The Rudolf Steiner Archive

During each winter in the past years, I was allowed to give a lecture here on a spiritual-scientific topic. The local friends have also requested such a lecture for this year. And it will seem understandable that in these difficult, fateful and destiny-bearing times, such a reflection may lead to that which fills us all deeply, deeply in our hearts and souls. Our thoughts and feelings are directed towards the East and the West, to where the great events of our time are unfolding in such a significant, grand, powerful, and painful way; where the fate of humanity is not discussed with words, but with deeds, which find expression in courage, confidence, bravery, in death and suffering, but also in all the uplifting sacrifices that are so abundant in the time when something so significant is also happening for our Central European humanity.

What can be stimulated in our present time regarding the relationship between the European national souls may be the subject of today's spiritual scientific reflection. It may be the subject of this reflection in the way that spiritual science can illuminate these very conditions. This spiritual science, which has indeed found little, truly little, favor and acceptance among the majority of contemporary people, but which, for those who are imbued with its innermost meaning, its innermost spirit, presents itself that it must take its stand for the whole movement for the whole life of the human spirit in the cultural movement for the present and the near future, just as the scientific movement for several centuries has taken its stand in cultural life. And it is precisely in the face of the deeply moving questions of life that spiritual science must prove itself.

Among the concepts that have provoked the most ridicule and opposition in my first fundamental spiritual science book - in my “Theosophy” - is the concept of the folk soul not as an abstraction, as a mere idea and sum of characteristics that hold a group of people together, but as a real, active being. We have already reached a point where the habits of thought that have been formed over centuries no longer want to go along with spiritual science.

Just as human beings, as the highest of earthly beings, stand in relation to the entities of the other natural kingdoms, just as the entities of the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms find their physical, sensory culmination in the human being, so spiritual science must show - however unusual it may be for present-day ideas - that the realms of beings are not limited to the visible, that there are other realms above the human being, which cannot be reached with the mind that is bound to our brain, or with our physical, sensory eyes and ears, but which can be reached with what Goethe called spiritual vision, spiritual eyes and ears. This is not said comparatively, but to express something that is as certain for anthroposophy as, for example, the biological results are for the external science.

Spiritual science says that the way a person, with their soul, faces the things and entities of external nature, and how they form concepts and ideas about them, so there are truly real spiritual beings, invisible to the physical eye, above the human being, and for these beings, the human being with their soul is as much a thought, as it is an idea, as the objects of external nature are for the human being. Thus we are permeated and held by these spiritual beings. And to one of the next classes of these beings, spiritual science must count what for many is only the coincidence of the characteristics of a people: the folk souls.

What matters is the relationship of the folk soul to the individual human soul. Spiritual science does not look at the soul like popular psychology. It regards it not as a product of the outer organization, but as the real creator of the outer organization. And not to make an easy classification, but out of the nature of things, the spiritual scientific researcher distinguishes three essential parts of the soul with the same justification - only of course transferred to another area - as one distinguishes in the rainbow spectrum the red color on one side, the green in the middle, and then the blue color. And just as one cannot grasp the interaction of light and colors without taking this structure, which is most clearly seen in the rainbow spectrum, so one cannot understand the human soul without the threefold nature that we describe as the sentient soul, the mind or emotional soul, and the consciousness soul. Just as the rainbow has the color red on one side, so the human being has the sentient soul on one side; in the middle, the human being has the mind or emotional soul; and just as the rainbow has the color blue, so the human being has the consciousness soul. As I said, this does not arise from arbitrariness, from a desire to classify, but is connected with the innermost nature of the soul.

Let us first take the sentient soul: just as the red part of the spectrum primarily contains warmth, so the sentient soul contains more of the desires, the passions, the passionate forces of the soul, but at the same time, when the soul goes through the gate of death into the spiritual world, [withdraws into] that which are the eternal forces of the soul, which mysteriously hide behind the drives, the passions, the desires, which at the same time are what imprints the soul with the eternal character. But what exists in the soul as the mediation of the eternal self of the human being with the temporal-spatial human being corresponds to the green color, which primarily serves the light, just as the mind serves the spiritual, mediating the human being's relationship to his eternal and temporal.

And the consciousness soul is what consumes the eternal between birth and death to work on the temporal; it is most turned towards the material world. The consciousness soul is what contains the soul powers that are least carried through the gate of death, that are least connected to the eternal self of man.

In all that we distinguish as nuances of the soul life, the actual I of the human being lives as light lives in the nuances of the spectrum. As there is light in every color, so there is I in every part of the human soul; but at the same time, what permeates the human being like an invisible entity passes through the I into the soul's members: the soul of the people to which he belongs. The relationship between the national soul and the individual human soul varies greatly, and nations differ according to the nature of the relationship between the national soul and the individual human soul. There is not enough time in the world if I were to attempt to develop in full, on the basis of spiritual scientific research, the nature of the relationship between the national soul and the human soul. A comparison can be enlightening here, but it should be more than just a comparison; it should give a genuine spiritual-scientific result.

If we look at a person in relation to the mineral, plant and animal world, we can distinguish three types of people. Firstly, there are people whose whole being is inclined only towards the external sense world, who cannot sharply concentrate their attention on something that withdraws from the sense world, who always need the impression of the outside world. They fall into indifference and inattention when they are supposed to have ideas that do not adhere to the outside world.

There is another relationship to the environment that we encounter more in inward-looking, sensible natures, who go through the world in such a way that their senses are little attracted by external nature, who produce inwardly, who bring forth from the life of the soul what they experience. They go through the world of the senses raving and dreaming. These are very different types of people because the soul relates to itself and to the outer world in different ways.

A third type is the one who has placed himself in history primarily through the representative of Germanness, through Goethe. A great thinker of his time called his thinking “representational thinking”. By this he meant that Goethe had the peculiarity of being just as oriented towards sensual things as he was, and that he could immerse himself in the spiritual that he was able to experience in and with things. The ideas of “spirit and body” were intimately interwoven in his soul. His thinking was objective and did not stray far from the objects, and when it did go to the objects, it did not stray from itself.

Corresponding to this threefold relationship of man to the world around him, we also have three types of relationship of the folk soul to the individual human soul. For just as the human being relates to nature, so the folk soul relates to the individual human soul. There are folk souls that relate to individual souls in such a way that they are completely devoted to the individual human beings, as it were, that they completely slip into them and permeate them, that the individual soul is something that is the imprint of the folk soul.

This is the preferred relationship for the souls that inhabit the west and south of Europe: the French, Italian and British people. The relationship is different for the Russian people. There we find that the folk soul remains, as it were, above the individual souls, that it does not enter into the being of the individual human being, which is expressed by the fact that the Russian people still have today - like a cloud spreading over the whole nation - the Byzantine religion, which does not connect with the individual soul. Such is the relationship of the folk soul to the individual Russian person.

[Where, as in Western Europe, the national soul takes hold of the individual souls, it dominates the individual souls so that the individual soul is something like an imprint of the national soul. Just as the national soul in the West is within the individual soul, so the relationship of the Russian national soul is such that it does not descend.

Like the person who lives only in his or her own soul, the national soul does not descend to the individual soul; the national soul, as it were, raves over the people. The Russian souls are not seized by the folk soul, but rather they are in anarchic confusion. Even when one thinks of the excellent representatives of the Russian people, of Tolstoy and so on, one sees how the folk soul hovers over them like a cloud and that the individual soul forces are not seized by it, but are in anarchic confusion.

Let us now turn to the center of Europe: here we find such a relationship between the soul of the people and the individual soul that we can compare this relationship with Goethe's objective thinking. We have the soul of the people lovingly and intimately entering into the individual souls and yet, at the same time, rising above itself and being transported into the spiritual worlds in order to draw new strength and carry it down from the spiritual worlds. We have here the life of the soul of the people above the human being in the spiritual heights, and then again in the individual human souls.

One can say: When you look at the people of Western Europe, a particular soul force is always taken hold of and ruled by the folk soul: in the Italians, the sentient soul; in the French, the mind or mind soul; in the British, the consciousness soul. All the qualities that the members of these nations have [precisely as members of these nations] immediately become clear and understandable when viewed from this perspective of the nature of the facts, which can be found through spiritual science. How powerfully passionate, how completely immersed in instinct, all of Italian life appears, right up to the greatness of Dante, who drafted his Divine Comedy from the images of the sentient soul. The Italian people become understandable when one knows that it is the folk soul that takes hold of the sentient soul here.

The French nation becomes understandable when one recognizes that the folk soul directly takes hold of the intellectual soul. I read how a psychological society in a German city tried to explain the French national character. The result was: That is their mathematical disposition. This disposition becomes immediately understandable when one knows that the folk soul directly takes hold of the powers of the intellectual soul. Everything in this western nation is illuminated when one knows that it tends to take things in such a way that, despite all striving for personal freedom and national freedom, it is inwardly dogmatized and systematized to the point of artistic activity, to the point of the details of artistic activity. And we also find the other side there. I would like to say the negative pole of the dogma: that is criticism, the dissolving element. On the one hand, the rational soul wants to see everything in a system of dogmas, and if it cannot, it rebels against it, and so we have either dogmatism or Voltairism. The starting point of Descartes' philosophy is doubt down to the last detail. You can understand what is happening in the French people if you know this.

I note that a number of prominent figures are sitting here who know that I have been dealing with these things for years and that they have not been formulated by the occasion of the present. But I believe that they can be enlightening for what we are now experiencing, which is so great, so meaningful and so painful.

Now to the consciousness soul. The part that is most inclined towards the outer life and carries least into the eternal part of the human being is the consciousness soul, and in the British people it is most seized by the folk soul. The character of the British people as a trading nation and also the character of Shakespeare immediately becomes clear. For what is his greatness based on? That he has portrayed the individual human being in such a sharp characteristic, that they stand firmly on the physical plane, that he characterizes them in what does not pass through the gate of death. He is so great because he has succeeded in characterizing so sharply what is human in man that is not eternal about them, but what they develop for the physical world between birth and death.

Now, the German national soul, or, as I could also say, Central European culture, is characterized by the fact that it does not take hold of the soul directly, but descends to the soul and takes hold of it in its entirety, as it were with that which flows from the sources of the spiritual world, for it has the gift of withdrawing into the spiritual worlds and drawing strength from there. Hence the peculiarity of the German soul to experience that which has the power of the eternal, which directly flows from the eternal into the individual souls. The individual soul must be able to feel that something in your soul lives through the national soul, which sinks into you, which is carried into you, and through which you are directly connected to what lives in spiritual heights. Hence the idealism, hence the ever-rejuvenating power of the German national soul.

One can go through the products of German intellectual life and obtain the evidence that, in contrast to other nations, the German has this peculiar relationship to the folk soul: not the individual soul elements are seized, as in the western and eastern nations of Europe, but the ego, of which the German seems to be less developed. One is a Briton, a Frenchman; a German is to be made.

It is an ideal because not a single power of the soul, but the whole soul is seized in the most profound life in the constant emergence of the different sides. Let us look back to the times when Christianity penetrated into the young, developing Germanic nation. How was it received? We can see this from the Old High German poem “Heliand”. What the individual - here the poet of “Heliand” - feels about the events, his personal experience, is directly related to the forces that surround him. What was only handed down to the Romans is reborn from the youngest germinal forces of the poet.

And in other poems we find how Christianity not only becomes part of the German people, but is born out of the individual human being, as it becomes a personal matter for the individual. It is the soul of the people that does not allow what comes to the people to grow old, but rejuvenates it so that it lives like a plant in the soul and rises again.

Furthermore, we see how a world view develops in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries that is called German mysticism, for example in the works of Tauler, Meister Eckhart, the unknown author of Theologia Deutsch, and so on. We see how the minds work in a peculiar way, how they relate to the spiritual world. The mystic Eckhart is convinced that the spiritual world must be experienced directly in the soul, that it must be left entirely to itself, that it must not move out of its own arbitrariness, but must give itself to the forces that are weaving and ruling through the world. Then something ignites in it, which is a spark, but in this spark lives God, the divine weaving and being.

The place where God lives within, [where Christ is born within, which suffers] and dies when the individual soul goes the way of suffering and passion, / gap in the text] is where Meister Eckhart coined the word “Gemüt”. In the mind, the world is spiritually revived, and it is aware that what a person thinks, the Godhead thinks, what a person feels, the Godhead feels, what a person wills, the Godhead wills, if only he gives himself to his God. There we have something of the intimate coexistence of the individual with the German folk soul.

And in the author of Theologia Deutsch we find a rejuvenation of the German Weltanschauung through a rhythmic beat of the life of the German national soul with the individual representatives of the German national soul. What in earlier times led to the resurrection of the life of Jesus, as if Jesus had wandered through Germany's countryside with his disciples as his servants, which so personally depicted the life of Jesus, which rejuvenated Christianity, that rejuvenates the worldview in German mysticism. And it is wonderful how deeply the German national soul intervenes in personal life! This becomes clear when we look at one of the disciples of mysticism, at Angelus Silesius, when we share a saying of this mystic, one of the deepest of the numerous sayings:

I neither die nor live. God Himself dies in me,

And what I am to live, He also lives for and for.

Oh, what depths, we say, only in relation to the thought of immortality! He who has done this feels the ruling divinity. When I die, it is just as much an act of the divinity as when I live, it is the divinity that lives in me. By letting God experience death in me, I am aware of my immortality.

One can say: such ideas of immortality, which point to an immortal power in the human soul that is not grasped by reflecting on what lies beyond death, but is already grasped by it in life, are demonstrated by Jakob Böhme, the simple cobbler from Görlitz, the profound philosopher, who was fully inspired by the German folk spirit. He directed his enlightened gaze to that which is of the divine worlds in his own soul. He saw the courage of human striving on earth in the fact that the individual human soul, which is otherwise given over to emotional impressions, to those of the intellect and so on, always knows itself connected with its immortal core, with that which lives in death, that knows how to die by living out of direct knowledge.

Jakob Böhme's goal was to experience death directly in earthly life, and that this is the seed for the experiences of life. An expression that appears to be the utterance of the German national soul through a single person is the following:

He who does not die before he dies,

He perishes when he dies.

Those who do not grasp during their lifetime what lives in the soul as an immortal and thus pass through the gate of death, those who do not grasp death as the source of spiritual life, perish when they die. We see the highest philosophical view, but one that is also imbued with elemental soul power, rising to the highest heights of the spiritual.

When we see such figures of German nationality before our minds, we perceive how the German national soul has a rejuvenating effect again and again, so that it must always take hold of spirit and soul as a fresh germ in order to go up the whole ladder, to go to the highest heights of spiritual fruit.

And after the scorching and burning devastation of the Thirty Years' War, we see the German soul's strength once again intervening in the life of the people.

This is also the case with Herder, who provided a broad overview in his “History of Mankind”, encompassing the entire nature of the soul, from the most elementary soul forces to the highest philosophical powers. There are many, many ways in which the soul of a nation lives in Goethe's soul. It is remarkable that we realize that in turn a poetic work could arise in him that could not have arisen within any other culture. If the German folk soul has the peculiarity of grasping not the individual soul forces but the whole soul, then it grasps the immortal in the mortal, and the personality becomes the bearer of the eternal. Therefore, Goethe's “Faust” could only arise within German culture. It contains everything in the human soul, all the striving for the very beginnings of spiritual life, which are consciously sought again after all tradition has been cast off. How is this presented?

Let us compare how the German soul power inspires the German people in relation to the French people. In both, the Greek is reviving. But how does it revive with the French poets? It is studied, the rules are adopted and so on. But how is it with Goethe? Even in “Iphigenia” the Greek is not adopted, but reborn anew, rejuvenated. And in “Faust” we have the union with what he regarded as Greek: Helen is reborn for Faust. He becomes young in order to unite with the representative of Greek culture. Faust, who has grown old, throws off the old and seeks the rejuvenating potion. What is historically given must be brought into connection with Faust in a rejuvenated form. This demands the full strength, the rejuvenating strength of the German national soul.

We can trace it everywhere in all the details of German intellectual life! This is what comes to consciousness through an immersion in the substance of the German national soul. One sees, feels and senses an ever-renewing power in it. However present culture may change, this renewing power will remain, because its magic breath will be breathed again and again in different epochs. This is a peculiarity of Central European culture. This hope and confidence, which immediately becomes strength, is the basis not for superficial but for profound optimism in the German, which is also connected to idealism in all philosophies. Whoever is truly capable of approaching what the German national soul has produced cannot despair of humanity, but always comes to a belief in humanity, and indeed to a spiritual belief in humanity.

This becomes very significant when one looks at spirits who turn their gaze to humanity in search of something that can give good hope for the further development of man, and who can find nothing, who believe that European culture has died out. No one can regard European culture as having grown old; they can understand the relationship between the soul of the people and the individual German soul. Anyone who considers European culture to be old does not understand that.

That is why we have a Russian intellectual who has searched for what can make humanity happy and cannot find anything that has grown out of this culture of the national soul. He looks everywhere and finds nothing. I am talking about Herzen, the great Russian who became so small in his own eyes when he wanted to understand Central European culture. The following saying of Herzen immediately sheds light on the way the Eastern European, anarchic soul views desolation where flourishing life can be seen by those who can understand Central European soul life. He enters into an intellectual alliance with an Englishman, with Stuart Mill, and says:

Mill is not exaggerating when he speaks of the narrowing of the mind, of the constant flattening of life, of the reduction of life to commercial culture. He says that England will become like China, and we add that England will not be alone.

That is what Herzen says, who has no understanding for what must fill the Central European with the highest vitality. And further he says:

Perhaps a coincidence will save us from Chinese desiccation.

If he had understood Goethe, such a statement would be impossible! Further Herzen says:

Where is the highest thought, that is, hope, which hardens the hearts so that they feel neither pain nor suffering. Look around you, what can uplift the hearts.

That the same force that brought forth the highest poetic and philosophical blossoms in Goethe is the same force that today brings forth countless victims, victims of death and suffering, that is what presents itself to us at the same time from the whole context of German life.

And has German life always been so misunderstood in the world as it is now, when it is being shouted at from all sides that it is a life of “barbarians”? Not only is Central Europe being surrounded like a large fortress with the intention of starving it out, no, it is also being scolded and reviled from all sides. Here and there, friendly voices are raised, for example, by a Romanian who exclaims:

All those who have studied in France and lived among the French people have rushed to fill the columns of newspapers with all kinds of praise. Why don't you, who have enjoyed German hospitality, respond to these people by saying that these barbarians have the best schools, clinics, universities and so on? That you were welcomed everywhere with open arms! Why don't you respond by saying that these barbarians, who were your teachers, are incapable of committing such crimes? [Why don't you respond?

These voices were not always so rare. It is uncomfortable for a Central European to characterize the German essence in value judgments. What I have said, I know, is as certain a result of spiritual scientific research as the laws of the solar spectrum are a scientific research result. But it is uncomfortable for a German to make value judgments about the German character, so let us first hear from others. First Emerson, the great American teacher. In his reflections on Goethe, he wrote as if there were some awareness of how the German national character relates to the individual soul, and of the difference between Eastern and Western Europe:

One [quality] in particular, which Goethe shares with his entire nation, makes him stand out in the eyes of both the French and English public: that everything in his work is based solely on inner truth. In England and America, people respect talent, but they are only satisfied when it works for or against a party of its conviction. In France, one is already delighted to see brilliant ideas going wherever they may. In all these countries, however, talented men write as far as their gifts will take them. If what they present stimulates the discerning reader and contains nothing that offends against good manners, it is considered sufficient. So many columns, so many pleasantly and usefully spent hours. The German mind has neither the French liveliness nor the Englishman's understanding, honed for practicality, nor, finally, the American

— as I said, an American writing in English —

All he has is a certain probity that never stops at the outward appearance of things, but always comes back to the main question: “Where is this going?” The German public demands that a writer stand above things and simply express himself. Intellectual agility is present, well and good: what does it advocate? What is the man's opinion? Where does it come from? Where does he get all these thoughts?

The English [...] only see the individual, they do not know how to grasp humanity as a whole according to higher laws.

The Germans think for Europe.

The English do not appreciate the depth of the German genius.

There is something alive in these words that can seem like an echo of what can arise from the intimate association of the soul of the people with the individual human being. And Emerson continues:

That is why the distinguishing terms used in higher conversation are all of German origin. While the English and French, who are mentioned with distinction because of their acumen and erudition, approach their studies and their point of view with a certain superficiality, and their personal character is not too deeply connected with what they have taken up and with the way they express themselves, is not too deeply connected, Goethe, the head and content of the German nation, speaks not because he has talent, but the truth concentrates its rays in his soul and shines out from it. He is wise in the highest degree, though his wisdom may often be obscured by his talent. However excellent what he says is, he has something even better in mind. He makes me curious. He has that fearsome independence that comes from dealing with the truth.

You could say: Well, that was said by Emerson, who lived far away in America. We have had to listen to it: the Germans who live now are not the same as they were. Even the French philosopher Bergson said how the Germans have become mechanical. It is strange how, in this day and age, a man who wants to be a philosopher wants to come to his judgment: He certainly longs for judgment! He knows that Germans have had great thoughts. He seems to feel that when cannons and rifles are turned against Germans from all sides, they should then recite poems by Novalis or Goethe in response.

Strange logic is going around the world today. When people say, “Who wanted this war,” and the English, French, and Russians claim, “We didn't want it,” one could say, “Yes, we believe that too!” But it does not depend on what one says, but on whether one can say the relevant thing. If five people stand threateningly around a house, and the person who lives in it sees this and tells them to go away, and they then, because they do not leave, are beaten up by them, the five can also say: “We did not want the beating!”

One cannot say that Emerson's judgment of the German “barbarians” is already outdated, but one would think that those who have immersed themselves in German intellectual substance can judge better.

A few years before the war, a book was published by an Englishwoman entitled “Eight Years in Germany”. She visited German schools, clinics and so on and, having got to know the German character, wrote the following:

We read a lot about the new Germany and the new German spirit. Is what exists now the mature work of generations? Blinded by the splendor of Germany's wealth, we are inclined to forget that it has never occupied any place but the very forefront except for prosperity. In literature, it has always provided the impetus; in science, it has always shone; in music, it has always dominated.

And now the following. I don't know if she would have written it now, but about two years before the war she did:

Forty years ago Germany was fighting for her existence, and she is still fighting for it today. It is entirely wrong to believe that Germany has already reached her zenith. She is fighting a quiet but determined battle against powerful rivals, whose power and experience was gained generations ago. [...]

On every border and across the water, opponents sit, commercially and politically, eagerly awaiting the moment when Germany slackens just a little, to pounce on it and bring it down.

The reasons why the German national character is so little understood can be grasped. Something can penetrate into the West from the German soul — less so into the East — but it is repelled in the West because it does not want to know anything about the dogmatic character of what wants to live actively in the whole soul. There is a certain understanding, but at the same time a reluctance to let it grow completely into the soul.

About a year and a half before the outbreak of the war, lectures were held in Manchester. They have been published and were very interesting, and the scholars explain in the preface why they are holding them: English journalists should be better informed about German conditions. About the immediate present, the scholar Herford said that on the whole it is out of the question that the creation of the German Reich has been beneficial to peace. [Gap in the text] History should be something more than a cinematograph and shed the higher light on things:

On the whole and in the big picture, there is no question

- it says -

that the establishment of the German Reich has been beneficial to world peace. This explanation will seem strange to those who know nothing but the events of the present and for whom history is nothing more than an ever-changing, dazzling cinematograph. But history should be something more. It is fitting for her to let the light of the past shine on the present confusion, and in that higher light, things that seem hurtful will take on a natural appearance. For if we look to the past, we find that our ancestors looked at France with far greater fear than the wildest rabble-rousers today fear Germany. And the fear of our ancestors had good reason. [...] So, to sum up, it can be shown that the founding of the German Empire was an asset for Europe and therefore also for Great Britain. For the events of the years 1866-1871 once and for all put an end to the possibility of waging predatory wars against the hitherto unprotected center of Europe, and thus removed an inducement to war which in earlier centuries had so often tempted into the wrong channels; they put the German people in a position to develop their hitherto stunted political abilities, and they helped to establish on a firm basis a new European system that has preserved the peace for forty years. This blessing resulted from the fact that German unity achieved at a single blow what Great Britain, despite all her expenditure of blood and money, had never been able to accomplish, namely, to secure the balance of power in such a decisive way that a great war became the most dangerous of all ventures.

When one is confronted with these things and wonders what lies in the souls of those who wrote them, one must have some understanding of the peculiarity of the European national psyche to grasp why one can understand [it] so little outside of Germany. Only enlightened minds can do that.

One mystic who has written beautiful things should also be mentioned. He confessed that he had great experiences with three mystics. One of them is Novalis, who gained so much from his intimate contact with the German folk soul. He uses beautiful words to characterize him. He says: “So much is going on on earth that can only interest earthly souls, such as what Shakespearean characters do. But if other beings from other planets could look down, what could interest them?” And he wonders if there is something that can interest other spirits as well, and in Novalis' writings he finds something that interests not only earthly souls but also beings that come down from heavenly heights. What the human soul can hardly bring forth in words is what he speaks of, what one would rather remain silent about, where true nature begins. He says:

But if he needed other proof, it would

— that is, presumably, the soul —

lead him among those whose works almost move one to silence. She would open the gate of the realm where some loved her for her own sake, without worrying about the small gestures of their bodies. They would climb together to the lonely plateaus where consciousness rises by one level and where all those who are filled with restlessness about themselves attentively survey the immense ring that connects the world of appearances with our higher worlds. She would go with him to the borders of humanity; for at the point where man seems to end, he probably only begins, and his most essential and inexhaustible parts are [only] in the invisible, where he must be on his guard unceasingly. On these heights alone, there are thoughts that the soul can approve of, and ideas that resemble her and are as commanding as she is. There, humanity has ruled for a moment, and these dimly illuminated peaks are perhaps the only lights that announce the earth in the spiritual realm. Their reflection truly has the color of our soul. We feel that the passions of the mind and body would resemble the tolling of bells in the eyes of a strange reason; but [the people I am talking about] have come out of the small village of passions in their works and said things that are also of value to those who do not belong to the earthly community.

This is how this enlightened spirit assessed Novalis. Who is it that speaks in this way? Is it someone who calls to account the self-righteous critics who are now railing against German “barbarism”? Is it someone who will take a stand against words such as:

In truth, it is difficult to question one's soul and to discern its weak, childlike voice amidst the useless clamor that surrounds it.

The words written by the enlightened man about Novalis are by Maeterlinck. And the words about the bawler are also by him. We are now experiencing such things; they characterize our time directly through themselves, without the need to add anything in particular.

The lectures mentioned, which were held in Manchester, have been published and also translated into German. In the preface there are some words that can also be read in English:

The source of the stream of his intellectual and political life lies in the Reformation. But at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, a current unique in world history began to flow in a way that has been as continuous as it has been characteristic since that time. Since the days of ancient Greece, the world has not seen such a spectacle of the closest fusion of the life of the statesman with that of the thinker. The spirit of Germany today is to a great extent concrete and practical.

The one saying this is Lord Haldane.

If we consider how different the European center and the European east must be in terms of the overall character of the people, it can be understood that a powerful confrontation was bound to occur there. This confrontation was seen by people who wanted to see clearly. Today we hear from all sides: The Germans wanted this war. Who wanted it, who, because of the special character of their national aspirations, had to want it for a long time, was always seen by reasonably enlightened minds. A man who is not particularly inclined towards Germanic nature writes:

As for me, I am in no doubt that a conflict between the Germanic and Slavic worlds is imminent, that it will be ignited either by the Orient, especially Turkey, or by the nationality dispute in Austria, perhaps by both, and that Russia will take the lead in it on one side. This power is already preparing for the eventuality; the Russian national press is spewing fire and flames against Germany. [...] The German press is already sounding its warning cries. It has been a long time since Russia gathered itself after the Crimean War, and it seems that it is now considered appropriate in St. Petersburg to take up the Oriental question again.

If, according to the more pompous than true expression, the Mediterranean Sea should once become “a French lake”, Russia has the even more positive intention of making a Russian lake out of the Black Sea and a Russian pond out of the Sea of Marmara. That Constantinople must become a Russian city and Greece a direct vassal state of Russia is a fixed goal of Russian policy, which finds its levers of support in the common religion and in Pan-Slavism.

