The Rudolf Steiner Archive

It has probably become clear to those people who attended the lectures which I was permitted to hold here this winter more or less regularly that this lecture cycle has dealt with a series of far-reaching questions concerning the soul. It is the intention of today's lecture, also, to deal with such a question, namely the nature of sickness and healing.

What might be said on the relevant facts in life from the point of view of spiritual science, in so far as they are only physical expressions of spiritual causes, was explained in earlier lectures held here—for example “Understanding Sickness and Death”³⁰ or “Illusory Illness” and “The Feverish Pursuit of Health “.³¹ Today I want to deal with significantly deeper questions in the understanding of sickness and healing.

Sickness, healing and sometimes the fatal course of some illnesses deeply affect the human life. And since we have inquired repeatedly into the preconditions, the spiritual foundations which lie at the base of our reflections here, we are justified in also inquiring into the spiritual causes of these far-reaching facts and consequences of human existence. In other words, what can spiritual science say about these experiences?

We will have to investigate deeply once again the meaning of human life as it develops in order to clarify how illness, health, death and healing stand in relation to the normal course of development of the human being. For we see the events referred to affecting this normal course of development. Do they perhaps contribute something to our development? Do they advance or retard us in our development? We can only reach a clear conception of these events if here, too, we take the whole of the human being into account.

We have often said here that the latter is constituted of four members: first, the physical body which the human being has in common with all mineral beings of his environment which take their form from the physical and chemical forces within them. The second member of the human being we have always called the ether or life body. This he has in common with all living things; that is, with the plant and animal beings of his environment. Then we spoke of the astral body as the third member of man's being; this is the bearer of pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, of all the emotions, images, thoughts and so on which flood through us throughout the day. This astral body the human being has in common only with the animal world of his environment. And then there is the highest member of the human being which makes him the crown of creation; the bearer of the ego, his self-consciousness. When we consider these four members, we can say in the first instance that there appear to be certain differences between them, even to the superficial view. The physical human body is there when we look at the human being, at ourselves, from outside. The external physical sense organs can observe the physical body. With the thinking which is tied to these organs, the thinking which is tied to the instrument of the brain, we can understand this physical body of the human being. It is revealed to our external observation.

The relation to the human astral body is quite different. We have already seen from previous descriptions that the astral body is only an outward fact, so to speak, for the truly clairvoyant consciousness; the latter can see the astral body in the same way as the physical one only by schooling the consciousness as has been frequently described. In ordinary life the astral body of the human being is not observable from the outside; the eye can only see the outer expression of the instincts, desires, passions, thoughts and feelings which surge through it. But in contrast, the human being observes within himself these experiences of the astral body. He observes what we call the instincts, desires, passions, joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain. Thus it can be said that the relationship between the astral and the physical body is such that in normal life we observe the former internally, but the physical body externally.

Now in a certain sense the other two members of the human being, the ether body and the bearer of the ego, are situated between these two extremes. The physical body is observable purely from the outside, the astral body purely from the inside. But the intermediary member between the physical body and the astral body is the ether body. It cannot be observed from the outside, but it affects the outside. The forces, the inner experiences of the astral body initially have to be transferred to the ether body; only then can they act on the physical instrument, the physical body. The ether body acts as an intermediary member between the astral body and the physical body, forming a link between outside and inside. We can no longer see it with the physical eyes, but that which we can see with the physical eyes is an instrument of the astral body only because the ether body is connected towards the outside with the physical body.

Now in a certain sense the ego acts from the inside to the outside, whilst the ether body acts from the outside inwards to the astral body; for by means of the ego and the way it affects the astral body the human being gains knowledge of the outside world, the physical environment, from which the physical body itself originates. Animal existence takes place without individual, personal knowledge because the animal does not have an individual ego. The animal inwardly lives through all the experiences of the astral body, but does not use its pleasure and pain, sympathy or antipathy to gain knowledge of the outside world. What we call pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, sympathy or antipathy are all experiences of the astral body in the animal; but the animal does not commute its pleasure into a celebration of the beauty of the world, but it remains within the element which causes the pleasure. The animal lives immediately within its pain; the human being is guided by his pain beyond himself into discovery of the world because the ego leads him out again and unites him with the outside world. Thus we see on the one hand how the ether body is directed inwards into the human being towards the astral body, whereas the ego leads into the outside world, into the physical world which surrounds us.

The human being leads an alternating life. This alternating life can be observed everyday. From the moment of waking in the morning we observe in the human soul all the in and out flooding experiences of the astral body—joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, feelings, images, etc. We see how at night these experiences sink down to a level of undefined darkness as the astral body and the ego enter an unconscious, or perhaps better said, subconscious state. When we look at the waking human being between morning and evening, the physical body, ether body, astral body and ego are interwoven, are inter-linked in their effects. When the human being goes to sleep at night, the occult consciousness can see that the physical body and the ether body remain in bed and that the astral body and the ego return to their proper home in the spiritual world, that they withdraw from the physical body and the ether body. It is possible to describe this in still a different way which will enable us to deal with the present subject in the appropriate way.

The physical body, which only presents us with its outward aspect, sleep remains in the physical world as the outward human being and keeps the ether body, the mediator between inner and outer, with it. That is why in the sleeping human being there can be no mediation between outer and inner because the ether body, as mediator, has entered the outside world. Thus one can say in a certain sense that in the sleeping human being the physical body and the ether body are merely the outer human being; one could even describe the physical and ether bodies as the “outer human being” per se, even though the ether body is the mediator between outer and inner. In contrast, the astral body in the sleeping human being can be described as the “inner human being”. These terms are also true of the waking human being, because all the experiences of the astral body are inner experiences under normal circumstances and what the ego gains in knowledge of the outside world in waking life is taken up inwardly by the human being to be assimilated as learning. The external becomes internalised through the ego. This demonstrates that we can speak of an “outward” and an “inward” human being, the former consisting of a physical and ether body, the latter of ego and astral body.

Now let us observe the so-called normal human life and its development in essence. Let us ask the question: Why does the human being return with his astral body and his ego to the spiritual world every night? Is there any reason for the human being to go to sleep? This subject has been mentioned before, but it is necessary for the topic we are dealing with today. Normal developments have to be understood in order to recognise the apparently abnormal states as they manifest themselves in sickness and healing. Why does the human being go to sleep every night?

An understanding of this can only be reached if one considers fully the relationship between the astral body and the ego and the “outer human being”. We described the astral body as the bearer of pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, of instincts, desires, passions, of the surging imagination, perceptions, ideas and feelings. But if the astral body is the bearer of all these things, why is it that at night the human being does not have these experiences, even though the actual inner human being is connected with the astral body in such a manner that the physical and the ether bodies are not present? Why is it that during this period these experiences sink down into an undefined darkness? The reason is that the astral body and the ego, although they are the bearers of joy and sorrow, judgments, the imagination, etc., cannot experience directly those things of which they are the bearers. In our human life the astral body and the ego under normal circumstances are dependent on the physical body and the ether body for awareness of their own experiences. Our soul-life is not something which is immediately experienced by the astral body. If this were the case, then we would also experience it during the night when we remain united with the astral body. Our daytime soul-life is like an echo or a mirror-image. The physical body and the ether body reflect the experiences of the astral body. Everything which our soul conjures up for us between waking up and going to sleep, it can only do because it sees its own experiences in the mirror of the physical and ether or life bodies. At the moment when we leave the physical and ether bodies at night we still have all the experiences of the astral body in us but we are not conscious of them because in order to be conscious of them the reflecting qualities of the physical body and the ether body are required.

Thus in the whole of our life as it takes its course from waking up in the morning to going to sleep at night we see an interaction between the inner and the outer human being, between the ego and the astral body on the one hand and the physical body and the ether body on the other. The forces which are at work here are the forces of the astral body and the ego. For under no circumstances could the physical body as the sum of physical attributes bring forth our soul-life out of itself and neither could the ether body. The reflecting forces come from the astral body and the ego in the same way as the image which we see in the mirror does not originate in the mirror but in the object which is reflected in the mirror. Thus all the forces which cause our soul-life lie in the astral body and the ego, in the inward nature of the human being. And they become active in the interaction between inner and outer world, they reach out, so to speak, for our physical and ether bodies, but at night we see them enter the state which we call “tiredness”. We see them exhausted at night. And we would be unable to continue our life if we were not in a position to enter a different world each night than the one which we inhabit from morning to evening. In the world which we inhabit when we are awake we can make our soul-life perceptible, we can create it before our soul. That we do with the forces of the astral body. But we also exhaust these forces and cannot replenish them out of our waking life. We can only replenish them out of the spiritual world which we enter each night and that is why we sleep. We would be unable to live without entering the world of night and fetching from the spiritual world the forces which we use during the day. Thus the question what we bring into the physical world when we enter our ether and physical bodies is answered.

But do we not also carry something from the physical world into the spiritual world at night? That is the second question, and it is just as important as the first one.

In order to answer this question, we have to deal with a number of things which are a part of normal human life. In ordinary life we have so-called experiences. These experiences are significant in our life between birth and death. An example which has often been mentioned here will illuminate this, the example of learning to write. When we put pen to paper in order to express our thoughts, we practise the art of writing. We can write, but what are the conditions required that we can do so? It is necessary that in a certain span of existence between birth and death we have a whole series of experiences. Think of all the things which you went through as a child, from the first clumsy attempts to hold the pen, put it to paper, etc., etc. One might well thank God that one does not have to recall all those things. Because it would be a dreadful situation if every time that we wanted to write we had to recall all the unsuccessful attempts at tracing the lines, perhaps also the punishments connected therewith, and so on in order to develop what we call the art of writing. What has taken place? Development in an important sense has taken place in the human life between birth and death. We have had a whole series of experiences. These experiences took place over a long period of time. Then they were refined, as it were, into an essence which we call the “ability” to write. All the other things have sunk into the indeterminate shadow of forgetfulness. But there is no need to remember them, because our soul has developed to a higher stage from these experiences: our memories flow together into essences which appear in life as our capabilities and abilities. That is our development in the existence between birth and death. Experiences are transformed initially into abilities of the soul which can then come to expression by means of the outer tools of the physical body. All personal experiences between birth and death take place in such a manner that they are transformed into abilities and also into wisdom.

We can gain an insight into how this transformation takes place if we take a look at the period between 1770 and 1815. A significant historical event took place during this period. A large number of people were contemporaries of this event. How did they respond to it? Some of them did not notice the events passing by them. Impassively they neglected to turn the events into knowledge, wisdom of the world. Others transformed them into a deep wisdom, they extracted the essence.

How are experiences transformed in the soul into ability and wisdom? They are transformed by being taken in their immediate form into our sleep each night, into those spheres where the soul or the inner human being reside during the night. There the experiences which occur over a period of time are changed into essences. Any observer of life knows that if one wants to master and co-ordinate a series of experiences in a single sphere of activity it is necessary to transform these experiences in periods of sleep. For example, a thing is best learnt by heart by learning it, sleeping on it, learning it again, sleeping on it again. If one is not able to immerse the experiences in sleep in order for them to emerge as abilities or in the form of wisdom or art, then they will not be developed.

This is the expression on a higher level of what we are faced with as necessity on a lower one. This year's plant cannot become next year's one if it does not return to the dark lap of the earth in order to grow again the following year. Here development remains repetition. Where it is illuminated with the human spirit it is a true “development”. The experiences descend into the nocturnal lap of the unconscious and they are brought forth again, initially still as repetition; but eventually they will have been transformed to such an extent that they can emerge as wisdom, as abilities, as life experience.

Thus life was understood in times when it was still possible to observe the spiritual worlds more deeply than is the case today. That is why, where leading personalities of ancient cultures wanted to speak of certain things by means of an image we see indications of these significant foundations of human life. What would someone have to do if he wanted to prevent a series of daytime experiences catching fire in his soul and being transformed into certain abilities? What, for example, happens when someone experiences a certain relationship with another person over a period of time? These experiences with the other person descend into the night-time consciousness and re-emerge from night-time consciousness as love for another person, which, when it is healthy, is an essence, as it were, of the consecutive experiences. The feeling of love for the other person has come about in such a way that the sum of experiences has been drawn together into unity, as if woven into a fabric. Now what would someone have to do to prevent a series of experiences turning into love? He would have to take the special measure of preventing the nightly natural process which turns our experience into essence, the feeling of love, from taking place. He would have to unravel again at night the fabric of daytime experience. If he can manage this his achievement is that his experience of the other person, which turns into love in his soul, has no effect on him.

Homer was alluding to these depths of human soul-life in his image of Penelope and her suitors.³² She promises marriage to each one after she has completed a certain fabric. She manages to avoid having to keep her promise only by unravelling each night what she has woven during the day. Great depths are revealed where the seer is also artist. Today there is little feeling left for these things and such interpretations of poets who were also seers are declared arbitrary and phantastical. This can harm neither the ancient poets nor the truth, but only our time, which is thus prevented from entering into the depths of human life.

Thus something is taken into the soul at night which returns again. Something is taken into the soul which the soul develops and which raises it to ever higher levels of ability. But now it must be asked: where does this development of the human being reach its limit? This frontier can be recognised if we observe how the human being when he wakes up in the morning always returns to the same physical body and ether body with the same abilities and talents, the same configuration which they have possessed from birth. This configuration, these inner structures and forms of the physical and ether bodies cannot be altered by human being. If we were able to take the physical or, at least, the ether body into the state of sleep then we would be able to change them. But in the morning we find them again unchanged from the evening. Here there is a clear limitation to what can be achieved by development in the life between birth and death. Development between birth and death is essentially restricted to experiences of the soul; it cannot extend to physical experience.

Thus for all the opportunities someone might have to pass through experiences which could deepen his musical appreciation, to awaken in his soul a profound musical life, it could not be developed if he did not have a musical ear, if the physical and etheric formation of his ear did not permit him to establish the harmony between the outer and the inner human being. In order for the human being to be whole, all the members of his being have to form a unity, to be in harmony. That is why all the opportunities which a person with an unmusical ear might have to go through experiences which would enable him to rise to a higher level of musical appreciation have to remain in the soul, have to resign themselves. They cannot come to fruition because the boundary is drawn each morning by the structure and form of the internal organs. These things are not dependent merely on the more rough structures of the physical and ether bodies but on very subtle relationships therein. Every function of the soul in our current normal life has to find expression in an organ; and if the organ is not formed in a suitable way then this is prevented. Those things which cannot be demonstrated by physiology and anatomy, the subtle sculpting within the organs, are precisely the things which are incapable of transformation between birth and death.

Is the human being completely powerless, then, to transfuse into his physical and ether bodies the events and experiences which he has taken into his astral body and ego? For when we look at people we can see that the human being can even shape his physical body within limits. One only needs to observe a person who has spent ten years of his life in deep inner contemplation: the gestures and physiognomy will have changed. But this occurs within very narrow confines. Is it always the case?

That this is not always confined to the narrowest of limitations can only be understood if we take recourse to a law which we have often mentioned here, but which needs to be recalled frequently because it is so alien to our present time, a law which can be compared with another one which became established for mankind in the 17th century on a lower level.

Up until the 17th century it was believed that the lower animals, insects, etc., could originate from river mud. It was believed that nothing more than pure matter was required to generate earth-worms and insects. This was thought to be true not only by amateurs but also by scholars. If we go back to earlier times we find that everything was systematised in such a way that, for example, instructions were given on how to create life from the environment. Thus a book from the 7th century AD³³ describes how the carcass of a horse has to be beaten tender in order to create bees. Similarly bullocks created hornets, donkeys, wasps. It was in the 17th century that the great scientist Francesco Redi³⁴ first pronounced the axiom: life can only originate from life! Because of this truth, which is taken as self-evident today so that no one can understand how anything else could ever have been believed, Redi was considered a dreadful heretic still in the 17th century and he barely escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno.

It is always like that with such truths. At first those who proclaim them are branded as heretics and fall prey to the inquisition. In the past people were burned or threatened with burning. Today this type of inquisition has been abandoned. No one is burnt anymore. But those who today sit on the curule chair of science regard all those who proclaim a new, higher level of truth to be fools and dreamers. People who today espouse in a different way the axiom regarding living things which Francesco Redi put forward in the 17th century are considered to be fools and dreamers. Redi pointed out that it is inexact observation to believe that life can originate immediately from dead matter but that it must be traced back to similar living matter, to the embryo which draws its matter and strength from the environment. Similarly spiritual science today must point out that what enters existence as soul and spiritual nature must originate from soul and spirit and is not an assembly of inherited characteristics. As the embryonic form of the earth-worm draws on the matter of its environment to develop, so the soul and spiritual kernel equally has to draw on the substances of its environment in order to develop. If we pursue the soul and spiritual nature in the human being backwards, we come to an earlier soul and spiritual element which exists before birth and which has nothing to do with heredity. The axiom that soul-spiritual elements can only arise from soul-spiritual elements entails in the last instance the axiom of repeated earth lives, of which a closer study of spiritual science furnishes the proof. Our life between birth and death leads back to other lives which we went through in earlier times. The soul and spiritual element originates in the soul and in the spirit, and the causes of our present experiences between birth and death lie in a previous soul and spiritual existence. When we pass through the gates of death we take with us what we assimilated in this life as transformation from causes into abilities. This we return with when we enter a future existence through birth.

In the time between death and birth we are in different circumstances than when we enter the spiritual world each night through sleep from which we wake up again in the morning. When we wake up in the morning, we find our physical and ether bodies as we left them the previous evening. We cannot transform them with our experiences in life between birth and death. We find our limitation in the finished ether and physical bodies. But when we enter the spiritual world through the gate of death we leave the physical and ether bodies behind and retain only the essence of the ether body. In the spiritual world we have no need to take account of an existing physical and ether body. In the whole period between death and a new birth the human being can work with purely spiritual forces, he is dealing with purely spiritual substance. He takes from the spiritual world what he requires to create the archetype of his new physical body and ether body and forms these archetypes up to the time of his new birth, weaving into them all the experiences which the soul was unable to utilise between birth and death in the previous physical and ether bodies. Then the moment arrives when this purely spiritual archetypal image has been finished and when the human being is able to sculpt into the physical and ether bodies what he has woven into the archetypal image; the archetype is thus active in this particular state of sleep which the human being is passing through.

If the human being were able to bring with him in a similar manner his physical body and ether body each morning on waking up, then he would be able to form them from out of the spiritual world; but he would also have to transform them. But birth means waking up from a state of sleep which encompasses the physical and ether bodies in the existence before birth. It is at this point that the astral body and ego descend into the physical world, into the physical body and the ether body, into which they can now sculpt everything which they could not form into the complete bodies of the previous life. Now, in a new life, they can express in an ether body and a physical body everything which they were able to raise to a higher stage of development but which they were unable to put into practice in the previous life because the complete ether body and physical body made it impossible.

Were we not able to destroy our physical and ether bodies, were the physical body unable to pass through death, it would be impossible to integrate our experiences into our development. However much we regard death with fear and shock and feel pain and sorrow at the death which will affect us, an objective view of the world teaches us in fact: we have to want death! For death alone gives us the opportunity to destroy this body in order to enable us to construct a new one in the next life so that we can bring into life all the fruits of earthly existence.

Thus two currents are active together in the normal course of human life: an inner and an outer. These two currents reveal themselves to us in parallel in the physical and the ether bodies on the one hand and in the astral body and the ego on the other. What can the human being do between birth and death in relation to the physical and ether bodies? Not only the astral body is exhausted by the life of the soul, but the organs of the physical body and the ether body are also exhausted. We can now observe the following: whilst the astral body is in the spiritual world during the night, it also works on the physical body and the ether body to restore them to their normal state. Only in sleep can what has been destroyed during the day in the physical and ether bodies be restored. Thus the spiritual world does indeed work on the physical and ether bodies, but with limitations. The abilities and structure of the physical body and ether body are given at birth and cannot alter except within very narrow margins. Two streams are active in cosmic development, as it were, which cannot abstractly be made to harmonize. If someone tried to unite these two streams in abstract reflection, tried to develop lightly a philosophy which said: “Well, the human being has to be in harmony, therefore the two streams have to be harmonious in man!” he would be making an enormous error. Life does not work according to abstractions. Life works in such a way that these abstract visions can only be achieved after long periods of development. Life works in such a manner that it creates states of equilibrium and harmony only by passing through stages of disharmony. This is the living interaction in the human being and indeed it is not meant to be made harmonious by reflection. It is always an indication of abstract, dry thinking if a harmony is imagined into a situation where life has to develop towards a stage of balance through disharmony. It is the fate of human development that we must have harmony as an aim which cannot, however, be reached if it is merely imagined into a given stage of human development.

It will now be easier to understand when spiritual science says that life presents different aspects, depending on whether we regard it from the point of view of the inner or outer human being. The person who wanted to combine these two aspects by some abstraction would leave out of account that there is more than one ideal, one judgment, but that there are as many judgments as there are points of view and that it is only when these different points of view act together that the truth can be found. This allows us to assume that life's view of the inner human being might be different from its view of the outer human being. An example will make clear that truths are relative, depending on whether they are regarded from one aspect or another.

It is certainly quite appropriate for a giant who has a hand the size of a small child to talk of his little finger. Whether a dwarf the size of the small child can also talk of the giant's little finger is another matter. Things by necessity are complementary truths. There is no absolute truth as regards outer things. Things have to be looked at from all different points of view and truth has to be found through the individual truths which illuminate one another. That is also the reason why in life as we can observe it the outer human being, physical body and ether body, and the inner human being, astral body and ego, need not in a given period of life be in complete harmony. If there were complete harmony then the case would be that when the human being enters the spiritual world at night he would take the events of the day with him and would transform them into the essence of ability, of wisdom, and so on, and the forces which he brought with him from the spiritual world in the morning into the physical world would be used only in relation to the soul life. But the frontier which we described and which is drawn for the physical body would never be crossed. Then, also, there would be no human development. The human being has to learn to take note of these limitations himself; he has to make them part of his judgment. The possibility must be given for him to breach these limits to the greatest possible extent.

And he breaches them continually! In real life these frontiers are crossed continually so that for example the astral body and the ego do not keep within the limits when they affect the physical body. But in doing so they breach the laws of the physical body. We then observe such breaches as irregularities, as disorganisation of the physical body, as the appearance of sickness, caused by action of the spirit—the astral body and the ego. Limits can be breached also in other ways, namely that the human being as inner being does not manage to correlate with the outside world, that he fails to relate fully to the outside world. This can be shown in a very dramatic example.

When the famous eruption of Mount Pelee³⁵ in Central America took place, very noteworthy and instructive documents were found in the ruins afterwards. In one of them it said: “You need not fear any more because the danger is past; there will be no more eruptions. This is shown by the laws which we have recognised as the laws of nature.” These documents, which stated that further volcanic eruptions were impossible according to the current state of knowledge of nature, had been buried—and with them the scholars who had written these documents on the basis of their normal scholarly knowledge. A tragic event took place here. But that precisely demonstrated the disharmony of the human being with the physical world quite clearly. There can be no doubt that the intelligence of the scholars who investigated these natural laws would have been adequate to find the truth if they had been sufficiently trained. For they were not lacking in intelligence. But although intelligence is necessary, it is insufficient on its own, Animals, for example, leave an area if such an event is imminent. That is a well-known fact. Only the domesticated animals perish with the human beings. The so-called animal instinct is therefore sufficient to develop a far greater wisdom as far as those future events are concerned than human wisdom today. “Intelligence” is not the decisive factor; our current intellect is present also in those who commit the greatest follies. Intelligence is therefore not lacking. What is lacking is sufficiently matured experience of events. As soon as the intelligence lays something down which appears plausible to its narrow limited experience it can come into disharmony with the real outward events and then the outer events break down around it. For there is a relationship between the physical body and the world which the human being will gradually learn to recognise and grasp with the forces which he possesses today already. But he will only be able to do this once he has accrued and assimilated the experiences of the outside world. Then the harmony which will have developed as a result of this experience will have been created by no other intellect than the one we have today; for it is precisely in the present that our intellect has developed to a certain stage. The only thing lacking is the ripening of experience. If the maturing of experience does not correspond to the outside then the human being becomes disharmonious with the outside world and can be broken on events in the outer world.

We have seen in an extreme example how disharmony between the physical bodies of the scholars and the stage which they had reached inwardly in the development of their soul came about. Such disharmony occurs not only when momentous events happen to us; such disharmony is given in principle and in essence always when any outer harm befalls our physical and ether bodies, when outer harm affects the outer human being in such a way that he is not capable of countering this harm with his inner forces, to ban it from his life. This applies whether it is externally visible or an internal sickness, which is, however, in reality only an external one. For if we have an upset stomach, then that is essentially the same as if a brick drops on our head. This is the situation which occurs when conflict arises—or is allowed to arise between the inner human being and the external world, when the inner human being cannot match the outer human being.

Fundamentally all illnesses are such disharmony, such breaching of the division between inner and outer human being. Something is created by the continual breach of these divisions which will become harmony only in the far distant future, which remains an abstraction if our thinking tries to impose it on our life. The human being only develops his inner life by beginning to realise that at his present stage he is not yet able to match outer life. This is true not only of the ego, but also of the astral body. The human being experiences consciously between waking up and going to sleep those things which are penetrated by the ego. The working of the astral body, the way in which it breaches its limits and is impotent to create proper harmony between the inner and the outer human being, lies outside normal human consciousness. But it is present, nevertheless. All these things reveal the deeper inner nature of sickness.

What are the two possible courses which an illness can take? Either healing or death occurs. In the normal development of life death must be seen as the one side and healing as the other.

What does healing signify for the development of the human being? First of all it must be clarified what sickness means for the overall development of the human being.

In sickness there is disharmony between the inner and the outer human being. In a certain way the inner human being has to withdraw from the outer one. A simple example is when we cut our finger. We can only cut the physical body, not the astral. But the astral body always transfuses the physical one and the result is that the astral body does not find in the cut finger what it should find when it penetrates into its smallest recesses. It feels disconnected from the physical part of the finger. That, in essence, is the nature of a whole number of illnesses that the inner human being feels disconnected from the outer, that it cannot penetrate the outer human being because an injury causes a division. Now health can be restored to the human being by outer means or the inner human being can be strengthened to such an extent that it is able to heal the outer human being. The link between outer and inner human being is re-established to a greater or lesser degree after healing, the inner human being can again live in the healed outer one.

This is a process which can be compared to waking up: after an artificial withdrawal by the inner human being we return to the experiences which are only available in the outside world. Healing makes it possible for the human being to return with those things which he could not otherwise bring back. The healing process is assimilated into the inner human being and becomes an integral part of this inner human being. Return to health, healing, is something which we can look back on with satisfaction because in a similar manner that sleep makes the inner human being progress we are given something by healing which allows the inner human being to progress. Even if it is not immediately visible, we are elevated in our soul experience, are enhanced in our inner human being by a return to health. In sleep we take with us into the spiritual world the things we have won through healing and the latter is therefore something which strengthens us as far as the forces which we develop in sleep are concerned. All these thoughts on the mysterious relationship between healing and sleep could be developed in full if there were the time, but it can be seen, nevertheless, how healing can be equated with what we take into the spiritual world at night; with that which brings progress into our processes of development in so far as they can be made to progress at all between birth and death. Those things which in normal life we draw in from outer experience come to expression in our soul-life between birth and death as higher development. But not everything which assimilated through healing emerges again. We can also take it through the gate of death and it can be of benefit to us in the next life. But spiritual science shows us the following: we should be thankful each time that we are healed, for each healing signifies an enhancement of our inner human being which can only be achieved with the forces which we have assimilated inwardly.

The other question is: what is the significance for the human being of the illness which ends in death?

In a certain sense it means the opposite, that we cannot restore the disturbed balance between the inner and the outer human being, that we cannot in the correct way cross the frontier between the inner and the outer human being in this life. As we have to accept our unchanged healthy body when we wake up in the morning we have to accept our unchanged damaged body when an illness ends with death and are incapable of making it change. The healthy body remains as it is and receives us in the morning; the damaged body can no longer receive us and we end up in death. We have to leave the body because we are no longer able to re-establish its harmony. But we then take our experiences into the spiritual world without the benefit of an outer body. The fruits which we gain as a result of our damaged body no longer receiving us become an enrichment for the life between death and a new birth. Thus, also, we have to be thankful to an illness which ends in death because it gives us the opportunity of enhancing the life between death and a new birth and to gather together the forces and experiences which can only mature during that time.

Thus we have here the consequences for the soul of illnesses which end in death and illnesses which end in healing. That gives us two aspects: we can be thankful to an illness which ends in healing because we have become strengthened in our inner self; and we can be thankful to an illness which ends in death because we know: in the higher stage which we enter in the life between death and a new birth death is of great significance for us because we will have learnt from it that our body must be different when we construct it for the future. And we will avoid the harmful aspects which caused us to fail before. The healing process makes our inner life progress, death influences the development in the outer world.

The necessity therefore arises that we take two different points of view. Nobody should think that it would be correct to say from the point of view of spiritual science: if death, which results from illness is something for which we must be grateful, if the course of an illness is something which elevates us in our next life, then we should really permit all illness to end in death and not make any attempt at healing! To speak like that would not be in the spirit of spiritual science, for the latter is not concerned with abstractions but with those truths which are arrived at from different points of view. We have the duty to make every attempt at healing with all the means at our disposal. The task to heal to the best of our ability lies embedded in the human consciousness. Thus the view that death, when it occurs, is something to be grateful for is not one which is normally present in ordinary human consciousness, but can only be won if we transcend it. From the “viewpoint of the gods” it is justified to let an illness end in death; from the human viewpoint it is justified only to do everything to bring about healing. An illness which ends in death cannot be judged on the same level. Initially these two views are irreconcilable and they have to progress in parallel. Any abstract harmonising is of no use here. Spiritual science has to advance to a recognition of the truths which stem from one particular side of life and of other truths which are representative of another side.

The sentence “healing is good, healing is a duty” is correct. But so is the other sentence “death is good when it occurs as the result of illness; death is beneficial for overall human development.” Although these two sentences contradict one another, both of them contain living truths which can be recognised by living knowledge. Precisely where two streams, which can only be made harmonious in the future, enter human life it is possible to see the error of thinking in stereotypes and the necessity to regard life in broad outline. It has to be clearly understood that so-called contradictions, when they refer only to experience and a deeper knowledge of the matter, do not limit our knowledge but lead us gradually into a living knowledge because life itself develops towards harmony.

