind, gained by what we have called reflective thought. It can be proven only by showing how it applies to life and is reflected there. If we look at life with the knowledge that the soul repeatedly returns and ever and again goes through a series of events and experiences between birth and death, we shall find how much satisfaction, how much strength and fruitfulness, these thoughts can bring. Or again, if we ask how the soul of a child can be helped to develop and grow stronger, if we presuppose that an eternally existent soul is here working its way into a new life, then this truth will shine in on us and give proof of its fruitfulness in daily experience. Any other proofs are false. The only way in which a truth of this kind can be confirmed is by giving proof of its validity in daily life. Hence there is a vast difference between these two kinds of truth. Those of the second kind are grasped in the spirit and then verified by observing their influence on outer life.

What then is the educational effect of these two kinds of truth on the human soul? It makes a great difference whether a man devotes himself to truths that come from reflective thought or to those that come from creative thought. If we steep ourselves in the wisdom of Nature and create in ourselves a true reflection of it, we can rightly say that we have in ourselves something of the creative activity from which the life of Nature springs. But here a distinction must be made. The wisdom of Nature is directly creative and gives rise to the reality of Nature in all its fullness, but the truth we derive from thinking about Nature is only a passive image; in our thinking it has lost its power. We may indeed acquire a wide, open-minded picture of natural truth, but the creative, productive element is absent from it. Hence the immediate effect of this picture of truth on the development of the human Ego is desolating. The creative power of the Ego is crippled and devitalised; the Self loses strength and can no longer stand up to the world, if it is concerned only with reflective thoughts. Nothing else does so much to isolate the Ego, to make it withdraw into itself and look with hostility on the world. A man can become a cold egoist if he is intent only on investigating the outer world. Why does he want this knowledge? Does he mean to place it at the service of the Gods?

If a man desires only this kind of truth, he wants it for himself, and he will be on the way to becoming a cold egoist and misogynist in later life. He will become a recluse or will sever himself from mankind in some other way, for he wants to possess the content of the world as his own truth. All forms of seclusion and hostility towards humanity can be found on this path. The soul becomes increasingly dried up and loses its sense of human fellowship. It becomes ever more impoverished, although the truth should enrich it. Whether a man turns into a recluse or a one-sided eccentric makes no difference; in both cases a hardening process will overtake his soul. Hence we see that the more a man confines himself to this kind of reflective thought, the less fruitful his soul will be. Let us try to understand why this is so.

Consider the realms of nature and suppose that we have before us an array of plants. They have been formed by the living wisdom which calls forth their inherent productive power. Now an artist comes along. His soul receives the picture that Nature sets before him. He does not merely think about it; he opens himself to Nature's productive power and lets it work upon him. He creates a work of art which does not embody merely an act of thinking; it is imbued with productive power. Then comes someone who tries to get behind the picture and to extract a thought from it. He ponders over it. In this way its reality is filtered and impoverished. Now try to carry this process further. Once the soul has extracted a thought from the picture, it has finished with it. Nothing more can be done except to formulate thoughts about the thought—an absurd procedure which soon dries up.

It is quite different with creative thinking. Here a man is himself productive. His thoughts take form as realities in outer life; here he is working after the example of Nature herself. That is how it is with a man who goes beyond mere observation and reflective thinking and allows something not to be gained from observation to arise in his soul. All spiritual-scientific truths require a productive disposition in the soul. In the case of these truths all mere reflective thinking is bad and leads to deception. But the truths attainable by creative thought are limited, for man is weak in the face of the creative wisdom of the world. There is no end to the things from which we can derive truths by reflective thought; but creative thought, although the field open to it is restricted, brings about a heightening of productive power; the soul is refreshed and its scope extended. Indeed, the soul becomes more and more inwardly divine, in so far as it reflects in itself an essential element of the divine creative activity in the world.

So we have these two distinct kinds of truth, one reached by creative thought, the other by reflective thought. This latter kind, derived from the investigation of existent things or current experience, will always lead to abstractions; under its influence the soul is deprived of nourishment and tends to dry up. The truth that is not gained from immediate experience is creative; its strength helps man to find a place in the world where he can co-operate in shaping the future.