Thus, the minds that wanted to see it, saw how the forces at work in Europe gradually brought about this time. This was written in 1870!

The antagonism between Eastern Europe and Central Europe has always been there, so that the logic of the question, “Who wanted this war?”, is the flimsiest, because the people, whose soul hovers like a cloud over it, has a desire for expansion, and because there is not the slightest understanding for what has been achieved in Central Europe. It was received in Russia, but the way it happened is again quite characteristic.

It is true, as Herman Grimm says, that the Englishman Mr. Lewes wanted to write an important book about Goethe. But he only told of a man who happened to be born in Frankfurt am Main and happened to die in Weimar, who had this and that experience and wrote these and those works. But the soul of Goethe does not live in it, because his soul slips through his fingers. He only sees what he can dogmatize; he only sees the Goethe that stands firmly on the ground – the dates of birth and death and so on. He knows the titles of the works and so on. But what Goethe really was, that he was the representative of the dialogue between the individual German and the German national soul, he does not sense.

Just as the phenomenon has the effect in the West that the inner passions rebel against it and translate it into the rough, but into the dogmatic, so that which is directly experienced by the Germans has the same effect in the East – as I said, they have often willingly accepted it – in the East it becomes a web of thought. Because the Russian feels that it must be carried up into the cloud that hovers over him, it becomes ghostly, shadowy.

Even the great philosopher Soloviev floats in this cloud. He borrowed his generous philosophy from German culture – but what lives with full life in the German soul seems ghostly to him, and it causes the confusedly fluttering thoughts that the German, who is accustomed to the intimate association with the folk soul, cannot follow as an image of truth. One must even experience it, [that an intellectual in Russia makes Goethe] into a ghost in yet another way, one who, however, once called another people “barbarians” before the war: Mereschkowski. He speaks of Herz's last vision of death:

The last vision of death in Herz is - Russia as a “land of free life” and the Russian peasant community as the savior of the world. He exchanged his old love for a new faith, but it seems that he realized in the last hour that this last faith was also an illusion. Even if faith deceived him, love did not deceive him; there was a certain correct outlook in his love for Russia: not the peasant community, but the Christian community will perhaps in truth become the faith that the young barbarians are to bring to ancient Rome.

So he says from the heart.

Meanwhile, however, he dies - without any faith: Farewell, corrupt Rome! ... Farewell, native land!

But let no one be deceived by what he says about Goethe in his latest book; the whole of Goethe has become a spectre there. That he does not understand the soul of the people, which has rejuvenated everything, that he cannot look at what Goethe is as a force of the soul of the world, is shown by the fact that he says that he dares to say such words of Goethe as:

When Goethe speaks of the French Revolution, he suddenly bends to the earth, as a giant might be crushed by an evil spell and shrink to the size of a dwarf; from a Hellenic demigod he becomes a German citizen and – if the shadow of the Olympian will have mercy on me – a German philistine, a “Herr von Goethe”, a privy councillor of the Duke of Weimar and a respectable son of the respectable Frankfurt merchant.

That about the “Faust” poet!

One understands what needs to be understood in the middle of Europe, and the extent of the understanding that is shown for the German national soul from both the left and the right speaks for this. One day, world history will not only be judged by archives, by what has been printed and written, but also by more subtle characteristics! It was actually with a heavy heart, through tears, through inner tears, that I realized something like an image in front of my soul, the way the forces of Europe stand, because it is so far from the original forces through which the individual outgrows the cosmos.

It is precisely [what that alliance of grand duchy and mendacious Pan-Slavism has done] to the Russian people that this image stands before me. We saw those first August days approaching. I will mention only three images from that time: In Central Europe, the Reichstag. Something characteristic is heralding the coming deeds; it is a purest expression of something infinitely youthful in the forces of the German national soul: the people are silent! There is something monstrous about this. Let us look instead to the west, to the French parliament; look at the speeches that have been made there, and how all these speeches flow out of the power of tyranny. And then we turn to Russia, where we are accustomed to seeing the best of the Russian man in silence: in the Duma, speeches rush, and they all talk in such a way that the words are phrases and everything looks like an arranged theatrical performance of speeches.

And so the European powers confront each other, and I am aware of the objectivity in which I have painfully allowed them to affect my soul. The silence in the middle is a symptom of something that is connected with the rejuvenating powers of the German national soul; from epoch to epoch, it has held dialogues with the most outstanding representatives of Germanness, and the most beautiful products can be traced back to this. The striving of the German people for the spirit has also been carried out in what has happened in our time.

That has always been the nature of German striving. But if you look at it and try to discern the fundamental character, you have to say: this German spirit has not yet exhausted the forces and possibilities for development that lie within it. The soul of the German nation has a rejuvenating power and will always rejuvenate it again and again. How rejuvenating is Fichte's philosophy! Like a stream of folk lore, it flowed into the times of “Speeches to the German Nation”. What brings his ideas to life in a strange and symbolic way is what a new education wants to give people as reality. Fichte knows how reluctant people are to accept the new, and needs a peculiar comparison. It is highly characteristic of his way of thinking.

But spiritual science, from which the attitudes flow that can be used to understand the conditions of the soul of the people, wants to be an active science that courageously and bravely extracts its results. It speaks of the eternal, not merely in abstract words, but as it speaks when the human spirit lives from incarnation to incarnation, so it speaks as it must speak today, about the rejuvenating powers of the German national soul.

Fichte says:

Time appears to me as an empty shadow, which stands over its corpse, from which an army of diseases has just driven it, and laments and cannot tear its gaze away from the formerly so beloved shell and desperately tries all means to get back into the dwelling of the plague. The invigorating breezes of the other world, into which the deceased has entered, have already taken her in and surround her with a warm breath of love; friendly voices of the sisters already greet her and welcome her; she is already stirring and expanding within her in all directions, to develop the more glorious form to which she is to awaken; but she has no feeling for these airs or hearing for these voices, or, if she had, she is absorbed in pain over her loss, with which she believes she has lost herself at the same time.

We can have confidence in the successful striving of the German spirit towards intellectual life, because we see what the German spirit has achieved. This is in the process of becoming and is not yet complete. It is as much a germ as it is a fruit. No matter how unintelligently people speak about Germany, it is not complete and must carry its inner strength out into the world. It is this strength that it has to defend. The time for what the German spirit has to defend will be seen to come. It may be expected. The souls who make the sacrifice of death today will, when those born later understand what the national soul can be for the German individual, they will be able to look down in the days to come on a time that will transform into [human salvation] and progress that which has been bought with such great sacrifices, [with courageous but painful sacrifices]. Truly recognizing the driving forces, it may be said that the German spirit has not reached perfection but will continue to develop:

The German spirit has not reached perfection
What it is to create in the world's becoming.
He lives hopefully in future worries,
He hopes for future deeds full of life; -
In the depths of his being, he feels mightily
Hidden things that must still mature and work.
How can, in the power of the enemy,
The wish for its end may uncomprehendingly revive:
As long as life reveals itself to him,
That holds him in the roots of being, creating?

Esteemed Attendees!

As I did last winter, I would like to take the liberty of speaking this evening about a topic that is intimately connected with the development of German intellectual life, and thus deviate from what I have been privileged to do for many years, both in this city and in other cities in Germany: to speak about a narrower topic of the spiritual-scientific worldview.

This deviation is certainly close to the human heart due to the great, momentous events in which the German people find themselves, due to the facts unfolding around us, which on the one hand represent a severe test, but on the other hand must become the source of many significant hopes for the future.

And besides, I don't think there's any need to speak out of a narrow-minded nationalistic spirit when one ties the great periods of German intellectual life to the spiritual-scientific considerations that have been cultivated here over the years. For it is my conviction, not based on some obscure feelings, but, as I humbly believe, on the recognition of the facts, that precisely what I have often shown here as a striving into the spiritual worlds is contained in its most significant germ in the most diverse endeavors of German intellectual life, in the flowering of this intellectual life.

If spiritual science wants to be science, then one could very easily – I would say – from a certain point of view, a matter of course, a matter of course that is superficial after all – one could very easily say: science must be international. And wanting to tie science to certain popular endeavors is unacceptable from the outset. So many people say. And it is so obvious when one speaks in this way that the matter of course already becomes superficial.

I will just say about this comparatively: for example, the moon is international, dear attendees, the same moon for all peoples; but what the different peoples have to say about the moon, from the soul, arises from their different dispositions. Now one could indeed say: that may apply to poetry, to literature. But if science is to become a worldview, then what science has to say must be objective, must be exactly the same for all people. But whether science penetrates deeply into the sources of existence or remains on the surface – to name only these two extremes – depends on the different dispositions of the individual peoples, on the impulses that the individual peoples have to give to humanity with what science is to them. And it is of the greatest importance that these impulses, these forces [...] arise out of the inherent qualities of the peoples! This is what is important for the overall development of humanity, not what can be common to all in the abstract sense!

To [hint] at what is actually meant here, one need only recall a saying of Goethe. When Goethe, on his great journey to the south, had not only viewed and explained the most diverse works of art in his own way, but had also studied natural facts and natural beings, he wrote to his friends in Weimar: After all that I have seen of knowledge and nature, I would most like to make a trip to India - not to discover something new, but to see what has already been discovered in my way.

The way of looking at what one is able to bring from the soul to the world phenomena and the world weaving is what matters. And that is intimately connected with the folk souls. And when one speaks, most honored attendees, of the German national soul and its effect within the German nation, it seems immediately obvious to anyone familiar with the course of German development that the summit reached by the German national soul at the end of the eighteenth century, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, must be reached. There, a worldview background was created, a background of knowledge, by minds such as Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, which, within European intellectual life, became a second [...] flowering period after the Greek one, through Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Lessing and others who belong to them. Behind Goethe's “Faust” and the other great poetic and artistic achievements stands what German world view has created in the field of thought development in those days.

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, appears first before the souls of today in such a way that it seems so obvious to consider German minds in connection with the development of their nationality. Johann Gottlieb Fichte appears first as the great orator in the “Speeches to the German Nation”. If you consider what was achieved by those speeches, each word of which must still ignite in the German soul today, for the simple reason that in one of the most difficult times in German history, every mind was invigorated and strengthened by these words, and how they actually shed light on the possibilities for German development. And because these speeches arose from the most intimate feeling for German national character and from the most intimate kinship with the innermost forces of the German national soul.

But how easily one would say: Yes, what Fichte spoke to the German people in his enthusiastic, fiery speech back then will easily find its way into every soul. But if you start from what Fichte's world view actually is, then you come to something difficult to understand. Oh, honored attendees, if only this prejudice of the difficulty of understanding such creations as Fichte's, Schelling's, Hegel's could fade away: Never could a personality like Johann Gottlieb Fichte have delivered his “Speeches to the German Nation” if one had not experienced that world view in one's soul, which only appears difficult to understand and which he felt, always felt, had arisen in him as if through a dialogue with the German national spirit itself. For that is how he felt about what he had to say!

Now, spiritual science, esteemed attendees, as it is meant here, is based entirely on the premise that there are dormant forces in the human soul that are not used in ordinary external life, not even when one intelligently observes this , nor in ordinary external science; but which must first be developed, [which must first] be brought out of the depths of the human mind, and developed into what can be used for Goethe's expressions: spiritual eyes, spiritual ears - through which one can look into, listen to, the spiritual world - spiritual eyes, spiritual ears!

Spiritual science assumes that such a real inner sense is not bound to a physical organ, but slumbers purely in the soul, but can be brought out of it. Spiritual science assumes that such a sense is able to perceive a real spiritual world that is around us and to which we belong with our souls and with our spirit, just as we belong to the physical-sensual world with our body. Only that when we look at the physical-sensual world with the organ of the physical-sensual body, it presents itself to us, which dies with our death. Whereas when the inner sense of man proceeds just as scientifically as the other senses or external science and through the external mind bound to the brain or nervous system, when the inner sense proceeds in this way with regard to the spiritual world, then man comes to the observation of those forces that are within him and that permeate the entire external world. [He comes to the observation] of those forces that represent for him the eternal, the immortal forces of the soul that go through births and deaths.

To awaken such an inner sense, such inner forces, was Fichte's, Johann Gottlieb Fichte's, unchanging striving for a worldview. He strove for such a sense. He could only do so because this unique quality - we will see later why I say “unique” - of the German national spirit lived in him, this will to acquire in one's own soul, through an elevation, through a strengthening, through a development of the soul forces, something that cannot be acquired if these soul forces are not strengthened , but which is one and the same – not a vague fantasy is meant here – which is one and the same as that which, as spirit, as real, objective spirit, is as objective as the external natural objects are objective for the senses, which, as spirit, permeates and interweaves the world.

For Fichte, the human self was able to live into this human self if the human self was able to grasp itself inwardly in such a way as to grasp what pulses and weaves and lives through the world as its secrets.

Fichte believed that when a person comes to experience this inner self, this center of the soul, in the right sense, in a truly direct and powerful way within themselves, then not only does he live as an individual human being in such inner experience, but then the life of the world, the world spirit, that which is the creative spirit in all things of existence, lives in this inner experience.

This desire to recognize with the innermost sense organ is what is so characteristic of Fichte. And it is characteristic of him because it was in his very nature. It was in his nature to grow together with that which made an impression on him. He did not just hear something, he did not just see something, but when he heard something, when he saw something, he put the whole feeling and life of his personality into what he heard, into what he saw. He was so immersed in what he perceived that he felt creatively immersed in it – recreating the world, recreating nature, recreating every other human life. This was present in him as a personal disposition.

To illustrate this, I would like to mention a few episodes from the life of Fichte, or rather Johann Gottlieb Fichte. He was a small boy of seven years old, a simple weaver's son; there he stood once at the edge of a stream that flowed past his father's small house. He had thrown a book into the stream! And he stood there crying, watching the book float away. Then his father came along and saw what had happened. The fact was that last Christmas his father had given the boy, who was precocious and did well at school, the “Horned Siegfried” as a present. On the boy, on the seven-year-old boy in the blue farmer's coat, the child of simple people, the mighty, the primeval Germanic deed of “Horned Siegfried” made such a powerful impression that he became completely absorbed in it. And then it turned out that one had to say: Although he used to be so diligent, conscientious and dutiful at school, he is now less attentive. He was reproached for this.

What did the seven-year-old boy do? He said to himself: “I like ‘Siegfried’, I love him, I am attached to him; but he must not take my duties from me, so I throw him into the water.

And again: He had turned nine years old. The neighboring landowner had come to the village where Fichte lived to hear the pastor's sermon there on a Sunday. He had arrived too late to hear the sermon. Then someone came up with a solution. They said: “There is a boy of nine who is so good at listening to sermons that he might be able to repeat the most important parts by heart.” And so they brought in nine-year-old Johann Gottlieb Fichte. He stood there awkwardly in his blue peasant's smock. Once the ice was broken, so to speak, he began to develop the sermon as he had heard it. But not, as children relate, by reciting the words from memory. Rather, he recreated them! So that one could see: the inner fire of the soul had grown together with what had reached him from the pulpit. Even as a boy, he was so intimately united with what was around him that he absorbed everything from the world. That was what he realized, and what led him to his world view, [what led him] to his world view in such a way that he felt: What lives as will in the individual person does not live merely as will in that individual person, but what lives as will in the individual person is like that drop taken from the sea, but which is of the same kind as the whole sea. The will that man learns to recognize in his ego, that throbs, lives and weaves through all existence as the will of the world. And when man pronounces “I,” the will of the world speaks in him.

Thus in his world view, the individual ego grew together with the will of the world. And as if on the wings of the will, what radiates from the divine-spiritual existence, from the divine-spiritual will existence, shines into the human soul as duty.

To him, duty became the highest, the most significant, that which enters a person as a duty – in relation to the world and its phenomena – as a task; this was an immediate inspiration of the divine spirit of will, which pulses and weaves and lives through the world.

And so, in his will as in his ego, Johann Gottlieb Fichte felt at one with the existence of the world. He believed that when he spoke, he spoke not out of personal arbitrariness but out of that which the God who wants to speak in the soul wants to say. And one really cannot imagine that anyone could have been more earnest than Fichte was when, for example, he spoke to his audience in Jena and tried to convey to the souls of his listeners what he had experienced in his soul as a world-certainty.

It was not a matter of merely communicating certain content, certain sentences, so that they would be heard, as was the case with other speakers; no, but for him, when he ascended the lectern, it was a matter of carrying in his soul something to carry in his soul something of which he knew - in true humility, in all modesty: “The world-will, ruling through the world, speaks through me; it must be carried into the souls of my listeners on the wings of my words. And there must be established that connection between the souls of my listeners and the divine-spiritual world-will, by which I myself am aglow and inspired.

And deep within his soul – within Fichte's soul – was the realization that the deepest thing in the world must be grasped by the innermost part of the soul. In turn, here is a short story, which is familiar to those who have studied Johann Gottlieb Fichte, about how he made the following demand of his listeners, for example. As an example of how he sought to establish an immediate personal connection with his listeners, he said: “Gentlemen, think the wall.” And so the people thought about the wall; it was easy for them. After he had let them think about the wall for a while, he said: “And now think about the one who just thought about the wall!” Then the people were already somewhat strangely touched; they did not really know what they should do; they were referred to their own inner being. They should become strong in themselves, in their own inner being, that which, as something impersonal and spiritual, permeates and interweaves the world.

In this way he sought to reach his listeners. And his words were not words shaped in the ordinary way. People who knew him well said: His speech rolls along like thunder, and his words are discharged like individual lightning bolts. He sought not merely to educate good souls, but to educate great souls.

And another said of him: Oh, with Fichte it is so that he lives and moves in the realm of the invisible world of thought; not like one who dwells within, but like one who rules this invisible world.

It was out of such a spirit that Fichte then, in his Berlin lectures from 1811 to 1813, said things that were probably not often uttered before a university audience. He spoke of a “new sense”, of a spiritual sense that is necessary for man if he wants to know the eternal in contrast to the temporal. He spoke of this by comparing this sense with another sense that prevails in ordinary life. He said: “My dear listeners! If a single soul – he meant Fichte's soul – were to appear among a number of people who cannot see Fichte and have never seen Fichte, would they not declare what he has to say to be fantasy? But it is the same with everything that your senses can see compared to what man can see when the new sense - as Fichte called it - the spiritual vision, opens up to him, through which a new world arises.

A genuine spiritual-scientific striving is developed here out of German scientific striving! And Fichte said, being aware of the contrast between this German striving and the Romance striving in relation to knowledge, Fichte said: This striving, that is a striving that emerges from the original source of the living, and that does not merely want to establish a knowledge of the dead.

Even more thoroughly than Fichte was able to do, one can point to certain Western views of eternity, which show quite clearly how different Fichte is from the world development of humanity than, for example, similar spirits from the Romance, French tradition. Take the excellent philosopher Descartes, Cartesius, who was active in France at the beginning of the seventeenth century. In a similar way to Fichte, he wants to start from what is in the soul: “I think, therefore I am” - “Cogito ergo sum”. But what does it represent? An endeavour to use the intellect to clarify what one already has. Fichte's energetic activity strives to develop in the soul something that one does not yet have, in order to recognize the actual, deep secrets of the world. And one need only mention one thing that comes to light particularly strongly in Cartesius, in Descartes. Descartes also tried to gain clarity about nature from the innermost depths of his spirit, from the innermost depths of the human spirit. About that which is around us. But he does not start from the living and therefore cannot come to the living. And it is characteristic of Cartesius, of Descartes, that he regards not only the other natural phenomena, but also the animals as inanimate, as moving, soulless machines. This is no exaggeration, this is a genuine Descartesian theory: only man, who experiences a soul within himself, actually has a soul in the true sense of the word. The rest of nature is soulless.

Compare this view of nature as something soulless, compare the directly living in Fichte: the soul of man stands in it in the divine will, which pulses and weaves through the world. He looks at external things, but he looks at them in such a way that man is called upon to see in external, material things that in which he has to see the divine will... ... and living everywhere, everywhere ensouled.

The time will come, honored attendees, when people will indeed pay attention to these differences between the individual nations, because the realization of these differences of such outstanding minds must bear fruit. We Germans have no need to prove all that we have now heard from some outstanding personalities on the enemy side. We Germans have no need to join in the tone of not only the misjudgment but the slander of German intellectual life, as we can hear it everywhere. But we do have reason to penetrate into the peculiar, into the essence of German intellectual life.

And then, like Fichte's follower, we see standing before us, also unrecognized, but as a personality who will already celebrate his resurrection, Joseph Wilhelm Schelling. Schelling does not stand there like Fichte. That is precisely what is significant in German intellectual life, this versatility, this diversity. He does not stand there like Fichte; Fichte stands there as if emerging from the contemplation of the individual personality, becoming aware of the world-will pulsating and interweaving through the world. Fichte's entire personality is active out of the will. Out of the soul, out of this German soul – for which the other languages of the West do not even have a literal translation – out of this German soul, Schelling creates his magnificent view of nature and spirit, which only appears difficult to understand.

For Schelling, nature is not something dead, something merely mechanistic; rather, nature is that which has been created out of the same forces over the course of millennia and millennia, out of the same forces that the human soul feels within itself when it truly goes within. And then Schelling looks at nature and can say to himself: That which lives and moves out there in nature – the same powers of the human soul that now come into being in human souls – have created that, have created a foundation for themselves, a preparation; so that they can arise and appear internalized in the human mind, in the human soul.

And so, for Schelling, soul and nature grow together in such a way that he coins the certainly one-sided sentence: To recognize nature is to create nature!

It does not matter at all whether one becomes a follower or an opponent of these great people, whether one agrees or declares oneself to be an opponent of what these great minds have expressed; today this can even appear childish; it does not matter; but what matters is to look at these personalities and to see the best in their personalities, their spiritual striving. It must not be a matter of repeating what someone has said out of the spirit of his time, but of strengthening and empowering oneself in relation to one's own soul forces, in order to perhaps create something completely different today from what Fichte can give than what Fichte gave.

If you see it the way those who heard Schelling, Friedrich Joseph Wilhelm Schelling, did – I myself met people who heard him in his old age and who fully confirmed what those who were young when Schelling was young had to say, when Schelling was at the University of Jena at the end of the 1790s. This is how they spoke, for example – I am telling you what Schubert, who himself was a deep spirit who wanted to penetrate into the depths of the human soul, wrote in his diaries after hearing Schelling in Jena: If someone came during a few afternoon hours on a weekday, Schubert says, you saw an eventful life in Jena. But this eventful life did not come from some kind of frequent celebration, not from some other kind of gathering; rather, this eventful life was because the hour was approaching when not only students, but mature men of all professions went to Schelling's lecture hall. Schubert continues: “The personal impression Schelling made on me was of a great, powerful man.” When Schelling spoke, it seemed to him as if he were standing there and his spiritual musings were directly connected to the spiritual world and his words were shaped in such a way that he grasped what he had to say from what he looked into: the spiritual world.

Fichte came across as a powerful person, as a powerful representative of the German essence. Schelling came across as an educator, a philosophical educator, who appeared to his listeners as if he was surrounded by an aura of spirituality, which he knew how to communicate even as a young man to those who listened to him. And those who heard him in his old age – as I said, I myself still knew people like that – [they] assured that the eye, which still sparkled in old age, spoke of the immediate personal nature of nature, which presented itself to him in the communications that he sought to give to humanity, not out of prudent wisdom, but out of an inner vision of the spiritual world. And Schelling speaks of the so-called [intellectual] views. In this way we have coined the word in his way for the new sense, for the spiritual sense, the spiritual sense that can be awakened in man and is able to look into the spiritual world. Schelling's way of speaking of this spiritual sense may be one-sided; but the fact that it could be spoken of with such earnestness in German intellectual life is one of the most significant intellectual blossoms, in the presence of which one must feel in the right sense.

The third person to be considered among those who created the world view from which Goethe's “Faust” and the other works of art emerged is Hegel. In Hegel, we again notice how he strives to relive in what the soul experiences in itself as an individual soul that which permeates the world, that which pulses through the world. But while Fichte sought this in the will and Schelling in the mind, Hegel sought it in pure, senseless thought. And when thought becomes completely pure, when thought does not lean on that which the senses observe externally, but when thought creates itself as free thought out of the soul, then for Hegel it is not the human soul alone but for Hegel it is the divine world-being that penetrates into the soul and that now kindles its world-thoughts, which gave rise to things outside, in the human soul as the light of the soul itself.

In Hegel, we have a remarkable kind of mysticism that does not want to revel in dark feelings, not a mysticism that wants to live only in feeling, because it believes that in feeling alone it is more closely in touch with the secrets of the world than in thinking. We have a mysticism in Hegel that is intellectually clear and yet not intellectually superficial, a mysticism that is suffused with the light of ideas, with the light of thought. But Hegel seeks to bring to life in his soul those thoughts that truly bring man together with divine thoughts. I would like to say: mystical, but not mystical darkness, but mystical light, mystical brightness.

Hegel did indeed oppose the idea that the new meaning, the inner meaning, should become something that man could only receive through a special disposition; and that is why he criticized Schelling, who spoke of [intellectual] intuition. In a sense, Hegel was right, because for every human being – you only need to read about it in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” , for every human being, this new sense is attainable if only he wants to develop it. And this new sense, basically it lives most beautifully, most gloriously in that man, in the German, to whom Fichte, when he showed him his seemingly so dark, arbitrary teaching, wrote in 1794: Philosophical endeavor, like every pure philosophical endeavor, weaves itself into the spirituality of your feeling; for this pure spirituality of your feeling is actually the touchstone. - So Fichte wrote to Goethe in 1794.

And Goethe himself, in the beautiful essay he calls “Contemplative Judgment,” spoke of the fact that there cannot be only one way of looking at the world that relies on the external senses. Rather, just as the power of judgment judgment otherwise judges only about the external sensory experiences, so the power of judgment can develop an impulse in itself, which unfolds an inner life, so that it sees the spiritual, as the senses see the sensual.

Kant still had this inner vision, this vision of the spiritual through the human spirit, of the divine spirit through the human spirit. Goethe said: Let us then bravely face this adventure of reason! And it is from this inner sense that everything Goethe wanted to offer to science was created. And Goethe, in his scientific and cognitive struggles, showed most clearly how the German mind must understand the world differently than the Western mind.

In his early youth, Goethe encountered what Descartes' worldview had become within the development of the French world view. While Descartes still regarded animals as machines, de La Mettrie had already written the book “Man a Machine”! The mechanistic worldview, rooted in the French national character, is a mechanistic view of the world, a view of the world as a mechanism.

And when this worldview was presented to young Goethe, he said, from his German worldview: “Now they are telling us about atoms that collide with each other; this great world machine. If only they would explain to us how this beautiful and diverse world can arise from these colliding atoms. But after they have shown us how the atoms collide and push each other, they do not explain anything more about it!

Now, this striving has been preserved in the mechanism to this day. The mechanistic world view is actually the French world view. Of course, esteemed attendees, this is not meant to apply to the individual members of a nation; individuality can rise above nationality, above that which has been discussed and which arises from the character, from the inner nature of nationality. And here I believe that the right thing has been said. I would like to let the voice of a man be heard, the voice of a man who may perhaps be heard when considering the striving of the French nation towards a scientific world view. This man says:

"Thirst for truth is not a French passion. Appearance is more important than essence, the shell more than the kernel, form more than substance, the shiny more than the fertile, public opinion more than conscience. This means that the center of gravity of the Frenchman is not within himself, but in the others, in the multitude. Individuals are zeros; the digit that forms them into a number comes from outside: that is the sovereign, the writer of the day, the most-read newspaper, in a word, the current master of fashion. All this can be deduced from an exaggerated sociability; it stifles in the soul the courage to resist, the power of judgment, personal conviction, the cult of the ideal."

This was not written by a German out of one-sided national sentiment, but rather, dear honored attendees, it was written in 1875 by Amiel, Henri Frederic Amiel, the French Swiss at the University of Geneva! He could know as someone who, although he was deeply familiar with German intellectual life, was bound to French intellectual life by his blood ties. And in 1862, Amiel wrote the following:

"I feel a common bond with a Goethe, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Leibniz, who are nevertheless sufficiently different from one another, while French philosophers, orators or mathematicians leave me cold despite their great qualities, because they do not carry the sum of general life within them, do not control all of reality, gag me or make me suspicious. What the French lack is direct knowledge of the living unity, a sense of the sacred, a feeling for the mysteries of being; what is theirs is the foundation of specialized sciences, the art of making a book, it is style, politeness, grace, a sense of order, art for art's sake, discipline, elegance, truth in the details, staging, proselytizing zeal, strength in practical conclusions. But for the journey through Inferno and Paradise, other guides are needed; they are rooted to the earth, in the realm of the finite, changing, historical, and limited. Mechanism and dualism are the pinnacles of their intellectual flight. To break out of this circle, they must force themselves.