Normal life proceeds in such a manner that we create abilities from experiences and that the things which we cannot assimilate between birth and death are woven into the fabric which we then make use of between death and a new birth. Healing and fatal illness intertwine with this normal course of human life in such a manner that every healing is a contribution to the elevation of the human being to a higher stage, and every fatal illness, too, leads the human being to higher levels. The former as far as the inner human being is concerned and the latter as far as the outer human being is concerned. Thus there is progress in the world in that it moves not in one but in two opposing currents. It is precisely in sickness and healing that the complexities of human life become visible. If sickness and health did not exist, normal life could only proceed in such a manner that the human being would spin the thread of his life hanging on to the apron strings of existence, never going beyond his limits. And the forces to construct his body anew would be given to him from the spiritual world between death and a new birth. In such a situation the human being would never be able to unfold the fruits of his own labour in the development of the world. These fruits can be unfolded by the human being in the close confines of life only in that he can err. For only by a knowledge of error can truth be arrived at. It is only possible to assimilate truth such that it becomes part of the soul, such that it influences development, if it is extracted from the fertile soul of error. The human being could be perfectly healthy if he did not interfere in life with his errors and imperfections by breaching his limits. But health which has the same origins as the inwardly recognised truth, health for which the human being wrestles from one incarnation to the next with his own life, such health only comes about through the reality of mistakes, through illness. The human being learns to overcome his mistakes and errors in healing on the one hand, and on the other he meets the mistakes which he was not able to overcome in life in the existence between death and a new life so that he learns to surmount them in the next life.

We can now return to our dramatic example and say: the intellect of those scholars who made such a wrong judgment at the time will not only become more cautious in jumping to conclusions, but it will let the experience ripen in order gradually to create harmony with life.

Thus it can be observed how healing and sickness affect human life so that the human being could never achieve his aims by his own effort without them. We can see how their seemingly abnormal intervention in our development belongs to human existence, as does error, if our aim is to recognise truth. We could say the same about sickness and healing as a great poet in an important epoch said about human error: “The striving human being errs.”³⁶ This might give the impression as if the poet had wanted to say: “The human being always errs!” But the sentence is reversible and might be said: “Let the human being strive whilst he still errs!” Error gives birth to renewed striving. The sentence “The striving human being errs” need not, therefore, fill us with despair, for every error brings forth new striving and the human being will continue to strive until he has overcome the error. That is as much as to say that error in itself points beyond itself and leads to human truth. And similarly it can be said: sickness may occur in the human being, but he must develop. Through illness he develops to health. Thus illness points beyond itself in healing and even in death, and produces a state of health which is not alien to man but which grows out of the human being and is in accord with this being.

Everything which appears in this context is well suited to showing us how the world in the wisdom of its existence avails the human being at every stage of his development of the opportunity to grow beyond himself in the sense of the saying by Angelus Silesius with which we concluded the lecture “What is Mysticism?” At that time we were referring to more intimate spheres of development; now we can expand its meaning to the whole field of sickness and healing and we can truly say:

If you transcend yourself in God's prevailing,
Then in your spirit will ascension reign!³⁷

• 30. “Wie begreift man Krankheit und Tod”, Berlin, 13th December 1906, in: Die Erkenntnis des Übersinnlichen in unserer Zeit und deren Bedeutung für das heutige Leben, Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach, Switzerland. (GA 55)
• 31. “Der Krankheitswahn im Lichte der Geisteswissenschaft”, Berlin, 13th February 1908; “Das Gesundheitsfieber im Lichte der Geisteswissenschaft”, Berlin, 27th February 1908. The parallel lectures held in Munich (3rd and 5th December 1907) are printed in Die Erkenntnis der Seele und des Geistes, Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach, Switzerland. (GA 56)
• 32. See Odyssey, 19th Book, 1.137 ff.
• 33. The reference is to the work De Natura Rerum by Isidore of Seville, c. 560-636, the last Occidental Church Father. Cf. also Rudolf Steiner's lecture of 18th January 1912 in Menschengeschichte im Lichte der Geistesforschung, Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach, Switzerland. (GA 61)
• 34. Francesco Redi, 1626–1698. Italian doctor, scientist and poet. Cf. his work Osservazione intorno agli animali viventi che si trovano negli animali viventi, 1684.
• 35. Volcano on the West Indian island of Martinique; largest eruption on 8th May 1902.
• 36. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust I, Prologue in Heaven, 1.317.
• 37. See note 20.

If we examine the human soul, comparing one individual with another, we find the greatest possible variety. In these lectures we have spoken of some typical differences and the reasons for them, relating them to character, temperament, capacities, forces and so on. One significant difference, the difference between positive and negative man, will occupy us today.

At the start, I want to make it clear that this treatment of the subject—which will be fully in keeping with my other lectures—has nothing in common with the superficial but popular descriptions of people as positive and negative. Our account will stand entirely on its own ground.

We might first look round for a kind of clarifying definition of what is meant by a positive or negative person, and thus we might say: In the sense of a true and penetrating teaching concerning human souls, we could designate a positive person as one who, in face of all the impressions pouring in on him from the outer world, is able to maintain the firmness and security of his inner being, at least up to a certain point. Hence he will have clear-cut ideas and concepts, together with certain inclinations and aversions, which outer impressions cannot disturb. Again, his actions follow certain urges and impulses which will not be affected by whatever transient impressions may come to him from daily life.

A negative man, on the other hand, can be described as one who readily submits to changing impressions and is strongly influenced by ideas which come to him from this or that person or group. Hence he is easily impelled to change what he had been thinking or feeling and to take something different into his soul. In his actions he is drawn away from his own impulses by all kinds of influences from other people.

These could be our definitions, roughly speaking. But if we inquire how these deeply rooted characteristics of human nature work out in practice, we shall soon be convinced that we have gained very little from our definitions and that to search for any such convenient labels is fairly useless. For if we try to apply them to real life we have to say: A man of strong passions and impulses, which have carried a certain enduring stamp since childhood, will have allowed all sorts of good and bad examples to pass him by without affecting his habits. He will have formed certain ideas and concepts about this or that and he will stick to them, whatever other facts may be brought before him. Countless obstacles will mount up before he can be convinced of anything different. Such a man would indeed be positive, but it would lead to nothing for him but a dull life, shut off from new impressions, seeing and hearing nothing that could enrich or enlarge his experience.

The other type of man, ready at any time to welcome new impressions and always prepared to correct his ideas if facts go against them, would become—perhaps in a relatively short time—a quite different being. As he goes through successive periods in his life he will seem to be hastening on from one interest to another, so that the character of his life will be quite transformed as time goes on. Compared with the other, “positive” type of man, he will certainly have made more of life—but according to our definition we should have to call him “negative”.

Again, a man of robust character, whose life is governed by custom and routine, might be led by the fashion of the moment to travel in a country richly endowed with art treasures. But he has loaded his soul with so many fixed responses that he passes by one work of art after another, at most consulting his Baedeker to see which are the most important, and finally he goes home with his soul not in the least enriched by all this trailing from gallery to gallery, from landscape to landscape. We would have to call him a very positive man.

By contrast, someone else might follow much the same course of travel, but his character is such that he gives himself up to every picture, loses himself enthusiastically in it, and so it is with the next picture and the next. Thus he passes along with a soul that surrenders to every detail, with the result each impression is wiped out by the next, and he returns home with a kind of chaos in his soul. He is a very negative person, the exact opposite of the other man.

We could go on giving the most varied examples of the two types. We could describe as negative a person who has learnt so much that on every subject his judgment is uncertain; he no longer knows what is true or false and has become a sceptic with regard to life and knowledge. Another man might absorb just as many of the same impressions, but he works on them and knows how to fit them into the whole of his acquired wisdom. He would be a positive man in the best sense of the word.

A child can be tyrannically positive towards grown-ups if it asserts its own inherent nature and tries to reject everything opposed to it. Or a man who has been through many experiences, errors and disappointments may nevertheless surrender to every new impression and may still be easily elated or depressed: compared with the child he will be a negative type. In brief, it is only when we allow the whole of a man's life, to work upon us, not in accordance with any theoretical ideas but in all its variety, and if we use concepts only as an aid in ordering the facts and events of a life, that we can rightly approach these decisive questions concerning positive and negative man. For in discussing the individual peculiarities of human souls we touch on something of the utmost importance. If we did not have to think of man in all his completeness as a living entity, subject to what we call evolution—so often discussed here—these questions would be much simpler.

We see the human soul passing from one stage of evolution to the next, and, if we are speaking in the true sense of spiritual science, we do not picture the life of an individual between birth and death as following always a uniform course. For we know that his life is a sequel to previous lives on earth and the starting-point for later ones. When we observe a human life through its various incarnations, we can readily understand that in one earthly life a man's development may go somewhat slowly, so that he retains the same characteristics and ideas throughout. In another life he will have to catch up with all the more development, leading him to new levels of soul-life. The study of a single life is always in the highest degree insufficient.

Let us now ask how these indications concerning positive and negative types can help us in studying the human soul on the lines laid down in previous lectures. We showed that the soul is by no means a chaotic flux of concepts, feelings and ideas, as it may seem to be at a casual glance. On the contrary, the soul has three members which must be clearly distinguished. The first and lowest of these we called the sentient soul. Its primal form is best seen in men at a relatively low stage of development who are wholly given up to their passions, impulses, wishes and desires and simply pursue every wish, every desire, that arises within them. In men of this type the ego, the self-conscious kernel of the human soul, dwells in a surging sea of passions, desires, sympathies and antipathies, and is subject to every storm that sweeps through the soul. Such a man will follow his inclinations not because he dominates them but because they dominate him, so that he gives way to every inner demand. The ego can scarcely raise itself out of this surge of desires. When the soul develops further, we see more and more clearly how the ego works from a strong central point.

In due course, as evolution proceeds, a higher part of the soul, which exists in everyone, gains a certain predominance over the sentient soul. We have called this higher part the intellectual soul or mind soul. When man ceases to follow every inclination or impulse, then in his soul something emerges which has always been there but can be effective only when the ego begins to control his inclinations and desires and to impose on the ever-changing impressions he receives some kind of coherence in his inner life. Thus when this second member of the soul, the intellectual soul, comes to prevail, it deepens our picture of man.

Next, we spoke of the highest member of the soul, the consciousness soul, where the ego comes to the fore in full strength. Then the inner life turns towards the outer world. Its conceptual images and ideas are no longer there only to control the passions, for at this stage the entire inner life of the soul is guided by the ego, so that it reflects the outer world and gains knowledge of it. When we attain to this knowledge, it is a sign that the consciousness soul has come to dominate the life of the soul. These three soul-members exist in all human beings, but in every case one of them predominates.

The last lectures have shown that the soul can go further in development—must indeed go further even in ordinary life, if we are to be human beings in the true sense of the word. A man whose motives for action derive entirely from external demands, who is impelled to act only by sympathy or antipathy, will make no effort to realise in himself the true quality of human nature. This will be achieved only by someone who raises himself to moral ideas and ideals, derived from the spiritual world, for that is how we enrich the life of the soul with new elements. Man has a “history” only because he can carry into life something which his inner being draws from unknown depths and impresses on the outer world. Similarly, we would never reach a real knowledge of world secrets if we were not able to attach external experiences to ideas. We draw forth these ideas from the spirit in ourselves and bring them to meet the outer world, and it is only by so doing that we can grasp and elucidate the outer world in its true form. Thus we can infuse our inner being with a spiritual element and enrich our soul with experiences that we could never gain from the outer world alone.

As described in the lecture on mysticism, we can rise to a higher form of soul-life by cutting ourselves off for a while from impressions and stimuli from the outer world, by emptying the soul and devoting ourselves—as Meister Eckhart puts it—to the little flame which is usually outshone by the continual experiences of daily life but which can now be kindled into flame. A mystic of this order rises to a soul-life above the ordinary level; he immerses himself in the mysteries of the world by unveiling within himself what the world-mysteries have laid down in his soul. In the next lecture we saw that if a man awaits the future with calm acceptance, and if he looks back over the past in such a way as to feel that dwelling within him is something greater than anything evident in his daily life, he will be impelled to look up in worship to this greater thing that towers above him. We saw that in prayer a man rises inwardly above himself towards something that transcends his ordinary life. And finally, we saw that by real spiritual training, which leads him through the three stages of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition, he can grow into a world which is as unknown to ordinary people as the world of light and colours is to the blind. Thus we have seen how the soul can grow beyond the normal level, and so we have gained a glimpse of the development of the soul through the most varied stages.

If we look at people around us, we find that they are at widely different levels of development. One man will show in life that he has the potential for raising his soul to a certain stage and will then be able to carry through the gate of death what he has gained. If we study how people go from stage to stage, we come to the concepts of positive and negative but we cannot now say simply that an individual is positive or negative, for he will exhibit each characteristic at different stages of his progress.

To start with, a man may have the strongest, most headstrong impulses in his sentient soul; he will then be impelled by definite urges, passions and desires, while his ego-centre remains in relative obscurity and he may be hardly aware of it. At that point he is very positive and pursues his life as a positive type. But, if he were to remain in that condition, he would make no progress. In the course of his development he must change from a positive into a negative person, for he has to be open to receive whatever his development requires. If he is not prepared to suppress the positive qualities in his sentient soul, so that new impressions can flow in; if he is unable to raise himself out of the positive qualities given him by nature and to acquire a certain negative capacity to receive new impressions, he will get no further.

Here we touch on something which is necessary for the soul but can also be a source of danger—something which shows very clearly that only an intimate knowledge of the soul can guide us safely through life. The fact is that we cannot progress if we try to avoid certain dangers affecting the life of the soul. And these dangers are always present for a negative person, since he is open to the influx of external impressions and to uniting himself with them. This means that he will take in not only good impressions, but also bad and dangerous ones.

When a very negative person meets another person, he will be easily carried away by hearing all sorts of things that have nothing to do with judgment or reason, and he will be influenced not only by what the other person says but by what he does. He may imitate the other person's actions and examples, to the point even of coming to resemble him quite closely. Such a man may indeed be open to good influences, but he will be in danger of responding to every kind of bad stimulus and making it his own.

If we rise from ordinary life to the level where we can see what spiritual facts and beings are at work in our vicinity, we must say that a man with negative soul-qualities is particularly open to the influence of those intangible, indefinable impressions which are hardly evident in external life. For example, the facts show that a man alone is a quite different being from what he is in a large assembly of others, especially if the assembly is active. When he is alone, he follows his own impulses; even a weak ego will look for the source of its actions in itself. But in a large assembly there is a sort of mass-soul in which all the various urges, desires and judgments of those present flow together. A positive man will not easily surrender to this collective entity, but a negative man will always be influenced by it. Hence we can repeatedly experience the truth of what a dialect poet, Rosegger, has said in a few words. He puts it crudely, but there is more than a grain of truth in what he says:

Oaner is a Mensch,
Zwoa san Leit',
San's mehra, san's Viecher.³⁸

We can often notice that men are wiser alone than they are in company, for then they are almost always subject to the prevailing average mood. Thus a man may go to a meeting without any definite ideas or feelings; then he listens to a speaker who takes up with enthusiasm some point which had previously left him cold. He may be affected not so much by the speaker as by the acclamation won from the audience. This grips him and he goes home quite convinced.

Mass-suggestion of this kind plays an enormous part in life. It illustrates the danger to which a negative soul is exposed, and in particular the danger of sectarianism, for while we might fail to convince an individual of something, it becomes relatively easy to do so if we can bring him under the influence of a sect or group, for here mass suggestion will be at work, spreading from soul to soul. There are great dangers here for persons of a negative type.

We can go further. In earlier lectures we have seen how the soul can raise itself into higher realms of spiritual life. And in my Occult Science³⁹ you will find an account of how the soul must train itself to accomplish this stage-by-stage ascent. In the first place it has to suppress the positive element in itself and open itself to new impressions by putting itself artificially into a negative mood. Otherwise it will make no progress. We have often explained what the spiritual researcher has to do if he wishes to reach the higher levels of existence. He has to bring about, deliberately and consciously, the condition which occurs normally in sleep, when the soul receives no outer stimuli. He has to shut out all external impressions, so that his soul is quite empty. Then he must be able to open his soul to impressions which at first, if he is still a beginner, will be quite new to him, and this means that he has to make himself as negative as possible. And everything in mystical life and knowledge of higher worlds that we call inner vision, inward contemplation, does fundamentally bring about negative moods in the soul. There is no way round that. When a man suppresses all stimuli from the outer world and consciously achieves a condition in which he is entirely sunk in himself and has banished all the positive characteristics that had previously been his, then he is bound to become negative and self-absorbed.

Something similar occurs if we employ an easier external method which cannot of itself lead us to a higher life but can give us some support in our ascent—if for instance we turn from foods which stimulate positive impulses in a sort of animal fashion to a special diet, vegetarian or the like. We cannot bring about our ascent into higher worlds by vegetarianism or by not eating this or that; it would be altogether too easy if we could eat our way up to those heights. Nothing but work on our own souls can get us there. But the work can be made easier if we avoid the hampering influence that particular forms of nourishment can have. Anyone who is trying to lead a higher, more spiritual life can readily convince himself that his forces are enhanced by adopting a certain diet. For if he cuts out the foods which tend to foster the robust and positive elements in himself, he will be brought into a negative condition.

Anyone who stands on the ground of genuine spiritual science, free from charlatanry, will never refuse to recognise the things, including external things, which are in fact connected with endeavours to lead a true spiritual life. But this means that we may be exposed also to bad spiritual influences. When we educate ourselves in spiritual science and eliminate everyday impressions, we open ourselves to the spiritual facts and beings which are always around us. Among them, certainly, will be the good spiritual powers and forces which we first learn to perceive when the appropriate organ has unfolded within us, but we shall be open also to the evil spiritual powers and forces around us just as if we are to hear harmonious musical sounds, we must be open also to discordant ones. If we want to penetrate into the spiritual world, we must be clear that we are liable to encounter the bad side of spiritual experiences. If our approach to the spiritual world were to be entirely negative, we would be threatened by one danger after another.

Let us look away from the spiritual world and consider ordinary life. Why should a vegetarian diet, for example, make us negative? If we become vegetarians because of some popular agitation but without adequate judgment, or as a matter of principle without changing our ways of living and acting, it may under certain conditions have a seriously weakening effect on us in relation to other influences, and particularly perhaps on certain bodily characteristics. But if we have gone over to a life of initiative, involving new tasks that arise not from external life but from a richly developing life of the soul, then it can be immensely useful to take a new line in diet also and to clear away any hindrances that may have arisen from our previous eating habits.

Things have very different effects on different people. Hence the spiritual-scientific researcher always insists on something that has often been emphasised here: he will never impart to anyone the means of rising into higher worlds without making it clear to him that he must not merely cultivate the negative soul-qualities that are necessary for receiving new impressions, nor must be content to develop inner vision and inward concentration, for a life which is to rise to a new level must have a content which is strong enough to fill and sustain it. If we were merely to show someone how he can acquire the strength that will enable him to see into the spiritual world, we should be exposing him to bad spiritual forces of every kind, through the negativity that goes with such endeavours. But if he is willing to learn what the spiritual investigator can tell him about the higher worlds, he will never remain merely negative, for he will possess something which can imbue his soul with positive content at a higher stage. That is why we so often emphasise that the seeker must not only strive for higher levels, but must at the same time give careful study to what spiritual science communicates. That is how the spiritual researcher takes account of the fact that anyone who is to experience new realms has to be receptive, and therefore negative, towards them.

What we have to call forth, when we set out consciously to develop the soul, can be seen in the various people we encounter in ordinary life, for the soul does not go through development only in its present life but has done so in previous lives and is at a definite stage when it enters earth-existence. Just as in our present life we have to proceed from stage to stage, and must acquire negative characteristics on our way to a positive stage, so the same thing may have happened when we last went through the gate of death and entered a new life with positive or negative characteristics. The design which sent us into life with positive qualities will leave us where we are and act as a brake on further development, for positive tendencies produce a clearly-defined character. A negative tendency, on the other hand, does make it possible for us to receive a great deal into our soul-life between death and a new birth, but it also exposes us to all the chance happenings of earthly life, and especially to the impressions made on us by other people. Thus when a man of negative type meets other persons, we can usually see how their characteristics leave their mark upon him. Even he himself, when he comes close to a friend or to someone with whom he has had an affectionate relationship, can feel how he becomes more and more like the other: in cases of marriage or deep friendship even his handwriting may be influenced. Observation will indeed show how in marriage the handwriting of a negative person may come to resemble increasingly that of his or her spouse.

So it is that negative types are susceptible to the influence of other people, especially of those close to them. Hence they are exposed to a certain danger of losing themselves, so that their individual soul life and ego-sense may be extinguished.

The danger for a positive type is that he will not be readily accessible to impressions from other people and will often fail to appreciate their characteristic qualities, so that he passes them all by and may be unable to form a friendship or close association with anyone. Hence he is in danger of his soul becoming hardened and desolate.

We can gain deep insight into life when we consider people in terms of the positive and negative aspects in human beings, and this applies also to the different ways in which they respond to the influence of Nature around them. What then is it that acts on a person when he is influenced by other people or when he absorbs impressions from the outer world?

There is one thing that always imparts a positive character to the soul. For modern man, regardless of his stage of development, it is sound judgment, rational weighing up, clarifying for oneself any situation or relationship that may arise in life. The opposite of this is the loss of healthy judgment, so that impressions are admitted to the soul in such a way that positive qualities are no protection against them. We can even observe that when certain human activities slip down into the unconscious, they often have a stronger effect on other people than when they arise from the conscious exercise of normal judgment.

It is unfortunate, especially in a spiritual-scientific movement, that when facts concerning the spiritual world are given in a strictly logical form, a form well recognised in other spheres of life, people are inclined to evade them; they find it uncongenial that such facts should be presented in a rational sequence of cause and effect. But if these communications are imparted to them in such a way that their judgment is not evoked, they are far more ready to respond. There are even people who are highly mistrustful of information about the spiritual world if it is given in rational terms, but very credulous towards anything they may hear from mediums who seem to be inspired by some unknown power. These mediums, who do not know what they are saying and who say more than they know, attract many more believers than do persons who know exactly what they are saying. How is it possible—we often hear it said—for anyone to tell us about the spiritual world unless he is in at least a half-conscious state and evidently possessed by some other power? This is often taken as a reason for objecting to the conscious communication of facts drawn from the spiritual world. That is why running to mediums is much more popular than paying heed to communications based on sound judgment and set forth in rational terms.

When anything that comes from the spiritual world is thrust down into a region from which consciousness is excluded, there is a danger that it will work on the negative characteristics of the soul, for these characteristics always come to the fore when we are approached by an influence from dark subconscious depths. Close observation shows again and again how a relatively stupid person, thanks to his positive qualities, can have a strong effect on a more intelligent person if the latter is easily impressed by anything that emerges from subconscious obscurity. So we can understand how it happens in life that persons with fine minds are the victims of robust characters whose assertions derive solely from their own impulses and inclinations.

If we take one further step, we shall come to a remarkable fact. Consider a man who not merely belies his own reason now and then but suffers from mental illness and says things that spring from this deranged condition. So long as his illness is not noticed, he may have an uncommonly strong influence on persons of finer nature.

All this belongs to the wisdom of life. We shall not get it right unless we realise that a man with positive qualities may not be open to reason, while a negative type of man will often be subject to irrational influences he cannot keep out. A subtler psychology will have to take account of these things.

Now we will turn from impressions made by individuals on one another and come to impressions received by people from their surroundings. Here, too, we can gain important results in the context of positive and negative.

Let us think, for example, of a researcher who has worked very fruitfully on a special subject and has brought together a large number of relevant facts. By so doing he has accomplished something useful for mankind. But now suppose that he connects these facts with ideas gained from his education and his life up to date or from certain theories and philosophical viewpoints which may give a very one-sided view of the facts. In so far as the concepts and ideas he has inferred from the facts are the outcome of his own reflective thinking, they will have a healthy effect on his soul, for by working out his own philosophy he will have imbued his soul with positive feelings. But now suppose that he meets some followers who have not themselves worked over the facts but have merely heard of them or read them. They will lack the feelings that he evoked in himself through his work in laboratory or study, and their frame of mind may be entirely negative. Hence the same doctrine, even though it be one-sided, can be seen as making the leader of their school positive in his soul, while on the whole throng of followers, who merely repeat the doctrine, it can have an unhealthy, negative effect, making them weaker and weaker.

This is something that runs through the whole history of human culture. Even today we can see how men of an entirely materialistic outlook, which they themselves have worked hard to develop from their own findings, are lively positive characters whom it is a pleasure to meet, but in the case of their followers, who carry in their heads the same basic ideas but have not acquired them by their own efforts, these ideas have an unhealthy, negative, weakening effect. Thus we can say that it makes a great difference if a man achieves a philosophical outlook of his own or if he merely takes it from someone else. The first man will acquire positive qualities; the second, negative qualities.

Thus we see how our attitude to the world can make us both positive and negative. For example, a purely theoretical approach to Nature, especially if it omits everything we can actually see with our eyes, makes us negative. There has to be a theoretical knowledge of Nature. But we must not be blind to the fact that this theoretical knowledge gained by the systematic study of animals, plants and minerals and embodied as laws of Nature in the form of concepts and ideas—works on our negative qualities in such a way as to imprison us in these ideas. On the other hand, if we respond with living appreciation to all that Nature in its grandeur has to offer, positive qualities are called forth in our souls—if for example we take delight in a flower, not pulling it to pieces but responding to its beauty, or if we open ourselves to the morning light when the sun is rising, not testing it in astronomical terms but beholding its glory. For anything we adopt by way of a theoretical conception of the world does not implicate our souls; we allow it to be dictated to us by others. But our whole soul is actively involved when we are delighted or repelled by the phenomena of Nature. The truth of Nature is not concerned with the ego, but that which delights or repels us is; for how we respond to Nature depends on the character of our ego.

Thus we can say: Living participation in Nature develops our positive qualities; theorising about Nature does the reverse. But we must qualify this by repeating that a researcher who is the first to analyse a series of natural phenomena is far more positive than one who merely adopts his findings and learns from them. This distinction should be given attention in wide fields of education. And a relevant fact is that wherever there has been a conscious awareness of the things we have been discussing today, the negative characteristics of the human soul have never been cultivated on their own account. Why did Plato inscribe over the entrance to his school of philosophy the words: “Only those with a knowledge of geometry may enter here”?⁴⁰ It was because geometry and mathematics cannot be accepted on the authority of another person. We have to work through geometry by our own inner efforts and can master it only by a positive activity of our souls. If this were heeded today, many of the philosophical systems that buzz around would not exist. For if anyone realises how much positive work has gone into formulating a system of ideas such as geometry, he will learn to respect the creative activity of the human mind; but anyone who reads Haeckel's Riddle of the Universe,⁴¹ for instance, with no notion of how it was worked out, may quite easily arrive at a new world-outlook, but he will do so out of a purely negative state of soul.

Now in spiritual science, or Anthroposophy, we have something which unconditionally requires a positive response. If someone is told that with the aid of popular modern devices, photographs or lantern-slides, he can see some animal or some natural phenomenon brought before his eyes on the screen, he will watch it quite passively, in a negative frame of mind; he will need no positive qualities and will not even need to think. Or he might be shown a series of pictures illustrating the various phases of a glacier on its way down the mountain it would be just the same. These are just examples of how wide is the appeal of these negative, attitudes today. Anthroposophy is not so simple. Photographs could at most give a symbolical suggestion of some of its ideas. The only way of approach to the spiritual world is through the life of the human soul. Anyone who wishes to penetrate fruitfully into spiritual science must realise that its most important elements are not going to be the subject of a demonstration. He is therefore advised that he must work on and with his soul, so as to bring out its most positive qualities. In fact, spiritual science is in the highest sense competent to cultivate these qualities in the human soul. Herein, too, resides the healthiness of its world-outlook, which makes no claim except to arouse the forces sleeping in the soul. In appealing to the activity inherent in every soul, Anthroposophy calls forth its hidden forces, so that they may permeate all the saps and energies of the body; thus it has a health-giving effect, in the fullest sense, on the whole human being. And because Anthroposophy appeals only to sound reason, which cannot be evoked by mass-suggestion but only through individual understanding, and because it renounces everything that mass-suggestion can evoke, it reckons with the most positive qualities of the human soul.

Thus we have brought together, without embellishment, a number of facts and examples which show how man is placed in the midst of two streams, the positive and the negative. He cannot rise to higher stages unless he leaves a lower positive stage and goes over to a negative, receptive condition, so that his soul acquires new content; he takes this along with him and thus becomes positive once more on a higher level. If we learn how to observe Nature rightly, we can see how world-wisdom arranges things so that man may be led from a positive to a negative phase, and on to a positive phase once more.

From this point of view, it is illuminating to study particular topics—for example, Aristotle's famous definition of the tragic.⁴² A tragedy, he says, brings before us a complete dramatic action which can be expected to evoke fear and pity in the spectators, but in such a way that these emotions undergo a catharsis or purgation. Let us note that man, on coming into existence with his usual egotism, is at first very positive: he hardens himself and shuts himself off from others. But then, if he learns to sympathise with others in their sorrows and feels their joys as his own, he becomes very negative, because he goes out from his ego and participates in the feelings of other people.

We become negative also if we are deeply affected by some undefined fate which seems to hang over another person, by what could happen on the morrow to someone with whom we are in close sympathy. Who has not trembled when someone is hastening towards a deed which will lead him to disaster—a disaster we can foresee but which he, driven by his impulses, is powerless to avert? We are afraid of what may come of it, and this induces in us a negative state of soul, for fear is negative. We would no longer have any real part in life if we were unable to fear for someone who is approaching a perilous future. So it is that fear and sympathy make us negative. In order that we may become positive again, tragedy sets before us a Hero. We sympathise with his deeds, and his fate touches us so nearly that our fates are aroused. At the same time the course of the dramatic action brings the picture of the Hero before us in such a way that our fear and pity are purified; they are transformed from negative feelings into the harmonious contentment bestowed on us by a work of art, and so we are raised once more into the positive mode.

Thus the old Greek philosopher's definition of tragedy shows us how art is an element in life which comes to meet an unavoidably negative state of feeling and transmutes it into a positive condition. Art, in all its realms, leads us to a higher level when we have first to be negative in order to progress from a less developed state.

Beauty, initially, must be seen as that which is intended to come before us in order to help us rise beyond our present stage. Ordinary life is then suffused with the radiance of a higher state of soul, if we have first been raised through art to a higher level.

Thus we see how positive and negative alternate, not only in individuals but in the whole life of man, and we see how this contributes to raising both the individual from one incarnation to the next and humanity as a whole. We could easily show, if there were time, how there have been positive and negative epochs and historical periods. The idea of positive and negative throws light into every sphere of the soul's life and of the life of humanity at large.