The past can be approached only by reflective thought, while creative thought opens a way into the future. Man thus becomes a responsible creator of the future. He extends the power of his Ego into the future, in so far as he comes to possess not merely the truths derived from the past by reflective thinking, but also those that are gained by creative thinking and point towards the future.

Herein lies the liberating influence of creative thinking. Anyone who is active in the striving for truth will soon find how he is impoverished by mere reflective thinking. He will come to understand how the devotee of reflective thinking fills his mind with phantom ideas and bloodless abstractions. Such a man may feel like an outcast, condemned to a mere savouring of truth and may come to doubt whether his spirit can play any part in shaping the world. On the other hand, a man who experiences a truth gained by creative thinking will find that it nourishes and warms his soul and gives it new strength for every stage in life. It fills him with joy when he is able to grasp truths of this kind and discovers that in bringing them to bear on the phenomena of life he can say to himself: Now I not only understand what is going on there, but I can explain it in the light of having known something of it previously.

With the aid of spiritual-scientific truths we can now approach man himself. He cannot be understood merely by reflective thinking, but now we can comprehend him better and better, while our feeling of unity with the world and our interest in it are continually enhanced. We experience joy and satisfaction at every confirmation of spiritual-scientific truths that we encounter. This is what makes these truths so satisfying: we have first to grasp them before we can find them corroborated in actual life, and all the while they enrich us inwardly. We are drawn gradually into unity with the phenomena we experience. We get away more and more from ourselves, whereas reflective thinking leads to subtle forms of egoism. In order to find confirmation of truths gained by creative thinking we have to go out from ourselves and look for their application in all realms of life. It is these truths that liberate us from ourselves and imbue us in the highest degree with a sense of truth and a feeling for it.

Feelings of this kind have been alive in every genuine seeker after truth. They were deeply present in the soul of Goethe when he declared: “Only that which is fruitful is true”—a magnificent, luminous saying of far—reaching import. But Goethe was also well aware that men must be closely united with truth if they are to understand one another. Nothing does more to estrange men from one another than a lack of concern for truth and the search for truth. Goethe also said: “A false doctrine cannot be refuted, for it rests on a conviction that the false is true.”²⁷ Obviously there are falsities that can be logically disproved, but that is not what Goethe means. He is convinced that a false viewpoint cannot be refuted by logical conclusions, and that the fruitful application of truth in practical life should be our sole guide-line in our search for truth.

It was because Goethe was so wonderfully united with truth that he was able to sketch the beautiful poetic drama, Pandora, which he began to write in 1807. Though only a fragment, Pandora is a ripe product of his creative genius—so powerful in every line, that anyone who responds to it must feel it to be an example of the purest, grandest art. We see in it how Goethe was able to make a start towards the greatest truths—but then lacked the strength to go further. The task was too arduous for him to carry through; but we have enough of it to get some idea of how deeply he had penetrated into the problems of spiritual education. He had a clear vision of everything that the soul has to overcome in order to rise higher; he understood everything we learnt yesterday about anger and the fettered Prometheus, and have learnt today about that other educator of the soul, the sense of truth.

How closely related these two things are in their effects on the soul can be seen also in the facial expressions they call forth. Let us picture a man under the influence of anger, and another man upon whom truth is acting as an inward light. The first man is frowning—why? In such cases the brow is knitted because an excessive force is working inwardly, like a poison, to hold down a surplus of egoism which would like to destroy everything that exists alongside and separate from the man himself. In the clenched fist of anger we see the wrathful self closed up in itself and refusing to go forth into the outer world. Now compare this with the facial expression of someone who is discovering truth. When he perceives the light of truth, he too may frown, but in his case the wrinkled brow is a means whereby the soul expands, as though it would like to grasp and absorb the whole world with devoted love. Observe, too, the eyes of a man who is trying to overhear the world's secrets. His eyes are shining, as though to encompass everything around him in the outer world. He is released from himself; his hand is not clenched, but held out with a gesture that seeks to absorb the being of the world.