One does not want to present a one-sided view, not out of national sentiment; therefore one must choose something that is said by someone who says it out of his own attachment, out of his blood ties to the French nation.

But the time has come when, just as other things, the relationship between the individual elements of the nation must be recognized objectively. And once one has achieved something like Fichte's achievement – Fichte, for whom that which lives outside in the world of the senses is, so to speak, the nationalized field of duty – if one compares that with what lives in the British, in the English world-view, then one need only point to where one will, take old Baco of Verulam, who would accept nothing except what the senses see externally – everything else is an 'idol' to him; and his book about idols is an attempt to prove that what man can grasp in his soul has no objective validity beyond sensuality. And if we go up to Spencer and all those who have a similar view, we arrive at the latest English world view, which has been developed out of the English view: it calls itself pragmatism. What is this pragmatism? It is not something that applies to us Germans. For us Germans, as with Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, it is something that experiences truth, and by experiencing truth, one lives together with the world spirit. But the Romance peoples and the British have no conception of the objective world spirit at all. It is something that will only be fully recognized in the future. [...] Truth [...] is something that arises in the soul as a result of this soul growing together with the world spirit itself. Then the soul brings this truth to bear on external things, and the external things become a revelation of spiritual truth. What are they to pragmatism, to this pragmatic product of a worldview? A caricature! I say this, as I said, out of pure fact, not out of any antipathy. For this pragmatism, truth is only of value insofar as one connects concepts and ideas in the spiritual, which are actually only brackets, only bands that bind together the external sensual facts, so that one can find one's way in the external sensual world. Truth has no meaning in itself, has no value in itself.

A person, for example, commits an act; he has thoughts. All this is expressed. We seek the soul for thoughts and actions. The soul is a real being for us. And as we grow together with the truth, the soul itself becomes a reality for us, it is grasped as a reality.

For pragmatism, the soul is a concept that was formed to orient oneself, to hold together the otherwise disintegrating thoughts of man as with a bracket. Truth is what is useful if one wants to understand the world. - The pragmatist forms concepts and ideas with a view to usefulness, so that he can find his way in the world.

One has only to compare this with what lives in the characterized summit of German intellectual life, and one will be able to get an idea of the spiritual world position of the German within the developmental history of humanity.

But now something else comes. If you look at Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, they are great, important minds, geniuses; they represent the coming together of man with the secrets of the world from three different sides: from the side of will, from the side of thought, and from the side of feeling. If anyone today still thinks – and most people do, in fact, think – that it must be so, that they are difficult [to read and understand], then I may well express my conviction that there is a way to present what these spirits have achieved in such a form that even the simplest mind can grasp what it is about, if it only wants to. These spirits can be fruitfully employed in schools; [that they cannot be fruitfully employed there] is merely a prejudice. But the peculiar thing that confronts one when one contemplates these spirits, esteemed attendees, is that in their triplicity something like a unity hovering over them asserts itself! One has the feeling that something is being expressed in three ways, invisibly prevailing over the three. It is what one might call: the German folk spirit itself.

Amiel - again the French Swiss - has sensed something of the fact that the German folk spirit itself seeks to grow together in the souls with the innermost reason for things. Therefore Amiel says:

“Perhaps only the Germanic spirit has the need to think for itself, to search for the very basis of things.”

Amiel therefore goes on to say:

“The German spirit, like the collective inspiration, passes into these characteristic personalities; it speaks through them.”

Therefore, dear attendees, it could happen that personalities actually came along, personalities whose work is largely forgotten today. Therefore, I may speak today by wanting to reopen this as if it were a faded, forgotten pursuit of the development of German thought. Personalities who are largely forgotten today, they appear after the great personalities just mentioned. And the strange thing is that, while these personalities are smaller minds, less ingenious, after the three greats, they even show greater achievements in the field of spiritual searching, more penetrating achievements than the great ones who preceded them. Of course, the great ones need stimulation; but the lesser ones who follow usually achieve greater things, at least more penetrating things, from what has once been stimulated within German intellectual development. They are closer to the soul's inner search for the concrete spiritual world, for the search for spiritual entities that can be found with the characterized sense, just as one finds concrete external natural objects and natural facts through the external senses.

And among these lesser spirits is the son of the great Johann Gottlieb Fichte: Immanuel Hermann Fichte. Certainly, there are not many today who still occupy themselves with this Immanuel Hermann Fichte; but Immanuel Hermann Fichte – to mention only that – already stands there and says: the human being whom we observe with our outer senses, the human being who is made of flesh and blood, is bound to the perishable earthly in terms of his material and his powers. But in this human being there is another human being. This other human being – I mentioned him earlier in these lectures. People still laugh about it a lot today. But they will not always laugh! That other person, whom Immanuel Hermann Fichte calls the “ethereal man”, is a supersensible, higher person who has certain higher powers through which he is just as connected to the eternal spiritual aspect of existence, to the whole universe, as his perishable body is bound here to the physical-sensory powers of the earth. And the etheric body, which Hermann Immanuel Fichte assumes, is what first builds the physical body!

And another spirit can appear before us, again more or less forgotten, but no less significant and no less characteristic for the innermost freedom and for the innermost strengthening of the forces of German intellectual life: that is Troxler. Who still knows him today? But how he stands before him who got to know him! Troxler wrote his beautiful lectures on a world view in the 1840s. In them, we see emphasized, again and again, how the human being who stands before us with his senses lives within a spiritual world, a spiritual human being who has a spiritual world around him just as the sensual human being has a sensual world around him. Troxler speaks of abilities that the soul has, which are only hidden in ordinary life. Troxler speaks of what he calls the “super-spiritual sense”.

What does he mean by that? When Troxler speaks of the super-spiritual sense, he means that the senses we usually call that and that have different organs are not the only organs of perception for humans; but that humans can perceive another world with new organs, with new senses, with purely spiritual senses, which is just as full of content as the external physical world.

I have said here before that many people today believe that there is a spiritual world in general. And anyone who bandies a few pantheistic terms about, thinking they are talking about a spiritual world – spirit, spirit and more spirit – is merely bandying abstract terms! Spiritual science speaks of the individual spiritual beings that can be seen; just as one does not always say only “nature, nature, nature!” when faced with the external physical world, but rather “lilies, tulips, carnations” and so on. Specifically, one shows what physical nature produces individually. In the same way, one can show what spiritual nature shows individually. This is what Troxler means when he speaks of the 'super-spiritual sense'. And then he speaks of the 'supersensible spirit', which is not dependent on sensuality, but which knows itself within the spiritual, which feels itself as a body within the spiritual.

But Troxler goes even deeper in his discussion of this spiritual, this higher human being, who goes through births and deaths. And it is wonderful how Troxler – not in an abstract, indefinite way – addresses the higher human being in a very definite way. Even if this is a faded, forgotten tone in the development of German thought, it lives in it. And whether one notices what is alive there or not is certainly important for understanding; but even if one has not noticed it, it lives in the development of German thought and will be noticed! It will celebrate its resurrection as an actual spiritual science!

Then Troxler sees that in the human soul, insofar as it experiences itself between birth and death in the outer physicality, three forces live - as the most beautiful forces according to Troxler's world of vision. First there is the power of faith - that which man has as the power of faith. What a person has as love power, he has it as the power of his soul, but in the soul, insofar as this soul lives in the body. Behind the power of faith, however, there is another, higher power for the soul itself, and Troxler calls this spiritual hearing. That is to say, he believes that the human being can develop the outer form, so to speak, the shell for a spiritual hearing, through which the human being, when he becomes aware of it, can perceive the language of spiritual beings, which speak of the eternal secrets of existence. Thus, faith appears as the outer shell of a much deeper power, an eternal power in man. Spiritual hearing is love, the power of love, which expresses itself in the body as the most beautiful, greatest flowering of the human soul. Nevertheless, for Troxler this is only the outer expression of the power of spiritual touch, of spiritual feeling. The one who loves has the most beautiful flowering of human existence on earth. For him, love is the shell for the powers of which he can become aware, which extend the spiritual organs in the material world so that he can touch the spiritual world as he touches physical things with his physical senses of touch.

And what lives in us as the power of hope is in turn the shell for Troxler, the power of spiritual vision.

So that Troxler sees a higher person in the ordinary person - a higher person who has a spiritual sense just as the physical person has a physical hearing; who has a spiritual feeling just as the physical person has a physical feeling and who has a spiritual vision, a spiritual soul. And that we can be seeing, loving and hearing people in the body, that is for Troxler because, when we go through the gate of death, our soul goes out of the body. The power of faith then appears as spiritual hearing, the power of love as spiritual touch, the power of hope as spiritual strength.

It is in this spirit that Troxler also expresses the following very beautifully. He knows that, in terms of feeling, we are closer to things on a human and spiritual level than with the mere abstract mind. But one can develop such thoughts that are just as close to the direct experience of the thing as feelings usually are. Nor does Troxler seek a sentimental mysticism. This is foreign to the essentially German nature! That vague, hazy sentimentality of mysticism is not part of the German character; it is also foreign to Troxler. But Troxler nevertheless speaks of “thoughts felt” - of thoughts that, like feelings, live as thoughts in the soul. He speaks of “intelligent feeling” and of sensitive thoughts - thoughts that touch the spiritual life!

Troxler is completely imbued with this view. And he once speaks of how he feels in harmony with the entire spiritual life of the German people through such a view, insofar as this spiritual life has appeared in great personalities after Christ. There Troxler says once - I will read these words to you myself:

"Even in the past, philosophers distinguished a fine, noble soul body from the coarser body... a soul that had an image of the body, which they called a schema, and which was the higher inner man... In more recent times, even Kant in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer seriously jokes about an entire internal spiritual human being who carries all the limbs of the external one on his spirit body. Lavater writes more and thinks the same; and even when Jean Paul humorously jokes about the Bonn under-skirt and the Platner soul-corset, which are said to be hidden in the coarser body-skirt and , we also hear him asking: “What is the purpose of and where did these extraordinary abilities and desires come from that lie dormant in us, like swallowed diamonds, slowly cutting through our earthly shell? ... In the stony limbs of

of man

“grow and mature in a way that is unknown to us... We could”

says Troxler further.

"cite a myriad of similar ways of thinking and creating, which in the end are only different perceptions and representations in which... the true, only teaching of the individuality and immortality of man is contained.

Troxler also speaks of the possibility of a science of man on the path of knowledge he sought, through which – to use his own terms – the “super-spiritual sense” in union with the “supernatural spirit” can grasp the supernatural essence of man in his “anthroposophy”.

Troxler cites these [individual personalities], and many others could be cited who, entirely from the essence of German national identity, sought the way to the real, true spiritual world. And before Troxler's [inner eye] stood a certain science. He thought: When man observes man himself with his senses and explains this observation with his mind, which is connected to the senses, then anthropology arises – the science of man through the senses. But anthropology arises from man observing man as a sensual being; but the spiritual man, the higher man with the awakened senses that we have already spoken of, can also observe man; then a higher science arises. In 1835, Troxler spoke beautifully of this higher science, as anthropology is, saying:

Although it is highly gratifying that the latest philosophy, which... must reveal itself in every anthroposophy... must reveal itself, is moving upwards, it cannot be overlooked that this idea cannot be a fruit of speculation, and that the true individuality of man must not be confused either with what it sets up as subjective spirit or finite ego, nor with what it confronts it with as absolute spirit or absolute personality.

This German spiritual life developed entirely out of the German national character. And is it not wonderful to experience such a phenomenon as this: In the 50s of the last century, a simple pastor in Sachsenberg in the Principality of Waldeck published a simple little book, a wonderful little book that is at the height of spiritual science, that stands apart from all materialism, but also from all mere intellectual and conceptual considerations, that sets out to consider the human soul in such a way that it can grasp spiritual reality.

Some of the simple Rocholler writing, which is simply written for seeking circles, may seem fantastic, but that does not matter; what matters is that we have here a simple person, at the pinnacle of education, leading a way into the spiritual worlds. It is the intention that counts. That is why intentions such as this little book, which was published in Waldeck in 1856, are so infinitely important. And anyone who might think that I am choosing to present these phenomena in order to prove something is quite mistaken.

However, over the past few decades, circumstances have developed in such a way that even the vast majority of scholars were numbed by what Goethe, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel had created, and descended from this height, thinking: the one-sided, materialistic Darwinism had proved powerful, the French materialism had proved powerful.

But what I am characterizing is not something that can be explained away by German intellectual life alone; rather, hundreds and hundreds of such phenomena could be cited. When people actually become aware of this, they will see the depth of German insight that can be drawn from German national character. For that is what really strives for a German world view, from German intellectual life.

Perhaps it may be mentioned, just as an aside, how profound these things actually are. Who among physicists, overwhelmed by French mechanism and English utilitarian philosophy, does not laugh inwardly when he praises them outwardly? I may well speak about the matter, for more than thirty years have passed since I endeavored to bring out the deep significance of Goethe's Theory of Colors in opposition to that theory of colors which is completely overwhelmed by Newtonism and by mechanism in general. Whenever you talk to a modern physicist about Goethe's theory of colors, all you get is, “Goethe's theory of colors doesn't tell you anything.”

This is quite understandable for someone who is familiar with today's circumstances; but there is something here. And that is that Goethe, through his direct coexistence with the mystery of the color spectrum, has created a tremendous work about nature and dared to oppose the intellectual appropriation by the British in Newton, and that the world has not understood it. But the chapter has yet to be written: Goethe - also in the theory of colors - is right against Newton, when one will grasp even more deeply what Fichte calls Germanness within Europe.

I could point to many other minds. As I said, you only need to pick them out. For example, I could point out a soul researcher - Schultz-Schultzenstein is his name, that is certainly a German name: Schultz-Schultzenstein - who tries to place the soul life of man under the concept of “rejuvenation” in the 1850s of the last century. Schultzenstein was able to offer some wonderful insights! He said that the human soul can only be properly understood in its life here between birth and death by observing the experiences it has as feelings and thoughts at the various stages of its life. And as it progresses, one can follow how the soul, like a previous skin, sheds what has already been experienced, and something continuous, something alive is renewed and rejuvenated within the soul.

I can point to another mind, whose literary activity also began in the 1850s and who died unnoticed in 1880. In my book “The Riddles of Philosophy” - [...] already in the first edition, which appeared in 1900 - I referred to Karl Christian Planck. He was a mind that was aware of how it created from German national character. Who knows him! But that does not matter, because what was in him as a force is at work in the German character, is at work in Central Europe and brings forth what belongs to the best life in Central Europe.

I would like to mention just one thing to show Karl Christian Planck's originality. Today, from the point of view of natural science, anyone who believes that they understand everything – to look at it the way the French look at the earth, the way the English observer looks at the earth, the way the geological observer looks at the earth – they look at the universe that consists of matter. For Planck, such an observer of the earth is like someone who would look at a tree only in terms of the trunk and the wood, and not in terms of the essence of the tree, the leaves, the blossoms and the fruits! For Planck, we do not see the earth in its entirety if we do not also see the whole human being on the earth. Planck looks at the earth as a spirit would, from the outside. And in what the geologist sees, we see only part of the earth, like the trunk, the wood of the tree, but nothing else of the nature of the earth. For Karl Christian Planck, the Earth is not only a living being, but a living, spiritualized living being. And what the physical human being himself is – as a flower, as a fruit – that belongs to the essence of the Earth. – A spiritual – Goethe would say – a spiritual worldview. And Christian Karl Planck is aware that he comes to such a spiritual worldview from the depths of the German people. Planck already expresses this beautifully in the 1860s. He has written several books; the books he has written breathe the breath of such a worldview. In 1864, in his book “Grundlinien einer Wissenschaft der Natur” (Foundations of a Science of Nature), he expresses beautifully how he is aware that he has come to his view, which sees the spirit in nature, from the depths of the German essence. I will read the words to you myself:

What power

writes Planck

deep-rooted prejudices from the previous view from his

the author's

writing, the author is fully aware of this; but just as the work itself, despite all the unfavorable circumstances, which, according to the author's

situation and professional position,

a work of this kind has been opposed, but has fought its way to its realization and its path into the public, so he is also certain that what must now first fight for its recognition will one day appear as the simplest and most self-evident truth, and that in it not only his cause, but the truly German view of things, will triumph over all still unworthy external and un-German conception of nature and spirit.

What our medieval poetry has unconsciously and profoundly foreshadowed will finally be fulfilled in our nation as the times mature. The impractical inwardness of the German spirit, which was met with harm and ridicule (as Wolfram describes it in his Parzival)

In 1864, before Wagner, these words were truly written!

finally, in the strength of its unceasing striving, it attains the highest; it looks into the last simple laws of things and of human existence itself; and what poetry has symbolized in a fantastically medieval way in the wonders of the Grail, the mastery of which is attained by its hero, that conversely receives its purely natural fulfillment and reality in the enduring knowledge of nature and of the spirit itself.

Karl Christian Planck died at the age of eighty. He left behind a writing that he called “The Testament of a German”; the first edition was published in 1881; the second edition by Diederichs Verlag in 1912. Who has dealt with it?

Well, people had other things to do! For example, they had to deal with the books published by the same publishing house by a man who lives in a rigid spirit - of course, that is not meant as a criticism of him at all; they also dealt with the books by the French philosopher - his name is still Bergson - a French name! He is the one who, since the beginning of the war, has not found enough defamatory words for the German worldview and German intellectual life. I think I actually said last year that this Bergson kept saying to his Frenchmen in Paris: the Germans once had a significant intellectual life, but now they have completely degenerated; all that can be seen is their mechanistic life. I said last year that in earlier times, good Henri Bergson would recite Novalis and Goethe and Schiller to you, in a time when he might not yet have called it “mechanical.” It cannot be emphasized enough. One looked out into the world with admiration. Not only now, during the war and the period of hatred – I have also tried to point out before what Bergson's “philosophy” is like.

A special feature of Bergson's philosophy is the following: He comes up with an idea; but he puts it forward in a light-hearted way. It consists in saying that one does not proceed correctly when one looks at the development of the world in such a way that one regards the subordinate beings as the origin of what man descends from, because one must start from man. That is indeed a very good thought: we must start from man. Man is the most original thing before any other being of the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdom existed. This is not understood today, but it is nevertheless founded in the writing on the reorganization of the world view of Bergson.

This also emerged in Planck's work: before the other things were there, man was there, albeit in different forms, and then he pushed away certain things that he could not use in his development, and so man came into being by excluding the plant and animal kingdoms. Just as man secretes his bones inwards, so that which is placed at the top, the plant kingdom, the mineral kingdom, secretes itself out of itself. This is a thought, esteemed attendees, that will become established in German intellectual life once the material colorations of Darwinism have been refuted and correctly illuminated.

All right, Bergson presents this; but I was able to show – as I said, just before the war, so that people would not think that it is only under the influence of the war events that things are now being characterized as they are here – I was able to show that precisely this idea, which – in a somewhat simplified form – the French philosopher Henri Bergson – that this idea, which already in the 1870s, 1882 [published], lived in the German thinker Wilhelm Heinrich Preuss – also a faded, forgotten aspiration of German intellectual life – was powerfully and energetically advocated by Preuss!

I am quoting a few words in which I have cited this Prussian, this German view of the matter; I am quoting these words from Pruss's book “Geist und Stoff” - 1899 in second edition already published. It says:

"It may therefore be time to establish a [different] doctrine of the origin of the organic species, which is not only based on one-sidedly established propositions from descriptive natural science, but is also in full agreement with the other laws of nature, which are at the same time also laws of human thought. A doctrine, at the same time, that is free of any hypothetization and is based only on strict conclusions from scientific observations in the broadest sense; a doctrine that rescues the species concept according to actual possibility, but at the same time adopts the concept of evolution as proposed by Darwin and seeks to make it fruitful in its realm.

The center of this new doctrine is man, the only species on our planet that recurs: Homo sapiens. It is strange that the older observers started with natural objects and then went so astray that they could not find the way to man, which Darwin only managed in the most miserable and thoroughly unsatisfactory way by seeking the progenitor of the Lord of Creation among the animals, while the naturalist would have to start with himself as a human being, in order to gradually return to humanity through the whole realm of being and thinking.

It was not by chance that human nature emerged from the development of all earthly things, but by necessity. Man is the goal of telluric processes and every other form that emerged alongside him borrowed its features from his. Man is the first-born being of the whole cosmos...

When its germs had arisen, the remaining organic residue no longer had the necessary power to produce further human germs. What did arise became animal or plant...

and so on. Bergson, the Frenchman, either does not know this German predecessor – which, in the case of a philosopher, would of course be just as big a mistake as if he knew him and did not name him; but the latter is to be assumed in the case of Bergson! He accuses today's Germans of mechanism! In the meantime, it has been possible to show that entire pages in Bergson's books have been copied from the Germans, whom he now disowns. Entire pages of arguments have been copied from Schelling and Schopenhauer by Henri Bergson! This is perhaps not a mechanical way of constructing intellectual life.

I would like to say: With something like this in the background, Germany's enemies now dare, insofar as they are represented by such personalities, to defame and belittle the German essence. But precisely from what is now at stake, in the world-historical development, this German essence will learn to assert that which lies at the bottom of its being, also in world-historical becoming.

Dear attendees, what is happening now – before world history – needs little saying to characterize it as one might imagine an objective act is characterized: There are enemies surrounding Central Europe. One need only mention a few figures that will speak strongly in the future, when things will be seen differently than Germany's enemies see them now: 777 million people, not counting the Italians, stood around Central Europe facing a group of 150 million. 777 million against 150 million. Do they need to be envious of this Central Europe? Well, the property of these 777 million people covers 68 million square kilometers, compared to the 6 million square kilometers of property owned by the 150 million in Central Europe. And these 777 million – multiplied by Italy – against these 150 million, they are in a position where they not only want to fight with weapons, but also want to have the better part of the rest of the world, want to starve the 150 million people. And leading people - people called “great personalities” from Germany's side - they indulge in the most vicious accusations and slanders of the spiritual life that has emerged in the 6 million square kilometers in the middle of Europe and show how little they understand of what is alive there.

Besides Bergson, there is, for example, the French philosopher Boutroux – shortly before the war, he was still traveling around in Germany, even giving lectures in German about the close scientific relationship between Germans and Frenchmen! Now he is saying things like this to his fellow Parisians: The Germans imagined that they had come to the end of all searching. With this, they also imagined that they were at the center of the divine order of the world and that they could rule over all men. [...]

We do not need to fall into this tone; but it is necessary to point out such facts and to get to know the facts. After all, Boutroux also managed – well, the Frenchman is witty – to make a joke not too long ago: the Frenchman, the Englishman and the German are talking about the pursuit of a worldview, of knowledge of external things; Boutroux said to his partner: the Frenchman, if he wants to get to know a camel, goes to the menagerie, looks at a camel and then describes it. The Englishman goes to the area where camels live, looks at the camel and then describes it. The German neither goes to the menagerie to see a camel nor to the area where camels live in distant lands, but goes into his room and studies the camel in its inwardness in its being and creates the camel in himself out of his being. The French are witty! Just this joke about Boutroux comes from Heinrich Heine!

And so much more could be said. It must be said: the German does not really need to fall back into the ways of those around him! But the German has all the more need to engage with that which is currently the best part of his nature in the pursuit of knowledge. The German nature will also overcome those prejudices which arise from the fact that, under the influence of French and English materialism, a person who searches for spiritual science is still considered today to be a dreamer, a person who does not live in reality: Oh, when you see someone like Planck or [someone like] Preuss – well, these people can spin theories, but to engage with reality, to see what lives in reality, that's what the “practitioners” are for; someone like Planck, you can't use him for life!

I could give many examples; I will just mention one in connection with Planck, since I was allowed to discuss him: about 35 years ago (Planck died in 1881) he wrote words that I will even read out. He was not a diplomat; he was not a politician; he was not one of those preachers who believe that they have a complete understanding of the workings of the world, that they have “lived it all,” who know how to speak authoritatively about everything from a broad perspective and disdain those who live only in the spiritual world. He was none of these. He was a simple man of vision! But a man who was able to see into the course of events. And what he developed before 1881 is written in his Testament of a German. He died in 1881. In it he wrote about what presented itself to him in the development of Europe. And he looked at it with discerning eyes. He wrote that war must come. And about this war he wrote the following words:

“If a people, universalistic and central by its very nature, is now in the sharpest contrast to its earlier history, unites to form a pure nation-state and, for all others, increases to the highest military armament, what else can be the consequence in a time of the highest national aspirations than ultimately the most comprehensive clash?”

So says the “impractical man of world view”! How many people who were practically inside the circumstances did not believe, when the war broke out, that the Italian would also stand against Central Europe! But the impractical man of conviction knew how to say this in 1881. Not only will the Russian East rise up against Central Europe, but as in the past we will also have to defend ourselves in the West and in the South.

“It is not only the antagonism of political interests that must provoke him,”

"but, as it is now becoming increasingly clear, above all the conflict of economic interests in their still nationally bound, still inorganically opposed form. And the more the contradictions and evils that this state of affairs brings about in relation to the universalistic increase of means of communication, which have already been discussed earlier, must come to the fore, the sharper the tension that arises on all sides as a result.

And to this is added another contrast, in which the inherent one-sidedness of our Western culture has created an enemy, and which, by the nature of things, must become hostile above all to the German spirit. From the very beginning, as we saw, Western Christianity and its striving for a full, humanly present mediation of the divine content has gone hand in hand with the rigid otherworldliness and bondage of the Oriental and Byzantine essence, for which ecclesiastical and political power and authority directly coincided. In this rigid unity, the Christian East remained just as unfreely confined as, conversely, in the West, the free national development overgrew religious unity and pushed it into the background. But the one-sided, secular, and outwardly material character of Western culture, which is rooted in this, has also made it possible for the unfree East to appropriate these external cultural means without having to absorb the deeper, free, spiritual side of that development. On the contrary, it only helped him to confront the West, which had fallen into a one-sided national separate existence, all the more consciously in the self-confidence of his distinctive religious and political unity, and thus, in view of the still unfinished state of other Slavic tribes and the disintegrating Turkish Empire, to claim an even more far-reaching significance for himself. And precisely because of this, by the very nature of things, he becomes an opponent of the nation, which also in this respect has its central and unifying human and universal calling, of the Germans, and especially of that empire, which for a long time has based its existence precisely on the comprehensive interweaving of German and foreign elements.

No political cleverness, no love of peace on the part of Germany can prevent this hostile clash within the current merely national order. For more powerful than all cleverness is the nature of the circumstances; and already now, despite the friendly attitude of Germany and Austria, the hostile mood of the Russian East is only emerging all the more clearly because one could not give it a free hand in everything, but had to set a certain goal. And if it comes to a fight one day, then, however much we have to fight it for the good of Europe, the latter will not stand by our side, but as in the east, we will also have to defend ourselves in the west and south at the same time; on all sides, national jealousy will rise up against the new empire in their midst.

But it is precisely the realization that in this last and most difficult struggle the completely inadequate nature of all previous purely national orders comes to light, that above all the universal position of the German nation, linked as it is to a series of foreign elements, is completely incompatible with it and could only lead to unending struggles. This realization will give this bloodiest of struggles its forever decisive significance and will open the minds of the nations, which are now still trapped in dull externalities, to their ultimate and lasting calling. The realization will dawn, amidst blood and tears, that it is never the mere nation-state and its commercial society that can bring peace and reconciliation, but only that of the universal law of vocation, that only in it lies the renewing rebirth for all the inner wounds, for the relationship of states to one another, for the degenerate conditions of the Orient, and for the corruption and externalization of one's own education. If the first struggle, which was intended to prevent our national awakening, has brought it to completion precisely for that reason, then conversely the second, which is caused by the very inadequacy of all this national order, will also lead beyond it forever to the humanly universal goal.

It is from the German spirit that a renewal of humanity must come, so that there may be a victory over that which lives in a sense indicated by these facts and which has come from an un-German spirit, especially in more recent times, and which can be characterized by saying: the power of incompetence that crushes all justified striving must be recognized. The German spirit is strong and vigorous and will recognize this in this area and will heal the world in this area when it becomes aware of what still lives in German intellectual life as a forgotten pursuit in many cases.