It never happens that one man is always negative and another always positive. Each of us has to go through positive and negative conditions at different stages of existence. Only when we see the idea in this light shall we accept it as a truth and therefore as a basis for the practice of living. And our discussion today has confirmed the saying that we have put at the beginning and end of these lectures—the saying by the old Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, who, because he could see so deeply into human life, was called the Obscure: “Never will you find the boundaries of the soul, by whatever paths you search, so all-embracing is the soul's being.”⁴³

Now someone might say: “All study of the soul must then be useless, for if its boundaries can never be discovered, no research can establish them and one could despair of ever knowing anything about them.” Only a negative man could take that line. A positive man would add: “Thank God the life of the soul is so far-ranging that knowledge can never encompass it, for this means that everything we comprehend today we shall be able to surpass tomorrow and thus hasten towards higher levels.” Let us be glad that at every moment the life of the soul makes a mockery of our knowledge. We need an unbounded soul-life, for this limitless perspective gives us hope that we may continually surpass the positive and rise from step to step. It is precisely because the extent of our soul-life is unbounded and unknowable that we can look forward with hope and confidence. Because the boundaries of the soul can never be discovered, the soul is able to go beyond them and rise to higher and ever-higher levels.

• 38. Peter Rosegger, 1843–1918. Styrian writer: “One is a man/Two are people/Any more are cattle”.
• 39. Rudolf Steiner, Occult Science, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1969.
• 40. These words over the entrance to the Platonic Academy can be found neither in Plato nor in any of his Greek and Roman contemporaries. They are first found in commentators on Aristotle in the 6th century AD; thus Elias, Aristotelis Categorias commentaria, ed. A. Busse (Comm. in Arist. Graeca XVIII, pars 1), Berlin 1900, 118.18; and Philoponus Joannes, Aristotelis de Anima Libris commentaria, ed. M. Hayduck (Comm. in Arist. Graeca XV), Berlin 1897, 117.29.
• 41. Ernst Haeckel, 1834–1919. Die Welträtsel Gemeinverständliche Studien über monistische Philosophie, Bonn 1899.
• 42. See Aristotle, Poetics, chapter 6.
• 43. See note 23.

The cycle of lectures which I was permitted to hold this winter before you, had the task of illuminating from the point of view of spiritual science as characterised in the first lecture here, the most various manifestations of human soul-life and of life in a wider context. Today, let us observe an area of human life which can lead to misery, suffering and perhaps also to the loss of hope. To make up for this, in the next lecture we will touch on a field entitled “Human Conscience”, which will lead us back to the heights where human dignity and value, the power of human self-consciousness is revealed most. And then, this year's cycle will be concluded with a reflection on “The Mission of Art”, which will try to show the thoroughly healthy side of what might appear to us today from its most terrible, dark aspect of life.

When error and mental disorder are spoken of, images of deepest human suffering arise in every person's soul, and images, too, of deepest human sympathy. And everything which thereby arises in the soul can also be a challenge to illuminate a little this chasm in the human soul with the light which we hope to have gained in these lectures. Particularly the person who increasingly accustoms himself to proceed in the way of thinking which has passed before our soul here must have the hope that the spiritual-scientific method of observation can illuminate in certain respects this sad chapter of human life. For anyone with some knowledge of the literature, and I am now referring less to the rapidly expanding non-specialist literature than to the specialist one, will be able to note from the point of view of spiritual science that it reaches an extraordinarily long way in some respects and offers a wealth of material for the assessment of the relevant facts. But on the other hand in no literature does it become so clear how little the different theories, views and modes of thinking in our time are appropriate to providing a framework for the experiences and scientific observations which have been collected. In this field in particular it can be seen clearly how spiritual science is in harmony with true and genuine science, with everything which we come up against as scientific facts, results and experiences. But it can also be seen how at each stage it finds a contradiction between these experiences and the way that they are interpreted from the current scientific point of view. As in other fields, we will again only be able to deal with the subject in outline, but perhaps it will provide the stimulus to gain a relevant understanding which can also flow into our practical life, so that we are increasingly capable of orientating ourselves in respect of the sad condition which we are about to touch upon.

In using the words “error” and “mental disorder” we will be aware that the one is fundamentally different from the other. Nevertheless, the exact observer of a soul-life which can be described truly as mentally disordered will find expressions and appearances which only seem to be different in degree from error committed in some respect in a life which is otherwise regarded as normal. But such observations are liable to misinterpretation in so far as certain directions of thought have the tendency to blur the individual divisions and to state that in fact no firm line exists between a healthy normal soul-life and one which can be described with the words “mental disorder”.

Such statements contain a certain danger which must be emphasised when the occasion occurs. And the danger lies not in the fact that the statement is wrong, but that it is correct. This may sound paradoxical, but nevertheless it is true, that wrong statements are sometimes less dangerous than correct ones which can be interpreted and put into practice in a one-sided way because the danger inherent in their correctness is not noticed. It is often thought to be sufficient that if something can be proved in a certain context it is correct; but it should be realised that every matter which is correct also has its reverse aspect and that any truth which we discover is true only in respect of certain facts and experiences. The danger arises in the moment that it is extrapolated to cover other areas, when it is carried too far and becomes dogmatic belief. That is the reason why in general not much is achieved if we know that a truth exists; the important thing is that in true knowledge we should know the limits within which that knowledge is valid.

We can certainly observe phenomena in normal healthy soul-life which, if they go beyond a certain point, are also pathological symptoms. The full weight of this statement will be noticed only by someone who is properly accustomed to observe life on a more intimate level. Who would deny the pathological aspect which can be included under the heading of “mental disorder” when someone is incapable of linking one comprehended concept with a second one at the right moment, so that he applies the first one in a new and completely inappropriate situation and acts on the basis of an idea which was correct for an earlier situation but not for a later one. Who would deny that this borders on the pathological? If it happens beyond a certain degree it is directly a symptom for mental disorder. But on the other hand, who would deny that there are people who are unable to advance in their work because of their long-windedness, their laboriousness. Here there is a situation in normal soul-life—the impossibility of progressing from an idea—where the point is approached at which it is necessary to stop speaking of error and start speaking of pathological mental disorder.

Let us assume, for example, that someone is prone to the error—and this really does happen—that when someone in the vicinity clears their throat this does not sound to him like a normal cough but gives him the illusion that people are saying unkind things about him. If that person then adjusts his life and actions in response to this illusion he will be considered as someone who is mentally disordered. And yet there is a thin line between this and occurrences in normal life where it happens that someone has overheard something and interprets the meaning in such a way that he thinks he hears something completely different to what was actually said. One meets cases where someone says: “Some person or other said this or that about me” and no trace can be found that the other person actually said that. It is not very easy to determine where the normal soul-life turns from its healthy course into disorder of the soul.

This may seem paradoxical, and it may provoke some reflection in this field, if we imagine that someone in an avenue of trees has the quite normal perception of seeing the trees nearby at their proper distance whilst those further away appear to move closer together and, deciding to tie ropes between the trees, he thereupon makes the lengths of rope shorter the further the trees are away. There we have an example of a person drawing the wrong conclusions from a perfectly healthy observation. But healthy observation only comes about because there is illusion. The illusion is also an observation. The unhealthy, harmful aspect of illusion only comes about when it is considered to be the same reality as a table standing before one. Only when the observations cannot be interpreted in the correct way can it be described as pathological. Now we can compare the case that someone has a hallucination and considers it to be reality in the normal physical sense with the paradox that someone was going to tie the trees of an avenue together with pieces of rope which became shorter and shorter. Logically, in principle, there would be no difference between the two things. Nevertheless, how easily can an illusion lead us to make a wrong judgment and how rarely would we make a similar wrong judgment in observing an avenue! Some people might consider all this silly. But all the same it is necessary to take such particulars into account, for otherwise one can quickly become side-tracked and does not see how easily normal soul-life can become disordered.

Now we can give further examples of still more striking cases concerning people whose soul-life is considered healthy and clear-sighted to the highest degree. I want to mention a German philosopher who is currently considered among the foremost in his field by those who work in it. The philosopher told of his following experience:

He was once in conversation with a person and this conversation led them to talk about a scholar known to both of them. At the moment when the conversation turned to the scholar, the philosopher was reminded of an illustrated book on Paris and immediately following that of a photograph album of Rome. Meanwhile the conversation continued about the scholar. The philosopher reflected how it was possible that during the conversation the image of first the illustrated book on Paris and then the photograph album of Rome could appear. And, indeed, he managed to establish the correct connections. For the scholar about whom they were talking had a noteworthy goatee. This goatee immediately called forth in the subconscious of the philosopher the image of Napoleon III, who also had a goatee; and this idea of Napoleon III which had pushed its way into his consciousness led via France to the illustrated work about Paris. And now the image of another man appeared before him who also had a Van Dyke beard, the image of Victor Emanuel of Italy; and this image led via Italy to the photograph album of Rome. There we have an arbitrary, haphazard sequence of ideas which unfolds whilst something completely different is happening in the fully conscious soul-life. Let us assume, now, that a person reached the point where the illustrated work about Paris arose in him and he then could no longer keep hold of the thread of the conversation, and immediately afterwards he had the subsequent idea of the photograph album of Rome; he would be subject to a haphazard life of ideas; he would be unable to hold an orderly conversation with anyone but would be enmeshed in a pathological soul-life which would lead him without rhyme or reason from one set of ideas to the next.

But our philosopher proceeds further and contrasts this with another case by which he hopes to recognise how these things are related. Once he went to the tax office to pay his taxes. He had to pay 75 marks. And since, in spite of his philosophy, he was an orderly man, he had entered these 75 marks in his expenditure book and had then proceeded with his other work. Later he wanted to remember the amount of tax which he had paid. He could not remember. He thought; and, being a philosopher, went to work systematically. He tried to recall the amount by the association of ideas. He concentrated on his walk to the tax office and he recalled the picture of the four gold twenty mark pieces which he had in his purse and, further, the image of the five marks which had then been given to him as change. He recalled these two images and was now able to discover by a simple subtraction that he had paid 75 marks tax.

Here we have two completely different cases. In the first the soul-life acts of its own accord, as it were, without any kind of control by the conscious sequence of ideas; it produces the image of the illustrated work about Paris and the image of the photograph album of Rome. In the second case we see how the soul acts quite systematically, choosing every step it takes. There really is a considerable difference between the two soul processes. But the philosopher fails to draw attention to something which the spiritual researcher would immediately notice. For the essential thing in the first case is that his attention is fixed on the other person, that the whole of his conscious soul-life is taken up with holding the conversation with the other person and that the haphazard images surface as if on a different level of consciousness, left to themselves. In the second case, the philosopher turns the whole of his attention to determining the sequence of ideas. This explains why the images occur haphazardly in the first case, whilst in the second they are under the control of the conscious soul-life.

But why are there images in the first place? The philosopher fails to answer that. Those who observe life, who know similar cases and are in a position to take into account the nature of the philosopher concerned (I happen to know not only the case but also the man) will be able to set up the following hypothesis. The philosopher was talking of a man who did not particularly interest him. A certain effort was necessary to keep up the concentration on the conversation. Because of this he had a certain amount of soul-life to spare which was not engaged in the conversation and which turned inwards. But he did not have the strength to control the resultant sequence of images so that they occurred haphazardly because he had to give his attention to the uninteresting conversation. This gives an indication how such images occur in the background of conscious soul-life as shadows. Numerous other examples could be given. I chose this example because it is very characteristic and much can be learnt from it.

Now the question may be asked: does such an event not prompt us to investigate human soul-life more deeply? And also: how can such a split in the soul-life come about in the first place? And here we come to the realm where experience of that unhappy subject we are dealing with today can be fitted quite naturally into what we have dealt with so often this winter. The philosopher mentioned in the example is faced with a riddle when recounting his experiences. He does not like to continue once he has told the facts because our external science stops short of knowledge about the essence of things and the human being, however much it may be descriptive.

Our observation of the essential nature of the human being has demonstrated that man must be looked at in more ways than is done by external science, that we have to distinguish an outer and an inner human being. We have shown in numerous areas that sleep has to be regarded differently from the way it is understood in ordinary science. We have shown how what remains in bed of the sleeping human being is only the outer man and that ordinary consciousness cannot follow the invisible higher true inner human being who leaves the outer human being in sleep. Ordinary consciousness just does not see that something leaves the human being which is just as real as that part which remains in bed, that the inner human being is given over to his real home, the spiritual world, between going to sleep and waking up. And it also fails to recognise that he extracts from there what he needs between waking up and going to sleep in order to sustain the ordinary soul-life. That is why we have to regard separately and clearly differentiate the outer human being, who is present with his laws also in sleep, and the inner human being, who is only present in the outer human being in the waking states, but separates himself in sleep. As long as this distinction is not made we will not be able to understand the most important events in human life. Those, who for reasons of convenience see everything as a unity and without a second thought want to establish monism everywhere, will accuse us of being dualists because we divide the human being into two members—an inner and an outer one. But such people should also admit the horrible dualism of the chemist splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen. It is not possible to be a monist in the higher sense if one does not recognise that the monon is something which lies much deeper. But those who see unity only in the most immediate things hinder themselves from being able to observe the manifold nature of life, from recognising those things which alone can explain life.

Now it was also shown that we have to distinguish individual members within the outer and the inner human being. In the outer human being we first distinguished the physical body which we can see and feel. Then there is another member which we call the ether body, which fashions and builds up the physical body. Physical body and ether body remain in bed during sleep. Then the parts which withdraw from the physical and ether bodies during sleep into the spiritual world were described in these lectures as the astral human body which, in turn, encloses the bearer of the ego. But we made still more subtle distinctions. In the astral body we distinguished three soul members, and a careful differentiation of these three members permitted an explanation of many occurrences in life.

We called the lowest soul member the sentient soul, the second member we noted as the intellectual or mind soul and the third one as the consciousness soul. Therefore, when we refer to the inner human being, we do not speak of a chaotic, undifferentiated intermingling of all kinds of will impulses, feelings, concepts and ideas, but we can carefully differentiate in the soul between these three members. Now in ordinary human life there is a certain interrelationship between the outer and the inner human being. The interrelationship can be characterised as follows: the sentient soul, our lowest soul member which contains our desires and passions to which we are slavishly subject if the higher soul members are little developed, is interrelated with the sentient body; this is similar to the sentient soul, but in the human being it is considered as belonging to the outer human being. The astral body has to be described separately from the sentient body here. For the three individual soul members are only modifications of the astral body, not only fashioned but also separated from it. In the waking state the sentient soul is in constant exchange with the sentient body. Similarly, the intellectual or mind soul is in constant interchange with the ether body, and the consciousness soul is in a certain sense intimately connected with the physical body. That is why we are dependent on waking consciousness as far as everything which is to enter the consciousness soul is concerned. The things transmitted by the physical body, the senses, the activity of the human brain, initially enter the consciousness soul.

Thus we have two three-membered sections of the human being which correspond to one another: the sentient soul and the sentient body, the intellectual or mind soul and the ether body, the consciousness soul and the physical body. This correspondence can help us to unravel the threads leading from the inner to the outer human being which can show us how man's normal soul-life may be disturbed if they fail to function in their normal way. Why does this happen?

The sentient soul is dependent on the effects of the sentient body, and when there is an incorrect correspondence between the sentient soul and the sentient body the healthy soul-life of the sentient soul is interrupted. A similar thing occurs when the intellectual soul cannot regulate the ether body in the correct way to make it a proper instrument for the intellectual soul. And the consciousness soul, too, will appear abnormal when the physical body is a hindrance and obstacle for the normal expression of the consciousness soul. If we divide the human being systematically in this way, an order of correspondence can be seen which is essential for a healthy soul-life. And it can also be understood that all sorts of interruptions can occur in the interrelationship between the sentient soul and the sentient body, the intellectual soul and the ether body, the consciousness soul and the physical body. And only the person who can recognise the threads running through this intricate organism and the irregularities which can arise will be able to recognise the disorder which can occur in the soul. Disorder only occurs when there is disharmony between the inner and the outer human being. Let us take the case of the philosopher once more.

The soul-life which takes place under the full control of the consciousness shows what is present in the consciousness soul on the one hand and in the intellectual soul on the other. But in the sentient soul the hardly noticed images follow one another: the illustrated work about Paris, the photograph album of Rome. This occurs because the philosopher brings about a split between his sentient soul and sentient body by diverting his attention whilst still relating to the person standing in front of him. The images of the illustrated work on Paris and the Rome photograph album must be sought in the sentient body; the uncontrolled process which was described takes place there. In the consciousness soul the conversation between the two people occurs; and the necessity of being forced to prevent attention from wandering from the conversation in this case causes a split between the sentient body and the sentient soul.

These are only passing states. For the least disturbance of our soul-life occurs when the sentient body alone becomes independent. We can still maintain reason and the inner thread of consciousness which preserves awareness: we are still present, too, beside the compulsive images which appear because of the sentient body which has become independent.

When such a split occurs in respect of the intellectual soul and the ether body, then the situation is a much more difficult one. Then we enter more deeply those states which verge on the pathological. Nevertheless, it is difficult to decide where the healthy state ends and the pathological one begins. An intricate example will make clear how difficult it is to maintain the experiences of the intellectual soul in complete independence when the ether body goes on strike, when it refuses to be merely a tool of our thinking. When the ether body goes independent and resists the intellectual soul it prevents the thought from coming to expression fully, so that the thought becomes stuck half way and cannot be completed. This can happen with the most clever people, so-called. Let us take a grotesque example.

Everyone will smile at and easily recognise the logical absurdity of the statement: it is a logical conclusion that you still possess what you have not lost. You did not lose big ears, therefore you still have big ears. The absurdity arises because the thought is not in accord with the facts. But on exactly the same pattern—that there is a preceding statement “what you have not lost” which make an unjustified assumption which goes unnoticed—the most unbelievable errors can be committed in the most important questions in life where the matter is a little more complicated. Thus there is a philosopher⁴⁴ who greatly emphasised a theory set up by him about the human ego. We have often mentioned here how even in its definition the ego is different from all experiences which we can have. Everyone can call a table “table”, a glass “glass” and a watch “watch”. Only the word “I” cannot be used by anyone else when it describes ourselves. This is indicative of a fundamental difference between the experience of the ego and all other experience. Such things can be observed; or they can be half observed. And they are only half observed when conclusions are drawn such as by the philosopher: “therefore the ego can never become object, therefore the ego can never be observed.” And it seems a clever view when he continues: if the attempt were made to grasp it, the ego would have to be present externally whilst at the same time being present within itself. That would be no different to someone running around a tree and saying if only he runs fast enough he can catch up with himself from behind. Who would not be convinced when the dogma that the ego can never be grasped in itself is backed by such an example! And yet: the whole thing is based on the fact that such a comparison is not valid. For it is based on the assumption that the ego cannot be observed. If the comparison with the tree were to be used, it would be possible to say only: the ego must not be compared with the person running round the tree but at most with a person who winds himself round a tree like a snake; then perhaps the feet could be held with the hands. Thus the ego is something quite different from everything else within our experience. It is a substance which we can grasp as the coincidence of subject and object. This has been hinted at by mystics at all times in the language of symbols, in the image of the snake biting its own tail. Those who used this symbol understood that they were observing themselves, as it were, in the image before them.

This example demonstrates how we advance from the feelings and perceptions of our immediate perception which can become disharmonious only with the sentient body, to those things which affect not only pure feeling, pure perception, but the intellectual or mind soul. Where we have to digest thoughts internally, which is already a much less arbitrary process, a hindrance is caused not only by the images themselves, but there is something which offers quite a different sort of resistance which cannot be recognised by a thinking which fails to pursue its processes rigorously to their conclusion. We had an example how the human being can enmesh himself in a logic whereof he does not notice that it is only his logic and not the logic of the facts. A logic of the facts is only present when we retain mastery over the link between the intellectual soul and the ether body, and thus the mastery over the ether body. Therefore those pathological expressions of our soul-life which are primarily the result of a breakdown in the link between our ideas turn out to be caused by the ether body not being able to serve as a healthy tool for the expressions of our intellectual soul.

But now the question is justified: if an ether body which creates a hindrance for our intellectual soul to unfold, is part of our nature, is there any choice but to say that the causes affecting the soul such that it passes from mere error to mental disorder lie in something over which we have no control? In a certain sense such an example, if it is truly understood, makes us aware of something which has been emphasised here repeatedly and which is considered to be nonsense by many of our contemporaries—even the most enlightened. We observe that our ether body throws obstacles in the way of our intellectual soul, thus not allowing it to finish any train of thought. So instead of admitting here that we are powerless and can go no further, we pass muddled and distorted judgment. Our judgment from the intellectual soul becomes mixed up with the intrusions of our ether body. A peculiar situation: we think that the ether body belongs to the outer human being and then it interferes with the activity of the intellectual soul as if it were on an equal level. How can this be explained?

Purely on a verbal level one can point to “inherited characteristics”, etc. That is done by those who, because of certain fixed patterns of thinking, are unable to reflect logically on matters concerning the soul. But the philosophers who are able to reflect on the soul say: the error, the chaotic confusion which enters the soul in such a case cannot be the result merely of physical heredity. In contrast, a well-known modern philosopher describes our internal processes which go beyond the purely physical with a remarkable phrase. It might be described as a pretty phrase, were we not dealing with a serious subject, when Wundt⁴⁵ says: “This leads us into the perpetual darkness of evolution!” A person used to rigorous thinking will find such a phrase by a world famous philosopher strange. Compare with this the truth of spiritual science which says: soul and spirit can only originate from soul and spirit—a statement on a higher level which we have often seen as comparable with another truth which the great natural scientist Francesco Redi voiced in the 17th century in a different field: living matter can only originate from living matter. Spiritual science not only reveals physical heredity, but shows that the spiritual element is active in everything physical. And in the situation where the contrary effect of our ether body on the intellectual soul becomes too great, it is plausible that something must have formed and prepared our ether body which is similar to our intellectual soul—only it has badly prepared it. If we therefore find such an error in our intellectual soul in the present, and if we are able to maintain our reason, we can correct the error in such a way that it does not penetrate as far as our corporeality. And one must not think that every emotion immediately results in sickness. No one is more rigorous than spiritual science in the view that it is nonsense to ascribe to external influences without a second thought when a person becomes mentally disordered. But on the other hand it must be understood, even if we have no power to change our ether body, that it is saturated and imbued with the same laws of error which exist when a mistake is made, but that we become sick when the error comes to expression in the ether body. Such error cannot normally take effect immediately in our present life between birth and death. This only happens if it becomes repeated and habitual. For it is another matter if we continually compound error upon error between birth and death in a specific case, if we regularly succumb to certain weaknesses of the thinking, feeling and willing and live with them between birth and death. The outer bodily nature can only change a limited amount between birth and death. When we pass through the gate of death the physical body with all the good and bad qualities is destroyed and we take with us in our thinking, feeling and willing everything good and bad which we have created. And in constructing our outer bodily nature in the next existence we transmit into it the errors and the chaos, our weaknesses in thinking, feeling and willing from our present existence.

Therefore, with reference to an ether body which holds us back, an error in our present soul-life cannot immediately take shape in our ether body, but the error which at present is only content if our soul participates in the organisation of our next existence. What appear in our ether body as causes and as certain characteristics will not be traced back to our present existence, but they can certainly be found if we return to an earlier incarnation.

This shows us that we can understand a wide field of mental disorder only if we grope not merely in the secret “perpetual darkness of evolution” but if we go to an earlier existence of the human being. Nevertheless, this truth also must not be taken to extremes; for we must be aware that the human being has within him besides the qualities from an earlier life also those which are inherited, and that certain qualities of our outer human being must be considered as hereditary. It is necessary to distinguish carefully between what the human being carries with him from one existence to the next and his characteristics as descendant of his ancestors.

Now a similar disharmony can arise between our consciousness soul, which forms the basis of our self-consciousness, and our physical body. Then not only do those characteristics appear in our physical body for which we are responsible from earlier incarnations, but also those which can be found in the line of descent. But here, too, the principle is the same. The work of the consciousness soul can find an obstacle in the active laws of the physical body. And when the consciousness soul meets these obstacles then all the things arise which appear so cruelly in certain symptoms of mental disorder. Similarly all the unhappy aspects of a particular organ appear when that organ is particularly prominent in our physical body. When the organs of our physical body work properly together and none of them is more developed than the others, our physical body is a proper instrument for our consciousness soul, just as a healthy eye presents no obstacle to seeing. In this context we can draw attention to a case told by an important scientist of our time. A person had impaired vision in one eye. As a result of this it seemed to him particularly at dusk, as if he saw something of the nature of apparitions. Because this impairment of the eye influenced his vision, he often felt as if someone was standing in his way. Where such an effect by the eye creates an obstacle normal sight is not possible. These partial defects can appear in all different forms.

When the consciousness soul finds an obstacle in the physical body, this is attributable to the special prominence of the one or the other organ. For when all the organs of the physical body are working together normally it causes no resistance to the consciousness soul and we can give expression to our self-consciousness in a regular way. An obstacle is noticed only when an organ gains special prominence, for then resistance is encountered, but if this free intercourse with the outside world is obstructed and we do not notice the obstacle in our consciousness, ideas of megalomania and paranoia appear as symptoms of the actual, more deeply seated sickness.

In thus observing man as a complex being, disharmony and harmony in life can be understood. It was not possible to indicate more than briefly how the various members interact and how spiritual science can bring order and clarification to the wonderful results which are presented in the relevant literature today.

If we understand this we will be able to gain further insights. Insights into the reality of the inner human being and the interaction of the outer and the inner human being from incarnation to incarnation; how in certain failings of the outer human being, in failings of the ether body for example, there appear the consequences of weaknesses and mistakes from earlier stages of existence. But this also shows us that we will not always manage to overcome them by an inner regulated, strong soul-life, if the obstacles are too great. But it is possible in many respects, because if in abnormal soul-life there is only the conflict between outer and inner human being, then we can also understand that it is important to strengthen the inner human being as much as possible. A weak person who does not like to pursue his thinking rigorously to its conclusion, who does not want to define his ideas clearly, who is not intent on developing his feelings in such a way that they are in accord with his experiences, such a person will be able to show only weak opposition to the resistance of the outer human being: and if he bears the seeds of illness within him he will succumb to mental disorder when the time comes. But the situation is different if we can oppose sickness of the outer human being with a strong inner being, because the stronger of the two will win! From this we can see that although we cannot always be assured of victory over our outer nature, we can do much to keep the upper hand over it by the development of a strong, regulated soul-life. And we can see the reason for trying to develop our feelings and emotions and our will in such a manner that we do not feel affected by every minor inconvenience; for trying to expand our thinking to encompass the greater context; for seeking to pursue with our thinking not only the most obvious threads but to pursue them to their most detailed entailments; for being concerned to develop our desires in such a way that we do not want the impossible but are in accord with the circumstances. If we develop a strong soul-life we may still encounter a limit, but we will have done the utmost to make our inner being predominate over all external resistance.

Thus we can see the significance for the human being to develop his soul-life correspondingly. In the present there is little understanding for what is meant by developing the soul-life. It has been mentioned on similar occasions before that much weight is given today to gymnastics, for example, going for walks, training the physical body. I do not want to comment on the principle contained therein; these things can be healthy. But they quite certainly do not lead to good results if only the outer human being is taken into consideration, as if he were a machine, when exercises are done which only aim to strengthen physiologically. In gymnastics such exercises should not be undertaken at all which are characterised by the view that this or that muscle should be strengthened in particular; but we should take care that we experience an inner joy with every exercise, that we fetch the impulse for every exercise from an inner feeling of well-being. The impulses for the exercises should come from the soul. The gym teacher, for example, should be able to put himself in a position emotionally of experiencing how the soul feels one or another sort of well-being when one or another exercise is undertaken. Then we strengthen the soul; otherwise we strengthen only the body, and the soul can remain as weak as ever. Those who know life will find that exercises which are undertaken from this point of view have a health-giving effect and make quite a different contribution to the well-being of the human being than the exercises which are undertaken merely as if the human being were an anatomical machine. The connection between the life of soul and the life of the physical body is only revealed by the exact investigation of spiritual science. Those who believe that the physical can balance spiritual effort are unaware of an essential element. The spiritual scientist knows that he can become extremely tired, for example, when he is required to communicate a truth to another person and then has to listen to the other speak who is not yet able to express himself properly about the subject, who cannot yet form proper images in his thinking—whilst for example he does not become exhausted however much he researches into the spiritual world; that could be continued indefinitely. The reason for this is that when one is listening to someone else one is dealing with physical communication whereby the physical brain is involved, whilst spiritual research still requires the physical organs to some extent on lower levels, but requires them less and less the higher it reaches and therefore becomes correspondingly less exhausting. When the outer human being no longer has to participate exhaustion and tiredness no longer arise. It can be seen that differentiation must be made in spiritual activity, that there are differences whether spiritual activity is given its impulse from the soul itself or whether it is prompted from the outside. That is something which should always be taken into account: in the various stages of the human being's development those events always take place which correspond to the inner impulses.

Let us take an example which has been emphasised before and which can be found in my little work The Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy.⁴⁶ There it says that the child up to the seventh year of age primarily feels the impulse in all its actions to imitate. Then, between the changing of the teeth and puberty, its development is characterised by what might be called “orientating oneself according to an authority” or acting according to the impression made on us by another person. Let us assume that these two stages of imitation and bowing to authority are ignored. If no account is taken of them the outer body, instead of becoming an instrument of the soul, will develop irregularly and the soul will then no longer have the opportunity in the consecutive periods of human development to affect in the correct way the irregular nature of the outer human being and interact with it. Then, when the human being enters a new stage of development at significant periods in human life, we see that to a certain degree a member of his being may have fallen behind if these rules are not observed. Ignoring this law lies at the basis of schizophrenia, dementia praecox. By ignoring the correct processes in earlier periods dementia praecox can arise as disharmony between the inner and outer human being, a symptom of belated imitation. It is often the case that the disharmony of those things which are cleanly divided by spiritual science is in many cases the cause of abnormality in the soul. Similarly we can see in the appearance of senile dementia towards the end of life the disharmony between inner and outer human being, brought about because the human being did not live in such a manner that harmony could exist between inner and outer man in the period between puberty and the time when the astral body is fully developed.