The whole difference between anger and truth is thus expressed in human physiognomy and gesture. Anger thrusts the human being deeper into himself. If he strives for truth, his being expands into the outer world; and the more united he becomes with the outer world, the more he turns away from the truths gained by reflective thinking to those gained by creative thinking. Therefore, Goethe in his Pandora brings into opposition with each other certain characters who can be taken to represent forces at work in the human soul. They are intended to express symbolically the relationships between the characteristics and capacities of the soul.

When you open Pandora, you come upon something remarkable and highly significant at the very start. On the side of Prometheus, the stage is loaded with tools and implements constructed by man. In all these, human energies have been at work, but in a certain sense it is all rough and ready. On the side of Epimetheus, the other Titan, there is a complete contrast. Here everything is perfectly finished; we see not so much what man creates, but a bringing together of what Nature has already produced. It is all the result of reflective thinking. Here we have combination and shaping, a symmetrical ordering of Nature's work. On the side of Prometheus, unsymmetry and roughness; on the side of Epimetheus, elegant and harmonious products of Nature, culminating in a view of a wonderful landscape. What does all this signify? We need only consider the two contrasted characters: Prometheus the creative thinker, Epimetheus the reflective thinker. With Prometheus we find the products mainly of creative thinking. Here, although man's powers are limited and clumsy, he is productive. He cannot yet shape his creations as perfectly as Nature shapes her own; but they are all the outcome of his own powers and tools. He is also deficient in feeling for scenes of natural beauty.

On the side of Epimetheus, the reflective thinker, we see the heritage of the past, brought into symmetrical order by himself. And because he is a reflective thinker, we see in the background a beautiful landscape which gives its own special pleasure to the human eye. Epimetheus now comes forward and discloses his individual character. He explains that he is there to experience the past, and to reflect upon past occurrences and the visible world. But in his speech he reveals the dissatisfaction that this kind of attitude can at times call forth in the soul. He feels hardly any difference between day and night. In brief, the figure of Epimetheus shows us reflective thinking in its most extreme form. Then Prometheus comes forward carrying a torch and emerging from the darkness of night. Among his followers are smiths; they set to work on the man-made objects that are lying around, while Prometheus makes a remarkable statement that will not be misunderstood if we are alive to Goethe's meaning. The smiths extol productivity and welcome the fact that in the course of production many things have to be destroyed. In a one-sided way they extol fire. A man who is an all-round reflective thinker will not praise one thing at the expense of another. He casts his eye over the whole. Prometheus, however, says at once:

In partiality let the active man
Find his pleasure

He extols precisely the fact that to be active entails the acceptance of limitations. In Nature, the right is established when the wrong destroys itself. But to the smiths Prometheus says: Carry on doing whatever can be done. He is the creative man; he emerges with his torch from the darkness of night in order to show how from the depths of his soul the truth gained by his creative thinking comes forth. Unlike Epimetheus, he is far from a dreamlike feeling that night and day are all one. Nor does he experience the world as a dream. For his soul has been at work, and in its own dark night it has grasped the thoughts which now emerge from it. They are no dreams, but truths for which the soul has bled. By this means the soul advances into the world and gains release from itself; but at the same time it incurs the danger of losing itself. This does not yet apply to Prometheus himself, but when a man introduces one-sidedness into the world, the danger appears among his descendants.

Phileros, the son of Prometheus, is already inclined to love and cherish and enjoy the products of creative work, while his father Prometheus is still immersed in the stream of life's creative power. In Phileros we are shown the power of creative thinking developed in a one-sided way. He rushes out into life, not knowing where to search for enjoyment. Prometheus cannot pass on to his son his own fruitfully creative strength, and so Phileros appears incomprehensible to Epimetheus, who out of his own rich experience would like to counsel him on his headlong career.

We are then magnificently shown what mere reflective thinking involves. This is connected with the myth that Zeus, having fettered Prometheus to the rock, imposes Pandora, the all-gifted, on mankind.