We have been able to glance over to the West on many an occasion. Finally, let us glance over to the East with a few words. This whole East, yes, how does it present itself? Central Europe?

The German essence: can it be characterized in relation to the West in such a way that one can say that one truly does not need to belittle the West in any way. One can know that the scientific spirit emanated from Italy before the dawn of the newer intellectual life. This scientific spirit has emerged from the south. One can know that the French spirit also gave rise to the rational conception of the world; that the sense of utility emerged from the English spirit, the view of the world in such a way that everything is placed in the utility. But just how far removed this British spirit is from the German spirit, well, you can tell by the fact that if someone wanted to try to characterize Fichte's theory of knowledge, where he repeatedly attempts to describe the self feeling and experiencing itself in the world spirit, if you are able to fully penetrate this field of knowledge, it would look strange linguistically alone...

If I say: “I represent the I” – not even that could be adhered to, [instead of the German word “ich” the English “i”] – not even that could be adhered to, that one [in English] goes from the lower-case “i”, as one writes in German, to the capital “I”, when you have experienced the “I” – Fichte calls it “reproduction”, the progression of culture in the “I” – within yourself, how should you call it when you want to move from the small “I” to the large “I”, since grammatically the personal “I” is written “I” everywhere.

You could say: the German essence relates to the Western essence in the same way that the Italians were the contemplatives, the French shaped reason, the utilitarian principle shaped the English; but the principle of internalization is part of the German essence. The Italian looks at the world. By looking at the world, he says: the world is quite right; but it just needs to be reshaped a little, it needs to be made to correspond to our ability, not a compulsory language, but a word that has been experienced. It is precisely when you look deep, deep inside, especially into the best sides of intellectual life, that this word is true.

The Frenchman says: This world is also worth / gap in the transcript ]. The Englishman says: [gap in the transcript] The German says: I also like the world. And within himself, he wants to create a small image of the world. The Russian, yes, one only needs to think of such characteristic figures as Ivan Karamazov in Dostoyevsky's “The Brothers Karamazov”. But this type of Karamasov character is poured out over the whole of the East in the nineteenth century. [...] Ivan Karamasov himself says: I would still accept God; but I cannot accept the world from God. The world, in the Russian sense, is actually something that should be replaced by another, namely by the one that is made for the Russian people.

It is a seemingly radical word, but anyone who follows the development of Russian thought in the nineteenth century will find it to be true. For it is indeed strange: from the first decade of the nineteenth century in Russia it is emphasized that in the Russian countryside there lives - Dostoyevsky said it, for example, despite the greatness of Dostoyevsky, one must also bear in mind the greatness of Dostoyevsky -: the Russian person is the one in all people who, through his universal humanity, must place his spiritual life in the place of others. And man faces the world in such a way that one can say: in the nineteenth century, he is increasingly coming to say to himself: European intellectual life is decrepit and has had its day. That must be eradicated. Russian intellectual life would be young; it must dominate. The Russian language means joy, means love. The West – and that includes Central Europe, but also France, Italy, Spain and England – means struggle, means war, means selfishness. This is the underlying tone of all [Russian] intellectual life in the nineteenth century.

Outwardly it does not appear so strongly; but it is so. Only strange: Who is then actually the first to have pronounced the nature of the Slav, from which they then want something quite different than lies in the Russian national spirit? They claim that a noble man spoke of it first, and they have built on that. Who was it that first characterized the matter so beautifully, coined a word, an idea, on which they then based the whole of the nineteenth century? Herder! Herder was basically the first Slavophile. But the word of a Slavophile has degenerated into megalomania. And it came to pass that it resounded again and again: Europe is decrepit, and Russian intellectual life must take the place of European intellectual life.

Dear attendees, as I said, just one more fact: in 1885 a book was published that was written by the Russian Yushakov. Yushakov stands on a somewhat different cultural ground than the one I have just mentioned – the literary counter-image, presented for that which has emerged up to the present day and up to our current terrible events – Yushakov, 1885, a remarkable book! He does not look to the West, but to the East, to Asia, to the Asian peoples. Now, as Jusakhov says in his, as I said, remarkable book: These poor Asians, they have shown themselves how they have gradually struggled from their cultural life up to the corresponding present culture, they have shown it as the struggle between two spiritual beings. But this struggle represents a reality in Asia. According to Yushakov, the two spiritual powers under whose influence the Asians were, were represented as the good Ormuzd and the evil Ahriman.

Ahriman was always the one who was the negation of Ormuzd. Jushakow says to the Iranian peoples, to whom the Persians and Indians also belonged: Ahriman, the evil spirit, took away these fruits of both material and spiritual culture from them.

But what have the European peoples of the West done? - Jushakow asks. They have squeezed out of those Asian peoples what those peoples had acquired under the influence of the good Ormuzd! Russian culture must intervene here. Russian culture is the only one capable – Jusakhov says, I am not saying this – of lovingly embracing the Asian peoples. Two powers stand in the world that will bring happiness in the future – and above all happiness to the Asian peoples; these two powers are – I am not saying this, Jusakhov is saying it! , these two powers are: the Russian peasant and the Cossack, the two great representatives of [Russian] humanity - says Yushakov in 1885. And he does not go to Asia to bring love to the Asians, to bring love to the Asians in turn, sooner or later the evil that the Western peoples have brought over Asia, which he could not really talk about in those days in the case of Germany, will be brought to light.

Strangely enough, the book is called “The Anglo-Russian Conflict”. And there Yushakov says in relation to this: The English show by their treatment of the Asian peoples as if they believed that these Asian peoples were only dependent on this unloving English love. And then Jushakow says how he imagines the relationship between his people and the English. He says to England - these are his words, his own words:

"England exploits millions of Hindus, but its very existence depends on the obedience of the various peoples who inhabit the rich peninsula; I do not wish anything similar for my fatherland - I can only rejoice that

my Russian fatherland [according to Yushakov]

is sufficiently far removed from this state of affairs, which is as splendid as it is sad.

Thus in 1885 the Russian Yushakov on England.

He is probably not primarily concerned with the alliance between Russia and England, but with restoring the blessings of Ormuzd to the Asians. Russia will now cross over to Asia, says Yushakov, because in Russia the alliance between the all-fertility developing farmer and the all-chivalry bearing Cossack is rooted in a deep culture, Yushakov believes, and they will prefer to spread Russian spirituality across Asia first.

Thus writes one of those minds that thought this way in Russia and already expressed it in the 1820s – in 1829: Western Europe and Central Europe are decrepit, have outlived their usefulness. But we in Russia, we have the right to bring this Europe under our rule. And when we have it – so says Kireyevsky – when we have it, then we will share what we have with the others, insofar as it is right.

This is not only the “right” thing to do in the political sphere, since the falsified “Testament of Peter the Great”, but also in the entire intellectual and cultural life. And what is going on through this Russophile: the excellent Russian philosopher Solowjow has said it himself. And you can read this in my book 'Thoughts During the Time of War' – it is not available at the moment, but it will be published again in a while. Solowjow himself said it: what is alive in Russian intellectual life comes from what one could call: Russia still has a long way to go before she attains the maturity of her own nature; for Russia is still today, in fact, in the midst of it, thoroughly in the midst of unclear mysticism. That is all. One has to be 'mystical' if one is to be able to say: This German spiritual life seeks the tool of mystical endeavor. On the contrary: fully conscious thoughts, light-imbued, thought-filled views, clear views; the German seeks an image of the world in order to shape his own being as similarly as possible to this image of the world.

The other nations should not be disparaged. But what can they recognize that the German strives for, that he strives for consciously, so that he makes his own image of man similar to the image of the world? The Italian cannot strive for it so consciously if he only strives from his nationality. He would have to be taught this, as it were, by suggestion, so that what is a striving for knowledge in him would have more of an effect than a morality.

The Frenchman wants it more as an intellectual art, to give the mind pleasure, to give the mind a sense of well-being. This is basically something that lies in the fundamental character as a French imprint of the mechanistic view of nature.

The Englishman wants – he would certainly also accept Fichte's science if one could transform its truths into a principle or a machine, if one could place it in the pragmatic order of life, could make pragmatism out of it, as it was mentioned today.

The Russian still needs unclear, hazy mysticism everywhere today. I have already mentioned Ivan Karamazov from Dostoyevsky's work “The Brothers Karamazov”, who is a true representative of the Russian who has absorbed Western European culture. God would be there, yes, God, but in mystical obscurity. And one can say: when the Russian becomes atheistic, he wants a mystical atheist. The Russian can become atheistic, but he almost wants the atheist to be revealed to him by God! You could also teach him Fichte's philosophy, you could also teach him Hegelianism; but then it would have to be found mysteriously on an altar somewhere or at least bear the imprint that it came into the world in a mysterious way!

In short, the various nations surrounding the German nation still stand today in such a way to this German spiritual life that there is truly every reason for the German to become aware of the germs and roots and diversity in his spiritual being! And the fruits and blossoms will come when the German becomes truly aware of this, aware of it precisely through the difficult time of trial in which he is currently mired.

Yes, what has been attempted to be presented in brief, dear attendees, developed on the 6 million square kilometers in the center, compared to the 68 million square kilometers in the surrounding area! And as if by bonds, which are also bonds of the spirit, this Central Europe is held together. The alliance between Germany and Austria is truly such a bond, one that is also based on the commonality of the spiritual life flowing through the two countries, through the two national territories.

I may say this because I have lived in Austria for more than half of my life, almost thirty years, and have participated in all the times of these thirty years in the way in which the German essence must live there in Austria, must live in multiform Austria. I have come to know what it means to take the word of one of the most German of Austrians – Robert Hamerling, the greatest son of Austria in the second half of the nineteenth century – and to feel it in the innermost being of someone who grasps the sense of belonging in Central Europe. Robert Hamerling said: “Austria is my fatherland; but Germany is my motherland”.

Robert Hamerling, as early as 1862, in his wonderful poem 'Germanenzug', spoke of this inwardness of the German world-view. Does it not appear to us in a beautiful form, this inwardness of the German world-view, when we see, for example, how Jakob Böhme, in very early times, speaks of how the German strives for knowledge, but in such a way that he wants to use it to enter into the spirit of the world? He expresses it so beautifully:

“When you look at the depths”

he means the depths of heaven

“And the stars and the earth, you see your God. And in you live and are you also. And the same God rules you also.” “You are created from this God and live in the same. Also, all your knowledge is in this God. And when you die, you will be buried in this God.”

Fine words! If we take this, which I have tried to illustrate today: it turns out that in this internalization of the German essence – in this desire to grasp what, as divine spirituality, permeates and animates the world within one's own inner being – lies the profound world-historical calling of the German. And it is so intrinsic to the German that it really stands out like a second wave in the great upheaval of the human race. If we look across to the Orient – looking differently than the Russian Yushakov – then we find in the Asian peoples how they have dreamed of, how they have also once tried to penetrate into the spiritual that lives and breathes through the world. They tried to bring the I so close that it was as if asleep, [that] the actual human inner being was asleep, and so the human being could merge into what the life of the world spirit in the principle of the All interweaves and lives through the world. Now that the greatest impulse for the evolution of the Earth has been introduced – the Christ Impulse – the Asiatic type is no longer the one that can dominate the human race.

The German nature has found the right way to penetrate into the spiritual world in the sense of the Christ impulse, so that the ego is not eradicated as it was in Asia; [but that which is sought in the future of the world as a divine-spiritual, that is achieved through the elevation, through the strengthening - not through the weakening - of the ego. But the I is precisely exalted, strengthened, in order to grow together with the whole world. Thus ancient human striving continues in the newest form, as in historical vocation the essence of the German spirit.

This is beautifully shown by Robert Hamerling, the Austrian German, in his “Germanenzug”, in which he describes in beautiful words how the ancient Germanic peoples, the ancestors of the Germans, once migrated from Asia to Europe, so that we take part in it, that we take part in the setting sun, in the mild twilight that spreads; and when everything sinks into a deep sleep, only one remains awake: the blond Teut. While everyone else sleeps, he is occupied with the thoughts of the future German being, the German task. The genius, the spirit of the German people, appears before the blond Teut and speaks to him of the future of the German people. This is how Robert Hamerling feels it and expresses it through the genius of the past to the blond Teut just as the Germanic peoples, the ancestors of the Germans, are crossing over from east to west. Thus speaks the genius:

"To whom will break the word from soul depths
Like your people, so rich, so delicate, so powerful?
Who breathes so solemnly in string sounds
His innermost? Who zich'n the sense so magnificent
Into the heavenly blue, granite hieroglyphics
Of the soul's upsurge from the narrowness of life?
Who finally ties the strands
Of the inquisitive thought to the stars
So boldly and strives and fights on all paths?
Who is so high, so deep, his urge, his hunch?
Who grasps the near and far so faithfully?
Where is every earthly and heavenly zone
reflected as in your thinking, O Teuton?

And how related, but on a higher level, appears the spiritual search for the divine reason of the world. Here, too, the genius of the German people speaks to the blond Teut as if through Robert Hamerling's mouth, from that which I just hinted at through the words of Jakob Böhme, where devotion becomes knowledge, where devotion becomes the world view, devotion to the divine spiritual forces of the world. This is how Hamerling has the blond Teut say to the genius of the German people:

"But however proudly you may strive,
Soaring high above other swarms,
You will always retain the ancient, sacred fire:
The dream-filled drunkenness of God
of the ancient Asian homeland. This holy ray, a temple fire, will glow in your chest and soul, remain with you and be your pilot at the helm! You only strive because you love: your most daring thought will be a devotion that seeks to merge with God."

Yes, the German needs to become aware of his German essence. Then he will find the right relationship to the events of the present! For he may trust in that which exists as the source, the root and germ of spiritual striving within the German nation. And whatever has such germs may be felt with hope and confidence that its blossoms and fruits will develop, despite everything that rises in hostility in the world against this spiritual foundation in German development.

I think that a truly objective, not a narrow-minded, consideration of the German nature says this. And the German can rely on such an objective consideration. Then he can also look objectively at the way in which one not only simplifies but also defames what extends over 6 million square kilometers compared to 68 square kilometers.

Anyone who looks at this, at the roots and the hoped-for seeds, blossoms and fruits of the future, may summarize what today's contemplation was, summarize it sentimentally in a few words. Words that are intimately connected with the whole feeling of the German essence, all German essence. They, too, are by Robert Hamerling, and they, too, prove how Central Europe has been welded together from this side and from the other side of the Ore Mountains, but has also been welded together by this common spiritual weaving and essence in this Central Europe.

Therefore, let us conclude today's reflection with a word from Robert Hamerling, the Austrian German, a word that summarizes in a sensitive way what I have tried to bring before your soul in a longer exposition - an unfortunately all too long exposition. Robert Hamerling says out of the sentiment from which he said “Austria is my fatherland, but Germany is my motherland”:

“And if ever the day
Should prove hostile to the German name,
From ocean to ocean shall run
The course of the German spirit!”

Distinguished attendees! When speaking of human knowledge, one initially has two things in mind. One is the knowledge that the individual human soul, the human mind, acquires for its own sake; the other is the knowledge that is a means of progress for the life of all humanity. One has only to think of knowledge that deals with the observation of natural phenomena and that is concerned with putting the forces of nature at the service of humanity to realize that what is called knowledge in this field not only gives satisfaction to the individual human soul, but that this knowledge wants to be a selfless servant to all humanity. It is easy to see that knowledge of the forces of nature serves the aims of humanity to a large extent. We see the knowledge gained through the thinking of researchers and inventors applied in practical life, and anyone who reflects on its value will easily see that the knowledge gained from the study of matter is intended to serve all of humanity.

But beyond this knowledge there is still another knowledge, which by its very nature does not allow for such practical application. This knowledge must exist for its own sake. Humanity needs it and could not live without it. But with this knowledge, too, we may ask whether it is really something that the human soul seeks only for its own satisfaction, or whether this knowledge, too, which we often say exists for its own sake, is not also in the service of human progress. If one tries to explore why the human soul thirsts and hungers, as it were, for such knowledge for its own sake, why it strives for an examination of the secrets of the world in order to recognize the significance of knowledge in the service of humanity, then one must delve into the essence and the [primordial] reasons of the human soul itself.

Now the branch of human research that is called spiritual science or theosophy seeks to recognize the essence of the human soul by pursuing this human soul into its deepest depths and trying to find the essence of the human soul on the basis of knowledge that goes beyond what the senses offer and what the mind, which is tied to the brain, can achieve. Spiritual science believes that, on the basis of its research, it can say something about the human soul that is of particular importance to this striving human soul. However, it must approach all that the intellectual culture of the last centuries has produced in an independent way. In no way does spiritual science take a position against the great achievements of human culture, especially of natural science; but in our time it must undertake exactly the same thing that natural science has undertaken many times over the last few centuries - it must test all the prejudices, all the beliefs of people today in the light of its insights. Spiritual science looks at something that is one of the most important things for knowledge in our time – at something that has only been instilled in science relatively recently.

People are very forgetful. Many truths that are generally recognized today were only conquered by the human mind in the 17th century, because until the 17th century, for example, both laymen and learned naturalists believed that earthworms, fish and other lower animals could develop from river mud. There are books from this time that discuss how living things develop from carcasses, for example. It was only in this 17th century that Francesco Redi first uttered the sentence that living beings could only come from germs of living beings of the same kind. That living beings can only come from living beings was a great heresy in the 17th century compared to the science of the time, and only with great difficulty did Francesco Redi escape the fate of Giordano Bruno.

The situation for the spiritual researcher today is similar when, for example, he focuses his attention on the properties of a human soul that comes into existence through birth. Today, when looking at the different properties of children, it is easy to say that these properties are inherited from the father and mother. Today it is believed that the structure of the human soul is composed of what comes from the physical environment, just as it was believed in the 17th century that living beings would consist only of what came from the physical environment. But the spiritual researcher must say: spiritual-soul can only come from spiritual-soul. He observes the miracle of how a human germ, which comes into existence through birth, develops in the course of its life from stage to stage, and he is clear about the fact that the human essence, which develops so mysteriously, can only come from its own kind. He knows that in order to understand what is developing, one must go back to another spiritual-soul realm. As we ascend from the animal to the human, we have to distinguish between the generic and the individual. We cannot ascribe to the human core of being the same thing that we address as generic in the animal. We have to say: what develops in the child over time does not lead back to a generic, but to an individual that comes into existence through birth. And when this thought is followed to its logical conclusion, this spiritual research into the origin of the soul and spirit leads the spiritual researcher to the idea of re-embodiment, to the idea of repeated lives on earth for human beings. For anyone who looks impartially at all the facts of life, repeated lives on earth are a reality, however much the feelings of people today may still rebel against it. Of course, it is no longer customary to burn heretics, but such things, which are heresies according to today's consciousness of people, are ridiculed. But this truth will be treated the same way as other truths and laws that humanity has acquired in the course of its development; after some time, it will no longer be possible to understand how there could have been people who could not believe that spirit comes from spirit.

Goethe pointed to what his essence had drawn from his environment. He could say:

From my father I got the stature,
the serious conduct of life,
from my mother the cheerful nature
and the desire to tell stories.

And then, after pointing out what he had attracted from his environment through inheritance, he modestly asks:

What, then, of the whole figure
can be called original?

Anyone who, like me, has studied everything related to Goethe has certainly acquired the respect due to Goethe's parents. But try to put together all their qualities – you will try in vain to bring to light what is original about the “little fellow”. Precisely that which we cannot find in the heritage of father and mother, precisely that is the Goethe whom we know and who he will always be in our culture. It is the most appealing task for an educator to assume that in the education of a child, a mysterious core of being struggles into existence that lies beyond all laws of inheritance, and that in every young human being this riddle must be solved anew. If we really apply this truth of repeated earthly lives to a child, it will no longer be out of keeping with us to look at the child's outer form in such a way that it appears to us as shaped, formed out of a soul-spiritual core of being. We observe the indeterminate features of this human countenance in the first days of the child's life; we see that they become more and more definite and, little by little, the child's entire body shows an ever more definite form of its own. We can see how the soul, which has come over from a previous existence, transforms these vague features into ever more distinct ones. It becomes visible how the inner core of the human being works on the forming physical shell.

If we consider this carefully, we will not find it difficult to recognize an ascending and a descending line of human life. We see how indeterminate forces work their way from the inner being to the surface, and at a certain point in time we see how everything that is inherent in the human being is revealed in the skills and abilities that he acquires. Then it happens that a person makes one side of his nature the dominant one. We see a kind of confrontation with his environment through the absorption of knowledge and wisdom, and we can say: This is something that is added to what was brought from previous embodiments. Then a descending current sets in in life, where we can no longer transform anything of what we have become externally and physically in our abilities - we can no longer even absorb anything into our memory.

We will only understand this actual work of the individual core of our being on the human being if we consider the whole of human life. This work on the human being can be divided into two clearly distinguishable states. The human being alternates between two states of consciousness: waking life and sleeping life. To consider life as a whole, we must ask ourselves: What do we owe to sleeping life and what do we owe to waking life? From sleep the soul must draw the strength for new work, and it is shown that invigorating forces accrue to the soul from sleep. An example of this: people who, by reason of their occupation, are obliged to learn much by heart, can experience that they do not progress well with their memorizing if they do not have a good amount of sleep between their work. Today, scientific observation also recognizes the importance of sleep for the removal of fatigue. In scientific circles, the prevailing view is that people get tired because the muscles, nerves, etc. are worn out and need to be supplied with new strength. However, this does not take into account the fact that muscles can also work without showing signs of fatigue. The heart muscles, for example, work without tiring. Why is that?

Asking this question is of tremendous importance for a healthy view of life. On closer observation, it becomes clear that fatigue only occurs under certain conditions. The heart does not tire, but the smallest muscles in the fingers can tire to such an extent that cramp-like pains occur, as can be seen, for example, in writer's cramp. When you research these things, you come to realize that fatigue and our waking daily activity are related. We come to see that fatigue occurs when we do not leave parts of our body to themselves, but instead permeate them with the effectiveness of the external work we do. The laws of the universe are implanted in our body; they are effective in it, and under their effectiveness the body does not tire. Fatigue does not occur when - unconsciously to the person - the laws of the universe work in his body. Fatigue occurs only when the human consciousness permeates the organism with its nature.

The naturalist Thomson asserts the independence of the soul life in relation to the bodily life. He says that the soul life is as separate from the body as the rider is from his horse. It is admitted that there is something in man that stands in the same relationship to his body as the rider to his horse. We tire our body, says Thomson, just as the rider tires his horse, because we are outside the horse and use the horse. Does the old image not emerge from a distant time in human development, in which people looked into a spiritual world by natural gift? There they saw the centaur, the man connected with the horse. It is true that “wise” natural science says today that the people of that time were childlike people, that they saw wild barbarians sitting on their steeds and coming out of the fog from the north, and that in the fog they could not distinguish where man and where steed was; from this these childlike people would have formed the image of the centaur. But in fact the centaur is a reality that shows, from a clairvoyant perspective, the relationship that arises between soul and body, and that is like that between rider and horse.

Thus the fact of fatigue compels us to recognize a certain independence of soul from body. That the course of certain processes in the human body does not result in fatigue is due to the fact that a universal law is at work, but the human being is not present with his consciousness. The human being tires because he is present with his consciousness in the processes of his body. But in the state of sleep, the human being is surrendered to the universal law. The human being needs this immersion in a different element, as it happens every night during sleep, and we will ascribe the right effect to sleep if we follow the essence of the human being as he lives in the world into which he enters when he falls asleep.

Then I have to speak of the experiences of the spiritual researcher. Spiritual research does not mean that one can gain knowledge of the secrets of the existence of the world at any level, but that we awaken dormant, germinal powers of knowledge within us. When these dormant powers of knowledge awaken, they give us eyes and ears of the spirit, so that we find ourselves in a situation like that of a blind person who regains his sight through an operation. We can only recognize how many worlds are around us if we have the organs to perceive them. We can only experience the world of light and color if we have eyes to see them and the world of sounds if we have ears to hear them. The spiritual researcher becomes a spiritual researcher by awakening the powers of knowledge that lie dormant in him, by opening spiritual eyes and ears. He carries out a certain training of the soul, that is, certain exercises through which the soul acquires organs with which it can see and experience new worlds. When a person becomes a spiritual researcher in this way, the perception of the spiritual world is not speculation, but reality.

When a person begins to look into these spiritual worlds, he makes new experiences, and I would like to emphasize one such experience that can shed light on the nature of sleeping and waking. It is the task of the spiritual researcher to investigate certain tasks of ordinary life and then to illuminate them with the light of the spirit. For example, you may reflect on a certain task in life and cannot solve it; the tool of thinking proves blunt. Then the spiritual researcher really feels separated as a thinking and knowing being from his physical body. He feels his physicality as one feels a hammer or another tool or instrument outside of one's being. Just as one can feel a hammer as too heavy, one can feel the failure of the individual parts of the brain: One feels that one cannot intervene in the brain.

The separation of body and spirit can be felt by the spiritual researcher in every one of his activities. But when the spiritual researcher wakes up from a state of sleep, perhaps a very short sleep, which he can induce at will through his developed will, it is as if he woke up from a very specific world in which he has done something, so that when he wakes up, activities that he performed immediately before waking up linger, and these have a very specific configuration. When he wakes up, the activities he performed before waking up could be painted by him in very specific figures and colors. But there is a difference between this mental activity and the usual daily activities. The usual daily activities are such that you think them through beforehand, so you work as if according to a model and are bound to the lines of a template.

The [spiritual] activity, on the other hand, [that a person performs while sleeping] proceeds as if we were following a line from our spirit that arises from the inner laws of our own soul. During sleep, the spiritual researcher feels this as an intervention of his soul activity in his physical body, in his brain. And he feels this activity, to which he has devoted himself in sleep, flowing into his body like warmth, so that this body has grown to meet the demands of the day. He experiences: You have worn out your instrument, and this activity is a repair of the instrument for the daytime work of the physical body. Like an architect, we work on our own physical body during sleep, and the spiritual researcher does this consciously. During the day, the physical body is constantly worn out, and we bring with us from another world the forces we need to build up our physical body. We do this unconsciously during sleep. If we consciously consider what we do unconsciously in our sleep, then we will find it credible that during sleep our soul dwells in a world other than the physical one. From the moment we fall asleep until we wake up, the soul really does enter a spiritual world, and that is the world from which man comes. Every night we have to dive into this sea of spirituality to draw from it the strength we need for our physical body and which alone makes it possible for us to survive between birth and death.

So our life goes, in that we appeal again and again to our spiritual existence, and we see this spiritual essence of man emerging anew from the spiritual world every day, as in a small re-embodiment. We find only one difference between re-embodiment and waking up: when we wake up in the morning, we always encounter the same body that we have built up since our birth. When we re-embody ourselves for a new life, however, we must first build up our corporeality anew.

When we consider the course of life, we see many, varied things approaching us that we can take in with our soul, but which we cannot implement in the life of our body. We develop by repeatedly drawing new strength from our sleep, but there is a certain limit to the incorporation of these forces into our physical being. For example, the soul can only receive musical impressions if there is a musical ear. The soul encounters a limit in the physical. Much of what is in our soul, what it wants to process, it cannot incorporate into the outer physical body. This gives rise to a certain disharmony, which is more than the usual tiredness that forces us to sleep. This gradual mismatch of the body to what our soul is becomes more and more pronounced the more a person develops a richer soul life. The soul life becomes increasingly unadapted to the life of the outer body. And here we must ask ourselves: where do we get this body from? When we see this body developing out of indeterminacy into a definite form in physiognomy and gestures, we regard the body we have in a particular life as a result of previous lives. We use this body as an instrument. We enrich our soul in the course of our life, and we find that what we have acquired in this life reaches the limits of our physical body, and that finally bursts this body.

So we have the descending line of life. We should be grateful to be separated from this body again, to be heading towards death, to have a soul with richly developed content that bursts the bounds of the body, right up to death. Those who look more deeply into these things will understand that a richly developed soul must go beyond the body and that we should not be surprised that in old age, especially in people with a richly developed soul, the brain can no longer serve the soul's life. Kant, for example, became weak-minded in old age, despite his rich mind. The outer tools of the body are no longer suitable for the soul; it withdraws with the content it has gained in this life, and it finally breaks the body. What we call death is different in humans than in animals. The ever-enriching soul of the human being breaks the corporeality and passes through death. Then this soul builds itself up according to the abilities and contents it has acquired during life, the body for a new incarnation.