This shows us that knowledge of the human being can illuminate the nature of error and mental disorder. And even if we find only a superficial link, if a person cannot say that error, in so far as it is part of normal soul-life, can affect our outer nature, it has to be said in contrast that the law according to which the development of a strong logic, a regulated soul-life harmonious in feeling and willing can strengthen us against the obstacles which arise from the outer human being is greatly encouraging. Thus spiritual science gives us the possibility, perhaps not always, but most of the time, of countering the superiority, the supremacy of the outer human being. It is important that when we strengthen and nurture the inner human being we strengthen and nurture it against the predominance of the outer human being. Spiritual science gives us the healing power to do this. It therefore always emphasises the importance of developing ordered thinking which avoids irrelevancies, not to stop with one's thoughts half-way but to pursue them consistently to the end. That is why spiritual science, with its strict demands to order our soul-life in such a manner that it appears internally disciplined and in harmony, is itself a medicine against the predominance of the pathological symptoms of our outward bodily nature. And the human being can be victorious over pathological pre-dispositions when he can envelop bodily weakness, bodily mis-formation with the light of a healthy willing, a healthy feeling and a self-disciplined thinking. That is something which is unpopular today, and yet it is important for an understanding of the present. Thus spiritual science even gives us some consolation, namely that in the spirit, if we truly strengthen it, we continue to have the best remedy for everything which can affect us in life. By means of spiritual science we learn not merely to theorise about the spirit, but we learn to turn it into a healing power within us when we make the effort to continue where philistines like to stop: the half-finished thought. For it is nothing but half-finished thinking when it is said: “Prove what you say about repeated earth lives and so on!” It cannot be proved to the person who refuses to lead his thoughts to their conclusion. Whole truths cannot be proved with half thoughts. They can only be proved to whole thinking, and whole thinking has to be developed by the human being within himself.

If the indications which have been given here are developed further, it will be seen that this is central to the evil of our time: the disbelief in the spirit, But it will also be seen that an indication has been given here where the means lie to transform disbelief into belief, into true strong spirituality. The belief in reason is lacking in large measure in mankind today. Therefore the reasoned objectivity which is necessary to understand the truths of spiritual science is not always present. It is not with ridicule and irony, but with a certain sadness that the lines in Faust about certain people might be applied to our present time.

“If they possessed the philosopher's stone,
The philosopher would not match the stone.”⁴⁷

Reason can understand spiritual science and reasoned understanding of spiritual science can heal the furthest reaches of the bodily nature. That, by the way, is claimed by others than only by spiritual scientists today. This claim has also been made by those who tried to approach the spirit by other paths than modern spiritual science, but such people, too, are little understood in the present. Who would not ridicule Hegel today precisely because he emphasised the existence, the work and the necessity of reason everywhere? He emphasised it in such a manner that he thought of the work of reason in the human being today in the following way: “I imagine this human life as a cross”, and for Hegel the roses on the cross were equivalent to reason in the human being. That is why he prefaces one of his works with the motto: “Reason is the rose on the cross of the present”,⁴⁸ and belief in reason will make the cross victorious. Belief in reason and belief in disciplined thinking, in harmonious feeling and willing will attach the roses to the cross. We have the strength in us to counter what we call mental disorder, at least to a certain degree, when we have belief in harmonious feeling which can be developed, harmonious willing which can be developed and self-disciplined reason which can be developed and which must be developed. If we develop these three, then under all circumstances we will be more strong and triumphant in life. And because Hegel draws together in reason a harmonious feeling, willing and disciplined thinking, a reasoned intellectuality, he makes the statement which can serve as motto for us in developing our soul-life, that for the human being reason should be the rose on the cross of the present.

• 44. The reference is likely to be to Johann Gottlieb Fichte, whose philosophy of the ego bases on the principle that the true ego, as the founding principle which determines subject and object, can never become object itself.
• 45. Wilhelm Wundt, 1832–1920. Philosopher.
• 46. Rudolf Steiner, The Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1980.
• 47. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust II, Act 1, Imperial Palace, 11.5063/64.
• 48. Cf. the Introduction to G.W.F. Hegel's Philosophy of Right. (Grundlinien einer Philosophie des Rechts oder Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundriss).

Allow me to begin today's lecture with a personal recollection. As a quite young man, I once had a slight experience of the kind which seem unimportant and yet can yield pleasant memories again and again in later life.

I was attending a course of university lectures on the history of literature.⁴⁹ The lecturer began by considering the character of cultural life in the time of Lessing, with the intention of going on to discuss various literary developments during the later eighteenth century and part of the nineteenth. His opening words were deeply impressive. In order to characterise the chief innovation which appeared in the cultural life of Lessing's time, he said: “Artistic consciousness acquired an aesthetic conscience.” His lecture showed that what he meant by this statement—we need not now ask whether it was justified—was roughly as follows:

All the artistic considerations and intentions connected with the endeavours of Lessing and his contemporaries were imbued with a deeply earnest wish to make something more of art than a mere appendage to life or a mere pleasure among others. Art was to become a necessary element in every form of human existence worthy of the name. To raise art up to the level of a serious human concern, worthy to be heard in the concert of voices which speak of the great and fruitful activities of mankind—such was the aim of the pioneer thinkers of that period. That is what the lecturer wanted to say when he emphasised that an aesthetic conscience had found its way into the artistic and literary life of those times.

Why was this statement important for a soul seeking to grasp the riddles of existence, as reflected in one or another human mind? Because a conception of art was to be ennobled and given expression in a way that left no doubt as to its importance for the whole character and destiny of human life. The serious nature and significance of artistic work were intended to be placed beyond discussion, and it is indeed true that the experiences denoted by the word “conscience” are such that all the situations to which they apply are ennobled. In other words, when “conscience” is spoken of, the human soul recognises that the word refers to a most valuable element in its own life, and that to be without this element would indicate a serious deficiency.

How often has the significance of conscience been brought out by the words, no matter whether they are taken literally or metaphorically: “When conscience speaks in the human soul, it is the voice of God that speaks.” And one could scarcely find anyone, however unprepared to reflect on higher spiritual concerns, who has not formed some idea of what conscience is. Everyone feels vaguely that whatever conscience may be, it is experienced as a voice in the individual's breast which determines with irresistible power what is good and what is bad; what man must do in order to gain his own approval and what he must leave undone if he is not to despise himself. Hence we can say: Conscience appears to every individual as something holy in the human breast, and that to form some kind of opinion about it is relatively easy.

Things are different, however, if we glance briefly at man's history and his spiritual life. Anyone who is trying to look more deeply into a spiritual situation of this kind will surely wish to consult those in whom a knowledge of such matters may be presupposed—the philosophers. But in this case, as in so many others of wide human concern, he will find that the explanations of conscience given by various philosophers are very different, or so it seems, though a more or less obscure kernel is similar in all of them. But that is not the worst of it. If anyone were to take the trouble to inquire what the philosophers of ancient and modern times mean by conscience, he would be met with all sorts of very fine phrases and also by many that are hard to understand, but he would find nothing of which he could say beyond question that it reflected his feeling: that is conscience.

Of course it would lead us too far if I were to give you an anthology of the various explanations of conscience that have been given over the centuries by the philosophical leaders of mankind. But we may note that from about the first third of the Middle Ages and on through mediaeval philosophy, whenever conscience was spoken of, it was always said to be a power in the human soul which was capable of immediately declaring what a man should do and what he should leave undone. However, these mediaeval philosophers say also that underneath this power of the soul there is something else, something of finer quality than conscience itself. A personality often mentioned here, Meister Eckhart,⁵⁰ tells of a tiny spark that underlies conscience; an eternal element in the soul which, if it is heeded, declares with unmistakable power the laws of good and evil.

In modern times, we encounter once more the most varied accounts of conscience, including some which make a peculiar impression, for they clearly fail to recognise the serious nature of the divine inner voice that we call conscience. There are philosophers who say that conscience is something that a man acquires when, by extending continually his experience of life, he learns what is useful, harmful, satisfying and so on for himself. The sum of these experiences gives rise to a judgment which says: “Do this—don't do that.”

There are other philosophers who speak of conscience in terms of the highest praise. One of these is the great German philosopher, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who pointed above all to the human ego not the transient personal ego but the eternal essence in man—as the fundamental principle of all human thought and being. At the same time, he held that the highest experience for the human ego was the experience of conscience,⁵¹ when a man hears the inward judgment: “This you must do, for it would go against your conscience not to do it.” The majesty and nobility of this judgment, he believed, could not be surpassed. And if Fichte was the philosopher who laid the strongest emphasis on the power and significance of the human ego, it is characteristic of him that he ranked conscience as the ego's most significant impulse.

The further we move on into modern times, and the more materialistic thinking becomes, the more do we find conscience deprived of its majesty—not in the human heart, but in the thinking of philosophers who are more or less imbued with materialism. One example will be enough to illustrate this trend.

In the second half of the 19th century, there lived a philosopher who for nobility of soul, harmonious human feelings and generous breadth of mind must rank with the finest personalities. I mean Bartholomew Carnieri:⁵² he is seldom mentioned now. If you go through his writings, you find that in spite of his fine qualities, he was deeply imbued with the materialistic thinking of his time. What, he asks, are we to make of conscience? Fundamentally, he says, it is no more than the sum of habits and judgments instilled in us during early youth and strengthened by the experience of life. These influences, of which we are no longer fully conscious, are the source of the inner voice which says: “This you must do—this you must not do,”

Thus the origin of conscience is traced back to external influences and habits, and even these are confined to a very narrow range. Some even more materialistically-minded philosophers of the 19th century have gone further still. Paul Ree,⁵³ for example, who at one time had great influence on Nietzsche, wrote on the origin of conscience. His book is interesting as a symptom of the outlook of our times. His ideas—allowing for some inevitable distortion of details in any brief sketch of them—are roughly as follows. Man, says Paul Ree, has developed in respect of all his faculties, and therefore in respect of conscience. Originally he had no trace of what we call conscience. It is gross prejudice to hold that conscience is eternal. A voice telling us what to do and what not to do did not exist originally, according to Ree. But in human nature there was something else which did develop—something we can call an instinct for revenge. This was the most primitive of all impulses. If anyone suffered at the hands of another, the instinct for revenge drove him to pay back the injury in kind. By degrees, as social life became more complicated, the carrying out of vengeance was handed over to the ruling authorities. So people came to believe that any deed which injured another person had by necessity to be followed by something that had previously been called vengeance. Certain deeds which had bad results had to be requited by other deeds. In the course of time, this conviction gave rise to an association of certain feelings with particular actions, or even with the temptation to commit them. The original urge for revenge was forgotten, but a feeling became ingrained in the human soul that a harmful action must be paid for. So now, when a man believes he is hearing an “inner voice”, this is in fact nothing but the voice of vengeance, changed into an inward form. Here we have an extreme example of this kind of interpretation—extreme in the sense that conscience is portrayed as a complete illusion.

On the other hand, we must admit that it is going much too far to assert, as some people do, that conscience has existed as long as human beings have been living on the earth; in other words, that conscience is in some sense eternal. Since mistakes are made both by those who think more spiritually about it, and by those who regard conscience as a pure illusion, it is very difficult to reach any agreement on the subject, although it belongs to our everyday inner life, and indeed to a sacred part of it.

A glance over the philosophers will show that in earlier times even the best of them thought of conscience differently from the way in which we are bound to think of it today. For when we say that conscience is a voice speaking out of a divine impulse in the breast of the simplest man, saying, “This you must do—that you must leave undone” this is somewhat different from the teaching we find in Socrates⁵⁴ and in his successor, Plato.⁵⁵ They both insist that virtue can be learnt. Socrates, indeed, says that if a man forms clear ideas as to what he should and should not do, then gradually, through this knowledge of what virtue is, he can learn to act virtuously.

Now one could easily object, from a modern standpoint, that things would go badly if we had to wait until we had learnt what is right and what is wrong before we could act virtuously. Conscience speaks with elemental power in the human soul and is heard by the individual as saying “This you must do, and that you must leave alone”, long before we learn to form ideas concerning good and evil and thus begin to formulate moral precepts. Moreover, conscience brings a certain tranquillity to the soul on occasions when a man can say to himself: “You have done something you can approve of.” It would be bad—many people might say—if we had to learn a lot about the nature and character of virtue in order to arrive at an agreed estimation of our behaviour. Hence we can say that the philosopher to whom we look up as a martyr of philosophy, whose death crowned and ennobled his philosophical work—I mean Socrates—sets before us a concept of virtue which hardly tallies with our view of conscience today: and even with later Greek thinkers we always find the assertion that perfect virtue is something that can be learnt, a doctrine not in keeping with the primitive, elemental, power of conscience.

How is it, then, that so pre-eminent and powerful a person as Socrates is not aware of the idea of conscience that we have today, although we feel whenever we approach him, as Plato describes him, that the purest morality and the highest degree of virtue speak through his words? The reason is, that the ideas, concepts and inward experiences which feel today as though they were innate, were in fact acquired laboriously by the human soul in the course of time. When we trace the spiritual life of humanity back into the past, we find that our idea of conscience and our feeling for it were not present in the same way in ancient times, and therefore not among the Greeks. Conscience, in fact, was born. But nothing about the birth of conscience can be learnt by the easy methods of external experience and scholarship, as Paul Ree, for example, tried to do. We have to go more deeply into the matter if we are to gain enlightenment for the human soul.

Now our task in these lectures has been precisely to illuminate the constitution of the soul, with the aid of the light that comes from raising the soul to higher levels of knowledge. The whole life of the soul has been described, as it reveals itself to the inner eye of the seer: the eye which does not gain knowledge of the sense-world only, but looks behind the veil of the sense-world into the region where the primary sources, the spiritual foundations of the sense-world are to be found. And it has repeatedly been shown—for example in the lecture, “What is Mysticism?”—that the consciousness of the seer opens the way into deeper regions of the soul, over and above the soul-life we experience in everyday life. We believe that even in ordinary life we come to know something of this deeper level when we look into ourselves and encounter the experiences of thinking, feeling and willing. But it was pointed out also, that in ordinary waking consciousness the soul reveals only the outer aspect of the spiritual. Just as we have to penetrate behind the veil that is spread over the sense-world if we are to discover the underlying causes of these appearances as they are revealed behind everything we see and hear and our brain apprehends, so we must look behind our thinking, feeling and willing, and thus behind our ordinary inner life, if we are to get to know the spiritual background of our own lives.

From these starting-points, we set out to throw light on the life of the human soul in its many interwoven branches. We saw that it must be conceived as made up of three members which must be distinguished but not—please note—treated as quite separate from one another. We named these three members the sentient soul, the intellectual soul and the consciousness soul, and we saw how the ego is the unifying point which holds the three members together, plays on them as though on the strings of an instrument, causing them to sound together in the most varied ways, harmonious or dissonant. This activity of the ego developed by gradual stages, and we shall understand how our present-day consciousness and soul-life have evolved from primeval times if we glance at what man can become in the future, or even today, if from within the consciousness soul he develops a higher, clairvoyant form of consciousness.

The consciousness soul in its ordinary condition enables us to grasp the external world perceived through our senses. If anyone wishes to penetrate behind the veil of the sense-world, he must raise his soul-life to a higher level. Then he makes the great discovery that something like an awakening of the soul can occur—something comparable to the outcome of a successful operation on a man blind from birth, when a hitherto unknown world of light and colour breaks in upon him. So it is with someone who by appropriate methods raises his soul to a higher level of development. A moment comes when those elements in our environment which we normally ignored, although they are swarming around us all the time, enter into our soul-life as a wealth of beings and activities because we have acquired a new organ of perception for them.

When someone achieves by training, a conscious seership of this kind, his ego is completely present throughout. This means that he moves among spiritual facts and beings, on which our sense-world is based, just as he finds his way among chairs and tables in the physical world: and he now takes up into a higher sphere of soul-life the ego which had led him through his experiences of sentient soul, intellectual soul and consciousness soul.

Let us now turn back from this clairvoyant consciousness, which is illuminated and set aglow by the ego, to the ordinary life of the soul. The ego is alive in the most varied ways in the three soul-members. If we have a man whose life is given over to the desires, passions and instinctive urges that arise from his sentient soul, we can say that his ego is hardly at all active; it is like a feeble flame in the midst of the surging waves of the sentient soul and has little power against them. In the intellectual soul the ego gains some freedom and independence.

Here man comes to himself and so to some awareness of his ego, for the intellectual soul can develop only in so far as man reflects upon and elaborates, in inner tranquillity, the experiences that have come to him through the sentient soul. The ego becomes more and more radiant and at last achieves full clarity in the consciousness soul. Then a man can say to himself: “I have grasped myself—I have attained real self-consciousness.” This degree of clarity can be activated by the ego only when it has reached the stage of working in the consciousness soul, after progressing from the sentient soul through the intellectual soul.

If, however, a human being can further rise in his ego to clairvoyant consciousness beyond the consciousness soul, comparable to yet higher soul-principles, we can well understand that the seer, looking back over the course of human evolution, should say to us: just as the ego rises in this way to higher states of soul, so did it enter the sentient soul from a subordinate condition. We have seen how the soul-members sentient soul, intellectual soul and consciousness soul—are related to the members of his bodily organisation—physical body, etheric and astral or sentient body. Hence you will find it understandable that as spiritual science indicates—the ego, before rising to the sentient soul, was active in the sentient body, and earlier still in the etheric and physical bodies. In those times the ego still guided man from outside. It held sway in the darkness of bodily life; man was not yet able to say “I” regarding himself, to find the central point of his own being within himself. What are we to think of this ego which held sway in the primeval past and built up man's exterior bodily organisation? Are we to regard it as less perfect, compared with the ego we bear within our souls today?

We look on our ego as the real inner focus of our being: it endows us with inner life, and is capable, through schooling, of endless progress in the future. We see in it the epitome of our human nature and the guarantor of our human dignity. Now when we were not yet aware of this ego, while it was working on us from out of the dark spiritual powers of the world, was it then less perfect, by comparison with what it is now? Only a quite abstract way of thinking could say so.

Consider our physical body; we look on it as having been formed out of the spiritual world in the primordial past as a dwelling for the human soul. Only a materialistic mind could believe that this human body had not been born originally from the spirit. Seen merely from an external point of view, the physical body must appear a miracle of perfection. What do all our intellectual ability and technical skill amount to, compared with the wisdom manifest in the structure of the human heart? Or take the engineering technique that goes into the building of bridges, and so forth—what is it compared with the construction of the human thigh-bone, with its wonderful crisscross of support members, as seen through the microscope. It would be sheer boundless arrogance for man to suppose that he has attained in the slightest degree to the wisdom inherent in the formation of the external physical body. And consider our soul-life, taking into account only our instincts, desires and passions—how do they function? Are we not doing all we can to undermine inwardly the wisdom-filled organisation of our body? Indeed, if we consider without prejudice the marvel of our physical organisation, we have to admit that our bodily structure is far wiser than anything we can show in our inner life, although we may hope that our inner life will advance from its present imperfection towards increasing perfection. We can hardly come to any other conclusion, even without clairvoyance, if we simply look impartially at the observable facts.

Is not this wise activity, which has built up the human body as a dwelling-place for the ego, bound to have something in common with the nature of the ego itself? Must we not think of this formative power as having the character of an immeasurably more advanced ego? We must say: Something related to our ego has worked during primordial times at building a structure which the ego could come to inhabit. Anyone who refuses to believe this may imagine something different, but then he must also suppose that an ordinary house, built for human habitation, has not been designed by a human mind but has been put together merely by the action of natural forces. One assumption is as true as the other. Thus we look back to a primordial past where a spiritual power endowed with an ego-nature of unlimited perfection worked upon our bodily sheaths. In those times our own ego was hidden in subconscious depths, thence it worked its way up to its present state of consciousness.

If we look at this evolution from the far-distant past, when the ego was hidden within its sheaths as though in the darkness of a mother's womb, we find that although the ego had no knowledge of itself, it was all the closer to those spiritual beings who worked on our bodily vehicles and were related to the human ego, but of incomparably greater perfection. Clairvoyant insight thus looks back to a far-distant past when man had not yet acquired ego-consciousness, for he was embedded in spiritual life itself, and when his soul-life, too, was different, for it was much closer to the soul-forces from which the ego has emerged. In those times, also, we find in man a primal clairvoyant consciousness which functioned dimly and dreamily, for it was not illumined by the light of an ego; and it was from this mode of consciousness that the ego first came forth. The faculty that man in the future will acquire with his ego was present in the primeval past without the ego. Clairvoyant consciousness entails that spiritual beings and spiritual facts are seen in the environment, and this applies to early man, although his clairvoyance was dreamlike and he beheld the spiritual world as though in a dream. Since he was not yet shone through by an ego, he was not obliged to remain within himself when he wished to behold the spiritual. He beheld the spiritual around him and looked on himself as part of the spiritual world; and whatever he did was imbued, for him, with a spiritual character. When he thought of something, he could not have said to himself, “I am thinking”, as a man might do today; his thought stood before his clairvoyant vision. And to experience a feeling he had no need to look into himself; his feeling radiated from him and united him with his whole spiritual environment.

Such was the soul-life of man in primordial times. From out of his dreamlike clairvoyant consciousness he had to develop inwardly in order to come to himself, and in himself to that centre of his being which today is still imperfect but will advance ever more nearly towards perfection in the future, when man with his ego will step forth into the spiritual world.

Now if light is thrown on those primordial times by means of clairvoyance in the way already described, what does the seer tell us concerning the human consciousness of those times when a man had, for example, committed an evil deed? His deed did not present itself to him as something he could inwardly assess. He beheld it, with all its harmfulness and shamefulness, as a ghostly vision confronting his soul. And when a feeling concerning his evil deed arose in his soul, the shamefulness of it came before him as a spiritual reality, so that he was as though surrounded by a vision of the evil he had wrought.

Then, in the course of time, this dreamlike clairvoyance faded and man's ego came increasingly to the fore. In so far as man found this central point of his being within himself, the old clairvoyance was extinguished and self-consciousness established itself more and more clearly. The vision he had previously had of his bad and good deeds was transposed into his inner life, and deeds once clairvoyantly beheld were mirrored in his soul.

Now what sort of forms were beheld in dreamy clairvoyance as the counterpart of man's evil deed? They were pictures whereby the spiritual powers around him showed how he had disturbed and disrupted the cosmic order, and they were intended to have a salutary effect. It was a counteraction by the Gods, who wished to raise him up and, by showing him the effect of his deed, to enable him to eliminate its harmful consequences. This was indeed a terrifying experience for him, but it was fundamentally beneficial, coming as it did from the cosmic background out of which man himself had emerged. When the time came for man to find in himself his ego-centre, the external vision was transferred to his soul in the form of a reflected picture. When the ego first makes its appearance in the sentient soul, it is weak and frail, and man first has to work slowly upon himself in order that his ego may gradually advance towards perfection. Now what would have happened if, when the external clairvoyant vision of the effects of his misdeeds had disappeared, it had not been replaced by an inward counterpart of its beneficial influence? With his still frail ego, he would have been torn to and fro in his sentient soul by his passions, as though in a surging boundless sea. What, then, was it that was transferred at this historic moment from the external world to the inner life of the soul? If it was the great cosmic Spirit that had brought the harmful effects of a man's deed before his clairvoyant consciousness as a healing influence, showing him what he had to make good, so, later on, it was the same cosmic Spirit that powerfully revealed itself in his inner life at a time when his ego was still weak. Having previously spoken to man through a clairvoyant vision, the cosmic Spirit withdrew into man's inner life and imparted to him what had to be said about correcting the distortion caused in the world-order. Man's ego is still weak, and the cosmic Spirit keeps a perpetual, unsleeping watch over it and passes judgment where the ego could not yet judge. Behind the weak ego stands something like a reflection of the powerful cosmic Spirit which had formerly shown to man through clairvoyant vision the consequences of his deeds. And this reflection is now experienced by him as conscience watching over him.

So we see how true it is when conscience is naively described as the voice of God in man. At the same time we see how spiritual science points to the moment when external vision became inward experience and conscience was born.

What I have now been saying can be drawn purely from the spiritual world. No external history is required; the facts I have described are seen by the inward eye. Anyone who can see them will experience them as incontestable truths, but a certain necessity of the times may lead us to ask: Could external history perhaps reveal something that would confirm, in this case, the facts seen by inner vision?

The findings of clairvoyant consciousness can always be tested by external evidence, and there is no need to fear that the evidence will contradict them. That could seem to happen only if the testing were inexact. But we will give one example that can show how external facts confirm the statements here derived from clairvoyant insight.

It is not so very long since the time when the birth of conscience can be seen to occur. If we look back to the fifth and sixth centuries BC, we encounter in ancient Greece the great dramatic poet Aeschylus,⁵⁶ and in his work we find a theme which is especially remarkable for the reason that the same subject was treated by a late Greek poet in a quite different way.

Aeschylus shows us how Agamemnon, on returning from Troy, is killed by his wife, Klytemnestra, when he arrives home. Agamemnon is avenged by his son Orestes, who, acting on the advice of the gods, kills his mother. What, then, is the consequence for Orestes of this deed? Aeschylus shows how the burden of matricide calls forth in Orestes a mode of seeing which was no longer normal in those times. The enormity of his crime caused the old clairvoyance to awake in him, like an inheritance from the past. Orestes could say: “Apollo, the god himself, told me it was a just act for me to avenge my father upon my mother. Everything I have done speaks in my favour. But the blood of my mother is working on!” And in the second part of the Orestean trilogy we are powerfully shown how the old clairvoyance awakens in Orestes and how the avenging goddesses, the Erinyes—or Furies, as they were later called by the Romans—approach.

Orestes sees before him, in dreamlike clairvoyance, the effect of his act of matricide in its external form. Apollo had approved the deed; but there is something higher. Aeschylus wished to indicate that a still higher cosmic ordinance obtains, and this he could do only by making Orestes become clairvoyant at that moment, for he had not yet gone far enough to dramatise what today we call an inner voice. If we study his work, we feel that he was at the stage when something like conscience ought to emerge from the whole content of the human soul, but he never quite reached that point. He confronts Orestes with dreamlike, clairvoyant pictures that have not yet been transformed into conscience. Yet we can see how he is on the verge of recognising conscience. Every word that he gives to Klytemnestra, for example, makes one feel unmistakably that he ought to indicate the idea of conscience in its present-day sense; but he never quite gets that far. In that century, the great poet could only show how bad deeds rose up before the human soul in earlier times.

Now we will pass over Sophocles and come to Euripides,⁵⁷ who described the same situation only a generation later. Scholars have rightly pointed out—though spiritual science alone can show this in its true light—that in Euripides the dream-pictures experienced by Orestes are no more than shadowy images of the inward promptings of conscience—somewhat as in Shakespeare. Here we have palpable evidence of the stages whereby the idea of conscience was taken hold of by the art of poetry. We see how Aeschylus, great poet as he was, cannot yet speak of conscience itself, while his successor, Euripides, does speak of it. With this development in mind, we can see why human thinking in general could work its way only slowly towards a true conception of conscience. The force now active in conscience was active also in ancient times; the pictures showing the effects of a man's deeds rose before his clairvoyant sight. The only difference is that this force became internalised; but before it could be inwardly experienced, the whole process of human development, which led gradually to the concept of conscience, had to take its course.

Thus we see in conscience a faculty which comes to the fore by degrees and has to be acquired by man's own endeavours. Where, then, should we look for this most intense activity of conscience? At that point where the human ego was beginning to make itself known and was still weak, that is something which can be shown in human development. In ancient Greece it had already advanced to the stage of the intellectual soul. But if we look further back to Egypt and Chaldea outer history knows nothing of this, but Plato and Aristotle were clairvoyantly aware of it—we find that even the highest culture of those times was achieved without the presence of an inwardly independent ego. The difference between the knowledge that was nurtured and put to use by the sanctuaries of Egypt and Chaldea and our modern science is that our science is grasped by the consciousness soul, whereas in pre-Hellenic times it all depended on inspirations from the sentient soul. In ancient Greece the ego progressed from the sentient soul into the intellectual soul. Today we are living in the epoch of the consciousness soul, which means that a real ego-consciousness arises for the first time. Anyone who studies the evolution of mankind, and in particular the transition from eastern to western culture, can see how human progress has been marked by ever-increasing feelings of freedom and independence. Whereas man had formerly felt himself entirely dependent on the Gods and the inspirations that came from them, in the West, culture first came to spring from the inner life.

This is especially evident, for example, in the way Aeschylus strives to bring about a consciousness of the ego in the human soul. We see him standing on the frontier between East and West, with one eye on the East and the other on the West, gathering from the human soul the elements that will come together to form the concept of conscience. He strives to give this new form of conscience a dramatic embodiment, but is not yet quite able to do so. Comparisons are apt to be confusing; we must not only compare, but also distinguish. The point is, that in the West everything was designed to raise the ego from the sentient soul to the consciousness soul. In the East the ego was veiled in obscurity and had no freedom. In the West, by contrast, the ego works its way up into the consciousness soul. If the old dreamlike clairvoyance is extinguished, everything else tends to awaken the ego and to evoke conscience as guardian of the ego as a divine inner voice. Aeschylus was the corner-stone between the worlds of East and West.

In the Eastern World men had retained a living awareness of their origin in the divine cosmic Spirit, and this made it possible for them to gain understanding of the event which took place a few hundred years after endeavours had been made by many—or Aeschylus for example—to find something that spoke as the voice of God within themselves. For this event brought to mankind the impulse which from all spiritual standpoints must be seen as the greatest impulse ever to enter into the evolution of the earth and man—the impulse we call the Christ-Impulse.

It was the Christ-impulse that first made it possible for humanity to realise that God, the Creator of things and of the external sheaths of man, can be recognised in our inward life. Only by understanding the divine humanity of Christ Jesus were men enabled to understand that the voice of God could be heard within the soul. In order that men should be able to find something of the divine nature in their own inner life, it was necessary for Christ to enter into the evolution of humanity as an external historical-event. If the Christ, a Divine Being, had not been present in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, if he had not shown once and for all that God can be discerned in our inner life, because he had once been present in a human body; if he had not appeared as the conqueror of death through the Mystery of Golgotha, men would never have been able to comprehend the indwelling of Divinity in the human soul.

If anyone claims that this indwelling could be discerned even if there had been no historical Christ Jesus, he could equally well say that we should have eyes even if there were no sun. As against this one-sided view of some philosophers that, since without eyes we could not see the light, the origin of light must be traced to the eyes, we must always set Goethe's aphorism: The eye is created by light for light.⁵⁸ If there were no sun to fill space with light, no eyes would ever have developed in the human organism. The eyes are created by light, and without the sun there would be no eyes. No eye is capable of perceiving the sun without having first received from the sun the power to do so. In the same way, there could be no power to grasp and recognise the Christ-nature if the Christ-Impulse had not entered into external history. What the sun out there in the cosmos does for human sight, so the historical Christ-Jesus makes possible what we call the entry of the divine nature into our inner life.

The elements necessary for understanding this were present in the stream of thought that came over from the East; they needed only to be raised to a higher level. It was in the West that souls were ripe to grasp and accept this impulse—the West, where experiences which had belonged to the outer world were transferred to the inner life most intensively, and in the form of conscience watched over a generally weak ego. In this way souls were strengthened, and prepared to hear the voice of conscience now saying within them: The Divinity who appeared in the East to those able to look clairvoyantly into the world—this Divinity now lives in us!