Most beautiful and gifted she approached
The amazed watcher, moving with noble grace,
Her gracious look inquiring whether I,
Like to my sterner brother, would repel her,
But all too strongly were my heart-beats stirred,
With sense bemused my charming bride I welcomed.
Towards the mysterious dowry then I turned,
The earthen vessel, tall and shapely, stood
Close-sealed ...

Prometheus had warned his brother against this gift from the gods. But Epimetheus, with his different character, accepts the gift, and when the earthen vessel is opened, all the afflictions that can befall mankind come pouring out. Only one thing is left in the vessel—Hope.

Who, then, is Pandora and what does she signify? Truly a mystery of the soul is concealed in her. The fruits of reflective thinking are dead products, an abstract reflection of the mechanical thoughts forged by Hephaestus. This wisdom is powerless in the face of the universally creative wisdom from which the world has been born. What can this abstract reflection give to mankind?

We have seen how this kind of truth can be sterile and can lay waste the soul, and we can understand how all the afflictions that fall on mankind come pouring out of Pandora's vessel. In Pandora we have to see truth without the powers of creativity, the truth of reflective thinking, a truth which builds up a mechanised thought-picture in the midst of the world's creative life. For the mere reflective thinker only one thing remains. While the creative thinker unites his Ego with the future and gets free from himself, the reflective thinker can look to the future only with hope, for he has no part in shaping it. He can only hope that things will happen. Goethe shows his deep comprehension of the myth by endowing the marriage of Epimetheus and Pandora with two children: Elpore (Hope) and Epimeleia (Care), who safeguards existing things. In fact, man has in his soul two offspring of dead, abstract, mechanically conceived truth. This kind of truth is unfruitful and cannot influence the future; it can only reflect what is already there. It leaves a man with nothing but the hope that what is true will duly come to pass. This is represented by Goethe with splendid realism in the figure of Elpore, who, if someone asks her whether this or that is going to happen, always gives the same answer, yes, yes. If a Promethean man were to stand before the world and speak of the future, he would say: “I hope for nothing. With my own forces I will shape the future.” But a reflective thinker can only reflect on the past and hope for the future; thus Elpore, when asked whether this or that will happen, replies always, yes, yes. We hear it again and again. In this way a daughter of reflective thinking is admirably characterised and her sterility is indicated.

The other daughter of this reflective thinking, Epimeleia, is she who cares for existing things. She sets them all in symmetrical order and can add nothing from her own resources. But all things which fail to develop are increasingly liable to destruction; hence we see how anxiety about them continually mounts, and how through mere reflective thinking a destructive element finds its way into the world. This is wonderfully well indicated by Goethe when he makes Phileros fall in love with Epimeleia. We see him, burnt up with jealousy, pursuing Epimeleia, until she takes refuge from him with the Titan brothers. Strife and dissension come simultaneously on to the scene. Epimeleia complains that the person she loves is the very one to seek her life.

Everything that Goethe goes on to say shows how deeply he had penetrated into the effects of creative thinking and reflective thinking on the soul. The creative thinking of the smiths is set in wonderful contrast to the outlook of the shepherds; whilst the latter take what Nature offers, the former work on the products of Nature and transform them. Therefore Prometheus says of the shepherds: they are seeking peace, but they will not find a peace that satisfies their souls:

Go your ways in peace; but peace
You will not find.

For a wish merely to preserve things as they are leads only to the unproductive side of Nature.

The truths which belong to creative thinking and reflective thinking respectively are thus set before us in the figures of Prometheus and Epimetheus, and in all the characters connected with them. They represent those soul-forces which can spring from an excessive, one-sided predilection for one or other way of striving after truth. And after we have seen how disastrous are the consequences of these extremes, we are shown finally the one and only remedy—the co-operation of the Titan brothers. The drama leads on to an outbreak of fire in a property owned by Epimetheus. Prometheus, who is prepared to demolish a building if it no longer serves its purpose, advises his brother to make all speed to the spot and do all he can to halt the destruction. But Epimetheus no longer cares for that; he is thinking about Pandora and is lost in his recollection of her. Interesting also is a dialogue between the brothers about her:

Prometheus:

Her form sublime, from ancient dark emerging,
Came near me also. To make another like her,
Even Hephaestus would have failed in that.