Now one could say that we do not remember our past life. This objection would have the same justification as if someone wanted to say: A four-year-old child cannot calculate, so no human being can calculate at all. - We want to try to see through the following consideration that it is possible to acquire the ability to remember earlier lives. To make this clear to us, I must mention that there is also a time for the ordinary human life when the person cannot remember. These are the first years of childhood, which a person does not remember, even though he was already there at that time. The point in time up to which memory reaches is connected with another point in time. You know, of course, that in the very earliest period of his life, a person has no sense of self. At a certain point in time, the sense of self arises in the child, and the beginning of remembering coincides with this. What lies before this point in time is not remembered. Why is that? Spiritual research shows that in his normal mental life today, through the development of this self-awareness, through which man attains the highest of this life, man erects something like a boundary around himself. A person's memory goes back to the point where self-awareness occurs. That is the boundary. At this boundary, self-awareness stops and withdraws from observation what happened before.

We can learn to see beyond this boundary if we apply the exercises that the spiritual student has to do to look into the spiritual world to our soul. There comes a moment when the person succeeds in leading this I one step beyond himself. That is the moment when one comes to switch off the ordinary I-consciousness that forms the boundary for memory. Then the person enters the spiritual world. He only has to learn to switch off the ordinary I-consciousness. The sense of self is brought about by the impact with the body. When a person overcomes this, as it is otherwise overcome in sleep, and when he learns to consciously enter the world in which he unconsciously dwells in sleep, the possibility of looking back on past lives begins.

This can only be achieved if man consciously turns his gaze to this other side of life, to the side that lies beyond the gate of death. We must uproot from the soul all fear and dread of what comes to man from the future. How afraid and anxious man is today of all that lies in the future and especially of the hour of death. Man must acquire composure in relation to all feelings and sensations towards the future, look forward with absolute equanimity to all that may come, and only think that whatever may come to us through the wisdom-filled guidance of the world. This must be brought before the soul again and again. This leads us to receive the retrospective powers for past earth lives as a gift.

In this way we can educate our soul until we attain the consciousness that past earth lives are not hypotheses and dreams, but that they stand before the soul as fact, as something that the soul can learn to observe. Our contemporaries do not want to admit that there is a possibility of awakening dormant powers in the soul, so that new worlds, hitherto hidden in the infinite bosom of existence, may be added to what the soul can experience. But we are on the verge of a time when people will gradually develop more and more of a relationship with what can be explored from the dark depths of the past and the future. We are heading towards a future where more and more people will have the urge to know, to recognize what the human soul and its destiny are all about. Thus, we are looking at an expansion of the ability to know, which enters into an alliance with the spiritual world.

All higher knowledge, says Goethe, is an extension of ordinary knowledge. Such extended, such higher knowledge is not abstract reflection on things. Such higher knowledge is a connecting of what is the essence of our soul with the spiritual and soul-like around us. Plato cites as proof of the immortality of the soul the possibility of the human soul's connection with the eternal, with that which is eternal outside of space and time, while things in space and time arise and pass away. If such higher knowledge is taken seriously, it contradicts everything that otherwise occurs as fatigue. Fatigue occurs in the knowledge that strives to explore the things around us. But when man allows the knowledge he has gained about things to take effect in his soul, when he has moments in life when what he has gained through his eyes becomes ideas and he can let these ideas work in him, when he can transform the lofty realm of sounds into ideas and let them continue to resound in his soul, then he learns to be awake in a state that can be compared to the state of sleep. Knowledge is given to us in the same measure as the consciousness of our ordinary ego begins to fade. The arbitrariness of this ordinary ego consciousness shatters, and man experiences true knowledge by feeling that he must fit into the laws of the spiritual world with his true ego.

While man is limited to a small space in the outer world by his physical body, which he repeatedly tires through the work of the day, and he must always compensate for this wear and tear of the body through sleep, he feels when the soul is truly “with itself” that it can also draw forces from the spiritual world while awake. He gets the feeling that a source is opening up for the soul, through which healing potions flow to us from the spiritual world, so that he can become master of the body. He feels that we can consciously enter the spiritual world, as we unconsciously do every night while sleeping. He feels that we can then consciously enter the realm of eternity when our knowledge becomes life. Then it will become something completely new, something that it cannot be for the ordinary consciousness of today's man. Plato said that in ancient times people developed the highest knowledge out of enthusiasm. Even if this ability of enthusiasm may have been lost to today's people, what has not been lost to them is that the knowledge of the world of ideas can become a life force in them, that they can feel how they connect with the root of existence and eternity by penetrating into things with their spiritual self through knowledge.

In this way we come to know knowledge as a living thing, as a healing process that extends into the physical body. It takes a long time before we get to know this knowledge, that is, this source of life in our soul. And we also get to know the connection with a very different factor of our culture. All our knowledge must be incorporated into what we can call being imbued with the living Christ. What is this living Christ in the human soul? It is nothing other than what we can experience when knowledge and truth come to life in us, as has just been explained, when we can feel our personality as if it were being filled by a second personality, by something that is truth itself. This is the living Christ, who is truth and life in the human soul. When one grasps the Christ in this way, He is not an abstract idea, but He is the living Entity Who at a certain point in time intervened in the evolution of humanity, an Entity Who fulfilled the Mystery of Golgotha and thereby entered into the life of human souls.

In the past of human evolution, the way people recognized each other was different than after the Mystery of Golgotha. In ancient times, people looked to the origin of man and they felt: Man is not valuable for the development of humanity as a sensual being; as spiritual beings we have descended from a spiritual world into this sensual world to live in a physical body, after we were previously in an ocean of divine spiritual life; through our soul we can in turn find our way back to this common human origin.

This is no longer appropriate for our time; something else corresponds to our time. In ancient times, the human soul sought the origin of humanity in order to become aware of what united people. Today we look at what the human being can become, at a common goal for all people. Looking towards this goal, people must be able to say to themselves: This concerns every human being; something must come alive in the innermost being of every human being – this is the living Christ. In the future, human souls will come together in him. The earth, the physical body – it will fragment in its material existence. But the human souls that have the living Christ within them will advance to other levels of existence. When the body of the entire planet has disintegrated, all mankind will be one again, not as it was before it descended to the earth, but one in which the Christ will live as a common soul-blood in this humanity.

All our knowledge must be dedicated to the great moment in the evolution of mankind when the human soul can turn to the God-man who accomplished the Mystery of Golgotha. When we look into the future of mankind, we look for the Christ-consciousness in every human being. This has a completely different sense and a completely different meaning than when the Buddhist teaching speaks of a Nirvana and means by that a detachment of the soul from all earthly things. No, the soul should not detach itself from the earthly. We look to the living Christ, who can grasp our souls with his life, and to how the soul can shape itself ever more richly through the life of Christ in it, through immersion in the source of wisdom and truth in ever new incarnations.

Thus we see that spiritual science does not stand in opposition to that without which our culture cannot be imagined - to Christianity. It does not want to fight Christianity, but to deepen it by pointing to the living Christ. We, as Westerners, look to the event of Golgotha as to the point in time that is also known from history, but which only acquires its deep value, its deep meaning for us through the fact that we gain the Christ-idea not only from the historical Christ, but deepen this Christ-idea through spiritual science. Only when we have imbued our knowledge with soul, light and spirit through the idea of Christ does this idea of Christ become for us that through which the true idea of immortality is revealed to us ever more surely. And when the Christ in us has become the light of knowledge and the life of knowledge, then we connect with the power through which we pass through many deaths and through many lives. Knowledge of Christ is the way for man to absorb within himself the forces that lead him to true immortality, that is, to victory over death.

This idea can only be gained from higher knowledge - not with ordinary knowledge, which only wants to deal with the material. Nowadays, only the external, the material, is pursued in man, and that is the most fleeting, the most transient. The words of Hamlet, for example, point this out, showing how dying and death must appear to him in his melancholy mind, in which the light of Christ does not yet shine. He speaks of the great Alexander, saying:

Alexander turned to dust;
Dust is earth;
From earth we make clay.

And he speaks of the great Caesar:

The great Caesar, dead and turned to clay,
Might stop a hole as well as the rough north;
Oh that the earth,
Before the wind and weather, might stick a wall.

But Hamlet is only talking about where the earth that became Caesar's body may have gone. He pursues the fleeting, transient material instead of reflecting on where the great, richly developed souls of the great Alexander and the great Caesar have gone. You don't see what is important in man if you only look at the transitory, at the material, and think about what might have become of it. You should look beyond what goes through death and birth to recognize what true immortality is.

In recent centuries, when knowledge of the material world has made such great strides, we have become more and more accustomed to regarding matter, that which forces the spirit into its fetters, as the essential. But matter will perish, disintegrate; the earthly body, consisting of matter, will disintegrate. The spiritual researcher, for example, views today's radium research in such a way that he knows: here is the beginning of the disintegration of the atoms that form the earthly body. The material of the earth will perish, but the eternal, even of the earthly body, will merge into the eternal essence of things. Today's striving for knowledge pursues the material, forcing the soul into its spell. One believes that one can speak of eternity, of the indestructibility of matter. In the face of words such as those spoken by Hamlet, it must be said, based on the realization of the true nature of the human being and at the same time on the realization of the true nature of materiality: Not only the great Alexander, the great Caesar, no, all human souls are parts of eternity; they take on a physicality from the materials of the earth in ever new lives, they go through ever new lives, which are only steps towards immortality. This applies to every human being:

The humblest man on earth
is a son of eternity.
And in each new life he will
conquer the old death.

Dear attendees! Since I have often been allowed to speak here about spiritual science and its results, may I be allowed to speak this evening about a special chapter that undoubtedly lies infinitely close to many souls: the Christ-question - not only because circles in our time there is an ever-increasing need to approach this question, but also because spiritual science in particular has something to say about this question, about how the Christ-question has to be integrated into our culture. Spiritual science does not want to be a germ of a new religion, but to show the way how to penetrate into areas that are not accessible to the ordinary senses, to modern science. It will not be possible to talk about what we want to deal with without briefly pointing out the many changes that have taken place in human hearts with regard to this question. For this, a brief review is necessary.

If we simply visualize Christianity's emergence into the world, we can initially say that at the beginning of our era something happened that gave the whole development of humanity a new impetus, a turn upwards. Even the non-believer will have to admit, for historical reasons alone, that the impulse that came through Christianity was a powerful one. At the time when the Christ Impulse entered the world, the human soul was in a very different condition than it is today, and a change in this condition will have to occur in the future simply because new powers of knowledge will awaken in the human soul. One thing is of historical significance: The most enlightened minds of the Occident, equipped with the deepest knowledge, had to recognize - under the highest tension of the powers of knowledge, through the greatest that they could muster in mental acuity - that something powerful had entered into the life of humanity through the Christ impulse. Let us first consider the view of the Gnostics, who are called “religious geniuses” by the most highly qualified and outstanding scholars of the present day. We do not want to talk about the cognitive value of Gnosticism, but we want to ask: What did the Gnostics think about Christ? We want to try to characterize the Gnostic attitude towards Christ. Gnosticism is a theory of evolution that must seem fantastic to people today. When we talk about evolution today, we ask: How did the human body develop through the various stages? - The Gnostic, on the other hand, said: “If you think impartially, you are led not to a material but to a spiritual origin; if you focus on the point where man came down from the spiritual into matter, you find that something was left behind in the purely spiritual heights in order to later penetrate into the development of mankind. Man could only progress by becoming more and more entangled in matter. If he had not done so, he would never have attained freedom. He had to become estranged from the spiritual in order to find his possibility of freedom in matter. Then, at the point in time when man was most deeply entangled in matter, that which had been held back earlier in the spiritual world at the origin of man had to pour into earthly development in order to prevent man from completely sinking into matter. That which flowed down from the spiritual worlds has been connected with the earth ever since, and Christ lives on with the development of mankind.

If we ask, with the means of spiritual science, how the Gnostics arrived at such ideas, we see on careful examination that these ideas, which the Gnostics brought forth from the deepest spiritual powers, come from an epoch when there was still direct vision, because in previous times the human soul was still attuned quite differently. From this original knowledge, ideas such as the Gnostic ones developed. Gnosticism seems like an heirloom of ancient knowledge. Here we encounter a lofty concept of Christ, which even those who consider Gnosticism fantastic must acknowledge: the Gnostic idea is bold and grandiose. We can quickly pass over the first Church Fathers who worked to establish the [Christian] dogmas. What the Fathers dared to do in those days, men later completely abandoned. In the middle of the Middle Ages, this view was completely abandoned. It was said: Human knowledge is not sufficient to reveal the heights to which Christ's entry into the earthly sphere could reach. Faith was substituted for real knowledge. Thus we see how the conception of Christ changes over the centuries, just as the character of the times changes with culture.

In the sixteenth century, we enter the age of great advances in the natural sciences. A [new] knowledge had to arise for this - a [new] kind of knowledge, which was primarily concerned with recognizing the material world and its laws. This knowledge emerged as an important developmental factor that transformed all commercial and industrial life. Medieval humanity still fully surrendered to faith; the Middle Ages believed what the Gnostics once recognized. The external world, which is our physical environment, shaped the new era. Thus, the whole concept of Christ was transformed: While the Gnostics could speak of a divine being that had only taken up residence in a human being, in more recent times it became increasingly impossible to imagine God incarnate. It would be interesting to show how, in the individual phases, the earlier conception increasingly recedes in favor of a [more outwardly] tangible Christ. Due to their inner state of mind, people were forced to refrain from seeing God incarnate and instead to see in him more and more the human being, albeit one of the most outstanding kind. In a human soul, in the man of Nazareth, one seeks today the starting point of Christianity, instead of seeing in this man only the gate through which the Christ entered [into the earthly sphere].

Enlightened minds, far removed from all theology, have wrestled with the question: How can a modern person relate to the Christ event? It is interesting, though, that the three personalities, who were all born in the same year just over a hundred years ago, endeavored to come to terms with this Christ event. Otto Ludwig wrestled with the material in order to shape it into a drama; Friedrich Hebbel noted the plan for a Christ drama. What they both wrote down shows that they could not cope with the problem, it was too big for them. We also know that Richard Wagner worked on this task and could not finish it.

As for this materialistic view of the mere human being Jesus, it must be said that it has not remained unfruitful; Jesus theology has also produced beautiful blossoms. Rittelmeyer's little booklet “Jesus” is just one example: it is something that can deeply touch the heart and soul. Modern theology has produced much of the same kind. Peter Rosegger, a justly popular poet of the present day, constructed a Jesus for himself. If you imagine Rosegger himself, highly idealized with all his beautiful, sympathetic qualities, you have his idea of Jesus of Nazareth.

Despite all the tremendous achievements of theology in recent times, a remarkable discovery has been made: that if you look at the Gospels with an open mind, Christ Jesus cannot have been a human being at all. Benjamin Smith, for example, claimed that all interpretations of the Christ as the simple man of Nazareth are a slap in the face of any scientific approach, that it is not possible, that it is incompatible with all tradition, to want to see only a human being, even if it is the most ideal, in the Christ; so one sees that the Christ Jesus must be a god. This realization comes at a time when humanity no longer has any conception of what a god is. And so the conclusion is drawn: since there can only be human beings on earth, but the Christ must be a god, he cannot have existed on earth at all. Under such circumstances, from such premises, there has been accomplished what for years has caused so much sensation: the denial of the personality of Jesus of Nazareth.

In brief, this is the course of the conception of Christ through the centuries. How does spiritual science relate to the Christ event? How can it relate to the most important problem of human development? Spiritual science starts from the premise that the human being not only has knowledge based on observation of the external world, but that he can also ascend to higher knowledge by developing dormant powers.

Just as the chemist, by separating hydrogen and oxygen, makes something completely new out of water, producing a substance with very different properties, so too can something completely new arise in the human being through the use of appropriate methods. Just as we cannot see what is in the water, we cannot see what powers a person has within them. Through a kind of spiritual chemistry, using exercises that are described in more detail in my books, something new can be developed in a person; the soul can work beyond the body and become aware of itself in the spiritual world. This is still quite foreign to many people and will only gradually become more common. Today, at the beginning of an epoch in which this knowledge will gradually become common property, it is possible to recognize the spiritual world, [as was once the case with the] Copernican world view, which was also laughed at at first, but which nevertheless became established. Today they no longer burn heretics who speak of a body-free perception of the soul, but they ridicule them and make them look foolish.

If we approach gnosis from this point of view, something emerges that is not just a further development and revival of gnosis: namely, that the human soul carries over what has been achieved in earlier epochs into later ones. If we embrace the doctrine of repeated earthly lives, we arrive at a more precise characterization of the earthly epochs themselves. Historical progress must be observed by spiritual scientific means. Then it becomes clear that just as man comes to hunger and thirst [in a natural way], so in ancient times he came to recognize the inner secrets of existence in images and visions from his own organization. Then the human soul lost this ability; man had to develop the ability to create concepts himself. This ability only arose later - on the basis of ideas (of a pictorial-visionary kind). Only out of shortsightedness can one deny that conceptual knowledge also had to develop first.

The epoch in which the human soul underwent this transformation is the time when the Christ entered into evolution; as a result, the human soul has become something other than it was before the Christ event. In ancient times, man received through images that which was hidden behind sensual existence. That is the characteristic of the old world view, that man attained knowledge in the form of images of how he was connected to the cosmos and the gods. This is still the view of ancient Hebrew times, in which a connection existed between the spiritual and the sensual world through the prophets and seers, as it were. But this connection was felt to be growing weaker and weaker the closer it came to the moment of the Mystery of Golgotha. If a special impulse had not come into the development of the earth at that time, the human soul would have felt more and more isolated, because man was left to his own resources, but at the same time man became isolated from that moment on. It is no exaggeration to say that we are heading towards the age of individualism. But with that, the possibility arose of finding something new that souls in the pre-Christian era could not yet find: the Christ presence. Since the emergence of Christianity, what was previously found in nature can be found in the spirit. Before the Christ event, man could no longer find the connection with the divine powers that he had in ancient times. The development of Christianity so far is only a preparation for the Christianity of the future; people will see that after a relatively short time the world situation will change completely.

There may be many who are satisfied with what is given by Bible and tradition; that is a selfish point of view. In rapid succession, souls will develop in such a way that they will no longer be able to approach the Christ in the old way. Man will stand more and more alone with [conventional] concepts and ideas. Man once felt as a spirit among spirits; the modern man can only feel as a body among bodies. But the souls that long to come to the inexplicable in themselves will ask themselves: How am I, how is my self connected to a spiritual world? If we look at these processes with understanding and soulfulness, a comparison suggests itself: When certain animals prepare for something special, they tend to go hungry. As a result, such processes take place within them that the forces of the organism that are released as a result flow in a different direction. And when we look at people, we see that they have acquired more and more knowledge about matter and its laws, but spiritually they have starved in terms of soul knowledge. At the same time, the direct perception of Christ was being prepared in the spiritual world. Over the centuries, the human soul has deprived itself of spiritual nourishment and thus, through starvation, developed those organs that will unfold in the future.

People are approaching a goal of development where they will find the Christ as they find a law of nature [today]. But they will not find him as a dead law, but as a living entity, and they will know: Since the Mystery of Golgotha, an entity has entered into the development of the earth that was not there before. Laws cannot comfort, they cannot help with pain, but the connection with the Christ can help, and this will be felt in the soul as strength. It will not be possible to find the Christ by dogmatic means; it will be possible to find the Christ in a completely different way; in a completely different way one will find the truth of the word: “I am with you until the end of the earthly days.” A time will come when it will not be considered impossible from a scientific point of view that since the Mystery of Golgotha the Christ Spirit has been living in the earth, in the earthly development of mankind. Until now, only those who know something about the Christ are recognized as Christians. In the future, people will know that the Christ did not come to Earth only to bring a teaching, but to accomplish an act. Then one can also find the Christ-germ in the Hindu, the Japanese, the Mohammedan.

I am fully aware that I am not speaking from a medieval point of view, but from one that fully recognizes everything that science has achieved. But just as one recognizes the laws of electricity, radioactivity and so on, one will recognize that the mystery of Golgotha is a superphysical matter. In order for people to be able to find the Christ, he had to undergo birth, baptism, and death, and by conquering death, he has been poured out into the evolution of the earth.

We have gone through a preparatory time in which Christianity was [merely] taken as a teaching. A time will come when the Christ can be found by those souls who seek him because he is on earth. He always worked through his existence, and people will find his existence as something that can reunite humanity, because he will be the one [for all people], for every [individual] person, as people are becoming more and more individualized. This is the Christ idea [in a time when] man is heading for a future that is even more de-deitified than monism would have dreamed of.

Just as we relate to external substances through physical nourishment, so we relate to the Christ spirit through our soul life. A great spirit, a distinguished thinker of the present day, Eliot, has said that the old religion is a sad, painful one; in the future, a religion will arise that gives joy. There is no denying that pain and death are in the world, and because they affect man, he needs a strong impulse to overcome pain and death - [the Christ impulse]. Modern philosophy suffers from the fact that it cannot find a balance for pain and death. And humanity will advance from the learned Christ, the Christ as a world teacher, to the seen Christ. Those involved in spiritual science will not be afraid of being called a monist; it is not the one who denies the spirit who is a monist, but the one who recognizes the spirit as the origin of being, who finds the monistic principle in the spirit.

Spiritually and psychically, the human being is immortal. In pre-Christian times, the soul was still known to be connected with the gods of nature. It is only in the twentieth century that we will become aware of the spiritual connection between the soul and the spiritual world, with Christ. Angelus Silesius is absolutely right when he says:

A thousand times may Christ be born in Bethlehem, but if he is not born in thee, thou art still lost for ever.

The mystical Christ [of whom Angelus Silesius speaks] has only become possible through the historical Christ. [Just as Goethe says:] If the eye were not sun-like, how could we behold the light? [so one can say:] If Christ were not there for our souls, how could we rise up to him, how could the sense of Christ arise in our soul? The historical Christ Jesus is as real as the sun is in the universe. Without disregarding the [biblical] traditions, one cannot overlook the fact that Christ is a God. According to the evolutionary theory of the Darwinists, man is merely a link in the chain of development of living beings. But the Darwinists have a great opponent, the great Darwin himself, who writes that it is unmistakable that a God infused life into the beings at the beginning. He writes:

I believe that all organic beings that have ever lived on this earth have descended from a primal form into which the Creator breathed life.

This is something that the modern Darwinian would like to deny – in fact, this sentence is missing from the German translations. But the person who claimed this is none other than Charles Darwin.

If you look at these things, you can come to a surprising insight: the monistic natural philosophy actually had to deny the spirit, because [according to it] everything depends on natural laws. But then the difference between good and evil basically ceases. That is what one should actually draw as a consequence, but one does not do it. However, however one may think about the great symbol [of the scene of temptation] in Genesis, where Lucifer speaks to man: “You will be like God and know what is good and evil,” something meaningful is said with these words. It is not important to call our time a time of transition; it is only significant to recognize what makes it a time of transition. If humanity did not come to the realization that the Christ is the most significant force in the evolution of the earth, it would come to believe that the experiences of the human soul are only the most highly intensified animal soul forces. If one were consistent, the soul's ability to distinguish between good and evil would cease. Yet another tempter speaks in our time, but one does not have the courage to hear him murmur: You will be made of animals, and no longer distinguish between good and evil.

But there is such a thing as the Christ impulse, which lives to show us that we are of the spiritual world and are in contact with spiritual beings, that our moral world order is intimately connected with the Christ in that with him the principle of love has come into the earth. And his voice says: You will not be of the animals, you will be with me, with me you will distinguish good from evil.

The sonship will be felt effectively. That the son comes from the father is scientifically based. But the father does not necessarily have the son. The moral world is related to the natural world order like the son to the father. Just as the father does not have to have the son, so [from the rule of natural laws, morality does not follow by itself]. The concept of the son makes clear in a wonderful way [the transformation of the natural into a moral world order through Christ].

Spiritual science feels in harmony with what the best, leading spirits of humanity have fulfilled. Schiller, whom people no longer love as much as they used to, but whom they will love again, once said:

Now the dull barrier of animality fell,
And humanity stepped onto the cloudless brow!
And the exalted stranger, the thought
Leaped from the marveling brain.

Thought will find the way to the one who is meant here: to the Christ of the twentieth century.

The Apostle Paul and Theosophy. Dr. Rudolf Steiner, Berlin, spoke on this topic at the Logenhaus on Sögestraße. The speaker's main points were as follows: The source of what we see is to be sought in the spiritual world, and to explore this is the task of theosophy. One of the greatest minds of all times is closely related to our modern understanding of theosophy: the Apostle Paul. He taught the knowledge of God (theosophy) and, through his correct recognition of the Christ Being, he has the merit of becoming the founder of the Christian worldview. The Apostle Paul's conviction is based on a supersensible experience. He looks beyond the world of the senses and recognizes its origins in the spiritual world. Only a worldview that is based on the supersensible can understand him. The theosophical worldview is such a worldview. It recognizes that there are forces in man that can develop in such a way as to enable him to penetrate into the world of the spirit. This was made possible for the Apostle Paul by grace. For modern-day theosophy, the human being is not just an external entity. In all living beings in which the “I” reveals itself, it is the same at its core, but very different in its degree of development. The highest “I” is embodied in Jesus, which was there before all people, and is therefore unique. As an all-encompassing divine being, it triumphs over death. These are also the thoughts of the Apostle Paul. Christ is the fulfillment of the law. He brings about through the impulse of his life what the outward law aims at: the harmony of men among themselves. To the Jews he was an abomination because they were bound by the law; to the Greeks he was foolishness because they believed that they could only attain knowledge of their divine essence through initiation into the mysteries. Paul, a representative of the true Christian philosophy of life, teaches that through union with Christ we are led back to the Father, to the Spirit from which we proceeded. The opponents of this philosophy of life should remember that they have learned the feelings with which they seek to combat Christianity from Christianity.

Report in the “Bremer Nachrichten” of November 9, 1909

Theosophical Society (Adyar), Bremen branch. Last Saturday, the Secretary General of the Theosophical Society, Dr. Rudolf Steiner of Berlin, spoke before a large audience at the Gewerbehaus on the topic of the higher significance of the Gospel of John. The speaker, as we were told, [among other things] stated the following: The two factors on which today's man relies when he searches for the sources of his religious concepts are, firstly, the abstract ideal that he creates in his heart of the Christ, and secondly, the external documents, the Gospels, to which he turns when he seeks consolation. The first leaders of Christianity had a different attitude to the Gospels than today's. They were not put off by the contradictions, but were glad that their view was opened in four directions. When one knows that each Evangelist wanted to portray a special aspect of the divine Being, then the apparent riddle of the Gospel of John, as the wisdom aspect, is solved. Today there is a new tool for the exploration of the tremendous Christ problem: spiritual research. Just as external science uses instruments to examine physical matter, so spiritual research uses its instrument, the human soul, to enter the spiritual world. With this developed instrument, the past can be fathomed without external records. Not everyone needs to become a spiritual researcher, just as not everyone needs to become a natural scientist. The unbiased person will use his sound reason to test the claims of the spiritual researcher. Critical research frays the fibers, spiritual research brings full light. There is not a single superfluous word in any of the four Gospels. Anyone who approaches them with a developed sense of truth has the impression that no more significant document could ever be created. This is especially true of the Gospel of John, which seems mysterious to people because of its beginning. The Logos (the Word) was called that which permeates the whole world, namely the ideas of wisdom. Man can form a certain idea of the wisdom-filled cause if he seeks to regard his own ego as a drop and the divine being as an ocean in which all ideas are contained. “In the beginning was the Logos” (John 1:1) can be translated as: “Before there was a visible world, there was the spiritual one, in which all the egos of humanity are rooted.” It will take a long development before man can recognize the highest human degree of development of the I, which was embodied in Christ Jesus. Not what was in him as a power was also in John; but the ability to recognize him completely was, for John means “seer”, or more correctly “feeler of God within”; because the forerunner, the Baptist, was such a one, the Evangelist could refer to him as a witness. The evolution of humanity is based on the law of love, which before Christ was linked to blood relationship. With the appearance of Christ Jesus, humanity was faced with the task of striving for the great ideal of universal brotherhood. Understanding from soul to soul, the cooperation of separated egos outside of blood relationship has only become possible with the appearance of Jesus. At the marriage at Cana, the mother was still a partner in the blood bond, which the Samaritan woman, as a stranger by blood, proves that the power of the ego penetrated into the alien soul. The resurrection of Lazarus proves the flowing over of his soul into the other being. The Mystery of Golgotha becomes understandable when one considers the development of humanity. The great Buddha, at the sight of death, gains the conviction that life is suffering; 600 years later, at the sight of the Christian symbol of Golgotha, the disciples gain the conviction of the victory of life over death. The spiritual world is not closed as long as man strives to let the spirit of Christ Jesus flow into him. Every sunrise can be a comparison for the awakening of the developed sense of truth. A forerunner for the understanding of Christ is the Gospel of John. — The speaker was rewarded with warm applause.