However, what was thus being prepared could not have become conscious experience if the inward Divinity had not spoken in advance in the dawning of conscience. So we see that external understanding for the Divinity of Christ Jesus was born in the East, and the emergence of conscience came to meet it from the West. For example, we find that conscience is more and more often spoken of in the Roman world, at the beginning of the Christian era, and the further westward we go, the clearer is the evidence for the recognised existence of conscience or for its presence in embryonic form.

Thus East and West played into each other's hands. We see the sun of the Christ-nature rising in the East, while in the West the development of conscience is preparing the way for understanding the Christ. Hence the victorious advance of Christianity is towards the West, not the East. In the East we see the spread of a religion which represents the final consequence—though on the highest level—of the eastern outlook: Buddhism takes hold of the eastern world. Christianity takes hold of the western world, because Christianity had first created the organ for receiving it. Here we see Christianity brought into relation with the deepened element in western culture: the concept of conscience embodied in Christianity.

Not through the study of external history, but only through an inward contemplation of the facts, shall we come to knowledge of these developments. What I am saying today will be met with disbelief by many people. But a demand of the times is that we should recognise the spirit in external phenomena. This, however, is possible only if we are at least able initially to discern the spirit where it speaks to us in the form of a clear message. Popular consciousness says: When conscience speaks, it is God speaking in the soul. The highest spiritual consciousness says that when conscience speaks, it is truly the cosmic Spirit speaking. And spiritual science brings out the connection between conscience and the greatest event in the evolution of mankind, the Christ-Event. Hence it is not surprising that conscience has thereby been ennobled and raised to a higher sphere. When we hear that something has been done for reasons of conscience, we feel that conscience is regarded as one of the most important possessions of mankind.

Thus we can see how natural and right it is for the human heart to speak of conscience as “God in man”. And when Goethe says that the highest experience for man is when “God-Nature reveals itself to him”, we must realise that God can reveal himself in the spirit to man only if Nature is seen in the light of its spiritual background. This has been provided for in human evolution, on the one hand by the light of Christ, shining from outside, and on the other by the divine light within us: the light of conscience. Hence a philosopher such as Fichte, who studies human character, is justified in saying that conscience is the highest voice in our inward life. On this account, also, we are aware that our dignity as human beings is inseparable from conscience. We are human beings because we have an ego-consciousness; and the conscience we have at our side is also at the side of our ego. Thus we look on conscience as a most sacred individual possession, inviolable by the external world, whose voice enables us to determine our direction and our goal. When conscience speaks, no other voice may intrude.

So it is that on one side conscience ensures our connection with the primordial power of the world and on the other guarantees the fact that in our inmost self we have something like a drop flowing from the Godhead. And man can know: When conscience speaks in him, it is a God speaking.

• 49. Held by his teacher and friend Karl Julius Schröer, 1825–1900. Cf. also Rudolf Steiner's remarks in the lecture of 29th October 1914 in Berlin, in: Aus schicksaltragender Zeit, Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach, Switzerland. (GA 64)
• 50. See notes 14 and 13.
• 51. See J.G. Fichte, Die Bestimmung des Menschen, 1800, Book 3: Glaube.
• 52. Bartholomew Carnieri, 1821–1909. Cf. his characterisation of conscience in the introduction to Der moderne Mensch. Versuch einer Lebensführung, Stuttgart, 1904.
• 53. Paul Ree, 1849–1901. Die Entstehung des Gewissens, Berlin, 1885.
• 54. Socrates, 470–399 B.C.
• 55. Plato, 427–347 B.C.
• 56. Aeschylus, 525–456 B.C., in his Oresteia trilogy.
• 57. >Euripides, c. 480–406 B.C., deals with this subject in Electra and in Orestes.<
• 58. See note 4.

We have been endeavouring, as Christmas has drawn near, to enter into that spirit which also from the anthroposophical standpoint may be called the true spirit of Christmas. We have been seeking to realise that there is an interpretation of the Christmas Festival, which in a measure enables us to bring the spirit of Christmas to bear on everything of importance that happens to a man during the year. The celebration of the Christmas Festival, in the true anthroposophical spirit, is a matter of the utmost importance to the anthroposophist, especially at the present time. And what else could this mean, this ‘celebration of Christmas in the true anthroposophical spirit,’ but that all the year round we should set before ourselves, in fervency of soul, the endeavour to fulfil our spiritual duty towards the present stage of human evolution; and to this end we must understand the task of humanity in our time and continually enrich our souls through experiences drawn from the spiritual world. This is to be our aim, in order that we may be able, that we may have the right to belong to those whose task it is to accomplish the necessary spiritual work in the next epoch of humanity. Thus the whole year through, we seek to fill our thoughts with what Anthroposophy has to give us, to open our hearts to anthroposophical wisdom. And when the year draws to its close (and even outwardly this season has a symbolical importance, for in the outside world, owing to the limited power of the sun’s rays, an excess of darkness prevails), then, at this Festival time, let us try to understand how we may connect our Christmas Celebration with the anthroposophical year that is past. Let us be continually realising afresh that anthroposophical truth, in its entirety, must be permeated and illumined by that mighty Impulse which we call the Christ-Impulse! If we try in this way to inscribe the anthroposophical truths in our hearts and souls, as the message of Christ Himself, then we can indeed say: At Christmas-time we anthroposophists must develop the spirit of Christmas by allowing all that we have learned during the whole year to be lighted up in our souls by means of deeper feelings, so that new force may be generated in us. We must be able to feel that we not only know something of anthroposophical wisdom, but that it penetrates our soul, our heart, becomes in us an illuminating, glowing force, which enables us during the coming year to fulfil our duty and to carry on our work in any sphere of life in which we may be placed. If we thus seek to transmute the holy truths of the Spirit into holy feelings, into holy force in our souls, then will be born in us, on a higher plane, that which we learn at first by means of the forces of this earthly world. For this reason we ought, ever more and more, to call to mind those occasions upon which one or another of the human family strove to rise to those spiritual realms where the Christ Himself is to be found. The truly Christian poet, Novalis, has already guided us, during this Christmas-time, into these realms of spirit. And again to-day a little of that anthroposophical Christmas spirit just described—the kindling of feeling by means of those rays of warmth—may well be sought in the writings of a truly anthroposophical poet, such as Novalis was. Let us turn to Novalis.

We may perhaps most effectually realise, in the various forms in which Novalis gives us his rarest wisdom, how we may be enabled, through Anthroposophy, to fill life with a new glory. All around us life is rushing by, and our own work forms part of this modern whirl of life. When, through Anthroposophy, we gain the power of bringing wisdom down from the spiritual world, we shall gild the whole of life with the gold of anthroposophical wisdom, however prosaic circumstances may appear. This we must learn. We shall see that life becomes filled with a new glory, if each year we allow the anthroposophical Christmas-spirit to enter into our souls; if we, so to speak, allow Anthroposophy to be re-born within us at Christmas-time, as feeling and perception. We shall then feel how impossible it is, if we want to live here in the ordinary world, to attain, even in small degree, to spiritual perception. There is much to-day which hinders a man from unfolding his wings in order to rise to the spiritual world! Let me tell you briefly something which we may regard to a certain extent as symbolical.

Many of us, who come to Anthroposophy, may say: Ah! everything which it offers to me would be beautiful, would be glorious; it warms my heart and fills my soul with love, but I cannot believe it! I am bound by what I have learned in the outer world, by the prejudices which I have acquired. ‘That is mere idle fancy,’ say these prejudices: ‘These things do not rest on any sure foundation!’ Many a man is thus thrown into bitter doubt. If he could only rise above the prejudices of the outer world, by which he is so beset at the present time, if he could only feel himself free in the pure ether of the spirit, he would know himself to be in touch with spiritual forces, and he would be able to make use of these forces in his daily work. The following little event may serve as an illustration of that attitude of mind, which prevents the ordinary man of the present day from perceiving, without prejudice or hindrance, all that Anthroposophy is able to provide for heart and soul.

There lived a man in the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, the German Count Hardenberg. He had a son, whom we know as Novalis, and we have been able to admit in intimate anthroposophical circles, that the poems and deep wisdom given to the world by this son sprang from a soul which was the reincarnation of significant and powerful personalities, who had accomplished momentous things for the earth. But how was the father, surrounded as he was by the influences of the outer world, to recognise this soul in his son? How could he have even a suspicion of the spirit, which was able to express itself in the soul of this son? He was as unable to free himself from the prejudices of the material world and his connection with the actualities of life around him, as many to-day, who are influenced by the prejudices of our time, are unable to perceive the impelling force of the spiritual wisdom of Anthroposophy. The old Hardenberg would have had to free himself, as it were, from harshness in his misunderstanding of his son; he would have had to rise above a completely material life, before he could feel, within his Moravian Community, anything of a deeply religious spirit—or, as one might perhaps say, ‘A knowledge of the universal spirit as it was understood in the olden days.’ Those traditional, authoritative influences which are operative within such a community were necessary in order that his inmost soul might be affected by that true Christian spirit, which can only be understood when it has received anthroposophical inspiration.

Old Hardenberg had once a remarkable experience of the breath of that Christian spirit, when he and others were assembled in the Moravian Church, and they began to sing one of their hymns. By means of this hymn, the origin of which he did not know, there came to him a breath from the eternal world. He was deeply moved by the hymn beginning:

Without Thee, where should I have ended,
Without Thee, what should I have done?

He perceived something which hitherto he had been unable to perceive! The service came to an end. Old Hardenberg went out and asked some of his fellow-worshippers: ‘Who then is the writer of this glorious poem?’ ‘It was written by your son,’ was the reply. Old Hardenberg, freed from all the associations of the ordinary world, undisturbed by the prejudices of the physical plane, had felt the compelling power of the spiritual life. But his son, as far as his physical body was concerned, had already been in his grave for some months. For this experience only came to old Hardenberg some months after the death of Novalis. Only when his surroundings were such as enabled him for a short time to escape from all his preconceived physical-plane ideas, was he borne upwards into the spiritual heights, and realised their constraining force—that constraining force which we ought to feel, untroubled by all the prejudices of the material world. Let us rise above the materialistic prejudices of the present day! Let us feel the constraining force of the spiritual life, and let power and warmth flow from it into our hearts! If we do this, we shall then fulfil our duty towards the humanity of the present day. Through this illustration, taken from a real experience of Novalis’ father, I wished to lead you into that spirit to which we now want to attain, by means of the strong, anthroposophical forces which lie in the songs of Novalis. (Here follow readings from Novalis’ ‘Spiritual Songs.’)

This time of Festival perhaps makes it easier not only to understand and to know, but to feel and to realise, all that we have been considering, through so many anthroposophical hours, in connection with our Gospels. And we know that a large part of the time which we had at our disposal during this past year, was devoted to this Gospel study. There are still further important deductions to be drawn from our study of the Gospels, and now, in the short lecture to-day, in which we must still think of our Christmas Festival, let us realise what is associated with that Event—the Christ-Event—which should be so vividly before us at Christmas-time.

Consideration of the Christ-Event enables us to estimate very fully the significance and force of the anthroposophical conception of the universe, as it affects the present time, and also the future of humanity. If we allow ourselves to be influenced by the same deep feeling for the Christ-Event, which filled the soul of Novalis, we shall continually be constrained to ask ourselves afresh: ‘How can that mighty impulse, which entered into mankind when Christ was born in Palestine, become more and more a reality to us?’ At the present time we are right in associating Anthroposophy with the Christ-Event. Could we but show how the different streams of human spiritual life, which existed before the time of Christ, were united in the Event of Palestine, we could also show how great a number of people have, at the best, but a dim idea of the Event of Palestine, and how it will only gradually be possible to understand it, in its full power and significance, in the far future, when men come to seek a more spiritual view of life. For however great may be the wisdom gained in the course of the evolution of the earth, this wisdom will only find its deepest fulfilment as it makes itself into an instrument for the understanding of what the Christ-Impulse really is. We are thus faced with the immediate necessity of bringing direct spiritual experience to bear upon the Christ-Event. At the time in which Christ walked on earth in bodily form, humanity received the great and powerful impulse to rise again into the spiritual world, but even now this impulse is only apprehended, in its true form, by those souls who are fitted to receive it. On the other hand, as though to complete the measure of that which must be overcome, humanity has continued to descend more and more deeply into materialism. Man’s whole existence is, in fact, a descent into matter. During the post-Atlantean time also, man has become ever more and more immersed in matter. The Christ-Event signified the impulse which enables men once more to ascend, but this empowering impulse has as yet been but little realised. On the other hand, the descent into matter, even during the time since Christ, has manifested itself ever more and more forcibly, and, as the result of this descent, the whole thinking, feeling, and perception of man have been injuriously affected. To-day we are already living in an age in which materialistic investigation is brought to bear on our understanding of the Christ-Event. And since we are met for serious thought, it is fitting to refer to such a serious matter as this application of materialistic investigation even to the most spiritual event that has ever happened on the earth. We see that the materialistic theology of the present day states on the authority of so-called ‘higher criticism,’ that it is impossible to give any proof of an outward historical Christ, and there are already theologians who say: ‘Higher criticism compels us to admit, that “ historically ” it cannot be proved that, at the beginning of our era, there lived in Palestine One of whom the Gospels proclaim such mighty facts, and from whom such mighty impulses appear to have been poured into the spiritual life of humanity.’ Thus Science to-day, as a result of its methods, seems to feel called upon to do away with the historical Christ. On this account, we need to remember that Spiritual Science, in accordance with its principles, is now being called upon to prove the historical Christ Jesus. The faith of men does not depend upon the truths belonging to any particular branch of learning. Illustration after illustration could be given to prove how threadbare such learning is. But people may spend their lives without perceiving that such proofs exist. Thus also in the future (and this will be the case for a long time to come) an ever-increasing number of people will follow the line of materialistic thought and will be influenced more and more by the belief that the true historical method must needs deny the certainty of an historical Christ Jesus. Science would seem to abolish that for which we are hoping to obtain a new symbol in the light of golden wisdom. The time will surely come, in which Christ will only be known in circles such as this, where through the study of Spiritual Science light is thrown on the words: ‘I am with you al way even to the end of the world,’ and where those who are able to investigate for themselves, through spiritual vision, will know that He, from Whom the Christian impulse has gone forth, is ever to be found in the spiritual world, and that certainty with regard to the Christ-Event is to be obtained from within that spiritual world. Only in circles in which such spiritual truths are acknowledged will it be possible to reach the assurance of that for which this symbol is once more being sought. And the outer world will not accept any proof that the historical, the outer scientific method, is itself built on an uncertain foundation. Certainly those who are able to understand the nature and value of Science to-day know already how threadbare and unfounded its methods are, and therefore how little is proved when those who believe they are proceeding on strictly scientific lines come to the conclusion that history provides no proof that any of the persons, from Christ down to the Apostles, ever lived.

But it will be a long time yet before men free themselves from that belief in authority which does not appear to them to be belief in authority. The worst form of this belief exists at the present time. And men do not perceive that He Who really frees us from belief in authority, is He Who taught man to build in his inmost being on the power of his own Ego. He who has revealed to us what the Ego is capable of taking into itself can also show us how to find the source and the power of truth within our own being. With Christ within, we find truth within; with Christ within, we find the sure foundation for free and independent judgment, a foundation which is deeper than that of authority. But during this hour, when our thoughts are turned to the Christ-Event, let us give our earnest attention, in order that we may realise our calling as anthroposophists. Perhaps I should postpone for future lectures what I now propose to include here, were it not that it will be some time before we meet again. But I want to direct your attention to what the anthroposophist should recognise as one of the most significant signs of the time in which he is living, namely, the impossibility, so to speak, of the scientific methods of the present day. One cannot hope to convince those who wish to believe in the material science which in our time explains away even the historical Christ. But there must be some who, through the teaching of Anthroposophy, understand something of the way in which material science is failing in all departments and how, in the future, spiritual life alone can promote the welfare of mankind.

In current events people fail to see the most important point. A lawsuit was recently held in Vienna, in which the whole civilised world was interested. Because this lawsuit was considered of importance, the whole of Europe may be said to have assembled in order to gain information from it, but probably the most important thing which happened there passed unnoticed. And even if this most important point were put into words those, who were not anthroposophically prepared, would regard it as a mere fantasy. A certain professor of history was present, a man famous in Europe, esteemed by the rest of his profession, who had written important words in accordance with the strict methods of historical research—a ‘good dabbler in learning.’ This dabbler in learning became possessed of a series of documents, which had been handed over by one of the southern countries of Europe. These documents were to prove that there had been treachery in the south-east of Austria. Now who could be more fitted, according to present-day ideas, to put the matter to the test than a professor of history? A historian, before all others, ought to be called upon to examine the value of documents. All the beliefs of the world are founded on documents! Truth is determined by the testing of documents and the way in which they are applied and compared. The truth, even about the miracle of Christianity, can be reached in no other way! The historian and investigator into whose hands these documents fell, was also a pupil of the professor of history whom I like to call to mind when I think of my own young days. There were, at that time, two historians; the one carried on his investigations in accordance with the strictest methods of documental research, the other, his colleague, paid less heed to these strict methods and was more concerned in seeing that the candidates knew something of real historical events. Now it happened that the favourite pupil of this investigator of documents was to take his degree. He was examined first in the science of ancient documents, i.e., the science by means of which one learns to establish satisfactorily how to arrive at the truth through outward material means. For instance, he was asked in which Papal Document the dot over the i appeared for the first time. This is, of course, a very important piece of knowledge, and the candidate knew instantly that it was in the time of a certain ‘Innocent’ that the dot over the i first appeared. But the other historian, his colleague, then said: ‘May I now ask something of the candidate who knew so exactly when the dot over the i first appeared?’ ‘Can you tell me, sir, when the Pope, in whose documents the dot over the i first appeared, ascended the Papal throne?’ No, he did not know that. ‘Do you know then, perhaps, when he died?’ No, he did not know that either. ‘Now tell me something else about this Pope.’ He knew nothing! Then said the Professor, whose favourite pupil he was, ‘Really, sir, it seems as if you are very stupid to-day.’ To which the other rejoined, ‘But, my dear colleague, he is your favourite pupil! Who then has made him very stupid?’

The historian in question had not, at that time, proceeded far on the path of learning. But he became an able student of ancient documents, capable of establishing the truth with regard to times far past, by means of historical investigation. So what more suitable person could be found to discover if there were any treachery in the documents which had been handed over to him from a most important quarter? In accordance with the methods of historical research he duly examined them, and in a public article made serious accusations against a number of people. This resulted in a lawsuit, and, during this lawsuit, one of the most important documents was proved to be an altogether clumsy forgery. The whole point lay in the fact that a certain personality ought to have taken the chair at the meeting of a society in a certain town; but on making inquiry, it was ascertained that this man had been elsewhere during the time in question.

We see here the methods of historical research at work on documents dealing with events of the present day and the only result in this case was that these methods were turned to a laughing-stock. The important point to which I alluded is this: not that any man, or men, were condemned, but that the historical, scientific method was completely condemned. And this was the really significant point which a modern lawsuit brought to light. We ought therefore seriously to face the question: What is a method worth, which sets out to decide whether something took place eighteen or nineteen centuries ago, when it is not in the position to discover anything about the plainest modern affairs? Here Science itself was brought to judgment and this is a fact that should be recognised! A science, arising out of the materialistic prejudices of the present day, will always be brought to judgment, if people are so indolent that they accept authorities without knowing what they are. The present day demands that we should know what our authority is. If, with an earnest belief in a spiritual philosophy, we give ourselves to the study of what is known to-day as Science, we shall see how it vanishes, how it proves to be built on sandy foundations and falls to pieces when we really set to work upon it earnestly. But men are not willing to regard the things of the present day from the spiritual standpoint. Men are not conscientious enough (that is, those who are outside anthroposophical life) to judge for themselves as to the character of these methods, which force materialistic, authoritative opinion into the minds of men. Hence for a long time to come, except within the intimate circle of anthroposophical influence, there will be no possibility of perceiving, in its true form, that which is for the highest welfare of mankind. And as Science increasingly questions and does away with that which took place in Palestine and which we symbolically bring to life anew in our hearts every year, then the anthroposophical, spiritual world-movement will provide a place in which the power of the Event in Palestine will shine forth ever more and more clearly and from this centre there will stream forth again into the rest of humanity that life which can only proceed from this Event. What can develop in our souls through a true inner experience of the Event of Palestine?

‘I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.’

We may look upon this as the fundamental word of Christ Jesus. That is to say, Christ Jesus lived in Palestine in bodily form at the beginning of our era. Since that time He is to be found in the spiritual world; for He has united Himself with the spiritual atmosphere of the Earth. He became ‘The Spirit of the Earth,’ If we seek Him within the spiritual atmosphere of our Earth, we find Him there. He permeates the whole life of our Earth ever more and more. But what are men to gain through the continual indwelling of the Christ- Spirit? If we want to understand clearly what men are to gain in the future through the dwelling of the Christ-Spirit in their souls, then we must continue what has been already attempted for some time in our anthroposophical movement. What we are doing in this movement has not arisen from any arbitrary spirit—not from any programme drawn up merely by this or that man. Spiritual life is traced back ultimately to those sources which we seek in the individualities whom we call the ‘Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Feeling.’ Through them, if we search rightly, we shall find the impulse which will enable us to work as we ought to work, from epoch to epoch, from age to age.

A great impulse has recently come to us from the spiritual world and today, on this solemn Christmas evening, let us refer to this momentous impulse—a direction, so to speak, which has come to us during recent years from the spiritual world. It is through this impulse that our anthropsophical movement here in Central Europe has developed. We might describe this impulse in human words somewhat in the following manner:

‘Look at what is happening in the outer world: the words of the Gospels are becoming more and more misunderstood! They are being explained childishly, they are being tested by outward historical methods. The spiritual investigator must for a time disregard all merely outward history. What is necessary now is that the Gospels should again be understood quite literally, for it is through the literal understanding of them that the real depths of their Wisdom are reached.’

The spiritual world has directed us to become acquainted once more with the literal meaning of the Gospels, to understand what is contained in the actual wording of them. And all that we have attempted in our study of the Gospels of St. John, St. Luke and St. Matthew and which we hope still to attempt in our consideration of the Gospel of St. Mark, has arisen from this impulse, as it developed and took shape. We ought to try once again to understand the Gospels literally! This we are told by those who have given us this impulse from the spiritual world. Such is the ‘coming Christianity,’ the following of this impulse to understand the Gospels in their literalness. And what shall we gain through the literal understanding of the Gospels, through giving heed to the instruction of the Spiritual Powers who have spoken from the astral plane with such clearness as would scarcely be possible a second time in one century? We shall gain what is necessary if we desire to make ourselves into instruments which shall be able to guide the coming era of humanity in the right way, able to direct that which requires guidance and instruction in the world around us.

When we look back on the evolution of mankind in the remote past, we know that the human ego was not yet fully developed. As we trace back the evolution of man, we come to the Group-soul. A certain number of human beings had at that time an Ego-soul in common, just as animals still have a group-soul to-day. We find this in every race. Thus we know that humanity has developed itself from the group-soul consciousness and at the time when Christ came down to our Earth humanity had reached the point in which the old group-souls were beginning to lose their significance. The old group-souls had withdrawn. Every man was now called upon to develop his own individual soul, his true individuality. And who brought that which was to be poured into the individual soul? It was brought by the Christ-Impulse! And the more we fill ourselves with the Christ-Impulse, the richer will our individuality become, so that those truths, which we need to carry over into the future, spring up within the Ego itself. At the present time we are at an important turning-point. Many are asking to-day: What does it mean, that we, anthroposophists, speak of reincarnation, when we have no recollection of any previous life? It is true, we have as yet no such recollection. But I have already pointed out, that if we take a four-year old child and say, ‘This is a human being, but he cannot reckon! that is no proof that human beings are unable to reckon. One must wait until the child has grown old enough to learn; in ten years he will be able to reckon I In the same way the human soul will so mature, that it will be able to remember past incarnations. Whether it will remember correctly or not is another matter.

We are at an important turning-point. In the fourth post-Atlantean period, Christ descended as that Impulse whereby man is enabled to realise his individuality as a self-dependent being. We are now in the fifth Period, the last in which men are unable to recall their former incarnations. In the sixth Period, which will succeed our own, men will have the power to recall the past. Whether they remember correctly depends upon how they receive into their souls to-day the impulse thereto: whether they make themselves capable of remembering in the right way. In the future only those will remember their present existence in the right way, who have taken into themselves the Christ- Impulse, the source of true individuality. On the other hand, those who do not appropriate this source of true individuality will form new group-souls. Look at the impulse there is in men to-day towards the group-soul spirit, although there is no need for it, when they might find instead the sources of truth springing up in their own souls. It is well-known how everybody wants to do as ‘they’, the other people, do. Men do not look for what is to be found in their own souls, but they follow that which leads them into companies and groups and we see them happiest when they can have, not truths which are independent, but those which are held in common with others. Yes, and what is more, people hate individuality and they think that through this hatred of what is individual they can forge the strongest weapon against such wisdom as the anthroposophical. For anthroposophical wisdom must shine forth in the soul of each individual, it cannot be forced upon us by lever and screw, or by means of the rack. All that Anthroposophy says must come to us without the help of any external instrument. We must each one of us appropriate its teachings for himself, without being persuaded through any outward means, because it belongs to the invisible world into which each one must enter through his own power of thought. Through anthroposophical wisdom a man becomes individual. If we receive this wisdom in the true individual way—i.e., permeated by the Christ-Impulse—then there sinks into our souls that which will enable us to recall, in the sixth Period, an individuality, which each man has for himself, which belongs exclusively to himself. On the other hand, the memory of those who to-day are seeking to live in the old group-soul spirit, will be such that the group-soul consciousness will still be present. They will remember their present incarnation in the sixth Period, but they will then see clearly that they made their judgment at that time dependent on the judgment of others. And it will be a fearful chain for a man to be obliged to feel himself as part of a group-soul consciousness.

The prospect of being bound to the group-soul consciousness threatens all those who are unable to receive the Christ-Impulse in our time. When we accept the Christ-Event, that Event which is the message to us of our human individuality, there enters into our souls the possibility of attaining the goal which humanity is to reach in the sixth Period—viz., that we should not look back to a group-soul consciousness, but to an individuality, permeated by the Christ. Thus he who comprehends Christianity in the right way to-day and understands how to inspire and permeate it with the spirit of Anthroposophy, will be enabled to rise to his full height and to be an instrument for work in the sixth Period.

That then is the question: whether we resolve to look back from our reincarnations in the sixth Period, upon our present ego as a non-individual, lacking in independence, bound up in the group-soul consciousness, or whether we desire to remember an ego, which has laid hold for itself of the source of spirituality in our Earth-evolution, which has laid hold of the great Word. Before all personality existed, before there was anything belonging to humanity upon the earth and ‘before Abraham was, was the I AM.’ That which lives within us is in close union with the Father-Spirit—something is brought to life in us through the understanding of the Christ-Impulse and it is this understanding alone which unites us consciously with the source of the universe. Thus the entering of the Christ-Impulse into our souls signifies the possibility of rising again in the sixth Period as individual beings who look back upon an independent existence. If we allow the Christ, truly understood, to be born within us, we shall be able to awaken the remembrance of this Christ in the sixth post-Atlantean Period. And if in the fifth Period, we celebrate a true Christmas Festival, we shall then be able to celebrate a true Easter Festival in the sixth Period. As the beautiful Christmas hymn sings in our hearts on Christmas night: ‘Unto you is born this day a Saviour, Christ, the Lord,’ so, in looking back to the birth of the Christ in our souls, we shall hear within ourselves the announcement of this true Higher Ego. We shall look back upon this, and shall allow the memory of it to arise as an Easter Festival within ourselves; and then we shall be able to hear the grand and beautiful strains of Easter music: ‘May the Christ arise in us, enkindling and illuminating our own divine individuality.’ In this way the Festivals of Christmas and Easter are linked together in the fifth and sixth Periods of our post-Atlantean epoch—this is how we must learn to understand what we are taught in the Gospels. We have already partially learned and we shall learn still further, how the forces of Buddha, of Zoroaster and those of the old Hebrew race, flowed together in Christianity, and how, as the Gospels also show, they were united in the Person of Jesus Christ. That which has lived and moved in the world in pre-Christian times, must now live in our own individuality: it must be born again, penetrated by the Christ- Impulse. We then celebrate the anthroposophical Christmas Festival in our own souls, the birth of Christ in ourselves. And if we carry this inner knowledge of the Christ through Kamaloka and Devachan and back into a new life on earth and ever again into new earthly existences, until the sixth Period is reached, we shall then remember what we experienced in the fifth Period, and shall thus celebrate in ourselves the Christian Easter Festival.

So, through the Christmas symbol, may that live in us symbolically, which we have been learning of late from the Gospels concerning the Mystery of Christ. So may these lights, now burning before us, incite us to give ourselves up to that impulse, which comes to us from the spiritual world: i.e., to understand the Gospels literally! And we look upon these outward lights as symbols of those lights which must be kindled in our souls and which, if they are kindled through the anthroposophical knowledge of Christ, will still bum in the sixth Period of the post-Atlantean epoch.

Let us feel, just at this Christmas Festival, that it is for us to resolve to become worthy instruments for the future evolution of humanity. Let us feel the full meaning and gravity of this anthroposophical resolve: we are not to be anthroposophists for our own sakes alone; but, taking into consideration what has just been said, we are to be anthroposophists from a sense of duty towards humanity. Let there shine down upon us symbolically from the Christmas-tree, the Light which can fill us with enthusiasm for our spiritual mission to the race. We shall then have understood something of that which can again give us strength in this New Year to become ever more and more familiar with anthroposophical life and anthroposophical wisdom.

From within our work in the Anthroposophical movement we look forward into the future of humanity and we let our souls and hearts be permeated with that which we believe will embody itself in the streams of evolution and in the forces of evolution of the future of humanity. When we contemplate the great truths of existence, when we look up to the Forces, Powers and Beings who reveal themselves to us in the spiritual worlds as the cause and foundation of all that meets us in the sense-world, here also we rejoice to know that the truths which we bring down from the spiritual worlds will and must be gradually realised more and more in the souls and hearts of the men of the future. Thus for the greater part of the year our spiritual gaze is directed either to the immediate present or the future.