Epimetheus:

Art thou, too, prating of this fabled birth?
From ancient gods, a mighty race, she springs:
Uranione, Hera's peer, and sister
Of Zeus himself.

Prometheus:

And yet Hephaestus, for her rich adornment,
Made for her head a net of shining gold,
Weaving with subtle hand the finest threads.

In every sentence spoken by Prometheus we see how mechanised, abstract limitations obsess his mind. Then Eos, the Dawn, appears. She is an unlit being who precedes and heralds the sun, but also contains its light within herself already. She does not simply emerge from the darkness of night; she represents a transition to something which has overcome night. Prometheus appears with his torch because he has just come out of the night. The artificial light he carries indicates how his creative work proceeds from the night's darkness. Epimetheus can indeed admire the sunlight and its gifts, but he experiences everything as in a dream. He is an example of pure reflective thinking. The way in which light can escape the attention of a soul absorbed in creative activity is shown by what Prometheus says in the light of day. His people, he says, are called upon not merely to observe the sun and the light, but to be themselves a source of illumination. Now Eos, Aurora, comes forward. She calls upon men to be active everywhere in doing right. Phileros, already having sought death, should unite with the forces which will make it possible for him to rescue himself. The smiths, who are working within the limits of their creative thinking, and the shepherds, who accept things as they are, are now joined by the fishermen. And we see how Eos gives them advice:

Morning of youth, dawning of day,
More beautiful than ever,
From the unfathomed ocean
I bring you now.
Awake, shake off your sleep,
You dwellers in the bay
By cliffs encircled,
You fishermen, arise,
And ply your craft.
With speed spread out your nets
Around the well-known waters,
A splendid catch is certain
When my voice cheers you on.
Swim, you swimmers! Dive, you divers!
Watch, you watchers on the heights!
May the shores and seas together
Swarm with swift abounding life!

Then we are shown in a wonderful way how Phileros is rescued on the surging flood and unites his own strength with the strength of the waves. The active creative power in him is thus united with the creative power in Nature. So the elements of Prometheus and Epimetheus are reconciled.

Thus Goethe offers a solution rich in promise, by showing how knowledge gained from nature by reflective thinking can be fired with productive energy by the creative thinking element. This latter acquires its rightful strength by receiving, in loyalty to truth, what the gods “up there” bestow:

Take note of this:
What is desirable, you feel down here;
What is to be given, they know up there.
You Titans make a great beginning,
But the way to the eternal good, the forever beautiful,
That is the work of the gods; they ensure it.

The union of Prometheus and Epimetheus in the human soul will bring salvation for them and for mankind. The whole drama is intended to indicate that through an all-round grasping of truth the entire human race, and not only individuals, will find satisfaction. Goethe wished to show that an understanding of the real nature of truth will unite humanity and foster love and peace among men. Then Hope, also, is transformed in the soul—Hope who says yes to everything but is powerless to bring anything about. The poem was to have ended with the transformed Elpore, Elpore thraseia, coming forward to tell us that she is no longer a prophetess but is to be incorporated into the human soul, so that human beings would not merely cherish hopes for the future but would have the strength to co-operate in bringing about whatever their own productive power could create. To believe in the transformation wrought by truth upon the soul—that is the whole perfected truth which reconciles Prometheus and Epimetheus.

Naturally, these sketchy indications can bring out only a little of all that can be drawn from the poem. The deep wisdom that called forth this fragment from Goethe will disclose itself first to those who approach it with the support of a spiritual-scientific way of thinking. They can experience a satisfying, redeeming power which flows out from the poem and quickens them.