Report in the “Bremer Nachrichten” of February 8, 1906

The day before yesterday, Dr. Steiner, General Secretary of the Theosophical Society, spoke to a large audience at the Trade House about brotherhood and the struggle for existence. He said the following: Two ideas arise in the mind of anyone who observes human social life according to its dominant forces. The one expresses the great ideal of humanitarians: brotherhood; the other that in which so many see a law of harsh reality: the struggle for existence. With a heavy heart, many say to themselves: Brotherhood is a beautiful ideal, but like so many other beautiful goals, only the slightest part of it can be realized in practice. Many human communities existed and still exist today in order to implement the ideal mentioned above in life. For thirty years, the so-called theosophical movement has joined them, and it has spread to most educated countries. It has made it its first principle to found the core of a general brotherhood of man. It regards, among other things, the spiritual deepening of life, feeling and thinking as one of its most important means. For it, brotherhood is not just a demand that applies to details of life; for it, brotherhood is what must necessarily arise when people recognize their true spiritual essence. It does not just speak of what is there for the senses and the mind, but seeks to clarify that spiritual forces and abilities lie dormant in people, through which they are citizens of an invisible world. It provides proof that the struggle for existence is only a necessary property of the lower physical world, but that unity and harmony set in immediately when man devotes himself to his higher powers. It is certainly not ignoble minds that believe that struggle is a mediator of human progress, that the forces of creation and action are steeled precisely by competition. A truly spiritual insight will never fall into the one-sidedness of regarding this competition only as a product of injustice and inhumanity. On the contrary, it proves that competition is a necessary consequence of the laws in the physical world. But it also proves that those who see struggle as the only means of civilization fail to take into account the existence of a higher world. Humanity owes all of modern civilization to purely materialistic thinking, which has harnessed the forces of nature to the service of progress in such a tremendous way. Present-day industrialism and commerce have emerged from this thinking. They stem from the knowledge of the physical world. And the harmony of humanity, which must necessarily follow in the wake of this external culture, can also come from nothing but knowledge. Knowledge of the physical separates man from man, but knowledge of the spiritual unites man with man, for it shows how the individual is nothing without all of humanity. - The speaker was rewarded with enthusiastic applause.

Translated by Catherine E. Creeger

Today in this branch meeting we will begin with several of life’s crucial issues that touch each of us daily. After that, we will rise to higher spiritual viewpoints for a while. I would like to start with two human qualities, two human errors or failings that are experienced as negative, as decreasing a person’s worth. We will speak about what we call envy and lying.

If you look around in life, you will easily notice that as a rule, there is a very natural antipathy to these two human qualities. Also, when we look up to other people as leaders among human beings, we see that they value the absence of these two failings. Goethe, for instance, was very concerned with self-knowledge and thinking about his own mistakes, and mentioned that while he had certain faults and certain assets, what seemed most important to him was that he could not count envy among his fadings. And the famous Benvenuto Cellini said that he was glad he didn’t need to accuse himself of lying. So we see that these great personalities sensed the importance of struggling against these two human qualities. And even the simplest, most unsophisticated individuals agree with leaders of humanity in their negative assessment of these failings.

If we ask ourselves why these two qualities are so instinctively condemned, we realize that almost nothing else is less compatible with one of the most important earthly qualities; envy and lying are incompatible with what we call empathy for other people. When we envy someone, we tend not to yield to the particular virtue devoted to the deepest, inmost kernel of that person’s being, to the divine in the other person. Actually, to empathize with someone is of value only when you are also able to appreciate the other person’s essence, his or her spiritual being. However, as a basis for empathy, appreciation for others includes recognition of their assets and the ability to take pleasure in their successes and level of development. All of this precludes envy. Envy shows itself to be a quality that is very closely related to an individual’s greatest egotism.

Something similar can be said about lying. If we tell an untruth, we break the law that applies to the truth—to create a bond that includes all individuals. What is true is the truth for all human beings. More than anything else, truth allows us to practice the development of a consciousness that includes all human beings. If we tell an untruth, we commit a heinous act against the bond meant to connect one human heart with another.

This is how things look when we consider them from the viewpoint of human beings. When we consider them from the viewpoint of spiritual science, we know that the effects of our earlier incarnations are being worked out in this lifetime, and that we are subject to many different influences. There are two great influences in particular that have to be worked through again and again—specifically, what we call the luciferic and the ahrimanic influences. We will not attempt to cover these from the cosmological point of view today, but will restrict ourselves to the life of human individuals. We will imagine that we have passed through many incarnations and that the power of Lucifer was already working on our astral body when we were going through our very first incarnation. Since then, this luciferic power has always been the power that tempts our astral body. Forces are present that proceed from Lucifer and exert an influence on our astral body. Basically, Lucifer’s efforts are directed toward gaining influence over the human astral body on Earth. We can find him in everything that pulls the astral body down, in all the qualities that live in our astral body as egotistical passions, desires, urges, and wishes. Thus, it must be clear that envy is one of Lucifer’s worst effects on us. Everything living in our soul that can be counted as envy falls into his territory, and each time we have an attack of envy, Lucifer takes hold of the urges in our astral body.

Ahriman, on the other hand, influences our ether body. Everything to do with disturbances of judgment derives from him—both the unintentional disturbance of arriving at a false judgment, and the deliberate one of lying. When we succumb to lying, Ahriman is at work in our ether body.

It is interesting that we feel these influences strongly enough to experience such great antipathy when they appear, and that people will do everything to combat these two qualities of envy and lying. You will not easily find people who consciously admit that they want to be envious. To be sure, “I envy you” has crept into our language as an idiom, but what it means is not so very bad; we do not mean actual envy when we say it. In any case, as soon as we notice envy or lying in ourselves, we do everything we can to combat it, and in doing so we take up the struggle against Lucifer and Ahriman in this particular area.

Often, however, something then happens that we should notice when applying ourselves to spiritual science. We can combat individual attacks of envy and lying, but when these qualities are stuck in our soul—when we have acquired them in earlier incarnations and are now combating them—they then appear as different qualities. When we try to combat a tendency to envy stemming from earlier incarnations, this envy puts on a mask. Lucifer says, “This person has noticed feelings of envy and is fighting me; I’ll turn this person over to my brother Ahriman.” And then a different influence takes effect, one that is a consequence of combating envy. Qualities that we are struggling against appear in disguise. Often the envy that we are fighting takes the form of an urge to seek out other people’s mistakes and to make them aware of them with a great deal of reproach. We encounter many people in our life who always discover the mistakes and negative aspects of others, as if with a certain clairvoyant strength. If we search for the basis of this phenomenon, we find that envy has been transformed into a compulsion to reproach, which the people in question take to be a very desirable quality. It is a good thing, so they say, to make people aware of the presence of their bad qualities. However, there is nothing more behind this compulsion to reproach than transformed envy in disguise. We should learn to recognize whether such qualities are the original ones or whether they are transformations of something else. In the process, we must consider whether such individuals were envious as children—perhaps we drove the envy out of them, and they have now become compulsive reproachers.

Lying also often transforms itself in our lifetime and shows itself in disguise. Lying can make us feel ashamed, but it’s not easily uprooted, and very often it metamorphoses into a certain superficiality with regard to the truth. It’s important for us to know these things so we can observe what we encounter in another person in life. People like this are satisfied with answers that make us ask, “How can they possibly be satisfied with an answer Eke that?” It is easy for them to say, “Yes, yes, of course, that’s the way it is.” Very often, this is the end product of the transformation of a personal tendency toward lying. We need to test the law of karma, particularly with regard to such qualities. People don’t pay attention to them, for among all the various beings at work on different planes, human beings are the most forgetful.

For instance, if we are acquainted with a person and remain close over the years, we can observe how some things in this person change. If we are still close after thirty years, we might find noteworthy connections within that person’s life when we look back over a lifetime together, while the person in question knows nothing about it, and has forgotten it all. We really should observe such things in life, however. Important connections become evident. For example, a certain person is envious as a child. Later, the envy is no longer evident, but at a later age it appears transformed as a lack of independence in the person in question, of wanting to be dependent on others. It appears in the form of ideas of being unable to stand on one’s own two feet, of always needing other people around to advise and help. A specific moral weaknesS appears as a consequence of the transformation of envy. When someone has this moral weakness, we will always find that this is the karmic consequence of transformed envy.

When transformed, lying creates a shyness later in life. In later life, someone who tended to lie as a child doesn’t dare to look people in the eye. Out in the country, people have an instinctive elemental knowledge of this, although it doesn’t function on the level of concepts. They say that you shouldn’t trust a person who can’t look you in the eye. Shyness and reserve that stem not from modesty but from fear of meeting other people are the karmic consequences of lying during the same incarnation.

What appears in this way as a moral weakness within an incarnation has an organizing influence on the next incarnation. The soul’s weakness resulting from envy cannot significantly destroy the body during this present incarnation, when the body has already been built up. But when we die and return in a new incarnation, the effect of these forces is such that they become organic weaknesses in building up the new body. We find that people who have possessed transformed envy in a previous incarnation form a weak body. We say without prejudice that a person is weak simply because people need to know what is weak and what is strong. When a person is easily susceptible to different influences and puts up no resistance, then we know that the person s body is weak, and that this weakness is the result of envy that was transformed earlier.

Now we must realize, however, that when a child is born into a particular environment as a weak child, we should not imagine that only this inner karma is active, but also that people are brought together in their surroundings for a reason, and not by chance. This aspect of karma—our adaptation to our environment—is extremely easy to see. A flower such as an edelweiss, for example, can only thrive in the environment to which it is adapted, and a human being also thrives only in the environment to which he or she is adapted. The simplest possible logic necessarily tells us this, for we can only understand life when we take this into account. Each being conforms to its environment; nothing is by chance. Therefore, we are born into the group of people we have envied or reproached; we find ourselves with our weak body among the people we have envied for their accomplishments in a previous incarnation, or something like this. It is infinitely important to know these things, because we understand fife only when we include them in our considerations. When a child with a weak body is born into our surroundings, we should ask ourselves how we are meant to relate to this. The right way to relate to it must be the most morally meaningful way—that is, to forgive. This will lead most surely to the goal in this case, and is also the best education for such a person. It has an incredibly educational effect when we can lovingly forgive a weak child who is born into our surroundings. The person through whom forgiveness occurs in a truly forceful way will see that the child becomes stronger and stronger because of it. Loving forgiveness must even affect thinking, because that makes it possible for the child to gather the forces needed to turn old karma around and get it moving in the right direction. Through this the child will also become physically strong. A child such as this often demonstrates unpleasant qualities. The healing effect is strongest when we love the child in the depths of our heart, and we soon find out just how effective the healing is.

Something comparable applies when we look at the other quality: lying. Within a single incarnation, the person who lies becomes shy in later life. This is a soul quality. But in the next incarnation, this quality takes effect as the body’s architect. In this case, the child appears not merely weak, but unable to acquire a proper relationship to its surroundings—that is, the child is mentally handicapped. In this case, we must think that we are the people to whom this person often lied, and we must repay the bad that happened to us with the best we can offer. We must try to communicate a great deal of the truths of spiritual life to such a person, and then we see how that person begins to blossom. We must always keep in mind that this individual lied to us a lot in earlier incarnations, and do everything possible to bring about a right relationship between this child and his or her surroundings.

When we consider these things, we find that as human beings we are always called upon to help other people come to terms with their karma in the right way. People understand nothing of karma if they think others must be left to their own karma. If we were to meet individuals who had lied to us, and we were to believe these people must come to grips with their karma by themselves, this would show that we do not have a correct understanding of karma. The right idea would be to provide help wherever possible. When it is said that we should leave people to their karma, this could only apply in the esoteric realm, but never in actual life.

Let’s imagine that we would make an effort to help other people according to their individual karma. Take a person with a shy nature. We concern ourselves lovingly with that person, creating a connection between that person and ourselves. We will then see in later life that something comes back to us from this person. We must leave this to karma, however; we are not allowed to hope for it. We must regard it as our obligation to help the other person. At this point we come upon a subtle law: Everything we do to help another person bear and overcome karma not only helps that person, it also does something for us. As a rule, however, what we do for the sake of our own quick progress will not help much. The only thing that can bear fruit for an individual is what he or she does for others. We cannot send good things in our own direction. The best effects come from helping another person overcome his or her karma, since what we do for others is a gain for humanity. We can do nothing for ourselves; that must be done in turn by others. That’s why we must understand empathy for other people in the highest sense of the word. If we develop this empathy in the highest sense, then we also feel an obligation to empathize with another person with regard to envy and lying. In this way we develop a feeling of solidarity that extends to all human souls.

In fact, humanity possesses the potential for each human being to always feel a connection to humanity as a whole, and this feeling, in all its different manifestations in life, should also be present and active in the individual’s struggles against Lucifer and Ahriman. By helping people whose physical bodies have become weak through the influence of envy that has been overcome, by coming to understand how we should behave toward these people, it can become clear to us that the world is filled with the impulses of Lucifer and Ahriman. How they can be overcome in the course of the Earth’s evolution also becomes clear. Anyone who traces such connections in his or her feelings necessarily comes to an ever deepening feeling for all of humanity. The possibility exists, so to speak, for each of us to feel what connects him or her to all human beings. However, this feeling has changed greatly in the course of human evolution. If we go back three or four thousand years, the feeling of what human beings have in common was very pronounced in everyone.

If we go back still further—back through the post-Atlantean cultures, back to old Atlantis, and still further back—we come to an incarnation in which we came down into a physical body for the first time. Before that, we existed in a spiritual state—or so it was still said three or four thousand years ago. At that time, wisdom-filled feelings such as this were to be found in all people. The human soul asked, “What does it mean to be a human being?” And it answered itself, “Before I came down into my body for the first time, I existed in a sea of divine-spiritual interweaving life. I was within it, and all other human souls were within it. That was our common point of origin.” This basic feeling in the souls of human beings made it possible for them to feel kinship, to feel that they had something in common with all human beings, because they felt that all human souls had a common origin. And if we recall how all the ancient mystery schools worked on people to make them good people who would be receptive to the most profound, intimate, and moving feelings, we can see that this was always done by pointing to their common origin, to the fact that all human beings proceed from a common divine source. It was easy to sound this note in their souls then, but it became more and more difficult. For example, if this note had been sounded then in the number of people now sitting here, it would have made an overwhelming impression.

But human feeling for our common origin became ever colder. This was necessary because humanity had to pass through a certain point in evolution. And if I describe that point, we will also have to look toward our human future, toward the goal of Earth’s evolution.

Just as our origin is common to all of us, just as all human souls sprang from a common source, so too all human souls will come together in a common goal. And how can we reach this goal so that we can continue to evolve once Earth has achieved its own goal and the material sphere beneath us is dissipating and falling away? How can we have a common understanding of this goal so that we proceed into our future together? The awareness of what we have in common will need to extend into the deepest sinews of our soul. This is only possible if we develop a feeling for our future, similar to the feeling people in ancient times had for their human origin, a feeling that is growing ever colder among humanity. Now, the feeling and the certainty of a common goal held by all human beings must come to life more and more in our souls. Regardless of our individual degree of development or where we stand in life, the very fact that we are human beings must make possible a soul experience that allows us to say we are all striving for a single goal. In looking toward this goal, we must also be able to realize that this is something that can concern each and every human being.

In our most profound inner depths, we must be able to find something in which we can all come together in a single point. Esoteric teaching calls this “something” the Christ. People thousands of years ago felt, sensed, and knew that our souls are all born out of a common divine source. Similarly, we will increasingly learn that just as we can be united and come together in something we think in common, something that can live in all human heads, there is also something that can live as a common element in all human hearts, something that can flow through all human hearts like the blood of life. If this pervades us more and more warmly in incarnations to come, these incarnations will then run their course in such a way that Earth, having achieved its goal, will be able to proceed to the next planetary stage—the Jupiter state—and human souls will come together as one in the common element of the Christ.

For this to be a possibility, the Mystery of Golgotha had to take place. In Jesus, the Christ became human so that this common stream of warmth could flow from human heart to human heart. The feeling for our common human goal has its origin in the cross on Golgotha, which connects past and future. This is the goal of future human evolution. It is not important whether we retain the name “Christ” for what we have in common. What is important is that all human beings learn to grasp that the feeling people originally had for their common origin is being transformed into a feeling for our common earthly future.

Earth’s evolution is divided into halves—one lasting until the time of the cross on Golgotha, and the other from that time until the end of Earth. We human beings have a great deal to do to grasp the Christ and his evolution. Once these things have been grasped, we as human beings will come together in a common goal for the Jupiter evolution. All the knowledge we have as individuals culminates in finding this principle of the Christ-like.

Today we tried to recognize how karma works from one incarnation to another to shape the body. Having done so, we understand how human beings can become more and more perfect as they go through incarnation after incarnation. We are still speaking of the Christ, though without using that name, because we are turning away from the personal element. When we are confronted with a child who lies to us, we ask ourselves how we can help this child transform his or her karma. We do not ask whether being lied to hurts us. We turn to the very center of the child’s being, and in doing so we help karma move on. In this way, deep human compassion will increasingly take effect in the world.

Thus, what we call spiritual science—if we also include in it a real grasp of life’s processes related to reincarnation and karma—prepares us to truly grasp the Christ impulse in the world. How people formulate this in words is not important. Those who really understand this evolutionary law cannot help but be Christians, whether they are Hindus or Muslims or belong to some other religious tradition. What’s important is that they take this impulse into their souls, the impulse for a common goal for humanity, as in ancient times the impulse to look toward our common human origin was alive in people.

Thus, spiritual science always leads to the Christ impulse. It cannot do otherwise. It would also be possible to summarize spiritual science as it appears today by saying, “Even if those who meet spiritual science want to know nothing of Christianity, in truth they are already being led to the Christ.” In reality, that is where they are being led, even if they resist this in words.

Today we have shown our souls something that has a direct connection to life. We have seen how we should act when a child lies or is envious. It must be clear to us that the thread of karma runs through all of the incarnations of a human soul, that its karma is spun according to its destiny. Having looked back to our origin in God, we look to God again when we look ahead to our human goal.

When we look back on the culture of the ancient rishis, we see that they pointed to the human origins, to the world in which human beings existed before descending into incarnation. This teaching persisted for hundreds and thousands of years. The great Buddha taught it when he spoke of how everything that created a connection to the world of our origin has been lost to people because they cling to embodiment. He challenged people to leave the world of embodiment so that their souls could once again live in the spiritual worlds of their origin. The prophets, in announcing the coming of the Christ, also pointed to a future in which human beings would once again discover their proper earthly goal. And then there was the Christ himself, and the act of the Mystery of Golgotha. Through this Mystery of Golgotha, the individual human being can now be led toward our Earth s divine-spiritual future.

Perhaps there is nothing quite as shattering as two similar statements of the Buddha and the Christ, which present to our souls the contrast between the old times and the new. As the Buddha stands among his pupils, he draws their attention to the body and says, “I look back from incarnation to incarnation and see how I have again and again entered a human body such as the one I now wear. Again and again, the temple of this body has been built up for me by the gods. Again and again the soul attempts to enter this bodily temple in new incarnations. Now, however, I know that I no longer need to return to a bodily temple. I know its beams are broken, its pillars collapsed. Through my knowledge, I have freed my soul from this body. The wish and desire to return to such a body has been killed.” This was a great and powerful result of the old time of looking back on our human origin. The Buddha, with his pupils and successors, strove to become free of the body. How powerfully different this is from the Christ standing before his intimate pupils and saying, “Tear down the temple of My body, and I will build it up again in three days.” These are the words of the Christ, taken at face value, regardless of how we interpret them. The Christ does not long to be free of the temple of the body. He wants to build it up again.

It is not as if the Christ himself would be there again in such a physical body in future incarnations. But what he teaches his pupils and all human beings is to return into this earthly temple again and again in order to make the Christ impulse greater and more intense in each successive incarnation, so that we human beings are able to take up more and more of earthly existence. In the end, we will be able to say that we spent these incarnations working to become more like the Christ. We become more like him by taking into this bodily temple what the Christ permitted to stream forth from his own being from the cross on Golgotha. We allow this to stream from human soul to human soul, for only through this can we understand each other now. This is what all human souls will have in common in our earthly future. And then the time will come when Earth as a planet will cease to exist, will fall into dust, and human beings in a spiritualized state will proceed to their next incarnation on a different planet.

The words of the great Buddha—“I feel how the columns of my bodily temple no longer bear weight, how its beams are breaking apart”—can stand before our souls as the endpoint of our common human origin. And when we turn to what the Christ says to his disciples—“I will build up the temple of this body in three days”—this can be for us like the beginning of the time that points to our earthly goal. We can expand upon this statement, saying: “In death, this temple falls apart, but we know that the best forces we have acquired in this incarnation are used for our next incarnation. We have received these forces by devoting our souls to the knowledge of Christ. In this way, we will always make progress from incarnation to incarnation.” When we human beings build up this bodily temple for the last time, we will have arrived at an understanding of our common earthly goal for the future.

It is the Mystery of Golgotha alone that can be the common impulse for humanity as a whole, for human and Earth evolution.

What spiritual science calls the mystery of death faces us in our times so significantly. Everything is in close or more distant interrelation with them. Above all, through spiritual science we receive not only the basic conviction, but the basic knowledge of the world in the physical body and of the world, into which we enter through the gate of death. However, this world is always alive also in the sensory life and surrounds us. It is only not recognizable for the human being engaged in the sensory life, because he does not have the necessary attention for it. If such drastic events flow through the time which demand so manifold sacrifices of the human beings as they surround us now, we must be woven with our whole souls in it. Hence, it is obvious to inform you about some matters by means of spiritual science.

We want to turn our glance to fields of life that show us how humankind has come to something fatefully illogical concerning its surroundings because of the materialistic way of thinking. We hear, for example, in the way usual today the individual nations accusing each another: I have not wanted the war; it is you who has incited it.—The question is legitimate and one can now already answer it—for the facts speak clearly—where the external causes are. But for the spiritual-scientific seer it is different. In this question he has to realise that the war is basically the last phase in the course of events, or at least a later phase of matters that were there already before. One commits a mistake in the judgment also with illness processes where one often still speaks of such, whereas these are already health processes, which must take place to recover. The external processes, which take place to paralyse the illness and to recover, have happened before and are not to be observed. The war also is an apparent illness process. It is an effort of humankind to come beyond certain processes which were there before. The illness lies already before in the really unhealthy relations between the peoples. If anyone investigates the external causes with reason, he ignores the internal ones. In the area where we are crowded together like in a fortress and are surrounded with a ring, it must seem reasonable to especially raise the question which the internal causes are, or of which kind the single cause is by which this encirclement was caused. One speaks of such an encirclement for the last years, for the last decades, but if you look at the great connections, it begins much sooner. It sounds peculiar, but one can give the year 860 A. D.—not 1860, but 860. For such a long time, the process is going on, which finds expression now in a way we can call the most dreadful war of humankind, since it inhabits the earth.

In the deeper interrelation of European history one finds the extremely strange fact that in Central Europe something of spiritual substance was crowded together. If anyone investigates this deeper interrelation, he sees that it was crowded together there for a particular purpose. It concerns not the external determinations of blood or race, but the fact that something like a spiritual substance permeates the world. Something like a snake-shaped ring contracts in Central Europe coming down from the distant north. Two currents of the east and west go to the south and meet forming a ring. From a centre, the Normannic tribes move in the 9th century down who are related by blood to so many things that later exist in Central Europe. But they push their way into the Romance element, which comes from Southern Europe, and flow together with it. In 860, they stand in front of Paris; there the Normans were overpowered by the Romance people. The western France came into being from that. More than the Angles and Saxons could bring to the British islands, the Normans brought back from France to England. In the east, the Normannic people moved down, they got from the north to the Volga and the Black Sea into the Slavic regions. Later the Tartar current coalesces. The Slavic element overpowers the Normans and gives them the Christian religion in its eastern form. They become Slavic as “Ros”—they are called in Finland that way—nothing has remained except the name Russia. This name is of Germanic origin. The name Rurik has the same origin.

About these relations one has rather doubtful views. In the west of Europe many people speak that the French are appointed to resurrect the old Celtic element in a kind of Renaissance. One has the idea that in Central Europe are mainly Teutons and that in the west the Celtic element predominates. However, it is vice versa, in the French population is much more Teutonic blood, in Central Europe is more Celtic blood, this is true. Thus maya stands against truth. Only the inhabitants of the west are completely overpowered by the Romance element. In the east the Norman and with them the Teutonic elements are overpowered by the foreign race element. Still today there a religion prevails that is foreign to the Russian folk-soul.¹ Thus the people in Central Europe are encircled as it were. The Romance element reaches to Constantinople, and on the other side the Slavic Normans reach to Constantinople as well. There we have the snake, the ring.

If we consider that what was crowded together there spiritually, we get the view that it has an especially important task. Yesterday, I have only indicated it, but, nevertheless, I have spoken of the fact that here a certain familiar contact of the folk-soul with the individual soul should take place and just thereby the nicest blossoms are produced with the best relatives. The ego should immediately be seized, not the single members of the soul like in the West, should be immediately living in the ego. From that arises—this would already have to be clear to the exoteric consideration—that in Central Europe basically complete hostility could never hold sway against idealism that always a certain tendency to the spiritual world was there to a high degree. When we began our spiritual movement, karma ordained that we had to act at first in association with the British movement. But externally everything was only a symptom of that what had to happen internally with a certain necessity. If we consider what the theosophical movement represents, from which we had to separate, you will notice that there the cultural life has split in two parts. The external life takes a purely materialistic way, and the spiritual element is coupled to it. They always fall apart.

Compare to that which must be our spiritual life for us. As in the organism the head cannot be thought without body, our spiritual life grows out of the general cultural life. You only need to start with Tauler, Eckhart, Angelus Silesius, then with Herder, Lessing, everywhere we have to develop what should become higher spiritual culture. We cannot couple our spiritual view to anything, we must have it as an organism, must raise it. We have to discover internally that the return of Christ is a spiritual affair. Hence, we cannot make the slightest concession. We are able to look at Christ as a figure only with the spiritual eye, approach Him with the internal experience. In the West that had to be dogmatised and materialised. People could not imagine it differently, as that He would come in the physical body. Hence, the absurd idea to present Christ in the body on the salver.² This happened in connection with what was encircled there.

Hence, the question must touch us objectively: how has the Central European civilisation to relate to the future culture?—Truth is something general, but it is something different how it arises. In the Central European civilisation are the springs for the whole spiritual culture of the future. We have to find the way from the German idealism to the spiritual culture. For that is necessary that here in the centre an ego-culture is founded. You can see that easily on the esoteric field. The human ego has to enkindle itself in the outside world, there only it is awake and realises internally. Thus the ego-culture of Central Europe is aroused from without. You need to look only at the last events, the standardisation of the German being. It is typical that the German empire was founded in 1871 on foreign ground. So many examples could be given that also show in the external events that there is an ego-culture in Central Europe.