All the more do we feel ourselves impelled on the special days of the year—on the Festivals which come through to us from time and its changes as set reminders of that which earlier humanity imagined and devised—on these feast days we feel ourselves impelled to realise our union with this earlier humanity, to sink ourselves a little into that which led men of past time out of fulness of heart and soul to place these sign-marks in the course of time which come down to us as the ‘Festivals of the year.’ If the Easter Festival is such as to awaken in us, when we understand it, thoughts of human powers and of the power of overcoming all the lower through the higher, everything externally physical through the spiritual, if the Easter Festival is a festival of resurrection, of awaking, a festival of hope and confidence in the spiritual forces which can be awakened in the human soul; so, on the other hand, the Christmas Festival is a festival of the realisation of harmony with the whole cosmos, a festival of the realisation of Grace. It is a festival that can again and again bring home the thought: No matter how doubtful everything around us may appear, however much the bitterest doubts may enter into faith, however much the worst disappointments may mingle with the most aspiring hopes, however much all that is good around us in life may totter, there is something in human nature and essence—this the rightly understood thought of the Christmas Festival may say—that only needs to be brought vitally, spiritually, before the soul, which reveals to us perpetually that we are descended from the powers of good, from the forces of right, from the forces of the true. The Easter thought points us to our victorious forces in the future—the Christmas thought points us, in a certain sense, to the origin of man in the primeval past.

In such a case one can clearly see, how the unconscious or subconscious reason or spirituality of man stands far, far higher than man with his consciousness can wholly compass. We have often reason to admire that which men have established in the past out of the hidden depths of the soul more than that which they have established out of their intellectual thoughts and understanding. How infinitely wise it appears to us, when we open the calendar, and for the 25th December we find registered the Birth-Festival of Christ Jesus, and then we see registered in the calender for the 24th December ‘Adam and Eve.’ It may be said: How clearly reasonable and spiritual it appears that out of the dim subconscious work of the Middle Ages, when Christmas plays were performed here or there about Christmas time by people from different places, when the ‘singers’ as they were called gathered for their Christmas plays, that the Paradise Tree should be brought forward. As in the calender ‘Adam and Eve’ appeared before the Christ Birthday Festival, so in the Christmas plays of the Middle Ages, the Tree of Paradise was brought forward by the troupe which took part in the performance of the Christmas plays. In short, there was something in the deep hidden soul-depths of men which caused them to place directly together the earthly beginning of humanity and the Jesus Birth Festival. In the year 353, even in ecclesiastical Rome, the 25th December was not kept as the Festival of the Birthday of Jesus. Only in 354 the Jesus Birthday Festival was celebrated for the first time in ecclesiastical Rome. Previous to this, there was a festival which brought to men a consciousness similar to the Jesus Birth Festival, namely, the 6th January, the day of remembrance of the Baptism by John in Jordan, the day which was commemorative of the Descent of the Christ from the spiritual heights, and the Self-immersion of the Christ into the body of Jesus of Nazareth. That was originally the Birth of the Christ in Jesus, the remembrance of the great historical moment which is symbolically presented to us as the hovering dove over the head of Jesus of Nazareth. The 6th January was the commemorative day of the birth of the Christ in Jesus of Nazareth. In the fourth century, however, it had for a long time been impossible for the self-assertive materialistic philosophy of the West to understand the penetration of Jesus with the Christ. Like a powerful fight this thought with instantaneous illumination was present to the Gnostics, who were in a certain respect contemporaries or direct followers of the Event of Golgotha. They were in the position of finding it unnecessary to seek the depth of this wisdom of the ‘Christ’ in ‘Jesus’ as we have to seek this wisdom again through modern clairvoyance. The Gnostics were able, by means of the last flickering of those old, original human clairvoyant powers to see, as it were, in the light of grace that which we must acquire again for ourselves concerning the great secrets of Golgotha. Much was clear to the Gnostics which we have to acquire again, for example, in particular, the secret of the birth of Christ in Jesus at the Baptism by John in Jordan.

Just as the old clairvoyance faded away for humanity generally, so did also the peculiar kindling of the highest clairvoyant power, of the highest Christmas light of humanity, which the Gnostics possessed. In the fourth century Western Christianity was no longer able to understand this great thought. Hence in the fourth century the true meaning of the Festival of the appearing of the Christ in Jesus was lost to Western civilisation. Man had forgotten what this ‘Festival of the Appearing’ of the 6th January actually meant. They had for a time—yes, right into our time, buried under much materialistic intellectual rubbish what indeed would not allow itself to be destroyed, the feeling toward the Christ-Figure in human evolution. If man could not understand that One Most High, as compared with humanity, had manifested Himself in the Baptism by John in Jordan, yet he could understand,—for that did not contradict materialistic knowledge,—that that bodily organism which was selected for the reception of the Christ was something significant. Hence they put back the Spirit-birth, which indeed took place in the John-Baptism in Jordan, to the Child-birth of Jesus of Nazareth, and set the ‘Jesus-Birth-Festival’ in place of the ‘Festival of the Appearing.’ To represent quite rightly and in detail, that which became the Christmas Festival of humanity always aroused significant feelings, high exalted feelings. Something significant lived in the human soul at the approach of Christmas, which may be expressed as follows: If man contemplates the world in the right sense, he can, by belief in humanity, fortify himself against certain things, against all life’s dangers and blows of fate; in the feeling of love and peace man can fortify himself in his deepest soul against all disharmony and strife of life. This is something which becomes ever more clearly bound up with the Christmas Festival. For what was it actually of which man reminded himself? From our anthroposophical point of view let us look at what man remembered.

We know what significant, real and powerful preparations human evolution had to go through in order that the Mystery of Golgotha could enter this human evolution. The human being who was the reincarnated Zarathustra, had to be born as one of the two Jesus children. He also had to be born for whom the real Jesus-Birth-Festival was the commemorative festival; he had to be born whose soul-substance had remained in the spiritual worlds. So long as humanity went through all that was possible within heredity through the generations up to the Mystery of Golgotha—for all other human souls had gone through the generations—so long had man been taking up the destroying forces that crept right into the blood. One single soul substance had remained behind in the spiritual worlds, guarded by the purest Mysteries and Mystery-centres, and then it was poured out into humanity as the soul of the second Jesus-child, the child of the Luke Gospel, that Jesus-child to whose birth all the commemorations and representations of the Christ-Festival, of Christmas, belong. At Christmas-time men’s thoughts went back to the origin of humanity, to the human soul, which had not yet descended, not even into Adam’s nature. They would say: In Bethlehem, in Palestine was born that soul-substance which had not taken part in the descent of humanity, but had remained behind, and for the first time in fact entered into a human body, in incarnating in the Jesus described by Luke. The human soul, when its thought is directed to the fact, may feel: One can believe in humanity, one can have faith in humanity; however much conflict, however much disbelief, however much disharmony has entered into it—and they have entered into all that has flowed into humanity from the time of Adam to the present—when one looks back on that which in olden times was called ‘Adam Kadmon,’ which became later the ‘Christ’ conception, there was kindled in the human soul confidence in the soundness of human force, and there was kindled confidence in the primeval peace-and-love nature of humanity. Hence the subconscious soul of man drew together the Jesus-birth Festival and the Adam and Eve Festival because man saw in fact his own nature in the Christ Child that was born, but his own nature in its innocence, in its purity.

Why then was the Divine Child placed before humanity for hundreds and thousands of years as the highest there was for the human soul to revere? For the reason that when man looks at a child and sees the child not yet able to say ‘I’ to himself, he can know that the child is still working on the human body, the Temple of the Eternally Divine, and because the human child who cannot yet say ‘I’ nevertheless clearly shows the sign of his origin from the spiritual world. Through this contemplation of the child nature man learns to have full trust in human nature. Here, where he can most easily foregather, when the sun shines least and warms the earth least, when he is not busied with the ordering of his outer affairs, here, when the days are shortest and the nights longest, when the earth gives him the best opportunity to foregather and to enter into himself, when all outer brightness, all outer beauty withdraws for a while from the outward view—here, the Western civilisation places the Birth-Festival of the Divine Child, that is, of the Human Being who enters the world pure and unsullied—and through the innocent entrance into the world can give to man at the time of his closest assembling with others, the strongest, the highest confidence through the knowledge of his divine origin.

To the anthroposophist it is a confirmation of the great truth that one can learn most from the child, when one sees that a festival of a child’s birth is placed in the course of time as a great significant festival of confidence in human evolution. So we admire the subconscious, the spiritual reason of the men of the past, who have placed such sign posts in the path of time. We feel then like those who decipher wonderful hieroglyphs, produced by the men of old through the placing of such festivals in the writing of the times and we feel one with these men of old. Whilst at other times our look is directed towards the future, whilst at other times we are willing to place our best powers at the disposal of the future, to strengthen and increase all faith in the future, here, on such festival days, we seek just to live in remembrance, to draw towards us as though incarnated the old thoughts teaching us at the present time that we can think truly in our way of what lies in the spiritual at the foundation of the external world; but that in earlier times—in a different way, it is true, but not less right, not less magnificent and significant—the True and Sublime was thought and experienced through the realisation of the oneness of humanity and the high possibilities that then lay ahead of humanity. This is our anthroposophical ideal, to be able to feel one with that which the men of old produced—often from the most hidden depths of the soul. These festivals, particularly the great ones, encourage this, if we can only through the anthroposophical truths imprint in our souls the significance of the hieroglyphic signs written in the path of time.

A wonderful thought unites with a wonderful emotion in our souls when we see how, in those centuries which followed the fourth which first transferred the Jesus-Birth Festival to the 25th of December, how there here flows into the souls of those men the feeling of confidence awakened through the child-nature, so that in painting, in the Christmas plays, everywhere, is shown how all the creatures of the Earth-kingdom bow before the Jesus-Child, before the Divine Child, before the divine origin of man. There comes before us the wonderful picture of the manger, how the beasts bow before this primal man; to these may be added those wonderful stories, as for instance that when Mary had taken the Child Jesus on the way to Egypt, a tree bowed itself, a very ancient tree, as the border was crossed by Mary with the child. Traditionally the legends of almost the whole of Europe relate that the trees in a remarkable way, in the Holy Night, bow to this great event. We could go to Alsace, to Bavaria, everywhere we find legends, how certain trees bear fruit in the Holy Night. All wonderful symbols which proclaim in fact how the birth of the Jesus-Child reveals itself as something which is connected with the whole life of the earth. When we recollect what we have so often said—that the ancient spiritual streams were given by the Gods to mankind, and how in ancient times men had clairvoyant insight into the divine spiritual world, how this clairvoyance gradually vanished from humanity in order that men might be able to come to the gaining of the ego—if we picture how here, in the whole human organisation something like a drying-up, a withering, of the old divine forces is taking place, and how through the Christ-Impulse which came through the Mystery of Golgotha there is a flooding of the withering divine forces with new water of life; then there appears to us in a wonderful picture what the Christmas legends relate to us, how the dried up and withered roses of Jericho shoot up of themselves in the Holy Night. That is a legend which we find everywhere noted down in the Middle Ages, that the roses of Jericho blossom in the Christ-night and unfold, because they first unfolded under the footsteps of Mary, who, when she carried the Child Jesus on the journey to Egypt, stepped over a place where a rose tree was growing. A wonderful symbol of what happened to human divine powers, that even things so dry and lifeless as that which one usually finds on the wayside, as the roses which apparently are dead, can spring up again and shoot forth through the Christ-Impulse which entered into the time evolution.

That to man was first given in reality what was destined from the beginning is expressed in the Jesus-Birth Festival, in the festival of the Birth of the Jesus infant. Before Adam and Eve existed, that was destined for humanity—so the Christmas legend says—which yet lies in the quite unspoilt divine child-nature of man. In truth however—and really on account of the influence of Lucifer—man has only been able to attain it after the whole period of time from Adam and Eve to the Mystery of Golgotha.

A deep emotion awakens in our souls when we take for our meditation a feeling, compressed into the one night of the 24th and 25th December, of what mankind has become from Adam and Eve to the birth of Christ in Jesus, through the Luciferic powers. If we can realise that, we shall really grasp the significance of this Festival, and realise the goal before humanity. It is as though humanity, if it would use its opportunity and take these sign posts of time as material for meditation, could really become aware of its pure origin in the cosmic forces of the universe. Here, looking up into the cosmic forces of the universe and penetrating a little by means of Anthroposophy, through the true spiritual wisdom into the secrets of the universe, humanity can first become ripe to understand this, that what as the Christ-Birth Festival was once understood by the Gnostics, was in fact the festival celebrated on January 6th, the Festival of the Birth of Christ in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, as a higher stage of the Birth-Festival of Jesus. To enable us to plunge into the twelve great Forces of the universe, the twelve Holy Nights are set between the Christmas Festival and the festival which should be celebrated on the sixth of January, which now is the festival of the Three Holy Kings, and which in fact is the festival we have been speaking about.

Again, without man’s really knowing it in present knowledge, these twelve Holy Nights are established out of the hidden wise depths of the soul of mankind, as though they would say: ‘Realise the depths of the Christmas Festival, but sink during the twelve Holy Nights into the holiest secrets of the cosmos, that is, in the realms of the universe out of which Christ descended to the Earth.’ Only when mankind wills to be inspired through the thought of the holy childlike divine origin of man, to let himself be inspired by the wisdom that works through the twelve forces, through the twelve holy forces of the universe, symbolically presented in the twelve signs of the Zodiac, due in truth to spiritual wisdom—only when mankind sinks into true spiritual wisdom and learns to discern the course of time in the great cosmos and in the single human being, only then will the mankind of the future, fructified through Spiritual Science, find to its own salvation the inspiration which can come from the Jesus-Birth Festival so that thoughts for the future may be permeated with fullest confidence and richest hopes.

Thus we may as anthroposophists allow the Christmas Festival to work on our souls as an inspiration festival, as a festival that brings the thought of human origin in the holy divine primeval human child so wonderfully before our souls. That light which appears to us in the Holy Night as the symbol of the Light of humanity at its source, that Light which is symbolically presented to us later in the lights of the Christmas-tree, rightly understood, is the Light that can give to our striving souls the best and strongest forces for our true real world-peace, for the true blessedness and real hope for the world.

Let us feel ourselves strengthened for the needs of the-future by such thoughts on the facts of the past, on the establishing of the festivals in the past; Christmas thoughts, remembrance thoughts on the origin of humanity, thoughts well-rooted which will unfold themselves to real, to most mighty soul-plants for the true future of humanity.

It is beautiful that circumstances permit of our uniting here this evening at this festival. For though the vast majority of our friends are able to celebrate the festival of love and peace outside in the circle of those with whom they are united by the ties of ordinary life, there are many among our anthroposophical friends who to-day are alone in a certain sense. It also goes without saying that those of us who are not thus drawn into this or that circle are, considering the spiritual current in which we stand, least of all excluded from taking part in the festival of love and peace. What should be more beautifully suited to unite us here this evening in the atmosphere, in the spiritual air of mutual love and peace that radiates through our hearts than an anthroposophical movement? And we may also regard it as a happy chance of fate that it is just in this year that we are able to be together on this Christmas Eve, and to follow out a little train of thought which can bring this festival near to our hearts. For in this year we ourselves stand before the birth of that which, if we rightly understand it, must lie very close to our hearts: I mean the

Birth of our Anthroposophical Society.

If we have lived the great ideal which we want to express through the Anthroposophical Society, and if we are accordingly inclined to dedicate our forces to this great ideal of mankind, then we can naturally let our thoughts sweep on from this our spiritual light or means of light to the dawn of the great light of human evolution which is celebrated on this night of love and peace. On this night—spiritually, or in our souls—we really have before us that which may be called the Birth of the Earthly Light, of the light which is to be born out of the darkness of the Night of Initiation, and which is to be radiant for human hearts and human souls, for all that they need in order to find their way upwards to those spiritual heights which are to be attained through the earth’s mission.

What is it really that we should write in our hearts—the feeling that we may have on this Christmas night?

In this Christmas night there should pour into our hearts the fundamental human feeling of love—the fundamental feeling that says: compared with all other forces and powers and treasures of the world, the treasures and the power and the force of love are the greatest, the most intense, the most powerful. There should pour into our hearts, into our souls, the feeling that wisdom is a great thing—that love is still greater; that might is a great thing—that love is yet greater. And this feeling of the power and force and strength of love should pour into our hearts so strongly that from this Christmas night something may overflow into all our feelings during the rest of the year, so that we may truthfully say at all times: we must really be ashamed, if in any hour of the year we do anything that cannot hold good when the spirit gazes into that night in which we would pour the all-power of love into our hearts. May it be possible for the days and the hours of the year to pass in such a way that we need not bo ashamed of them in the light of the feeling that we would pour into our souls on Christmas night!

If such can be our feeling, then we are feeling together with all those beings who wanted to bring the significance of Christmas, of the ‘Night of Initiation,’ near to mankind: the significance and the relation of Christmas night to the whole Christ-Impulse within earthly evolution.

For this Christ Impulse stands before us, we may say, in a threefold figure; and to-day at the Christ-festival this threefold figure of the Christ-Impulse can have great significance for us. The first figure meets us when we turn our gaze to the Gospel according to St. Matthew. The Being who is born—or whose birth we celebrate—on this Christmas Eve, enters human evolution in such a way that three heads of mankind, three representatives of high magic come to pay homage to the kingly Being who is entering man’s evolution. ‘Kings’ in the spiritual sense of the word: magic kings come to pay homage to the great spiritual King Who appears in the high form that He has attained. For as high a being as Zarathustra once was, passed through his stages of development in order to reach the height of the spiritual King whom the magic kings came to welcome. And so does the Spirit-King of St. Matthew’s Gospel confront our spiritual gaze: He brings into human evolution an infinite fount of goodness and an infinite fount of mighty love, of that goodness and that love before which human wickedness feels itself challenged to battle. Thus again do we see the Spirit-King enter human evolution: that which must be enmity against the Spirit-King feels itself challenged in the figure of Herod; and the spiritual King must flee before that which is the enemy of spiritual kingship. So do we see Him in the spirit, in His majestic and magic glory. And before our soul there arises the marvellous image of the Spirit-King, of Zarathustra reincarnate, the flower of human evolution, as He has passed from incarnation to incarnation on the physical plane, and as wisdom has reached perfection, surrounded by the three magic spirit-kings themselves, by flowers and heads of human evolution.

In yet another figure the Christ-Impulse can come before our souls, as it appears in the Gospel according to St. Mark, and in St. John’s Gospel. There we seem to be led towards the cosmic Christ-Impulse, which expresses how man is eternally related to the great cosmic forces. We have this connection with the great cosmic forces when, through an understanding of the cosmic Christ, we become aware how through the Mystery of Golgotha there entered into earthly evolution itself a cosmic impulse. As something yet infinitely more great and mighty than the Spirit-King Whom we see in the spirit surrounded by the magicians, there appears before us the mighty cosmic Being who will take hold of the vehicle of that man who is himself the Spirit-King, the flower and summit of earthly evolution. It is really only the short-sightedness of present day mankind which prevents men from feeling the full greatness and power of this incision into human evolution, wherein Zarathustra became the the bearer of the cosmic Christ-Spirit. It is only this short-sightedness which does not feel the whole significance of that which was being prepared in the moment of human evolution which we celebrate in our ‘night of initiation,’ in our Christmas. Everywhere, if we enter but a little more deeply into human evolution, we are shown how deeply the Christ-Event penetrated into the whole earthly evolution. Let us feel this as we follow this evening a relevant fine of thought, whence something may stream out into the rest of our anthroposophical thought, deepening and penetrating into the meaning of things.

Many things might be brought forward for this purpose. It could be shown how, in times which were still nearer to the spiritual, an entirely new spirit appeared before mankind: new in comparison with the spirit that held sway and was active in earthly evolution in pre-Christian times. For instance, there was created a figure, a figure, however, which lived, which expresses to us how a soul of the early Christian centuries was affected when such a soul, having first felt itself quite immersed in the old Pagan spiritual knowledge, then approached the Christ-Impulse simply and without prejudice, and felt a great change in itself. To-day we more and more have a feeling for such a figure as Faust. We feel this figure, which a more modern poet—Goethe—has, so to speak, reawakened. We feel how this figure is meant to express the highest human striving, yet at the same time the possibility of deepest guilt. It may be said, apart from all the artistic value given to this figure by the power of a modern poet, we can feel deep and significant things of what lived in those early Christian souls, when for example we sink into the poem of the Greek Empress Eudocia. She created a revival of the old legend of Cyprian, which pictures a man who lived wholly in the world of the old heathen gods and could become entwined in it—a man who after the Mystery of Golgotha was still completely given up to the old heathen mysteries and forces and powers. Beautiful is the scene in which Cyprian makes the acquaintance of Justina, who is already touched by the Christ-Impulse, and who is given up to those powers which are revealed through Christianity. Cyprian is tempted to draw her from the path, and for this purpose to make use of the old heathen magical methods. All this is played out between Faust and Gretchen, in the atmosphere of this battle of old Pagan impulses with the Christ-Impulse. Apart from the spiritual side of it, it works out magnificently in the old story of the Cyprian and of the temptation to which he was exposed over against the Christian Justina. And even though Eudocia’s poetry may not be very good, still we must say: there we see the awful collision of the old pre-Christian world with the Christian world. In Cyprian we see a man who feels himself still far from the Christian faith, quite given up to the old Pagan divine forces. There is a certain power in this description.- To-day we only bring forward a few extracts, showing how Cyprian feels towards the magic forces of pre-Christian spiritual powers. Thus in Eudocia’s poem we hear him speak: (‘Confession of Cyprian.’)

‘Ye faithful ones in Christ, who in your hearts
Do cherish true and warm our Saviour great in praise:
Behold my tears outpouring and then hear
While I relate the fountain of my grief.
And ye, who still are lost in dark illusion bound
To idol images, pay heed, ye too, to that
Which I shall tell of their deceit and falsehood.
For never lived a man, who to false Gods
Was given up as I was; never one
So deeply versed in all the demon’s arts.

‘Yea, I am Cyprianus, whom, a child,
My parents brought unto Apollo dedicate.
The orgies’ hue and cry became my lullaby,
What time the fearsome dragon’s feast was celebrate.
At seven years they consecrated me
Unto the Sun-God Mithras. Then I lived
In Athen’s noble city, as a citizen—
Such was my parents’ wish. When I was ten,
I lit Demeter’s torches, and I sank myself
In Kora’s mournful death-complaint. Then as a temple-child
I nourished Pallas’ serpent in the castle’s walls.

‘Then I ascended on the forest-mount,
Olympus’ height, where fools would make believe
The radiant dwelling-place of Gods sublime.
I saw the Horse and the hustling winds,
The days’ long chorus, wafted on on wings
Of fantasy, to speed through life on magic wings.
I saw the spirits’ fiery headlong fray,
And ambuscades deceitful. Some of them anon
Bluster and burst with ridicule and glee,
While others petrified in terror rooted stand.
I saw the ranks of Goddesses and Gods;
For forty days or more I lingered there.
And as the sun did set, I ate the fruits
Of leafy shady bowers. And there, like messengers
From kingly castles, sped the spirit-beings,
Then to descend to earth with thousand ills
To vex the race of men.

‘I numbered fifteen years, already knew
The power and work of spirits and of Gods;
And of high priests my teachers there were seven—
It was my parents’ will that I should gain
Science of all that bides upon the earth,
And in the airy realms, and in the oceans’ depths.
I searched through that which in the human breast
Destruction brews—what ferments in the herb,
In flowery juices; and what sickening creeps
Around the wearied body; nor did I neglect
That which the gaudy snake, prince of the world, conceives
To challenge the eternal goals of God.

‘I wandered on in Argos’ fairest land—
Argos that nourished the rose.
’Twas just the season’s round of Eos’ feast,
Eos white-raimented, Tithonos’ spouse,
There I became their priest.
I learned to know what windy brothers speed
Through airy spaces and this pole’s long round;
What binds the ploughland with the waters’ flood,
And darkens o’er the skies with showering rain.’

Thus had Cyprian learned to know everything that was to be learned by being, so to speak, initiated into the pre-Christian mysteries. Oh! he describes them exactly—those powers to whom those could look up who were entrusted with the ancient traditions of initiation in a time when those traditions no longer held good; his description of them and of all their fruits which were no longer suitable to that age is fascinating.

‘Myself I saw the demon face to face,
When I had won him by my sacrifice.
I spake to him, and he did answer me
With words of flattery. He praised my youth,
My fairness and my skill unto his works,
Assigned to me dominion o’er this world
And spirits to accomplish my behests;
He greeted me by name, what time we parted,
And all his great ones looked on us amazed.
His countenance is like unto the flower
Of purest gold: and on his head a diadem
Of glittering stones; his raiment’s like a flame,
And all the earth doth shiver as he moves.
In dense array around his mighty throne
Spear-bearers stand, their eyes cast on the ground.
Thus he makes up to be a God; he imitates
The Great One’s works, whom boldly challenging,
He yet creates but powerless fantasies—
For all their demons’ being is emptiness.

And then it goes on to describe how the temptation approaches him, and how all this works on him before he comes to know the Christ-Impulse-

‘I wandered from the Persian land away,
And came to Antioch, great town of Syria.
Here I accomplished many a miracle
Of hellish mystery and of enchantments’ crafts.
Here a fair youth, Aglaidas, once sought me out;
And others with him, fired with passionate love.
Towards a maiden was his heart aglow,
Justina was her name. He now entreated me,
Clasping around my knees, to conjure her
Into his arms by means of magic craft.
I hearkened to his prayers and then at first
Appeared to me the demon’s powerlessness.
Many as were the spirit-throngs he ruled,
So many he sent out to tempt her soul;
And every one returned from her abashed.
Me too, who pleaded for Aglaidas, Justina’s faith
And purity and piety could put to shame.
She shewed me then the vanity of mine arts,
And many a sleepless night I fingered on
With manifold enchantments’ drudgery.
Ten weeks the prince of spirits stormed the heart
Of yonder maiden. Till Eros, alas,
Not only sped his shaft to wound Aglaidas:
I too was seized and tom with frenzied love.

And from this confusion into which the old world brought him, Cyprian is healed through the Christ-Impulse, in that he cast aside the old magic to understand the Christ-Impulse in its full greatness. We have later in the Faust poem a kind of shadow of this legend, but filled with greater poetic power. In such a figure as this, it is brought home to us very strongly how the Christ-Impulse, which, with some recapitulations we have just brought before our souls in a twofold figure, was felt in the early Christian centures.

A third figure, as it were a third aspect of the Christ-Impulse, is one which can especially bring home to us how, through that which in the full sense of the word we may call Anthroposophy, we can feel ourselves united with all that is human. This is the aspect which is most uniquely set forth in St. Luke’s Gospel, and which then worked on in that representation of the Christ-Impulse which shows us its preparation in the ‘Child.’ In that love and simplicity and at the same time powerlessness, with which the Christ Jesus of St. Luke’s Gospel meets us, thus it was suited to be placed before all hearts. There all can feel themselves near to that which so simply, like a child—and yet so greatly and mightily—spake to mankind through the Child of St. Luke’s Gospel, which is not shown to the magic kings, but to the poor shepherds from the hills. That other Being of St. Matthew’s Gospel stands at the summit of human evolution and paying homage to him there come spiritual lungs, magic kings. The Child of St. Luke’s Gospel stands there in simplicity, excluded from human evolution, as a child received by no great ones—received by the shepherds from the hills. Nor does he stand within human evolution, this Child of St. Luke’s Gospel, in such a way that we were told in this Gospel, for example, how the wickedness of the world felt itself challenged by his kingly spiritual power. No! but—albeit we are not at once brought face to face with Herod’s power and wickedness—it is clearly shown to us how. that which is given in this Child is so great, so noble, so full of significance, that humanity itself cannot receive it into its ranks. It appears poor and rejected, as though cast into a corner by human evolution and there in a peculiar manner it shows us its extra-human, its divine, that is to say, its cosmic origin. And what an inspiration flowed from this Gospel of St. Luke for all those who, again and again, gave us scenes, in pictures and in other artistic works—scenes which were especially called forth by St. Luke’s Gospel. If we compare the various artistic productions, do we not feel how those, which throughout the centuries were inspired by St. Luke’s Gospel, show us Jesus as a Being with whom every man, even the simplest, can feel akin? Through that which worked on through the Luke-Jesus-Child, the simplest man comes to feel the whole event in Palestine as a family happening, which concerns himself as something which happened among his own near relations. No Gospel worked on in the same way as this Gospel of St. Luke, with its sublime and happy flowing mood, making the Jesus-Being intimate to the human souls. And yet—all is contained in this childlike picture—all that should be contained in a certain aspect of the Christ-Impulse: namely, that the highest thing in the world, in the whole world, is love: that wisdom is something great, worthy to be striven after—for without wisdom beings cannot exist—but that love is something yet greater; that the might and the power with which the world is architected is something great without which the world cannot exist—but that love is something yet greater. And he has a right feeling for the Christ-Impulse, who can feel this higher nature of Love over against Power and Strength and Wisdom. As human spiritual individualities, above all things we must strive after wisdom, for wisdom is one of the divine impulses of the world. And that we must strive after wisdom, that wisdom must be the sacred treasure that brings us forward—it is this that was intended to be shown in the first scene of The Soul's Probation, that we must not let wisdom fall away, that we must cherish it, in order to ascend through wisdom on the ladder of human evolution. But everywhere where wisdom is, there is a twofold thing: wisdom of the Gods and wisdom of the Luciferic powers. The being who strives after wisdom must inevitably come near to the antagonists of the Gods, to the throng of the Light-Bearer, the army of Lucifer. Therefore there is no divine all-wisdom, for wisdom is always confronted with an opponent—with Lucifer.

And power and might! Through wisdom the world is conceived, through wisdom it is seen, it is illumined; through power and might the world is fashioned and built. Everything that comes about, comes about through the power and the might that is in the beings and we should be shutting ourselves out from the world if we did not seek our share in the power and might of the world. We see this mighty power in the world when the lightning flashes through the clouds; we perceive it when the thunder rolls or when the rain pours down from heavenly spaces into the earth to fertilise. it, or when the rays of the sun stream down to conjure forth the seedlings of plants slumbering in the earth. In the forces of nature that work down on to the earth we see this power working blessing as sunshine, as forces in rain and clouds; but, on the other hand, we must see this power and might in volcanoes, for instance, which seem to rise up and rebel against the earth itself—heavenly force pitted against heavenly force. And we look into the world, and we know: if we would ourselves be beings of the world-all, then something of them must work in us; we must have our share in power and in might. Through them we stand within the world: Divine and Ahrimanic powers live and pulsate through us. The all-power is not ‘all-powerful,’ for always it has its antagonist Ahriman against itself.

Between them—between Power and Wisdom—stands Love; and if it is the true love we feel that alone is ‘Divine.’ We can speak of the ‘all-power,’ of ‘all-strength,’ as of an ideal; but over against them stand Ahriman. We can speak of ‘all-wisdom’ as of an ideal; but over against it stands the force of Lucifer. But to say ‘all-love’ seems absurd; for if we love rightly it is capable of no increase. Wisdom can be small—it can be augmented. Power can be small; it can be augmented. Therefore all-wisdom and all-power can stand as ideals. But cosmic love—we feel that it does not allow of the conception of all-love; for love is something unique.