We must not fail to mention a remarkably beautiful phrase that Goethe included in his Pandora. He says that the divine wisdom which flows into the world must work in harmony with all that we are able to achieve through our own Promethean power of creative thinking. The element that comes to meet us in the world and teaches us what wisdom is, Goethe called the Word. That, which lives in the soul and must unite itself with the reflective thinking of Epimetheus, is the Deed of Prometheus. So the union of the Logos or Word with the Deed gives rise to the ideal that Goethe wished to set before us in his Pandora as the fruit of a life rich in experiences. Towards the end of the poem, Prometheus makes a remarkable statement: “A real man truly celebrates the deed.” This is the truth that remains hidden from the reflective thinking element in the soul.

If we open ourselves to this whole poem, we can come to realise the heroic yearning for development felt by men such as Goethe, and the great modesty which prevents them from supposing that by reaching a certain stage they have done enough and need not try to go further. Goethe was an apprentice of life up to his last day, and always recognised that when a man has been enriched by an experience he must overcome what he has previously held to be true.

When as a young man, Goethe was beginning to work on Faust, and had occasion to introduce some translations from the Bible, he decided that the words “In the beginning was the Word”, should be rendered as “in the beginning was the Deed”. At this same time he wrote a fragment on Prometheus.²⁸ There we see the young Goethe as altogether active and Promethean, confident that simply by developing his own forces, not fructified by cosmic wisdom, he could progress. In his maturity, with a long experience of life behind him, he realised that it was wrong to underestimate the Word, and that Word and Deed must be united. In fact, Goethe revised parts of his Faust while he was writing his Pandora. We can understand how Goethe came by degrees to maturity only if we realise the nature of truth in all its forms.

It will always be good for man if he wrestles his way to realising that truth can be apprehended only by degrees. Or take a genuine, honest, all-round seeker after truth who is called upon to bring forcibly before the world some truth he has discovered. It will be very good if he reminds himself that he has no grounds for pluming himself on this one account. There are no grounds at any time for remaining content with something already known. On the contrary, such knowledge as we have gained from our considerations yesterday and today should lead us to feel that, although the human being must stand firmly on the ground of the truth he has acquired and must be ready to defend it, he must from time to time withdraw into himself, as Goethe did. When he does this, the forces arising from the consciousness of the truth he has gained will endow him with a feeling for the right standards and for the standpoint he should make his own. From the enhanced consciousness of truth we should ever and again withdraw into ourselves and say, with Goethe: Much that we once discovered and took for truth is now only a dream, a dreamlike memory; and what we think today, will not survive when we put it to a deeper test. The words often spoken by Goethe to himself in relation to his own honest search for truth may well be echoed by every man in his solitary hours:

A poor wight am I
Through and through.
My thoughts miss the mark,
My dreams, they are not true.²⁹

If we can feel this, we shall be in the right relationship to our high ideal, Truth.

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• 21. Cf. for example the polemic “Eine Duplik” (1778), part 1.
• 22. Edward Henry Harriman, 1848–1909. North American railway magnate.
• 23. Herman Grimm, 1828–1901, in his essay “Ernst Curtius, Heinrich von Treitschke, Leopold von Ranke”, in: Fragmente, vol 1, Berlin & Stuttgart, 1900, p.246.
• 24. Heinrich von Treitschke, 1834–96. German historian.
• 25. Karl Friedrich Solger, 1780–1819, from 1811 Professor of Philosophy in Berlin. Cf. Erwin. Vier Gespräche über das Schöne und die Kunst, 1815, and Vorlesungen uber Asthetik, ed. Heyse, 1829.
• 26. Robert Zimmermann, 1824–98. Professor in Vienna. Member of the school of Herbart. Cf. his Asthetik, 1858–65.
• 27. The first quotation is from the poem “Vermächtnis”, 1829; the second is from the “Sprüche in Prosa” in vol V, p.402 of Goethes Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften, edited with a commentary by Rudolf Steiner, 5 vols, Dornach, 1975.
• 28. Faust 1, 11.1224 and “Prometheus”, a dramatic fragment, 1773.
• 29. From the poem “Sprichtwörtlich”.