It seems reasonable to ask: which meaning do the deaths have for the spiritual world?—Countless human beings go in the prime of life through the gate of death. At first the connection of ego, astral body, etheric body with the physical body is separated. The physical body is handed over apparently to the earth, the etheric body to the etheric world; astral body and ego go on. However, this must strike us: are the etheric bodies of the human beings of normal age going through the gate of death different from those of the young men? As to the physical body one understands this, as to the etheric one will understand it now. The etheric body could still have supplied the physical body for decades, and could have worked on it. It goes with these unused forces through the gate of death, coalesces there with the folk-soul, and the work of the folk-soul will be impregnated in future with the unused forces of these etheric bodies. It is our task to understand that. Human beings will be there who will know: the folk-soul is an active element. Only if one knows that the unused etheric bodies will work as a spiritual force in concrete way in the spiritual world, then one can understand what takes action really. The consciousness of this concrete relationship with the spiritual world will be important. Thereby, namely by creation of such a consciousness of the spiritual world, spiritual science becomes more and more life in the souls and does not only remain doctrine. The human being knows that he is in a spiritual aura as he knows here that the air is in his surroundings. Like he distinguishes clean and dirty air here, he will feel good and bad spirits, experiencing and feeling the spiritual aura.

Only this is the right fruit of spiritual science. We see it if we consider events that are close to us and can teach us. One of them just happened in the place of our construction. In this case it was a child whose etheric body was unused. The forces are there; somebody who beholds them who knows how to behold them sees that they have gone over into the aura of our Dornach construction and live in it. This is an example I am responsible for. The etheric body which belongs with its forces more to the community is really working on. Since that time it tries to do something by means of inspirations nearby the construction. These are supporting forces.

Such matters are obvious to us, we can be taught through them how mysterious the connections are in the spiritual world. Just in the last time we experienced in the karma of our society that dear friends have died off. What I said in the Vienna cycle³ about the life between death and new birth became completely clear just in some of these souls. One of these souls has found so surely the way into our movement when the physical body was already worn-out. Since it was in our movement, it was a being whose soul faced me like through a body that had become bright and transparent as glass. After death the picture of this soul, as it was already before, grew together with that which it presented after. I was not able to help myself to give the obituary which shows that I was so surely together with this soul. The following words made themselves audible for about three days, after death had occurred:

You came to us.
The gentleness of your being
Spoke out of the calm strength of your eyes—
Calmness of your soul
Flowed in the waves
With which your glances
Carried your internal weaving
To things and human beings;—
And the soul penetrated your voice
Which revealed—more through the kind of word
In its eloquent manner—
What was working as a secret
In your lovely soul
Than it was contained in the word;
However, without saying a word
It revealed itself
To the compassionate love of human beings—
This being that told of noble, calm beauty
Of the world-soul's creation
To receptive feeling.

The consciousness is dampened after death, just because a flooding consciousness is there. This happens by the review you have on death first—not in the case of suicide,—as it were a solar point. That belongs to the most beautiful, highest experiences. You resume it there, you say to yourself: there you have lived,—and you orientate yourself that way in the spiritual world.

Our friend was out of the stage of the etheric review, so that I spoke to the present, but not yet conscious being. Then a moment of consciousness occurred as a result of the heat, and she saw the cremation. Time there becomes space.

The events in the physical and spiritual worlds correspond to each other. In such a case, calling does not return like an echo from the spiritual world, but converts itself to an answer, giving the gist, from the not yet conscious soul. By such examples we recognise feeling and feel recognising the spiritual world. The result must be to experience the reality of the spiritual world. It is especially important to get this definite feeling in our time, so that the physical welfare and the mental welfare arise for the whole humankind out of the seriousness of the present. For always the big, significant world events were, also for a superficial knowledge, the clear expression for the fact that there are not only sensory beings, but that the spiritual beings are working into the sensory world.

It is difficult to break through the veil which separates the physical and spiritual worlds. This makes self-knowledge difficult to the greatest possible extent; one imagines that as something too easy. It is sometimes difficult already in the external physical sense. The significant philosopher Ernst Mach⁴—not Ferdinand Maack, otherwise, I would not have spoken of a significant philosopher—gave a grotesque example of it. Mach describes in one of his works that when he was a young man a disagreeable countenance struck him once in a mirror of a shop-window, which he had immediately to recognise as his own to his dismay. He experienced something similar later again. While getting into a bus he saw a man with an ugly face who met him from the other side, and recognised only afterwards that he had seen himself in the mirror. The human being is still even more uncertain about the being or form of the soul. People do not dream of what one has to do to get self-knowledge. In the subsoil of the soul, maya has often large dimensions. A human being has the impulse of cruelty; he lives together with people whom he torments every now and then et cetera. He looks for an external cause for it; he often uses an ingenious gift of invention to veil the structure of his soul. I myself knew somebody who spoke repeatedly how many great sacrifices his activity demanded. But I had to say that it was only a lust of his soul, which he satisfied. When he spoke of sacrifices that way, only egoism stood behind that. Real self-knowledge is only accessible if one advances in spiritual science gradually, in so far as he experiences by himself what is in the world.

There are chatting people in the world who organise chat hours. Apparently, that is even the case when men go to their sundowners. If they are asked, why they chat, people have all kinds of important reasons for that. But if we glide with our hand over velvet or silk, we have a feeling of pleasure. While somebody is chatting, his etheric body knocks perpetually against the air set in motion, and in doing so it is stroked. This is nothing bad. You understand what goes forward with chatting, only if you know that the human being has an etheric body.

Humankind goes towards a time when it must face such matters more and more. Spiritual science must arouse the consciousness for it more and more. Then people who state today in their materialistic mind that everything spiritual is daydreaming will look as if anybody wanted to say where the air is, is nothing at all. Like one discovers that the air is real, humankind will find out that the spirit is something real. If you consider the biggest mystery, Christ's Death and Resurrection, you may believe that Christ, after he has gone through the Mystery of Golgotha, would have worked on humankind particularly by means of teaching. However, what people knew about Christ was the least.

The theologians have quarrelled, but very few understood something right. Only a part of historical events happens in the consciousness. An example of that is the battle between Maxentius and Constantine at the Milvian Bridge on the 28th October 312 A. D., which was decided not by some external circumstances, but by effects of non-physical kind. With an army which was far stronger than that of his adversary Constantine Maxentius had to defend Rome. Questioning the Sibylline Books he got the advice to lead his troops out of Rome and then he would destroy the enemies of Rome that way. He was still encouraged in that by a dream. Also Constantine had a dream that his soldiers should bear banners with the monogram of Christ instead of the old field signs. Thus it happened, and the army of Maxentius, which had been led out of Rome contrary to reason, was defeated by the weaker armed forces of Constantine, and Maxentius himself found his death on the run. The Christ Impulse had here worked in the subconsciousness of the people.

The impulse lives in the subconsciousness, as if ships go on the sea, but the important matters would take place in submarines. An important point in time is again in the 15th century. At that time, the Maid of Orleans intervened in the course of history in such a way that everything that happened later was determined through it. The whole map of Europe would be different, also the spiritual life if the English had won. The Maid was a servant of St. Michael. Schiller was deeply touched by the figure of the Maid of Orleans: “the world likes to blacken the beaming.” Whereas Voltaire vented his rage against her, even Shakespeare could not understand her, Anatole France pressed her down into the materialistic view, all Western people of intellect did not understand her, and Schiller embodied this sublime figure in his drama.

It was necessary that the Maid of Orleans went through a kind of unaware initiation to fulfil her historical mission. It concerned an initiation as it is described to us in the legend of Olaf Åsteson. Such initiations, for which certain karmic conditions were necessary, could take place in the time of the thirteen nights between the 25th December and 6th January. If the external light has the slightest strength, an inner enlightenment is possible. Thus Olaf Åsteson had real spiritual experiences in the sleeping state during thirteen nights, which he then reports before the portal of a church, as it is shown in the Dream Song. Also the Maid of Orleans spent thirteen nights as it were in the sleeping state, namely in the body of her mother. In the last time before birth the human being is especially accessible to unaware influences from the spiritual world. On the 6th January the Maid of Orleans was born. During this day all the inhabitants of her birthplace gathered because something quite unusual was to be felt in the aura of the village. It was the birth of the Maid of Orleans, to whom the Christ Impulse was implanted just before she saw the physical sunlight.

The proper purpose of all our attempts and that what depends on us is to gain a living connection between the physical and spiritual worlds. People will recognise that the time of twilight of this war means a turn of an era. Human beings should know that the souls of those who have sacrificed themselves are working on and that this war has the task to close the materialistic age.

It is necessary that souls are there who send thoughts into the spiritual world like extending arms and bring down the consciousness from the spiritual world, souls conscious of spirit. The more such souls conscious of spirit send their thoughts upwards—a lot depends on the fact that our spiritual atmosphere is penetrated by such thoughts,—the more the fruits which come from the sacrificial deaths can mature. Thus we summarise our consideration in the words:

From the courage of the fighters,
From the blood of the battles,
From the grief of the bereaved,
From the nation's sacrifices
Will grow up the fruits of spirit
If souls aware of spirit turn
Their senses to the spirit land.

• 1. From Symptom to Reality, third of nine lectures (Berlin, 1918), volume 185 of Steiner's Collected Works (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1976)
• 2. the Indian boy Krishnamurti was propagated as the reincarnated Christ by Annie Besant, the president of the Theosophical Society (Adyar).
• 3. Inner Nature of Man and Life Between Death and Rebirth, eight lectures (Vienna, 1914), Steiner's Collected Works volume 153
• 4. Ernst Mach (1838–1916), Austrian physicist and philosopher

My dear friends,

We first commemorate those who are in the fields of the difficult confusions of the present and turn to their protecting spirits:

Spirits of your souls, watchers in action!
Your wings may bring
Our souls' imploring love
To earthlings trusting in your protection!
That united with your might
Our plea may helpfully shine
On the souls it lovingly seeks.

And while we turn to the protecting spirits of those who, as a result of these events, have already passed through the gate of death:

Spirits of your souls, watchers in action!
Your wings may bring
Our souls' imploring love
To the people of the spheres who trust in your protection!
That united with your power
Our plea may help to radiate
The souls she lovingly seeks.

And the spirit we seek through our spiritual science, the spirit that wanted to go to the salvation of the earth, to the freedom and progress of humanity through the Mystery of Golgotha, be with you and your difficult duties!

My dear friends!

In our present time - and I mean present in the broadest sense, so that it encompasses the centuries in which we live, the centuries of our fifth cultural period, which began in 1413 and we now stand in this our present – we find few such people who live life to the full like the now less well-known but once quite sensational philosopher Schelling, who died in 1856. Let us take a brief look at the nature of this philosopher Schelling. It is something that people of the present day find extremely difficult to understand. As early as the 1790s, the philosopher Schelling appeared in Jena, exerting a powerful influence at the university through the power of his speech, captivating everyone with the spirituality of his entire being. What he presented at the time was a kind of worldview, one might say, which attempted to grasp and depict reality from two points of view. He presented a natural philosophy and a spiritual philosophy. He wanted to grasp reality from these two sides – from the side of natural existence and from the side of spiritual existence.

It was in fact one of the high points of German intellectual life. For at that time one could, as it were, learn - you can read about it in my book 'Vom Menschenrätsel' - one could learn from a personality such as Schelling's, from the way the spirit speaks through the human being. Then came the time when Schelling had, as it were, taken a further step, when he presented what he had presented earlier in a different form. It was the time when he wanted to present more, not the world from one side, the side of its natural existence and from the other side, that of its spiritual existence, but rather that which underlies nature and spirit in common. And again he spoke, as it were, captivatingly, fervently, magnificently, but as if from a different key, presenting the same thing. Then came the time when he lectured less and devoted himself more to writing, when he immersed himself in Jakob Böhme's profound worldview. He then presented what he had previously presented as natural and spiritual philosophy from a different point of view, in very different words, in a very different way. And only by delving into this in such a way, by absorbing what he, one might say, was able to grasp more in abstract thoughts in his work with Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and by deepening this through the great, powerful insights of Jakob Böhme, was he able to present something like something like “The Mysteries of the Deities of Samothrace”, where he really brought to life again from certain spiritual depths what these strange mysteries of the first period of the fourth post-Atlantic period, the last period of the third post-Atlantic period, held in their bosom.

Then came Schelling's theosophical period, as it is called, the time in which he tried to penetrate to the deepest sources of being, in which he tried to depict human development from a unified world source.

So his theosophical period. And finally came the time – it was the time when he was called to Berlin by Frederick William IV – of his so-called positive philosophy, which has been preserved in his two-volume significant work “Philosophy of Mythology” and in his other two-volume work “On the Philosophy of Revelation”. There he attempts to present what has flowed into human development in the ancient mysteries and through the mystery of Golgotha. He was not well understood. He spoke, after all, about things for which our time has little time, and one can say, if one wants to compare someone with Schelling, not in terms of the intensity, comprehensiveness and artistry of his work, but in terms of his individual humanistic approach, then in modern times it could only be Goethe. What is the significance of a personality like Schelling? Schelling, who in his old age, with his eyes enlivened by the spirit, made an enormous impression on those who still got to know him – what was it that was most remarkable about Schelling?

Yes, my dear friends, what was remarkable about Schelling was the peculiarity that he, more than other people, was able to work independently, even though he was not fully aware of this activity, to work in his etheric body, not just, as is usually the case with modern people, in his physical body. The possibility of thinking and feeling in a healthy, relaxed etheric body was something that Schelling had.

And there was something else connected with this. It was connected with something that modern philistinism can understand so little: Schelling remained capable of development to a certain degree well into his old age; he remained capable of development well into his fifties. The modern person does not remain capable of development. The modern person concludes his ability to develop - we will have more to say about this later - at a relatively young age. And he is indeed proud of having concluded his capacity for development at a young age. Even today, one rarely encounters people who, let us say, at the end of their twenties or the beginning of their thirties, have the right sense to listen to fairy tales; indeed, even have the right sense to take in Goethe's Iphigenia or Schiller's William Tell with soulful vividness. That is what children absorb when they are young; adults do not concern themselves with it.

My dear friends, compare the extent of the difference in today's people between development in young years and later development. In young years, people are still completely connected with physical-bodily development in their spiritual-soul development. As we know, the child develops physically and bodily, but it is connected with this physical and bodily development, with the consolidation of the nervous system, with the strengthening of the muscular system and so on, with the inner configuration of all organs, that the child's spiritual and psychological development goes hand in hand with physical and bodily development. And how dependent people are on their physical body in their 14th to 17th year! This changes later. Then the spiritual-soul development goes its own way, and for most people today it does not go any way at all. They retain the same way of judging, the same way of relating to the world, and so on. If someone like Schelling appears in the present day, then, yes, then one finds that he has undergone transformations in his life, as they say; that in his forties he spoke from a different key than in his twenties. Of course, he spoke from the same source of truth, but in a different key.

And when Schelling presented his “Positive Philosophy” in Berlin in the 1840s, people could not understand how the man who had presented natural philosophy in his youth could now speak of positive Christianity in such a way. In modern times, Schelling was one of those exceptions who remained capable of development as a personality throughout their life, who were truly able to transform the stiffness and stuffiness of the original philistine that is found in people today, and remain agile in spirit.

Now there is something else about Schelling: the fact that modern man, if he does not undergo an inner spiritual development in the sense of our modern spiritual science, then he has an extraordinarily difficult time, if he does not remain as capable of transformation as Schelling, to also come to inner, positive, spiritual experiences. That is why it came about that what Schelling then called “positive philosophy”, as “philosophy of mythology”, in which he treated the mysteries, as philosophy of revelation, in which he treated the mystery of Golgotha - that is why he really spoke in quite abstract terms in this part of his later age. In terms that not only repelled people who said to themselves: Now what does he want, he used to speak of natural philosophy, now he suddenly speaks of the mystery of Golgotha? Not only did he repel people who could not understand such a thing, but also those who wanted something, one could say, more real.

When he spoke of potency a 1, potency a 2, of being before creating and after creating, and so on, these were abstractions that were alive for him, but he did not understand how to make them come alive. Where did it come from? Yes, you see, in a personality like Schelling's, you find something, let's say, like an atavistic retardation. Schelling was actually a transferred Indian rishi. Schelling was capable of development to the highest age, but so were all the people of the primeval Indian time. They remained as today only children are capable of development. They remained so dependent in their spiritual and soul life on the physical and bodily to the highest age - as children today are in their youth. But these people of the primeval Indian times, just the first time after the great Atlantic catastrophe, they did not feel as Schelling did, who was, so to speak, an atavistic latecomer. They remained capable of development well into their fifties; then they felt the spiritual radiating and flaming up within them in a special way.

When our children today show the dependence of the soul-spiritual on the physical-bodily, it is in the time when the physical-bodily is growing, becoming more perfect, is in ascending development. The consequence of this is that during this time children primarily feel how their etheric body promotes growth, blossoming and flourishing; how their etheric body works in the physical body. Between the ages of seven and fourteen, a person could already receive tremendous revelations, but they cannot do so today because the etheric body is busy with something else, because the etheric body is busy helping the physical body to grow and flourish. And if a person were to have significant experiences in the etheric body – in their forties or even fifties – then they are no longer capable of development today, the etheric body is no longer suitable for doing more than just store our memories of youth better than those of later experiences. We then say: memory decreases; but the memories of our youth then come to the fore. But there is another way in which we notice this downward development, which begins at the age of 25 and becomes particularly pronounced in these later years. We mineralize ourselves, one could say radically, we sclerotize ourselves. And with the hardening, the compaction of the physical body was connected in these ancient times, in the first period after the Atlantic catastrophe, in the primeval Indian times, that the human being did not now notice his etheric body being used for the physical body. The physical body collapsed, but the etheric body was particularly receptive to really receiving the spiritual world within itself. And the consequence of this was that in this first epoch after the Atlantic catastrophe, people remained capable of development until the age of fifty, until the age of fifty-six; then later until the age of fifty-five, fifty-four, fifty-three, fifty-two, fifty-one, fifty, forty-nine ; that these people could wait, so to speak, their whole lives for this great event, which then occurred according to the experiences of others; that the body collapsed, and the soul, so to speak, already here, still bound to the physical body, felt at home in the same spirituality into which it passed when it went through the gate of death. In this first, primeval Indian age, the transition into the spiritual world when passing through the gate of death was therefore not as significant as for a modern human being, because the human being was already inside, so to speak. He had become independent of the physical body at an advanced age. Today we are also becoming independent, but we do not notice it because we do not remain capable of development until this time.

You see, this is a peculiar and significant phenomenon, which, for certain reasons that we will discuss later, is particularly important for the present to be considered. The development in the old days, in the first days after the Atlantic catastrophe, was such that people remained capable of development without being stimulated from within, without them doing anything special; so immediately after the Atlantic catastrophe was over, they remained capable of development until the age of 56, then less and less, and finally until the age of 49. This, my dear friends, gives us the approximate age of the human race as a whole. We could say that at that time, humanity was declining from the 56th to the 49th year. The individual human being begins with the year one, two, three, and is getting older and older. Humanity as a whole began its age after the Atlantic catastrophe at the age of 56 and is getting younger and younger. And when the first post-Atlantean period, the primeval Indian period, was over, human beings only remained viable until the 49th year, then until the 48th year, and so on. They could not gain experiences of the spirit in such an intensive way as in earlier times. Imagine what a completely different impact that had on social life at that time than our kind of human development has on our present social life. Every person in those days knew in their youth that the patriarchs are those who are suffused and aglow with wisdom. And people looked up to these patriarchs as the leaders of humanity. This gave the social life of that time its character. Today, every young badger in his twenties already feels finished, wants to be elected to parliament and pass judgment like the oldest person. That is the big difference between that time and today, when people listened to those who had matured not only in their ascending physical life but also in their descent. And while the ascending physical life is such that it actually hides the spirit, the descending physical life, where we, as it were, mineralize, is such that – while the body declines – if one remains capable of development – people today no longer do – it is precisely then that the spirit blossoms in the soul. In the second post-Atlantean cultural period, things had already changed. People only remained capable of development until the age of 48, then until the age of 47, 46, 45, 44, 43, 42. So the whole human race is declining in age, and the human being is entering. That was the time when there were still people who, so to speak, remained capable of development even as their physical bodies were declining, who had direct experiences from the spiritual world. But these experiences were no longer as strong as in the older times. This is because in this period people could no longer use the etheric body to the same extent as in the older times. That is the peculiarity of the ancient Indian cultural period, that people were able to use their etheric body in a quite extraordinary way, in a quite independent way, and therefore to experience in the etheric body that which a person then goes through when he has passed through the gate of death and discarded the etheric body. But with the etheric body, one can experience this to a certain extent if one remains capable of development in the way that was still the case in the primeval Indian period.

The time when people only experienced things in the sentient body, as was the case in the ancient Persian epoch, was already more divorced from the spirit. But even so, it was the case in this ancient Persian epoch that, especially in a state of sleep, in a state similar to a sleep interspersed with real dreams, people felt when they reached their forties: Yes, this soul that dwells in me, it belongs to the spiritual world, it lives in the spiritual world within me; when it has passed through the gate of death, it enters into this spiritual world. Those who died young at that time were not excluded from the feeling of happiness that consisted in being able to say: One grows old and then wise, spiritually mature; for those who died young knew at the time that there are repeated earthly lives – but they also knew that when someone dies young, they are used for something else in the spiritual world, that they have a good task there, that the gods need this soul, which has not fully lived out its earthly lifetime. On the whole, however, social life was particularly meaningful because of this atmosphere, so that one knew: if you live to be so old, you will reach your forties, then you will experience that you know, your soul belongs to the spiritual world. Only when you are fully awake during the day does your body prevent you from seeing it. That is why it was called the “dark world”, in which only the body sees physically; and the other was the “world of light”, in which one was in such exceptional states. This is the origin of the teaching that came to mankind, somewhat coarsened, as the Ormuzd and Ahriman teaching, as the teaching of light and darkness.

On the whole, however, it can be said that in these two oldest periods, in the first and second post-Atlantean periods, people still truly perceived the spirituality of nature around them. Air was not just air to them. Nor was the air just air for these people back then, as it is now when I pick up a living being, which is just matter. It is matter that has been lived through and ensouled. So at that time the air was not just air, the flame of fire not just a flame of fire and water not just water. Rather, people knew that spiritual life was in all these elements. Therefore, they were in a certain way dependent on the air that they took in with their breathing, dependent on the water that they absorbed and that lives in the human being from the environment, dependent on the warmth of the environment. What do people today know about these elements in which we live? They know in a pinch: Well, now the air is inside me, then it is outside.

The fact that the air is sometimes inside and sometimes outside still gives people today a thought about their dependence on the world of elements, but it is a feeling of a purely physical dependence. That spiritual things enter me through air and warmth is something that people today no longer know, and they know even less about the significance of this. That, for example, what is called the national soul lives in these elements was still something that people of the first and second cultural periods experienced as perception; something that was as certain to them as anything that we perceive physically and sensually today. What does a Frenchman know, for example, when he drinks wine from his country, when he drinks water, that his national soul is in these elements? As truly as the soul of our individual human being manifests itself through our flesh and blood, so truly does the national soul manifest itself in French wine and water, that is, in that which is connected with the national element, the national soul. This is the body of the national soul. Likewise, the Italian national soul lives in all that is air and permeates the air. The Russian national soul lives in all that flows into the earth as warmth, into the soil and then rises up from the soil. The Russian national soul lives in the warmth, but not in the warmth directly, but in the warmth absorbed by the earth and flowing back again. And so we can point this out about every single nation. Some just do not allow it because then they would call us names and say: we are being arrogant about them. But these are truths. The truths that are drawn from spiritual science are not always convenient, but they are the truths that one must know if one wants to stand in reality today.

What lives in the elements in this way was known in the first post-Atlantic periods; people felt it. But this went back further in time, when people in the third post-Atlantic cultural period, in the Egyptian-Chaldean epoch, could only use this sentient soul. There, people were only capable of development in the beginning up to the age of 42, then up to the age of 41, 40, 39 and so on, until the age of 35. Then they entered the period of non-developability. From then on, they only remained capable of development if they took in spiritual life through the mysteries. It came less and less from within. The spiritual life united with the human being less and less by itself. This was also connected with the fact that people no longer felt their belonging to what lived as elements on the particular stretches of the earth. That the same does not happen from above over Indian soil as over Persian soil or even Greek soil was as clear to people in the first period after the Atlantic catastrophe as we know today that the nose cannot be in place of the ear and the ear cannot be in place of the nose. What developed as Indian culture had to well up at this particular point on the Earth. What developed as Greek culture could only well up at a certain point on the Earth. This gave the whole Earth a physiognomy. But there was not the same discrepancy within as there is today in our experience. Just think what people today know about how they are spiritually connected to their piece of Earth! What do they know about it? They also do not think about why the nose is at the place where it is, and why the ear is at its place. And so we can experience that today people have no idea about the most important things.

Many people of the white race emigrated to America. That they become quite different people in America than in old Europe, that is not realized today. And again, they do not realize that they are different people in eastern America than in western America. In eastern America, the gaze will be quite different, the human hands will be much larger than in Europe! The skin color will be different. That turns out. The people resemble the old population of America in some ways. This is not the case in California, but it is the case in the east.

Reality is there, but people do not live in that reality. They live in abstract concepts. That was precisely the difference between the ages when people remained capable of development well into old age, that they felt dependent on what they belonged to; that they also felt it spiritually.

You see, humanity is getting younger and younger. The older person grows into a certain age, and humanity is getting younger.

Now we come to the fourth cultural period, the Greco-Latin epoch. Yes, humanity remains capable of development only up to the age of 35, at the beginning. The Greco-Latin cultural period begins in the year 747 before the Mystery of Golgotha and ends in the year 1413 after the Mystery of Golgotha. In the early days, humanity was capable of development until the 35th year, then until the 34th year, into the 33rd, 32nd, 31st year. When the year 1413 approached, they were only capable of development up to the age of 29. Beyond that, people could only remain capable of development by kindling spiritual life in their souls. Nothing comes to people by itself anymore; that is the important thing.

But still, in this fourth cultural period, people were still capable of development until the time when, at the age of 35, man reaches the height of his life. During the ascent, they were capable of development. 35 is the middle of life, then the descent begins. That is why the Greeks still felt to the utmost: in everything that lives physically, the soul lives. The Greeks, for example, could not imagine that one walks without the soul moving the legs; that one moves the hands, the arms, without the soul doing so.

Only: They could only experience the soul as being connected to the body - no longer as in ancient times, when it went downhill from the age of 35 onwards, that the soul was experienced as being active in the spiritual world. Therefore, something peculiar occurred to those who were not initiated into the mysteries. For them, it was different, of course; those who were initiated into the mysteries learned there how the soul lives in the spiritual world after passing through the gate of death. But those who were not initiated into the mysteries could become very wise in Greece, as Aristotle was very wise. But from what could be achieved by mere human knowledge, people without mystery wisdom could not achieve anything other than a knowledge of how the soul animates the body. But they could not learn that the soul lives without the body after death. That is why Aristotle's idea of immortality is that if I cut off one arm, he is no longer a complete human being; if I cut off two arms, even less so; if I take his whole body, then he is no longer a complete human being at all. Aristotle, therefore, clings to his wisdom even after death, but the person who has passed through the gate of death is an incomplete human being. For the Greeks, a complete human being was one who consisted of both body and soul. The independent life of the soul in the realm of spirits could only be achieved through the mysteries.

Aristotle, who was only a supreme sage, but who certainly stood at the highest level of historical wisdom, regarded the dead person as an incomplete person because he lacks the body that belongs to the complete person.

You see, it was under such conditions that the time came when great changes had occurred in the linear development of ancient humanity, which alone made possible that peculiar human condition that we then find in the Greco-Latin age of Romanism. This Romanism is quite different from Greek culture. Greeks really experienced in the most eminent sense what had become of humanity, they experienced in the most eminent sense the 35th, 34th, 33rd year of life. The Greeks experienced it as I have described it. The Romans did not want to experience it that way. The Romans were either striving to gain power. They extended their power over the whole earth known to them at that time. Or they endeavored to use this power to gain easy access to the soul, if possible. That is why, when Romanism was dominated by Caesarianism, the mysteries were misused in this way, and the Roman Caesars forced themselves to be initiated. The first Caesar was already an initiate. As a powerful man, he was of course able to force the initiation. What had been kept secret in earlier times was forced by the Roman Caesars. “Caligula” - the word would mean something like “little soldier's boots”, “little conscript boots” in our language - he was initiated into the mysteries. And it is no fable when we are told that Caligula was able to commune with the spirits of the moon's existence during the night. He was able to do so because he had been initiated into the mysteries.