As the Jesus-Child is placed before us in St. Luke’s Gospel, so do we feel it as the personification of love; the personification of love between wisdom or all-wisdom and all-power. And we really feel it like this, just because it is a child. Only it is intensified because in addition to all that a child has at any time, this Child has the quality of forlornness: it is cast out into a lonely comer. The magic building of man—we see it already laid out in the organism of the child. Wherever in the wide world-all we turn our gaze, there is nothing that comes into being through so much wisdom as this magic building, which appears before our eyes—even unspoiled as yet—in the childlike organism. And just as it appears in the child—that which is all-wisdom in the physical body, the same thing also appears in the etheric body, where the wisdom of cosmic powers is expressed; and so in the astral body and in the ego. Like wisdom that has made an extract of itself—so does the child lie there. And if it is thrown out into a comer of mankind, like the Child Jesus, then we feel that separated there lies a picture of perfection, concentrated world-wisdom.

But all-power too appears personified to us, when we look on the child as it is described in St. John’s Gospel. How shall we feel how the all-power is expressed in relation to the body of the child, the being of the child? We must make present in our souls the whole force of that which divine powers and forces of nature can achieve. Think of the might of the forces and powers of nature near to the earth when the elements are storming; transplant yourself into the powers of nature that hold sway, surging and welling up and down in the earth; think of all the brewing of world-powers and world-forces, of the clash of the good forces with the Ahrimanic forces; the whirling and raging of it all. And now imagine all this storming and raging of the elements to be held away from a tiny spot in the world, in order that at that tiny spot the magic building of the child’s body may lie—in order to set apart a tiny body; for the child’s body must be protected. Were it exposed for a moment to the violence of the powers of nature, it would be swept away I Then you may feel how it is immersed in the all-power. And now you may realise the feeling that can pass through the human soul when it gazes with simple heart on that which is expressed by St. Luke’s Gospel. If one approached this ‘concentrated wisdom’ of the child with the greatest human wisdom—mockery and foolishness this wisdom! For it can never be so great as was the wisdom that was used in order that the child-body might lie before us. The highest wisdom remains foolishness and must stand abashed before the childlike body and pay homage to heavenly wisdom; but it knows that it cannot reach it. Mockery is this wisdom; it must feel itself rejected in its own foolishness.

No, with wisdom we cannot approach that which is placed before us as the Jesus-Being in St. Luke’s Gospel. Can we approach it with power?

We cannot approach it with power. For the use of ‘power’ can only have a meaning where a contrary power comes into play. But the child meets us—whether we would use much or little power—with its powerlessness and mocks our power in its powerlessness! For it would be meaningless to approach the child with power, since it meets us with nothing but its powerlessness.

That is the wonderful thing—that the Christ-Impulse, being placed before us in its preparation in the Child Jesus, meets us in St. Luke’s Gospel just in this way, that—be we ever so wise—we cannot approach it with our wisdom; no more can we approach it with our power. Of all that at other times connects us with the world—nothing can approach the Child Jesus, as St. Luke’s Gospel describes it—neither wisdom, nor power—but love. To bring love towards the child-being, unlimited love—that is the one thing possible. The power of love, and the justification and signification of love and love alone—that it is that we can feel so deeply when we let the contents of St. Luke’s Gospel work on our soul.

We live in the world, and we may not scorn any of the impulses of the world. It would be a denial of our humanity and a betrayal of the Gods for us not to strive after wisdom; every day and every hour of the year is well applied, in which we realise it as our human duty to strive after wisdom. And so does every day and every hour of the year compel us to become aware that we are placed in the world and that we are a play of the forces and powers of the world—of the all-power that pulsates through the world. But there is one moment in which we may forget this, in which we may remember what St. Luke’s Gospel places before us, when we think of the Child that is yet more filled with wisdom and yet more powerless than other people’s children and before whom the highest love appears in its full justification, before whom wisdom must stand still and power must stand still.

So we can feel the significance of the fact that it is just this Christ-Child, received by the simple shepherds, which is placed before us as the third aspect of the Christ-Impulse; beside the Spirit-Kingly aspect and the great Cosmic aspect, the Childlike aspect. The Spirit-Kingly aspect meets us in such a way that we are reminded of the highest wisdom, and that the ideal of highest wisdom is placed before us. The cosmic aspect meets us, and we know that through it the whole direction of earthly evolution is re-formed. Highest power through the cosmic Impulse is revealed to us—highest power so great that it conquers even death. And that which must be added to wisdom and power as a third thing, and must sink into our souls as something transcending the other two, is set before us as that from which man’s evolution on earth, on the physical plane, proceeds. And it has sufficed to bring home to humanity, through the ever-returning picture of Jesus’ birth at Christmas, the whole significance of love in the world and in human evolution. Thus, as it is in the Christmas ‘night of initiation’ that the birth of the Jesus-Child is put before us, it is in the same night as it comes round again and again that there can be born in our souls, contemplating the birth of the Jesus-Child, the understanding of genuine, true love that resounds above all. And if at Christmas an understanding of the feeling of love is rightly awakened in us, if we celebrate this birth of Christ—the awakening of love—then from the moment in which we experience it there can radiate that which we need for the remaining hours and days of the year, that it may flow through and bless the wisdom that it is ours to strive after in every hour and in every day of the year.

It was especially through the emphasising of this love-impulse that, already in Roman times, Christianity brought into human evolution the feeling that something can be found in human souls, through which they can come near each other—not by touching what the world gives to men, but that which human souls have through themselves. There was always the need of having such an approaching together of man in love. But what had become of this feeling in Rome, at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha took place? It had become the Saturnalia. In the days of December, beginning from the seventeenth, the Saturnalia took place, in which all differences of rank and standing were suspended. Then man met man; high and low ceased to be; every one said ‘thou’ to the other. That which originated from the outer world was swept away, but for fun and merriment the children were given ‘Saturnalia presents,’ which then developed into our Christmas presents. Thus ancient Rome had been driven to take refuge in fun, in joking, in order to transcend the ordinary social distinctions.

Into the midst of all this, there entered about that time the new principle, wherein men do not call forth joking and merriment, but the highest in their souls—the spiritual. Thus did the feeling of equality from man to man enter Christianity in the time when in Rome it had assumed the merrymaking form of the Saturnalia, and this also testifies to us of the aspect of love, of general human love which can exist between man and man if we grasp man in his deepest being. Thus, for example, we grasp him in his deepest being, when at Christmas Eve the child awaits the coming of the Christmas child or the Christmas angel. How does the child wait at Christmas Eve? It awaits the coming of the Christmas child or angel, knowing: He is coming not from human lands, he comes from the spiritual world I It is a kind of understanding of the spiritual world, in which the child shows itself to be like the grown-up people. For they too know the same thing that the child knows—that the Christ-Impulse came into earthly evolution from higher worlds. So it is not only the Child of St. Luke s Gospel that comes before our souls at Christmas, but that which Christmas shall bring near to man’s heart comes near to every child’s soul in the loveliest way, and unites childlike understanding with grown-up understanding. All that a child can feel, from the moment when it begins to be able to think at all—that is the one pole. And the other pole is that which we can feel in our highest spiritual concerns, if we remain faithful to the impulse which was mentioned at the beginning of this evening’s thoughts, the impulse whereby we awaken the will to the spiritual light after which we strive in our now to be founded Anthroposophical Society. For there, too, it is our will that that which is to come into human evolution shall be borne by something which comes into us from spiritual realms as an impulse. And just as the child feels towards the angel of Christmas who brings it its Christmas presents—it feels itself, in its childlike way, connected with the spiritual—so may we feel ourselves connected with the spiritual gift that we long for on Christmas night as the impulse which can bring us the high ideal for which we strive. And if in this circle we feel ourselves united in such love as can stream in from a right understanding of the ‘night of initiation,’ then we shall be able to attain that which is to be attained through the Anthroposophical Society—our anthroposophical ideal. We shall attain that which is to be attained in united work, if a ray of that man-to- man love can take hold of us, of which we can learn when we give ourselves in the right way to the Christmas thought.

Thus those of our dear friends who are united with us to-night may have a kind of excellence of feeling. Though they may not be sitting here or there under the Christmas-tree in the way that is customary in this cycle of time, our dear friends are yet sitting under the Christmas-tree. And all of you who are spending this ‘initiation night’ with us under the Christmas-tree: try to awaken in your souls something of the feeling that can come over us when we feel why it is that we are here together—that we may already learn to realise in our souls those impulses of love which must once in distant and yet more distant future come nearer and nearer, when the Christ-Impulse, of which our Christmas has reminded us so well, takes hold on human evolution with ever greater and greater power, greater and greater understanding. For it will only take hold, if souls be found who understand it in its full significance. But in this realm, ‘understanding’ cannot be without love—the fairest thing in human evolution, to which we give birth in our souls just on this evening and night when we transfuse our hearts with that spiritual picture of the Jesus- Child, cast out by the rest of mankind, thrown into a comer, born in a stable. Such is the picture of Him that is given to us—as though he comes into human evolution from outside, and is received by the simplest in spirit, the poor shepherds. If to-day we seek to give birth to the love-impulse that can pour into our souls from this picture, then it will have the force to promote that which we would and should achieve, to assist in the tasks that we have set ourselves in the realm of Anthroposophy, and that karma has pointed out to us as deep and right tasks in the realm of Anthroposophy.

Let us take this with us from this evening’s thoughts on the Christmas initiation night, saying that we have come together in order to take out with us the impulse of love, not only for a short time, but for all our striving that we have set before us, inasmuch as we can understand it through the spirit of our anthroposophical view of the world.

Let us on this day in particular, turn our hearts with special devotion to those who are without on the scene of action, and who have to devote their lives and souls to the great task of the age; and let us say:

Spirits of their souls, active Guardians,
May your vibrations carry
The imploring love of our souls
To the Earth-men committed to your care,
That, united with your power,
Our prayer may radiate helpfully
To the souls it lovingly seeks.

And for those who have already passed through the portal of death in consequence of the severe duties demanded of them in these times, we will repeat the same words in a slightly altered form:

Spirits of their souls, active Guardians,
May your vibrations carry
The imploring love of our souls
To the sphere-men committed to your care,
That, united with your power,
Our prayer may radiate helpfully
To the souls it lovingly seeks.

And may that Spirit Whom we seek in our spiritual strivings, the Spirit who went through the Mystery of Golgotha for the sake of the freedom and progress of humanity, the Spirit Whom we must specially bear in mind today, may He be with you in your severe tasks.

Let us call to mind the decree ringing forth from the depths of the Mystery of the Earth’s evolution.

‘Revelation of the Divine in the heights of existence and peace to men on earth who are permeated by good will.’ And as Christmas Eve approaches, we must (this year in particular) ask ourselves: ‘What are the feelings that unite us with this saying and its deep cosmic meaning?’ That deep cosmic meaning in which countless men feel the word ‘peace’ resounding, at a time when peace keeps away from a very large part of our earth. How should we think of these Christmas words at such a time?

There is one thought, which, in connection with this verdict, sounding through the world, must concern us far more deeply at this present epoch than at any other time—one thought. Nations are facing each other in enmity. Much blood has saturated our earth. We see and feel countless dead around us at this time. The atmosphere of sensation and feeling around us is interwoven with infinite sorrow. Hate and aversion are heard murmuring through the spiritual realm and might easily testify how very far removed men still are in our day from that love which He wishes to announce Whose birth is celebrated on Christmas Eve. One thought, however, arises: we think how opponents can face each other, enemy face enemy, how men can mutually bring death to one another and how they can all pass through the same Gate of Death with the thought of Christ Jesus, the Divine Light-Bringer. We recall how, in the whole earth, over which war, suffering and discord are spread abroad, these men can still be one at heart, however greatly they may otherwise be disunited, who in the depths of their hearts are united in their connection with Him Who entered the world on the day we commemorate at Christmas. We see how through all enmity, aversion and hatred, one and the same feeling may everywhere penetrate the human soul at this time: out of the blood and hatred may spring the thought of an inner union with One, with Him Who has united the hearts through something higher than anything which can ever separate mankind on earth. Thus the thought of Christ Jesus is a thought of immeasurable depth of feeling, a thought of infinite greatness uniting mankind, however disunited it may be as regards all that is going on in the world. If we grasp the thought in this way, we shall want to comprehend it still more deeply at the present time. We shall feel how much there is that can become strong and powerful within human evolution if connected with this thought—this thought which must develop in order that many things may be acquired by human hearts and souls in a different way from the present tragic method of learning them.

That He may strengthen us, That He may invigorate us,

That He may teach us all over the earth really to experience in the truest sense of the words the utterance of the Christmas Eve saying, which transcends all that separates men from one another. This it is which he who really feels himself united with Christ Jesus solemnly vows anew at Christmas time.

There is a tradition in the history of Christianity which repeatedly appears in later times and for centuries became a custom in certain Christian regions. In olden times representations of the Christian Mysteries were organised chiefly by the Christian Churches for believers in many different regions. And in the remotest times these representations began by reading, occasionally even by enacting, the story of Creation as it occurs at the beginning of the Bible. There was first shown just at Christmas time, how the Cosmic Word sounded forth from the depths of the Cosmos and how out of the Cosmic Word Creation gradually arose: how Lucifer appeared to man, and how men thereby began their earth-existence in a manner different from what was originally destined for them before the approach of Lucifer. The entire story of the temptation of Adam and Eve was brought forward, and it was then shown how man was, as it were, embodied in the Old Testament history. Then as time went on there was added that which was presented in more or less detail in the performances which evolved during the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries in the countries of Central Europe (of which we have just seen one small example). Very little now remains of the grand thought which united the beginning of the Old Testament at this Christmas Eve festival with the secret history of the Mystery of Golgotha. Only this one thing remains, that in our calendar, before the actual Christmas Day comes the day of Adam and Eve. This has its origin in the same thought. But in olden times, for those who through deeper thinking, through deeper feeling, or through a deeper knowledge, were to grasp the Mystery of Christmas and the Mystery of Golgotha, with the help of their teachers, there was exhibited also again and again a great comprehensive thought: the thought of the Origin of the Cross. The God Who is introduced to man in the Old Testament gives to man, as represented by Adam and Eve, this commandment: ‘Ye may eat of all the fruits of the garden, but not of the tree—not of the fruits which grow on the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.’ Because they did eat of this they were driven from the original scene of action of their being.

But the tree—as was shown in many different ways—came by some means into the line of generations, into the original family from which proceeded the bodily covering of Christ Jesus. And it so came about that (as was shown at certain times) when Adam, the man of sin, was buried, there grew out of his grave the tree which had been removed from Paradise. Thus the following thoughts are aroused: Adam rests in his grave: the man who was led astray by Lucifer and passed through sin, rests in his grave. He has united himself with the Earth-body. But from his grave sprouts the tree which can now grow out of the earth, with which Adam’s body is united. The wood of this tree descends to the generations to which Abraham and David belong. And from the wood of this tree, which stood in Paradise and which grew forth from Adam’s grave, was made the Cross upon which Christ Jesus hung.

That is the thought which again and again was made clear by their teachers to those who had to understand the Mystery of Golgotha and its secrets from a deeper point of view. A deep meaning lies in the fact that in olden times profound thoughts were expressed in such pictures. And even at the present day this is still the case, as we shall presently see.

We have made ourselves acquainted with the thought of the Mystery of Golgotha which reveals to us that the Being Who passed through the body of Jesus has poured out over the Earth and into the Earth’s aura what He was able to bring to the Earth. That which the Christ brought to the Earth is since united with the whole body of the Earth. The Earth has become quite different since the Mystery of Golgotha. In the Earth-aura there lives what the Christ brought out of the heavenly heights to the Earth. If we unite this spiritually with that old picture of the tree, it shows us the whole connection from another point of view. The Luciferic principle drew into man as ho began his earthly career. Man as he now is belongs to the Earth, through his union with the Luciferic principle. He forms part of the Earth. And when we lay his body in the earth, this body is not merely that which anatomy sees, but is at the same time the outer mould of what man is in his inner being within his earthly nature. Spiritual Science makes it quite clear to us that what goes through the gates of death into the spiritual worlds is not the only part of man’s being, but that man through his whole activity, through his deeds, is united with the Earth. He is really united with the Earth as are those events which the geologists, mineralogists and zoologists, connect with the Earth. We might say that that which binds man to the Earth is at first concealed from the human individuality on going through the gates of death. But we surrender our external form in some manner to the Earth. It enters the Earth-body. It carries in itself the imprint of what the Earth has become through Lucifer’s entering the Earth evolution. That which man accomplishes on the Earth bears the Luciferic principle in it. Man brings this Luciferic principle into the Earth-aura. There springs forth and blossoms from man’s deeds and activities not only that which was originally intended for man but that which has mingled with the Luciferic principle. This is in the Earth-aura. And when we now see on the grave of the man Adam led away by Lucifer, that tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which through the Luciferic temptation has become different from what it originally was, we then see everything that man has become through forsaking his original state, when he submitted to the Luciferic temptation and brought something into the Earth’s evolution not previously determined. We see the tree grow out of what the physical body is for the Earth, that which has been stamped in its Earth form, and causes man to appear in a lower sphere on the Earth than the one originally destined for him, which would have been his if he had not succumbed to Lucifer. There grows out of the whole Earth existence of man something which has entered human evolution through the Luciferic temptation. While we seek knowledge, we seek it in another way than that originally destined for us. That however allows us to recognise that what grows out of our earthly deeds is different from what it would have been according to the original Divine decree. We form an earth existence other than the one laid down by the original Divine Will. We mingle something else with it; something else, concerning which we must form quite definite conceptions if we want to understand it.

We must form such ideas as these, if we wish to understand correctly. We must say to ourselves as follows: I am placed in the Earth evolution. What I give to the Earth evolution through my deeds bears fruit. It bears the fruit of knowledge which comes to me through my participation in the knowledge of good and evil on the Earth. This knowledge lives on in the evolution of the Earth and is present therein. When, however, I behold this knowledge it becomes in me something different from what it would have been originally, it becomes something which I must alter if the Earth’s goal and task are to be reached. I see something grow out of my Earth deeds which must become different. The tree grows up, the tree which becomes the Cross of earth existence. It becomes something to which man must acquire a new relation, for the old relation does no more than allow the tree to grow.

The tree of the Cross, that Cross that grows out of the Luciferically tainted Earth evolution, springs up out of Adam’s grave, out of the man-nature which Adam acquired after the fall. The tree of knowledge must become the stem of the Cross because man must unite himself anew with the correctly recognised tree of knowledge as it now is in order to reach the Earth’s goal and task.

Let us now ask—and here we touch a significant Mystery of Spiritual Science: How does the case stand with those principles which we have learnt to recognise as the principles of human nature? Now we all know that the highest member of human nature is the Ego. We learn to utter ‘I’ at a definite time of our childhood. We enter into relation with the Ego from the time to which in later years memory carries us back. This we know through various lectures and books upon Spiritual Science. Up to that time the Ego worked formatively upon us, up to the moment when we have a conscious relation to our Ego. The Ego is present in our childhood, it works within us, but at first only builds up our physical body. It first creates the supersensible forces in the spiritual world. After passing through conception and birth, it still works for a time—lasting for some years—on our body, until that becomes an instrument capable of consciously grasping the Ego. A deep mystery is connected with this entry of the Ego into the human bodily nature. We ask a man we meet how old he is, and he gives as his age the years which have passed since his birth. As has been said, we here touch a certain mystery of Spiritual Science that will become ever clearer and clearer in the course of the near future, but to which I shall now merely refer. What a man gives as his age at a definite time of his life, refers only to his physical body. All he tells us is that his physical body has been so many years evolving since his birth. The Ego takes no part in this evolution of the physical body but remains stationary. It is a Mystery difficult to grasp, that the Ego, from the time to which our memory carries us back, really remains stationary: it does not change with the body, but stands still. We have it always before us, because it reflects back to us our experiences. The Ego does not share our Earth journey. Only when we pass through the gates of death we have to travel back again to our birth along the path we call Kamaloka in order to meet our Ego again and take it on our further journey. Thus the Ego remains behind. The body goes forward through the years. This is difficult to understand because we cannot grasp the fact that something remains stationary in time, while time itself progresses. But this is actually the case. The Ego remains stationary, because it does not unite with what comes to man from the Earth-existence, but remains connected with those forces which we call our own in the spiritual world. There the Ego remains; it remains practically in the form in which it was bestowed on us by the Spirits of Form. The Ego is retained in the spiritual world. It must remain there, otherwise we could never, as man, fulfil our original task on Earth and attain the goal of our Earth-evolution. That which man here on Earth has undergone through his Adam-nature, of which he left an imprint in the grave when he died in Adam, that belongs to the physical body, etheric and astral body and comes from these. The Ego waits; it waits with all that belongs to it the whole time man remains on Earth, ever looking forward to the further evolution of man, beholding how man recapitulates when he has passed through the gates of death, and retraces his path. This implies that as regards our Ego we remain in a certain respect behind in the spiritual world. Man will have to become conscious of this, and humanity can only become conscious of it because at a certain time the Christ descended from those worlds to which mankind belongs, out of the spiritual worlds Christ descended, and in the body of Jesus prepared, in the twofold manner we already know, that which had to serve Him as a body on Earth.

When we understand ourselves aright, we continually look back through our whole Earth life to our childhood. There, in our childhood, precisely the spiritual part of us has remained behind. And humanity should be educated to look back on that to which the spirit from the heights can say: ‘Suffer the little children to come to Me !’ Not the man who is bound to the Earth, but the little child. Humanity should be educated to this, for the Feast of Christmas has been given to it, that Feast which has been added to the Mystery of Golgotha, which need otherwise only have been bestowed on humanity as regards the three last years of the Christ life, when the Christ was in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. It shows how Christ prepared for Himself this human body in childhood. This is what should underlie our feelings at Christmas: the knowledge of how man, through what remains behind in heavenly heights during his years of growth, has really always been united with what is now coming. In the figure of the Child man should be reminded of the Human-Divine, which he left behind in descending to Earth, but which has now again come to him. Man should be reminded by the Child of that which has again brought his child-nature to him. This was no easy task, but in the very way in which this Festival of the Cosmic Child, this Christmas Festival, was developed in Central Europe, we see the wonderful, active, sustaining force within it.

What we have seen today is only one of many Nativity Plays. There have remained from olden times a number of so-called Paradise Plays which were produced at Christmas and in which the story of Creation is enacted. In connection with the representation of today, which is merely a pastoral play, there has also remained behind the Play of the Three Kings offering their gifts. A great deal of this was recorded in numerous plays which for the most part have now disappeared.

About the middle of the eighteenth century the time begins in which they disappear in country districts. But it is wonderful to trace their existence. In West Hungary, about 1850, Karl Julius Schröer, made a collection of Christmas Plays such as-these in the neighbourhood of Pressburg. Other people made similar collections in other places. But what Schröer then discovered of the customs connected with the performance of these plays may sink deeply into our hearts. These plays were there in manuscript in certain families of the villages and were regarded as something especially sacred. With the approach of October preparations were always begun to perform this play at Christmas before the people of the place. The well-behaved youths and maidens were sought out and during this time of preparation they ceased to drink wine or alcohol. They might no longer romp and wrestle on Sundays. They had really to lead what is called a holy life. And thus a feeling prevailed that a certain moral tone of the soul was necessary in those who devoted themselves at Christmas to the performance of such plays, for they could not be performed in the quite worldly atmosphere. They were performed with all the simplicity of the villagers, but profound seriousness prevailed in the entire performance. In all the plays collected by Schröer and earlier by Weinhold and others in many different regions, there is everywhere this deep earnestness with which the Christmas Mystery was approached. But this was not always so. We need only go back two centuries further to find something else which strikes us in the highest degree as peculiar. The very manner in which these Christmas plays became part of the life of the central European villages in which they arose and gradually evolved, shows us how powerfully the Christmas thought worked there. It was not immediately taken up in the manner just described; the people did not always approach it with holy awe, with deep earnestness, with a living feeling of the significance of the occurrence.

In many regions it was begun by erecting a manger before the side altar of some church. This was in the fourteenth or fifteenth century; but it goes back to still earlier times. A manger was erected, a stall with an ox and an ass, the Child and two figures representing Joseph and Mary. Thus at first it was attempted with simple art; later an attempt was made to bring more life into it, but on the spiritual side. That is, priests took part; one priest represented Joseph and another Mary. In earlier times they spoke their parts in the Latin tongue, for in the old churches great stress was laid on this—it was considered very important that the spectators should understand as little as possible of the matter and should only behold the external acting. But this could no longer continue to please, for there were among the spectators those who wanted to understand something of what was being enacted before them. Gradually it became customary to recite certain parts in the dialect used in the district. Finally the wish arose in people to participate, to take part in the experiences themselves. But the thing was still quite strange to them. We must remember that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries there was not as yet the knowledge of the Holy Mysteries, of the Mystery of Christmas, for instance, which we today regard as a matter of course. We must remember that although the people year in and year out attended Mass, and at Christmas the Midnight Mass, they did not possess the Bible, which was only there for the priests to read; they were only acquainted with a few extracts from the Holy Scripture. And it was at first really to acquaint them with what had once occurred that these things were dramatised in this fashion for them by the priests. The people first learnt to know of them in this way.

Something must now be said which I must ask you not to misunderstand, but it may be brought forward because it expresses purely historical truth. It was not that the participation in the Christmas plays proceeded from some mysterious influence or anything of that nature; what attracted the people was rather the desire to take part in what was presented before them and to draw nearer to it. At last they were permitted to share in it. Things had to be made more comprehensible to the laity. And this clearer understanding progressed step by step. At first the people understood absolutely nothing about the child lying in the manger. They had never seen such a thing as a child in a manger. Earlier when they were not allowed to understand anything, they accepted it: but now they wanted to share in it, it had to be made comprehensible to them. And so a cradle was brought and as the people passed, each one took part by rocking the child for a moment. Thus similar details were developed in which they took part. Indeed there were even districts in which all was quite serious at first, but when the child was brought, they made a tremendous uproar, everyone screaming and showing by dancing and shouting the pleasure they felt in the birth of the child. It was then received in a mood that felt a passion for movement and a desire to experience the story. But in this story lay something so great and mighty that, out of this quite profane feeling there gradually evolved that holy awe of which I have already spoken. The subject itself impressed its holiness on a performance which could not at first have been called in the least holy. Precisely in the Middle Ages the holy story of Christmas had first to conquer mankind. And it conquered the people to such an extent that in the performance of their plays, they desired to prepare their lives with this moral intensity.

What was it that thus overcame the feelings, the soul of man? It was the sight of the Child, of that which remains holy in man whilst his other three bodies unite with the Earth evolution. Even though in some districts at different times the story of Bethlehem took on grotesque forms, yet it lay in human nature to evolve this holy regard for the child-nature, which is connected with what entered into the development of Christianity from the very beginning. And that is the consciousness of the necessity of a reunion of what remains stationary in man when he commences his Earth evolution, with what has connected itself with Earth-man, so that man gives over to the Earth the wood from which the cross must be made with which man has to form the new union. In the more remote times of Christian development in Central Europe, nothing but the conception of Easter was popularised, and only in the manner described was the conception of Christmas gradually developed. For what appears in ‘Heliand,’ for instance, was composed by various individuals, but never became popular.

The observance of Christmas grew into a popular custom as described, and it shows in a manner really startling how man acquired the thought of the union with the child-nature, that pure and noble childlike character that appeared in a new form in the Jesus-Child. When we so grasp the power of this thought that it lives in the soul as the only conception in our existence capable of uniting all men, then we have the true Christian conception. This Christ-Thought becomes mighty in us, it becomes something which must grow strong within us if the further Earth evolution is to proceed aright. Let us remember here how far removed man is in his present Earth-existence from what is really contained in the depths of the Christ-Thought.

A book by Ernst Haeckel has recently appeared called Thoughts about Life, Death, Immortality and Religion, in Connection with the World-War. Now a book by Ernst Haeckel certainly springs from a deep love of truth, certainly the deepest truth is sought for in it. The following may give some idea of what the book is intended to convey. It sets out to indicate what now transpires on the Earth, how the nations are at war with each other, living in hate, how countless deaths take place every day. All these thoughts which obtrude so painfully on mankind are mentioned by Haeckel, but naturally with the underlying thought of considering the world from his own point of view. We have said that Haeckel may, even by Spiritual Science, be considered a profound investigator. His point of view may indeed lead to other results, but leads to what can be observed in the newer phases of Haeckel’s evolution. Now Haeckel forms thoughts on the world-war. He too remarks how much blood is flowing, how greatly we are encompassed by death. And he asks: ‘Can the thoughts of religion endure by the side of this? Can one anyhow believe (he asks) that some wise Providence—a kindly God—rules the world, when one sees so many dying every day through mere chance (so he says)? They do not perish from any cause attributable to a wise cosmic ordering, but through the accident of meeting a possible shell. Have these thoughts of the wisdom of Providence any meaning in the face of this? Must not just such events as these prove that man is nothing more than what external materialistic history of evolution declares and that all earth existence is fundamentally directed not by a wise Providence but by chance? In the face of this, can there be any other thought than that of resignation (continues Haeckel), of saying: ‘We give up our bodies and pass out into the thought of the cosmic all?’ But if one questions further, (though Haeckel does not put the question), if this! all’ is nothing but the play of endless atoms, has the life of man any meaning in earth-existence? As said above, Haeckel does not pursue the question, but in his Christmas book he gives the answer: ‘These very events which touch us so painfully show us that we have no right to believe that a good Providence or wise cosmic ruling or anything of the kind moves and Eves in the whole world. So we must be resigned—we must put up with things as they are!’

And this is a Christmas book! A book nobly and honourably planned. But this book is based on the remarkable prejudice that it is useless to seek for a meaning to the earth. That it is denied to humanity to seek in a spiritual way for a meaning!

If we only observe the external course of events we do not see this meaning. Then it is as Haeckel says. And at that it has to remain, that is, that this life has no meaning! That is his opinion. A purpose may not be sought. But perhaps someone else may say: The events now taking place show us, for the very reason that, if we look at them externally and point only to the fact that numberless bullets are ending the lives of men today, they appear without purpose—those very events show us that we must seek more deeply to find the purpose. We must not simply seek a purpose in that which happens on the Earth alone, when these human souls forsake the body, but we must investigate the life that now begins for them when they pass through the gate of death. In short, another man may say: ‘Just because no meaning can be found in the external, it must be sought elsewhere, in the supersensible.’ Is that anything else than to take the same thought into another—quite different—domain? Haeckel’s science may lead those who think as he does today to deny all meaning to Earth-existence. It may seem to prove, from what happens so painfully today, that the Earth-life as such has no meaning. But if we grasp it in our way—as we have often done before—then this very same science becomes a starting point for showing what deep and mighty purpose can be discovered by us in the world phenomena. For this, however, there must be the spiritual active in the world; we must be able to unite ourselves with the spiritual. For man in the sphere of erudition does not yet understand how to let that power work on him which has so wonderfully conquered the hearts and souls that on beholding the Christmas Mystery, out of a profane comprehension, there has arisen a holy understanding. Because the learned cannot yet grasp this and cannot yet unite the Christ-Impulse with what they see in the external world, it is impossible for them to find a real true meaning in the Earth. And so we must say: The Science of which man is so proud today—and rightly so—with all its immense progress is not in itself in a position to lead man to any satisfactory philosophy. It can just as easily lead to a lack of sense and meaning as to a meaning for the Earth, just as in any other domain. Let us consider science in the later centuries, especially in the nineteenth and up to the present day—evolving so proudly all its wonderful laws, and let us look at what surrounds us today. It has all been produced by science. We no longer burn, as Goethe did, a night-light. We bum something else and illumine our rooms in a very different fashion. All that possesses our souls today, as the result of our science has arisen through the immense progress of which man is so proud, so justly proud. But how does this science work? It works beneficially when man evolves what is good. But today, just through its very perfection, it produces invincible instruments of murder. Its progress serves the cause of destruction as well as that of construction. Just as on the one side that science of which Haeckel is a follower may lead either to sense and meaning or to nonsense and lack of meaning, so, in spite of its greatness, it may serve both destruction and construction. And if it depended on science alone what was produced, then, from the same sources from which it constructs, science would bring forth ever more and more fearful instruments of destruction. Science itself has no direct impulse to bring humanity forward! If this could be realised, science would then, and then only, be valued in the right way. We should then know that in the evolution of man there must be something more than man can reach by means of science.

What is this science of ours? In reality none other than the tree growing out of Adam’s grave; and the time is drawing near when man will recognise this. The time will come when man will know that this tree must become the wood which is the Cross of humanity and which can only become a blessing when on it is crucified and properly united with it, that which lies on the further side of death, yet lives already here in man. That it is to which we look up in the Holy Christmas Eve, if we feel this Mystery of the sacred Festival aright—and that is what can be represented in childlike fashion, and yet is the cloak of the greatest Mysteries. Is it not really wonderful that in this simple way it could be brought home to people that something had appeared which, though it cannot extend beyond childhood, yet governs a man during his whole Earth-life? It is related to that to which man, as a supersensible being, belongs. Is it not wonderful that this, which is in the highest degree invisible and supersensible, could approach so near to those simple human souls through simple pictures such as these?

Indeed those who are learned will also have to follow the same path as those simple souls. There was even a time when the Child was not represented in the cradle nor in the manger, but when the sleeping child was placed upon the Cross I The Child sleeping on the Cross! A wonderful, profound picture, which expresses the whole thought I wished to lay before your souls today.

Cannot this thought in reality be very simply stated? Indeed it can! Let us just seek the origin of those impulses which today oppose each other so terribly in the world. Whence do they originate? Whence originates all that today is in such bitter conflict, all that makes life so difficult for humanity? It all originates in what we become in the world after the time of our earliest recollection. Let us go back beyond that time, let us go right back to the point when we are called the little children who may enter the kingdom of heaven. We do not find it then, there was then nothing in the human soul of what today is strife and hatred. In this simple way the thought can be expressed and today we must visualise spiritually that there is in the human soul an original condition rising above all human strife and disharmony.

We have often spoken of the old Mysteries, which were intended to awaken in the nature of man that which allowed him to perceive the supersensible; and we have said that the Mystery of Golgotha represents on the stage of history clearly for all mankind, the story of the supersensible Mystery. Now that which unites us with the true Christ-Thought is within us, it is really in us—to enable us to have moments in our life (this is to be taken literally not symbolically) moments when, in spite of everything we may be in the external world, we can yet make that which we have received as children alive within us, moments in which we behold man in his development between birth and death, and can feel the child-nature in ourselves.

In my public lecture on Johann Gottlieb Fichte, I might have added a few words more—perhaps they might not have been thoroughly understood then, they would, however, have explained many things which dwelt in this particularly devout person. I might have said why he became such a very special person; it was because, in spite of his age, he retained more than most people of the child-nature. There is more of the child-nature in such men than in others. Men like these, men who retain more of their child-nature, keep their youth and do not grow old as do others. This is really the secret of many great men, that they can in a sense remain children—speaking relatively, of course, for they have had to lead the life of men.

The Christmas Mystery appeals to the child-nature within us. It points us to the vision of the Divine Child that is destined to take up the Christ—and to which we look up as to something over which the Christ, Who went through Golgotha for the salvation of the Earth, already hovers.

Let us be conscious of this when we give over the imprint of our higher man, our physical body, to the Earth. This is not a mere physical event, for something spiritual takes place. But this spiritual event only takes place aright because the Christ-Being, by going through the Mystery of Golgotha, has flowed into the aura of the Earth. We do not behold the entire Earth in its completeness unless we visualise also the Christ, Who, since the Mystery of Golgotha, is united with it. We may pass Him by, as we pass by anything supersensible if we are merely equipped in a materialistic sense; but we cannot pass Him by if the Earth is really to have for us a true and actual purpose. Everything rests upon our being able to awaken in ourselves that which opens our gaze to the spiritual world.

Let us make this Christmas Festival what it should be to us, a Festival which not merely serves the past—but also the future; that future which is gradually to bring forth the birth of the spiritual life for the whole of humanity. We must unite ourselves with the prophetic feeling, with the prophetic premonition, that such a birth of the spiritual life in man must be accomplished, that a mighty Christmas must work to influence the future of humanity, a bringing to birth of that which in the thoughts of man gives a meaning to the Earth, that meaning which became the objective of the Earth when the Christ-Being united Himself with the Earth-aura, through the Mystery of Golgotha. Let us meditate at Christmas on the thought how from the depths of darkness light must enter human evolution. The old light of the spiritual life which was gradually dying out before Golgotha had to pass away and has now to arise anew, it must since Golgotha be born again through the consciousness in the human soul that this soul of man is connected with what the Christ had become to the Earth through the Mystery of Golgotha.

When more and more men arise who can thus grasp Christmas in the sense of Spiritual Science, it will become a force in the hearts and souls of men which has a meaning for all times, whether in such times as men give themselves over to feelings of happiness, or when they must feel sorrow and pain such as we feel today, when we think of the great misery of our time.

Concerning the vision of the spiritual which gives meaning to the Earth, it has been expressed in beautiful words which I will put before you today: (Here follows a rough translation):

That which gives mine eyes the power
To cause deformity to disappear,
To turn dark nights to radiant suns of brightness,
To turn disorder into order, and decay to life;
Life, which through the ages,
Weaves invisibly in space,
Leading me on to th' eternal sources
Of the Beautiful, the True, the Good.
The source of all Delight,
In which immersed, my strivings are but vain.
Life it is, which since in Urania’s eyes I gazed,
The deep, the clear, the blue—pure flames of light
I have silently perceived and looked upon.
Since then I see those eyes in deeps profound,
The only permanent things in my existence,
They live on in me, part of my life,
And see through my beholding.

And in another small poem:

Nothing is but God, and God is naught but Life.
Thou knowest this, as I myself know too,
And yet our knowing would ne’er have power to be,
Unless t’were knowledge of the Life of God.
How fain would I devote myself to this!
But where shall it be found; if into some knowledge it doth flow,
Forthwith it is transformed into a semblance.
Commingled with Him, surrounded by His sheath,
When thou dost wake the true sheath to behold,
It is thy Self!
Let all that perishable is, decay.
Henceforth let God alone dwell in thy strivings,
Learn to discern what beyond all striving yet Eves on;
Then will the Sheath itself become perceptible,
And unveiled be the Life Divine.

It is true men do not always know how to understand those who lead them to a vision of the spiritual which gives a meaning to the Earth. The materialists are not alone in this. Others, who believe themselves to be no materialists because they continually repeat, ‘God, God,’ or ‘Lord, Lord,’ too often do not know what to make of these guides to the spiritual. For what could one make of a man who says:

‘Learn to discern what beyond all striving yet Eves on;
Then will the sheath itself become perceptible,
And unveiled be the Life Divine

who sees Divine Life in everything? He might be reproached with holding the world away from him, with denying its existence. Such a man might be accused of denying the existence of the world. His contemporaries accused him of denying God, of being an atheist, and drove him away from the High School on that account. For the words I have just quoted were written by Johann GottEeb Fichte. He is a case in point. When there Eves on in a human soul aU through his earthly life that which dwells as an impulse from the Mystery of Golgotha and the notes of which may be heard in the Christmas Mystery, a way is then opened in which we can find that consciousness in which our own ego flows in union with the Earth-Ego. For the Earth-Ego is the Christ. In this way something is developed in man which must become greater and greater if the Earth is to achieve that evolution for which it was destined from the beginning of aU things.

And so from the spirit of our Spiritual Science we have today tried to transform the Christmas thought into an impulse; and while looking up to it from that which is now going on around us, we shall try not to behold a want of purpose in the Earth-evolution, but rather in the midst of sorrow and pain, even in strife and hatred, to see something which finally helps man a step forward.

More important than the search for the causes of what happens today is this: that we should turn our gaze to the possible effects, to those effects which we must conceive as bringing healing to mankind.

That nation or people will do the right thing which is able to fashion something healing for mankind in the future, from what springs up out of the blood-saturated Earth. But this healing can only come about when man finds his way to the spiritual worlds: when he does not forget that not only a transitory but an eternal Christmas exists, an everlasting bringing to birth of the Divine Spiritual in the physical Earth-man.

Especially today let us retain the holiness of this thought in our souls, and keep it there, even beyond the Christmas season, during the time which can be for us in its external course, a symbol of the evolution of fight. Darkness, the most intense Earth-darkness prevails at this time of the year. But we know that when the Earth lives in the deepest outer darkness, the Earth-soul experiences its light, its greatest time of growth begins.

The spiritual time of awakening coincides with Christmas and with this spiritual awakening should be united the thought of the spiritual awakening of the earth-evolution through Christ Jesus. For this reason the Christmas Festival was placed just at this particular time.

In this cosmic and at the same time earthly and moral sense let us fill our souls with the thoughts of Christmas and then, strengthened and invigorated with this moral thought, let us, as far as we can, turn our gaze on everything around us, desiring what is right for the progress of events and especially as regards the present occurrences. And as we begin at once to make active within us the strength we have been able to acquire from this Christmas Festival, let us conclude once more by turning to the Guardian Spirit of those who have to take a difficult part in the great events of the times.

Spirits of their souls, active Guardians,
May your vibrations carry
The imploring love of our souls
To the earth-men committed to your charge,
That, united with your power,
Our prayers may helpfully irradiate
The souls they lovingly seek.

And for those who have already passed through the gates of death while fulfilling the severe tasks given to man as a result of the great demands of our present time, let us repeat those words again in a slightly altered form:

Spirits of their souls, active Guardians,
May your vibrations carry
The imploring love of our souls
To the sphere-men committed to your charge,
That united with your power,
Our prayers may helpfully irradiate
The souls they lovingly seek.

And may the Spirit Who passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, that Spirit Who, for the progress and salvation of the Earth, has made Himself known in the Mystery of Christmas, which men will gradually learn to understand better and better, may He be with you in the severe tasks that lie before you.

It will be a hundred years on 9th May, 1905, since Schiller died, and the educated world in Germany will certainly celebrate the memory of this event. Three generations lie between Schiller and us; and so our first task would appear to be to survey the meaning of Schiller to us today. The last great Schiller festival took place in 1859, but with quite a different significance from what ours can have today. Times have changed enormously. The pictures, problems and thoughts which occupy our contemporaries are quite different. The celebration held in 1859 was something which penetrated deep into the heart of the German people.

In 1859 there were still men who themselves lived wholly in the ideas which had been brought out by Schiller's poetic power. It may be that this year we shall see more exuberant festivities; but no such participation from the depths of the soul is any longer possible.

The question therefore forces itself on us, what has happened since then? and how can Schiller still mean anything to us? The grand pictures (and ideas) of the Goethe-Schiller period have vanished. In 1859 these ideas were still incorporated in individuals with whom the older among us became acquainted when we were young. These leading spirits, who were rooted completely in the traditions of the time, are now with the dead. The youngest among us have no longer any knowledge of them.

In the person of my teacher Schröer, who put the Goethe period before us in enthusiastic fashion, I had been privileged to know a man who was rooted wholly in that period. In Herman Grimm the last example died of those whose souls were completely at one with that period. today, all that is past history. Other problems concern us. Political and social questions have become so pressing that we no longer understand that intimate artistic attitude.

Men of that period would have a strange effect on us; we have lost their deep, “soulful” attitude to art. That is no reproach; our times have become hard. Let us take three leading thinkers of the present and see how differently they talk of the movements of their time.

First, Ibsen: we see how he deals comprehensively with the problems of our modern culture, how he has found the most penetrating melody to suit the modern heart and a civilisation which is passing into chaos. Then, Zola: What is to be the relation at the present between our art and a life which is threatening to explode in social struggles—that is the question he thrusts upon us. That life appears to us rigid and impenetrable, decided by quite other forces than our fantasy and soul. Lastly, Tolstoi, who started from art, and only later became a preacher and social reformer. today such a purely aesthetic culture as Schröer depicted to us for the Goethe-Schiller period seems quite impossible.

At that period the decisive problem of life was what we might call the aesthetic conscience. Beauty, taste and artistic sensitivity were regarded as problems quite as serious and pressing as politics and freedom are today. Art was regarded as something which must have its part in the machinery of culture. But today, Tolstoi, who has created masterpieces in the sphere of art, deserts his art and looks for other means of speaking to the sensibility of his contemporaries.

Schiller therefore is not to be judged in our times as he was in the Eighteenth Century. But what has remained, is the impressive depths of his “Weltanschauung” (worldview). Quantities of questions receive a wholly new light as a result of Schiller's view of the world. Our business in these lectures is to try to look at them from this standpoint.

In dealing with the various problems of our times and our culture, in science as in artistic effort, there is nowadays great confusion and obscurity. Every youthful author thinks it his business to establish a new philosophy; literature is choked with books on questions which have been long ago solved. Questions are unfolded which, in the form we see, reach no conclusion because those who are trying to solve them have not really occupied themselves with the problems. Often indeed, the questions are not even asked properly, so that the problem really lies in the way in which the questions are put.

There are two currents out of which we can see the personality of Schiller growing up:—on the one side the growth of materialism, on the other the longing for the assertion of the personality. What we call “Illumination” Aufklärung has its roots in these two currents.

Age-old traditions were tottering during the Eighteenth Century. In the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries the deepest questions of the human spirit were solved on the basis of tradition; and no shocks were dealt to man's fundamental relationship with the world and its deepest foundations.

Now came a difference; it was impossible to solve the basic problems dealing with the human life of the spirit in the same sense as had been done for centuries. In France, stimulated by English “Sensationalism,” a rationalistic, materialistic philosophy was growing up. The soul was beginning to be deduced from material conditions; everything was to be explained out of the physical. The Encyclopaedists made spirit originate in matter. The ups and downs in the world around us were a whirl of atomic movement. “Man is a machine”—that was more or less the form in which La Mettrie formulated his materialistic creed. Goethe already complained, when he grew acquainted with the writings of these French materialists (Holbach's Système de la Nature), and was indignant at men's presumption in trying to explain the whole world by a few barren ideas.

By the side of this was a second stream which derived from Rousseau. Rousseau's writings made an enormous impression on the most important men of the time. There is a story about Kant, who was a great pedant, and took his daily walk so punctually that the inhabitants of Königsberg could set their clocks by him. But there was one occasion when to the astonishment of the inhabitants the philosopher did not appear for some days: he had been reading Rousseau, whose writings had gripped him so hard that he had forgotten his daily walk.

The foundations of a whole civilisation had been shaken by Rousseau. He put the question whether mankind had risen as a consequence of civilisation; and his answer was a negative. In his view men were happier at a stage of nature than at their present stage when they allowed their personality to decay in itself.

In times when men, basing themselves on tradition, still believed they knew something of the relationships of the world, they were not so intent on the personality. Now, when the personality had cut asunder the bonds between itself and the world, men began to ask how that personality was to establish itself firmly in the world.

They believed that it was impossible to know anything about the deepest foundations of the world and the soul. But if, as a result, there was nothing any longer secure in the world, the longing towards better material conditions was bound to increase in everyone. The revolutionary efforts of the Eighteenth Century had their origin here; connected with the materialistic current. A good Christian of the Seventeenth Century could not have spoken thus of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. This striving after liberty (freedom) must be regarded as the fundamental current of the time.

Schiller was young when these ideas of freedom were ripening. Rousseau's ideas had, as we have just said, a colossal influence on the most important men in Germany, like Kant, Herder and Wieland. The young Schiller was also fascinated; and we find him, even at the Karlsschule, engaged in reading Rousseau, Voltaire, etc.

The age had reached a dead end. The upper classes had lost all moral soundness. An external tyranny dominated in school as well. In Schiller there was a peculiar depth of temperament which appeared, even in boyhood, as a tendency towards religion. For that reason he had, moreover, originally intended to study theology; his whole disposition urged him to the deepest problems of existence. The peculiar form taken in Germany by this striving for freedom was in the union of piety with an infinite longing for emancipation. The urge towards the freedom of personality, and not merely religion, is also the atmosphere of Klopstock's Messiah: it is in his religious feeling that the German wants to be free. The Messiah made a great impression on Schiller.

Schiller chose the faculty of medicine; and the way in which he tackled the subject, is related to the questions which were particularly occupying him. He tried to reach some conclusion on these questions by a serious study of nature. The teaching in the Karlsschule was to have a deeply comprehensive and all-round effect on him. The weaknesses to be seen in modern secondary education did not exist in that school. The natural sciences were studied thoroughly; and the centre of study was philosophy. Deepest questions of metaphysics and logic were discussed.

Thus Schiller entered on his medical studies with a philosophic spirit. The way in which he took them is important and significant for his life. We cannot understand Schiller wholly if we do not read the two dissertations which he wrote after finishing his studies. They deal with the questions:

What is the relation between spirit and matter?

What are the relations of the animal and spiritual natures in man?

Of the first only little survives. In the second Schiller puts to himself the question how we have to understand the working of the material in the human body.

For Schiller, even the material body has something spiritual. There are men who see in the body only something low and animal. There is no depth of content in a view which thus lowers and abominates the body; nor was it the view of the young Schiller. For Schiller the body is the temple of the spirit, built by wisdom, and not to no purpose possessing influence on the spirit.

What is the significance of the body for the soul? that is the question which Schiller, who felt the physical also to be holy, sought to solve. He describes, for example, how the quality of soul expresses itself in gesture and in feeling. He seeks to explain to himself, in fine and illuminating fashion, what remains permanently of the movement of soul thus expressed. He says at the close of his dissertation:—

Matter breaks up again, at death, into its ultimate elements, which henceforward wander through the kingdoms of nature in other forms and relationships, to serve other purposes. The soul departs, to exercise its power of thought in other spheres and to observe the universe from other sides. We may say, of course, that it has by no means exhausted the possibilities of this sphere, that it might have left this sphere more perfect; but do we know that this sphere is lost to it? We lay aside many a book which we do not understand, but which we may perhaps understand better some years hence.

This is how Schiller tries to make clear to himself the eternal of the spirit in its relation to physical nature—without however under-estimating the physical. That remained the central problem for all Schiller's life: How is man born from out the physical and how does his soul and the freedom of his personality stand towards the world? How is the soul to find its centre now that the old traditions have gone?

After having in the dramas of his youth thundered forth all his passion for emancipation, and won over the heart of his people, he busied himself with history and philosophy, and we touch the deepest problems of the history of civilisation or cultural history when we study the dramas of Schiller. Everyone had a piece of Marquis Posa in himself, and so Schiller's problem took on a new feature. The deepest questions in relation to the human soul and the meaning of life were discussed. He saw how little had been achievable on the external plane. In Germany the effort was being made to solve the problem of freedom in an artistic way; and that resulted in what we may call the “aesthetic conscience.” Schiller, too, had put the question to himself in this way; and he was sure that the artist could give man of the highest. He dealt with this problem in later years. In his “Letters on the aesthetic Education of Man” he says: Man acts unfreely in the external world from necessity; in the world of reason he is subject to necessity, to logic. Man is thus hedged in by the real world and by his ideal of reason. But there is another, middle condition between reason and the sense world, the aesthetic. Anyone who has artistic sensibility, appreciates the spirit in the sensible; he sees spirit enwoven in nature. Nature is to him a beauty-filled picture of the spiritual. The sense world is therefore only the expression of the spirit; in a work of art the sensible is ennobled by the spirit. The spirit is removed from the kingdom of necessity. In beauty man Eves as in freedom. Art is thus the intermediary between the senses and reason in the realm of freedom.

Goethe felt the same in presence of the works of art in Italy. In the beautiful the impulse of mankind towards freedom finds its satisfaction; here he is raised above iron necessity. Not by force or state-laws. In aesthetic enjoyment Schiller saw an education into harmony. As man, he feels himself free through art; and so he would like to transform the whole world into a work of art.

Here we see the difference between that time and our own. today, art is kept in a corner; then, Schiller wanted to give life an immediate impression through art. today Tolstoi has to condemn art, while Ibsen, in his art, becomes the critic of social life. At that time Schiller wanted to interfere direct on life by means of art. When he wrote his pamphlet on “The Stage as a moral Institution,” during the period when he was acting as reporter at the Mannheim theatre, he did it because he wanted to give a direct impulse to civilisation by means of art.

We have seen how Schiller grew up out of the ideas of the Eighteenth Century and how the ideals of the Age of Enlightenment had taken root in his soul. They had already assumed their peculiar form when he left the Karlsschule and wrote the above-mentioned theses.

If we want to describe these ideas in a word, we may say that the main problem was the emancipation of personality. This liberation from age-old tradition goes still further. When medieval man before the age of “Illumination” thought about his relation to himself, to nature, the universe and God, he found himself ready established within the universe. He worshipped the same God without, who dwelt within his own soul; the same forces which were active in the world without, were active in man's own soul; there was a certain unity to be seen in the laws of the universe and in the nature of man. We need only think of men like Giordano Bruno: This monistic conviction of the relationship of nature to man can be found in his writings.

There was thus no gulf between what we may call the moral claim and the objective laws in nature. This opposition only arose later when man excluded nature from divine influence. The attitude which has grown up in materialism, knew no relation between nature and moral feeling or what man develops within himself as a moral claim.

This was the origin of Rousseau-ism, which is fundamentally a revolutionary feeling, a protest against the whole line of development hitherto. It teaches that when we observe man's demand for freedom and his assertion of morality, a harsh discord appears. It asks whether there really can be such a difference between the objective world and human nature, that men must long to get out of it, to escape from the whole of their civilisation.

These spiritual struggles found expression in the temperament of the young Schiller; and in the three dramas of his youth this longing receives a new form. In the “Räuber,” in “Fiesco” and “Kabale und Liebe” we see depicted concretely, with a vast pathos, the demand that man must do something to produce this harmony. In the figure of Karl Moor, we see the creation of a man who bears in himself the opposition between the objective order and the demand made by his humanity, and feels called upon to produce some harmony between nature and himself. His tragedy arises because he believes that he can restore the law by lawlessness and arbitrariness. In “Fiesco” the longing for freedom crashes on the rock of ambition. The ideal of freedom fails through this disharmony in the soul of the ambitious Fiesco, who cannot find his way so far as to put order into the moral ideal. In “Kabale und Liebe” the demand of human nature in the uprising middle-classes stands opposed to the demands of the world as they were expressed in the ruling classes. The relation between moral ideals and general ideas applicable to the world had been lost. The discord echoes grandly, for all their youthful immaturity, from the first dramas of Schiller.

Such natures as Schiller's find themselves less easily than the one-line, simpler and. unsophisticated type, just as we see in natural evolution that lower creatures require shorter periods of preparation than the more highly developed animals. Great natures have to pass through the most varied phases, because their inmost qualities have to be fetched up from the deepest levels. Anyone who has much in him and comes into the world with a claim to genius, will have a hard path, and will have to work through many earlier stages—as the analogy of the embryonic development of higher animals shows us.

What Schiller lacked was knowledge of man and of the world. His first plays show him with all the defects which arise from that fact, but with all the merits which hardly appear again later so clearly. This judgment is made from a fairly high level; we have to realise what we owe to Schiller's greatness. But things could not remain thus for long. Schiller had to rise beyond this limited horizon; and we see how in his fourth play, Don Carlos, he works his way to another standpoint. We may look from a double angle, first from that of Don Carlos, second that of Marquis Posa. Schiller himself tells us how his interest at first lay with the youthful fiery Carlos and then passed to the cosmopolitan Posa. That indicates a deep change in his own personality.

Schiller had been summoned by his friend Körner to Dresden, so that he might work there in peace. There he grew acquainted with a philosophy and view of the world which was to have a great influence on his own personality. Kantianism was a necessary study for a person like Schiller, and we shall understand his standpoint yet more deeply if we delay a moment over what was then working upon him.

At that time, we can see two quite definite currents in German intellectual life. The one is that which finds most definite expression in Herder's Ideas for the history of the philosophy of mankind; the other the Kantian philosophy. In Herder we have the passion to put man into relation with the whole of nature and to understand him in that relation. It is this striving for unity which makes Herder appear so modern a man. ... Arguments brought now-a-days against Kantianism with its dualism (which is still regarded as only an academic philosophy), exist already in Herder's Metacritic. The whole embraces a mass of great ideas; there is a striving after the unification of nature and man. From the lowest product of nature right up to the thought of man there is one law. What is seen in man as the moral law, is in the crystal the law of its form. One fundamental evolution runs through all that is, so that that which forms the flower in the plant, develops in man into humanity. It is the world-picture which appeared in Goethe also and which he expressed in Faust in the words:

How all weaves itself to a whole; one thing works and lives in the other,

and which he describes in his Hymn to Nature.

Goethe is wholly permeated by this striving for unity, as it found expression in Giordano Bruno, the Pythagorean. He stands completely within the stream:

What were a God who only touches from without,
And lets the All run past in cycles?
His task it were to move the world within,
To foster nature in himself, himself in nature.

That is the monistic stream, to which Schiller at that period still was a stranger. For him there was still a two-ness, a dualism.

In his Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason Kant had set a definite limit to human knowledge. Man's capacity for knowledge extends as far as reason goes. It can only give him the external, and cannot pierce to the real being of things. That which is the thing-in-itself, is hidden behind the appearance; man cannot even speak of it. But there is something within man which cannot be mere appearance. That is the moral law. On the one side—the world of appearance; on the other—the moral law, the categorical imperative, the “Thou shalt,” which may not be doubted, which rises above knowledge and cannot be taken as appearance. Thus in Kant's philosophy we have not merely a duality such as we saw before, but the whole world of human spiritual life is divided into two halves. That which is to be superior to all criticism, the moral law, is not knowledge at all, but a practical belief, which contains no limits of knowledge but only moral postulates. Thus Kantianism appears as the .most abrupt exposition of dualism.

Before Kant there was a science of external appearance, and then a science of reason which could penetrate by innate activity to God, soul and immortality: that is the form of the Wolffian philosophy. Kant, who had studied the English Sensationalists, Hume and Locke, was at this juncture led to have doubts: how shall we get anywhere if we have always to test the highest ideas of God, Freedom and Immortality by their reasonableness. He says in his introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason “I had to destroy knowledge in order to make room for faith.” Because we must believe, and in order that we may believe, he thrust down knowledge from her throne. He wanted to start from foundations which left no room for doubt. Knowledge cannot ever reach to these things, but the “Thou shalt” speaks so decisively that the harmony which man is unable to discover, must be accomplished by God. And so we have to postulate a God. As physical beings we are enclosed in barriers, but as moral beings we must be free. This gives an unbridgeable dualism; there is no balance between man and nature.

Schiller, who in accordance with his temperament still held to the opposition between nature and man, pictures in Don Carlos the growth of man beyond nature to his ideals. He never puts the question of what is possible, but only the question of the “Thou shalt.” In Don Carlos it is not a criticism of court-life that we have: That passes into the background behind the practical moral postulates. “Man, be such that the laws of your action could become the universal laws of humanity.” That was Kant's demand; and in Marquis Posa, the cosmopolitan idealist, Schiller sets up a claim for the independence of the ideal from all that comes from nature.

When he finished Don Carlos, Schiller stood in the completest possible opposition to the view of Goethe and Herder, and therefore at the beginning of his life at Weimar no contact with them was possible. But Schiller became the Reformer of Kantianism: he strove for a monistic view, but could find the unity only in the aesthetic sphere, in the problem of beauty. He shows us how man only lives fully when he both ennobles nature up to his own level and draws morality from above into his nature. The categorical imperative does not subdue him to its sway, but he serves willingly what is contained in the “Thou shalt.” Thus Schiller reaches the heights and rises above Kant. He opposes Kant who makes of man not a free being but a slave, bowed beneath the yoke of duty. He saw clearly that there is something in man quite different from this bowing beneath the yoke of the “Thou shalt.” In monumental phrases we find expressed his approximation to the essential of Goethe's and Herder's attitude: “Gladly serve I my friends, yet alas I do it with pleasure; thus it irks me to find that there's no virtue in me.”

Kant had degraded what man does willingly from his own inclination, and set on a higher level what he did from a sense of duty. Kant apostrophises passionately the stern duty which has nothing attractive in her. Schiller raises man from his own weakness, when he makes the moral law a law of his own nature. Through the study of history, through honest inclination and devotion to human life he reached the harmony that had been lost and thus to an understanding of Goethe. Schiller describes in splendid words in the memorable letter of 23rd August 1794, what was Goethe's way:

“I have for a long time, even though from a distance, observed the course of your spirit and with ever new wonder noted the path you have traced out for yourself. You seek for the necessary in nature, but you seek it along the hardest path, from which all weaker forces would shrink. You take all nature as a whole in order to illuminate a part; and in the totality of their appearances you seek the basis of explanation for the individual.”

Here Schiller had reached the height to which he had to evolve. Though he had started from a dualism, he had now reached the unity of man and nature.

Thus he attained to that form of creation which was peculiarly his in the latest period, from the middle of the nineties onward, and to friendship with Goethe. It was a historical friendship because it did not look only for the happiness of their two selves but was fruitful for the world and for humanity.

In this friendship of Goethe and Schiller we have not merely Goethe, and Schiller, but a third something: Goethe plus Schiller. Anyone who follows the course of the spiritual life, will discern in it one being, which could only exist, because in their selfless friendship and mutual devotion something developed which stood as a new being above the single personality. This mood will give us the proper transition to Goethe and to all that he meant to Schiller.