And Nero was an initiate. And what did people like Caligula, who knew Nero from the initiation? What did they know? They knew that the development of humanity had now reached a stage where physical experience no longer yields the spirit. The Roman Caesars and their friends, the initiates, knew the secrets of existence so well that physical existence on earth no longer yields the secrets of the spirit. Nero, who added the necessary madness to the initiation, therefore made the decision: Since the world no longer provides the spiritual anyway, the whole world should perish. Thus the fire of Rome was ignited, from which the whole known world should perish. He wanted to ignite the world fire! He was convinced that people had become so depraved, because people only remain capable of development until they are about 30 years old, that they were no longer worthy of continuing to exist. He wanted to convert the entire life of the soul into the spiritual, but he wanted to do it his way: through the destruction of the earthly.

Now, something else is happening. We have seen that humanity is regressing in terms of spiritual experience. In the first post-Atlantic cultural epoch, this experience lasted until the 56th year. Then it lasted until the 55th year, the 54th, 53rd, and so on. Humanity as a whole became younger and younger. And when the human race in the fourth post-Atlantic cultural epoch had only reached 35, then 34, then 33 years of age, when the ability to develop had declined to the age of 33, it happened in history that in the body of Jesus of Nazareth the Christ lived until the 33rd year of the humanity living backwards from above after the 33rd year. So that the 33rd year of Christ Jesus, when he died, coincides with the declining age of humanity. Think about what that means! Christ Jesus grew towards humanity, which was getting younger and younger, humanity, which first reached the age of 56 in the primeval Indian epoch, then reached the age of 55 and so on backwards. When it had descended to the age of 33, the Christ developed in the body of Jesus of Nazareth in order to live here on Earth for 33 years and then to bring humanity that which we have called the assimilation of the Christ impulse into earthly existence, to bring that which humanity could no longer attain. For Aristotle, the deceased human being was already an imperfect human being. Through the Mystery of Golgotha, it was possible to grasp immortality again, to absorb impulses again in order to recognize the connection between man and the spiritual world. When the development of humanity had regressed to the age of 33, humanity would have perished without the Mystery of Golgotha, without the ignorance of the spiritual world, had Christ Jesus, who had become 33 years old, not come to meet humanity, having become 33 years old himself, and poured out his love upon humanity.

This is a profoundly significant truth that spiritual science reveals to us about the connection between the Mystery of Golgotha and the entire development of life of humanity on Earth. And it really is one of the most harrowing truths that can come to us from spiritual science when we feel such a colossal connection between the development of humanity up to the 33rd year, the growing towards of Christ Jesus to this humanity, and their meeting. It is one of the greatest insights that can be gained by people in their earthly existence. From it they can see how short-sighted and obtuse are the people who claim today that spiritual science detracts from Christianity; whereas it supports it in the most decisive way by deepening it, by knowing how to make such great and powerful things out of the historical truths and will do more and more. The anti-Christian people are truly not the intellectuals, but those who want to be within the positive denominations, and who thereby exclude the real insights that humanity needs today from Christianity. That is the terrible thing, that today we see people at work who join one or the other denomination as pious people, and who actually fight Christianity with the words of Christ Himself, by not letting arise what is in the Christ-word:

I am with you until the end of the world.

But not for the reason that people can lie on the lazy bed and say: We no longer want to strive, the Christ will make us happy. Rather, Christ Jesus is on earth so that we can accept him into our souls and develop our knowledge more and more, develop it more and more.

But you can see that we are now living in a crisis in the fifth post-Atlantic period, which you will recognize from what I have discussed. Because the human race is declining, it declined until 1413 to the age of 29, then to 28. And now we live in the age where people only remain capable of development until the age of 27. Then, if a person wants to remain capable of development, he must absorb an independent soul impulse through the study of spiritual science or something similar. Otherwise, a person who only wants to absorb what human development itself provides will always remain 27 years old, even if he lives to be a hundred.

This, my dear friends, is something that makes so much understandable to us in the present time, when we are surrounded by so many riddles. We cannot solve these riddles, at least not to the extent that we need to solve them, with the concepts and ideas that humanity has today, which know nothing of spiritual science. Only by looking at the bigger picture of existence, only by learning to recognize that humanity has regressed to the age of 27, can the riddles that surround us today be resolved. And today it is really the case that we see people who want to rule life with their ideas, but who do not grasp life because they do not want to take up an independent spiritual development, but stop at the age of 27. There the ideals have not yet been permeated by reality. There the ideals have not yet been permeated by reality. Oh, it is so difficult for people today, so very difficult, to grasp the difference between ideas that are related to reality and mere euphonious ideals, which, if I may put it trivially, make one lick one's chops with spiritual and mental voluptuousness. But they are not capable of intervening in reality.

In the realm of world observation, people do not want to profess ideas that are akin to reality. They look at a clock, which is a real thing, it is an object that is there. Fine. That is what it is. They also look at a flower that they put in front of them, just as much as a real object as the clock. But that is not what it is. The clock is something complete, it can exist in itself as it is. I have to cut the flower, there has to be a root. If there is no root, it is not real. If I imagine a flower without a root, then I have an unreal thought. Mankind will have to learn this again, that a thought must not only be logical, but that it must also be real. Today, mankind has forgotten this because it does not develop beyond the age of 27; because people stop at words that merely sound beautiful. What use is it, my dear friends, when someone declaims: We are entering, through the great trials of this war, into an age in which people will think and feel differently, in which every person must be placed in their rightful place, and in which each person's abilities must be recognized in that place. You can't object to fine words. A right word – but must it [then] also be a word of reality? If the person concerned is then convinced that his nephew is just the most capable person for a place, then the whole tirade, the whole phrase of “the most capable in the right place” is of no use.

If only people could grasp the difference between ideals that are close to reality and those that are abstract ideals! It is not so bad, relatively speaking, when we mistake a flower for something real. But it is bad when we want to introduce and incorporate unrealistic concepts into social life, into state life. This is how it has come about that we have the most unrealistic concepts in science. Because what is being peddled today as economics, and especially what is being peddled as political science, is not just not a science, but it is a completely unrealistic talk; because people do not even know how to form real concepts about state connections.

Let us put this to the test: there is a person who is actually an excellent person, who is even sympathetic to my aspirations, the Swede Kjellén, who has now published the book “The State as a Way of Life”. Study this book from beginning to end. One can say: If someone today were to want to build something in the natural sciences with similar dilettantish, abstract concepts, as Kjellén did with the state as a form of life, they would simply be laughed out of the room. If someone were to talk about a botanical question the way Kjellén talks about the state as a form of life today, it would be so ridiculous that even someone with only a primary school education would laugh. The concepts are so unrealistic. But that is not apparent today. It is stated in the book: the individual human being relates to the state as the cell relates to the human organism. The individual human being is therefore the cell. Yes, my dear friends, that is the most ridiculous thing you can imagine in the face of reality.

If anything can be compared, then it can only be the whole development of the earth, and only individual deeds can be compared with the earth. The comparison would be valid. But to regard the individual human being as a cell in relation to the state as an organism – that is mere talk.

You see, this is what is so little understood today, this growing together with reality, which must come through inner spiritual development. That is why we live today in a time that is so infinitely full of trials for man. Man must go through this crisis, this estrangement from reality, but one must learn to understand it.

Rather than mention a nearby example, which would be difficult for the audience to understand, let us take a more distant example. I can choose this example because I characterized this personality long before the war, so that one need not believe that the jingoism generated by the war is evoking this characteristic. I was looking for a typical person who is no older than 27. Yes, but because this person is in the most important position, one could even say in the very first position today, a great deal depends on whether the ideas of a twenty-seven-year-old are poured out over the world or those of a person who has undergone spiritual development. Today, one has to grow into it through spiritual development.

A typical personality, who, even if he lived to be 100, would still be no older than 27, is Woodrow Wilson, the President of the United States of America. He is truly a typical personality. And, one might say, the cross of the present, the immediate present, hangs on it. Hence those intoxicating ideas that this man sends around the world in his rallies, all of which are so alien to reality – so alien that he sends a proclamation of peace around the world and then, in a few weeks, has a war in his own country. So little does what this man is able to say engage with reality. His ideas are fine: freedom for all peoples, and so on. The ideas are fine as such. In Germany there are outstanding writers who call these ideas profound. But it is not a matter of liking ideas. What matters is not that one should feel, as it were, a sensual pleasure in ideas, but that ideas are capable of sustaining reality, of immersing themselves in reality. But when people who do not live past the age of twenty-seven come across ideas that are full of reality, they consider them to be unrealistic.

So, my dear friends, it is with the human being of the present time that he, as it were, removes himself from reality. Since spirit is also present in reality, one simply, one might say automatically, removes oneself from reality when one removes oneself from the spirit. But one cannot place oneself in reality if one remains capable of development only up to the age of 27.

Now, this is also connected with what we feel to be such a depressing mystery in our time. People are moving away from reality. As a result, they are also losing their sense of proportion to a high degree, the sense of simply grasping the facts correctly. Because this sense of fact is diminishing to an enormous degree. And these things are connected with what we feel to be such terrible, earth-shattering events. But it was difficult, before these times, to even talk about these things. Read what has been said about the social development of humanity in the cycle that was given in Vienna about life between death and a new birth, where there is even talk of cancer in a social context. These things have not been taken with full seriousness and full importance. Do you remember an answer that was given often? Even during public lectures, people kept asking: How does the increase in the Earth's population correspond to repeated Earthly lives? I gave the various reasons that suggest that things are quite compatible. However, I never forgot – you will remember – to add: But the time may come very soon when people will be horrified to realize that humanity can also decrease. Of course, one could not speak directly of the serious misfortune that awaited humanity. But that is connected, my dear friends, with this distance from reality. And when we face this difficult time today, we must realize that it is above all important to live through it in real wakefulness, in genuine wakefulness.

You will recall that in earlier times, up until 1914, I mentioned a variety of people, including Herman Grimm, who died at the beginning of the 20th century. Certainly, if we now follow the soul of such a person in the spiritual world, it relates itself in a certain way to the momentous events of the present. But one can also have the thought of asking oneself how a spirit like Herman Grimm, who expressed great and meaningful things, who spoke in a very penetrating way from the point of view of the nineteenth century, can think about world events. You see, Herman Grimm, for example, coined the beautiful word in the last days of his life: 'mankind's reckoning is at hand'. But how did he imagine this reckoning? He indicates it in his collected essays, called “Fragments”, in the volume that he himself published. A reckoning of the time is at hand, he says, great figures that today history cites as great figures will disappear into the nullity; others that today humanity pays little attention to will be highlighted. And when the year 2000 has come, people will talk about a completely different story.

And Herman Grimm expressed many other profound things in a similar way. So that one can ask: He did not have spiritual science, he also rejected it, but one could always imagine: He stands beside me as a spirit of the nineteenth century. But since 1914, I can no longer think that he is standing beside me when I mention him. Since the summer of 1914, he appears as if he had lived centuries before and had become a stranger to what he loved on earth in his last life on earth; he stands there like a mythical figure. For we have really lived through more in these three years than we otherwise would have in decades, if we have lived through what has been compressed into these years. And what has gone before seems, one might say, to have become as alien as what one has taken on from the history of past centuries; even those personalities with whom one has lived, with whom one has exchanged words and thoughts. And one would like to see an awakening of humanity. But this awakening can only come about through spiritual science penetrating much deeper into the human soul. As you can see, spiritual science does not come as something arbitrary. Because humanity has declined in age, because it only ages 27 years by itself, that which makes people capable of development must come from within. The soul must be made capable of development independently of the body. But this can only be done in a spiritual way. Those who do not want to know anything about the spiritual will always remain 27 years old, even if they live to be a hundred. Therefore, today one would really like to be able to enliven what one has to say, what is necessary to awaken humanity; one would like to be able to enliven it in a different way than through words; for words themselves have already taken on something of abstractness. What words were in earlier times! When people said “doubt,” they felt that the “dou” and “two” were in it; that, so to speak, the idea was split into two; they still felt the connection between “two,” “dou,” “conflict,” “although.” All of that has become abstract; people have turned away from reality itself in language. Or who today feels a reality pulsating through language in a deeper sense? We say “human being” today. Then we open the dictionary and find the Latin “homo”, also human, and we believe it is the same. We find the Greek dictionary and find the word “anthropos”, human; we believe it is the same. We have become “lexical”, that is, unreal in such matters. But “human being” is related to “Manas”, to the Sanskrit word “Manas”. But that means: the “spiritual self” in man. And the one who uses the word “human” as a word for that which walks and acts on two legs, which has hands and thinks and so on, who uses this word “human”, which is the adaptation of the oriental word “Manas”, he looks at the spiritual in man and describes man above all as spirit. The one who, like the Greeks, says “anthropos”, refers to the “speaking of the soul from the eyes”. The “shining eyes” are called “anthropos”, the soul that speaks from the eyes, from the face. We can already see that this is something different from when we use the word “homo” or the French word “homme”. In this case, French points to its origin.

So you see how people from different nations describe the human being itself, this gives the language special nuances of reality. Who has a feeling for this today? Isn't this feeling lost when we open the dictionary and read one for the other? We no longer even have a feeling for it. When we say, for example, “pretty good,” we mean “almost” or “nearly” good today. While the word “pretty” is related to “befitting,” “befitting,” “befitting.” So that you can actually only use the word if you want to imply: It is completely good, pleasantly good, befittingly good; so good, as befits.

But we feel how the unreal sense of the present extends even into the words. One would like to have something other than words today, because the words themselves have already become unreal, if one wants to speak through what, as spiritual science, wants to come into humanity again, so that the human soul may become related to reality again.

It is therefore not surprising that unfortunately what we have just spoken about is also evident in our field. A friend who had heard from me about this 27th anniversary of humanity, a friend who is involved in the political struggle of our time, said to me: Yes, that is a ray of light that finally illuminates much for me that is now passing away around us. One would like people to try to understand with this ray of hope what is so enigmatic in reality. Then one cannot be surprised that even within our small section of reality, what we are seeing now is happening.

I know very well, my dear friends, that in this society there are always people who do not want to see this because they see it as something ordinary that is spoken of in such terms; they would like to withdraw gracefully because, as they say, they want to promote peace. But this has finally led to the emergence of an attitude in our society that the person who is attacked is actually a bad guy, and that we should feel as much compassion as possible for those who attack.

But this can only lead to disaster; as has become quite clear to date. Therefore, because we have to talk about the necessary measures to be taken, I have to mention a few things here that are truly not “personal”. Because by trying to push things into the personal sphere, they are trying to eliminate spiritual science, which is already becoming uncomfortable; they know that this would not be possible with a decent polemic. They try something else, and I must say: our members must keep their eyes open for this, and they must know how this society actually had to be founded so that things are possible that are actually only possible here, that would not be possible outside. They will come, but today they are not yet possible to the extent.

Let us assume that I have discussed the case often, but it should have been discussed much more often; it should not have been kept secret in such a distinguished way. There we have it, a man being pushed into the Society by members. He comes to the lectures, takes part in everything, gets hold of everything that can be read, and copies down everything he can get hold of from other members in private transcriptions and so on.

You may ask: Why is such a person accepted? Yes, you see, that's a dilemma. You can't say to him, because of something a person will do in the future, “You're a bastard – excuse me – and that's why I'm not accepting you!” Even though you know full well that the man shouldn't be accepted – he has to be accepted. Well, this man, after he had obtained everything he could, went to America. Before he left, he solemnly swore that he would behave decently. He would publish a book, he was still discussing the title because it was so difficult to translate; I myself had given him the instruction to say “world conception”. It's not really a word that the English appreciate, but [gap in transcript]...

Well, he went over there. He wrote down everything he had heard here in his book, but he also wrote down everything he had received from private transcripts and notes that had not yet been published. But he did it like this: he wrote a preface to the first edition in which he says that he had heard a lot from Steiner, but that it did not give him the final conclusion. This conclusion was brought to him when he was called to a master in the Transylvanian Alps; he gave him the final touch, the last truth.

And now look: what he had received as the final polish, as the final truth in the Alps from a master: these are the things that he had copied here from the unpublished lectures. Now you can say: that's American! Fine. One says to oneself: something like that can happen when one knows American ways. But that's not all. Here in Germany, a bookstore was found,

a book publisher who had the book translated, and a translator who translated the whole book. So we have the outrage of things migrating to America and being brought back again, of the publishing house of Hugo Vollrath having the book printed in German, and saying: Yes, the things would have had to be brought from the impure air into a purer air, which the other had copied from the one who had lied about the Transylvanian master.

You see, for something like this to be possible in literary life, this society had to be founded, because if something like that were done outside, one would immediately have the right judgment about such an outrage, about such disgrace, which is also done to the publishing industry. I have mentioned this more than once, nothing has happened except that these “lesson letters” — as such he publishes the book — are sold everywhere. That was a great outrage. But these things happen. We have no way of intervening unless discernment sets in, unless the members stop regarding everyone who is a little twisted as a “high initiate”; unless they stop regarding everyone who rants about everything as a victim, but rather start making their own judgment.

For we are indeed experiencing in the worst possible way how people are distancing themselves from reality. Along comes a magazine called “The Invisible Temple”! Yes, that's very nice, you have to find something deeply mystical: “The Invisible Temple”! It is a magazine published by an association that is tremendously “significant”.

In one of the issues of this magazine, it says: the philosophers – and I am also called a philosopher – claimed that only they themselves had wisdom; all others had only a sham and false wisdom. “So to read with Haeckel and with Dr. Steiner.

Now I ask you: Where does it say that what I said can only be found in me, that all others have only a sham and an after-wisdom? Or where is there even something similar? Yes, do you dare to call such things by their right name today, no matter whether the tirade maker Horneffer calls his magazine “Invisible Temple” or something else? One should not be misled by the mystical verbiage on the title page, but call a lie a lie – because it is a lie. One should really strive towards the truth, because it is important that we seek the truth, that we develop a sense of fact, not mystical fantasies, but a sense of truth. For with a sense of truth, we must also enter the spiritual world; otherwise we will not find it.

You see, a man from a town in central Germany once wrote to Dr. Steiner saying that he had now reached a turning point in his spiritual life and did not know what to do. Should he [marry into a business] or should he devote himself to Theosophy? How understandable, Doctor Steiner told him, that it was not her job to help him marry into a family and so on. After some time, he appeared in the then Theosophical Society. Those who were present at the general assembly could hear how he, without a trace of recitation talent or skill, poured Schiller's “Cassandra” over the unfortunate audience. Then he decided not to become a painter, but to be a painter. We really did everything possible to give him the opportunity to learn in Munich. But he didn't want to learn anything, he wanted to be a painter, not become a painter. However, we couldn't declare him a painter overnight. We could have declared him, but not made him a painter. So he was so disappointed that he now wrote all kinds of foolish things, for example that he got bruises from exercises and so on. In short, a person who approaches us with such questions as to whether he should marry into [a business] and who behaves as this man did should be looked at with a critical eye, that's what matters.

And then we had a member, a man whom many knew as a loyal member who even wrote articles advocating anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. He wanted to publish a book through our publishing house one day: “Who Was Christ?” Until then, he was a follower who grumbled here and there, especially when he knew that it could not come directly to our ears – but some people do that. But you see, this writing is only a small-scale edition of what the Heindel writing is. Grasshoff called himself Heindel in America, here he was Grasshoff and copied. In America, he published what he had copied here as Heindel, as the master's emissary in the Transylvanian Alps. That is in Transylvania. People always pointed to such areas where there are castles that you don't usually go to because not even small trains go there, right, where the mountains form a triangle.

However, a man from Budapest once said to me: “Mrs. Besant has pointed us to a master who lives deep in Hungary in a certain castle.” We went there and found a castle, but nothing that reminded us of a master. We found that the castle belonged to the Hungarian treasury.

Everything Mrs. Besant said was wrong, but: “You have to believe her!”

Well, you see, in the book “Who was Christ?” that the person in question wanted to publish, there were things in it that simply could not be published by the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Publishing House because they were partly borrowed from cycles; but in particular it was a certain audacity - at least it made such an impression on Dr. Steiner - that he said: Dr. Steiner has indeed made allusions, but these allusions must now be further explained. Well, that could not exactly suit the manager of the publishing house, that the person concerned brought the explanations that not only came from cycles and lectures that were not published. To a certain extent, it is a Heindel case again. But this member has now become an enemy! A real enemy.

As far as I am concerned, people should write about “contradictions”. [gap in the transcript] Well. “Mysticism”, for example, is not the same for everyone. If you talk about mysticism in two places, you have to characterize it in this way and in that way; everyone can find contradictions there. But you don't attract a dog with such “contradictions”. Therefore Seiling would not have made an impression - because that is his name, who was previously seen as a loyal supporter. It is very telling that the man simply becomes an enemy after his writing is rejected. No one would want to claim that there is no causal connection here. Talking about contradictions - factual articles - can never harm the humanities, even if such articles are incomprehensible and foolish.

Or the Dessoirs and others. I make a strict distinction between what is factually possible, even if it is disapproved of, and what is indecent and impossible.

You see, the good, dear Deinhard, who died last week, is one of those who has done the most for what I call anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, and he has come to us from the position of opposition. And he must be considered one of the most meritorious people in our field. When I started going to Munich to give lectures at the beginning of the century, the following announcement appeared: under the influence of Deinhards, the announcement “The traveling salesman for Theosophy from Berlin is here again”. I did not consider that to be something bad, but rather something quite possible. Someone can express his opinion in crude words that I am concerned with peddling Theosophy on my travels. There is nothing wrong with such a judgment.

Or when Meyrink wrote an article in “Simplizissmus” in which he describes “Doctor Schmuser” – or something like that – with which he means me and those who are friends with me, it is extremely amusing, but it does no harm. But Seiling is not about anything like that. He started off by writing an article about the silly arguments about the contradictions, embellishing them with what I supposedly said at the meeting. But he then told objective untruths. I never said that I felt offended by the part about contradictions, but I told him that the doctor would have been annoyed by it. It came down to the fact that vanity was at play [gap in the transcript] So he spun a very nice yarn.

Or he went further in a sophisticated way to the fact that he wrote an article “in defense”, in which he speaks of the most harmless thing there is – because there is nothing more harmless than our marriage; but other women have made a scandal. How does he use this scandal that others have made? By cleverly weaving his sentences so that he says: Our marriage led to an incredible scandal. But it wasn't meant to; because it was no one else's business. But others made a scandal. This is an addiction to vilification! An addiction to vilification taken to the point of vulgarity that one can hardly imagine being increased any more.

And when these things were discussed in Munich, it was said that the worst case, the case of Goesch, was yet to come. This Goesch, who has concocted handshakes and other absurdities, whose entire attacks consist of nothing but a smorgasbord of absurdities and spite. But there are editors who print such things. Things will get worse, because people today, when they are sexually aroused, consciously sexually aroused, see it in others. That is one of the secrets of our time. That is why it could happen that a member – she had been a member for a long time – who actually always had to be turned away, who was never given serious exercises, and with whom I have not spoken since 1911, except [a gap in the transcript] an information about her mother - that she wrote an article that above all also vilified Dr. Steiner, an article of such nonsense, such hatred and such foolishness that nothing like it had ever been written before. This personality is capable of writing: Dr. Steiner spoke of the Lazarus miracle, where the human being is transformed. He apparently wanted to perform this miracle with me. Therefore, when I was in a sanatorium, he sent chocolate to thicken my blood and so on and so on.

So this sending of chocolate is a particularly magical act. And think: such a personality finds paper and printing ink at his disposal and the editor even makes the comment

[These are follies that could send a sane person to the insane asylum! - Ed.]

So, if Frau Doktor had gone to a fruit shop, she would have probably taken oranges with her; instead, she went to a pastry shop and bought chocolate – because she was supposed to perform the Lazarus miracle on my behalf! Yes, it cannot be said. For example, there is a note that Dr. Steiner sent sculptures or the like to the person in question. I would have stepped in from behind and performed magical acts.

The whole thing refers to the fact that once group photos came from Norway. The personality in question brought something she wanted to give up. I had not yet seen the picture and looked at Frau Doktor over my shoulder. That was the whole thing. It is stamped as a magical operation.

But that comes from the fact that such chatter has arisen and been particularly cultivated in certain circles. Therefore, such a judgment must be suggested from time to time. And so I am compelled to speak of it because such things have occurred in society, because, for example, a person like Seiling has the audacity to say: There are mistakes in my cycles, but I have not checked them because I supposedly have no time; but I would have time if I did not spend so much time in private conversations with members! - Seiling was one of those who repeatedly sought private conversations, though when he still felt like a friend and supporter. So he knows better than to say such a thing. He knows the facts. That is the / gap in the transcript].

Now, the one who has to speak particularly esoterically today before a number of people, he knows because he has to express things that are connected with the [gap in the transcript]

Today, speaking things that are meant to move people again, is something that humanity cannot bear. Therefore, the one who has to speak about such things in front of 120 people knows that among these 120 people there are 70 possible enemies; but those who can become enemies. With 120 listeners, 70 possible enemies! It is only a question of whether these enemies will then be decent or indecent. All in all, it is a necessity today, and it is as difficult for me as it can be for those who will be affected by it. It is difficult for me, but two measures must be taken. Two measures. And it would be untrue to mention one without the other.

The first is that all private conversations must cease from now on. Because of what has been made of these private conversations, by “Seiling and Co.” for example, and also by others - that is what is likely to lead to slander in the hands of dishonest editors who find it much too inconvenient to attack spiritual science directly - then they would have to study it. So they attack it by involving it in scandals, defamations and so on, up to the last article that is so foolish as to talk about Dr. Steiner having given exercises to that personality. When the personality was asked: How dare you say that you were given exercises? “Yes,” she said, ”Dr. Steiner showed me some forms in a eurythmy lesson; for the other people, the lines meant what is written in the letters and lines, but for her they were instructions for exercises that Dr. Steiner gave her on my behalf.

Now Dr. Steiner had done nothing but recite poems. Nothing at all was said about that. But then it is claimed: And if Dr. Steiner did not mean the exercises, then she is simply the involuntary medium of Dr. Steiner. So, it is imperative that the private conversations be completely avoided for the time being. I will make sure — you just have to be patient for a while — that a replacement is created. But private conversations cannot continue if such things are made of them. They must stop in the near future. Not because of the content of the slanderings - I have often said that such things must come - but so that people finally see how serious things are. One must not say, as it has been said in Munich: Because of a few people, we must now all suffer! One must turn to those few people, one will find them, and one will also find the right way to find them – not to those who, under the compulsion of an iron necessity, have to take such measures.

The second thing is that I authorize everyone to tell everything, as far as they want, that has been said in private conversations with me. What I have said to any member must never be shunned from the light of day. [Gap in the transcript] is not considered to be objectively untrue, as Seiling [Gap in the transcript] But it will be proven if such a measure is taken: Without exception, anyone can tell the truth about what has been discussed in private conversations with me.

These two measures belong together. It is sad that these measures have to be taken, but, as I said, especially those who are serious will understand that these measures are good in this day and age, when people are driven into scandals and slander.

These measures, my dear friends, must be taken. These things are also connected with the crisis through which humanity is passing. Here, too, knowledge must lead us forward. And it will lead us forward.

Humanity has become extremely frivolous. Finally, let me read you a sentence from a person who also sought the spirit, who sought it on the path through Catholicism: [von] Barres, [von] Maurice Barres.

[It is a futile effort to seek the afterlife. It may not even exist! And however we approach it, we cannot learn anything about it. Let us leave occultism to the enlightened and the charlatans; whatever form mysticism may take, it defies reason. But let us turn to the Church, first of all because she is inextricably linked with the tradition of France. And then because she, with the authority of centuries and great practical experience, formulates the rules of that ethics that must be taught to nations and to children. And finally, because, far from abandoning us to mysticism, she defends us directly against it, silences the voices of the mysterious groves, interprets the Gospels and sacrifices the generous anarchism of the Savior to the needs of modern society."

There is the church, let's go inside, even though we say: the afterlife may not even exist! Imagine the cynicism! This is the attitude that Maurice Barrös, a truly characteristic person of the present day, has expressed; this is how one seeks the spirit in Catholicism. He has no desire to become Catholic, but: Catholicism has deigned to interpret the Gospels in such a way that [gap in the transcript], where the Savior is only taken as he suits modern humanity.

Humanity must pass through this test. But we must know that the realization of the spirit is to be sought from the impulses of the spirit. If we familiarize ourselves with it, we will find the way that is to be sought for humanity today.